SONATAS FOR VIOLIN & PIANO

SCHUMANN: Marchenerzahlungen

For this sixth volume in Quartetto di Cremona’s exploration of the complete Beethoven String Quartets, the ensemble tackles the String Quartet in A major, Op. 18, No. 5, and the String Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 130, pairing an early piece and a late piece to give some insight into the composer’s development. In both of these compositions, Beethoven’s incorporation of folk music can be seen. In other aspects, these two works are vastly different, the earlier showing his enthusiastic and uplifting style, and the later showing his passionate and sometimes brooding methods. Quartetto di Cremona has been internationally lauded for their “extremely mature and lyrical sound.” (Strad) The group formed at the Stauffer Academy in Cremona in 2000, and since then has acquired an extensive repertoire.

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The debut CD Wild Bird by the Duo 47/4, Music for Violin and Harp, presents a series of picturesque, contrasting 20th and 21st c works, by turns meditative, imaginative, colorful and loaded with energy. Violinist Viktoria Kaunzner and the harpist Anna Viechtl became acquainted during their period of study at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin. As stipend holders of "Yehudi Menuhin Live Music Now" they performed concerts together whilst still students, founding the "Duo 47 / 4". The 47 harp strings and the four violin strings give the Duo it's name.

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Classical Music

VIVALDI Concertos, Op. 10/1-6 (RV 433-37). Suonata à 4 al Santo Sepolcro in E?. Concerto in g, RV 157 • Matthias Maute (rcr, fl); Jörg-Michael Schwarz (vn, ldr); Rebel • BRIDGE 9377 (56:40)


Here is an exciting and well-played disc of Vivaldi concertos (and a Sonata for strings and basso continuo) played not by a full orchestra but by the eight-piece Dutch group Rebel (pronounced “ruh-BELL,” after the French Baroque composer Jean-Féry Rebel). Although it is only an octet, Rebel performs these works in the “La Scintilla” brisk-orchestral style pioneered by that Italian orchestra. In Vivaldi this works very well, and since this is the music of that composer, this group’s style could also be called “modified Red Priest” as a model on the British ensemble of that name. I was utterly delighted by Matthias Maute’s recorder playing in the concerto, op. 10/3, nicknamed “The Goldfinch.” His technique is so good that he is able to create swirling lines that almost sound as if they are easy to play, which they most certainly are not. Moreover, Rebel’s strings—including the oft-tricky basso continuo—are not only consistently in tune but have a good tone. In this album, they play so much as an ensemble that one comes to hear them as a sort of chamber orchestra. I wondered how they might actually sound in music where they are called upon to perform in opposing motion, i.e., in works calling for an interplay of the instruments.


Only in the transverse flute concerto (op. 10/4) did I feel that Rebel’s strings had a bit too edgy a tone quality, incurred by their insistence on only using straight tone (an approach not supported by historical scholarship), and a very thin straight tone at that. The richness of the double bass and cello underneath the higher strings created a nice balance of sound, especially in the concerto for alto recorder (op. 10/5). Here the lower pitch brings the strings down by about a third from the other concertos, and the generally pastoral quality of this music is welcome relief from the composer’s generally upbeat style.


This disc, though having a long list of competitors in this material, is a worthy follow-up to this group’s previous disc, Shades of Red (Bridge 9173). Recorded in St. John’s Lutheran Church in Stamford, Connecticut, the sonics have just enough ambience around the instruments to give a nice sheen to them without overdoing it.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

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...a tremendous new recording of Vivaldi's Opus 10 Flute Concertos played by brilliant young Belgian virtuoso Matthias Maute and one of the Big Apple's top original instrument crews, Rebel (accent on the second syllable). It's an extraordinary display of panache and virtuosity...and Rebel backs him with ferocious energy and risk-taking authenticity... The playing is out of the box with its ornaments, plastic phrasings and simulated spontaneity so that each new section, each new tune, each new dashing series of runs and trills, brings with it unexpected surprises and just enough time to catch your breath between movements.

-- Laurence Vittes, Huffington Post

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DOMESTIC OPERA

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Annotator Allan Kozinn writes: "if audiences listened as devotedly to contemporary piano scores as to the great works of the 17th through early 20th centuries, the two works Martin Perry plays here would be regarded as landmarks of the piano’s huge repertory. No doubt one day they will be – Paul Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis has a constituency among discerning pianists and listeners; for many, Hugo Weisgall’s Sonata for Piano remains an undiscovered gem, something that may change once listeners who think of Weisgall as principally a vocal composer realize that his instrumental music is as just as dazzling." Martin Perry delivers intensely musical, brilliantly realized readings of these two important twentieth century keyboard masterworks.

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REVIEW: Perry plays the Weisgall, a profound but rarely heard work from the composer's 70th year, masterfully.

— NMC (New Music Connoisseur)

"Feasts of beautifully sculpted phrases...glimpses of heaven" - Philadelphia Inquirer

"Soulful depth...dramatic flair and contrast" - New York Times

This two-CD set offers all the works that Prokofiev wrote for the violin as solo instrument. One of the most sought-after and acclaimed virtuoso violinists today, James Ehnes is accompanied by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Gianandrea Noseda and by the pianist Andrew Armstrong, with whom he has previously made a number of highly acclaimed Chandos recordings. The distinguished Amy Schwartz Moretti joins him in the Sonata for Two Violins.- Chandos

Reviews

Orchestral Choice "... James Ehnes’s particular combination of matchless virtuosity, sweet tone, flowing tempi and interpretative restraint suits all this music down to the ground... the contribution of the BBC Philharmonic is distinguished throughout ... Strongly recommended." David Gutman - Gramophone magazine - October 2013

“Wow. Everything works here. James Ehnes rarely disappoints, and the playing on this beautifully recorded two-disc set is immaculate. It’s not just the musicality, the remarkable ability to give shape and colour to the thorniest solo writing, but his modesty – he’s a player who knows exactly when to step back and let collaborators take the spotlight… Unmissable.” Graham Rickson – theartsdesk.com – 28 September 2013

"... Ehnes and his pianist give performances worthy of the giants (Oistrakh and Richter) for whom their parts were conceived." Hugh Canning - The Sunday Times - 8 September 2013

Classical CD of the Week "... Ehnes is joined by Amy Schwartz Moretti for an electrifying performance of the duo sonata... In their mix of lyricism and sharpe-edged rhythmic and harmonic piquancy. Ehnes and Moretti are absolutely spot on in defining the music’s character. This is playing that truly grabs you by the scruff of the neck and commands attention... For the two concertos Ehnes teams up again with an orchestra and conductor he knows well - the BBC Philharmonic and Gianandrea Noseda - who yield apt, complimentary shades of colouring, both brilliant and pungent, to match Ehnes’s superb artistry." ***** Geoffrey Norris - The Daily Telegraph - 28 September 2013

"... the sound is terrific, and given the excellence of the performance throughout, and the convenience of having all of these works ’under one roof’. as it were, there’s no reason to put off acquiring this set..." Raymond S Tuttle - International Record Review - October 2013

"... Prokofiev wrote tuneful music, rich and rhythmic, and James Ehnes is outstanding in bringing this attractive music to life." Peter Spaull - Liverpool Post - 19 September 2013

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PAYSAGE • Susanna Phillips (sop); Myra Huang (pn) • BRIDGE 9356 (54:06 Text and Translation)



Songs by Debussy, Fauré, Messiaen


Susanna Phillips has been singing professionally for at least 5 years now and it is a wonder to me that she hasn’t already been recorded, this being her first recital disc. She has the voice and talent that quite likely will get her to the top of her profession sooner rather than later, all the potential makings of a major artist. So the Bridge label has had the perspicacity and the good fortune to debut her on CD, and they have another winner here.


Phillips sings an all-French program, from the 19th-century lyricism of Gabriel Fauré to the more tonally ambiguous (as the booklet puts it) work of Claude Debussy and the modern sounds of Oliver Messiaen, who created his own otherworldly soundscape to express the mystic and religious nature of his own texts. The three composers are not presented in that developmental order; the rather musically complex songs of Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées put both singer and pianist to work right away with the composer’s Impressionistic music. Phillips is expertly accompanied on piano by fellow Juilliard grad Myra Huang; Opera News opines that she “bids fair to be among the top accompanists of her generation.” The rather spiky dissonance of Messiaen’s song cycle Poèmes pour Mi is presented next, providing an even greater artistic challenge for both artists, and they respond admirably. Four lovely pieces by Fauré finish the program, allowing Phillips to display her fine voice and ability to add colors in more lyrical passages.


If Phillips’s French is not idiomatic, it is still quite good. Three different French styles are heard here and the singer does them all justice, but some of this music is not for the faint of heart. Timing is a bit short at about 54 minutes, but gets excused because of the fine music-making of both Phillips and Huang. A well-written and informative essay on the music by Malcolm MacDonald is included in the booklet, as are texts and translations.


FANFARE: Bill White

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BEN-HAIM Piano Quartet in c, op. 4 1. Two Landscapes for Viola and Piano, op. 27 2. Five Pieces for Piano: Canzonetta (No. 4), op. 34 3. Improvisation and Dance for Violin and Piano, op. 30 4. Clarinet Quintet, op. 31a 5 • 1 Benjamin Bowman (vn); 1,2,5 Steven Dann (va); 1,5 Bryan Epperson (vc); 1 David Louie (pn); 2-4 Dianne Werner (pn); 4,5 Erika Raum (vn); 5 Joaquin Valdepeñas (cl); 5 Marie Bérard (vn) • CHANDOS 10769 (77:05)

Here is a long overdue collection of chamber works by Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim (1897–1984). Only the C-Minor Piano Quartet on this disc is noted as a premiere recording, but to the extent that recordings of any of the other pieces heard here exist, they’re few and far between. Among the five works on the disc, only the Improvisation and Dance shows up in the Fanfare Archive, in a 30:6 review of a Hyperion CD containing several violin and piano works by Ben-Haim, performed by Hagai Shaham and Amon Erez. Otherwise I’m not finding any other current listings for the pieces on this disc. Perhaps I just didn’t look hard enough.

Ben-Haim’s bio, briefly, is as follows: He was born Paul Frankenburger in Munich, studied composition under Friedrich Klose (a former Bruckner student), and served as assistant conductor to Hans Knappertsbusch and Bruno Walter. In 1933, Ben-Haim emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine, settled in Tel Aviv, Hebraized his name (which means “son of life,” not “to life,” as it’s sometimes incorrectly translated), and became an Israeli citizen in 1948 when the country declared its independence.

The Piano Quartet, composed in 1921 by the young Frankenburger while still in Munich, is easily described. It’s the next piano quartet Brahms would have written had he lived another 24 years. Everything about the piece—the gestural language, the melodic material, the thematic development, and the piano patterns and figurations—evokes the spirit of Brahms, except for one thing. The harmonic context, with its somewhat more liberal application of dissonance, parallelism, and freer approach to progression, suggests that Ben-Haim had received some exposure to Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, and, according to the note, Richard Strauss and Max Reger. Nonetheless, for all its youthful susceptibility to the musical influences that would have been part of Frankenburger’s German world, his Piano Quartet is a masterful and powerful work, at times turbulent and tragic, and at other times meltingly poignant. In three large movements, it’s a big, late romantic work of nearly 30 minutes’ duration. The performance of it by the ARC Ensemble’s players is nothing short of magnificent. But it’s such a compelling work, I can’t imagine it not being taken up by others and becoming part of the standard piano quartet repertoire.

By the time Ben-Haim came to compose the Two Landscapes for viola and piano, respectively titled “The Hills of Judea” and “The Spring,” in 1939, he’d been living in Israel for six years, and his style had already radically changed as a result of adapting to his surroundings and embracing his Jewish culture. We now hear in these two short musical sketches the familiar sounds of nomads in the desert and the exoticisms we tend to associate with the Hebraic melos.

Alone among the pieces on this disc, the Improvisation and Dance , also composed in 1939, is the one that has enjoyed a bit more exposure on disc. As noted above, it was included on Hyperion’s CD (67571), coupled with works by Bloch, and it can be heard in an all-Ben-Haim program of works on a Centaur CD (2766), which also contains the composer’s arrangement of the last movement of his Clarinet Quintet, op. 31a (on this disc) as the Pastorale variée for Clarinet, Harp, and String Orchestra, op. 31b. Ben-Haim dedicated The Improvisation and Dance for Violin and Piano to Zino Francescatti. Whether he ever recorded it or not, I don’t know, but Francescatti did record Ben-Haim’s G-Major Sonata for Solo Violin in 1958, a recording that has circulated on more than one label, but is currently available on an Orfeo CD (711081).

The Improvisation movement is a kind of free-flowing dolente thing, marked Molto rubato , and evoking that image, once again, of a camel caravan wending its way across the desert dunes. The Dance movement, as you’d expect, is an animated, spirited, strongly accented rhythmic piece that sounds like a bunch of riled-up shtetl Klezmerim going after a marauding mob of Bartók’s Rumanian peasants.

In 1944, Ben-Haim composed a set of five piano miniatures, published as Five Pieces for Piano, op. 34. Considering that the timing of the disc is a generous 77 minutes, it’s churlish to complain that Dianne Werner gives us only one of the pieces from the group, No. 4, titled “Canzonetta,” but you can hear the entire set, for free no less, in a number of YouTube performances by half-a-dozen different pianists. The style Ben-Haim adopts for these pieces is best characterized as Impressionistic.

Originally written in 1941, the Clarinet Quintet was revised in 1965, and, as mentioned above, Ben-Haim rescored its last movement, a set of variations, for clarinet, harp, and string orchestra, assigning it the same opus number, but with a “b” appended. Like the Piano Quintet that opens the disc, the Clarinet Quintet is a large three-movement work lasting over 27 minutes, but unlike the much earlier Quartet, the Quintet is in a dissonant, occasionally almost atonal language that’s more difficult to penetrate in just one or two hearings. But the score’s romantic impulses do break through to the surface now and then, reminding us once again of Ben-Haim’s musical roots.

On that subject, there remains some controversy regarding Ben-Haim’s bona fides as an authentic Israeli composer. Not all commentators and critics accept Ben-Haim as either a true Israeli composer or even a particularly significant composer. An in-depth online paper by Ronit Seter in Volume 9 (2011) of Israeli Studies in Musicology Online (biu.ac.il/hu/mu/min-ad/11/Seter-Hirshberg_Ben-Haim.pdf) cites a number of sources that advance the opinion that Ben-Haim, not entirely unlike Ernest Bloch, was essentially a European romantic who colored his works with Hebraic-sounding melodies and harmonies without making a real effort to explore the more modern “art” music of some of his Israeli contemporaries, like Josef Tal, for example. What I read in this, however, is sour grapes. The crux of the criticism seems to me to be not that Ben-Haim wasn’t Jewish or Israeli enough, but that he wasn’t modern enough—that he retained his romantic roots far into the 20th century, resisting the various avant-garde movements, and that he continued to compose music that’s beautiful and deeply moving.

That can certainly be said of the works on this disc. The players that make up the ARC Ensemble give deeply committed performances of every one of them, and Chandos’s usual wide-range and deep sound stage add excellent dimensionality to the recording. Urgently recommended.

FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

This selection was nominated for the 2001 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance.

Also available: Ginastera: Orchestral Works, Vol. 1 / Mena, BBC Philharmonic

This is the second in our three-volume series of Juanjo Mena's idiomatic exploration of Ginastera's orchestra works with the BBC Philharmonic. The series was started to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the greatest of all Argentinean composers, Vol. 1 - receiving uniformly high praise. This album features a late work, lesser-known, yet rich in surprises, namely the Second Piano Concerto. Here the keen musicality and sweeping virtuosity of Xiayin Wang meet the sumptuous sound of the BBC orchestra. It succeeds her recording of concertos by Tchaikovsky and Khachaturian with the RSNO which was made Editor's Choice by Gramophone. It is coupled with the exotic early ballet Panambi, heard complete with a concluding contribution from the Manchester Chamber Choir.

Rustem Hayroudinoff follows up the critical success of his recent disc of Rachmaninov's complete Preludes for solo piano with this recording of Rachmaninov's complete works for cello and piano. He is joined on this disc by Alexander Ivashkin, one of today's most distinguished cellists, who has made an enormous contribution to the Chandos catalogue with his benchmark recordings of his native Russian repertoire. Recorded in: St Michael's Church, Highgate, London 2-4 April 2003 Producer(s) Rachel Smith Sound Engineer(s) Jonathan Cooper Michael Common (Assistant)