The piano works by Isaac Albéniz range from indisputable masterpieces to ravishing salon music, the composer painting with bright Spanish colors as well as the hues of Classicism and Romanticism. On nine discs, originally released between 1998 and 2017 and gathered here, Miguel Baselga guides listeners through the music of his compatriot, earning acclaim from reviewers worldwide: ‘pianism of the highest order’ (MusicWeb-International); ‘berauschend agil und rhytmisch spannungsgeladen’ (PIANONews); ‘un pianista elegante y refinado’ (CD Compact). Composed between December 1905 and January 1908, only a year before the death of Albéniz, Iberia is the crowning achievement of the composer’s genius. Marking a high point of the post-romantic piano literature, this collection of ‘12 nouvelles impressions’ was to serve as an endless source of inspiration for other composers throughout the twentieth century, admired by Debussy and Messiaen, who called it 'the marvel of the piano'. Baselga’s exhaustive series places Iberia in its proper context, and with the assistance of Albéniz scholar Jacinto Torres, he has been able to access original editions and scores, including rarities such as the Marcha militar by a nine-year-old Albéniz and the composer's two scores for piano and orchestra. We are also given the opportunity to hear three improvisations, transcribed from a phonograph recording made by the composer in 1903.

REVIEW:

Miguel Baselga was the first and (I believe) only pianist to have recorded Albéniz’s complete solo piano works, a project encompassing nine CDs. The cycle has been reissued in a boxed set, together with each individual release’s original booklet. It remains a significant catalog milestone.

As a stylist, Albéniz covered all bases, from unabashedly salon-like trifles and flashy neo-Lisztian fare to the Iberia Suite’s astonishing originality and labyrinthine complexities. Since Baselga wanted each disc to represent different aspects of Albéniz’s musical personality, he cunningly divided Iberia’s four parts across the first four volumes, aiming to give lesser-known masterpieces like the wild and woolly La Vega and tender Barcarola Op. 202 their due.

The two concerted works (the Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rapsodia Espanola) also receive impressively fresh and well-balanced readings. And for those who can’t get past the faded sound of Albéniz’s three 1903 improvisations preserved on private cylinders, Milton Laufer’s painstakingly notated editions will be revelations, especially in Baselga’s inspired hands.

In all, Baselga’s combination of technical brilliance, exuberant temperament, and tonal imagination yields consistently idiomatic and enjoyable results. A must-have for serious aficionados of Spanish piano music.

– ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

Joseph Haydn once remarked: ‘I was not a magician on any instrument, but I knew the power and effect of all of them.’ This knowledge he used to good effect in his cello concertos, composed some twenty years apart for two different cellists in ‘his’ orchestra at the court of Prince Esterhazy. Both works are firmly established in the concert repertoire, but this has not always been the case. Concerto No. 1 in C major was long believed to be lost and it was only in 1961 that a set of parts were discovered in the Prague National Museum. The D major concerto, on the other hand, was never lost, but for a very long time there was doubts concerning its provenance. Only when Haydn's manuscript was found in 1954 could the work’s authorship be clarified beyond doubt.

These two jewels in the cello repertoire are here performed by the acclaimed Swiss cellist Christian Poltéra who also directs the Münchener Kammerorchester. Closing the disc is a work composed some 150 years later: the composer and viola player Paul Hindemith wrote his Trauermusik for himself to perform at a concert commemorating the death of George V of England in 1936. It is here heard in the version for cello and strings.

REVIEW:

Christian Poltéra is front and centre in these vivacious performances of Haydn’s two cello concertos. His ‘Mara’ Stradivari is in fine voice, throaty and gruff in chivvying low-register passages but singing plangently in the high-lying lyrical writing that is such a feature of both works.

-- The Strad

The critically acclaimed Italian composer Vito Palumbo has had works performed all over the world by leading orchestras. He began his career with postmodern experimentation, going on to different forms of music theatre. In recent years Palumbo has focused on works for full orchestra, exploring the possibilities of colors and textures – sometimes with the help of electronics – and putting the concept of ‘historical memory’ at the centre of his own composing.

With echoes seemingly coming from Alban Berg’s violin concerto, Palumbo’s own Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (2015) displays bittersweet lyricism. Characterized by a dramatic language and driven by a strong and varied rhythmic impulse, the single-movement work also offers transitional moments of static beauty typical of the composer’s usual finesse in the scoring. With its title echoing the past, Chaconne for 5-string electric violin and electronics (2019-20) highlights the different ways in which the electronics intertwine with the live electric violin, within a conception animated by a strong theatrical sense, like a script for a play that does not reject emotional gestures. About this work, the composer has remarked ‘I want the meaning of my music to be apparent from listening, without the need for verbal justification.’ Both works are championed by the violinist Francesco D’Orazio, a close collaborator of the composer and the dedicatee of the Chaconne.

REVIEWS:

Cast in a single movement of around 30 minutes, the Violin Concerto (2015) starts out with sepulchral stirrings that gradually open out texturally and dynamically on to an evocative backdrop for the soloist to pursue a mainly lyrical and often imaginative discourse. While the violin is very much first among equals across what unfolds, its contribution stands out owing to the fastidiousness of Palumbo’s orchestration; notably during those later stages (of a piece in several arclike sections) when other instruments come briefly if tellingly to the fore to extend the music’s expressive remit. A final and evidently defining climax precedes its dying down towards the musing and even mystical serenity with which this work closes.

Francesco D’Orazio is the assured soloist both here and in Chaconne (2019-20), its scoring with electronics testament to the scrupulousness by which Palumbo approaches the medium. In the initial ‘Woven Lights’, a five-string electric violin is heard in the context of sampled sounds whose gestural immediacy decreases as these are drawn into a sonic continuum as unpredictable as it is imaginative. A long and often plangent cadenza makes way for ‘The Glows in the Dark’, the violin now surrounded by 30 pre-recorded variants of itself as this music assumes a rarefied while also capricious quality typified by tangible weightlessness.

Francesco Abbrescia has realised the electronics with audible sensitivity, and the London Symphony Orchestra respond with equal finesse to the astute conducting of Lee Reynolds. Warmly recommended[.]

-- Gramophone

Palumbo himself has mentioned Berg’s 1935 Violin Concerto as an inspiration for his own concerto of 2015, and connections are clear in the more recent piece’s sumptuous harmonies and deep lyricism (a wonder-filled section near the end even sounds uncannily like a John Williams movie score). There’s a sense of ever-expanding melody that soloist Francesco D’Orazio captures excellently in his warm, generous playing, with an expressive, finely controlled vibrato and abundant character across the rhapsodic writing; the London Symphony Orchestra provides spirited support under Lee Reynolds.

D’Orazio swaps his Guarneri for a five-string electric fiddle in Palumbo’s two-movement Chaconne, which first pits the soloist against a shimmering electronic backdrop, and later against 30 mirror images of himself. It’s a volatile, sometimes elusive piece that blends fantasy and sonic adventurousness, and D’Orazio responds with far harder-edged, sometimes astringent playing that stands out beautifully against the composer’s washes of sound. The massed, high-pitched violins set microtonally apart in the Chaconne’s second movement make for a rather headache-inducing, if impressive, sonic texture, but it’s the piece’s uneasy relationship with more traditional tonality and playing, and its joyful celebration of the wild unpredictability of sound that make it particularly striking. Recorded sound is close, warm and clear throughout.

-- The Strad

Of the two scores the first is a Concerto for violin and orchestra. This is in a single-tracked 30-minute movement. A solution of tense foreboding and beetling catastrophe are the order of the day. The violin evokes thoughts of Ifrits rising like evocations of flame and driven upwards by superheated thermals. Palumbo embraces some ferociously stropped violent dissonance but weaves in a romantic style: Walton/Berg. It is as if a sky-soaring Ariel is gripped by a mystical pilgrimage. There are moments of appeasing calm (8.40), hesitant wispy writing deep in the undergrowth (18.11). Pizzicati and precipitous slides recall Hovhaness with the solo instrument slipping frictionless and free. (28.00). All ends in silence. This work will appeal to those who warm to the Violin Concerto by Missy Mazzoli – also on BIS.

A change of instrumental cams and gears comes with the other work: a Chaconne for five-stringed electric violin and electronics (2019–20). There’s no orchestra this time. The music is in two substantial movements: Woven Lights and The Glows in the Dark. The first of these has the soloist juxtaposed with sampled sounds and electronics. The second has D’Orazio’s solo plus 30 pre-recorded electric violin parts. Like the more conventionally scored Concerto this work is intricate and delicate: a jangling and twangling Prospero’s Island. It’s another impressively virtuoso piece – a thing of wonder.

As is BIS’s practice these days, the CD comes with a supportive essay and other written material. It’s all in a cleverly contrived card sleeve.

-- MusicWeb International

The year 2023 has served contemporary music rather well on record. Among its many highlights, Vito Palumbo’s new album Woven Lights burns bright indeed. Coming five years after the composer’s first BIS Records release, the second volume brings together two notable scores focusing on the violin – in its acoustic and electric raiments – featuring Francesco D’Orazio as soloist.

The album opens with Palumbo’s thirty-one-minute Violin Concerto (2015) in one movement, followed by the twenty-seven minute Chaconne (2019–20) for electric violin (five strings) and electronics. Cast in two movements – which can also be performed separately – the latter features sampled sounds, electronic soundscapes devised by Francesco Abbrescia and up to thirty pre-recorded electric violin parts.

Documented on microphones at Abbey Road Studio 1, London on 17 September 2016, with D’Orazio joined by the London Symphony Orchestra under Lee Reynolds, the Violin Concerto is given an immersive workout on the new album. Although conceived as extended monolith, one hears traces of more traditional concerto scheme embedded within its awe-inspiring arch. Scored for solo violin and [orchestra], the violin concerto is awash with formidable instrumental writing, giving rise to an enthralling sequence of soundscapes.

Emerging from nowhere, the music begins to take shape in various orchestral noises; tam-tam pulses, low drones, Tibetan bowls and ascending vibraphone patterns. Out of the string fabric, violent orchestral pulses are drawn as the introduction draws to its close, paving the way for the solo violin to enter the soundstage. Accompanied by glockenspiel and strings, soon joined by woodwinds, the soloist begins to unfold an endless melody – to put it in Birtwistlesque terms – colorized by muted brass. This leads to rousingly kinetic section with virtuoso violin figurations and percussive orchestral interjections, contrasted some pages later by cloud-like arpeggios.

Cooling down, the concerto flows into its meditative central section of dazzling color, where the soloist’s candle-lit musings are echoed by translucent orchestral chiaroscuro. Here, Palumbo draws some astounding textures from the solo instrument and the symphonic ensemble alike. However, the music does not linger. Jagged soundscapes re-emerge some four minutes later in a passage of splendid unrest. This, in turn, leads to astounding near-stasis of utmost sonorous focus. Almost imperceptibly, the textures grow increasingly volatile, channeling all their repressed energy into an inevitable burst of instrumental electricity. Out of the rumors, a shadowy section remains, marked by loose melodic threads hanging mid-air between the orchestral instruments and the solo violin – a high-point in the concerto’s musical subtlety.

Rippling figurations mark the transition into a toccata-like tour-de-force passage, featuring hyper-kinetic instrumental singing from the soloist, answered by fluid orchestral propulsion. Cooling down to a riveting hall of mirrors, characterized by slowly-rotating melodic arches and dream-like woodwind pulses, the music crossed the threshold back to the surreal realm from whence it first emerged. Transformed by its journey, the concerto fades into tangible silence.

Given in dream-of-a-performance by D’Orazio and the LSO with Reynolds, the Violin Concerto is served with full spectrum of timbral nuance. Unraveled in ever beautifully aligned layers, the interplay between the soloist and the orchestra comes off admirably throughout the entire musical quest. Embraced with absolute control over the musical narrative, D’Orazio’s take on the solo part is nothing short of remarkable. Peerless in their studio work, the members of the LSO deliver a wonderful take on the orchestral score. Guided by Reynold’s attentive podium sensibilities, the musical discussion between the LSO and their soloist are always spot-on, their sonorous clarity being enhanced by sensitive engineering and post-production.

A concerto for the focused listener, Palumbo’s score keeps unlocking its sonorous secrets in the course of repeated iterations, lending itself marvelously even to the most zealous close examination.

The title track of the album, the eighteen-minute Woven Lights first movement of the Chaconne seems to stem from some realm interrelated – somewhat – to the pensive central sections of the Violin Concerto. An ever-permuting interplay between the fully written-out electric violin part and its real-time computer-processed echoes, interwoven with sampled sounds of glass and metal, the movement is perhaps best described as the musical equivalent of northern lights – if one is to resort into simple analogies. Sonorous aurora of gorgeous blues and greens, the tapestries of Woven Lights call forth a plethora of associations related to time and space, yielding to transformative listening experience.

Bridged with a cadential passage, the music is carried over into The Glows in the Dark second movement. An intricate web of live and pre-recorded parts, the eight-minute soundscape gazes into the open space and nebulae beyond, zooming in and out of musical cloud-formations resulting from multiples of the solo instrument. A quest into the unknown, aural apparitions travel across the resulting contrapuntal network, to a dazzling effect. Disappearing beyond our scopes, the music dissolves into interstellar space, calling forth the listener’s mental theater to complete its narrative.

A superlative rendition from D’Orazio and Abbrescia, the fused creativity of solo instrumental performance and its electronic reimaginations yields to veritable sonic discovery, exploring strange new worlds through shared musical ritual. Fabulously realized on the new album, the Chaconne is a milestone score.

-- Adventures in Music

James Newby wished to dedicate his second disc on BIS - a recital of English song - to his sister Laura who passed away in 2015, her daughter, and his mother.

After singing Gerald Finzi’s ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ at her funeral, he felt it fitting that the cycle from which it is taken, Let us Garlands Bring, would form the centerpiece of the program. Alongside this cycle, pianist Joseph Middleton and Newby have designed a program of English songs that reflect on themes of loss, grief and death – but also joy, love and healing with varying styles, sound worlds and atmospheres. George Butterworth, Rebecca Clarke, Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Liza Lehmann and Errollyn Wallen are just some of the composers who complete the program, including Arthur Somervell with his cycle ‘A Shropshire Lad’. Like Heinrich Heine’s poems that Schumann used for his famous cycle Dichterliebe, these poems by Alfred Edward Housman deal with unrequited love in first person lyrics. This disc ends on a lighter note with the whimsical song, ‘The Green-eyed Dragon’ by Wolseley Charles, which often concludes live performances as an encore.

Previous BIS releases of works by John Pickard have mainly featured instrumental compositions. This recording presents another facet of the British composer’s work, with compositions for choir under the expert direction of Martyn Brabbins as well as two instrumental pieces.

The five short Latin motets as well as Ozymandias, Pickard’s opus 1, can be described as ‘occasional pieces’ composed during the composer’s student years or for the choir he conducts at the University of Bristol. They display solid tonal grounding and mainly homophonic writing and provide a stepping-stone to some of the more dissonant style found in the latter works. Written for the BBC Singers, whose reputation is well established, the Mass in Troubled Times is an ambitious work bearing witness to a context of global uncertainty. The Mass is a collaboration with the writer Gavin D’Costa, who conceived a complex text based on multiple sources in five languages, combining Western and Middle Eastern religious texts with poetry evoking the plight of refugees. Orion for trumpet and organ, which is partly programmatic, evoking the most splendid constellation and allowing trumpeter Chloë Abbott to shine, and Tesserae for solo organ, with its dazzling virtuosity, played here by the work’s first performer, David Goode, complete this disc.

Classical Music

REVIEWS:
BBC Music (3/98, p.66) - Performance: 4 (out of 5), Sound: 4 (out of 5) - "Suzuki...plays the most tautly structured Bach....[He] makes light of the technical demands - hands crossing, finger-knitting polyphony, dazzling figurations - and characterises each variation imaginatively..."

Classical Music

Classical Music

Includes work(s) by Kaikhosru Sorabji. Soloist: Michael Habermann.

Classical Music

Classical Music

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.



At last, a modern Nielsen to lead the field - and a future classic?

There are eight or so modern accounts of the Nielsen Clarinet Concerto in the catalogue, plus a few no less impressive that have come and gone. Most have fine qualities. Yet for sureness of idiomatic touch none dislodges Ib Erikson’s classic 1954 Danish accounts.

Closer to the mark than any modern rivals is this new issue from Martin Fröst, the clarinettist of the moment for all-round artistry allied to adventurous approach to repertoire. He seems to have Nielsen’s irascible masterpiece in his bloodstream, as surely as he has its technical contortions under his fingers. Vänskä ensures that the Lahti players are never fazed by the exposed edges in the accompaniment, and only the very drawn-out final bars come across as slightly self-conscious. Detail for detail, phrase for phrase, I would have to give this team the palm over the old Danish recording, even before considering BIS’s immeasurably superior sound quality. Even so, Erikson and Wöldike remain a benchmark for insight into the character of the piece.

Kalevi Aho’s Concerto starts arrestingly but without a trace of the attention-seeking that afflicts certain other clarinet concertos of recent times. There is something in Aho’s five continuous movements that recalls Nielsen’s directness and free-flowing succession of ideas, and the cadenza that forms the second movement even brings momentary echoes of Nielsen’s uncompromising skirls and flourishes. But the Finn’s sights are set more on the starkly elemental than on the quirkily personal. For Aho the Vivace con brio third movement is the “centre and culmination”, and it is certainly exuberant – dangerous, even – in its restless virtuosity, rather like Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel driven mad by inner demons. After this a sad slow movement brings sober reflection, and an Epilogue concludes the work on a note of mystery.

Few would now question the status of the Nielsen as the finest clarinet concerto of the 20th century. Time will tell with Kalevi Aho’s concerto in the 21st. In the short term it will probably daunt as many prospective soloists and orchestras as Nielsen’s work did in its time. But there can have been few equally impressive head-on engagements with the concerto medium in recent years. In sum, a CD of rare distinction.

-- David Fanning, Gramophone [5/2007]

This is an, err… enchanting disc of Grieg’s choral music – both original and arranged for choir. The opening, resonant, full bodied choral arrangement of the popular “At Rondane”, op.33, No.2 (originally for voice and piano) is plain gorgeous in its moody way. Two religious songs were prepared for mixed choir by Grieg himself of which “Withered, Fallen – At the Bier of a Young Wife” sounds a bit predictable, but touching in its cathedral-like piety. In this song, as in “Ave, Maris Stella” or indeed most of the other works on this glorious sounding (multi-channel/stereo) hybrid SACD, the non-Norwegian ear will always pick up a certain preciousness, that silver-voiced, Christmas-choir touch with scents and touches of mulled wine, snow boots, and blond locks under a woolen hat.

“Margaret’s Cradle Song” op.15, No.1, a short gem some 90 seconds long, was written in appreciation of the birth of his daughter Alexandra in 1868. It is set to the Ibsen poem of the same name and hauntingly beautiful. Alexandra, however, never got to appreciate her song; she died shortly after it was written. (Which is tragic and yet, given that it was set to something by Ibsen, also so terribly appropriate.)

Grete Pedersen, who conducts the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir also sets the first of the Lyric Pieces op.71 “Det var engang” for mixed choir. It might be the only miscalculation in that the result sounds nice and pleasant but also — in its dum-de-dum new-agey way — cheap.

Norway was already an independent nation when Grieg composed the 1907 Four Psalms op.74, his last work. It’s a somber end to his musical output – with “Jesus Christ is Risen” being an especially austere, if moving, setting of this Hans Adolf Brorson text. The four psalm settings are based on a collection of Norwegian “newer and older mountain tunes” that Grieg wanted to help preserve with his musical adoption. He has achieved that all over again by having them included in this very fine reminder that Grieg is so much more than the Grieg of a certain mountain king’s hall, or of lyric pieces, or a piano concerto.

-- Jens F. Laurson, WETA 90.9

This hybrid disc plays on both CD & SACD players.

BACH Cantatas: No. 17; 1,2,3,4 No. 19; 1,3,4 No. 45; 2,3,4 No. 102 2,3,4 • Masaaki Suzuki, cond; Bach Collegium Japan (period instruments); 1 Hana Blažíková (sop); 2 Robin Blaze (ct); 3 Gerd Türk (ten); 4 Peter Kooij (bs) • BIS 1851 (SACD: 76:24 Text and Translation)


Masaaki Suzuki continues his estimable series with Volume 46 of the complete Bach cantatas. The latter half of the year 1726 saw the creation of these pieces, done at a time when Bach was not writing as many of his own and making use of the work of other composers in his churchly duties. Johann Ludwig Bach composed the texts for these cantatas, from a cycle of the church years published in Meiningen in 1704, and evidently a great inspiration for Sebastian Bach. All except No. 19 are bipartite in form, beginning with a quote from the Old Testament, followed by a parallel quote from the New at the beginning of part I. No. 19 is dedicated to Michaelmas.


But what sets these apart is the almost symphonic conception of the opening choruses, boisterous and energetic, and even the timings indicate that something is up—4:07, 4:08, 5:19, and 5:35, respectively (according to the order in the head note) are quite extensive for the cantatas in general, and it gives Bach ample opportunity to develop his music in the way that perhaps only the Passions allow. The extended division of the works also gives him time to accentuate the differences in mood among movements, more dramatically than in some other cantatas. Though these pieces are taking place in comparatively bland seasons—10th (102), eighth (45), 14th (17) after Trinity, and St. Michael (19) Sundays, respectively, the depth of compositional effort is a little startling. The last particularly was always celebrated with much splendor and high drama, and Bach does not disappoint; right from the start, without benefit of orchestral introduction the choir enters the fray with blazing coloraturas. This is after all, music about a war in heaven. But the trumpets and timpani ensure that by the end no one is in doubt as to the victor, and all leave the church suitably exalted.


O Lord, Are Not Thine Eyes Upon the Truth (No. 102) must have blown away some parishioners with its massive sweep and concise themes used as the basis for the entire cantata. No. 45, He Hath Showed Thee, O Man, What Is Good takes as its theme obedience, and Bach demonstrates this musically by using only one theme in the opening movement, expanding the argument brilliantly combining fugal and concertante elements. This is perhaps the most relaxed of the works on this disc, each movement in possession of noble bearing and high stature. Whoso Offereth Praise Glorifieth Me (No. 17) is the most joyous on the disc, amplified by the tight and unified structure of the opening movement, even though the final chorus may be considered more reflective as it speaks of mankind’s very short passage through life, and implores pity from the Father.


As I have mentioned before, Suzuki’s renderings are definitely a believer’s Bach, more impassioned and assertive than others. Recently I have had a chance to listen to all of Koopman’s recordings and have to fess up to a mistaken judgment; while they are not as demonstrative as these, they are a valid take on a many-faceted music, and I now reverse myself on my previously harsh opinions. Even so, this one sounds great in Super Audio, and if push came to shove I would still recommend these over all others currently offered. Bring on Volume 47!


FANFARE: Steven E. Ritter

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

A calendar filled with orchestral concerts and chamber recitals in many of the world’s most prestigious venues has given the clarinettist Martin Fröst ample opportunity to develop a wide range of encores, for every occasion. Known for the imaginatively themed concert programmes he devises with various musician friends, he has also explored a number of musical genres. These aspects of his artistry are both demonstrated on this constantly engaging disc, which includes immortal gems such as Rachmaninov’s Vocalise and Kreisler’s Liebeslied as well as pieces rather less usual in a classical context: Charlie Chaplin’s Smile and the klezmer traditional Let’s Be Happy rubbing shoulders with an improvisation over the Nat King Cole standard Nature Boy. Throughout the programme Fröst receives the expert support of the pianist Roland Pöntinen, a chamber music partner of long standing who has also been involved in devising many of the imaginative arrangements, for instance of Vittorio Monti’s Csárdás. Three other musical companions of Fröst’s make cameo appearances, with mezzo-soprano Malena Ernman joining the clarinet in the head-long flight of not one, but two bumble-bees. Torleif Thedéen’s cello sings a heartfelt Ave Maria above the gyrating accompaniment of Fröst’s clarinet, while Svante Henryson, also a cellist, plays in his own duo piece Off Pist, in which the clarinet and cello chase each other up and down alpine slopes. Martin Fröst’s spectacular career on disc began in 1995, with one of his first CD reviews, in In Tune Magazine, describing him as ‘A Swedish Clarinet Star’, and continuing ‘Fröst has everything – including genius’. More than 10 discs later his recording of Bernard Crusell’s three clarinet concertos caused the reviewer in French Classica-Répertoire to remark that ‘in every movement his playing hits upon the appropriate elegance, the perfect phrasing, the true colour, the required virtuosity, the necessary playfulness ... as he pursues his musical intentions all the way’ – a description that could equally well be applied to the present disc!.

Berlioz Rottrerdam PO/Nezet-Seguin,Antonacci Symphonie fantastique; Cleopatre

Emilia Amper, one of Sweden’s most exciting young folk musicians, is also one of the finest nyckelharpa players in the world today. (In fact, she can even boast of being a World Champion on the instrument, a title she won in 2010.) For Trollfågeln, her first solo disc, she has devised a programme which demonstrates the numerous facets of her own musical personality, and of her instrument. With its roots stretching back to medieval Europe, the nyckelharpa (‘keyed fiddle’) almost died out in the middle of the twentieth century, but has made a remarkable comeback and is attracting an increasing number of performers in Sweden and around the world. Firmly grounded in Swedish traditional music, Emilia Amper has also worked with musicians from many other backgrounds, and regards folk music as a common international language, and a way of combining tradition with spontaneous improvisation in a playful reflection of our own times. Consequently, on Trollfågeln (‘The Magic Bird’) a traditional dance tune such as Bredals Näckapolska stands next to Emilia’s own take on rock music, Kapad (‘Hijacked’). Similarly, Ut i mörka natten (‘Into the Dark Night’), a song about budding love that she’s written and composed herself, is contrasted with Herr Lager och skön fager, her setting of a poem from the late 1800s describing the sad outcome of a love affair. Solos are mixed with settings in which Emilia is joined by a string ensemble from the famous Norwegian chamber orchestra the Trondheim Soloists, or by another well-known virtuoso on the nyckelharpa, Johan Hedin, as well as by some of her regular collaborators: Anders Löfberg, Dan Svensson and Olle Linder. In turns hypnotic, melancholy and meditative, groovy and jubilant, Trollfågeln is a breathtaking roller-coaster of a disc.

After a move to the U.S.A., Bohuslav Martinů was to compose four works which all belong to the central 20th century repertoire for the viola. Maxim Rysanov, one of today's leading viola players, has gathered these works on this disc, opening with the Rhapsody-Concerto from 1952. In this lyrical two-movement work, characterized by sustained legato writing, sudden changes of mood and texture and a vivid style of orchestration, Rysanov is supported by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the eminent Martin? expert Jirí Belohlávek. The two Duos for violin and viola which follow are slightly earlier (from 1947 and 1950, respectively) and were written with the husband-and-wife team Joseph and Lillian Fuchs in mind. Here the young Russian violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky joins Rysanov, in two scores where exacting technical demands bring the reward of an astonishing richness in sounds and variety from such a sparse instrumentation. Maxim Rysanov closes the disc in the company of the pianist Katya Apekisheva, performing the Viola Sonata of 1955 – like the Rhapsody-Concerto in two movements, with a tough, passionate mood that often recalls the composer's better-known cello sonatas.

Already well known to opera audiences worldwide, Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling is also a dedicated and acclaimed recitalist, as noted by reactions in the Sunday Times and Gramophone, among other publications, to her two previous BIS releases with pianist Paul Rivinius that feature songs by Richard Strauss and Franz Schubert. This new, third BIS disc of songs by Edvard Grieg, Jean Sibelius and Wilhelm Stenhammar takes its title from Stenhammar’s I skogen (In the forest), with many of the selected songs either played out in or depicting natural settings, in a manner familiar to Nordic composers.

Although highly productive and respected in his lifetime as a Lied composer, Robert Franz (1815–92) has since become a peripheral figure in music history. As they began to explore the songs of Franz, Georges Starobinski and baritone Christian Immler were moved by their findings to devise a program including twenty-three of the composer’s often quite brief songs. Using the poet Heinrich Heine as their guiding star, they present these – all Heine settings but from different opus groups – in the form of two ‘imagined’ song cycles, framed by further settings of Heine poems by Schumann and Liszt.

Conceived as homage from the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir to the man who founded it in 1950 and remained its leader for 40 years, Knut Nystedt who passed away in December 2014, at the age of 99. Alongside the two Bach motets here featuring the choir along with Ensemble Allegria and Maria Angelika Carlsen on violin solo, among Nystedt’s repertoire with the choir, the collection also prominently features four works of Nystedt’s, including O Crux (1977) which Nystedt regarded as one of his main works. The choir provides an ineffable epitaph to Nystedt’s legacy with this release, together with Grete Pedersen, Nystedt's successor as artistic leader of the choir. Recorded in Super Audio.

In this final volume of Mozart's complete piano concertos, Ronald Brautigam and Die Kölner Akademie, listeners are treated to Mozart's very earliest attempts in the genre. In these works, young Mozart expands his existing sonata movements into proper concertos, many believe this was a task given to him by his father, Leopold. After a few years, Mozart adopted a more mature approach to the concertos but still used arrangements of sonatas as inspiration. "An ideal mixture of clarity and stylish effervescene" - International Record Review

Described as ‘one of the most innovative and influential among progressive figures of his time’, György Ligeti (1923 – 2006) was able to constantly reinvent himself. In his earliest works, written in Communist Hungary, the musical language is often an extension of that of Bartók’s and he kept his most daring compositions to himself. Escaping Hungary in 1956 he was able to revel in the freedom to experiment – with electronic techniques as well as elaborate serialism – but he was forever sceptical of schools and steered his own course throughout life. The 1960s and early 70s were a highly productive period, which saw works such as Lux Aeterna and Lontano, as well as three of the works on the present disc. In the Cello Concerto and the Chamber Concerto, Ligeti in different ways explores the idea of the concerto as something collective, rather than polarised between the one and the many. The Cello Concerto is striking, and even provocative, in that the soloist often seems to aspire to silence and even absence rather than virtuosic display. The Chamber Concerto, on the other hand, dazzles because here all 13 players are unmistakably present, all essential to the design and character of the whole. Like the Cello Concerto – and the Piano Concerto – Melodien can be performed by large orchestra, but also, as on the present recording, with a single string player per part, becoming a natural pendant to the Chamber Concerto. The disc closes with the Piano Concerto from 1988, which Ligeti had begun sketching eight years earlier but was only able to proceed with after having composed his first set of studies for piano solo. Ligeti himself described the five-movement work as a statement of his ‘aesthetic credo’. Performing these complex scores is the Norwegian specialist ensemble BIT 20 under the Swiss conductor Baldur Brönnimann, with soloists Christian Poltéra and Joonas Ahonen, making his first appearance on the BIS label.

In 2009, at the age of 19, Haochen Zhang became one of the youngest musicians ever to win the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Since then he has had a busy concert schedule, primarily in his native China and in the U.S.A. but also in Europe where he made his début at the BBC Proms in 2014. Recording has been less of a priority for Zhang, and it is only now that he releases his first studio album, recorded at the Reitstadel, the well-known audiophile venue in Neumarkt in Germany. For this recital, Haochen Zhang has devised a programme made up of works that he feels particularly close to. As he writes in his own liner notes, they ’not only speak to me in a very intimate way, but also connect with one another at a corresponding level of intimacy: as a whole they form a unique musical narrative.’ The pieces all share a reflective and introspective quality, albeit reflective in different ways.

Opening the disc, Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen were described by the composer as ‘reflections of an adult for adults’ and in the closing Op. 117 Intermezzi, Brahms also seems to be looking backwards – but with resignation rather than intimate tenderness. Framed by these two, the works by Liszt and Janáček contain overtly dramatic episodes, but contemplative interludes form a recurrent feature of the Ballade, and in Presentiment, the first movement of Janáček’s Sonata, the dark forebodings seem to rise up from the composer’s own soul.