Italian composer Riccardo Malipiero (1914–2003) was the nephew of Gian Francesco Malipiero. He was a pioneer of twelve-tone technique in Italy. His 6 published piano works encapsulate half-a-century of development, from the post-Respighian 14 variazioni (1938), to the classicism of Diario second (1985). This is the first-ever recording of this music.

REVIEW:

The present six works, tracing this Milanese composer’s piano music from 1938 to 1989, are made up of short, separately-tracked musical episodes—the perfect answer to a challenged attention span. There are 49 tracks so Toccata’s attention to detail is nothing short of lavish. In addition the pianist’s essay on the composer and his solo piano music encompasses nine closely packed but perfectly eye-friendly pages. The booklet is in English only. The works recorded here make up Malipiero’s published corpus for piano solo. They here receive their recording premieres.

The 14 Variazioni di un tema musicale are already fully formed in dodecaphonic terms and angular style. Costellazioni finds this composer at close to the peak of the avant-garde’s popularity. We hear awkward figures rumble, ripple and skitter, deep bass chords resound. The hypnotic writing evokes thoughts of distant galaxies. The work ends in a stutter that gutters and then finally peters out. He is the master of Stravinskian scurrying figuration; cool, cold with flourishing rhythmic thunder and grunt.

This is tough music presented with factual and technical diligence as well as artistic qualities. Credit to the pianist for carrying through this distinctive project from concept to execution. There’s no want of valour in choosing this music to champion.

-- MusicWeb International

"After Debussy and Schumann, Nelson Goerner comes back to the composer who revealed him to the great audience of recorded music: Chopin. His first Chopin recordings won him high praise and countless distinctions (3 Diapasons d’Or!): ‘Everything he touches seems 'right’ wrote Gramophone in a recent issue. Nicknamed ‘the great poet of the piano’, he now attacks Chopin’s 24 Préludes, which he chose to record live, in a single go, in Poland where he is particularly appreciated and considered an essential pillar of the Chopin Institute. As a complement, Nelson Goerner opts for the Barcarolle Op. 60, the Polonaise Op. 44 and the Berceuse op.57.

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REVIEW:

This is a disc that can only solidify Goerner's reputation as one of the outstanding Chopin exponents of his generation. His interpretations are never less than original, deeply considered, and filled with characteristic detail. That they also exhibit rare qualities of wisdom and discernment make him someone to return to, again and again.

– Gramophone

Four musicians among the most talented of their generation join forces to play unknown manuscripts containing unpublished sonatas by Young, Abell and anonymous composers-all this plus the complicity of Thomas Dunford and Jerome van Waerbeke.

Classical Music

Ireland’s leading collegiate choral ensemble, The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin bring us their first recording on Signum. The program of this album is a blend of Scottish and Irish music, themed around water and farewell. Conductor Desmond Early says of the album, “It is happy coincidence that the title of this disc, Invisible Stars, and the motto of University College Dublin – Ad Astra (to the stars) - connect in this... This recording is our celebration of creativity, talent, and youthful energy, and at the same time a gesture of remembrance toward the many 'invisible stars' who went before us a century ago."

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REVIEWS:

Blending ‘folk’ voices with choral precision tight harmony isn’t easy but Desmond Earley has a passionate stake in both and doesn’t put a foot wrong here.

– Choir & Organ

For sheer beauty of sound and contemplative luxuriousness, this debut by the mixed-voice Choral Scholars of University College, Dublin is an altogether captivating experience. Lovers of elegantly crafted singing will find much to enjoy here in a survey of Irish and Scottish songs that also reaches across the Atlantic in the Appalachian-accented Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair … Vocal solos are pristinely realised, the ensemble sound gilded and glowing.

– Classical Ear

This 2nd release continues Toccata Classics’ pioneering releases of music by Baltic, and Estonian, composers. Eller (1887–1970) was one of the founding fathers of Estonian music – the best-known of his students is Arvo Pärt. His huge output of piano music encompasses some 200 works, almost none of which have been recorded before.

Peter Garland is a composer, world traveler, musicologist, writer whose music is always informed by his well-traveled ear and strong sense of personal vision. (His music has appeared on five previous Cold Blue CDs.) After the Wars, a resonant, sometimes clangorous four-movement piano solo performed by new-music champion Sarah Cahill, displays a unique sense of grace and a sincerity of expression. Garland writes about the piece: “Each of the transparent and self-contained movements takes as inspiration a Chinese poem or Japanese haiku.... I explore the quality of resonance in the piano: not just the notes played on the keyboard, but the sense of echo and fade produced by a very deliberate use of pedaling, and the sustaining and release of piano keys after notes and chords are sounded. It creates a sense of timbral color and acoustic perspective (proximity and distance).... Each movement is like a single image, simply stated with relatively little temporal or thematic development—very much like the poems they are based on.” After the Wars is a 20-minute CD EP/single. MusicWeb Int’l wrote of it, “There is an interesting use of space and time in this work. On the surface, it’s quite simple, but the sounds develop over the span of the four movements as you slowly grow accustomed to the underlying structure…and after listening to this disc several times, I wanted to hear more.” Julien Cowley wrote in The Wire, “Pianistic shell bursts interspersed with wounded reflection …. Garland’s After The Wars… alternates ruggedness and delicacy, oppressive weight fringed with luminosity in a powerful evocation of desolation and scarred hope.” And Gapplegate Classical-Modern Review wrote, “Garland weaves a web of expressive, muted magic and we readily fall under its spell. Very recommended.”

Barnard, Trevor: A Piano Odyssey

In the 1970s LP cycles of Liszt’s transcriptions of Beethoven symphonies exercised some fascination. Those first forays by Cyprien Katsaris have been emulated by a fair few pianists since then.

August Stradal, whose life overlapped with that of the composer by some 26 years, has done a similar service for Liszt in making thoroughly grown-up versions of Liszt’s thirteen tone poems. Stradal was not the first – Malcolm Macdonald in his extended liner essay mentions that Carl Tausig prepared solo versions of eleven of the twelve works but some of these have been lost and what survives lacks the worked-through finesse and burly grandeur of Stradal’s efforts. Liszt made his own two piano version of these works but Stradal’s inspired efforts open the door to a much wider constituency. It is interesting to note that the orchestral versions themselves were prepared by Joachim Raff from Liszt’s piano manuscripts.

If you have already been drawn to Risto’s earlier Toccata volume then you will have acquired this one long before this review appears. Others dipping their toes into the cycle cannot fail to come away from the experience impressed.

The diminutive Orpheus drips self-absorbed romance and ominous atmosphere. Much of this mood-concentrated music exercises a sort of hypnosis on the listener – try the sustained slow-swirling introduction to Tasso. Hamlet establishes a similar spell. It has plenty of gloomy clouds but also grumbles, cascades and raves with Mephisto fury. In these aspects it is redolent of Malediction and Totentanz. Contrast the poetry with the Francesca da Rimini-style storms that follow. Risto is not short on panache as we can hear in the often resplendent final pages of these works. Hungaria follows Tasso. Alongside its struttingly rustic chivalry even the bombast works well. The shrill bagpipe whistle at the end of the poem comes off far more splendidly than it has any right to do from a ‘mere’ piano.

I am not at all sure that these solo versions do not work better as pieces of music than the orchestral editions which in Haitink’s (Philips) hands often had my attention drifting. Masur (EMI) was better as was Solti (Decca) but even they struggled.

Roll on Risto’s cycle of the Stradal Bruckner symphony arrangements. Stradal’s version of Bruckner 8 played by Risto is something I would very much like to hear. I can live in hope.

Meantime keep scanning the skies for vol. 3 of this eminent Liszt entry.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

NIcholas Sackman's music is not limited by particular stylistic lines but within the freedom of contemporary expression uses traditional qualities of harmony, pitch and rhythm to engage with the performer and listener. More simply, just really good music.

This double-disc set of new recordings includes the world premier recording of Cello Sonata in A, composed by Britten as a boy of 13 years of age. A culminating release in celebration of Britten's centenary. The booklet's liner notes were written by the artists. 

Schulhoff was one of many composers who took up the challenge to embrace jazz and to incorporate it into their music. He was one of the most successful at writing works that were no mere pastiches but genuinely jazz-inspired - ones that could just as easily have come from the pens of people like Scott Joplin or Billy Mayerl.

Fünf Pittoresken (Five Pictures) date from as far back as 1919 and are remarkable for their wit and experimental nature. The first two entitled Foxtrott and Ragtime ‘do exactly what it says on the tin’ and are clearly influenced by Scott Joplin whose Maple Leaf Rag had been such a hit in the early years of the twentieth century. That they were penned by a white Jewish Central European is surprising enough but they are convincing in their recreation of true jazz rhythms that one would normally ascribe solely to a black composer such as Joplin.

One must surely conclude that Schulhoff had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he ‘created’ the third of these pictures since it is entitled In futurum. It consists of 85 seconds of total silence which anticipates John Cage’s notorious 4'33" (by 33 years) in which a pianist sits at the piano with orchestra and no-one does anything for that precise length of time. Cage, a pioneer in indeterminacy in music, claimed that its motivation was an attempt to demonstrate that there are sounds to be heard in a concert hall full of audience even when no music is played. It will be different each time the ‘work’ is ‘performed’ with different ambient sounds occurring as well as audience breathing and the odd cough and even, perhaps, extraneous sounds from outside the building. Schulhoff’s ‘work’ may also ‘benefit’ from the same effect in a similar venue but with the technical expertise that comes into play in the recording studio such possibilities are lost. Before I read the booklet I thought I had received a rogue copy and contacted the distributors who tried 6 copies themselves before contacting the manufacturer and label owner who told them that it was not a fault. Note to self: when in doubt read the booklet first! ‘Normal service was resumed’ for Pictures 4 and 5 which were just as refreshingly jazzy as the first two.

The Piano Sonata No.2 is in a different league owing more to the French school of Ravel than to the jazzmen of the USA. A wonderfully restrained and understated first movement gives way to a mercurial second in scherzo form. The third is beautifully appealing and gentle “exuding an air of calm contentment” as the booklet notes so aptly put it. The sonata closes with a fourth movement that once again recalls Ravel and shows that Schulhoff was someone whose writing is of equal interest to that of the great French composer.

The two piano pieces that follow were composed in 1936 when the threat of Nazism was clear. The first is entitled Optimistic Composition while the second is entitled The Czech Workers and presents a militant stance that must surely be read as a challenge to the threat from the West. Schulhoff, as a communist, hoped that this threat would be defeated by the combined might of working people everywhere.

Schulhoff’s Musik für Klavier in vier teilen dating from 1920 takes us back to the days when the influence of jazz in his music was at its strongest. While this work is not overtly as jazzy as the Five Pictures that opened the disc its influence can be detected nevertheless. The second movement which is in the form of a lengthy set of ten variations is particularly affecting.

The last work on the disc is Esquisses de Jazz which was written in 1927. It is Schulhoff’s most well known work and though its subtitle is Six pièces faciles pour piano the word facile translates as easy since there is nothing ‘facile’ about it. These are piano pieces heavily influenced by jazz though they do not attempt to be jazz pieces per se; they are seen through a jazz prism while retaining a distinctly Schulhoff stamp of innovation. The one entitled Charleston is a particular case in point.

In recent years a lot more of Schulhoff’s works have been appearing on disc and about time too for they increasingly reveal a huge talent across a wide range of compositions that includes six completed symphonies. It is all the more sad to realise what could have been created subsequently had he not been cruelly arrested and sent to a concentration camp in Bavaria. There he is believed to have died from TB at the early age of 48.

This is the second disc of Schulhoff’s piano works to appear on the Grand Piano label both played by Caroline Weichert. Her deft touch and sympathetic approach enables the music to weave its spell. She has also released another disc of Grainger’s piano music for the label and previous releases on the Koch Schwann label show that she prefers to concentrate on lesser-known composers. I find this refreshing since there remains so much wonderful music to be discovered. We need people like her to help in that process.

This is a fascinating disc of music that is rarely heard and when as lovingly played as it is here deserves a wide listenership.

-- Steve Arloff, MusicWeb International

This CD, the 1st of 2 to examine American composer Farwell’s (1872-1952) piano music marks the 140th anniversary of his birth and the 60th of his death and includes a number of world premiere recordings.

Suddeutsche Orgelmeister, Vol. 4

Twenty five years after their last recording of piano duets on Chandos, the Canadien pianists Louis Lortie and Hélène Mercier return in a watershed collection of magnificently played duets by Rachmaninoff including the two suites and an arrangement for his Symphonic Dances. The Lortie/Mercier piano duo have known one another since their early teens, and have a considerable collaborative discography that showcases their affinity for the art of 4 hands and 2 pianos performances and repertoire.

Classical Music

Leopold Kozeluch (1747-1818) was born in Bohemia but spent his professional life in Vienna, where he became a famous musician and composer, for a time even eclipsing Mozart’s fame. The sonatas included in this second volume have 3 or 4 movements, of the same scope as Haydn’s sonatas. They are written in the Galante Style, with easy flowing melodies, featuring a highly developed keyboard virtuosity in the abundance of scales, arpeggios, runs in thirds and sixths, repeated notes and tremolos. Jenny Soonjin Kim plays a fortepiano (Kozeluch preferred fortepianos to harpsichords). The first volume of the complete Kozeluch Sonatas was praised by the press for its spontaneity, keen sense of the style and effortless and brilliant technique.

When Michael Gordon's Timber, scored for six amplified wooden 2-by-4s, premiered in 2009, it brought the physicality and endurance of percussion performance to a new level. In the liner notes for Slagwerk Den Haag's recording of the piece, released on Cataloupe Music in 2011, Gordon described a connection to the work of shamanist author Carlos Castaneda, whose self-imposed spirit journey in the desert could wipe the brain clean and "bring on visions." Newly recorded by Mantra Percussion and reworked by an A-list of producers and DJs, Gordon's deep exploration into the extreme possibilities of rhythm gets the full electronic treatment on Timber Remixed. This album contains six key remixes by Squarepusher, Oneohtrix Point Never, Tim Hecker, Johann Johannsson, Fennesz and Hauschka.

Classical Music

Following CD releases for Sony Korea and ARS Productions, the first of pianist William Youn’s CD series of Mozart’s piano works was released by Oehms Classics in 2013, and honored with the Pizzicato Supersonic Award (Luxembourg). Now, Oehms Classics and William Youn proudly present the second album in their Mozart series. The press has praised the Korean pianist William Youn (b. 1982) as a “genuine poet” with a “bravura technique of touch”. In 2011 he was honored with the Bavarian Art Promotion Prize in his chosen home city of Munich.

Matt Haimovitz’s continuously-evolving and intense engagement with the Bach Cello Suites reaches a new zenith with Overtures to Bach, six new commissions that anticipate and reflect each of the cello suites. The new overtures expand upon the multitude of spiritual, cross-cultural, and vernacular references found in the Bach, building a bridge from the master’s time to our own. The solo cello recital has been a Haimovitz trademark since the year 2000, when he made waves with his Bach “Listening-Room” Tour, in unconventional venues throughout the US. In the fall of 2015, he released his profound new interpretation of the Bach Suites, The Cello Suites According to Anna Magdalena, inspired and informed by an authoritative manuscript by Bach’s second wife, and performed on period instruments.

The new album, Overtures to Bach, pairs each new work with the Prélude from the suite it introduces, with Haimovitz performing on cello and cello piccolo. Philip Glass simply and eloquently prepares the audience for the first Suite with his Overture, encouraging an open and calm frame of mind. For the second suite, Du Yun creates a heartbreaking quilt of cries in The Veronica, mingling a Russian Orthodox prayer for the dead, Serbian chant, and central European gypsy fiddle music. Vijay Iyer’s Run responds to Bach’s third suite with infectious energy and kinesthetic rhythms that celebrate the natural resonance of the instrument as well as the composer’s jazz roots. Then, Roberto Sierra’s La memoria plays on our memory of Bach's Suite IV, seamlessly referencing motivic fragments and creating a kaleidoscopic mirage with the exotic flavors of Caribbean bass lines and salsa rhythms. David Sanford’s Es War, a response to the fifth suite, opens with a tour de force of pizzicato, then wrestles with Bach’s epic fugue with a saxophone’s wails. For the sixth and final suite, Luna Pearl Woolf is inspired by pre-Western Hawaiian chant, taking full advantage of the virtuosic properties of the cello piccolo and treating it operatically, from the low bass to the soprano stratosphere.

Overtures to Bach spans more than time, linking us to far-flung corners of our musical world and offering an entrée into six distinct compositional voices. Then, as Philip Glass writes, “Just let Bach’s music begin. It’s there for the listening.”

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

After a notable Debussy recital hailed by the international press, Nelson Goerner continues his Zig-Zag Territoires collaboration in the company of Robert Schumann. + On the program: two emblematic works from Schumann’s universe: the Etudes Symphoniques, op. 13 (including the posthumous etudes) and Kreisleriana, op. 16, plus a short piece Schumann said was ‘the most difficult piece ever written’: the Toccata, op. 7. + This new recording clearly demonstrates Nelson Goerner’s highly rigorous approach, exceptional generosity and richness of sound.