The new album Lady Viola presents various viola repertoire performed by Czech eminent violist Kristina Fialová. Pieces on this release include by Rebecca Clarke, Sylvie Bodorová, Lillian Fuchs and more. Fantasia for Solo Viola by Sláva Vorlová is world premiere recording. Kristina Fialová has been primarily praised by the critics for her impeccable technique, impassioned performance and sophisticated musical sentiment. After winning the Michal Spisak International Competition in Katowice, Poland, she was invited to the major concert stages around the world. Her appearance at the prestigious Tivoli Festival in Denmark was followed by her debuting in Tonhalle Zürich, Cologne philharmonic hall, Sumida Triphony hall in Tokio, Gran Teatro Nacional in Lima and giving a recital at the Prague Spring festival.

For the past twenty years, while maintaining an unsurpassed career as a trombone soloist and in tandem with being a sought-after conductor, Christian Lindberg has also been composing. Previous releases of his music have earned him critical praise: the reviewer in American Record Guide ‘was captivated by his interesting ideas and rich harmonic language’ while his counterpart on German website Klassik-Heute characterised Lindberg as ‘a marvellously deft, self-reliant composer’. The present album is the third BIS release dedicated entirely to Lindberg’s music, and features some of his more recent works. In his own liner notes, Lindberg describes his method of working, and explains the background of the three pieces recorded here with the Odense Symphony Orchestra. In regards to Steppenwolf, his viola concerto, he was attracted by the solo instrument’s ‘melancholic and deep qualities … offering an opportunity to compose something that could never be expressed in the same way with, for instance, a violin’. In a classical, three-movement concerto form, the work isn’t programmatic as such, but while composing it, Lindberg was reminded of the novel by Hermann Hesse. The title of the following piece, on the other hand, refers to a previous composition by Lindberg himself. Composed for a television project involving music as well as dance, the fifteen-minute Tales of Galamanta uses material from the ‘arte commedia’ Dawn from Galamanta.

Wells Cathedral Choir and director Matthew Owens are joined by violist Philip Dukes and mezzo-soprano Rachael Lloyd for this exploration of choral works by the American composer Gary Davison. Part of a continuing and fruitful relationship, all of the works on this recording were written for, and premiered by, the Wells choir. Consisting entirely of first recordings, this new album contains Davison’s largest work to date – the 'Missa pro defunctis', a powerful and moving setting of the Requiem – alongside 'Most High, Glorious God', the beautifully simple 'Wessex Service', and the uplifting 'Awake, My Soul'. The Wells Cathedral Choir was hailed in 2011 by an international jury from Gramophone as the greatest choir with children in the world, and the sixth greatest overall. The choir celebrated its 1100th birthday in 2009: boys first sang at Wells Cathedral in 909 and the full choral tradition dates back over 800 years. In 1994 the choral foundation at Wells was enriched by the addition of girl choristers. Today the choir consists of eighteen boy and eighteen girl choristers. and twelve Vicars Choral.

One aspect in the life and work of the great Genoese virtuoso Nicolò Paganini that may be lesser known but in no way should be underestimated is the pronounced interest with which he dedicated himself to chamber music both as an interpreter and as a composer. He was drawn in particular to the genre of the string quartet – and here we are presenting his energetic String Quartet No. 3, a work revealing his brilliant mastery in the field of chamber music. In his Tre Duetti for violin and bassoon Paganini also proves to be a very sophisticated composer of chamber music who succeeds in lending each of the three duets an individual, independent character. Among other things, these works have in common the beautiful cantability of their themes and a writing style radiating obvious joy in the shared musical experience, in “jouer,” as the French so fittingly term it. The influence of song is in constant evidence when we speak of the Italian instrumental music of the nineteenth century in general and in particular of Paganini’s chamber music or that of composers such as Rossini and Donizetti who distinguished themselves mainly in the field of the opera. In the three duets this vocal influence is naturally combined with the clear requirements of instrumental part writing.

Individuality that unfolds in the common effort – it is here that we are likely to find the secret of the Vogler Quartet, an ensemble that has pursued a unique career with the same membership ever since 1985. “The Vogler Quartet demonstrates that homogeneity, tonal warmth, and rich sonority need not stand in opposition to transparency and clarity. This is congenial performing on a benchmark level!” This is what klassik-heute wrote of the preceding release in our edition of Dvorák’s quartets. We are now presenting Dvorák’s Quartets Nos. 2 and 5 and the Terzett op. 74 on Vol. 4 in this edition with these highly acclaimed interpreters. To paraphrase Hartmut Schick, the author of the most important German-language monograph on Dvorák’s quartets, the formal idea to return to the essential themes of the preceding movements in the finale of a cyclical work in order to form a summation from them at the end played a significant role in Dvorák’s composition of instrumental music in more than one movement. In his last works, such as his ninth symphony, he developed this process to its fullest potential, and it is also a factor in his young Quartet No. 2. In his Quartet No. 5, however, the composer again sought close contact with the Classical quartet tradition. Nevertheless, it is unusual that all four movements of the quartet are in F minor. His Terzett op. 74 is not a four-movement sonata cycle but a freer collection of four character pieces. This was the way that Dvorák stylized Slavic folk music: In the main part he interlocks 2/4 time and 3/4 time in the manner of a furiant. The theme of the A major trio has a second beat with syncopated accentuation and resultant lengthening pointing to closeness to the slow mazurka type. The last movement is formed by a series of variations on a theme invented by Dvorák in the manner of an instrumental recitative and then varied a total of eleven times.

String quartet-mates Bogdana Pivnenko, Taras Yaropud, Kateryna Suprun, and Yurii Pogoretskyi join forces with pianist Iryna Starodub to bring some of Ukraine's most brilliant twentieth-century music to the world.

Boris Lyatoshynsky was a leading member of a new generation of Ukrainian composers that emerged in the 1920s. His expansively conceived Ukrainian Quintet finds him at his most emotionally overt, with a heartfelt Lento e tranquillo second movement. Dedicated to Lyatoshynsky, Valentin Silvestrov’s Piano Quintet dates from the start of his Modernist odyssey of the 1960s, while Victoria Poleva’s withdrawn and secretive Simurgh-quintet is part of a style that embraces spiritual themes and musical simplicity, referred to as sacred (or 'holy') minimalism in the West.

REVIEW:

Violinist Bogdana Pivnenko and her team make a strong case for the Poleva's Simurgh-quintet, showing great sensitivity, yet also enough dynamic range to create a sense of momentum towards the ending. The pioneering nature of this disc will hopefully encourage more exploration of this repertoire.

-- Gramophone

Bela Bartok, while most widely known for his orchestral works, was also an established composer of chamber music. His music for violin has become some of the most important in the instrument’s repertoire. The three works featured on this recording have been transcribed for viola by Vidor Nagy. Vidor Nagy, accompanied by Peter Nagy and Divertimento Budapest, brilliantly performs these technically challenging works.

Andreas Speer writes of this new album: “A soft knock at the door. Who is it? Could it be? - Hopefully it is! - Hidden feelings, longings arise, a sense of who and what it could be, and then the door opens, and it's him – rather than crashing in he enters cautiously, and the reality is even sweeter and more beautiful than imagined - Please excuse me giving rein to such unrestrained romanticism, but these are pretty much the associations running through my mind as I listen to this recording. The tapping motif in the timpani and the singing lover are as one: Beethoven's Violin Concerto is chamber music. Daniel Gaede plays unaffectedly without any soloistic pretensions and on the same wavelength as the Polish Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra under Wojciech Rajski. As a prelude rather than an encore, the three brothers in spirit, Daniel, Thomas and Sebastian Gaede play the Serenade op. 3.”

Josef Schelb (1894–1977) is one of the better-kept secrets of German music. His output was substantial: he lost most of his early music in a bombing raid in 1942 but, as if to make up for lost time, wrote some 150 more works after that, in the tonally liberated, quasi-Expressionist contrapuntal tradition of Hindemith and Hartmann; Bartók was an important influence, too. These three concertos show him at his most engaging: the contrapuntal craftsmanship that drives the music forward is deployed with a light and nimble touch, and passages of touching delicacy contrast with others where a lively sense of humour comes bubbling up to the surface.

October 29, 1923 - a date steeped in history. In the midst of a year of political and economic crisis, the age of public radio in Germany was ushered in with the first broadcast of the "Berliner Funkstunde", from the attic of an office building on Potsdamer Platz. The composers assembled on this album not only profited from these developments, but also, in part, actively shaped them.

The composer Ernst Toch experienced the crisis year of 1923 in Mannheim, where his "Dance Suite" op. 30 was premiered on with great success. In this work, Toch was able to realize his interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration and new forms of expression. His imaginative use of instruments is one of the most fascinating aspects of the suite.

The "Frauentanz" for soprano, flute, viola, clarinet, horn and bassoon op. 10 by Kurt Weill, written in the summer of 1923, reflects the interest in chamber music line-ups typical of the time. The decisive factor was not only a new ideal of sound and expression, but also the experience that in times of crisis, pieces with small ensembles had better chances of being performed.

Ernst Krenek had found essential impulses for his work in Berlin; when the crisis came to a head in the summer of 1923 he composed the "Three Mixed Choirs" a cappella op. 22 on poems by Matthias Claudius. Krenek designed these folksong-like works written by a lyricist from the epoch of Empfindsamkeit as parables.

For the festive concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of the unification of the cities of Buda and Pest to form the capital and residence city of Budapest in the autumn of 1923, Béla Bartók created his "Dance Suite" for orchestra - a "rather touchy issue", as the internationalist-minded composer explained in a private note.

REVIEWS:

Given [the events of 1923 in central Europe], you might imagine a CD of mostly German music entitled 1923: Wild Sound of the 1920s might sound a bit, well, wild. Far from it. If anything, it shows the opposite: surrounded by violence and the threat of chaos, the four composers represented here by works they composed in 1923 responded by raising their art to the nth degree of refinement and subtlety. Take Ernst Krenek, a composer who nowadays is remembered for a smash hit opera about a Black jazz musician, and for writing later in life some of the most fearsomely intellectualized, complex works in the entire history of music. He’s represented on this disc by three settings for choir of the 18th-century poet Matthias Claudius, of a ravishing otherworldly beauty caught to perfection in these performances.

Kurt Weill, known to the world for his bitingly satirical music dramas, appears as the composer of seven exquisitely allusive, bittersweet songs based on medieval German poems. Ernst Toch’s Dance Suite is a brilliantly imagined set of six “character” pieces for just a handful of instruments, with titles like The Red Whirling Dance and Idyll. Standing somewhat to one side of all this German romantic/modernist intensity and compression is the Dance Suite by the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, with its rumbustious evocations of Balkan and North African Music.

The occasional whiff of expressionist harshness or a gently satirical distortion of a waltz shows these composers were not completely cocooned in their composing studios. They were alert to the jarring, shifting currents outside. But what the CD reveals most strongly is how much these composers were focused on their own internal, imaginative world – and how much they cared about craftsmanship. Every bar in all four pieces is exquisitely made, and that quality is caught in the performances, which are all of enormous refinement.

-- The Telegraph

The year 1923 was a year of crisis in Germany; inflation was heating up and far right-wing parties were jockeying for power. In October, the first broadcast of public radio in Germany took place from the “Berliner Funkstunde” station on Potsdamer Platz. This provocative new disc from the Choir and Symphony of Bavarian Radio includes four works written a hundred years ago by a group of innovative composers who all made use of the new, disruptive technology of radio.

Kurt Weill’s Frauentanz is a suite of seven medieval songs, scored for soprano, flute, viola, clarinet, horn and bassoon. Weill helped to create the familiar soundtrack for Weimar Berlin, and this performance by Anna-Maria Palii and the fine instrumentalists of the Bayerischen Rundfunks orchestra provides the authentic feel of a society that was becoming increasingly decadent and hysterical in 1923 and beyond.

Ernst Toch’s Dance Suite is another clever and imaginative piece with interesting orchestration: flute, clarinet, violin, viola, double bass and percussion. The Berlin sound is also evident here, something a bit harsh and raw, in contrast with the softer-focused, more lyrical and pastoral modernism of Paris.

The Ernst Krenek work is a bit of a surprise: his 3 Choruses for a cappella choir . The ‘antique’ sound of these pieces remind me of two of my favorite works: Vaughan Williams’ G minor Mass, from 1921, and Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Missa São Sebastião, from 1937. All three provide old wine in new bottles: ancient cadences with a modernist twist.

The final work on the disc is probably the best known: Bela Bartok’s Dance Suite for Orchestra. This is an orchestral showpiece, a kind of try-out for his Concerto for Orchestra written more than two decades later. Both pieces treat orchestral instruments in a solistic, virtuosic way. The source material might be folkloric, but this is definitely written in a modernist idiom.

Inflation, far right-wing agitation, disruptive technology: yes, we’re talking about 1923, not 2023. And the music on this disc is as fresh and forward-looking as some of the best music written today.

-- Music for Several Instruments (Dean Frey)

The English composer Steve Elcock (b. 1957) spent years writing music without ever expecting it to be heard: based in rural France, he worked as a translator, composing in his spare time. The emergence of his orchestral and chamber music on Toccata Classics over the past few years has led to his being acclaimed as one of the most important composers at work today. This recording of his four works (to date) for string quartet confirms that judgement: all in single spans, they generate tension and energy in equal measure – animated, in one of them, by a lively sense of humour.