Classical Music

FANTAISIE • Mathieu Dufour (fl); Kuang-Hao Huang (pn) • ÇEDILLE 90000-121 (57:00)


FAURÉ Fantaisie. GAUBERT Fantaisie. HÜE Fantaisie. DOPPLER Hungarian Pastoral Fantasy. TAFFANEL Fantasy on Themes from Weber’s “Der Freischütz.” BORNE Fantaisie Brilliante on Themes from Bizet’s Carmen


Here are six pieces for flute and piano, all but one by French composers, and all titled “Fantaisie.” Yet except for Fauré, I’d have thought that not one of these composers would come up in conversation other than by flutists and flute fanciers. So I suppose I was a bit surprised to find a number of similarly programmed recitals including these composers and pieces reviewed in the Fanfare Archive.


A release covered in Fanfare 23:1 by John Lambert included the Fauré and Gaubert fantasies as well as a piece by Taffanel, though not his Fantaisie. Another CD, reviewed by Paul Ingram in 28:2, did include Taffanel’s Fantaisie as well as Borne’s. Still another disc reviewed by Lambert in 24:3 included both Borne’s and Hüe’s. And the one not-French composer in the mix here, Albert Franz Doppler, had his Fantaisie turn up on a release reviewed by Lambert in 21:5, which also contained the Borne. So it seems that none of these composers and their fantasies are as obscure as I imagined.


Anyone who knows the flute world is sure to recognize the name Mathieu Dufour. He was and is once again principal flute of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a post to which he was appointed at the age of 25 by Daniel Barenboim. The “was” happened during the 2010 season, when Dufour left his post in Chicago to join the Los Angeles Philharmonic on a trial basis. The marriage went sour, and he left abruptly, midseason, to return to Chicago where he’d been allowed to retain his post as a kind of dual citizen. The L.A. divorce was nasty, with some regrettable remarks made by Dufour about the Los Angeles orchestra quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times , remarks for which the flutist later apologized, insisting he’d been misquoted.


Kuang-Hao Huang, Dufour’s piano partner on the disc, is a well-known artist in the Chicago area. He pursues an active performing and teaching career, has concertized throughout the U.S. as well as in England, France, China, and South Korea, and collaborates regularly with chamber-music ensembles.


The works on the CD fall into two groups, plus one that falls into neither. The Fauré, Gaubert, and Hüe fantasies are virtuosic contest pieces written for the annual competitive concours examinations held by the Paris Conservatory. The Borne and Taffanel are examples of the popular 19th-century genre of opera paraphrases, which were written in great numbers—many by Liszt—to tunes from well-known operas of the day. The square peg in the round hole is Franz Doppler, both for being of Hungarian birth and for his Hungarian Pastoral Fantasy, which falls into neither of the above categories. The piece is presumed to be based on Hungarian folk melodies, which may have been manufactured by Doppler rather than borrowed from authentic sources. Doppler’s name rang a bell. It was something I’d read before. He was the composer who assisted Liszt in orchestrating some of his works when Liszt was first learning to orchestrate.


The two opera paraphrases are quite dazzling and not insignificant concert works in their own right. Taffanel mines Der Freischütz for gold and finds far more nuggets of the precious metal in Weber’s opera than I ever have. Borne’s Carmen Fantasy is, if anything, even more brilliant, as the “brilliante” in its title promises. Either Borne was the more technically adept flute master and imaginative composer, or Bizet’s music lends itself better to this sort of treatment than does Weber’s. Perhaps both propositions are true.


Exemplary playing in service to unfamiliar and entertaining music combines with excellent recording to make this a most recommendable release.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

The Pacifica String Quartet plays with such lovely tone that even the thornier bits of the atonal Seeger and the acerbic Hindemith works come across as elegant, even mellow. The truth is, both are full of beautiful and arresting music, and as these performances show, all it takes is a group willing to play them that way. This is particularly noticeable in the evocative Andante of Seeger's quartet--a brief work lasting barely 12 minutes in all, but one full of unusual textures and imaginative ideas. Similarly, the Hindemith never has sounded so warmly expressive. Its opening Fugato isn't just a neo-classical counterpoint exercise but a lyrical movement sculpted from long, flowing lines, while rude gestures in the second and fourth movements have plenty of guts but never for a moment turn gratuitously coarse.

This last observation holds particular relevance in considering Janácek's Second Quartet, a work of high drama and intense passion that some quartets make positively ugly. Indeed, you might at first find the Pacifica Quartet too smooth, but that impression turns out to be mistaken as the work proceeds. Consider, for example, the hysterical outburst midway through the third movement, with the violin screaming above a pulsating accompaniment. Not only does the passage erupt with all of the necessary violence and abruptness, but you can actually hear the individual components of the rhythmic underpinning below the wailing violin. Usually, the passage comes off as a blur. The Pacifica players also adopt an entirely appropriate and stylish use of portamento to give Janácek's melodic lines an extra touch of expressivity. Only the finale strikes me as a touch leisurely, though no less detailed or committed.

Like so many recent Cedille releases, the repertoire is so intelligently chosen (all three works are roughly contemporaneous, dating from 1922-31), so interestingly varied, and the engineering so impressively lifelike, that this disc adds up to considerably more than the sum of its highly enjoyable parts. This is a challenging release, but one that no admirer of top-notch quartet playing will want to miss. It provides an excellent opportunity to get to know music that many collectors might not otherwise rank high on their list of priorities, but that is well worth hearing nonetheless. In short, this is everything that an important new recording should be. [10/10/2006]

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

The son of Alessandro Scarlatti, who created a new school of opera in Naples, Domenico Scarlatti is particularly distinguished for his remarkable series of 555 surviving keyboard sonatas, written while employed at the Spanish court in Madrid.

This new release features Mozart’s Serenade in B-Flat major, K. 361 "Gran partita" and Haydn’s Notturno No. 8 in G Major, Hob. 11:27. Mozart’s largest and possibly most innovative instrumental work, Gran partita demonstrates the composer’s sensitivity to the varying colors of wind instruments. Harpsichordist and conductor Trevor Pinnock leads the Royal Academy of Music Soloists Ensemble for this album.

Review:

The veteran Baroque specialist Trevor Pinnock has made a strong series of Mozart recordings with his English Concert historical-performance orchestra. Here, with the more youthful Royal Academy of Music Soloists Ensemble, he achieves one of his most distinctive Mozart creations. The sizable Serenade in B flat major for 13 winds, K. 361, is a work that lacks obvious tunes and can, in many performances, collapse under its own weight. Pinnock forges an extremely distinctive reading that brings out the inner polyphony in this outwardly non-polyphonic work. His ensemble passages are dense blocks of sound that have an abstract, almost Webern-like quality. To hear it at its best, sample one of the pair of minuets (tracks 2 and 4), where any galant quality to the music is pushed deep into the background. It's hard to imagine this as a "serenade," but the truth is that the circumstances of composition of this work, like those of the last three Mozart symphonies, are unknown, and Pinnock's reading is as valid as any other. An added attraction is the little-recorded Notturno No. 8 in G major, Hob. 2/27, which brings down the curtain and lowers the tension a bit with a fine example of the mature Haydn's jocularity. An often fascinating example of Pinnock's way with Mozart.

– All Music Guide (James Manheim)

Classical Music

Includes work(s) by Florent Schmitt. Soloist: Pavlina Dokovska.
Includes work(s) for piano by Béla Bartók. Soloist: Pavlina Dokovska.

Between 1894 and 1916 Wilhelm Stenhammar composed a total of seven string quartets, of which one (F minor, 1897) was withdrawn immediately after its first performance. In Scandinavian music of its time, this series of quartets is unique both in its consistency and in its musical aspirations. Taking its name from the composer, the Stenhammar Quartet with this recording signs off on the first ever complete traversal of the cycle on CD. (The only other previous cycle was recorded in the 1980's by three different ensembles, and did not include the then still unpublished F minor quartet.)

On this final disc, the Stenhammar Quartet performs the Swedish composer’s first two attempts in the genre. The C Major Quartet was composed only a few months after Stenhammar had made a sensational breakthrough with his Op.1, the piano concerto in B flat minor which he himself had premièred as soloist with the orchestra of the Royal Opera in Stockholm. But already two years earlier he had begun a close collaboration with the Aulin String Quartet, and it was for this ensemble that he composed his first quartet, as well as the following four. Like the piano concerto, the C major quartet is influenced by Brahms, whose quartets Stenhammar had been studying, and may to some extent be regarded as a highly promising apprentice work in the genre. In contrast, the String Quartet No.2 in C minor, written just two years later, represents a more independent approach, with a highly imaginative treatment of themes and motifs.

REVIEW:

The Stenhammars conclude the first-ever complete cycle of their namesake's quartets on disc with characteristically energetic and well-explored readings of his first two essays in the genre.

– Gramophone

In addition to being a renowned new music pianist, Margaret Leng Tan is a specialist at the toy piano. Her performances are dramatically captured here by Spanish director Anton Cabaleiro. Ms. Tan performs Cage's classic"Suite for Toy Piano," her arrangement.

THIS IS A STANDARD DVD WITH AUDIO ONLY (NO VISUALS). IT IS NOT A DVD-AUDIO AND WILL PLAY ON ALL DVD PLAYERS.

String Quartet No. 2 (1983)
FLUX Quartet
Tom Chiu, violin
Cornelius Duffalo, violin
Kenji Bunch, viola
Darrett Adkins, cello

Feldman's monumental String Quartet No.2 is in one unbroken movement. The FLUX Quartet performance is complete, lasting a total of 6 hours 7 minutes and 7 seconds. Available in 2 Editions: a 5-CD set OR complete and uninterrupted on 1-DVD!

In the 1970s Feldman took up the study and collecting of antique Turkish rugs, a highly evolved and exquisite folk art. The rugs are intricately patterned, symmetrical in basic design but with constant variation and displacement in the detailed execution of that design; strikingly and subtly colored, including fine variegations of principal colors resulting from the dyeing process. Analogies are clear to Feldman's music as it takes up large-scale patterning, partly working with his familiar subtle gradations of rhythm and instrumental color and ostinati, loops or extended repetitions of a sounds, partly - and especially in this second string quartet - continually finding new and surprising qualities of color. There are a number of sounds in this piece unlike anything one has heard from a string quartet.

Lasting more than six continuous hours, it is "a disorienting, transfixing experience that repeatedly approached and touched the sublime." - Alex Ross, in his review of the FLUX Quartet's New York City performance in The New Yorker.

String Quartet 2's score is 124 pages, at one tempo marking of 63-66 beats per minute - as such, a slow tempo. Feldman idiosyncratically sets the bars, so one page may last as little as about half a minute or as much as nearly seven minutes.

"A very exciting quartet composed of four young men...who have lots of ideas and clearly enjoy making music together," - Anthony Tommasini, NY Times, the FLUX Quartet has performed to rave reviews at many music centers around the world. FLUX have performed Quartet 2 in concert numerous times and know the score intimately. The FLUX Quartet's repertoire consists of notable pioneers as well as visionaries of tomorrow - from "classics" by Nancarrow, Ligeti, and Cage, to works by John Zorn, Ornette Coleman, Oliver Lake, and tenor balloonist Judy Dunaway.

This deluxe set features liner notes by Feldman's colleague Christian Wolff, mixing personal experiences and recollections with analysis; and by FLUX founder Tom Chiu who writes of the "experience" of performing such a large-scale work.

One can experience the work uninterrupted - complete, with no need to change discs - on the DVD Edition; along with the thrilling realism of uncompressed 24-bit PCM sound. This audio-only DVD can be played on any DVD player (note: there are no visuals).

For ease of navigation, both the DVD and CD versions have many track points (approximately every 5-6 pages of the score) which allow you to navigate through the disc(s) and the piece. The tracks are identical for both the DVD and CD.

An active composer in the former Soviet Union from the 1960s until 1981, Viktor Suslin (1942–2012) also formed the important improvisational ensemble Astrea with fellow composers Sofia Gubaidulina and Vyacheslav Artyomov in 1975. As a composer, Suslin used a wide variety of compositional methods, was content with simple elements as basic compositional material and form-wise retained a balance between classicism and innovation. The première recording of Sofia Gubaidulina’s 2013 So sei es (‘So be it’), subtitled 'in memoriam Viktor Suslin', was composed especially for this disc.

The inspiration for this album came from a bassoon, which Donna Agrell acquired in the mid-1980s. The instrument was a Grenser & Wiesner, and had been built in Dresden around 1820. The rare instrument came with an address label on its original case, which indicated that it had been delivered to Stockholm. This label inspired Ms. Agrell to investigate the music that was popular in Stockholm around that time. The works that Ms. Agrell has chosen for this album are chamber works which were all premiered by Frans Preumayr, a bassoon virtuoso who inspired composers such as Berhard Henrik, Edouard Du Puy, and Franz Berwald to write pieces for him. Other artists on this recording include clarinetist Lorenzo Coppola, violinists Marc Destrube and Franc Polman, violist Yoshiko Morita, cellist Albert Bruggen, bassist Robert Franenberg, and pianist Ronald Brautigam.

Gustavo Gimeno conducts the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg in a fascinating survey of confident, assured and striking orchestral works by the young Shostakovich. This new recording from Pentatone includes his breathtaking Symphony No. 1 Op. 10 - the student work which brought Shostakovich international fame. While indebted to the Russian masters, Shostakovich's early works nevertheless demonstrate his precocious brilliance, originality and falir and they offer an intriguing glimpse at the evolution of his distinctive, mature style. From the easy going and good humored Scherzo Op. 1, the Tchaikovskian Theme and Variations in B-flat major Op. 3, or the Stravinskyan Scherzo Op. 7, his youthful vitality is never in doubt. But with his Symphony No 1 Op. 10 he produced his first masterpiece and found his own distinctive voice. It's a thrilling work full of sardonic edginess, pained introspection and dramatic outbursts, and closes with a barnstorming finale. Composed 10 years later, the aptly titled Five Fragments for orchestra Op. 42 are short, pungent and austere pieces; the arresting style is modernist but the sound is unmistakeably Shostakovich. Following his acclaimed conducting debut with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 2014, Gustavo Gimeno took up the post of Music Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg with the 2015-2016 season. An auspicious collaboration with Pentatone followed in 2016 and three releases with the orchestra are planned in 2017. "His musical rhetorics are refined, his grip on the structure of the compositions is accurate and convincint" observed Joep Stapel in the NRC Handelsblad, "Gimeno knew how to keep the tension and made the musicians...excel." Elsewhere in a busy international schedule, Gimeno has debuted with major orchestras in Europe and America, and toured with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra to Taiwan and Japan.

Martha Aarons played with the Cleveland Orchestra from 1981 to 2006. Every summer she teaches and serves as principal flute for the Aspen Music Festival. Since becoming a freelancer, she has performed as guest principal in the Baltimore Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera, and she enjoys frequent appearances with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Solo credits include the Cleveland Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony, Aspen Chamber Symphony, and Ohio Chamber Orchestra. Currently she is a regular guest artist at Rancho la Puerta, in Tecate, Mexico. Ms. Aarons has taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Duke University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Oberlin College, and Skidmore College as Filene Visiting Artist-in-Residence. She also taught and performed as visiting artist at Shanghai Conservatory. In 2002 she served as assistant professor at the Eastman School of Music. In 2003 Ms. Aarons performed the Aspen Music Festival premiere of the Flute Concerto by Christopher Rouse.

Classical Music

Classical Music

BRAHMS: Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115 / String Quartet No. 3

The prolific and eclectic 20th century composer Charles Koechlin is known to many as the composer of the Seven Stars Symphony and the Jungle Book. The heralded oboist Stefan Schilli together with his numerous guests presents chamber side of Koechlin with this release.

There is no finer work in the medium than William Mathias' Harp Concerto, a stunning combination of characterful melody and magical handling of texture. The finale in particular must be counted as one of the most successful concerto movements in the 20th-century literature for any instrument, and this performance featuring the work's dedicatee Osian Ellis is just about perfect in every way. Why this piece isn't a concert staple remains a mystery. The other two works in their individual ways are also very satisfying and well worth hearing, if perhaps not quite as remarkable as the Harp Concerto.

Gervase de Peyer gives a fearless account of the Clarinet Concerto, a piece that vacillates between mellow lyricism and strident outbursts. The thematic material here isn't quite as memorable (to me at least) as that in the Harp and Third Piano Concertos. This latter lives squarely in the school of Bartók and Prokofiev, with a "night music" central movement and a finale that sounds like an amalgam of Bartók's Second, Barber, and Ginastera, albeit with a Welsh musical accent. Peter Katin is the excellent soloist, David Atherton conducts splendidly, and the recording is of the very highest quality. Outstanding and essential for anyone who enjoys really good 20th-century concertos.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

The women appearing before our ears throughout this program range from the Virgin Mary and Dido, queen of Carthage, to Shakespeare's Desdemona and the unfortunate Anne Boleyn, waiting for her execution in the Tower of London in 1536. But the disc also features four other heroines - the Italian composers Claudia Sessa, Francesca Caccini, Lucrezia Vizzana and Barbara Strozzi. All active between 1590 - 1675, they will have required great courage to rise above the social conventions of the time, but this surprisingly productive period for female composers also offered an opportunity that would disappear in later centuries: the all-female environment provided by the convent. More than half of the women who published music before 1700 were nuns, including Sessa and Vizzana, who are here represented by brief meditations on teh suffering and death of Christ. Caccini and Strozzi, on the other hand, lived very much in the secular world - Caccini at the Florentine court and Strozzi as a free-lance musician and composer in Venice. Unhindered by the restrictions imposed by the church on sacred music they both adhered to the new stile moderno championed by Claudio Monteverdi. Celebrated for their singing, they composed vocal music which makes 'the words the mistress of the harmony and not the servant', to quote Monteverdi's brother Giulio Cesare. The soprano Ruby Hughes has already made her name for herself in a wide-ranging repertoire, but has a special love for the constellation of lute, cello and voice. With Jonas Nordberg and Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann - who also contribute instrumental solos - she here reveals in the dramatic and expressive potential offered by this trio combination, and by the music by these female composers and their English colleagues Henry Purcell and John Bennet.

This set includes a blu-ray audio CD playable on blu-ray players only and a standard CD playable on all CD players.

GRAMMY-nominated Ronn McFarlane is joined by Mindy Rosenfeld to present this recording. Explained by Rosenfeld, it’s “about gathering some of our favorites, a musical feast. A wide cross section of styles… these timeless tunes from past centuries still touch us in ways words cannot, stirring our life energy.”

Classical Music

Classical Music

A classic disc filled with nursery rhymes that when taught have given children a musical base for many generations. 50 classic tunes in all.

Gallery hymns of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Carnival Band made their debut in the summer of 1984. Their repertoire ranges from medieval dances to music hall songs in a style that draws on early music and folk from Europe East and West, and America North and South. Maddy Prior enjoys many and various musical activities. Working with the Carnival Band holds a special affection for her. She says that the joyful and enthusiastic way the projects are approached make them a delight to do. Elsewhere she has been singing with Steeleye Span for around twenty years and continues to do so with undiminished enjoyment. She also works regularly with her husband Rick Kemp, writing and performing their own compositions. She had done projects with June Tabour and numerous television and radio appearances. Maddy Prior and The Carnival Band were first brought together in 1984 for a BBC Radio 2 broadcast of Christmas carols. This became the basis of 'A Tapestry of Carols' (CDSDL366) which was enthusiastically received by the press and the public. Another commission from Radio 2 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of John Wesley's spiritual awakening and the 200th of his brother Charles' death led to this, their second recording. While Maddy Prior and The Carnival Band are happy to maintain their separate identities and careers, they enjoy these occasional collaborations which give them the opportunity to combine their different styles and talents.