Christopher Gunning returns with recordings of his Violin Concerto, Cello Concerto and Birdflight. Not composed until 2011, Gunning’s Violin Concerto was composed after inspiration whilst the composer was out hiking in Wales. The violin is supposed to represent ducking and weaving, rather like the insects and animals found in the Welsh hills and valleys. However, despite this positive venture for the composer, the emotions of sadness and melancholy are never far from this music – feelings which never seem far from Gunning’s music. The Cello Concerto is quite different. Although composed hard on the heels of the Violin Concerto, it is generally darker though equally expressive. The third piece, Birdflight, is for the orchestra alone; a kind of tone poem. At the opening and close there is some quiet night music with spacious strings. The birds take flight but encounter a problem; a hawk is on their tail. The birds manage to hide and there is a pause. Then, when danger has passed, they take off and once again enjoy the sheer pleasure of flying.

Sono Luminus presents Der Klang der Offenbarung des Gottlichen, an opera in four acts by Kjartan Sveinsson. This marks the first collaboration between Sono Luminus and Kjartan, who is a founding member of the legendary band Sigur Ros. An opera of severe and supreme beauty, critics have raved about the work. “Der Klang boasts all the qualities we tend to associate with sweeping modern neo-classical—it's beautiful, reflective, sad...Sveinsson has a light touch, but his work hits a deeper and more visceral level, permeating and lingering long after it’s subsided...Whatever he does, he has already quietly announced himself as a major talent.” (Pitchfork) “Sveinsson, in conjunction with co-author Ragnar Kjartansson, has created an opera for the ages...it finds grace in unexpected places, arriving far after the prayers have ended.” (acloserlisten.com) "There is such a longing [for beauty] indeed in Sveinsson’s searching score, a meditative sonic canvas for Kjartansson’s exquisite images. Even absent the visual component, Sveinsson’s music summons a hushed awe that makes for a mesmerizing listen on its own.” (WQXR)

Sæunn Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir writes, “I dream in Icelandic despite having spent most of my life outside of Iceland. My native language shows itself in other ways too, as I found out early in my development as a cellist, when my teacher pointed out that I am extremely sensitive to the textures and overtones of sound, probably related to the abundance of unvoiced consonant sounds in Icelandic. It is an old language, preserved by isolation, and in the process of adapting to a quickly changing world. I see classical contemporary music sharing a similar process, finding new sounds and ways of expression through old means in a dialogue with our way of life. There is also an appreciation of silence and economy of expression in Icelandic culture that I find comforting and fascinating. This project is a compilation of pieces by composers that not only share my mother-tongue and culture, in language and music, but also bring their unique perspective and expression in their compositions. From the moment that I played Solitaire for the first time, I felt a connection, not only to the music but also beyond the music. The more recent pieces are collaborations with Halldór, Páll and Þuríður and I couldn’t have asked for more generous artists to come into my life and allow me to explore my voice through their music. This project has stretched me and challenged me in ways that I couldn’t begin to comprehend, a homecoming of sorts in my musical life and I have many people to thank for making it happen.”

Icelandic-American cellist, Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir, enjoys a varied career as a performer, collaborator and educator. She has appeared as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Iceland Symphony, among others, and her recital and chamber music performances have taken her to many of the world’s prestigious halls including Carnegie Hall, Suntory Hall, Elbphilharmonie and the Barbican Center. The press have described her playing as “charismatic” and “riveting” (NYTimes) and praised her performances for their “emotional intensity” (LATimes).

Julian Brink is a South African composer. Born in Johannesburg in 1989, he first picked up his mother’s guitar at the age of ten and grew up playing in rock bands. He discovered a love of contemporary classical music through the films of Paolo Sorrentino and Paul Thomas Anderson. Hearing Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will be Blood, in particular, was what led him to pursue composition. Although he didn’t learn to read music until he was 19, while studying guitar at undergraduate level, he went on to complete a master's degree in film scoring through Berklee College of Music and relocated to California in 2015. Brink works in film music and lives in Los Angeles with his wife, actress Maddie Hasson.

In collaboration with eminent classical label Sono Luminus, Utility Music is Brink's first standalone release. Originally composed in 2019 as a score for an abandoned film project, the music was arranged for piano, harp and string trio. It was later repurposed, reorchestrated and combined with a few older pieces into what is its current form. The album features performances by several distinguished musicians, with the heart of the music being the string trio of Moldovan violin virtuoso Dan-Iulian Drutac; Nick Revel, violist of the Grammy Nominated PUBLIQuartet; and Joe Zeitlin who was the lead cellist on Mica Levi’s Oscar-nominated score for Pablo Lorraín’s Jackie.

TRACKS:

• Colombo / Green Fingers
• Miniatures
• Simple Trio No. 1
• Eventually Lapse
• Albatross
• At Night
• Eastwood No. 4
• Simple Trio No. 2
• Aura for M
• Baptism in the Field
• Pattern Shells

REVIEW:

For his first standalone release, Julian Brink has repurposed and re-orchestrated an incomplete score for an unfinished film. The 11 short, delectable tracks ‘toss boundaries’, as the trombonist provocateur Juliane Gralle observes. Taken together, it feels like there might still be a movie in there, somewhere.

‘Miniatures’ has the feel of a haunted, southern Viennese waltz surrounded in fog, its central beauty emerging serenely through the mist accompanied by drops of ringing pizzicatos. ‘At Night’ features cellist Joe Zeitlin creating other-worldly shadings of tone and colour then lifting them gently from the musical score. The two ‘Simple Trio’ tracks, which offer a vade mecum of ‘uncomplicated transitions between notes to make the samples sound more realistic’, feature the trio of Zeitlin, violinist Dan-Iulian Druțac and viola player Nick Revel of PUBLIQuartet, which Brink describes as ‘the heart of the album. I try to forget that they haven’t all met each other and aren’t playing together in the same room.’

‘Albatross’ channels John Cage and Morton Feldman with mesmerisingly deceptive, irregular beats, wonderfully quiet. The last track, ‘Pattern Shells’, influenced by Villa-Lobos, is a spontaneous splurge of brass and tropical birds.

-- Gramophone

Icelandic cellist, singer, and composer Gyða Valtysdóttir, a founder of the band múm and 2019 winner of the prestigious Nordic Council Music Prize, releases Epicycle II. Gyða Valtýsdóttir came to prominence with electronic experimentalists múm, the lauded Icelandic group leading the charge in the country’s fertile underground scene in the early 00s, rightfully gaining international recognition. She left the band to pursue her studies as a cellist; gaining a twofold Master’s degree from Musik Akademie, Basel, both as a classical player and a free-improvisational one. Since then she has journeyed with a colorful palette of collaborators, including The Kronos Quartet, Josephine Foster, Damien Rice, Colin Stetson, Jónsi (of Sigur Ros fame), Skúli Sverrisson, Ólöf Arnalds, Ben Frost, Aaron & Bryce Dessner (from The National) and visual-artist Ragnar Kjartansson. To name but a few.

REVIEWS:

Some of the musicians, like her fellow art-pop renegades Ólöf Arnalds and Jónsi, emphasize her crystalline, eldritch voice. Others, including Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Daníel Bjarnason, deploy her cello in yearning lines and voluptuous waves. Altogether, the album offers otherworldly transport.

-- The New Yorker

Epicycle II is a wonderful experience and a tantalizing look into the future of experimental music collaboration.

-- San Francisco Classical Voice

Epicycle II is her crowning achievement to date.

-- A Closer Listen

From atmospheric micro-polyphony to heart-rending moments of electronic intimacy, the music is interesting and powerfully drawn.

-- Music City Review

A deeply cinematic score at times, this album is often transporting with great lift, giving the listener long opportunities to soar, bird-like, over the Icelandic landscape and beyond, for the most part leaving us safely and gently deposited on the earthly shore.

-- The Whole Note

This is a ‘concept-album’ around Maurice Ravel and his special relation with Hélène Jourdan Mourhange, a dear friend and violinist nicknamed "Moune." The program is set-up in order to take the listener by the hand into Ravel’s musical world through a series of pieces which are gradually more deep and complex. The music is played on a 1935 Hautrive piano, while violin and cello are played on gut strings. The Tzigane is in the rare version for Luthéal (Pleyel, 1910), a period prepared piano with a distinct character. About Lina Tur Bonet, Diapason writes: “Impressive: Lina Tur Bonet’s discography aligns beautiful achievements’. Indeed her previous releases have already collected all European awards.

Born July 10, 1923, in Tiflis (later named Tbilisi), Georgia, Rudolf Kerer (also spelled Kehrer) was descended from Swabian immigrants and grew up within the Pietist community in Georgia. He began piano studies at six, and by twelve qualified for the gifted class at the Tbilisi Conservatory. In 1938, he performed in public Tchaikovsky's first Piano Concerto. In October 1941, Kerer and his surviving family were deported as enemy aliens to Kazakhstan. Without a piano, he devised a “table piano,” a table on which he painted a keyboard, so he could “practice.” By 1949-at 26-he had given up his dream of a musical career but in 1954, in Uzbekistan, he was accepted at the state conservatory as a student in the class of Zelma Slonim-Tamarkina. Three years later, Kerer graduated, and began teaching piano in Tashkent. Four years later, in 1961, he competed in the second All-Union Competition in Moscow and won the first prize. Following this winning, Kerer became a professor at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. He performed throughout the Soviet Union but was not allowed to concertize abroad. In 1988, at 65, he was allowed to serve on the jury of the Beethoven competition in Vienna. He remained there to teach at the Musikhochschule for eight years. Later, he moved to live in Zurich, where he died on October 29, 2013. This release hears him performing some of music’s most beautiful piano concertos and sonatas.

Edward MacDowell (1860-1908), an exact contemporary of Gustav Mahler, was widely considered the most important American composer of his day-a time when American music was based primarily on European models. Antonin Dvorák called on American composers to turn to indigenous sources, such as Negro spirituals and Indian tribal music, for inspiration. MacDowell flatly rejected this, commenting, What Negro melodies have to do with Americanism remains a mystery to me." Thus, in the Piano Concerto No. 1 we hear the comfortable old echoes of the Grieg A minor and, in the finale, Dvorák's own concerto. MacDowell's second concerto displays a noticeably higher degree of originality, though here too the European influence is clear, in this case Saint-Saëns. The dark and portentous opening creates a mood of anticipation before the piano enters to launch the drama of the first movement. The finale is brisk and exciting, with some wonderfully bravura piano writing, with which soloist Stephen Prutsman unreservedly flaunts his brilliant technique. He's just as fine in the brief Witches' Dance, which is rather tame and far less spooky than we have come to expect after the likes of Berlioz. The soothing sounds of MacDowell's gentle Romance for Cello and Orchestra close this interesting program. As on many other Naxos recordings, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland (led here by Arthur Fagen) delivers performances of international caliber. Fine sound, too." - ClassicsToday.com (Victor Carr, Jr.), January 15, 2001

This new double-album by pianist Lars Vogt, violinist Christian Tetzlaff and cellist Tanja Tetzlaff includes some of Franz Schubert's greatest works of chamber music, including his Piano Trios and the Arpeggione Sonata in breath-taking interpretations. Pianist Lars Vogt tragically passed away on September 5, 2022 due to a serious illness before this album of Schubert’s chamber music was released. This album stands as a testament of his outstanding chamber musicianship together with his long-time chamber music partners Christian Tetzlaff and Tanja Tetzlaff. “If not much time remains, then it’s a worthy farewell. - - Incomprehensible. Such expression. Such fragility, such love.”

REVIEWS:

These are studio recordings made in separate sessions in 2021. Everything one could want in Schubert’s Piano Trios is present: rhythmic buoyancy, beautiful phrasing, united ensemble playing that still leaves room for individual voices, and inner joy in the music-making. There’s also the ineffable feeling of sympathy among three friends who feel free to be themselves without departing from the wholeness of a performance.

-- Fanfare

These 2020–2021 recordings containing the complete extant works for piano trio of Franz Schubert and featuring the well-known trio of cellist Tanja Tetzlaff, pianist Lars Vogt, and Tanja’s brother, violinist Christian Tetzlaff, are being released at this time partly in memory of Vogt’s untimely passing in September of last year. The recollections of both Tetzlaffs and their dignified expressions of sorrow for the loss of a longtime friend and collaborator who will certainly be very difficult to replace as the piano voice of the trio are most eloquent and moving.

In two well-filled CDs we are given all the music Schubert is known to have written for piano, violin and cello, including Piano Trios No. 1 in B-flat, D898 (Op. 99) and No. 2 in E-flat Major, D929 (Op. 100), the indescribably lovely Notturno in E-flat, D897, which was originally intended as the slow movement of Trio No. 1; a “Rondo brillant” in B Minor. D895; and a fine arrangement for cello and piano of the “Arpeggione” Sonata in A Minor, D821. The last-named gave new viability to a richly textured work originally written for a hybrid instrument that was soon considered strictly from Vaudeville and vanished from the musical scene.

All these works receive a stamp of excellence for the artistry Vogt and the Tetzlaffs apply here.

-- Audio Video Club of Atlanta (Phil Muse)

A radically systematic logic stunningly manifested itself quite early in the music of Richard Strauss. He avoided the instrumental genres, was attracted to the tone poem right from the very start, and worked toward the goal of making the opera his central focus. And yet his beginnings lay in chamber music, a fact demonstrated on this release with two examples in new recordings. The Piano Trio No. 2 is lengthier than its predecessor and very ambitious both in its tonal register and execution. The formal norms – sonata form, song form, scherzo, and then another sonata movement – are upheld with completeness and elegance. The piano trio had a long line of tradition going back to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, but the composer who set standards in the middle of the nineteenth century is particularly clearly recognizable here in a model function: Mendelssohn. Only about seven years passed between this trio and Strauss’s only Piano Quartet, but in 1885 too he was still a very young composer. The quartet displays impressive advances in technique; now Strauss apparently could draw on all the compositional resources then available, and the higher virtuosic demands on the instrumentalists are also quite evident. Strauss attracted the greatest attention with his large-format op. 13 lasting almost forty minutes, a work that even brought him a prize from the Berliner Tonkünstlerverein.

In his song settings, Korngold pursued the Romantic ideal and lavished considerable care and inventiveness on their composition. His seemingly effortless gift for melody is everywhere ap-parent in this second volume (Vol.1 is on 8.572027), whether in the early works or the songs from the 1940s, which would not sound out of place in an operetta or a Broadway musical. Also present, notably in the Drei Gesänge, Op.18, is an exciting, experimental approach to harmony that reflects the music of his most radical opera, Das Wunderder Heliane (8.660410-12).

REVIEW:

Already in the 1920s, as a young man, Korngold was composing in a powerfully vocal idiom, as can be heard in the four Lieder des Abschieds (Songs of Farewell). He did not become a prolific art song composer, but there are lieder dotted among his long list of compositions This second volume of his complete songs include Sonett fur Wien from 1953, just four years before his death. The mezzo, Sibylle Fischer, has the task of expressing so much sadness in the four Lieder des Abschieds, a mood she passes to the baritone, Uwe Schenker-Primus, in the Drei Gesange. He also has the task to hark on sorrow in the Lieder aus dem Nachlass, and we hear him to better effect in the forthright Five Songs. That Korngold wrote songs for the cinema surfaces with Morgen from the film The Constant Nymph, here recreated with a piano trio accompaniment, and sung with a smooth elegance by Britta Stallmeister. Together with the pianist, Klaus Simon, the vocal trio give us a rare chance to hear forgotten Korngold.

– David's Review Corner (SDavid Dento)

HK Gruber (b.1943) is one of the more refreshing of contemporary composers. His music is widely performed today, but since it takes time to become a household name many people have yet to make his acquaintance. Some background material is thus in order. This is how he presents himself on the Internet: 'Composer, conductor, chansionnier and double bass player HK Gruber (Vienna, 1943), is one of the most well-known and well-loved figures on the contemporary music scene, and yet he remains something of an enigma. Composing in his own highly individual style, he has been labelled 'new-Romantic', 'neo-tonal', 'neo-expressionistic' and 'neo-Viennese', but his music remains refreshingly non-doctrinaire - a deceptively simple and darkly ironic idiom which often includes a heavy dose of black humour. Berg, Stravinsky, cabaret and pop music are all influences, but whatever stylistic ingredients he uses in his works, he remains inimitably himself: one of the major talents of post-war music. Gruber's most popular and beloved composition, the neo-gothic 'pan-demonium' Frankenstein!!, was premiered in 1978 by Simon Rattle and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Sicne then it has travelled across several continents in several languages and in different guises: in concert, in staged performances, on television, and on film. Among Gruber's other compositions are a cello concerto writtten for Yo-Yo Ma, the percussion concerto 'Rough Music' and a trumpet concerto 'Aerial' written for Hakan Hardneberger and commissioned by the BBC Proms. His dramatic works include the apocalyptic opera 'Gomorra and Gloria'. This disc contains three important works by HK Gruber including his 'Cello Concerto' which is performed by Robert Cohen. The Swedish Chamber Orchestra is the eloquent band and the composer conducts the programme himself. Those of us who may sometimes be daunted by 'the dryness and abstraction of the content of the rigorous serial approach' will surely rejoice at Gruber's humour, enthusiasm and joie di vivre. At BIS we are very pleased at being albe to add his name to our catalogue.