Neeme Järvi is one of the most recorded conductors of our time - but this is the first time he records the Tchaikovsky symphonies! He does so with "his" orchestra of 22 years standing, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra: a combination whose many recordings on BIS has made huge audiences very happy indeed! That Tchaikovsky and Järvi really is a 'dream team' concert audiences all over the world have been able to hear for themselves over the years. A student of the legendary Yevgeni Mravinsky - whose Tchaikovsky interpretations are still considered among the greatest - Järvi here gives us a vibrant Pathétique of unusual clarity, firmly rooted in the great Russian tradition, followed up by a Francesca da Rimini of great passion and fire. We are of course extremely proud to be able to offer this unique opportunity to fans of Tchaikovsky, Järvi, the GSO - and to all other music lovers. That the recording is also one of the first multi-channel, surround sound releases of these much-loved works surely adds to the attraction! As will be the coming instalments in the Järvi-GSO Tchaikovsky cycle, this disc is a Hybrid Super Audio CD, meaning that it is playable on all CD and SACD players with an option of stereo or surround sound when played back on SACD equipment. Packed in an elegant slipcase, this is a release which certainly should make a difference to anyone's CD collection!

Classical Music

Formed in 1978, London Baroque enjoys the position of being one of the most experienced and long-lived baroque chamber groups. Combining 8 albums originally released between 2003 and 2013, the present set of trio sonatas can be seen as the fruit of all those years of research, experiment and discovery. The trio sonata was the primary vehicle for chamber music in the seventeenth and at least half of the eighteenth centuries. Its history mirrors other developments throughout the whole of the baroque era. This set is chiefly concerned with those for two violins and continuo, with occasional digressions into those for violin, bass viol and continuo, and one with viola replacing the second violin. Like the string quartet in later ages, most composers (with some notable and regrettable exceptions) tried their hand in the form. The customary addition of a figured bass part played on a harpsichord or organ around 1600 meant that middle parts of the old contrapuntal style could be excluded and chamber music soon began to favor the trio sonata texture. 150 years later, with the string quartet, the process was reversed as the viola took over the middle ground previously occupied by the keyboard.

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Excerpts from reviews of previously released volumes included in this set:

The Trio Sonata In 18th-century Germany

London Baroque is one of the older ensembles in the world of historical performance practice. It is still going strong, and it is remarkable how it has kept its high standard over so many years. That also applies to the Bis trio sonatas series: eight discs, intelligently put together and forming a lively documentation of an important part of music history. The playing is again of the highest quality.

– MusicWeb International

The Trio Sonata In 18th-century Italy

London Baroque’s program-opening performance of Albinoni’s Balletto in G features a fresh, unsentimental treatment of the composer’s characteristically slow first-movement Preludio Largo, followed by sprite deliveries of the second and third movements and a dashing Vivaldi-esque concluding Gavotta Presto. Their performance of Giuseppe Sammartini’s Sonata V is equally inspired. Locatelli’s Sonata in D major also receives a captivating, distinguished performance featuring plenty of thrilling fiddling, especially in the Allegro molto finale. London Baroque performs Vivaldi’s famous Op. 1 No. 12 trio sonata “La Folia” with the leaner continuo of just a cello and harpsichord backing the two violins originally specified by the composer. How refreshing!

– ClassicsToday

Trio Sonata In 18th Century France

Listening to these virtuoso performers swing through much of Couperin’s glorious music is often dazzling. It’s been more than a decade since London Baroque began its European trio sonata recording odyssey for BIS, with by and large great success. And here is another wonderful installment, warmly recommended.

– ClassicsToday

Classical Music

The Minnesota Orchestra has an illustrious past, numbering such legendary figures as Eugene Ormandy, Dimitri Mitropoulos and Antal Dorati among its music directors. As of 2003, Osmo Vänskä is the tenth man on the post, and has had a very successful first season, rounded off by a European tour. During this eventful year, the team also recorded the first volume in what will be one of the first complete cycles of Beethoven's symphonies in Surround Sound. We are now releasing this recording on a disc which is sure to make its mark! Osmo Vänskä -- described as 'an exemplary Beethoven conductor, it's hard to think of anyone better at present' (Andrew Clements in The Guardian) -- has chosen to open his Beethoven cycle with Symphonies No.4 and No.5. The Fourth was on the programme during the orchestra's European tour this spring in performances that were very warmly applauded by the critics: the Vänskä/Minnesota interpretation ?bristled with energy and displayed a muscular, finely honed ensemble-- and 'proved that the possibilities of the modern-instrument approach are not exhausted yet' according to the British music press, and a German reviewer was struck by the symphony's Finale ('one could not imagine it played more vivaciously and grippingly') as well as 'the immensely rich' dynamic contrasts of the performance as a whole qualities that certainly are brought out in the Surround Sound version on the present disc. (As all our Surround Sound releases, this too is issued on a so-called hybrid disc playable on all CD-players in stereo.) In first-class acoustics (Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis) and using the latest recording technology, our most experienced recording team have given free sonic rein to Osmo Vänskä and his Minnesota Orchestra in performances that are among the most exciting one can imagine!

DEBUSSY OGAWA (PIANO) THE SOLO PIANO WORKS- 1'ERE ARABESQUE, L74/1; 2'EME ARABESQUE L74/2; DANSE (TARENTELLE STYRIENNE), L77; BALLADE (SLAVE) POUR LEPIANO, L78; VALSE ROMANTIQUE, L79; REVERIE, L76; MAZURKSA, L75;ETC.

Classical Music

This volume heralds the beginning of the most substantial and ambitious compositional exercise in Bach’s career: an annual series of cantatas in which the composer planned that every Sunday in the church calendar would be identified, textually and musically, by the appropriate chorale for the season. Bach’s second annual cycle – or Jahrgang 2 – was never completed but it contains around 40 chorale cantatas in which, most notably, the first stanza of the chorale is presented variously as an intricate fantasia on the chosen hymn, proclaimed with stirring fervour, usually by the sopranos. While Bach sought new compositional challenges here, he also knew that his boys at St Thomas’s would cope better with familiar chorale-based material than the highly complex choruses which characterise the earlier cycle.

Suzuki’s approach to these cantatas is not strictly chronological as has often been the case. He starts with the first piece in the cycle, the splendid O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort (No 20), which Bach performed on the first Sunday of Trinity (June 11, 1724) but jumps a week by missing out No 2 (with its strikingly austere stilo antico opening movement) and goes for No 7, and then chooses No 94 from a few weeks later. None of this has much bearing on the performances except that this formula seems to juxtapose deftly the wide range of forms used by Bach. The extended and graphic description of Christ’s baptism in Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam (No 7), articulated by two concertante violin parts, is contrasted with the dazzling French overture of No 20. If the playing in the former is somewhat prosaic, Suzuki gives the majestic opening movement of O Ewigkeit such apt propulsion in the bass line that one only intermittently yearns for the more secularised elegance of Herreweghe.

It seems curious that two performances of No 20, released so closely, should employ the same tenor and bass soloists in Jan Kobow and Peter Kooy. Suzuki’s approach with both singers is rather more rhetorical than Herreweghe, who tends to irradiate the music for its own sake, enhanced by the cultivated strings of Collegium Vocale. Both have something interesting to say but Suzuki connects language and music with greater depth of sentiment.

As exemplary a work is Was frag ich nach der Welt (No 94), a substantial cantata whose librettist clearly worked in close collaboration with Bach, ensuring that each stanza of the chorale could be presented with disarming invention. The work is as eager to provide telling dramatic imagery as it is to ruminate on the transience of life and Mammon’s vanity. Bach makes instant demands on his virtuoso flute player who, judging by the number of obbligato parts from this period, was no slouch. It is a marvellous, fresh and abiding testament to Bach’s increasing obsession with unified and economical means. Suzuki realises its quizzical turns and relishes the enriching set-pieces.

Pieter Jan Leusink and Ton Koopman’s readings are full of character and ruddy energy (in the case of Koopman and the Amsterdammers, particularly distinguished instrumental performances) but neither can boast Robin Blaze’s commentary on our deluded world, Betorte Welt. All told, another success chalked up for this continually impressive Bach series.

Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, Gramophone [5/2004]

The BIS Complete Edition of the CPE Bach Keyboard Concertos with this disc reaches Volume 12, and is by now firmly established as a major contribution to the repertoire. These are performances which have received great acclaim, for instance Volume 10 (CD914) which Diapason described with the words: 'Spányi and his orchestra speak the language of Carl Philip as one speaks one's mother tongue, bringing out nuances, voices and contrasts without ever overstating the effects.' the whole series has been greeted as 'fascinating' and 'constantly surprising' (in Répertoire), 'very important' (classicstoday.com), 'splendid' (Fanfare) and being of 'an exceptionally high standard' (Diapason). For this volume, a sonatina and a concerto from the early 1760s have been brought together with a concerto from 1746.

Classical Music

Classical Music

One of the truly iconic works in the repertoire for string quartet, Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden is named after the song which has lent its theme to the second movement. At the end of Matthias Claudius’s poem, which Schubert had set as a 20-year-old in 1817, Death cradles the Maiden in his bony embrace. And her fear, in the first verse, of encountering his tomb-cold touch is mirrored by his desire for her in the second. In Schubert’s lifetime, death was a constant presence in everyday life and even a young person like himself would have encountered it at close quarters – in fact, his own mother had passed away when he was only 15. When Schubert returns to the song in 1824 and starts work on the string quartet, death has nevertheless grown even more real: in the meantime he has become acquainted with pain and disease during the bouts of the syphilis that he knows will kill him. He turns the song into a set of variations, preceding it with a ferocious Allegro, and following it with a Scherzo and a Finale that have been described as ‘the dance of the demon fiddler’ and ‘a dance with death’. The acclaimed Chiaroscuro Quartet performs the work on gut strings, which brings out the vulnerability and desperation even further. The players then let us down gently with the youthful String Quartet No.?9 in G minor, a work in which the minor key offers Schubert the opportunity to play with light and shadows, rather than full-scale drama.

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REVIEWS:

With their ‘period’ sound world (gut strings, Classical bows, sharp articulation) allied to hungry tempos and phrasing that vaults across the bar line, Schubert’s darkest quartet seems more than ever a study in the inexorable power of rhythm. Their unvarnished sonorities (vibrato minimal or non-existent) make Schubert’s harmonic clashes all the more excruciating. It is also, properly, a drama of uncomfortable extremes.

– Gramophone

Light and shade abound in performances of brisk, fierce beauty.

– The Strad

Classical Music

Classical Music

In an effort to arrange the first performance of his Seventh Symphony, Gustav Mahler declared it to be his best work, ‘preponderantly cheerful in character’. His younger colleague Schoenberg expressed his admiration for the work, and Webern considered it his favorite Mahler symphony. Nevertheless, it remains the least performed and least written-about symphony of the entire cycle, and has come to be regarded as enigmatic and less successful than its siblings. One reason for this has been the huge – even for Mahler – contrasts that it encompasses: from a first movement which seems to continue the atmosphere of the previous symphony, the ‘Tragic’ Sixth, to a finale that has been accused of excessive triumphalism, and which Mahler himself once described as ‘broad daylight’. Between these two poles, he supplies no less than two movements entitled Nachtmusik (‘night music’) framing a scherzo to which the composer added the character marking schattenhaft (‘shadowy’). Mahler famously said that ‘a symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.’ The Seventh is as true to this dictum as any other of the symphonies, offering a wealth of emotions, moods and colours. The composer makes full and imaginative use of the orchestra’s extended wind and percussion sections – including cowbells, whips and glockenspiel – as well as a mandolin and a guitar, adding a troubadour-like aspect to the nightly serenade of the fourth movement.

All of this is brought to life by the players of the Minnesota Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä, as they continue a cycle praised for the performances as well as the recorded sound.

REVIEWS:

I might have predicted that this of all the Mahler symphonies would chime with Osmo Vänskä’s very particular gifts as a conductor. The brilliance and clarity of this performance (and recording – BIS’s technical prowess much in evidence), to say nothing of Vänskä’s way with rhythm and articulation, is in itself the source of much pleasure.

– Gramophone

Vänskä’s apparent eccentricities here are mostly to accentuate Mahler’s own in his most outlandish ad unpredictable symphony. All the brass do the Minnesota Orchestra proud, and if the strings aren’t of central-European richness, Vänskä usually moulds them to produce the desired effect. The sounds are beguiling to the last, and the essential triumph of engineering in this most testing of symphonies is peerless.

– BBC Music Magazine