Also available on Blu-ray

BRAHMS, J.: Serenade No. 2 / Alto Rhapsody / Symphony No. 2 (Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Nelsons) (NTSC)

In 2014, all signs pointed to a new beginning at the Lucerne Festival. For the first time, the festival would take place without the incomparable Claudio Abbado, with the young Latvian Andris Nelsons leading the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. Nelsons had already won the trust and respect of both listeners and performers in a moving memorial concert for Abbado in Lucerne. He is known internationally as one of the most gifted conductors of his generation. Now he was poised to lead the prestigious festival into a new era – he brilliantly mastered this “greatest challenge”(as he himself called it) of his career. The audience and the musicians responded with heart-felt gratitude. “He is aware of every single player and carries us on an unbelievable wave of enthusiasm”, according to concertmaster Sebastian Breuninger. Solo violist Wolfram Christ adds, “Nelsons accepts what is inherent in our orchestra and what comes from Abbado; he builds on it and makes it into something new.”

ANDRIS NELSONS CONDUCTS BRAHMS

Johannes Brahms:
Serenade No. 2 in A Major, Op. 16
Alto Rhapsody, Op. 53
Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73

Sara Mingardo, contralto
Bavarian Radio Chorus
Lucerne Festival Orchestra
Andris Nelsons, conductor

Recorded live at the Concert Hall of KKL Luzern, 15–16 August 2014

Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: PCM Stereo / Dolby Digital 5.1 / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Subtitles: German, English, French, Japanese, Korean
Running time: 109 mins
No. of DVDs: 1 (DVD 9)

Steinway ambassador, Guildhall professor, and cofounder of the London Piano Festival, Charles Owen turns to the late piano works by Johannes Brahms for his latest AVIE release. Within this collection of Capriccios, Rhapsodies and Intermezzi, Charles reveals myriad moods with the composer harking back as well as facing forward- from evocations of Schubert, Schumann and Liszt in the Eight Klavierstucke, Op. 76; winter-like darkness in the two Op. 79 Rhapsodies; Hungarian foot-stomping dance forms in the seven Fantasies that comprise Op. 116; nostalgic contemplation in the Op. 117 Intermezzi; romantic inflections in Op. 118 Klavierstucke which were dedicated to Clara Schumann; and the tonally forward Klavierstucke, Op. 119. “A class above the rest… His performances are underpinned by an unwavering musicality that is enhanced by close attention to the score.” (International Piano) “Exemplary. Classic. Spellbinding. And enthusiastically recommended.” (Fanfare) “Fantastically versatile… he hits the nail on the head… very stylish, very faithful.” (BBC Radio 3 Record Review)

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REVIEW:

In the Op. 117 Owen finds an apt simplicity to its opening number, while the second has a nice gentleness. The third is filled with a tangible sadness, and is nicely inward—altogether more urgent than Jonathan Plowright, who produces one of the most touchingly withdrawn readings on record. In Op. 116 Owen is particularly telling in the A minor Intermezzo, which has a pleasing intimacy, contrasting with the turbulence of the following number and the sonorously beautiful E major Adagio that forms the set’s centrepiece.

The two Op 79 Rhapsodies are another highlight of this set, with Owen conveying the requisite sense of power, surmounting their difficulties with ease and making the much-played G minor very much his own.

– Gramophone

BRAHMS String Sextets Nos. 1 1 and 2 1. String Quintets Nos. 1 2 and 2 2 • Alexander Str Qrt; 1,2 Toby Appel (va); 1 David Requiro (vc) • FOGHORN 2012 (2 CDs: 130:33)


Completed in 1860, the first of Brahms’s two sextets is an effusive outpouring of youthful ardor that belies the age and life-experience of the 27-year-old composer who wrote it. By 1860, Brahms had already lived through the harrowing events of Schumann’s attempted suicide, commitment to a mental institution, and premature death, not to mention the effects of those events on Clara and her children. But Brahms was also in love with Clara, or at least with some idealized love surrogate for Clara, and this B?-Major Sextet seems to sing a song of blissful, sun-filled days, until the arrival of the second movement, that is—a set of variations in D Minor on a theme strongly redolent of the Gypsy melos Brahms picked up during his tour with Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi and which would infuse much of his music for the rest of his life.


Perhaps the most amazing aspect of this Sextet is the clarity of the textures and lines Brahms maintains throughout the work, in spite of the addition of two more instruments to the ensemble and the thickness of the scoring. It’s a transparency that can be heard with penetrating purity in this performance by the Alexander Quartet in which Tony Appel takes the first viola part, and David Requiro takes the second cello part.


Four years later, Brahms turned his attention to a second sextet, this time in G Major, completing it in 1865. Throughout its composition, Brahms was involved in the most serious romantic dalliance of his life, one that very nearly led to the marriage altar. The woman was Agathe von Siebold, to whom Brahms had proposed. Then, suddenly, Brahms got cold feet and broke off the engagement. What this has to do with the Sextet is that it contains one of the composer’s rare (perhaps only) use of a musical cryptogram in which bars 162–168 of the first movement contain the notes A-G-A-D-H (B)-E, a reference to Agathe.


The G-Major Sextet is also richly melodic, but tinged perhaps with just a bit of wistful nostalgia and regret; at 32, Brahms is becoming the sorrowful, lonely traveler we know from many of his later works. The minor-key Scherzo, which now comes in second place, and the Poco Adagio which follows it, have a certain portentous gravitas about them, as if Brahms now knows the journey going forward will not be a particularly happy one for him.


Toby Appel and David Requiro switch roles for the G-Major Sextet, with Appel playing second viola and Requiro playing first cello. The effect on the ensemble is a darkening one, which suits the music perfectly. Go-to, long-time favorites in this piece have been the Nash Ensemble on Onyx and the Raphael Ensemble on Hyperion, but once again, the Alexander Quartet, joined by Appel and Requiro, makes a most persuasive case for the score with a tonal refulgence, textural translucence, and expressivity of phrasing that are hard to resist.


Much later in Brahms’s output come the two string quintets. The F-Major was written in 1882 at Bad Ischl, the composer’s favorite summer retreat. The normally highly self-critical Brahms was so pleased with the work that he wrote to his publisher, “You have never had such a beautiful work from me,” and in a letter to Clara Schumann, he called it “one of my finest works.” History has not necessarily concurred, if one judges by the number of recordings the piece has received; at around 30, it would seem to be Brahms’s least popular chamber work. Hearing it, one has to wonder why, for it contains some of the composer’s most haimish music, warm, sun-drenched, and filled with the optimism and promise borne by a spring day. Unusual for Brahms’s larger chamber works as well is the fact that the Quintet is in three movements instead of four, with the second movement combining elements of a slow movement and a Scherzo into one.


I first learned the quintets from the 1970s LP recordings by the Guarneri Quartet with Michael Tree, which I reviewed in their digitized transfers in 32:6. The players bring a great deal of warmth and bigheartedness to their readings, but they’re perhaps not quite as technically polished as are the Boston Symphony Chamber Players on a Nonesuch CD, which I’ve long enjoyed. I haven’t heard the Uppsala Chamber Soloists’ recent entry on Daphne, which Lynn Bayley praised highly in 37:1, but of those I am familiar with—and in addition to the above-cited Guarneri and Boston versions, they include the Juilliard Quartet with Walter Trampler and the Hagen Quartet with Gérard Caussé—I’d have to say that the Alexander Quartet with Tony Appel outshines them all. The readings are closest to the classic Guarneri accounts in their warmth and beauteous sound, but more technically polished, better balanced, and offering more detailed recorded sound.


The same may be said of the G-Major Quintet, op. 111, the work Brahms intended to be his last, but as we know, Fate had other plans for him. The Quintet was composed in 1890, again at Bad Ischl, as the previous Quintet had been. Surprisingly, there’s no sense of leave-taking, nothing autumnal in the character of this music. It’s in fact quite joyful. In certain ways, however, it does sum up the totality of Brahms’s art. It has been called the composer’s most cosmopolitan work, suggesting a diversity of Italian, Viennese, Hungarian, and Slavic influences. The score has an almost serenade-like personality to it, reflecting back on Brahms’s early orchestral serenades.


These are performances to fall in love with and to live with happily ever after.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Classical Music

Classical Music

REQUIEM, OVERTURES, SYMPHONIES

Brahms: Symphony No. 1, Variations on a Theme by Haydn & 5 H

This is a DSD (Direct Stream Digital) recording

Lullabies of my sorrow", that is how Brahms described his short pieces for piano, the intermezzi, capriccii, Klavierst�cke and others. In the small form he expresses his deepest musical thoughts, full of tenderness and melancholy. A new recording with Norwegian pianist H�kon Austb�, who shows his deep insight into this complex music. Austb� already revealed his great artistry in his recordings of Erik Satie and of the complete Lyrische St�cke of Edvard Grieg, which received rave reviews.

Apart from his high-profile concert activities, Franz Konwitschny was inseparably associated with the foundation and development of the new Eterna label. Between 1959 and 1961 Eterna issued all Beethoven’s and Schumann’s symphonies in the then innovative stereo format. Like all of Konwitschny’s late recordings, these gramophone records are now sought-after collector’s items that offer interpretations of lasting significance. One such notable document of the great maestro is the present recording of Johannes Brahms’s First Symphony, made in June 1962 only weeks before Konwitschny’s death. The producer of this recording, Dieter-Gerhardt Worm, praises “the coherence and euphony of the interpretation. Konwitschny does nothing subjectively, he interprets the work. When I played Konwitschny the recording in hospital before his last concert tour, tears of joy rolled down his face.” Worm, who worked on most of Konwitschny’s recordings as a young production manager for the Eterna label, remembers the focused studio work and the immense artistic importance of the conductor: “As a conductor, he was always one of the greatest for me. What he did as a Bruckner conductor, for instance, was incredible. Konwitschny was more than a musician to whom one could say anything; he was someone who knew instinctively how to apply what he had learnt and integrate it into his conducting gestures.”

BRAHMS, J.: Violin Concerto / TCHAIKOVSKY, P.I.: Symphony No

A beguiling take on the Hungarian Dances with lashings of rubato, coupled to a set of waltzes that exchanges salon innocence for concert hall sophistication.

– BBC Music Magazine

BRAHMS GREATEST HITS (ECO-FRIE

No musician of our time is more closely associated with the Brahms piano concertos than Rudolf Buchbinder. The patrician Austrian pianist, who even possesses copies of the composer’s autograph scores and piano parts, stated that “it requires a whole lifetime to become intimate with Brahms’s sound world and achieve the maturity that gives you new freedom as a performer”. He represents the living proof of that assertion. Buchbinder’s interpretations are further claimed to be “a modern-day point of reference” to quote the leading American critic Jed Distler on his first recording of Brahms’s piano concertos in the late 1990s.Sony Classical releases the live recordings of Brahms’s two masterpieces for piano and orchestra – one from the composer’s firebrand youth, the other from his mellow maturity – which Buchbinder, approaching his 70th birthday, made with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by his dear friend and esteemed collaborator Zubin Mehta. Mehta, whose ties with Brahms’s adopted home of Vienna are nearly as deep as the soloist’s, has cited Brahms as one of the two composers (Richard Strauss being the other) whose works, more than any others, inspired him to become a conductor.In 2015, Buchbinder and Mehta united to perform Brahms’s piano concertos with the quintessential Brahmsian orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic. It was a veritable summit meeting of great interpreters of these concertos. The reviewer for Vienna’s Kurier wrote of these performances, “what Rudolf Buchbinder, the Vienna Philharmonic and conductor Zubin Mehta delivered at the Musikverein already deserves the accolade ‘milestone’. Here were a phenomenal piano virtuoso, a no less outstanding orchestra and a deeply knowledgeable conductor collaborating to perfection and producing an image of Brahms that does honour not only to Vienna.”

ANDRE WATTS LIVE IN TOKYO 1980

This album marks a milestone in the extensive discography of the Hagen Quartett – myrios classics is honoured to present their first recording of a Brahms string quartet. The quartet op. 67 is paired with Brahms’ piano quintet op. 34. Here, the Hagen Quartett is joined by their regular collaborator, pianist Kirill Gerstein. The unprecedented three-decade career of the Hagen Quartet began in 1981. Its early years, marked by a series of prizes in chamber music competitions and an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon that was to produce around forty-five albums over the following twenty years, enabled the group to work its way through the virtually un- limited quartet repertoire from which the distinctive profile of the Hagens has emerged. Collaborations with artistic personalities such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt and György Kurtág are as important to the Hagen Quartet as its concert appearances with performers including Maurizio Pollini, Mitsuko Uchida, Sabine Meyer, Krystian Zimerman, Heinrich Schiff and Jörg Widmann. The group’s concert repertoire and discography feature attractive and intelligently arranged programmes embracing the entire history of the string quartet, from its pre-Haydn beginnings right through to Kurtág. The Hagen Quartet also works closely with composers of its own generation, whether by reviving existing works or by commissioning and premiering new pieces.

Starring The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Solveig Kringelborn, Swedish Radio Choir.

Brahms: Violin Sonatas

Classical Music

After the success of his album of the 2nd Concerto of Brahms, Joseph Moog follows with a superb recording of the turbulent 1st Concerto, coupled with the late Piano Pieces op.119.

Gramophone said of the 2nd concerto, “Moog’s technical aplomb is abundantly apparent... the scherzo sounds almost inhumanly easier here.” Pizzicato said “Moog plays with imagination and individuality... peerless accompaniment and brilliant, virtuoso playing.”

Brahms: The Symphonies, Haydn Variations & 8 Hungarian Dance

Classical Music

On this new release the Fischer Duo beautifully performs the two Brahms Sonatas for Cello and Piano. This album also includes Two Songs for Alto, Viola (or Cello) and Piano, Op. 91, performed with cello alongside mezzo soprano Abigail Fischer. Since 1971 when they started playing together, the Fischer Duo has delighted lovers of chamber music across the country with performances described as "boldly imaginative and technically assured," (Boston Globe), "intense and persuasive" (Gramophone), and "Soaring lines with both beauty and intensity" (New York Times). The Fischer Duo has been widely praised by music critics for its choice of repertoire. Thoroughly versed in the classical repertoire of Brahms, Beethoven and Schumann, the Fischer Duo has acquired an equally impressive reputation for rediscovering neglected works of the past and for commissioning new pieces from masters such as George Rochberg, Richard Wilson, Samuel Jones, Augusta Read Thomas, Pierre Jalbert and over 20 more.

Asked the question ‘How many sonatas for violin and piano did Johannes Brahms compose?’, many lovers of chamber music would probably answer three, and maybe also add their respective keys and opus numbers. When pressed, a number of them would also remember the so-called F.A.E. Sonata, a collaborative effort by the young Brahms, Albert Dietrich and their mentor Robert Schumann. But very few would probably think of the two Opus 120 sonatas, composed in 1894 for clarinet (or viola) and piano, but a year later published in the composer’s own version for the violin. As the range of the B flat clarinet goes a fourth lower than that of the violin, Brahms had been forced to make considerable revisions to the clarinet part – which in turned entailed changes in the piano part, and consequently the printing of a new piano score. The seasoned team of violinist Ulf Wallin and pianist Roland Pöntinen have now decided to record all the Brahms sonatas, and the results are being released on two albums, the first one including the first of the ‘official’ sonatas, No. 1 in G major, Op. 78, the F minor Sonata from Op. 120 and Brahms’s Scherzo from the F.A.E. Sonata. Wallin and Pöntinen round off the programme with transcriptions of two of Brahms’s more lyrical songs.

Since adopting a new artistic profile, the Hague Philharmonic is demonstrating more than ever that symphonic music can still be meaningful to large and diverse audiences in the 21st century. At the new Zuiderstrandtheater in Scheveningen, the orchestra's home venue, prior to concerts audiences are treated to a lively RO-starter pre-program of live music and interviews. Everything on this recording fits like a glove - musicians, conductor and sound technique are at the highest of their abilities. Soprano Renate Arends and baritone Thomas Oliemans are internationally acclaimed soloists with both beautiful and strong careers in opera, oratorium and song.

These works by Johannes Brahms certainly need no introduction, as they are recognized as being among the greatest of all clarinet works. These are superb performances on historical instruments. Marie Ross is one of the most innovative leaders of the next generation of early music performers. She frequently performs with superstars like Cecilia Bartoli and Lawrence Brownlee in the world's most famous theaters, Th��tre des Champs-�lys�es and Th��tre du Ch�telet in Paris, Theater an der Wien in Vienna, and the Berliner Philharmonie, to name a few. She is the Associate Principal Clarinetist with the French orchestra, Ensemble Matheus (Jean-Christophe Spinosi) where she performs everything from Mozart on the 5-key classical clarinet to premieres of contemporary works by composers like Guillaume Connesson on the modern clarinet. She can be heard chatting about her performing experiences, with colleagues and artists of various disciplines, and about other topics like her historical clarinet collection on her podcast, Fidelio.

The Italian-born pianist and Leeds competition winner Alessio Bax returns with his third solo recital disc for Signum. His programme surveys a selection of highlights from Brahms' pianistic output, charting his development from the early lyrical collection '4 Ballades' (1854) through to the 'eight perfect gems' that are the 8 Klavierstücke Op.76 (1871-78). Bax also tackles Brahms' fiendish set of 'Variations on a Theme of Pagainini, Op.35', which Bax describes in the programme notes as one of 'the most fearsome works ever written for piano'.

Paul Watkins presents three enduring masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire, Johannes Brahms’s two cello sonatas and the Clarinet Trio. Joining Mr. Watkins are two musicians of the highest caliber, the pianist Ian Brown, his established duo partner, and clarinetist Michael Collins. Completed in 1865, the Cello Sonata No. 1 is somewhat reserved in character, with an elaborate fugal finale that pays homage to Bach. Some twenty years later, Brahms composed his more adventurous, expansive and extroverted Cello Sonata No. 2. The Clarinet Trio, op. 114 was written for clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, an artist who inspired Brahms to compose a series of works for the clarinet considered some of the supreme masterpieces in the instrument’s repertoire. “Perhaps no clarinetist around today is capable of floating a purer, smoother and more beautifully contoured melodic line than Michael Collins, and he is often heard at his best in [Brahms’s] four late masterpieces.” - BBC Music Magazine “Paul Watkins [is] unquestionably, in my opinion one of today’s foremost cellists.” - Fanfare

This Oehms Classics 2CD set presents a complete edition of the four symphonies of Johannes Brahms by the Tonkünstler Orchestra led by Andrés Orozco-Estrada. The Tonkünstler Orchestra is among the most important institutions on the Austrian music scene. The orchestra maintains a concert repertoire from Viennese Classicism to the Romantic period through to music of the 21st c. Mr. Orozco-Estrada, born in Colombia and active on the Viennese music scene since 1997, concludes his music directorship of the Tonkünstler Orchestra, which he’s held since the 2009/2010 season, in September 2015.

As a tribute to Alexander Baillie on his 60th birthday, he and John Thwaites join together to create an outstanding release of cello and piano music by Brahms. The Brhams Sonatas have formed part of many a recital by Baillie and Thwaites over the years but what makes these so special are the pianos. The pianos for this release were chosen specifically for each sonata and are authentic to the time of the composition.