All my life I have admired, studied and performed the music of the extraordinary Argentinian composer, Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992). So, when I was offered the chance to publish a whole instrumental Piazzolla album of my own for the centenary of his birth, I decided to base my tribute solely on Piazzolla titles but… with a little something extra. I decided to design a varied and comprehensive listening experience - an hour of accordion solos, instrumental duos, and pieces that I arranged for accordion and a small ensemble as a tribute to the Master of Tango! The music is all Astor but with a touch of Bjarke here and there and maybe everywhere, in fact. There are no singers involved, but Piazzolla’s music sings, and our instruments sing, and at every corner there is melancholy, tripping feet, fast figures, and an atmosphere of Buenos Aires.” (Bjarke Mortense) All of Piazzolla’s more than 750 works are inextricably bound to an essential and unmistakable Argentinian identity. His output includes an opera, music for the theatre, film scores, concertos, chamber music and songs. He loved to startle the listener by spicing up his music with chromaticism, dissonance and abrupt surprises: yet Piazzolla paid homage to Johann Sebastian Bach on almost every page he ever wrote. In commemoration of the genius of Nuevo Tango the young Danish master of the modern accordion, Bjarke Mortensen and his friends serve up a true musical banquet that will satisfy all tastes.

Andreas Späth was a clarinetist, a violinist, an organist, and a voice teacher as well as the city music director in Neuchâtel, the concertmaster of the Ducal Court Orchestra in Coburg, and an honorary member of the Swiss Music Society. His death at the ripe old age of eighty-five in 1876 marked the end of an active and richly varied musician’s life – so that it is hardly surprising that he wrote more than 150 compositions for a wide range of genres. Rita Karin Meier has explored Späth’s works for clarinet, his early main instrument, and teams up with the Galatea Quartet and Karl-Andreas Kolly for a long-overdue tribute to this composer who is entirely forgotten today.

The Nocturnes, the three Melodies, and the Elegy also very much reflect the character of romantic composition. The title of the last work in particular might mislead today’s listeners. Anything but melancholy and sorrowful, it tends more to the free form of a fantastic character piece and includes spirited polonaises. There is also more to the Melodies than the title might suggest; they are concertante duets elaborated with fine art. Meier, the principal clarinetist at the Zurich Opera, and Kolly present these works with wit and charm- in what is a highly rewarding discovery!

Alex Weiser's latest recording, the follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-nominated and all the days were purple, is a love letter to New York City. Featuring acclaimed singer Annie Rosen with a seven-piece chamber ensemble, the album comprises two song cycles that explore the city from complementary perspectives. The first cycle, in a dark blue night, features five settings of Yiddish poetry written by newly arrived immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These poems reflect on the city at night — glowing, quiet, majestic.

It's followed by Coney Island Days, told through the recorded memories of Weiser's late grandmother. It features vivid, buoyant adventures about childhood in the bustling immigrant world of Coney Island in the 1930s and 40s — days at the beach, at the family's knish store, at the Russian baths and much more. "My grandmother grew up in Brooklyn spending summers in Coney Island, living with her family in a single room behind their knish store," Weiser says. "Hers was a multilingual world where she was taught English at school, but where her Yiddish-speaking parents could barely understand the language of their new land."

Together the two cycles celebrate the marvel and multiplicity of New York City, through a look at a little-explored chapter of its history.

Heinrich Baermann is quite well known today as Carl Maria von Weber's source of inspiration. The famous virtuoso, for whom Weber personally created his clarinet concertos, repeatedly took up the pen on his own - and did so with great success. Several dozen works by Baermann have been transmitted to us. Here Rita Karin Meier and the Belenus Quartet turn to his three quintets for clarinet and strings and with them very outstandingly bring back to life his much-acclaimed cantabile playing as well as his legendary virtuosic capabilities. Especially in the Quintet in F minor, Op. 22 Baermann's closeness to Weber cannot be missed. The tempestuous beginning, in which the strings introduce the yearning and urgency of the Allegro non troppo, is pure romanticism from the very start. The magnificent opera scene in the second movement offers Rita Karin Meier outstanding opportunities to display her wonderfully warm tone in all sorts of different shadings. The Adagio of the Quintet Op. 23, which even today is quite frequently performed, acquired unsual fame. After its rediscovery in 1922 it was initially regarded as a work by Richard Wagner - which absolutely certifies its high quality!

Viktor Kalabis (1923-2006), one of the most distinguished figures of 20th-century Czech music, wrote dozens of opuses, mainly instrumental pieces, including for his wife, the world-renowned harpsichordist Zuzana Ružickova. As he himself put it, his aim was to create music rooted in his country, music for educated listeners. Although he also drew inspiration from 20th-century classics, Kalabis arrived at a synthetic style of his own, an alternative to the rational compositional techniques – a Neo-Romantic alternative, akin to Neo-Classicism. Besides the first ever album of Kalabis’s complete piano oeuvre, Ivo Kahanek and other leading Czech instrumentalists have recorded the composer’s three sonatas. The one for cello reflects the dramatic events in Czechoslovakia between June and September 1968: the months of euphoria of the Prague Spring, followed by disillusionment and resignation in the wake of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion, which for two decades to come would numb all hopes of freedom. The clarinet sonata (1969) too clearly refers to the time of its coming into being: drama, grief and sorrow, escalated into harrowing helplessness. The elliptical and coherent violin sonata (1982) places emphasis on the instrument’s typical ethos – melodiousness, bright sound and soulfulness. After 3 albums featuring Kalabis’s symphonies and concertos, the present recording affords yet another insight into the composer’s musical universe.

The internationally renowned Czech-born composer Karel Husa, Pulitzer Prize and Grawemeyer Award winner, gathered invaluable experience from Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger, with whom he studied in Paris in the 1940s and 1950s. He was also greatly influenced by the folk music of his native Bohemia, as well as Slovakia, which is duly reflected in his Évocations de Slovaquie and Four Bohemian Sketches. Husa’s later pieces for clarinet and a variety of other instruments attest to his propensity for innovation and experimentation, yet all of them are comprehensible and listener-friendly. The present album opens with the gracious and, now and then, melancholy Sonatina by Bohuslav Martinu, who, just like Husa, studied in Paris and experienced exile sorrow. The young Czech clarinettist Anna Paulová, a Prague Spring laureate and the holder of numerous accolades from other international competitions, has enthusiastically devoted to Karel Husa over the long term. Recorded with superb instrumentalists, her Supraphon debut is likely to increase general interest in the remarkable composer’s music. A variety of clarinet colours and shades in Karel Husa and Bohuslav Martinu works

The Finnish artist Christoffer Sundqvist is one of the leading clarinetists of his generation, and we are very happy to have won him for our complete edition of Louis Spohr's works for clarinet and orchestra (partly first recordings!). Not only the extremely brilliant and masterful four clarinet concertos can be heard, but also all the other works for clarinet and orchestra, composed at that time for the virtuoso Johann Simon Hermstedt. When Hermstedt played Spohr's potpourri on themes from Winter's opera "Das unterbrochene Opferfest" op. 80 in Leipzig on October 13, 1812, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung commented: "The potpourri for clarinet was not only very happily composed from ideas of the sacrificial feast, but these ideas were also mostly quite excellently processed; and so it would like to stand at the top among the works of this genre. An indispensable complete edition, not only for clarinetists!

Following his acclaimed recording of sonatas by contemporaries of Beethoven, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet further celebrates the great composers’ anniversary year with this set of the complete Beethoven Piano Concertos. Electing to direct the Swedish Chamber orchestra from the keyboard, Jean-Efflam writes: ‘To play a concerto under a conductor who shares and enriches one’s vision of the work concerned is one of the greatest joys in the life of a soloist. Nevertheless, one can also admit that some aspects of performing without a conductor may prove advantageous. Rehearsal time is generally speaking made longer by the process of working out the different protocol of gestures from the soloist and the leader in coordinating the ensemble playing. As this work proceeds a creative bond is forged, resulting in an artistic osmosis, a common vision of the work, in which compromise has no place. For the pianist there is also the delight of appearing face to face with the entire orchestra, in direct visual communication, the musicians perhaps more likely to take personal initiatives, thus multiplying the pleasure of a genuine participation, dialogue, and musical exchange.’ The Cadenzas used in this recording are all Beethoven’s, from the set that he wrote-out in 1809, and so are contemporaneous with the Fifth Concerto.

REVIEW:

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's interpretations are distinctive in several respects and succeeds in standing out from the crowd. The Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, has a straightforward slow movement quite unlike the stomp fests that have become routine, but the subtlety and rhythmic complexity of Bavouzet's solos in the outer movements is absorbing. In the Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat major, Op. 73 ("Emperor"), Bavouzet unleashes the full ringing tone of his unusual piano, and he manages the trick of getting a really exciting, forward-moving reading of this work with a small group. With fine engineering support from a small university auditorium in Sweden, Bavouzet delivers a Beethoven concerto cycle that's worth listeners' investment of time and money.

– AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

Aaron Copland’s popular Clarinet Concerto, with its tender and poignant opening, highly virtuosic central cadenza and brilliantly jazzy final movement, is preceded by Robert L. Aldridge’s Clarinet Concerto, which has been described as the direct descendant of the Copland. Classical, folk, jazz and klezmer influences are brought together in a work which is infectious in its driving rhythms and soaring melodies. Aldridge’s Samba for clarinet and string quartet is an attempt to make this instrumentation sound like a Latin big-band. David Singer, the acclaimed longtime principal clarinetist of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, is joined on this recording by the internationally renowned Shanghai Quartet and A Far Cry Orchestra, a Boston-based collective of young professional string players who perform without a conductor and with rotating leadership.