This selection was nominated for the 2001 Grammy Award for "Best Choral Performance."
This selection was nominated for the 2002 Latin Grammy Award for "Best
Classical Album."

Classical Music

Includes work(s) by various composers. Soloists: Joachim Held, Bettina Pahn.

The complete Works for Violin and Piano of George Enescu - The Romanian musicians Remus Azoitei and Eduard Stan interpret the Works of Enescu with intuitional understanding for his multifaceted music - Including the famous 3rd sonata op.25 “dans le caractère populaire roumain” - “No need to look any further: this is a first-rate collection." Gramophone Of all of Enescu's works for violin and piano, the 3rd Sonata Op. 25 "dans le caractère roumain populaire" ("in Romanian folk character" ) composed in 1926 is the most famous and stands roughly in the center of his work for these instruments. In addition to the two other sonatas, a dramatic sonata „torso“ in A Minor, the "Impressions d' enfance" and some smaller works have survived. The Ballad, composed in Paris in 1895 by the precocious fourteen year old Enescu begins his work for violin and piano, ending with the nostalgic Andante malinconico of 1951. Two Romanian musicians, violinist Remus Azoitei and pianist Eduard Stan bring this multifaceted music to life with their gorgeous playing- and drawing inspiration - adding a personal touch - with their own intuitive understanding of Romanian culture, just as the master composed them.

George Enescu’s primary instrument was the violin, but he also wrote a substantial body of works for piano, including sonatas, suites, preludes, and other short character pieces. This three-disc Hänssler Classic set of the complete works for piano solo, performed by Romanian pianist Raluca Stirbat, offers valuable insights into Enescu’s evolving methods and artistic development over a period of four decades, from the Suite No. 1 in G minor, Op. 3 (1897) to the Piano Sonata No. 3 in D major (1935). Enescu passed through several phases, starting with a fascination with Baroque forms in his teenage years, and progressing to an enthusiasm for Wagnerian chromaticism and Romanian folk music, which led to a more integrated mature style. Stirbat is an ardent proponent for Enescu’s music, and her album is the first complete set of his piano music on CD. Recorded at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, the sound is crisp and detailed, though the resonance of the performing space is quite pronounced.

– All Music Guide (B. Sanderson)

Valentin Radutiu, born in Munich in 1986, received his first cello lessons from his father at the age of six. While still attending school, he studied at the Mozarteum University of Salzburg under Clemens Hagen from 2001 to 2005. After high school he became a student of Heinrich Schiff in Vienna. Since 2007 he has been a member of David Geringas' cello studio at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin.

Valentin Radutiu is the current winner of the competition "Sound and Explanation - Conveying Works in Music and Word« of the Cultural Committee of German Business." The Music Prize of German Business is one of the most important awards for young musicians in Germany. - Artist's website

REVIEWS:
Fanfare (5-6/00, p.115) - "...The choral sound, consistently pleasing, is...attentive, flexible, and exquisitely blended....Rilling uses six full-voiced soloists - none of whom is averse to using a vibrato....There's no weak link in the team..."

Includes work(s) by Johann Sebastian Bach. Soloist: Joseph Payne.

Experience the lush sound of the Dresden Piano Trio performing classic trios by composers Antonín Dvořák, Leoš Janáček, and Josef Suk. This recording evokes the passionate nature of the repertoire, creating a memorable musical journey for the listener.

The Dresden Piano Trio, comprised of Roglit Ishay, piano, Kai Vogler, violin and Peter Burns, violoncello, was founded following a cooperation between Kai Vogler and Roglit Ishay at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont. The ensemble debuted in 1990 in the Chamber Music Hall of the Berlin Philharmonie. The trio has given many concerts throughout Germany and the rest of Europe. The repertoire includes all the major works for piano trio from the late Romantic era to the early 20th century.

DVORÁK Cypresses: 18 Songs for Voices and Piano (original version, 1865 1 ). Cypresses: 12 Songs for String Quartet (from original version, arr. Dvorák 2 ). Cypresses: 6 Songs for String Quartet (from original version, arr. Hans-Peter Dott 2 ) • 1 Marcus Ullmann (ten); 1 Martin Bruns (bar); 1 Andreas Frese (pn); 2 Bennewitz Qrt • HÄNSSLER 98641 (2 CDs: 81:05 Text and Translation)


Let me begin with just one swipe at Hänssler Classic, a label whose marketing practices I’ve questioned before. This entire program could fit onto a single CD. Discs of over 80 minutes, once rare, are now fairly common. A saving grace, however, is that as of now, mid-October 2012, ArkivMusic is selling the two-disc set for $26.99, which places it in the mid-price category on a per-disc basis. Hänssler is to be commended, however, for coming up with the idea of presenting Dvorák’s Cypresses complete in its original scoring as a song cycle for voices and piano, plus in its partial arrangement of 12 of the 18 songs for string quartet by the composer himself, and, in addition, in arrangements of the remaining six songs for string quartet by German composer Hans-Peter Dott (b. 1952). If anyone has done this before, it’s not reflected in any of the current listings I found. In fact, Dvorak’s string quartet arrangements far outnumber recordings of the song cycle.


Details of the song cycle’s path from composition to publication still remain a bit sketchy and open to some dispute. This much is known: Dvorák set the songs down on paper in 17 days between the 10th and 27th of July 1865. The 24-year-old composer was lovesick over one of his young pupils who didn’t share his feelings. So, like Mozart, Dvorák ended up settling for the girl’s younger sister, whom he eventually married. It’s hardly surprising then that the texts of the songs, taken from Cypresses: A Collection of Lyric and Epic Poems by Gustav Pfleger-Moravský, tell of unrequited love. Also generally agreed upon is that Dvorák intended eight of the songs—Nos. 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 13, 14, and 15—to be sung by a tenor, while the remaining 10 songs—Nos. 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, and 18—were intended to be taken by a baritone, which is the way they’re divvied up on the disc.


But here’s where things get a bit dicey. It took Dvorák another 23 years, during which he arranged, rearranged, and otherwise tinkered with the songs, before he sent them to Simrock for publication in 1888 with the title, not Cypresses , but Love Songs , to which the opus number 83 was assigned. Yet a 2012 program note from the Chamber Music Society of Williamsburg unequivocally states that “Dvorák chose never to publish the songs in their original form, but material from several of the songs cropped up in his first two symphonies and in his operas and other vocal works.” Clearly, the songs were published in 1888, but I’m guessing that the discrepancy hinges on the words “in their original form,” for according to the imslp.org catalog of Dvorák’s complete works, the songs that were actually published were all third and fourth revisions of the originals. Meanwhile, a year earlier the composer selected 12 of the songs—Nos. 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 16, 17, and 18— and began reworking them for string quartet, keeping close to the original models. He made only some minor rhythmic adjustments, and only in one case did he change the key. He did, however, reorder the pieces in a different sequence from the original song cycle—6, 3, 2, 8, 12, 7, 9, 14, 4, 16, 17, 18—and titled his collection of quartet arrangements Echo of Songs . These were not published, however, until 1921, 17 years after Dvorák’s death.


This brings up another misunderstanding that has been perpetuated regarding Dvorák’s titling of both the published song cycle and the string quartet arrangements that remained unpublished in his lifetime. All Music Guide states that it was the composer himself who named the song cycle Cypresses , but as noted above, he didn’t. He titled it Love Songs . And as for the composer’s quartet arrangements of 12 of the songs, he called them, again as noted above, Echo of Songs . The only Cypresses Dvorák was familiar with, other than the trees, was the collection of poems so titled by Pfleger-Moravský. The Cypresses title was conferred upon the string quartet arrangements—and then only retroactively and by association with the songs—by the publisher of the string quartet cycle, Hudební matice umrlecké besedy, and/or the cycle’s editor, composer Josef Suk. Hans-Peter Dott surmises there are reasons Dvorák omitted the six songs—1, 5, 10, 11, 13, and 15—from his own quartet arrangements, but Dott doesn’t tells us what those reasons might have been. Instead, he decided to arrange them himself anyway, and they’re included as the last six tracks on disc 2, after Dvorák’s 12.


So, there you have it: the complete song cycle, published in 1888 as Love Songs , Dvorák’s own string quartet arrangements he titled Echo of Song , published in 1921, and a recent arrangement by Dott of the remaining six songs—all on a two-disc set boldly titled “Cypresses,” with a stand of cypress trees pictured on the cover, a title Dvorák never gave to any of these pieces. I’m not sure he’d be amused. For millennia, the cypress tree has been associated with death and mourning—which is why it’s often found planted around cemeteries—not with the pain of rejected love, the subject of these songs. The music can be quite lovely, if a bit overly sentimental, but the singers and players exercise care not to succumb to some of its more self-pitying moments. While tenor Marcus Ullmann and baritone Martin Bruns deliver their respective songs with warmth of feeling and a good measure of tonal bloom, their voices are of a similarity of timbre and character that sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish which singer is performing which song without referring to the designated numbers in the notes.


When it comes to the string quartet arrangements, at least of the 12 made by the composer, there’s a good deal more in the way of competition, among which is a very fine reading by the Emerson Quartet. But not being familiar with every recording of the quartet versions listed, I can’t say whether any ensemble has previously included the additional six arrangements made by Dott, and Hänssler’s album note is not forthcoming on when Dott made them. If it was very recently, perhaps even for the Bennewitz Quartet and this recording, then this could be a first.


Neither the songs nor the quartet arrangements of them represent Dvorák at his best. One might even say that musically they are Dvorák before he blossomed into the Dvorák we know and love. All of the pieces are of sameness in tempo and mood, without much in the way of Dvorák’s later melodic inspiration or harmonic inventiveness to make any one of them particularly memorable. For that, of course, the singers and players are not to blame. So, recommended on the grounds that this may be the most complete recording of Dvorák’s “cypress”-based compositions collected together in a single set.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

“…Incidentally, I am more and more convinced that, in essence, music is not something that could be poured into a strict, traditional form. It consists of colors and time expressed in rhythm…” (Claude Debussy, 1907) These words essentially summarize a whole movement- the movement of musical Impressionism. Claude Debussy is responsible for the fact that the newer French piano music of his time came to be highly regarded. After the age of Liszt, he developed in essence a newly independent style of piano music, and gave French Impressionism an exalted position in the field of music. Both of the books of Preludes by Debussy are an expression of this style. The first book was written between 1909 and 1910. The second, between 1910 and 1912. In total there are 24 compositions with which Debussy continued- if only superficially- the tradition of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier or Chopin’s 24 Preludes. Eloise Bella Kohn is a regular guest of France’s most prominent concert venues and festivals such as Salle Gaveau and Lille Piano Festival. Being awarded Young Talent by the renown cultural magazine Diapason in 2016 and “Yamaha Artist” since 2018, the young French pianist shows an extraordinary depth of musicality and is leading a promising career.

The works of the outstanding composer César Cui (1835–1918), whose name will forever be remembered in music history, are yet to be rediscovered and fully appreciated. Cui was a rare type, one of those universal prodigies who throughout his career combined seemingly irreconcilable talents as an artist and military academic. Cui’s life was shaped by an astonishingly unique outlook that was predisposed to an organic synthesis of various cultural traditions and styles. He was a member of The Five, the group of Russian composers led by Mily Balakirev dedicated to the production of a specifically Russian type of music. This album contains piano transcriptions of three of his finest works- his Suite No. 2 op. 38, his Miniatures op. 20, and his Miniatures op. 39. Performing these pieces are fine pianists Maria Ivanova and Alexander Zagarinskiy.

What happened in Leipzig in 1733 was crucial to the development of a musical genre that has been an integral part of the music scene for over two hundred years: the keyboard concerto. That year, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his great Concerto in D minor BWV 1052 and his second oldest son Carl Philipp Emanuel, aged just 19, composed his first keyboard concerto, the Concerto Wq 1 in A minor. Anyone who directly compares the two concertos will hardly believe that they were both written in the same place and at the same time: on the one hand, the elder Bach's harpsichord piece, which plumbs the deepest depths of polyphony; on the other, the younger Bach's new approach to keyboard-writing, a style that almost seems to overlook the omnipresent tradition of counterpoint. Setting aside the extremely complicated compositional history of JS Bach's harpsichord concerto - from the presumed adaptation of an oboe concerto by Benedetto Marcello through to the arrangement of Bach's own violin concerto for keyboard by his son Emanuel (BWV 1052a) - what is certain is that the younger Bach did not simply inherit the keyboard concerto as a genre from the hands of his father; he played a decisive part in shaping and enriching it from the outset. Another point to note is that the composer's artistic identity fundamentally changed during this period: the truths of faith ceased to be the focal point, eclipsed by principles of the Enlightenment, namely self-assurance and self-reliance.

There seems to be no plan at Hänssler to record all of the CPE Bach keyboard concertos on modern piano, but the three volumes that pianist Michael Rische has released thus far have been splendid, and generally superior to the competition from Miklós Spányi on BIS if only because Rische takes the composer at his word when he demands a really quick Allegro assai (Wq. 46 finale) or Allegro di Molto (Wq. 22). As in previous releases in the series, Rische offer two concertos with orchestra plus one from the group of six, Wq. 43, in the composer’s arrangement for piano solo.

Bach designed these latter works for popular consumption: they belong to his “easy” pieces, both technically (not really) and in terms of their moderate length and less weird than usual harmonic syntax. However, this doesn’t mean that the music is in any way bland or boring. Even in the brief central Adagio, only two and a half minutes long, Bach spins out a curiously affecting, consistently intriguing melodic line. Really, the man couldn’t write a boring keyboard piece if he wanted to.
Aside from the brilliant, early-ish D minor Concerto Wq. 22, the other major work is the double concerto in F major, Wq. 46, in which Rische is joined by Rainer Maria Klaas to make up a richly sonorous duo. There is only one other double concerto by Bach, specifically written for harpsichord and piano, which appears on the BIS complete cycle, but this wonderful piece deserves to be hugely more popular than it is. At twenty five minutes it’s a major work, with horns added to the string orchestra, and it would grace any concerto program.
As in previous releases in this series, the playing sparkles in the outer movements, and reveals a whole winning lyricism and sentiment in the central slow ones. Rische exploits the capacity of the modern piano fully, but always tastefully and stylishly, in the service of the music. The playing of the Kammersymphonie Leipzig is also excellent, here without conductor, unlike the earlier releases. First rate.
-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

On the occasion of the 300th birthday of C. P. E. Bach in 2014, this timeless recording of his popular Magnificat along with the Missa brevis of his distant relative Johann Ludwig Bach is available once more. These are brilliant recordings by Helmuth Rilling.