Classical Music

This release is the third volume in cpo’s series of Bach’s harpsichord concertos. A particular highlight is the Triple Concerto in A minor for Harpsichord, Flute, Violin and Strings, which recalls the harpsichord role in the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 and brims with its own rhythmic and harmonic contrasts. The Concerto Copenhagen ensemble from Denmark rank as one of the world’s best orchestras performing on original instruments, and present a spirited interpretation of these works under and with their conductor Lars Ulrik Mortensen.

On the last volume of our edition of Dora Pejacevic's complete works, Nataša Veljkovic turns to the great Croatian composer’s music for piano. The nuanced richness in her attention to the tonal resources of the instrument, the demanding piano part, often polyphonic and exhibiting all the dimensions of orchestral sound, demonstrate Veljkovic’s self-assured and virtuosic mastery of the art of performance and Pejacevic’s perfection in her compositional craft.

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REVIEWS:

Although probably unknown even to the vast majority of musicians, Dora Pejacevic (in old documents also Pejacsevich) should, in fact, be considered a major Croatian composer, leaving behind a considerable catalogue of fifty-eight opuses (106 compositions), mostly in late-Romantic style, including songs, piano music, chamber music, and several compositions for large orchestra, arguably her best oeuvre, her Symphony in F sharp minor, being considered the first symphony in Croatian music.

The piano is the main focus of Pejacevic’s output, given that it was the medium in which she was best able to express her musical ideas and to convey the essence of her music – only four of her works, in fact, don’t include the piano. Unlike Clara Schumann, Pejacevic wasn’t a pianist as such, so didn’t appear in concerts featuring performances of her solo pieces. Despite this, her gift for keyboard composition, especially as the works from her middle and later periods suggest, does very much correspond to the performance-style of the piano virtuosity of the time. As a rule, any demanding solo part or passage is subservient to the musical idea, and not there for mere dazzle or show.

The recording, presentation and playing are all first-rate – save for a slight apparent confusion over opus numbers – and laying out the tracks in non-chronological order across the two discs works very well, and maintains the interest throughout.

It’s good to know that, even after many years in music, there’s always something fresh to discover, and the fact that this composer is from a country about which the headlines for many years have been so unwelcoming, makes this new issue even more appealing.

– MusicWeb International

Pejacevic’s piano pieces are well served by Natasha Veljkovic’s warmly sensitive playing.

– BBC Music Magazine

Veljkovic plays consistently well with imagination, an impressive variety of touch and tone and a real flair for the idiom.

– Gramophone

Brahms once wrote of Walter Rabl, “In any case, the best is a piano quartet with clarinet. It is said to be by Rabl, a Nawratil pupil. I know the young man and his music only a little… Of course I now am keeping him and his piece in mind.” This sentiment was sent to Brahm’s publisher, Simrock in 1896, when Rabl was only twenty-three years old. Simrock included Rabl’s compositions in his catalogue very shortly thereafter.; Rabl’s compositions embody the spirit of Brahms. His compositional artistry can be attested to stringent education, and his compositions immediately mesmerize the listener.; This album opens with his Op. 1, the Clarinet Quartet, is follows by his Op. 2, Fantasy Pieces for Piano Trio, and closes with his Violin Sonata, Op. 6, which he composed just after the end of the nineteenth century.

Part of the Thuringia Cantat series which documents the musical diversity in this German region, this album brings attention to and honors a composer who died at the young age of 18 and has since been overlooked by today’s cultural memory: Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar.; For the first time on CPO, the young prince’s concertos are being presented in complete form. In addition to his concertos, the album includes the harpsichord transcriptions of Bach based on these compositions.; This project was supervised and designed by musicologist Dr. Manfred Fechner of Jena, who also wrote the very informative and user-friendly booklet text.

Soprano Dorothee Mields joins forces with gambist Simone Eckert and the Hamburger Ratsmusik to bring us an enjoyable program featuring concertos, quartets, and arias by Carl Friedrich Abel and his colleague Johann Adolf Hasse. Abel was one of the most famous gambists of his time. He has been said to move his listeners to tears, and a contemporary of his stated that he composed to the soul. He served as chamber musician to the King of Poland for ten years before earning his fame as a composer and soloist in London. In all selections on this album, the viola da gamba is the featured instrument.

Markus Poschner has skyrocketed to the top, with the German Conducting Prize in 2004 in particular furthering his career. Ever since then he has also regularly performed as a guest with orchestras of the greatest national and international renown. In the 2017/18 season he will succeed Dennis Russell Davies as the opera director at the Linz State Theater and principal conductor of the Bruckner Orchestra of Linz. Poschner became the principal conductor of the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana at the beginning of the current season and now is dedicating his premiere with this orchestra on the present CD to two compositions by Richard Strauss directly related to Lugano. Along with the Suite op. 60 with the incidental music to Der Bürger als Edelmann of 1917, Poschner conducts the Duet Concertino for Clarinet, Bassoon, and Strings penned by Strauss much later, in 1947, for the Lugano Orchestra and also premiered by him there. The attractive historic(al) bonus tracks include selections (Four Songs for Soprano and Orchestra by Strauss) from precisely this concert conducted by the composer on 11 June 1947 (his birthday!) as well as the concert address delivered by Bernhard Paumgartner on the same occasion.

At long last CPO is now releasing Ernst von Gemmingen’s Violin Concertos Nos. 3 and 4 as world-premiere recordings, again interpreted by one of the most versatile musicians of our times: Kolja Lessing, who both as a violinist and a pianist has lent strong impulses to music culture with his interpretive and musicological insights. CPO also has him to thank for the exemplary interpretation recorded here. In his booklet text he himself writes: "We as yet know only a little or almost nothing about the human being and artist Ernst von Gemmingen, whose extant music library, however, offers eloquent testimony to his select taste. An autodidact and a visionary, borne by a wealth of violinistic invention almost boundless for his times with respect to double-stop and bel-canto playing, no less in view of sophisticated figurations up to the highest registers, in his four broadly dimensioned violin concertos he created what practically amount to theatrical scenarios. The Violin Concertos Nos. 3 and 4 recorded here for the first time reveal these scenic qualities, paired with violinistic character and expressive eloquence surging far head into early romanticism – in even greater measure than in his first two concertos." A symphony by François-Joseph Gossec, Gemmingen’s contemporary and the principal composer of the French Revolution, complements the two concertos.

Here, the polyphonic segments of the selected Magnificat compositions are based not on monophonic models but on pre-existent compositions. Accordingly, here we have to do with parody works in which a procedure widespread in Masses is applied to the Magnificat. Forty of Lasso’s 101 Magnificat compositions are to be assigned to this type. These imitation Magnificats in no way involve a simple re-textualization of pre-existent works. At the beginning Lasso mostly rather precisely draws on his particular model, but then he quickly departs from it. In the Magnificat on Rore’s Da le belle contrade the beginning corresponds to the original, but soon thereafter it departs from it the textual passage in Deo salutari« is completely freely set. This procedure thus is somewhat similar to collage technique: the possibilities range from the use of whole passages to the re-layering of blocks, paraphrasing, quotations of individual voices, free continuation, and so on. The result may safely be termed a new creation on the basis of a pre-existent work. The sound developed by the Singphoniker may be described as cathedral and no less directly immediate. The great fullness of sound displayed by this six-man vocal ensemble never fails to amaze the listener« (FonoForum 2/13).

CPO's previous release with the soloists and ensembles of the Boston Early Music Festival was awarded two prestigious prizes. The recording of Charpentier’s opera La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers and La Couronne de Fleurs received the Grammy Award for the Best Opera Production in February 2015 and recently won the Klassik-Echo 2015, again for the Best Opera Recording of the Year. Prior to this double success, other productions by cpo and BEMF had been nominated for Gramophone Awards. In the category of the Best Opera Production these were Ariadne by Johann Georg Conradi and Thésée and Psyché by Jean-Baptiste Lully. In addition, Thésée and Psyché received nominations in the category honoring Baroque Vocal Works.

Now the American ensemble joins forces with successful soloists like Aaron Sheehan and Teresa Wakim for our production of Handel’s opera Acis and Galatea in the version of 1718, which was composed for the landed estate of the Earl of Carnarvon and does not recycle music from the earlier version. Both Acis and Galatea and the cantata Sarei troppo felice heard here represent decisive turning points in Handel’s career. The Italian cantata came at the beginning of the one and half decades spent by Handel in the service of patrons. Acis and Galatea marks the highpoint of this phase and therefore, like the cantata before it, clearly renders recognizable the musical means available to him in the private ensembles of his employers. Moreover, Acis and Galatea contains the musical and textual seeds of the English oratorio, which after 1742 completely supplanted opera compositions.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

REVIEW:

Concerto Copenhagen and Lars Ulrik Mortensen adopt the minimalist one-voice-per-part approach to the choir: 10 expert voices have been chosen shrewdly, with five ‘concertino’ singers (the soloists) reinforced in choruses by an additional five ‘ripieni’ voices.

To my mind, Mortensen’s special performance, full to the brim with insightful musicianship and a refreshing avoidance of contrived formulas, comfortably joins Parrott, Junghänel and John Butt as the finest examples of this kind of perspective on performing Bach’s monumental sacred masterpiece.

Maria Keohane and Joanne Lunn combine to beguiling effect in an understated ‘Christe eleison’, and the latter sings ‘Laudamus te’ radiantly in partnership with Fredrik From’s sophisticated violin obbligato playing. The musical conversation between oboist Antonie Torunczyk and countertenor Alex Potter in ‘Qui sedes’ ebbs and flows sweetly. Peter Harvey’s ‘Quoniam’ has dignified gravitas (and tasteful horn-playing by Ursula Paludan Monberg), and Jan Kobow sings poignantly in partnership with flautist Katy Bircher in the Benedictus.

The individual components are routinely marvelous, but Concerto Copenhagen produce something much more than the sum of its parts: one of the most profoundly captivating interpretations to have emerged recently.

– Gramophone

Franz Liszt’s mystical piano cycle, Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses takes its title from a collection of poems by the French romanticist Alphonse de Lamartine and underwent an unusally long period of gestation, written over a period of two decades. Liszt’s religious and abiding preoccupation with poetic themes in his creative works was in part fueled by his passion for the works of and friendship with de Lamartine. Given a splendid interpretation by pianist, Michael Korstick.

From a performance at the 2015 Valletta International Baroque Festival in Malta, this live performance of the engaging Cologne-based choir and orchestra Die Kölner Akademie led by Michael Alexander Willens aims to refocus attention on the little known Malta born Naples based late Baroque composer Girolamo Abos. The engaging performances of these Maltese Christmas masses with Die Kölner’s impeccable attention to detail bring new attention to this seldom recorded composer whose works are characterized by elegantly constructed forms and spirited contrapuntal thoroughbass that on this collection approach a level of revelation.

Captivating verismo intermezzi. The focus [of this CD] is occupied by intermezzi from the famous operas of Giacomo Puccini, Pietro Mascagni, and Ruggero Leoncavallo and their masterfully instrumented music rich in emotions and ideas. Here three verismo works by these composers merit special mention: According to some music historians, the Rome premiere of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana on 17 May 1890 signaled the birth of this special stylistic current. Ever since its Milan premiere on 21 May 1892 Leoncavallo’s two-act Pagliacci has become the perfect counterpart to the one-act opera by Puccini, who was six years his junior. Italo Montemezzi’s L’amore dei tre re (The Love of the Three Kings) developed the fundamental verismo concept in phenomenal fashion and into three gripping acts. This lesser-known opera was staged at the Teatro alla Scala considerably later, on 10 April 1913, when its composer was thirty-eight-years old. - cpo (Translated from German text.)

Franz Anton Hoffmeister numbers among the composers born during the 1750s who distanced themselves from the genre of the symphony during the 1790s without completely refraining from the composition of such works. It is not entirely clear how many symphonies Hoffmeister composed. Forty-four have been identified so far, and at least forty-two of these works had been composed by 1792. Hoffmeister then let a decade pass before he presented himself to the public with his last symphonies, which are heard on this recording. The Symphony in D major in particular favorably impressed the Gewandhaus reviewer for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung: »A symphony by Hoffmeister, it too unpublished, is lively, friendly, in no way shallow, and by far belongs to the most outstanding music that this composer has written for instruments.« Both symphonies are marked by high compositional mastery and great powers of imagination. The overture from the heroicomic opera Der Königssohn aus Ithaka (The King’s Son from Ithaka), one of Hoffmeister’s most successful stage works, rounds off this CD. - cpo - (Translated from German text.)