Returning to his beloved bassoon Peter Whelan takes a fresh look at the two surviving works by Mozart for the instrument: Concerto K. 191 and Sonata K. 292. These attractive early works were most likely composed during the composer’s time in Salzburg. The concerto is the earliest of his woodwind concertos, and has become a staple work for every bassoon player: it showcases the tremendous capabilities of the pre-nineteenth-century instrument, its agility, extraordinary range and tone color. Whelan and his virtuoso Ensemble Marsyas are playing from the original printed parts since the autograph score has not survived. While the sonata’s original medium is uncertain – for two bass instruments or bassoon and keyboard – Whelan makes it his own with Kristian Bezuidenhout performing the continuo line. Ensemble Marsyas rounds off the program with Mozart’s most dramatic work for winds, the Serenade in C minor. Composed in Vienna for the Harmonie (the bassoon’s natural home), it served as a musical laboratory where Mozart could experiment with the virtuoso and lyrical possibilities of his Viennese wind soloists who later animated his greatest operas.

In the early 19th century, while Haydn and Mozart remained revered, many of their once admired contemporaries quickly fell into oblivion and with them much delightful, finely crafted music. In a recital centered on songs of parting, Carolyn Sampson and Kristian Bezuidenhout seek to make some amends to this. They open with August Bernhard Valentin Herbing's Montan und Lalage, a miniature opera for one singer, with the keyboard-as-orchestra providing the scenery and stage action. Giving Bezuidenhout's fortepiano the recognition it deserves, the program also includes no less than two songs dedicated to the instrument, by composers we rarely hear of today: Friedrich Gottlob Fleischer and Christian Michael Wolff. But even though Mozart and Haydn are still household names, it isn’t on account of their solo songs, which makes the performers’ decision to also throw light on their less familiar work a welcome one. The program features four songs each by them, including Mozart’s Lied der Trennung (Song of Parting), which has lent its name to the entire program, as well as Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos, a dramatic cantata in which the Cretan princess Ariadne expresses her love of the Greek hero Theseus … and her agony when he sails off, leaving her alone on the island of Naxos.

REVIEW:

This a program cleverly designed, as they so often are today. The theme is separation, but the opening extensive song is by August Bernhard Valentin Herbing, a long narrative to be balanced by Joseph Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos at the other end. In between are other songs by composers both familiar and not: 4 by Mozart, 3 other ones by Haydn, interspersed with 2 by Friedrich Gottlob Fleischer and one by Christian Michael Wolff. It should be noted that the Haydn songs, apart from Arianna, aren’t from his late English settings, but are German-language pieces written a couple of decades earlier. Sampson is a “known quantity”, a pure and well-controlled soprano whose home is more or less exactly where she is here: late 18th- and early 19th Century lieder. Bezuidenhout (on loan to BIS from Harmonia Mundi) is a firstclass fortepianist, quite capable of pushing his instrument past its reasonable limits, as he does at the end of Arianna.

-- American Record Guide

A re-release of Beethoven's Sonatas Nos. 3 & 9 (Kreutzer) from celebrated violinist Viktoria Mullova and her duo partner for this recording, Kristian Bezuidenhout. The pair bring a tension-filled account of these works, displaying their energetic and spontaneous take on what's considered one of Beethoven's most challenging works.

The Baroque dream team of Rachel Podger and Kristian Bezuidenhout interpret the astonishing music of C.P.E. Bach’s Violin Sonatas in C Minor, B Minor, D Major and G Minor. The two early sonatas here from the 1730s resemble the older style of his father. Listening to these works, you can imagine J.S. Bach glancing over Emanuel's shoulders while he wrote them as a teenager at home in Leipzig. The later sonatas, written 30 to 50 years later, reveal an emancipated composer whose developed musical language embodies the 'Empfindsamer Stil', the directly emotional and rhetorical style characteristic of northern-german music of the time.

Rachel Podger writes: “It was wonderful to delve into the specific musical world that belongs to C.P.E. Bach for this recording with Kris. These violin sonatas are (quite unfortunately!) largely overshadowed by the classical Viennese sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven. Part of his genius is that he is full of surprises and unpredictable turns, and this was hugely enjoyable for me during the musical partnership with the wonderful Kristian Bezuidenhout.”

REVIEWS:

Rachel Podger and Kristian Bezuidenhout are performers of the highest level of technical polish, and I am especially impressed by Bezuidenhout’s imaginative and assertive pianism. Podger’s violin was built by the Genoese maker Antonio Pazarini (Pesarinius) in 1739. Excellent sound from Channel as usual.

-- American Record Guide

Across the later sonatas Kristian Bezuidenhout and Rachel Podger savor the qualities of coaxing, pleading, playfulness, and arresting quirkiness that signal their identification with the so-called Empfindsamer Stil. But nothing is ever cut and dried. The keyboard opening of the B minor Sonata, composed some three decades after its G minor cousin, sounds like a throwback to the teenage work. And, rich in Empfindsamer fingerprints, the Arioso with five variations proves to be a 1780 respray of an earlier work.

At one level, Bezuidenhout and Podger help to pinpoint the chronology, allotting a handsome-sounding copy of an 1805 Walther fortepiano to the later works and a Taskin-inspired harpsichord to the products of the 1730s. It’s just one example of the thoughtfulness with which they approach a set of performances that are as equally persuasive in the bustling, youthful incisiveness of the G minor and D major Sonatas, as in the pristinely-paced, probingly expressive whimsy of the Arioso. Their music-making is infectiously spontaneous yet tellingly ‘considered’ – seamless rapport and impeccably-judged articulation delighting in a stream of illuminating felicities. CPE Bach’s free-spirited sonatas have surely found their free-spirited match.

-- BBC Music Magazine

This is how it’s done, my friends. A completely scrumptious new release from the queen of the Baroque violin, Rachel Podger. In partnership with keyboardist Kristian Bezuidenhout, Rachel gives to us a bit over an hour of completely entrancing music by the often underestimated Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788), fifth child and second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach.

There should be nothing underestimated about these keyboard and violin sonatas. They are imaginative, innovative, sublime. Add to this the impeccable performances, with that breath of life Rachel delivers so well in all of her performances, the excellent partnership with Kristian Bezuidenhout, and the utterly delightful recording quality from Jared Sacks, and one has an album to savor again and again. It is a must listen recording.

There is pure joy in Podger's performances, one feels her connection with music, the composer, and her audience. Kristian Bezuidenhout is her perfect partner in these works, As with Podger, his playing is not tied to a metronome. He plays, as does she, with a degree of improvisational exploration that makes these works far more interesting than in many other hands.

Listening to them together, one feels their connection in this music. I was particularly struck by this in their excellent performance of the Sonata in C minor which fairly danced with barely contained energy in the final Presto movement – their timing together is exquisite.

The shift from harpsichord to fortepiano and back again adds great interest to the recital. With the change in instruments, the texture of the sound changes. The balance of the violin and the keyboard shifts. Hard to accomplish in a live performance, but a delightful gift across the breadth of this recording.

-- Paul Rushton of Positive Feedback

A few years after a complete recording of Mozart’s solo piano works that has gradually come to be regarded as a benchmark, Kristian Bezuidenhout has taken all the time he needed to tackle Haydn, the other towering figure of the Viennese Classical keyboard repertory: “Preparing for this recording has been a vivid reminder that it is remarkably difficult to play Haydn’s music well, but that with enough care, and attention to detail, his music has the potential to come jumping from the page. It would be hubris to suggest that I am even close to unlocking any of its secrets, but I am so humbled by the sheer beauty, humanity, wit and delightful irony of this music, that the desire to continue is irresistible.”

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REVIEW:

The listener is drawn in by the myriad subtleties of Bezuidenhout’s playing and by the glorious sounds he draws from his instrument. Soon you’re hanging on every note of this sequence that seems to travel from darkness to darkness. Most important, though, is Bezuidenhout’s playing itself. Technique is obviously not an issue. Decoration, too, is sparing rather than trowelled on. This is the very opposite of ‘look-at me’ pianism.

– Gramophone