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

Widely acknowledged to be Franz Schmidt's finest symphony, the main offering of this 2010 MDG Live disc is in some ways the composer's most challenging work. Schmidt composed the Symphony No. 4 in C major as a requiem for his daughter Emma, who had died in childbirth in 1932. Schmidt's grief is plainly evident in the brooding music, which works its way through many unexpected chromatic turns and dark modulations, and develops a plaintive trumpet theme, heard at the beginning and in various guises throughout the work. In terms of the structure, Schmidt combined sonata allegro and variation forms to elaborate the trumpet theme as a primary subject, and the four movements are to be played as one continuous movement. Schmidt is often regarded as a conservative composer, but his dissonant harmonies here are quite adventurous for his style, and the uncertain mood of the music is ambiguous enough to remind one of late Mahler. The filler work, the Intermezzo from Schmidt's opera Notre Dame, is a sweetly lyrical work that is cast in a more conventionally Romantic vein than the symphony, though it's uplifting mood is a suitable contrast to the bleakness of the preceding work. Stefan Blunier and the Beethoven Orchester Bonn play both works with passionate commitment and deep emotion, and the high standards of performance and reproduction that are typical of MDG's hybrid SACDs are met in this excellent recording.

-- Blair Sanderson, All Music Guide

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.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

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

Classical Music

Only those familiar with the marginalia of 20th century music history might recognize the name Josef Hauer--he was an associate of Arnold Schoenberg, enjoying equal success until his career was cut short by the political turmoil of 1930s Germany. After the Third Reich declared Hauer's music to be decadent he retreated from public life and began to keep something of a musical journal consisting of tiny pieces, many of which were completed in a single morning. These Zwölftonspiele, as he called them, outline compositional games he would play with 12-tone rows, using complicated theories to connive his short-but-substantial opuses.


The pieces are single-focused and short--the longest on this disc clocks in at just under six minutes, while the shortest is 58 seconds. Unlike the compact and refined music of Webern, perhaps a model for Hauer's brevity, these are little obsessive miniatures, almost minimalist in their sense of development and drive. This composer does not shy away from blunt, grinding repetition, something that others in the Second Viennese School considered anathema. Compositional method aside, Hauer wrote good tunes and his work has a compelling and organic sense of harmony--if the title didn't say so, it would be difficult to discern this music as 12-tone.


The members of the Ensemble Avantgarde have no small hand in the extraordinary effect of this disc--they find the music in Hauer's games and play in a thoughtful, committed fashion. Especially effective are the five pieces for solo piano, the work for violin and harpsichord, and the string quartet, but this whole disc is worth listening to as a complete experience. It does not need to be swallowed as strong medicine, like much high modernism, but can be enjoyed as a collection of one composer's darker moments. The selections are intelligent and the ordering makes sense (apparently not many Zwölftonspiele have survived, so it is hard to say what sort of options the group had when planning the recording). For those who generally shy away from dodecaphonic music, fear not! This is a collection of varied and musical works by a too-neglected composer, one that can be enjoyed by more than just composers and scholars.
--Daniel Felsenfeld, ClassicsToday.com

First presented in 1734, Oreste isn't quite an "opera" by Handel. Rather, it's a pastiche, albeit put together by the composer himself for the cast who would star the following month in the newly composed Ariodante. Oreste, whose plot is much the same as Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride, is almost entirely (there are a couple of newly composed dance sequences) made up of arias from the composer's other operas, some going back as far as 1707. There are bits of Partenope, Sosarme, Tamerlano, Rodrigo, Lotario, Ottone, Agrippina, and other operas, all here in different contexts, most with different texts and most arranged in slightly different ways. If this were the first Handel opera I'd ever heard, and I hadn't been told it was a collection of bits, I'd never know, and I'd be dazzled by it. Much to the composer's credit, the borrowings make an interesting whole, and the two hours and 25 minutes go by with alacrity, the dramatic moments piling one upon the other.

And as with any works by Handel, especially those designed for the greatest singers of his day, paramount to even the slightest success is a strong sense of what constitutes Baroque style and the ability of the performers to negotiate complicated vocal lines. So without a recognizable name in the crowd, you have to wonder, are these unknown singers--all of them Greek or of Greek parentage--up to their tasks? The answer is a delightful "yes".

In the castrato role of Oreste, Canadian-born mezzo Mary Ellen Nesi is a real find. The voice is expressive and handsome, and she has no trouble with the rapid passagework or with Handel's smoother lines that require a true legato. She is a singer to keep an eye on: even in our chock-full-of-good-mezzos time, she's worth hearing. Mata Katsuli as Ifigenia sings with a whitish tone that at times sounds unhealthy, but she too is "in" her role. Ermione (Orestes' wife, not in the Gluck, but apparently in the neighborhood of Tauride) is the big soprano role, and Maria Mitsopoulou has the temperament and the technique, and only some nasty top notes mar her performance. As the villainous Toante, bass Petros Magoulas is fluent and arresting. His captain, Filotete, is well done by the opaque-voiced countertenor Nicholas Spano, and tenor Antonis Koroneos as Oreste's pal Pilade is remarkable with his coloratura, but his voice almost entirely lacks body. George Petrou leads the expert Camerata Stuttgart with sensitivity to the singers, although you sometimes wish he had pushed them a bit more. In short, yes, it's a pasticcio, but it's terrific Handel, it's dramatically coherent, and it will make a good addition to your collection.
--Robert Levine, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

REVIEWS:
International Record Review (3/00, pp.88-90) - "...Schleiermacher imparts a remarkable sense of continuity and climax to the score's disparate elements. He effects smooth, split-second dynamic contrasts with the utmost ease and control of sound....a winning release..."

Includes work(s) for piano by Henry Cowell. Soloist: Steffen Schleiermacher.