.

Five hundred years ago the Reformation occasioned an upsurge in the production of church music, and even today Luther’s powerful sacred hymns continue to be mainstays in Lutheran religious services. However, Luther’s fruitful juxtaposition of “transmitted” and “modern” music shows that he was also fond of drawing on songs from the “old church.” The Lutheran chorale masses recorded by Hermann Max with his Rheinische Kantorei on vinyl more than thirty years ago represent a special form within these parallel- or shared- relational worlds. Even then the MDG sound engineers used the latest digital technology for the recording. Along with the chorale masses by Christoph Bernhard, Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, and Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer, Hermann Max presents three works that were highly modern during their times. Schein’s composed interpretations of his source texts ventured onto terrain normally reserved for theologians- at least in the old church. But this too is in the spirit of the Reformation: the “priesthood of all believers” can of course not be excluded from the musical sphere! And so this valuable new edition expands our view of Protestant church music, from a much too rarely considered but welcome perspective.

Luigi Boccherini’s contemporaries ranked him with Joseph Haydn, but during later times the high esteem enjoyed by his music faded – when everything of Italian origin that was not an opera was generally dismissed. The young musicians of Scala köln believe that it is high time to reopen Boccherini’s case and are now presenting the results of their new investigation: a delightful program demonstrating that Boccherini’s treasure trove holds more in store than just his famous Minuet. The musicians of Scala koln, led by the violinist Christoph Mayer and the oboist Monika Nielen, bring this music to the stage in fresh new interpretations that are historically informed and feature period instruments. The mixed instrumentation with winds and strings comes with a guarantee of richly varied listening pleasure- boredom is absolutely out of the question!

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Elegant writing beautifully presented.

Douglas Boyd and his Winterthur forces are proving to be a reliable signing for MDG. This disc follows an excellent recording of the Rheinberger organ concertos. In both cases, we are talking about music that has made very few outings on CD, let alone SACD, so to find them presented at this quality is a treat.

Schubert, according to the liner-note, put great energies into improving his reputation as a composer for the stage, but of the ten stage works he completed, only three were preformed in his lifetime. Rosamunde was one of them, and its poor reception was apparently one of the reasons why later stage projects failed to find a home. Problems with the work's dramaturgy have been blamed for its failure, rather than any inadequacies on the part of the music. And the music is good. It falls somewhere between the Schubert the chamber composer and Schubert the symphonist. There is plenty of drama here, but for the most part it retains the civilised formality of the Classical era. Performing the incidental music – and great as it is, the word 'incidental' is definitively appropriate – poses a few challenges. A choir is required, but they only put in a few appearances, as does the alto soloist. Schubert writes trombone parts, but he only uses them to support the choir. So the whole project is a bit impractical, and while you need a range of talented musicians, none is given the opportunity to really show off those talents.

Fortunately, the Musikkollegium Winterthur musicians have what it takes. There is some elegant woodwind writing, all of which is beautifully presented. And those trombone parts, brief as they are, are played with enviable precision and tonal focus. Douglas Boyd achieves a good balance between the composer's aspirations to drama and his innate sense of musical elegance. There are a number of points where the music builds up to a thematic statement through a swell on an upbeat or a short crescendo, and Boyd is able to create just the right sense of anticipation, and without excessive intervention.

It is probably worth noting that this is very much Schubert on modern instruments. There is nothing wrong with that but it seems to be rapidly becoming the exception rather than the rule. The textures are warmer and more homogeneous than you get from period instruments, but - unlike in the later symphonies for example - there is little in the way of contrapuntal or textural detail to lose in the weave. That also limits the potential benefits of the SACD audio. The audio quality is good, and it brings a sense of warmth and intimacy to the quieter textures, especially the woodwind solos, but there is little in this score to bring out in terms of pertinent incident and colour.

The disc opens with a bonus track of sorts. It turns out that Schubert wrote the Rosamunde music to a tight deadline and did not have a chance to write an overture. Instead, the programme opens with the overture to Die Zauberharfe. The liner-note assures us that the overture is very much in the spirit of the Rosamunde music, and so it is. However, the Rosamunde movements are thematically interconnected - though a theme better known from the quartet of the same name. The overture does not share this link and so stands out from what follows. That's not a big grumble, but it does call the logic of the programming into question. Even with this imported overture, the running time is still under an hour. So why not include a few more overtures and incidental movements too?

-- Gavin Dixon, MusicWeb International

Andreas Späth was a clarinetist, a violinist, an organist, and a voice teacher as well as the city music director in Neuchâtel, the concertmaster of the Ducal Court Orchestra in Coburg, and an honorary member of the Swiss Music Society. His death at the ripe old age of eighty-five in 1876 marked the end of an active and richly varied musician’s life – so that it is hardly surprising that he wrote more than 150 compositions for a wide range of genres. Rita Karin Meier has explored Späth’s works for clarinet, his early main instrument, and teams up with the Galatea Quartet and Karl-Andreas Kolly for a long-overdue tribute to this composer who is entirely forgotten today.

The Nocturnes, the three Melodies, and the Elegy also very much reflect the character of romantic composition. The title of the last work in particular might mislead today’s listeners. Anything but melancholy and sorrowful, it tends more to the free form of a fantastic character piece and includes spirited polonaises. There is also more to the Melodies than the title might suggest; they are concertante duets elaborated with fine art. Meier, the principal clarinetist at the Zurich Opera, and Kolly present these works with wit and charm- in what is a highly rewarding discovery!

Will listeners raised on virtuoso performances of Mozart's piano concertos be able to make room in the hearts for Christian Zacharias' recordings with the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne? It depends on how willing they are to forego the pleasures of virtuosity for the pleasures music-making. This is not to say that Zacharias isn't a virtuoso pianist. As his twenty years of recordings make very clear, he has talents and abilities far beyond those of most mortal pianists. But it is to say that, as those recordings make equally clear, Zacharias is far more interested in music-making than he is in virtuosity. As both pianist and conductor here, Zacharias leads performances which are all about sympathetic interplay, about musicians listening to each other, about the meaning behind the notes and the joy inside the notes. The Lausanne musicians respond joyfully to Zacharias' direction, playing with him and not for him and breathing life into every line and sonority. While listeners raised on virtuoso performances may find something lacking, those listeners who value playing together more than showing off will find much to enjoy.

Musikproduktion Dabringhaus und Grimm's sound is ideally balanced between detail and depth and between immediacy and atmosphere, thereby providing an aural image of a real pianist with a real orchestra in a real place in real time.

- James Leonard, AllMusic Guide

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Gabriel Faure has frequently been termed “the father of Impressionism.” Why this is so rendered very apparent on this state-of-the-art album featuring interpretations of his two Piano Quartets by the superb Mozart Piano Quartet. With great virtuosity, a fine sense of sound, and an intelligent command of the complex overall structure, the four instrumentalists brighten the performance skies with their musical fireworks. The Parisian music world of Faure’s time was characterized by emancipation from Germany hegemony in chamber music after the traumatic outcome of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and by the beginnings of an original French musical language beyond the opera. Faure’s quartets draw formally on the tradition- and yet breathe a new spirit: church modes and whole-tone scales mark so many a motif, and here and there, along with the “classical” development of the themes, we also encounter entirely new harmonic fields and soundscapes. For instance, the beginning of the Adagio in op. 45 already suggests Ravel’s “La vallee des cloches” from the Miroirs: like a memory, distant bells ring in the piano part, over which the very lonely viola gives its all in a pastoral song of lament- enchanting! The two slow movements belong to the absolute highlights on this release.

Classical Music

Classical Music

RHEINBERGER Organ Concertos: No. 1 in F; No. 2 in g. 3 Pieces for Cello and Organ • Stefan Johannes Bleicher (org); Douglas Boyd, cond; Musikkollegium Winterthur; Cäcilia Chmel (vc) • MDG 1643 (SACD: 57:58)


Josef Rheinberger (1839–1901) is frequently named alongside Max Bruch, Karl Goldmark, Robert Fuchs, and Carl Reinecke when mention is made of late 19th- to early 20th-century German Romantic composers who cultivated an essentially conservative style influenced by the Mendelssohn-Schumann-Brahms-Joachim axis. Budding composers from abroad, including America, flocked to Germany to study under these men and to have bestowed upon them the mantle of a proper German pedigree. In Leipzig, Reinecke could claim Grieg, Sinding, Svendsen, Janá?ek, and Weingartner among his students; while in Munich, Rheinberger could name Humperdinck, Parker, Chadwick, Wolf-Ferrari, Thuille, and Furtwängler among those he instructed.


Rheinberger’s instrument was the organ, a fact that’s hard to ignore based on his vast output in which the organ plays a dominant role. Yet, in his entire voluminous catalog—the solo organ pieces alone occupy 12 CDs—the two concertos on this disc are the only concerted works I’m aware of that he wrote for organ and orchestra. The mind leaps immediately to the similar compositions by Rheinberger’s French contemporaries Widor and Guilmant, but the reality is that Rheinberger’s concertos are in a more classical mold and of a thematic content somewhat similar to the chorale-like melodic and harmonic manner of Saint-Saëns. Oddly, as well, there are not a few passages that seem to anticipate the sort of ceremonial hubbub and pageantry one hears in Elgar’s soon-to-be pomp and circumstance mode. Rheinberger’s concertos, however, predate the earliest of Elgar’s coronation marches by 17 and seven years, respectively.


The Concerto No. 1, dated 1884, two years before Saint-Saëns’s brilliant “Organ” Symphony, is modestly orchestrated for three horns (or two horns and bassoon) and strings, with the organ filling in for the absent winds. Scoring in the Concerto No. 2 of 10 years later isn’t much augmented, but to the earlier ensemble Rheinberger adds two trumpets and timpani, so that the organ must still furnish the sonorities that would ordinarily be supplied by flutes, oboes, and clarinets. If the Second Concerto finds its voice somewhere between Saint-Saëns and Elgar, the First Concerto reaches a bit further back, perhaps to Mendelssohn and Schumann.


These are not hard works to like. They’re tuneful, spirited, and engaging enough that one doesn’t miss the fuller symphonic approach that Saint-Saëns took to the orchestra or the more variegated splashes of color Widor and Guilmant drew from their Cavaillé-Coll and French organs.


There are two or three more recordings of these works available than I find reviewed in the Fanfare Archive. In 23:6, John Bauman covered a Classico release featuring organist Ulrik Spang-Hansen with the Chamber Philharmonic of Bohemia led by Douglas Bostock; while in 28:5, James Reel readdressed a Capriccio recording that had originally been reviewed in 16:2 and was recycled in SACD format with the rear channels presumably artificially processed. That disc featured organist Andreas Juffinger with Harmut Haenchen conducting the Berlin RSO. Not reviewed, as far as I can tell, are recordings by Ulrich Meldau with Daniel Schweizer presiding over the Zurich Symphony Orchestra on the Motette label, and a more recent Naxos version by organist Paul Skevington with Timothy Rowe leading the Amadeus Chamber Ensemble. Of these several editions, the only one I have for comparison purposes is the Juffinger in its “enhanced” SACD incarnation.


The Capriccio booklet has nothing to say about the organ, though the recording was made in Berlin’s Jesus-Christus-Kirche, so I assume the instrument to be of German, Swiss, or Dutch pedigree, but for the concertos the new MDG recording is to be preferred. Newly recorded in February 2010, the disc is in true surround format. Full-page specifications are given on Winterthur’s historic Stadrkirche organ built by E. F. Walcker in 1887–88 and restored in 1980–84 by the Swiss firm currently doing business as Kuhn Organ Builders, Ltd. And MDG’s Bleiche and Boyd are considerably more animated than Capriccio’s Juffinger and Haenchen in every movement of both concertos, delivering performances that are crisply articulated and in which the organ and orchestra are beautifully integrated.


MDG’s bonus is three pieces— Abendlied, Pastorale, and Elegie —Rheinberger transcribed for cello and organ from a set of six pieces he’d originally written for violin and organ at the dual requests of church organist Johann Georg Herzog and the composer’s publisher, August Robert Froberg. Adagio meditation-type pieces for a solo string instrument accompanied by organ were rarities, if indeed they existed at all at the time. Rheinberger’s contributions are exactly what you would expect—the musical equivalent of votive candles flickering in the transepts. Cellist Cäcilia Chmel plays prayerfully enough, but the angels remain frozen in their friezes, unmoved by Rheinberger’s entreaties.


Definitely recommended for enjoyable, if not great, music, fine performances, and superb recording. I will not, however, be throwing away my Juffinger and Haenchen on Capriccio for the simple reason that it includes Rheinberger’s Suite for Violin and Organ, op. 166, a lovely neobaroquish affair that echoes with distant strains of Bach, Handel, and Corelli, and is a more substantial and preferable alternative to the three cello pieces on the current disc.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

For British listeners, the name of Reinecke is likely to evoke Stanford’s recollection - after an uninspiring period of study with him - that “of all the dry musicians I have ever known, he was the most desiccated”. Scandinavians will remember that Grieg thought no better of the man and that for Svendsen, “not only is he envious and bloodless … he is also in the highest degree villainous”. Yet many musicians sought him out during his long reign at the Leipzig Gewandhaus (1860-1895), including Sullivan, Bruch, Delius and the three just mentioned, while Elgar travelled to Leipzig in 1882 to hear him conduct.
 
If this all suggests a plodding academic, the “Undine” Sonata for flute and piano, the one work by Reinecke that remains at least on the fringe of the repertoire, is neither academic nor lacking in fantasy. A disc containing the First Symphony, the Violin Concerto and some smaller pieces suggested to me that further examination of Reinecke would be never less than pleasant, if hardly thrilling. Maybe thrilling would be too strong a word for these cello sonatas too, but they do suggest he was more inspired in chamber music than in larger orchestral pieces.
 
In some ways the first sonata is the most attractive of all. Its ballad-like opening theme immediately catches the attention and the second theme is not only well contrasted, it is introduced in a very remote tonality indeed. What is striking about this movement is the mastery with which it combines free-flowing, rhapsodic feeling with tight formal control. Though Reinecke is said to have looked back to Mendelssohn and Schumann for his models, and certainly rejected Liszt and Wagner, his music combines romantic spirit with an intuitive sense of form. Here, at least, he was able to make his own personal fusion of classical ideals and romantic freedom. The second movement also contains a number of quite contrasting ideas and the finale has much surging passion.
 
The claims of the second sonata are not to be underestimated, either. After a short but brooding introduction the first movement leads off with a pithy, expressive idea that revolved in my head for some days afterwards. Again, Reinecke’s formal control is tight even while the effect is of free rhapsody. The themes tend not to appear and reappear in the expected places and tonalities, and are inclined to undergo transformations just where an exact recapitulation might seem in sight. The second movement is marked “Quasi fantasia” and has much soaring romantic melody. The finale starts with a catchy tune but is inclined to chase its own tail a bit too much for its own good. This, admittedly, is a common failing among 19^th century finales when not written by Brahms.
 
Altogether, it may be said that, if Reinecke did not revolutionize sonata forms, he nevertheless evolved an intuitively inventive way of reinterpreting received formal wisdom. The interesting thing is that exactly the same thing could be said about his grudging pupil Stanford’s chamber music, even down to a tendency to write finales that chase their own tail. One is bound to wonder if Reinecke’s music did not have a greater influence on Stanford than he later cared to admit, having been so disappointed by the man himself. Also common to both composers is a complete equality between the two partners, with plenty of challenging material for both players and a continual melodic interplay that must make Reinecke’s chamber music rewarding to perform. Ultimately, I suppose this music inhabits smiling valleys and pleasant domestic surroundings rather than soar above the mountain peaks, but we can surely find a place for music that does this so attractively.
 
The third sonata arouses more ambivalent reactions. Dedicated “to the shade of Brahms”, who had just died, its formal mastery will not be questioned. Furthermore, while in one sense it occupies harmonic ground solidly rooted in Schumann, its restless modulations look ahead to the world of Reger. It is a bitter, even vehement work by a composer whose art was by then left high and dry by musical progress. The only problem is that Reinecke’s easy flow of melodic inspiration seems to have dried up. The themes are clear-cut and functional, but neither the composer’s masterly development of them, nor these performers’ imagination and conviction, can hide the fact that the cupboard is a little bare. Only the second theme of the finale recalls the warmth of earlier years. Nevertheless, as often with late works by composers clinging to the style of their youth in the teeth of what they perceive as ugly modernism, the sense of isolation and disillusionment can be moving in themselves. Here, too, the case of Stanford is an obvious parallel.
 
Manuel Fischer-Dieskau, just in case you’ve been wondering, is the great baritone’s son. It would seem that interventionism, as an interpretative creed, runs in the family. But, like his father at his best, MF-D knows how to intervene in a way that brings the music to life, and he extracts the maximum range of expression from these scores. The Canadian pianist Connie Shih has an easy technical command and a well-rounded tone in the heavier moments. She and the cellist seem in full agreement over how to play this music. They leave me wondering why the first two sonatas, at least, never made it into the not very large repertoire of romantic cello sonatas.
 
Cellists reading these words may be wondering where they can get the scores. They will be delighted to find that the IMSLP-Petrucci Library, a great Internet resource, apparently offers all three for free download. They will be a bit less delighted when they find that the file of no.1 is missing pages 4-15, jumping from the first page of the first movement to the last page of the second, so you get only the finale complete. Also, there’s not a cello part, instead there’s an alternative violin part. The second sonata is complete but the piano part of no.3 lacks the last page, or maybe the last two. In compensation you get pages 10 and 11 twice. I used to think that people who do things for love not money do them properly, but on this showing even some who work for love are as slap-happy as any half-hearted employee anxious for the next coffee break. Granted, one shouldn’t look a gift-horse in the mouth, but we may reasonably check that it has all four legs.
 
None of this little grumble, obviously, affects the value of this finely recorded and excellently annotated disc of three cello sonatas well worth investigating. The name of Reinecke is beginning to come alive for me.
 
-- Christopher Howell, MusicWeb International

Includes ov(s) by Joh Christoph Graupner. Ensemble: Nova Stravaganza. Conductor: Siegbert Rampe.
Includes work(s) by Joh Christoph Graupner. Ensemble: Nova Stravaganza. Conductor: Siegbert Rampe.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.



BRAHMS Piano Sonatas: No. 1 in C; No. 3 in f • Hardy Rittner (pn) • MDG 9041538 (Hybrid multichannel SACD: 67:51)


“One of the best new solo Brahms albums to come my way in quite some time” was how I described Volume 1 of Hardy Rittner’s survey of Brahms’s early piano works in 32:1. Volume 2 adds the First and Third Sonatas to the Second Sonata, Variations on a Theme of Schumann , and ballades previously released. For this recording, Rittner plays a slightly earlier piano, one made in 1849–50, from the workshop of Ignaz Bösendorfer. On Volume 1, he played an instrument made in 1851.


I’ve always wondered why Brahms never wrote another piano sonata after having written three huge and enormously difficult essays in the form before his 21st birthday. It wasn’t for lack of wanting to. We know that his initial sketches for what would eventually become the D-Minor Piano Concerto began as a sonata for two pianos. The same is true of the F-Minor Piano Quintet, which Brahms did preserve and publish as op. 34b. But in both cases, these were conceived for two keyboards, not one. Brahms was an accomplished pianist, appearing publicly in that capacity on a regular basis, so one would think that the solo piano sonata would have been a logical vehicle for him to exploit. My conjecture—and it’s just that—is that even though the piano, by every evidence of the sound of the instrument on this disc (an instrument of exactly the same vintage as the sonatas), had evolved to its approximately modern-day state, it was still incapable of producing the symphonic sound and textures Brahms was able to achieve in his chamber works that joined piano with strings. The Bösendorfer here—serial number 1665—is of the new rounded case design with separate fallboard, a compass of seven octaves, and a length of over seven and a half feet. It also has both damper and una corda pedals.


A reading of any history of the piano’s evolution will tell you that, except for body length, which increased to approximately nine feet in the early 20th century, and continuing refinements to the frame and key mechanisms, most of the technical innovations, such as the double escapement action, the single piece cast iron frame, felt-covered hammers, the sostenuto pedal, and over-stringing were all inventions and improvements of the 19th century, some dating from even before Brahms was born. So, for all intents and purposes, Rittner’s Bösendorfer is much closer to a Steinway Model D than it is to any instrument Mozart would have known.


The sonic impact of this hybrid multichannel SACD is palpable, as it was on Volume 1. I find myself, however, not quite as wowed by Rittner’s readings of these two sonatas as I was by his previous release. His playing, technically, is still most impressive. But he is competing here against a number of pianists who have earned very high marks in this repertoire. I’m thinking in particular of Emanuel Ax and Mikhail Rudy. What seems ever so slightly lacking to me in Rittner’s performances is Brahms’s youthful exuberance, the sense of a young man barely out of his teens feeling, if not sowing, his oats. There’s just a bit of reserve or holding back in some of the go-for-broke passages, where Ax and Rudy throw caution to the winds and abandon themselves to Brahms’s unleashed passions.


This is a very minor criticism and should not put anyone off from acquiring this disc. Just to hear these works performed on an instrument that Brahms himself might have played, and captured in a recording of such depth and physical presence, is enough to offset any trifling reservation I may have expressed. If Rittner and MDG are planning a full run at all of Brahms’s works for solo piano, I definitely look forward to future installments.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Richard Strauss composed a career total of more than two hundred songs, most of them for a high female voice. The master repeatedlyw as inspired by sopranos, and the fact that he married one of these ladies, Pauline de Ahna, is proof of his intimate association with this wonderful art. Maria Bengtsson's fine selection from all his compositional periods demonstrates the versatility of Straussian composition, and in Sarah Tysman she has a piano partner whose subtle interpretations far transcend mere accompaniment. Commenting, illustrating, harmonizing- Strauss indeed assigns very important tasks to the piano. In "Morgen!" it is more the case that the voice accompanies the piano; thunder and storm are experienced in "Schlechtes Wetter"; and in "Standchen" we can even feel the youth's jittery nerves. The writer's shout verging on bitonality at the end of "Fur funfzehn Pfennige" shows what undiscovered possibilities lie in store in traditional harmony; of course, until the end of his long life, Strauss rejected all atonal advances. Maria Bengtsson meets these challenges with the natural magnificence of a virtuoso also schooled on Strauss's theatrical oeuvre. And her teamwork with Sarah Tysman can be experienced in impressive transparency above all in this meticulously produced album.

Franz Schmidt was ''the most musical man in Vienna'' - this is what Gustav Mahler had to say about his fellow composer, who, unlike him, is almost completely forgotten today. Stefan Blunier has rediscovered this late-romantic master and now with the mighty forces of the Beethoven Orchestra of Bonn presents Schmidt's Symphony No. 2 together with Richard Strauss's Festival Prelude composed during the same year for the opening of Vienna's Konzerthaus. Schmidt played in a string quartet with Arnold Schonberg, but the tonal idioms of the two composers could not have been more different. While Schonberg very early bade farewell to major-minor harmony and later turned to twelve-tone music, Schmidt remained true to tonality until the end of his life. After the Austrian Anschluss this commitment brought him dubious distinctions from the Nazis - which of course did not help him after the fall of the ''Thousand-Year Reich.'' Schmidt calls for a gigantic orchestra for his second symphony. However, sheer volume is a concern only in a few passages. He instead emphasizes kaleidoscopic color shifts produced in what is often an instrumentation reminiscent of chamber music. Behind it all there is a masterfully composed texture with overlapping themes and variations resulting in a cyclical work structure with a systematic logic.

“Sing a new song unto the Lord!” What motto could be more fitting for this debut by the BachWerkVokal? Framed by Bach’s festive New Year’s Day Cantata and his double-choral motet on Psalm 98, this recording by the instrumentally and vocally multifaceted Salzburg ensemble presents works by Buxtehude, Telemann, and Handel – and as a special treat two previously undiscovered solutions to Mozart’s Puzzle Canon on the same text. Along with this premiere, two other recording firsts enrich this meticulously produced Super Audio album. Telemann’s cantata has never been released in recorded form- which is not at all understandable in view of his interpretation rendering the text with absolutely onomatopoetic Baroque splendor. Now the ocean surges, now the streams of water jubilate, and the harps, trumpets, and drums mentioned in the psalm also make themselves heard. Gordon Safari, the ensemble’s founder, has completed the Cantata BWV 190, a work transmitted in fragmentary form. This versatile conductor is now presenting this festive work for the first time. Truly a “new song!” As we gather from Buxtehude’s Latin psalm setting, both Handel and Bach learned from him. His Novum!-The Lord! seems to have been tailor-made for the BachWerkVokal. The remarkable room impression of this three-dimensional recording shines with Baroque splendor even in the secular setting of the home- and lends Bach’s double-choral motets the radiance of a live performance.

When Friedrich Wilhelm Markull died at the age of seventy-one in 1887, posthumous tributes honored him as a “most highly knowledgeable musician and a most highly outstanding organist and composer for the church, school, and salon and of classical orchestral works.” For more than fifty years Markull had played a significant role in Danzig’s music culture. It was in a very dismal state when he began his activity there, but he built it up ex nihilo and brought it to a great flourishing. Andrzej Szadejko has chosen a first attractive selection from Markull’s countless organ compositions and recorded these works on the historic Bucholz organ at the Church of St. Nicholas in Stralsung- a welcome continuation of the very promisingly inaugurated Musica Baltica series. Markull made his musical debut as a child prodigy and was appointed to the post of principal organist at St. Mary’s Church in Danzig. Its organ with three manuals and over fifty stops offered everything that the Northern German romantic musical heart desired. In 1945 St. Mary’s Church was destroyed along with Danzig’s entire city center. Fortunately, however, the sound typical of early romanticism has been preserved for today’s listeners in the lavishly restored Stralsund organ. The many small-format compositions accounting for a large part of Markull’s oeuvre in particular profit from these circumstances. Many of them must have found use during religious services, and among them we find chorale preludes and settings, postludes, and trios. The interpretive markings ranging from “Slow without dragging” through “Lively with a very flowing recital” to “Fiery and animated” are typically romantic and make for a delightfully varied listening experience.

The opening Trois danses cubaines by Alejandro García Caturla (1906-1940) is very much a typical example of Hispano-American musical culture, and would be right at home on a disc of music by Chavez, Villa-Lobos or Ginastera. Like Aaron Copland, he studied under Nadia Boulanger during a stay in Paris, and likewise seamlessly integrates old and new world techniques to great effect. Too bad he died so young. He was a lawyer by day, and it seems one of his clients was rather "disappointed" by his services. The following Preludio para Penthesilea by composer Carlos Fariñas (1934-2002) has, according to the liner notes, become a highly requested concert piece, and I can understand why. With it's constant barrage of multiple percussion instruments adding layer after layer of cross-rhythms and powerful forward momentum, it's hypnotic and almost ritualistic effect could certainly bring an audience to it's feet. A quick change of gears brings US to the beautifully exotic Pregón y Danza by Enrique González Mántici (1912-1974) whose opening pages bring to mind a sound reminescent of Miles Davis around his "Sketches of Spain" period. The aptly titled Rítmotiv, first performed in 2002 under the direction of it's composer Guido López-Gavilán del Rosario (b1944), is an orchestral tour-de-force as it introduces, overlaps and superimposes various rhythmic motifs and melodies to become a cornucopia of captivating sounds all assembled together by a craftsman. The final work on this CD, the deeply moving in Memoriam. A mi esposa Lillian Acosta by Alfredo Diez Nieto (b1918), once again demonstrates that grief is very much a universal human emotion and is expressed the same way regardless of nationality. It's the odd man out on this CD, simply because for that reason, it does not sound Cuban at all. It's a striking work, scored for strings alone, written to honor the loss of his wife in 2010. It's remarkable by it's simple gestures and yet clutching emotion, with closing notes to ponder over.