Sibelius studied the violin in his youth, and actively entertained the prospect of a career as a professional violinist for much of his student life. After graduating from the Helsinki Music Institute, in 1890, he went to Vienna to continue his studies, and while there he even auditioned (unsuccessfully) for a place in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. So, it comes as no surprise that the instrument plays an important place in his compositional output. What might be surprising is that he wrote only one concerto – this might perhaps be due to the difficult conception of the work. The first performance received mixed reviews, and led to extensive revision of the score. It was only when Jascha Heifetz in the 1930s started to perform the concerto regularly that it gained its place in the standard repertoire. Although there was no second concerto, Sibelius’s numerous other works for violin and orchestra are no mere miniatures, as the recordings on this album amply demonstrate. The acclaimed international virtuoso James Ehnes is accompanied here by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Edward Gardner.

One of the foremost musicians of his generation, James Ehnes continues to dazzle audiences around the world. Here he joins the BBC Philharmonic and Sir Andrew Davis in a recording of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto. Written for the Polish virtuoso Samuel Dushkin, the four-movement work takes the music of Bach as its inspiration, and is built around a chord of the notes D, E, and A, which Stravinsky described as his ‘passport to the concerto’ and with which the solo violin part opens each movement. Dushkin gave the premiere, conducted by Stravinsky, in Berlin in 1932.

Apollon musagète, a ballet in two parts for string orchestra, was written in 1927-28, and demonstrates the composer’s complete rejection of the Russian folk music and idioms that had been so instrumental in his previous ballets (The Firebird, Petrushka). They are replaced by a concentration on ‘pure form’, which became known as his neo-classical style. The album is completed by his two orchestral suites – light-hearted music arranged from piano duets he had written in the 1910s – and Scherzo à la russe, a showpiece for the Paul Whiteman band that he composed in the early 1940s when newly arrived in California.

Nielsen’s epic Violin Concerto was premiered in Copenhagen in February 1912, by violinist Peder Møller. Nominally the work is set in two movements; both open with a slow section and move to a faster one. Whilst unusual, this could be seen as a more usual fast – slow – fast three movement form, but with an extensive slow introduction to the first movement. The music moves quickly from one idea to the next, and overall has a bold, playful and optimistic feel. In stark contrast, although written only a few years later, the fourth symphony is more cohesive and unified as a work.

Written against the background of the first world war, the work is a celebration of life itself. Just before the premier in 1916, Nielsen described it as: ‘Music is Life, and, like it, inextinguishable.’ Composed in the usual four movement form, each movement continues from the last without a break. The final movement features two sets of timpani battling each other across the orchestra. The recording was made in Bergen’s Grieghallen, in Surround Sound, and is available as a hybrid SACD and in Spatial Audio.

REVIEWS:

Nielsen's Violin Concerto couldn’t have a better advocate than James Ehnes: strong in his lyricism when he needs to be, alert to all dynamics and a sense of fantasy which is outstanding in the two cadenzas.

-- BBC Music Magazine

James Ehnes – that most elegant and unflashy of players – seems to relish all that is unexpected about the piece...Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic give it real backbone and play like its greatest champions.

-- Gramophone

In Nielsen's Fourth Symphony, Gardner succeeds handily. The orchestra plays outstandingly well for him in all departments and he keeps the symphony moving. This is appropriate because all the movements are connected. I found his slightly quicker tempo for the second movement convincing with the woodwinds as delectable as one would expect and the dynamics quieter than in some recordings.

-- MusicWeb International

Alban Berg's output proved tremendously influential in the development of music in the twentieth century. His natural ability to write lyrical melodic lines probably remained the most outstanding quality of his style. His Op. 1 Piano Sonata was the fulfilment of a task set by his teacher and peer Schoenberg to write non-vocal music. The Passacaglia, written between the sonata and World War I, was only completed in short-score, and may have been intended to form part of a larger work. Both pieces are recorded here in skillful orchestrations by Sir Andrew Davis.

The Three Orchestral Pieces were composed alongside his first great masterpiece, Wozzeck, and could be seen as a tribute to his musical hero, Mahler. The Violin Concerto, from 1935, was commissioned by the American violinist Louis Krasner, but was inspired by the premature death (from polio) of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler and the architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, hence the subtitle ‘to the memory of an angel’. It proved to be one of the composer’s final works as Berg died later that year as the result of an abscess from an insect sting.

REVIEW:

The first track on this disc brings us Andrew Davis’s orchestration of Berg’s Piano Sonata. Berg wrote this accomplished piece when he was studying composition with Arnold Schoenberg. Originally meant to have had a slow movement and a finale, it ended up stand-alone. It is conceived in standard sonata-allegro form. The liner notes mention the structurally conventional fact of the repeated exposition. Harmonically, the work is very chromatic. It presents unstable key centres, whole-tone scales, with sometimes dense, often polyphonic, music. In its original incarnation, it demands a highly technical pianism. Andrew Davis explains that “its emotional and dramatic range is enormous”, and that this new orchestration needed to relate to “the sonorities of the era” – those of Mahler, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Schrecker. The result is a wonderful tapestry of sound. The mood varies from gentle to fervent, with a satisfyingly gentle conclusion. The organic nature of the sonata form seems to unfold continually, leading us on a magical, if sometimes disconcerting, journey. For my review, I listened several times to this hauntingly lovely re-creation of Berg’s early masterwork: it has suddenly become one of my favourite Berg pieces.

Berg wrote the Three Pieces for orchestra during the opening stages of the First World War. They present a frightening musical image of the unfolding horrors. It has been pointed out that they have Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for orchestra as an inspiration. Yet, they sound nothing like the elder man’s work. In fact, Mahler is the stylistic arbiter. One commentator has suggested that it is Mahler’s Eleventh Symphony, in the same way that Brahms One is Beethoven’s 10^th (or is it 11^th?).

The movingly beautiful Violin Concerto was the last major work that Berg composed, and one of his greatest. It was dedicated “to the memory of an angel”, the daughter of Gustav Mahler’s widow Alma and the architect Walter Gropius. Sadly, Manon died of polio at only eighteen. The work is a perfect balance of lyricism and drama. James Ehnes’s performance is magical. He tends towards optimism, which seems to bolster Berg’s contention that serial music could also be romantic. I was taken by his interpretation of this concerto and the integration of the various stylistic innovations such as the Bach chorale, the waltz-like theme and the Carinthian folk tune. The balance between the structural serialism and the more tonal moments is well managed here. There is a tenderness of tone that sings of affection but sometimes echoes despair, a tempestuous protest against life’s tragedy, and a sad, requiem-like epilogue.

Gavin Plumley’s booklet notes in English, German and French give a detailed introduction to all four works. “A note by the conductor” is a valuable extra: an essay-length appreciation of Berg’s music and an explanation of his approach to the two orchestrations. There are several photographs of the composer, the recording session, the violin soloist and the orchestra and conductor.

This is a remarkable disc. I enjoyed the two transcribed works, which genuinely add to our appreciation and understanding of Alban Berg’s earlier achievement. The performance of the two works of genius – the Three Pieces for orchestra and the Violin Concerto – are revelatory in their sympathy and understanding. It is an album that all enthusiasts of the composer must own.

-- MusicWeb International (John France)

During his long and exceptionally fruitful creative life, Richard Strauss (1864–1949) composed only a few works for the cello. Only three have survived and small as that number may seem, those cello works are critical to the composer’s development. Daniel Muller-Schott sees the early Sonata for cello and piano op. 6 and the late tone poem “Don Quixote” op. 35 as marking the path that was to lead Strauss within the space of a few years from Romanticism to the Modern era in music. The cellist highlights this watershed in Strauss’s artistic development with his own transcriptions, expressly made for this album, of the Lieder “Zueignung” op. 10/1 and “Ich trage meine Minne” op. 32/1.

Four years after a highly successful Bartok recording with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Edward Gardner here returns to the composer on SACD, with James Ehnes as solo violinist, and his Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. The central piece in this recording is the Concerto for Orchestra, the largest work that Bartok completed during the last five years of his life and described by the composer, in the program notes for its 1944 premiere, as ‘a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.’ It is joined by the Dance Suite, the immediate predecessor, among Bartok’s few works for full orchestra without a soloist, of the Concerto for Orchestra, though by more than two decades; and by the violin Rhapsodies, the colorful folk influences of which are revealed by James Ehnes, a specialist in the repertoire, who already has recorded the complete sonatas as well as the concertos for violin and for viola to critical acclaim.

As a pianist, Dohnányi was legendary. As a composer, however, he was for many years dismissed as little more than a musical adjunct of Brahms. Certainly his music is more conservative than that of his contemporaries, but it is hard to see how anyone could fail to be engaged by its humour and passion. Wtih music this rich in detail you need a top-flight orchestra to bring out all the nuances and subtlety in the orchestration. Matthias Bamert and the BBC Philharmonic have already proved themselves worthy Dohnányi advocates. The irrepressible Howard Shelley is the pianist in the virtuosic piano concerto. Clifford Lantaff is the BBC Philharmonic's own renowned harpist and the young James Ehnes, who performed with such élan on Chandos' recent Hummel disc, is the soloist in the violin concerto.