Classical Music

BIS's Skalkottas cycle gets better with every release and it started very well' was the Gramophone opinion of one of our previous discs and this new installment will surely confirm them in this view. Two years ago Nikos Samaltanos put everybody in his debt with a double album of the piano music of Skalkattos - 'A timely release, urgently recommended' in the opinion of the Gramophone. Samaltanos returns here with a fascinating disc of concertos for various instruments - a previously unrecorded concerto for two violins as well as concertos for trumpet, oboe and bassoon or combinations of these - and piano. This music gives full reign to the adventurous and individual sonorities that we have learned to associate with Skalkottas. Another BIS/Skalkottas landmark!

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Alexander Glazunov's Symphony No. 2 (completed in 1886, when the composer was 21) is distinguished by its quintessentially Russian thematic style, which like Borodin's juxtaposes "oriental" and "occidental" melodies. The Symphony's main theme, announced in a commanding unison statement at the first movement's opening, appears in all four movements in various guises, establishing the work's cyclic unity. Glazunov's motivic development technique stems directly from contemporary Russian practice (already he displays the mastery of orchestration and large forms that would characterize his later work), so any fan of 19th century Russian symphonic music will find much that is comfortably familiar here. However, even non-Russophiles will derive enjoyment from Glazunov's always ear-catching tunes, colorful orchestration, and dramatic sensibility (particularly in the outer movements). Tadaaki Otaka shows himself to be finely attuned to Glazunov's special sound-world and lavishes much care and affection on this music, leading the BBC Wales Orchestra in an enthusiastic and highly polished performance.


Glazunov's Mazurka in G major (1888) actually is a self-contained suite of dances (the dance suite was a popular form of the Russian National school) and points the way toward the imaginative and vibrant style of his later ballet scores. The orchestral fantasy From Darkness to Light was dedicated to Busoni, and it displays (in the darkness section) some surprisingly advanced harmonic devices (Glazunov reportedly had no sympathy for any modernist tendencies, at least later in his career). Out of this pushed-to-the-edge chromaticism emerge the pure tonal harmonies of light, as the work follows a rather obvious path of "transfiguration". Otaka and his forces are just as convincing in these two filler works, making the whole program quite enjoyable. BIS' vivid recording presents a naturally balanced sound picture with a wide dynamic range.
--Victor Carr Jr, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

Not many instruments have a birthday - the tuba, however, does: the 12th September 1835. It is true that more or less similar instruments were already in existence, but it was on that day that a patent for the instrument was registered in Germany. By the second half of the century, with the operas of Richard Wagner, it had become an indispensable colour in the orchestra, and was later to play a significant role in works by such composers as Richard Strauss, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. Tuba concertos started to appear in the middle of the twentieth century, and finally gave lie to the cliché that the tuba was heavy, clumsy and incapable of playing fast. On this disc, the Norwegian tuba virtuoso Øystein Baadsvik explores some of these concertante works, including pieces by the Georgian composer Alexander Arutiunian and the Swedish composer Torbjörn Lundquist. The programme opens and closes with a Williams, however. Written in 1954, Ralph Vaughan Williams' Concerto for Bass Tuba was at first considered a last eccentricity of an aged composer, but with the passing of time it has become recognized as a classic.

Classical Music

Sibelius' early Quartet in B-flat Op. 4 (1890) is quite lovely and well worth hearing. It contains some striking anticipations of the composer we know and love, particularly in the harmonies of its slow movement and in its imaginative use of string texture (pizzicato especially). It also shows something of that instinctive feeling for movement that the mature composer developed to such a phenomenal degree. The Tempera Quartet performs both this work and the later Voces Intimae with notable liveliness and evident enthusiasm. In the latter piece, the clean ensemble and vigorous rhythmic profiling prevent the music from sounding dour, particularly in the central slow movement (from which the quartet's nickname derives). However, on occasion--in fortes--the tone of the violins turns a bit crude as the players dig into the notes with excessive vehemence.

The opening piece on the disc, a 12-minute Adagio, features a few attractive but not really memorable ideas. It ends somewhat ambiguously (nothing new when it comes to Sibelius), here suggestive of more to follow--but what that might have been we will probably never know. A tiny fragment of the original ending of Voces Intimae only a few seconds long fulfills BIS's intention to record every scrap of music that Sibelius wrote; but the disc concludes sonorously with the Andante festivo, taken at a good clip and sounding less solemn than usual in this reduced format. As suggested with respect to the major works, the Tempera Quartet handles all of this music expertly, and BIS's sonics are the most consistently excellent in the business. Do try the B-flat quartet: its quality will surprise you.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

The women appearing before our ears throughout this program range from the Virgin Mary and Dido, queen of Carthage, to Shakespeare's Desdemona and the unfortunate Anne Boleyn, waiting for her execution in the Tower of London in 1536. But the disc also features four other heroines - the Italian composers Claudia Sessa, Francesca Caccini, Lucrezia Vizzana and Barbara Strozzi. All active between 1590 - 1675, they will have required great courage to rise above the social conventions of the time, but this surprisingly productive period for female composers also offered an opportunity that would disappear in later centuries: the all-female environment provided by the convent. More than half of the women who published music before 1700 were nuns, including Sessa and Vizzana, who are here represented by brief meditations on teh suffering and death of Christ. Caccini and Strozzi, on the other hand, lived very much in the secular world - Caccini at the Florentine court and Strozzi as a free-lance musician and composer in Venice. Unhindered by the restrictions imposed by the church on sacred music they both adhered to the new stile moderno championed by Claudio Monteverdi. Celebrated for their singing, they composed vocal music which makes 'the words the mistress of the harmony and not the servant', to quote Monteverdi's brother Giulio Cesare. The soprano Ruby Hughes has already made her name for herself in a wide-ranging repertoire, but has a special love for the constellation of lute, cello and voice. With Jonas Nordberg and Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann - who also contribute instrumental solos - she here reveals in the dramatic and expressive potential offered by this trio combination, and by the music by these female composers and their English colleagues Henry Purcell and John Bennet.

Classical Music

Classical Music