The three works on this album were all composed between 1943 and 1953. Despite the extreme experiences and difficulties she faced during this undoubtedly most tragic time in Poland’s history, Grazyna Bacewicz managed to compose outstanding works which constitute splendid testimony to the vibrant creative potency for which she was renowned. Until 1939 her career as a virtuoso violinist and an emerging composer evolved naturally. Trained by the best Polish pedagogues at the Warsaw Conservatory, she went on to acquire an international education thanks to an Ignacy Paderewski Scholarship, which allowed her to pursue her studies in Paris: composition with Nadia Boulanger, violin with André Touret (1932 – 33) and Carl Flesch (1934 – 35). In spite of her soloistic successes she decided to join the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra as its leader, in order that an improved knowledge and understanding of an orchestra should inform her composition. Poland then suffered terribly at the hands of Hitler and Stalin, before coming under the control of the Soviet Union. This album was recorded and released in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, a state cultural institution promoting Polish culture around the world and actively participating in international cultural exchange.

REVIEWS:

Grieg’s four Symphonic Dances are a late work, completed in 1898. Grieg takes his inspiration (as in so much of his output) from traditional Norwegian folk tunes, and the four movements together deliver a symphonic unity in their overall effect. Both Bergliot and Before a Southern Convent are written on texts by Grieg’s good friend the author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, who was also a theatre manager in Oslo. Bjørnson is considered one of the four great Norwegian authors alongside Ibsen, Lie, and Kielland, received the 1903 Nobel Prize for literature, and wrote the words for the Norwegian national anthem. Bergliot – a declamation with orchestra – tells the story of a dramatic episode involving the chieftain Einar Tambarskjelve and his son Eindride, killed by King Harald Hårdråde. Before a Southern Convent is a more traditional setting – requiring two vocal soloists, female choir, and orchestra rather than the narrator of Bergliot – of the story of the folk-hero and barbarian Arnljot Gelline. In the course of his wild escapades, he killed a chieftain, but allowed the chieftain’s daughter, Ingigerd, to live. This daughter left the homestead and wandered southwards in poverty – through Europe. At long last she arrived at a convent which granted her admittance. The album is completed by the Funeral March for Rikard Nordraak – a friend of Grieg’s, who died of tuberculosis in 1866. Grieg conceived it first for solo piano, but whilst travelling by train to Bergen to attend Grieg’s funeral, Johan Halvorsen made the orchestral arrangement heard in this recording.

After our Bruckner/Haitink (CC 72895), we are very proud to present the result of a new collaboration with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and its prestigious Saturday Matinée series. This disc contains two major orchestral works by Reinbert de Leeuw, composed respectively in 1974 and in 2013. While Abschied is a stormy and compact piece, Der nächtliche Wanderer is an enormous work suffused with resonant memories. Both are world premiere releases and this CD is a significant addition to the contemporary music record repertoire.

Cut or Uncut?

Anton Bruckner would have been 200 years old in 2024. Instead of using flowery but ultimately helpless advertising slogans to promote the 100th release for the Bruckner Year, we are trying to encourage people to think about production processes in classical music with a special release. What is a recording actually about?

Anton Bruckner's 7th Symphony twice in full length, each time on one CD. A live recording (uncut) and a studio production (cut) under identical conditions. Compare them! And don't allow your judgement to be swayed by different recording circumstances!

This comparison would not have been possible without András Keller and Concerto Budapest. András Keller follows an unbroken European tradition that stretches way back into the last century, perhaps even as far back as Anton Bruckner himself. And the monumental arches and climaxes in Anton Bruckner's music are perfect for every listener to ask themselves: What do I want from a recording? What moves me more, live or produced, cut or uncut?

SOMM Recordings is thrilled to announce African Pianism, Volume 2, a new installment in a collection of piano music by African composers. Following suit from her critically acclaimed first African Pianism album, Rebeca Omordia brings us a fascinating program with no less than 8 First Recordings. Among these is the 4th in a selection of three Studies in African Pianism by Akin Euba, a Nigerian composer who makes a return on this second volume and whose “African Pianism” style, inspired by the research of Ghanaian composer J.H. Kwabena Nketia. The music of Algerian composer Salim Dada attempts to be a means by which a natural message of peace and dialogue may exist between the Arab-Muslim world and European civilization. Moroccan composer Nabil Benabdeljalil, like Akin Euba, makes a second appearance in this series with a new set of four pieces including 3 first recordings. Fellow South African Grant McLachlan contributes his arrangement for solo piano of the anti-apartheid protest song “Senzeni Na?”, which begins “What have we done? Is our sin that we are black?”. Fela Sowande, a Nigerian composer of the previous century, figures on the program with hauntingly original “K’A Mura” from 2 Preludes on Yoruba Sacred Folk Melodies. Also representing the first half of the 20th century is celebrated African American composer Florence Price in her luxuriantly pianistic Fantasie nègre.

Hailed as an "African classical music pioneer" (BBC World Service) and "a classical music game changer" (Classical Music), award-winning pianist Rebeca Omordia is an exciting virtuoso with a wide-ranging career as soloist, chamber musician and recording artist.

A selection of delightful miniatures for violin and piano in original versions and arrangements by some of Armenia's most admired composers. This album marks the Naxos debut of acclaimed violinist Nikolay Madoyan. A selection of Armenian piano music can be heard on Naxos 8.573467. Works by Arutiunian, Bagdasarian, Barkhudarian, and Komitas can also be heard via albums on the Grand Piano label.

The Pacific Quintet have gone beyond the standard classical repertoire and have selected pieces that represent their diversity. Its musicians were born and raised all over the globe — Japan, Honduras, South Korea, Germany, and Ukraine/Turkey — and here present music from their home countries, transcending all differences of culture, language, and tradition. Two pieces, one by the Honduran composer Jorge Santos and the other by the South Korean female composer Soeui Lee, were commissioned especially for this album, which also includes Fazil Say’s quintet Alevi dedeler raki masasinda and a medley of Japanese folk songs; Hanns Eisler’s Divertimento represents Germany, the Pacific Quintet’s home base. The album ends with an arrangement of music from West Side Story and pays homage to Leonard Bernstein, the founder of the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo where the players first met. As this project shows, they are truly United in music.

To mark the 75th anniversary of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO) in 2024, the BR-KLASSIK label is now making previously unreleased recordings of concerts available on CD and as a stream. The six-part composition My Melodies for eight horns and orchestra was composed between 2016 and 2018, revised for the first time in 2019, and then again in 2023 as the musica viva Munich version. It was commissioned by Bavarian Radio’s musica viva with the support of the Friends of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra e.V. This is a live recording of the premiere of the Munich 2023 version on June 23, 2023, from the Herkulessaal, again as part of BR's musica viva concert series, with the horn section and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Matthias Hermann.

Helmut Lachenmann, born in Stuttgart in 1935, is one of the most renowned German composers of contemporary music. He studied piano, music theory, and counterpoint in Stuttgart and composition with Luigi Nono in Venice. The first public performances of his works took place in 1962 at the Venice Biennale and at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. He taught composition in Hanover (1976-1981) and in Stuttgart (1981-1999), and gave numerous master classes in Germany and abroad. His works are performed by internationally renowned players and orchestras all over the world. Helmut Lachenmann has received numerous awards, most recently the GEMA German Music Authors' Prize for his life's work (2015).

The phenomenon of melody has long preoccupied Helmut Lachenmann. He went to study in Venice at the end of the 1950s with Luigi Nono, a teacher who strictly insisted on a critically reflective approach to musical material. Nono had objected to any trace of linear progression in Lachenmann's compositional sketches as a "tonal cell" – a melodic object that was seen as a recourse to a romanticizing tonal language that had to be overcome. The impetus for the scoring of My Melodies came from a rehearsal of Lachenmann's opera The Little Match Girl in Madrid in 2008: eight horns forming a homogeneous yet at the same time complex instrument. The premiere took place ten years later. In 2023, My Melodies was extended by 77 additional bars since that first performance, with Lachenmann drawing on further sketch material. It is rare for the composer to alter his own works after their premiere - but the sound ideas for the eight horns seem to have retained a special fascination for him. The bonus tracks offer short excerpts from this concert recording of My Melodies. They present characteristic passages of the work, inviting listeners to detect specific noises or sequences and to familiarize themselves with Lachenmann's world of sound.

Bruckner’s Fifth is eminently suited to an arrangement for performance on the organ above all because of its musical texture. In no other Bruckner symphony, for example, does counterpoint play such an important part. I am thinking in particular of the great fugue in the final movement. It really does seem as if many passages of this magnificent work were composed as if with the organ in mind, even though the Fifth is not a piece for organ at all, being in the first place a symphonic work. And yet it lends itself admirably to the extraction of a compositional substrate with no loss of essential content. That cannot be said of all Bruckner’s symphonies. Of all his symphonies, in my opinion, the Fifth, Eighth and Ninth are most amenable to an arrangement for organ. Building on the compositional core, it is the orchestral treatment above all that plays a key role. If this is lacking, an arrangement of the work can deprive the work of its grandeur. That is again at risk if one attempts to copy the orchestra or to transpose certain orchestral effects one-to-one onto the organ. Such an approach is generally unsatisfactory, because organ writing is governed by different rules than those applying to orchestral scoring. It would be fatal to make the organ rival the orchestra. My aim from the start was to avoid imitating the orchestra and to create a work specifically for organ in the manner of an organ symphony.