The Hardanger fiddle resembles its ancestor the viola d'amore in that it has a course of resonating strings under the fingerboard, and this gives the otherwise thin-toned instrument a certain huskiness that sounds oddly compelling. Of course, it helps that Geirr Tveitt composed two terrific concertos for this folk fiddle. The first, dating from 1955, is quite a substantial piece (nearly half an hour long), and as might be expected the music takes traditional Norwegian melodies as its starting point--but like Bartók Tveitt integrates the idiom into a contemporary musical language. It's a lovely work, one that consistently engages the ear and skillfully contrasts solo episodes with evocative and powerful passages for full orchestra. The second concerto, from a decade later, has three movements named for three famous fjords. Tveitt marks the slow movement "Danza determinata e lenta", and "determined" is the quality that comes most readily to mind in this compact (less than 20 minutes), tuneful, and purposeful piece. Soloist Arve Moen Bergset plays both concertos with the necessary verve and gutsy enthusiasm, and Ole Ruud supports him confidently.


Nykken, subtitled a "symphonic painting for orchestra", tells the story of a mischievous water sprite who takes the form of a white horse, lures a young man onto its back, and then takes him on a wild ride that culminates in a deadly plunge back into its native pond. The music is extremely colorful and quite graphic, making the story easy to follow and one heck of a good time too. There's an excellent earlier recording of this piece on Simax, but the differences between the two aren't really significant. Anyone who has recently been turned on to Tveitt as a result of the wealth of attention he has been getting from Naxos and BIS needs no further urging from me. This is marvelous music, marvelously played and recorded.
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Refulgent hyper-Szymanowskian writing, angry dissonance, delightfully stirring jewelled veils.

Ullén and Bis stick to their last with the seriousness of purpose that goes with eminence and invincible confidence in Sorabji’s music. That confidence is securely placed. Sorabji drank deep of that confidence in calling these pieces Transcendental in the first place.

Ullén, with a loftiness and fantasy that recalls Busoni and Godowsky, shoots the kaleidoscopic rapids of Sorabji’s Transcendental Etudes. The shifting veils of lapidary complexity in No. 44 are played with intoxicating fluency – not mere technical proficiency. After such refulgent hyper-Szymanowskian writing we come to the angrily dissonant No. 45 which in its volleys of notes recalls Nancarrow. The galloping articulated ruthlessness of Nos. 46, 48, 51, 53, 62 55, 60 and 62 is blended with humour (55) and in 60 there’s Mussorgskian macabre alongside romantic afflatus. The sprinting Volante continues into the Vivace (49). After breathtaking display comes a more Apollonian mood in No. 50. A Medtnerian spirit is alive in No. 52. The jewelled veils shift delightfully in an Aeolian wind whispering through the pages of No 54. Romance plays high cards in the Moderato. No. 58 in its episodic flurries contrasts with the knowing Cyril Scott meditations of the Quasi fantasia (59).

This disc is the very acceptable sequel to the 100 Transcendental Etudes nos 1-25 by Fredrik Ullén on BIS 1373. Studies 26-43 are on BIS-CD-1533. Volume 1 was reviewed by me in 2006; Volume 2 in January 2010.

Presumably there are two more CDs to come after this. Can we hope that Bis will then have moved on to his six reputedly elaborate piano concertos and the truly epic symphonic and choral pieces by then? They will be an expensive proposition.

Ullen’s commentary on the Studies can be found at the Sorabji Archive.

Other notable Sorabji recordings have been reviewed here: Opus Clavicembalisticum (Geoffrey Douglas Madge), Transcriptions (Michael Habermann) and an extremely desirable three CD collection of Michael Habermann’s performances on the BMS label.

Elegance and power personified in these Transcendental Studies.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

More than most composers currently active, Brett Dean uses music to tackle political and social themes of our times. A common factor in the works on this recording is the sometimes problematic aspects of human communication and the erosion and misuse of language. The recording was made during a public performance of Vexations and Devotions in the framework of the BBC Proms in 2007, with David Robertson conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the Australian children's choir Gondwana Voices.

A beautifully packaged box of the complete Grieg piano music on BIS and a fantastic deal at 12 CDs for the price of 3.

There is so much here that one can explore these works for years and never truly get to the bottom of them... a collection of gems that sparkle from any angle.

Eva Knardahl's recordings of Grieg's music for solo piano – here completed with recordings by Love Derwinger of the works unpublished during Grieg's lifetime – have been a milestone ever since they were first released on LP at the end of the 1970s. The Norwegian pianist's interpretations of the music of her countryman blew away decades worth of cobwebs and caused many to reconsider an oeuvre of which one part was so well-known as to risk becoming banal and another was all but unknown. At the time of the first release one reviewer likened Knardahl to ‘an Alicia de Larrocha of the North, who makes her instrument ring out like a cathedral’. When the recordings were re-released on CD, another wrote that her performances ‘suggest that there's a lot more to Grieg's several hundred little pieces than pretty lyricism ... She brings a forthrightness and color to the Norwegian master – even a countrified robustness – that few have suspected is there. Knardahl's performance of the famous Piano Concerto is a rendering full of grandeur, poetry and power. She can really stand comparison with any of her rivals.’

FULL REVIEW

Norwegian-born pianist Eva Knardahl, who died in late 2006, had a very long career. Well-known in her native Norway, she made her debut at the age of 12 performing with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra. Throughout her life, she recorded a variety of works for piano, paying special attention to the works of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. This box set contains 12 CDs, covering all of Grieg’s compositions for piano.

Knardahl performs on the first ten discs in the set, and Love Derwinger is the pianist for the recordings on discs 11 and 12. This is a repackaging of individual discs that were released over the years, with the Knardahl recordings made between 1977 and 1980, and the Derwinger recordings dating from 1993. It seems unfair that only Knardahl gets her name on the front of the box; Derwinger is credited only on the back. Knaredahly’s recordings were issued first on LP and then reissued on CD in 1987.

The set contains a comprehensive booklet in English, Swedish, German and French, nearly 180 pages long - about 30 pages of text for each language. Fortunately, unlike many other Bis booklets, this one printed in a font that does not require a magnifying glass to read.

Grieg's piano music is one of the monuments of keyboard music, and probably deserves to be regarded much more highly. While not as intense as Beethoven's piano sonatas, or the works of Chopin or Liszt; while not as lofty as the vast output of Bach or that of Mozart, Grieg's piano music combines not only a unique impressionistic approach to the piano, but also elements of folk music from his native Norway. On top of that, many of the tunes in the short pieces are so engaging that you'll find yourself humming them.

Grieg's piano works are mostly made up of short pieces. His 66 lyric pieces, were composed throughout his career but there are also collections of Norwegian folk songs, peasant dances and other works. With just one piano sonata, and one piano concerto - but what a concerto! - his oeuvre is largely one of miniatures. But the size of these works in no way detracts from their interest and force. One can simply listen to the first of the Lyric Pieces, Arietta, to understand just how subtle Grieg's compositional style is. In a simple-sounding ballad of just over a minute, he manages not only to paint a melancholy picture, but also demonstrates that his harmonies are unique and unforgettable. This is a brief piano piece that is more a song without words than a statement of keyboard music.

The three discs of lyric pieces span his entire career, so listening to them in order offers not just a journey through melody, but also an opportunity to listen to how Grieg's style grew over time. His Op. 4 no. 3, Melody, has an intense, melodramatic sound, as does, for example, Op. 54, no. 1, Shepherd's Boy, which is a dark work. Some pieces have such lightness that one can only smile when listening to them. In a way, however, it is fitting that the final work in this series, Op. 71, no. 7, Forgetting, is a reworking of one of the earliest lyric pieces, Waltz, Op. 12 no. 2. Grieg comes full circle with this last lyric piece, showing the subtle ways in which his music evolved.

While there is pleasure enough in listening to the progression of Grieg's style through the first three discs of lyric pieces, one can start again with disc 4, which begins another examination of Grieg's career in chronological order. While it makes sense to group the lyric pieces on the first three discs - which also corresponds to the original release of these recordings on individual discs - it might have been more logical to reorder all the music so the twelve discs flowed in chronological sequence, rather than having two "sets" within the box.

Beginning with the earliest pieces, his Op. 1, Four Piano Pieces, his Poetic Tone-Pictures (Op. 3) and so on, the set traverses his output. In spite of the different names given to groups of works, Grieg's tone does not vary a great deal. All the pieces cover a range of tones from melancholy to exuberant, from bittersweet to pastoral.

An exception can be found in his sets of Norwegian folk songs, where he arranged the raw material of his country's music heritage for solo piano. These helped gain him greater notice, and are one of the finest examples of folk-music brought into the concert hall. There are dozens of such works, many of them tiny gems, others more substantial.

Grieg also wrote one piano sonata, which is somewhat different, on the surface, from his smaller works. A true romantic sonata, it nevertheless features his now familiar song-like approach to music, especially in its second movement. This sonata was and is often performed, yet it is surprising that he did not write another. He remained more interested in his miniatures though he also wrote orchestral and chamber works. In the same manner, he composed just the one piano concerto, which is an extremely popular and oft-performed work. It is played here by Knardahl, with the original version also performed by Love Derwinger.

One work that stands out is the Ballade in G minor, Op. 24, the longest amongst Grieg's pianistic output at just over 20 minutes in this recording. This comprises a series of 14 variations on a Norwegian folk song. Grieg composed this piece after the deaths of his parents in the autumn of 1875. He was overcome with grief, and that comes through in this densely emotional work Knardahl plays it with her emotions at her fingertips.

Some of the pieces are transcriptions from Grieg's larger orchestral works, such as Peer Gynt, Sigurd Jorsalfar, and the Holberg Suite. Grieg very much enjoyed making piano reductions of these works, and his transcriptions shed interesting light on the larger works from which they derive.

The last two discs contain works not published during Grieg's lifetime. Whether the early version of the Piano Concerto, alternate versions of a few works, or some very early pieces that he never deemed interesting enough for publication, these two discs in essence offer the extras or out-takes of Grieg's piano output.

Across the 787 minutes of this set, I have to confess to a preference for Grieg's shorter pieces over the piano sonata, concerto and Ballade. From almost any time in his career, from his lyric pieces to the Norwegian folk songs, from his "short pieces" to his transcriptions of his own songs, dipping into this astounding range of work is never disappointing. In the same way that Schubert rarely wrote a mediocre lied, Grieg has very few weak piano pieces. You can dip into these works at any time and the gods of shuffle will pull out an interesting juxtaposition of pieces that, in spite of when they were composed, fit together organically. There is so much here - again, the comparison to Schubert's lieder comes to mind - that one can explore these works for years and never truly get to the bottom of them. While the last two discs contain some works that are, perhaps, minor, the remainder of this set is a collection of gems that sparkle from any angle.

The recording quality of these discs is excellent, and the piano sounds present without too much reverb, though the Derwinger recordings are a bit hollower than the Knardahl discs. The recording hall adds a different type of reverb, and Derwinger plays a Steinway to Knardahl’s Bösendorfer. For an interesting recording, you might also want to listen to Leif Ove Andsnes' selection of Lyric Pieces played on Grieg's own piano. Given the price and completeness of this set, and the quality of the performances, there is little reason for you to hesitate. Even if you've only sampled Grieg's works in the past, this budget set is a fine reason to discover the full range of his piano compositions. Should you not want all this Grieg, however, the individual discs are still available from BIS, and the three CDs of Lyric Pieces would be a great purchase.

-- Kirk McElhearn, MusicWeb International

Classical Music

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


In the early days of CDs, it always was cause for special comment in reviews (and a high rating for sound!) whenever you came across a recording so realistic and natural it seemed as if the performer was right there in the room with you. This disc would have received that production accolade, and happily gets similarly high marks for its first rate, reference-quality performances.

This is certainly not the first time Bach’s suites for solo cello have been performed on viola–a perfectly natural adaptation and transposition, the viola strings identically configured, their tuning an octave higher than the cello–and while there’s no definitive version of the score, there are contemporary copies of these pieces that enable an arranger/adapter such as Simon Rowland-Jones (in this case) to create a performing edition that’s both faithful to Bach and idiomatic to the instrument in question.

And speaking of faithful, violist Maxim Rysanov plays with a respect for the score–no distracting affectations here!–but also distinguishing his interpretations with a well-considered assertiveness in tone and articulation that confirms the viola’s voice as, if not equal in depth and sheer sonic power to that of the cello, at least as technically impressive and musically satisfying. Rysanov performs these three suites on his 1780 Guadagnini viola, and proudly explains his decision to perform Suite No. 6, originally written for a five-stringed instrument, in its original key–D major–in spite of the difficulty this presents for a player on a four-string viola. (This same approach was successfully executed by violist Patricia McCarty in her viola-traversal of the cello suites for Ashmont several years ago–read review here).

That “up-close and realistic” digital sound we marveled at back in the 1980s often had one drawback, due to the newness of the technology, or simply to the ignorance or unawareness of the production team: along with the timbral realism of the strings or flute or piano or whatever came the presence of the equally, frighteningly natural breathing and wheezing and occasional humming and groaning of the performer, or the clicking and clacking of valves or keys, not to mention the squeaking and screeching of fingers sliding on guitar strings. Thankfully, although we do occasionally hear evidence of Rysanov’s physical, breath-taking existence, it’s minimally distracting (unless you choose to clap on the headphones and turn up the volume).

Rysanov recorded the other three suites for BIS on an earlier CD, and it’s clear that in these confident, exemplary readings he confirms these works as legitimate viola concert pieces rather than simply useful studies or “borrowed” material for an instrument short on its own substantive solo repertoire. In fact, in Bach’s own time and place, “authentic” Bach sometimes meant recycled, re-purposed Bach–keyboard concertos from violin concertos; mass movements from cantata movements; sacred works from secular ones. The idea of making transcriptions or arrangements of Bach is as old as the composer himself.

Many violists besides Rysanov have taken on the cello suites (in several different editions)–but of course this practice doesn’t stop with the viola: Bach made an arrangement of the C minor suite BWV 1011 for lute, and indeed the lute and guitar are the instruments of choice in many modern transcriptions. And the ready adaptability of these pieces to other instruments or ensemble forms isn’t confined to plucked and bowed strings–or even to the world of the traditional classical music stage. Let’s enjoy a great example, from the Gigue of the C major suite BWV 1009–an energetic, sometimes feisty little piece that brings out the livelier side of two very different interpreters: Rysanov with his solo viola, and the Swingle Singers of 1964. Whatever your preference, you have to agree–it’s Bach, and it works.

-- David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

There are no bad recordings of Sibelius' epic Kullervo Symphony, only good and a bit less so. In this latter category fall the comparatively unimaginative Panula (Naxos) and the stodgy Colin Davis (RCA). All of the others, especially both Berglunds (EMI), either Järvi (father and son on BIS and Virgin respectively), Salonen (Sony), and Segerstam (Chandos) are very good indeed. This new recording upholds Vänskä's fine reputation as a Sibelian, and offers further testimony to the exceptional playing standards of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra.


Osmo Vänskä's interpretation differs from those listed above in two respects. First, because his orchestra has a comparatively small string section (still substantially larger than that of the work's premiere, as the finely detailed booklet notes point out), he has little trouble balancing prominent wind passages against the often-dense string accompaniments. The very opening of the work, gentler and softer than usual, makes this clear immediately, and the whole performance has an unusual degree of transparency. Second, he adds about four minutes to the average timing of the second movement (Kullervo's Youth), which works very well when the playing is so impressively sustained and the results so tellingly atmospheric. Still, 19-plus minutes is a long time to have to wait until the narrative sections of the work begin with Kullervo and his Sister (marvelously sung by the Helsinki University Chorus and the two soloists), and despite Vänskä's confident musical shaping, some may find this just too much of a good thing. It's a highly subjective matter, even if there's no doubting the legitimacy of the overall concept.


The remainder of the work proceeds without a hitch, and if you get the impression from any of the foregoing that Vänskä leads what is in any way a timid or small-scale performance, the brilliantly exciting fourth movement (Kullervo Goes to War) will shatter that assumption. In fact, as with all of Vänskä's Sibelius, he plays the music with tremendous sweep and passion, taking delight in employing a vast dynamic range, and the Lahti brass section delivers plenty of brilliance and fullness of tone when called for. The recording, the first made in the orchestra's gorgeous new hall, captures the work magnificently, with excellent balances between voices and instruments. And so, while not clearly superior to the best versions mentioned above, Vänskä and his forces do offer insights that certainly justify purchase of this disc if you find yourself drawn to Sibelius' enthralling early masterpiece.
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music