Aaron Copland wrote his rarely-heard ballet Hear Ye! Hear Ye! for Ruth Page, the dancer and choreographer who was to become the Grande Dame of American ballet. Its scenario is a murder in a nightclub and the ensuing trial in a Chicago courtroom. Copland infused the score with the spirit of his jazz-influenced pieces, controversially distorting part of the National Anthem, and infiltrating music from some of his earlier works. In complete contrast, Appalachian Spring is his most famous work, a true American masterpiece founded on transfigured dance tunes and song melodies.

Recorded in: Orchestra Hall, Detroit 12,13 November 1994 & 26 May 1996 Recorded in: Orchestra Hall, Chicago 20-22 & 25 April 1989 & 30 January-3 February 1991 Producer(s) Charles Greenwell Ralph Couzens Lan Shui (assistant) Chris Hazell - Chicago Sound Engineer(s) Dan Dene Robert Shafer Mitchell Heller - Chicago

This outstanding new live recording brings together groundbreaking works by Arnold Schoenberg and Dmitri Shostakovich, two of the twentieth century’s most monumental composers. Arnold Schoenberg’s Kol Nidre is set to the Jewish prayer which is said on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The work premiered in Los Angeles in 1938, four years after Schoenberg fled Europe, and one month before the anti-Jewish Kristallnacht took place across Nazi-occupied Germany. Philip Huscher described the work as a “stark, strong modernist statement.” Shostakovich’s Suite on Versees of Michelangelo Buona explores themes just as weighty, including love, morality, death, and the resilience of the human spirit, all shown through the poetry of Renaissance great, Michelangelo. The work was originally conceived to honor Michelangelo’s 500th birthday. The Chicago Tribune commented on these performances, “Such was his textual penetration that [Abdrazakov] was able to extract the full emotional weight of the words and music, abetted by Muti’s finely detailed exposition of the spare orchestral fabric.”

Chicago has long been a welcoming home to the working composer, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the heart of the musical life they found in the city. The three American composers whose music is performed on this recording all have important ties to the CSO, from Philip Glass’ formative years as a student listener in Orchestra Hall in the 1950s, to Jessie Montgomery, who is the Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence today, and Max Raimi, who is both a prolific composer and a longtime member of the Orchestra’s viola section. 

The works by Montgomery and Raimi were both their first CSO commissions, and these are their world premiere performances. Montgomery’s Hymn for Everyone is a meditation for orchestra that speaks to the significance of her emergence in today’s cultural climate through its reflection on the personal and collective challenges of the spring of 2021. In it, a hymn-like melody traverses different orchestral choirs to poignant effect. For each poem in Raimi’s Three Lisel Mueller Settings, he selects an admired colleague to enter into a dialogue with the soloist, mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong. This highlights the talents of Principal Clarinet Stephen Williamson in a frenetic waltz, Principal Bassoon Keith Buncke in a tragic elegy and Principal Bass Alexander Hanna in a metaphor for hope, with soaring, song-like phrases that transcend standard conceptions of the instrument’s expressive possibilities.

Glass’ Eleventh Symphony is part of the symphonic tradition that captivated him as a student. Each movement has its own unique character — the first bold and driving, the second crowned by a slowly unfolding melody and the third a barrage of cascading energy and racing percussion.

For Glass in the 50s, it was Fritz Reiner. Now Riccardo Muti champions the compositional voices of the age with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. “It takes courage,” says Glass of the Orchestra’s legacy of performing contemporary music, “and that courage becomes a tradition.”

REVIEWS:

This album stands as testimony to the Italian master’s innate musical understanding and ability to bring out the best in almost everything he conducts.

-- Gramophone

Glass delivers a variant of the crowd-pleasing movie music he has trademarked for decades. It is hard to gainsay America’s most prolific and popular serious composer. Muti’s performance is all that it could be, and the orchestra lends glamour to the score.

-- Fanfare

Almost forty years after his first recording on Chandos, this unique limited-edition release gathers some of the best and most-awarded recordings on the label by one of the most prolific conductors of all time: Neeme Järvi. It highlights a 200+ discography that explores an astonishingly wide repertoire, with selections from the legendary complete series of Prokofiev’s symphonies and Tchaikovsky’s ballets to the groundbreaking discoveries of composers such as Atterberg or Suchon. It features nearly a dozen of the numerous orchestras with which he has collaborated, including the RSNO, Chicago Symphony, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, all here celebrated at their best. Offered at a very special price and retaining the original covers, this product also includes very special notes by James Jolly, Editor in Chief of Gramophone, as well as exclusive photos and interviews with figures central to Järvi’s extraordinary musical life.

Past praise of previously released material included in this set:

Prokofiev: Symphony No 6, Waltzes Suite / Järvi, SNO

As in all of his Prokofiev symphony recordings–this was the first, by the way–Järvi really digs into the music. The engineering is as big and bold as the performances. This recording deserves classic status.

– ClassicsToday

Smetana: Má Vlast / Järvi, Detroit Symphony

Järvi and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra deliver an expansive reading of the complete work, and their feeling for the music's vivid imagery and richly Romantic expression is spot on.

– All Music Guide

REVIEW:

This is not only one of the best sounding violin and orchestra recordings ever made, but the entire concept is so smart, so well executed, and so thoughtfully planned that even if it were not so musically stupendous it still would be worthy of your attention. As it is, this is one of those rare productions in which absolutely everything goes right. Consider, for example, the problems attendant upon releasing yet another recording of the Brahms Concerto. You have a small independent label with excellent musical credentials but limited resources, a soloist of great musical gifts (Rachel Barton's previous discs have all been top-notch) but who isn't a "big name", and a work that virtually every other violinist with access to a microphone has recorded, sometimes more than once. Given the fact that on musical evidence Barton's Brahms certainly deserves to be heard, what's a label to do?

First, secure the services of a world-class orchestra under a fine conductor (Carlos Kalmar, music director of the Oregon Symphony and Chicago's Grant Park Festival, fills that bill nicely). Amazing, isn't it, that when major labels are screaming about how they can't afford to record major American orchestras Cedille has found the resources to do just that? Second, instead of simply offering the Brahms, you find an interesting coupling. And let's not kid ourselves: Joseph Joachim's Hungarian Concerto isn't just an "interesting coupling"; it is the Holy Grail of Romantic violin concertos, a work so lengthy (47-plus minutes, about the same as the Elgar concerto), so difficult, yet so deliberately symphonic and, in a sense, anti-virtuoso in conception that it has never once received even a merely adequate recording. Take that coupling, play it to a fare-thee-well (demonstrating once and for all that the work is indeed a brilliant and neglected masterpiece), and then toss in an equally fine Brahms Concerto, all offered at a two-for-one price. If that isn't a recipe for success, then nothing is.

Indeed, Joachim's youthful Hungarian Concerto is so beautiful and full of life, its Gypsy-tinged melodies so entrancing, that only its inordinate difficulty accounts for its rarity. In concert it would be a show-stopper, and Rachel Barton has its full measure. The heavily symphonic first movement requires the soloist to engage in genuine chamber-music dialog with the orchestra, especially the principal winds. Joachim's orchestration must stand with the finest ever achieved in a concerto; there are no dead spots and no balance problems as long as the soloist has the taste and musicianship to know when to cede the spotlight and when to take command.

Take the remarkable cadenza as a typical example: there's no barnstorming sawing and scraping, but instead a densely flowing river of lyricism joined now and then by solo flute and oboe. It's one of the most purely gorgeous passages ever written for the violin, and Barton plays it for all it's worth (and finishes up with some devastating descending chromatic octaves that actually sound like musical notes and not a rusty hinge).

The slow movement features another very attractive principal theme, and when it returns at the movement's conclusion in the cellos, decorated by garlands of ornamentation from the soloist, the result sounds like some lost work of Dvorák at his most melodically characterful. Barton's electrifying attack on the finale, a dazzling "Rondo from hell" with a whiplash perpetual motion principal subject, sets the seal on this remarkable performance. Her double-stops (and there are tons of them: check out from 2:30 into the movement) are as sweetly tuned and richly voiced as her legato is smooth and her sense of rhythm acute. Even after this long work I wouldn't be surprised if you went right back and played the finale over again. It's that much fun.

The word that most succinctly sums up Barton's Brahms is "aristocratic". Among recent recordings, she plays Milstein to Hilary Hahn's Heifetz. The timings are identical to Perlman and Giulini's celebrated performance with this same orchestra, but for my money Barton achieves an even finer balance between poise and virtuosity (and shows far greater dynamic sensitivity, especially in the finale). With opening-movement tempos relaxed but never slack, Barton's warm, round sound allows her to really dig into the music where necessary (witness that famous fanfare-like motive, or Joachim's first-movement cadenza)--but she never emits a raw or unlovely note. The second movement, with a gorgeous oboe solo at the start, is just heavenly, and the finale reveals plenty of high-spirited energy but also numerous delightfully phrased touches in its various episodes. At the very end Barton and conductor Kalmar produce a wind-down coda simply perfect in its timing and wit. She even includes her own eminently musical and enjoyable cadenza on a separate track. Simply jump ahead when the orchestra stops (the balance of the coda is also included, so you don't have to skip backward to get the ending).

As noted above, the sonics are sensational. The opening of the Brahms, with dark-hued strings answered by the winds like a gleam of sun breaking through the clouds, will take your breath away. Although Barton deserves much of the credit for emitting such attractive sounds, it certainly helps that Cedille's engineers capture her shining tone with nary a trace of shrillness, even in the highest positions. Barton herself writes an excellent set of notes (surely indebted to Tovey in discussing the Joachim, but none the worse for that), and to put the icing on the cake she plays a 1742 Guarneri "del Gesu" violin, the "ex-Soldat", selected by Brahms himself for his friend and colleague, violin virtuoso Marie Soldat. Recordings don't get any better than this. Rachel Barton, conductor Carlos Kalmar, and Cedille deserve your enthusiastic support for putting this project together and executing it with such perfectionist zeal and consummate musicianship. There's also a lesson here that the whole industry should take to heart: Where there's a will, there's a way, and it's OK to make fewer recordings, especially if you make great ones. Astounding!

--David Hurwitz

The career of conductor Rafael Kubelik (1914 – 1996) provides an interesting insight into the world of music in the twentieth century. Born the eighth child of the then world-famous violin virtuoso Jan Kubelik and his wife Countess Marianne Csaky-Szell, he was already commanding attention while he was studying piano, violin and composition at the Prague Conservatory between 1929 and 1933. In 1935 he embarked on a tour of the United States as his father's accompanist. The Czech Philharmonic Orchestra (which Vaclav Talich raised to the status of a top European orchestra) hired him as its conductor in 1936. When, the following year, Talich fell ill during a tour of western Europe, Kubelik filled in for him and began consolidating his international reputation. Despite his tendency towards subversive programming (he often included works by banned composers), he was able to retain the post after taking it over in 1941. In the post-war period Kubelik’s work with the orchestra enriched the cultural life of his country and in 1946 he became one of the founders of the Prague Spring Festival. Kubelik defected in 1948, though, in protest against the communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia. His three-year term as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra ended as a result of the ill will born him by the music critic Claudia Cassidy. His time as Music Director of The Royal Opera at Covent Garden was brought to an end because of opposition from Sir Thomas Beecham. Nevertheless, among orchestra musicians he was one of the most well-liked and esteemed conductors. His openness, fair moral principles and the friendly working atmosphere he created brought him a degree of recognition which even produced award-winning results in the recording studio.

"Gilels made two recordings of this concerto. The later version was made for DG in the early 1970s with Eugen Jochum and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and has earned a high reputation over the years. This earlier version, made in January 1958, is no less remarkable and very different. Perhaps it was the temporary transatlantic influence of Reiner and his orchestra which persuaded Gilels to see the concerto as a vehicle for a display of brilliant virtuoso playing, with fast tempos and little relaxation except in the third movement. certainly the playing in the overture has the same characteristics. But when this approach was harnessed to Gilel's intellectual strength the result was a performance of great power." -- The Gramophone

Riccardo Muti leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, men of the Chicago Symphony Chorus and bass soloist Alexey Tikhomirov in this poignant performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, Op. 113 (Babi Yar). Recorded live in September 2018, the ensemble shines throughout—from passages requiring the sheer sonic force of the first movement to the indelible moments provided by single instruments, reminding the listener that despite the enormity of its theme, this is, after all, a symphony of individuals. Muti and musicians expertly navigate the intricacies of the five movements, each set to the poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and expressing themes that were dear to Shostakovich—revolution and war, the individual’s role in society, idealism in the face of easy compromise, prejudice and intolerance. Yevtushenko said, “Over people like Shostakovich death has no power. His music will sound as long as humankind exists. . . . When I wrote ‘Babi Yar,’ there was no monument there. Now there is a monument.”

-----

REVIEWS:

There are American ensembles with a more sustained Shostakovich tradition than the Chicago Symphony but the present recording, taken from the opening concerts of the orchestra’s 2018-19 season, can stand comparison with any of its distinguished predecessors, however different in tone. Strongly recommended.

– Gramophone

The tone virtually throughout is dark and intense, most particularly the opening movement which sets the title poem. Muti confirms his identification with this work in its subsequent movements. Tikhomirov, rich-toned and sentient throughout, is backed by a superbly characterful Chicago Symphony Chorus.

– BBC Music Magazine

The CSO’s performance, with bass Alexey Tikhomirov and the men of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, revealed Muti’s continuing devotion to Shostakovich’s often-shattering music. It was the first concert of the CSO’s new Symphony Center season, and the audience’s mood was festive. Muti channeled that excitement into rapt, almost reverent attention with a searing performance of a dramatic work that is very close to his heart.

– Chicago Sun-Times