The name of Vladimir Ivanovich Morkov (1801-1864) is known only to those Western listeners who have been faithfully following the recent revival of the Russian seven-string guitar. But even in the context outside of the Russian guitar, Morkov stands out as a musician, music critic, composer, arranger, and pedagogue of the highest order. It is rather that the disappearance of the Russian seven-string after the 1917 October Revolution let the world almost completely forget this exceptional scholar and artist. THE CZAR'S GUITARS consist of Oleg Timofeyev, the world's renowned expert on the Russian guitar tradition and John Schneiderman, the critically acclaimed virtuoso of plucked instruments (Baroque lute, European and Russian guitars).

Unlike Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the supreme composers of the high Baroque, Handel was not by profession a church composer. He did write a number of anthems and smaller sacred works and invented the English oratorio, a hybrid of sacred and secular elements that assures his renown in sacred music, particularly through a single work of that genre, Messiah. Messiah bookends this ten-album set, with a which begins with the original, and ends with Mozart's arrangement of the work. Also included are Saul, Alexander's Feast, Belshazzar, and Dettinger te Deum. These reference recordings are presented by the biggest names of baroque music scene: Karl Richter, Helmuth Rilling, Ulrich St�tzel.

Whenever a definition is made in an attempt to distinguish one artistic concept from others, such delineation becomes an art in itself and is sometimes artificial. Music, let alone the musical genre of the art song, is no exception. Catch-all headings make matters easier. The two song cycles on this release certainly qualify as art songs. Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his opus 98 in 1816; musicologists commonly describe An die ferne Geliebte (to the distant beloved) as the first ever song cycle. Franz Schubert wrote his Schwanengesang (swan song) in 1828, the year of his death; the songs were posthumously made into a collection. In terms of its musicological and sociological development, the Lied, having long been considered “inferior,” underwent a kind of emancipation process throughout the early modern period up until the start of the 19th century, when the emergence of the educated middle-class, particularly in the German-speaking world, allowed the new genre to take root. Such songs were performed at small venues too: in salons, small halls and before audiences that were not necessarily aristocratic of courtly. Dynamically versatile and affordable, the piano was now a common keyboard instrument and was often used to accompany the vocalist with supportive harmonies and melodic counterpoint.

Only in his young age, Haiou Zhang has received wide recognition by critics and audiences in Europe, North and South America, and the Far East. In January 2016, Haiou Zhang conquered more than 15,000 concertgoers with 14 recitals throughout major concert halls in China. His Liszt and Mozart releases under the nobel label Hanssler Classic are now on the market worldwide. Reviews have been stunning. “The B minor Sonata of Liszt, in music once considered technically unplayable and musically incomprehensible, Haiou Zhang recreates a visionary masterpiece and a landmark in the history of music with exceptional grandeur and lucidity (…) Haiou Zhang is a most serious artist.” (Gramophone)

The compilation of works on this release is intended to provide a reasonably comprehensive view of the unaccompanied sacred choral music of the Romantic era while confining itself to German-language composers from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines. The chronological order of the composers and the consideration of a number of central works aims to show the interrelationships of the choral music scene over a period lasting more than a century. The young singers of the Jugendkonzertchor (the youth choir of the Dortmund Choral Academy) engage in intensive rehearsal work and supplementary voice training, their principal focus being the unaccompanied choral music of all periods. The ensemble’s broad repertoire also encompasses oratorio and choral symphonic works and popular music for choir. The Ruhrnachrichten newspaper praises the “perfectly homogenous overall sound and the admirably well trained soloists” of the jugendkonzertchor, who “fill the space around them with a power of their fresh young voices” to create a “luxury sound” : this is a choir of which “great things can be expected in the coming years.”

Several attempts have been made over the last sixty years or so to record all Robert Schumann's works for solo piano, a fascinating cosmos full of variety that ranges from extremely virtuosic pieces for the concert hall to valuable literature for piano tuition. This attractive but difficult quest has unfortunately been marked by a lack of the necessary care, not to mention purely artistic deficiencies, so that none of the releases deserves the name "complete recording". Since Schumann published several works in two more or less different versions, it is not legitimate in a "complete recording" to include only one of the versions, let alone to amalgamate two of them. Moreover, works published at remote places as well as unpublished works and fragments that could easily be completed without too much speculation, have so far been taken into account only in exceptional cases. Florian Uhlig's 15-album set is the first genuine complete recording of Robert Schumann's works for solo piano. On albums sensibly concentrating on different themes, the pianist for the first time attempts to present all the original piano works between 1830 (Abegg Variations op. 1) and 1854 (Theme and Variations in E flat Major), using the latest critical editions and/or first editions. Several of those releases include first recordings. The introductory notes written by Joachim Draheim, who has discovered and/or edited a number of the works, throw light on the biographical and historical backgrounds of the respective groups of works.

Benjamin Bruns began his singing career as an alto soloist with the boys' choir in his home city of Hanover. After four years of private singing lessons with Prof. Peter Sefcik, he studied at the Academy of Music and Theatre in Hamburg under the Kammers�ngerin Renate Behle. While still a student, he was offered a permanent contract by the Theater Bremen, a position which allowed him to build up a broadly based repertoire at an early stage. It was followed by a similar contract with the opera house in Cologne. His professional journey then took him via the Dresden State Opera to the Vienna State Opera. His repertoire contains such roles as Belmonte (Die Entf�hrung aus dem Serail), Tamino (Die Zauberfl�te), Don Ottavio (Don Giovanni), Ferrando (Cos� fan tutte), Camille de Rosillon (The Merry Widow), Loge (Das Rheingold), or the Italian Tenor in the Strauss operas Capriccio and Der Rosenkavalier. Since his debut in summer 2012 he sang the Steersman in The Flying Dutchman for five seasons at the Bayreuth Festival. Oratorio and lieder form an important counterweight to Benjamin Bruns's stage work. At the heart of his extensive concert repertoire are the great sacred works by Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Mendelssohn. He has sung with such renowned ensembles as Berliner Philharmonics, the S�chsische Staatskapelle Dresden, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonics, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the Bach Collegium Japan, the WDR Symphony Orchestra as well as Choir and Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome or the Akademie f�r Alte Musik Berlin. Together with pianist Karola Theill he is regularly giving Lied recitals, dedicated especially to the important cycles of Schumann, Schubert and Beethoven. But also songs by Wolf, Britten, Faur�, Szymanowski and Strauss are to be found in his programs.

Founded in 1998 with members from the world-famous Gachinger Kantorei, Stuttgart's celebrated men's choir "Die Meistersinger" have devoted themselves to rescuing the rich repository of 19th century works for male voices from obscurity. The "Mannerchor" has a distinguished history throughout the Germanic lands, often serving the community with multiple functions such as a social club, political forum or an ad hoc auxiliary to professional guilds. In keeping with the spirit of the season, "Die Meistersinger" return to offer their perfect blend of voices and rich, goldenhued sound in a program of Christmas favorites.

Legendary voices like Ingeborg Danz and Andreas Schmidt + Re-release of a CLASSIC bestseller + "A great deal in it's favor" (Gramophone)

Sofja Gulbadamova's recording of a total of 14 Humoresques by the composers Edvard Grieg, Max Reger, Antonin Dvorak and Robert Schumann demonstrate the very wide range that music bearing this title could have in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. While the literary humoresque was a popular and entertaining, relatively short-lived "Biedermeier-style narrative form" (Appel), musical humoresques covered a whole range of forms - from the small-scale to the large-scale, multi-part format, from the amusing and lively through to the enigmatic and ambiguous. Be prepared for contrasts, exaggerations, the OTT and the seemingly incompatible, for pieces that can cause you to laugh or indeed to cry, and which plumb the depths of the abysmal, the desperate and the gloomy - music that speaks both directly and sometimes between the lines.

The St. Cecilia�s Mass represents a very happy combination of strict Palestrina style and modern opera elements. Gounod had already composed his first opera, Sapho (1851), at the urging of the famous singer Pauline Viardot, whom he knew from Rome. Neither this opera nor his next two such works were a success on the stage, but the experience he had gathered with these dramatic works did him well in the mass. He exhibits fine, firm control in his treatment of the dramatic contrasts occurring in particular in the Gloria and Credo. The "laudamus te" in the Gloria, an Allegro pomposo, offers powerful solo and tutti effects. In the following Andante on the text "Domine fili unigenite" Gounod lends special emphasis to the "miserere nobis." The terzetto with choir featuring the imploring vocal gestures of the three bass, tenor and soprano soloists would do credit to any French grand opera. The Credo is completely oriented toward the idea of the community united in faith. The instrumentation with brass instruments is an open demonstration of firm Catholic conviction, and the clanging cymbals turn the ascension, "et ascendit in coelum," into a veritable triumphal march. Gounod�s somewhat high-handed treatment of the liturgically prescribed text of the Agnus Dei is also to be explained by his need to heighten the dramatic effect of the music at this point. The solo tenor and solo soprano sing the "Domine non sum dignus," (Lord, I am not worthy...), a text which normally finds it's liturgical place not in the Agnus Dei but in the communion rite. The individual admission of sin is thus placed over against the collective "miserere nobis." Gounod�s employment of these effects is extremely moderated in comparison to the practices in the grand opera. Beautiful melodies, catchy motifs repeated and varied with new texts, and simple accompaniment figures in the instrumental parts lend each mass unit a basic uniform mood.

The sonatas on this album (except K311, this sonata was written in Mannheim) were composed in Munich as part of a cycle encompassing six sonatas. Mozart found himself in the Bavarian capital over the winter of 1774-1775 to produce his opera La finta giardiniera. The degree of imagination that Mozart, as a youth of 18 or 19, drew upon in his approach to the sonata genre is truly astounding. Each of these works - which based on their extensive virtuoso demands were presumably written for his own use - offers an individual and profoundly original solution to the specific problems of the genre, and if the young composer perhaps lacks something in his mastery of the form compared with his later works, it is well compensated for by his sheer wealth of imagination. What is more, we read in Mozart's correspondence that he repeatedly performed the works himself from memory, which was not a given in those days.

Several attempts have been made over the last sixty years or so to record all Robert Schumann's works for solo piano, a fascinating cosmos full of variety that ranges from extremely virtuosic pieces for the concert hall to valuable literature for piano tuition. This attractive but difficult quest has unfortunately been marked by a lack of the necessary care, not to mention purely artistic deficiencies, so that none of the releases deserves the name "complete recording". Since Schumann published several works (Impromptus op. 5, Davidsb�ndlert�nze op. 6, Symphonic Studies op. 13, Concert sans Orchestre or Sonata in F Minor op. 14 and Kreisleriana op. 16) in two more or less different versions, it is not legitimate in a "complete recording" to include only one of the versions, let alone to amalgamate two of them. Moreover, works published at remote places as well as unpublished works and fragments that could easily be completed without too much speculation, have so far been taken into account only in exceptional cases.

Franz Liszt occupied a special place among the great pianists of the nineteenth century. The boundless virtuosity which he brought to his instrument made him not only a rock star in his time, it also enabled him as a composer to realize his musical vision without having to make any allowances for technical limitations. Thus, he became not only the creator of a new style but also a pathbreaker for new directions in music whose influence would last well into the 20th century. Many factors contributed to his multifaceted personality; therefore, it is not surprising that seemingly incompatible elements like despair and transfiguration, demonism and religious ecstasy often stand next to each other and create the kind of tension which is the hallmark of a great composer. The present program features a selection of the most virtuosic and radiant works of Franz Liszt.

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was born in Hamburg in 1809 and died in Leipzig at the age of 38. He was very early musically gifted. Mendelssohn performed in public at the age of 9 and composed already from the age of 11. As a pupil of Friedrich Zelter, who was a friend of Goethe, Mendelssohn composed at the age of 17 his first masterpiece: the Overture to the Midsummer Night's Dream. This is included in the extensive release as well as a large number of other known or less known pieces by him. The String Quartet in F Minor Op. 80 - written in memory of his beloved sister Fanny - which was recorded in this collection by the Aurora String Quartet is undoubtedly one of his most beautiful works. The Gächinger Kantorei with Helmuth Rilling, the Bach Collegium Stuttgart, the Bartholdy Piano Quartet, the Heidelberger Sinfoniker with Thomas Fey, Ana-Marija Markovina and other renowned interpreters and orchestras can also be heard.

Artists

Juliane Banse, Wolfgang Brunner, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Benjamin Frith, Christian Gerhaher, Walter Gieseking, Matthias Goerne, Marlis Petersen, Gitti Pirner

Dana Protopopescu, Sibylla Rubens, Michael Schade, Wolfgang Schone, Julia Varady, Iris Vermillion, Aurora String Quartet, Bartholdy Piano Quartet, Fine Arts Quartet, Gachinger Kantorei, Rundfunkchor Leipzig, Chamber Choir of Europe, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, Heidelberger Sinfoniker, Kurt Masur, Nicol Matt, Helmuth Rilling, Thomas Fey



REVIEW:

Now here’s an interesting marketing ploy: At the cusp of Beethoven’s 250th anniversary year, what does Hänssler Classic do but bring out a 56-CD big box devoted to Mendelssohn! The collection draws upon the Hännsler/Profil back catalog, fleshed out by recordings licensed from other labels.

Its contents are loosely organized by genre, with discs 50 through 56 containing chamber, concerted, solo, and vocal pieces omitted from discs 1 through 49. Both the String Quartet in A minor Op. 13 and Violin Sonata Op. 4 are represented by two performances each. Most of Dana Protopopescu’s solo-piano Mendelssohn recordings appear, but not her Six Preludes and Fugues Op. 35. Instead, Gitti Pirner’s Op. 35 (originally on Calig) occupies disc 20, coupled with her Fantasy in F-sharp minor Op. 28. Yet somehow Protopopescu’s Op. 28 Fantasy survived the purge; it’s on disc 48. In any event, the heart of the Mendelssohn Edition lies in its extensive and well-chosen vocal and orchestral selections.

Pride of place goes to Helmuth Rilling’s recordings of the oratorio Elias and the rarely heard, thoroughly delightful comic opera Der Onkel aus Boston. Doris Hagel’s brash, vividly detailed, and headlong period-instrument Paulus energizes this overextended and occasionally dull work as no other recording does. Nicol Matt makes as vibrant a case as any for Mendelssohn’s reams of sacred vocal music. Thomas Fey’s surveys of the string symphonies (he wisely opts for No. 8 in its incarnation with winds) and the five symphonies for full orchestra remain points of reference. No complaints about the collection’s generally fine modern-day chamber recordings, although one would have expected stereo versions for the popular Piano Trios instead of the late-1940s Oistrakh/Knushevitsky/Oborin versions.

– ClassicsToday (Jed Distler)