The Austrian composer Walter Bricht (1904-70) was one of many musicians of Jewish ancestry who fled Vienna after the Anschluss for the safety of the USA; Bricht became a valued professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. Fittingly, it is the nearby Fort Wayne Philharmonic, in its own debut recording, that has made the first album of Bricht’s music. The recording reveals another major Viennese voice and points to yet another potentially important career cut off in the bud by the Nazis. Bricht was reportedly Franz Schmidt’s favorite student, and the late-Romantic styles of the two men are indeed very closely aligned in their mix of Baroque counterpoint, Classical form and Wagnerian chromatic harmony: Bricht’s Symphony in A minor might almost be Schmidt’s No. 5.

While I was thoroughly enjoying myself listening to this disc an analogy sprang to mind regarding 19 ^th Century war-horse piano transcriptions. It struck me that – from a 'modern' perspective – they are rather like a great steam locomotive, totally redundant and outmoded but actually rather inspiring and a triumph of engineering!
 
I have written before that I have an enduring pleasure in hearing a good transcription of something utterly preposterous ... and what could be more preposterous than transcribing Wagner’s Ring for solo piano? The key to raising both the transcription and indeed the performance of it hangs on several far less absurd considerations. These are as follows. How well does the transcriber retain the essence of the work in question? How successfully does the transcriber satisfy the twin musical imperatives of writing a work pleasing as both a virtuoso piano piece and as ‘simple’ music? Lastly, how well is the performer able to surmount the vast technical hurdles implied by the genre whilst producing a performance of real musical value? The reason for my pleasure in this disc is that on every count I would have to say: very well indeed.
 
To start with the composer/transcriber; August Stradal was yet another of those acolytes of Liszt who seem to have spent a good part of their creative careers trying to out-arrange their master. One can imagine an unspoken conflict between Liszt’s many disciples each trying desperately to produce piano music of ever greater complexity and virtuosity. Along the way Stradal had Bruckner as a teacher and in later life provided important biographical information on both those masters. He also transcribed Bruckner’s Symphonies 1-2 and 5-8 for piano … now there’s a project for Toccata to consider! For those interested the Bruckner transcriptions as well as the 2 Liszt Symphonies, Brandenburg No.3 and other works too can be viewed and downloaded from the IMSLP website – unfortunately none of the works recorded here can be so viewed.
 
I quite enjoy playing a little game when listening to transcriptions such as this – it’s called “count the imaginary fingers”. The closer you get to twenty the better. Pianist Juan Guillermo Vizcarra makes a staggeringly powerful case for these transcriptions and he is no mean interpreter of Wagner either. The six excerpts from the Ring are grouped sensibly together in chronological order. Hence the disc opens with three selections from Die Walküre. The first two are rather dwarfed by an extended transcription of its closing pages. Siegmund’s Love-song comes first and shows Stradal’s skill at retaining the original voicing of the opera with the hero ‘singing’ in the middle register of the keyboard and the ‘orchestra’ fully represented above and below. Vizcarra is especially skilled at layering the dynamics within these complex textures ensuring that the ear is guided to primary and secondary material. He is a very dynamic player – his performance had me thinking back to the days of LPs and Michael Ponti’s trail-blazing discs on Vox-Turnabout of various Opera paraphrases. Occasionally I did wonder if Vizcarra was overly-muscular which, allied to a quite close and dynamic recording, does risk ‘virtuosity-awareness-fatigue-syndrome’. Conversely, this is music that should overwhelm one in whatever format it is performed. Vizcarra goes on to prove that he is by no means ‘just’ a virtuoso. Indeed I found his pacing of the seventeen minute selection from the end of Die Walküre very impressive. Likewise the single excerpt from Siegfried – Forest Murmurs – is beautifully paced. I say this even if just occasionally the leading melodic line feels a fraction heavy in comparison to the accompanying material but I do feel rather mean-spirited mentioning this.
 
Malcolm MacDonald in his predictably fascinating and insightful liner cites the two Götterdämmerung excerpts as representing the apogee of Stradal’s art with regard to Wagner. Certainly the sheer complexity of textures that he is able to retain from the original version of Siegfried’s Rhine Journey is astonishing. Again I find Vizcarra’s pacing of the closing pages which then lead with seamless skill into Siegfried’s Funeral March wholly convincing. Given that so much of the orchestral texture in this extraordinarily valedictory passage is built on long-held chords building crescendi this is the one time a piano struggles to maintain the illusion of the original. This is for the simple and obvious fact that a piano cannot play a crescendo without repeating a note or chord. That aside Vizcarra is a very impressive interpreter and Stradal’s transcription builds to a remarkably powerful climax replete with little sky-bursts of keyboard flurries and virtuoso gestures.
 
Sensibly, the final third of the disc is devoted to a far less rhetorical and grandly dramatic transcription of the five Wesendonck Lieder. These do already exist in the original version for piano and voice. MacDonald explains that Stradal stays essentially faithful to Wagner’s original except in two respects; he changes the order of the songs and moves the vocal line into the middle register again whilst at the same time moving Wagner’s right-hand piano part up the octave. This has the twin effect of making that element of the accompaniment sound immediately more ‘brilliant’ whilst keeping the now inner vocal line clear of conflicting part-writing. Vizcarra is beautifully poetic throughout the cycle although again I occasionally wondered if he strove too hard to give the inner/vocal line prominence. Especially since the placing of this line in a tenor/baritone register changes the feel quite significantly from their mezzo-soprano original. Again this seems like minor carping when one has been given the opportunity to hear such startlingly effective transcriptions in such convincing performances.
 
Toccata Classics is one of my favourite labels with the questing and quirky nature of the repertoire they offer very much a reflection on the tastes and passions their founder and executive producer Martin Anderson. This disc is another excellent example of his sure-fire sense of rare and unknown music well worth restoring and exploring. More Wagner please but a set of the Bruckner transcriptions really would be something.
 
-- Nick Barnard, MusicWeb International

This new album is a stroke of luck. For 15 years Nina Stemme has been reinvigorating Wagner’s female roles with the dramatic soul and vocal power previously attained perhaps only by her compatriot Birgit Nilsson. Nina Stemme’s role interpretations are met with great acclaim among both audience and critics, and 2013 she was the first recipient of the Opera Award for Best Female Singer. Nina Stemme was appointed Swedish Court Singer 2006, Austrian Kammersängerin 2012, and she has been selected ”Singer of the Year” twice, 2005 and 2012, in the German magazine Opernwelt. On this release she performs works from Tristan und Isolde, Siegfried, Hollander, and Die Walkure.

Described as "one of the most interesting composers" of recent years, composer-performer Giorgio Mirto is a leading light in the world of contemporary guitar music. Here Mirto fronts his own chamber music for guitar and strings, supported by a superb group of colleagues and friends who make this music glad and infectious. Mirto approaches composition for the guitar as only a performer and lover of the instrument can, with great affinity and delight.

Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst (1812-65) was one of the leading musicians of his day, a friend of Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt and Mendelssohn, and for Joseph Joachim 'the greatest violinist I ever heard'. This sixth album - in a series of seven presenting all his compositions for the first time - begins and ends with some of the most difficult music for solo violin ever composed: Ernst's Six Polyphonic Studies (the last of which is a set of variations on 'The Last Rose of Summer') and his transcription of Schubert's song, Der Erlkonig. Between these pieces come some less familiar fare: five Schubertian piano pieces, and two settings of Goethe.

REVIEW:

MOZART Symphonies: No. 25; No. 40. Piano Concerto No. 14 • Wolfgang Sawallisch, cond; Friedrich Gulda (pn); Concertgebouw O • ORFEO 795 091, mono (69:37) Live: Salzberg 7/2/1958

This concert places the E? Piano Concerto (K 449) between the two G-Minor Symphonies (K 183 and K 550), resulting in an artfully constructed Mozart program. For a monaural recording, the sound quality is good, although a bit damped. Audience noise is not present except between movements and as applause at the end of each work.

Sawallisch’s beat is strong throughout, and orchestral clarity is good enough to allow part-writing transparency. Tempos are generally rapid, so that nothing ever drags. The opening movement tempo of K 550, however, could use a little braking. Exposition repeats are observed in the first and last movements of K 183 and in the first movement of K 550. The last movement of K 550, however, is played without repeats, and this leaves impressions of imbalance and unfinished business. Obviously, the conductor thought otherwise, and I bow to his judgment.

Friedrich Gulda at 28 and Wolfgang Sawallisch at 35 were, in 1958, among the most promising young pianists and conductors of the time. This account of Mozart’s Concerto No. 14 is a living example of that promise. The conductor reached great heights in the coming years, eventually being named conductor laureate of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The pianist was a maverick with a penchant for challenging the musical establishment and daring to display a strong interest in jazz. He eventually faded as a performer who was once sought-after by the more traditional concertgoers. His death in 2000 at age 69 revived interest in his early recordings. In the Piano Concerto, this disc offers a snapshot of promise of two artists in vintage Mozart. Twenty years earlier in a studio recording, 35-year-old Rudolf Serkin and conductor Adolf Busch and the Adolf Busch Chamber Players offered this Concerto in a different, more quickly paced style, but still as vintage Mozart. In both performances, there is no tempo tampering, no dynamics distortion, and no excesses of expression—there is just beautiful Mozart expressed by beautiful phrase shaping. The closest to these standards in a modern recording is Murray Perahia’s with the English Chamber Orchestra. Perahia’s tempos are closer to Serkin’s than to Gulda’s in the first movement, but closer to Gulda’s than to Serkin’s in the last movement. Where Serkin and Perahia perform with chamber orchestras, Gulda performs with a full, but suitably reduced, orchestra that Sawallisch never allows to overpower either the music or the piano sound.

This is a memorable Salzberg Festival program from which one comes away with a deeper understanding of Mozart. This is a very good disc to have.

FANFARE: Burton Rothleder

The first two Toccata Classics volumes of the orchestral music of the English composer David Hackbridge Johnson presented three mighty symphonies, conceived on a large scale and powerful in their utterance. The Fifteenth Symphony, tone-poems and other works offered here show a change in focus: an engagement with the natural world, reflecting the poetry of changing light and shifting winds, with man's impermanent presence dwarfed by the implacable grandeur of nature. Here Paul Mann, a frequent Toccata Classics artist, conducts the orchestra of the very town- Liepaja, on the coast of Latvia- that inspired the Fifteenth Symphony.

Although Knappertsbusch conducted “Lohengrin” many times, until now no recording by him has been issued, so the welcome discovery of this live performance from Munich fills a gap in the discography... We first hear Knappertsbusch pushing the Prelude on, refusing to linger but instead urging the singing strings to create what is almost a sense of tension and expectation, culminating in the great chordal climax by the brass. The Act II Prelude, too, is wonderfully played, the orchestra producing a dark, brooding sound proleptic of Ortrud’s calling upon the “Entweihte Götter!” --MusicWeb

Classical Music

York-based chamber choir, The Ebor Singers, with the director Paul Gameson, make their Resonus Classics debut with an album of works inspired by the English Civil War and, in particular, the 1644 Siege of York. Based around the ''York'' psalms of William Lawes, this fascinating recording features a programme of music that may have been performed in York's historic minster around this time of huge political, social and religious upheaval.

The term division refers to a particular type of improvisation or composition that flourished in England in the middle of the seventeenth century. Simply put, division music involves splitting longer notes into shorter ones and larger intervals into smaller ones. In order to ‘divide’ you need a subject, or theme, and this was most often a pre-existing vocal melody or a repeating ground-bass. Following on from his critically acclaimed recording of solo English viola da gamba works (Tickle the Minikin), founder member of Fantascus, Robert Smith, is joined by the prolific and celebrated viola da gambist, Paolo Pandolfo, for this album of English duos for the instrument. Featuring a selection of seventeenth-century repertoire from Christopher Simpson, John Jenkins and Simon Ives, this album is packed with divisions for duo, which are often intensely virtuosic. Also featured are a selecon of preludes from Christopher Simpson’s The Division Viol and an addional prelude by Smith himself.

The American composer George Antheil (1900–59) enjoyed the sobriquet ‘the Bad Boy of Music’ thanks to the mechanistic scores of his early career. This anthology of piano music from the last twenty years of his life reveals a muse that could also be affectionate, flirtatious and capricious – but the ‘Bad Boy’ occasionally re-emerged, as in the diabolical mischief of the wild, peppery, Prokofievan toccatas also recorded here. Ms. Judy Pang is increasingly on demand as an inventive solo and chamber musician with eclectic repertoire. She has established herself as a performer of works both mainstream and contemporary. Alongside her dedication to a wide-ranging selection from the canon of piano repertoire, she has continued her scholarly study of French impressionist music, on which she has given lecture recitals both in New York and Shanghai. Her numerous performances have taken her as far afield as the US, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Finland, Australia and China.

The Austrian composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837) studied both piano and composition with his great countryman Mozart, and was also a friend of Beethoven, of which aspects of these relationships we can hear all throughout his septets. We can hear, too, why Robert Schumann's generation praised him so highly. As heard in these recordings, here is a Classical master on the cusp of the Romantic era, original in instrumentation and technique and subtle in his harmonies.

The whims of opera fans are legendary, and if justice were to be served, soprano Krassimira Stoyanova would be as famous as Anna Netrebko (perhaps) and Angela Gheorghiu (definitely). Hers is a grand sound, with metal behind it, formidable pitch-accuracy, and fine insights into the characters she’s portraying. She eschews exaggeration–possibly to her detriment: she easily could milk many of the arias here (Adriana’s opening monolog, Manon Lescaut’s final-act spiel) for that extra, Olivero/Scotto emotion, but she sticks very closely to written note values and dynamics. Her use of portamento is echt Italian, and her voice is made for this big-boned music when need be, and she can sing sweetly as well: her Liu is lovely, as is the start of “Un bel di”.

There’s great warmth in her singing of Adriana’s two arias; her “La mamma morta” is filled with tragedy, and she sings the heck out of Fidelia’s hand-wringing aria from Puccini’s Edgar. The lengthy scene from Mascagni’s Lodoletta is a welcome rarity, and she’s thoroughly involving. Wally’s aria may lack Callas’ unspeakable sadness, but it reaches great heights; ditto for her “Vissi d’arte”.

I get the feeling that if her conductor had been more of a dramatist than the accompanist Pavel Baleff is here, this fine CD would have worked its way into “magnificent”. I’d like to add that a bit more hysteria/overt emotionalism would not hurt–I saw her Aida live at the Met last season and admired it greatly, but even then I wished she had been a touch more earthy. As it is, this CD gives great pleasure and is well recorded. Stoyanova’s is a voice to hear.

– ClassicsToday (Robert Levine)

Johannes Brahms exhibited a noticeable disposition to paired works, composing 2 serenades, 2 piano concertos, 2 sonatas for cello and clarinet and likewise 2 string sextets. The first sextet, in B flat major, op. 18 reflects the work-filled time he spent in Detmold. Brahms began working on the second sextet in G, op. 36 in September 1864. That Christmas, he sent Clara Schumann it's first three movements, completing the work in May 1865. On this record, the soloist ensemble of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam plays both sextets.

Classical Music

Classical Music

SCHÜTZ Cantiones Sacrae , Op. 4 • Hans-Christoph Rademann, cond; Dresdn C Ch • CARUS 83.252 (2 CDs: 108: 31 Text and Translation)


The fifth issue in Rademann’s projected complete works of Heinrich Schütz, this publication of 1625 has already been recorded complete three times. Rudolf Mauersberger used a large choir of men and boys with instrumental ensemble; the Eterna recording was once available on Telefunken LPs but, in a Berlin Classics set of 10 CDs of Schütz’s music, never came for review. Manfred Cordes ( Fanfare 20:5) got a rave review for rendering one voice to a part, unaccompanied except for motets that required continuo. Matteo Messori (30:5) also used one voice to a part with organ continuo throughout. The new version has a vocal ensemble of 18 with continuo.


One might wonder why this collection of Latin-texted motets, written over a period of years (some of them were certainly sung for the Emperor Matthias when he visited Dresden in 1617) is not heard as often as the German-texted Geistliche Chor-Musik of 1648, which has been recorded complete 10 times. In a very informative note here, Oliver Geisler shows that Carl von Winterfeld (1834), Philipp Spitta (1894), Joachim Moser (1936), and most recently Clytus Gottwald have singled out the treasures that are to be discovered here, beginning long before the revival of interest in the greatest German composer of the 17th century. The last-named lamented that 20th-century church music has been modeled on the 1648 book instead of this expressionist music that would have led composers in more adventurous directions. It would seem that the music is more admired than loved. Rademann sets out to make it loved.


To read Cordes’s notes is to imagine that, foreseeing this new recording, he was arguing against it in his insistence on one voice to a part without the “rigid sound” of the organ, but his real reference was to Mauersberger’s pioneering set. Rademann shows how light and flexible his singers can sound in this madrigalian music, and the continuo is so discreet as to fade out of hearing. (Indeed, I cannot hear it at all in at least one piece, “Dulcissime et benignissime Christe.”) I find the two versions equally appealing, appreciating the one I am hearing before switching to the other equally impressive performance. My head tells me that Cordes argues persuasively, but my heart tells me that the warmth of Rademann’s multiple voices is unarguable. These Scriptural texts in Latin are not madrigals, after all.


At least six conductors have assembled partial collections of this music to fit a single disc. The largest was two LPs under Helmut Rilling, both issued here on Musical Heritage Society, probably a projected complete set that was never finished. The most recent, a full CD by Erik van Nevel (15:5), was commendable when the only complete set was Mauersberger’s, but van Nevel never made the rest of the book. It should be noted that I referred in that review to “41 motets;” the correct count is 40, since “Pater noster” is printed twice as the secunda pars of two motets. If you have not discovered the marvels of this book, I urge you to hear Rademann. He promises to give us a commendable complete works.


FANFARE: J. F. Weber

Piano duo Vicky Yannoula & George-Emmanuel Lazaridis make their debut appearance on the Resonus Classics label with the first volume of a landmark series of Carl Czerny’s arrangements for four hands of the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven. A prolific and trusted arranger of many of Beethoven’s works, Czerny creates fascinating and faithful versions of these popular works that display the impressive virtuosic and orchestral range and capabilities of the instrument. Yannoula & Lazaridis begin with two of Beethoven’s best-known works – the first and fifth symphonies.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Esteemed British composer, Richard Harvey, returns with a sublime album of new choral works recorded in Estonia by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, conducted by Heli Jurgenson. Additional performances feature The Latvia Radio Choir conducted by Sigvards Klava. And the strings of the Hungarian Film Orchestra. This new album features ten new compositions for mixed choir, some of which are also scored for string orchestra, organ and various soloists. The recordings were made in the awe inspiring acoustic of St Nicholas Church Museum, Tallinn in Estonia. The texts are sourced from traditional works in most cases with other inspiring libretti from British poets Archibald Lampman and George Herbert.

Bayer Records releases here a world premiere recording: Angelika Huber and Kilian Sprau recorded songs and Shakespeare sonnets by Anton Beer Walbrunn. (Bayer)

Classical Music