If Art Tatum had been white, he might have made a career as a great classical pianist. Had Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938) been black, he might have become a great jazzer. His best playing is said to have been to private gatherings in his New York salon, and his compositions are beautifully wrought for the quiet delight of connoisseurs. They are relatively, but only relatively, easy listening. Virtuosi sometimes play the short pieces here as encores, when they do all the hard work and the audience relaxes. They are stylishly served in a recording which captures the sensitive colouring of this 34-year-old Russian pianist.

-- Adrian Jack, BBC Music

*** Please note: while the booklet includes a synopsis and notes in English, the printed libretto is in German only. ***

Schwarzschwanenreich ("Realm of the Black Swan") is that dark chamber of the human psyche in which a woman is driven by guilt and shame to kill her own illegitimate child. She is execrated by a cruel, intolerant society, and even the love of a good man cannot save her from the flames, although it does reconcile her to her fate.

Siegfried Wagner had all the basic skills needed to conceive a viable operatic plot and put together a serviceable libretto. The plot can obviously be linked with that of many operas whose heroines are in some sense outsiders, from Euryanthe to Elektra, and in 1910, when Schwarzschwanenreich was written, it could almost have been taken as a bid to wrest the high ground of expressionistic melodrama from such wild radicals as Schoenberg, not to mention the more conventional Zemlinsky or Schreker. Wresting the high ground was not Siegfried Wagner's way, however, and the leisurely lyricism of the opera's Prelude, harmonically constrained and rhythmically flaccid, gives notice that he prefers the happy endings of fairy tales to the harsh resolutions of tragedy. As with his first opera, Der Beirenhiriuter, the livelier scenes work best. There's a shameless rip-off of Hagen's vassalsummoning (GOtterddmmerung) in Act 1, and some strong moments of confrontation and recrimination later on, but even these tend to run out of steam, and attempts to modulate to a more elevated tone are at best bland and at worst banal.

Most of the Thuringian team throw themselves uninhibitedly into the piece. Kerstin Quandt is too restrained a villainess, but Beth Johanning and Walter Raffeiner, as the unfortunate heroine and her honest but ineffective lover, work through moments of vocal bluster to achieve some robustly ardent characterization. The recording strikes a reasonable balance between voices and orchestra, and the conductor sustains as high a level of dramatic engagement as the patchy score permits. The libretto included is in German only, but there is a detailed English synopsis.

-- Gramophone [11/1995]

KORNGOLD: Captain Blood / STEINER: The Three Musketeers

VITOLS: Dramatic Overture / Fantasie / Spiriditis / 'Autumn

STANFORD: Sonatas for Organ, Opp. 151-153

BRETON: Piano Trio in E Major / String Quartet in D Major

LUMBYE: Orchestral Works, Vol. 2

CASTELNUOVO-TEDESCO: Shakespeare Songs

Addinsell: Goodbye Mr. Chips - A Tale of Two Cities

BEST CHINESE EVERGREENS

HE / DING / HUANG: Chinese Orchestral Works

Includes concerto for zghonghu, op. 1 "su wu". Ensemble: Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor: Wing-Sie Yip.

ZHU, J.: Symphonic Fantasia / Symphony No. 4

Includes spring festival overture. Ensemble: Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor: Lim Kek-Tjiang.
Includes the white-haired girl. Ensemble: Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor: Lim Kek-Tjiang.

Ma: Symphony No. 2 - Song of the Mountain Forest

GREAT WALL SYMPHONY

VIOLIN CONCERTO 'WANG HAOJUN'

PACINI: Saffo

SUPPE: Marches / Waltzes / Polkas

The selections on this disc were recorded live at the Guerrero Foundation's 1994 Prizewinner's Concert.

RESPIGHI: Bella dormente nel bosco (La)

A genuine discovery—constantly inventive music of considerable achievement, for which Gérard Korsten obtains performances of real distinction from his orchestra.

First things first. Adolf Fredrik Lindblad was a Swede, born in Skänninge, not too far from Stockholm, in 1801. He was a precocious composer (with a flute concerto premiered at the age of 15) in a country where there was no real audience for serious symphonic composition, other than as middle-class divertissement. Sent to Germany to learn a trade, he returned to Sweden where, thanks to perceptive friends in Uppsala, he was sent back to Germany to study with Zelter in Berlin; another of Zelter 's pupils was one Felix Mendelssohn, and he and Lindblad became friends. On his return to Sweden, Lindblad founded and directed (until 1861) a piano school, composing vigorously all the while; he died in 1878.

Some of Lindblad's 200 songs later gained considerable popularity thanks to his pupil Jenny Lind with whom, P.-G. Bergfors's notes tell us, he had an affair. Those songs earned him the nickname of "the Swedish Schubert"—but the link with Schubert is not only a superficial one of similitude: Lindblad's two symphonies (written in 1831 and 1855) show that he also inherited something of Schubert's symphonic manner, though probably without actually knowing much (or any?) of the music.

The first movement of No. 1 wrestles with a thematic fragment from Beethoven's Ninth, and reminiscences of Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Weber dart and weave through the textures here and elsewhere; Lindblad also shows himself to be particularly fond of the Beethovenian sforzato. The finale—which begins with a bright fugue—brings Lindblad closest to his slightly older contemporary Franz Berwald, especially when he uses the same driving rhythmic figures, stiffened by the trumpets, that Berwald so often deployed. The Second Symphony shows a quantum improvement in confidence: Right from the start of the Maestoso slow introduction of the first movement, there's a sense of power waiting to be released, confirmed by the energetic, optimistic sonata-allegro that follows, again with Berwaldian touches of color in an orchestration, which otherwise owes more to Beethoven and Mozart than anyone else. A dignified, though busy, Poco allegretto instead of slow movement (doubtless learned from Beethoven Seven) and a knockabout scherzo lead to a finale that shows Lindblad to have been following the progress of early Romanticism on the Continent—not that early by 1855, perhaps, but his sound world seems already to have been established by the time of the First Symphony. In its sheer buoyant, lively enthusiasm the closest relative of this Second Symphony of Lindblad's is Bizet's Symphony in C, written in exactly the same year—indeed, the two works sometimes sound uncannily alike, though it's almost 100% certain that Lindblad won't have been acquainted with the Bizet, which was completely unknown until its first performance in 1935 (just after it was discovered in Bizet's papers, bequeathed to the Paris Conservatoire by his wife's second husband).

A genuine discovery, this—constantly inventive music of considerable achievement, for which the South African conductor Gérard Korsten obtains performances of real distinction from his Swedish players. The sound isn't terribly polished, but who cares? The main thing is to put across the music in as lively and communicative manner as possible, and here they succeed admirably.

Good, bright sound with plenty of depth. Recommended with considerable enthusiasm, then, as another corner of musical history is uncovered.

-- Martin Anderson, FANFARE [11/1999]

STRAUSS II, J.: Edition - Vol. 37

STRAUSS, Josef: Edition - Vol. 9

LACHNER: Symphony No. 8 / Ball-Suite