Together with his friend Holst, at the beginning of the 20th century Ralph Vaughan Williams deliberately took the course of liberating himself from ''German influence'', as they called it, working for original British music. He found models and inspiration in original English folk music. Most of the works recorded here rank among the less known pieces by the composer, but all of them very clearly reflect the personal hue, the absolutely ''personal style'' of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Capriccio Encore is a series of re-releases of the most famous recordings from Capriccio's back catalogue, fully re-mastered. The legendary recordings of artists such as Sandor Végh, Ton Koopman, Sir Neville Marriner and the Vienna Boys' Choir also contain repertoire highlights that have a particularly special appeal, from the baroque to the present day. This specific Encore album features the Vienna Boys' Choir alongside the Symphonieorchester der Wiener Volksoper, performing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Requiem in D minor and Ave verum corpus. Also on the album is Anton Bruckner's Motetten.

Austrian composer Hanns Eisler is best known for composing the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic, for his long partnership with Bertolt Brecht, and for his film scores. His promising career in Hollywood, however, was interrupted by the Cold War. Film studio bosses blacklisted his music, and he was subjected to two interrogations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Despite efforts by his American musical powerhouse friends Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, he was deported in 1948. In addition to the Oscar-nominated score for Fritz Lang’s film “Hangmen Also Die,” this release contains other rarely heard works by Hanns Eisler, in which the special interpretation that this pupil of Schoenberg had developed of the twelve-tone technique plays an astonishingly important role for the field of film and orchestral music.

REVIEWS:

Eisler's music bears the stamp of a modern original. Thankfully, recordings of his works are far more plentiful than they once were. The Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin under Johannes Kalitzer do the honors for these works and their dedication gives us what sound to be very fitting performances, spirited and detailed.

-- Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review

The composer wrote the first book on composing for film and treated the craft as an art in its own right. His score to Hangmen Also Die was nominated for a 1942 Oscar. The Grapes of Wrath is an alternative score to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which was being filmed at the time by John Ford with music by Alfred Newman. Eisler’s work, with a searing twelve-tone lament, is infinitely preferable. And then there is a serialist score for Joris Ivens’s Maiost propaganda film, The 400 Million, again a work of uncompromising power. Beautifully played. We really need to hear more Eisler.

-- Musical Toronto

What a man, what a violin, what an artist! […] And his expression, his manner of phrasing, and finally his soul!’ Franz Liszt, 1831 (about Paganini). The transcriptions and arrangements of Paganini’s études represent a special case and, besides a bow before the great colleague, demonstrate demands on extreme technical skills. In his études, the pianist Liszt is quite evidently endeavouring to place alongside the Devil’s violinist Niccolò Paganini a Devil’s Pianist, which he completely succeeds in doing. In general, recourse is taken to the second version (1851) today, as it seems to be in keeping with Liszt’s definitive desire. However, all the more interesting on this new release is a direct comparison with the earlier version (1838), which exhibits an even more dense notation and difficulties transcending technical borders.

Capriccio's Encore series features re-releases of the most famous recordings from the Capriccio back catalogue. These legendary recordings are of artists like Sandor Vegh, Ton Koopman, Sir Neville Marriner and the Vienna Boys' Choir. The series spans highlights from the baroque era to the contemporary era. This album showcases the Moscow Virtuosi, led by Vladimir Spivakov in a famous recording of Schnittke's Hieronymus Bosch Fragments.

Capriccio Encore is a series of re-releases of the most famous recordings from Capriccio’s back catalogue, fully re-mastered and competitively priced. The legendary recordings of artists such as Sandor Végh, Ton Koopman, Sir Neville Marriner and the Vienna Boys’ Choir also contain repertoire highlights that have a particularly special appeal, from the baroque to the present day. This Encore release's highlight is Luigi Cherubini's Coronation Mass Krönungsmesse, performed by Kölner Rundfunkchor and Capella Coloniensis.

Capriccio Encore is a series of re-releases of the most famous recordings from Capriccio’s back catalogue, fully re-mastered and competitively priced. The legendary recordings of artists such as Sandor Végh, Ton Koopman, Sir Neville Marriner and the Vienna Boys’ Choir also contain repertoire highlights that have a particularly special appeal, from the baroque to the present day. This specific Encore release features Sergei Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 2 and Vocalise, Op. 34 No. 14, performed by the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, lead by Sir Neville Marriner.

Capriccio Encore is a series of re-releases of the most famous recordings from Capriccio’s back catalogue, fully re-mastered and competitively priced. The legendary recordings of artists such as Sandor Végh, Ton Koopman, Sir Neville Marriner and the Vienna Boys’ Choir also contain repertoire highlights that have a particularly special appeal, from the baroque to the present day. This Encore release features iconic works by Richard Strauss performed by the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, lead by Sir Neville Marriner.

Capriccio Encore is a series of re-releases of the most famous recordings from Capriccio’s back catalogue, fully re-mastered and competitively priced. The legendary recordings of artists such as Sandor Végh, Ton Koopman, Sir Neville Marriner and the Vienna Boys’ Choir also contain repertoire highlights that have a particularly special appeal, from the baroque to the present day. This Encore release features William Boyce's 8 Symphonies, performed by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, lead by Sir Neville Marriner.

Periodically someone decides the time is ripe for a re-appraisal of the music of the Ukrainian-born Polish composer Karol Szymanowski. Among his most persuasive advocates have been such eminent conductors as Pierre Boulez and Simon Rattle, both of whom have committed much Szymanowski to disc. But, for one reason or another, he remains a name known to many while his music remains largely unknown. Possibly the Etude in B flat minor for piano – one of the most deeply moving of all piano études, with its powerful echoes of Rachmaninov – will be familiar to pianists, but little else from his broad output finds its way into the consciousness of music lovers. This latest disc devoted to Szymanowski on Capriccio’s “Modern Times” series does all it can to keep Szymanowksi obscure, but the music succeeds where Capriccio fails, and I would recommend this most strongly to all of those for whom Szymanowski is merely a name that sounds like a Russian transliteration of Schumann or a spoof composer with a name derived from a cross-fertilization of Schumann and Tchaikovsky. These are not the best performances you will find, and the packaging is grim, but the music is wonderful and for those whose idea of hi-fidelity is listening to music through their computer speakers, the flat recorded sound will not unduly disturb the pleasure of an encounter with this gorgeous music.

The trouble with describing the music of an unfamiliar composer is that one reverts to comparisons with better-known ones – as if originality of voice is given only to those whose music has crossed the fickle threshold of popular taste.

With the Concert Overture which opens the disc, one can possibly be excused this, for if any music ever sounded like a Richard Strauss tone poem, this does. From its boisterous opening to its triumphal conclusion, it is a feast of Straussian gestures and ideas, a wonderful orchestral romp and a stirring musical journey. And this is what Szymanowski intended, for in 1904 when he wrote it, Richard Strauss was the dominant figure. If the booklet notes are to be believed, Szymanowski deliberately aped the style of Strauss “as a provocation to the, in his view, completely fossilized structures of Polish music”.

At this point we must break off to mention those booklet notes, tightly compressed into a distinctly unappealing booklet which seems designed to put off potential buyers. Christian Heindl’s German text is dense enough, striving to place Szymanowksi in some sort of context with Polish music at the start of the last century. But the English translation (claiming to be the work of one Ian Mansfield) is a disgrace. Seeming to have done little more than run the original German through a free online translator, and not even having made the effort to check the spelling afterwards, Mansfield comes up with such incoherent nonsense as; “he ranks as one of the many tone wolves and practically outsiders in music”, “the composer instrumented the cycle for chamber orchestra”, and “meaningful for the concert hall and fathoming it to the depths”.

Soprano Marisol Montalvo is, thankfully, infinitely more eloquent in the cycle of five songs, Slopiewnie, which bears the same opus number as Szymanowski’s great opera, King Roger but is otherwise unconnected. Exotic, sometimes harmonically brittle, sparsely orchestrated but highly effective, these are a world away from the lush world of Strauss’s orchestral songs and present a musical voice which is both distinctive and accomplished. There is nothing identifiably Polish about these settings of Polish texts by Julian Tuwim, but the booklet note suggests the musical idiom is derived from Gorals, an ethnic group which “has its area of distribution in the Polish Tatra and the Beskids, but also in parts of Slovakia”. It also observes some stylistic parallels with Stravinsky and Les Noces. Montalvo has a pure, shining vocal quality with an innately focused sense of pitch.

The major work on the disc is the Fourth Symphony, subtitled Sinfonia Concertante, but which is, to all intents and purposes, a fully-fledged piano concerto. Szymanowski wrote the work for himself to play (although he dedicated it to Artur Rubinstein) and called it a Symphony to disguise his shortcomings as a concerto soloist. Ewa Kupiec is the fleet-fingered soloist, delivering the almost Ravelian delicacy of the first movement with a refreshingly light touch supported by the kind of clear-textured orchestration which seems such a feature of Szymanowski. Even as the movement builds up to its great climax, the feeling of delicacy and suppleness Kupiec brings to the performance is never lost, and Karl-Heinz Steffens seems to have an instinctive feel for the balance which comes across even when the recording engineers have done little to assist. A gentle, fluttering second movement introduces all manner of magical orchestral effects, much in the manner of a Bartók night-music movement but built around Polish rather than Hungarian folk songs. And in the final movement it is the spirit of Polish dances which seems to dominate in music that sounds like Ravel and Bartók holding hands but is, in reality, uniquely the voice of Szymanowski – stunning orchestral writing, impeccably crafted moments of climax and repose and an exotic musical language which is utterly enthralling. Steffens maintains a wonderfully incisive rhythmic momentum which his German players throw themselves into with great gusto.

The Nocturne and Tarantella is an orchestration, made two years after Szymanowski’s death by Grzegorz Fitelberg, of a work originally written for violin and piano. It draws attention to Szymanowski’s fondness for the exotic, combining Spanish and Italian elements in a scintillating dance-like display, where only the final cadence seems indicative of a composer not quite of the very first rank, but with a voice all his own.

– MusicWeb International (Marc Rochester)

With Capriccio Encore we re-release the most famous recordings from the back catalogue in a remastered version, new design and for a special price. Legendary recordings of artists like Sandor Vegh, Ton koopman, Sir Nevill Marriner or the Vienna boys’ Choir are also included as special repertoire highlights from the baroque to the contemporary era. This release features Concerto Koln performing music by the songs of the most famous Baroque composer, Johann Sebastian Bach. These songs come from his children Johann Christian, Carl Philipp Emanuel, Wilhelm Friedemann, and Johann Christoph Friedrich. While the master father’s influence can be clearly heard in all of these works, one can also hear the subtle shift to the Classical era in these pieces. Celebrated harpsichordist Gerald Hambitzer is the featured soloist for CPE Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in G minor.

Composer Arthur Lourié was born as Naum Izrailevich Lur'ya in 1892. Lourié wasw a charismatic bohemian and Soviet cultural politician who did not return from a so-called official journey to Berlin in 1922. Lourié was a pioneer of Modernism music and he enjoyed mingling among the poets and painters of the Silver Age and was greatly inspired by them. His musical oeuvre is just as multi-faceted and diverse as the writings of that time.

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REVIEW:

This overview of Arthur Lourié’s music for solo piano tends to bear out an idea now gaining credence, namely that Lourié, at least in some instances, anticipated rather than echoed Stravinsky. Ernst’s sensitively artistic performances point up Lourié’s remarkable diversity of expression, and make a compelling case for his music.

– Gramophone

In order to take a respite and, in his own worlds, “to recuperate,” from his own compositions, Max Reger frequently engaged in “piece work,” in which he would arrange works by other composers. This release includes Reger’s original work 5 Orchestral Songs, as well as Reger’s arrangements of songs for voice and orchestra from Edvard Grieg, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and Franz Schubert. Conductor Gregor Buhl has made his mark as an opera conductor. He also frequently performs on the concert stage with the Radio Symphony Orchestras of Berlin, Hamburg, and Leizip, and the Helsinki Philharmonic.

Johann Michael Haydn never quite reached the fame of his older brother Joseph, but still introduced an impressive oeuvre into the classical repertoire. J. M. Haydn’s Serenade in D was composed in Salzburg in 1767. The ten movement work displays Haydn’s affinity for chamber compositions. Founded in 1986, the Virtuosi Saxoniae is made up of principal members of the Dresden Staatskapelle. The ensemble concerns itself with 18th century European music, devoting themselves to the great figures of the Hasse era.

The Fitzwilliam Virginal book is one of the primary sources of keyboard music. The book, which is now housed in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, hails from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods in England. This release features excerpts from the Fitzwilliam Virginal book from composers including Giovanni Picchi, Orlando Gibbons, John Bull, William Bird, and more. English conductor, organist, and harpsichordist Ton Koopman performs the works on this album. He was knighted in 2003, receiving the Order of the Netherlands Lion, and is currently a professor at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague.

This re-release is one of CAPRICCIO’s most famous recordings which has been remastered for optimal quality and offered at a special price. The first work chosen for this release is Johannes Brahms’ String Quintet in G Major. The piece, scored for two violins, two violas, and cello, was intended to be the composer’s last piece of music. The one movement string sextet Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night) is considered Schoenberg’s earliest important work. The piece is inspired by Dehmel’s poem of the same name, and was written in just three weeks.

The Alla Turca fashion made its way into Turkish operas after the final siege of Vienna and the Turkish defeat. Since the early 17th century dozens of arias, operas, and instrumental works have been composed in this style. This project, Carneval Oriental, is inspired by these cultures, celebrating carnivals as it was most likely held in the 16th and 17th centuries. Images of caftans and turbans, Turkish drinks, and hookahs are brought to mind. The Pera Ensemble and L’arte del mondo teams up on this recording to bring us a quality performance of Baroque music from Italy and France laced with oriental spice.

The title of this album comes from the Thelonius Monk piece, Round Midnight. At the time of the song’s publication, Monk was labeled an outsider. His intense harmonies and the complexities in his music put others off. The virtuosic performances on this recording, however, present an acceptable medium for such elaborate polyphonies.; Alongside this composition from a jazz great, this album also includes a wide range of moods, from the gloomy Saint-Saens Dance Macabre, to Purcell’s Fairy Queen. This album of “nighttime” themed music is performed with ease, agility, and fervor.; Performers are Falk Maertens and Raphael Mentzen, trumpet, Paolo Mendes, Horn, Andreas Klein, Trombone, and Johannes Lipp, Tuba. All are members of the Deutschen Symphonie-Orchesters Berlin.

The great niece of the largely unsung early-mid 20th century Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer whose book "Die Wasserfalle von Slunj" brought him rare recognition and was conceived as a novelistic counterpart to Beethoven's 7th Symphony, this premiere of Johanna Doderer's 2nd Symphony 'Bohinj' is an artistic memorial to Lake Bohinj in Slovenia, around 300 km away from the Croatian waterfalls her great uncle wrote about to great effect. Doderer has said she "was fascinated above all by the superb scenery. In the course of time, I found out what happened there during the First World War. In short, the idyll utters a silent scream. My three-movement work also touches on this sound." With the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz conducted by Ariane Matiakh, the release also features teh soprano Anne Schwanewilms as well as the violinist, Yury Revich and is an excellent introduction to U.S. audiences of this prolific and much commissioned contemporary composer.

The cellist Harriet Krijgh and pianist Magda Amara present a program of Rachmaninov pieces that sensitively reflect and capture his genius with this release. Along with well known Rachmaninov repertoire, the CD also includes Sonata for cello and piano op.19 which evolved after a lengthy period of depression and compositional despair catalyzed by the critical failure of his Symphony Nr. 1 and requiring therapeutic treatments to end. Some have said that after emerging from this creative black hole, Rachmaninov’s humility and compassion produced works that were richer than was the case previously. This release makes a convincing argument that this was indeed the case.

Following on from their most successful album “sound escapes” (Capriccio C5239) the young, aspiring Signum Quartet address Bohemian music culture. Beside Antonín Dvorák’s famous String Quartet Op. 106 and Josef Suk’s Meditation on the Old Czech Chorale ‘St. Wenceslaus’ (1914), an impressionistic offering on the beginning of WWI, is the 1923 composed Five Pieces for String Quartet by Erwin Schulhoff, which experiments with dance forms and provides a most virtuosic challenge. “… the Signum Quartet, which must already be counted among the best ensembles of its generation…” (Pizzicato)

Arnold Schönberg founded the Society for Musical Private Performances in November 1918 “to give Arnold Schoenberg the opportunity personally to carry out his intention of providing artists and art lovers with a veritable and precise knowledge of Modern Music”, as Alban Berg described in a leaflet in 1919. Chamber music, solo pieces and songs saw performance, and to a great extent, properly arranged for the available means, original large-scale orchestral works of topical and artistic high-quality were also produced. In the autumn of 1921, Schönberg embarked on an arrangement of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, which, however, he broke off in the middle of the first movement. The continuation was to be taken over by Webern, but this did not happen, evidently as a consequence of the end of the society. It was only in 1982/83 that the German composer, conductor and musicologist Rainer Riehn (b. 1941) was prepared to continue what had been begun.

Dvořák composed the Biblical Songs op. 99 in 1894 during his time in America (1892-95), working as artistic director and professor of composition at the New York Conservatory of Music. His 9th Symphony, appositely termed ‘From the New World’ was to be followed by a further symphony, but Dvořák opted instead for treating the Biblical Songs, which, in their austerity, hardly allow scope for an American scent but rather are possibly reminiscent of the composer’s Czech homeland. Dvořák, the Catholic, had long demonstrated his faith with numerous works of fervent piety: Stabat Mater (1876), Requiem (1890), the Mass in D major as well as the pieces for solo voice and organ, for instance, the works that can be heard on this CD - Ave Maria, Ave Maris Stella and Hymnus ad laudes in festo Sanctae Trinitatis (1877-79) as well as the organ preludes and fugues of 1859 by the then 18-year-old composer.

After the successful album release “Slavonic Souls” (Capriccio C5039) the Vienna State Opera Singer Zoryana Kushpler, accompanied on the piano by her partner and twin sister Olena, offer a rich recital of famous Spanish songs by the likes of Granados, de Falla, Mompou, Rodrigo and Montsalvage, including some choice rarities by these composers. Born in Lvov, Ukraine, Ms. Kushpler made her debut at the Wiener Staatsoper in 2007 as Adelaide in Richard Strauss’s Arabella. She has also been heard there in the operas of Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Puccini, Offenbach and Johann Strauss.

Henning Mankell (1868-1930), whose grandson and namesake has become one of Swedens most successful authors of crime novels, was himself a modest person, not very interested in a public career. Mankell earned his livelihood as a private teacher of piano and music theory in Stockholm, as a music critic and as a member of the board of the Academy of Music. If Mankells life was a tranquil one, his compositions were all the more colourful, at least those from the last two decades of his life. His works were given labels such as Impressionism or Futurism by the critics of the age. He was probably interested in French Impressionism, but he did not identify with it. Many of Mankells works, and especially the bolder ones, remained unpublished for a long time, but were still occasionally performed by musicians who recognized their value. Gösta Nystroem (1890-1966) had an obvious talent both for pictorial art and music. He had a lifelong fascination for the sea and loved to be among fishermen, sometimes even taking part in their work at sea. Two composers had a special influence on him in Paris: Stravinsky and Honegger. For a few years, Nystroem used dissonance extensively, influenced by the style of The Rite of spring. Nystroem followed Vincent dIndys historically oriented teaching, which was of great importance to him, but his most inspiring teacher in Paris was the Russian music theorist Leonid Sabaneyev, with whom he worked for several years. The composer later declared himself to be both a great lover of absolutely pure music and an incurable romantic, a description that is relevant for this recording and also for his instrumental music in general.