They took their name from the amulet in Michael Ende's Neverending Story", and their playing is equally intuitive, secretive, spiritual and polished when they perform the three string quartets by Schumann. The Auryn Quartet has been established at the top of international quartets for almost twenty years now, and this recording is once more a masterpiece of select, well-balanced quartet art." (Abendzeitung)

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Here Joseph Haydn's music is revealed as the perfect expression of truth. And the Auryn's performance of his string quartets is exactly as it should be: vigorous, beautiful to listen to, and full of feeling. A rediscovery both of sheer beauty and intellectual development.'

Composer: Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)

Performers:
Matthias Lingenfelder, violin
Jens Oppermann, violin
Stewart Eaton, viola
Andreas Arndt, violoncello


Track Listing:
1. String quartet op. 17 no. 1, Hob. III:25 in E major Moderato
2. Menuet
3. Adagio
4. Finale. Presto
5. String quartet op. 17 no. 2, Hob. III:26 in F major Moderato
6. Menuet. Poco allegretto
7. Adagio
8. Finale. Allegro di molto
9. String quartet op. 17 no. 3, Hob. III:27 in E flat major Andante grazioso
10. Menuet. Allegretto
11. Adagio
12. (Finale). Allegro di molto
13. String quartet op. 17 no. 4, Hob. III:28 in C minor Moderato
14. Menuet. Allegretto
15. Adagio. Cantabile
16. Finale. Allegro
17. String quartet op. 17 no. 5, Hob. III:29 in G major Moderato
18. Menuet. Allegretto
19. Adagio
20. Finale. Presto
21. String quartet op. 17 no. 6, Hob. III:30 in D major Presto
22. Menuet
23. Largo
24. Finale. Allegro

Timing: 141:10

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Mauricio Kagel directs a surreal story about the return of Beethoven. We are in the year 1970 and Beethoven returns to see his hometown and his house in the year of his 200th birthday. A wondrous 35mm B&W film tells of Beethoven's experiences in the 20th century.

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Includes work(s) by Toshio Hosokawa. Soloists: Mayumi Miyata, Stefan Hussong.

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Bridge Records, Inc. Of New Rochelle, NY, is pleased to announce the release on DVD of the film, GEORGE CRUMB, BAD DOG!. The 66 minute documentary/performance film features performances by the George Crumb Ensemble, including the composer himself performing on percussion. Crumb is seen in interview, and the film presents historic photographs, and complete performances of Apparition (1979) on texts by Walt Whitman; Three Early Songs (1947); and Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik (2001) on Thelonious Monk's 'Round Midnight. The film's soundtrack also presents excerpts from many of Crumb's masterpieces including Star-Child, Music for a Summer Evening, Mundus Canis, Pastoral Drone, Quest, and Sit Down Sister. With Tony Arnold, soprano; George Crumb, percussion, Robert Shannon, piano; David Starobin, guitar. The DVD soundtrack includes versions in stereo and in 5.1 surround sound in both Dolby and DTS formats. (2009, Directed by David Starobin, 66 minutes).

Whether performing Grieg, Grainger, or Schumann, Grainger himself seizes on the music's rifts: while he can produce a fetching cantabile, he tends to disturb the surface by jabbing at the accompaniments, shifting mood without preparation, sharpening the rhythmic profile (a special boon in the Schumann Symphonic Etudes), and grabbing on to small details. The piano part of the orchestral In a Nutshell is not really a solo opportunity—but Grainger uses it as a platform to rail against the orchestra, snapping out his accents in a way that turns the music violent... Echt Grainger is certainly what we get on the Music & Arts CD... However, I can't help regretting Music & Arts's choices when they put together this CD. I have no complaints about the performances themselves. Grainger's antisentimental roughening of the Grieg (modeled, in part, on his mentor Grieg's own readings) is the most vital I know; and despite the sprinkle (and occasional downpour) of wrong notes, this particular performance (once available on an International Piano Archives LP) is arguably the best representation (he never made a studio account) that has survived. But why couple it with the commercial studio recordings of the Schumann works, which have long been widely available from both Pearl and Biddulph?

Still, Maggi Payne's transfers are good, too...and former Fanfare colleague Kevin Bazzana's elaborate essay serves as a model for the kind of annotation that [others] should be providing...

-- Peter J. Rabinowitz, FANFARE [3/1998]

Songs of Solace is a musical response to Julie Nicholson's book A Song for Jenny. The book details the harrowing events surrounding the 7/7 London bombings in which the lives of Julie's daughter Jenny and fifty-one others were cruelly taken. The writing and recording of this disc has been a 5 year process - gradually refining the material through live performances until it felt ready. The songs with words are all settings of texts quoted in the book or included in Jenny's funeral service. The songs without words are a more visceral response to having read and re-read the book: sorrow, questioning, anger, despair, grief, memory, love.

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KOECHLIN Chansons bretonnes, op. 115. Cello Sonata, op. 66. DEBUSSY Cello Sonata • Peter Bruns (vc); Roglit Ishay (pn) • HÄNSSLER CD 98.258 (53:11)


The tentative thumbs-up given to the Lidstrom/Forsberg tilt at Koechlin— Chansonnes Bretonnes , Books I and II, and the Cello Sonata (Hyperion 66979, Fanfare 22:1); Book III (Hyperion 67244, Fanfare 27: 2)—is a thumbs-down after hearing this new Bruns/Ishay release. With no comparisons, Lidstrom’s dragging pace and overload of clinging sensitivity presented Koechlin’s art as recondite, arcane, fragile, spaced-out, while Bruns and Ishay’s brisker pace—often by several minutes in many of these brief pieces—animates the Breton folk-song arrangements with lift, lilt, and charm. Likewise, the novel melodic/harmonic geste of the Cello Sonata leaps from the limbo of the “interesting” chez Lidstrom/Forsberg (the consolation prize one awards music of unfathomable complexity one intends never to hear again) to the desmesne of the piquantly novel, teasing us to return. Nor are Bruns and Ishay hustling the music for an easy score, but following directions—the Andante quasi Adagio of the Sonata’s middle movement, for instance, need not be a molasses-treading dirge, as it is with Lidstrom and Forsberg. The contrast puts one in mind of Schoenberg’s quip, “My music isn’t ‘Modern,’ just poorly performed.”


While Koechlin titled the folk-song collection Vingt Chansons bretonnes , Lidstrom and Forsberg have included a Marche d’Arthur which the composer omitted “due to its brevity (five bars),” Koechlin scholar Robert Orledge notes, though the performers distend this to 28 seconds. Bruns and Ishay eschew it but give us the set of 20 pieces, as Koechlin prepared it, complete on a single disc. Their Debussy Cello Sonata seems to search for a bit more than there is to find, heard after, say, Gary Hoffmann’s breezier go at it with David Golub (Delos 3167), though their performance still gives pleasure, supplying a substantial bonus. Sound is upfront and balanced, capturing every nuance with vibrant gutsiness. Orledge’s informed liner notes confect a final elegance. The performances of choice, enthusiastically recommended.


FANFARE: Adrian Corleonis

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[A] must-have for Frederic Rzewski's fans, of whom, to judge from his large CDiscography, there exists a passel... This performance by the composer (an excellent pianist) of the solo-piano work, The Road (1996), consists of "Turns" and "Tracks," the first two of a projected eight parts, which Rzewski guesses will take about two and a half hours to play. The music shows to excellent advantage one of Rzewski's (for me) more engaging sides—a taste for the whimsically extravagant meander crafted in an anything but slipshod manner. From his remarks we learn what the music already demonstrates: a commitment to structure, schemata, form (more apparent, in the event, in the all-piano release). The Road also reveals Rzewski's fondness for broad effects: on toward the end of "Turns" we hear a stretch of hand-to-wood drumming; in the 25-minute "Tracks," which begins in silence, thence to some scarcely audible inside-the-piano scratching, we hear in addition to some impressively powerful keyboard writing renewed knocks on the instrument's body, a little vocalizing, and so on.

Rzewski's music rarely strays far from his social concerns. "'Turns' is a set of eight two-minute studies, some of which resemble fugues. No. 4 is a piano arrangement of a choral piece protesting the French nuclear tests in the South Pacific, 'Stop the Testing!' which I wrote on the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing... ."

Whangdoodles (1990), composed for its present performers, is a work of considerable charm and ingenuity. As its motivic device, Rzewski takes two songs, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, (O the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees I the rockrye springs where the whangdoodle sings. . . ), and Yidl mit 'n Fidi, which bounce about and mesh into a comely entity. As for acerb tonalities, the writing wouldn't trouble your maiden aunt. Winant's important percussion part consists largely of a hammered dulcimer, "a folk instrument of Persian origin . . . found . . . in both East European and Appalachian traditional music. 1 would like to think that the 'whangdoodle' of the American hobo song may suggest the whanging, or twanging, sound typical of the instrument." Rzewski goes on to say that for this work his "technique involves the intentional suppression of the censoring superego . . . while the writer dodges through the window thereby opened." In the parlance of the volk Rzewski celebrates, "Whatever gets you there," for indeed it does.

In the final work, To the Earth (1985), we hear another of Rzewski's penchants, which in this tidily concocted and brief (8:49) morsel works very nicely: chanted speech. Percussionist William Winant delicately drums on four flowerpots while reciting a "text based on a Homeric hymn," ("To the Earth, Mother of us all, I will sing . . . "). A paean to Mother Earth on flowerpots indeed!

Performances top-drawer, recorded sound very good.

-- Mike Silverton, FANFARE

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It is not often that a young vocal artist releases a debut album that is so "complete" or so convincingly conceived and finished to such a high polish as is the ase with Anett Fritsch. What makes it all the more astounding is that she achieves this by singing arias from the Mozart/Da Ponte trilogy of Figaro / Don Giovanni / Cosi, masterworks by a composer regarded and feared in equal measure for the complexity of his writing. Yet the repertoire focus she has chosen is entirely in keeping with the soprano's career to date. She began in her teens and has progressed in recent years through a series of acclaimed performances on international opera stages.

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REVIEW:

Anne Fritsch's Mozart is a sheer delight. This is no bland essay of the usual suspects painted in anonymous colors but a vivid portrait gallery of characters that Fritsch has portrayed on stage. From the very first bars of the Overture to Marriage of Figaro the playing of the Munich Radio Orchestra instantly makes yous it up and listen. A jewel of a disc.

– Gramophone

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This selection contains both ADD and DDD recordings.