Classical Music

What do we know about the Swiss music world of the 18th century? Not much. So, for this reason, we consider Charles Burney's discovery of the musicianship of Gaspard Fritz during a visit to Geneva to be quite something. Fritz's music is Sturm und Drang, Storm and Stress, at it's finest, full of power, and on the same high level as the Mannheim School.

WAGENAAR De getemde feeks: Overture. Levenszomer. Saul en David. Romantisch Intermezzo. Frithjofs Meerfahrt • Antony Hermus, cond; NW German Phil • CPO 777 479-2 (50:16)


Outside of the Netherlands, the music of Johan Wagenaar (1862–1941) is not well known. Its most prominent bid for worldwide dissemination, conductor Riccardo Chailly’s Decca CD with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, was issued almost 20 years ago. (It seems like it was almost yesterday.) Of course it was deleted during the previous decade’s Great Cultural Purge, but those who want it badly enough might be able to find a used copy, or an ArkivMusic CD-R reincarnation. (It is not currently listed on their Web site, but it may well be cycled back into circulation if enough people request it.) It overlaps the present CD in the overture to De getemde feeks (The Taming of the Shrew) and Saul en David . An earlier recording of Frithjofs Meerfahrt (“Frithiof’s Sea Voyage”) can be found on a disc of Dutch overtures in which the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra is conducted by Jac van Steen, but that has become scarce as well. Those who are interested in exploring Wagenaar’s music probably will gravitate to the present release, then, unless money is no object, or unless they are particularly persistent.


I was curious about Wagenaar back in the early 1990s because I mistakenly thought that he had been the composition and harmony teacher of Bernard Herrmann. Actually, that was Bernard Wagenaar, who was no relation to Johan! I was glad to discover Johan Wagenaar’s music, however, for its (Richard) Straussian opulence and its salubrious affect. Those qualities are expressed most strongly in the concert overture, dating from 1909, which opens this CD—a good example of putting one’s best foot forward. Wagenaar doesn’t try to translate Shakespeare’s play into music. Instead, he contents himself with creating a positive, masculine mood, and his success in doing so is appealing enough.


Strauss often is cited as Wagenaar’s strongest influence, and then Berlioz, but it takes only a little imagination to hear his indebtedness to Brahms, and perhaps even a glance or two eastward at Glazunov. Elgar, who composed his own virtual tribute to Strauss in his orchestral work In the South , also can be compared to Wagenaar … or rather, the other way around, since Wagenaar’s music lacks the creativity of Elgar’s, to say nothing of Strauss’s. Still, one can argue that there can never be too much late-Romantic music, and Wagenaar’s works, while not revolutionary, are very satisfying when they are judged on their own terms. Levenszomer (“Summer of Life”) is a voluble expression of human happiness—perhaps the composer’s own, having found success after an impecunious childhood. Frithjofs Meerfahrt lacks many of the musical cues composers generally use to suggest Fahr ting on the Meer , or the Meer itself, and an episode involving two sea monsters is hardly impressive, so perhaps it is best to hear it as absolute music—it succeeds rather well as that. The same is true for the Intermezzo , which is more Romantisch stylistically than in the sense of amorousness. Saul and David naturally features an important part for the harp. Its inspiration was a painting by Rembrandt—no longer thought to be authentic, however. Again, Wagenaar’s skilled but generalized response encourages one to hear the score as accomplished absolute music, and to leave it at that.


The present selection sticks to music composed before 1910, so a second volume might be in the works. (Knowing cpo’s habits, that actually seems likely.) The Northwest German Philharmonia can’t compete with the Royal Concertgebouw’s tonal allure, but there’s nothing at all embarrassing about these performances. Antony Hermus knows his way around the music and keeps it from stagnating, although Chailly believes in it too, and almost succeeds in hiding the moments—not very many, mind you—when Wagenaar’s inspiration flags. In the absence of Chailly, though, this cpo disc makes Wagenaar’s case well enough.


FANFARE: Raymond Tuttle

Antonio Roseltti spent the most productive years of his life in two rural residential capitals in southern and norther Germany, far removed from the centres of contemporary musical life. Yet the poet-composer Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubert and the well-travelled English musical savant Charles Burney numbered him among the mos timportant and beloved composers of his day, the latter even placing him on a par wtih Haydn and mozart. Not only do the many known performances of his music prove that it was indeed popular and widely disseminated in his day, his success is also reflected in the fact that more than half o fhis output was issued in print by renowned publishers until well into the late 1790s. The piano has been the center of Natasa Veljkovic's life ever since she was four years old. After studies with her ''musical father'', Prof. Arobo Valdma, in Belfrade, she was accepted to Prof. Paul Badura-Skoda's class at the Vienna University of Music at the age of fourteen. She has earned many distinctions and awards throughout her career and regularly perofrms throughout Europe.

It was not too long ago that Otto Nicolai's name was known to pera audiences exclusively in association with his comic opera The Merry Wives of Windsor. Then the performance of his opera Il Templario changed our view of this composer's oeuvre. Il Templario, a work premiered in Turin in 1840, met with great international acclaim and recognition when it was produced on the stage. It's success has encouraged us to acquaint the music world with yet another Italian opera by Nicolai produced in Chemnitz: Die Heimkehr des Verbannten, which celebrated it's premiere as Il proscritto in Milan in 1841. Three years later it was presented as a German opera entitled Die Heimkehr des Verbannten in Vienna in a version revised by Nicolai that went on to be successfully performed about forty times over a period of three years at the Court Opera Theater.

Yes, this music is ridiculously conservative, as we might expect from a founder of the post-Mendelssohnian Leipzig school, but with a difference. Unlike so many of his colleagues Jadassohn, who composed these four symphonies between 1860 and 1888, keeps all of their elements in scale. They are brief (about thirty minutes maximum), immaculately scored, tuneful, and not afraid to be light without ever turning frivolous. Indeed, in their day these works were criticized for their lack of profundity. Today, we can see this as one of their greatest virtues.

The First Symphony looks back less to Mendelssohn than to Schumann, with better scoring. Consider the scherzo, and try to guess the composer. After that, the range expands a bit. Jadassohn had a genuine lyric gift, evident in the two Cavatinas for violin and cello, respectively, and also at such moments as the slow movement of the Third Symphony. With the Fourth Symphony, in C minor, Jadassohn does strike a more serious note, but once again at no point does it ever seem that he’s stretching his material farther than it wants to go. He knows how to keep his music moving, and he’s not ashamed of the fact that he’s not Beethoven. That’s saying a lot.

The performances by the Brandenburg State Orchestra under Howard Griffiths are quite good, with characterful contributions from the woodwinds and nice, clean ensemble generally. In the two Cavatinas, Thomas Georgi (cello) and Klaudyna Schulze-Broniewska (violin) play sensitively and don’t overload their predominantly gentle solo lines. The sonics are also naturally balanced and warm. Jadassohn’s symphonies may not be “important,” but they are wisely written, attractive pieces and for that reason well worth getting to know.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

The first volume of CPO's two-part release of concertante quartets or 'Concerto Sonatas' by Georg Philipp Telemann features seven works, each of which is scored for a different chamber ensemble selecting its particular combination of instruments from the recorder, transverse flute, oboe, violin, viola, viola da gamba, violoncello, or bassoon over a thoroughbass foundation. No other composer of the era offers better material for studying the various playing styles of the concerto sonata than Georg Philipp Telemann. There are more than thirty trio sonatas and quartets in which Telemann explored sonata and concerto border regions and moved between them in various chamber ensembles. The ensemble Cologne Camerata — Camerata Köln is one of the most long-loved chamber music ensembles for early music in the world. Under the name of Camerata Köln a handful of music students founded the ensemble in 1979 at the music conservatoire in Cologne. Ever since then, enthusiasm for the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the desire and imagination to pursue wholly new sounds and forms of interpretation, artistic approaches and stage presence in combination with a great deal of research and spontaneous desire for music making have marked the work of the ensemble and their international concerts.

Based on the Wolfenbüttel Church Constitution of 1569, this performance recreates the form of an Easter Mass drawn together from compositions by Michael Praetorius, and sung in the order used during Praetorius' time as the chapel master.

In 1915 the Hungarian composer Emmerich K�lm�n celebrated what certainly qualifies as his greatest pubic success in the operetta metropolis of Vienna with Die Cs�rd�sf�rstin. For his next operetta, which beheld the light of the stage world at the Johann Strau� Theater in Vienna on 21 September 1917, K�lm�n and his librettists Alfred Maria Willner and Rudolf �sterreicher drew on a work that had already been presented with success in Budapest and had even conquered New York's Broadway: it was thus that Zsuzsi kisasszony (Miss Susi) or Miss Springtime (Fr�ulein Fr�hling) became Die Faschingsfee (The Carnival Fairy) for the Viennese public of the war years. For it the three authors came up with a plot that is set in Munich during the Carnival season and in the twilight years of the monarchies in Bavaria and Austria-Hungary issued it's appeal for the elimination of social strictures and the guarantee of the right to follow one's own heart. While Die Faschingsfee was redesigned as a most highly successful star vehicle for Fritzi Massary in Berlin, the same work - with hits like �Heut' flieg ich aus,� �Liebling, du mein Liebling,� and �Lieber Himmelvater, sei nicht b�s� on the same high musical level as Die Cs�rd�sf�rstin - celebrated it's Munich premiere in 1918 at the G�rtnerplatztheater and during subsequent years scored triumphs around the world. On the occasion of it's hundredth anniversary, the theater director Josef E. K�pplinger and his team rescued this fun Carnival work from decades of neglect and revived it right on time for the Munich Carnival in 2017!

Classical Music

F. E. FESCA Symphonies: No. 2 in D; No. 3 in D. Cantemire: Overture • Frank Beermann, cond; North German RSO • cpo 999 869 (61:04)


Not unlike Gossec, Mehul, and Onslow in France, or the Germans Spohr and Ries, Friedrich Ernst Festa (1789–1826) was a symphonist whose works have been eclipsed by Beethoven. Frank Beermann has sought to alleviate this neglect in performances with Hannover’s North German Radio SO. Their recording of Fesca’s Symphony No. 1 became available last year (cpo 999889). This new cpo release includes excellent performances of Fesca’s two remaining symphonies, recorded in the fall of 2001. Beermann is a conductor familiar to the record-buying public these days, especially due to his collaboration (conducting the Bamberg SO) with Matthias Kirschenreit in the complete Mozart piano concertos on Arte Nova.


Though it’s doubtful that anyone would argue for an elevation of Fesca’s status above that of Kleinemeister , this is music of considerable charm and skill. Oddly, the Second Symphony, composed between 1809 and 1813, seems more innovative than the Third, dating from 1816. The Second Symphony, for instance, features interesting writing for the woodwinds, which are given special prominence in the Andante con moto. Thematic elements of the finale seem oddly quirky, in a way that leaves one wondering if this were creative audacity that didn’t quite come off or simply awkward writing.


In critical assessments, Fesca’s orchestrations are often described as conventional. At least on the basis of these symphonies, this judgment seems unduly harsh. His handling of the orchestra is never less than effective, the string-writing is consistently idiomatic, and textures occasionally achieve an almost Mendelssohnian translucence. The overture to Cantemire , the first of two operas that Fesca wrote for Karlsruhe, rounds out the program.


Balances and presence in this record leave little to be desired. The performances are strong and imaginative. While the music itself must suffer in comparison to Beethoven and Weber, it nevertheless presents a worthy contribution to the rich and varied landscape of the early-19th-century symphony.


FANFARE: Patrick Rucker

Claudio Abbado has termed Aglika Genova and Liuben Dimitrov "the piano duo of the young generation" and the two have indeed come to be regarded as one of today’s most sought-after piano duos worldwide. On their latest CD, dedicated to their beloved teacher Vladimir Krainev, who died in 2011, they interpret suites by Anton Arensky. Arensky enjoyed enormous renown as a composer during his short lifetime and his chamber, instrumental, and vocal legacy, including above all the five suites for two pianos heard here, impressively attests to his artistic stature. From his audiences, whose members included the geniuses Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy, he earned great praise for these suites, both in the orchestral version and in the original version for two pianos. Arensky grew up in a music loving well-to-do family and studied counterpoint and fugue as well as composition under Rimsky-Korsakov at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He then became a composition teacher at the Moscow Conservatory, where he was appointed to professorship in 1889. He trained many students who later became famous composers (including Rachmaninov and Scriabin). This refreshingly modern interpretation of the suites presents them in all their fascinating sophistication and transparency and reveals the spirited emotionality, sincerity, and bold virtuosity of the effective and dazzling piano parts in their best light. - CPO, (Translated from German.)

Felix Woyrsch (1860-1944) studied music with Ernst August Heinrich Chevallier. In his youth he held posts as a conductor and organist in several German cities in the 1890s and 1900s and by 1917 he was a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts. In 1933 at age 73 he was ordered into "forced retirement" as head of the Altona Singakademie by the Nazis. In 1936 Woyrsch received the Goethe Medal. He lived until 1944.

Woyrsch stated his main influences included his friend Brahms as well as Bach, Palestrina, Lassus, and Heinrich Schütz. As a composer Woyrsch considered himself self-taught by these past masters. He stated: "I have not had a bad teacher, name of a good sound: I have a counterpoint in Palestrina, Lassus, Sweelinck. Schutz and Hassler studied and very often sat quietly at the foot of the Great Sebastian; composition taught me Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn, as well as the masters of modern times, Brahms and Wagner, I have to thank a lot." Historically Felix Woyrsch is part of the group of obscure German late-romantics, such as William Berger, Felix Weingartner, Albert Dietrich and Paul Juon who shared a harmonic language ranging from Brahms to Richard Strauss as well as early Schoenberg and Korngold. Composers who carried on the tradition of the symphony. The CPO label together with the Oldenburg State Orchestra led by Thomas Dorsch have embarked on bringing the colorful, romantic music of this "North German Brahms" successor to greater public awareness. - CPO (Translated from German)

Classical Music

REVIEW:



The creation of music for this significant annual season has occupied composers of the 17th and 18th centuries in numerous ways involving not only liturgical works but also newly written cantatas or pastorales that focus upon both the nativity itself and the importance of the birth of Christ for humanity. In short, it is an inspirational time of year that seems tailor-made to write music of all types and varieties.

Neapolitan music of the early galant heralds the emerging Classical style, always lyrical, homophonic, and graced with contrasts that allow for emotions within the music to emerge. It is equally significant that Naples not only housed famous teachers in the conservatories, but that these taught and inspired men such as Cimarosa, Paisiello, and others, without whom Italian opera would be quite bereft. One such was Francesco Durante, who although he did not compose opera nonetheless left his mark on a huge number of people ranging from his protégé Giovanni Pergolesi to the aforementioned. It is good to see that his music, mostly written for the church, is undergoing somewhat of a rediscovery, for it represents a vital historical link in the development of Classical-period music. Durante began his career at the San Onofrio Conservatory in 1710 at the age of 26, and within 20 years was hailed as the foremost maestro in the city, although he was now at the Poveri di Gesù Cristo Conservatory. His third and final post was maestro at the Santa Maria Conservatory in 1742, meaning that he was active virtually everywhere in the city.

This disc presents one of his Christmas motets, Ad presepe venite, to which is added two Marian Magnificats, a litany, and a Mass that Durante labeled for some reason “Pastorale.” Of these, the motet is clearly the most advanced work, with oboes and horns that add a particular brightness to the sound in the first movement. This is a lilting pastoral Siciliano in 12/8 time, in which the soloists act as a chorus of the whole. The harmony is mainly triadic, but one can feel the bucolic nature of the work. The first aria, “Candida lumina,” has a soaring melodic line that contains extensive coloratura, with some nice register leaps. The central section seems a bit perfunctory, but that just outlines the faster portions all the better. The work concludes with a duet for alto and tenor, a solemn-paced pastoral movement that would not be out of place in Vivaldi, especially with some nicely pungent suspension. The two Magnificats are more conservative works, although the second, in C Minor, is a short, sweet chorus with only an organ continuo to back it up. This is clearly useful, meant for churches with little resources. The Mass has a wonderful chromatic line in the violin, and Durante makes good use of pedal points to anchor the sometimes angular choral writing.

The performance by Michael Willens and his Cologne Academy is excellent. He keeps the tempos moving along nicely, and the instruments phrase things quite sensitively. Roberta Mameli has a bright, clear voice, handling the various displays with little effort, such as the melismas of the “Candida Lumine” aria in the motet. In this same work, Ursula Eittinger blends well with tenor Andreas Post, although she often seems closer to an alto than a mezzo. Her voice is nicely resonant and has more depth than one might expect. Stephan McLeod also has some wonderful declamatory lines in the B♭-Major Magnificat. In short, this is a recording that not only continues Willens as one of the premier Baroque/Classical interpreters, it also offers a crucial and well-performed insight into a composer who is only now beginning to be recognized for his impact on the development of the Classical style. My only moment of surprise is that only the motet actually incorporates the oboes and horns; surely a selection of Durante’s music can be found to make more use of these instruments. Still, this comes highly recommended.

-- Fanfare