Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Bach's motets have been very lucky on disc. This latest version from Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan is as good as it gets. In addition to the canonic six pieces, BWV 225-230, we also get the much more rarely heard Ich lasse dich nicht BWV Anh. 159, and O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht BWV 118. This brings the playing time of the disc up to more than 75 minutes, and may well prove important to Bach collectors. The singing is uniformly excellent, the small choir and soloists seemingly perfectly scaled to give the more complex pieces, Jesu, meine Freude in particular, plenty of contrast without any cost of contrapuntal clarity.

In the works with double choir, Suzuki has decided to double the first choir with strings, the second with winds, an excellent choice. In the other works he mixes winds and strings, always with an ear to giving each voice its own vivid identity. He doesn't dispute the authenticity of the brief BWV 230 (Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden), and the performance has great spirit and rhythmic verve. Several of these works (Fürchte dich nicht BWV 228, for example) were written for funerals, but however solemn the occasion or the mood, the music always soars. BIS's SACD sonics are typically marvelous. Just great!

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

Classical Music

The piano works by Isaac Albéniz range from indisputable masterpieces to ravishing salon music, the composer painting with bright Spanish colors as well as the hues of Classicism and Romanticism. On nine discs, originally released between 1998 and 2017 and gathered here, Miguel Baselga guides listeners through the music of his compatriot, earning acclaim from reviewers worldwide: ‘pianism of the highest order’ (MusicWeb-International); ‘berauschend agil und rhytmisch spannungsgeladen’ (PIANONews); ‘un pianista elegante y refinado’ (CD Compact). Composed between December 1905 and January 1908, only a year before the death of Albéniz, Iberia is the crowning achievement of the composer’s genius. Marking a high point of the post-romantic piano literature, this collection of ‘12 nouvelles impressions’ was to serve as an endless source of inspiration for other composers throughout the twentieth century, admired by Debussy and Messiaen, who called it 'the marvel of the piano'. Baselga’s exhaustive series places Iberia in its proper context, and with the assistance of Albéniz scholar Jacinto Torres, he has been able to access original editions and scores, including rarities such as the Marcha militar by a nine-year-old Albéniz and the composer's two scores for piano and orchestra. We are also given the opportunity to hear three improvisations, transcribed from a phonograph recording made by the composer in 1903.

REVIEW:

Miguel Baselga was the first and (I believe) only pianist to have recorded Albéniz’s complete solo piano works, a project encompassing nine CDs. The cycle has been reissued in a boxed set, together with each individual release’s original booklet. It remains a significant catalog milestone.

As a stylist, Albéniz covered all bases, from unabashedly salon-like trifles and flashy neo-Lisztian fare to the Iberia Suite’s astonishing originality and labyrinthine complexities. Since Baselga wanted each disc to represent different aspects of Albéniz’s musical personality, he cunningly divided Iberia’s four parts across the first four volumes, aiming to give lesser-known masterpieces like the wild and woolly La Vega and tender Barcarola Op. 202 their due.

The two concerted works (the Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rapsodia Espanola) also receive impressively fresh and well-balanced readings. And for those who can’t get past the faded sound of Albéniz’s three 1903 improvisations preserved on private cylinders, Milton Laufer’s painstakingly notated editions will be revelations, especially in Baselga’s inspired hands.

In all, Baselga’s combination of technical brilliance, exuberant temperament, and tonal imagination yields consistently idiomatic and enjoyable results. A must-have for serious aficionados of Spanish piano music.

– ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

Classical Music

'A disc without flaws, a true marvel' is how Jean-Jacques Kantorow's previous recording of music by Édouard Lalo was described in the Spanish magazine Scherzo. The disc in question included three works composed for the great violin virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate: the violin concerto, Fantaisie norvégienne and the perennial favourite Symphonie espagnole. In a review in Gramophone, the soloist was compared to his great predecessor: 'Kantorow, one of today's most individual players, has the measure of Lalo's Sarasate-inspired violin-writing - he's able to toss off the virtuoso passagework in a seemingly effortless manner and his distinctive tone lends a sensuous allure to Lalo's melodies.' On the present disc, Kantorow plays two other works intended for Sarasate, the brief Fantaisie-ballet on themes from Lalo's ballet Namouna, and the large-scale Concerto russe. The latter piece, in four movements, borrows themes from two wedding songs included by Rimsky-Korsakov in his collection 100 Russian Folk Songs. A typically expressive and virtuosic composition, it is also one of the first important French works to draw upon Russian music - many others were to follow. Two shorter violin works are included here, but the disc closes with another concerto, the Piano Concerto from 1888. It was the composer's final major work, and in it he seems to depart from the pattern of his violin concertos, with their prominent solo parts. Lalo rather chooses to integrate the piano into the orchestral texture, and although the writing is redolent of the great Romantic concertos, it offers few opportunities for the soloist to show off - a possible reason for the work's absence from modern concert programmes and its rarity on disc. Championing this solo part is Pierre-Alain Volondat, and as in the other works orchestral support is provided by the eminent Tapiola Sinfonietta, conducted by Kees Bakels.

MOZART WILLENS (COND.); BRAUTIGAM (FORTEPIANO); DIE KOLNER AKADEMIE PIANO CONCERTOS- PIANO CONCERTO NO. 24 IN C MINOR, K 491; PIANO CONCERTO NO. 25 IN C MAJOR, K 503

In 2009, at the age of 19, Haochen Zhang became one of the youngest musicians ever to win the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Since then he has had a busy concert schedule, primarily in his native China and in the U.S.A. but also in Europe where he made his début at the BBC Proms in 2014. Recording has been less of a priority for Zhang, and it is only now that he releases his first studio album, recorded at the Reitstadel, the well-known audiophile venue in Neumarkt in Germany. For this recital, Haochen Zhang has devised a programme made up of works that he feels particularly close to. As he writes in his own liner notes, they ’not only speak to me in a very intimate way, but also connect with one another at a corresponding level of intimacy: as a whole they form a unique musical narrative.’ The pieces all share a reflective and introspective quality, albeit reflective in different ways.

Opening the disc, Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen were described by the composer as ‘reflections of an adult for adults’ and in the closing Op. 117 Intermezzi, Brahms also seems to be looking backwards – but with resignation rather than intimate tenderness. Framed by these two, the works by Liszt and Janáček contain overtly dramatic episodes, but contemplative interludes form a recurrent feature of the Ballade, and in Presentiment, the first movement of Janáček’s Sonata, the dark forebodings seem to rise up from the composer’s own soul.

Hugely productive, Kalevi Aho has composed close to 30 concertos to date. These include works for traditional solo instruments – piano, violin, cello – but also more unusual ones, such as the theremin or accordion. One project of Aho's is to write concertos for all of the instruments of the symphony orchestra, from the flute to the contrabassoon, and in 2015 the turn came to the timpani. The work was commissioned by the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra for its timpanist Ari-Pekka Mäenpää, and Mäenpää and Aho worked closely together during the writing process. The result is a concerto that explores the instrument's full potential, from the melody opening the concerto, which lasts more than thirty bars, to the rhythmically compelling third movement. Composed almost 30 years earlier, Piano Concerto No. 1 reflects the composer's interest at the time in numerology, and specifically in so-called cyclic numbers. The colorful and exciting work is however anything but cerebral. The soloist is Sonja Fräki, who chose Aho's music for piano as the subject of her doctoral studies, and whose recording of the solo works was released to great acclaim in 2015. With the two works on this album, no less than 16 concertos by Aho are available from BIS, in recordings that have been praised by reviewers worldwide, and received distinctions including the prestigious ECHO Klassik Award.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Throughout his career, Sergei Prokofiev wrote a large number of works for the stage – some of them highly successful, others less so. Whichever the case, Prokofiev would rarely miss the opportunity of recycling the score in one way or another – staying more or less close to the original in an orchestral suite or using it as material for a completely new work, such as the Third and Fourth symphonies (based on the ballet The Prodigal Son and the opera The Fiery Angel, respectively.) The present release combines suites created from Prokofiev’s very first opera (The Gambler, 1915–17) and his very last ballet (The Stone Flower, 1948–53). Based on a short novel by Dostoyevsky, The Gambler doesn’t have separate numbers that can easily be detached. Instead Prokofiev created ‘portraits’ of the four main characters, by re-assembling the music associated with them throughout the opera. The plot of The Tale of the Stone Flower was based on a collection of folk and fairy tales from mining communities of the Ural Mountains, and Prokofiev composed a 150-minute score in an idiom relying on folk elements and nineteenth-century musical traditions. While waiting for official permission to have the ballet performed, he planned a number of orchestral suites. On this recording, the Lahti Symphony Orchestra and their principal conductor Dima Slobodeniouk splice together two of these compilations: the Wedding Suite, Op.126 and the Gypsy Fantasy, Op.127, both of which were performed before the ballet itself, in 1951. The result is preceded by the opening of the actual ballet, entitled The Mistress of the Copper Mountain. These suites frame the brief Autumnal Sketch, one of the composer’s earliest acknowledged works for orchestra.