On the violin Henri Vieuxtemps made his quick way from one success to the next, and Robert Schumann even compared him to Niccolo Paganini. However, the viola was his secret love, and he created some of his most beautiful compositions for it. Christian Euler and Paul Rivinius have set standards with their recordings of English viola music and works by Paul Hindemith, and their Vieuxtemps interpretations are guaranteed to delight avid viola fans- and not only them! The cantabile playing style so typical of the Franco-Belgian violin school and such an important influence on Vieuxtemps and then on his pupil Ysaye is especially effective when executed on the viola. When Christian Euler plays the beginning of the Sonata op. 35 and its long melody lines and the standout Barcarole not only so very airily and freely but also with sonorous intensity, the result is pure listening joy. The Elegy op. 30 is perhaps the most beautiful contribution to the program. From the very beginning Paul Rivinius employs dryly speckled chords to produce an atmosphere in which the melancholy song of the viola is able to unfold in endless lament. And then at the end, when things really get down to business, what remains is astonishment at all that can be done and is done on the viola.

Classical Music

Classical Music

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

VASKS Episodi e Canto perpetuo. Quartet 1 • Tr Parnassus; Avri Levitan (va) 1 • MDG 903 1513 (Hybrid multichannel SACD 65:15)


Péteris Vasks belongs to the grouping of Eastern European composers who were trained in the Soviet era (he was born in Latvia in 1946), and have, since the fall of the iron curtain, amalgamated modernistic (formerly banished) elements into their aural palette. The work of such composers as Pärt, Gubaidulina, Silvestrov, and Górecki, while very different in important ways, all share a depth of expression reflecting a dark world view and life experience that does not occur in the music of their Western colleagues. Vasks wrote this piano trio in 1985; he describes it as “a painful journey through misery, disappointment and suffering towards love,” and dedicates the piece to Olivier Messiaen. The French master’s influence is all over this beautiful work, with many echoes from the Quatuor pour le fin de temps . There are the huge cluster chords on the piano, the oddly lurching rhythmic effects, and most tellingly, grand, arching crescendos of intense emotional power, reminiscent of Messiaen’s two magnificent louanges (praises) from the Quartet.


The Quartet (it is a piano quartet), completed 16 years later, begins in a generally more jaunty way, incorporating what sound like folk-dance elements, in the manner of Bartók. It is not without the singular expressiveness of the composer, however, especially in the canti that are at the heart of the six-movement work. The language of the music is more approachable than the 1985 work, but it is as uncompromising in depth of expression. The more jagged edges of the earlier music make it more interesting to me, though, particularly in the rhythmic structure. None of this is what I would call easy listening, nor was it intended to be.


Performances by the German ensemble Trio Parnassus, as well as by Israeli violist Avri Levitan in the Quartet, are superbly committed and vibrant, and MDG, as usual, captures them in rich, natural sound.

FANFARE: Peter Burwasser


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

RUSSIAN TRUMPET CONCERTOS • Reinhold Friedrich (tpt); Christoph-Mathias Mueller, cond; Göttinger SO • MDG 901 1770-6 (SACD: 61:26)


SHAKHOV Romantic Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra. ARUTIUNIAN Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra. O. BÖHME La Napolitaine. Tarantelle. VASILENKO Concerto for Trumpet “Concert-Poem.” GOEDICKE Concert Etude


The title of this disc is something of a misnomer. Out of the five composers represented here, one is an Armenian (Arutiunian), one a German immigrant to Russia (Böhme), and one a descendant of German immigrants to Russia (Goedicke). As it is, none of the works featured here—all unabashedly tonal and written in a popular vein—sound particularly “Russian” in any way.


Information on most of these composers is hard to come by, especially regarding Ilya Emmanuilovich Shakhov (1925–1986), who has no entry in any of the multiple online and print sources I consulted. According to the booklet notes, he was a pupil in violin at the Moscow Conservatory but had no formal training in composition. His studies were interrupted at age 16 with the Nazi invasion of Russia, at which point he entered military service and endured various hardships before returning to musical activities upon the war’s end. His Concerto, dating from 1955 and cast in the traditional fast-slow-fast three-movement form, is, at 22: 20, the longest work on this disc. It is a pleasantly upbeat and entertaining piece that sounds a bit like a cross of Rimsky-Korsakov with Francis Poulenc or William Walton in one of their cheekier, unbuttoned moods. The slow movement is quite lovely, and the entire piece is colorfully orchestrated in a manner that suggests the composer was intimately familiar with concert band repertoire.


Alexander Arutiunian (1920–2012) is easily the most famous figure represented on this release, with his Trumpet Concerto from 1950 being perhaps his most frequently performed composition. While conforming to the confines of Soviet Socialist Realism folkloric composition, it is of much higher quality of inspiration and compositional craft than most such works. Although traces of the influences of Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev are present (though remarkably not of Khatchaturian), the work also draws upon Armenian folk melody influences, particularly that of the ashug , an 18th-century minstrel that is an Armenian counterpart of the medieval troubadour or Meistersinger . A somewhat contrasting slow movement sounds more like French café music from one of the members of Les Six . As with the Shakhov concerto, the whole is brilliantly orchestrated.


In 36:3 I reviewed a CD featuring French trumpeter Thierry Gervais that included the Vasilenko “Concert-Poem,” and so I will refer readers there for notes on the composer and piece. While I slightly prefer Friedrich as a trumpeter due to his more mellow sound, the Gervais performance is better overall due to a superior conductor on the podium knowing how to shape the piece more effectively.


Oskar Böhme (1870–1938?) and Alexander Goedicke (1877–1957) are each represented by a brief and lively encore piece, the latter having its original piano part orchestrated by Gene Mullins. As its title indicates, La Napolitaine , dating from about 1900, is a brief tarantelle that sounds like something Rossini or Donizetti would have tossed off in a spare moment. The Concert Etude from 1936 sounds like a side piece from the desk of Glazunov, although at moments it also brings to mind the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.


Since both composers wrote trumpet concertos, I wish that one of those had been included instead—particularly in the case of Böhme, whose life ended horribly. Born in Dresden, he first established a reputation as a trumpet virtuoso there with tours beginning in 1885. In 1897 he migrated to Russia, where he played in the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra in St. Petersburg until 1921 and also taught at a music school. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he was assigned by the government to teach at a music school on Vasilievsky Island in the harbor of Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was then named) from 1921 to 1930, and then played in the Leningrad Drama Theater Orchestra from 1930 to 1934. At that point, being suspected as a foreign national of German extraction, he was arrested by the KGB in one of Stalin’s waves of mass purges and banished to a music school in Chkalovsk, a provincial administrative center on the Volga River in an area where the so-called Volga Germans lived. After teaching there from 1936 to 1938, he was re-arrested and vanished; there is one unconfirmed report of him being seen in 1941, at age 71, working as a slave laborer on construction of the Turkmen Channel Canal in Turkmenistan.


For his part, Alexander Goedicke (a first cousin to Nikolai Medtner) was far more fortunate. The son of a piano teacher at the Moscow Conservatory, he received his initial musical training there as a piano and organ virtuoso, where he was awarded the gold medal in 1898, followed in 1900 by first prize in the Anton Rubinstein Competition in Vienna. Despite having no formal training in composition, he also won the conservatory’s Rubinstein Prize for Composition at age 23. He was appointed a professor of piano there in 1909 and also of organ in 1923; his performing repertoire included the complete organ works of Bach.


Reinhold Friedrich, a pupil of Edward Tarr, has been professor of trumpet at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik (State Music Conservatory) in Karlsruhe since 1989. He is a widely traveled soloist, and has been principal trumpet of the Lucerne Festival Orchestral under Claudio Abbado since its founding in 2002. His discography includes over 50 LPs and CDs, several of which have been reviewed to approval in these pages. His is a tone that is more sweet than piercing, which happens to be how I like trumpets to sound, and in any case it is most appropriate for the present program. The Göttinger Symphony does justice to its part of the proceedings; conductor Christoph-Mathias Mueller is sound but not exceptional, as he could do more with bringing out inner voices and shaping phrases than he does. The SACD recorded sounded matches Friedrich perfectly, having an exceptionally pleasant mellowness. In sum, while there is nothing profound here, it is one of the most delightfully entertaining anthologies of trumpet music ever to come my way, and thus receives my hearty endorsement.


FANFARE: James A. Altena

New York in the 1950s. Ambitious creative spirits from many different backgrounds met in the Cedar Bar and engaged in lively discussions about the future of art and music. They included the artists Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns and the composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earl Brown, and Christian Wolff. Steffen Schleiermacher has taken a closer look at this explosive mix with his Ensemble Avantgarde and presents astonishing new findings: although the four composers often appeared as a group, their works are radically different – a fascinating journey back to the times of volcanic-force creative probing and questioning.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.
Recording information: Ehem. Ackerhaus Abtei Marienmünster (09/25/2008-09/26/2008); Ehem. Ackerhaus Abtei Marienmünster (02/03/2009-02/04/2009).

Sergei Taneyev's Piano Quintet, op. 30 is as passionate as you could wish; it's a huge piece, lasting nearly 50 minutes. The first movement alone lasts nearly twenty. The idiom is late-Romantic, owing something to Brahms but to my mind it is much closer to César Franck, as it is as passionate a work as Franck’s piano quintet. A sombre, very chromatic opening leads to an anguished allegro. The themes are good. The piano writing is very rich, almost in concertante style, often in opposition to the strings as a group. The first movement is long and strenuous but varied in texture and with moments of relief. It builds to a tremendous climax at the beginning of the recapitulation with a pounding bass in the piano while the strings cry out over it. There is a stretto coda full of dark imaginings.

The scherzo is lighter in mood, featuring a theme of repeated notes. In contrast to the first movement the players here have to be light on their feet. The trio section is slower and features long, winding lines in the strings while the piano writing is less full, almost Mendelssohnian. We return to the opening music, if anything even faster than before.

The slow movement begins with a powerful theme in the bass which turns out to be that of a passacaglia, repeating under a melody which gradually takes shape above it, increasingly decorated. Apparently this is the first passacaglia in Russian music; it is certainly impressive.

The finale features a vivid theme in jagged rhythms and another with a soaring lyrical line. After a good deal of strenuous writing there is a very quiet passage. We return to more energetic writing before the close, with restless modulations suggesting a search for a conclusion which finally arrives with an evocation of the pealing of bells.

The coupling is a song-cycle, Taneyev’s last, which sets poems by Jakov Polonski (1819-1898) who is apparently highly regarded in Russia. These songs all deal with love, but my appreciation was hindered by the fact that they are sung in Russian, while the booklet gives them only in German, with neither the original Russian nor an English translation. While Olga Gollej does sterling work on the piano both here and in the quintet, Marina Prudenskaya, basically an operatic mezzo, indeed a Wagnerian, seems to have some difficulty fining her voice down to the scale needed for songs with piano. There is also a slight edge to her voice and a certain unsteadiness.

There are no such reservations about the performance of the Piano Quintet. The Leipzig String Quartet is a well established group who apply themselves to Taneyev’s work with enthusiasm. The recording maintains a good balance between the piano and the strings, in an acoustic suggestive of a small concert hall. There are now several other versions of this work to choose from; however, if you want the songs, this is currently the only available recording, which might sway the balance for some listeners.

– MusicWeb International (Stephen Barber)

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

The Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck was number one in influence on the Northern European organ style of the seventeenth century, and his own special sound world can now once again be experienced. A four-hundred-year-old swallow's nest organ from the Renaissance era has survived in St. Mary's Church in Lemgo, and its few missing pipes have been precisely reconstructed on the basis of historical models. Harald Vogel presents this unique instrument of European rank in a rich and varied program of works by Sweelinck, some of them celebrating their recording premieres.

Classical Music

Unlike the cantatas discussed in my review of Gottfried Stölzel's 1736/37 so-called "Christmas Oratorio" on CPO (type Q4082 in Search Reviews), these, composed in 1728 and intended for use during Christmas, are more musically substantive (but still concise) and offer some outstanding arias and duets. In addition, we hear recitatives that in harmonic and melodic effect are far more than just functional devices--and the choral sections, while relatively short, are also very well crafted, showing the work of a composer adept at devising solid thematic material and knowing how to keep it interesting. The stylistic similarities to Bach will be obvious to anyone familiar with the cantatas of the slightly older master (he was five years Stölzel's senior), and if you really try, your imagination may trick you into believing you're hearing a direct reference or two--a little thematic slice here, an orchestral flourish there--and certainly Stölzel's use of compound meter in the duet aria "Heller Aufgang aus der Höhe" with obbligato violin (from the opening cantata) is a page right out of any number of Bach's works in the genre.


But the high quality of the writing, especially in the attractively shaped arias, bespeaks a composer with some fine ideas of his own. Try the alto/bass duet in the above-mentioned cantata, or the soprano solo in the following work, a lovely melody that dances liltingly along accompanied by oboes and strings. Here and throughout, soprano Christine Rembeck shows easy confidence to go with her beautiful voice, and her ornaments are attractive and effective. In fact, all of the singers are first rate, taking to their "roles" with obvious appreciation for such singable and satisfying music. There are some unusual features of scoring, such as the alto aria in the Christmas cantata Kündlich groß ist das gottselige Geheimnis, with its eerie continuo doubling and violins weaving around above the voice in thirds.


The oboe concerto is a feisty work that wastes not a note, from the lively opening Allegro to the short Andante that begins in faux-passacaglia fashion with only upper strings accompanying the soloist. The third movement is a compact Allegro with enough challenging flourishes and fleeting runs to satisfy an oboist looking for a few moments to show off. Stölzel shows imagination in his chorale harmonizations--from the trumpet-tinged In diesem Licht kannst Du sehen to the simple and direct Gib mir, o Jesu, nur heilige gute Gedanken (which many listeners will recognize as "Lobet den Herren").


The recording is somewhat spacious and heavy on the resonance, which lends a hugeness to the sound that swallows some detail in the tutti sections. And--typically and irritatingly--MDG provides only German texts (with no accompanying track numbers). On first listen, I thought I was not going to have a whole lot to say about this music--but the more I listened, the more I enjoyed, and it's likely you'll do the same. These are really fine works that competent church choirs and accomplished college and community choral groups should seriously consider as alternatives to programs typically heavy on Bach and Handel.
--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

This Spohr collection gets off to a slow start with the Overture Op. 12. It's an early effort (1806), and though it was a success in its day, to modern ears it sounds very predictable and more than a little hackneyed. Luckily, its six minutes are over quickly, yet the unimpressive musical content leaves us unprepared for the arrestingly beautiful work that follows. The Quartet-Concerto deliberately attempts to do Beethoven's Triple Concerto one better by including four soloists. Predictably, the four play mostly as a quartet with the orchestra mainly providing backdrop. But when the two mesh, the result is a wonderfully lush sonority that combined with Spohr's lyrical intensity makes for some arresting moments, especially as played by the excellent Leipzig String Quartet and the equally fine Leipzig Chamber Orchestra under Sebastian Weigle.

Spohr's Nonet was something of a path-breaking work in that its dimensions and material correspond more closely to that of a symphony than to the divertimentos of Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert. Brahms was highly influenced by this composition, and in it you can hear early hints of that composer's style. The Nonet satisfies by its full-dress sonorities, beautiful themes, and brilliant invention. The slow movement contains an especially beguiling melody that remains in the ear long after the movement's end. The nine soloists of the Ensemble Villa Musica play with all the excitement of discovering a masterpiece--which perhaps they have. The recorded sound from both venues is rich, warm, and full-bodied.
--Victor Carr Jr., ClassicsToday.com

Michael Massong’s debut recital on MDG contains a program: lyrical pieces, in large part especially arranged for this CD, display a vocal quality of trombone playing that is without equal. Rachmaninoff’s famous “Vocalise,” the fine emotion of Carl Maria von Weber’s “Romanze,” and Franz Liszt’s “Romance oubliée,” in which Michael Massong teases previously unheard-of vocal expressive depth out of his instrument.

Michael Massong is a genuine globetrotter. Born in Germany, he studied with all the greats of his instrument in Frankfurt, London, and New York and travels around the globe for master classes and solo performances. In order to meet his high demands, he has developed his own series of alto and tenor trombones in cooperation with the Thein brothers.

A musical cosmopolitan and a Russian patriot, a highly educated historian and a progressive who was skeptical about progress: there were differences of opinion about Sergei Taneyev even during his lifetime. The Utrecht String Quartet has set itself the task of his long overdue rehabilitation. Dutch musicians, together with Peter Wispelwey and Alexander Zemtsov present his two string quintets in a new recording shedding new light on Russian music from around the turn of the 20th century.

The much-acclaimed inner turmoil of the “Russian soul“ is celebrated here in a stirring manner. Perfect for the Utrecht String Quartet, which once again has made a valuable (re-)discovery!