The compositions on this album, broadly considered, are connected with Beethoven’s efforts on behalf of the theater, and they also attest to his desire to compose for the larger public without having to lower his standards. The center here is formed by his music for Goethe’s Egmont. The Dutch Count Egmont failed in his resistance against the tyrannous rule of the Duke of Alba and was executed. The decisive factor in Beethoven’s choice of this subject must have been that Goethe himself assigned a dramaturgically important role to music above all at the end of his play, and in his composition Beethoven followed these pretextual givens to the letter. When Egmont, in prison prior to his execution, sees the vision of his beloved Klärchen as the personification of liberty, then Egmont’s words and the musically designed vision join together in a melodrama. The album also includes three overtures and Wellington’s Victory, in which Beethoven combines the older tradition of the “battaglia,” the musical depiction of a battle, with victory pathos. Its effect lies not so much in the masterful treatment of the musical material itself as in the development of a spatial dimension for a realistic battle scene and in the big sound overpowering the listener, in short: in its theatrical character. During Beethoven’s lifetime it was his most successful composition.

Michael Haydn wrote his Italian “Serenata” to a libretto by Metastasio on the theme of the lover’s grief felt by the goddess Diana, who took vows of chastity without thinking that she might be hit by Amor’s arrows. This opera in two acts from 1778 celebrated its premiere during Michael Haydn’s lifetime but then was forgotten for more than two centuries; it was first performed again in full in Salzburg in 2018 and now is finally available on cpo. The performance was a cooperative venture of the Institute for Mozart Interpretation, Salzburger Hofmusik, and Johann Michael Haydn Society. The term “serenata” should not be mistakenly equated with “serenade.” It refers to musical tributes for instruments and voices performed mostly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for occasions such as coronations, weddings, and birthdays and ranging in genre from the secular cantata to the full-scale opera. After the successful performance drehpunktkultur. at wrote: “Johann Michael Haydn, the great Joseph’s ‘little brother,’ the ‘Salzburg Haydn,’ is always good for surprises. Wolfgang Brunner introduced the composition with humorous wit and supplied finely felt and energetic accents at the harpsichord, also in the arias. His approach to the performance of the work was perfect and in original sound. The Hofmusik – and, in its sole short appearance, the Mozart University Vocal Ensemble – performed with animo and sympathetic feeling. The audience was extremely pleased.”

On 23 June 1962, in the Mainz City Theater, Paul Hindemith conducted the premiere of a commissioned work that he had composed together with the writer and dramatist Carl Zuckmayer for the two thousandth anniversary of the former Roman castellum “Mogontiacum.” In their Mainzer Umzug the two authors had the city’s extraordinarily long history, from the Celts to current times, march before the mind’s eye of the public, whose members were delightfully amused by the explanations given by the commentators in dialect and at the end applauded all the participants with tremendous ovations. Despite this success, the Mainzer Umzug has continued to the present day to be a rarity in the catalogue of Hindemith’s works. After two repeat performances in Vienna and Berlin, it disappeared into the publisher’s archive until the conductor Hermann Bäumer again brought it into public view one and a half years ago. This General Music Director of the Mainz State Theater introduces his most recent cpo release with this practically forgotten parade, continues with the popular Symphonic Metamorphoses of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber and the prelude to the Requiem When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d, and rounds things off with a stylistically genuine bonus that is an absolute must: the Narrhalla-Marsch with which the military musician Georg Karl Zulehner, one of the founding fathers of the Mainz Carnival Society (MCV), created the »theme song« for all female and male Carnival revelers.

At long last our successful Reger Edition continues on its way. The critics have been more than enthusiastic about the previous releases, and Musik & Theater even stated: “These recordings number among the best currently available in the field of Reger’s organ music.” This month we are releasing Vol. 7, again with two albums in the best SS, and this time featuring Reger’s five easy-to-play Preludes and Fugues op. 56. Although the composer termed this composition “an organ work of small caliber” in a letter to the publisher Lauterbach & Kuhn, the critics reacted positively, and the organist and composer Robert Frenzel numbered its pieces, which form anything but a secondary work, “among the most poetic phenomena in the most recent organ literature.” And we absolutely have to agree with him. The generic combination of “Prelude and Fugue” is frequently assigned to the realm of so-called absolute music, but Reger’s op. 56 does not seem to belong to this world in which only the musical structure is of significance; instead, particularly the preludes, which mostly practice dynamic moderation – like many of the “pieces” from op. 59 and other works – are distinguished by a pronounced poetic character.

The premiere of Franz Lachner’s Symphony No. 6 was held in Munich on 19 April 1837 with the composer as the conductor. The Munich press termed it a “magnificent work” and an “outstanding masterpiece,” and in this truly extraordinary work Lachner refrains from the confrontational juxtaposition of large-format thematic blocks (above all occurring in his third and fifth symphonies), instead presenting a “more organic” compositional style in which motivic-thematic developments are realized step by step. Lachner’s Concertino for Bassoon and Orchestra is a work from 1824, composed during his Vienna years. He dedicated it to Theobald Hürth, who was then the Vienna Court Opera Orchestra’s principal bassoonist. It is not known whether or not Hürth ever performed this work in public, and performances of it are not documented. It is one of the earliest extant compositions by Lachner and possibly his first work with orchestra. Here Chia-Hua Hsu, the solo bassoonist of Taiwan’s Evergreen Symphony Orchestra, interprets its recording premiere.

Following marches, polkas, and waltzes by Benjamin Bilse, Richard Eilenberg, Josef Gung’l, and Carl Millöcker, this new release is now the fifth cpo album with the conductor Christian Simonis. This time he turns to two members of the Fahrbach family of musicians: to Philipp Fahrbach the Younger and Philipp Fahrbach the Elder. In mere numbers the members of the Fahrbach family by far surpassed the members of the Strauss family. Like the Strausses, the Fahrbachs also composed superb dances and marches. Moreover, in the Vienna and Austria of those times the Fahrbach dynasty of musicians contributed enormously to the music culture and development of popular music not only in the capital city’s region but also beyond it. The titles of the works, the occasions of their composition and performance, and not least the music itself with all its allusions are in the oeuvre of the Fahrbachs just as much »history in music« as they are in the compositions by the Strauss family. The Fahrbachs are no longer so famous today simply because of the poor state of the surviving source documentation. Like his father, Philipp Fahrbach the Younger was a conductor of military and private orchestras and in this capacity of course also a composer. The waltzes of father and son in particular enjoyed great favor among the public and music critics. The musical oeuvre of Philipp Fahrbach the Younger comprises more than five hundred compositions, most of which can be assigned to the genres of Viennese dance and march music. His most successful and most famous work is also heard on this album: the brilliant polka française “Im Kahlenbergerdörfel” op. 340.

Since only a very few compositions from Johann Wilhelm Hertel’s complete oeuvre were printed during his lifetime, the dissemination of his music was very limited and restricted. The rediscovery of this master’s two cello concertos in the early 1990s already represented a great enrichment of the repertoire of violoncello concertos from the age of Empfindsamkeit and the style galant around 1750. Bettina Messerschmidt became acquainted with Hertel’s music at the beginning of her career as a Baroque cellist and enthusiastically welcomed the warmth, power, and melodiousness of his compositions right from the very start. In the concertos she often develops a dialogue between the cello and the strings through contrasting expression of an intensity recalling the cello concertos written by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach around the same time. Along with two symphonies by Hertel, his only organ concerto, in all probability composed during 1756-57, is heard on our new releases. Here too the organ shines in dancy movements with fiery figurations

Max Bruch has never made things easy for fond listeners or performers of music; his contemporaries found him hard to handle, and so have later generations. The reason behind this has nothing to do with the superlative, worldwide renown of the first of his violin concertos, or with his musical language, which had already fallen out of fashion when he died exactly a hundred years ago. Instead, Bruch himself much too quickly and all too often lost his faith in his “musical progeny” because he did not have the patience to let them mature in peace and to secure a place in the broader public consciousness. This applies to the opera Die Loreley, which offers a rewarding listening experience, as well as to his three symphonies composed between 1868 and 1882 and originally intended as a series of works forming a trilogy. However, Max Bruch set aside the third part in order to focus on dramatic and choral symphonic projects. He first wanted to write his second opera, Hermione after The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare, and Odysseus, his first secular oratorio. As things turned out, the spectacular long-term success of these musical pictures from antiquity meant that his original symphonic project was relegated to the back burner. However, once we experience the three sister works in their originally planned context, as the present new production enables us to do, the tide turns in their favor. The revealing path from the heroic idea underlying the first symphony, which, by the way, we are presenting for the first time in its original five-movement version, over the tragic stance of the second symphony, to the “Rhine idyll” of the third symphony leads us to the realization that this triad deserves much more credit than its meager performance figures would make us believe.

David Monrad Johansen’s catalogue of works displays a mere thirty-six opus numbers as well as a dozen unnumbered compositions from periods. The Epigrams on Norwegian motifs form his last lengthier composition as well as one that is more clearly related to Norwegian folk music than the other works recorded here. Monrad Johansen harmonized the given melodies in his characteristic manner while above all ennobling them with the tender colors and sumptuous fireworks of his detailed orchestration. However, it is first and foremost in his successful Pan op. 22 symphonic music that he exhibits his mastery in orchestral coloration, which in part may have its model in Richard Strauss but also follows the French impressionists, so that it stands at the intersection of the influences and imprints in his oeuvre. The Symphonic Variations and Fugue op. 23 (1944-46; rev. 1959 and 1964), more than Pan and its equal portions of German and French influence, are related to Monrad Johansen’s German education and exhibit many neoclassical elements, so that here Max Reger and Franz Schmidt come to mind, in whose music great variation works with fugues stand out for their tradition-forming function. Already at the beginning of his artistic career Monrad Johansen distinguished himself as an outstanding pianist, and at the latest since his Paris stay in 1927 he was drawn to the idea of composing a concerto, but nearly three decades would pass before this plan became a reality. In its general outline the concerto displays the traditional three-movement structure and classical formal models. However, what particularly stands out is the dramatic alternation between the piano part, which is maintained in virtuosic style throughout, and the contributions by the orchestra.

Following Karl Weigl’s Cello Concerto, we are now releasing his last two String Quartets, his seventh and eighth such works, which were neither commissioned works nor performed during his lifetime. The premiere of Quartet No. 7 was held at the Austrian Institute in New York in 1956, seven years after the composer’s death, and the Concord Quartet premiered Quartet No. 8 at Lincoln Center in New York only years later, in 1973. Weigl completed his next-to-last quartet in January 1942 and in this work much more clearly than in its successor adheres to the finely felt lyricism generally distinguishing him as a composer. It is a work without »screams« and hardly anything would lead us to suspect that it is not a composition from Weigl’s years in Vienna. The same cannot be said of his eighth and last quartet. Weigl knew how to shock his listeners without needing to seek refuge in unresolved dissonances. And this quartet indeed is shocking. The first movement is blunt and mysterious at one and the same time. With its dotted motif the fugued development section strives toward a coda that in the end modulates from minor to major without prior warning. An agonizing but tender melancholy marks the following movement: only Weigl was able to send waves of gloomy brooding through such gentle pondering. The conclusion has the effect of a lonely, mute scream in the night.

the Joker is the absolute all-time favorite opera among Croatians. A couple of years ago it celebrated its seven hundredth performance alone at the Zagreb National Theater. The Croatian Jakov Gotovac, one of the most trailblazing composers of the earlier Yugoslavia, premiered the opera in 1935. After its immediate success it toured through what was then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and today it continues to be a favorite selection for performance programs in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. In Germany, however, this comic opera brimming with musical wit has to be assigned the status of a rarity. Its last performance prior to this one was in Munich in 1942 – in a German translation. But now back to the original: on Sunday, 19 May 2019, the Munich Radio Orchestra under its principal conductor, the Croatian Ivan Repušic, presented a concert performance of Ero the Joker in Croatian. The lead solo roles are sung by native speakers of Croatian, and for the occasion the Croatian Radio Chorus, with which Repušic has launched a cooperative program, made the trip to Munich. Gotovac’s music sparkles with Eastern European and Mediterranean folkloric influences. The composer is regarded as one of the founders of a Croatian national musical language that in the nineteenth century was fueled by the yearning for national identity. Here we hear music full of lyrical and witty moments and with magnificent arias and choral numbers. And its hero is a joker who challenges fate.

Along with the renowned classics of the trumpet concerto literature by Joseph Haydn and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, the musical epoch known today as “Classicism” also witnessed the composition of other solo concertos for trumpet. These concertos were written not for valved instruments but for the natural trumpet without valves – an instrument on which the player in principle can produce only the tones of the natural harmonic series. Performing on a four-hole Baroque trumpet model and with the richly nuanced L’arpa festante ensemble, the Hungarian trumpeter Krisztián Kováts interprets festive trumpet concertos by Johann Matthias Sperger, Johann Stamitz, and others in which the timpani expressively reinforce the tutti sound of the orchestra. The purpose of the present recording is to call attention to the long-forgotten art of clarino playing. The use of original instruments enabling us to come very close to the composer’s musical intention is a very substantial prerequisite here. The corpus of the Baroque natural trumpet is much longer than that of modern valved instruments, so that a sound spectrum rich in overtones is the result. The repertoire recorded here was once performed by only a few most highly privileged and specialized trumpeters whose artistry enabled them to imitate the articulation and lightness of the human voice in the clarino register.

WETZ Christmas Oratorio • George Alexander Albrecht, cond; Marietta Zumbült (sop); Máté Sólyom-Nagy (bar); Thuringian CO; Erfurt P Ch; Dombergchor Erfurt • CPO 777 638-2 (70:02 Text and Translation)


In Fanfare . 20:5, William Zagorski reviewed cpo’s release of the Requiem by Richard Wetz (1875–1935). His enthusiastic appraisal of the work is more or less identical to my reaction to this Christmas Oratorio, a later Wetz work completed in 1928. Zagorski’s concluding endorsement well applies to this new recording: “Does this obscure offering by an obscure composer belong in the international standard repertoire? After listening to this fine and illuminating performance, I can answer that question in a single word: absolutely.”


The Christmas Oratorio—powerful at times, artfully composed in a way that sustains interest over its considerable length, and often affecting—is a significant discovery. Cpo does the music a great service by issuing it in such a fine, polished performance. Unfortunately, listeners eager to learn about this inexplicably neglected composer are shortchanged by the absence of a basic biography of Wetz in the booklet notes. Zagorski had the same complaint, and I refer subscribers to his review in the Fanfare Archive. It provides biographical background originally found on the website Len@musicweb-international.com.


The oratorio has a three-part structure comparable to that of L’Enfance du Christ, though it’s less of a dramatic narrative, and lacks Berlioz’s moments of exoticism. The titles of the work’s three sections are “Expectation and Annunciation,” “The Birth of Christ,” and “The Three Kings.” Wetz’s text is made up of a sequence of old German folk poems and his musical setting effectively interweaves folk-like material into a more complex chromatic style. Part II builds to a grand finale and part III ends with a big, jubilant double fugue, a contrapuntal tour de force , but much of the oratorio maintains a consoling tone that steers clear of sentimentality or bombast. The overall effect is not unlike that of the Brahms Requiem.


Wetz’s three symphonies composed in the manner of Bruckner have been issued by cpo and praised by three Fanfare critics. There are some Brucknerian climaxes in the Christmas Oratorio, but its overall feeling has more of a kinship with the tuneful, evocative music of Hansel and Gretel . Wetz’s melodic lines have some of the character of Parsifal’s simpler leitmotifs, and his adherence to tonality has something in common with the music of his Austrian contemporary Franz Schmidt. But in re-listening to Schmidt’s 1935–37 oratorio The Book of the Seven Seals , its eclectic, more operatic striving for effect strikes me as more effortful than Wetz’s approach. Of course, the Book of Revelation calls for something less gentle than the Nativity story.


There’s a recurring pattern in the Christmas Oratorio that Zagorski notes in Wetz’s Requiem, a musical movement from darkness to light, or conflict to resolution. Wetz’s careful chromatic writing, often imitative, creates a mysterious, brooding atmosphere that’s eventually dispelled by the opposite mood. We hear the former in opening orchestral prelude, among many other passages, and the latter in the first entrance of the women’s chorus with a simple diatonic folk tune. It’s a magical effect.


If the names of the provincial-sounding choruses and orchestra are unfamiliar to you, have no fear. They perform at the highest level. Conductor George Alexander Albrecht leads an inspiring, well-balanced performance and it doesn’t hurt that the baritone soloist, Máté Sólyom-Nagy, who has a large role, sounds uncannily like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in his prime: a pure and resonant voice with glorious diction. Marietta Zumbült is adequate, but a more radiant, secure soprano soloist would have made this a perfect performance. The recorded sound is properly resonant with a wide dynamic range.


FANFARE: Paul Orgel

This is the second volume of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's works for violin and piano. Weinberg's Violin Sonata No. 1 covers the path from C minor to C major, a popular tradition of the time while Sonata No. 2 reveals his increasing creative ambitions. Sonata No. 3, has a lyrical tone which dominates the first movement. The structural design is more economical and grows more elaborately throughout.

Rare but Irresistible: Cello Meets Harp Singing melodies of the cello borne by the silvery splendor of the harp’s tonal cascades – Mathias Johansen and Silke Aichhorn formed their duo in 2018 in order to revive the rarely performed literature for these two instruments. It is not clear why there are so few original compositions for this duo form. In the nineteenth century the tradition was for the harp to accompany virtuoso violinists. In his time Frederick the Great of Prussia employed a harpist to accompany his own flute solos and the violin sonatas of his violinists Benda and Graun. Prior to the French Revolution this combination was very much in vogue in the distinguished residences of the Parisian nobility, and then, in the early nineteenth century, it found its place on the German concert stage with the musical husband and wife Louis and Dorette Spohr. The combination of soft, bowed tones on the violin or the cello with sparkling runs on the harp is tonally irresistible – as Silke Aichhorn and Mathias Johansen demonstrate on their first joint album. The program includes original works as well as familiar classics and hidden treasures for orchestra or other combinations of instruments – all masterfully presented by the two musicians. The result is a unique sound space, full of romantic feeling, power, and emotion, in which listeners will experience new fascination on each new hearing.

This album features three dazzling but previously only little-known compositions for royals from Telemann’s immense trove of vocal music. The selections have been chosen from the field of commissioned and occasional compositions written for special occasions such as acts of homage, funerary ceremonies, weddings, birthdays, and inaugurations. Two works from Telemann’s primary creative field, that of church music, round off the program. The three works featured on this recording have in common points of reference to the particular English kings during whose reigns they were written; these monarchs were also in personal union the Prince Electors of Braunschweig-Lüneburg (for short: “Electors of Hanover”). All three works are distinguished by scoring for an ensemble with trumpets as “royal instruments” – sometimes in a majestic function, sometimes in a tonally subdued, mournful function – and with a bass singer as the vocal representative of the monarch. These works brimming with ideas and designed with virtuosity and color are from the master’s late compositional period and, depending on the particular occasion, express gratitude, appreciation, or grief vis-à-vis the British-Hanoverian rulers. Although these feelings certainly first and foremost reflect the stance of those who commissioned them, Telemann’s musical settings lend them universal appeal.

The Musicalisches Lob Gottes in der Gemeine des Herrn may be regarded as the impressive high point of Telemann’s printed annual cycles. The present recording of three cantatas from this annual cycle tends more to chamber musical design. It interprets the compositions as intimate sacred music for which an ensemble with eight members completely suffices in performance respects – something corresponding to the reality in performance practice in most German church music ensembles in the eighteenth century. In view of the intimate interpretation of these cantatas, the intermezzi interspersed in them from the Twelve Fantasies for Viola da Gamba Solo have the effect of a meditative deepening of the religious subject matter. The four fantasies selected are elaborated with fine art and are just as richly arrayed musically as are the church compositions.

The present recording spreads out before us the rich musical panorama covered by Pachelbel’s Magnificat compositions. We do not know what we should admire more about these works: the complexity of the contrapuntal and concerto textures or the naturalness and cantability of the part writing. In addition, we have Pachelbel’s great variation artistry, which constantly brings forth new formal designs, instrumental combinations, and focal points on the basis of one and the same text. Moreover, the natural flow of Pachelbel’s music includes a steady stream of musical rhetorical interpretations, and the richly pictorial Magnificat text offers plenty of opportunities for them. On this recording two sacred concertos and a Mass in three movements complement the four very different Magnificat settings and serve as contrasts to them.

The present recording of Christoph Graupner's Passion Cycle of 1741 concludes on Vol. 4 with the highly expressive cantata for Laetare Sunday GWV 1123-41. Laetare Sunday ("Joy" or "Refreshment" Sunday), the fourth Lenten Sunday, actually assumes a certain special positive status with it's central focus on God's action, which alone can rid human beings of their failings. However, Johann Conrad Lichtenberg, the author of the text, had a different view: here the dominant theme is the inequity of the rulers and judges who pronounce on Jesus while he bears everything with patience. In the end the verdict concerns the collective guilt of humankind, for which there initially seems to be no remedy. Here two things stand out: the decision in favor of two duets (instead of two arias) and the instrumentation of the cantata as a whole. The blend of instrumental color renders audible what is a direct musical realization of the textual content. The selection of chorales from Graupner's oeuvre between 1713 and 1751 illustrates the extraordinary variety of his compositional production, and the constantly changing coloration brought about by the nuanced instrumentation conveys this to the listener with special clarity. "The Baroque boom - here it in fact has brought new gems to light" (klassik-heute. Com of Vol. 3).

Max Drischner’s “Neobaroque” music is best understood when it is viewed in its context shaped by the youth music movement and the organ revival. Drischner composed most of his works for church performance in simple circumstances. He wanted to write appealing music that would reach »the people« and receive a positive response from its audiences – and even today his music attracts quite a few genuinely enthusiastic fans. The selection of compositions recorded here on a magnificent, richly colored symphonic organ consists of free pieces and pieces set to chorales that can also be played on small organs or in some cases even on the piano.

Among the free organ works, the impressive Passacaglia in E major occupies a special place in Drischner’s self-understanding because of his detailed comments on it and his suggestions for interpretation. Its title, Sonnen-Hymnus (Sun Hymn), owes to several factors: Drischner incorporates his experiences of sunrises in the mountains of his native Silesia into it and forms associations with creation hymns such as Psalm 104: 27-28 (verses with parallels in an ancient Egyptian hymn ascribed to the pharaoh Akhenaten) and St. Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun (“Cantico di Frate Sole,” 1224 / 25). Drischner renders this into music based on a theme of eight measures developed from an E major chord and cited a total of thirty-four times. It typically occurs in triple rhythm and is elaborated in registers, degrees of textural complexity, and forms of rhythmization. Drischner’s chordal doubling of the voices produces a hymnic character in the concluding part, and the registration with cimbelstern bells lends a special radiance to this segment.

Wilhelm Furtwängler was an avid composer even as a boy. His natural talent developed continuously until he had reached early adulthood. His compositions from these early years included symphonic works and an impressive Te Deum, but the promise they contained was not fulfilled: while Furtwängler quickly was able to obtain increasing success as a conductor, his creative juices ceased to flow for almost a quarter of a century. It was first after his open conflict with the new German regime (in the “Hindemith Affair”), causing him to resign from all his official posts, that his compositional energies once again streamed forth. The yield from the last twenty years of his life, when he apparently was in search of lost times past, included two violin sonatas, a piano quintet, a piano concerto, and three monumental symphonies. And the search was successful: already the Symphony No. 1 in B minor composed between 1938 and 1941 releases with elemental force the energies formerly held back and sends them flowing into architectures of Brucknerian dimensions without the composer ever slavishly following the precedents set by the Austrian master. With this work Wilhelm Furtwängler, standing firmly on Late Romantic tonal ground, thoroughly acquainted with the resources of the philharmonic orchestra, slow and deliberate in his composing, introduced a triptych that can be understood as a memorial to a bygone era and at the same time is to be heard as a hopeful signal.

REVIEWS:

Never publicly performed during Furtwängler’s lifetime, his first symphony has been overshadowed by the rather better-known second. On this new disc, recorded in first-rate sound that uncovers more than a few hitherto unappreciated felicities, American conductor Fawzi Haimor delivers a performance that effectively overcomes the work’s structural deficiencies. As a result, this flawed but nevertheless impressive score may now be appreciated more than ever before.

-- MusicWeb International

Furtwängler’s First Symphony has long been seen as a problem child, but Fawzi Haimor surpasses earlier accounts and finds elegant solutions to its many problems.

-- Fanfare

The fifth concert in our series of “Music from Wolfenbüttel Castle” features performances and recordings of multifaceted cantatas by Georg Caspar Schürmann. Like no other musician before him, Schürmann exercised a comprehensive influence on the Wolfenbüttel court music world during his more than fifty years of service there. During these decades he produced an impressively extensive and richly varied oeuvre: almost thirty operas, numerous table compositions, a Passion, and church cantatas for large ensembles are documented. In his Christmas cantata “Siehe, eine Jungfrau ist schwanger” we experience Schürmann as a composer of gripping ensemble compositions with finely chiseled fugue subjects. For many years the anonymous New Year’s cantata “Nimm das Opfer unsrer Hertzen” was also ascribed to Schürmann. Although Georg Österreich is now assumed to have been its composer, the opening aria in particular with its highly effective postponement of the resolution of dissonances displays a clear stylistic closeness to Schürmann’s opera arias from this time.

Max Reger’s oeuvre occupies a unique position between the centuries. His advanced compositional techniques made him one of the most frequently performed composers at the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen in Vienna and meant that he was held in great esteem by Arnold Schönberg. His affinity for Bach in his settings as well as in his choice of forms, architectonic techniques, and specific instrumentations was just as obvious as his grounding in Romanticism and his veneration for Beethoven and Brahms. Reger’s ties to the tradition – in this case to Mozart and Brahms – were the point of departure for his Clarinet Quintet in A major op. 146, a work radiating an ease that hardly seems to have been disturbed by the circumstances of a world war. The major tonality of the work is unusual in the chamber music from Reger’s late period and something it shares with the String Sextet op. 118. Apart from the sextet, after 1909 it is found only in the Flute Serenade in G major op. 141a and in the clarinet quintet. In contrast to these two other works, however, the sextet is of much greater complexity in formal design and material elaboration, which happens to be assigned to a very obvious thematic presentation. Even though Reger did not live to experience the publication and premiere of the clarinet quintet, the string sextet received a posthumous tribute inasmuch as the study score was immured in the base of Reger’s funerary monument in the Waldfriedhof in Munich on 11 May 1930.

Concerto Copenhagen, the Danish National Baroque Orchestra, has developed into one of Scandinavia’s leading Baroque orchestras and has earned its place in the front ranks of the world’s most fascinating and innovative orchestras of this kind. The orchestra now turns to Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous Orchestral Suites. Although extensive research has been conducted for many years, it is not known when the suites were composed. Today everything indicates that the suites were written much earlier than is assumed and then merely had to be adapted to Bach’s new Leipzig circumstances. It is therefore not unusual for them to be performed – as on this recording – without timpani and trumpets. Although the especially popular third suite is a ceremonious, sumptuous work, the material contributed by the wind instruments is hardly of considerable significance. The suite enjoys a top ranking on the charts of Bach’s most attractive and best-loved works. Some of his most popular melodies can be found in their movements. Suite No. 2 in B minor ends with the immensely famous flute solo of the Badinerie (a “joke” comparable to the Italian “scherzo”) frequently employed on television as a signature tune. Here the Johann Sebastian Bach we encounter is not the one who quests for deep spiritual knowledge or probes hidden aspects of the human soul. On the other hand, he rarely wrote mellower, more uplifting melodies or simpler, more elegantly designed dance rhythms than in these twenty-four movements brimming with magical variations, atmosphere, and rich color.

On the occasion of its 25th Birthday Anniversary, the Piano Duo Genova & Dimitrov realizes this year a fervent wish with a genuine mammoth project taking the pianists to their emotional limits in a form that has never been witnessed in the music world before: the two exceptional artists have recorded on cpo Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Complete Works for Piano Duo as a double album. The manifold colors in these pieces full of musical ideas are just spectacular… truly a captivating affair of the heart and an hommage to their idol Rachmaninoff. But nobody can describe this music better than the pianists themselves: "Rachmaninoff's Second Suite, Schubert's Fantasy, Mozart's Sonata!, this was the authoritative answer that we, being Postgraduate students at the Hanover University of Music, received at the end of 1995 from our teacher, the piano legend Vladimir Krainev, to our question which works we could prepare for our first piano duo competition. At that time, we would have never imagined that almost 25 years later from these few words the idea for this grand project would develop – a project we are now so particularly proud of." And justifiably so. Their impressive interpretations of the whole wide range of diverse compositions display Rachmaninoff’s multifacetedness in all its emotionally incredible, supercharged glory.

REVIEW:

This is a useful release from a discographical standpoint in that it accounts for every Rachmaninov two-piano and one-piano-four-hands composition or arrangement. The Genova & Dimitrov Piano Duo plays the Suite No. 1’s opening Barcarolle with less rubato leeway compared to Trifonov/Babayan and Ashkenazy/Previn. Although comparable strictness prevents the second movement from spilling all over the place, the players still allow the busy decorative background writing plenty of breathing space. The final two movements are excellently balanced, and it’s nice to hear the finale’s persistent “bell” ostinato roll out in long lined fashion, rather than hammered away.

The duo’s superb ensemble and careful balances make Rachmaninov’s early tone poem The Rock sound especially plausible and idiomatic in the composer’s “de-orchestrated” four-hand arrangement, although his Capriccio on Gypsy Themes loses some spice in translation, so to speak; it would have helped had Rachmaninov retained some of his original percussion parts! However, the ubiquitous C-sharp minor Prelude frankly gains little via its two-piano expansion.

I prefer the Genova/Dimitrov duo’s broader and lyrically inflected rendition of the not-so-interesting Russian Rhapsody to the heavier, emphatic Previn/Ashkenazy, while their expressive restraint in the Six Morceaux for Piano Duet contrasts to the Owen/Apekisheva duo’s slightly fussier approach. The Symphonic Dances stand out for Genova/Dimitrov’s wonderfully lithe and impetuously phrased finale.

Unfortunately the popular Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos proves this collection’s one real weak link. The Introduction transpires heavy-handedly, while the Waltz falls into predictable square-cut patterns and Tarantella lacks sufficient dynamic contrast. You’ll find far more flexibility and character in any of Martha Argerich’s Second Suite recordings (my favorites are the studio version with Nelson Freire and the live Gabriela Montero collaboration). Eckhardt van den Hoogen provides informative yet eccentric and stylistically convoluted booklet notes. Recommended on the whole, but make sure you’ve got an Argerich Second Suite handy.

– ClassicsToday (Je Distler)