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”.

MusicWeb wrote of this new release: “This is a valuable addition to the discography. The Los Angeles concerts of 1963-1964 were given at the Hollywood Bowl, in which Heifetz and Piatigorsky played the Brahms Double with Leonard Bernstein, and at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion where the violinist essayed the Beethoven with Zubin Mehta. Neither concert has apparently been issued before. There are two bonus tracks, previously released, that come from the Bell Telephone Hour with Donald Voorhees conducting in Radio City, New York in February 1950. The Evorak is tightly coiled, cloaked and hooded, full of inimitable tonal splendor and not remotely relaxed while the Sarasate Habanera is suave and bewitching. Cembal d’amour once issued this but their transfer is cloudy and palpably inferior to this one.”

Classical Music

Known for his highly imaginative and philosophical approaches to his musical presentations, Federico Colli is back with a second album on Chandos. Having begun with Scarlatti sonatas, he now turns his hand to the great master J.S. Bach to explore the relationship between Bach’s music for keyboard and what Colli regards as its transcendent quality, its universal beauty. In a personal note for the booklet, Colli explains how he arrived at the extraordinary interpretations captured here. The relationship he explores is discoverable in the Italian Concerto and Partita No. 4, but it is in Ferruccio Busoni’s arrangement of Bach’s Chaconne that the relationship, in his view, becomes clear. Colli offers the listener a vivid interpretation which links the progress of the piece, rich in symbolic detail, to important stages in the life, and afterlife, of Christ, different re-iterations of the theme and of the tonalities corresponding with key moments in the religious narrative. As always, Colli gives deeply felt and exciting performances, his irrepressible personality and flair evident throughout.

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

Here is an album whose contents seem odd as it couples the violin concerto of a (still) Russian composer to the viola concerto of an English one. Instead, the coupling is very clever since Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto, whose premiere was in 1923 (while the composer was still living in France, a few years before his return to Soviet Union) served as a much-admired model to Walton’s Viola Concerto, whose first performance was played by Paul Hindemith in 1929. The similarities between the two works go beyond the three-movement structure slow-quick-slow and concern themes, accompaniments and the rondo form of the virtuoso central Scherzo. The smart idea of such unusual coupling came to one of the few great living violinists who can really play the viola with equal skill: Isabelle van Keulen. This glorious album is crowned by the orchestrated version of Vaughan Williams’ masterpiece The Lark Ascending. One of German radio’s best orchestras, the NDR Radiophilharmonie is conducted by Andrew Manze, Keri-Lynn Wilson, and Andrew Litton.

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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

Classical Music

Classical Music

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

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 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.

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.

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.

”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

The violin sonatas of Joaquin Turina have in recent years attracted the attention of violinists looking for attractive Spanish repertoire beyond Sarasate, but this complete survey is unrivalled on disc. The real discovery for many listeners will be Turina’s Op.28, El Poema de una sanluqueña (Poem of a Sanlúcar Girl). This 20-minute, four-movement fantasy was written in 1923 and inspired by a cruel remark overheard by the composer: ‘Sanlúcar girls don’t marry and Sanlúcar boys marry outsiders’ – Sanlúcar being a coastal city just north of Cadiz. Turina’s idea was to immerse himself in the hopes and dreams of such a young woman. The movement titles - ‘In front of the mirror’ – ‘The Song of the Moon’ – ‘Hallucinations’ – ‘The Rosary in the Church’ – hint at the varied expressive and musical worlds, including oblique references to Andalucian folksong as well as highly impressionistic evocations that owe not a little to Ravel and Debussy. The Variaciones Clásicas of 1932 show another, more formally rigorous side to Turina’s craft as a composer, though the theme itself is no less imbued with a Romantic, yearning quality through its transformation as a Cuban folksong, a seguidilla and finally a dashing zapateado. The last two pieces of the collection appear as occasional pieces that are included in broader cycles. Euterpe is part of an ambitious work that seeks to represent the coming of the Greek muses to Spain, each of the them being represented by a different scoring: this is written in the lively tempo of a Sevillan dance. Finally, with Homenage a Navarra, Turina elegantly acknowledges the heritage of Sarasate in a short work based on his compatriot’s melodies.

This is an album of works of the 20th Century for Flute, Clarinet, and Voice, also featuring piano, harpsichord, and viola. All of the musical compositions are based upon first-rate works of poetry. The compositions by composers such as Aaron Copland, Marilyn Biery, Cornelius Boots, Jay Batzner, and David Biedenbender feature text by poems such as “As It Fell Upon a Day,” by Richard Barnefield, “Provincetown, August,” by Terry Blackhawk, and even classics in the literature canon such as Canterbury Tales and works by William Shakespeare. This programme was recorded in 2015 at the Staples Family Concert Hall at Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. The artists are Central Michigan University Music School faculty, and the project was funded by a Creative and Scholarly Support Grant from the university.

Michelagnolo/Michelangelo Galilei was born in 1575 as the second son of the influential music theoretician Vincenzo Galilei and was the younger brother of Galileo Galilei. Michelangelo, who was considered a musical prodigy during his youth, embarked on the career of a professional lutenist and, following several stations in Poland and Lithuania, entered the service of the Court Orchestra of Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria in Munich on 16 February 1607. Axel Wolf presents here Galilei's Primo libro d�intavolatura di liuto, Munich 1620. The German lutenist, Axel Wolf, studied with Hans Michael Koch and Rolf Lislevand. As a member of the ensemble "La Sfondrata" he was a prizewinner at the 1992 International Competition for Early Music Ensembles in Utrecht, Netherlands. In the course of his concert career Axel Wolf has made appearances at international festivals in Boston, Bruges, Utrecht, Prague, Edinburgh and Innsbruck, as well as appearances in Rome, Tokyo, New York and Tel Aviv as soloist or member of ensembles such as Musica Fiata Koln, Freiburger Barockorchester, Ars Antiqua Austria and The English Concert London.

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.

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.

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 great Cervantes, he taught me the magic and great humanity that poetry and the music of our Golden Century harbor. In the middle of the 16th century appears in Spain the ''cross-strung harp'', as Juan de Bermudo confirms in his work, Declaration of Musical Instruments, year 1555. This appearance is due to the growing music chromatization and the progressive emancipation of the specific instrumental language. Therefore, the harp, diatonic so far, becomes a chromatic instrument in a very original way: adding an order of chromatic strings interwoven or intertwined with the diatonic ones. It turned out to be an extremely practical invention for the spanish Violeros and, apparently, not sued out of the Iberian Peninsula. The famous Tomos, witness the harp's musical intervention in these two fields, sacred and profane. One of the most prolific composers of the Tonos was Juan Hidalgo, a Royal Chapel's musician, Pedro Calderon de la Barca's right hand and, in turn, prominent harp player.

Krzysztof Lason is a violinist, teacher, and improviser who studied in Katowice, Warsaw, and Graz. He is a prize-winner of the competiitons in Cracow and Val Tidone, a scholar of the Ministry of Culture and the Dutch foundation Iris. He has performed in over 25 European countries, the USA, Canada, Japan, China, India, and Nepal, and he has recorded for Decca, BBC3, WDR3, the Polish Radio, DUX, and CD Accord. He has been nominated for the International Classical Music Awards and the Polish music award “Fryderyki.” He is fascinated with sound possibilities of the violin and he willingly performs contemporary music, which is often written specially for him. He has performed Dharma at Big Sur by John Adams on a six-string violin as the first Pole in the history together with the Orchestra of New Music. He has premiered a number of new compositions. He is passionate about balancing on the verge of music styles; he feels at ease in chamber ensembles. However, above all, he appreciates the freedom of expression, which he achieves by improvised music.

After their album entitled Singing Cello, this recording released by Istvan Vardai and Julien Quentin offers a compilation of popular cello pieces of the 19th and 20th century, performed on the famous Stradivari cello referred as '1673 Strad', earlier used by Jaqueline du Pre� and Lynn Harrell. The cellos manufactured by the renowned Italian instrument-maker have, somewhat surprisingly, an even better reputation than his violins. Out of the 65 items remaining, the '1673 Strad' was made relatively early, being the only Stradivari cello dating back to this year. Istvan Vardai was born in 1985. He studied with Laszlo Mezo at the Liszt Academy of Music and with Reinhard Latzko at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Veinna. Since his debut concert in 1997, he has performed all over the world and has won numerous accolaides. French pianist Julien Quintin has established himself as a versatile and sensitive musician, exhibiting great maturity and poise. His remarkable depth of musicianship and distinct clarity of sound coupled with flawless technique, make him an artist in demand as both soloist and chamber musician.

Classical Music

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)

This is the second release in an important new APR series devoted to the French Piano School. For around 150 years France has nurtured a distinctive style of pianism centered on the teaching of the Paris Conservatoire. The heyday of the school was probably the first fifty years of the 20th century and this series of recordings aims to explore in depth the often-forgotten recordings made at this time. Victor Staub (1872-1953) and Lazare-Lévy (1882-1964) were both students of Louis Diémer at the Paris Conservatoire in the latter part of the 19th century and both were to follow in his footsteps as great teachers in that institution and elsewhere. Indeed, their list of pupils reads as a roll call of 20th century French pianists. However, they were also extremely fine pianists and this set presents, for the first time, their complete studio recordings. The Staub titles are almost forgotten and none have ever been reissued before. As one would expect, clarity, brilliance and refinement are much to the fore in these exemplars of the French School.