This release has been sourced from the Richard Itter archive of 'live' recordings. The collection is very important for collectors because it has never been released before onto the market. Following the archive's launch in October 2017 with releases featuring Beecham, Bohm, Cantelli, Karajan, du Pre, Klemperer and Rostropovich, it has received universal praise from both the classical media and record collectors for the excellent sound and performances. Robert Casadesus was a renowned 20th century French pianist and composer who knew and worked with Ravel. He was especially known for his celebrated performances of the Mozart Concertos accompanied on record by George Szell- the Gramophone called it 'exquisite Mozart playing,' as well as his recordings of Ravel, Faure and Debussy. He recorded Beethoven's First, Fourth, and Fifth Concertos, the latter two multiple times, though these were all made in the studio. He also extensively recorded the Beethoven Violin Sonatas with Zino Francescatti, who also appears in ICA Classics' Pierre Monteaux set.

Paul Hindemith was an all-round musician, virtuoso violist, composer and educator. He mastered all the instruments of the orchestra to a more or less professional level of proficiency, all of which was more than adequate preparation for conducting too. He was strongly influenced in his conducting by Wilhelm Furtwängler, placing the highest value on the living tradition of interpretation. This release features his 1958 recording of Bruckner’s radiant Seventh Symphony; the mature master locating Bruckner’s achievements as a high point on the continuum between Bach and his own work.

Known across Europe as “The Saxon,” Johann Adolph Hasse was extraordinarily popular as an operatic composer. Written for private performance in aristocratic palaces, his chamber cantatas gained him fame among the most wealthy and powerful, and are featured on this new recording. Early- music ensemble Hof-Musici specializes in period instrumentation and performance of Baroque music.

When the Beaux Arts Trio played this concert in 1960, the soon to be world famous ensemble was only 5 years old. During the next 48 years and several changes in membership, the Beaux Arts would become recognized as one of the greatest classical music ensembles in the world, under the constant leadership of Menahem Pressler. In September 2008, the Beaux Arts Trio played it's final concert - but here you can admire their beginnings.

Classical Music

This previously unreleased live recording of Jacqueline du Pré playing the Schumann Cello Concerto is her first public performance of the work, given in the Royal Festival Hall on 12 December 1962 with Jean Martinon conducting the BBCSO. She had worked intensively on the concerto with Paul Tortelier in Paris prior to this concert. When Du Pré studied the Schumann with Mstislav Rostropovich at the Moscow Conservatoire in 1966, he exclaimed, ‘This is the most perfect Schumann I have ever heard’. The 1962 live performance of the Dvorák Cello Concerto by Rostropovich has also never before been released. He is partnered by Carlo Maria Giulini, who went on to to make a studio recording of the same concerto with him in 1977. The Times critic described this Edinburgh Festival performance as an ‘exciting’ and ‘emotionally supercharged interpretation’ with Giulini’s reading ‘full of finely wrought points of detail’. The attractive bonus features Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya in the Ária from Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras.

In the last years of his life, the great composer and violinist Tartini (1692-1770) labored at a cycle of sonatas for solo violin. The resulting manuscript offers the most important composition for solo violin after Bach and, at six hours in duration, the largest integrated work for the instrument. This is a world premiere of the complete work.

Walter Berry reflected in an interview in 1985, "we played in the Theater an der Wien (during the rebuilding of the Vienna State Opera) and we developed a certain style, a Mozart style which was connected very much to the singers of that time … this was an incredible ensemble." Harold Rosenthal, Editor of Opera magazine, described the staged performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall on 13 September 1954 as ‘a sheer delight’, highlighting the performances of Erich Kunz (Figaro) and Sena Jurinac (Cherubino), while Irmgard Seefried (Susanna) was ‘one of the joys of this recording’ (George Hall). These Richard Itter tapes of the live broadcast have never been released before, and the superb recording fully captures the atmosphere in this light-footed performance in a packed Royal Festival Hall to perfection.

Mykola Lysenko (1842–1912) is regarded as ‘the father of Ukrainian classical music’. As did Bartók later in Hungary, he went out into the field, listened to what the people were singing and fashioned an individual musical language that brought together the styles of Chopin and Liszt and the essence of Ukrainian folksong. This first CD of his piano music reveals a voice, long forgotten, of extraordinary immediacy and appeal.

LAVISTA String Quartets:

No. 1, “Diacronia”;

No. 2, “Reflejos de la noche”;

No. 3, “Música para mi vecino”;

No. 4, “Sinfonias”;

No. 5, “7 Invenciones”;

No. 6, “Suite en 5 partes” 

Cuarteto Latinoamericano • TOCCATA TOCC 0106 (75:27)

The influences on the work of Mario Lavista (b. 1943), Mexico's leading contemporary composer, range from mediaeval, religious and folk music to modernism. His music has a powerful sense of atmosphere and colour — the Second String Quartet, Reflejos de la noche, is played entirely on harmonics — and a vigorous rhythmic drive reminiscent of the quartet-writing of Shostakovich.

Cuarteto Latinoamericano, string quartet

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The playing of the Cuarteto Latinoamericano is accomplished, free yet tightly directed from start to finish. Indeed, the quartet was effectively the inspiration, the impetus certainly, for most of these quartets. The players seem to have the music in their blood. It would be hard to think of more persuasive accounts.
 
The booklet that comes with this CD is informative without feeling any need to rush, proselytise or over-advocate. That must be in keeping with what one senses is an aspect of Lavista's confident and generous personality. To be judged sui generis for sure, these six works are not only different enough one from another, but also amazingly creative enough to repay repeated hearings. As an indication of new directions for the medium, they make every sense. As beautiful works in their own right, they are superb.
 
-- Mark Sealey, MusicWeb International

Includes work(s) by various composers. Soloist: Alexander Kniazev.

This recording was formerly available as Eurodisc CD 610-510-231. It is
also available as 610 520.

Mexican composer Manuel Maria Ponce is best known for a handful of popular songs and guitar pieces, and yet he left a huge legacy of some 500 works- orchestral, chamber, and piano music, art songs, and folksong arrangements. These works together form the foundation of the Mexican national repertoire, and yet they are as good as unknown. The works recorded here- some for the first time- reveal a composer with a surefooted command of the orchestra: his early impressionism is infused with echoes of Mexican indigenous culture in textures of unsuspected richness. Jose Miramontes Zapata graduated from the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire in Leningrad. He has worked as pianist, choir director, and cultural manager. In 2000 he founded the Orquesta Sinfonica de San Luis Potosi and as artistic director and principal conductor he has promoted many choral and orchestral activities with local young musicians, developing a constant cultural growth in San Luis Potosi with more than 80 concerts per year. The San Luis Potosi Symphony Orchestra occupies an important role in the diffusion of Mexican symphonic music, with concerts in some of the major halls in Mexico, China, and Europe. Further releases of major Mexican symphonic works are in preparation with Toccata Classics.

Classical Music

The English composer Steve Elcock spent years writing music without ever expecting it to be heard: based in rural France, he worked as a translator, composing ‘for the drawer.’ A recent Toccata Classics recording of his Third Symphony and other orchestral pieces revealed him to be a major symphonic voice. The works on this first album of his chamber music show the same long-term control of harmonic tension, occasionally leavened by a mischievous sense of humor. The Clarinet Sextet and The Shed Dances are immediately appealing in their melodiousness and harmonic language, whereas the darkly aggressive String Trio No. 1 foreshadows the Third Symphony with its stark juxtaposition of contrasts, and An Outstretched Hand offers a disturbing comment on our troubled 21st century condition. The Veles Ensemble is a string trio based in London, its repertoire both exploring rarely heard masterpieces and bringing the classics to life. A special interest of the ensemble is in promoting new compositions and contemporary music.

The musical language of the New York-based Arnold Rosner (1945–2013) clothes the modal harmony and rhythm of pre-Baroque polyphony in rich Romantic colours, producing a style that is instantly recognisable and immediately appealing. This second Toccata Classics album of his orchestral music contrasts the high-spirited Unraveling Dances – a rhapsody with more than a nod to Ravel’s Bolero – with the powerful symphonic suite Five Ko-ans for Orchestra and Rosner’s dramatic, dark, hieratic setting of Kafka’s The Parable of the Law for baritone and orchestra. American baritone Christopher Burchett has appeared on the stages of opera companies throughout the United States and Europe, including New York City Opera, Santa Fe Opera, and The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Opera News has described him as a ‘fearlessly vulnerable’ performer, ‘who gave an unflinchingly, heroically human performance that will linger long in the memory.’ Nick Palmer is music director of the Lafayette Symphony in Indiana, North Charleston Pops in South Carolina and the ‘Evening Under the Stars’ music festival in Massachusetts; principal pops conductor of the Altoona Symphony in Philadelphia; and distinguished conductor in residence at Kentucky Wesleyan College.

REVIEW:

This is the second of Toccata’s blessed progression of discs of orchestral music by New York-based Arnold Rosner. You can find reviews of Volume One here and here. Toccata have also issued a chamber music disc. Rosner wrote serious tonal music and the performances on this disc and its recording qualities are a superb compliment to Rosner’s achievement. There is nothing circus-like, trivial or superficial in his output. Even his Millenium Overture packs a far from cheap punch - imposing and sturdy.

The Five Ko-ans for Orchestra comprise No. 1 Music of Changes, No. 2 Ricercare, No. 3 Ostinato, No. 4 Music of Stillness and No. 5 Isorhythmic Motet. They are like a sequence of Samuel Barber’s essays yet distinguished by this composer’s trademark incessant persistence and cool limpidity. These qualities are juxtaposed with passages that are gaunt, statuesque and imposing. The music is not at all ascetic: witness the Respighian horn whoops in the first of the Ko-ans and the brief climactic pages in the Fourth Ko-an. Rosner’s writing throughout these five separately tracked pieces is grand. Indeed, all three works on this disc are further testimony that a Rosner score could have been written by no-one else. That is not to say that certain facets of his language do not touch base with other composers. Vaughan Williams is one reference point but Rosner has his own spare yet dynamic style. Few composers’ music can attain the feeling that he evokes of a lonely listener in some temple looking up giddily at the capitals of the towering columns. That sense of being lost in the moment - an intensity of today’s mindfulness. The Third Ko-an, the shortest of the five, pummels away rapidly and with a motoric power that appears indefatigable. The Fourth is a more peaceful essay - relaxed repose dominated by woodwind solos. The valedictory Fifth ends with a drift into hard-won silence. A Ko-an is defined by Rosner as “a riddle, action, remark or dialogue not comprehensible by rational understanding but conducive to intense or prolonged meditation.”

The other works here include the vigorous 16-minute Unraveling Dances. Through eleven variations the composer draws on familiar musical references: Renaissance, Baroque and Middle Eastern. The writing is richly colored and almost extravagantly joyful use is made of the orchestra. The work rises to a formidable conclusion of dancing grandeur - Rosner’s aural window opened out onto the music of the spheres.

The disc finishes with the 24-minute setting of Kafka’s The Parable of the Law for baritone and orchestra. The words set are reproduced in Toccata’s booklet. The music is hieratic, dramatic and dark-hued. A typically striking introduction commands by quiet and confident insinuation. Soon the slightly mournful baritone, Christopher Burchett, enters, singing of his long and ultimately unsuccessful wait and pleading for entry to “The Law”. The music is sombre, chiming and mesmeric as befits the Kafka text but rises to fury and sneering as the singer presses his bootless case for entry. There is something of RVW’s Pilgrim about the man trying, without success, to persuade The Doorkeeper to permit him access to The Law. The words are less sung and more spoken in hopelessness at 13:00. Later on, Burchett superbly shadows the orchestra in a pitch of roiling excitement although the final pages spell deep peace.

The liner-notes are by none other than Walter Simmons who has done so much for US composers of the generations beyond Gershwin, Copland and Bernstein. He has been a doughty advocate of Rosner’s music as he has also of Schuman, Persichetti, Mennin, Barber, Bloch, Creston, Flagello, Giannini and Hanson. He is also the producer of this disc. I just hope that there are later volumes.

-- MusicWeb International (Rob Barnett)

Classical Music

Roger Smalley (1943–2015) made his mark, first in his native Britain and then in Australia, as composer, pianist, conductor, writer, academic and teacher. Although as performer and commentator he was at the forefront of musical modernism, he was also very fond of nineteenth-century Romanticism, and much of his music bridges the gap between old and new, retaining its roots in the past while reflecting the concerns of his own time, as the works on this album demonstrate.

In his last years, Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) labored at a cycle of sonatas for solo violin. The resulting manuscript offers the most important composition for solo violin after Bach and, at six hours in duration, the largest integrated work for the instrument. Now at Vol. 3, this first complete recording is based on a fresh study of the source and includes a number of works in Tartini’s shorthand, overlooked in earlier editions. “Skærved has a fine sense of Baroque style and an understated virtuosity…” (Infodad) “…one waits impatiently for the series to unfold.” (MusicWeb Int’l)

Friedrich Gernsheim (1839–1916), born in Worms, on the Rhine, grew up to be one of the most formidable musicians of his age: composer, pianist, conductor and teacher. Even as a teenager, Gernsheim was attracting attention as a virtuoso-composer, earning comparisons with Mozart. These two early piano sonatas – restored by Jens Barnieck from Gernsheim’s manuscripts – combine youthful freshness with preternatural assuredness, showing awareness of Schumann and anticipating Brahms. By the time of the Six Preludes, written a decade later, Chopin has become the dominant star in Gernsheim’s firmament.

WEINBERG Children’s Songs. Beyond the Border of Past Days. Rocking the Child • Olga Kalugina (sop); Svetlana Nikolayeve (mez); Dmitri Korostelyov (pn) • TOCCATA 0078 (60:12 Text and Translation)


Mieczyslaw Weinberg (to use what has become the preferred spelling of a composer whose music is hard to find because of the various ways he is listed—Vainberg, Vaynberg, Weinberg) was born in Poland in 1919. He spent most of his life in the Soviet Union, and was a close friend and colleague of Shostakovich, whose influence on Weinberg was very strong.Weinberg had fled the Nazis in 1939, escaping from a horror that saw his parents and sister murdered, settling first in Minsk then hiding again from Nazis in Uzbekistan. In 1943, Shostakovich invited him to move to Moscow, where he lived until his death in 1996. Weinberg wrote 26 symphonies (one fewer than Miaskovsky!), 17 string quartets, other chamber works, a few hundred songs, sonatas and concertos for various instruments, seven operas, much incidental music for film and the theater, and much else. His music is finally being discovered by an enterprising record industry that has run out of room for more Beethoven or Mahler! If it is unlikely that Weinberg will enter the central canon in a way that Shostakovich has, it does seem as if he might occupy an important place on the periphery, perhaps similar to that now occupied by Nielsen.


It is easy to point to the Shostakovich influences on his music; one hears it in many of the songs that make up these three cycles (particularly Rocking the Child ). But he is not a carbon copy of Shostakovich, and certainly not a “poor man’s Shostakovich.” Weinberg has his own musical face, and the more of his music one hears, the more familiar it becomes. The Shostakovich relationship is handy as a tool for placing Weinberg, stylistically, to someone unfamiliar with his music. If you respond to the music of Shostakovich, you are very likely to find Weinberg attractive.


But there is a touch more restraint and straight-forward lyricism in Weinberg; he doesn’t always show the anguish, the pain that one hears in Shostakovich’s scores, nor does he demonstrate quite the same degree of sarcastic wit. Not that those qualities are not there (and there are some works, such as the Requiem, that sear with their pain), but they are perhaps just a bit less extreme in Weinberg. The Jewish influence on Weinberg’s music is strong—and although Shostakovich was influenced by klezmer and other Jewish musical traditions (just listen to the Piano Trio), it is a more integral and consistent part of Weinberg’s art, perhaps stemming in part from his roots as a pianist and conductor at a Warsaw Jewish theater. It is particularly present in the Children’s Songs and Rocking the Child , more subtle in Beyond the Border of Past Days.


The Children’s Songs, op. 13, are set to poems by Itzhol Lejb Perez; Beyond the Border of Past Days sets poems by Alexander Blok (Shostakovich’s Blok songs are among his finest); and Rocking the Child to poems of Gabriela Mistral. The Perez and Mistral poems are translated into Russian and set in that language. Thanks to Toccata Classics for providing Cyrillic and English texts (no transliteration, but that seems only a minor problem). Excellent notes by David Fanning round out the high production values.


The two singers are satisfying. Children’s Songs and Rocking the Child are for soprano, Beyond the Border of Past Days for mezzo. Both singers have a bit of what we like to call that Slavic edge, but it is not too severe. Both are masterful at shaping the music, and they and pianist Dmitri Korostelyov do not seem to be sight-reading the material at all. One feels that they are deeply into the music. Natural and well-balanced sound completes the picture. This disc is a major addition to the catalogue, introducing us to some deeply moving music.


FANFARE: Henry Fogel

"• Giacomo Facco (1676–1753) was active in southern Italy as violinist, choirmaster and teacher.. • Once highly esteemed, Facco disappeared from musical history entirely until a set of his twelve Pensieri Adriarmonici were discovered in 1962, a story told in the accompanying booklet. • The Pensieri Adriarmonici have much in common with the music of his Venetian contemporaries. • This first volume of the first-ever complete Pensieri Adriarmonici performances are by the Mexican Baroque Orchestra."

ELGAR: SEA PICTURES, FALSTAFF,

This is the soundtrack from the movie "Le Roi et Moi", an animated version of "The King and I" sung in French.

WAGNER: PIANO TRANSCRIPTIONS F