Schubert, we are told in the reminiscences of his friends, did not dance. But he was always happy to play the piano for dancing in the convivial atmosphere of gatherings of friends, and was considered to have a real gift for it. In all he composed more than 400 short dance works, of which 42 (Waltzes and Ländler), are performed on this disc by the brilliant pianist Vassily Primakov. In addition to dance pieces, Primakov has recorded extraordinarily intimate readings of six of Schubert's haunting Impromptus-- works composed in the final years of the Viennese master's brief life.

Classical Music

This disc presents the world premiere recording of Poul Ruders's latest symphony, completed in 2013. The symphony, composed in three movements is, in some ways, the great Danish composer's most traditional symphony- an explosive, quick-paced first movement followed by an hypnotically inward-looking slow movement, followed by a bristling dance finale. Aside from its outer-trappings, Ruders 5 inhabits a sound world all its own. The first movement's opening brass fanfare is followed immediately by startling police whistles and pounding drums- music of volcanic power and intensity. The slow movement employs a huge registral span, and the third movement's funky dance rhythms collide with dense harmonic underpinnings. The work is given a brilliant reading by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, led by the Estonian maestro, Olari Elts. The recording was made in the Danish Radio's new concert hall, named by Gramophone, as one of the "10 best concert halls in the world".

This disc presents the premiere recordings of two major Poul Ruders orchestral scores. Offred Suite is a suite of the five major arias from Ruders's greatest international success, the opera, The Handmaid's Tale. Ruders has structured the music in Offred Suite to flow continuously, so that the overall effect is that of a monodrama. Singing the role of Offred is the brilliant young soprano of Metropolitan Opera fame, Susanna Phillips. Ruders's Symphony No. 3 'Dream Catcher' is a 30-minute long work in two interconnected movements. After a stormy introduction, the music dissolves into the main movement, a long-breathed Adagio sognante. This dreamlike movement connects to a Scherzo prestissimo, a movement which annotator Malcolm MacDonald describes as: "a tour-de-force of virtuoso orchestral writing, a teeming, yelping, squealing, buzzing, chittering, whooping riot of sound." The performances by the Odense Symphony under conductor Scott Yoo are nothing short of spectacular. Volume Six of Bridge's Ruders series (BRIDGE 9336) was Grammy-nominated, and Volume Seven (BRIDGE 9375) has just been chosen as Editor's Choice by Gramophone.

This disc compiles 4 award-winning recordings of works that Danish composer Poul Ruders has written for the guitarist, David Starobin. Psalmodies is an eleven movement ëconcerto-concert-suiteí that begins and ends with movements for solo guitar, and displays a wide range of emotions ñ from introspective to circus-like. Starobin and Speculum Musicaeís performance was named a Fanfare ëBest of the Yearí. Etude and Ricercare is a sober 13 minute essay in pure polyphony. Originally on Bridge 9057, the recording was Gramophone ìEditorís Choiceî. Chaconne is a short meditative solo that was originally on Starobinís Newdance. Newdance won the 2000 ìIndieîfor Best Solo CD of the Year and a Grammy nomination for ìBest Solo Performanceî. Paganini Variations (originally released on Bridge 9122) is a high-spirited concerto based on Paganiniís famous 24th Caprice. Given a 10-10 (highest rating) by Classics Today.com, critic David Hurwitz wrote: ìPoul Rudersí music is expressionistic in the best sense of the term: exciting, extreme, violent, hallucinatory, and often strikingly beautiful ñ it grabs you by the throat and never lets go. How guitarist David Starobin gets all of those notes under his fingers is anyoneís guess, but manage it he does. Itís an amazingly virtuosic display of supreme musicianship.î

Bridge has the admirable philosophy of concentrating on a few composers in which the label believes, and then issuing a series of discs that begin to give us listeners a sense of the scope of their work. It’s an invaluable service, which one could only wish were more widely imitated. Not only does the label support such obvious masters as Carter and Crumb, but the Dane Poul Ruders (b. 1949) is an instance of its taking a chance on a younger composer just hitting his prime. The works on this program come from three different points in the composer’s career. The Piano Sonata No. 2 is the earliest (1982); De Profundis dates from 1990; and the two orchestral works are the most recent, with Concerto in Pieces composed in 1994–95 (and one of Ruders’s biggest “hits”), and Fairytale in 1999.

The sonata is a brilliant work in four movements, lasting 25 minutes. It comes from the period when Ruders had just found his voice, which combined the astringent spikiness of modernist gesture with a more cyclic flow and a “pitch-centricity” suggestive of minimalism. Like his compatriot Per Nørgaard, Ruders found ways to spin out his music so that it seemed to be constantly regenerating itself (though the models he chose to follow had more to do with change-ringing than Nørgaard’s “infinity series”). As a result, the music moves from a dark, more dissonant and taut world towards ever-greater radiance. If I think of a point of comparison, it might be the Copland Piano Variations, though far more expansive in its scale. The pianist, in a live performance from the Aldeburgh festival, is none other than Thomas Adès, the great young hope of English music, who plays this very difficult music with bravura. One hears a tiny bit of strain in the rendition, especially in the climax of the first movement, but overall I find myself even more open to Adès’s own compositions on the basis of his obviously overwhelming musicianship. This recording is a rare instance of that wonderful thing, when one major artist takes the time and effort to devote himself to the work of another.

De Profundis is scored for two pianos and percussion. It’s conceit is simple: a slow and inevitable rise from low to high in every manner—from bass to treble register, from spare to prolix texture, from slow to fast tempo, from dark to blinding color. Ruders handles the task with a great sense of dramatic pacing. Of course, the progression sounds similar to what I described above in the sonata, but here it is far more continuous in its transformations (though from a different Scandinavian country, Ruders seems to have learned a lot from Sibelius).

The two orchestral works are colorful and occasional. Fairytale was commissioned by the Nordic youth orchestra that performs it here (stunningly). It is non-stop, ostinato-driven, breathless. The Concerto in Pieces was commissioned as a double tribute, to both the tercentennial of Purcell’s birth and the 50th anniversary of the Britten Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra. The idea was to create a modern analogue to the Britten, and as such, it had to be an incredibly intimidating commission, perhaps even more so for a foreigner. But Ruders seems to have relished the challenge. The work exudes a sense of athletic exuberance, a delight in discovering new ways to tweak its source (a different Purcell piece than Britten’s choice, by the way), and a constant pleasure in sonic and structural invention. While all the orchestral sections get a full workout, the music makes its point more from distinctive color-combinations than exposure of separate choirs. Tuba, muted trumpet, harp, and saxophone get extended solos in different variations. And one hears a very strong Sibelian reference in the horns in the final variation.

In the end, this is an extremely successful release, and one can’t help but be impressed with Ruders’s mastery of whatever medium he puts his mind to. Having said that, I must close with one reservation. The recent works, despite their confidence and technical bravura, somehow feel a little hollow in comparison to the composer’s earlier pieces. To take one example, his orchestral piece from 1982, Manhattan Abstraction, is absolutely thrilling and overwhelming in its energy, but there’s also something profound there, a linkage between the sonically brilliant surface and a rigorously logical architecture. Of course, these newer orchestral pieces are lighter by virtue of their commissioning circumstances, so I don’t want to rush to a judgement based solely on them. I was sensing this same unease in my review of the previous release in this series (Fanfare 26:6). Indeed, it may be that Ruders’s imagination has moved more into the world of music drama and these instrumental works are partaking thereof, relinquishing that more Germanic devotion to the transcendentally abstract. I said in that earlier review I probably needed to hear the recording of his opera The Handmaid’s Tale, and I’m ashamed to say I still haven’t. This review makes it particularly obvious I have to do so.

But this more general critique doesn’t take away from the worth of this release, which is recommended, nor from my admiration and encouragement to Bridge to stay their course and their continued advocacy of composers in whose mastery they trust.

Robert Carl, FANFARE

Classical Music

Selections recorded in May and Decemeber 1995.

The meteoric ascent of Vassily Primakov's international career has resulted from a series of competition victories, prizes in honor of his artistry, and his award-winning recordings. Winner of First Prize in the Young Concert Artist International Auditions and the Audience Prize of the Gina Bachauer International Competition, Primakov was named the Classical Recording Foundation's "Young Artist of the Year" in 2007. His much-heralded recordings have garnered National Public Radio's "CD of the Year" (Chopin Mazurkas, 2010), American Record Guide's "Best of the Year" (Schubert Impromptus; and Dvorak Piano Concerto, 2011) and BBC Music Magazine's Music Choice. (Chopin Ballades, Brahms Intermezzi, and Scriabin Sonata No. 4, 2010). This new recording presents Primakov's renditions of some of Rachmaninoff's most beloved works, played on a superb Bechstein Concert Grand.

Classical Music

The David Amram Quartet plays: Pull My Daisy; Lover Man; Take the “A” Train; Saint Thomas; Summertime;Gracias, Amigos; Tennessee Waltz; Red River Valley; Blue Monk

When Jack Kerouac and David Amram did the first-ever jazz/poetry reading in New York City in 1957, the excitement of that collaboration led to the documentary film Pull My Daisy. These live performances from the late 80s feature guitarist Vic Juris, bassist Victor Venegas, drummer Akiro Tana and saxophonist Paquitode Rivera. Led by composer/performer David Amram.

At the time of his death in April 2011, Peter Lieberson had planned the present recording, a project he was never to hear realized. The present disc fills out our picture of Lieberson’s accomplishments in the concerto genre, placing the spotlight on two previously unrecorded large-scale works, the Piano Concerto No. 3 and the Viola Concerto. The compositions assembled here complicate the perception that Lieberson’s style evolved straightforwardly, the caterpillar of hard-as-nails maximalism metamorphosing overnight into the butterfly of sweet-smelling neo-romanticism, as exemplified in his masterpiece, “Neruda Songs”. The Piano Concerto No. 3 synthesizes elements from Lieberson’s previous efforts in the form, and brings the cycle to a brilliant and dramatic conclusion. Annotator Matthew Mendez calls the Viola Concerto “a big-hearted, eminently songful piece in the Walton mode.” Lieberson wrote that: “My entry into composing the Viola Concerto was through my love of the viola sound itself. It’s difficult for players, but the expression is very direct, so it’s not a difficult piece to hear.”

PAYSAGE • Susanna Phillips (sop); Myra Huang (pn) • BRIDGE 9356 (54:06 Text and Translation)



Songs by Debussy, Fauré, Messiaen


Susanna Phillips has been singing professionally for at least 5 years now and it is a wonder to me that she hasn’t already been recorded, this being her first recital disc. She has the voice and talent that quite likely will get her to the top of her profession sooner rather than later, all the potential makings of a major artist. So the Bridge label has had the perspicacity and the good fortune to debut her on CD, and they have another winner here.


Phillips sings an all-French program, from the 19th-century lyricism of Gabriel Fauré to the more tonally ambiguous (as the booklet puts it) work of Claude Debussy and the modern sounds of Oliver Messiaen, who created his own otherworldly soundscape to express the mystic and religious nature of his own texts. The three composers are not presented in that developmental order; the rather musically complex songs of Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées put both singer and pianist to work right away with the composer’s Impressionistic music. Phillips is expertly accompanied on piano by fellow Juilliard grad Myra Huang; Opera News opines that she “bids fair to be among the top accompanists of her generation.” The rather spiky dissonance of Messiaen’s song cycle Poèmes pour Mi is presented next, providing an even greater artistic challenge for both artists, and they respond admirably. Four lovely pieces by Fauré finish the program, allowing Phillips to display her fine voice and ability to add colors in more lyrical passages.


If Phillips’s French is not idiomatic, it is still quite good. Three different French styles are heard here and the singer does them all justice, but some of this music is not for the faint of heart. Timing is a bit short at about 54 minutes, but gets excused because of the fine music-making of both Phillips and Huang. A well-written and informative essay on the music by Malcolm MacDonald is included in the booklet, as are texts and translations.


FANFARE: Bill White

Classical Music

REVIEWS:
Billboard (11/27/99, p.54) - Recommended