Engelbert Humperdinck's music for the pantomime of Karl Gustav Vollmoeller's arguably most important stage work impresses with it's deeply Romantic sound and large-scale choral scenes and had so far led an unforgivable shadowy existence in the composer's oeuvre. Premiered in London in 1911, none other than Max Reinhardt adapted this work for film (1912) and staged numerous performances with hundreds of actors, singers, and dancers - finally also at the Salzburg Festival in 1925. This recording represents the first complete recording of this deeply Romantic masterpiece.

Dmitri Shostakovich is one of the indubitably great composers of the 20th century and left works of greatness in every genre, from the symphonies to opera, film- and light music, concertos, and, of course, chamber music. This collection offers a great overview of his contributions to that genre. It features a few favorites, like Rudolf Barshai's Chamber Symphony (arranged from String Quartet No.8), String Quartet No.1, and the Piano Quintet to lesser-known gems and rarely heard works for two pianos like the tiny, witty Tarantella or his dramatic, cinematic Concertino. It is capped with Alfred Schnittke's tribute to the master, the Prelude in Memory of Dmitri Shostakovich.

Dmitri Shostakovich is first and foremost known for his symphonies and string quartets - works that contain some humor, but even more darkness, brooding, and desolation. But there is the jaunty side of the great composer, too, and nowhere does it come to it's cheerful fore than in these works, the Jazz Suites, the Tahiti Trot, and his Ballet Suites. This set, accompanying Capriccio's boxes of Shostakovich's Symphonies, Film Music, Orchestral Songs, and Chamber Music, is rounded out with two concertos. In the playful Piano Concerto, that humorous side comes through in the many quotations of songs, own works, and Beethoven. Only the grim Violin Concerto, held back, like the 4th Symphony, for fear of retribution, offers no smile.

Dmitri Shostakovich is known for his symphonies, his chamber music, maybe the popular Suites, and to some extent even his film. Largely unknown, however, is his vocal symphonic music, of which only the cycle on Jewish Folk Poetry, Op. 79, has gained some wider popularity. Here these hidden gems are brought together in authoritative interpretations under Michail Jurowski and the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne with it's rich Shostakovich tradition under Semyon Bychkov and Rudolf Barshai, among others, from the Six Romances on words by Japanese poets to the Suite on Verses by Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Christian Sinding might be thought of as a Grade-B composer. That’s not a dismissal, merely an assessment to adjust the expectations. He’s not the symphonic Grieg we’ve been missing, nor a Nordic Brahms that’s been overlooked. He’s an – essentially German – symphonist of the second rank who wrote very pleasing works that we will sadly not hear in the concert halls, but which can enliven our musical diet on record if we need to take a break from the usual suspects. To unfold their inherent fervour, his compositions are dependent on sensitive and enthusiastic interpretations, but that’s exactly what they get from the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra under Karl Heinz Steffens, for whom Sinding has become a composer close to his heart.

The two works recorded on this disc both come from a creative period at the beginning of the 1930s. In terms of style, with his works linked to basic tonalities, Weigl drew on the sound realm of late Romanticism, from whose aesthetics he never departed in favour of more progressive contemporary trends. Weigl’s knack for orchestration shows both in the hymnic climaxes as well as the chamber music-like passages. Weigl never lived to hear any performances of either his Third Symphony or the Symphonic Prelude. Like so many of his larger works, these scores were not (re-)discovered until interest in Weigl’s music resurged decades later. This release allows audiences to hear both works for the first time on record.

REVIEW:

Stylistically, the pieces clearly show Weigl’s own voice, even as they remain close to the late-Romantic symphonic style.

The symphony's rich palette of development and treatment leads from intimate moments of chamber music to grand climaxes. The large orchestration of the Symphonic Prelude indicates that it was intended for the concert hall rather than as incidental music. Overall, the works remain rooted in traditional sounds.

Weigl was unable to experience performances of these works. The new interest in his music is also reflected in these premiere recordings. The Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz and conductor Jürgen Bruns illuminate these works with successful commitment.

— Pizzicato (Uwe Krusch)

When the music of Nikolai Kapustin was discovered by a wider audience in the West, it was positively shocking: Who was this Soviet (!) composer, whose music sounded more like an Oscar Peterson improvisation than anything else - but who wrote detailed scores, black with notes?! As we discover more and more of his music and as we again can hear on the present recording, Kapustin developed his style subtly and steadily. He went with the times. As the music that influenced him changed, so did Kapustin's. The development of Big Band Jazz can be traced in his work. In that sense Kapustin never settled on one style (within the parameters of his unique fusion of jazz and classical, granted) but remained flexible about the musical material and the way he related it to the orchestra.

Harriet Krijgh is one of today's most exciting and promising young cellists. Her grace and expressiveness touch her audiences as soon as she is on the concert platform. Her discography also comprises of six discs, all released by Capriccio in the last six years, featuring music by Kabalewski, Haydn, Brahms, Rachmaninoff as well as several French composers. Krijgh is winner of numerous competitions. She was chosen "Rising Star" of by the European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) and was artistic director of the Utrecht Chamber Music Festival in 2017 and 2018. With the present CD she made a long-held wish come true and presents two of the most popular cello concertos by Dvorak and Elgar.

Béla Bartók is one of the unquestionably “great” composers and one of the few modern composers who established themselves in the repertoire. His three piano concertos are central to his biography and musical output, but only the Third, with some generosity, could be considered “popular.” Although well represented on disc, the first two are rare concert program guests. Tzimon Barto sees a problem in an all-too-mechanical approach to these two percussive works: “Even Bartók needs a supple touch. If you bang away at it, without rhythmical buoyancy, of course it will become tedious.” These recordings are his attempt at doing justice to his Bartók-ideal.

REVIEW:

Christoph Eschenbach and Tzimon Barto have a long history of collaboration. Bartók, too, has long been a frequent composer on Eschenbach’s programs.

In these recordings, the two musicians offer very special, unconventional interpretations. They are not interested in motoric coolness, in hard-edged virtuosity, but in a very interesting way they search for moods and a narrative that cannot be found in the many other good interpretations of the Bartók concertos. Not with Zimermann/Boulez, not with Bavouzet/Noseda, not with Kocsis/Fischer, and, going back even further, not with Anda/Fricsay.

Eschenbach and Barto take their time with the music and, with remarkable transparency and many warm colors, create sometimes very mysterious and exciting passages, such as in the slow movement of the first concerto, or a wonderfully atmospheric Allegretto, which, at nine and a half minutes, lasts up to two minutes longer than with other interpreters. Even more astonishing is the greatly extended Adagio religioso, which at nearly 14 minutes is up to four and a half minutes longer than other recordings used for comparison.

All in all, however, this new recording is definitely interesting and worth listening to, because it brings out new aspects and gives Bartók a variety of expression that cannot be found anywhere else.

— Pizzicato

Christmas Songs from different Scandinavian Countries. Sung in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and Icelandic.

Mystic Orthodox Christmas Chants from Russian and Bulgarian Monasteries.

Alfred Schnittke's film music encapsulates almost everything that characterises the Russian composer's compositional style. A self-described polystylist, he began writing for film in the 1960s, penning 66 film scores between 1962 and 1984 for Soviet film companies. His method of drawing on the past was rejected by the avant-garde but embraced by filmgoers and concertgoers too. Volume six in this CD Edition of Schnittke's film music presents music from the film series "Little Tragedies" (1979) based on popular novels by Alexander Pushkin. After longtime research conductor Vladimir Jurowski also recorded all parts of the score which have been cancelled at the end for the final Film Version.

World Premiere Recordings of Christmas Cantatas from the Archive of Assisi Monastery.

Most popular and traditional Christmas Music and Songs from the Austrian Mountain Regions.

Addendum! After already 12 CDs comprising the Dopplers' complete music for flute(s), including various arrangements, Flutist and mastermind Claudi Arimany presents additional works he discovered in different libraries after the last release. Arimany spent decades researching this project, inspiring many famous musicians to become involved in it's realization and he close now again another gap in musical history.

Praised for "her mastery of phrasing and of the dramatic dimension" (Diapason), "astonishing virtuosity" (Revelation Classiques) and "her infinite delicacy" (Le Populaire du centre), French violinist Irene Duval is establishing herself as a uniquely compelling performer with a strong interest in combining works central to the repertoire with little-known gems. Born in France to a French father and Korean mother, Irene Duval grew up in Japan, Indonesia, and Hong Kong before returning to France at the age of eleven. She studied with Suzanne Gessner and Jean-Jacques Kantorow, before entering the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris in 2008 in the class of Roland Daugareil; in 2014 she joined the Kronberg Academy in Germany, where she studied with Mihaela Martin for three years.

Walter Braunfels is a composer whose music died twice: Once when the Nazis declared his music "degenerate art". Then again when post-war Germany had little use for the various schools of tonal music; when the arbiters of taste considered any form of romantic music - almost the whole pre-war aesthetic - to be tainted. This already 10th release of Capriccio's Braunfels Edition focus on one of his most popular Opera works. What makes Jeanne D'Arc such an uncommonly effective music drama is not just the often sumptuous, post-romantic musical language but Braunfels' own libretto. The main storyline of Joan of Arc is known well enough: Vision, liberation of Orleans, coronation of the Dauphin, arrest, trial, and burning at the stake. Braunfels somehow managed to put together a libretto from the original French and Latin 15th-century trial documents of Joan of Arc, a smidgen of by George Bernard Shaw (Saint Joan), and his own additions, that makes this story and it's characters - in so many ways so far removed from a modern audience's sensibilities and reality - relatable to listeners today.

This final release of Capriccios Bruckner Symphonies - The Complete Versions Edition includes his very first and last Symphony. In March 1861, Anton Bruckner completed his counterpoint studies with the renowned teacher Simon Sechter who had also taught Schubert. His graduation signaled the end of an extended compositional hiatus. Bruckner's F-Minor Symphony was conceived in the classical and early romantic tradition of Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann. Bruckner's Ninth: his best (as some say) symphony, certainly his most daring and, thanks to the missing finale, his most mysterious. It is where Bruckner meets Mahler and, while working on it, his maker. He wanted to write a finale, of course, but too much remains missing. What is left, is a heavenly Adagio, which quietly fades away with references in the brass to the two preceding symphonies. Thus ends Bruckner's uncompleted life's work.

Anton Bruckner began the revision of his Third Symphony after completing the Fifth on 16 May 1876 and continued working on it sporadically until 28 April 1877. Then, after the Vienna Philharmonic rejected the Symphony for a third time, Bruckner's friend, Hofkapellmeister Johann Herbeck, took matters into his own hands. He arranged to conduct the work himself on the concert series of the Society for the Friends of Music [Gesellschaftskonzerte] on 16 December 1877. After Herbeck passed away unexpectedly, Bruckner was forced to conduct the symphony himself. The performance proved to be one of the worst debacles of his career. The players were rude and unreceptive, and the audience left the concert hall in droves. Despite the public fiasco, Theodor Rattig, one of the few people who stayed, offered to publish the symphony. Two other people who were there at the end, Gustav Mahler and Rudolf Krzyzanowski, prepared a piano four-hand reduction for Rattig's publication which appeared at the end of 1879. It was the first publication of a Bruckner Symphony.

Maria Herz, nee Bing, was born in 1878 in Cologne. By the 1920s, she became to be recognized as a dynamic element of the contemporary music scene. New music's 'chief theoretician', Theodor W. Adorno, became interested in her works and their style, which was rooted in Late Romanticism and aimed at Modernism by way of Expressionism, New Objectivity, and Neo-Baroque, all while retaining it's playful, charming air. She was close to a veritable Who's-Who of contemporary musicians, including the Budapest String Quartett, Gregor Piatigorsky, Emanuel Feuermann, Hermann Abendroth, Otto Klemperer, and Hans Rosbaud. In her lifetime, only five songs (1910) and a transcription of Bach's Chaconne for string quartet (1927) were published, but all her 30 orchestral works, solo concertos, chamber music pieces, and art songs have survived in manuscripts. The Nazis seized her family's assets and forced Maria Herz to emigrate, first to England, and, after the war, to the United States where she lived with her children and died in 1950, in New York.

Anton Bruckner finally received the award of an honorary doctorate of the University of Vienna on 11 December 1891. For Bruckner, receiving the doctorate fulfilled a long-time wish. He had spent most of his life pursuing academic credentials and applied for honorary doctorates at Cambridge University in 1882 and at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Cincinnati in 1885. Two days later, Hans Richter conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in the first performance of the second or so-called “Vienna” version of the composer’s First Symphony, which he had dedicated to the university in gratitude for the degree. The changes Bruckner made in the revised version of the First Symphony are not as extensive as those he made to the Third, Fourth, and Eighth Symphonies during the late 1880s and early 1890s. His revisions to the First Symphony did not affect the overall form of any of the movements. He changed many details of orchestration, articulation, and phrase length, some of which are difficult to notice on first hearing. The 1891 autograph score is, nevertheless, the composer’s final word on how he wanted his First Symphony to be performed and understood.

Ernst von Dohnányi was interested in various inventions throughout his life, so it is not surprising that around 1909–1910 he became one of the main promoters of pianos with a semi-circular keyboard. At that time, they had long been experimenting with creating the most comfortable keyboard possible, with all its parts being at the same distance from the pianist, and being able to play it with the same body and hand position at the bottom, middle or top of the keyboard range. It seems that the Viennese Ludwig Bösendorfer started making pianos with a concave keyboard (Bogenklaviatur) only in 1910, and Dohnányi used them exclusively in the territory of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. After Dohnányi moved home to Budapest at the end of 1915, one of his own pianos was the short Clutsam-Bösendorfer, which is currently owned by the Budapest Museum of Music History. This CD offers the first recording of this special instrument after a long time restoration.

“Since Beethoven, nothing has been written that even comes close!”

The great conductor Arthur Nikisch made this remark to Bruckner’s former student, Joseph Schalk and also his fellow conductor, Hermann Levi, described the piece as “the most significant symphonic work since Beethoven’s death.”

Arthur Nikisch conducted the first performance in the Stadttheater, Leipzig, on 30 December 1884, with Bruckner in the audience. While the performance was not a total triumph, it brought the sixty-year-old composer significant international recognition for the first time. During the composer’s lifetime, the Seventh, especially its Adagio, was his most popular symphony, and it remains among his most beloved and frequently performed works.

Bruckner’s Third Symphony had always been something of a problem child among Bruckner’s symphonies, from its disastrous first reception (an enthused youthful Gustav Mahler notwithstanding) until well into the 20th century. In its original form, it is the longest, most Wagnerian of his symphonies – and often considered, rightly or not, the first truly Brucknerian symphony. While some cherish the uncompromising originality of the first version, Bruckner himself wanted the third, much tightened Edition performed, finding it “incomparably better”. It is that final version that is here recorded – and listeners can now easily decide for themselves.

Bruckner’s Second Symphony is a rare enough encounter in its 1877 version, but it’s virtually unperformed in the 1872 original version. This is not owing to some deficiency of the earlier ideas compared to the later alterations. It’s mainly habit and convenience because to get new parts and re-learn something ostensibly known, that differs in a great many details, means an extra expense of effort and resources. That’s a shame, really, because it is decidedly worth discovering the original, not-yet-ironed-out rawness of Bruckner’s early masterpiece, which was something unheard of at the time – but needn’t remain unheard now.