On this transatlantic album, three American composers born during the first half of the last century rub shoulders with two young musicians from Eastern Europe. A member of the BBC New Generation Artists scheme, the violinist Aleksey Semenenko first met the pianist Artem Belogurov at the Stolyarsky Special Music School in Odessa at an early age. Even if their individual careers have taken to different parts of the world, the two still perform together whenever possible, and here they present three sonatas. Of the composers, the best-known is André Previn who composed his Violin Sonata No. 2 in 2011 for Anne-Sophie Mutter. An improvisatory spirit permeates the work which is in three movements with the markings Joyous, Desolate and Brilliant. Tony Schemmer and Paul Gay are both based in the Boston area and share a background in which jazz and classical genres merge. This is reflected in their sonatas, composed in the 1980s and here appearing on disc for the first time.

REVIEWS:

My tastes in repertoire generally stop with the mid-20th century and I don’t take an active interest in contemporary work. Perhaps that very fact indicates why I responded so favorably to Crossroads: American Violin Sonatas, for here are three composers—two of them still living—who continue the craftsmanship, seriousness of purpose, and tonal communicativeness of the best mid-20th-century American music. These sonatas offer no Postmodern spoofery, nor avant-garde aural assaults. All three composers deftly mix popular elements with their classical technique yet in a way that is integral and natural.

The performances of the Ukrainian musicians are faultless and idiomatic, as is the recorded sound. This delightful disc afforded some new discoveries for me and comes strongly recommended.

-- Fanfare

Semenenko and his duo partner present premiere recordings of jazz-influenced sonatas written in the 1980s. The Schemmer is a particularly joyful discovery.

-- BBC Music Magazine

The Stockholm Syndrome Ensemble is – as the name implies – based in Stockholm, and consists of five of the city's leading musicians. Project-based and often inviting guest performers, the SSE is known for its imaginative programmes built around a particular event or concept and bringing together music from various genres and eras. For its first release on BIS the ensemble has taken Brett Dean’s Voices of Angels as their point of departure, a work scored for the same forces as Schubert’s ‘Trout quintet’ and inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s first two Duino Elegies: ‘Angels (it’s said) are often unable to tell whether they move amongst the living or the dead.’ Dean’s work from 1996 opens a programme which ranges from Bach to Sofia Gubaidulina, and includes various scorings for between two and six performers. The angels reappear in songs by Wagner and Gubaidulina performed by Christianne Stotijn, one of the ensemble’s guests on this disc – but it is also safe to assume that they are standing around the heavenly throne which Bach approaches in the chorale prelude ‘Vor Deinen Thron tret ich hiermit’ – here transcribed for strings. The same prelude is the subject of Gubaidulina’s Meditation, while the disc closes with a work by Gubaidulina’s friend Alfred Schnittke, namely his Hymn for cello and double bass.

In 2008, Carolin Widmann, Jörg Widmann, Nicolas Altstaedt and Alexander Lonquich performed Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the end of time for violin, clarinet, cello and piano with the seriousness of spirit and subtle understatement that the work requires. Composed in 1940 in a German prisoner-of-war camp, Messiaen here reached a pinnacle of his composing career at the age of just 31. In this work he conveys to his listeners his spiritual interpretation of (musical) time and plays of colour. With these four exceptional chamber musicians, all masters of their art, the Salzburg Festival was treated to an exemplary performance of this work.

Made between December 1948 and June 1950, these recordings enjoy an unusual history which is bound up with the burgeoning industry of classical music retail in the postwar era. Among the best stocked record stores in New York at that time was The Gramophone Shop on 42nd East Street, co-owned by William H. (Bill) Tyler and Joseph F. (Joe) Brogan, an Irish-American collector and dealer. Trying to rival or surpass the mail-order business of H. Royer Smith in Philadelphia, the shop issued (in 1929 and 1931) two fat paperback catalogues, The Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music. Three further editions, from 1936, 1942, and 1948, remain standard reference works. The store also ran it's own mail-order business with the reputation as a specialist in rare and high-quality recordings from Europe. From that arm of the business naturally developed the store's own label, marketed as the Gramophone Shop Celebrities (GSC) series. This is the first time these recordings have been available on modern media.

Ronald Center (1913–73) is sometimes described as ‘the Scottish Bartók’, and his music does indeed capture some of the stark, wild energy of the Scottish landscape in a style of Bartókian asperity. These three string quartets show him, in his northeast corner of Scotland, to have been fully conversant with the quartets being written around the same time by Barber, Britten and Shostakovich, but their direct manner, terse expression, wiry humor and roots in Scottish folk-music ensure that Center is his own man.

The beauty that the Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks evokes in his works would not be possible without the experience of violence and cruelty in this world. He grew up in a country deprived of liberty, and because of his faith and his artistic convictions he was exposed to reprisals from Russian cultural doctrine. His father, a Baptist pastor, was regarded as an “enemy of the people”, and his homeland was under Soviet control. As a result, Vasks developed a vision of freedom and subtle protest in his music. In the so-called “singing revolution”, the countries of the Baltic region with their traditional love of choral music initiated their independence from Soviet rule. Vasks' expressive, direct and often deliberately simple music quickly became the mouthpiece of the long-suppressed Latvian people, giving the nation a proud voice that can be heard worldwide.

Today, alongside Arvo Pärt, Vasks is one of the most famous composers from the Baltic states of the former Soviet Union. The works on this release are for chamber-music string ensembles: his first symphony "Balsis - Voices" (1991), the haunting violin concerto "Tala gaisma - Distant Light" (1996/97), and the piece "Viatore” (the traveler; 2001), dedicated to Arvo Pärt, here in a version for eleven solo strings by the conductor, church musician and arranger Stefan Vanselow. The Münchner Rundfunkorchester plays under its chief conductor Ivan Repušic, and the concerto soloist is Stanko Madic, first concertmaster of the MRO.

REVIEW

Distant Light's heartfelt, rooted performance may well prove a front runner in a field more competitive than that of any other concerto by a living composer. There is a strong sense of narrative sound from Repušić’s orchestra but also from Madić, whose control of vibrato and tone colour ranges from nervous intensity to still radiance. The cantabile movements retreat without exactly relaxing, the cadenzas are determinedly articulate and the overall power is cumulative more than choreographed. The difficult-to-record ending comes off well.

Recommended as a string-only immersion in Vasks’s world, a competitive account of his most famous work or just something to keep you going until the light actually returns.

–Gramophone

Inspired by the image of a violin melody ‘flying off’, Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng’s virtuosic three-movement concerto Let Fly interweaves Chinese and Western classical elements. Vivid legends of astrological animals inform Zodiac Tales, a tour de force concerto for orchestra. Reflecting the city of Suzhou’s ancient, continuous cultural heritage, traditional nostalgia fuses with contemporary rhythms in the exciting Suzhou Overture. These works are featured here in their world premiere recordings.

Virtuoso violinist Francesca Dego joins forces with legendary conductor and period performance pioneer Sir Roger Norrington for this recording of Mozart’s 3rd and 4th violin concertos – the first time either soloist or conductor have recorded the works. The outstanding musicians of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra provide the accompaniment, with reduced numbers of strings and antiphonal violin seating to replicate the size and seating of the Salzburg court orchestra who gave the premier performances of these works. Norrington’s attention to detail and style is enthusiastically embraced by soloist and orchestra resulting in a beautifully fresh and captivating interpretation of these well-known works. Dego completes the album with the violin sonata Op.1 No.4 with her regular recital partner Francesca Leonardi.

This is already our third encounter with the great Polish composer Fryderyk Chopin – an encounter, in fact, that is as unusual as his music, which has delighted people around the world for over one hundred and fifty years. In Fryderyk’s day, not everybody was able to listen to his works. To hear one of his concerts they would have had to travel to where he lived – in his early years that meant going to Warsaw, and later even further, i.e. to Paris. Today, all we have to do is listen to one of his albums and imagine that the genius composer is playing especially for us.

This programme of previously unrecorded works illustrates a highly distinctive aspect of Nikos Skalkottas as a composer: The ‘neoclassical’ Skalkottas goes hand in hand with the ‘national’ and the ‘modernist’ composer, the common denominators being perfect architecture of form, harmonic refinement and skillful orchestration. The opening Sinfonietta in B flat major is a typical example of the composer’s ‘neoclassical’ side. In four movements and with a duration of 25 minutes, it was written in 1948, during Skalkottas’s final years. It is followed by the Suite for Violin and Chamber Orchestra and the Concerto for Violin, Piano and Orchestra, examples of the composer’s atonal idiom. Both works were among the many that disappeared after the composer left Berlin in 1933. The remaining pieces demonstrate Skalkottas’s involvement with the project of exploring the traditional music of Greece. The Cretan folk song Digenés in his Last Agony was transcribed and harmonized by Skalkottas – for this release a recording from 1930 of the voice of Eleftherios Venizelos, the Greek Prime Minister at the time, has been superimposed over the newly recorded orchestral accompaniment. The two marches are original compositions, but follow Greek models, while the Nine Greek Dances are Skalkottas’s orchestrations of published folk songs. Simple and functional, they are in no way reminiscent of his great work, the 36 Greek Dances for large orchestra, but still reveal the composer’s refined aesthetic approach. In a labor of love, the music is performed by conductor Byron Fidetzis and violinist Georgios Demertzis, who have both made important contributions to the Skalkottas discography, as well as pianist Vassilis Varvaresos and the Athens Philharmonia Orchestra, making their first appearance on BIS.

When Frank Peter Zimmermann says that Mozart has always been easy for him, he needs only to recall his debut concert at the age of ten when he played Mozart’s G major Concerto K. 216; or when as a fresh 20-year-old, he made his first recording of the five concertos for EMI. He’s played these works nearly 300 times in concert, and one can appreciate the intense physical and spiritual experience that Zimmermann brings to these new recordings.

Paganini’s violin, the legendary ‘il Cannone’, made by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù in 1743, is one of the most important musical instruments in the history of Western music. Paganini was the greatest virtuoso of his time, acclaimed throughout Europe and an inspiration to performers and composers alike. On his death, he bequeathed ‘il Cannone’ to his home city of Genoa, where it is permanently housed under high security in the Town Hall. It has been heard on record just a handful of times. Francesca Dego was given the honor of recording with it after the success of her first performance on the instrument, in October 2019, when she was invited to play Paganini’s First Violin Concerto at the Paganini Celebratory Concert at Teatro Carlo Felice, in Genoa. Francesca Dego comments: ‘Spending a few enchanted days recording with this priceless treasure was unforgettable. I was overwhelmed when I was first handed the instrument that had caressed the ears of Schumann, Schubert, Goethe, Rossini, Bellini, Berlioz, Chopin, Heine, and so many more. I remember standing in that very room as a young girl, hypnotized, staring at history behind glass, fingers tingling at the thought of touching it. And suddenly there I was, holding Paganini’s violin. I feel so privileged to be able to share the soul of ‘il Cannone’ in a new recording. I remember thinking long and hard about the ideal programme and carefully selecting a series of works paying homage to Paganini. The ‘Cannon’ has pretty much only ever been used to record music by Paganini, so the idea of its celebrated tone teaming up with composers who idolized the Italian virtuoso throughout history is really exciting to me!’

REVIEWS:

Dego has an expressive touch, skittering over the strings, yet finding plenty of attack in Szymanowski’s Trois Caprices. Corigliano’s Red Violin Caprices are at times spellbinding, descending into a guttural, harried chase. Leonardi accompanies sensitively throughout.

– BBC Music Magazine

If you’re keen to hear Paganini’s favourite plaything (or favourite fourstringed one, at any rate), performed with technical finesse and strong musicality while shown off by suitably polished engineering, then this amply does that job.

– Gramophone

Virko Baley was born in Ukraine in 1938 and came to the USA as a refugee in 1949, eventually making his home in Las Vegas. He has long been fascinated by the poetry of Emily Dickinson, as can be heard in the two moving works recorded here – one an orchestral song-cycle setting her texts, the other a suite for violin and piano inspired by those settings. They display an acute ear for orchestral colour, a fondness for dramatic gesture and a strong sense of lyricism, occasionally inflected by distant echoes of Baley’s eastern European origins, the richness of the song-cycle placing him downstream from Mahler and Berg and the restraint of the Songs without Words occasionally evoking Arvo Pärt.