In his ninth and tenth of a total of fourteen releases of Bach’s collected organ works, Kare Nordstoga pulls together much of what was not collected from the composer’s side- preludes and fugues. The double form prelude (or toccata) and fugue has been an established form of composition since the 1600s. The North Germans Dietrich Buxtehude and Georg Bohm made a powerful contribution to this contrastive style in which the freer first part and the more rigorous second part are united in a dynamic whole. The young Johann Sebastian harvested significant impressions from these two composers during his time in Lubeck and Luneburg, and this album was recorded in Luneburg. Kare Nordstoga (b. 1954) studied at the Norwegian Academy of Music. Following his debut in 1978, he continued his studies in London and he was for a time organist at Ullern Church, before coming to Oslo Cathedral in 1984. He has also been associated with the Norwegian Academy of Music, where he was appointed professor in 1994.

REVIEW:

Nordstoga displays a fine architectural grasp of the works and builds them with convincing inevitability. Integrity is the hallmark of all his playing: He is careful but not cautious; deliberate and determined but not dragging and dour; sure-handed and solid but not showy or superficial. The only thing I do not find here is the uniquely electrifying excitement that Ton Koopman brings to his complete cycle. But if, unlike me, your taste in Bach organ performances runs more towards the older tradition of stately grandeur, then definitely consider investing in Nordstoga.

– Fanfare

Classical Music

Lars Haugbro, who received his doctoral degree from Cornell University, made his brilliant piano debut in Oslo in 1982 and has since performed as soloist and chamber musician in Scandinavia, Italy, Spain, Russia, and the U.S. He has appeared as soloist with a number of symphony orchestras, including the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, and has made television and radio recordings for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK). He is often invited to serve as a jury member at the International Edvard Grieg Piano Competition in Bergen, and at the Young Musicians Competition in Oslo, among others.

Poets and composers have always found inspiration in the themes of Easter and it's many moods: from awe, festivity, and hope; to disappointment, betrayal, and anguish; to victory and boundless jubilation. Seen in relation to the Passions, there are few recordings of Easter hymns.

Also available: Scriabin: Symphony No. 2 & Piano Concerto / Petrenko and Scriabin: Symphony No. 1 & Prometheus / Petrenko

This CD release marks the start of a creative partnership between the Oslo Philharmonic and LAWO Classics. Alexander Scriabin’s deep immersion in esoteric philosophy and related spiritual awakening became integral to his art. The Russian composer’s initial conservative musical language evolved in the early 1900s and opened up to daring harmonic territories. His art was influenced in part by his reading of Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, a syncretic blend of ancient wisdom, occult practices, mysticism, and critical reactions to Darwin and modern "materialist" science.

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REVIEWS:

Petrenko shows an excellent grasp of each symphony's dramatic trajectory, and a broader than usual awareness of the creative legacy within which Scriabin worked.

– BBC Music Magazine

Petrenko’s debut disc with his new Oslo band should not be overlooked: Scriabin’s virtuosic writing holds no terrors for them, and they wallow in the “Voluptés” of No 3’s central movement with ravishing transparency. The Poem of Ecstasy is heady stuff, brilliantly played.

– Sunday Times (UK)

Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) is a distinctive voice in twentieth-century classical music, and together with the master of the tango, Astor Piazzolla, he is the towering musical figure of Argentina. Born in Buenos Aires of an Italian mother and a Catalonian father, Ginastera is a complex composer and personality, shaped by the traditional folk culture and history of his native country and by impulses from the world at large, during a time of radical upheavals in the realm of Western classical music. The Harp Concerto was commissioned in 1956 by Edna Phillips. The work was not premiered until 1965, and then it was the Spanish harpist Nicanor Zabaleta. When the concerto first appeared, it became a brilliant addition to the harp literature and twentieth-century instrumental concertos. Variaciones concertantes was completed more than ten years earlier and was premiered in Buenos Aires in 1953. The music is an irresistible combination of orchestral timbres and virtuosity communicating directly with the listener, especially as regards the entertainment aspect inherent in virtuosic orchestral sound and a demanding soloist performance.

Francis Poulenc is not an easy composer to relate to. Not the man himself perhaps- though possibly that too- but his music. It is somehow dated. Here is a composer who produced his best works, all more or less completely tonal, at a time when Arnold Schoenberg was writing twelve-tone music and Poulenc's countrymen Oliver Messiaen and Pierre Boulez were into innovative rhythms, scales and techniques to lift the music out of the realm of subjective emotionalism. This release features three concertos by Francis Poulenc. The Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani (1938) is considered to be the most popular and, perhaps, the most serious. The Piano Concerto (1949), a light concerto a wellspring of musical ideas, more or less brutally juxtaposed. The Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (1932) lies perhaps somewhere between these two.

Organist Halgeir Schiager's first release on the LAWO Classics label is a tribute to German composer and organist Johann Gottlob Schneider (1789-1864). Today Schneider is virtually forgotten, but in his time he was compared to Paganini and given the sobriquet "king of organists." He represents organ literature between Bach and Mendelssohn, traditionally regarded as a period of decline.

The Oslo Philharmonic and Vasily Petrenko present the first of a new series of recordings of Richard Strauss' orchestral music. This first release features the great tone poems "Also Sprach Zarathustra" and "Ein Heldenleben," both works the Oslo Philharmonic has a long history of performing at home and abroad. Vasily Petrenko, chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic since 2013, exploits the special intensity of the orchestra's string sound and it's magnificent wind and brass sections to full effect in this thrillingly virtuosic music. Vasily Petrenko is one of the most significant and galvanizing musicians alive, and has won numerous accolades for his recordings of Russian repertoire, including two Gramophone awards. With the Oslo Philharmonic, he has recorded works by Shostakovich, Szymanowski, Strauss and Prokofiev, as well as a major cycle of orchestral works by Alexander Scriabin. The Oslo Philharmonic was born in 1919 and over the next half-century, the orchestra's reputation grew steadily. In 1979, it changed forever with the arrival of a young Latvian arriving in Norway, Mariss Jansons, who transformed it to rival the great Philharmonics of Vienna, Berlin and New York.

"Bach: Sonatas" is the fourth recording in Kåre Nordstoga's series of Bach's complete organ works. The main works on this double-CD are the six "Trio Sonatas".
As a definitive collection of etudes, the trio sonatas are for classical organists what Czerny’s studies are for pianists. Playing the organ requires the ability to manoeuvre independent lines in both hands and the pedals, and this is perfected playing Bach’s sonatas. In the words of Bach connoisseur Albert Schweitzer:
"To this very day they are the Gradus ad Parnassum for every organist. Whoever has studied them thoroughly will thereafter encounter scarcely a single difficulty. The slightest unevenness in touch is heard with appalling clearness in this complicated trio playing.
The sonatas are a book of study not only for performers, but for composers as well. Bach’s private lessons for gifted students required a repertoire for the study of the noble art of polyphony. At the same time, this is concert music and art in its full complexity, where the art of polyphony is cultivated alongside the most moving melodie."

Classical Music

In 1778, Mozart spent half a year in Paris accompanied by his mother, Anna Maria. Tragedy struck in the middle of the summer, when she died of fever. Both works on this album were composed during the first weeks after their arrival in the city. In a letter to his father dated April 7, 1778, Mozart wrote that he had composed a sinfonia concertante for Mannheim musicians visiting Paris, scored for flute, oboe, horn, and bassoon. The work on this recording is considered to be a revised copy of the score, with the flute replaced by a clarinet.

Classical Music

Classical Music

All the ''pigeonholing'' and talk about genres in our day and age has led to confusion in one or another of the camps: is it jazz, is it classical, or what actually is it? With this clearly in mind, we - the classical singer and the jazz pianist - have ventured together in Terra Nova's tonal world in an attempt to create our own ''universe''. Jan Gunnar Hoff is a jazz pianist, but he composes in a style that overlaps with what can be defined as classical, with its fine melodies and melodious improvisations, and with its singable compositions. We wish to give you a genre-free musical experience, in which the music elevates the text, and in which the two of us, each in our way, bring the essence, melancholy and beauty of the music into this indefinable universe of text and melody.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Eugene Asti writes of this new release: "When I was trying to decide which solo pieces to record, I felt drawn to the late piano works as they seemed in some way related to his songs. Brahms's Lieder are some of his most intimate and personal compositions, and although small in scale, there is a wealth of emotional depth and poetic sensibility to be explored in them. The exact same thing can be said of the late piano works, which are likewise small in dimension and certainly not composed as virtuosic showpieces. They are also among the most beautiful and profound of all his works, possessing a truly vocal quality with which, as a song pianist, I can immediately identify (some could almost be called 'songs without words'). In the making of this recording, I was very fortunate that LAWO chose a wonderful reconditioned Steinway D dating from 1893, which is just a year after the composition of these late piano pieces." Eugene Asti is one of the foremost accompanists of his generation, and regularly tours and records as a solo musician. His many recordings have garnered him widespread critical acclaim.

Classical Music

Classical Music

The idea of arranging Janacek's two string quartets for string orchestra has implicated two different approaches for me. The first is timbral: while the quartets' ever-changing dramatics make it challenging to ''resonate'' with the solo instruments in a string quartet, the collective sound of the orchestra adds a new dimension to the music. The other approach was to incorporate Leo Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata into Janacek's music of the same name, and thereby introduce a new form of drama. In his quartet, Janacek does not follow the storyline of Tolstoy's novella as closely as Arnold Schoenberg once did with his musical setting of Richard Dehmel's poem, Verklarte Nacht. However Janacek's writing brings on intense emotions with strong linguistic and theatrical gestures, which, in my opinion, would be further reinforced in direct connection with the novella. Tentatively, we introduced a selection of quotes from the novella in our concerts and this eventually led to the idea of developing a radio drama performance. In this arrangement, the quartet's four movements are performed in their entirety, ''strategically'' positioned in four crucial points in the story, while parts of the music also serve as a dramatic foundation for the text. In the process of text adaptation, the novella's plot and emotional aspects were given priority over its philosophical considerations.

The period instrument ensemble Barokkanerne presents Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in a debut recording with LAWO Classics. Led by Alfredo Bernardini, the group performs ground-breaking symphonies and concertos of this ardent next-eldest son of Johann Sebastian Bach.

The music spans more than 30 years of C.P.E. Bach’s life as a composer - from his engagement as court musician in Berlin to his last years as director of music in Hamburg. This is Sturm and Drang and Enlightenment at its fieriest. Reason and feelings are distilled in a contrast-laden musical universe - Empfindsamkeit, sensitivity - in which humans and things human are the new wine of the age. Italian baroque oboe specialist Alfredo Bernardini, one of the world’s leading performers of early music, has garnered a number of international prizes for his many recordings. He is, among other things, the founder and artistic director of the ensemble ZEFIRO. Principal harpsichordist Christian Kjos is a sought-after performer who as a member of the quintet Ensemble Meridiana has won a number of prizes at international early music competitions.

Barokkanerne, which debuted in the summer of 1989, has remained a Norwegian early music ensemble with an extensive concert schedule - including its own concert series in Oslo. The orchestra is a frequent guest at festivals throughout Norway and has been involved in a number of productions for Norwegian Radio and Television (NRK). The album was recorded in East Fredrikstad Church. - LAWO

Predicting which musical currents would sweep the young William Walton along in the mid 1920s must have been tricky. The composer had already given birth to the acerbic, neo-classical take on texts by Edith Sitwell that was Façade (1922). Two years later he spent a season knocking out foxtrots for the Savoy Orpheus Band, and even started work on a concerto for two pianos, jazz band and orchestra. Four years after that, Walton hatched plans for his first orchestral concerto proper: a score that would take elements from both those pieces but would stand with at least one foot in the late Romantic tradition of Elgar, Bax and others. After being drawn to the viola as an instrument of depth, Walton decided that a Viola Concerto was viable. In the words of the composer’s biographer Michael Kennedy, the ‘dark and huskily passionate sound of the viola became the perfect medium for the [concerto’s] prevailing mood of plaintive melancholy. Coupled with this work is Christian Sinding’s Suite Im Alten Stil.

Classical Music