For the fifth volume in her series of Erik Satie's piano music, Noriko Ogawa reaches back to an early period in the composer's life. A large part of the program comes from Satie's so-called mystical period. Influenced by medieval plainsong and avoiding all pathos, Satie resorted to austere melodies based on rhythms and harmonies simplified to the extreme; he turned away from the concepts of development and variation in favour of simple repetition of perfectly symmetrical phrases. In other words, he broke completely with the classical-romantic tradition. In its purity and abstraction, Satie’s music from this period seems surprisingly modern by comparison with that of his contemporaries. The title of this volume is Ésoterik Satie, a nickname given to the composer during the period when he began a collaboration with Joséphin Peladan, the grand-master of the ‘Rose-Croix catholique du temple et du graal’, an artistic movement close to symbolism and esotericism. Satie’s fascination for the Middle Ages is reflected not only in the music itself, but also in the titles of some works, such as Ogives (the pointed arches of Gothic architecture), Danses gothiques or Fête donnée par les Chevaliers Normand.

REVIEW:

Noriko Ogawa is a sure guide to these pieces. She plays them on an 1890 Erard piano, which has a bright, clear, rather shallow tone. The booklet is very informative, though the pieces are not played in the order in which they are discussed. These works are best taken a few at a time. Satie’s world is intense but it is also narrow, and the pieces here are all rather similar.

-- MusicWeb International

Born in 1972, Albert Schnelzer belongs to the most widely noticed Scandinavian composers of his generation. He has written in all genres, and the present album includes a concerto as well as both orchestral and chamber works. Schnelzer’s orchestral output has attracted great attention, with A Freak in Burbank belonging to his most often heard works. Inspired by Haydn as well as by the filmmaker Tim Burton, it has been played more than 70 times to date, in venues such as the Berlin Philharmonie, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and the Royal Albert Hall. It here appears on album for the first time, performed by the Västerås Sinfonietta conducted by Simon Crawford-Phillips. The same team has also made the premiere recordings of two other works: Burn My Letters – a commission for Clara Schumann’s 200th anniversary – and the violin concerto ‘Nocturnal Songs’, composed for Ilya Gringolts. Interspersed with these are three chamber works – Dance with the Devil, Apollonian Dances and Frozen Landscape – performed by some of Sweden’s foremost instrumentalists.

REVIEW:

A Freak in Burbank is an exciting and vivid work, full of insistent rhythms, quixotic harmonies, and colorful orchestration. There is a capricious spirit in it that grabs the attention of the listener, much as, for example, Haydn’s music does.

Dance with the Devil is for solo piano, and also grabs the attention of the listener from its very first notes. The opening, in fact, is cut from the same musical cloth as is Bartók’s Allegro Barbaro, and like that seminal work Dance never lets up in its energy level. The notes aver that the piece is influenced by heavy metal music.

Burn My Letters—Remembering Clara is scored for chamber orchestra and depicts in music the voluminous correspondence between Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. In this rather neo-Romantic work, the composer has attempted to capture something of the energy and lust for life of Clara Schumann, in addition to representing the hectic life she lived as a touring pianist. In this work, he has attempted to assimilate (successfully, I think) the frankness in which Schumann writes about her doubts, fears, and sorrows. Despite such heavy concepts, the piece has a lightness and airy quality about it that I find most attractive.

The program turns back to the realm of chamber music with Apollonian Dances for violin and piano. Violinist Cecilia Zilliacus and pianist David Huang are both clearly masters of their respective instruments, and the work simply couldn’t be in better hands.

Frozen Landscape remembers a vivid experience from Schnelzer’s youth when he was up in the mountains of northern Sweden. This piece’s unrelenting quiet dynamic level sustains interest throughout its seven-and-a-half-minute duration. Both cellist Jakob Koranyi and pianist Huang pull off exquisitely what must be a difficult work to bring across.

The concert concludes with Schnelzer’s Violin Concerto No. 2, “Nocturnal Songs,” a 25-minute work from 2018.

The work was written for violinist Ilya Gringolts, who performs it at the highest level here, even the finger-busting finale. First-class orchestral support is supplied in the pieces that require it by Simon Crawford-Phillips and the Västerås Sinfonietta, an ensemble of which I’ve been previously unaware but glad to have become acquainted with.

This CD is splendid in every parameter, and I am truly delighted to become familiar with the work of such a talented member of the newer generation of Swedish composers.

-- Fanfare

For a string player, Beethoven’s 16 quartets are of an importance similar to that of his sonatas to a pianist and for every composer of string quartets they remain a benchmark. The Chiaroscuro Quartet have begun their cycle of these works at the same place as Beethoven did, with the Op. 18 set which occupied him intensively for the best part of two years (1798 – 1800). The effort he put into these quartets was surely due to the fact that he had much to live up to – they would after all be measured against those of Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven was clearly determined that the six quartets of the set should present the widest possible overview of his art.

The Chiaroscuros released the first three in 2021 – a disc which was included among the finest new releases of the year in BBC’s Record Review. The present album opens with the only minor-key quartet of the six, No. 4 in C minor, which in the years that followed became Beethoven’s most popular quartet – to his growing irritation as he felt it overshadowed later works. In No. 5 in A major Beethoven follows closely in the footsteps of Mozart: its third movement and finale are in fact modelled on Mozart’s quartet in the same key (K?464), which Beethoven had copied out before he began work on his own quartet. With No.?6 in B flat major it is rather Haydn that we see hovering in the background: for instance his way of making witty capital out of the most elementary material or the rhythmic games in the third movement Scherzo.

REVIEW:

This is the best recording of any Beethoven Quartets I have heard in a long time, not because it is, unusually, a period performance on gut strings and historical bows, or that it is superbly well recorded in surround, but because these players have dared to completely rethink these well-known pieces and turned them into a series of wonderful surprises.

The set has to be heard no matter how many other recordings one possesses. If it goes on to encompass the whole series - and who knows if it will? - it could become the period performance cycle against which others in the future are measured. Recording, in surround and stereo, notes and presentation are immaculate: an object lesson in how such things ought always to be done.

-- MusicWeb International

In the early 19th century, while Haydn and Mozart remained revered, many of their once admired contemporaries quickly fell into oblivion and with them much delightful, finely crafted music. In a recital centered on songs of parting, Carolyn Sampson and Kristian Bezuidenhout seek to make some amends to this. They open with August Bernhard Valentin Herbing's Montan und Lalage, a miniature opera for one singer, with the keyboard-as-orchestra providing the scenery and stage action. Giving Bezuidenhout's fortepiano the recognition it deserves, the program also includes no less than two songs dedicated to the instrument, by composers we rarely hear of today: Friedrich Gottlob Fleischer and Christian Michael Wolff. But even though Mozart and Haydn are still household names, it isn’t on account of their solo songs, which makes the performers’ decision to also throw light on their less familiar work a welcome one. The program features four songs each by them, including Mozart’s Lied der Trennung (Song of Parting), which has lent its name to the entire program, as well as Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos, a dramatic cantata in which the Cretan princess Ariadne expresses her love of the Greek hero Theseus … and her agony when he sails off, leaving her alone on the island of Naxos.

REVIEW:

This a program cleverly designed, as they so often are today. The theme is separation, but the opening extensive song is by August Bernhard Valentin Herbing, a long narrative to be balanced by Joseph Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos at the other end. In between are other songs by composers both familiar and not: 4 by Mozart, 3 other ones by Haydn, interspersed with 2 by Friedrich Gottlob Fleischer and one by Christian Michael Wolff. It should be noted that the Haydn songs, apart from Arianna, aren’t from his late English settings, but are German-language pieces written a couple of decades earlier. Sampson is a “known quantity”, a pure and well-controlled soprano whose home is more or less exactly where she is here: late 18th- and early 19th Century lieder. Bezuidenhout (on loan to BIS from Harmonia Mundi) is a firstclass fortepianist, quite capable of pushing his instrument past its reasonable limits, as he does at the end of Arianna.

-- American Record Guide

The music of the Russian Orthodox Church was an essential part of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s musical background. As a boy he was deeply moved by the sound of St Petersburg’s cathedral choirs, and phrases reminiscent of liturgical chant permeate his music. His Vespers has long been admired as a summit of Russian liturgical music. It has unfortunately tended to overshadow the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, his earlier large-scale sacred composition. Named after the fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople and Church Father, the Liturgy consists of a sequence of prayers, psalms and hymns, which are sung or chanted by the different participants in the service. Rachmaninoff did not make use of any existing chants (as he would later do in his Vespers), but chose to reflect their style and spirit with music entirely of his own. The sonorities he creates is rarely achieved by plain four-part writing: instead the voices are frequently divided, solos emerge from the choir, and the range of textures shows great imagination. The Liturgy is here performed in the warm acoustics of the Niguliste Church in Tallinn by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir – listed among the ten best choirs in the world by the BBC Music Magazine in 2020 – conducted by Kaspars Putninš.

REVIEW:

Rachmaninoff himself esteemed this work highly, and when it receives the careful performance it gets here, it is indeed lovely. Choral music in the Baltic countries maintains a very high level of quality, and this small choir is arguably the jewel in the crown. Note that some online sources designate this as a reading of "excerpts," but it is not; Putniņš omits only some short responsorial sections, including one short movement, in accordance with the preference of modern editors. A wonderful performance of this Rachmaninoff masterwork.

-- AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

Also available: Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 2 / Zimmermann

Since the mid-1980s, Frank Peter Zimmermann has earned recognition as one of the leading violinists, admired not only for his technical skill and interpretive intelligence, but also for his versatility in a wide-ranging repertoire. His extensive discography spans from Bach concertos and Beethoven sonatas to works by composers such as Ligeti, Magnus Lindberg and Brett Dean. But during the four decades that Zimmermann has been making recordings, he has never previously recorded Bach’s Sei solo, the six sonatas and partitas for solo violin which form an absolute pinnacle in the repertoire for the instrument. As he now takes on these works, it is with great respect for the task at hand – Zimmermann compares them to ‘a mighty tree, which protects me and crushes me at the same time’, the music giving him hope and strength at the same time as it confronts him with his limits as a violinist. On this first disc of two he offers us Sonata No. 2 in A minor, as well as the D minor Partita No. 2 with the iconic Chaconne and Partita No. 3 in E major.

REVIEW:

Zimmerman’s interpretations are the most impressive I have heard in recent years. The tone is magnificently focused, occasionally throaty but without excessive vibrato.

-- BBC Music Magazine

Maurice Ravel composed many works which stand as classics for both solo piano and for orchestra. On this disc, all except one work were first conceived for piano, which raises the question how it is possible to transfer such pianistic music to the orchestra without making it sound like a mere ‘colorized’ version. Ravel’s orchestral writing was the result of a long apprenticeship and careful study. Although his skills as an orchestrator are much admired today, his ability to coax new sounds out of the orchestra wasn't always appreciated in his own time, however – in 1907 the critic Pierre Lalo complained that ‘in Ravel’s orchestra, no instrument retains its natural sound…’!

Among the works performed here by Sakari Oramo and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra are some of Ravel’s earliest compositions, including the much-loved Pavane pour une infante défunte, but the album closes with a later work: La Valse, written in 1920 as one of only four works by Ravel originally conceived for orchestra. The idea of composing a tribute to Johann Strauss had pursued Ravel since 1906, but it took a commission from Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes for him to return to the project. When Diaghilev found it unsuited for ballet, Ravel gave it the subtitle ‘choreographic poem’. It was premiered in concert in 1920 and enjoyed immediate success.

REVIEW:

The ostensible title of this disc is “La Valse,” which is actually the least interesting performance on it. Oramo delivers a quick, lithe and lean interpretation of a work that ought to sound like a decadent, high cholesterol indulgence that explodes in a giant orchestral aneurism at the end. Here, he leaves the music no room to increase in urgency through the apocalyptic closing pages, although the playing is excellent and the sonics, as usual, first class. No, the real treat here is Le Tombeau de Couperin, here given with the two movements of the piano original that Ravel left off the orchestral version (Fugue and Toccata) very idiomatically arranged by Kenneth Hesketh. I particularly like Oramo’s decision not to take the opening too quickly, so that we get to savor the melody as well as Ravel’s gorgeous harmonies. It’s a splendid performance all around.

After Le Tombeau, the highlight of the program must be Une barque sur l’océan, still something of a rarity (even the score used to be hard to find), and I suppose a work that seems to fail next to Debussy’s La mer. The truth is that it’s a totally different beast, mostly dark and mysterious, and that’s just how Oramo plays it. The remaining works are mostly good. The inevitable Pavane for a Dead Princess and the Minuet antique are unkillable, but Alborada del gracioso needs more swagger towards the end. Why doesn’t Oramo give the trombones a chance to inject a little healthy vulgarity into the concluding bars? Of course, it’s not as if we’re short of worthy alternatives in most of this music, but the excellence (and novelty) of Le Tombeau and Une barque make this release impossible to dismiss.

-- ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)

This boxed set brings together Thomas Dausgaard and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra’s cycle of Brahms’ symphonies, originally released as four separate discs. Each symphony is coupled with carefully selected works to provide a well-rounded idea of the composer’s orchestral output.

Favorites such as the two concert overtures are included – the laughing and the weeping one, to paraphrase Brahms himself – as well as the beloved Haydn Variations (on a theme likely not by Haydn at all…). Another perennial favorite is the Alto Rhapsody, here with Anna Larsson singing the solo part, but there are also less-heard works – Brahms’s orchestrations of his own Liebeslieder-Walzer for instance, and of six songs by Schubert.

Throughout the set, the composer’s Hungarian Dances run like a thread. Brahms's orchestrations of Nos. 1, 3 and 10 have pride of place on disc 1, with the remaining 18, in much praised orchestral versions by Dausgaard, spread over the remaining three discs. In reviews of the individual discs, critics used words such as ‘freshness’, ‘transparency’, and ‘urgency’ to describe the performances, with Fanfare expressing pleasure at hearing ‘Brahms from the edge of one's seat’.

REVIEWS:

Exciting in quite a different way is Thomas Dausgaard’s invigorating cycle of Brahms symphonies (with interesting additions) with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. ‘The real purpose of using a small orchestra’, Dausgaard told Andrew Mellor regarding his recording of Brahms’s Second, ‘is to allow us to appreciate all the music that’s there, so that it comes to life in every corner, rather than becoming a mesh of sound'...Dausguaard [conducts] with a sense of style.

-- Gramophone

If you are sympathetic to the ideas that Brahms’s orchestral works can be played successfully by a smaller ensemble, and that the music does not lose its effectiveness when somewhat faster tempos are used, then there is no reason not to explore what Dausgaard and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra have done here. He is an intelligent conductor who infuses his ideas with personality, and Brahms is in good, un-arthritic hands. The recordings, made between 2011 and 2018 in the Örebro Concert Hall, sound wonderful.

-- Fanfare

When he died, Nicolaus Bruhns was just 31 years old, and only twelve of his vocal works and five organ compositions have survived. On the strength of these, he is nevertheless considered one of the most prominent North German composers of the generation between Buxtehude and Bach.

Buxtehude was in fact Bruhns's teacher, and thought so highly of him that he recommended him for a position in Copenhagen. There he worked as a violin virtuoso and composer until 1689, when he returned to Northern Germany to become organist in the main church of Husum. It was here that most if not all of the extant works were performed. According to Bach's obituary, Bruhns was one of the composers that he took ‘as a model’, and he is therefore naturally of interest to Bach specialist Masaaki Suzuki.

On this first of two discs made in collaboration with the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Suzuki directs – from the organ – a group of singers and musicians, in six of the vocal works: so-called ‘sacred concertos’ scored for 1-3 soloists and various combinations of strings with basso continuo. Suzuki’s performances of two organ pieces by Bruhns – the larger of the two preludes in E minor, and the fantasia on the chorale Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland – appear here as well.

REVIEWS:

These performances by famed Bach conductor Masaaki Suzuki were recorded in 2016 and 2017 at Yale University in the U.S. but not released until 2022. Bruhns is closer to Buxtehude (and there's even the flavor of Heinrich Schütz) in these chamber cantatas than he is to Bach. Suzuki directs these pieces from the organ and gets wonderful results from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music choir; if it originally had an American sound, Suzuki smooths it out. His soloists are not quite the equal of those he assembled in Japan, but they are idiomatic and fully equal to the music, perhaps consistent with what the composer would have heard. A wonderful Baroque release commended to anyone with the slightest interest in Bach and his world.

-- AllMusic.com

Devised by Laetitia Grimaldi and Ammiel Bushakevitz, Ombres brings together songs by nine women composers whose lives span the years 1821–1964. Many of the songs were written during the so-called Belle Époque, at a time when women might be accepted as performers – especially in domestic settings – but struggled to be recognised as composers. And even in the cases when their music was heard – for instance in the fashionable salons of Paris – or published, it soon fell into oblivion. Several of the songs included here were discovered by Grimaldi and Bushakevitz in libraries and archives, having gone out of print long ago. With Ombres, the performers liberate the nine composers from their shadowy existence, and demonstrate the wide range of their music, from Cécile Chaminade’s bustling Villanelle to Pauline Viardot’s nocturnal Les étoiles or the ghostly Les lavandières by Augusta Holmès, about the Midnight Washerwomen from Celtic mythology.

REVIEW:

What is beyond question is that some of the songs by the two most well-known of these composers, Pauline Viardot and Cécile Chaminade, are quite wonderful. Viardot wrote some real gems. The melody of “Les ombres de minuit” (The shadows of midnight) is haunting, the atmosphere of “Les deux roses” (The two roses) truly perfumed, the refrain of “Haï luli” folk-like and unforgettable, and the unquestionable beauty of “Les étoiles” (The stars) a gift to savor.

Chaminade's three songs, all characteristically La Belle Époque, include a lovely “Villanelle” which shines best when sung in a voice filled with youth and sunlight. “L’anneau d’argent” (The silver ring) is meant to elicit smiles, and “Nice-la-belle” (Beautiful Nice) is the French equivalent of the romance of the New York skyline as viewed from the Staten Island Ferry in a black-and-white movie from the ’30s or ’40s.

Be sure to listen to de Polignac’s hauntingly beautiful, far from ordinary “Jardin du roi” (The king’s garden). There are plenty of surprise turns in her songs to engage on multiple levels. And enjoy how Holmès, the daughter of an Irish major who was educated at Versailles, set her own poetry.

-- San Francisco Classical Voice (Jason Victor Serinus)

Seventy years ago, on the 29th July 1951, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 at a concert marking the reopening of the Bayreuth Festival after seven years of silence following the Second World War. It was a momentous occasion, and the concert was broadcast by Bavarian Radio and transmitted across the world, for instance by Swedish Radio. Using the analogue mono tape as digitized by Swedish Radio, the present disc reproduces the broadcast as it would have been heard by listeners in Sweden: we have chosen to not change anything, not to ‘brush up’ the sound, not to clean and shorten the pauses or omit audience noises within the music, but to keep the original as it was. In this way we hope to recreate the feeling of actually sitting in front of an old radio in 1951, listening to this concert – a true historical document.

REVIEW:

Nothing else in the realms of recorded music is quite like it and I would urge you to share the experience...I’m not claiming that this performance will suit every mood or even every taste, but if and when it does hit target it will leave you changed for ever.

-- Gramophone (Editor's Choice, March 2022)

Since 2004, Andreas Haefliger has been presenting Perspectives, a series of recital programs, in concert and on recordings. Each program focusses on one or two Beethoven sonatas, juxtaposed with works by other composers which in some way interact with Beethoven’s music and with each other. Now, for his latest release on BIS, Haefliger has instead opted for an all-Beethoven recital, choosing to present the composer’s three sonatas Op. 31 as a group. In his introduction to the disc, Haefliger describes the set as occupying ‘a very special place in the Beethoven sonata cycle: It preserves a link to the past but gives us also a vision of the works to come, exploring humour and tenderness, nature and the psychology of the human mind.’ The recording took place in the Salle de Musique in La Chaux-de-Fonds, celebrated for its superb acoustics, on a Bechstein concert grand which Haefliger describes as ‘a piano which, while a modern instrument, retains a nostalgic quality in its sound world and was a constant source of inspiration during the sessions.’

REVIEWS:

This is a superb release on all counts, and anyone who cares about these sonatas ought to give it a listen. In addition to Beethoven and Haefliger, the third star of this SACD is the C. Bechstein Concert Grand D 282 that the pianist plays, in a recital hall in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.

-- Fanfare

The performances are crisp and meticulous. Everything is worked out precisely, and one can feel the artist’s serious purpose. There is little humor or relaxation; perfection is the goal, and Haefliger gets close. There is little to criticize. These are really very fine performances, and the Bechstein piano with its relatively light bass serves the music well.

-- American Record Guide