Classical Music

Classical Music

Thomas Albertus Irnberger and the Israel Chamber Orchestra – they are an ‘entente musicale’ of the highest standard, as evinced by the previously released Violin Concertos by Hans Gál, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Karl Goldmark. This new release, with conductor Martin Sieghart, features the rarely heard Violin Concerto in D minor op. 8 by the young Richard Strauss, followed by his Sonata for Violin and Piano in E flat major op. 18, completed only a few years later, in 1888. Mr. Irnberger’s accompanist on piano is Michael Korstick.

The emotional effect of Beethoven’s music on contemporary listeners was enormous: his works were experienced as something completely unheard of and revolutionary. In this recording on a historical fortepiano, the Italian pianist Edoardo Torbianelli explores Beethoven’s high ideals and profound introspection of his music, which are considered essential features of his works. To this end, there is hardly a more suitable work than the Diabelli Variations, op. 120, Beethoven’s last great piano work. Encoring the variations is Beethoven’s prior opus, the Bagatelles, op. 119.

The fact that an ensemble with the name ‘Mozarthaus Quartet’ produces its debut CD with a Mozart program undoubtedly elicits little surprise. Balanced against the choice of at least 23 works of genius Mozart composed for this instrumentation tips the scales decidedly in the quartet’s favor. Sandor and Adam Javorkai, Kazutaka Takahasi and Alexander Park begin with the String Quartet in D minor KV 421 from the series of the ‘Haydn quartets’. The second work (in D major KV 575) derives from the group of the last three quartets Mozart dedicated to the King of Prussia (the ‘Prussian quartets’).

Named after the song cycle Songs of a Poor Girl, which Friedrich Hollaender composed for his first wife, the Berlin diseuse Blandine Ebinger, in the 1920s, this somewhat different ‘song recital’ illustrates the destinies of a fictional singer in the 1920s. Interpreted by versatile actress and singer Nina Prol with support from the Trio de Salon, the program is sustained by bizarre little dramas and tragi-grotesques by exiled composers who later carved out magnificent careers in America: Friedrich Hollaender, Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill.

Classical Music

Beethoven's Sonata, Op. 23 in A minor seems to portray the darker side of love, it's unfulfillment, whereas the later Op. 24, the so-called spring sonata - as a sort of characterization of a loving heart's feeling of spring - references the sweet, beautiful aspects of love. Irnberger and Michael Korstick furthermore present the variations Se vuol ballare WoO 40 on a theme from the opera Le nozze di Figaro, which Beethoven dedicated to his beloved Eleonore von Breuning, which leads to all those pieces having been written thinking of beloved women. The likes of J�rg Demus, Evgueni Sinaiski, and Paul Badura-Skoda, as well the Israel Chamber Orchestra / conductor Roberto Paternostro and the orchestra 'Spirit of Europe' / conductor Martin Sieghart have stressed the young Thomas Albertus Irnberger's musical skill. Michael Korstick studied with J�rgen Tr�ster in Cologne, Hans Leygraf in Hanover, and Sascha Gorodnitzki at the Juilliard School. For his CD recordings, he has been awarded the 'Echo Klassik Prize', the Prize of German Record Critics, several times and the MIDEM Classical Award.

Black and White Statements, the new album by Istanbul-born pianist Seda Röder, are twelve Austrian reflections on the piano, miniatures by contemporary Austria composers that each reinvent and redefine the sound of the piano. The most varied instrument preparations, experimental performance techniques and other effects characterize these works, the majority written for Ms. Röder. In recent years, Seda Röder has established a reputation as one of the most interesting of contemporary music interpreters. “ You are a master of avant-garde piano!’ - Alfred Brendel

On a quest between unrequited love, passion and apocalypse, here you can sometimes hear despairing, pausing, but also conciliatory and optimistic songs from Vienna at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The tenor Norbert Ernst and Kristin Okerlund presented selected songs by Austrian composers Franz Schreker, Alexander Zemlinsky and Wilhelm Kienzl. The Wang Valley Songs by the Wiener Neustadt composer Michael Salamon, dedicated in 2010 to Mr. Ernst, were written after seven poems from the cycle The Wang Valley by the greatest Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty, Wang Wei (around 701–61).

With the album 1914, Gramola, in co-operation with the French Cultural Institute, is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. Many works of the war years, including these rarely heard pieces, testify to the immense suffering and the power of destruction, such as the Paino Quintet in C minor, op. 42 (1917/18) by Louis Vierne, which he composed in memory of his murdered son. In addition, the album also contains compositions apparently unaffected by the horrors of the war years, such as the Preludes for Piano, op. 38 (1914/15) by Vierne, or the Sonata for Violin and Piano, op. 64 (1915/16) by Charles Koechlin, which is kept entirely in the Impressionist manner.

‘…French Neo-Classicism represents an affectionate and critical look at the past…without malice.’ These are the words the Swiss cellist Christophe Pantillon uses to describe the connecting character of the otherwise strongly contrasting post-1945 works on his new solo CD. Starting with Honegger’s Paduana (1945), the chronological arch stretches over Ibert’s Étude-Caprice (1949) and Ghirlarzana (1950), the Sonate (1956) by Henri Sauguet, the Suite en Concert by André Jolivet (1965), Dutilleux’s 3 Strophes sur le nom de Sacher (1976-82) and finally David Chaillou’s Seul (2011).

The second part of the latest Mozart trilogy by pianist Paul Badura-Skoda on the period fortepiano is entirely characterized by tragedy. The sequence of tragic minor works by Mozart during his Vienna years, concluding with the unfinished Requiem of 1791, include the Fantasias in c, KV 475 and d, KV 397 as well as the subdued and moving Adagio in B minor: lamenting, menacing, but also, typifying Mozart, glorifying and conciliatory notes – laughing amongst tears. His last Piano Sonata in D major, by contrast, links cheerful elegance to polyphonic structural depth and outshines the previous gloom.

With his Männerchorvereinigung and the brass ensemble of the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz, Thomas Kerbl presents the second edition of secular men’s choirs. Bruckner’s own choir experience as a bass and his activity as a musical director formed the basis for a vast number of choir works, in which the large quantity of secular works displays a hitherto hardly known facet in Bruckner’s oeuvre, as he was frequently reduced to his function as a church musician. Trained as a pianist in Linz, Thomas Kerbl has been dean of artistic studies at the Bruckner University since 2009.

The Jeunesse MehrWERT Prize of the Erste Bank was awarded for the first time to the Adamas Quartet in 2013. A major concern of these four young musicians is the treatment of outlawed music, works termed as degenerate and banned in Germany beginning in the 1930s. Against this backdrop, String Quartet No. 2, op. 7 ‘From the Monkey Mountains’ by the Czech composer Pavel Haas and the String Quartet No. 2, op. 26 by Erich Wolfgang Korngold were selected for this debut CD. The already widely acclaimed ensemble opens with the Quartet op. 64/5 by Joseph Haydn, the ‘Lark’s Quartet’.