Choral Music (Sacred) - Distler, H. / Reger, M. / Mendelssoh

AMERICAN PIANO MUSIC

This album features two compositions by Jean Sibelius from different moments in the Finnish musician's life. The Impromptu Op.5 for string ensemble is an early work from 1894, in which Sibelius uses some thematic materials from his solo piano impromptus Nos. 5 and 6 from the Op.5 set. The Romance in C Op.42 (1903) was composed during a difficult phase in the composer's life caused by excessive alcohol consumption, which prompted him to leave Helsinki and move with his wife near to Lake Tuusula, where he could dedicate himself to composition far from the temptations of the Finnish capital. The piece is divided into short sections in which the melodic ideas arise from fragments of the octatonic, or diminished, scale of alternating whole and half steps supported by dissonant harmonies that add further tonal instability. Samuel Barber's typically inspired melodic vein emerges from the very beginning in his Serenade Op.1 for String Quartet or String Orchestra, dating from 1928. Featuring chromaticism's and dissonant passages, a duality is established between a first, rhythmic and impetuous thematic idea and a lyrical melody. The final movement brings greater serenity and joy through the choice of a major mode and the adoption of a graceful and leaping theme whose fragments pass in counterpoint between one voice and another. When Benjamin Britten composed his Simple Symphony Op.4 he was just 20 years old, and he describes the idea in an introduction to the score: 'This "Simple Symphony" is entirely based on material from works which the composer wrote between the ages of nine and twelve [.]. Although the development of these themes is in many places quite new, there are large stretches of the work which are taken bodily from the early pieces - save for the re-scoring for strings'. In effect, Britten extrapolates eight themes from his juvenile compositional production, associates two of them with each movement and creates a structural mix between the four movements of a Classical symphony, the dances of the Baroque suite and popular folklore. Da pacem Domine is a Gregorian style piece composed by Arvo P�rt in 2004 to commemorate the victims of the Madrid terrorist attacks on trains, which killed 192 people. P�rt first composed a version for four voices on the text of a Latin prayer. That atmosphere of contemplation is preserved in his subsequent edition for chamber orchestra. The modal composition, in D Dorian, conveys the feeling of a search for calmness, a request from man to God for peace in the wake of such a tragedy. Scattered appearances of B flat and the leading tone (C sharp) mitigate and add a piquancy to the modal atmosphere.

Both Beach and MacDowell were formidably accomplished pianists who wrote concertos in barnstorming virtuoso style, for themselves and their contemporaries to play, but they could also turn their hand to the lucrative domestic market for piano-duet music. In doing so they also tapped into the 19th-century, Romantic preoccupation with childhood which Schumann had encapsulated in his Kinderszenen of 1838.

MacDowell wrote his Moon-Pictures Op. 21 in the winter of 1884–5 and subtitled them ‘after H.C. Andersen’s Picture-Book without Pictures’, referring to an 1848 collection of short bedtime stories.

Published in 1901 and dedicated to the composer’s niece, the six duets of the album’s title collection, Summer Dreams by Beach, are shorter and technically simpler than the Moon-Pictures, but they are prefaced by literary quotations which once more indicate that this is not music for children so much as music for adults to play to children, and for adults to play at being children. In any case, simpler means and fewer notes need hardly imply naivety of expression, and Beach’s self-taught technique was too rigorous to allow anything less than the most deftly fashioned work to escape her desk.

Composed in 1883, Beach’s brief 3 Movements for piano duet are the work of a prodigiously talented teenager who knows her early-Romantic piano literature – including Kinderszenen – inside out, but who also understands at this stage how to emulate rather than merely copy her models.

In the following year of 1884, the 23-year-old MacDowell wrote his 3 Poems Op. 20. Strictly speaking, Hamlet and Ophelia is the outlier in this collection, since MacDowell composed it in 1894 as a tone-poem for orchestra in the Lisztian manner, and then made this two-piano transcription rather than leaving the work to the kind of professional arranger habitually commissioned by publishers for such work. Nevertheless, he took the kind of care over it that Brahms did in arranging his symphonies, and the piano-duet version retains the brooding tension of the opening and effectively transfers the violinistic surges of Hamlet’s main section to the keyboard.

The album’s final collection takes a chronological leap forward to 1952, but its nostalgia-drenched mood belongs to an intermediate age. ‘One might imagine a divertissement in a setting of the Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel’, Barber explained in a letter to his publisher, ‘the year about 1914, epoch of the first tangos. Souvenirs – remembered with affection, not in irony or with tongue in cheek, but in amused tenderness.’ Barber, it should be noted, would have been four years old at the time, and so these are ‘souvenirs’ in the manner of sepia-tinted postcards.

Pianist Mira Gill is of East-Indian descent. Born in Salt Lake City, she is now based in New York City. The piano works of Samuel Barber are a specialty of hers, and it shows in these superb performances.

Samuel Barber's Vanessa was premiered at the Met in January, 1958; a co-production with the Salzburg Festival, it reached there in August of the same year, and this recording documents that occasion. Audiences took to it at once, but the Austrian press disliked it, finding it very old-fashioned. It was recorded by RCA with the original New York cast, a version that's been available on-and-off for years; it is currently unavailable. Two years ago Chandos released a recording led by Leonard Slatkin starring Susan Graham and Christine Brewer that is magnificent in every way; however, it presents the opera in its revised, three-act version. This Orfeo release contains the same music as the RCA (an extra aria for Vanessa, filled with coloratura, different act divisions, and other small changes), and almost the same cast. In the major roles, it is only the replacement of Regina Resnik with Ira Malaniuk that matters.

It's an excellent performance, and if you want the four-act version with Steber, Elias, Gedda, and Tozzi, you'll now have to buy this, since the RCA has disappeared. The foursome are as fine here as on the original, with a top note or two from Steber a bit harsher--but since this was taped live, it offers even more urgency and theatricality in the delivery of all concerned. Tozzi in particular makes a better impression as the Old Doctor, his last-act aria especially moving. Malaniuk sings in heavily accented English as the Old Baroness, but it's hardly out of place and her imperiousness matches Resnik's. Dimitri Mitropoulos has at the end of his baton the magnificent Vienna Philharmonic, which plays Barber's rich, post-Straussian, Hollywood-like score brilliantly. The recording includes a brief interview, in both German and English, with Samuel Barber.

In sum, the Chandos recording is superb, and given one's druthers, I'd say that only the Chandos and either this set or the RCA are necessary. There is stage noise and occasional overload, but these are not seriously detrimental. Vanessa may be tonally and dramatically "old-fashioned", but so are the pleasures it gives.

--Robert Levine, ClassicsToday.com

Immediately upon their debut at the 1969 Marlboro Festival, four brilliant young American musicians calling themselves the Cleveland Quartet were hailed as a chamber ensemble of exceptional quality. Over the next quarter century, they performed on every continent, including nearly 30 complete Beethoven cycles in the US and Europe. At their peak, the Cleveland Quartet gave more than 100 concerts a year. They became the first classical artists to play on the televised Grammy awards and performed at the White House for President’s Carter inauguration. “A quartet in the great tradition,” declared Stereo Review’s critic, commenting on the Cleveland’s Beethoven for RCA Victor, their exclusive label between 1972 and 1987.

Most of the ensemble’s recordings for RCA have never appeared on CD until now. Sony Classical is pleased to present this entire, critically acclaimed discography in a box set of 23 discs.

The earliest entry, first released in 1973, comprises the three Brahms quartets, idiomatic performances that Gramophone’s enthusiastic reviewer heard as “suffused with a warm and mellow light. Scrupulous attention is given to every detail and yet lyrical phrases are allowed their head. … There is no other complete set of these three works that effectively rivals this new recording.”

The same magazine also acclaimed the next Cleveland release, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”: “I know of no string quartet with more sumptuous tone than the Cleveland. Their style of music-making is equally generous: they squeeze the last drop of expression out of every bar. … The recording is excellent in catching their tonal body and bloom.”

And so the story continued, with quartets by Haydn, Ives (“A definitive performance” – High Fidelity) and Barber, as well as collaborations with Emanuel Ax in the piano quintets of Schumann, Brahms, and Dvorák, which Stereo Review in 1977 deemed “the finest thing the Cleveland Quartet has yet given us – simply gorgeous playing that is totally integrated, within the foursome and with the pianist, at every point.”

There are also two octets. In Mendelssohn’s, the Cleveland players are joined by the Tokyo Quartet, in Schubert’s by such distinguished British soloists as Barry Tuckwell on horn and Jack Brymer on clarinet. And, not least, there is the Schubert String Quintet with Yo-Yo Ma as second cellist, recorded and originally released by CBS. Gramophone called the performance “splendid”, one that goes “to the very heart of this wonderful work.”

But the core of the Cleveland Quartet’s RCA discography is surely the complete Beethoven cycle they recorded between 1974 and 1979. Stereo Review was thoroughly impressed in the Early Quartets by the “(seemingly) effortless agilità, rhythmic vitality and flexibility, and feel for structure and the big line”, and its reviewer found the performances of the Middle Quartets “full of intensity and flexibility with never a hint of self-indulgence, romantic excess, or, for that matter, academicism or over study. The string sound is gorgeous and beautifully recorded.” And, writing about the Cleveland’s Late Quartets, the magazine called it “a true capstone” to the series.

After many acclaimed releases on BIS, most recently ‘Sounds and Sweet Airs – A Shakespeare Songbook’ (BIS-2653), Carolyn Sampson’s latest recital with Joseph Middleton lives up to its name: it is an eloquent testimony to the English soprano’s love of her art. This programme artfully blends well-known and lesser-known lieder by German and Austrian masters such as Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf with French songs by Gounod, Poulenc and Franck, as well as works by Anglo-Saxon composers such as Hubert Parry, Samuel Barber and Ivor Gurney. Female composers are not forgotten, with rarely-performed songs by Rita Strohl based on slightly risqué poems by Pierre Louÿs, music by Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Kaija Saariaho – who has recently passed away – and Deborah Pritchard, whose song presented here was composed especially for Sampson. And while Leonard Bernstein’s comically cheeky song ‘I hate music’, appears to be a call not to let music take itself too seriously, Errollyn Wallen’s ‘Peace on Earth’, which concludes the album, invokes calm and encourages us to find peace, a message that seems more relevant today than ever.

This is a wonderful program of works for cello and piano by composers such as Libby Larsen, Samuel Barber, and George Walker.

The saxophone section of the U.S. Navy Band is spectacular in Waypoints. These musicians represent a convergence of extraordinary talent, which stands out in composer David DeBoor’s “Concerto After Dvorak” (Tracks 7-9). Waypoints also features works by Torke, Grainger, Zwilich, Sousa, and Barber.

Vol. 5 of American Piano Music. The Anthology of American Piano Music is designed to show the stylistic breadth, high musical quality, and great originality of the best American piano works. The series contains underrated, neglected or forgotten masterworks of the American literature for solo piano from the 18th to the 21st century that have been selected primarily for their musical worth and originality. The com- positions are assembled in a series of themed CDs, their programs being connected by one common theme or overarching idea. Vol. 1, "American First Sonatas", comprises the first piano sonatas by four American composers from different periods, including the very first sonata ever composed in North America. Vol. 2, ‘Music of the Night’, a 2 CD album, assembles a selection of American nocturnes and other piano works related to the theme of Night, while Vol. 3, 'American Landscapes', includes three complete cycles of character pieces and eight stand-alone works featuring musical impressions from North American landscapes. Vol.4 contains the complete set of compositions for piano and orchestra by George Gershwin. The present CD (Vol.5, "American Dances") is a compilation of works for solo piano that are related to the theme of Dance.

A fantastic collection of American choral classics ranging from Thompson’s sublime Alleluia to the terrific choral arrangement of Gershwin’s Summertime from Porgy & Bess. Conductor Robin White’s excellent arrangement of the traditional Shenandoah balances the programme nicely along with Copeland’s "I bought me a cat". This is a surprising and entertaining collection. Alban Voices is a chamber-choir formed over 20 years ago by Robin White and his late wife, Freda, originally as a relief choir for services in St. Albans Abbey. It has always been an ad-hoc grouping, drawn together as and when required: many of the current members sing regularly in London’s top symphonic choirs. Among other appearances, it featured most notably in a pivotal episode of the BBC TV soap opera EastEnders in December 2003. More recently, the group’s recording of Robin’s original Christmas song, Light of the World, accompanied by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, has been well received, and was played on Scala Radio and Classic FM in the run-up to Christmas 2022.

Robin White trained at Imperial College, London and the Royal College of Music, studying conducting with Vernon Handley and orchestration with Bryan Kelly. He has conducted open-air, pop-classics concerts at National Trust and other venues across the south-west of England and the midlands. He has also worked with leading soloists such as John Lill, Christopher Warren-Green, Alexander Baillie and Emma Johnson in concerts in Bristol and the Channel Islands. His 1992 recording of Edwardian light music for Chandos Records was played extensively on Classic FM.

The songs of Samuel Barber offer the beauty of his output in microcosm. ‘Complete’ in this context used to mean the 47 songs gathered in a Deutsche Grammophon 2CD set from 1994, but there are 65 songs here, making it the most complete survey yet recorded.

Most of the lesser-known and unpublished songs on CD3 date back to Barber’s student years, but he took up composing young, and was always inclined towards writing for voices and responding to poetry. He made his matchlessly evocative setting of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach when he was just 21 years old. However, by the time of the Op. 10 Songs, Barber’s harmonies have thickened in texture and expressionist harmony: these are heroic numbers demanding an interpreter of heroic projection, another world away from the almost painfully confessional mood of the music which has made his name such as Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Nevertheless, they paint a vivid portrait of Barber himself, who had a fine baritone voice and would delight in performing his songs while accompanying himself at the piano. 

Barber could read Proust in French, Goethe in German, Dante in Italian and Neruda in Spanish, and his erudite choice of poets and poems reflected facets of his complex character: a restless melancholy on the one hand, and an impish wit on the other. His part-Irish ancestry drew him towards Joyce, Yeats and James Stephens, and his interest in his Celtic heritage prompted the writing of his best-known song-prompted the writing of his best-known song-cycle, the Hermit Songs Op. 29. Much later in life, he returned to song (and to Joyce) with Despite and Still Op. 41 and the Three Songs Op. 45. Both collections are coloured by introspection and resignation, but they are masterpieces of the song-writer’s art. 

Few composers in the history of “art song” can compare to the figure of Samuel Barber (1910-1981), whose innate gift for lyricism found expression in his exceptional baritone voice, and who would perform any number of his songs accompanying himself at the piano.

Performed by three excellent Italian singers, Mauro Borgioni (baritone), Leilah Dione Ezra (soprano) and Elisabetta Lombardi (mezzo soprano), who won their spurs on the most important international stages. This project is another triumph of Filippo Farinelli, indefatigable pianist and promotor of prestigious recording projects, such as the complete songs by Jolivet, Berg, Dallapiccola and Ravel, and instrumental projects by Koechlin, Jolivet, Hindemith and Debussy.

Among his many recordings for Brilliant Classics, the pianist Filippo Farinelli has made complete surveys of the song output of Berg, Ravel, Dallapiccola and Jolivet, in conjunction with colleagues who have immersed themselves in the idiom. Here he is likewise joined by a trio of Italian singers who show themselves at home with the wistful, changeable moods of Barber the song-composer.

This album of works by Debussy, Prokofiev and Barber aims to show not only the fascination of the increasing complexity of musical language in the 20th century but also the desire to preserve the ideas and achievements of previous musical epochs. The expansion of tonality and the search for new rhythmic and acoustic solutions in the first book of Debussy’s Préludes are followed by Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives, perhaps his only work that was clearly influenced by Impressionism.

Some pieces from Visions fugitives could seem to be part of Debussy’s cycle, although Prokofiev’s famous Feroce offers electrifying rhythms and sharp dissonances. I have chosen Barber’s Piano Sonata as my final work. This unique masterpiece literally sprouted from the soil of 20th century musical discoveries but still retained Baroque and Classical structures. The stunning fugue that concludes the sonata sounds like a manifesto: no matter how far the creative process takes us, there is always something constant to which we will always return. (Konstantin Emelyanov)

Step back to a time when the night was an antithesis to the clarity of illumined day. In the especially fertile imaginations of the 19th-century Romantic composers, this was a time when the world gave itself over to mystery and magic. These works explore the “otherness” of night and its potential for strangeness. The album also focusses on the theme of passion, mostly from the Romantic period. In the especially fertile imaginations of the 19th-century Romantic composers, this was a time when, shielded from the gaze of the Almighty, the world gave itself over to mystery and magic: lovers met for forbidden trysts, revelers drank and cavorted through the small hours, and spirits walked the earth. In this album, Brownell hopes to transport you out of our sterile, modern understanding of night and into the stranger, more interesting reality it must have been for most of human history.

Described by Musical Opinion as “potentially one of the most significant pianists of his generation, since winning 1st Prize at the 2005 J.N. Hummel Competition (Bratislava), he has achieved widespread recognition as “one of the foremost Hummel interpreters of our time” (Hudobný Život). Brownell’s performances have been seen and heard on BBC radio and television, Classic FM, NPR, CBC, ORF, and RBB KulturRadio. He has been soloist with orchestras such as the Hallé, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and Calgary Philharmonic.