Prophets of the New is a series from Sony focusing on classic recordings of the 20th century's most revolutionary works. Le Sacre du Printemps serves as a point of reference to all who seek to establish the birth certificate of what is still called “contemporary” music.

R E V I E W S

There is a controlled intensity about Boulez's 1971 New York performance of Petrushka... In The Rite of Spring...Boulez is less lyrical than the composer but compensates with relentless rhythmic urgency. The massive vividness of sound matches the monolithic quality of the interpretation.

-- Penguin Guide
reviewing Le Sacre du Printemps previously reissued on Sony 64109

This set is offered at a special price - two discs for the price of one.

This disc also contains lyrics for the final eight carols: "O come all ye Faithful", "Angels we have heard on high", "Silent Night", "Joy to the World", "O little town of Bethlehem", "The First Nowell", "Lo, how a rose e'er blooming", and "Hark the herald angels sing". To encourage sing-along participation, these pieces are recorded with instrumental accompaniment only.

MUSIK FESTIVAL DAVOS - YOUNG A

The series of Schubert recordings by the Tal and Groethuysen Duo received the 1998 Cannes Classical Music Award for "Best Special Edition."

DELIUS: SEA DRIFT, HASSAN, ARA

BERLITZ PASSPORT - THE MUSIC O

SCARLATTI: HARPSICHORD SONATAS

BERLITZ PASSPORT - THE MUSIC O

BERNSTEIN FAVORITES- ORCHESTRA

MOZART: STRING QUINTETS NOS 3

CHOEURS DE L'OPERA DE VIENNE -

COLORS OF JAZZ - FOR TROPICAL

MUSSORGSKY: PICTURES AT AN EXH

A delightful disc. Tal and Groethuysen play with passion and complete unanimity, and their sure-fingered techniques suggest the "velocity exercises" are well behind them.

Of all the composers whose names are far better known than their music, Czerny must be the most famous. Czerny? Oh yes, he was the chap who wrote those 'velocity exercises', the medicine pianists must take if they are to get better. True, but that wasn't all, his opus numbers leave little change out of 850! So why the neglect? Maybe there are two reasons. First, as a pupil of Beethoven, a teacher of Liszt and a contemporary of Schubert, he was born at the wrong time, surrounded by compositional giants. Second, it was his large output of didactic works and his eminence as a teacher that shaped his image, and his emphasis on technical brilliance was not always helpful to the balance of his music. I can see that, but it's hard to believe he wrote virtually nothing that is worth hearing! No, it's not that, it's probably that his academic image has been so strong that his music has simply been overlooked—if you try this record you'll see what I mean.

Despite his success Czerny was a tortured depressive and it reflects in his music; abrupt and extreme changes of mood, with correspondingly sudden changes of pace, volume and touch, and high-tension cascades of notes lie in wait for the tandem-pianists in the works on this recording. Echoes of Beethoven and Schubert rub shoulders with pre-echoes of Liszt. Czemy was not a great composer but he was a fluent one and, though you may be excused for thinking that he might have been wise to prune some of his lengthy utterances and to abate the firework displays, he often touches the heart-strings.

Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen are new names to me (and to the catalogue) and the insert booklet offers only two photographs as enlightenment; what does seem clear is that this first recording is unlikely to be their last. They play with passion and complete unanimity, and their sure-fingered techniques suggest the 'velocity exercises' as being among those things that are well behind them. The piano itself is not of the kind Czerny would have used, but it has an appropriately clear sound—crystalline cantabile and fortes that are strong but not thunderous. The recording copes well with the wide dynamic range of the music. A delightful disc, to be sure.

-- John Duarte, Gramophone

Track Listing
1. How Do You Keep the Music Playing?
2. Eleanor Rigby
3. Just the Way You Are
4. Through the Fire
5. What's New?
6. That's What Friends Are For
7. You've Got a Friend
8. With Every Breath I Take
9. Just the Two of Us
10. You Are So Beautiful
11. Saving All My Love for You

Personnel: John Basile, Wayne Krantz (guitar); Dick Oatts (flute, saxophone); Randy Brecker (trumpet, flugelhorn); Fred Hersch (piano, synthesizer); David Finck (electric bass); Dave Ratajczak (drums); Jim Saporito (percussion).

Liner Note Author: Mort Goode.

Recording information: Skyline Studios, New York, NY.

Arrangers: Fred Hersch; Brad Dechter; Byron Olson.

OBRAS MAESTRAS DEL CANTO ANDAL

SCARLATTI, VIVALDI: STABAT MAT

Liner notes are in German.

Intense and enthusiastic musicality inform every performance in this engaging program of mostly unfamiliar music.

This is a wholly delightful record. The Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society sometimes invites distinguished singers to join the instrumentalists in an evening at Alice Tully Hall, and this disc is the result of one such concert with two of America's brightest singing talents. Intense and enthusiastic musicality inform everything they do here, and they show their catholicity of taste in a wide-ranging programme of mostly unfamiliar music. Indeed even the one really well-known piece, "Non so pia", is presented in the unusual guise of an arrangement by Mozart himself for piano and violin accompaniment. It serves as a welcome memento of Miss von Stade's youthful, palpitating Cherubino, seen and heard at both Glyndebourne and Salzburg in recent years. Throughout, her tone and approach remind me of the young Christa Ludwig, except that one would have been unlikely to hear the Austrian mezzo in the French item, Chausson's sensual Chanson perpetuelle, which von Stade sings with dark, smouldering tone so right for its fin de slick eroticism. Judith Blegen is no less engaging in her solo items. She darkens her usually bright soprano for "Ja, wir schwären", an aria with clarinet obbligato from Die Verschworenen, written in 1823, with a typically Schubertian sense of longing. The Saint-Saens item comes from one of his early operas. The vocal line is in an attractively sinuous vein with a violin solo, another example of the French composer's art prompting thoughts that he may be in for a much-needed revaluation.

The Schumann and Brahms duets in varying moods demonstrate the almost perfect blend of the two voices and also the thought that must have gone into their preparation so unanimous is the phrasing. Both ladies sing German, as they do French and Italian, with great fluency. The accompaniments, under the direction of the ubiquitous Charles Wadsworth, are all worthy of the singing, Gervase de Peyer's clarinet and Gerard Schwarz's trumpet being worthy of special mention. Joel de Maria is an anagram of Jaime Laredo, who is undoubtedly the violinist concerned here! The proof-reading and ordering of the texts is poor; otherwise I have nothing but praise for the accomplishments displayed in a more than adequate recording.

-- Gramophone [2/1976]

MOZART: OBOE CONCERTOS MIYAMO

Soloists were principals of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Ormandy.

3CDS

From the multi-award-winning stage and film composer of Alien 3 and Batman Forever comes a new oratorio. War, terrifying silence, and violent death invite simple statements as well as, hopefully, more complex ones. This work, despite a plethora of interwoven texts, is a direct utterance: a lament, a conjuring of brief images, which rub against each other to evoke not just a surge of emotion but a sense of purgation. The instrumentation and word-setting is not without beauty (especially the Vietnamese flute and snatches of children’s songs); choirs will enjoy performing it. The work is gestural in concept: a cello elegy in the first movement from the splendid Yo-Yo Ma; an unnerving helicopter simulation, a pithy extended scherzo, a diabolic chorus listing Vietnam combat operations, a dose of Mahlerian threnody. Perhaps most effective are two extended solos, setting Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, which freshen up the prevailing monodic feel: that for Maddalena in the first part, where a genuine feel for angular chromatic line surfaces; and that for Panagulias merging into duet in the final movement. Here, and at the close, Goldenthal achieves a dramatic cogency not wholly evident elsewhere. If not Psalmus hungaricus or A Child of Our Time, it’s at least related in spirit. A fine choir, and top-notch wind phrasing.

Performance: 5 (out of 5), Sound: 5 (out of 5)

-- Roderic Dunnett, BBC Music Magazine

The success of Tavener’s The Protecting Veil for cello and strings has inevitably meant that every major recording company feels obliged to have its own version. Sony now makes its bid with Yo-Yo Ma and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, director David Zinman. Ma has been working hard of late to promote his image as an intelligent, sensitive cellist (but listen to how he plays and this seems unnecessary). With Zinman he has won a 1997 Grammy for recordings of new cello concertos by Danielpour, Kirchner and Rouse, so the Tavener seems a natural choice. It’s partnered by Wake Up... and Die, the world premiere recording of a work that is dedicated to Ma and written for solo cello and orchestral cello section. The seven sections of The Protecting Veil challenge performers to capture the repose of Tavener’s mystical style, while retaining a sense of forward momentum without which most listeners will switch off. Though lacking a concerto’s rhetoric, the piece can still benefit from the special tone and sense of propulsion that an experienced soloist will bring to it. This is Ma’s strength; his playing is fuller and slightly more driven than that of the richly poetic Isserlis on Virgin’s benchmark original. Couplings may also be important. With Wallfisch and the RPO come Eternal Memory and Thrinos, two other Tavener cello works, finely played; with Knight and the English Sinfonia, Nyman’s Strong on Oaks. Even so, if your aim is to update your original purpose, Ma looks like a firm favourite.

Performance: 5 (out of 5), Sound: 5 (out of 5)

-- Nicholas Williams, BBC Music Magazine


Since making an immediate impact at its world premiere at the 1987 Proms concerts, John Tavener's The Protecting Veil has gone on to great critical acclaim and popular success. The widespread reception of Tavener's work has been aided in large part by the eloquent advocacy of its first interpreter, Steven Isserlis, whose Virgin recording continues to rack up the sales. Indeed, it is the sensitivity and spiritual intensity of Isserlis's premiere performance and subsequent best-selling recording that has made Tavener's meditative work the most popular cello concerto written in the modern era. Now, with the first recording by a certified international star cellist of the stature of Yo-Yo Ma, the future of The Protecting Veil seems assured.

A work of quiet, at times, ascetic meditation, Tavener's opus rises to moments of transcendent beauty and a spiritual exaltation rarely heard in music of our cynical postmodern age. Redolent of the incense and religious mystery of the British composer's Russian Orthodox faith, The Protecting Veil is cast in a single, broad, 45-minute span, divided into eight sections. The work is a staggering technical as well as interpretive challenge for the soloist, who is called upon to explore a wide yet often subtle range of expression, with barely a bar's rest throughout.

More remote and otherworldly than Isserlis's in the long opening solo, Ma's playing is consistently gentle and inward, his tonal coloring more subdued, as one might expect from an artist who seems most inspired exploring a minute range of quiet expression. Yet Ma's playing is less moving than Isserlis's at the opening, where the British musician's plaintive, febrile solo has an almost human vocal quality. Zinman's accompaniment is more assertive (or less pointedly refined— Rozhdestvensky's finely judged support is terrific), yet echoes Ma's every turn of phrase like a glove. Still, for all his laserlike focus and intensity, Ma's playing here is strangely missing in the spiritual element that is so essential to this contemplative music.

Either it's an editorial lapse or John Tavener has rethought the structure of The Protecting Veil, since the booklet divides the work into seven parts, not the previous eight. (The second section, "The Nativity of the Mother of God," is now enfolded into the eponymous opening section, which in its quarter-hour length now comprises about a third of the entire work.) In the section formerly known as "The Nativity," Isserlis conveys more of Tavener's startlingly inventive writing, suggesting a Middle Eastern bazaar milieu, yet Ma scores in his rather jaunty "Annunciation," which is quite different from Isserlis's. Yo-Yo Ma is a wonderful musician, but here, as at other times I must confess, I find his committed, even strenuous intensity sometimes eclipses the musical essence of the work he is playing. Ma's more spacious conception of the long central solo, "The Lament of the Mother of God at the Cross," seems better judged to me than Isserlis's relatively fleet account—the one aspect of Isserlis's performance that doesn't seem quite right. Yet despite adding nearly two and a half minutes, Ma doesn't find any greater spiritual mystery and sorrow in this section. Most crucially, the opening up at the start of "The Resurrection"—likely the most striking representation of pure spiritual exaltation written by any composer in the last 20 years—doesn't have any of the sense of joyous release, power, or exhilaration of the Virgin performance, sounding merely loud and busy. In the ensuing section of "The Dormition," however, Ma is superbly moving, and his withdrawn, expectant playing is most impressive. Yet it is just that kind of insight that is missing elsewhere in this performance. The final apotheosis is powerful and resonant, but I must confess I expected more from this performance and was disappointed. While there are moments of insight, I don't feel that Yo-Yo Ma is entirely inside of this music as Steven Isserlis so clearly is, evident by the natural eloquence and unique authority of his playing.

Where this new Sony issue does score is in the world premiere recording of Wake Up. . . And Die, commissioned by Sony for its star cellist. Tavener's work is scored for solo cello against an ensemble cello accompaniment. The opening palindromic solo is rather meandering, but at 4:48 a quick upward run by the soloist heralds the emergence of the backing cellos, and from then on the music becomes consistently more interesting. In fact, Wake Up. . . And Die is an inspired work with moments of striking beauty, expertly realized by Ma, and it makes a suitable coupling for its celebrated discmate.

Yo-Yo Ma is never less than interesting, and the many who admire the quiet eloquence of The Protecting Veil will snap this disc up for Wake Up. . . And Die, as they should. Yet in the main work, Steven Isserlis and Rozhdestvensky remain without peer, conveying more of the spirituality and beauty of Tavener's "lyrical icon in sound" than any rival. In fact, listening again to Isserlis's recording, my normally rambunctious West Highland White Terrier was mesmerized, silent, and transfixed by the long, singing line of Isserlis's opening solo. (I don't recommend this as an everyday critical technique, but it certainly was interesting.)

Superb recorded sound. And a special plaudit for the striking cover photos by Annie Liebovitz. The back shot of Ma's cello alone in an ethereal glowing light could not convey more perfectly the mystery and religious solace of the music. Would that all cover art were this apt and inspired.

-- Lawrence A. Johnson, FANFARE [1/1999]