Heavy and deliberate as Maazel’s idiosyncratic point of view undoubtedly is, you can’t fault the execution, very much on the side of Mahler the modernist. Jagged textures stand revealed throughout, offset by richly resonant sound and characteristically warm VPO strings worked to the bone in an attempt to realise as many of the detailed dynamics as possible. I confess a personal nostalgia for the very Viennese waltzes and ländlers of this scherzo, fondly remembered from youthful impressions of the same work, players and conductor on a first-time visit to Vienna.

-- David Nice, BBC Music Magazine

The TACET label, famous for ist visionary, high-quality repertoire policy, uses new technology to search for new ways of using the auditorium for musical experiences. Andreas Spreer, owner and manager of the label Tonmeister of this recording, places the listener right in the middle of the musicians: opposite the viola, with the violins at front left and right and the two cellos behind his or her shoulders. This configuration is most definitely unusual and takes some getting used to; but what three-dimensionalness it gives to Schubert’s wonderful – and wonderfully played – String Quintet! The themes become tangible thanks to the masterful interpretation, the structure of the work is intuitively understandable, and the attribute “acoustically transparent” should really be redefined after this recording. (Kulturspiegel)"(…) Ever wondered what it was like to play in a chamber group such as this? Well, choose your instrument and sit close to that speaker. You’ll get a pretty good idea." (Audiophile Audition)

Christopher Fox is one of the leading lights in British contemporary music. He wrote four pieces with the title "Straight Lines in Broken Times" - this is the second (the third is included on Metier msv 92059).Each piece, though otherwise totally independent, spins it's music out of a continuous stream of notes. The other major works on this album are all expertly performed by the Ives Ensemble.

Evgeni Koroliov has played the Seasons in a particularly lyrical and transparent way impossible to improve upon. (Arpeggio)

Feltsman sweeps through the 24 Preludes with genuine poetic bravura. ...[T]here is a daring and Romantic fire in the playing which only add to the agony of his plight...

-- Allan Ulrich, Los Angeles Times [7/27/1986]

This CD of Adolf Busch's lyrical writing for clarinet is the first in a series of recordings of his light-filled chamber music in an effort to rediscover one of the leading musicians of his day. Bettina Biegelbeck has appeared as clarinet soloist with a number of orchestras. The Busch Kollegium Karlsruhe was founded by Biegelbeck expressly to make this recording.

This is not a historical recording. Yet mysteriously the music is performed in an interpretation which is historically authentic down to the last detail. The key to this mystery is: The original performer was present at the recent recording session, but not physically: The music is heard on a modern Steinway. Never has music stored in the Welte-Mignon system sounded so "right" or so good. Thanks to TACET's much-praised recording technique, and because the Welte-Mignon memory system and sound production mechanism have now been newly adjusted for the first time by the leading expert in the field - and are thus able to meet TACET's requirements. (Welte-Mignon was invented in 1904.) the Welte-Mignon mystery can now speak to US without distortion.

Classical Music

Much of the music of Joan Cabanilles (1644–1712) is as virtuosic and colourfully Baroque as that of his northern contemporary, Dietrich Buxtehude, though it is also touched with a distinctively Spanish intensity. He is claimed as the most prolific of all composers for the organ, and publication of his works, begun in 1927, is still under way. This is the second in an ongoing series of recordings designed to restore a great Valencian master to his unique glory. Timothy Roberts studied with Christopher Kite and Jill Severs, also receiving masterclass tuition from Kenneth Gilbert and Gustav Leonhardt. He worked for about thirty years as a busy touring keyboard player, twenty of them as principal keyboard of the Gabrieli Consort and his Players; he also became director of His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts. In recent years he has also gained experience as a recording engineer and sound editor, composer and music-typesetter.

John Cage's Etudes Australes, performed here by pianist Sabine Liebner, launched a series of virtuoso studies born out of the composer's renewed interest in traditional instrumentation and notation. This complex work consists of a total of 32 etudes divided into four books, which John Cage based on maps of the southern night sky. From these maps, locations of planets were selected via chance and translated into pitches, transforming indeterminacy into a new aesthetic category. For Cage's Etudes Australes, the moment of performance is its only moment of reality. Only what is in the present can be heard: in this case, a constantly changing kaleidoscope of sound.

Includes work(s) by Carl Heinrich Biber, various composers.

Soprano Claudio Bottcher and pianist Jovita Zohl have worked as a duo since 2008. Their recording entitled Zeit(t)resume is dedicated to works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio. Stockhausen's music box cycle Tierkreis (Zodiac) is presented here in a version for soprano and piano. In Berio's Sequenza III, based on a text by the Swiss writer Markus Kutter, a wealth of emotional states is expressed. Using the voice, the natural instrument of man, the text is articulated through sounds, syllables and words. Stockhausen's Klavierstucke IX shows the characteristic principle of his serial thinking - to arbitrate gradually as well as organically between pairs of opposites. The special charm that characterizes Quattro Canzoni poplari is born out of Berio's fascinating interpretation of traditional folk songs.

For twenty-five years Ulrich Beetz, Birgit Erichson and Gerrit Zitterbart have been making music together as the Abegg Trio": and there can be no doubt that this is a very special recording which this trio, the winner of so many awards, has brought out to celebrate their silver jubilee. It is one which the Abeggs have obviously treated themselves to, because the Piano Trio op. 8 by Frederic Chopin, the Piano Trio op. 42 and the Novelettes op. 29 by Niels Wilhelm Gade are outstanding for the calm and meticulous care which has arisen from long practice with these works.

Classical Music

MOZART: VIOLIN CONCERTO NO 2,

After 20 highly acclaimed classical guitar records, Liona entered the "new age" with style in 1988. Starting with the Vangelis piece from The Year of Living Dangerously (L'Enfant) and featuring guest appearances from Eric Clapton, David Gilmour (Pink Floyd) and Yo-Yo Ma, the scope and variety of Persona is kind of "beyond belief." Exciting, beautiful and dazzling, it's just like the artist herself.

-- AllMusic.com

Kempff: Rare Recordings (1936-1945)

This album by the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra playing on period instruments under the direction of Aapo Hakkinen includes Ludwig van Beethoven’s (1770-1827) complete incidental music to Goethe’s Egmont.

What distinguishes Beethoven’s Egmont are great dramatic emotion of style, tightly unified musical ideas, and an absolute determination to create a sense of the triumph of freedom as the Utopian dream of the whole of mankind. The overture, the only one of the ten numbers to be heard regularly today in the concert-hall, draws all these intentions together in concentrated form. Its meaning is revealed only in context, together with the interludes and the final musical episodes.

BUSONI: Works for Piano and Orchestra

Do many Americans realize what they owe to Josef Gingold, who after a distinguished career as concertmaster and soloist has now taught several generations of violinists at Indiana University? In addition to teaching some of the stars (whose publicists often prefer to label their charges as Galamian or Heifetz pupils, even when it was Gingold who made musicians out of them) of the solo and chamber-music platforms, America's orchestras benefit mightily from having Gingold pupils populate their violin sections. The Faéré, from a two-LP set on Red Bud that John Wiser praised in Fanfare 8:5, p. 249, is a 1966 concert recording with much tape hiss and audience noise, but is no less lovely for all that: patience and experience are called for and supplied. The Kreisler items, some of which are rarely encountered in recital or on disc, are from a mid-1970s Fidelio LP (I cannot find the Fanfare review). Gingold's rhythms are perhaps not as springy and tight as Kreisler's from the 1920s—this is more like the later Kreisler, when Gingold knew him. The sound here is a bit metallic. While the entire Red Bud set should be transferred to CD, this is a worthy and desirable homage to Josef Gingold.

-- David K. Nelson, FANFARE [9/1989]

The Fauré is a mono recording; the Kreisler pieces are recorded in stereo.

Lars Vogt continues his series of concerto recordings with the Royal Northern Sinfonia with this new recording of Johannes Brahms’ (1833–1897) First Piano Concerto together with Four Ballades (Op. 10) for solo piano. As in previous albums, Lars Vogt conducts from the keyboard.

The evolution of Brahms’ 1st Piano Concerto took several steps. Originally conceived to become a Sonata for Two Pianos through orchestration it was developed into a four-movement Symphony until reaching into its final form of a Piano Concerto in three movements. During the process, which lasted from 1854 to 1856, some movements were also discarded and replaced by new material. This music is packed with much drama. No wonder since these years were particularly tumultuous in Brahms’ personal life: it was during this period when his great mentor Robert Schumann was sent into an asylum and ultimately died. It was also time when Brahms formed a close, lifelong friendship to Clara Schumann. Some of these feelings might well be echoed in the peaceful 2nd movement, Adagio.

Brahms’ Four Ballades, Op. 10 are works written in 1854 by a young composer barely in his 20s, yet these pieces are technically mature and profound in such a manner that they could even be compared to his final piano opuses.

Lars Vogt was appointed the first ever “Pianist in Residence” by the Berlin Philharmonic in 2003/04 and enjoys a high profile as a soloist and chamber musician. His debut solo recording on Ondine with Bach’s Goldberg Variations (ODE 1273-2) was released in August 2015 and has been a major critical success. Lars Vogt started his tenure as Music Director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia in September 2015. Lars Vogt was nominated for Gramophone’s Artist of the Year award in 2017. His recordings of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos Nos. 2 & 4 (ODE 1311-2) together with the Royal Northern Sinfonia and an album of Dvorak’s Piano Trios (ODE 1316-2) received Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice in May 2018 and in December 2018. His most recent album on Ondine featuring four Mozart’s Piano Sonatas (ODE 1318-2) was also chosen Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice in July 2019.

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REVIEW:

The music-making is nothing short of sensational. This is a bold Brahms D minor with immense character, audacious and courageous. It is also perhaps the most sensitive and subtle reading of the score in recent memory. A wealth of seldom-heard orchestral detail emerges, with exquisite wind-playing especially prominent. Nothing is extraneous; every gesture seems bent towards maximum expressivity.

– Gramophone

Classical Music

"Julian Rachlin has a rapturously wide tonal armoury. From the very opening of the Concerto he demonstrates an imaginative reach; his sound being slender yet nectar-sweet. What is more, Maazel and the Pittsburghers catch the same kindling spirit. There is an alacrity and engagement about their playing that is not always present in the symphonies. Rachlin deserves consideration alongside Spivakovsky (Everest), Oistrakh (BMG-Melodiya) and Mullova (Philips). This is no also-ran and neither is the gentle second serenade."

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

Classical Music

Classical Music