Classical Music

Vocal Recital: Grummer, Elisabeth - MOZART, W.A. / SCHUBERT,

MASS IN B MINOR

Chant for quiet meditation Timeless music from the early church, it's rites and it's rituals, creates an unhurried atmosphere of calm. Vocal plainchant and instrumental music combine to envoke the medieval world in sound with fine performances from groups new to the Gift of Music: The Oxford Clerkes and the stunning musicians of Le Basile.

Art and Music: Masters of the Modern Age, Vol. 1 Description CD with full-color, illustrated, explanatory booklet. Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is remembered as the painter of ballet dancers, but the scope of his genius ranged widely. An acute and witty observer, he depicted his native Paris in it's many diverse aspects, often hinting at a social isolation and unease hidden beneath the colorful surface. On this CD, the world of Degas is given a musical perspective with a carefully chosen selection of pieces by the finest composers of his time. Inside, Hugh Griffith provides explanatory notes on his life and musical environment Disc Two Description Paul C�zanne (1839-1906) received almost no recognition until the last years of his life, but is now widely regarded as one of the key figures in the development of modern art. His structural use of color was the starting point for the Fauve painters; his strongly geometric approach to composition led directly to Cubism. On this CD, the world of C�zanne is given a musical perspective with a carefully chosen selection of pieces by the finest composers of his time. Inside, Hugh Griffith provides explanatory notes on his life and musical environment. Disk Three Description During the past 20 years, Arvo P�rt has consolidated his reputation as one of the most significant contemporary composers with a sequence of magnificent sacred choral works. Dating from between 1990 and 2001, the works on this recording exemplify P�rt's mature idiom at it's most harmonically expressive. If Triodion represents his music at it's starkest and most unadorned, Kanon Pokajanen, the composer's largest work after the 1982 St John Passion (Naxos 8.555860), is music of a dark-hued and intensely felt contemplation. P�rt's emotionally-charged Bogor�ditse Dj�vo, is a vibrant tribute to the Virgin Mary. The Elora Festival Singers' recording of P�rt's Berliner Messe can be heard on Naxos 8.557299.

Edvard Grieg and his librettist Bjurnstjerne Bjurnson were both fascinated by a great period in Norway's past: The Viking Age, whose sagas, and fierce conflicts between Christianity and the old Norse religion, inspired all three of Grieg's works recorded here. Landkjenning depicts the moment when Olav Trygvason (960s-1000) and his men sight the Norwegian coast for the first time on their voyage from England to Norway. As King from 995 to 1000, Olav worked single-mindedly to Christianize Norway. Conceived as a true Norwegian national opera, but left unfinished, the three scenes from Olav Trygvason explore pagan rituals and tributes to the Norse gods in anticipation of King Olav's entrance into the pagan temple. Includes the world premiere recording of Edmund Neupert's Resignation orchestrated by Grieg.

Classical Music

The Danse macabre – the idea that Death comes for everyone regardless of status or importance – has fascinated musicians for centuries. In 2011, inspired by a vast 16th c. painting by Bernt Notke in St Nicholas Church in Tallinn, the English composer Gregory Rose (b. 1948) set the mediaeval German texts which sit below each panel, turning Notke’s terrifying vision into a bleak but grimly humorous ritual. The recording features the world-renowned Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. It was recorded in the very church that houses Notke’s paintings and is conducted by the composer.

REVIEW:

So, if one were interested in the now 21st-century oratorio, or musico-dramatic theater work, then one should well enjoy Rose’s efforts here. Having listened to the work numerous times over the course of a few weeks now, the music has grown on me and stayed in my memory, disturbing as it sometimes is. But in the weeks now leading up to the Christmas season, this music certainly makes one pause and think; and it makes for a vivid contrast to all the jingle bells and songs about St. Nick that one is now hearing all over. So for those paintings in St. Nicolas’s church, we can only be grateful now in numerous ways.

-- Fanfare

Dvořák composed the Biblical Songs op. 99 in 1894 during his time in America (1892-95), working as artistic director and professor of composition at the New York Conservatory of Music. His 9th Symphony, appositely termed ‘From the New World’ was to be followed by a further symphony, but Dvořák opted instead for treating the Biblical Songs, which, in their austerity, hardly allow scope for an American scent but rather are possibly reminiscent of the composer’s Czech homeland. Dvořák, the Catholic, had long demonstrated his faith with numerous works of fervent piety: Stabat Mater (1876), Requiem (1890), the Mass in D major as well as the pieces for solo voice and organ, for instance, the works that can be heard on this CD - Ave Maria, Ave Maris Stella and Hymnus ad laudes in festo Sanctae Trinitatis (1877-79) as well as the organ preludes and fugues of 1859 by the then 18-year-old composer.

Ensemble ArtChoral/Matthias Maute - "Art Choral, Vol. 2: Baroque I" / Ensemble ArtChoral under the direction of Matthias Maute. Volume 2 surveys choral repertoire by late Renaissance and early Baroque masters such as Claudio Monteverdi (Italy), Carlo Gesulado (Spain), Gaspar Fernandes (Portugal), Heinrich Sch�tz, Hans Leo Hassler (Germany) and Henry Purcell (England) - composers whose music reflects the flowering of vocal polyphony in pre-baroque Europe. Virgin Music Group; ATMA Classique; Classical.

Beethoven wrote that he composed the oratorio Christus am Ölberge (Christ on the Mount of Olives) in just "a fortnight, amid all sorts of tumult and other unpleasant and alarming events in my life." It marked the first time since the two ‘imperial cantatas’ of 1790, the Cantata on the Death of the Emperor Joseph II WoO 87 and the Cantata on the Accession of Leopold II WoO 88, that he had embarked on a multi-movement vocal work. Christus am Ölberge was also Beethoven’s first composition on a religious subject and was destined to remain his only oratorio.

Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, first published in 2011 in Hebrew, and in 2014 in English, is justifiably one of the most celebrated books of our time. With its audacious subtitle, the book attempts to explain and explore why our particular species has thrived while most others have perished, and how we are set apart from all others due to our ability and desire to understand and give meaning to things that do not necessarily exist – such as the shared myths of language, money, religion, love, political boundaries, and a host of things not truly tangible but with which we have developed a shared understanding. What I have attempted is a humble musical response to human signposts, concepts, myths, or ideas that we as a species have carried with us, developing along the way these past couple hundred thousand or so years – breadcrumbs on the path of humanity. I imagined the modern piano as a sort of meta-instrument, present at the dawns of humankind, the cognitive and agricultural revolutions, and some of the most notable inflection points of our troubled and triumphant history. The piece begins not on the piano, but at the piano, with a single human breath, as I imagine the first music to have been, somewhere near the dawn of our species. If it is, like most, intended to die off one day, I imagine the very last music to sound more or less the same.

On the occasion of her fiftieth birthday, Agnes Palmisano presents a cross-section of diverse Viennese Dudler and so-called coloratura yodels from two centuries under the album title "Dudel-Diva". The Viennese Dudler (the urban form of yodeling that emerged from the tradition of today's Theater an der Wien), listed as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO since 2010, has in her one of the best and most successful interpreters today, who, together with a select ensemble of specialists in this cultural heritage, is able to bring the entire range of Viennese Dudler to the point and to the ear in a unique way. To this end, she is collaborating with the duo Wiener Blond, Die Gebruder and members of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. The bandwidth of this exemplary album ranges from the beginning of the yodel in the early 19th century to contemporary new compositions.

Czech Ensemble Baroque’s first recording dedicated to František Ignác Antonín Tuma (Requiem, Miserere) confirmed his firm position among Europe’s major late-Baroque composers. A pupil of the renowned Viennese master J. J. Fux, his music is characterized by immaculate refined counterpoint, yet he also embraced and brought to bear elements of the incipient Galant style. Dating from three different phases of his life, the three pieces featured on the present album map Tuma’s artistic development. The grandiose Missa Veni Pater Pauperum, written in 1736 for the Schottenstift, a Benedictine abbey in Vienna, is from the time when he served Count Franz Ferdinand Kinsky, who had provided him with a thorough education. The festive 1745 Te Deum, scored for a similarly extensive ensemble, was composed for the Stift Wilhering, a Cistercian monastery in Upper Austria, which performed it on multiple occasions within the celebrations of the Feast of Corpus Christi.

As regards the Sinfonia ex C, Tuma most likely conceived it towards the end of his days, when he lived in seclusion at the Premonstratensian monastery in Geras, Lower Austria. The three festive pieces, recorded for the very first time, attest to Tuma’s being a composer richly deserving of special attention. Tuma’s music in festive colors – landmark premiere recordings

Born in 1946, Vladimir Martynov is one of several composers from the former USSR whose music taps into a vein of perpetual memory and farewell. Literally so in the case of Der Abschied, an eight-movement cycle for small ensemble which stands on the threshold like a guest at a gathering of friends, unable or unwilling to shut the door behind them and venture out alone. One of Martynov’s most distinguished contemporaries was the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov, who talked of a ‘genetic aural well’ for Russian music which, like Orthodox prayer, cannot be learnt as a text, but which exists beyond any text. Silvestrov explicitly recognized his own output as ‘meta-music’ or even ‘post-music’, and the same could be said of many pieces in Martynov’s output. Tiny motifs and gestures are layered and expanded across a meditative space in a distinctively Russian form of Minimalism that bears certain similarities with the better-known outputs of Pärt and Schnittke but pursues a consciously more austere path: both the Requiem and Stabat mater are imbued with the timeless qualities of chant and ancient melisma. Martynov’s music began to attract a certain cult following in the West during the 1990s with performances and recordings made principally by the violinist Gidon Kremer and his former partner, Tatiana Grindenko. As both a violinist and conductor, Grindenko has continued to keep Martynov’s flame burning, and she leads most of the performances here, which were made mostly in Moscow over the course of several years and in several cases receive here their first international release.

Tenor Ian Bostridge completes his Pentatone trilogy of Schubert song cycles with a rendition of Schwanengesang, together with the renowned pianist Lars Vogt. Schwanengesang was compiled and published after Schubert’s death, and the pieces are literally among his swansongs. Ranging from the romantic ‘Ständchen’ to the gloomy ‘Der Doppelgänger’, these lieder are all infused with a deep sense of melancholia and longing. Just like Winterreise, they are most suited for mature interpreters, both vocally and in terms of life experience, and this recording captures Bostridge’s ripened interpretation, enhanced by Vogt’s masterful playing. Schwanengesang is coupled with the extensive song Einsamkeit (Loneliness), which further adds to the desolate, but ultimately consoling character of the album. Pentatone is very grateful that Vogt managed to make this recording despite a serious medical condition. Sadly enough, he eventually did not live to see the album’s release.

Ian Bostridge is one of the most celebrated tenors and lied interpreters of his generation. His Pentatone recording of Schubert’s Winterreise (2019) was crowned with the ICMA Vocal Music Award 2020. Bostridge has also released Die schöne Müllerin (2020) and Respighi Songs (2021) with the label. Lars Vogt, one of the leading pianists of our time, makes his Pentatone debut.

REVIEW:

This 2022 release, which pianist Lars Vogt did not live to see, is one of the pianist's swan songs, and it makes a fitting memorial. This may be one of the factors that propelled the album onto classical best-seller lists in the autumn of 2022, but the album has intrinsic merits on which it can rest.

Vogt delivers an exceptional performance as an accompanist in these pieces. To an unusual degree, they emancipate the accompaniment from the melody line, and Vogt's way of setting a whole scene with the introductions is uncanny. As for the star of the show, tenor Ian Bostridge, one notes a new richness in his lower register as he approaches his sixth decade. Otherwise, this is trademark Bostridge, with flexible lines tending toward an operatic approach, clear diction, and controlled emotion. Another draw is the presence of Einsamkeit, D. 620, a set of connected songs that shows Schubert responding directly to Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98. The real star here though, perhaps, is Vogt, and it is good to have this release to remember him.

-- AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

SOMM RECORDINGS announces the release of I Vow to Thee, My Country, believed to be the first recording to feature all of Gustav Holst’s sacred choral music, by the Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea directed by William Vann, with organist Joshua Ryan and Richard Horne on tubular and bass bells. A prolific composer best known for his orchestral spectacular The Planets, Holst was an expressive and sincere composer and arranger of religious music despite his professed agnosticism. Included are his only setting of the Anglican Service for Evening Prayer, Nunc Dimittis, and his substantial Two Psalms and Four Festival Choruses, whose inspirations range from the Bible, Byzantine liturgy, 16th-century sources (not least Bach), and Welsh hymns. The 12 other featured songs see Holst setting an impressive array of centuries-spanning texts, and include the striking eight-part setting of Ave Maria for unaccompanied female voices, the ecstatic Not Unto Us, O Lord, premiered by the Royal Hospital Chelsea and William Vann in 2020, and the disc’s anthemic title song, its melody borrowed from The Planets’ ‘Jupiter’. I Vow to Thee, My Country is sponsored by The Holst Society, who also commissioned four new arrangements making their debut on album by Iain Farrington, and includes extensive, authoritative notes by Andrew Neill.

Signum Classics is proud to present Romanian-born soprano Angela Gheorghiu’s first album on the Grammy award winning label. Described as “the world’s most glamorous and gifted opera star” (New York Sun), Ms. Gheorghiu’s magnificent voice and dazzling stage presence have established her as a unique international opera superstar.

Her new album, released to mark the anniversary of celebrated composer Giacomo Puccini, brings together a collection of well-known arias and songs spanning many years of his career. The album features a World Premiere Recording of the recently rediscovered aria “Melanconia”, which is most probably from 1883 and not 1881 as previously thought. Other notable works on the recording are “Salve Regina” from Le villi, “Storiella d’amore” as well as the title track “A te,” composed by Puccini at just 16 years old.

Myriam Leblanc/Ensemble Mirabilia - "Amour fou" / With the album, Amour fou, soprano Myriam Leblanc and Ensemble Mirabilia take us on a journey of love via arias and songs spanning more than 800 years. From Faur�'s poetic, "Au bord de l'eau," to Jacques Brel's heartrending, "Ne me quitte pas," and Barbara's, "Dis quand reviendras-tu?" Leblanc has gathered a bouquet of music depicting the most human of all sentiments. Amour fou also includes an aria from Vivaldi's cantata Amor hai vento, several old English songs by Thomas Campion and more.

Denis Plante and Stephane Tetreault - Stradivatango - For bandoneon player and composer Denis Plante", tango evokes the old-fashioned melancholy of the bandoneon", an instrument that whispers melodies of bygone elegance. Stephane Tetreault's Stradivarius cello infuses tango with another layer of deep vibrations. With new album", Stradivatango", Plante presents original tango compositions", including "Stradivatango"," "Tango romance" and "Menage ? trois"," paired with tangos by such emblematic composers of the genre as Astor Piazzolla", Carlos Gardel and Angel Villoldo.

Toronto Mendelssohn Choir/Jean S�bastien Vall�ee -"Remember: 130 Years of Canadian Choral Music" / 2024 marks the 130th anniversary of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, one of Canada's oldest, largest and most recognized choral ensembles. Currently under the direction of Jean-S�bastien Vall�e, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir is proud to celebrate it's anniversary with the release of the album, Remember. Many of the works featured on this double CD set are pieces of Canadian choral music history that have a symbolic or special meaning for the choir. Virgin Music Group; Virgin Music International; Classical

Sir Charles Mackerras was a towering figure in the world of classical music - renowned for his versatility, meticulous scholarship, and electrifying performances as principal conductor of the English National Opera and a frequent guest conductor with leading orchestras and opera companies worldwide. Mackerras was particularly celebrated for bringing a revelatory freshness to familiar scores through his deep understanding of period performance practices and original manuscripts. This set covers a substantial part of his recorded legacy, ranging over half a century, from his debut on record in 1951 to his finest later recordings.

Conductor Sir Thomas Beecham was one of the two most influential pioneers of early orchestral recording history, alongside Leopold Stokowski, both artists strikingly displaying a new potential in the gramophone's capacity for quality orchestra reproduction through the brilliant sonorities and dynamic shadings of their discs. When Sir Thomas formed his handpicked London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1932, it is not an exaggeration to say that a new era of the very highest artistic and virtuosic orchestral quality was born, and he quickly discovered how to seize the kaleidoscopic colours, rhythmic panache and tight discipline of his LPO performances for the gramophone. He repeated the procedure again when he created his Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1946, and his prolific recording operations with both orchestras set legendary standards of artistry, virtuosity and sonority in gramophone history. All his mono recordings made for Columbia Graphophone and His Master Voice have been collected in this box set as a companion to Warner Classics' box of all his EMI stereo discs, revealing more vividly than ever before their luminous and exhilarating qualities. A lot of the recordings in this boxset have been specially remastered in HD from the original sources, many of them previously unreleased on CD.

Eccentric and dilettante, the quintessential English grand bourgeois, Sir Thomas Beecham was a self-taught conductor with a highly personal style and taste, brimming with elegance and charm. Beyond his tireless activity on stages around the world, he championed an eclectic repertoire ranging from Handel to Stravinsky, encompassing great classics as well as French composers such as Debussy, Saint-Sa�ns, and Bizet -his Carmen remains a landmark recording. A passionate advocate for the music of his compatriot Frederick Delius, Beecham also played a pivotal role in 20th-century English musical life, founding both the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1932) and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (1946). This box set brings together all the stereo recordings from his rich discography for Columbia and HMV, including the very first experimental stereo recording of Mozart's Symphony No. 41 first movement from April 1934.

Jonas Kaufmann - "The Decca Recordings" [15 CD Boxset] The first boxset anthology chronicling a major chapter in the recording life of supreme tenor Jonas Kaufmann. Encompassing an entire decade of glorious music making from 2002-2012, the collection provides a rounded portrait of Kaufmann as opera star and Lieder recitalist, heard here at the height of his vocal prowess. All recordings unfailingly received rave reviews at the time of release; many of them are standard-setting and are now returned to physical circulation as part of this set. All additional material recorded in sessions for respective albums are included with those albums. Featured among the operatic repertoire is a rare recording of Humperdinck's fairytale opera K�nigskinder with the late Armin Jordan. Also included, is a disc devoted to Kaufmann speaking about Wagner's music and the roles he portrays on his Decca recital disc (audio only, in German and English). Presented on 15 CDs with their original jackets. Limited Edition.