This album marks the culmination of two special Hallé collaborations and includes four major pieces from one of the most distinctive of current British compositional voices. Delyana Lazarova (Hallé Assistant Conductor 2020-23) and composer Dobrinka Tabakova (Hallé Artist in Residence 2022-23) were both born in the historic city of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Working together for the first time during their time with the orchestra they formed a strong musical connection in which the Hallé musicians displayed a close understanding of the intricacies and dialect of Tabakova’s musical language. This album contains two of Tabakova’s major orchestral works. The three-part Earth Suite, which the composer says was inspired by ‘the overwhelming force of Nature’, recently drew ‘exquisite playing’ from the Hallé (Bachtrack, April 2023).

Orpheus Comet features fast rhythmic material combined with atmospheric transparent orchestrations and a glorious climax featuring quotations from Monteverdi. The two significant concertos for strings and soloists included on this album solidified Tabakova’s reputation as an outstanding contemporary voice and display the composer’s close affinity with string instruments. Ukrainian-British Maxim Rysanov, is one of Tabakova’s longest collaborators who premiered the Concerto for Viola and Strings in 2004, a piece described as being ’saturated with an inner, captivating and natural energy’ (Culture Magazine, Nov 2004). The Concerto for Cello and Strings (whose score was described as ‘gorgeous’ by the Daily Telegraph, Australia) is here performed by Guy Johnson, one of the most exciting British cellists of his generation.

The program of this album offers a varied selection of chamber music with piano written by Hans Gál between 1922 and 1940. Among these, the main work on the album is undoubtedly the Piano Quartet written for the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein. The work consists of four substantial movements, and each of the movements is uniquely melodic; moreover, there are strong contrasts between the two light and airy movements II and IV on the one hand, and the dignified opening movement and delicate Adagio on the other. Richness and variety characterize this most productive period of composer Hans Gál. The rest of the program is of a decidedly lighter character than the Piano Quartet and shows Gál at his most fluid and melodic.

A MusicWeb International Recording of the Month for July 2022!

All in all Maria Bach left more than 400 works to posterity. Most (about 80%) are Lieder and choral works, followed by smaller-scale piano works; not unlike Edvard Grieg or Hugo Wolff, she was an expert in that field, though she did also compose three ballets, made up of small, orchestral piano pieces. Her most ambitious works then, are the few excursions she made into the realms of chamber music (solo cello sonata, cello sonata, piano quartet and quintet, string quintet and two string quartets), in which she ventured a confrontation with the traditions of the grand, established genres. On the present release, Oliver Triendl, Marina Grauman, Nina Karmon, Öykü Canpolat, and Alexander Hülshoff showcase Maria Bach’s chamber works, including the Piano Quintet “Wolga-Quintet”, the Cello Sonata, and the Suite for Cello Solo.

Review

[Maria Bach's] music is infused with French and Russian elements and one can quite hear why it was so appealing to Roger-Ducasse who ensured that her 31-minute Piano Quintet was performed at the Paris Conservatoire when she visited Paris in 1930-31. Like all good music it’s clearly susceptible to strongly divergent interpretive stances. The Hänssler team is anchored by Oliver Treindl, who in my experience is probably one of the most hard-working and often recorded of players. He’s also an athletic figure who ensures forward-moving tempi.

The eminent cellist Paul Grümmer was a family friend and Bach was fortunate he liked her music and played the Cello Sonata frequently. It’s modestly structured – three movements and 19 minutes in this reading by Alexander Hülshoff and Treindl – and has a ripe Brahmsian rhapsodic feel, with a warmly curvaceous lyricism in the Romanze second movement. As with the Piano Quintet the finale is full of dextrous animation.

The final work in the disc is the Suite for cello, a crisp four-movement affair that looks back to Popper, as the notes indicate, rather than [J.S.] Bach. After a sonorous, chordal Praeludium come the registral leaps of an etude-like Scherzo, an expressive Air and then another of her favoured variations for a finale – including a Tango-like one – which call for supple bowing. It’s a deft work, all the more so in not honouring [J.S.] Bach’s legacy in any obvious fashion.

In terms of amplitude and density of sound this disc is an impressive one. The players sound firmly engaged in what must have been unfamiliar repertoire. They’ve been backed up by some classy notes. For overt expression, choose this[.]

Jonathan Woolf 

This album of two piano quartets by Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) captures pianist Lars Vogt’s last recordings. Before his premature death and between treatments, Lars Vogt was able to record a multi-award-winning album of piano chamber music works by Schubert together with Christian Tetzlaff and Tanja Tetzlaff, as well as albums of Mozart’s and Mendelssohn’s piano concertos. However, a project to record Brahms’ complete piano quartets was left unfinished after the studio recording of Piano Quartet No. 2 was completed. With the help of recording producer Christoph Franke, we are now able to offer this recording together with Piano Quartet No. 3 from a live concert performance in connection with the studio recording. Combined, these make up Lars Vogt’s last recordings. Violinist Christian Tetzlaff, violist Barbara Buntrock and cellist Tanja Tetzlaff offer stellar performances in these landmark recordings and fulfill Lars Vogt’s late wish to have these performances released.

REVIEW:

The final recordings of pianist Lars Vogt have offered many riches, but this one is arguably the most profound of all. This may be the most intense recording of the C minor quartet on recordings. In both works, the coordination among the players evinces a joy that characterizes the highest ideals of chamber music.

— AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

Anna Noakes, concerto and recording soloist with BBC Concert Orchestra and RNSO has performed at the QEH, Wigmore Hall and Purcell Room as soloist, recitalist and chamber musician as well as at many of Britain’s most respected Festivals, such as Cheltenham, Brighton, Leicester, Salisbury, City of London and Dartington. Her playing has inspired composers such as Simon Holt, Martin Yates, Cecilia McDowall, John Ashton Thomas, Dave Heath and Martin Butler to write for her. Anna has recorded numerous CD’s for Dutton, ASV, Naxos and Guild of both solo and chamber music, many of which have received Gramophone Magazine’s coveted “Critics Choice”.

Anna broadcasts for BBC Radio3 and Classic FM and works as Guest Principal Flute with the LPO, Philharmonia, RPO, the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House and ENO’s together with ECO, Northern Sinfonia, CLS, Locrian Ensemble and Britten Sinfonia. She is also in demand to record the music for Film and TV, scores that include, Kingsman, Golden Circle, James Bond, Lord of the Rings, Stardust, Hugo, Arthur, Chicken Run, Golden Compass, Black Swan, Narnia series, Harry Potter, Shrek, Da Vinci Code, Bridget Jones and Love Actually to name a few.

Professor of Flute at Trinity College of Music for seventeen years, Anna has given masterclasses for BFS, RAM, RNCM, GSMD, DIC Dublin, Cork School of Music and is currently the woodwind coach for both World Youth Orch, LSSO and Cambridge University. Anna is a founder member of the South American Folk Ensemble ‘INCA’ and was for ten years the Artistic Director of the Yoxford Arts Festival.

The inherently civilised music of the composer and pianist Jean-Michel Damase (1928–2013) reflects, to an endearing degree, the combination of subtlety, mastery and – as we hear in this collection – the inspiration and lasting high quality of wind playing in his native France. This inherent quality for long encouraged the country’s composers to write with a particularly sensitive ear for the possibilities of wind instruments – few national composers in the twentieth-century could write for such soloists and ensembles with the felicity and natural inspiration as the French exhibited.

This new album by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and its chief conductor Nicholas Collon features some of the most recent orchestral compositions by Magnus Lindberg culminating with his new Viola Concerto, a substantial new work masterfully performed by Lawrence Power as soloist.

Composer Magnus Lindberg (b. 1958) is one of Europe's leading names in contemporary music. Having traveled a long road as a composer, from the steely and edgy modernism of his early period to the soft and sonorous sound worlds of his most recent output, Lindberg's new, more emollient sound world building on a harmonic environment rooted in pentatonic scales at times seem to hark back even to Debussy and Impressionism.

After Songs of Solitude (BIS-2553), a project designed by Hiyoli Togawa at a time when Covid forced people across the world into isolation (released in March 2021), the Japanese-Australian violist now presents another themed album focusing on the situation of children. During the pandemic, she kept thinking of the many children who do not have a loving home and were forced to stay at home, and so were exposed helplessly to violence, hunger and poverty.

As with her previous disc, she commissioned works on the theme of childhood from composers around the world. Thirteen of them, from Europe, Asia, North America and Australia, answered the call and embarked on a journey into childhood. The result is a collection of lullabies, childhood memories and adventures. Playful, wild, silent, funny, serious or dreamy, these works are musical pleas for the rights of children around the world. Hiyoli Togawa combines them with the Allemandes from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for solo cello. Each of these Allemandes presents a new character, opening a very special dance universe. They invite us to surrender ourselves to the genuine and undisguised joy of playing and perhaps, almost, to lose ourselves in it – to find ourselves.

Allan Pettersson’s Symphony No. 15 is characterized by a high degree of tension right from the striking opening: brief, emphatic chords from horns and trombones above the tremolo of a side drum. Soon an expressive melodic subject is heard from the first violins, followed by contrasting rapid scales – at which point Pettersson has presented the greater part of the symphony’s building blocks. Like so many of the composer’s symphonies, the 15th is in one movement, but with clearly defined sections. It was completed in 1978, two years before Pettersson’s death, and was followed in 1979, by the sixteenth symphony, the last work that the composer submitted for performance. Only later did it become known that Pettersson had also been working on a Viola Concerto – a work that, if not fully completed, was so far advanced that it has been accepted as part of his œuvre. It is presented here by the Swedish violist Ellen Nisbeth, who also performs one of Pettersson’s very earliest compositions – a Fantaisie pour alto seul, dated June 1936, when the composer himself was about to embark on a career as violist. On this the tenth disc in their acclaimed Pettersson cycle, the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra and Christian Lindberg bring their combined expertise to bear on the orchestral scores.

The familiar in a new guise – Tatjana Masurenko and the Yaruss Quartet are therefore in good company when they clothe the music of the Russian Romantics in novel acoustic garments. Using viola, soprano domra and alto domra, accordion and double bass, they play 19th century works in their own arrangements, using gut strings for all of their instruments, the domras sounding somewhat like Italian mandolins. In this guise, compositions by Rimsky-Korsakov, Musorgsky, Borodin and Glazunov seem lighter, more open and agile, their music expressing a fresh elegance with different colours, taking on a completely new character.