Kristian Riisager (b. 1996) received his educated at Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” in Berlin and The Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, where he is still studying. In recent years, Kristian has played a number of solo and chamber music concerts around Denmark, just as he has played concerts in Sweden, Germany, Lithuania and Georgia. He has won prizes at several competitions, including Berlingske Classical Music Competition, the national Steinway Festival and Music Without Limits in Lithuania. Kristian Riisager has also made a name for himself as a lied accompanist, and together with soprano Louise McClelland Jacobsen he won 1st prize in the Rued Langgaard Competition. As part of the prize they played in the 2021 opening concert of the Rued Langgaard Festival in Ribe. Kristian has received support from several foundations. Among other things, he has received a Steinway Grand Piano for use during his studies from the Augustinus Foundation. This is Kristian Riisager’s debut album.

The present release is the third and final instalment in Foyle/Štšura’s complete recording of Beethoven’s Piano and Violin Sonatas. The sonatas on the first two albums were emblematic of Beethoven’s early and middle periods, showcasing the composer’s command of the Classicalidiom. The last two sonatas push the boundaries of the genre even further, resulting in artistic efforts of increased emotional intensity, cyclical scope, and lyrical intimacy. They are also considered among the most dramatic and challenging works in the duo repertoire. An early review of Sonata no. 9 in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung was rude: ‘The addition to the title ‘scritta in uno stile molto concertante, quasicome d’un concerto’ appears eccentric, presumptuous and ostentatious’. However, to modern audiences this ‘like a concerto’ element that describes the equality and democratic dialogue between the two instruments is now integral to our understanding of the notion of chamber music and in this, Beethoven was a trailblazer. According to the great violinist Carl Flesch, ‘a flower must blossom in the souls’ of those performing Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano and Violin in G major Op. 96. The work dates from 1812, a full decade after previous six sonatas, and in its sublime beauty and pathos represents the transformation in Beethoven’s later works from the heroic, defiant drama immortalized in works like the ‘Kreutzer’ to something far more searching and spiritual, rather akin to his late quartets.

Assistant Professor of Double Bass George Speed enjoys a career that combines teaching with solo, chamber, and orchestral performing. He joins the College of Music faculty after 14 years as Associate Professor of Double Bass at Oklahoma State University, where he received the 2009 Wise-Diggs-Berry Award for Teaching Excellence. For the past four summers, Mr. Speed has served on the artist faculty of the Brevard Music Center in Brevard, North Carolina. He joins with pianist Heidi Louise Williams for this new release, showcasing a program of Bass favorites and transcriptions, including works by Beethoven, Boccherini, Dragonetti, and Sperger.

REVIEWS:

"All Fidelio and Beethoven fans will need this."

As most opera lovers know, Beethoven toiled greatly over his sole opera which was premiered in 1805 and revised in 1806--and then finally again in 1814, in the version that is now famous and beloved. The recording under consideration here is of the first version; this is the third time it has been recorded commercially.

Listening to this version...is an ear-opener: much music was eventually used in the familiar 1814 version, but even within those many pages there are small alterations everywhere and they're great fun to spot.

The performance is excellent, indeed marginally better than [the recording by John Eliot] Gardiner. It's as tightly led in exciting passages but Bertrand de Billy also captures some rapturous stillness and warmth in "Mir ist so wunderbar" and elsewhere, while Gardiner seems a bit clinical. De Billy also has slightly better singers. Camilla Nyland's sound is grander than Hillevi Martinpelto, and her reading of the text is deeper; Kim Begley and Kurt Streit are vocally both fine, but Streit's sweetness and goodness make a better case for Florestan. Peter Rose's understated Rocco is never mugged, and while I prefer a heavier voice than Gerd Gochowski's as Pizarro, his ease with the vocal line is a pleasure to hear. Dietmar Kerschbaum's Jaquino never cloys and Brigitte Geller's Marzelline is beautifully sung. De Billy gets thrilling playing from the Vienna Radio Symphony--the scoring in this version of the opera is very horn-heavy and generally heftier than the 1814--and I have a preference for ORF's non-period instruments here. The Arnold Schoenberg Choir sings with accuracy and feeling. All Fidelio and Beethoven fans will need this.

-- ClassicsToday.com

Unless one lived in a major European center with an orchestra, the opportunity to hear large-scale works by the great composers of the age was well-nigh impossible. The insatiable demand for new chamber versions of famed orchestral works saw Hummel ar-ranging Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos. 2 and 6 ‘Pastoral’ not long after the great composer’s death. Hummel approached his task with great care, bringing a fresh perspective to the works in his sensitive and compelling chamber music configurations. Hummel’s arrangements of Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3 ‘Eroica’ can be heard on Naxos 8.574039.

On his new release, pianist Charles Foreman presents a program of sonatas by Beethoven. Pianist Charles Foreman made his debut in 1972 with the Chicago Civic Orchestra conducted by David Gilbert, playing the Brahms B-flat Concerto. Since then, he has won prizes in Canadian and U.S. piano competitions, received two Canada Council grants for study and performance in Europe, performed over 30 times with orchestras in North America (including eight repeat engagements with the Calgary Philharmonic), under conductors such as Edmond Agopian, Mario Bernardi, Rolf Bertsch, Boris Brott, Stephen Franse, Stewart Grant, Arpad Joo, and Gerhardt Zimmermann, and played over 750 solo and chamber recitals in Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Canada, and the U.S. He has been equally praised for his superb musicianship, his formidable technique, his vast repertoire, and his imaginative programming. He has premiered works by composers as diverse as Istvan Anhalt, George Crumb, Stewart Grant, Oskar Morawetz, Violet Archer, Gerhard Wuensch, and William Jordan. His multi-faceted career has included professional broadcasting, professional acting, musical direction, and arts administration.

The present release is a mind-blowing rendition of a contemporary classic by amazing Ukrainian pianist, past winner of Van Cliburn competition. “Recordings usually start to live their own lives after their release. However, this one happened to be very special since it acquired its very meaning long before getting to the publishing phase. Recorded in September 2021, this project survived February 24, 2022 - the date marking for me the end of a fragile balance between humanity and medieval darkness. This recording is dedicated to the people of a free and independent Ukraine, whose unshakable spirit will never be defeated.” (Vadym Kholodenko)

Clara Haskil was throughout her life a sensitive, empathetic and intelligent pianist with enormous expressive power. At the same time she was particularly modest: she was able to subordinate herself both to the composers whose works she performed and to the chamber musicians who partnered her, never placing herself center stage, but serving the music first and foremost. Clara Haskil is acknowledged as a great Mozart pianist (see albums 1 to 3), but she also left a significant legacy in her interpretation of works by Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and Schumann. Her favorite duet partners were Pau Casals, George Enescu, Géza Anda and especially Arthur Grumiaux, with whom she recorded all of Beethoven’s violin sonatas. This recording presents a few samples of their duo recordings.

REVIEW:

The Romanian-Swiss pianist Clara Haskil is considered one of the most important Mozart interpreters of all time. This is also evident from this release, half of the program of which is dedicated to Mozart.

When one speaks of Clara Haskil, one inevitably thinks of her wonderful Mozart recordings with Ferenc Fricsay, Igor Markevitch and violinist Arthur Grumiaux. Her Mozart continues to have a timeless beauty that has defied all the trends of the past decades. Haskil’s interpretations have not aged; the playing is as fresh and honest as on the first day. Mozart’s music resounds with a matter-of-factness, an unerring sense of the essential that few artists have.

But there is also something strangely compelling about Haskil’s Beethoven. This is evident in these recordings with the Third Piano Concerto and in the sonatas.

The Schumann solo pieces date from the early 1950s and are distinguished by subtle nuances and tonal beauty.

The unaffected simplicity of these interpretations gives Schumann’s music a very distinctive eloquence.

-- Pizzicato

Beethoven wrote that he composed the oratorio Christus am Ölberge (Christ on the Mount of Olives) in just "a fortnight, amid all sorts of tumult and other unpleasant and alarming events in my life." It marked the first time since the two ‘imperial cantatas’ of 1790, the Cantata on the Death of the Emperor Joseph II WoO 87 and the Cantata on the Accession of Leopold II WoO 88, that he had embarked on a multi-movement vocal work. Christus am Ölberge was also Beethoven’s first composition on a religious subject and was destined to remain his only oratorio.

As the Italian pianist Giovanni Bellucci remarks in an extensive booklet introduction, this album is the fruit of study over the past 20 years and more, into the worlds of both Beethoven and Liszt and their meeting point in these transcriptions where the Hungarian composer sought to honor his forebear as the original leader of an artistic movement we now think of as Romanticism, where the composer places himself at the front and center of his works. Liszt’s transcriptions diverged from the ready-made arrangements which publishers rapidly produced and reprinted to meet the demands of amateur and domestic audiences. Here, the symphonic world of Beethoven is not merely experienced as a distant echo but translated into the idiom of the virtuoso piano which swept across Europe during the latter half of the 19th century, led by Liszt and Clara Schumann. Thus in these performances, Bellucci seeks a kind of fidelity to the Romantic age of the transcriptions rather than the Classical age of the original works.

Taking broad tempi and probing deeply into textures which, after all, condense the soundworld of an entire orchestra into the span of ten fingers, Bellucci presents an individual and compelling new vision of works which renew themselves at the hands of each new generation’s interpreters. The cycle reaches its climax with the Ninth, recorded live at the2014 Lisztomania Festival in France, with the participation of the Czech Philharmonic Choir of Brno and soloists Hana Škarková, Lucie Hilscherová, Michal Lehotský and Martin Gurbal. Other studio sessions have taken place in the famous Salle de Musique at La Chaux de Fonds in Switzerland, between 2018 and 2021.

They are among the most striking recordings of classical music ever made: the radio recordings with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Wilhelm Furtwängler, made between 1939 and 1945. Made at the height of the collaboration between orchestra and conductor, Furtwängler’s artistic personality is conveyed here as vividly as nowhere else. You can experience performances whose immediate expressive intensity arises from the moment of performance – and in which not least the existential experience of the Second World War reverberates. In a limited vinyl box with 8 LPs, Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings is now releasing a selection of all the surviving radio recordings that have already appeared on the CD/SACD Wilhelm Furtwängler: The Radio Recordings 1939-1945. With the enclosed code you can also download all the recordings of this edition in studio quality. When he was elected chief conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker in 1922, Wilhelm Furtwängler impressed the musicians with his unique charisma. It was based on an intriguing interpretative principle: his baton technique avoided very precise gestures and deliberately relied on the blurring of tonal contours. For the remastering of the radio recordings, the best available material was used, in particular original tapes that were taken to the Soviet Union after the end of the war and only returned to Germany in the early 1990s. The recordings were carefully restored before vinyl mastering, digitally scanned using state-of-the-art technology and remastered in 24-bit resolution.

Few musicians in the world are as intimately familiar with Beethoven’s piano sonatas as Daniel Barenboim, who has been exploring these works since the earliest days of his career - a musical novel in 32 chapters and an artistic cosmos in itself. Barenboim recorded the full cycle of Beethoven sonatas in the Pierre Boulez Saal in 2020 and presents these works in chronological order of their creation - providing an exciting look at the composer’s artistic development. With this sonata cycle, Barenboim has set himself a legacy!

The box includes 234 minutes of bonus material: a 42-minute interview with Barenboim on Beethoven and 3 masterclasses with him as well, working with students of the Barenboim-Said Academy. This section of the program features Alexandre Kantorow (winner of the 1st price and gold medal at the Tschaikowsky Competition, working on Sonata No. 2), Nathalia Milstein on Sonata No. 15 “Pastoral” and Fabian Müller on Sonata No. 23 “Appassionata”). “No matter how many times you play them there are always fresh, personal perspectives waiting to be discovered.” (Daniel Barenboim)

Beethoven’s three sonatas of Op. 10 were published in September 1798 and were written with Beethoven the pianist as much to the forefront as Beethoven the composer. During this time, the young virtuoso was certainly as renowned as a pianist and improviser as he was a composer, and these three early sonatas contain the whole kaleidoscopic range of his youthful musical, emotional and pianistic language. Pianist Daniel Tong returns to Resonus with this period instrument recording, his first solo album for the label, performed on a fortepiano by Paul McNulty – a copy of an 1805 instrument by the celebrated ‘Viennese School’ maker, Anton Walter.

The Brandenburg Symphony Orchestra took advantage of the restrictive time without an audience and an outstanding soloist for a new production with an exquisite Beethoven recital: the overture "The Consecration of the House" is followed by the 4th Piano Concerto with a once again fantastic Lauma Skride, who also contributes to the listening pleasure with the rarely heard Variations in C minor WoO 80. As a bonus, the second album contains an intellectual and linguistic highlight: Peter Gülke and Alfred Brendel discuss Schubert, Beethoven and the art of interpretation.

The beginning of the Piano Concerto No. 4 is unique: instead of a showy and determined start, Beethoven begins with a downright flippant prelude; piano and orchestra are far apart, find each other only with difficulty, and the composer completely denies the soloist essential parts of the thematic material. Lauma Skride and the Brandenburg Symphony Orchestra celebrate the autobiographical loneliness of the deafened virtuoso, which takes on desperate forms in the second movement, in a touching way - even the finale's gut-wrenching moments are not free of the mood of the beginning.

Beethoven based the C minor Variations on an extremely unwieldy theme. And he treats it with extreme rigor; the relentlessness with which he sticks to the formal structure of the theme as well as to the fundamental tone is very reminiscent of a passacaglia. Only at the very end does the composer free himself from the corset, before the work fades away in pianissimo.

Nannette Streicher (1769–1833) was regarded throughout her life as a prominent piano maker, who was regarded in Vienna as the “third great Master” after Johann Schantz and Anton Walter already at the age of 27. Not averse to innovation, Nannette Streicher produced instruments at the highest technical level, while good relations with musicians such as Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven or Ignaz Schuppanzigh, but also with amateurs such as Karoline Fürstin von Lobkowitz or Georg Graf von Apponyi were helping to sell the grand pianos, with numbers produced rising up to 85 instruments per year. One of these instruments from 1813 was donated to the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna by the Bösendorfer company, where it was restored from 2013 on and even made playable again.

Ines Schüttengruber presents this fortepiano on this release with music from the time of its creation by Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Franz Schubert, Ignaz Moscheles, Jan Václav Hugo Voríšek and Anna Maria (Nannette) Streicher.