Classical Music

Roger Smalley (1943–2015) made his mark, first in his native Britain and then in Australia, as composer, pianist, conductor, writer, academic and teacher. Although as performer and commentator he was at the forefront of musical modernism, he was also very fond of nineteenth-century Romanticism, and much of his music bridges the gap between old and new, retaining its roots in the past while reflecting the concerns of his own time, as the works on this album demonstrate.

Friedrich Gernsheim (1839–1916), born in Worms, on the Rhine, grew up to be one of the most formidable musicians of his age: composer, pianist, conductor and teacher. Even as a teenager, Gernsheim was attracting attention as a virtuoso-composer, earning comparisons with Mozart. These two early piano sonatas – restored by Jens Barnieck from Gernsheim’s manuscripts – combine youthful freshness with preternatural assuredness, showing awareness of Schumann and anticipating Brahms. By the time of the Six Preludes, written a decade later, Chopin has become the dominant star in Gernsheim’s firmament.

Roy Agnew (1891-1944) - one of few early-twentieth-century Australian composers to gain international success - wove many external influences into a warmly Romantic personal style of striking variety and wide appeal, and his compositions, largely for the piano, are startlingly virtuosic, harmonically daring and charmingly sentimental by turn. Beautifully written by a natural pianist for his own instrument, they often recall the virtuosic textures of Liszt and Skryabin and occasionally show flashes of the Impressionist colours of Debussy. This is the fifth album that Stephanie McCallum - Associate Professor in piano at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music - has recorded for Toccata Classics. The four earlier ones all focused on French composers: Alkan, Bo�ly and Ropartz. Now she turns her considerable talents to rescue a forgotten composer from her native Australia.

This album introduces both a new voice and a new choir to western audiences: the Estonian P�rt Uusberg (b. 1986) is well known at home as a film actor as well as a composer; and in 2017 Collegium Musicale carried the coveted Silver Rose Bowl of the EBU competition 'Let the People Sing' home to Tallinn. Uusberg's works use many of the devices that have made recent Baltic choral music so popular in the wider world: melodies that unfold calmly over long bass lines, sustained by suspensions and piqued by mild dissonance - reflecting an awareness of the immensity of nature in music that is both exquisitely beautiful and infinitely touching. Endrik Uksvarav graduated from the Estonian Academy of Music and Theater as a conductor in 2004. The Estonian chamber choir Collegium Musicale was founded by Endrik Uksvarav in October 2010, with a repertoire extending from Renaissance to contemporary music. A special place in that repertoire belongs to Estonian composers, among them Arvo Part, Erkki-Sven Tuur, Helena Tulve and Part Uusberg. The aim is to act as ambassadors for Estonian music at the same time as delivering an intense emotional experience.

The TACET label, famous for ist visionary, high-quality repertoire policy, uses new technology to search for new ways of using the auditorium for musical experiences. Andreas Spreer, owner and manager of the label Tonmeister of this recording, places the listener right in the middle of the musicians: opposite the viola, with the violins at front left and right and the two cellos behind his or her shoulders. This configuration is most definitely unusual and takes some getting used to; but what three-dimensionalness it gives to Schubert’s wonderful – and wonderfully played – String Quintet! The themes become tangible thanks to the masterful interpretation, the structure of the work is intuitively understandable, and the attribute “acoustically transparent” should really be redefined after this recording. (Kulturspiegel)"(…) Ever wondered what it was like to play in a chamber group such as this? Well, choose your instrument and sit close to that speaker. You’ll get a pretty good idea." (Audiophile Audition)

Much of the music of Joan Cabanilles (1644–1712) is as virtuosic and colourfully Baroque as that of his northern contemporary, Dietrich Buxtehude, though it is also touched with a distinctively Spanish intensity. He is claimed as the most prolific of all composers for the organ, and publication of his works, begun in 1927, is still under way. This is the second in an ongoing series of recordings designed to restore a great Valencian master to his unique glory. Timothy Roberts studied with Christopher Kite and Jill Severs, also receiving masterclass tuition from Kenneth Gilbert and Gustav Leonhardt. He worked for about thirty years as a busy touring keyboard player, twenty of them as principal keyboard of the Gabrieli Consort and his Players; he also became director of His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts. In recent years he has also gained experience as a recording engineer and sound editor, composer and music-typesetter.

This album by the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra playing on period instruments under the direction of Aapo Hakkinen includes Ludwig van Beethoven’s (1770-1827) complete incidental music to Goethe’s Egmont.

What distinguishes Beethoven’s Egmont are great dramatic emotion of style, tightly unified musical ideas, and an absolute determination to create a sense of the triumph of freedom as the Utopian dream of the whole of mankind. The overture, the only one of the ten numbers to be heard regularly today in the concert-hall, draws all these intentions together in concentrated form. Its meaning is revealed only in context, together with the interludes and the final musical episodes.

Lars Vogt continues his series of concerto recordings with the Royal Northern Sinfonia with this new recording of Johannes Brahms’ (1833–1897) First Piano Concerto together with Four Ballades (Op. 10) for solo piano. As in previous albums, Lars Vogt conducts from the keyboard.

The evolution of Brahms’ 1st Piano Concerto took several steps. Originally conceived to become a Sonata for Two Pianos through orchestration it was developed into a four-movement Symphony until reaching into its final form of a Piano Concerto in three movements. During the process, which lasted from 1854 to 1856, some movements were also discarded and replaced by new material. This music is packed with much drama. No wonder since these years were particularly tumultuous in Brahms’ personal life: it was during this period when his great mentor Robert Schumann was sent into an asylum and ultimately died. It was also time when Brahms formed a close, lifelong friendship to Clara Schumann. Some of these feelings might well be echoed in the peaceful 2nd movement, Adagio.

Brahms’ Four Ballades, Op. 10 are works written in 1854 by a young composer barely in his 20s, yet these pieces are technically mature and profound in such a manner that they could even be compared to his final piano opuses.

Lars Vogt was appointed the first ever “Pianist in Residence” by the Berlin Philharmonic in 2003/04 and enjoys a high profile as a soloist and chamber musician. His debut solo recording on Ondine with Bach’s Goldberg Variations (ODE 1273-2) was released in August 2015 and has been a major critical success. Lars Vogt started his tenure as Music Director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia in September 2015. Lars Vogt was nominated for Gramophone’s Artist of the Year award in 2017. His recordings of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos Nos. 2 & 4 (ODE 1311-2) together with the Royal Northern Sinfonia and an album of Dvorak’s Piano Trios (ODE 1316-2) received Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice in May 2018 and in December 2018. His most recent album on Ondine featuring four Mozart’s Piano Sonatas (ODE 1318-2) was also chosen Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice in July 2019.

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REVIEW:

The music-making is nothing short of sensational. This is a bold Brahms D minor with immense character, audacious and courageous. It is also perhaps the most sensitive and subtle reading of the score in recent memory. A wealth of seldom-heard orchestral detail emerges, with exquisite wind-playing especially prominent. Nothing is extraneous; every gesture seems bent towards maximum expressivity.

– Gramophone

Classical Music

Today, French Baroque composer and keyboard virtuoso Louis Marchand is perhaps best known as the performer who failed to take up J.S. Bach's challenge for a musical 'duel.' Unfortunately, this colorful legend has overshadowed Marchand's ample gifts as a composer of organ and harpsichord music. Writing in the 'old fashioned' style of d'Anglebert, he employs a profusion of ornaments which enrich the sustaining power of the sound. In contrast, the music of Rameau immediately imposes a new and revolutionary conception of music. Everything here breathes harmony. The discourse is always deliberately clear, favoring transparency over the bombastic effects of a more sensual harpsichord sound. The Donzelague harpsichord that is featured on this disc provides the link between these two seemingly antithetical composers. Donzelague built his instruments in Lyon and both Marchand and Rameau lived in Lyon at different points in their lives. Christophe Rousset explores the connections and contrasts between these giants of the period.

Trip Into Friendship is the project of three musician friends celebrating their long friendship with music. Orlando "Maraca" Valle in Havana, Orlando Poleo in Caracas and Gerard Naulet in Paris have been friends for 20 years. This recording under Orlando "Maraca" Valle's brilliant artistic direction and Orlando Poleo's exceptional rhythmic pulse, with a supporting wink from Gérard Naulet for Latin-jazz, help traditional melodies of Cuba music meet the original compositions of the three musician friends. The "trip" is a tribute to Latin-American music. Getting together a world-class group of musician friends during a stay in the Norman Countryside, because music knows no boundaries, and celebrating Cuban and Latin-American traditions, is the invitation offered by Gérard Naulet and his "Amigos" with this festive and passionate trip. This album is dedicated to Alena, Orlando Valle’s daughter; for whom he wrote the very beautiful same name melody during the recording.

Schubert's great E flat major trio had its first performance on December 26, 1827 at a concert in the Musikverein with the legendary violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who had given first performances of Beethoven’s five last string quartets earlier in the decade. Trio Vitruvi returns to Schubert's gem, giving us the original (longer) version of the score in an impassioned reading. Niklas Walentin, Alexander McKenzie, and Jacob la Cour have performed critically acclaimed concerts in Denmark, China, Russia, France, Ausria, Portugal, Belarus, and Germany in the most beautiful and famous concert halls. They won both first prize and audience prize at the Danish National Radio’s Chamber Music Competition of 2014, and first prize at the Jurmala International Music Competition that same year. “The young Vitruvi Trio showed highest technical and musical qualities… I can recommend them everywhere.” (Adam Fischer)

Paul Mendelssohn, Felix’s younger brother, was a banker by profession but an accomplished amateur cellist, and it is to him that we owe Felix Mendelssohn's three major compositions for cello and piano. This new recording presents Mendelssohn's complete output for cello and piano, and includes the three large scale works, as well as two short pieces, performed by leading virtuosi Marcy Rosen and Lydia Artymiw. Marcy Rosen has established herself as one of the most important and respected artists of our day. Los Angeles Times music critic Herbert Glass has called her "one of the intimate art's abiding treasures." She has performed in recital and with orchestra throughout Canada, England, France, Japan, Italy, Switzerland, and all fifty of the United States. She made her concerto debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the age of eighteen and has since appeared with such noted orchestras as the Dallas Symphony, the Phoenix Symphony, the Caramoor Festival Orchestra, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, the Jupiter Symphony and Concordia Chamber Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall, and the Tokyo Symphony at the famed Orchard Hall in Tokyo. Lydia Artymiw has emerged as one of the most compelling and individual pianists of her generation. For over forty years, she has consistently earned rave reviews, firmly establishing herself as a unique artistic personality with rare communicative gifts. Critics have praised her artistry and highly original interpretations, her warmth, intelligence, poetic gifts, thoughtfulness, versatility, and most of all, her distinctive and beautiful sound.

The Bulgarian Emil Tabakov (b. 1947) follows in the footsteps of such musicians as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, being active as both composer and conductor. Like Mahler, he prefers to write for large forces and now has ten symphonies to his name. Again like Mahler, Tabakov’s symphonies explore the darker side of the human spirit in epic scores as austere as they are powerful. Behind the plain title of Tabakov’s Concert Piece for Orchestra (1985) lurks an extraordinary explosion of violence and anger. The Fourth Symphony (1997) sandwiches a wild Bulgarian dance between two glacial slow movements, the second with an episode of Tchaikovskian lyricism at its centre; the finale is a dark, whirling moto perpetuo- a ride through hell. This is the third volume of a projected series of all ten Tabakov symphonies, most of them receiving their first recordings.

The Swiss composer �mile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950) is best remembered for his development of Eurhythmics, which teaches the appreciation of music through movement. But Jaques-Dalcroze, who studied with Delibes and Faur� in Paris and with Bruckner and Fuchs in Vienna, was a considerable composer in his own right, with operas, cantatas and orchestral works among his substantial output. These piano works, all written in the 1890s, are generally lighter in style, showing the influence of Schumann and the salons of Paris. Winner of several national and international prizes, the Milanese pianist Adalberto Maria Riva received a special mention at the International Competition of Music IBLA Grand Prize in 2008. This distinction allowed him to undertake a tour in the USA in April 2009 with a concert in Carnegie Hall. His repertoire ranges from Bach to contemporary composers, a sequence that he presents in a cycle of concert-conferences based on history and pianistic literature in a number of cultural and musical institutions across Europe.

Winner of the First Prize at the Maria Canals Piano Competition in Barcelona, Viv McLean has performed in all the major venues in the UK as well as throughout Europe, Japan, Australia and the USA. Viv's concerto work includes appearances with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Halle Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, Sinfonia Viva, Orchestra of the Swan, Orchestra of St John's, Northern Chamber Orchestra, Scottish Concert Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra under the baton of such conductors as Daniel Harding, Wayne Marshall, John Lubbock, Christopher Warren-Green, Owain Arwell Hughes, Philip Hesketh, David Charles Abell, Stephen Bell, Carl Davis, Christopher George and Marvin Hamlisch. Recent concerto highlights include Mozart K467 with the ECO at the Royal Festival Hall, Grieg with the LPO at the Barbican, Rachmaninov's 3rd Concerto with the RPO in Cambridge, Gershwin, Bernstein, de Falla and Ravel with the Hall� at the Bridgewater Hall, The Sage Gateshead and other venues in the North of England, and Beethoven's 5th Concerto with the Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall. Viv has recently been on tour with the London Concert Orchestra where he played Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in venues including the Royal Festival Hall, Symphony Hall, Bridgewater Hall, St David's Hall Cardiff, Philharmonic Hall Liverpool and Leicester's de Montfort Hall. On this new release, he presents a programme of well-known George Gershwin compositions and transcriptions.

Mark Andre's music is introverted and fragile, but it speaks to the listener with a shy intensity: hij! This is the title given by the German-French composer to a pair of pieces recorded for this album by the cr�me de la cr�me of avant-garde music ensembles: the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne conducted by Mariano Chiacchiarini as well as the SWR Vocal Ensemble and Experimental Studio with conductor Marcus Creed and sound director Joachim Haas. The music on this album is characterized by the unique nature of it's sounds. It sensitizes our ears to the tiniest nuances and creates mesmerizing fields of tension on the borders between sound and silence. Intricate and subtly transformed contrapuntal structures weave their way through hij 1 (for orchestra) like bewitching sound shadows searching for resonance, a resonance which becomes the point of departure for hij 2 (for vocal ensemble and electronics). This music is absolutely contemporary, yet it embraces the inherited musical tradition in a completely authentic and unpretentious manner. It slips stealthily into our consciousness and vanishes just as mysteriously.

This recording pairs music for violin and piano by two young British composers who found themselves marooned in American exile by World War II: Richard Arnell (1817-2009) and Stanley Bate (1911-59). Both composers established respectable careers for themselves in the New World before returning to Britain, Arnell in 1947 and Bate in 1949. Arnell’s music can be warmly lyrical and fiercely dramatic by turn, rather like its volatile and energetic composer. Bate’s First Violin Sonata has echoes of two of his teachers- Vaughan Williams and Hindemith. Plymouth-born violinist Patrick Wastnage attended Dartington College of Arts from the age of sixteen. He went on to the Guildhall School of Music, where he studied with Yfrah Neaman, Erich Gruenberg, David Takeno and later with Sandor Vegh. Joining the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1986, he has led a parallel career as soloist and chamber-music player. Elizabeth Dunn studied the piano at the Guildhall School of Music with Geraldine Peppin. Since then she has performed extensively as soloist, accompanist, and in chamber groups.

Recording all the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti on the piano is an undertaking of great moment and fascination: a journey through shared cultural experience, as well as one that explores the subtle thought processes of a musical genius, with his Italianate approach to art. This is the fifth volume in this outstanding series. Carlo Grante is one of Italy’s foremost concert pianists. He has performed in such major venues as the Vienna Musikverein, the Berlin Philharmonie’s Chamber Music Hall, London’s Wigmore Hall, and more. He has appeared as soloist with all of the world’s major orchestras. In 2014-2015, his series “Masters of High Romanticism,” featuring three recital programmes each devoted to Chopin, Chumann and Brahms, was taken to major halls in New York, Vienna and Berlin. Though best known for his Scarlatti, Mozart, and Chopin interpretations, Grante has had many contemporary works dedicated to him, including Adolphe’s Chopin Dreams. He has released nearly 50 recordings.

Helmut Lachenmann is often associated with the musique concrète instrumentale that he developed during the middle years of his career. The pieces on this recording, however, were written both before and after this particular aesthetic phase. The point of departure for these ideas (as Lachenmann put it in 1970) is sound itself “as the characteristic result and signal of its mechanical origin and the more or less economical use of the energy required to produce it.” Noise-like instrumental sounds are examined for similarities and contrasts. They are also cataloged: categories and families are created as the foundation of a kind of motivic development using noises and sounds. In “Got Lost” Lachenmann used four lines from Nietzsche, the poem “All Love Letters Are Ridiculous” by Fernando Pessoa and a short note in English lamenting the loss of a laundry basket which gave this work its name. Lachenmann wrote: “Three only seemingly unrelated texts, stripped of their lofty, poetic, or mundane diction, are all presented by the same sound source – a soprano voice singing ‘any old way’ – and sent into a constantly changing intervallic field of sound, resonance, and movement."

In 1961, Mauricio Kagel wrote a piano piece with two titles. As a solo work, it is called “Metapiece." It can also, however, be played together – either simultaneously or in alternation – with other pieces by Kagel or other living composers, and is then called Mimetics. In this way, Kagel opens at the conceptual level various possibilities for the interpreter to realize his composition. The pianist Sabine Liebner has accepted Kagel’s invitation to collaborate and undertaken her own musical journey through the composer’s piano music. Sabine Liebner‘s response to his invitation to play with the idea of open form is unique in that she combines “Metapiece” exclusively with other piano pieces, all of them composed by Kagel himself. “Metapiece”, in its “Mimetics” form, surrounds these other works or is laid over them. Framed by “Mimetics”, the “Cuatro piezas para piano” and “MM 51” are played in their original forms, and the piano etude “An Tasten” is subverted by a version of “Mimetics”. At the end of Liebner’s response to Kagel’s original invitation, “Metapiece” itself appears in a 20-minute solo version.

Cellist Marcy Rosen's recent recording of Mendelssohn's Complete Works for Cello and Piano with pianist Lydia Artymiw has received glowing reviews from the international press. The present reissue of her 1989 MHS Strauss & Grieg album presents two staples of the romantic cello repertoire in impassioned readings. Marcy Rosen has established herself as one of the most important and respected artists of our day. Los Angeles Times music critic Herbert Glass has called her "one of the intimate art's abiding treasures." She has performed in recital and with orchestra throughout Canada, England, France, Japan, Italy, Switzerland, and all fifty of the United States. She made her concerto debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the age of eighteen and has since appeared with such noted orchestras as the Dallas Symphony, the Phoenix Symphony, the Caramoor Festival Orchestra, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, the Jupiter Symphony and Concordia Chamber Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall, and the Tokyo Symphony at the famed Orchard Hall in Tokyo. In recital she has appeared in New York at such acclaimed venues as Carnegie Hall, the 92nd Street "Y" and Merkin Concert Hall; in Washington D.C. at the Kennedy Center, Dumbarton Oaks, the Phillips Collection and the Corcoran Gallery, where for many years she hosted a series entitled "Marcy Rosen and Friends." In recent seasons she has given Master Classes and appeared on stage in Beijing and Shanghai, China, the Seoul Arts Center in Korea and in Cartagena, Colombia.

Did you know that the legendary American Maverick Harry Partch wrote music for West Coast jazz icons Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan? They never got a chance to play his smart and funny Ulysses at the Edge of the World, but this “Minor Adventure in Rhythm” really swings in time signatures that would have made Dave Brubeck blush. So opens a collection of Partch classics that no one has really heard before. His score for the film Windsong was edited for the soundtrack, and though music lovers will recognize the material from the subsequently expanded Daphne of the Dunes, the symphonically structured original is much more dramatically crafted, and is presented here for the first time. It turns out that there are actually Twelve Intrusions, too, not eleven. And a demented sonata? Oh yes! Though the composer never performed or recorded it, his 1950 composition Sonata Dementia is in three movements: I. Abstraction & Delusion, II. Scherzo Schizophrenia, and III. Allegro Paranoia. Filled to the brim with humor, flights of fancy, and a febrile imagination, it was later reworked as “Ring Around the Moon,” but what a treat to hear the original in all its zany glory. The Bonus Tracks reveal even more lost treasures: here is the original 1904 Edison recording of the Native American “Cançion” that Partch had transcribed in the 1930s and used to close his final Intrusion “Cloud Chamber Music.” But best of all, the first-ever recording of Partch as performer, playing what is probably his most famous piece, Barstow: 8 Hitchhiker Inscriptions in front of a live audience in 1942, just a year after it was written.

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REVIEWS:

The recording is excellent with the performers giving a committed and engaging performance. Even the 1942 recording, wonderfully remastered, comes up well. The information in the booklet gives an excellent introduction to Partch and his music. This disc would serve as a good introduction to Partch’s music for any fan of American music, especially that off the beaten track. It certainly makes me want to hear the previous recordings in this series.

– MusicWeb International

There isn't a dull moment here. While Harry Partch admirers may be the primary market, anybody will enjoy this.

– AllMusic Guide

Guido Cantelli’s live recordings with the Philharmonia Orchestra are exceptionally rare because the BBC seldom broadcast any of his concerts. ICA Classics released Cantelli’s live concert from the Edinburgh Festival in September 1954 on ICAC 5081 but there has been nothing else. Toscanini was Cantelli’s mentor and there is no doubt that he would have continued in the great conductor’s footsteps had he not been tragically killed in an air accident in Paris on the 24th November 1956. He was 36 years old. ICAC is proud to present Vladimir Jurowski’s recording of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty. It was recorded live in December 2013 with the ‘Svetlanov’ orchestra. Jurowski has already accumulated a large catalogue of recordings all of which have received great critical acclaim.