Classical Music

What we call silence is for me comparable to a dense knot of noise, frequencies, and sounds," says Rebecca Saunders. "From this surface of apparent silence I try to draw out and mould sound and colour." Samuel Beckett's works have become very important for the composer. Therein lies, perhaps, a certain parallel to Rebecca Saunders's more recent music: in the increasing sparseness of a language that gradually shuts out the inessential and ornamental. "Stirrings Still" is a music that seems to be inside and outside at once - both mobile sound sculpture and a journey beneath the surface of the sound waves, into the interior of a sound that suddenly seems more distant yet more intense. "Such and much more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end," Beckett writes at the end of his "Stirrings Still". "Oh all to end.

Classical Music

Classical Music

This is not just an anthology which works—it's a wow!

This is the sixteenth gala of the Richard Tucker Music Foundation—''a look at an era just gone by'', as conductor James Conlon calls it—recorded live before an enthusiastic audience. It starts with a great lift-off: America the Beautiful (no mention of its composer Samuel Augustus Ward, whose hymn is treated to a showbiz arrangement) sung by Leontyne Price. At the age of 63 she can still summon enough patriotic fervour to make non-Americans want to apply for citizenship papers on the spot! And she isn't the oldest performer by any means. Robert Merrill is ten years her senior and delivers Weill's ''September Song'' touchingly but with a maddening tendency to anticipate the beat.

Weill is also represented by the ecstatic virtuosity of the Ice-Cream Sextet from Street Scene, still fresh in one's memory from the ENO performances in London and the two recordings now available on Decca and TER. Then there are two settings of William Blake's ''Tiger! Tiger! burning bright'' (''Songs of Experience''). Virgil Thomson set the poem twice: this is the second of his Five Songs from William Blake written in 1951, but it is William Bolcom who brings the house down with his version for chanting chorus backed by a variety of orchestral percussion.

One of the most moving performances is Karen Holvik in Stephen Foster's immaculate Ah! May the red rose live alway, with piano (Steven Blier). More calculating, but equally polished nostalgia comes from Barber, especially ''Must the winter come so soon'' from Vanessa, hauntingly sung by Frederica von Stade, recently admired for her Melisande at Covent Garden. But also ''Give me my robe'' from Barber's Anthony and Cleopatra, sung with equal poignancy by Carol Vaness.

Tatiana Troyanos sings Copland's setting of Robert Lowry's ''At the river'' with impressive, quiet dignity. Bernstein is the only composer who gets in three times—the Collegiate Chorale is on form for the first of the Chichester Psalms; Jerry Hadley sings ''Maria''; and there's an ensemble from Candide. Finally, in case you didn't sign on for US citizenship, Marilyn Horne gives a truly commanding performance of Berlin's classic God bless America. This is not just an anthology which works—it's a wow!

-- Peter Dickinson, Gramophone [6/1993]

Dvorák: Piano Quintet in A, Op. 81; Artur Rubinstein, piano; Guarneri Quartet. RCA Gold Seal 6263-2.

Artur Rubinstein was a youthful 84 when he sat down with the Guarneri players in the spring of 1971 for this recording of the Dvo?ák quintet. His lovely tone and lively phrasing, the clarity of the textures that emerged under his hands, and most of all the instinct he possessed for the singing line, proved infectious and spurred his colleagues to one of their best efforts on record. The sound, while not the best, has good presence. – Ted Libbey, author of The NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection.

Includes sonata(s) in d major by Luigi Boccherini. Soloists: Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky.

Fred Lerdahl is one of the least known among “major” American composers. Lerdahl’s music is greatly admired by cognoscenti, and his theoretical writings are among the most important of the latter 20th century, but his music remains less known to the general public, perhaps because of its non-doctrinaire stance. A Lerdahl composition might at any moment be tonal or atonal, it might luxuriate in Lerdahl’s rich melodic and harmonic gifts, or it might make reference to various musics of our past. Pulitzer prize-winning composer Paul Moravec writes that: “The deep, fresh, inspired music of Fred Lerdahl is a beacon for listeners making their way forward through the millenium’s strange and wonderful landscape of the imagination. Organic images express the way in which Lerdahl’s music seems so right as it unfolds in time, giving the impression of inexorability.” Time After Time, a Pulitzer prize finalist, is for the familiar ‘Pierrot plus percussion’ formation. In two movements, the eighteen and a half minute composition employs spiral forms, in which simple ideas become elaborated and more complex with each cycle. Marches for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano is a phantasmagoria of over-laid march-like ideas. One can feel the presence of Sousa and Mahler, lurking in the wings as Lerdahl creates an overall mood that veers between humor and fervent instrumental brilliance. Lerdahl's Oboe Quartet was composed for La Fenice, the ensemble that performs it here. Led by the superb oboist Peggy Pearson, the quartet integrates the oboe into the ensemble in a single 13 minute movement whose overall mood is playful with occasional dark undertones. Waves for chamber orchestra simply must be heard to be believed. Given a stunningly controlled reading by the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, this recording is a re-mastered release of the out-of-print Deutsche Grammophon recording.

Rubinstein Collection, Vol. 48: Chopin: Polonaises

Classical Music

Includes God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen; O Holy Night Arturo Sandoval and the Canadian Brass Jazz All-Stars; Sleigh Ride Medley; Little Drummer Boy; the Toy Trumpet Canadian Brass, and more. 18 tracks.

Cellist Marcy Rosen's recent recording of Mendelssohn's Complete Works for Cello and Piano with pianist Lydia Artymiw has received glowing reviews from the international press. The present reissue of her 1989 MHS Strauss & Grieg album presents two staples of the romantic cello repertoire in impassioned readings. Marcy Rosen has established herself as one of the most important and respected artists of our day. Los Angeles Times music critic Herbert Glass has called her "one of the intimate art's abiding treasures." She has performed in recital and with orchestra throughout Canada, England, France, Japan, Italy, Switzerland, and all fifty of the United States. She made her concerto debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the age of eighteen and has since appeared with such noted orchestras as the Dallas Symphony, the Phoenix Symphony, the Caramoor Festival Orchestra, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, the Jupiter Symphony and Concordia Chamber Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall, and the Tokyo Symphony at the famed Orchard Hall in Tokyo. In recital she has appeared in New York at such acclaimed venues as Carnegie Hall, the 92nd Street "Y" and Merkin Concert Hall; in Washington D.C. at the Kennedy Center, Dumbarton Oaks, the Phillips Collection and the Corcoran Gallery, where for many years she hosted a series entitled "Marcy Rosen and Friends." In recent seasons she has given Master Classes and appeared on stage in Beijing and Shanghai, China, the Seoul Arts Center in Korea and in Cartagena, Colombia.

Classical Music

Classical Music

THE HEIFETZ COLLECTION VOL 10

French composer Mark Andre's ...auf... consists of three independent orchestral pieces. Taken together, they can be heard as a cycle or as a triptych. Though they are related, each work begins again the search for new resonances and means for transitions between sounds. Andre studied composition with Claude Ballif and Gérard Grisey at the Conservatoire de Paris. He continued his studies in Stuttgart with André Richard at the SWR Experimentalstudio and with Helmut Lachenmann.

Did you know that the legendary American Maverick Harry Partch wrote music for West Coast jazz icons Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan? They never got a chance to play his smart and funny Ulysses at the Edge of the World, but this “Minor Adventure in Rhythm” really swings in time signatures that would have made Dave Brubeck blush. So opens a collection of Partch classics that no one has really heard before. His score for the film Windsong was edited for the soundtrack, and though music lovers will recognize the material from the subsequently expanded Daphne of the Dunes, the symphonically structured original is much more dramatically crafted, and is presented here for the first time. It turns out that there are actually Twelve Intrusions, too, not eleven. And a demented sonata? Oh yes! Though the composer never performed or recorded it, his 1950 composition Sonata Dementia is in three movements: I. Abstraction & Delusion, II. Scherzo Schizophrenia, and III. Allegro Paranoia. Filled to the brim with humor, flights of fancy, and a febrile imagination, it was later reworked as “Ring Around the Moon,” but what a treat to hear the original in all its zany glory. The Bonus Tracks reveal even more lost treasures: here is the original 1904 Edison recording of the Native American “Cançion” that Partch had transcribed in the 1930s and used to close his final Intrusion “Cloud Chamber Music.” But best of all, the first-ever recording of Partch as performer, playing what is probably his most famous piece, Barstow: 8 Hitchhiker Inscriptions in front of a live audience in 1942, just a year after it was written.

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REVIEWS:

The recording is excellent with the performers giving a committed and engaging performance. Even the 1942 recording, wonderfully remastered, comes up well. The information in the booklet gives an excellent introduction to Partch and his music. This disc would serve as a good introduction to Partch’s music for any fan of American music, especially that off the beaten track. It certainly makes me want to hear the previous recordings in this series.

– MusicWeb International

There isn't a dull moment here. While Harry Partch admirers may be the primary market, anybody will enjoy this.

– AllMusic Guide

Chamber Music (Baroque) - Frederick Ii / Benda, F. / Bach, C

Ferdinand & Mendelssohn: Piano Quartets

ABBEY ROAD: A CAPELLA

HAYDN: Trumpet Concerto in E flat major / MOZART: Serenade N

Weber, C.M. Von: Flute Trio, Op. 63 / Ries, F.: Flute Sonata

Leopold Godowsky's liberal adaptations of three Bach Cello Suites retool the originals in the image of hyper-romantic pianism. Harmonies implied by Bach are filled out and elaborated, with new counterpoints and sundry inner voices popping up like rabbits out of a magician's hat. Climaxes get reinforced with booming chords or octave doublings, emerging from the bowels of the keyboard. At times the music's dance origins threaten to buckle under Godowsky's garish filigree. Carlo Grante's light touch and digital deftness, however, keep the textures airborne and alive. He occasionally fidgets with rubato in a way that throws rhythmic definition askew, but he always makes the piano writing sound offhandedly easy. Excellent booklet notes make this release even more enticing. --Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

Flute and Guitar Recital: Nicodemus, Heike / Mangold, Maximi

"[A] lovingly prepared, executed and recorded performance..." Performance: 4 (out of 5), Sound: 4 (out of 5) -- Keith Potter, BBC Music Magazine