Classical Music

The players have lived and breathed this music – the results are stunning.

The success of Philip Glass outstripped the first flush of celebrity in the 1980s and 1990s. This logical set serves further to consolidate his reputation in a world in which no single style has monopoly or ascendancy.

The Third Quartet owes its existence to a commission for the music for Paul Schrader's film of the life of Yukio Mishima. Mishima’s samurai life and death by seppuku made him almost as much of an iconic figure in the 1960s as Che Guevara. The music moves between a lulling iterative murmur (II) and a sense of rise and uplift (IV). The finale (V) is almost Schubertian or may remind you of a fragment from Smetana’s bustling Aus Meinem Leben. I have heard Company in two other different orchestral version recordings recently: the Naxos Glass set and the EMI ‘American Classics’ disc. The first and third movements are suggestive of a melancholic slowed fanfare. The third is chaffingly Sibelian. The finale is shot through with urgently propulsive power; angst and exhilaration meet and mediate. The early death of the artist Brian Buczak from HIV/AIDS was the spur for the Fourth Quartet. It is one of the longer quartets and has only three movements. It's a work of more complexity than its mates on CD1. There is a great tenderness here and the slow-rocking and piercing poignancy of the second movement is memorable. In the finale it is as if the lock-gates have been raised to release a surge of Schubertian melody.

The First Quartet is from the mid-1960s; pretty early for Glass. It dates from shortly after he had completed his not entirely comfortable studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Pierre Boulez. The work has some of his trademark iterative cell-patterning but the world he creates is more involved, varied, troubled and dissonant. The Fifth Quartet - so far his last - is contemporary romantic. Its second movement is launched with a typical sombre ostinato but other figures of passionate and sanguine weight are interleaved. Passion too drives the third movement which is thrillingly empowered. The fourth carries reminiscences, in Schubertian cotton wool, of those unhurried fanfares of Company. In a flighty finale high-pitched bustle and wonderfully inventive optimistic writing lead to a triumphantly winged episode. There's just a hint of Tippett at full throttle in this music which at the close moves into tender reflection.

As with the other performances you feel that the Smith Quartet have lived and breathed this music.

The set is well presented and the whole effect is very pleasing prompting curiosity about the other Signum/Smith collaborations - Different Trains (Reich) SIGCD 064 and Ghost Stories SIGCD 088.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb Internationl

Classical Music

Katia Labèque/Marielle Labèque/David Chalmin/Bryce Dessner -"Sonic Wires"

Founded in 2018, the Dream House Quartet is bringing classical and contemporary music into completely new forms as a matter of course. The members draw on decades of expertise: the two piano sisters, Katia and Marielle Labèque, are joined by Bryce Dessner (Grammy-winning guitarist, composer and founding member of The National), and composer, musician and producer David Chalmin. Together they perform radical commissions from visionary composers and key contemporary works from the past half century.

This set contains both ADD and DDD recordings.

Classical Music

Accepted onto the early admissions programme of the University of Chicago, Philip Glass graduated aged just nineteen with a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy, practising the piano in his spare time. Subsequently studying at the Juilliard School, Glass’s name has since become synonymous with the minimalist style. His film compositions have earned him a Golden Globe as well as three Academy Award nominations.

This selection of pieces showcases Glass’s music for solo piano, with each of the works baring the hallmarks of minimalism. Among the pieces featured in the collection is Metamorphosis, a set of five variations that evolve over the course of the entire work to create a stirring final movement. Also present are extracts from the soundtrack of Stephen Daldry’s film The Hours, as well as ‘Truman Sleeps’ from The Truman Show (which earned Glass a Golden Globe award for ‘Best Original Score’). The collection ends with the ‘Trilogy’ Sonata, containing piano transcriptions of Glass’s three ‘portrait’ operas: Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha and Akhnaten.

Dutch pianist and composer Jeroen Van Veen studied at the Utrecht Conservatory and has played with many orchestras throughout Europe and the USA, under renowned conductors such as Howard Williams, Peter Eo?tvo?s and Robert Craft. An accomplished recitalist, van Veen has also appeared at festivals including the Reder Piano Festival and the Festival der Kunsten (Bad Gleichenberg). His compositional style is closely related to minimalism, and contains elements of jazz, blues and pop music.

OTHER INFORMATION:
* Recorded 23–28 October 2006, Barbara Church, Culemborg, The Netherlands.
* Includes notes on the composer and a biography of the artist.

In the late 1960s, the composer Michael Nyman coined the term "minimalism" to describe a new musical aesthetic characterized by a certain simplicity and economy of means. One of the composers associated with this movement, La Monte Young, embraced the term with enthusiasm, while others like Steve Reich and Philip Glass nuanced it with terms such as "music without intention" or "music with a repetitive structure". The term "hypnotic music" might also be appropriate for some works by Simeon ten Holt or Arvo Part, provided we are attuned to the monotonous hum of rain, have a fondness for grey-the languid greys of overcast days-or appreciate a certain suspension of the world. Considered to be the most gifted and promising pianist of his generation in Poland, Szymon Nehring is the only Pole to have won first prize at the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv (2017). He was also a finalist at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw with only 19 years of age. Szymon Nehring performes with orchestras such as Sinfonia Varsovia, Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice, NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic, Israel Symphony Orchestra, Bamberger Symphoniker, Hamburger Symphoniker, Orchester philharmonique de Marseille and Orchestre Paseloup in France and the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, collaborating with conductors such as John Axelrod, Lukas Borowicz, Sylvain Cambreling, Karina Canellakis, Pablo Heras-Casado, Marzena Diakun, Lawrence Foster, Giancarlo Guerrero, Jacek Kaspszyk, Grzegorz Nowak, Pawel Przytocki, George Tchitchinadze, David Zinman and Omer Meir Wellber. He also performed and recorded with the late Krzysztof Penderecki, among other works Mr. Penderecki�s piano concerto.

Louis Glass (1864-1936) began his career as a pianist, but illness forced his retirement from active concertizing and his focus turned toward composing. His six symphonies clearly occupy the center of his oeuvre. Early influences of Schumann, Gade and Grieg soon yielded to influence from Ce�sar Franck. Glass also displays strong influence emanating from Bruckner, very unusual during this generation and beyond the borders of German-speaking Europe. CPO's new Glass Complete Symphonies, Vol. 1, features his idyllic Forest Symphony No. 3 and the Summer Life orchestral suite.

Louis Glass was a contemporary of Carl Nielsen, however his musical ideals were of the late-Romantic idiom. Like Nielsen he composed six symphonies, but as a composer he was a dreamer and his lush, brilliantly orchestrated works hark back to a time when modernism had no influence. This is the first complete recording of the six symphonies which were played frequently in Denmark, but vanished into the mist of a forgotten world. The splendid Bulgarian orchestra easily identifies with Glass’ musical sound world, stretching back and absorbing the style of the early Richard Strauss. These symphonies were recorded between October 1999 and August 2000, and feature the Plodiv Philharmonic led by renowned conductor Nayden Todorov.

The works in this programme demonstrate Philip Glass' perpetual goal of connecting with his audience. Taking shape as something like a hidden sonata form, Mad Rush contrasts peaceful atmosphere with tempestuousness and mesmerising beauty. The last of it's kind in Glass' oeuvre, 600 Lines, here receiving it's premiere recording on solo piano, is an obsessive and hypnotically restless toccata that represents the zenith of his experiences while working with Ravi Shankar. These two monumental works are joined by premiere recordings of the subtly transformed Metamorphosis Two, and Glass' transcription of Paul Simon's The Sound of Silence.

Alongside Nielsen, Glass is the genius of Danish romantic music, but recordings of his work are rare - we present the only available recording of his two fine sonatas and other works. "Music from a pianist who feels every note.. The double-CD is one of the finest to appear in recent times." - the Statesman (Calcutta)

While Louis Glass until about 1910 had endeavored to develop a personally colored type of late romantic symphonic music, a new, strange dimension then suddenly opened up in some of his works. This dimension was connected to the influence of theosophy, which began around 1913 and would lead to some works of speculative stamp. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and others had established the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. One of her pupils, the English author Annie Besant, served as the society’s president beginning in 1907 and established the Order of the Star of the East in 1910. When the Danish section first met, Louis Glass played the organ. It was around this time that Glass began his work on the Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra, as this work is the first that reflects the composer’s relation to theosophy- which is shown above all in the work’s introspective motto alluding to theosophy: “From the spirit’s eternal canopy tones calling man sound down. And man turns away from the world and remains alone in order to find peace.”

GLASS, L.: Symphonies Nos. 5 and 6

In New York it is impossible, almost forced, not to end up trapped by the music of Philip Glass. His operas sound at the Metropolitan Opera, his portrait by Chuck Close on the 86th Street subway and that “Mad Rush” of the city that never sleeps. This project was born influenced by the performer’s musical moment and circumstances after having lived in the Big Apple for 7 years. This “Mad Rush – Philip Glass” project has brought together some of the most representative pieces by one of the most influential composers on the current music scene, recently awarded the XIV BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Music and Opera “for his extraordinary contribution to musical creation and opera, with a great impact on the history of music in the 20th and 21st centuries”, according to the jury. Trained in the US at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, Fabio obtained his Master of Music with the highest qualification under the tutelage of the renowned pianist and pedagogue Philip Kawin, having previously obtained his Piano Performance Undergraduate´s Degree at Musikene, Conservatorio Superior de Música del País Vasco with Ricardo Requejo and Emmanuel Ferrer-Lalöe.