Classical Music

[A] reminder of the awe-inspiring calibre of Emanuel Ax's Chopin... His technique in the daunting demands of the Ballades...is so masterly that you almost forget its comprehensive range or the way even the highest hurdle is taken with yards to spare. Again, when you hear him at 8'20" as he starts the long and intricate climb towards the Fourth Ballade's heavenstorming climax you may well wonder when you have heard this passage more subtly or grandly inflected...

Time and again you are made aware of how Ax, with his sumptuous tone and rhetorical grandeur, can contain even Chopin's most audacious gestures within an overall sweep and impetus as inevitable as a force of nature. Generous and big-handed, Ax's Chopin is noble, grandly aristocratic and, above all, heartfelt.

-- Bryce Morrison, Gramophone [4/2006, reviewing RCA 72554]

In 1937, Cincinnati's May Festival gave the world premiere of R. Nathaniel Dett's oratorio, "The Ordering of Moses", a 'Biblical Folk Scene' composed in 1932.  The event was broadcast live to the nation by NBC radio.  The present recording captures a thrilling 2014 concert of Dett's magnum opus, performed by four stellar vocal soloists, the May Festival Chorus, and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James Conlon.

 REVIEWS:

Conlon leads the Cincinnati musicians in a performance of radiant intensity. The chorus are in glorious communal voice and the Cincinnati Symphony blend elegance with vitality. How is it possible that a work as soaring and powerful as R. Nathaniel Dett’s The Ordering of Moses could have languished for so long?

-- Gramophone

This is certainly a major milestone in African-American classical music—a fine piece, very well done!

-- American Record Guide

This brilliantly stirring 1937 oratorio receives its first commercial recording, live from Carnegie Hall. Excellent soloists with sensitive chorus and orchestra.

-- BBC Music Magazine

John Cage (1912-1992) had a particular predilection for poetry. "[Poetry]," he wrote, "is not poetry by reason of it's content or ambiguity, but by reason of it's allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words." And about Stefano Scodanibbio who transcribed the "Freeman Etudes" and "Dream" for contrabass and in this recording also serves as the conductor of "Concert for Piano and Orchestra" and "Radio Music": "Scodanibbio. I thought he played beautifully. He played 'Ryoanji' absolutely better, than anyone I ever heard. - I haven't heard better double bass playing than Scodanibbio's. He's really extraordinary. His performance was absolutely magic."

From Heaven to Hell" The music of the angels as a euphonious affair is a relatively recent notion. In the Old Testament, the polyphonic praise of God was imagined as an overpowering roar. Martin Smolka's "Rush (Hour in Celestial Streets)" comes closer to this older concept with it's after-work traffic jam, though he also takes a detour through microtonality to write entirely new harmonies. On earth, light music celebrates a joyous resurrection in a very special "music machine" in Mauricio Kagel's "Orchestrion-Straat". And with his "Racconto dall'Inferno" (tale from hell"), Louis Andriessen sides both with and against Dante, submitting evidence that hell does have a sound-and that anyone caught in it's repetitive loops will find it difficult to escape. "We're on the highway to hell.

Am�riques" - a symbol of renewal, adventure, and discovery - is a symphonic eruption that earned a place in the twentieth century's list of scandals at it's premiere. The version on this CD for two pianos, eight hands introduces the musical world to a work of extreme pianistic virtuosity, both delicate and ecstatic, a work whose wild activity could not be more different from the almost motionless introspection of the Feldman pieces. As Feldman said: "Instead of inventing a system like Schoenberg, Var�se invented a music that speaks to us with it's incredible tenacity rather than it's methodology. When listening to Var�se, we ask ourselves, 'How did he do it?' and not 'How was it done?'

TOSCANINI COLLECTION VOL 6 - B

The theremin is the only instrument that can produce sounds without being touched. The hands of the performer dance in the air. Invented in the 1920s, the theremin did not really achieve a breakthrough in the following decades. On "Touch! Don't Touch!" Lydia Kavina and Barbara Buchholz pick up the thread of theremin history with new compositions. Eight German and Russian composers were commissioned to write pieces for two theremins and instrumental ensemble. They followed the maxim that there should be no limits to the sound; everything should be possible. The result is this marvellous CD.

Critically acclaimed ensemble Chamber Domaine returns to Resonus with this portrait of Finland’s most prominent national composer- Jean Sibelius. Featuring a combination of both well known and lesser performed works, artistic director and conductor Thomas Kemp leads a programme of instrumental, chamber and string orchestra compositions including the suite for strings, Rakastava (The Lover), the brooding Malinconia for cello, and the fulsome Andante Festivo in celebrating the depth and versatility of this great composer. The album was recorded with spectacular sound quality, and features a full color booklet. Chamber Domaine is a trailblazing ensemble acclaimed for its virtuosity, distinctive programming and passionate advocacy of the music from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chamber Domaine is project based and has a modular lineup of outstanding instrumentalists and vocalists ranging from duos to chamber orchestra.

Schwerin Brass Collegium's new release features a mixture of well-known carols and traditional arrangements of Renaissance and Baroque seasonal music. Also included are tasteful transcriptions of popular works such as Corelli's Christmas Concerto as well as interludes for the organ, played by the renowned organist Jan Ernst.

Classical Music

The focus of the pieces by Alvin Lucier on this CD is on the phenomena of resonance - sympathetic vibration - in many variations. "Time and again I find myself having to pare away any musical gestures in a work in order to uncover the true idea in a piece," says Alvin Lucier. The composer knows which ideas he wants to liberate. But the process of causing the environment to resound is always a collaborative, interactive project. It needs someone who is creatively engaged, even obsessed, to make Lucier's music of ideas a music of the ears. Someone of precisely the type found in this production - Matthias Kaul.

LAWES: THE ROYAL CONSORT JACO

WAGNER: ORCHESTRAL MUSIC BOUL

Martin, F.: Trio Sur Des Melodies Populaires Irlandaises / B

Classical Music

PROKOFIEV: PIANO SONATAS NOS 2

"Since Helmuth Rilling has undoubtedly recorded more of Bach's music than anyone else, one may wonder why it's taken him so long to get around to these most popular of the master's scores, and why he did so in Oregon, rather than in his hometown and with his Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, which he founded thirty years ago and has conducted ever since. But Rilling has been associated with the Oregon Bach Festival for nearly as many years, and he made a fine recording of Bach's overtures (orchestral suites) with the Festival Orchestral in 1992 (see Fanfare 16:6). While Rilling has never apologized for using of modern instruments in Bach's music and continues that practice here, he does retain the recorders in Concertos 2 and 4 and a viola da gamba in No. 6. For the present recording, Rilling has assembled a distinguished group of soloists, headed by violinist Kathleen Lenski and including Jeffrey Kahane, harpsichord, Elizabeth Baker, violin (in Concerto No. 2), Judith Lisenberg, recorder, Allan Vogel, oboe, Carol Wincenc, flute, Cynthia Phelps, viola, and far from least, Stephen Burns, trumpet. Contending that Bach would not have inserted a whole piece between the first and last movements of the third concerto, Rilling simply decorates the two chords that make up the second movement with a brief harpsichord flourish. (The timings for the second and third movements are transposed in the booklet.)

As with his overtures, Rilling's Brandenburgs are comfortably familiar in their broad outline and offer a minimum of controversial details. The playing is always accomplished and sometimes much better than that. The Second Concerto—the best of the lot—is an unqualified success."
Review of original release of this recording, Hänssler 98927

Just how masterly Szell was as a Straussian is demonstrated in all three of these items, recorded in 1960 and 1961. By then Szell had built the Cleveland Orchestra into what was regularly described very fairly — as the finest in America. These performances with a slight reservation over the hectic opening of Don Juan bear out not just what tautness and precision of ensemble the orchestra were achieving, but the thrusting emotional intensity. Szell as a person was one of the most daunting of conductors, chilling anyone around him; he certainly had musical fires within him, a point I never doubted in the conversations I had with him in his last years. I am glad that the One of the century's great cellists, Pierre Fournier, in Don Quixote accompanied by George Szell Photo 11 m 1' booklet-note includes memories from the horn player, Myron Bloom, bearing out what feelings there were behind the chilly facade.

Bloom, one of the greatest of American horn players, promoted by Szell to be first horn in Cleveland in 1955, a year after he joined the orchestra, is also very well celebrated here. I was sorry when after Szell's death and Maazel's succession, he was persuaded to go to the Orchestre de Paris to sort out their horn section, for he made far too few solo recordings, and in Cleveland he might have made many more. This one of the Horn Concerto No. 1 is marvellous at bringing out the enormous range of dynamic and tone colour Bloom had at his command. In the outer movements lightness and agility are wonderfully contrasted with heroic power, and in the central slow movement the impact of the braying.fortissinio in the middle section is all the greater when set against such gentle poetry in the outer sections.

The other artist here celebrated is of course the cellist, Pierre Fournier, who made this version of Don Quixote several years before recording it with Karajan in Berlin for DG. The contrasts are fascinating, for against my expectation Fournier is freer in his rubato with Szell, who prefers more flowing speeds than Karajan, making this a noble portrait, the more intense for not being so expansive. The opening of Don Juan, as I said, is hectic in its pursuit of brilliance, but very quickly Szell finds the same combination of opulence and urgency that marks the rest of the disc. A most welcome historic reissue, very well transferred, with sound both warm and detailed.

-- Edward Greenfield, Gramophone [2/1998]

Brahms, J.: Trio in A Minor, Op. 114 / Clarinet Sonata No. 1

A FESTIVAL OF ROMANIAN MUSIC

Classical Music

The music of German composer Robert Kahn, who was also Johannes Brahms' contemporary, was nearly forgotten after World War II. Included on this disc are rarely recorded pieces performed by the Hohenstaufen ensemble, featuring two of Kahn's great granddaughters, Rahel and Sara Rilling.

SWING YE NOEL WILLIAM NOLL, R

BRAHMS: SYMPHONIES 1-4, ETC.