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).

This seven-CD box gathers together the complete orchestral music of Wagner's hapless son Siegfried, an amiable composer of modest gifts who spent his life like a herring trapped between two barracudas: his strong-willed, mean-spirited, mother Cosima and his Nazi-sympathizing wife Winifred. Cursed with an impossible legacy in the form of his father's own work, Siegfried lacked the spine to turn his back on the past and write music without inhibition in the forms that best suited him. And who can blame him? We can only imagine what it must have been like for him to write a grand, exuberant work like the Symphony in C only to have everyone around him deny that the work even existed because the great Richard had declared that the symphony was "dead."


The four discs of overtures, the symphonic poems, and the concertos also demonstrate an enthusiasm for symphonic composition, and had he not felt impelled to churn out one opera after another, Wagner, Jr. might very well have become a significant musical voice after all. Of course, the jury's out on the stage works until a representative sample see the light of day in carefully prepared performances and recordings, but as far as conservative, German late Romantics go, you could certainly do worse (Pfitzner, for example). Whether you want seven discs of this stuff, on the other hand, is another question entirely. Start with the vibrantly Brucknerian Symphony in C, and then try the first volume of Overtures, which are symphonic poems in all but name (especially the sixteen minute prelude to Die heilige Linde). If you're hooked, you can continue to explore one disc at a time. Werner Andreas Albert plays this music with his typical consistency and commitment, and the sound is very good. A low-risk proposition for the mildly adventurous. [1/31/2001]
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

...Johann Kalliwoda was a tremendously interesting and talented composer, and both symphonies offer a fund of very attractive ideas. The Fourth Symphony, with its introductory funeral march, scoring that includes three trombones, and its delicious 6/4 scherzo, is perhaps more noteworthy in this respect, but both pieces--and the overture (in a turbulent F minor)--offer plenty of listening satisfaction. - David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

Classical Music

While little is known about Dario Castello (before 1600-1644), we are left with his Sonate concertate in stil moderno. This work by Castello, published in two books in 1621 and 1629 enjoyed great popularity, and were continually reprinted. Castello’s music is known for its virtuosic solos. The Musica Fiata performs these works with grandeur.

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Classical Music

Classical Music

Includes work(s) by Jacques Offenbach. Ensemble: Cologne West German Radio Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: Gerhard Oskamp. Soloist: Guido Schiefen.

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PETTERSSON Violin Concerto No. 2 • Isabella van Keulen (vn); Thomas Dausgaard, cond; Swedish RSO • cpo 777199 (55:21)


Andreas K. W. Meyer’s notes provide a timeline for the life of Allan Petterson (1911–1980), “orchestra violinist, composer, oddball.” In any event, he cast his Second Violin Concerto in one, almost hour-long, movement (the recording has been divided into 10 tracks for those who might want to study specific sections). Its elfin opening, with swirling tonal parts in the upper registers surrounding the stratospheric solo, provides little preparation for the dense textures to come. If these seem to lack transparency, listeners should be aware that van Keulen and Dausgaard play the Concerto in a “revised version,” in which the composer supposedly significantly lightened the original. It may be no accident that this dense undergrowth continuously threatens to drown the solo part, the brilliant writing of which could hold its own with an accompaniment less aggressively dense than this one. After the tonality evaporates along with the mood of the early measures (only to return satisfyingly at the end), the piece might be taken to resemble in its textures Penderecki’s First Concerto, but the solo seems more idiomatic, and ingratiating, too, in Pettersson’s work; there’s more flirtation, however fleeting, with tonality, for example at the a tempo at figure 41 in the score (the designation of the fourth track) and even more strikingly through most of the a tempo of the seventh and at the beginning of the cantando, tempo IV of the eighth and ninth tracks—and, throughout, woodwind sonorities highlight many passages. Meyer relates that Ida Haendel, the dedicatee, gave the work its premiere on January 25, 1980 (it had been composed between 1977 and 1979).


It might not strike most listeners that Pettersson based the Concerto on a poem, God Goes over the Meadows , and his own musical setting of it. The text continues (in Susan Marie Praeder’s translation), “but only between thistles,” and this line may offer some insight into the work’s thickets of thorns and brambles. Meyer points out that his song’s folk-like style provided the “material point of departure.” So the intermittent tonality and passages of simpler, less entangled, lyricism may hearken to this fons et origo . Whatever lies at the center of this massive Concerto, however, its accessibility to audiences may depend less upon it than upon the composer’s ear for striking sonorities, for dramatic contrasts, and for soaring, effective writing for the solo instrument. Since Pettersson wrote his First Violin Concerto, according to the notes, in 1949, for Violin and String Quartet, this one represents a quantum leap into complex sonorities while remaining within the genre of the Violin Concerto. Adventurous listeners should find the work, the performance by both soloist and orchestra, and the wide-ranging and stark recorded sound especially rewarding. Strongly recommended to them.


FANFARE: Robert Maxham

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The Geisterinsel is a masterpiece of poetry and language: nothing more musical could be imagined. This positive judgment pronounced by Goethe in 1798 was seconded by Duke Carl August, the ruling prince in Saxe-Weimar, when he wrote in 1801 that there was "really beautiful music" in this stage work. Both men were championing a singspiel in three acts premiered at the National Theater in Berlin on 6 July 1798 and performed fifty-five more times at this house until 1825. The authors of this successful work were the Gotha-born Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter and Friedrich Hildebrand of Einsiedel and it's composer was the K�nigsberg native Johann Friedrich Reichardt. After a short phase as a brilliant violin virtuoso Reichardt, who was influenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, became a pathbreaking "thinking artist" who soon met with recognition in various European countries as a composer and versatile writer active in many fields. With simple means Reichardt's music seeks, in keeping with the particular situation, to do justice to the tension between the "gentle melodies" of delightful spirit voices and the horrors of hell. It is primarily in his ensemble and final scenes that this composer produces a complexity that he had learned from Gluck and Mozart.

Includes serenade(s) by Franz Anton Hoffmeister. Ensemble: Consortium Classicum. Conductor: Dieter Klöcker.