This release has been sourced from the Richard Itter archive of 'live' recordings. The collection is very important for collectors because it has never been released before onto the market. Following the archive's launch in October 2017 with releases featuring Beecham, Bohm, Cantelli, Karajan, du Pre, Klemperer and Rostropovich, it has received universal praise from both the classical media and record collectors for the excellent sound and performances. Celebrated violinist Yehudi Menuhin was very familiar with the Mozart Concertos, and played all seven including the spurious No. 6. These 'live' performances reflect Menuhin's Mozart playing during a single month in 1956 where he performed all the composer's major works with orchestra. Menuhin brings great insight and experience to every concerto and his intonation which became a concern in later life is spot on with these performances.

This set of ‘live’ authorized recordings featuring the highly distinguished conductor Bruno Walter with the BBC Symphony Orchestra comes from the BBC’s annual May Festival, held in London in 1955. None of these recordings has been published before, and in the case of Wagner’s Faust Overture, this is Walter’s only post-war account. The mid-1950s saw Walter at the height of his powers, and the ‘live’ recordings here are very focused, having a great sense of forward movement and excitement – most notably in Haydn’s Symphony No.96 and Mahler’s Symphony No.1 – compared to some of the studio accounts in the early 1960s when Walter was well into his 80s. The set also contains Walter with the great German soprano Irmgard Seefried in ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’ from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which illustrates both her superb artistry and his genius as a Mahler conductor. Brahms’s Song of Destiny (Schicksalslied), a Walter favorite, completes the set. All recordings have been sourced from the Richard Itter archive, as Beecham caught ‘live’ often showed the mercurial side of his character, and no performance was the same either in the studio or in the concert hall. All the performances included here from the Edinburgh Festival, London’s Royal Albert Hall, Royal Festival Hall and the BBC Studios are from Beecham’s final years, from 1954 when he had fully established the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and himself as central figures in England’s musical life, to 1959 when he conducted an extraordinarily memorable account of Brahms’s Symphony No.2. Every broadcast is captured here in exemplary sound for the time.

I need a musical discourse, Holliger once said. This is a good description of his characteristic way of composing. Unlike Boulez, he does not base his works on charts and tables, but neither does he employ carpets of sound in the manner of Ligeti or the Spectralists. Particularly in his vocal works, Holliger allows himself to follow the associations suggested by certain words, and these associations in turn generate still other connections. "Shir Shavur" [The Broken Song] is the title of a cycle for choir that Holliger wrote based on 12 of David Rokeah's poems. The idea of discourse can be seen in the fact that Holliger set both the Hebrew and the German versions of the text. This principle is also evident in the different ways the choral forces are handled. There are antiphonal or double choir settings, but also responsorial settings for solo and choir. In "Utopie Chorklang" [Choral Sound Utopia], he divided the choir into three groups of twelve voices each. These three groups are "tuned" in different ways, like registers of an organ. The second group sings it's pitches, but the first group sings a third of a tone higher than written and the third group a third of a tone lower.

Craig Morris, former principal trumpet player of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, has recorded brilliant solo trumpet versions of three Philip Glass classics. Morris’s new recording features works ranging from Glass’s constantly shifting ‘Melodies’ (1995) to the driving minimalist rhythms and figures of ‘Gradus’ (1968) and ‘Piece in the Shape of a Square’ (1967). ‘Melodies’ was written as incidental music for a play based on the novel, Un Captif Amoureux (Prisoner of Love) by the French author Jean Genet. Glass’s thirteen melodies cover a wide range of emotion, from touching and introspective to joyous and dancing. The visual element of ‘Piece in the Shape of a Square,’ is much more a part of the composition than it is in ‘Gradus.’ The music is set up in a roughly 10’ square, with one performer on the inside of the square and one performer on the outside. The performer on the inside moves around the square in a clockwise direction, while the performer on the outside moves around in a counterclockwise direction. Virtuoso trumpeter Craig Morris plays both parts on this fascinating recording.

The case of the composer Hans Winterberg (1901–91) is a strange one. A survivor of the Terezín concentration camp, where he had been interned as a Czech Jew, after the War he settled in Munich as a German citizen, and his music enjoyed a number of broadcasts – but after his death, his estate disappeared into the vaults of the Sudeten German Music Institute, where it was placed under embargo, emerging only in 2015. This first album of his music reveals an unusual and individual voice, an idiosyncratic blend of Stravinsky, Janácek and Hindemith, with touches of Poulenc, often expressed with brittle humor and rhythmic verve. The Arizona Wind Quintet is the faculty ensemble-in-residence at the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music in Tucson. Formed in 1977, the AWQ has cultivated a tradition of excellence in both performance and teaching. The other instrumentalists on this recording are distinguished musicians active in the Tucson area, several of them teaching at the Fred Fox School of Music, although they appear in concert and at festivals all over North America.

BrIdge Records launches Anne-Marie McDermott's Mozart Piano Concerto cycle with Vol. 1 of the series offering Concerto No. 6, K. 238, and Concerto No. 13, K. 415. The Odensesymfoniorkester (Denmark) is conducted by Scott Yoo. Of Ms. McDermott's extraordinary musicianship BBC Music Magazine recently wrote: "McDermott's heart has heft and translucence, structural certainty and seasoned humanity." In a career that has spanned over 25 years, American pianist Anne-Marie McDermott has played concertos, recitals and chamber music in hundreds of cities throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. The breadth of her repertoire matches that of her instrument, spanning from Bach, Haydn and Beethoven to Rachmaninoff, Prokoviev and Scriabin to works by today’s most influential composers -- Aaron Jay Kernis, Steven Hartke, Joan Tower and Charles Wuorinen, among them. As an Artistic Director, Ms. McDermott leads the Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival in Florida and the Avila Chamber Music Celebration in Curacao.

The Munich-based French pianist Jean-Pierre Collot presents the piano works of Jean Barraqué, one of the most important composers of Serialism. This is a journey of discovery through Jean Barraqué's piano works, deeper and deeper through quasi-archaeological layers that bring us closer to the arcana of creation. The Sonate pour piano (1950/1952), masterpiece and experiment at the same time, here recorded for the first time in the definitive recast version, demands of us that we break all boundaries, as far as our conception of tempo, dynamics or agogic is concerned, that we create and explore new imaginary spaces. The deeper we go back in time, the more mysterious and gloomy the early pieces (1947-1949). All of these works are premiere recordings. The prelude to the third act of Tristan [Richard Wagner] — like a ghostly and fragile motto [of the young Barraqué] — throws on the whole program its pale, nebulous light. The Munich-based French pianist Jean-Pierre Collot presents the piano works of Jean Barraqué, one of the most important composers of Serialism.

This is the second volume of Otto Klemperer’s ‘live’ authorized broadcasts from 1955 and 1958. None has ever been published before. When comparing the conductor’s studio accounts, Rob Cowan in Gramophone magazine said of the first set: ‘Viewed overall, what we have here is the Klemperer we already know and love, but granted wings and, trust me, you can tell the difference almost straight away’. Klemperer had a great affection for Mozart’s Symphony No.25, here almost a minute faster than his 1956 account. In his booklet note, Richard Osborne describes the performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No.5 from the 1958 Edinburgh Festival as “a performance that genuinely gathers itself to greatness.” Klemperer’s performances of the Brahms Requiem were justly famous, and this 1955 ‘live’ account precedes his acclaimed 1961 studio recording and is almost five minutes faster. Gramophone described the latter as follows: “Klemperer’s reading of this mighty work has long been famous: rugged, at times surprisingly fleet with a juggernaut power.” In this ‘live’ performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Klemperer is joined by the baritone Hans Wilbrink from the Munich State Opera and the German lyric soprano Elfride Trötschel, a protégée of Karl Böhm. The Mozart and Brahms recordings have been sourced from the Lyrita Recorded Edition Trust, while the authorised BBC broadcast of Beethoven Symphony No.5 is from another collection.

This fourth album in the Toccata Classics survey of the chamber music of London-born Stephen Dodgson (1924–2013) offers a first installment of his many works for woodwinds. Much of it brings Dodgson’s sense of fun to the fore, often through rhythmic mischief or an insouciance that recalls Poulenc, but it also has that particularly English strain of lyricism that suggests the impermanence of beauty. British composer and broadcaster Stephen Dodgson’s prolific musical output covered most genres, ranging from opera and large-scale orchestral music to chamber and instrumental music, as well as choral works and song. He wrote in a tonal, though sometimes unconventional, idiom. Paul Griffiths, in The Oxford Companion to Music, writes that Dodgson “proved adept at producing likable, well-crafted music to order, often for unusual chamber ensembles.”

The orchestral music of the English composer David Hackbridge Johnson (b. 1963) is one of the most important discoveries to have been made by Toccata Classics. This second volume brings two mighty symphonies: the dark and tragic No. 10 (2013), cast in a single monumental span, and the three-movement No. 13 (2017), a fierce and fiery affirmation of life. They are complemented here by an orchestral ‘motet’ which passes plainchant in kaleidoscopic review. Writing in Gramophone, Guy Rickards said of Hackbridge Johnson’s Ninth Symphony: “what is so astonishing is not his ambition in attempting such large, big-boned structures… but that he possesses the compositional technique to achieve them so completely… This is a profound, complex, and visionary utterance.” Paul Mann, who here leads the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, is a regular guest conductor with many orchestras throughout Europe, the USA, Australia and the Far East. He enjoyed a famous collaboration with the legendary rock group Deep Purple and was a close friend of its keyboardist Jon Lord. He first came to international attention as first prizewinner in the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition, and as a result was appointed assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. This is his twelfth project with Toccata Classics.

Few things small enough to fit in the palm of the hand can inspire wonder about the limitless potential of human creativity. A collection of early Renaissance devotional objects- elegantly precise boxwood carvings of miniature rosaries, prayer beads and altarpieces, on display as part of a major international exhibition- served as the direct inspiration for this musical program. These objects draw viewers into a private and intimate world of meditation; religious scenes carved with precision and poetry evoke a bygone world of intense spiritual devotion- sometimes tormented, sometimes luminous, but always fascinating. The music in this program is designed to elicit similar sensations in listeners. Originating in northern European circles, contemporary with those who produced these boxwood carvings, these spiritual pieces are not intended for grand cathedrals or public ceremony, but for personal meditation, private chapels and rooms, family houses and assemblies. Like the beads and rosaries, their craftsmanship is precise, superb; rich in subtle details, they lead us to wonder, and to contemplation.

Fridrich Bruk- born in Kharkov in 1937 and a Finnish resident since 1974- made his name as a composer of tangos. But the heart of his music lies in a series of eighteen symphonies, which have a strong narrative elemtn, some reflecting Jewish themes, others inspired by Karelia and Finland. Symphony No. 17, Joy of Life, has an autobiographical programme charting, in abstract terms, Bruk’s surmounting of the obstacles fate put in his path. Symphony No. 18 takes as its starting point a Latvian-Jewish folksong: it is premised on the deportation of his grandparents from their Latvian home, in an anti-Semitic campaign by Tsarist Russia that Bruk sees as a kind of prologue to the Holocaust. Gertruda Jerjomenko is a Latvian pianist and harpsichordist. She made her solo debut in a CPE Bach concerto with the Baroque orchestra Collegium Musicum Riga under the guidance of Maris Kupcs and has since appeared at concerts and festivals as a soloist, chamber and orchestra music, in Latvia and abroad.

Critically acclaimed ensemble Chamber Domaine returns to Resonus with this portrait of Finland’s most prominent national composer- Jean Sibelius. Featuring a combination of both well known and lesser performed works, artistic director and conductor Thomas Kemp leads a programme of instrumental, chamber and string orchestra compositions including the suite for strings, Rakastava (The Lover), the brooding Malinconia for cello, and the fulsome Andante Festivo in celebrating the depth and versatility of this great composer. The album was recorded with spectacular sound quality, and features a full color booklet. Chamber Domaine is a trailblazing ensemble acclaimed for its virtuosity, distinctive programming and passionate advocacy of the music from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chamber Domaine is project based and has a modular lineup of outstanding instrumentalists and vocalists ranging from duos to chamber orchestra.

The longer the modern era lasts, the older “New Music” grows, and the more versatile it becomes. Upon closer listening, one quickly becomes aware of the many byways and backroads of the genre, in addition to the principal trends, and one composer who trod his own path decisively, with great success, is Gottfried von Einem. Since his breakthrough with the premiere of his opera Dantons Tod (the death of Danton) at the Salzburg Festival in 1947, through to the composer’s death in 1996, many of his works have been performed on the international music stage, as witness recordings featuring the likes of Böhm, Karajan and George Szell on this label. However, everyone knows that for a composer to continue to develop his artistic skills he needs more than glittering premieres, and so the Orfeo label is delighted to mark the 100th birthday of the composer born in 1918 by releasing, alongside other new recordings of his works from its catalogue, a retrospective of von Einem’s work featuring the very best performers of today.

The earliest work on this new release is the choral work with orchestra Stundenlied, which originates from a highly interesting cultural and historical source: a collaboration with the playwright Bertolt Brecht who from 1949 lived in the German Democratic Republic. The story of Christ’s passion is witnessed and presented in a popular, naive way as a dreadful event and brilliantly depicted by von Einem using simple and stringent compositional means to produce a work that is haunting and authoritative, performed here by the Singverein and Philharmonic Orchestra of Vienna under Franz Welser-Möst.

Johan Botha’s unfailingly radiant and yet powerfully carrying voice established him over many years as a Strauss and Wagner singer par excellence, but most of all as a youthful hero, and not as a weighty heroic tenor. In fact, Tannhauser was something of a marginal role for him, but what a role! The recording of the Rome episode in the Vienna State Opera premiere of June 16, 2010, with which the release’s four-part Wagner portrait begins with excerpts from Vienna Staatsoper productions, movingly reveals how as a suffering yet passionate pilgrim he returns from Rome dejected and unredeemed. The bridal-chamber scene from the third act of Lohengrin looks back to Botha’s early years at the Staatsoper. Fifteen years later, he is an ideal Walther von Stolzing, who after a night of dreams reveals his Prize Song to cobbler-poet Hans Sachs, who in turn refines it and writes it down. The most moving scene comes perhaps at the close of Ariadne auf Naxos, when a figure hailed as Hermes, the divine messenger of death, proves to be Bacchus, the god of love. The recording captures one of Botha’s last appearances at the Vienna Staatsoper.

Cuban-American pianist Jorge Bolet (1914-1990), misleadingly labeled the "last Romantic" among 20th century pianists and marketed under this title when he achieved world fame at the end of his career, was first and foremost a gentleman of the piano. Few pianists interpreted the great piano music of the 19th and early 20th centuries with such unerring stylistic assurance and technical mastery that was at the same time completely free of vanity and striving for effect. Rather than vague sentimentality, Bolet - who studied at the world-renowned Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with David Saperton, son-in-law of the legendary pianist Leopold Godowsky, and later succeeded Rudolf Serkin as director of ist piano department - sought a balance between musical and pianistic intelligence. Thanks to these qualities, his recordings, which include not-uncontroversial transcriptions from the golden age of piano playing before 1914, are considered benchmarks.

These recordings for the RIAS Berlin from 1962-73, featuring works by Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy along with highly virtuosic encores and arrangements by Moritz Moszkowski and Godowsky (among others), are no exception: here we experience a pianist and musician who rightly occupies a place among the pantheon of great pianists.

All the recordings in this three-CD box set are first releases from the master tapes.

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REVIEW:

Almost everything by Bolet is worth acquiring, but this collection is particularly valuable. Few pianophiles will be aware of the existence of these radio broadcasts from the early 1960s.

Disc 1 opens up with Bolet on top form, including an intense account of Vallee d'Obermnann that ends more in despairing torment than than rapturous ecstasy.

Disc 2 includes a number of superb accounts of Bolet favorites. The third disc contains a muscular, magisterial rendition of Chopin's F minor Fantasy, most characteristic of this great artist yet by no means devoid of introspection and sensitivity. All four of Chopin's Impromptus are a real joy. The Debussy Preludes selections form a beautifully played sequence of individually defined tone-poems.

– Gramophone

Chaya Czernowin has developed a musical language in which space and gesture are the focus of her compositional interest: the discovery of musical changes in perspective that irritate and can sometimes be misleading. The listener never knows which musical gestures will come into focus and which will fade into the background. The compositional organization of space and time plays an important role in "HIDDEN", Chaya Czernowin’s quartet for strings and electronics. This is a work that deals with things unseen: things that are never revealed in their entirety, and can only be perceived (if they are perceived at all) as shadowy intimations. Czernowin says, " ‘HIDDEN’ is a slowly unfolding, 45-minute listening experience that permits our ears to turn into eyes. Our ears are given space and time to become accustomed to a totally unpredictable territory of sound. " As Chaya Czernowin has explained, she wanted to create an “Etude in Fragility” with her cycle of works for voice and breath.

The organ music of Joan (or Juan) Cabanilles (1644–1712) is virtuosic and colourfully Baroque, and touched with a distinctively Spanish intensity. Cabanilles is claimed as the most prolific of all composers for the organ, and publication of his works, begun in 1927, has not caught up with his output. But the surviving manuscripts can be seriously corrupt, requiring extensive editing and sometimes even detailed recomposition. This recording – Volume Three of an ongoing series – therefore uses a number of new editions to present the music as never heard before, as close as possible to what the composer might have intended. It was made using the historic (1732) organ in the Basilica of Sant Jaume in Vila-real, Valencia. Timothy Roberts was for twenty years principal keyboard of the Gabrieli Consort and Players; he also became director of His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts. In recent years he has also been active as a recording engineer and sound editor, composer and music-typesetter.

Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber (1782-1871) was long considered as one of the most typically French and most successful opera composers of the 19th century. His overtures were once favourites of the light Classical repertoire. This opera francais, first performed on 3 May 1825, relates to the venerable tradition of the rescue opera, topical since the French Revolution. Both book and score were equally successful. The opera represents a decisive development in Aubers style, a turning away from imitation of Rossini to Boieldieu’s simplicity and thereby to a specifically French tradition. It was the first of Auber’s mature opera-comiques, an international success, characterized by an Italianate sparkle with French grace and lyricism. The work remained in the repertoire from 1825 to 1896 and was performed 525 times. By the 1850s it had been translated into German, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Czech and Hungarian. On German stages this opera remained one of Auber’s most popular works, given as late as 1950 in Vienna.

Quite by chance Georg Philipp Telemann became godfather for the title of this album. In the year of his 250th anniversary, the Pfeiffer Trumpet Consort concentrated on the oeuvre of one of the most prolific composers of music history. A variety of his compositions are still unpublished until today, an incentive for us to perform works which have never before been heard in this way. Telemann was an outspoken friend of the trumpet, who used this instrument in many of his pieces- whether it be his spiritual and secular oratorios, cantatas, orchestral works, chamber music, or solo concerts. Another special attraction for the ensemble was the adaption of music of the English renaissance originally written for keyboard instruments, which we consider suitable to present here with trumpets, organ, and timpani in an all new sound. Splendid arrangements emerged, giving the listener the chance to discover the richness of this centuries-old music in a new and entertaining way. The Pfeiffer Trumpet Consort presents with this album a varied program with many unknown treasures, making an important contribution to the Telemann Year.

Classical Music

The multicultural melting pot of Malta is home to the Malta International Music Festival, a major cultural event hosted annually by this Mediterranean island nation. One of the Festival’s most memorable concerts- the one recorded here- took place in 2017: a Trio Gala program for which the well-known Khachaturian Trio as well as five other brilliant musicians- formed into trios (and one duo)- performed a dazzling array of varied and highly appealing music. The program includes both well-known and novel music by Maltese composers Joseph Vella and Alexey Shore; also Uzbekistan native Ilya Dimov. Highlights include a brilliant rendition of Khachaturian’s world-famous Sabre ance in a version for piano trio, the sublime Andante from Arno Babadjanian’s Piano Trio, and a breathtaking performance of the much-loved Handel-Halvorsen Passacaglia for violin and cello. In addition to the Khachaturian Trio, the distinguished performers include a number of well-known artists, predominatnly from Armenia and Russia.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Of those composers who held the highest positions at St Mark's basilica in Venice, Natale Monferrato (1610-85) is manifestly one of the most thoroughly forgotten nowadays. After working with the leading musicians of this prestigious institution, he succeeded Francesco Cavalli as maestro di cappella in 1676. His output, consisting exclusively of sacred music, includes some twenty collections published between 1647 and 1681. Although he wrote a great deal of polyphonic music, he also produced three collections of Motetti a voce sola. Most unusually, these three books accord an important place to compositions for the often neglected alto voice. They are so voluminous that only the Libro Terzo of 1666 was used for this recording. The motets are divided into varied and contrasted sections that range from the spirit of recitative to that of the aria, using very diverse forms in a manner that is bound to remind us of the models of opera as it developed in Venice from 1637 onwards. This world premiere recording blazes the trail for discovery of an undeservedly neglected composer.