Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

Classical Music

Classical Music

"The Stockholm Chamber Brass here presents a well-played program of Renaissance music arranged for modern brass, with the pluses and caveats that implies. The music’s fantastic and very well-selected: Susato, Dowland, Monteverdi, Gesualdo. The program itself smartly combines these, moving from lively dances and martial airs to arias and slow works of great beauty. Many tracks add percussion to the mix. The Monteverdi ‘moresca’ (track 25) is irresistible. The brass ensemble plays marvelously throughout, especially in slower, more introspective selections. Only the very first track, ‘La Spagna’, features a trombone solo that I think sounds hurried. Thoughtfully, one trumpet is on the far left and the other on the far right, and even more thoughtfully, the booklet tells you who’s who.

This is a highly polished modern brass quintet playing Renaissance arrangements with solemn precision and occasional dancing exuberance. The recorded sound’s terrific and the project is well-documented."

-- MusicWeb International

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Without ever having received any formal training, Swiss-born composer Frank Martin (1890-1973) spent a long time developing a style which, from his breakthrough in 1942, would make him a highly respected international figure. As the legendary pianist Paul Badura-Skoda put it: 'Many great works of this century are admired; few have the privilege of being loved. Frank Martin created works which are both admired and loved.' On the present disc the works in question are his Cello Concerto, the Ballade for cello (in the version for piano) and the 8 Preludes for piano. On two previous discs Christian Poltéra has presented works for the cello by composers from his native Switzerland. The latest of these, dedicated to the music of Honegger, was recently released and has already received high praise, for instance on the web site Classics Today.com, whose reviewer wrote: 'If you want a superb collection of Honegger's music for cello, both chamber and orchestral, then this CD is just the ticket - a terrific way to plug what is probably a serious repertoire gap in your collection.' As on previous discs in Poltéra's 'Swiss trilogy', he is again supported by the Malmö Symphony Orchestra under Tuomas Ollila-Hannikainen (in the Concerto) and by the eminent pianist Kathryn Stott, who also shines in the Preludes for piano solo, a fascinating display of Martin's broad variety of expression and techniques.

‘A born master of the orchestra’ is how the British composer John Pickard was described when BBC Music Magazine reviewed a previous disc of his orchestral music, while Fanfare called it ‘essential listening for lovers of modern music’, finding the performances ‘absolutely thrilling, emotionally involved and seamlessly evolved’. Given such reactions, it is not surprising that Pickard, Martyn Brabbins and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra decided to continue their rewarding collaboration, with results that can be heard on the present disc. The three pieces included span three decades, and in his own liner notes to the disc, Pickard remarks that the programme gives an overall sense of his development as an orchestral composer: ‘from the clear outlines of the early Sea-Change, with its indebtedness to the sound-world of several Nordic composers, through the colourful exuberance of the Piano Concerto, to the darkness and turbulence of Tenebrae.’ Completed in 2009, Tenebrae takes as its starting point a fragment from Carlo Gesualdo’s Tristis est anima mea (Sad is my soul) from the composer’s settings for the Tenebrae services of Holy Week. The work is in itself a result of the earlier collaboration between Pickard and these performers; commissioned by the Norrköping orchestra which gave it its première in 2010, it is dedicated to Martyn Brabbins. Joining the team on this disc is Fredrik Ullén, making his first recording with orchestra after a number of highly praised solo recitals. John Pickard’s piano concerto has three movements, Toccata - Passacaglia - Fuga, forming a continuous span. During the course of the thirty minute-long work, three different basic relationships between soloist and orchestra are explored: dialogue, dominance and partnership, the latter illustrated in the closing double fugue, throughout which the soloist and the orchestra work together very much as a team.

Classical Music

Following a series of acclaimed recordings of 19th-century music including complete cycles of the symphonies by Schubert and Schumann, Thomas Dausgaard and his Swedish Chamber Orchestra turn to Felix Mendelssohn. The team’s latest offering unites three of the composer's four celebrated concert overtures, written between 1826 and 1835 and setting new standards for this emerging genre: Mendelssohn’s overtures are also tone poems, combining a Classical conception with Romantic expressivity. The earliest of the three – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Mendelssohn composed at the age of seventeen, and his sister Fanny later remarked how Shakespeare's play had been a constant presence at their home, and ‘how at various ages we had read all the different roles, from Peaseblossom to Hermia and Helena…’ The overture immediately became one of Mendelssohn’s signature pieces, and seventeen years later he returned to it, composing additional incidental music for a stage production of the play. Written for soloists, women's choir and orchestra, the complete Midsummer Night score is included here. The disc opens with the last of the four overtures to be composed, however: The Fair Melusine, which Mendelssohn wrote after having heard an opera based on the old French tale of the water spirit Mélusine and her sad fate. Actively disliking the opera, Mendelssohn was provoked into his own musical setting of the subject matter in the form of a concert overture. Water – and its depiction in music – also plays an important role in The Hebrides, the closing work on the present recording. Inspired by the poems by Ossian – which captured the imagination of an entire generation at the beginning of the Romantic era – Mendelssohn visited Scotland and the Hebrides in 1829, and already during this trip he sent a postcard to his family, with the overture's famous opening written down in a four-part setting.

Classical Music

As the hub of a fledgling British Empire, London around 1710 was burgeoning with new wealth and offered the perfect setting for operatic entrepreneurs eager to spread the latest Italian fashions. It was thus a city of opportunity for Handel, fresh from spending five years in Italy, but also for many other touring musicians including Arcangelo Corelli, Francesco Maria Veracini and Francesco Geminiani. This recording unveils a portrait of the chameleon Handel, emerging in the panache of his early Italian-styled Amadigi, reaching maturity in the 'English operatic' Hercules and arriving finally in the perennial melodic grace of Theodora, his penultimate oratorio. Extracts from these works, in which the young Norwegian mezzo-soprano Tuva Semmingsen displays both vocal agility and a wide-ranging emotional palette, are interspersed with instrumental works by Handel's Italian contemporaries. Corelli's Concerto grosso in D major, from the celebrated Opus 6, and Geminiani's 'La Follia' in D minor - incidentally a reworking of Corelli's famous violin sonata - both illustrate Italian instrumental music at its most sumptuous, in colourful and dynamic performances by the Norwegian period band Barokksolistene. For further variety, the leader and artistic director of the ensemble, Bjarte Eike, also performs a chamber work by Veracini, who visited London regularly during some three decades in the early 18th century. The Sonata in A major was published in England in 1744, and it would be quite tempting to interpret the use in it of a Scottish tune, Tweed's side, as merely a clever marketing device to charm a local audience, were it not that the tune, and the composition itself, was so attractive.