Following her lyrical and witty complete recording of Mozart’s Keyboard Sonatas, issued by naïve in March 2023, Yeol Eum Son invites Svetlin Roussev to join her in enfolding himself in the enticingly subtle harmonic intricacies of Germanic post- Romanticism.

For their second recital as a duo, the Bulgarian violinist and the Korean pianist follow the course taken by works written over a period of slightly more than half a century by composers or famous performers upon whom Richard Wagner exercised crucial influence. They take on almost every genre – cinema, opera, chamber music, transcription – treating it in the lyrical, large-scale manner of the Bayreuth master. During their unexpected, fascinating journey, Svetlin Roussev and Yeol Eum Son chart a variety of pathways, from Waxman to Strauss.

So many different worlds! To begin, two figures who made their indelible mark on the music written for Hollywood. Of German-Polish origins, in 1946 Franz Waxman (Rebecca, Sunset Boulevard, A Place in the Sun, Prince Valiant) wrote, at Jascha Heifetz’s request, a paraphrase on themes from Wagner’s Tristan et Isolde, actually an adaptation of a section of the score he composed for the film Humoresque (Warner Brothers, 1947). In summary, a manifesto in music of an impossible love – to which, at the end of the disc, an extremely rare transcription one of the better known Wesendonck-Lieder, credited to the great virtuoso Leopold Auer, forms a response.

The programme continues with Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a child prodigy in Vienna during the 1910s. The famed Mariettas Lied – the best-known moment in his opera Die tote Stadt – and the sublime nocturne from his incidental music for Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (the Scene in the Garden) remain as much moments of lyric intensity as truly cinematographic, deliciously intoxicating love scenes. But lovers also know how to frolic, and if already in Korngold they readily do so, the three more light-hearted pieces by Fritz Kreisler will place them in everyday, commonplace scenarios, where laughing reigns.

The keystone of the programme is unarguably the magnificent Sonata for Violin and Piano that Richard Strauss composed in 1887. He was 23 years old, and still heavily influenced by Schumann and Brahms, even Grieg. Svetlin Roussev and Yeol Eum Son make its case with radiant commitment, sensitive to the spirit stirring in the young Richard, then already in love with the soprano Pauline de Ahna, who would become his wife.

Beyond Wagner, this highly original album above all celebrates that moment of falling in love when, overwhelmed, the heart quivers, to the point of being transformed.

The performers write: ‘Selecting the repertoire for our album Path to the Moon, we wanted to explore a number of possibilities for binding together a programme. To place different works alongside one another is a wonderful way of bringing out new and unusual qualities in each piece. William T. Horton’s fantastic image The Path to the Moon immediately inspired a flurry of ideas, including works on the subjects of both night and the moon, as well as pieces which invoke the exploratory nature of humankind’s voyage to the moon. Britten wrote his Sonata for Cello and Piano only two years after the first object made by humans had touched the surface of the moon, in 1959. Humans throughout history and from all cultures have been drawn to and taken inspiration from the moon and we have tried to reflect this in our eclectic choice of song repertoire: from Toru Takemitsu to Nina Simone and from Lili Boulanger to Florence Price. As we hope you will hear on this album, Walker’s Cello Sonata rings with echoes of the sound-worlds of blues and jazz and is infused with a beautiful lyricism. We really believe that Walker’s Cello Sonata deserves to become a staple of the chamber music repertoire and are absolutely thrilled to offer you a recording of it in the context of our own exploration of a path to the moon.’

Second and last volume of Krongold’s complete String Quartets survey by the Alma Quartets. The disc contains the First Quartet (composed in 1923) and the Piano Quintet (1921). Music from Vienna raging Twenties in flawless performances by one of today leading string quartets. Ideal match between Alma Quartet and a specialist pianist as Severin von Eckardstein. Ritmo (SP) on first volume (CC 72869): The recording offered by Alma Quartet is the best available of these works for its understanding of the expressive world of Korngold; is perfect intonation and reading of these difficult works.

On this critically-acclaimed recording, Arabella Steinbacher brings together Bruch’s world famous First Violin Concerto with Chausson’s lush Poème and Korngold’s Violin Concerto, which is gradually gaining ground as a twentieth-century masterpiece. Steinbacher is joined by the Orquestra Gulbenkian under the baton of Lawrence Foster, with whom she has developed a congenial musical partnership over the years. BBC Music Magazine commented that “there is no doubting Steinbacher’s refulgent sound or the flair of her delivery” while MusicWeb International praised “the tingling climax of this Chausson.”

After a temporary absence, this album now returns to the physical market in an affordable Stereo re-issue. Arabella Steinbacher is a multiple award-winner with an extensive Pentatone discography spanning more than a decade. Lawrence Foster and the Orquestra Gulbenkian are also longstanding partners of the label.

Excerpt from review of the original SACD version of this release:

There is no doubting Steinbacher's refulgent sound or the flair of her delivery.

-- BBC Music Magazine

The years 1900-1914 were perhaps the most thrilling period in European music history: the cradle of what we now call musical Modernism. This was the time when the great “avant-garde schools” took shape: in Paris, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, and particularly in Vienna. Music branched out into a multitude of aesthetics, styles, and genres, as we can see in in the variety of terms that attempt to describe art in that period: Impressionism, Expressionism, Art Nouveau, Neo-Classicism, Foklorism, Late Romanticism, Symbolism, and others. Our program selection for this album focuses on two works written in Vienna in 1913 – the “summer of the century”, as author Florian Illies calls a pivotal year that put an end to the long 19th century and introduced the somber 20th century. The two works are Alban Berg’s Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano op. 5 and Egon Kornauth’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano. 1913 was the year of several “scandalous” premieres: Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, Berg’s Altenberglieder, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and others that were less scandalous: Debussy’s Images pour Orchestre, Max Reger’s Isle of the Dead, Sibelius’s Luonnotar, de Falla’s La vida breve, and Richard Strauss‘s Festliches Präludium.

One of the New York Times' 5 Classical Albums to Hear Now

Shortlisted for the Gramophone Awards

Perhaps nobody since John Barbirolli has been able to make strings sing like the brilliantly talented John Wilson.

Following their critically acclaimed album of English Music for Strings, Sinfonia of London and John Wilson turn to Germany and three outstanding works for string orchestra. Franz Schreker’s Intermezzo, the oldest piece here, was composed in 1900, before Schreker’s rise to fame in the opera houses of Germany and Austria, but shows strong indications of what was to follow. Korngold composed the Symphonische Serenade following his return to Vienna from Hollywood after the Second World War, and shortly before he wrote his Symphony in F sharp. Korngold effortlessly conjures a vivid range of colors and textures from his large forces (32 violins, 12 violas, 12 cellos, and 8 basses) in a work that explores the virtuosity of the players to the full. Composed in 1945, as a reaction to the horrors of the war, and the desecration of German culture, Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings seems to look backwards to the German Romantic tradition (a trait even more evident in his Four Last Songs, of 1948). The moving final passage, marked ‘In Memoriam’, leaves the listener to contemplate in silence.

"Wilson’s release wins hands down. Part of the victory is due to the conductor and string players’ panache…whatever the mood, the Sinfonia’s tone stays full-blooded and refulgent, just like Chandos’s recording." -Times of London

REVIEW:

What a fine and stimulating recording this is. Perhaps nobody since John Barbirolli has been able to make strings sing like the brilliantly talented John Wilson. Franz Schreker’s “Intermezzo” here has a sheen to it that is intensely delicate one minute and impossibly sumptuous the next. Strauss’s “Metamorphosen” has rarely had such an agonizingly drawn out, lovingly burnished performance as this. Even better is the rarity that accompanies it: Korngold’s Symphonic Serenade, a disfigured, difficult recollection of all that poignantly easygoing light music in the Austrian tradition, written when he returned to Vienna from Hollywood. The hush that Wilson finds for its slow movement is indescribably haunting.

-- The New York Times

Korngold’s greatest critical successes lay in the field of opera and in his film scores. The early sets of incidental music reflect these two elements, sharing the theatrical bravura of opera and anticipating his own later filmic techniques. The music for the Viennese production of Shakespeare’s much Ado About Nothing in 1920, heard here in full, is expressive and dramatic. Der Vampir, a psychological study of desire, seduction and greed, is rarely heard, but remains a potent example of Korngold’s instinct for directness of characterization.

“[It's] a pleasant surprise to be confronted with something completely unfamiliar…The Holst Sinfonietta performs these waltzes, flourishes and scarps of underscoring with considerable color and Schwung." -Gramophone

REVIEW:

This disc reaffirms – as if such proof were still necessary – just what a prodigious genius the young Erich Wolfgang Korngold was. The complete incidental music for Korngold’s score to Much Ado About Nothing runs to nearly fifty minutes of music brimming over with pointed musical characterisation, subtle scene-setting and gorgeous melody – all written before his twenty first birthday.

The playing of his Holst-Sinfonietta is uniformly excellent and the engineering manages to find a really effective balance between all the disparate instruments. Time and again I marvelled at the genius of Korngold’s lushly economical scoring.

A further attraction of this new disc for the Korngold completeist collector is the presence of the world premiere recording of his score to accompany Der Vampir oder Die Gejagten The Vampire or The Hunted). Written just three years later this is a fascinating score in the almost expressionist way the music instantly illuminates and comments on the drama.

The issue for the listener – especially the non-German speaking ones – is that the bulk of the music is underscoring dialogue. In this instance Cornelius Bauer (who also contributes the useful liner note) and conductor Klaus Simon have produced a concert version where a narrator explains the plot as well as performing a number of roles. Here Ekkehard Abele is the suitably dramatic narrator/voice. However, due to copyright issues the liner cannot reproduce any of the texts for the work. This is compounded by the fact that the liner briefly outlines the convoluted plot but gives no actual synopsis and no indication of which track/cue fits what part of the plot. Furthermore, it would appear that some of Korngold’s music has been lost. The score as it currently exists ends with an extended dream sequence but there are two more acts in the original play which include indications of further music cues. So what we have here is an attenuated arrangement of an incomplete score in an [potentially] unfamiliar language.

None of which sounds too enticing but this is where Korngold’s especial genius shines through. The instrumentation of Der Vampir is even smaller than Much Ado. Here he uses just flute, violin, cello, harp, piano and percussion as well as a Greek-style spoken chorus for the aforementioned dream-sequence. None of the music cues are anything like as extensive or self-contained either but goodness me they are effective. The playing here is every bit as skilled and apt as in the main work but this will remain very much an appendix to the main body of Korngold’s work.

The main value of this disc is the complete recording of Much Ado About Nothing which is immensely enjoyable. Der Vampir is valuable as a first recording and in the way it illustrates the range of Korngold’s skill especially at such a young age. The only real mystery is why such a valuable recording has sat in the Naxos vaults for nearly eight years.

-- MusicWeb International (Nick Bernard)