Classical Music

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

Classical Music

Classical Music

Previously available on six single CDs, BIS offers Ronald Brautigam's Mozart Sonata cycle in one package. While the music easily could have fit on five discs, you still get six for the price of three. It's wonderfully worth it. To be sure, Brautigam's Paul McNulty fortepiano (modeled after an Anton-Gabriel Walter instrument circa 1795) doesn't match the timbral differentiation between registers we often encounter from other fortepianos. It has the advantage, however, of a clear, resonant sound and, praise be, it holds its tuning. Brautigam's imaginative interpretations capture Mozart's many moods, from the gallant style of the six earliest sonatas to the tensile drama and operatic leanings of the A minor (K. 310) and C minor Fantasia and Sonata (K. 457 and 475). Sometimes Brautigam's tapered diminuendos seem a bit arch and unnatural. At least his occasional mannerisms don't emerge as interpretive tics. If you're looking for a reasonably priced Mozart Sonata cycle played on a period instrument, look no further. Excellent sound and annotations, too. --Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

Miklós Spányi is still cranking out C.P.E. Bach recordings, and he's lucky in having a label as loyal and dedicated as BIS. This is Volume 17 out of, I don't know, a billion or so, and like the other discs in this series it's pretty terrific. Spányi uses a harpsichord in the F major concerto and a tangent piano in the other two works. His playing is consistently stylish, full of life, lyrical and virtuosic by turns. And let's not forget: Emanuel Bach was a very, very good composer. The music is consistently interesting and characterful, from the colorful horn writing in the F major concerto to the surprising harmonic twists and turns in the C minor (C.P.E. in minor keys is always special). Toss in pellucid engineering and excellent accompaniments from the intrepid members of Opus X Ensemble, and the result is a joy. Really, you can dip into this series anywhere and be rewarded with excellent, unfamiliar music. Why not start here?

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Appearing with leading orchestras and conductors around the world, Evelyn Glennie has also collaborated with musicians as diverse as Emmanuel Ax, the King's Singers and Bjork. Another unexpected partner is the Taipei Chinese Orchestra, with which she first performed at the 2009 Deaflympics. Returning to Taiwan a year later, she recorded the present disc of original compositions and arrangements for percussion and Chinese orchestra. The programme is wide-ranging in geographical terms, with works by composers from the Far East, as well as by German-based Nebojsa Zivkovic, whose duo Born to Beat Wild for bass drum and trumpet here is performed with a suona, 'Chinese oboe', replacing the trumpet. But the disc also spans a vast distance in time, in that the final work, Emperor Qin Crushing the Battle Formations, is a reworking by the composer Yiu-Kwong Chung of an ancient score first performed in the year 627 at the court of the second Tang Emperor. Ecstatic Drumbeat is the last of four discs that present collaborations between the Taipei Chinese Orchestra and soloists from a Western tradition, with Evelyn Glennie following in the footsteps of flutist Sharon Bezaly, saxophonist Claude Delangle and trombone player Christian Lindberg on her own oriental journey.

To the general public, Masaaki Suzuki is known as the inspired leader of Bach Collegium Japan, currently undertaking a complete cycle of Bach's cantatas for BIS. He has also received much praise for his on-going recordings of the harpsichord music by the same composer. But his début was actually as an organist - he started playing regularly at Sunday services at the age of 12! When going to the Netherlands to study, Suzuki pursued parallel courses, graduating with a soloist's diploma in both organ and harpsichord. The years spent in The Netherlands also explains his familiarity with the musical world of J.P. Sweelinck, and with the traditions of the Dutch Reformed Church with its ties to Calvin and his 'Genevan Psalter'. The attractively varied programme on this disc alternates secular music for the organ with Sweelinck's settings of psalms from the Genevan Psalter. Due to the suspicion with which the Dutch Reformed Church - and Calvin - regarded instrumental music in religious contexts, these settings were not intended to accompany the congregational singing, but were rather played either before or after the service, providing an opportunity for meditation and afterthought. They fill a similar role on this disc, sandwiched as they are between the more extrovert Toccatas and Fantasias, but also testify to the central place these psalms had in Sweelinck's work. As an epitaph put it, it was he 'who put to music David's royal word, And made it to resound in Zion, in Holland it was heard.' The organ chosen by Masaaki Suzuki is a splendid instrument built by Marc Garnier according to the Northern German and Dutch style of the mid-17th century, especially for the use in the services of the Kobe congregation of the Reformed Church of Japan, where the tradition of congregational singing of Calvin's Genevan Psalter is particularly strong.

Classical Music

Classical Music

This is all early Haydn (with the exception of the two marches), but it is not immature. He was in his mid- to late-20s when he composed most of these pieces, and they are beautifully written for a wild assortment of ensembles. There are works for winds alone, serenades for wind and strings (including a couple featuring pairs of English horns), some early pieces with clarinets, a divertimento for harpsichord, a cassation with four horns, music with flute, and an insanely virtuosic trio for horn, violin, and cello. Manfred Huss includes the famous "St. Anthony Chorale" even though it's not by Haydn, and Simon Standage turns in a really lovely performance of the First violin concerto, with a slow movement so winsome you'd never know he's playing a period violin.

Indeed, Huss and his team manage to have the best of both worlds, offering a clearly "authentic" sound without any of the timbral unpleasantness that so often comes with it. There's only one exception: the natural horn playing, particularly in the trio mentioned above. Here I have to be dogmatic: get a modern horn, gentlemen. The alternative on offer here oscillates between crudeness and sheer desperation, however brave the effort.

Still, such is the value of the music and vibrancy of the performances that this set, attractively priced at five discs for the cost of three, is an essential item for any self-respecting Haydn collection. Much of the material was released previously on Koch in a series of single discs, but for all intents and purposes this set should be seen as brand new, for that is how it sounds whether you're listening for the first time or the tenth.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.
Includes work(s) by Uljas Voitto Pulkkis. Ensemble: Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: Susanna Mälkki. Soloists: Jaakko Kuusisto, Sharon Bezaly.

Classical Music

Ottorino Respighi's Roman Trilogy (the tone poems Pines of Rome, Fountains of Rome and Roman Festivals) holds a very special place in the orchestral repertory, challenging almost any other composition for sheer sonic audience appeal. Spectacular scenes such as Fontana di Trevi in the glitter of the mid-day sun, children playing under the pine-trees of the Villa Borghese or gladiators fighting at Circus Maximus provided the masterly orchestrator with the opportunity to employ the full palette of the large-scale symphony orchestra, to which he added various instruments, including organ, piano, celesta, glockenspiel, mandolin and tambourines. In fact, in the third part of the Pines of Rome Respighi went even further and specified, for the first time ever in classical music, the use of a gramophone, playing a recording of a nightingale singing. As a result, these works glitter, shimmer, blare and thunder: a true feast for the ear which here has found worthy exponents in the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP) and John Neschling. Previous releases by this team include recordings of music by Villa-Lobos and his Brazilian colleagues Camargo Guarnieri, Francisco Mignone and Claudio Santoro, and individual discs have been described by reviewers as 'the most vibrant, colorful, rhythmically vital and virtuosic performances imaginable' (on website Classics Today.com), 'an orgy of colours and rhythms' (in Diapason), and 'an assured blend of lush colours, pulsating rhythms and supple phrasing' (in International Record Review.) Such qualities certainly work in the Old World, too - and nowhere better than in Ottorino Respighi's Rome!

REVIEW:

The São Paulo Symphony Orchestra is a superb ensemble by any standards, and displays their virtuosity in the three Respighi symphonic poems.

-- SA-CD.net

(World Première Recording) Few composers have been as consistently preoccupied with their national origins as Jón Leifs, who only found his calling as a composer when he encountered a collection of Icelandic folk music. From the very beginning, Iceland, its music and myths, its landscape and climate furnished him with the material for almost all of his compositions. And from the very beginning Leifs knew that he wanted to create a great oratorio using texts from the Edda, Iceland's national treasure. The scoring is among Leifs' most colourful and inspired, including the composer's signature Nordic lurs and an extended percussion section. This landmark in Icelandic music is performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and the Schola Cantorum choir under the baton of Hermann Bäumer - a constellation that last came together on disc on the highly acclaimed Viking's Answer, the previous Leifs' release on BIS.