Sekles (1872–1933) was a leading figure in German music in the first decades of the20th century. In 1928, as director of the Hoch Conservatorium in Frankfurt, he established the 1st academic program in jazz studies, an act of courage that unleashed furious attacks from Nazi press. His music was banned during the 3rd Reich and was virtually forgotten until now.

Following the announcement by Tasmin Little of her intended retirement from the concert platform, we wanted to create an album that would stand as both a tribute to, and celebration of, her outstanding career as a performer. What better way to do so than ask her to select her own, personal favorites from her recorded career? An exclusive Chandos artist since 2010, Tasmin has made a series of recordings that have proved a cornerstone of the Chandos schedules for a decade, and feature a range of composers and styles of quite breath-taking variety. The first album concentrates on concerti, and features both Walton’s and Britten’s concertos with Edward Gardner, along with the slow movement of her award-winning Elgar recording with Sir Andrew Davis. The second features works from Vivaldi though to Shostakovich via Brahms, and includes (among many other gems) her recording of Vaughan Williams’s iconic The Lark Ascending. It also celebrates Tasmin’s recital partnerships with three outstanding pianists: Piers Lane, Martin Roscoe, and John Lenehan. As she writes in her booklet note: ‘I am very happy that this final, double-album set should reflect so many aspects of me as a musician; and I remain full of gratitude for the tremendous opportunities I have been given to play and record with the greatest musicians of today. I hope you all enjoy this final release.’

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was one of Italy’s most influential and important composers during the 20th century. He was inspired to write for the guitar after meeting Andrés Segovia, and in the years that followed he wrote over one hundred works for the instrument. The Quintet for Guitar and String Quartet, a rare combination, reveals perfect sonority and construction with a serene Iberian mood. The Sonatina for Flute and Guitar contrasts joyfulness with poignant melodies, while the Eclogues are bucolic and lively. Written for Segovia and his wife Paquita Madriguera, the Fantasia for guitar and piano presents an expertly blended texture for this combination of instruments. Guitarist Leonard Becker is the Second Prize winner of the International Hannabach Guitar Competition 2020, held in Augsburg, Germany. He has performed with orchestras including the Pilsen Philharmonic Orchestra, with which he performed Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuezin 2019. Alongside Louis Vandory, Valerie Steenken, Elisabeth Buchner and Márton Braun he is the founder of the Tedesco-Quintett (guitar and string quartet), which won First Prize at the International Chamber Music Competition ‘Gerhard Vogt’ in 2019.

Max Reger has remained a controversial composer, in a way perhaps comparable to Wagner, Hindemith and Shostakovich. Even today, the presence of his oeuvre is by no means a matter of course in concert life or on recordings. There are still numberous musicians, including serious ones, who reject Reger's work, at times with good reason. Even a trained, experienced listener may find his works difficult to grasp, let alone comprehend. This release does a great deal to compensate for the gap in knowledge of Max Reger.

After her acclaimed PENTATONE debut with Transfigured Night, Alisa Weilerstein returns with a complete recording of Bach’s Cello Suites. These pieces present the highest mountain to climb for any cellist, and one of the most transcendent and rewarding experiences for listeners alike. With his suites, Bach crafted — essentially without direct precedent — a body of solo cello music that forever defined the genre and brought the Baroque cello on par with its more popular cousin, the viola da gamba. Since Pablo Casals put them in the limelight again after 150 years of relative oblivion, Bach’s suites have become the alpha and omega for generations of cellists. To Weilerstein, the joy of this music — vibrant, contemporary, unquestionably alive — is the joy of discovery. Having heard and studied these pieces for years, she now entrusts her interpretation to the listener. Since signing an exclusive contract PENTATONE, Alisa Weilerstein has released Transfigured Night (2018), and featured on Inon Barnatan’s Beethoven Piano Concertos Part 1 as well as Old Souls, an album with music for flute and strings (both released in 2019).



REVIEWS:

Weilerstein’s special qualities? Her resolve to allow each movement of each suite to shine on its own terms. Hers is not an overview systematically imposed but more a way to facilitate the cycle’s immense expressive range piecemeal. Not that the best of her rivals don’t; but with Weilerstein you enjoy the sensation of being escorted through a Baroque dance hall by an all-encompassing commentator with a comprehensive understanding of what she plays.

– Gramophone

Put Weilerstein next to most of her colleagues in these suites (competitors would be the wrong word – Bach doesn’t encourage competition) and she would win for sheer resonance of tone and length of line...There are dozens of recordings of these suites to choose from, but this stands up with the best.

– Guardian (UK)

When the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals revived the solo suites of Bach in the first decades of the last century, he reminded both audiences and composers of the huge potential of his instrument to hold the stage in its own right, no less than a violin or a piano. Inspired by his charisma, and that of his successors such as Tortelier and Rostropovich, many modern composers have followed Bach’s example. The Italian cellist presents music by ten of them on this exciting debut album for Brilliant Classics. Tortelier and Rostropovich are represented by their own, little-known but highly imaginative works – a Circus Suite and an innocently titled but fearsomely challenging study respectively. Carter Brey, the principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic, has also written for the instrument with inside knowledge, in a tango of big, seductive gestures preceded on Tarantino’s album by Latin-themed showpieces from Albeniz, Piazzolla and Rogerio y Taguell. Each half of the album is brought to a reflective close with a soliloquy by the modern Italian composer Giovanni Sollima. The cello’s melancholy moods are further explored by Ilse de Ziah and Sebastian Diezig, but Tarantino has chosen and ordered his repertoire to display the cello’s expressive range to its fullest. Mixing familiar and little-known composers, it’s a perfect introduction to the ever-expanding universe of solo cello music beyond Bach. Born in 1977, Luciano Tarantino is a performer and teacher with his origins in Puglia, in the far south of Italy. He has played with many of today’s greatest conductors and founded a music festival in the region of his birth. On this recording he plays a fine 1736 cello by Antonio Testore.

Recent scholarship on Luis Misón (Mataró, 1727–Madrid, 1766) demonstrates the growing interest among the musicological community in studying the life and work of one who is an essential composer in the history of Spanish music. Musical historiography has extolled Misón's contribution to the genre of the tonadilla escénica, a genre widely appreciated in his time and which must have had a notable influence on his instrumental music, about which less is known. His talent as a flautist was appreciated within the noble circle of the House of Alba, where musical academies were held in which Misón actively participated and for which he composed 12 sonatas for transverse flute and bass dedicated to the Duke of Alba. These pieces were located in the archives of the House of Alba and described in 1927 by José Subirá (1882–1980), but unfortunately they disappeared during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). The discovery of the five hitherto unknown Sonatas for Flute and Bass by Misón represents a substantial contribution to the Spanish chamber music repertoire of the second third of the 18th century for this instrument, given the scarcity of pieces written by Hispanic composers contemporary to Misón in which the flute is definitely the real protagonist. Moreover, they are sonatas which, from a technical point of view, pose interesting challenges to the flautist, something that highlights Misón's mastery of the flute, in accordance with surviving documentation of the period.

Ortega explains that José Teixidor (c.1751–c.1811), vice-master of the Royal Chapel from 1778, considered his works to be no lesser than those of the best-known foreign composers and said of him that he was an unequalled performer on the transverse flute. The sonatas are found in five musical manuscripts preserved in the Lebrija Palace in Seville, a stately home dating from the 16th century, which in 1901 became the property of Regla Manjón y Mergelina (1851–1938), Countess of Lebrija. With regard to the sources, it seems unlikely that any of the five are autograph. (Although up to five different copyists have been identified, there is nothing to suggest that any of them could be Misón, himself.) Generally speaking, the sonatas are characterised by the importance of melody, regular phrases and steady rhythms, as can be seen in the elaborate seisillos of the Allegro moderato of the Sonata [No.3] in G major. Overall, the basso continuo line is simple – excepting the B section of the Allegro of the Sonata [No.4] in G major (undated) – allowing the role of the flute to stand out prominently. This recording is the culmination of a long process of recovery of Spanish 18th-century musical heritage that deserves to be disseminated, studied and enhanced. After more than two centuries of silence, Misón's music is heard again.

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was born in Venice in 1678, in a period during which the cello was acquiring popularity in the world of concerts and an important role in musical entertainment. The Red Priest ennobled the soul of the cello. It gave him the inspiration for no less than twenty-seven concertos for solo cello, a concerto for cello and bassoon (rv 409 in E minor), another one for two cellos, string instruments and basso continuo (rv 531 in G minor), a considerable number of works with the indication “violoncello obbligato”, and nine sonatas for cello and basso continuo (in addition to the beginning of a tenth sonata which has been lost). For these works, musicological research has often placed the name of Vivaldi side by side with that of Antonio Vandini, whose six sonatas for cello and basso continuo have been recorded for Tactus by Bologna Baroque in 2018 (TC 692202). For the recording, we used two cellos of the Fondazione Orpheon that belong to Maestro Jose Vasquez: a cello of the Montagnana School (circa 1750) for the solo part and a Simone Cimapane from 1692 (that according to some written evidence had belonged to Arcangelo Corelli’s orchestra) for the basso continuo part.

Joseph Haydn once remarked: ‘I was not a magician on any instrument, but I knew the power and effect of all of them.’ This knowledge he used to good effect in his cello concertos, composed some twenty years apart for two different cellists in ‘his’ orchestra at the court of Prince Esterhazy. Both works are firmly established in the concert repertoire, but this has not always been the case. Concerto No. 1 in C major was long believed to be lost and it was only in 1961 that a set of parts were discovered in the Prague National Museum. The D major concerto, on the other hand, was never lost, but for a very long time there was doubts concerning its provenance. Only when Haydn's manuscript was found in 1954 could the work’s authorship be clarified beyond doubt.

These two jewels in the cello repertoire are here performed by the acclaimed Swiss cellist Christian Poltéra who also directs the Münchener Kammerorchester. Closing the disc is a work composed some 150 years later: the composer and viola player Paul Hindemith wrote his Trauermusik for himself to perform at a concert commemorating the death of George V of England in 1936. It is here heard in the version for cello and strings.

REVIEW:

Christian Poltéra is front and centre in these vivacious performances of Haydn’s two cello concertos. His ‘Mara’ Stradivari is in fine voice, throaty and gruff in chivvying low-register passages but singing plangently in the high-lying lyrical writing that is such a feature of both works.

-- The Strad