Komitas was one of the first Armenian musicians to undergo classical Western musical training, in Berlin, in addition to music education in his own country. He published both folksong collections and writings on Armenian church melodies, and his work laid the foundations for the development of a clearly defined national musical style. The Seven Folk Dances evoke the specific timbres of Armenian instruments, the Seven Songs for Piano are fleeting and lyrical while the Twelve Children’s Pieces based on folk-themes are beautifully crisp. Msho-Shoror is one of the most ancient of all Armenian dances.

REVIEW:

These days the most widely known Armenian composers are probably Khatchaturyan and Babajanian but, if you want to hear music that really evokes the scenery, people and cultural heritage of Armenia, look for the works of Komitas – a composer generally regarded as the founder of the Armenian national school of music.

...it is difficult to imagine a specific piano and acoustic better suited to performance of this music and, unless finding this was achieved purely by luck (which I doubt) the search must have taken somebody - probably Mikael Ayrapetyan himself - considerable effort. Whoever it was the results do him much credit.

The last seven pieces were not intended as a set – but composed individually during the period 1899 to 1911 and arranged here for violin and piano by four Armenian composers (including two who were founder members of the Komitas Quartet, referred to above). These are all beautifully and atmospherically played here by Ayrapetyan and a Russian violinist who seems to have a considerable affinity for the Armenian style (although his performance of ‘The Apricot Tree’, which comes third, does not quite displace that of Chilingirian in my affections). Several of these pieces have been arranged for other combinations but they work very well on violin and piano.

Booklet notes are excellent and in English and German. The only problem with this CD is that attempting to listen to all the piano music together is rather too much of a good thing. Interesting though the pieces are, ideally one needs rather greater instrumental variety and it would have been preferable to have the violin and piano pieces spread throughout the disc rather than collected at the end. Perhaps this can most easily be achieved if your CD player allows for random track sequence or programming. At any rate, it is not much of a problem and I can strongly recommend exploring this illuminating and beautifully recorded disc.

-- MusicWeb International

Classical Music

George Enescu’s primary instrument was the violin, but he also wrote a substantial body of works for piano, including sonatas, suites, preludes, and other short character pieces. This three-disc Hänssler Classic set of the complete works for piano solo, performed by Romanian pianist Raluca Stirbat, offers valuable insights into Enescu’s evolving methods and artistic development over a period of four decades, from the Suite No. 1 in G minor, Op. 3 (1897) to the Piano Sonata No. 3 in D major (1935). Enescu passed through several phases, starting with a fascination with Baroque forms in his teenage years, and progressing to an enthusiasm for Wagnerian chromaticism and Romanian folk music, which led to a more integrated mature style. Stirbat is an ardent proponent for Enescu’s music, and her album is the first complete set of his piano music on CD. Recorded at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, the sound is crisp and detailed, though the resonance of the performing space is quite pronounced.

– All Music Guide (B. Sanderson)

Stravinsky described Nikolay Roslavets as "the most interesting Russian composer of the 20th century," but after decades of suppression in the former Soviet Union his significance is still being assessed even today through newly discovered and reconstructed works. Although Scriabin's influence can be heard in earlier works, reconstructed works. Although Scriabin's influence can be heard in earlier works, Roslavets' constant experimentation with original and complex compositional techniques resulted in his "new system of tone organization" and "synthetic chords". Olga Andryuschchenko describes Roslavets' daunting piano music as "fire and ice!"

After a long wait, their new recording is finally here! This time the young Finns give the String Quartets of Shostakovich their attention. The Third Quartet may be considered something like the opposite of the composer's "classical" 9th Symphony - and one of the most beautiful of the cycle. The Fourth Quartet is rather lyrical and densely scored. The Seventh Quartet, undoubtedly a painful and personal work, was composed in memory of Shostakovich's first wife, who died in 1954.

The Finnish string quartet Meta4 has developed in recent years, to become one of the world's top quartets. Founded in 2001, the four musicians won the Shostakovich Competition (Moscow) in 2004, and later, in 2007, the Haydn Competition in Vienna. In the years since, the Meta4 Quartet has maintained a busy concert schedule performing in the great halls and musical centers of Europe. The quartet's repertoire includes works from Haydn to the present day, including many works especially written for them. Their first CD (a program of Haydn's op. 55 Quartets) received wide critical acclaim and several coveted awards including the Prize of the German Record Critics' Award and the 2010 Echo Klassik Award.

Described by Aram Khachaturian as "the greatest Soviet Armenian composer", Haro Stepanian followed the pioneering efforts of composers such as Komitas in establishing a strong national voice for Armenian music. He composed three symphonies, operatic works, numerous songs, chamber pieces, and works for piano. Building on the models of Chopin, Rachmaninov and fellow Armenians such as Komitas and Tigranian, the 26 varied and sharply contrasting Preludes are exquisite folk-influenced miniatures suffused with sadness, poetic contemplation, the natural world and scenes of Armenian life.

REVIEWS:

The Grand Piano engineers conspire with happy results in rendering Ayrapetyan’s admirable way with chiming charms and epic rhetoric.

-- MusicWeb International

Building on the models of Chopin, Rachmaninov and fellow Armenians such as Komitas and Tigranian, these 26 varied and sharply contrasting Preludes from 1947, 1948, 1956 and single from 1964 and 1965 are exquisite folk-influenced miniatures suffused with sadness, poetic contemplation, the natural world and scenes of Armenian life.

-- Records International

…these are what might be termed strong examples of the Socialist Realist aesthetic. Mr Ayrapetyan plays them with a wide palette of tonal color, fine virtuosity, and consummate musicianship. The piano sound is a little boomy and reverberant, but that is better than claustrophobic.

-- American Record Guide

CLASSICAL OBOE • Lajos Lencsés (ob); Budapest Str; 1 Franz Liszt CO; 2 Auer Qrt; 3 Miwako Nagatomi (vn); 4 Vidor Nagy (va); 4 Dieter Brachmann (vc) 4 • HÄNSSLER 99.277 (66:57)


MOZART Adagio and Allegro, K 594. 1 DITTERSDORF Symphony in F: Adagio non molto. 2 Andantino in G. 2 HAYDN Divertimentos: No. 1 in D; 3 No. 2 in A. 3 VANHAL Quartet in C, op. 7/6 4


It’s been nearly a half century since I had the privilege of witnessing Igor Stravinsky conduct Les noces with Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Roger Sessions playing the four pianos. It was a rare assemblage of celebrated composers as performers, but not an unprecedented one. Josef Haydn is known to have invited Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf (second violin), Johann Baptist Vanhal (cello), and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (on his favorite stringed instrument, the viola) to play string quartets with him. Foss and Sessions may have been the Dittersdorf and Vanhal of their time (and vice versa), but I doubt that either Barber or Copland—in their wildest dreams—would have equated themselves with Haydn and Mozart.


This historical footnote is the hook on which Lajos Lencsés, one of our most prolific and imaginative oboe virtuosos, has hung this compilation of mostly recycled odds and ends. Alert readers will notice the array of assisting artists on the disc. Only the Mozart was newly recorded, but the mixture of sources does not intrude. Little, if any, of the program is quite as advertised. The Adagio and Allegro is a transcription of a piece for mechanical organ. Haydn’s divertimentos, composed for his princely employer, were originally scored for baryton trio. The Dittersdorf pieces are slow movements from two of his Six Symphonies after Ovid’s Metamorphoses . I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that the Vanhal contribution was originally a string quartet. No matter. Appropriating music written for another instrument, quite acceptable in Classical Vienna, is hardly unheard of today, and it creates possibilities for programming that would not otherwise exist. Lencsés makes the most of those possibilities. Fanciers of the oboe with a hankering for something a little out of the ordinary (but not too much so) should enjoy this disc.


FANFARE: George Chien

Classical Music

Alexander Arutiunian was one of the most prominent composers in the USSR, one of the representatives of the Armenian ‘Mighty Handful’ and much admired by Shostakovich. An accomplished pianist, Arutiunian created virtuoso piano works that are rooted in Armenian folk traditions while expressing, in the words of Hayk Melikyan, “a rich palette of emotions reflecting both his time and the history of his nation”. From the Armenian Dance of 1935, with its delicate, transparent texture and strong rhythmic drive, via the more dissonant, neo-classical Polyphonic Sonata, the descriptive Musical Pictures, and the almost Debussyan approach to tonality in the Six Moods, to the simple and beautifully crafted Album for Children of 2004, the works on this recording, the first complete edition, span Arutunian’s entire compositional career.

Classical Music

The German music journal Fono Forum said of Rilling's Elias, "Helmuth Rilling realizes the stylistic span of the choirs from an ascetic a cappella to an impressionistic coloration, an almost Brahmsian Sentiment, and even up to a dramatic intensity. The orchestra is their equal. High-caliber soloists are thoroughly convincing."

Classical Music

Classical Music

Florian Uhlig has often played the concerto under the direction of Penderecki as well as with other conductors throughout the world. Uhlig gives an exceptional interpretation of this successful contemporary work that is particularly close to his heart.

This fifth and final CD in her “transfigured” series finds the South African born, New York based pianist Petronel Malan dedicating herself to works of Johannes Brahms as transformed by such figures as Lowell Liebermann, Eduard Schütt and the immortal Ignaz Friedman. Ludwig Stark’s modification of Brahms’s Haydn variations Op 56a here receives its world-premiere recording. Lauded as an unmistakably creative force in the classical music industry, Ms. Malan is a thrice-nominated Grammy® artist, including “Best Instrumental Solo Album” for her debut disc Transfigured Bach.

This is the first CD for the Trio Atanassov, an award-winning and upcoming trio from France.

Little known outside his native Croatia, Ivo Maček (1914-2002) occupied an important place in 20th c. Yugoslavian musical life as pianist and educator. + He composed a small number of solo piano works, all of which can be heard on this world première recording. + The Intermezzo is among his most poetic early miniatures, while the expressively wide-ranging Theme and Variations is one of his most inventive pieces. + His 1985 Sonata is the most elaborate and imposing of his solo piano works, whereas the 1980 Violin Sonata typifies the increasing sophistication and poise of his later style.

• Mostly premiere recordings of Baroque Recorder Sonatas from the collection of Viceroy of Naples • The greatest discovery of the collection is certainly the sonata by Adolf Hasse, then Europe's leading opera composer • These works are among the highlights of late Baroque music

Valentin Radutiu, born in Munich in 1986, received his first cello lessons from his father at the age of six. While still attending school, he studied at the Mozarteum University of Salzburg under Clemens Hagen from 2001 to 2005. After high school he became a student of Heinrich Schiff in Vienna. Since 2007 he has been a member of David Geringas' cello studio at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin.

Valentin Radutiu is the current winner of the competition "Sound and Explanation - Conveying Works in Music and Word« of the Cultural Committee of German Business." The Music Prize of German Business is one of the most important awards for young musicians in Germany. - Artist's website

Classical Music

This 26-CD set containing CPE Bach’s complete solo piano works represents a landmark of the highest importance and, more significantly, listening pleasure. Ana-Marija Markovina has made a specialty of playing these works. She previously recorded the Prussian and Württemburg sonatas (for Genuin), but it is difficult to overstate the richness and variety found on these discs, or Markovina’s consistent success in rendering it all with such freshness, excitement, intensity, and charm. CPE Bach’s keyboard output consists primarily of sonatas, dozens of them, ranging over the entire course of his career, roughly from the 1740s through the 1780s. Most are three-movement pieces in fast-slow-fast form, but there are also rondos, fantasias, variations, character pieces, teaching pieces, arrangements of concertos and other orchestral works, dances, and everything from the very simple to the exceptionally complex, both technically and expressively—an entire world. More astonishingly, the quality of this music is almost uniformly high. Bach was a true craftsman, and while everyone will have their favorite works–and it’s pointless to say that it’s all equally good–you can sample just about anything on any of these discs and you will find plenty to enjoy and captivate your attention.

Markovina plays this music on the modern piano, the instrument that comes closest to any available in Bach’s day to realizing his clearly notated intentions. For example, he almost always asks for a full range of dynamics, from pp to ff, and his writings make clear that he valued above all a beautifully sustained, singing tone. The clavichord offered him the most possibilities in this regard at the start of his career, while in his last years his clear preference was for the piano (even though he had expressed reservations about early versions of the instrument in his 1750s Essay on the True Art of Playing the Keyboard). Markovina exploits the piano’s full dynamic range, as well as its ability to vary articulation, sustain the melodic line, and add muscle to Bach’s emphatic and often syncopated rhythmic schemes. In this respect she is far bolder than, say, Danny Driver’s genteel, almost effeminate CPE Bach recordings on Hyperion.

However, the most telling comparison has to be made with Miklós Spányi’s ongoing series of the complete keyboard works for BIS. Spányi uses period instruments, which have some advantages (the clavichord’s vibrato, for example), but also all of their inadequacies, including a lack of sustaining power and often a great deal of mechanical noise. On the piano, Bach’s music sounds modern; on early instruments, it sounds old. This contrast is exacerbated by Spányi’s inability to play a true allegro at speed. Consider, for example, the marvelous Sonata in B minor Wq. 65/13, which dates from the 1740s. The finale is marked “Allegro molto”. Spányi takes about six minutes (on the clavichord), Markovina slightly more than three. The difference in both sonority and expressive intensity is shocking, with Markovina infinitely more powerful and exciting.

CPE Bach’s modern reputation rests largely on his music in the “empfindsamer Stil”, with its highly expressive, emotionally eruptive, and constantly surprising writing; but a little-known aspect of this style was also the attempt to imbue music with a genuine sense of humor. Haydn, for example, learned a great deal from Bach’s pregnant use of silence. So rather than offer the usual examples of minor-key pathos, I offer as a listening sample the start of “L’Aly Rupalich”, a character piece also provisionally entitled “La Bach”, and possibly intended as a self-portrait of the composer. CPE Bach scholar Paul Corneilson describes the work as “a disco piece”, and how right he is.

Corneilson is also the Managing Editor of the Packard Humanities Institute’s ongoing CPE Bach Complete Edition, and it is largely thanks to that organization that this set of recordings has been made possible. CPE Bach fans, then, should be delighted to know that Corneilson has assembled an absolutely splendid volume of scores under the title The Essential C.P.E. Bach, containing 25 “greatest hits” from the composer’s keyboard, chamber, orchestral, and vocal music. Retailing for only $50, this beautifully printed, 350-page volume also contains excellent introductions to the composer as well as all of the music contained therein, a bibliography, a select discography, and a concordance that helps to locate each work by Wotquenne and Helm numbers.

Highlights include not only “L’Aly Rupalich”, a selection of sonatas, and the wonderful Rondo in E minor subtitled “Farewell to My Silberman Clavichord”, but also the Sonata for Unaccompanied Flute, the programmatic Sonata in C minor for Two Violins and Bass, and the amazingly dark Fantasia in F-sharp minor for Violin and Keyboard “CPE Bach’s Emotions”. There are also two complete symphonies, two complete concertos, and among the vocal pieces a bit of the celebrated Magnificat and the extraordinary Heilig for double chorus and double orchestra, a masterwork that everyone who loves Bach (Sr.) and Handel really must hear (there’s a fabulous performance on Harmonia Mundi).

You can order the score directly here, and I can’t recommend this elegant and smartly assembled volume highly enough. The same holds true of Markovina’s big box of Bach. I know, 26 CDs is a lot, and you’re not going to be playing them every day, but the important thing to remember is that you could, and you’d never be bored.

David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

This is Leonard Bernstein's later version of Shostakovich's Fifth, captured live while the New York Philharmonic was on tour in Tokyo. It's an excellent performance, similar to Bernstein's first reading, but a bit broader on the whole, and better (or at least more closely) recorded. The finale still goes very quickly, a decision that Shostakovich himself supported, and Bernstein treats it more as an unabashed triumph than a hollow victory, which is also perfectly in keeping with the musical possibilities. Elsewhere he remains a powerful and passionate exponent of the work, turning in an exceptionally intense Largo and a take-no-prisoners first-movement development section. Of course, he's also on firm ground in the Mahlerian scherzo, and the response of the Philharmonic is all that we might reasonably ask.


The coupling is no mere make-weight. Rudolf Barshai prepared all four of Shostakovich's chamber symphonies from their various string quartets, and no one conducts them better. This one, the most popular and frequently played, comes from the tragic Eighth Quartet, and while DG also has an excellent Barshai recording of the piece, this one has nothing to fear from the competition. It's an extremely solid performance that doesn't stint on the music's dark drama. The scorching second movement, with its frantic Jewish dance music alternating with the composer's DSCH monogram, is heavier than you might be used to from the quartet original, but it's entirely logical given the larger forces used. Barshai, a string player himself, really knows how the music ought to go, and the sonics are excellent. This is a fine, very welcome reissue.
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

PETROUCHKA SEASONS

This is a DSD (Direct Stream Digital) recording
The proliferation of music for strings can make it easy to overlook the grand tradition of arrangements for brass. Italian masters Giovanni Gabrieli and Girolamo Frescobaldi are the featured composers on the re-mastered and re-released recording THE ANTIPHONAL MUSIC OF GABRIELI. A collaborative effort of the Philadelphia, Chicago, and Cleveland Brass Ensembles (along with E. Power Biggs on organ), this album evokes the majesty and charm of the Italian Renaissance.
No soloists take center stage; instead, the collaborative interplay of performers builds layers of harmonies through the melody. The superbly engineered stereo recording makes the most of this interplay, creating the impression of being surrounded by the orchestra; a diagram illustrating the seating arrangement used during the recording session is a useful tool in understanding the music. Understanding of the music aside, the clarity and precision of performance make this album a very serene and enjoyable listening experience.

APOTEOSIS - VIOLA BASTARDA