Hardly any other event during Mozart Week has remained so vividly in visitors' memories as the 1994 production of Ombra felice. Mozart's creative excess in the field of opera is evident not only in fragments of stage works such as Zaide KV 344, L'oca del Cairo KV 422 and Lo sposo deluso KV 430, but also in the more than seventy arias and ensembles he composed as individual works. Some of these are abandoned or unfinished drafts, as Mozart's singers (or sometimes Mozart himself) were not entirely satisfied with them, while others were contributions to foreign opera productions, which were often performed in the form of pasticcios at that time. This broad compilation thus provides a good overview of Mozart's aria compositions.

Heinz Holliger, an exceptional oboist, pianist, and composer, did not compose anything for piano for almost 40 years after his 1961 work "Elis - Three Nocturnes". A whole series of musical tributes and birthday greetings composed since the beginning of the 21st century was then published in 2019 under the Schumannesque title "Albumblatter" (Album Leaves) and has now been recorded in it's entirety for the first time by Kirill Zvegintsov. These are typically Holligerian, highly intricate showpieces with many references, which are expertly explained in the album essay. These works are combined with early and late piano works by the Swiss composer and pianist Jurg Wyttenbach, who died in 2021 and had a close musical relationship with Holliger. In the last years of his life, this expert in New Music took on the daring task of completing Beethoven's sketches for an alternative third movement for his Piano Sonata Op. 109 - an undertaking that only such a skilled pianist and composer could attempt. In the last days of his life, Wyttenbach was able to listen to the premiere of this reconstruction by Zvegintsov. The Ukrainian pianist combines and contrasts this experiment with the original modern works in a very stimulating way.

In our first CD 'Musical Pearls' (2022), we have opened the door wide to the amazing repertoire of the 20th century for flute and harp. Thanks to the unique compositions in each composer's oeuvre, this repertoire immediately gives an idea of how extensive the range of compositional techniques was throughout the 20th century. Works by Inghelbrecht, Liebermann, Maayani, Rorem and Lutoslawski could be discovered. This second CD opens the door a little wider and once again reveals the richness and diversity of this original repertoire. This time the following six composers are presented: Rohozinsky, Alwyn, Zbinden, Gotkowski, Feld and Holliger. These two CDs are part of a discographic project dedicated to this astonishing original repertoire for flute and harp of the 'post-Debussy era'. Our aim is to collect the most representative works from very different genres and to reconstruct this corpus, rich in style and colour, and free it from it's shadowy existence. We follow the many traces of this extensive repertoire, which has never before been compiled in this way, with the flute and harp duo showing a thousand different faces. Quite delicately and with winding melodic lines, the duo also unfolds a rhythmic and virtuoso extravagance in a different light. Different facets sometimes show a serious and austere character and at other times humour with sarcastic punchlines. This contrasting repertoire - with it's sensual, bold or rough lines, depending on the moment - amazes and captivates. The moods unfold without hesitation, asserting themselves, spreading out in the light and captivating us with a sometimes reserved, sometimes haunting emotion.

[The] new three-CD set titled “Zimmermann: Recomposed,” on the German Wergo label, is among the standout releases of 2022. -- The New York Times

Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918–1970) was one of the most distinctive composers in the musical avant-garde after the Second World War. While Karlheinz Stockhausen served as a kind of ‘generator’ in Cologne during the 1950s and 60s, inventing completely new sounds and techniques, Zimmermann was in many ways his opposite, a ‘transformer’ who redefined previously existing material by placing it in new contexts and collage-like structures, anticipating the ideas of the Postmodernists. Zimmermann created these new contexts on many levels.

Especially in his younger years, he arranged and orchestrated songs and piano pieces using brash and daring instrumental colors. These arrangements then found their way into his works that are now recognized as modern masterpieces: “Alagoana”, “Konzert”, “Sinfonie in einem Satz”, “Stille und Umkehr”, etc. His self-composed works employing numerous quotations as well as his arrangements ‘recomposing’ previously existing music are juxtaposed in the excellent recordings presented by WERGO in this collection. It contains more than three hours of music as well as an extensive booklet with a wealth of information and an interview with Heinz Holliger, the guiding spirit behind this production.

Holliger conducted all of the recordings and has worked for years to ensure that Zimmermann’s long-forgotten arrangements were rescued, published, performed, and recorded. The performances and recordings took place as part of the celebrations organized by the WDR in Cologne in honor of Zimmermann’s 100th birthday. This new release from WERGO presents a fresh perspective on the composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, whose tragic suicide shortly after the completion of “Stille und Umkehr” shocked the musical world. His fascinating instrumental effects and his embrace of popular and traditional music make his works feel much more at home in our contemporary world than they did in the cultural atmosphere of his time, with its faith with technology and progress.

A New Yorker Notable Recording of 2022!

On his new album Elegie, Sony Classical artist and pre-eminent lieder singer Christian Gerhaher returns to the beguiling beauty and dark melancholy of late-Romantic Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck.

Schoeck’s song-cycle Elegie was compared to music ‘from another world’ when it was first performed in 1923 and remains one of the unappreciated wonders of the lieder repertoire. Its 24 songs, accompanied by an ensemble of 15 instrumentalists, trace a narrative of aching farewells, lost love, and fading beauty.

Christian Gerhaher is in demand the world over for his instantly recognizable baritone voice, which combines lightness and lyricism with unparalleled depth of meaning. It is the perfect vessel for Austro-German lieder and has found a resonant home in Schoeck’s music. Following in the footsteps of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Gerhaher has already proved himself a renowned exponent of Schoeck’s Notturno for baritone and string quartet.

On this new recording of Elegie, Gerhaher’s characteristic plangent delivery and intimacy with the microphone reveal the glowing beauty of these curious and captivating songs, which set handpicked poems by Eichendorff and Lenau. The cycle presents a series of atmospheric portraits linked by a first person half-narrative that slips and slides between emotional states, much of it stalked by a deep sense of loneliness.

Schoeck’s dark, introspective score has prompted intrigue among musicologists and historians. Some speculate that Elegie was a reaction to the composer’s intense but ultimately unhappy relationship with the pianist Mary de Senger, and his coming to terms with its anguished end (Elegie is dedicated to the pianist). Others have interpreted the work as Schoeck’s farewell to Romanticism, as the musical avant-garde moved to a place he no longer understood.

Schoeck’s music did react to contemporary trends. Elegie’s etched, precise and luminous ensemble of 15 players glances in the direction of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat.

On this recording, Gerhaher is joined by the boutique ensemble that is the Basel Chamber Orchestra and conductor Heinz Holliger.

REVIEWS

Christian Gerhaher, perhaps [Dietrich] Fischer-Dieskau’s most formidable modern successor, has made an even stronger case in recordings of “Notturno” and “Elegie,” two Schoeck cycles for voice and ensemble. The Sony Classical label released Gerhaher’s account of “Elegie” earlier this year, and I have been listening to it obsessively, a little more mystified and mesmerized each time.

Gerhaher, born to sing such music, applies burnished tone, precise diction, and a hint of a cabaret artist’s arched eyebrows. The ensemble weaves dark magic around him...Heinz Holliger, who conducts the Basel Chamber Orchestra on the Sony recording, chooses to augment the string section, which only enriches the effect. 

--The New Yorker (Alex Ross)

In a new recording with the Basel Chamber Orchestra and the conductor Heinz Holliger, Christian Gerhaher, a Schoeck champion, plies his sumptuous baritone in declamatory lines and arching phrases, and reaches effortlessly for limpid high notes. His voice recedes hauntingly into rests without cheating the full values of the notes.

Transience dominates: A string or a woodwind instrument, sometimes doubling the vocal line, sighs and dissipates against a stark orchestral landscape. Many songs hover around the two-minute mark, expiring quickly like lilacs plunked in a vase — fragrant, blooming, short-lived. Gerhaher and the players deliver the listener from these tiny deaths in the final, and longest, song, “Der Einsame,” sustaining its delicately spun lines in pillowy A-flat major and making peace with loneliness.

--The New York Times (Oussama Zahr)

Throughout his career, Ilya Gringolts has devoted himself to performing contemporary music as well as the great concert repertoire, while also developing a keen interest in historical performance practice. The focus of his latest recital disc is therefore quite logical: music of our own time and its inspiration: Johann Sebastian Bach. The album title is Ciaccona and besides Bach’s iconic composition, Gringolts plays a further two chaconnes – or three if one counts the Ciacconina which opens Heinz Holliger’s brief cycle, composed for Isabelle Faust in 2014. The Spanish composer Roberto Gerhard wrote his Chaconne using his own take on twelve-tone technique. In his introduction to the album, Gringolts describes its twelve movements as including ‘everything from chorale to ländler … probably the most Viennese music ever written by a Catalan.’ The album closes with Kontrapartita by the French composer Brice Pauset, ‘a kind of through-the-looking-glass Bach partita’ to quote Gringolts once again. Pauset composed his work in 2008 – seven movements, each written with a particular movement from Bach’s partitas for solo violin in mind. For this work (and the interwoven movements by Bach) Gringolts has chosen to use a violin with a baroque setup, finding that the instrument seemed to respond to the ‘historically informed avant-garde’ of the writing.

REVIEW:

The disc ends fittingly, I think, with the great Chaconne from the second Partita, preceded by the movement it inspired. There are eighty-five minutes of music on this disc. Gringolts is an exciting violinist, his technique flawless, his sound sumptuous and this is a CD that I think every serious violinist and lover of the instrument will want to own.

– Classical Music Daily

It is often said that Elliott Carter is the most European of all American composers. Without a doubt, the New York-born composer is one of the most interesting personalities of the New Music scene in the USA. His wide-ranging compositional output is complex, filled with philosophical and poetic allusions that range from orchestral and chamber music, solo instrumental and vocal pieces to his first opera, which he first wrote at the age of 90. He wrote his compositions from his head, without using any instruments, and many of his works were only heard at the premiere. For his 100th birthday, the Sonatina for oboe and harpsichord was premiered by Heinz Holliger and Peter Salomon and has now been recorded for the first time on GENUIN. With this recording, the Swiss Chamber Soloists honors the rich oeuvre of Elliot Carter – music that is full of elegance and transparency.

REVIEW:

This is a very pleasing recital of miscellaneous works from throughout Carter's career, with one significant discographic gain. This is the elegant and utterly charming extant movement of the 1947 Sonatina for Oboe and Harpsichord, a cheerful and genial piece full of neoclassical poise and melodious invention, and romantic warmth. The Études and Fantasy give the lie to the notion of Carter as an unapproachably complex composer. Expressive little character pieces, each addressing a different compositional and technical issue, they are remarkable for their clarity and charm. Carter was 103 when he wrote his concentrated little String Trio, featuring the viola in an unusually prominent rôle. Like most of the composer's late music it is brief and relatively easygoing, while still compressing many ideas into a brief span and exhibiting no diminution whatsoever of his imaginative or technical powers. The vocal pieces demonstrate Carter's natural sense of writing for the voice, reminding us that in his youth he had considerable experience as a choral tenor. The Zukovsky songs in particular are especially tender and expressive, the two "voices" duetting in affectionate dialogue. Nine by Five is the composer’s second wind quintet, written six decades after the neoclassical brass quintet. All but one of the players double their instruments, hence the title, producing a wide range of timbral possibilities in various combinations. The work has a strong pull towards tonality in some sections.

– Records Intenraional

I need a musical discourse, Holliger once said. This is a good description of his characteristic way of composing. Unlike Boulez, he does not base his works on charts and tables, but neither does he employ carpets of sound in the manner of Ligeti or the Spectralists. Particularly in his vocal works, Holliger allows himself to follow the associations suggested by certain words, and these associations in turn generate still other connections. "Shir Shavur" [The Broken Song] is the title of a cycle for choir that Holliger wrote based on 12 of David Rokeah's poems. The idea of discourse can be seen in the fact that Holliger set both the Hebrew and the German versions of the text. This principle is also evident in the different ways the choral forces are handled. There are antiphonal or double choir settings, but also responsorial settings for solo and choir. In "Utopie Chorklang" [Choral Sound Utopia], he divided the choir into three groups of twelve voices each. These three groups are "tuned" in different ways, like registers of an organ. The second group sings it's pitches, but the first group sings a third of a tone higher than written and the third group a third of a tone lower.

The third volume of the complete orchestral works by Robert Schumann features the Cello Concerto and the 2nd version of the Symphony in d, two major works composed and revised during Schumann’s time as music director in Duesseldorf. + In both works, the movements of the classical model merge into one another without interruption. + Heinz Holliger's interpretations draw on a life-long study of Schumann's oeuvre, thought, personality and fate. + His approach imparts lightness and lucidity to these opulent scores, rectifying the widespread image of this romantic composer as a weak orchestrator.

Two well-known and two less-familiar orchestral works by Debussy • A new recording from the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (SWR) and Heinz Holliger, following up on their globally acclaimed Koechlin series • A continuation of the orchestra’s exploration of the French orchestral repertoire that began with their CDs of the music of Koechlin • May 21st 2014: Heinz Holliger’s 75th birthday The "Afternoon of a Faun“ together with the orchestral "Images" are among Claude Debussy’s best known and most popular compositions. Both works show different side of the composer: "Afternoon of a Faun" is a textbook example of musical impressionism, while about the "Images", the composer himself said that his goal was to “try to achieve something different – an effect of reality”. The scores contrast well with the two Rhapsodies: the one for clarinet, called the "first" Rhapsody, was sketched out within a few weeks at the end of 1909, while the "second" Rhapsody for saxophone was only completed and orchestrated after the death of its author. The Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (SWR) and conductor Heinz Holliger manage to bring out the evocative, dynamic colors and peculiarities to be found in all of these works with precision.

Audite here presents the second volume of the complete recording of Robert Schumann's orchestral works. The series includes all the symphonies, overtures and concertos. Heinz Holliger and the WDR Symphony Orchestra have recorded the works with an orchestra of the same size available to Schumann. In so doing, they not only uncover the sonic ideal of the composer, but also its consistent and convincing realization. Holliger's performances draw on a lifetime study of Schumann the man and the musician.

This CD launches a complete series of recordings of Robert Schumann's orchestral works, performed by the WDR Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Heinz Holliger. Holliger's performances draw on a lifetime study of Schumann's music, thought, personality and fate. His approach imparts lightness and lucidity to these opulent scores through a hierarchical balance of parts, delicately gradated dynamics, and invigorating tempos. The widespread image of this romantic composer as a weak orchestrator receives a refreshing and well-grounded correction. Volume 1 of the series presents the First Symphony in B-flat major (Op. 38), Overture, Scherzo and Finale (Op. 52) and the original 1841 version of the Fourth Symphony in D minor (Op. 120).

MAMLOK 5 Capriccios 3,6. Stray Birds. 1,2,11 Fantasy-Variations. 12 Panta Rhei. 7,9,10 5 Bagatelles. 4,8,10 String Quartet No. 2 13. Confluences. 4,7,8,10 Kontraste 3,5 • 1 Phyllis Bryn-Julson (sop); 2 Harvey Sollberger (fl); 3 Heinz Holliger (ob); 4 Helge Harding (cl); 5 Urusla Holliger (hp); 6 Anton Kernjak, 7 Heather O’Donnell (pn); 8 Kirsten Harms, 9 Susanne Zapf (vn); 10 Cosima Gerhardt, 11 Fred Sherry, 12 Jakob Spahn (vc); 13 Sonar Qrt • BRIDGE 9360 (72:45 Text and Translation)


This is the third disc from Bridge devoted to the music of Ursula Mamlok; I reviewed the second in Fanfare 34:6. Like its predecessor, it offers an attractive and varied conspectus of the music of this impressive composer. Again the works cover a wide span of time, here from Stray Birds (1963, written when the composer was 40) to Kontraste (2010). It is gratifying to hear no falling-off of quality; indeed, the consistently high level of inspiration and technique is a hallmark of this disc (if I may be so presumptuous). Also again, we have many multimovement works, here totalling 33 tracks. Most of the movements are short (less than two minutes) and this concision can be hard to take in at first.


It is interesting that seven of the eight works here contain one movement that is far longer than any of the others in the work. In the case of the Five Capriccios for oboe and piano (1968) that open the disc, the final movement, even though it is barely four minutes, is still longer than the other four combined. Curiously, there is no sense in which the structure of any of the works on this disc feels unbalanced, nor does one feel that the shorter movements are breathless, or cut short. Mamlok judges the structures perfectly. In the first of the capriccios, one may think the trick is going to be a limited amount of thematic material in each movement, but the second and fourth capriccios are impassioned and intense with diving and swooping melodic lines. All four create powerful little statements (really, with Mamlok’s music every note has an active, individual purpose) that are then elegantly and coolly meditated upon in the relatively extended finale. In this work each movement is merely given a metronome marking; in later works Mamlok was given to somewhat poetic names for these longer movements. They are typically marked “Still, with utmost simplicity,” “Still, as if suspended,” though there are also a Larghetto , a Molto tranquillo , and so on. It is as if the brisk movements collect the necessary ingredients to enable the slow movement, usually at or toward the end of the work, to happen.


The Five Bagatelles for clarinet, violin, and cello (1988) shows Mamlok’s style becoming somewhat more diatonic. At the same time, every note seems carefully chosen and weighed; the music is written with care and precision, so that even as simple an idea as the insistent oscillating minor third that runs through and characterizes the second movement appears fresh yet inevitable. The odd-numbered pieces are especially good at capturing gaiety and humor while the long penultimate bagatelle, poignant and drawn out, is a satisfying contrast. In the Second String Quartet, from 1998, one can hear Mamlok’s style has subtly shifted again. If in the earlier works discussed the instruments were sharply characterized individuals, always playing against each other—against in the sense of differentiated from, not in an antagonistic way—in the quartet there is, in addition, more concerted music (in the first movement, for example) and even (in the second) momentary deference of an instrument to the others by adopting an accompanying role (I’m thinking of the slow pizzicatos). And, in the third and last movement, real drama and tension, with some sharp shifts of tempo and mood, all in an event-packed four minutes. I think “concision” is probably an unhelpful word for a lot of Mamlok’s music; “compression” would be better. And if I pass over the remaining works on the disc, it is only through lack of space.


The string quartet receives a fine, committed performance from the Sonar Quartet, three of whose members—Kirsten Harms, Susanne Zapf, and Cosima Gerhardt—play in three other works on the discs. Apart from the two Holliger pieces and Stray Birds , the recordings here are a coproduction with German Radio Köln, and they are as fine and meticulous as are the performances and the music itself. The Holliger performances, which open and close the disc, and which are a little cooler in presentation, come from Zürich. Stray Birds is a reissue of a recording previously on CRI. Bridge has done the composer proud. I found it a long disc to review—not, I hasten to add, because I disliked the music, but because it demands and deserves the same attention from the listener that the composer evidently gave it. One didn’t really want to listen to this CD all the way through, preferring to savor a couple of pieces at a time. And, it’s true, I found I needed time to get into the music. But it richly repays the effort and I certainly feel my somewhat neutral response to the earlier disc must be reviewed. This is clearly music that should be heard, which will appeal to the heart as much as the head, and which will enrich as well as entertain.


FANFARE: Jeremy Marchant