Following her recital dedicated to exiled composers (BIS-2332), Sueye Park joins forces with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, conducted by Valentin Egel, to present concertante works for violin and orchestra by Karl Goldmark and Jean Sibelius. The two composers may belong to different generations and cultures, but their musical DNA is strikingly similar; both were virtuoso violinists who weathered financial and political storms, drew inspiration from Mendelssohn and Wagner, and penned masterful violin concertos. Their paths actually crossed in Vienna (1890-91), when Sibelius studied under Goldmark, and this brief but significant mentorship inspired violinist Sueye Park to pair their works on this album. At the heart of the album is Goldmark's Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 28 (1877), a sweeping, virtuosic masterpiece that marries Hungarian folk inflections with German Romanticism. Complementing this are Sibelius's exquisite shorter works: the late Suite JS 185, the lyrical Two Serious Melodies, Op. 77, and the highly expressive Humoresques, Op. 87. Together, this program celebrates two composers who were supremely at home writing for the violin-an instrument inextricably woven into the fabric of their musical identities.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Brahms’s friend Carl Goldmark completed Merlin in 1886, when it was premiered at the Vienna Hofoper. Fairly successful on both sides of the Atlantic before the Great War but hardly heard since, it’s representative of an almost-forgotten genre of 19th-century operas on aspects of the Arthurian mythos. (Chausson’s Le Roi Arthus and Albéniz’s Merlin are other examples).

The libretto by Siegfried Lipiner concentrates on Merlin’s fatal love for the wild child Viviane, which dims the magical powers with which he had served King Arthur, so that he falls victim to the Demon he had previously enslaved.

This spirited revival reveals a beautifully-scored and theatrically quite sure-footed piece fascinatingly poised between Brahms and Wagner: chromatic, Tristan-esque motifs contrast with choral writing more out of Rinaldo and the Triumphlied.

Between these extremes there is a supple, late-Romantic middle-ground where Goldmark’s declamatory vocal writing rises to occasional eloquence, with some noble orchestral passages that seem to anticipate Elgar.

The piece was certainly worth revival, but actual greatness eludes it. Luckily this production is vocally strong, with Robert Künzli as a noble-voiced Merlin, Frank van Hove as the scheming Demon and Anna Gabler a touching Viviane being the clear stars of the show.

-- Calum MacDonald, BBC Music Magazine

Classical Music

Karl Goldmark was one of the most popular and frequently performed Central European Romantic composers until the Nazi Regime in the 1930's. The ostracism of his work continued after World War II, until finally at the end of the 20th century slowly a selective rediscovery of his oeuvre took place. With this release Thomas Albertus Imberger continues to ending this oblivion of Goldmark's manifold work.

Die Koenigin von Saba (The Queen of Sheba) was Karl Goldmark's first opera. It conquered stages across Europe after its premiere in 1875. This production of the opera was recorded at Theater Freiburg, The four act opera stars vocalists Katerina Hebelkova and Nuttaporn Thammathi.

Carl Goldmark was not a symphonist – and that is no secret. His few attempts in this field – an early work, in part lost, and his second symphony, his op. 35, did not add up to much, and the Ländliche Hochzeit, to which the generic label »symphony« was assigned, does nothing more than confirm that this master of orchestral colors was above all good at atmospheric and character pictures. Goldmark very evidently needed a programmatic or dramatic “pretext” in order to rise up to his creative best, which is why he was able to gain the greatest fame and to score his most important successes with his stage works (tops here: Die Königin von Saba) as well as with his concert overtures. As he himself said, a change of milieu was good for his powers of inspiration, and so he repeatedly sought out extremes while selecting his materials and subjects. Accordingly, this new album with the Bamberg Symphony and the conductor Fabrice Bollon is also a “composite”: it complements Vol. 1 (555 160-2) with a program including the three mirthful overtures Im Frühling (In the Spring), In Italien (In Italy), and Aus Jugendtagen (From the Days of Youth), the preludes to his last two operas, Götz von Berlichingen and Ein Wintermärchen (A Winter’s Tale), and a special rarity in the form of the symphonic tone picture Zrinyi – a musical monument to this Hungarian-Croatian national hero and a work with which Goldmark wanted to express his gratitude to his home Magyar territory.

Mainly known today for his violin concerto, during his lifetime the Hungarian composer Karl Goldmark was praised for the quality of his instrumentation, his skilful use of folk music and his own Jewish heritage, and his evident gift for melody. The author of several operas, among them The Queen of Sheba, Goldmark wrote music in most genres, and although largely self-taught he was sought out as a teacher of composition by Sibelius, among others. Composed in 1875, his ‘Rustic Wedding’ Symphony was his most popular orchestral work. At the first performance the audience hailed it as a triumph, and Goldmark’s friend Brahms said about it: ‘clear-cut and faultless, it sprang into being a finished thing, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter.’ The five-movement symphony has sometimes been described as a suite of tone poems, including a wedding march with variations depicting the wedding guests, a nuptial song and a bucolic wedding dance. Even though the work is now a rarity in concert, conductors such as Sir Thomas Beecham and Leonard Bernstein demonstrated their belief in it by performing it on many occasions. Composed some ten years later, Goldmark’s E flat major symphony, Op.35, is far less well-known. Although its form is more traditional than that of its predecessor, it is similar in mood – bucolic and high-spirited – and provides rich opportunities to sample Goldmark’s skill as an orchestrator and musical colourist. Performing these unjustly neglected works is the Singapore Symphony Orchestra – a band which under its principal conductor Lan Shui has impressed reviewers in repertoire as diverse as Debussy’s La Mer (‘an unequivocally world-class performance’, BBC Music Magazine), Zhou Long (‘utterly compulsive… orchestral playing of the highest calibre’, International Record Review) and Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony (‘a moving, completely satisfying performance’, allmusic.com).

Carl Goldmark, Jewish composer of Hungaro-Austrian descent, practically never in his youth received comprehensive musical training, which may be why he only at the age of 30, around the year 1860, gained public attention as a composer with his string quartet Op. 8. Foregone has a period of intense self-study of counterpoint and works by Bach and Beethoven. Two years later, Goldmarks string quintet Op. 9 premiered, though being thought of as too bold for the taste of the audience, hence it's performance was refused by Ferdinand David, concert master of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, after having made some unpleasant experiences with the string sextet by Brahms. The Haydn Quartet, for more than 20 years "quartet in residence" in Esterhazy Palace in Eisenstadt, is being supported by outstanding cellist and professor Rudolph Leopold.

A spectacular tribute to Hungarian-born composers, from the brilliant, award-winning performers — Grammy-nominated violinist ELMIRA DARVAROVA (first and only woman-concertmaster of The Metropolitan Opera) and pianist THOMAS WEAVER (professor at Curtis Institute of Music), the album “FROM LISZT TO LIGETI” brings an exceptionally vivid narrative linking historic milestones in the legacies of a number of superb Hungarian-born musicians — composers and performers, who have so enormously contributed to enriching the world’s cultural treasure-trove.

Liszt, Joachim, Bartók, Kodály, Hubay, Goldmark, Ligeti — they have all bequeathed us masterpieces to behold and cherish, throughout several centuries of showcasing, shaping, preserving, and amalgamating national traditions and global influences through the prism of their own personal creative gifts.

This album is a charismatically kaleidoscopic retrospective that traces the historic perspective of how uniquely innovative artists such as Bartók and Kodály built the cornerstones of their oeuvre by exploring, embracing, critically analyzing, and then reshaping Liszt’s ideals. It also explores how Ligeti followed on the heels of Bartók and Kodály with his own ethnomusicological research, creating, still in his student days, a little-known Duo that he kept editing and crystallizing throughout his life and various periods of transforming and modernizing, but then later returning to conventionally established expressive means. Additionally, it delves into how Joachim — as a muse to numerous music giants, such as Brahms, Liszt, Dvorák, Bruch, Robert and Clara Schumann — influenced and caused cataclysmic events without which the history of music would not have been the same.

In addition to the best-known Hungarian-born composers Liszt, Bartók, Kodály, and Ligeti, the inclusion of Joachim in this album as a co-author (not just dedicatee) of Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12” (in its version for violin and piano) makes sense historically not only because Joachim in his transcription radically transformed Liszt’s composition but also because Joachim famously contributed to the creation of numerous gems by some of the greatest-ever composers, such as the violin concertos by Dvorák and Bruch (who published these works after Joachim helped in creating them) and Brahms’ First Piano Concerto (bearing Joachim’s handwritten corrections which elicited “thank-you” letters from Brahms, during the 4 years Brahms took to write that concerto).

The inclusion in this album of the Hungarian-born composers Hubay and Goldmark is also well-justified, bringing up yet other interesting dimensions to the album’s narrative. The album’s deeply-considered collection explores the affecting lyrical gift of Goldmark, who, as the largely self-taught son of a synagogue cantor, followed his ingrained melodic instincts from growing up without riches among 20 siblings, to becoming Vienna’s leading composer (after the deaths of Brahms and Bruckner), teaching Sibelius, and writing a mind-blowing violin concerto, a symphony championed by Sir Thomas Beecham and by Leonard Bernstein, and several operas, one of which was produced at The Metropolitan Opera in 1885, and three of which were presented in Vienna during Mahler’s leadership of the Court Theatre.

Hubay’s unparalleled contribution as a historical “cross-roads” figure is also well-defined in this album, not only because of who he was — the son of an elite musician (who conducted the Budapest premiere of Wagner’s “Lohengrin”), a student of Joachim, a department head at Brussels’ Royal Conservatory (succeeding Vieuxtemps and Wieniawski), a chamber music partner of Liszt and of Brahms (performing with Brahms the world-premiere of Brahms’ D Minor Violin Sonata, and the world-premiere of Brahms’ Third Piano Trio), composer of numerous concertos, symphonies, and operas (one of which was embroiled in a scandal reported 100 years ago by The New York Times), and the teacher of many illustrious star-violinists who became muses to Bartók, Kodály, Ravel, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Rebecca Clarke (among these violin prodigies were Bartók’s girlfriend Stefi Geyer, Eugene Ormandy of The Philadelphia Orchestra fame, and Joachim’s great-nieces Jelly d’Arányi and Adila Fachiri, who not only inspired Bartók and many others but also spear-headed the search for Schumann’s long-suppressed violin concerto, “cancelled” and hidden by its dedicatee — their great-uncle Joachim).

The choice of Hubay’s well-known czardas “Hejre Kati” for inclusion in this album reflects the evolution and role of that genre in the history of Hungarian musical traditions — from the early roots of czardas stemming from verbunkos (used even by Haydn), to its controversial misappropriation by dilettante performers whose inflectional performing style was confused and misinterpreted by Liszt as original Hungarian folk melodies, to more tasteful artistically expressed concert-stage compositions (like Hubay’s “Hejre Kati”), to the eventual dethroning and demythologizing of the czardas by Bartók and Kodály, who discovered, revealed, and incorporated the true authenticity of their home country’s original folk music.

The album selections follow Bartók’s evolving from the student-composer of a traditionally-profiled, Romantically-influenced Andante and the mature creator of “15 Hungarian Peasant Songs” and “Rhapsody for Violin and Piano No.1” (embodying his scientific and artistic mission to reveal the exquisitely-uncontroverted authentic beauty of ancient folk melodies) to the transfigured innovator who elevated and transformed old rustic traditions, fusing them into new and progressive forms and rhythms, reaching out to impressionism and jazz (as depicted in Bartók’s “Dance in Bulgarian Rhythm No. 6”), and paving the way for Ligeti’s experimentalism, which, through multiple “back and forth” constructing and de-constructing, reflected Ligeti’s never-ending search for artistic inspiration (this album presents the, recorded here only for the second time, recently-discovered Duo for Violin and Piano, which Ligeti never submitted for publication but continued returning to, and working on).

The unusually meticulous album notes cover the multi-dimensional, serendipitous, and cross-pollinating nature of essential events and legacies, which endure and continue to fascinate us.

Ning Feng, together with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin conducted by Antony Hermus, releases the violin concertos of Johannes Brahms and Carl Goldmark. This pairing is particularly apt as these works were both written in 1877, and the composers were dear friends. In Goldmark's lyrical Violin Concerto, Ning Feng plays the original 5-minute cadenza which is seldom heard in it's entirety. Written only a few months after the Goldmark, Brahms' famous Violin Concerto in D, Op.77 needs little introduction. Ning Feng has long been associated with this concerto, having played it when he won First Prize in the International Paganini Competition 2006 as well as First Prize in the 2005 Michael Hill International Violin Competition.