Principal trombonist of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Jörgen van Rijen is also much in demand as a soloist with a special commitment to promoting his instrument. Various composers have written new pieces for him, including James MacMillan and Theo Verbey, whose works are included on the present release together with Luciano Berio’s SOLO for trombone and orchestra. The present recordings were made at concerts with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Iván Fischer, Markus Stenz and Ed Spanjaard respectively. They have previously been showcased on three different discs on the RCO’s own Live Horizon label, and are gathered together here for the first time. The album therefore highlights the versatility of van Rijen as a musician, but also of his instrument as perceived and presented by three very different composers.

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Sono Luminus proudly presents Celebrating the American Spirit, performed by Essential Voices USA and directed by Judith Clurman, which reconfigures musical expressions of nationhood. EVUSA comes together with guest soloists and instrumentalists, including singers Kelli O'Hara and Ron Raines, and composer arranger Larry Hochman. There is even a new lyric by Sheldon Harnick, the famed lyricist of Fiddler on the Roof. From beginning to end, EVUSA delivers imaginatively conceived performances that articulate new visions of community and civic responsibility in the 21st century. At the core of the CD is 'Sing Out Mr. President', a series of sixteen newly commissioned works set to quotations by U.S. presidents stretching from George Washington to Barack Obama. Judith Clurman initiated this inventive project in response to 9/11, after she conducted the Juilliard Choral Union in a wrenching memorial concert at a firehouse in New York City.

Leonard Bernstein's own version bettered? Yes, indeed! This is, handily, the best sung, best played, most intelligently interpreted recording of Mass currently available. Of course, Bernstein's rendition always will have sterling qualities, including some wonderful solo singers with really characterful "pop" and Broadway voices, but for its sheer musical integrity combined with the advantage of the composer's final revisions to the score, this version is unbeatable. Jubilant Sykes, as the Celebrant, easily outclasses Alan Titus' very fine premiere recording of the role. His voice has more edge; he's more at ease with the various pop idioms; he sounds radiant at the work's opening and grows increasingly desperate as it proceeds. This only serves to make his climactic breakdown tragically believable.

The various street singers are, one and all, terrific. "God Said" becomes the work's comic climax, which is as it should be. "I believe in God", "Confession", "World Without End", and "Thank You" are both idiomatic and beautifully sung. The children's choir sounds luminous in the Sanctus, while the adult chorus, from Morgan State University, sings with gusto as well as immaculate diction, with every word clearly comprehensible. Marin Alsop knits the whole ensemble together with infallible insight and verve. Her tempos, a bit different from Bernstein's, quicker here ("God Said"), a touch slower there (the wild dance in the Offertory), are no less right.

It's all fabulously recorded with a glittering impact that never turns unduly aggressive. The multi-textural layering in the climactic Dona Nobis Pacem comes across as both musically and physically overwhelming. Mass has its detractors, but when performed with this kind of conviction the piece can be inexpressibly moving. Alsop never has made a finer recording--it's both a tribute to her mentor Leonard Bernstein, as well as to her exceptional talent as an exponent of his music.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com (10/10)

Although Philip Glass came late to the string quartet, his contribution to the genre has since become a significant one. This disc features the first four of his five quartets, ranging from the uncharacteristic yet fascinating sound-world of the First, through the compact dimensions of the subsequent two (themselves derived from theatre and film scores). The more expansive manner of his Fourth Quartet makes allusions to the formidable string quartet heritage, in particular those of Schubert and Dvořák.

The musical world of Arvo Pärt has fascinated listeners and performers for several decades. The astonishing, breathtaking musical landscape he presents brings us to another dimension in which time seems to cease to exist. And his music reaches an audience which is wider than that of any other contemporary composer of art music today, teaching us that newly composed music can serve to fulfil spiritual needs. As BIS' contribution to the celebration of Pärt's 70th anniversary this year, we have looked back through our mirror and brought together a number of works spanning more than three decades of his career: from 1964 to 1998.

Torleif Thedéen and Roland Pöntinen, who with this disc give us the larger part of Schnittke's chamber music for the cello, are long-time partners whose first joint recording for BIS was made in 1986 - entitled 'The Russian Cello', it incidentally included a performance of the first of Schnittke's cello sonatas. Since then the two have appeared on a number of discs together, performing works by Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Hindemith and Anton Webern among others. Their recording of the Chopin Sonata, coupled with works by Robert Schumann, was highly acclaimed in The Gramophone, whose critic found that the team gave 'this wonderful music a sweep and gradeur that's immensely satisfying'.

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Summer

Rather than an attempt to depict a reality-based musical view of China, pianist Jenny Lin's program seems designed to show how fantasy tends to mix with reality in many Western composers' attempts to evoke the flavor of a far-off, exotic land that held strong fascination. Of course, this fascination with the Orient in general began centuries ago with Europeans' first awareness of music, styles, food, and art, an awareness that grew to spawn periodic fads and influence fashions. Rulers stocked their palaces with treasures brought from the far east; Puccini and Gilbert and Sullivan celebrated this attention and many other composers included or tried to include elements of what they thought was oriental "flavor" in some of their works. Most often, however, the result was as much like real Chinese as the Moo Goo Gai Pan from your local takeout.


Lin has chosen a varied and eminently colorful program that includes many unfamiliar works--but no one can complain that this isn't one of the more engaging, intriguing, original, and entertaining piano recordings to come along in the past year. And pianist Lin is a wonderful musician, in total technical command of this long (nearly 80 minutes) and formidable program. And (as long as we're on the subject) she imbues the music with an enticing mix of variously scented spices that truly bring out the unique, if rarely authentic flavors of each composer's creation. As you might expect the pentatonic scale and its permutations are a ubiquitous presence, a feature that may have seemed merely curious a century ago but now comes off as more than a little cartoonish and hackneyed. But it still can be made charming and even pretty, as in Martinu's The Fifth Day of the Fifth Moon, or sensuous, as in the surprising, Debussyian Lotus Land by Cyril Scott. Morton Gould's Pieces of China is a kind of Pictures at an Exhibition for the Kodak age. The idiom is a hybrid of borrowings from popular music styles (especially jazz) and the Western composer's "do-it-yourself Chinese music fake book"--but it's an absolutely charming condensation of cliché and postcard images, from "The Great Wall" to "Puppets" to "Slow Dance-Lotus".


Other highlights include Anton Arensky's Étude sur un theme chinois Op. 25 No. 3, a great encore piece that whirls and swirls its way through four exciting minutes; Percy Grainger's Beautiful Fresh Flower, loaded to overflowing with open fourths and pentatonic melodies; John Adams' predictably busy-but-going-nowhere evocation of China Gates; and Albert Ketèlby's In a Chinese Temple Garden, complete with gong. The prize for most authentic goes to Alexander Tcherepnin's Five ('Chinese') Concert Études Op. 52. The composer not only lived in the Far East for nearly three years in the 1930s, but he married a young Chinese concert pianist, Lee Hsien-Ming, for whom the etudes were written. Inventive and artful in their use of real Chinese melodies and impressions of Chinese instruments, these pieces have been virtually ignored by pianists but, especially as Lin presents them, they also deserve serious attention by others. Lin's fluid legatos, skillfully calibrated dynamics, and polished rapid fingering technique really shine here.


In the "works that have Chinese names but nothing to do with China" category are Abram Chasins' Rush Hour in Hong Kong, which from the sound of it just as well could be San Francisco or London or any other city; Ferruccio Busoni's Turandots Frauengemach, which is based on the folk tale Turandot, but whose theme is the very English tune "Greensleeves" which, according to the excellent liner notes, Busoni mistakenly thought was Chinese; and Rossini's Petite Polka chinoise, in which amusingly you can hear lots of Chopin but virtually no chinoiserie. Lin plays this with knowing humor and understated flair.


Lin's Steinway benefits from an acoustic that complements and naturally captures its full range and character, from robust lows to ringing highs. This is a release that every piano enthusiast should own. Those looking for a quirky but unfailingly delightful visit to China will enjoy it too. [7/1/2000]
--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

• Elliott Carter wrote some of the most challenging and probing works of the latter half of the 20th and first years of the 21st century. Violinist Caroline Chin and cellist Brian Snow excel in this literature.

RUDERS: Kafka's Trial (Proces Kafka, Prozess Kafka)

For Bunita Marcus opens with a clear call to our attention. With these first six notes, we step over the threshold and into the journey of the piece. We know that we are in this for the long haul: Morton Feldman’s late works are notorious for being marathons. He composed For Bunita Marcus in 1985, immediately after his four-hour For Philip Guston, and two years after his six-hour String Quartet (II). These earlier works make an hour-long solo piano piece seem short. Still, it is a long time to sustain a single movement, a single journey, and we inevitably have this in mind as we take the first step: so this is how it starts.

Despite the mystic beauty of his music, John Tavener's place in Western music is a controversial one. His desire to create musical ikons for a time in which he believes 'man has lost his belief not only in God, but also in himself' is provocative. Yet part of the attraction of his music must surely arise from its symbolic nature, a reflection of his deeply-held Orthodox faith. This collection covers a wide range of Tavener's celebrated choral output and includes his immediately popular setting of William Blake's The Lamb, and the luminously spiritual, Ikon of Light.

SCHNITTKE: Piano Quintet / String Trio / Stille Musik

In his 1996 Fourth Symphony, Philip Glass reworked six out of the ten tracks from David Bowie's Heroes album into orchestral pieces that function both as independent entities and integral symphonic components. It isn't necessary to know the original Heroes in order to appreciate how Glass manipulates the essentially simplistic melodic content by way of striking harmonic juxtapositions, rhythmic vamps laced with unpredictable accents from the percussion, and orchestration that's cannily varied yet clear enough to take down by dictation. In The Light, Glass also generates considerable textural and dramatic mileage from the simple, undulating motives heard at the work's outset. What prevents the signature repetitive modules from running into the ground or sticking in the mud is the composer's unerring sense of when to introduce a new idea, slightly alter a chord voicing, or vary the instrumentation.

One main difference between Marin Alsop's interpretations and Dennis Russell Davies' premiere recordings on Nonesuch concerns engineering philosophy. On Naxos, the Bournemouth Symphony emerges in a more natural, concert-hall perspective as you might perceive from a dead-center orchestra seat in a vibrant but not overly resonant hall. The Russell Davies recordings reproduce their orchestras (the American Composers Orchestra in the Symphony, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in The Light) at relatively close, detail -oriented range and pack a more immediate punch. For example, in Alsop's slightly faster rendition of the symphony's fourth-movement Sons of the Silent Age, the antiphonal cross-rhythms midway through the work converge to more fluid and blended effect. By contrast, Russell Davies' slower, more heavily accented version beefs up the harps and low brass. And while Alsop begins V 2 Schneider (the final movement) at a bright clip that ever-so-slightly slows down within the first minute, Russell Davies is rock steady. Although I lean toward Russell Davies' recordings (which result from the composer's production team), Alsop's equally world-class interpretations unquestionably convey their own character and validity.

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

The world renowned French horn player Radek Babor�k has chosen for his new album "Orquestrina" compositions inspired by dance in it's various forms; alongside compositions by famous authors as Astor Piazzolla (Histoire du tango), Gabriel Faur� (Pavana) or Maurice Ravel (Bol�ro) the album also contains works less known, including Lev Kogan�s dances and songs rooted in Jewish music, Corrado Saglietti�s suite for horn and a string quartet and three small pieces for solo horn. The fifteen member ensemble is made of great soloists and chamber music players. Many of the compositions are presented here for the first time in newly created arrangements. The album is full of energy and masterful performances and undoubtedly it shall become an event of the year, not only within Czech music scene.

The only collection of the complete string quartet works of American composer John Adams. Includes liner notes by John Adams.

“Hearing the Attaca Quartet play is to experience a mix of high energy technical skill and musical intelligence. They are an ensemble devoted to their mission with a future of unlimited potential.” – John Adams

The internationally acclaimed Attaca Quartet has become one of America’s premier young performing ensembles. Praised by Strad for possessing “maturity beyond its members’ years,” they made their professional debut in 2007 as part of the Artists International Winners Series in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall.

“Fellow Traveler” [is] an exhilarating new CD devoted to the complete string quartet works of John Adams...the [Attacca Quartet's] playing is exuberant, funky and exactingly nuanced...[A] vivacious, compelling set. -- Steve Smith, New York Times [3/29/2013]

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When it comes to composers broadly categorized under the heading of minimalism, it's rare to find works grouped by genre in the conventional way. But the Attacca Quartet, a young group out of New York's Juilliard School, shows what can be done with this set of three pieces by John Adams, entirely different in tone but clearly the products of the same composer. The best-known work on the program, John's Book of Alleged Dances (1994), has been recorded several times. It's a madcap work, full of humorous or satirical images and references to styles of music from the Baroque to rock, yet very tightly constructed. Its ten movements may be played in any order, and they do seem to suggest dance interpretation, even though Adams referred to them as "alleged dances" because the dance steps for them had not been invented yet. The String Quartet of 2008, by contrast, is in keeping with the general greater seriousness of the music of Adams' middle age. Its giant 20-minute first movement manages to weave sections of traditional sonata form together with a progression from the composer's basic minimalist style into more jazz-inflected music, and it's one of Adams' most ambitious structures. The Attacca Quartet does well with both these contrasting emotional worlds and is undaunted by the considerable technical challenges in the music. The small Fellow Traveler (the work is dedicated to opera director Peter Sellars and refers to his interest in physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, suspected of being a Communist or "fellow traveler" by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation) closes out the program with melodies related to those of Adams' operatic works. Adams operas like Doctor Atomic and especially Nixon in China are better known than any of the music here, but this crackling release might carve out a place for the two larger works in the general quartet repertory.

-- All Music Guide

On this album Kjell Tore Innervik performs Morton Feldman's The King of Denmark and Iannis Xenakis's Psappha, exploring the intimate performing space with large format recording techniques, engaging the listener in immersive audio. The Xenakis was recorded twice: once from the perspective of an intimate listener, and a second time literally "over-head", giving a first-persona perspective. The difference not only in microphone technique but also in the performer's state of mind and how he projects his playing has a profound impact on the listening experience. Radical Interpretations of Iconic Musical Works for Percussion (2013-2017) was an interdisciplinary artistic research project hosted at the Norwegian Academy of Music in collaboration with the Oslo Academy of the Arts, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Westerdals Oslo ACT and 2L through the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme. A utopia, a non-existent place, is a projection where there are no constraints of practicality, nothing to hold you back. Such is the approach to the music on this album- in each piece of music, using all the resources at their disposal, the recording engineers unite the composer, performer, recording artist and listener, and take them at least some of the way to a utopia.

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"Some of the most beautifully played and appealing contemporary chamber and piano pieces you're likely to hear", said American Record Guide about the album Mezzotints – Chamber Music by Ståle Kleiberg. And now there is a follow-up: a new string quartet, two trio constellations and the song cycle ‘Do You Believe in Heather?’, which has given the album its title. Ståle Kleiberg is often called a "modern romantic", and for good reason. We encounter a distinctive and highly individual alloy of modern and romantic elements in his music, whether it is characterized by a still, meditative lyricism or an energizing vitality. His String Quartet no. 3 encompasses this entire range of expression. The music speaks of summer. It is imbued with joie de vivre, and was composed with a full command of the genre and with considerable virtuosity. The flute-viola-harp ensemble is less common, but by no means unknown. Following Debussy's Sonata, several trios have been composed for this ensemble, and Kleiberg's ‘Trio Luna’ is a fine and most welcome addition. The work's three movements capture the mood of three dissimilar outer and inner landscapes, all of them bathed in moonlight, albeit at different times of day and night. ‘The Light Smith’ is also a trio; it is a song cycle for mezzo-soprano, clarinet and piano, and is chamber music on a very high level of inspiration. Both ‘The Light Smith’ and ‘Do You Believe in Heather?’ are settings of poetry by the distinguished Norwegian poet Helge Torvund. These poems engage with such archetypal themes as light, quietude, love, death and nature, but they treat these themes as real, everyday experiences, rather than abstract concepts. While the theme of ‘The Light Smith’ centers on the beginnings, growth and culmination of life, it is autumn and winter we meet in ‘Do You Believe in Heather?’

This album was nominated for the 2005 Grammy Award for "Best Choral Performance."
Recording information: Warsaw Philharmonic Hall (08/31/2002-09/03/2002); Warsaw Philharmonic Hall (09/06/2002-09/07/2002).

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Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s passionate Sixth Symphony is dedicated to the memory of the writer George Mackay Brown, with the ‘very special musical virtuosity’ of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in mind. It is one of his most beautifully expressive works and, whilst not untroubled, reaches moments of serene beauty. Composed for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, Time and the Raven is a brilliant and exciting collage, whilst few contemporary works enjoy such popularity as the magical An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise.

Acclaimed British composer John Rutter’s Gloria was a milestone in his career and remains an evergreen favourite with choirs worldwide for its freshness, drama and sheer beauty. His joyous setting of the Magnificat was conceived, in the composer’s words, as ‘a bright Latin-flavoured fiesta’ and is performed here in its version for choir, organ and chamber orchestra. This delightful choral album concludes with Rutter’s setting of the Te Deum, one of the church’s most ebullient hymns of praise to the Almighty.

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I vividly remember seeing Penderecki conduct the New York Philharmonic in a particularly wrist-slashing concert consisting of his De Natura Sonoris No. 2 (I loved it when the percussion section appeared to attack a filing cabinet with a hacksaw), this Viola Concerto, and as a cheery finale, Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony. It was winter, and snowing heavily. By the end of the concert there were about a dozen people left in the hall, which came as no surprise. The Viola Concerto struck me as uniformly grey and dismal, and it still does. Try as I might, and as well played as it is here, I’m not convinced that this is one of the composer’s more compelling efforts.

The Second Cello Concerto, on the other hand, is terrific, a large piece recognizably in the composer’s later, neo-romantic style. It’s still dark-ish, but far more varied in texture, timbre, and expression than the Viola Concerto, and it’s very well played here. You also always can count on Wit and his Polish forces to deliver the goods, particularly in Penderecki, and they don’t disappoint. You may also like the Viola Concerto more than I did. This isn’t a top recommendation in this series, then, but I have no qualms about the quality of the music making or the engineering.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

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This is a compelling addition to the already impressive series of Naxos CDs devoted to the music of one of Europe's most important living composers. These two substantial works by Krzysztof Penderecki date from the early days of the period where he was, in his own words, "saved from the avant-garde snare of formalism by a return to tradition". In other words, any listener not enamoured of the post-war hardcore European modernism in which Penderecki more than dabbled - as his renowned Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima or the notorious De Natura Sonoris I and Fluorescences testify - can safely read on.

Nevertheless, neither the Viola nor the Second Cello Concerto can be construed as especially easy listening. The music is a heady mixture of neo-Romanticism and early modernist elements, employing a language that both Shostakovich and Bartók would have recognised, yet going beyond the relatively mainstream idiom of his 'Christmas' Symphony. In character both works are certainly darksome, a sense of menace never far off - perhaps a reflection of difficult times in communist Poland. The bleak, eerie strings-only opening of the Second Cello Concerto is particularly memorable: the work was written for and premiered by Mstislav Rostropovich and is as relentlessly Cimmerian as any Penderecki, or any other composer for that matter, has written. Confrontational, multi-climactic and superbly scored, this is one of Penderecki's key works. The Viola Concerto is notably shorter and less spectacular, but is nevertheless stylish and accessible, providing also a convenient route into the sterner challenges of the Cello Concerto.

Guided by the expert but still underrated Antoni Wit, the excellent Warsaw Philharmonic give surely award-winning accounts of these demanding scores. The Russian soloists are majestic too: intuitive, expressive and virtuosic. This is Grigori Zhislin's first recording for Naxos, but he knows the Viola Concerto very well by now: a friend of Penderecki's, he gave the Russian premiere of the composer's Violin Concerto, and then took up the viola at Penderecki's request in order to be able to give the premiere, a quarter of a century ago, of his new Viola Concerto! Some may recall Tatjana Vassiljeva's only other recording for Naxos, her 'Cello Recital' (8.555762) almost a decade ago, on which she performed the Sonatas of Britten and Debussy among other works. Naxos released that in their occasional 'Laureate Series', in which they showcase award-winning newcomers. The surprise is that it took them so many years to re-record someone of Vassiljeva's great talent.

Sound quality is very good. The booklet notes are informative, albeit focused on a step-by-step guide to the music. Despite the short running time, for anyone new to Penderecki, but perhaps familiar with Shostakovich's symphonies and concertos, this disc is an ideal place to begin what should be a thrilling exploration.

-- Byzantion, MusicWeb International

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Classical Music