Classical Music

Classical Music

The music of J�n Leifs is often inspired by Iceland's powerful nature and literary heritage. From early on he was profoundly influenced by the medieval tradition of Icelandic literature, preserved in a handful of manuscripts, including the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda. Leifs' magnum opus is the Edda oratorio, a massive (although incomplete) work in three large parts which occupied him on and off for most of his composing career - from around 1930 to his death in 1968. A partial performance of Edda I - The Creation of the World - met with incomprehension, and Leifs only resumed work on his great project a decade later, completing the second part - The Lives of the Gods - in 1966. He immediately started on the third part of the oratorio, and was still working on it at the time of his death. Neither of the two finished parts were performed in his lifetime, Edda I receiving it's first complete performance in 2006 and Edda II in 2018, in conjunction with the recording of the present disc. Leifs' music is as ruggedly grandiose as it's subject matter and the score calls for vocal soloists, choir and large orchestra, making huge demands on the performers. Once again the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and the intrepid Schola Cantorum join forces under the baton of conductor Hermann B�umer, following up on their acclaimed recording of Edda I, which was described by reviewers as 'one of the recording events of the year' (Gramophone) and 'splendid in it's craggy and intensely individual lyricism and magnificence' (MusicWeb-International. Com).

Palestrina preceded Victoria as chapel master of the Roman Seminary. Apart from this the younger composer seems to have little connection with the elder and indeed on the strength of the two main works performed on this disc, Victoria was the more cosmopolitan and less passionate in style. The four singers of New York Polyphony along with their three colleagues listed above produce some of the purest and most beautiful sounds I have ever heard in this music. The marketing paragraph reproduced in the liner notes refers to them being regarded as one of the finest in the world, I confess their name was entirely new to me but on the strength of this remarkable display of musicianship and virtuosity they seem to justify the description. The strength and unity of their approach combined with absolute accuracy of pitch makes this disc an essential purchase however many other performances you may own of the Palestrina Missa in particular.

The meticulously detailed BIS track listing shows exactly where plainchant propers are interpolated in the Missa Papæ Marcelli and Motets in the Victoria. This provides the fuller perspective for listening that the composers would have expected. Ivan Moody's brilliantly written liner notes help us, listening as we are to music from close-on half a millennium ago, to place these stunningly beautiful pieces in their context. Moody also tries his best to justify the curious album title 'Roma Æterna'; difficult because it refers to the lasting nature of the city despite changes in culture and politics, and this music is all from a short time in the late 16th century and has only theological eternity in mind.

BIS always make splendid recordings, but the acoustic of the St Cecilia Cathedral seems to have helped this recording to even greater clarity and spaciousness than normal. The 150 years of history behind St Cecilia's in Omaha seems to have culminated in acoustic expertise being brought to bear during the late 20th century which may be the reason this disc sounds so good. I cannot help but add a tale from their website about the collection of monies when cathedral reconstruction was needed around 1866. Apparently the efforts of one Father Kelly were remarkably successful partly because of this incident: "Entering a dance hall in a mining camp one day, one of the men demanded to know what he (Father Kelly) was doing there. 'I am collecting for a new cathedral in Omaha,' was the reply. Thereupon the Western man doffed his hat, drew his trusty six-shooter, and accompanied the astonished priest around the room, thus obtaining more than a hatful of money through this 'persuasive' method." Modern cathedral fundraising would probably prefer to eschew this approach!

– MusicWeb International (Dave Billinge)

If the String Symphonies, collected on the accompanying release SACD1738, are the works by the young Mendelssohn on his way to becoming a fully-fledged composer, the concertos give a more all-round picture of the composer. Beginning in 1822, when he composed the Concerto in D minor for Violin and the Concerto in A minor for Piano, Mendelssohn kept returning to the concertante format throughout his life, until the great E minor Violin Concerto, written three years before his death, in 1844. Between these works can be found the two rarely heard Concertos for Two Pianos - youthful, but surprisingly mature works - as well as his two piano concertos Opp 25 and 40, and three concert pieces for piano and orchestra. Soloist in these is Ronald Brautigam, who will be well-known for his acclaimed surveys of the solo piano music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Isabelle van Keulen takes on the works involving solo violin, and was at the time of the original release described as a 'winning soloist with a soft tone like the finest-spun silk - plus strength to match, when required' (Gramophone). Swedish pianists Roland Pöntinen and Love Derwinger partner each other in the concertos for two pianos, virtuosic works first performed by Felix and his sister Fanny. The accompaniments throughout are provided by Amsterdam Sinfonietta, under Lev Markiz, and were characterized as 'both polished and warmly supportive' (Gramophone).

A MusicWeb International Recording of the Month

It was in 1953, 65 years ago, that Herbert Blomstedt conducted the Gothenburg Symphony for the first time. Since then he has been back on numerous occasions, performing a wide range of works – only not those by Wilhelm Stenhammar. Blomstedt has told of how an international career gave him little opportunity to study and conduct Stenhammar’s music. At the age of 85, however, when he no longer had any obligations as a chief conductor, he thought ‘now or never’ and began to study the composer’s major scores in earnest. And when the time came to perform and record them, what other orchestra could he choose but the Gothenburg Symphony – Stenhammar’s ‘own’ orchestra which he conducted between 1907 and 1922. The works on this album are possibly the finest orchestral music that Stenhammar composed and he gave the premières of both with the orchestra, Symphony No. 2 in 1915 and the revised version of the Serenade in 1920. In fact, he even dedicated the symphony to the members of the orchestra, his ‘dear friends’.

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REVIEW:

This is an outstanding disc which all lovers of the music of Wilhelm Stenhammar should hear. I think that both works are new to Herbert Blomstedt’s discography and I’m thrilled not only that he’s now recorded them but also that he’s given us performances of such distinction. And how fitting it is that the orchestra involved should be the Gothenburg Symphony, since Stenhammar was the orchestra’s principal conductor from 1907 to 1922; not only did they give the premiere of the Second Symphony but also Stenhammar dedicated it to the orchestra.

As usual with a BIS release, production values are high. As I’ve indicated already, the recorded sound is excellent and despite the long playing time of the disc I detected no diminution in sound quality. The notes by Tomas Block are very good. BIS have recycled the portion of his note dealing with the Serenade from the Lindberg disc but why not: the note is excellent so why reinvent the wheel?

– MusicWeb Internatioanl

The lute flourished for more than five hundred years, until it's decline towards the end of the eighteenth century, and for large parts of that time it was the most important instrument in all of Western music. Some of the most exciting developments took place in the 1500's, including the first instances of printed lute music as well as changes to the instrument itself. On this release, Jakob Lindberg, one of the great lutenists of our time, pays tribute to three colleagues from 600 years ago: Francesco da Milano, Marco dall'Aquila and Alberto da Mantova.

Classical Music

*** This single-layer stereo SACD can ONLY be played back on an SACD player. ***

Ultra Extended Playing Time: More than 4 hours of music on 1 SACD!

This pioneering recording, which was first released in 1995 as a set of four conventional CDs, contains the complete solo lute pieces ascribed to John Dowland. As opposed to the composer's lute songs and instrumental dances, which Dowland himself carefully prepared for publication, his lute solos have survived in much less reliable versions. Jakob Lindberg, student and successor of Dowland specialist Diana Poulton as lute professor at the Royal College of Music in London, brought all of his expertise to bear in preparing the scores and choosing among variant versions for his recordings, and also wrote the informative liner notes included in this edition. Dowland's solo lute music is extraordinarily varied and ranges from light frivolous pieces to profound works expressing the darkest melancholy. It is characterized by an uncommon tunefulness and many of the pieces were given texts to become lute songs, one example being his famous pavan Lachrimæ which he also published as the song Flow my teares. This also applies to several of the many galliards - a genre which also shows a wonderful diversity: extrovert dances inspired by 16th-century 'battle pieces' but also sublime, introvert and sweet-sounding pieces such as the Melancholy Galliard. In order to perform these 92 pieces, Dowland's testament to lutenists, Jakob Lindberg uses three different instruments, first and foremost an 8-course lute but also a 10-course lute and an 8-course orpharion.

Steven Isserlis has earned a reputation as one of the foremost cellists of our day. At the same time he has become known for his ingenuity and innovation in programming, something which this disc is the perfect example of. It combines four works for cello and orchestra all arranged at his personal request, and each of them by the arranger of his choice.

‘A pleasing melancholy’ is how Robert Burton described the feeling that certain music can give rise to, in his The Anatomy of Melancholy from 1621. Some 20 years earlier John Dowland, melancholic par excellence, had expressed a similar idea in the dedication of his Lachrimae, or Seven Tears: ‘pleasant are the tears which music weeps’. During this period in England, melancholia had become fashionable, especially in cultural and literary circles, and spawned countless poems, paintings and songs. When Dowland’s lute song Flow My Tears was published in 1600, the instrumental Lachrimae Pavan on which it was based had been in circulation for several years and was the composer’s ‘number one hit’ both in England and on the continent – and four years after the song, he returned to the music and varied it in the ‘seven tears’ for viol consort and lute. Colleagues of Dowland such as Robert Jones and John Danyel explored similar moods and emotions in their own songs, sometimes – as in Danyel’s Eyes look no more – making clear allusions to Dowland’s famous pavan. The Chelys Consort of Viols released their first disc in 2015 to critical acclaim. For the present recording they are joined by lutenist James Akers, and Emma Kirkby, the English soprano who has long been a leading figure in the field of early music.

Despite his advanced age and the chaos surrounding him, Richard Strauss remained highly productive well into the 1940's. As the Second World War was coming to an end in 1944-45, the eighty-year-old composer was working on his Oboe Concerto and Sonatina No. 2 for winds, as well as the Metamorphosen for strings. While the latter work was an explicit response to the destruction Strauss was witnessing, in the Concerto and the Sonatina the composer seemed to be turning his mind away from the events surrounding him. There is a pastoral quality to the oboe concerto, with a highly tuneful solo part and more than occasional touches of nostalgia for the 18th century. Similarly, Strauss headed the score of the sonatina with a dedication ''to the spirit of the immortal Mozart at the end of a life full of thankfulness''. To an extent, one might say that Strauss at the end of his life returned to the musical models of his youth. It is therefore fitting that these two works frame the Serenade in E flat major for wind ensemble, composed more than sixty years earlier in the tradition of entertainment music by Schubert and Mendelssohn. Alexei Ogrintchouk, one of today's leading oboists, has proven himself in previous recordings for BIS ranging from Bach to Nikos Skalkottas and Antal Dorati. With sterling support from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Andris Nelsons, he here makes light of the considerable difficulties of the solo part of the oboe concerto, and also directs his colleagues from the orchestra's wind section in the works for wind ensemble.

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REVIEW:

Late Strauss has a sound very different from the sumptuous, huge-orchestra one of earlier Strauss, and the 1945 Concerto for Oboe and Small Orchestra, one of the composer’s final works, shows this quite clearly. The live recording of the concerto for BIS by Alexei Ogrintchouk is a very fine, well-played one, and the conducting by Andris Nelsons is sensitive and nicely paced.

Ogrintchouk is both oboist and conductor in the other works on the SACD, which are studio recordings. The short, charming, lively and quite self-assured Serenade for 13 Wind Instruments is from the opposite, earliest part of Strauss’ career, dating to 1881.

The final work on this disc is much more substantial — longer than the other two put together. The label Sonatina therefore seems something of a misnomer. It features very skillful wind writing — a Strauss characteristic that does not always get adequate attention — and an overall warm and mellow sound somewhat reminiscent of that of Brahms. Strauss was something of a natural in wind writing, as the excellent playing on this recording makes abundantly clear.

– Infodad.com

This set is available at a special price: 6 discs for the price of 4.

The universal appeal of the music of Johannes Sebastian Bach is such that most musicians, regardless of their instrument, long to play it. As a consequence, his works are constantly being arranged for other instruments – following a practice that Bach himself excelled at, repeatedly reworking his own music as well as that of others. A case in point are the four so-called lute suites, all of which now belong to the standard repertoire of most concert guitarists. To what extent they were originally composed for a plucked instrument has always been a matter of contention and has given rise to many hypotheses. They hail from various periods in Bach’s career, and range from youthful elan (BWV 996) by way of the zenith of artistic creativity (BWV 995, 1006a) to serene maturity (BWV 997). For this recording, Franz Halász has himself transcribed two of the suites, performing the others in arrangements by Ansgar Krause. For reasons of practicality, the suites in G minor and C minor are usually transposed when played on the guitar, but the present arrangements have made it possible to record all four works in their original keys for the first time on the guitar. An unusually generous playing time furthermore allows them to be collected on a single disc. Franz Halász appears on a number of acclaimed albums for BIS, in a wide-ranging repertoire including Bach’s three sonatas for solo violin, which he, according to one reviewer makes ‘entirely his own’ (BBC Music Magazine).

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REVIEWS:

These days they are also often played on the guitar, as Franz Halász does here. And he makes a first class job of it. The innocent ear will be beguiled by his impeccable technique, without any noise from sliding fingers or intrusive nails. The pleasure in listening to his virtuosity is greatly increased by the vivid recorded sound BIS afford him.

– ClassicsFM

Recorded in a deliciously resonant acoustic but with plenty of close-up detail, this is a guitar recording to relish at every level. Halász doesn’t ‘baroque-up’ his playing, but manages to synthesise a timeless ancient feel with what feels like contemporary expressive weight. Franz Halász’s recording can stand on its own in this field, and it’s not hard to imagine this becoming many people’s favourite.

– MusicWeb International

Composer, piano virtuoso, conductor, teacher – Camille Saint-Saëns was all of these things, but also a keen archaeologist, astronomer, botanist, historian, illustrator, poet, playwright… A seasoned traveller, he was the most famous French musician in his own lifetime, acclaimed in North and South America, the Middle East and across Europe. It is ironic, then, that his extensive and varied output isn’t better known today – except for a few works of which the most famous, Carnival of the Animals, is one Saint-Saëns himself had little affection for. Now often regarded as old-fashioned or even reactionary, we tend to forget that Saint-Saëns during his lifetime was sometimes heckled for the boldness of his works. Furthermore, he defended the music of the revolutionaries Wagner and Liszt, earned the admiration of figures as Berlioz, Debussy and Ravel and – in 1908 – composed one of the first original scores for a film!

Jean-Jacques Kantorow and the Tapiola Sinfonietta have championed the music of Saint-Saëns on a series of acclaimed albums, and are now joined by the young Alexandre Kantorow – son of the conductor – for a survey of his works for piano and orchestra. In 1858, Saint-Saëns became the first major French composer to write a piano concerto, but on this first release of two the Kantorows present the three last concertos. Composed over a period of almost 30 years (1868 – 1896), these are highly individual works: Piano Concerto No. 3 is a bold attempt to reconcile Classical form with a Lisztian pianistic brio, No. 4 employs an unusual formal scheme in which themes are reused in a cyclic manner and, finally, the ‘Egyptian’ (No. 5), named after the second movement, which in the composer’s own words describes ‘a sort of Eastern journey that goes all the way to the Far East’.

REVIEWS:

It is no hardship to review yet another Saint-Saëns piano concerto recording when it is as good as this. Believe me, Kantorow is the real deal – a firebreathing virtuoso with a poetic charm and innate stylistic mastery. I had forgotten just how demanding is some of the piano writing in No. 4 is but I have rarely heard it delivered with such commanding ease and infectious delight.

– Gramophone

We seem to be undergoing a Saint-Saëns piano concerto bonanza, and this excellent disc could well take pride of place had it not been for Louis Lortie’s Chandos recordings, which are just that much finer still. The outstanding performances here are the Fourth and Fifth Concertos, the former cogently shaped and urgently projected, especially in the work’s latter stages. Alexandre Kantorow respects the music’s basic sobriety but still endows the outbursts of virtuosity with appropriate élan and sparkle. I can’t think of many performances of the second movement that make the music sound more purposeful.

– ClassicsToday (10/10; Robert Hurwitz)