Richter Archives, Vol. 18: 1958 Budapest Recital (Live)

Creston:
Violin Concerto No. 2, Op. 78
(World Premiere) November 17, 1960
Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Georg Solti
Engel, Carl:
Sea-Shell
arr. Zimbalist. Australian tour, Sydney Town Hall. July 1952
Glazunov:
Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 82
March 3, 1968
Radio-Orchester Beromester, Zurich, Erich Schmid
Godowsky:
Triakontameron No. 11 'Alt Wien'
arr. Heifetz
Kreisler:
Tambourin Chinois, Op. 3
Mendelssohn:
Song without Words, Op. 19b No. 1 in E major 'Sweet Remembrance'
arr. Heifetz. Australian tour, Sydney Town Hall. July 1952
Mozart:
Violin Concerto No. 4 in D major, K218
February 9, 1960
The Denver Symphony Orchestra, Saul Caston
Paganini:
Caprice for solo violin, Op. 1 No. 9 in E major 'The Hunt'
January 20, 1970, New York WQXR Radio (The listening room)
The Bell Telephone Hour Orchestra, Donald Voorhees
Caprice for solo violin, Op. 1 No. 21 in A major
Caprice for solo violin, Op. 1 No. 11 in C major
Caprice for solo violin, Op. 1 No. 16 in G minor
Prokofiev:
The Love for Three Oranges: March
arr. Heifetz. Australian tour, Sydney Town Hall. July 1952
Ravel:
Tzigane
Saint-Saëns:
Etude en forme de valse Op. 52 No. 6

The Symphony No. 2 of Johannes Brahms was composed in the summer of 1877. It's cheery and almost pastoral mood often invite comparisons with Beethoven's sixth symphony. On this SACD from Channel Classics featuring Iván Fischer leading his Budapest Festival Orchestra, Brahms's 'pastoral' symphony is paired with two overtures. The Tragic Overture offers a somber contrast to the sunny mood of the symphony, while the Academic Festival Overture ends the program on a positive and uplifting note.

Aida Stuckie was a Swiss violinist and teacher whose career began when she won the Geneva Competition in 1940. After this initial success she toured Europe and performed under the most famous conductors including Pina Pozzi, Walter Frey, Christoph Lieske, and Elly Ney. Dedicated to education, she began teaching in 1948, and continued throughout the rest of her life, taking a position at Zurcher Hochschule der Kunste in 1992, where she remained until her retirement. Anne-Sophie Mutter is her most famous student. She wrote of her teacher: "Aïda Stucki's recognition as an artist is both inevitable and overdue. Her artistry is a timeless inspiration. Her interpretation incorporates bewitching sound, personal instinct coupled with great insight to the wishes of the composer. I admire this great violinist deeply. These recordings are a must for any string player and music lover." (Anne-Sophie Mutter) This album won the German Record Critics' Award, 2010.

This Blu-ray Disc is only playable on Blu-ray Disc players and not compatible with standard DVD players.

Also available on standard DVD

With an outstanding cast including Daniela Dessi, Fabio Armiliato, Alessandro Luongo, and Alida Berti, this incomparable performance is Puccini at his finest.; Directed by Ettore Scola, who has created a great number of award-winning films, this performance is from the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago.; One of the most represented operas in history, becoming the inspiration for many works to come, La Boheme is a rich, grandiose opera, which is wonderfully represented in this recording.

Picture Format: 1080i, 16:9
Sound Formats: PCM Stereo, DTS-HD MA 5.1
Subtitles: Italian, German, English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese
Region: All
Total Running Time: 123 mins

Jon Nordal celebrated his 90th birthday in March 2016. Nordal and the Iceland Symphony joined forces to celebrate his life and his creative works. Three pieces on this recording were written in the height of Nordal's creative years, 1973-1975. This recording is the Ondine debut for conductor Johannes Gustavsson and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.

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.

Includes work(s) by Georg Philipp Telemann. Ensemble: Michaelstein Telemannisches Collegium. Conductor: Ludger Rémy.

Includes cantata(s) by Georg Philipp Telemann. Ensemble: Accademia Daniel. Conductor: Shalev Ad-El. Soloists: Dorothee Mields, Klaus Mertens.

Includes work(s) by Evan Ziporyn. Ensemble: Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Conductor: Gil Rose. Soloists: Anne Harley, Evan Ziporyn.

Polish by birth, Alexandre Tansman settled in France, a major influence on his composition. He was a close associate of Stravinsky, particularly during his war-time exile in America. Tansman favored the clarinet, in particular, among wind instruments.

Dutch composer Louis Andriessen turned minimalism upside down in the 1970's with his radical musical responses to American experimentalists Reich, Riley and Glass. He challenged these composers' trance-like states with a European sense of edginess and angularity, and the results are exciting and overpoweringly aggressive. Hoketus - the lankmark of European minimalism - takes its name from the medieval art of hocketing, splitting a single melody between two groups of instruments separated in space. Earth-shattering and tribal in its elemental power, Andriessen describes this piece as a 'Gigantic Dancing Human Machine'. Its recording is an international collaboration of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, members of London's Icebreaker ensemble, and musicians from Andriessen's own group. Workers Union and Hout both generate high-voltage energy out of wild unison melodies and rhythms. the Bang on a Can All-Stars have worked closely with Andriessen over the past 10 years, bringing to these works their intense dedication and extreme musicality, and performing them all over the world.

"The five violin concertos here are in Tartini's characteristic three-movement form (fast-slow-fast); all but D.28 (which includes a pair of horns) have string accompaniments. Their appeal lies in their fresh simplicity, which the excellent soloist Ariadne Daskalakis and the Cologne Chamber Orchestra directed spiritedly by Helmut Müller-Brühl capture to perfection, as they do the expressive appeal of the slow movements, notably that of the G major, D.80, and the D major, D.28; but the B minor is graceful too, and its Larghetto is given the title Lascia ch'io dica addio ('Let me say goodbye'). The recording is first class and, for those who like modern-instrument performances, as do we, the disc is worth seeking out."

- Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music - 2008 Edition, page 1353

Though Peter Il'yich Tchaikovsky was a highly prolific and successful composer, he offered only six chamber works for publication. This brief catalogue included three complete string quartets and four single movements.

See previous volumes in this set.

Volume 1 Naxos 8570001

Volume 2 Naxos 8570002



MENDELSSOHN String Quartets, Vol. 3: No. 3 in D, Op, 44/1; in E?, op. “0.” Theme and Variations, op. 81/1. Scherzo, op. 81/2 • New Zealand Str Qrt • NAXOS 8.570003 (68:53)


In Fanfare 33:4, I was favorably impressed by the second installment in the New Zealand String Quartet’s Mendelssohn cycle for Naxos. This is the third and, I would guess, final volume in the series. The first volume was apparently not sent for review because it does not show up in the Archive. Because the numbering of Mendelssohn’s works is so out of sync with their chronology—the string quartets being no exception—some recapping of the prior review may be helpful in assessing this survey.


Quartet Number Date completed Vol. Naxos No. in chron. order


E?, op. “0” 1823 3 8.570003


2, op. 13 10/1827 2 8.570002


1, op. 12 9/1829 1 8.570001


4, op. 44/2 6/1837 1 8.570001


5, op. 44/3 2/1838 2 8.570002


3, op. 44/1 7/1838 3 8.570003


6, op. 80 9/1847 1 8.570001


In addition to the above, between 1827 and 1847, Mendelssohn wrote four completely independent, stand-alone movements for string quartet that were published posthumously in 1850 under the single opus number of 81. Playing these pieces together, however, as if they constituted a unified string quartet, is absurd, as noted in my prior review. No composer of this period, who had not taken complete leave of his senses, would have ended a work in the key of E?-Major that began a semitone higher in the key of E Major, and to top it off, written a scherzo in a key (A Minor) that is removed from the key of the concluding movement (E?-Major) by a diminished fifth (aka a tritone). I commended the New Zealand Quartet for at least having the good sense to split these movements up between volumes:


Theme and Variations in E, op. 81/1 3 8.570003


Scherzo in a, op. 81/2 3 8.570003


Capriccio in e, op. 81/3 2 8.570002


Fugue in E?, op. 81/4 2 8.570002


It remains to be seen whether the ensemble will follow up with a fourth volume containing the complete study fugues for string quartet the boy wonder wrote in 1821 at the age of 12. If so, it will be the most complete survey of Mendelssohn’s works for string quartet on disc that I know.


While there have been previous recordings of the early (1823) E?-Major Quartet, this is the first time I’ve seen an opus number of “0” assigned to it. Since it’s not the first work Mendelssohn ever wrote, it would have made more sense to assign the number “0” to the quartet (as in Bruckner’s Symphony No. 0) rather than to the opus number. But done is done. If I were building a library from scratch, I would be completely content with this Naxos survey of Mendelssohn’s string quartets.


Though some 13 years separate the D-Major Quartet that opens the disc from the composer’s famous Octet of 1825, the writing in this much later work recalls the earlier piece. From its initial catapulted launch of an upward arpeggio in the first violin, the first movement is a virtual nonstop volley that plays with the same figure, tossing it between voices and counterpointing it against itself in overlapping entrances. The Menuetto and the Andante espressivo movements sing of the connubial bliss Mendelssohn must have felt having just returned from his honeymoon, while the Presto con brio echoes the first movement of the “Italian” Symphony, completed five years earlier. This was a happy time in the composer’s life, and the D-Major Quartet—the first in a set of three quartets published collectively under the opus number 44 that Mendelssohn dedicated to the Crown Prince Gustav of Sweden—is veritably bursting at the seams with brilliant, scintillating passagework and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of lyrical melody.


That Mendelssohn’s own musical personality is already emerging in his early E?-Major Quartet, op. “0,” should come as no surprise. By 1823, the 14-year-old had already written his 12 string symphonies and had honed his skills at counterpoint and writing for strings. But neither should we imagine that at this young age he is not also relying on and imitating earlier models. The Adagio ma non troppo surely exhibits more than a passing familiarity with the Adagio affetuoso of Beethoven’s F-Major Quartet, op. 18/1, though the adolescent Mendelssohn can’t quite muster Beethoven’s sturm und drang outbursts. The Minuetto, on the other hand, is pure Haydn; its humorous hiccupping figure might easily be mistaken for a movement from one of Papa Joseph’s quartets.


According to note author Keith Anderson, the stand-alone Theme and Variations movement that ended up as op. 81/1 was actually written in 1847, the last year of Mendelssohn’s life, and was intended as a movement in a new quartet. As we know, of course, that didn’t happen; instead, what did happen is that it became the first movement in a posthumously patched together “quartet” composed of pieces written much earlier. Thus, the E-Minor Scherzo, op. 81/2, sounds very much like it could be an outtake from the Midsummer Night’s Dream Scherzo.


The New Zealand String Quartet plays with a great deal of panache. There’s buoyancy, sparkle, and wit in these performances, not to mention engagement on an emotional level without affectation. It goes without saying of course that technical matters of tempo, dynamics, intonation, bowing, breathing, and balance are totally tidy. Indicated repeats are observed, recorded sound is top-notch, and Naxos’s budget price makes this a steal. If you’ve already invested in one or more complete sets by recently reviewed ensembles, such as the Emerson, Gewandhaus, and Pacifica Quartets, you probably don’t need another one. But as I said above, if I were just starting to build a collection, or, even if I just wanted to fill in a gap or two in an existing one, the New Zealand Quartet’s Mendelssohn would be right near the top of my list. Strongly recommended.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Classical Music

Includes work(s) by Franz Schreker. Ensemble: AML Lucerne Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: John Axelrod.

The New Zealand String Quartet' first Naxos recording of Mendelssohn' string quartets was praised as 'an auspicious start' by Gramophone and 'opulently recorded' by Classic FM magazine. It's warmly affectionate accounts continue with this second of t.

Classical Music

Classical Music

D. SCARLATTI Keyboard Sonatas: K 52; K 77; K 79; K 139; K 170; K 176; K 277; K 344; K 340; K 388; K 398; K 456 • Francesco Nicolosi (pn) • NAXOS 8.570368 (61:02)


Scarlatti fans are many, and growing in number. Russian pianist Vladimir Horowitz was in great part responsible for a reevaluation of the composer’s works, frequently playing Scarlatti sonatas in his recitals. His recordings of a few of these sonatas are revered by pianists and melomanes alike, and no wonder about it. He was supremely aware of the Italian master’s genius in portraying different emotions and in eschewing any of the dictates of style, writing music that sparkles with cleverness and emotion and remains almost unclassifiable in terms of style or school.


Since then, the early-music crowd took possession of these works, and Scarlatti’s œuvre has occupied its rightful place among the harpsichordists. It appeals to anyone who plays a keyboard instrument, as an almost didactic tool: each sonata presents a new exciting problem, a feature that serves to improve some necessary aspect of technical or musical abilities. It also inspires fanatical discussions: staunch defenders of period instruments have fits at hearing a single Scarlatti phrase on a piano, pianists often declare that “had Scarlatti known the modern piano, he would have abandoned the harpsichord” (a pretty lame argument, if you ask me).


Fashions come and go, but Scarlatti remains a hit with keyboard-players, a challenge to be faced, a citadel to be conquered. Options abound. On the harpsichord, my favorites are many, and run from the aggressively elegant Pierre Hantaï (for Mirare), to the variegated approach of Kenneth Weiss (for Satirino), with bows to brutally succinct Nicolau de Figueiredo (Clássicos), and to the reliability of Richard Lester (Nimbus).


There are the pianists who follow the example set by Horowitz, who had an extraordinarily powerful vision of this meridional music, at the same time full of passion and precision. There are those who play the sonatas with Mozartean delicateness (Soyen Lee, for example, for Naxos), subtle sobriety, as Fabio Grasso does (Euterp), and even exuberant intelligence, as my all-time favorite Mikhail Pletnev. From this small list, one can get an idea of the very contrasting stances that find defenders among Scarlatti fans. It is reasonable to state that there is a Scarlatti for absolutely every taste in the world.


The present CD, by Francesco Nicolosi, will thus find its share of admirers, and an equally large number of detractors, for the very same characteristic that the first group will love and the second one will hate. It presents a very pianistic approach, one that makes the pieces sound like Chopin nocturnes. Curiously, the sonatas that are readily identifiable as Baroque are the more “Bachian” ones (like K 52), perhaps because we are already so used to hearing “romantic” versions of Bach. There is a lot of pedaling and ample use of rubato, articulations are softened, and the twisted dissonances are underplayed, partly because the right hand gets more emphasis than the left. Nicolosi’s fluent technique itself somehow diminishes the impact of the more dramatic sonatas: he plays with the easy assurance of a marathon runner quickening his step to catch a bus on a Sunday afternoon. Nothing wrong about that, granted. This is still sensitive playing that takes advantage of Scarlatti’s many subtleties and highlights the stunning quality of the compositions. But the enormous scope of the composer’s imagination gets attenuated, and the resulting versions seem old-fashioned. In the end, this CD says more about Nicolosi and the piano than about Scarlatti and his music.


For those who know Scarlatti and know they like it on the piano, this disc is definitely recommended, as well as for fans of Romantic music who are seeking a first encounter with the music of the 18th century. For those who want a pianist’s sound, but a harpsichordist’s conception, or even a truly personal vision of Scarlatti, this CD will fail to hit the mark.


FANFARE: Laura Rónai

Claudio Arrau in Moscow: Brahms Concertos (Live)

Richter Archives, Vol. 20: Janácek & Hindemith (Live)

Emil Gilels Legacy, Vol. 8: Studio & Live Recordings (1950-1

Successful string quartet performance is all about communication, in the purest sense of the word: constant giving and exchanging, a communion among the players based on an intimate relationship bound by deep understanding, of the music and of each other. It’s the essence of what is meant by ensemble. When you have that, you can play anything together and make it vital, and most of all, true to the composer’s intent.

As my colleague David Hurwitz said in an earlier review, Brahms’ quartets are “respected more than they are loved”, and can sound “overworked” and “texturally monotonous”. It’s true that you can play unlawfully fast and loose with these quartets and pretty much get away with it, given enough rhythmic finesse and blurring of textures, and these are among the many reasons that listeners, including me, usually aren’t that much in love with these dense, phenomenally busy, complicated pieces. But when you hear them played with the unusual clarity, scintillating detail, and dynamic, exacting, turn-on-a-dime expressive statements uttered by an ensemble of literally one interpretive mind and unassailable technique, you have to rethink the reasons for your avoidance reflex when faced with a Brahms quartet close encounter.

When the New Zealand Quartet made this recording its members had been working and playing together for 20 years, a rarity in the music world, and a situation that pays huge dividends in performance. There are few relationships anywhere in which the members spend more time together, pouring heart and soul into an intensely charged, creative collaboration, its success built both on individual artistic drive and vision, and contingent on compromising, blending, and capitalizing on the strengths of those impulses and passions. Any group that can manage this, whether a married couple or a string quartet, is something of a miracle, and, especially if you’ve seen this group in concert, you know how special it is.

And there is no holding back in these performances: the NZSQ literally attacks and wrestles Brahms’ scores to the ground–a positive, friendly intervention, for the good of all concerned. These performances should not disappoint any listener, whether you hate Brahms or love his music, because they take you out of the realm of preconception and just deliver aggressive, uninhibited, and yes, passionate expressions of these scores, respectful of the composer while always working to realize the fullness of the music that Brahms struggled so long and hard to create.

My only regret here is that with a recording you don’t truly experience what this group is doing. Unless you actually see them in concert, you don’t appreciate the incredible group dynamic that’s happening during a performance, you don’t totally get the ensemble interaction that produces this result. They stand when they perform–cellist Rolf Gjelsten sits on a special raised platform–and there’s a physicality to the communication among the players that’s only comparable to a dance, a ballet. And if you can make a ballet out of Brahms’ string quartets, well, you’ve got something that’s worth listening to.

– ClassicsToday (David Vernier)