Classical Music

Violin Recital: Ricci, Ruggiero - BACH, J.S. / MATTHESON / P

This selection includes a book and a poster.

Nikolay Andreyevich Roslavets was viewed by his Russian colleagues as one of the most original, innovative and progressive composers of the 1920s, a period of extraordinary artistic experimentation between the Russian Revolution and the Soviet regime'.

Recording information: Bösendorfer Hall, Vienna, Austria (06/09/2008-06/11/2008).

Recording information: St Mary's Church, Walthamstow, London, UK (01/03/2008-01/05/2008); St Mary's Church, Walthamstow, London, UK (01/08/2008-01/10/2008).

Although Australian by birth, Alfred Hill spent much of his youth in New Zealand before embarking on studies in Leipzig, where he met Brahms, Dvořák and Tchaikovsky. + A prolific symphonist and operatic composer, he also wrote a sequence of seventeen notable string quartets. + His style evolved constantly, the influence of Dvořák leading on to the impressionism of his mid-period. + By the time of the String Quartets Nos. 12 to 14 his mastery of technique – in his younger days he had played in a prominent string quartet – ensure that the music is balanced, subtle, and full of playful wit. + This is the fifth of six volumes of the complete Alfred Hill String Quartets.

ALFANO Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Piano. Cello Sonata • Samuel Magill (vc); Scott Dunn (pn); Elmira Darvarova (vn) • NAXOS 8.570928 (60: 06)


These days Franco Alfano (1875–1954) is remembered more for his controversial and much maligned 1926 completion of Puccini’s Turandot than for his own well-crafted and often quite striking music. His career started promisingly. In 1904, his opera Risurrezione , based on Tolstoy’s last full-length novel, made him internationally famous (see Henry Fogel’s review in Fanfare 28:4). In 1918, he rose to the directorship of Liceo Musicale, Bologna, and two years later helped to found the society Musica Nova. His career remained on the ascendancy until 1926, when Toscanini’s de facto damnation of his completion of Turandot made him an odd man out in Italian music. Add to this that two of his contemporaries, Malipiero and Respighi, were changing the focus of Italian music from opera to purely instrumental, while Alfano continued doggedly in the operatic realm with Madonna imperia (1927), Cyrano de Bergerac (1936), Don Juan de Manara (1941), Il dottor Antonia (1949), Vesuvius (1950), and Sakùntala (1952). Then further add that Alfano was on favorable terms with Mussolini’s fascist government and one has a pretty good recipe for his subsequent obscurity.


Then there is the music itself, as illustrated by these two chamber works—soft edged, introspective, and quietly luminous in a most Debussian manner. Cellist Samuel Magill, in his liner notes to this release, points out that Alfano was half French (on his maternal side), and spent the years from 1899 until about 1905 in Paris, where he composed light music for the Folies Bergère. It is plain from these two pieces that he soaked up the atmosphere and found it most congenial. The earlier of these two works, the Cello Sonata, was commissioned in 1928 by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. It is a tour de force in its exploitation of the cello’s full compass and coloristic possibilities. The high A-string writing makes it seem a super violin, and the use of harmonics in combination with quiet sustaining pedaled piano figurations creates moments that would have made both Ravel and Debussy proud. It is a long and discursive work that opens serenely, as if to say “I will reveal a great mystery,” and then travels from the elementally abstract toward the more and more intelligible; unfathomable mystery gives way to unbridled passion, and then to a moment of sublime peace.


The Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Piano of 1932 is similar to the Cello Sonata, but given the third instrument, the violin, it is richer in tonal possibilities. Its opening revealing a kinship with Renaissance polyphony, indeed farther back than that, shows how easily those languages can dovetail into that of the French Impressionists. Alfano, like Bruckner and Brahms, was an antiquarian. In both of these works, Debussy’s idea that pure sonority should be an element of music equal with melody, harmony, and rhythm, is writ large.


All three performers are excellent and play with razor-edged accuracy, passion, and insight in these two world-premiere recordings. The recording, alas, is harsh in its upper register, requiring treble cut on my system, but, on the other hand, it reveals everything, as if under a microscope. The piano, however, is splendidly registered throughout.


FANFARE: William Zagorski

Joaquin Turina' songs are little-known today, but not only was he part of an important and influential group of early twentieth-century Spanish composers such as Albeniz, Falla and Granados, he possessed a beautiful and individual compositional style.

Always among the most innovative of composers, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) wrote several works that deliberately blur the distinction between chamber orchestra and chamber ensemble. Among these, the First Chamber Symphony compresses the classical symphonic format into a tensile single movement scored for only fifteen players, while the Suite draws its seven instruments into a maelstrom of vitality whose inspiration lies in the dance styles that were popular during the 1920s. The Zahir Ensemble is one of Spain’s most exciting modern music groups, whose passion and technical accomplishment have gained them an ardent following.

Scriabin' cycle of Piano Sonatas is one of the most visionary and dramatic in the canon.

Includes work(s) by Jean Marie Leclair. Soloists: Fenwick Smith, John Gibbons (classical), Laura Blustein, Laura Jeppesen, Christopher Krueger.

Classical Music

PIANO TRIOS

This CD features rare but beautiful repertoire from Franck.

The importance of Giovanni Battista Viotti in the history of violin music has long been acknowledged. One of the most original characteristics of these works is the fact that their movements are often linked, thematically, by a certain affinity in their first few bars which makes each work distinctly coherent. Viotti was a very polished composer, gifted with a rich melodic vein and an inborn sense of formal balance.

Classical Music

The Scelsi Collection. With the 'Scelsi Collction', Stradivarius presents the extraordinatry artist, Giacinto Scelsi: musician, poet, writer, and intellectual of our time. In close collaboration with the Isabella ScelsiFoundation, sole heir to the composer, Stradivarius continues its production of a series of recordings made with excellent performer, among them those who are already experts of Scelsian practice as well as those who are exploring the 'universe of Scelsi's for the first time. Conceived as an exclusive collection of monographic albums, hitherto never undertaken in Italy, these new recordings of his vast compositional output will constitute a reference point for the awareness, study, and performance of the oeuvre of Giacinto Scelsi.

Although Shostakovich's chamber music is dominated by the fifteen string quartets, he also left his mark on the piano trio, the piano quintet and the accompanied sonatas.

Includes nocturne(s) for piano by Frédéric Chopin. Soloist: Israela Margalit.

The internationally distinguished guitarist Jose Fernandez Bardesio plays music from North, Central, and South America, in all its great diversity of style. Its various influences from tango, folk, jazz and Afro rhythms make this music an essential part of the guitar repertoire. His arrangement of Ginastera’s Tres Danzas Argentinas is a real challenge and an expedition to the limits of the guitar; for the bitonal first and third dances, the three bass strings are retuned. Ginastera employs guitar techniques on the piano, such as the golpe, and for this reason Bardesio’s arrangement is seen as an enrichment of the literature.

The amalgamation of cultures in a potpourri of musical exchange is what “Mantra Meets Classic” is all about. The pinnacle of a journey of five years has been reached, and what is about to unfold, is a dream, of offering a Divine work, “Shanmuga Kavacham,” to the whole world. It was written in the Tamil language by the saint/poet Srimath Pamban Swamigal in 1891. The saint had prophesized, that after 100 years, this sublime work would reach a Global audience, and here we are today, bearing testimony to this miraculous prophecy, through an Indo-German Collaboration.

DUKAS: Piano Sonata / Variations on a Theme of Rameau

The Naxos Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition: Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenth-century German authors, early Romantics and Biedermeier poets.

Classical Music