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)

A previously unknown contemporary score of the St. Mark Passion falsely ascribed to the Magdeburg music director and composer Johann Heinrich Rolle recently came to light in the Library of the Royal Conservatory in Brussels. On the basis of the new identification of the copyist’s hand, a largely original version of Georg Philipp Telemann’s St. Mark’s Passion of 1759 is now available today, and it is on this version that this recording draws. Freshly penned “poetical reflections” were added to the Evangelist’s text. The anonymous, theologically educated author of these reflective arias and accompagnati, who in consultation with the composer also chose the selection of church songs and designed the overall structure of the libretto, coordinated the sacred message of the text with a finely calculated affective dramaturgy. The affective areas developed by the composer are in each case modeled on the situations depicted in the recitatives. Here extremely harsh affective contrasts could exist side by side within a single aria. Moreover, in Telemann’s accompagnati his dramatic depictive artistry is even more apparent than in the arias. Remarkably, for the Evangelist’s part the recently discovered source prescribes a male alto, not the otherwise customary tenor. This is not a unique case; in his other Passions composed between 1758 and 1766 Telemann also uses voices other than the tenor for the narrator’s part. The reasons for this departure from the norm are uncertain. All that we know is that during this period Telemann experienced some difficulties with his new tenor Wilhelm Jacob Credius (1724-78). However, it is also known that Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Telemann’s successor as music director, assigned the Evangelist’s part to voice registers. For the present recording Hermann Max decided to transpose the alto part down by an octave into the baritone range, as Georg Michael Telemann, the composer’s grandson, had done in his version of the work.

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.

On this new production the Kölner Akademie has recorded two oratorios composed by members of the generation after Bach and explicitly focusing on the theme of the Resurrection. Johann Friedrich Agricola composed Die Auferstehung des Erlösers for performance in St. Peter’s Church in Berlin on the First Day of Easter in 1758, and Gottfried August Homilius wrote the Oratorium auf Ostern in 1767, when it was probably performed in the Church of Our Lady in Dresden. Agricola’s Easter cantata Der Gottmensch jauchzt is included with the two oratorios. Regarded during his lifetime as “certainly now absolutely the best church composer,” Homilius wrote an extensive cantata consisting of ten individual movements in the form of his oratorio for Easter. His music already displays elements of Early Classicism and the empfindsamer Stil, his cantata choruses are frequently of homophonic design and song character, and the polyphonic sections are rather rare. While the oratorio by Homilius continues to contain the historical component of the Easter event, Die Auferstehung des Erlösers by Agricola, with its subtitle Ein musikalisches Gedicht, is much more freely designed. The three accompagnato recitatives are of special musico-dramatic significance; in them the author of the text embellishes the earthquake accompanying the resurrection of Jesus and the mysterious event on the whole with rich verbal and pictorial formulations. The works presented here attest to the mastery of their composers. Arias of marvelous musical beauty, the naturalness of their expression, and the dramatic suspense in the individual movements continue to make for compelling listening even today.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg grew up in Warsaw, a city in which Poles then accounted for two thirds of the populace and Jews for one third of its residents. The Jews increasingly regarded themselves as Poles, just as he did. The three works on this album clearly attest to the fact that Weinberg felt that he belonged to both traditions. The Concertino and the Cello Concerto have Jewish roots, while the Fantasy is a piece with a typically Polish character. If the Concertino, in which the orchestra is extraordinarily sparingly used and the violoncello practically plays a solo, may be described as the composer’s »lyrical journal« in music notes, then the Cello Concerto derived from it has even more clearly been written for the grand stage. It is more fully developed, the work has assumed a new character, and the orchestra plays a more important role in it. These changes are apparent already in the first movement and become more and more clearly audible in the following movements. A new theme is sounded in the second movement, and the wind instruments imitate the sound of klezmer groups. The third movement assumes a central significance and verges on a bravura piece without ever losing its popular character practically suggesting folk music. The soloist’s cadenza, here very much more clearly structured than in the Concertino, leads to the finale, which creates the impression of having been added to lend the music the prescribed “Soviet optimism.” However, when the theme from the first movement returns at the very end, this initially occurs with an admixture of pathos, then somewhat sentimentally – which situates this work very far from the intimate music familiar to us from the Concertino.

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.

At the fourth concert of our series “Music from Wolfenbüttel Castle” in 2019, the St. Matthew Passion Das Leiden und Sterben unseres Herrn Jesu Christi was performed and recorded. After the death of Johann Rosenmüller the Wolfenbüttel court selected a new chapel master in 1684: Johann Theile, who in the view of Duke Anton Ulrich and his musical advisors had always been a very well-qualified candidate. It is to be assumed that Theile’s experience in the field of the opera recommended him for the post of court music director in Wolfenbüttel – after all, during his tenure, which lasted from 1685 to 1689, a court opera theater was established at Wolfenbüttel Castle, where works by Lully and Italian composers were performed. The multifaceted richness of Theile’s compositional artistry is reflected in special measure in his St. Matthew Passion published in Lübeck in 1673. In it elements of the traditional church style are combined with progressive techniques of dramatic narration and meditative reflection in song. In their subtle emotionality, which is expressed both in the leading of the voice parts and in the design of the instrumental ritornellos, the arias and canzonettas invite listeners to engage in personal, highly emotional contemplation of the Biblical events, very much in the spirit of the Pietistic currents that then were taking shape. While most listeners will be familiar with the accompaniment of the words of Christ by stringed instruments from the Passions of Johann Sebastian Bach, the accompaniment of the Evangelist’s narrative with gambas in Theile’s Passion produces an entirely new and different effect.

Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek devoted himself primarily to the opera and to orchestral music in his capacity as a composer; chamber and piano music played a rather secondary role in his oeuvre. Here the genre of the string quartet, to which he turned at points during his compositional development, formed an exception. What was central for him here was always “the idea.” For him this idea was not a theme or a melody but the idea for a work. For example, he explained that he designed the Donna Diana overture in five minutes while lying on the divan and smoking a cigar. With the idea for the work in his head, he sat down at the piano and sought suitable themes for it. It is thus that many of his quartets experienced a difficult and varied developmental history since he often took them up again, revising and rewriting them at times. However, all the quartets may be regarded as independent contemporary contributions to the genre; they range from his early development, when he continued to regard Beethoven as his model, to his complex and individual mature late quartets of great expressive power.

Following the release of Carl Reinecke’s complete string quartets, we are now launching a new recording of his most important symphonic works. His Symphony No. 3 formed the rousing finale of his era as a conductor at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. Reinecke never defended himself verbally against charges by his contemporaries that he was a »conventional composer«; instead, he shared the opinion of his critics, stating that he had »never had the audacity to regard himself as a trailblazing genius.« Musically, however, he puts an immediate end to all clichés. Without holding things up with a slow introduction, he has the first movement of his op. 227 storm ahead on its path, full of élan, with defiant chordal beats, driven by syncopated rhythms, and for a time offering space for lyrical secondary ideas. And he offers an extremely rich arsenal of powerful orchestral parts. His Symphony No. 1 in A major was performed six times between 1858 and 1892, which means more than any other symphony by him at the Gewandhaus. It has a slow introduction leading seamlessly into the first allegro, an andante greeting Mendelssohn and Schumann, and a robust scherzo framed by a melancholy and delicate trio and in its coda announcing the clarinet solo introducing the finale, and it was in revised form that Reinecke again included it on the Gewandhaus program on 22 October 1863. With his radiant and splendid Triumphal March op. 110 this master of large-scale symphonies and operas, virtuosic instrumental concertos, sophisticated piano and chamber music, and warm-hearted and playful compositions for children shows that he can also serve up pomp and showy brilliance in keeping with the genre and the occasion and ignite a four-minute

Reinhard Keiser’s Kleine theatralische Musik contains arrangements of instrumental versions of opera numbers composed for Hamburg and performed there. With the greatest probability this work involves a collection of “theater music” compiled by the composer from his operas written prior to 1718. This work is complemented by further instrumental music as well as cantatas and arias by Keiser. The program covers a spectrum including Keiser’s initial years in Hamburg, the period of his greatest success in the second decade of the eighteenth century, and his difficult traveling years following 1719. First, we have performances of works as they exist in their original form in the sources: the cantata “Die bis in den Tod geliebte Iris” and the “Theatralische Musik.” Second, we have arias and a cantata from an anthology in the Berlin State Library. Third and last, we have interpretations of cantatas that in keeping with the composer’s practice were taken over for his own arrangements. Reinhard Keiser is regarded as one of the most important German composers of the Baroque, and his Pomona previously released on cpo offers an ideal introduction to the world of the German-language Baroque opera. This new Keiser release once again offers proof of the profound stylistic knowledge and sophisticated instrumental and vocal culture of the ensemble led by Thomas Ihlenfeldt in an optimal reproduction.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Along with Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian, Dmitri Kabalevsky was one of the “Big Four” of Soviet music. Following our recordings of his four symphonies, complete works for piano and orchestra, cello concertos, string quartets, and complete piano sonatas, this release again turns to his keyboard music featuring works for piano solo, this time focusing on his complete Préludes. Bach’s idea to set a monument to the well-tempered system by writing two cycles of twenty-four preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys has continued to fascinate composers of all succeeding generations, and Kabalevsky was no exception. His multifaceted preludes not only are obliged to Scriabin but also already reveal his own personal style and show him striving to develop new harmonic solutions. Yet another interesting rarity for piano fans!