Classical Music

The music of Austrian composer Hans Gal is being rediscovered and appreciated more and more for it's infectious tunefulness and verve, and bears close comparison with the music of Dvorak and the other mid European late Romantics. Here is the first and only recording of his works for piano duo : The album was previously released on Olympia but only weeks before that label's demise, so it will be new to almost everyone.

With his versatility as a performer, noted virtuoso and Professor of Music Franco Gulli (1926-2001) in his career dealt with all the classics of the violin repertoire from Vivaldi to the contemporary composers. On this CD, IDIS offers Mr. Gulli’s interpretations of two classics of the 20th c. violin repertoire: Béla Bartók’s 2nd Violin Concerto, recorded in 1959 and played with incredible poetry and beauty of sound; and a 1957 recording of Sergei Prokofiev’s Concerto no 1 in D Major op 19, where Gulli is accompanied by the iconoclastic conductor Sergiu Celibidache.

The latest Tactus CD from I Solisti Laudensi features works by six Italian composers (two by Vivaldi) active from the Baroque to the 20th c., in transcriptions for organ and strings accomplished in the 19th c, as well as a 20th c. piece for identical forces by the 20th c. composer Cardenio Botti. Founded in 1970, the I Solisti Laudensi ensemble’s many standout appearances have taking place at festivals and in concert halls throughout Italy and across Europe.

Includes work(s) by Jean Sibelius.

Classical Music

Given the popularity of Schumann’s A-Minor Piano Concerto, I’d be willing to wager there are readers out there who have amassed recordings of it in double-digit numbers. If you are one of them, you may already have this one in an earlier incarnation, for the performances on this disc are not new. The concerto comes from a 1988 Budapest production; the Introduction and Allegro appassionato, from a 1992 Belgian production; and the Introduction and Allegro, from a 1996 Polish production.

The current release, however, can be recommended for joining this trilogy of Schumann’s concerted works for piano and orchestra on a single disc. In fact, it is the identical program I praised to the heavens in a review of an MDG DVD-A with Christian Zacharias. If you heeded my advice and acquired that disc, the present Naxos recording, and all others, for that matter, are superfluous. Nonetheless, Jenö Jandó, who has become a well-known Naxos commodity, is a very fine pianist whose playing here is technically flawless and interpretively orthodox. Translation? You can’t go wrong.

One minor editorial correction: the note states that Schumann’s two single-movement concert pieces for piano and orchestra, coupled here with the concerto, are his only other works for this combination. Not so. In 1839, he wrote a Konzertsatz in D Minor for piano and orchestra that predates the works on this program. There is a recording of it on a Koch International Classics CD.

Jerry Dubins, FANFARE

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

In May 1784, shortly after completing the two piano concertos recorded here, Mozart described them in a letter to his father as 'concertos which are bound to make the player sweat.’ In his correspondence he also pointed out the particular importance of the wind instruments in the two works. This is obvious already in the first movement of the Concerto in D major, K 451, which opens the disc: for long stretches Mozart revels in the soloistic capabilities of the winds and elsewhere he builds up chordal textures in which the winds’ distinctive colours dominate. In a similar manner, the winds take the lead from the very beginning of the B flat major concerto, K 450, with the strings answering. Throughout the movement, the woodwinds are absolutely vital to the narrative and Mozart playfully exploits the diverse colours of the winds, frequently featuring pairs of them playing in octaves: oboe/bassoon, oboe/horn or horn/bassoon. In the Andante the wind instruments are silent from start, but once they enter they again dominate in terms of colours. The delicacy of the piano writing throughout this movement adds to the very special quality of the concerto, in which Mozart seems to point the way towards Beethoven.

Previous discs in this series have earned distinctions such as Editor’s Choice (Gramophone), IRR Outstanding (International Record Review), ‘10’ (klassik-heute.de) and Disco excepcional (Scherzo). On their eighth instalment, Ronald Brautigam and Die Kölner Akademie have chosen to close the programme with a Rondo in D major, originally intended as a replacement finale for the Piano Concerto No.5, K 175. Offering a range of different moods and introducing a variety of quasi-operatic characters, the Rondo became greatly popular in Vienna and beyond, and was in fact sometimes published as a stand-alone work.

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s two Piano Concertos form a contrasting pair. Concerto No 1, written in 1927, is a vivid and witty example of his romantic spirit, exquisite melodies and rich yet transparent orchestration. Concerto No 2, composed a decade later, is a darker, more dramatic and virtuosic work. The deeply-felt and dreamlike slow movement and passionate finale are tinged with bleak moments of sombre agitation, suggestive of unfolding tragic events with the imminent introduction of the Fascist Racial Laws that led Castelnuovo-Tedesco to seek exile in the USA in 1939. The Four Dances from ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, part of the composer’s recurring fascination for the art of Shakespeare, are atmospheric, richly characterised and hugely enjoyable. This is their first performance and recording.

R E V I E W:

CASTELNUOVO-TEDESCO Piano Concertos: Nos. 1, 2. Love’s Labour’s Lost: 4 Dances • Alessandro Marangoni (pn); Andrew Mogrelia, cond; Malmö SO • NAXOS 8.572823 (76: 43)


Naxos’s two discs of this composer’s Shakespeare overtures really turned a lot of heads, mine included, a couple of years ago. Therefore, it was inevitable that the label would add to its Castelnuovo-Tedesco discography. The two piano concertos are not new to CD. However, as happens with greater frequency these days, alternative recordings have either gone out of print or are prohibitively expensive imports. This new release makes a lot of sense then, and it has been made all the more attractive by the addition of the four dances from Love’s Labour’s Lost , in not only their first recording but also their first performance!


That’s probably a good place to start. Castelnuovo-Tedesco composed these in 1953, but apparently Boosey & Hawkes, to which they were offered, did not publish them, and neither did Ricordi. Thus, they remained in manuscript, and unheard, until they were lent by the composer’s niece, Lisbeth Castelnuovo-Tedesco, to Alessandro Marangoni, who prepared a performing edition. This utterly delightful music should not have waited 60 years for a performance. The composer’s affinity for Shakespeare, already demonstrated in the concert overtures, also comes forward here. There is a gently ironic, somewhat Ravel-like and somewhat cinematic approach to old dance forms here. A lush Sarabande (for the King of Navarre) is followed by a mocking Gavotte (for the Princess of France) and a quietly loquacious Spanish Dance (for Don Adriano de Armado). Last is a Russian Dance—the flavoring is subtle—which corresponds to the scene in Shakespeare’s comedy in which the King and his scholarly companions disguise themselves as Muscovites to woo the Princess and her three ladies. Again, it floors me that this music had to wait so long to be heard.


A similar situation applies to the Piano Concerto No. 2. The original score appears to have been lost, but Marangoni found a copy in the Library of Congress and prepared a performing edition of the piano part. (The orchestral parts were found somewhere else—talk about pieces and parts!) Both of the concertos are an unusual marriage of virtuoso writing and Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s relatively relaxed compositional style. The second concerto is the darker of the two; it was composed in 1936–37, shortly before the composer, who was a Jew, left Italy, ending up in Hollywood. It is, however, not a tragic work, but it lacks the lightness and wit of the other two works on this CD. For me, its romantic gestures don’t add up to a lot, given the not very distinctive quality of the melodic writing. Also, Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s longer works don’t have the structural strength of the Shakespeare overtures, for example, and this also contributes to the sense that the music is always going somewhere but never quite arriving. It is, by the way, proudly tonal. I am reminded of Respighi’s comment, around this time, that “dissonance has its place as a medium of tone-color, and polytonality has important uses as a means of expression, but for their own sake, they are completely abhorrent to me.”


So, as suggested, the Piano Concerto No. 1 (1927), which opens the CD, is less moody. As Graham Wade writes in his booklet note, it “was written in a spirit of optimism and ebullience.” Like the second concerto, its middle movement is a Romanza, although here, its introspection is less merited, and perhaps driven simply by the need for contrast. As I relisten to both of these concertos, I think the best way to describe them would be “Nino Rota meets Rachmaninoff,” although the First, in particular, is less impressive than either of those composers usually managed to be.


Away from the piano bench, Marangoni appears to be putting unusual effort forward on behalf of the composer, and I have no reason to believe that his pianism is holding either of these concertos back. He seems to enjoy their romantic lushness, and he has the fingers to make the most of that quality. Andrew Mogrelia, a familiar name from many Naxos releases, is associated with ballet music, and so it is not surprising that color and transparency are two strong features of these recordings. The Swedish orchestra is just fine, as is the engineering.


This is most desirable, I think, for the 16 minutes allotted to the dances from Love’s Labour’s Lost. I don’t reject the possibility, however, that the two piano concertos might grow on me, in time.


FANFARE: Raymond Tuttle

Alexandra Dariescu makes her concerto debut with Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Alexandra Dariescu has garnered an impressive reputation for her outstanding solo recordings and concert performances and was recently named as one of 30 pianists under 30 destined for a spectacular career in the International Piano Magazine.

If you ask oboists about the golden age of their instrument, they will in all likelihood refer to the first half of the 18th century. It was the time when a plethora of music for the oboe was written - solo and trio sonatas, concertos, cantatas... No court orchestra could make do without the instrument. Many of these pieces were created by the three most feted late-Baroque composers: Antonio Vivaldi (he conceived about two dozen concertos for solo oboe!), J. S. Bach, and his friend G. P. Telemann, who is deemed one of the most prolific composers of all time. Although dating from the same period, the works by the three creators represent three very different worlds. Yet that which they have in common is their virtuosity and the associated high technical demands placed upon the soloist. Besides Ensemble 18+ and his musical soul-mate, the harpsichordist Barbara Maria Willi, Vil�m Veverka invited along as a guest to participate in this dream project his teacher and colleague Dominik Wollenweber, oboist of the Berliner Philharmoniker. With this new album, Veverka has confirmed his firm position among the most acclaimed oboists on the international scale. "Vil�m Veverka breathes new life into concertos by three Baroque masters."

Sergei Prokofiev, the great 20th century composer of such works as Peter and the Wolf, the ballet music Romeo and Juliet and music for the Sergei Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevski was also a great pianist: five of his orchestral concertos are dedicated to this instrument. These live performances from 2004 feature noted Franco-Lebanese pianist Abdel Rahman El Bacha (b. 1958). Mr. El Bacha’s first recording, dedicated to Prokofiev’s early work, won the Grand Prize of the Académie Charles Cros.

John Ireland was an exceptional composer for the piano, as was his contemporary York Bowen. He may not have been a "major" composer in a conventional sense, but his work deserves to be better known, especially outside of England. His Piano Concerto is a masterpiece. Sure, the influence of Prokofiev is obvious, but Ireland embraces it and makes it his own. Written in 1930, it offers a combination of romantic glamor, saucy wit, and lyrical expressiveness that's quite personal and memorable. John Lenehan plays it as well as anybody has to date, with a very winning combination of fluidity in passagework and an easy rhythmic precision in the finale that sounds just right.

Legend, a tone poem for piano and orchestra, lives up to its name. It's a brooding, dramatic work that, like so many short pieces for piano and orchestra, never will be heard in concert because of its brevity. Why doesn't some pianist put together a program of tone poems for piano and orchestra and turn them into a "mini" concerto? Anyway, what makes this program so attractive is the inclusion of the solo piano works. Lenehan already has produced several fine discs of Ireland's piano music, and there's no question that he understands the idiom. The pieces on offer here really show Ireland's range, from the passionate First Rhapsody to the poetic Sea Idyll and colorful Three Dances. Excellent sonics too.

– David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

Naxos’s program of Scandinavian violin concertos represents both night and day in the works of former violinists and composers Jean Sibelius and Christian Sinding. Sibelius’s rhapsodic concerto bears the impress of the young man who improvised on the violin in the craggy fastnesses of his native country; Sinding’s (the first, from 1898, of three) pays tribute to the late Romantic virtuoso tradition, with the soloist’s opening gesture curiously suggestive of a finale theme from Bruch’s First Concerto. If Sibelius’s dimly lit Serenade and Sinding’s expansively cinematic Romance (there’s a touch of the cinematic in the concerto as well, although both works antedated the era) don’t suggest night and day, they make almost as strong a contrast. Henning Kraggerud plays with great virtuosity in Sibelius’s violinistic magnum opus, and the recorded sound, though balanced, captures even the snap of his bow in the inky vortex of the first movement’s swirling passagework. His tone on the 1744 Ole Bull Guarneri del Gesù, lent to him for this recording, sounds as runically eldritch as Sibelius’s music itself. Kraggerud makes the most of this sinuousness, playing the second movement’s sinking double stops moodily rather than ecstatically. He affects the same mysterioso in the recitative-like sections of Sibelius’s Serenade. Sinding’s concerto, on the other hand, turns out, as its opening foreshadows, to be an extroverted romp (although the slow movement provides its share of somber, resonant musing); and as the music’s tension relaxes, so does the edge on Kraggerud’s virtuosity (he seems more at home in the danse macabre than in the tantoli). But he’s ardently songful in Sinding’s Romance from 1910, of which this recording’s proclaimed by its label to be the first. Bjarte Engeset and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra provide a sonorous and allusive (and appropriately abrupt, where necessary) backdrop to Kraggerud’s dark divagations in Sibelius’s works and a lush romantic one for his more extroverted gambols in Sinding’s.

Kraggerud faces Olympian competition in Sibelius’s concerto, but his dark-hued yet brilliant reading compares favorably on its own terms with Heifetz’s cold light or Vengerov’s highly personalized meanderings. He has Sinding’s works pretty much to himself. The release can therefore be recommended all round: a strongly competitive, eerie Sibelius concerto, a Serenade that, while it may not match Mutter’s languid yearning (Deutsche Grammophon 447-895-2), provides the requisite subdued colors in its less histrionic way, and two unfamiliar works by Sinding.

Robert Maxham, FANFARE

Russian pianist Emil Gilels is regarded by many as one of the most significant pianists of the twentieth century and is universally admired for his superb technical control and burnished tone. The performance of Brahms's Piano Concerto 2 dates from 1971when Gilels was at his peak, and the live recital dates from 1974 featuring performances of Debussy and Prokofiev, both favorites of the pianist.

The eight-member, San Francisco Bay Area-based Archetti Baroque String Ensemble was founded in 2010 by violinist Carla Moore and viola da gambist John Dornenburg to perform the rich chamber concerto repertory of the Baroque era in historically-informed style without a conductor. The ensemble's name, "little bows" in Italian, alludes to the dominance of bowed stringed instruments in the Italian Baroque concerto repertory. Centaur's Handel and Hellendaal: Grand Concertos is their debut CD. "dazzling clarity" (SF Examiner Online) "beautiful ensemble playing" (Early Music America)

Classical Music

Composed in 1947-48 but unperformed until 1955, Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto is one of the great concertos of the twentieth century. The wide emotional range of it's four-movement structure encompasses an opening of brooding, elegiac melancholy, a manic scherzo, a harrowing and deeply felt passacaglia, and a brilliant, concluding burlesque. Wolfgang Rihm has been described as 'one of the most approachable, engaging and profound composers writing music today' (The Guardian). The solo violin in Gesungene Zeit (Time Chant) plays one long fine-spun melody, the work creating a maximum of expression with a minimum of means.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Samuel Jones is a sensitive musician with great imagination, and he is a real craftsman. These works should be part of the core of the great American repertoire. Of his Symphony No. 3, Jones writes: "I wanted to capture in music that magical moment."

Classical Music

Michael Collins combines the roles of clarinet soloist and conductor as he leads the Swedish Chamber Orchestra in three works that chart the journey of the clarinet from Mozart’s late eighteenth-century Europe, via Aaron Copland’s 1940s America, to today’s classical scene with a piece written, for Michael Collins, in 2007 by the Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin.

Mozart composed his Clarinet Concerto, just weeks before his death in 1791, for Anton Stadler, the first great clarinet virtuoso. Stadler performed the work on what today is known as the basset clarinet, which features additional low notes without compromising the higher register. Unfortunately, Mozart’s manuscript score has been lost. In recent years, however, editors and performers have made several attempts to determine Mozart’s original intentions, and the version recorded here represents one such reconstruction. The concerto has a quality of serene and resigned beauty, recognisable from Die Zauberflöte, and from Mozart’s Requiem.

Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto was commissioned in 1947 by Benny Goodman, the most famous band leader of the swing era, who has been credited with having made jazz ‘respectable’. Goodman also had a second career as a classical clarinettist. He was eager to enrich the repertoire by inviting major composers to write for him, and Copland was happy to take on the challenge.

Elena Kats-Chernin is one of Australia’s leading composers. Her Ornamental Air was written in 2007 in response to a commission from a group of orchestras including the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, with Michael Collins as the intended soloist. The score is modelled closely on the Clarinet Concerto by Mozart. Not only are the orchestral forces identical – two flutes, two bassoons, two horns, and strings – but the solo instrument is the basset clarinet, for which Mozart also wrote his concerto. Kats-Chernin’s writing here takes full advantage of the exceptionally wide range of the instrument, as well as its potential for both virtuosity and lyricism.

- Chandos