Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Mahler Karneus, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra Kindertotenlieder

Classical Music

This new release is the final installment in Chandos’ Atterberg series with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Neeme Jarvi. This volume features two rarely performed centuries from the later years of Atterberg’s career. The seventh century is featured first in its final form which consists of three movements. While it was composed in 1942 with four movements, it didn’t reach its final shape until 1969 when Atterberg removed the last movement. The ninth symphony was regarded by the composer as “evil.” He set parts of the Icelandic poem “Volupsa” which tells of how evil came into the world and how it will eventually cause total destruction. The work is a single movement large-scale rondo form.

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

Written at the height of the era of "Soviet Realism" in the USSR, when composers were being criticized or banned for music deemed "formalistic", Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Symphony No. 3 embraces the dictum of positiveness that called for an avoidance of the cerebral qualities of Western art music and urged the embrace of Russian folk song to be incorporated into symphonic works, the latter actually being a pre-revolutionary tradition held over from Czarist times. Though written to please the cultural commissars and endowed with melodic ideas of immediate appeal and directness, the work also has a darker undercurrent that surfaces from time to time, especially in the more militant and rhythmically driven last movement. This gives the symphony an unusually wide aesthetic range from a light pops concert atmosphere to occasionally stark, serious expression.

Suite No. 4 from the ballet "The Golden Key", a puppet ballet loosely based on Pinocchio is also tuneful and of interest for its somewhat eccentric dances, (a "Cricket" dance consists of little less than a minute of a single, rhythmically odd, continuously repeated hopping motive,) as well as folk-like dances with a rustic quality. If Weinberg in these works had been a Western composer of that era the music would often be considered light pops concert fare with bright, straight-forward tunefulness, not unlike popular movie or TV music, yet at times there is a darker undercurrent that occasionally surfaces. We know from other Weinberg works that he was capable of music of considerable emotional depth. This occasional faint uneasiness might have been sensed in these otherwise tuneful works, for Weinberg himself withdrew his Third Symphony before the premiere to correct "errors" and later edited and revised it and the ballet, though eventually accepted by a Soviet dance company was not staged. Both were performed some ten years later and after Stalin's death. Interesting, eccentric and appealing music that comes from living through a dangerous period.

- Greg La Traille, ArkivMusic.com

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WEINBERG Symphony No. 3. The Golden Key: Suite No. 4 • Thord Svedlund, cond; Gothenburg SO • CHANDOS 5089 (49:53)


Mieczyslaw Weinberg found it easier than most composers in the late 1940s and early 1950s to comply with the vague yet dangerously contradictory goals of the Zhdanov Doctrine. He had a naturally lyrical gift, a clear sense of structure, and an ability to write simply, with complete focus. Paying uncomplicated tribute to folk music without a hint of condescension was easy for him, though of course it came easier in smaller forms than larger ones. That was why a plethora of such works as the Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes , the Polish Themes, Serenade for Orchestra , and Fantasy for Cello and Orchestra , along with various concertinos and sonatinas grace Weinberg’s list of compositions at that time. But the Symphony No. 3 was a bid for popularity in a big, mainstream work. It was not to get a chance to grow an audience, unfortunately, as Stalin’s paranoia over Jews (and Poles, Ukrainians, and just about every other group he could imagine) denied Weinberg a performance. It had to await the so-called “cultural thaw” under Krushchev for its debut in 1960. I can find no other currently available recordings of the work.


The Symphony No. 3 is very much of its time and place, as you’d expect. The dissonant elements of the First Symphony, the gritty anguish of the Second, the complexities of counterpoint and the emotional ambiguity of both, are nowhere to be found. The work is formally non-programmatic, but it’s all to easy to hear the “youth” theme (a standard formula in many composers’ Soviet pieces of the period, a naively cheerful melody with a flattened seventh and little else to offer the world) in the first movement and the minor-key, slightly dissonant obstacles it faces as a tribute to the Young Soviet Facing the Tide of Obstruction and Overcoming. To Weinberg’s credit, his youth theme is the most graceful I’ve heard, and his orchestral writing is a delight throughout. The attractive Scherzo includes a Polish mazurka, along with a few fine examples of counterpoint imbedded as folk improvisation, while the Adagio is a threnody displaying Khachaturian’s gift for emotional directness without descending into mawkishness: pathos, not bathos. The finale returns to the battlefield of the opening Allegro, with curious overtones of Shostakovich’s Fifth and Sixth. It ends not with the triumphalism one might expect, but with a grim “soldiering on” attitude that doesn’t quite fit with or summarize everything that’s gone before.


The ballet The Golden Key was finished in 1955, two years after Stalin’s sudden death (and Weinberg’s resultant freedom from prison). The satirical tale of the puppet lovers Burattino and Malvina, who after facing several animal and human antagonists encourage the other puppets to revolt, would seem tailor-made for the composer’s talents, but Weinberg found it surprisingly difficult to gain acceptance for the score. When the Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater finally accepted it in 1955, it took another seven years before staging The Golden Key —and then, only with a largely reworked scenario. Weinberg, like Prokofiev, knew the value of a good ballet suite, and he wrote four in 1964 that accessed music from the original and the revised versions. This, the fourth suite (presumably others will appear in future releases in this series), is a tuneful delight. My favorites are the dance of the two animal villains, Alice the Fox and Basilio(!) the Cat, a nose-thumbing, heavily accented folk piece; and “The Pursuit,” with its nod at Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.


Thord Svedlund is in strong form on this release, emphasizing orchestral color, clarity, and internal balance. He doesn’t miss any of the humor in the Third Symphony’s Scherzo or several of the ballet’s dances, but also doesn’t shortchange the emotional appeal of the former’s Adagio and the latter’s Elegy. The Gothenberg musicians play with delicacy and character. This certainly isn’t the most representative disc of Weinberg to come down the musical pike, as more attention is finally paid to this excellent composer, but it may prove to be the one with the greatest overall appeal to general classical listeners. My only reservation is the short timing. At less than 50 minutes, was there nothing else Weinberg composed for orchestra that could have been included?


Regardless, definitely recommended.


FANFARE: Barry Brenesal


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This latest CD volume from Chandos makes for another outstanding contribution to their unique survey of Weinberg’s symphonies and pleasure is diffused only slightly by the short playing time.

The playing by the Gothenburgers is exemplary. This is early Weinberg - at least the Third Symphony is. It's a 30-plus minute, four movement, B minor piece written in 1950 and revised in 1959. The first movement sports a tickling forward-pressing motif. This is clothed sweetly, at first, but the atmosphere becomes gradually more determined and warlike-heroic with a sideways glance at Shostakovich's Leningrad. It's extremely exciting and might be thought of as comparable to the first symphonies of Sviridov and Dvarionas among others. It is not as belligerent as these other examples; certainly the sweet oboe pastoral (I 6:20) is far more gentle than anything found in those other works. Something of dancing snowflakes in this but also of warm pine forests. A chill sets in towards the end of the movement. There's a playful sprinting and flittering allegro giocoso and this can be contrasted with a potently sustained and meditative gloom. There’s tenderness in the Adagio (III) which is almost as long as the first movement. The clarinet solos have a plangently woody bubble and the theme seems a byway off the Volga Boatmen’s Song. This ends in a becalmed murmur from the strings. The finale returns to the implacably sturdy fast-pulsed mood of the heroic first movement. This is a splendidly rich recording with a nice throaty roar to the brass.

This revised version of the Symphony was premiered by Aleksandr Gauk conducting the All-Union Radio and TV Symphony Orchestra in Moscow on 23 March 1960.

The Golden Key was a ballet written in 1954-55 to a fairy fable scenario by Aleksey Tolstoy (1882-1945). In this format the music was premiered on 10 June 1962. Two years later Weinberg extracted for suites of which this is the last. The music is full of Petrushkan character, gawky, winningly elegiac (tr. 6 with its oboe singer), impudently Respighian (tr. 7) and ruthlessly driven (The Rat). The final Pursuit movement combines iterative obsessional onrush with an innocence absent from the assaults of the Symphony’s first and final movements

Every part of this production shouts quality. The notes are by David Fanning whose knowledge of the music and the era must be second to none. Svedlund knows the Weinberg works well having already recorded many of them so he is a reliable and inspired guide

If you enjoy Russian music of the mid and first half of the last century then you need to hear this. It's by no means garish poster material and its depth and accessible grip may surprise.

– Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

Classical Music

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

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

This is a Super Audio CD playable only on Super Audio CD players.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) Gothenburg Symphony OrchestraNeeme Jarvi, conductor Symphony no 1 in G minor "Winter Dreams", Op. 13; Romeo &Â?JulietSymphony no 2 in C minor "Little Russian", Op. 17; Overture in FSymphony no 3 in D major "Polish", Op. 29; The Snow Maiden, Op.12Symphony no 4 in F minor, Op. 36; Symphony no 5 in E minor, Op 64Symphony no 6 in B minor "Pathetique", Op. 74; The Tempest;Overture on the Danish National Anthem; Voyevoda Dances;Dmitri Pretender and Vassily Shuisky; Serenade for N.Rubinstein;Capriccio Italien; Francesca da Rimini; etc.

Click here to view all 13 volumes of The Sibelius Edition


This set contains almost all of Sibelius' incidental music written to accompany spoken theater (King Kristian II, Swanwhite, Pelléas and Mélisande, Belshazzar's Feast, Kuolema, Jedermann, The Language of the Birds, and The Tempest), as well as his ballet-pantomime Scaramouche. Missing are the two movements for strings from The Lizard, which presumably will be included in a later release--but in all respects that matter BIS offers an embarrassment of riches. Indeed, you get to hear most of this music twice, since the complete edition includes both the original theatrical scores (from Vänskä) as well as the later concert suites drawn from them (featuring Järvi). Not everything is duplicated: Everyman, for example, never got turned into a suite (it's a bit too fragmentary), but it's well worth hearing.

The performances are all splendid and extremely well-recorded. There's not a weak link in the bunch. The original scores, with the exception of The Tempest, have no competition on disc, while Järvi's versions of the suites all rank with the best. His is still the only complete recording of Scaramouche, a patchy but fascinating piece. It's true that perhaps only diehard Sibelians will want to compare the arrangements side by side, but at a special price (6 CDs for the price of 3) anyone can afford to sample. This extremely well-executed project certainly deserves your support, and will reward it amply.

– David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

WIRÉN Concert Overture No. 2. 1 Serenade for String Orchestra. 2 Ironiska småstycken (Ironic pieces) for Piano. 4 Piano Sonatina. 5 Miniature Suite for Violin & Piano. 6 Cello Sonatina. 9 Cello Concerto. 3,9 Sinfonietta 4,8 • 1 Tor Mann, 2 Sixten Eckerberg, 3 Sixten Ehrling, cond; 1 Stockholm R O; 2 Gothenberg S O; 4 Camilla Kinberg; 5 Stig Ribbing (pn); 6 Sven Karpe (vn); Dag Wirén ( 6 pn, 8 cond); 9 Maurice Maréchal (vc); 9 Harry Ebert (pn); 3 Gustav Gröndahl (vc) • CAPRICE 21761, mono (79:47)


Arné Wirén was a Swedish bass who recorded with (among others) Hjördis Schymberg, Bette Björling, and Erik Sædén. This Wirén’s first name was Dag (1905-1986), and I was rather relieved to discover online that he “is not widely known outside his native Sweden, though his music began gaining notice internationally on recordings in the decade following his death. His first serious compositions date to the 1930s and divulge a neo-Classicism tinged by a Romantic warmth.” So if this is your introduction to Dag Wirén, as it was mine, there’s the skinny on him.


This disc, titled Vintage Wirén, presents what are possibly the first recordings of these pieces. I say “possibly” because of the obscurity of these recordings in the West, and the fact that the liner notes don’t volunteer this information. (Whatever happened to the days when record companies told you EVERYTHING—whether or not the recordings were first versions or not, whether or not they’ve ever been on LP and/or CD before, who the performers are, etc.? This is the bane of modern record collecting, and reviewing. Modern-day record labels generally tell you very little or nothing.) This CD was initially reviewed by James A. Altena in Fanfare 33:6, and I am indebted to him for explaining that “Tonsåttaren,” who is listed as the pianist in the Miniature Suite and conductor of the Sinfonietta, is the composer himself.


What one hears on this disc are light but well-crafted works of the style I tend to call “popular neo-Classic.” The “Andante espressivo” of the Serenade for String Orchestra, for instance, strongly resembles the contemporary work of young Sam Barber or Copland in his popular phase, although the entire serenade shows the influence of both Stenhammar and of Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony. This is not a bad thing, and Wirén very obviously had a sense of humor, as his music practically bristles with it. The notes claim this the single most popular contemporary Swedish classical piece in existence, though later on in the notes they explain that it wasn’t issued in its entirely until 1949, nine years after it was recorded.


The Ironic Pieces for piano also runs in the Prokofiev vein, although Wirén purposely avoids some of the spikier harmonies of that style. Camilla Kinberg plays them with tremendous drive, finesses, and—yes—humor, particularly in the “Promenade” which starts and ends with a light tread but, in the middle, stomps around noisily with solid whacking notes in the bass.


The problem I had with the piano Sonatina was not the quality of the music, which was fine, but the condition of the records. All of these seem to have been pressed off-center, which causes the phenomenon known as a “swinging copy.” This, in turn, makes the pitch constantly fluctuate. What’s so annoying is that this is an easily correctable flaw: just get a turntable with a removable spindle. Put the record on the turntable with the spindle in, then remove it and start playing it at a slower speed (like 33 rpm). Watch how the grooves “swing,” and then very gently tap the edge of the disc with your fingernail until it looks more centered and regular. It works every time.


The Miniature Suite for Violin and Piano starts with a fairly innocuous, 49-second opening, but the Adagio is considerably interesting and moody. The remaining movements, though brief and lighthearted, are a bit less humorous or frivolous. So, too, is the Cello Sonatina, played well by Maréchal and pianist Ebert, who at this time (1940) was the regular accompanist for tenor Jussi Björling. My one complaint about this piece was that it seemed to be recorded rather distantly.


Even better, as both a piece and as a recording, is the Cello Concerto, though the soloist (Gröndahl) is not as secure in his bowing or intonation as Maréchal. On the other hand Sixten Ehrling, heard here in a very early recorded example of his work, shows why he was considered one of Sweden’s better conductors. This work’s moody, more serious quality reveals Wirén to have been a fine composer who might have developed more seriously had his beloved “Serenade” not taken over the imagination of the public. He creates a fine feeling of suspense in the “call-and-response” style of the concerto, and at roughly 16 minutes it does not overstay its welcome.


The transfers are, for the most part, masterfully done. Remastering engineer Marie Wisén (if I translate the word “Redaktör” correctly) has removed all traces of record sound, leaving just the music to be savored without damaging the quality of the string tone, always a hazardous operation. My only complaint is that she did not then boost the treble to restore some of the upper frequencies, which makes these recordings sound muffled. I was able to obtain good quality sound, however, by turning the treble control on my amplifier all the way up. Otherwise, recommended.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

In his symphonic works Torbjorn Iwan Lundquist is using a special technique, in which large form is made from large musical blocks. The third symphony is written in one movement, but you can distinguish three blocks and a concluding part, ‘the reminiscence’- in which the accumulated power reverts to the original nothingness in the end. The third symphony was begun in 1971 in Jamtland and was completed in 1975 at Salto in Bohuslan. As in most of Lundquist’s symphonies, this symphony begins with a primal cell, his association theme, a gust of wind, which unfolds into a grandiose sunrise. Nature means a lot for Lundquist. The idea for the Symphony No. 3- which also had the title Sinfonia dolorosa and is dedicated to the composer’s deceased wife Maud- he got during a mountain hike, shortly after his wife’s death. The symphony was first performed in September 1976 in Malmo, by Malmo Symphony Orchestra conducted by Janos Furst. Lundquist was working on the fourth symphony for several years, mainly in 1984-85. Also this is in a single long, mighty, movement. It is almost twice as long as the third symphony, and it is also written for large orchestra with extensive percussion. After the premiere in Gothenburg in October 1985, with the Gothenburg Symphony under the direction of Sixten Ehrling, who also got the dedication, the composer withdrew the score and revised it slightly a year later. “Performance, yes- because the composition does not feel completely finished until I heard it,” says Lundquist.

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

Born in 1972, Sebastian Fagerlund was recently described on the website MusicWeb International as ‘yet another obscenely talented young musician from Finland’. The occasion was the release of his opera Döbeln (BIS-SACD-1780), with a score that the reviewer went on to characterize as ‘both forward-looking and audience friendly’. Composed in 2009, Döbeln is Fagerlund’s first and so far only opera, and on the present disc we hear three orchestral scores. The musicians of the eminent Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra revel in the composer’s striking gift for orchestration, in performances supervised by the rapidly emerging young conductor Dima Slobodeniouk, who has collaborated with Fagerlund on several occasions previously. The clarinettist Christoffer Sundqvist is also well acquainted with Fagerlund’s music, and his playing served as inspiration for the composer as he wrote his colourful and eventful Clarinet Concerto. Following that work here is Partita, consisting of three movements with titles that mirror the composer’s concerns: Cerimonia (Ceremony), Risonanza (Resonance) and Preghiera (Prayer). According to Fagerlund himself, the work is not associated with any specific religion but rather with an inner, spiritual struggle in general; the need for everyone to find his or her own ‘prayer’. Closing the disc is Isola (Island) which sprang from a visit by the composer to an island in the Turku archipelago formerly used to segregate lepers and the mentally ill from the rest of society. On admittance inmates were expected to bring with them the wood for their own coffins, an ‘isle of the dead’ which today is an idyllic holiday location. A similar alternation of darkness and light, of movement and motionlessness, of violence and sensitivity, permeates Fagerlund’s tone poem.

Neeme Järvi is one of the most recorded conductors of our time - but this is the first time he records the Tchaikovsky symphonies! He does so with "his" orchestra of 22 years standing, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra: a combination whose many recordings on BIS has made huge audiences very happy indeed! That Tchaikovsky and Järvi really is a 'dream team' concert audiences all over the world have been able to hear for themselves over the years. A student of the legendary Yevgeni Mravinsky - whose Tchaikovsky interpretations are still considered among the greatest - Järvi here gives us a vibrant Pathétique of unusual clarity, firmly rooted in the great Russian tradition, followed up by a Francesca da Rimini of great passion and fire. We are of course extremely proud to be able to offer this unique opportunity to fans of Tchaikovsky, Järvi, the GSO - and to all other music lovers. That the recording is also one of the first multi-channel, surround sound releases of these much-loved works surely adds to the attraction! As will be the coming instalments in the Järvi-GSO Tchaikovsky cycle, this disc is a Hybrid Super Audio CD, meaning that it is playable on all CD and SACD players with an option of stereo or surround sound when played back on SACD equipment. Packed in an elegant slipcase, this is a release which certainly should make a difference to anyone's CD collection!

The fourth volume of the BIS Tchaikovsky cycle focuses on Symphony No. 2, nicknamed for its use of themes from the folk music of Ukraine ('Little Russia'). The first presentation of the work, at a private gathering, was a welcome success for the young Tchaikovsky in 1872: 'The entire assembled company almost tore me apart with delight, and Mme Korsakov, with tears in her eyes, asked if she might arrange it for piano four hands.' Even so, seven years later, during a stay in Rome, Tchaikovsky reworked the symphony radically. As on previous discs, the symphony is combined with shorter, and often less well-known, works. The Overture to Ostrovsky's play The Storm - later used by Janacek for his Kata Kabanova - was written as a holiday assignment during Tchaikovsky's studies at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and earned him his teacher's disapproval for the extravagant, Berlioz-inspired scoring. The Overture in F was also a student work, which Tchaikovsky adapted for large orchestra when offered a welcome opportunity to have his work performed in Moscow. Just a couple of years later, he received a prestigious commission for a work to mark the wedding of the Tsarevich Alexander with the Danish Princess Dagmar. In the resulting Festive Overture he used motifs from the Danish and Russian national anthems, finally letting the Danish anthem resound in all its glory, in a splendid Maestoso. Even in later life Tchaikovsky regarded this piece highly, preferring it to the much more popular '1812' Overture. The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under its principal conductor emeritus Neeme Järvi gives all in this interesting programme.

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

Classical Music

Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Serenade is unquestionably an orchestral masterpiece, one of two that he wrote (the other being the Second Symphony), and this remains its finest recording. Järvi remade the work for DG, and very well too, with this same orchestra, but as is so often the case the second effort doesn’t quite measure up to the initial outing. In the first place, this performance includes the “Reverenza” movement that Stenhammar later deleted. It’s a charming minuet, and since it’s followed by the Canzonetta, a slow waltz, it’s easy to understand why he decided, however reluctantly, to leave it out. I’m not entirely sure it fits here as the second movement–that means a lot of slow music between the opening Overture and the Scherzo–but it’s still good to have and you can always just skip it if the result turns out to be boring in your opinion.

Second, Järvi offers the most exciting and rambunctious performance of the Scherzo yet recorded. This movement really can and should be a virtuoso extravaganza, and here it has a huge impact, assisted in no small degree by some of the best recorded sound that BIS ever managed in Gothenburg. The rich bass, wide dynamic range, and superb balances permit Järvi and his players to let it rip in thrilling fashion. Add to that a lovely, flowing Notturno and a meaty, muscular finale and the result is one of the glories of the BIS catalog. The Serenade has been lucky on disc, and has received a striking number of fine recordings, but this is the one to own to get to know the work.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

Alpha begins a complete cycle of the symphonies by Sibelius with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and it's new musical director, Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Originally a percussionist, the 33-year-old trained at the famous Sibelius Academy. His career took off after he stepped in at the last minute to conduct the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. In the great tradition of Finnish conductors Santtu-Matias Rouvali is known for his extremely physical and organic interpretations: "Music unmistakeably flows from him," commented The Sunday Times. When Bachtrack asked him how he shapes the orchestral sound, he replied: "I sing it, I move my hands the way I want it... The conductor should be able to show tempo somewhere in the body... I was also a drum kit player, so my feet and hands can do different things at the same time. When you read the score, you sing it in your head... I think it's the sense of inside groove that you get from playing percussion which is very important in Sibelius's music." In the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra he finds a prestigious cohort of musicians with an impressive discography, and joins a line of their illustrious musical directors, notably Neeme Jarvi, the orchestra's principal conductor from 1982 to 2004, but also Gustavo Dudamel- who made his first major recordings with the GSO- Christoph Eschenbach, Kent Nagano, and others.

Born into a working-class family, Anders Eliasson’s earliest musical experiences originated from within himself: ‘they were my own singing, and tunes I heard on the radio’. At the age of nine he began to play the trumpet, and soon after he became the leader of a jazz band for which he wrote arrangements. Aged 14, he found a local organist to teach him harmony and counterpoint, and at 16 he left his hometown for Stockholm to study privately. In 1966 Eliasson enrolled at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, studying the various techniques and trends of modernism, from dodecaphony to musique concrete. But in the end he found it impossible to ‘break away from more than a thousand years of tradition’, as he put it: ‘Music is like H2O: melody, harmony and rhythm are a single entity. And it has to flow.’ The three works recorded here – all for the first time – are examples of the highly personal idiom he developed as a consequence.

REVIEW:

Eliasson’s Symphony No 3 operates on a continuous weave, the saxophone often riding its surface, whose tightness can put a clamp on the music. To my ears the modality sounds restrictive, rather than a parameter to prompt greater creativity. There are some fine moments, none better than the celestial transition from the ‘Fremiti’ third movement to the ‘Lugubre’ fourth (of five).

Similarly, Eliasson’s Trombone Concerto is a work of deeper structural principle than the label ‘concerto’ might denote and one in which the composer instructed the dedicatee Christian Lindberg to ‘play like a caged bird’. Once more the music can chase its own tail, without the degree of structural fascination or universal vision – the sort Nørgård finds from even more restrictive means – that might have rendered such a chase thrilling.

Thank heavens for Eliasson’s Symphony No 4, in which the composer’s obsessive compositional personality yields embracing fruits. Here the tonal journey is better defined, the development of a single motif clearer and more ripe, the textures more varied and the feeling generally more visceral.

All said and done, a mixed bag. But the soloists give their works everything and the conductors don’t shirk on Eliasson’s firm principles, even if Oramo has more to work with.

-- Gramophone

After the resounding success of Volume 1 (Gramophone Editor’s Choice, Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, Diapason d’Or, Choc de Classica, FFFF Télérama), the project to record the complete Sibelius symphonies continues with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, whose career as a conductor is entering top gear: he has just been appointed Principal Conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. At the turn of the twentieth century, as Finland struggled to free itself from Russian rule, Sibelius and his wife faced several domestic dramas, including the loss of one of their daughters, Kirsti, to typhoid fever. The Second Symphony, written in the brilliant key of D major, seems to be marked by the events of the composer’s private life, but many of his contemporaries nevertheless saw it as a political manifesto! In 1898, Sibelius composed the incidental music for Adolf Paul’s play King Christian II, the story of the downfall of a king of Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden and Norway) in the sixteenth century. The suite derived from it was successfully performed in several European cities.

Born in 1972, Albert Schnelzer has established himself as one of the most successful contemporary Swedish composers. Taking inspiration from both dance and literature, he writes music that has been described as pulsating with feverish tension and vibrating rhythms, outgoing but with room for fragile and lyrically expressive moments. The three works gathered here were composed between 2011 and 2014, with two multi-movement works flanking the single-movement Tales from Suburbia. The work is inspired by the idea of suburbs embodying the transition between countryside and urbanity, where the organic world of nature contrasts with concrete structures and where past meets present. Framing Tales from Suburbia are two concertos, one for cello and one for orchestra, which both owe a debt to the rock band Pink Floyd’s iconic album Dark Side of the Moon. The work titles – Crazy Diamond and Brain Damage – are both borrowed from the album tracklist, and the individual movements carry titles taken from the lyrics. As Schnelzer himself explains in his liner notes, he hasn’t used any actual musical quotations but the lyrics have provided catalysts for his own music. In the cello concerto his focus has been on the fate of Syd Barrett, one of the founder members of Pink Floyd who was forced to leave the band due to deteriorating mental health. Brain Damage – Concerto for Orchestra on the other hand can be seen in terms of wandering through a series of different moods: anger, frustration, grief and perhaps even a glimpse of hope.

Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov stands out among the major works of the opera repertoire in having an extremely complex creative history. The original libretto, by the composer himself, was based closely on Pushkin’s Shakespeare-inspired drama about the ill-fated Russian ruler. Mussorgsky completed the score in 1869, and submitted it to the committees of the Imperial Theatres. It was rejected, however, primarily because of the lack of a female lead and therefore a love interest, but Mussorgsky’s unadorned style has also been mentioned as a reason. In 1871 the composer therefore reworked the opera extensively, adding new scenes – and a female principal in the form of the Polish princess Marina Mniszek – and changing the overall structure from seven scenes into a prologue and four acts. The revised Boris was completed in 1872, and two years later it was finally performed in St Petersburg, while the Moscow audience had to wait until 1888, seven years after the death of its composer. In order to promote the work, Mussorgsky’s colleague and friend Rimsky-Korsakov undertook to revise the work, making the orchestration more traditional and colorful and softening a number of harsh harmonies. It was the Rimsky-Korsakov version that took the opera out of Russia and without it, the opera would not be as widely known as it is today. In recent times, however, several opera houses have begun performing the more abrasive original version from 1869, and it is this ‘Ur-Boris’ that has been recorded here. It is performed by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under its principal guest conductor, Kent Nagano. They are joined by a cast of mainly Russian vocal soloists, headed by Alexander Tsymbalyuk as Boris, a role he performed under Nagano already in 2013 at the Bayerische Staatsoper. In the opera, as in Pushkin’s drama, the Russian people plays a hugely important role – here performed by the Göteborg Opera Chorus.

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REVIEWS:

Tsymbalyuk’s young-sounding Tsar is beautifully sung, gaining in intensity from the scene in the Kremlin onwards; but the developing extremity of his emotional responses is never overdone and his death scene remains restrained, with no scenery-chewing.

– Opera

This new account, based on live performances, is beautifully sung and played, and recorded in surround sound. Although one can nitpick many aspects of this recording, there is much to enjoy. It is especially valuable to now have a recording of the opera as Mussorgsky first intended it.

– MusicWeb International

Taking a phone call, Miklós Rózsa could scarcely believe that the legendary violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz really was seriously interested in his Violin Concerto and ready to give the work its premiere – but so he did in 1956, and the first recording of the work, with its extreme technical challenges, was also made by Heifetz. And it had been just the same with the Violin Concerto by Korngold: the 1947 premiere and the brilliant first recording of this 20th-century classic again showcased Heifetz as soloist.

In the new generation of genuinely American musicians, one outstanding figure was Leonard Bernstein, an all-rounder whose early success led on to even greater heights. Bernstein rated his Violin Concerto of 1954, “Serenade,” inspired by Plato’s Symposium, as his best work ever, and this work too in its imaginatively slimmed-down scoring is now acknowledged to be an important 20th-century concerto for violin.

As an “encore,” this compilation includes the masterly Symphonic Dances from the immortal “West Side Story.”

REVIEWS:

This set of American concertos sees her widen her recorded repertoire still further and her performances of all three are highly successful. She’s very well supported by the young Finnish conductor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali who here appears with the two orchestras of which he’s currently Music Director. The Gothenburg Symphony does the honors on the first disc while disc two features the Tampere Philharmonic. Both orchestras make first rate contributions.

— MusicWeb International