A cloudy sky and raindrops beating on the window: this itself is practically music, and for centuries, the sound of rain from the clouds has inspired not only painters but also poets and composers. On her debut GENUIN album, violist Karolina Errera and her piano partner Lilit Grigoryan present a selection of highly emotional music from John Dowland to Benjamin Britten. The prizewinner of numerous international competitions has placed a wide range of original works and arrangements on the program of this release – moving works that are best suited by both the warm sound of viola and piano, as well as the playing culture of the two interpreters!

He was the king of the piano, and his homeland was the land of poetry: Frédéric Chopin. And a new GENUIN album by Viacheslav Apostel-Pankratowsky is dedicated to his compositions. The young pianist has chosen a fine selection of nocturnes and waltzes, prefacing them like an overture, so to speak, with the famous Military Polonaise. The carefully thought-out program takes us on a poetic journey through Chopin's world; tonal relationships create new perspectives and approaches to seemingly well-known works. Apostel-Pankratowsky's fine piano playing traces the intricacies of these incredible miniatures with extreme precision and detail!

Common ground in differences, moments, and eternity: The new GENUIN album by the internationally award-winning pianist Nadezda Pisareva makes great strides with major works by Franz Schubert and Ludwig van Beethoven. The younger composer's six Moments musicaux and the older composer's Hammerklavier Sonata were written at roughly the same time, both marking the epochal shift from the Classical to the Romantic era in their own way. The young pianist, who counts pianist Georgy Tchaidze, violinist Diana Tischenko and the Casals Quartet among her chamber music partners, is enormously impressive in her approach to both musical works, tracing their structures with clarity.

Dorothee Eberhardt's fifth portrait album on GENUIN is made up of new and recent works for unusual instrument combinations. First-class ensembles and musicians such as the Monet Quintet, the Trio Tricolor (Korbinian Altenberger, violin, Christoph Eß, horn, and Boris Kusnezow, piano), Zoltán Kovács (clarinet) Axel Gremmelspacher (piano), and Catherina Lendle (violin) take part. In addition to the tremendous musical palette of the works, they are characterized by strong rhythms, especially in the form of rhythmic ostinati, in which Dorothee Eberhardt has reimagined Johann Sebastian Bach's ideas: “Extravaganza” is full of drive, “Magma” enchants with filigree and complex rhythmic meshes, and “Neon” virtually intensifies into a state of breathlessness.

A new GENUIN album featuring the Leopold Mozart Quartet is dedicated to the string quartet works of composer Heinz Winbeck, who died in 2019. The Augsburg ensemble, made of four musicians who are active throughout Germany, is known for its high artistic quality, demanding programming, and enormous versatility. Winbeck's three string quartets were written in a period of only five years, between 1979 and 1984, and are the expression of a mature composer at the height of his powers. An unconditional will characterizes Winbeck's music to expressivity and is particularly evident in the interpretation by the Leopold Mozart Quartet: Expansive lines, the use of sparse material, and the search for extreme states – gripping, new chamber music!

One of the most independent chamber music ensembles on the international scene celebrates its twenty-second anniversary by releasing an album entitled "Black Mass" on the GENUIN label. It is a dark ride through highly emotional music of the 20th century and takes its name from Alexander Scriabin's piano sonata "Messe noire," whose quartet version is presented here for the first time on disc. Also recorded for the first time is the 1st String Quartet by Christoph Staude, one of the first pieces in the ensemble's repertoire. In addition, quartets by Arthur Vincent Lourié and Ivan Wyschnegradsky are featured. All in all, a living history of the quartet and an artistic statement at the highest instrumental caliber!

REVIEW

Schwarze Messe translates as Black Mass, the nickname given to Scriabin’s ninth piano sonata, a version of which appears here. There is no obvious connection with the other works, but they make an enterprising programme, in which three of the four works have links, albeit somewhat loose ones, with Russian Futurism. The Asasello-Quartett specializes in recent and contemporary music and they have also recorded a well-regarded set of the Schoenberg string quartets.

We begin with Arthur Lourié. He was a Russian composer who was involved with the Russian avant-garde in the years before the first World War. After the Revolution he first worked for the Soviet government but then left and moved to Paris where for a number of years he was close to Stravinsky, who entrusted him with the piano arrangements of several of his works. They later fell out. When the Germans seized Paris he moved to the USA, where he remained for the rest of his life. In his early years Lourié was influenced by late Scriabin, but in his later years he became a neoclassicist, like Stravinsky. What I had previously heard of his music was pleasant enough, but minor and derivative. This quartet, however, is a different matter. It is in a late romantic idiom which is moving towards expressionism – in fact, it reminded me of Berg’s early quartet. It is in two quite long movements which are full of interesting and varied material, with perhaps more of a rhythmic drive than the Berg. I was impressed by this work and started wondering about Lourié’s two later quartets.

Christoph Staude stands rather apart from the other composers here, being much more recent and German. He has been around a good long time but has been little recorded, and hearing his quartet, I am not surprised. It dates from 1986 and is full of gestures which were fashionable at the time, such as glissandi, sudden explosive outbursts, harsh sul ponticello writing, mysterious mutterings and even a Bartók pizzicato. The five short movements pass slowly.

Next we have a transcription for string quartet of Scriabin’s ninth piano sonata, the work after which this disc is named. This is one of the most powerful and convincing of Scriabin’s later works. He takes three themes, all basically quite simple: a descending chromatic scale, a repeated rhythm with a falling semitone and a rising passage, and out of them gradually weaves an extraordinarily sinister and menacing work, culminating in a chromatic cascade which in the right hands can make the flesh creep. The problem is that the work is very idiomatically written for the piano, for example exploiting the ictus of repeated notes and the waves of sound created by the sustaining pedal. The transcription is quite nicely done, but I would rather have heard a work written for the string quartet.

Finally we have the first string quartet of Ivan Wyschnegradsky. He was another Russian who went into exile in Paris. His speciality was writing in microtones, that is subdivisions of the octave finer than the semitones of our normal tonal system. He wrote mainly in quartertones, but also in third, sixth and even twelfth tones. Many composers have been intrigued by the idea of microtones, and you can hear the occasional use of them as decorative elements in works by Enescu, Bartók and Szymanowski. Wyschnegradsky was much more thorough-going in his devotion, in particular, to quartertones, and he even wrote a short textbook, Manual of Quartertone Harmony. His second quartet here is in three short movements which show a Bartókian energy and drive with a vigorous opening and some attractive lyrical writing. The quartertones don’t make an entrance until a cello theme part way into the first movement and thereafter you can hear them, particularly in a passage of dense and very peculiar-sounding harmony. However, the work is an attractive one, and I found myself entertaining the heretical thought that it could have been revised into normal writing without losing anything important. Wyschnegradsky seems to me to have been a potentially valuable composer who wasted his life going up a blind alley.

The performances here are compelling and the recording good. The Lourié quartet seems to me a genuinely valuable work and the Wyschnegradsy an interesting curiosity. The Staude is a dud and the Scriabin transcription a wasted opportunity. These seem to be the only currently available versions of all the works here. There are, of course, many recordings of the Scriabin sonata in its original piano version, and there was once a recording of all three of Lourié’s string quartets by the Utrecht quartet on the now-defunct ASV label. So a mixed bag and a disc for the adventurous.

Stephen Barber

Tilman Sillescu is one of the most successful composers of our time for video games and film music. He has won many awards for his game scores, including compositions for the great ANNO series and "Age of Empires 4." Now Sillescu has composed his first symphony and is releasing it on GENUIN: the Staatskapelle Weimar has recorded the large-scale work under the direction of Christian K. Frank with full musical sensuality. The symphony "NACHTLICHTER" ("Night Lights") is composed in four thematically interwoven movements: it is not a crossover between film music and symphonic music, but a veritable, unique tonal painting in terms of it's musical language and structure!

Clarinetist Richard M�hlfeld unexpectedly kindled a creative fire in the aging Johannes Brahms one last time, resulting in a beautiful series of chamber music works for this instrument. Musicians of the WDR Symphony Orchestra now present an album on GENUIN featuring the Clarinet Trio and the Clarinet Quintet. Trio Chronos (with Simon Deffner, violoncello, and Gottlieb Wallisch, piano), joined by violinists Jos� Maria Blumenschein and Cristian Suvaiala, and violist Junichiro Murakami, forms the basis of the two distinguished chamber music formations led by clarinettist Andreas Langenbach. Autumnul works of aching beauty!

The Deutsche Streicherphilharmonie, Germany's youngest top orchestra, is releasing a new album on GENUIN. Under the direction of Wolfgang Hentrich, the young musicians perform the wonderfully elegiac String Serenade by Anton�n Dvor�k and an energetic Marimba Concerto by the Brazilian Ney Rosauro with the fabulous Alexej Gerassimez. Moreover, the release features the world premiere recording of a work by Dietrich Z�llner explicitly composed for the Deutsche Streicherphilharmonie, which presents the orchestra's virtuosity, sonority, and, as it states in the booklet, the "hidden talents" of it's members in the most fitting way. Surprises are guaranteed!

Guitarist Anne Haasch sets the mood for a dialogue across centuries in her new GENUIN release with works by Johann Sebastian Bach and Manuel Mar�a Ponce. She combines the rarely recorded 24 Preludes by the Mexican composer with the Lute Suite No. 2 by the Leipzig Thomaskantor, whom he revered. However, the juxtaposition of these works is a dialogue not only across time but across continents as well. Like Bach, Ponce has mastered the art of creating dense, eternal spheres of tension, but within ostensibly inconspicuous forms and simple, poetic lines. Anne Haasch captures this immensely expressive music's architecture, rhetoric, and content with her clear and vibrant playing.

One of the most exciting cellists of the younger generation and the "Piano Discovery of the Year" team up for this GENUIN release: Benedict Kloeckner and Danae Dorken perform works by Robert Schumann, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Bohuslav Martinu. They have named their album "Nostalgia and Revolution", a title that applies to all three composers who, in a twofold manner, both mirrored and shaped their times. Splendid duo playing with long and sweeping lines together with a fair share of hooks and barbs – a fascinating chamber music production that gives us hope that we’ll be hearing more from this duo in the future!

The Eliot Quartet has already been showered with prizes, including awards at the German Music Competition, the Mozart Competition in Salzburg, and the Melbourne Competition. Its new GENUIN release presents two milestones of the string quartet repertoire: Ludwig van Beethoven's Razumovsky Quartet, Op. 59 no. 1, and Sergei Prokofiev's thrilling Second Quartet. Both works deal with East European folklore, and the four musicians bring out their melodic colors and rhythmic peculiarities with great accuracy and homogeneity of sound.

Johann Sebastian Bach is commonly understood as the starting point of the violin repertoire. But there was unaccompanied violin music before him, too—and it is truly exciting! The renowned baroque violinist Nadja Zwiener presents this music with her solo debut album on GENUIN. Her inspired recording shows that Bach was able to build his repertoire on a great foundation: Composers such as Johann Georg Pisendel, Johann Westhoff, and even Arcangelo Corelli and Giuseppe Tartini wrote highly challenging works for the incredibly versatile instrument. The concertmistress of the English Concert and the Gaechinger Cantorey takes us on a fascinating journey.

Pianist Swetlana Meermann-Muret takes us on a journey through the heights and depths of the Russian soul in her new GENUIN release. The prizewinner of international competitions devotes herself to gems of piano literature—the rarely recorded miniatures by Anatoly Lyadov and Anton Arensky. Lyadov's Preludes, in particular, are more than just precursors of well-known works by Rachmaninoff and Scriabin! Swetlana Meermann-Muret, a native Russian pianist, devotes herself to these treasures with an attention to detail and a warm sound. Moving testimonies of a lost culture!

Like Friedrich Gulda and Martha Argerich, the Swiss pianist Brigitte Meyer comes from the Viennese talent factory of the great teacher Bruno Seidlhofer. Her long international career has taken her to the world's foremost stages and together with outstanding musicians. Now she is releasing an album with works by Joseph Haydn with GENUIN in the Artist Consort series. In a period of more than thirty years, Haydn wrote over sixty piano sonatas: from the beginning of his service at the court of Esterházy to the years of his fame in Europe. Brigitte Meyer plays four of these esprit-packed works with great delicacy and elastic drive.