The superb Horszowski Trio is heard here in their debut recording. The Horszowskis (Jesse Mills, violin, Raman Ramakrishnan, cello and Rieko Aizawa, piano) draw their name from legendary pianist, Miecyslaw Horszowski, who made one of his specialties the repertoire of the three composers presented here.

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This new recording marks the first complete performance of Harry Partch’s major cycle in three parts, Plectra and Percussion Dances. On the original 1953 recording, Castor & Pollux, was missing three movements, and the finale, Even Wild Horses, was missing its tenor saxophone part.

The virtuosi of Partch give us revelatory interpretations of these stunningly original scores. Also included is a 7 minute spoken introduction, given by the composer in 1953 on the occasion of the broadcast premiere of this work.

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In the decades since the review disc material was originally recorded there has been exponential growth in interest in the classical guitar. Paralleling this are the numbers of people who play to concert standards and of those preoccupied with the short history of the instrument and its past champions.

During the period from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s the great José Rey de la Torre made twelve commercial recordings none of which are currently available. The review disc comprises material originally released in late 1950 or 1951 on the Philharmonia label (PH 106), later re-released on Elektra (EKL 244) and then again on Nonesuch (H-7123). It also includes a 1950 rendition of the Boccherini Quintet in D major featuring the Stuyvesant String Quartet (Philharmonia PH 101). The final track is a previously unissued live performance of Etude No. 11 by Villa-Lobos.

Rey de la Torre was born in Gibara, Cuba in 1917 and died on 21 July 1994 in San José, California. A child prodigy, he studied guitar in Havana with Severino Lopez, a student of Miguel Llobet. In 1932 his family sent him to Barcelona to study under Llobet.

On 9 May 1934 Llobet presented him in a concert at the Academia Marshall together with a pianist and then shortly after in a solo recital. Both received rave reviews from the tough Barcelona critics. Catalan composer and critic Jaime Pahissa described Rey as the most complete guitarist he had heard. Another critic compared him not only with Llobet but also with Pablo Casals.

Rey moved to the U.S.A. in 1937 or 1938 to establish his concert career. Motivated in particular by homesickness he made several return trips to Cuba to give concerts after which his family moved from Cuba to New York to support him.

Around 1961, right at a time when his career was flourishing, he suffered a setback: the middle finger of his right hand became less responsive and was a challenge for a number of years until Marianne Eppens, a physical therapist, was able to isolate the cause and offer a remedy. In 1969 they were married and moved to California. In 1975 at the zenith of his career Rey was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a disease which ended his performing career a year later.

The guitar playing on the review disc is quite inspiring. Informative and comprehensive notes accompanying this disc refer to Rey’s ‘poetic, precise, playing still evident half a century on - his rich resonant tone, his exquisite phrasing and sense of line, his bravura technique and profound musicality’. Testimonial of these qualities is readily found on the disc including a splendid rendition of Albeniz’s Torre Bermeja - The Crimson Tower [2]. We are reminded in the notes that, unlike much of what is recorded today, this particular recording was made without any edits.

Rey premiered Six Variations on a Theme by Milan [5] by composer/pianist Joaquin Nin-Culmell on 10 November 1947. Of him the composer said: ‘As a young player he was astounding. His playing was aristocratic and exact, quite different from the romantic, improvisational school of Segovia.’

The hitherto unreleased live performance of Etude No. 11 by Villa-Lobos is highly evocative of actually being at that very concert, coughs and all - not to mention the beautiful live guitar playing.

Given the vintage of the recordings the overall sonic qualities are quite good. No master tape was available for the solo recording so it was restored from a copy of the Elektra LP. The live recording of the Villa-Lobos Study has an eerie life-like quality.

Particularly touching is the great reverence, admiration and affection with which students, friends and associates refer to Rey de la Torre - also known as José, or Che - by that select group. Much of this is encapsulated in what ex-student Anthony Weller wrote in the accompanying notes: ‘Sometimes it is difficult to grasp how very quickly the vagaries of time can erase a performer’s legacy; the familiar name becomes an unfamiliar ghost. Now the classical guitar audience will have one of the instrument’s greatest poets, at his magnificent best, before them again, more than half a century later. May he never be forgotten.’

We can only hope that, like Mr Weller, future champions will emerge to ensure that past great exponents of the guitar, such as Jose Luis Gonzalez (1932-1998) will never become unfamiliar ghosts but forever be remembered for their magnificent contributions when the guitar had so few of their kind.

This is a highly important historical recording by one of the instrument’s greatest exponents.

-- Zane Turner, MusicWeb International

2008 Grammy Winner! - "Best Instrumental Soloist Performance"

The god of inspiration sprints hand in hand with Garrick Ohlsson as the pianist nears completion of his Beethoven sonata cycle. The present disc opens with one of Op. 2 No. 3's finest recorded performances. Ohlsson's lean, propulsive first movement incorporates distinctly contrasted themes and subtle tempo modifications. Everything hangs together so well that when Ohlsson leans on the accelerator for the movement's final octave outburst the effect is conclusive rather than vulgar.

Ohlsson also plays Op. 14 No. 1 beautifully, bringing a refreshingly terse quality to the Allegretto by underlining its sudden dynamic shifts. The pianist's genial, expansive account of Op. 14 No. 2's opening movement evokes memories of Claudio Arrau's likeminded mid-1960s recording, yet Ohlsson stresses different details, such as the left hand's chromatic broken octaves. Ohlsson's crisp yet full-bodied shaping of the second movement's detached chords brings out the music's Haydn-like wit, to say nothing of the finale's aptly timed, elegant fingerwork.

Excellent sound and notes.

-- Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

Just Released -
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Vol 5 / Garrick Ohlsson
The newest volume in Garrick Ohlsson's impressive and illuminating cycle.

Voices From The Morning Of The Earth: A Cycle of American Songs from North and South, East and West (2008) is the sixth of seven American Songbooks that occupied George Crumb for most of the millennium’s opening decade. This recording (Volume 17 of Bridge's Crumb Edition) completes Bridge's cycle of Crumb's American Songbooks. The seven songbooks are approximately five hours in length, and constitute George Crumb's magnum opus. Also on this CD is Crumb's Idyll for the Misbegotten. The composer writes that “flute and drum are to me those instruments which most powerfully evoke the voice of nature. I have suggested that ideally (even if impractically) my Idyll should be “heard from afar, over a lake, on a moonlit evening in August.” The Sleeper with words by Edgar Allan Poe, transforms Poe's lugubrious meditation on a dead beloved (“Soft may the worms about her creep!”) into a haunting ode to a woman slumbering beneath the “mystic moon.”

BEETHOVEN String Quartets, op. 18/1–6 • Budapest Qrt • BRIDGE 9342/AC (2 CDs: 135:18.


This set completes Bridge’s offering, in three installments, of a complete live Beethoven cycle by the Budapest Quartet, drawn from concerts at the Library of Congress over the period of its long residency there, from the war years to the early ’60s.


As a fixture of the American musical scene in the mid 20th century, the Budapest Quartet was in many ways the chamber-music equivalent of what Toscanini and the NBC Symphony represented on the orchestral scene: a similar “high Modernist” approach of score-based rigor, with virtuoso execution characterized by tonal luster, rhythmic brio, and expressive intensity. Although the sound and interpretations are familiar from the quartet’s studio recordings from the 1930s (CDs on Biddulph) and early and late 1950s (mono cycle on United Archives, stereo remakes recently collected in a bargain box in Sony’s Masters series), these live versions consistently score in their extra keenness, freshness, and the kind of spontaneous risk-taking only possible at a live event.


Quartets Nos. 1–3 are taken from concerts in 1944, with Edgar Ortenberg on second violin (the notes inform us that No. 3, from March 9 of that year, was actually his debut appearance with the group); No. 5 dates from a year earlier, when Alexander Schneider still occupied that seat. First movements are tightly coiled, with perfectly balanced tonal weight, knife-edge attack, and a wonderfully supple molding of the themes within a rigorously classical conception of unified tempo. (Exposition repeats are consistently omitted throughout.) Slow movements have great expressive immediacy, luxuriant tonal fullness, and often a penchant for dynamic and articulative extremes—for two examples, hear first violin Joseph Roisman’s breathtaking emergence from inaudibility in the messa di voce beginning of his melody in the Adagio of No. 1, and the radiant textural saturation the group achieves in the last variation of the Andante cantabile from No. 5. Scherzos leap off the page with rapier-like cut and thrust; finales are forcefully projected with trenchant, weighty brilliance (No. 1), blistering brio (No. 2), and mercurial group reflexes at an extreme tempo (No. 3).


Two late performances (No. 4 from 1962, No. 6 from 1960) undeniably display evidence of a collective hardening of the arteries, with thicker sonorities, less responsive interplay, and some moments of less than perfect tuning (though these should not be exaggerated). Even so, there is ample compensation in a lifetime’s accumulated interpretive wisdom, with a dramatic and emotional engagement that remains highly compelling—in No. 4 in C Minor, hear the richly affecting consolation they draw from the first movement’s contrasting major-mode theme, or their highly original conception of the third movement’s Trio, with a long-breathed gradual acceleration.


The sound is close-miked and clear, vividly transferred at a high level. There is some distortion in the loudest passages from the 1940s recordings, though this will present no obstacle to the set’s obvious target audience of historic collectors.


As a bonus we have a nine-minute rehearsal fragment from 1944, a fascinating glimpse of the quartet at work on the exposition of the E-Major Molto Adagio from the Second (E-Minor) “Razoumovsky” Quartet. There is a lively back-and-forth (in Russian—naturally—with no translation provided), with painstaking attention (as one would expect) to tuning and rhythmic control, and the vivid sense of an interpretation being hammered out among four strong-willed individuals. The atmosphere is highly concentrated, with no hint of comfortable routine.


Besides being a mandatory purchase for those collecting the cycle, this set will be self-recommending to chamber-music aficionados and historic collectors generally.


FANFARE: Boyd Pomeroy

Volume 18 of Bridge's Complete Crumb Edition features premiere recordings of two recent works ("The Yellow Moon of Andalusia" and "Yesteryear") as well the premiere recording of the recently revised version of a Crumb classic, "Celestial Mechanics". Crumb returns to his favorite poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, for "The Yellow Moon of Andalusia", six settings of English translations of Lorca's work. The performance features the work's dedicatees, the brilliant American soprano Tony Arnold, and the superb pianist, Marcantonio Barone. Mr. Barone follows with Crumb's 'Thelonious Monk variations' for solo piano, "Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik". Crumb was never satisfied with the ending of "Celestial Mechanics" and re-wrote it in 2012, recorded here for the first time. "Yesteryear" is a vocalise for soprano and three players, dedicated to Ms. Arnold. Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award-winning composer George Crumb, now in his 88th year, continues to compose highly expressive, colorful and dramatic music. This new recording is a must-hear for all fans of a unique voice in contemporary music.

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The esteemed American pianist Anne-Marie McDermott has played concertos, recitals and chamber music in hundreds of cities in the United States, Europe and Asia. Recent collaborations include recitals with her violin partner, Nadja Salerno Sonnenberg, chamber music with the piano quartet, Opus One, and concertos with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Dallas Symphony Orchestra in Vail, Colorado. Ms. McDermott's upcoming recordings for Bridge include a series of Mozart concertos, and the new Poul Ruders Piano Concerto No. 3, "Paganini Variations", recorded with the Odense Symphony Orchestra. On the present release, McDermott has once again chosen the sonatas of Haydn, making this her second volume of the composer’s work for Bridge Records. “We have waited a long time for an American pianist of this stature.” (Gramophone) “She’s one of the great American pianists of her generation.” (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

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.”

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GERSHWIN Rhapsody in Blue. Rhapsody No. 2, “Rhapsody in Rivets.” Variations on “I Got Rhythm.” Piano Concerto in F • Anne-Marie McDermott (pn); Justin Brown, cond; Dallas SO • BRIDGE 9252 (72:53)


Gershwin’s four works for piano and orchestra fit so comfortably on a single CD that it’s surprising how rarely they all show up together. Currently, arkivmusic.com lists only two direct challengers: Sony’s compilation of Levant’s classic but dim-sounding recordings (with the preludes as a bonus) and a Conifer disc with performances by Michael Boriskin, which was tepidly reviewed by Michael Ullman in 22:5. This new Bridge issue, therefore, fills a significant if unexpected discographic gap. Even when held up against less complete collections, though, these classy performances stand high.


On the whole, the performances are characterized by a light (even Gallic) touch, not only on the piano but also in the orchestra, where the brass and percussion are generally kept under control. I don’t want to suggest that McDermott is tame or aloof: with her imaginative articulation and dynamics, coupled with her willingness to tease the rhythms and tone (listen to the Debussian colors before rehearsal 10 in the Concerto’s second movement), she invests the music with plenty of personality. But mercurial though it may be, that personality tends to be suave rather than aggressive, deft rather than determined, snappy rather than assertive. Rarely does she reveal the claws beneath her velvet paws. Thus, for instance, she sets out the big tune in the Rhapsody in Blue with a tenderness that nimbly sidesteps the self-indulgent gush that drowns, say, Leonard Bernstein’s performances; she dances through the climaxes of the Concerto, more apt to impress us with a wink than with a whack; she turns the Second Rhapsody, pushy even under Levant’s sophisticated fingers, into a delectable tin-pan soufflé. Justin Brown is a sympathetic partner, and the orchestra gives us considerable detail without a hint of pedantry (try, as but one example, the nifty upward arpeggio on the bassoon three measures before 7 in the middle movement of the Concerto). Frothy but sassy, these performances will lift your spirits.


I wouldn’t quite say that McDermott sweeps the field. Any lover of Gershwin will want to consider the Levant, too, as well as the Earl Wild/Arthur Fiedler recordings of the Concerto, the Variations , and the Rhapsody in Blue . Jon Nakamatsu’s intently modernist version of the Concerto on Harmonia Mundi (31:1), in state-of-the-art SACD sound, is also well worth knowing. But McDermott’s solidly engineered performances are surely among the front-runners. Enthusiastically recommended.


FANFARE: Peter J. Rabinowitz