Giuliano: Symphony for Mandolin / Mandolin Concerto in G Maj

Classical Music

Over 75 minutes of the great Czech composer's most well-known works are represented here on Naxos, the budget classical CD leader. These are all modern, digital recordings taken from their catalog

George Benjamin is a contemporary composer known best among small circles, but with a loyal international following. This recording contains five of his pieces, and they share a common style. Benjamin treats a composition as a landscape: a kind of blank, rolling panorama onto which he affixes musical ideas. His sound is very textured and evocative. 'Ringed by the Flat Horizon,' for example, portrays a storm that overtakes a vast open space. The music begins ominously and contains a variety of created sound effects along with rapid fire crescendos into huge orchestral crashes. 'A Mind In Winter' is contrarily a setting of "The Snowman" (a poem by Wallace Stevens), and yet is built upon the same sort of abstract picture-building and sweeping evocative gestures for the voice. Benjamin's vocabulary is developed from the modern schools of atonality, and his teacher Messiaen is a clear and strong influence on his work. For those attracted to the modern schools of classical composition, they will find a great many layers to be unveiled in this recording.

"Having a premiere recording of Bartok on Naxos makes an unmissable bargain. His Viola Concerto was the uncompleted work which, soon after his death, Tibor Serly put together from sketches. Now Bartok's son Peter, with the scholar Paul Neubauer, has re-edited those sketches. Though the differences are small, this first recording of the revised version, superbly played, proves fascinating, sounding closer to the Concerto for Orchestra. With the rich-toned Chinese violist Xiao as soloist, that version is here presented alongside Serly's. The warmly atmospheric Two Pictures and a viola work make a good coupling."

– The Penguin Guide to Compact Discs & DVDs - 2005/6 Edition, page 114

Includes work(s) by Tomaso Albinoni, Arcangelo Corelli, George Frideric Handel, ? Marcello, Johann Pachelbel.

HOFMANN: Violin Concertos

Classical Music

Classical Music

KROMMER: Clarinet Concertos Opp. 35, 36 and 91

Mozart: Concerto for 2 Pianos in E-Flat Major, K. 365, Piano

MANFREDINI: Concerti Grossi Op. 3, Nos. 1-12

ITALIAN BAROQUE FAVOURITES

Berg: Violin Concerto & Chamber Concerto (Live)

Brahms: Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77

This is a winner of a disc, the first of a projected series covering all 12 of Boccherini’s cello concertos, beautifully performed on modern instruments but with concern for period practice and superbly recorded. One minor snag is a confusion over numbering. Naxos calls its first selection of works Nos. 1-4, whereas in Gramophone and on the Gramophone Database the new numbering above is used. What many collectors will be concerned about is the Boccherini Cello Concerto beloved of generations in Grutzmacher’s corrupt edition.

When many years ago I questioned Jacqueline du Pre about choosing it for her recording, she promptly justified herself, saying, ‘But the slow movement is so lovely.’ She was quite right, as her classic recording makes clear (EMI, 10/67), but that movement was transferred from another work, in fact No. 7 in G, one of the four works here. Tim Hugh’s dedicated account of this lovely G minor movement is a high spot of this issue, with rapt, hushed playing not just from the soloist but also from the excellent Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Anthony Halstead. It develops into a long cadenza, a sustained meditation lasting almost two minutes out of the six-and-a-half, and I should have liked to have it identified in the notes.

As it is, Hugh offers substantial cadenzas not just in the first movements of each work, but in slow movements and finales too, though none is as extended as the one in the G minor slow movement. Halstead, as a period specialist and a horn virtuoso as well as a conductor, matches his soloist in the dedication of these performances, clarifying textures (not least in the ripe horn parts, presumably played on natural instruments) and encouraging Hugh to choose speeds on the fast side, with easily flowing slow movements and outer movements which test the soloist’s virtuosity to the very limit, without sounding breathless.

The formula in all four works is similar, even though each has its individual delights, with strong, foursquare first movements, slow movements that sound rather Handelian and galloping finales in triple time. Not just for those who know only the old Grutzmacher concerto, all this will be a delightful discovery. And remember, there are two more issues to come.

-- Edward Greenfield, Gramophone [10/1999]

Bach & Vivaldi: Concertos

Classical Music

ALBINONI: Adagio