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Gulda Meets Shostakovich / Kleinhapl, Piehlmayer, Vienna Koncertverein
Both Shostakovich and Gulda were masters at blending the levels of art and light music in a profitable way. One discreetly and he almost refines through the back door, the other in the form of a provocative cultural shock in his role as a musical bourgeois terror. On his recording for Ars Produktion, Friedrich Kleinhapl unites works of the two 'opposing' geniuses. Friedrich Kleinhapl is immensely expressive and passionate. Worldwide, he entices the audience as well as critics as a soloist and as chamber musician with his noteworthy performances. He does many things in a new and different way: starting with his posture holding the cello, and his interpretations to the thrilling way to tell the pieces’ stories during the concerts and the individual arrangement of his programs and art projects. Additionally, he concerns himself in a heartfelt way with children with hearing impairment through his association “Get a Hearing”.
V4: ART OF VIOLIN
VIOLIN CONCERTOS
Bach & Bach-Busoni: Keyboard Works / Colli
REVIEW:
My enthusiasm for this disc is less about Colli’s philosophical ruminations upon the music, however heartfelt they may be, and more about his approach to playing it, which is both compelling and fresh; it combines abundant technical finesse with a visionary grasp of scale and structure, as well as the ability to project extremes of fragility and monumentality (most notably in the Chaconne), and above all to conjure a kaleidoscopic palette of colours and textures from his Steinway. This is an intelligently compiled programme, stunningly performed, in immaculate sound. Do not hesitate.
– Gramophone
Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No. 1 - Walton: Viola Concerto - Vaughan Williams: Lark Ascending / Keulen, NDR Philharmonic
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REVIEW:
Full marks for this well-conceived program, which brings together two works closely related but rarely coupled. Van Keulen plays the Prokofiev with a shiny, rather glassy (rather than glossy) tone. No reservations are needed for the Walton, whose introverted yet deep running emotion well suits van Keulen’s way with the husky-toned viola she plays. Conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson finds an ideal balance of restraint and (in the scherzo) extroversion.
– BBC Music Magazine
COMPLETE PIANO SONATAS
LES SAUVAGES
Mozart: Piano Concertos, Vol. 3 - K. 450 & 451; Quintet K. 452 / Bavouzet
This third volume in the series from the electrifying combination of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Manchester Camerata under Gabor Takacs-Nagy explores the final two of the six piano concertos of the year 1784, on which Mozart staked his reputation as both a performer and composer. Alongside these works features the pioneering Quintet for Piano and Winds, also from 1784, the first written for this combination of instruments and a work which Mozart regarded as his finest to date. The consecutive Kochel numbers of the three piano works hint at a remarkable story: not only were they all written in the same extraordinarily productive year, but all were completed in the same month, March, when Mozart was just twenty-eight years old. The two concertos form a pair, and in letters to his father Mozart makes it clear that he wrote them for his own performance: “Nobody but I owns these new concertos in B flat and D,” adding in another letter, two weeks later, “I consider them both to be concertos which make one sweat.” Heard in this context, Bavouzet’s playing is all the more astonishing.
REVIEWS:
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet has joined forces with Gábor Takács-Nagy and the Manchester Camerata to record the complete Mozart piano concertos. This is the third volume in the series. Bavouzet has won awards for his recordings of Haydn, Debussy, Prokofiev and Grieg. This recording shows that he is also a born Mozartian.
The three works on this recording all date from 1784 when Mozart was newly married and beginning to forge a freelance career for himself. The Piano Concerto in D Major K451 uses trumpets with timpani and has a distinctive military character. Takács-Nagy’s tempo is spot on in the opening movement marked Allegro assai. He and the Manchester Camerata open the movement with vibrancy and dynamism, and bring an infectious enthusiasm to Mozart’s springy dotted rhythms. Bavouzet’s phrasing and passagework are a model of classical decorum, and he uses subtle rubato to superb effect. There is excellent interplay between piano and orchestra, with phrases passing seamlessly between the players. The music is beautifully characterised. The militaristic opening theme gives way to the camp, whimsical second subject. The Manchester Camerata’s woodwind section are enchanting at the start of the slow movement. Bavouzet brings charm and restraint to the movement before giving us a moment of heart-stopping poetry in the interlude before the return of the opening them. The finale has enormous fizz and sparkle. There is tight, spirited interplay between soloist and orchestra. Bavouzet brings enormous energy to the increasingly elaborate passagework. It is impossible not to be swept along with the joys of music-making.
This is an outstanding recording and is worthy to sit alongside the great Mozart concerto recordings such as those by Perahia and Uchida.
-- MusicWeb International
Kinship / Stephan
This cleverly thought-out album is a tribute to Bach and his kindred spirits. Who is akin to whom? Are they spiritual or elective kinships? In the first instance, all the pieces recorded here are akin to each other in that they are especially suitable or that most sensitive of all keyboard instruments, the clavichord. Beauty is another common feature, which they display in their own way. And in the circle of fifths these pieces are very close to one another. Personal and familial kinships become apparent with the name of Bach. It is also known that JS Bach chose JA Reincken, around forty years his senior, as his teacher: Reincken can certainly be described as a musical father, a true kindred spirit, to JS Bach. Johann Gottfried Muthel slots into the ensemble as a logical consequence. He was JS Bach’s last pupil who had participated in transcribing The Art of Fugue and who composed in a consistently new and noncontrapuntal style. In this respect, he is musically much closer to Bach’s sons Carl Philipp Emanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann, almost a brother to them.
The Polish Violin / Pike, Limonov
The acclaimed violinist Jennifer Pike returns to Chandos to explore her heritage through the repertoire of a group of composers fundamental to the history of Polish music for the violin. From Janiewicz in the late eighteenth century right through to Bacewicz in the middle of the twentieth, Poland produced a number of composer-violinists well known across Europe. All of them were talented musicians as well as composers, their compositions technically demanding. Jennifer Pike here plays music by Karlowicz, Szymanowski, Wieniawski, and Moszkowski with complete control and deep feeling, sympathetically accompanied by Petr Limonov, winner of the Nikolai Rubinstein International Piano Competition.
Bach: Harpsichord Concertos, Vol. 1 / Bonizzoni, La Risonanza
This is the first volume in a complete survey of Bach’s harpsichord concertos, recorded by La Risonanza in one-to-a-part practice performance. With his Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, Bach had created the first ever harpsichord concerto. In Leipzig, the opportunity arose to continue this experiment: each week at Café Zimmermann he conducted his Collegium musicum in orchestral concerts that lasted around two hours. In the summer of 1733, he took delivery of “a new harpsichord, the like of which has not been heard before around here.” This magnificent instrument, which featured in the Zimmermann concerts, urgently called for concertos to be played by Bach himself as soloist, and even more so his sons and students. Not only in Saxony but also well beyond, Bach was considered to be the absolute authority on all things harpsichord and organ; he thus had to make his own contribution to the emerging genre of the ‘clavier concerto.’ The manuscript of his six harpsichord concertos should therefore be understood as a repertoire collection for his Collegium musicum, and as a personal manifesto.
Johan Helmich Roman: Golovinmusiken, Beri 1 / Laurin, Höör Barock
In 1728, the recently appointed court Kapellmeister Johan Helmich Roman was approached by Count Golovin, the Russian ambassador in Stockholm. Golovin was organizing a celebration of the recent coronation in Moscow of Tsar Peter II, and naturally wanted music to add to the festivities. His six years in London – where he made the acquaintance of Handel among others – and subsequent experience as assistant court Kapellmeister, made Roman the obvious choice for the count. The result was Golovinmusiken (The Golovin Music), an autograph score consisting of 45 movements of varying lengths. These are the facts as we know them, and everything else is conjecture: Roman’s manuscript lacks vital instructions regarding instrumentation, dynamics or tempi, and although the first three movements are in four parts, the rest are in three parts or (in a few cases) two. When a performing edition was being prepared in the 1980s, the editors came to the conclusion that the material was in fact incomplete, and a second violin part was added. It was also deemed that the order of the movements was probably not the one in which they would have been performed. The edition in question formed the basis for a partial recording of the work, comprising 22 movements. 290 years after Count Golovin’s feast, as Dan Laurin and his colleagues in Höör Barock recorded the complete work, their approach was a different one. Making use of a total of 18 different instruments – from sopranino recorder and oboe da caccia to bassoon, strings and baroque guitar – and featuring highly imaginative continuo playing from Anna Paradiso at the harpsichord, their performance sounds as full and varied as one might wish for, without any added parts. Laurin’s performing version also follows the order of Roman’s score, creating a number of smaller suites out of this greater whole that a wider audience now can enjoy for the very first time.
William Youn Plays Mozart Sonatas (Complete Edition)
”His Mozart combines the clarity of Christian Zacharias with the refined nuances of Alfred Brendel and the warm sound of Daniel Barenboim.“ This was the verdict in the 5/2015 issue of Fono Forum, which in the next issue promptly awarded the star for the Album of the Month to William Youn for Volume 2 of his edition with Mozart’s piano sonatas. OehmsClassics is proud to have completed this cycle with an exceptional artist, and to be presenting all five volumes here in one spectacular set. The award-winning pianist William Youn has been described by critics as a “genuine poet” with “sovereign, bravura technique of touch”. After early studies in Korea and in the USA, William again changed continents to study at the Hanover University of Music and at the Piano Academy Lake Como, where he worked regularly with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling, Dmitri Bashkirov, Andreas Staier, William Grant Naboré and Menahem Pressler. Based now in his adopted hometown of Munich, Germany, William performs internationally from Berlin via Seoul to New York with major orchestras
Turina: Complete Music For Violin And Piano
Poet as Muse: Music for Flute, Clarinet & Voice
Galilei: Il primo libro d'intavolatura di liuto
Beethoven: Complete Symphonies, Vol. 4 / Kim
This new release is the fifth volume in Centaur's set of the complete Beethoven Symphonies, transcribed for Piano by Paul Kim. Paul Kim maintains a career that aims to bridge the pathways of performance, musicology, and education. As a recitalist, piano soloist and chamber musician, he has collaborated with many of the world's leading artists, orchestras, and conductors. Critics have noted his "brightest flashes of virtuosity and clear transparent quality" (The New York Times) as well as "his musical honesty and integrity, his very recognisable strength of character and personality" (Gramophone). He has been featured in interviews, articles, and television and film documentaries in such media outlets as Newsweek, The New Yorker, International Herald Tribune, PBS, NPR, CNN, and the BBC. Dr. Kim's research and teaching areas include Beethoven, Messiaen, Wagner, symphonic literature, and twentieth-century music.
Schmitt: Suites from Antoine et Cleopatre & Symphony No. 2 / Oramo, BBC Symphony
Making his debut on Chandos, Sakari Oramo, who with the BBC Symphony Orchestra this year has championed new and rarely performed works, presents in surround sound the extravagant musical world of Florent Schmitt. The recording follows two exceptional Barbican performances with the same forces, a ‘sensuous and exotic’ Antoine et Cleopatre, according to the Financial Times (2016), and the first performance for nearly a dozen years of Symphony No. 2 (2017). The Second Symphony, the last major work by Schmitt, has nothing valedictory about it: as lavish and rhythmically sophisticated as his earlier music, emphatically bounding in fast passages and supple in slow, it also encompasses all the different musical expressions and styles that he had used over almost eight decades of composing. On the other hand, it is far from being an ‘old man’s piece.’ ‘It is really exuberant- very, very inventive, and incredibly busy for everyone,’ as Sakari Oramo explained in a BBC Radio 3 interview. The symphony is paired with the two orchestral suites from Antoine et Cleopatre, music written for Shakespeare’s play, premiered in 1920 at the Paris Opera, and very rarely recorded since then.
Berg: Lulu / Petrenko [Blu-ray]
Lulu, Alban Berg’s hauntingly mysterious opera in a new production by Dmitri Tcherniakov, has been one of the major events of the 2014/2015 Bayerische Staatsoper season : an ideal setting for conductor Kirill Petrenko first-ever video recording! A sensuous and impenetrable opera, Berg’s masterpiece depicts the burning and sometimes bestial intensity of human relationships through the figure of Lulu, the true femme fatale, bearer of an enigma that haunts us way beyond the end of the opera. Venenous, sibylline, deathly for who approaches her, the dangerous Lulu destroys the established and bourgeois order she evolves in, carrying away with her all certainty, just like the audacious and demanding musical language Berg invented to give form to this unreachable character. Frank Wedekind’s work proved indeed to be an extremely fertile ground for the dodecaphonic composer’s imagination, and gave birth to one of the most singular and ambitious work of art of the twentieth century. With the privilege of a dream cast, gathering Berg’s best interprets, this new production of Lulu is conducted by Kirill Petrenko, and staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov. A visionary genius considered as the contemporary stage "enfant terrible", it is with a shattering realism that he directs those characters, hostages to their own passions and darkest fantasies, and reveals the complexity of this great human and social tragedy. Marlis Petersen is Lulu, a role she was then singing for the ninth time, and which awarded her, for this production, the title of "singer of the year" by German magazine Opernwelt.
The Harp's Theatre
VIOLINO SOLO
Dancing Cello
VOX IN VITRO
Paddle to the Sea / Third Coast Percussion
Third Coast Percussion’s Paddle to the Sea transports listeners into a realm of imaginative sounds and world-premiere recordings evoking the aquatic world. Anchoring the album is the Grammy Award-winning ensemble’s original new collaborative composition Paddle to the Sea. The fearsomely talented foursome conceived it as a live soundtrack to the charming, Oscar-nominated 1966 film of the same name, based on a classic children’s story about a Native Canadian boy who carves a wooden figure called Paddle-to-the-Sea and launches him on a solo canoe voyage to the ocean. The Dallas Morning News called Third Coast’s concert performance “arresting and enjoyable.” TheaterJones called it “unforgettable” and said, “There was something magical about the performance, but it is almost impossible to describe the experience in mere words.” In composing Paddle to the Sea, Third Coast found a wellspring of ideas in the other works they’ve included on the album. Jacob Druckman’s Reflections on the Nature of Water revels in textures and timbres unique to the marimba as it explores the different characters water can embody. Third Coast plays its own arrangement of selections from Philip Glass’s 12 Pieces for Ballet (originally composed for piano) — also drawing inspiration from Brazilian group Uakti’s multi-instrumental version, titled Aguas da Amazonia. The final leg of Third Coast’s waterborne adventure is Zimbabwean Musekiwa Chingdoza’s arrangement of Chingwaya, a song from the Shona tradition used to call water spirits.
REVIEW:
Today’s percussionists are amazing virtuosos, and the members of Third Coast Percussion play with astonishing precision and sensitivity throughout this intelligently planned recital built around the theme of “water” in many of its forms. There are two major works, the most important of which is Jacob Druckman’s amazing marimba solo “Reflections on the Nature of Water.” Its six movement are broken into pairs, and spread throughout the disc. As the idiom is strongly atonal, it makes a refreshing contrast to the mellow harmonic syntax of the remaining pieces.
The other major work is Third World Percussion’s original film score Paddle to the Sea. The movements have evocative titles, some presumably taken from the images to which they correspond: The Lighthouse and the Cabin, Open Water, Nagara, The Locks, etc. Other bits are simply evocative and more impressionistic: Flow, Thaw, Sanctuary, Release. The entire work plays for about thirty-five minutes, and despite the considerable skill that obviously went into its crafting, it doesn’t seem to have much musical substance. It sounds like background, and presumably suits its purpose admirably, but you may well feel differently.
Also interspersed with the other items are four superbly made transcriptions from Philip Glass’s score to Aguas da Amazonia, easy on the ear and magnificently played. The last of them, Amazon River, brings the program to a satisfying conclusion. Finally, the players toss in a Zimbabwean song of the Shona people, Chigwaya, supposedly used to call water spirits. It’s charming, but also musically ephemeral. It would have been interesting to hear the song used as the basis for something more extended in form.
The bottom line here is that the performances are amazing, the music of variable quality but never gratuitously difficult or off-putting, and the engineering is perfect. You make the call.
– ClassicsToday (David Hurwitz)
