TRUMPET CONCERTI

PIANO CONCERTOS 20-25

GUITAR CONCERTI

SYMPHONIES 35-41

SPARTACUS / GAYANCH & MASQUERADE SUITES

CONVERSATIONS IN SILENCE from the Nashville Chamber Orchestra is a selection of sumptuous folkloric instrumental music performed by an exceptional group of musicians. Classical tradition is adhered to but not stridently; the songs are infused with a Western sensibility.

PLANETS

VIOLIN CONCERTOS

SYMPHONY 1

GRAN PARTITA

martinu sym. no. 4 martin turnovsky; a. navarra, cello;ladislav cery, viola; Pavel Stepan, Ilja Hurnik-piano; L. jasek, violin; Czech Phil. Orch.Prague Chamber sym. Orch. ; Martin Turnovsky great czech conductors martin turnovksy

Julius Röntgen was a remarkable composer: prolific, joyous, traditional at heart, but eclectic in practice. As with many, similarly productive artists, his output is often adjudged “variable” by those who haven’t heard most of it. Of the roughly two dozen symphonies that he composed, most appeared in the final years of his life (he died in 1932). No. 9 dates from 1930. Subtitled “The Bitonal,” Röntgen called it “ultra-modern,” and indeed the opening bars bear a striking resemblance to those of the Berg Violin Concerto, composed some five years later (sound clips). That said, this single movement piece, lasting only a bit more than a quarter of an hour, quickly reveals its clearly tonal grounding, “bi” or not. What truly stands out is not just the harmonic audacity, but the often arresting use of instrumental color (the harp at the start) and keen feeling for atmosphere. It’s a fine piece.

Symphony No. 21 is a touch longer–a single movement just shy of twenty minutes. It has a certain Brucknerian nobility both in the writing for the brass as well as the freely contrapuntal style of much of the texture. It dates from only about a year after the Ninth, which tells you something about Röntgen’s rate of production during these late years. The earlier Serenade (1902) does exactly what music of its type ought to: it’s relaxed, tuneful, sunny, lyrical, and vivacious by turns. Röntgen’s love of Grieg and the Scandinavian nationalists is very much in evidence.

As with the other discs in this series, David Porcelijn leads vivid and confident performances of this very unfamiliar music. He secures good playing from the Frankfurt players, and CPO’s sonics, typically, are terrific. This disc admirably displays both Röntgen’s wide range of expression and his development as an artist. It’s music well worth getting to know.

– ClassicsToday (David Hurwitz)

The stage had fascinated Alexander Tansman ever since his youth. One example is the music for Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, which was performed at the Polish Theater in Lódz in 1916. Alexandre Arnoux wrote the librettos for the ballets Sextuor and Bric à brac. The atmosphere of his novella Sextuor recalls E. T. A. Hoffmann’s romantic narratives. It is the dramatic love story of the passion shared by a violin and a violoncello for a flute. The actors are musical instruments, and Tansman believed that here he had found ideal material for a ballet. And so it was: the work composed in 1923 was performed with great international success and made the young composer famous. Although he suffered a great loss when his mother died in 1935, Tansman found the strength to write a larger theatrical work. The result was the ballet Bric à brac. The director of the Grand Opéra in Paris wanted this ballet set between stalls of wood and corrugated iron at a flea market near the Porte de Clignancourt for a premiere during the 1939 / 40 season. However, the outbreak of World War II thwarted these plans. After long negotiations the work finally premiered on 30 November 1958.

While Louis Glass until about 1910 had endeavored to develop a personally colored type of late romantic symphonic music, a new, strange dimension then suddenly opened up in some of his works. This dimension was connected to the influence of theosophy, which began around 1913 and would lead to some works of speculative stamp. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and others had established the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. One of her pupils, the English author Annie Besant, served as the society’s president beginning in 1907 and established the Order of the Star of the East in 1910. When the Danish section first met, Louis Glass played the organ. It was around this time that Glass began his work on the Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra, as this work is the first that reflects the composer’s relation to theosophy- which is shown above all in the work’s introspective motto alluding to theosophy: “From the spirit’s eternal canopy tones calling man sound down. And man turns away from the world and remains alone in order to find peace.”

The influential critic Karl Flodin commented after the premiere of Sibelius’ Second Symphony: “A symphonic poem the like of Sibelius’ Second Symphony has never been heard before, it’s something rarely heard in the genre of modern symphony. The more you listen to this brilliant work, the more powerful its contours seem, the deeper its soul appears and the more striking become the clues which hint at an understanding of this composition.” OehmsClassics has found the perfect partners for this recording with Dmitrij Kitajenko and the Gurzenich Orchestra Cologne and has complimented Sebelius’ Second Symphony with two delightful short pieces by Edvard Grieg. The Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne is one of Germany’s leading orchestras and can look back on a great tradition. Since 1986 the ensemble’s home has been at the Kölner Philharmonie, where it presents about 50 concerts annually, simultaneously giving over 160 performances a year at the Cologne Opera.

Hamburg marked an important year in its history in 1762. The city’s large St. Michael’s Church had been destroyed by fire in 1760, and twelve years later the magnificent new Baroque structure (as yet without a tower) was dedicated. This event was celebrated as an official state ceremony, and of course Georg Philipp Telemann, the city’s music director, who by then was eighty-one years old, had to supply the music for it. Aware of the great importance of this event, he produced one of his most magnificent and most expressive scores with an ensemble including six double-choral trumpets and timpani. He wrote Der Tag des Gerichts, the great oratorio of his old age, during the same year, and his dedication music is situated on this same high musical level.

Classical Music

Reinhard Goebel, an esteemed Baroque music connoisseur, ranks Zelenka among the five best composers of the first half of the 18th century. The cycle of six sonatas for two oboes, bassoon and continuo serves to prove that his assertion is far from being mere hyperbole, that it is a justified opinion worthy of being giving serious thought. Although for many years Zelenka performed all the duties of Kapellmeister and court composer of the Dresden Hofkapelle, he did not gain the appraisal he deserved. Zelenka’s sonatas are among his “free” works, which he wrote urged by innermost needs, above and beyond his official commitments. The pieces reach the very limits of musical possibilities – both as regards placing high technical requirements on the performers and the compositional methods and means of expression applied, including the striking architecture of the cycle as a whole. The result is magnificent and fascinating indeed; owing to its complexity and timelessness, the sonatas may perhaps only be compared with J. S. Bach’s six cello suites. And when these gems are undertaken by musicians as open-minded and of such superlative quality as members of the Berliner Philhamoniker, the listener can look forward to a great feast. The present recording is extraordinary due to the combination of the technical facilities of modern instruments and the profound insight into Baroque performance.

A luminous, easily recognizable instrument, and a symbol of Italy's learned and popular musical tradition, the mandolin has been the subject of several major compositions throughout the history of music. First of all, the famous concertos by Vivaldi: two of them appear here on this intensely romantic album (‘Come une volta’) that Julien Martineau - one of today’s greatest figureheads of the instrument - has recorded for Naïve. We also finally get to hear, thanks to the world premiere recording by Julien Martineau, the legendary, virtuosic and poetic second concerto (of which the manuscript was lost) by Raffaele Calace (1863-1934), who was often described as "the Paganini of the mandolin". The instrument is in fact so close, in many ways, to the violin. The Caudioso concerto completes an album which, steeped in authenticity and musical excellence, honors and lends prestige not only to the art of mandolin, but also to Italian and musical culture as a whole.

Four years after CPO issued an initial volume of David’s invigorating symphonies (Nos 1 and 6 on CPO 777 741-2 – Gary Higginson’s enthusiastic recommendation can be read here), we now get a second helping in performances that were seemingly laid down some three years before those on that disc. In contrast to death and taxes, CPO’s recording and release schedule are a mystery to us all (and a source of frustration to some). Having said that, those of us who feared for the recording of rare repertoire when CDs first emerged should simply be grateful for the stalwart work CPO actually do; who, thirty-odd years ago, could possibly have foreseen complete recorded cycles of Searle, Frankel and Wellesz symphonies, to name but three ‘Brits’ off the top of my head?

I can only reiterate my colleague’s enthusiasm for David’s symphonies. On paper, an expectation of ersatz Hindemith or Hartmann would be quite understandable. Descriptions of David’s music have often suggested dry, competent academicism – the reality seems very different. There is a clutch of stylistic allusions and comparisons one could make, but there is a great deal that is fresh, inspired and enjoyable about these works. Above all, they don’t meander; they appear to be really coherent and well-formed. This was my abiding impression of the first disc, and it applies here too. Indeed, the splendid Second Symphony on this disc lasts almost three-quarters of an hour – and I would argue that is not a moment too long.

Scored for a big orchestra, this work was completed by David in the summer of 1938 while he was holidaying in the upper Austrian highlands. It begins with a mysterious, chromatic theme played on a solo flute, before other solo woodwind instruments take on the melody and the sound and structure begin to fill out. These understated chamber-like wind textures belie what is to come. There are a lot of exposed solo lines in this work, which hint at a hibernal solitude. However, frenetic strings eventually join the fray, projecting a virility which certainly evokes Hindemith. The material evolves naturally from the original theme (indeed David embraces monothematicism throughout his symphonic corpus) and is developed most skilfully. Vibrant colours are achieved via judicious washes of tuned and untuned percussion which sporadically perforate the fuller orchestral textures. The mood of this music seems untouched by the date and place of its provenance – although it’s neither ecstatic nor joyful, it instead projects a sense of cautious optimism. One passage at 9’13 strongly evokes Hindemith’s great Harmonie der Welt symphony - David’s work pre-dates it by 13 years! As the movement heads toward its conclusion, with more adroitly played solo clarinet and bassoon, the mood briefly becomes more melancholy and terse. But this is a momentary reflection; the busy string gestures soon return and see us to the movement’s energetic, meaty conclusion which, in turn, suggests this composer’s true hero, Bruckner. Notwithstanding David’s fiercely twentieth century idiom the spirit of the Linz master is rarely far away in this music.

The two central movements, largo e cantabile and scherzo, are both relatively brief. The note quotes a contemporary critic as detecting a hint of Pfitzner’s operatic masterpiece Palestrina in the slow movement. Adopting an arch-like structure, it is an enigmatic, ambiguous essay which generates an uneasy calm. The string writing at its centre is glowingly beautiful. Rhythmically speaking the Scherzo is even more Brucknerian; here I detect something approaching bucolic joy, albeit one that’s oddly claustrophobic. The central trio section delights in strummed string effects. Some of the wind writing is almost jazzy and certainly gloriously sophisticated. The main theme soon gets under one’s skin. It ends abruptly - seemingly a David trademark.

The finale is a massive and ambitious passacaglia. I found it deeply impressive, but it requires effort on the part of the listener. It portentously reconstitutes the main theme from the first movement, initially stated in lower strings, and presents 31 superbly contrasting and interesting variations, seamlessly woven together with richly imaginative orchestration and plenty of opportunity for the principals of the ORF band to show off. There is a suppressed and not necessarily benign power at work in this compelling and measured movement. The ORF orchestra may lack the weight and sheen of their better- known Viennese counterparts but they invest this strange music with real passion and exceptional commitment. I suspect it would require a cold heart for a keen listener not to be moved by it. While I certainly found David’s Symphonies 1 and 6 to be technically accomplished and compelling, I believe this Second Symphony trumps them both. Needless to say, one cannot help but repeat the oft-asked question: where has this music been all my life?

The Symphony No 4 is harder work; it is effectively David’s ‘War’ Symphony. He made three attempts at writing it: the second draft was destroyed with his home in Leipzig during an air-raid in 1944. In fact, according to the booklet note, David rushed back into his burning house and rescued his son’s parakeets and what he thought was the almost-completed symphony. As it turned out it wasn’t – he thus reconstructed it from memory in a third and final draft which he completed in 1948. The opening dirge-like theme emerges gradually in winds and strings in the opening, brief slow movement. The brass provide more ominous colours which add to the prevailing solemnity - given the circumstances of the work’s gestation, this material seems more than apt. Gary Higginson mentioned Rubbra in his review of the earlier disc and there is again a hint of that composer’s controlled power in this movement. The pent-up energy is released in the following Allegro moderato, a terrific and compelling fugue. It builds inexorably with ripe timpani rolls and imaginative counterpoint towards a brass-dominated conclusion which again ends abruptly. Another Brucknerian Scherzo follows. The first half of this is oddly wistful and as light as air, suspended by what the note describes as “…impressionistically shimmering sonic ornaments…”. The orchestration in the middle section thickens momentarily before serene harp figurations puncture the flowing strings and winds. The movement concludes with a mercurial sense of urgency. At the outset of the fugal finale, the material heard at the opening of the work returns, somewhat shorn of any residual sentiment. It generates a somewhat muted, but not unappealing momentum. The orchestration throughout the finale is both transparent and vivid although its ending is somewhat troubled and ambiguous.

David’s Fourth Symphony then is a terse and rather compressed affair. It doesn’t disclose its qualities immediately and is the archetypal tough nut to crack. I’ve given it a few listens now and although I am beginning to like it, I feel it lacks some of the easier-going charm of its coupling here. Wildner leads the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra in searching and committed accounts of both works, although I didn’t find their efforts here quite as polished as those on their previous David disc. As mentioned, that was recorded three years later and I suspect the orchestra by then had better found their way with this composer’s distinctive idiom. The recording is faithful without being spectacular and I am happy to report that CPO’s documentation is first-class – there is a wonderfully detailed introduction to these works by Dr Bernhard A. Kohn (the keeper of the David archive) which has been translated into perfectly comprehensible English (not always the case with CPO). As with the previous volume it includes several musical examples of David’s thematic material. I hope we aren’t kept waiting too long for the next instalment in this fascinating series.

– MusicWeb International (Richard Hanlon)

“The two concertos are distinguished by their classical musical language rich in ideas and their colorful instrumentation. Eberl’s music radiates with a lightness similar to that of Mozart, which is why the later confusion about the authorship of their works comes as no surprise. The piano part has a glistening and brilliant sound, while the orchestra forms a richly instrumented accompaniment. The melodic invention and harmonic structure are of timeless beauty.” This is what klassik.com wrote of the Vol. 1 featuring the piano concertos of Anton Eberl. Vol. 2 with his Concerto for Two Pianos op. 45, a work highly esteemed by his contemporaries, has a stylistic design adhering to the ideals of Viennese classicism and stands out for its multifaceted instrumentation. Eberl too seemed to have had a high opinion of this work. Whenever it was possible, he performed it during his concert tours throughout Germany, for example, in Berlin with Giacomo Meyerbeer, who was not even fifteen years old at the time. The release also includes the two Sonatas for Piano Four Hands op. 7, works proving to be very demanding in their piano parts as well as in their compositional structure.

SR9 Trio promotes a creative vision of current Western percussion. Attached to the classical musical heritage, they are actively involved with careful rereading and transcriptions for 3 marimbas of emblematic scores. Since its creation in 2010 at the CNSMD of Lyon, the SR9 Trio performs in France and worldwide, notably in the United States, Canada, Germay, England, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. Paul Changarnier, Nicolas Cousin, and Alexandre Esperet are three young and curious musicians and they definitely express themselves in a wide range of performances. They like to collaborate with various artists to explore other artistic fields, including dance and theater, and create new projects where all disciplines merge into one creative expression. This programme follows their previous release “Bach at the Marimba,” and is conceived upon the theme of dance throughout music history, from Rameau to De Falla.

Peter Seivewright was amongst the first musicians to seriously research (in 1994) the 100+ keyboard sonatas by Venetian composer Galuppi, also famed as a pioneer of opera buffa. While others have since come to appreciate and record the fine variety and novelty of these works, for many personal and career reasons, Seivewright’s series was held up after volume 3 was released in 2004 but is now back on track with this intermediate album which includes also the G major Piano Concerto. Many of the sonatas have had to be reconstructed from single movement manuscripts. They show amazing diversity, from single-movement works to two- and three-movement pieces, and from basic baroque style to a Romanticism prescient of Schumann. Seivewright strongly believes that the works were specifically written for the pianoforte rather than harpsichord due to their frequent need for sostenuto and other factors. Peter Seivewright studied at Oxford then at the Royal Northern College of Music. He has performed extensively as recitalist and concerto soloist and has taught in colleges around the world, from Scotland to Trinidad to Afghanistan and most recently in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

While the music world is getting ready for next year’s 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth, this year’s bicentennial of the birth of the Polish national composer Stanislaw Moniuszko has gone practically unnoticed outside Poland. For this reason, this new recording of his two string quartets is all the more welcome. The composer who would become the celebrated master of the operas Halka and The Haunted Manor wrote these quartets during or shortly after his Berlin study years and in a style continuing to draw on the vocabulary of classical models. At the same time, the twenty-year-old student displays a sense of humor, melodicism, and chamber finesse that not only make for a genuinely rewarding listening experience but also are worth hearing again and again. A “late” creation by Moniuszko’s young fellow Pole Juliusz Zarebski is being presented here together with the quartets. At the end of his life this favorite pupil and confidant of Franz Liszt wrote an absolutely “avant-garde” piano quintet that might have launched a bold and daring oeuvre but ended up serving as a farewell: when this virtuoso pianist and composer delighting in experiment died in 1885, he was a mere thirty-one years old.

‘Rencontre' is the first recital album of soprano Raquel Camarinha and pianist Yoan Héreau, new signings on Naïve. It crystallizes several years of passionate live music-making for the duo. From Debussy to Poulenc, via Ravel and the all-too rare Delage, we are invited on a journey akin to a game of mirrors between composers, music, poems, characters and performers, that is in turn amorous, dreamlike, mysterious and wonderfully evocative. The Portuguese soprano Raquel Camarinha was born in Braga in 1986. She began her vocal studies in 2000, completed the Secondary Singing Course in 2004, and in 2009 the Undergraduate Course in Music, at the University of Aveiro. In 2011 she took her master’s degree at the Paris Conservatoire Supérieur de Musique et Danse, in the class of Chantal Mathias. Winner of several national and international awards, in 2011 she won first prize at the Luísa Todi National Singing Competition in Portugal, as well as the Best Female Performer Award at the Armel Opera Competition in Hungary.