When it comes to melody, the uncompromising linear clarity and chamber-style flexibility enjoyed by reed instruments give them a big advantage over choirs and orchestras. Even hard-liners from the historical performance camp are swept away by the beauty and brilliance with which Calefax bring new zest to well-known and much-performed works from Bach to Berg.

Accomplished wind virtuosity is what makes the sacred sublimity of these compositions by Byrd and Pärt into genuine sound orgies in which the beauty of Kai Wessel’scountertenor voice seems to shine like a radiant, solitary light.

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Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Following its successful Schubert and Schönberg series, the Leipzig Quartet scores again. This time, the German ensemble has chosen Brahms, and its affectionate performances rise directly to the top of the available recordings for these works. The Quartet in B-flat major flows with a natural pace and an obvious affinity for Brahms's bittersweet moods. In particular, the Leipzig Quartet infuses a heart-stopping melancholy to the autumnal Agitato. The opening movement is taken a hint slower than the prescribed Vivace, but nonetheless manages to convey a feeling of spontaneity and vivacity thanks to the quartet's commitment to note. Add in a velvety, gorgeous tone, and impeccable ensemble playing, and you'll get a memorable performance, one you'll often want to come back to. A youthful work, the Sextet op. 18 reaches the same heights of inspiration as the later string quartet. Here again, the Leipzig Quartet plays with a perfect balance between control and expression (a few spots of less than perfect intonation notwithstanding). The lines are clear and well shaped, the textures transparent, the choice of tempos always suited to the character of the music. Even more important: the Leipzig musicians and their friends, the violist Hartmut Rohde and the cellist Michael Sanderling (son of the conductor Kurt), sound as if they love the music madly and want to share their passion for it. An index option in the first movement of the sextet allows the listener to skip the marvelous introductory melody by the cello and hear the piece as originally conceived by Brahms (the definitive version works better!). Informative liner notes and top quality recording are on the same wavelength as the performances. Without any doubt, a beautiful achievement.

--Luca Sabbatini, ClassicsToday.com

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Classical Music

What a debut! The Scherzo in E flat minor is the first exsisiting composition by Johannes Brahms, and its gloom and bizarre character go beyond even the no-joking-matter models set by Chopin.

Hardy Rittner has recorded this rarity on the fourth installment of his historical Brahms series – for the first time on a 240-centimeter Ignaz Bösendorfer grand piano from 1846. The biting tone of this instrument immediately gets under the skin and forms an exciting contrast to the two J. B. Streicher grand pianos.

The two Rhapsodies op. 79 get things going. Brahms would not have been Brahms if he had not composed these pieces with a compelling formal logic. The second rhapsody bears the heading “Molto passionato,” and Hardy Rittner conjures magnificent passion out of the Streicher grand piano from 1868.

In the Piano Pieces op. 76 he spreads out a multicolored kaleidoscope ranging from melancholy to graceful charm and from dancy mirth to eerie gloom - it all is there and can be experienced with special immediacy on this historical instrument.

Brahms composed sixteen waltzes as his ticket to Viennese musical society and dedicated them to the feared critic Eduard Hanslick. This tactic paid off. Hanslick became Brahms’s most glowing admirer.

Rittner shows why this was so: simple on the surface, these exquisitely crafted waltzes create their own special cosmos of expressive colors with a wonderfully catchy tune, a racy Hungarian piece, and other masterful intricacies in three-four time.

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

The first Brahms concerto is a touchstone for each and every pianist. Until now nobody had dared to record the concerto on a historical grand piano with an orchestra performing on historical instruments. On his solo recordings Hardy Rittner has already conquered the Brahms Olympus on various occasions. He is joined by the brilliantly arrayed l'arte del mondo orchestra under the conductor Werner Ehrhardt. The result: a great risk - in a live performance - has become a great recording.

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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

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

Some compositions are so good that we wish we could have two of the same. The early Piano Trio in B major op. 8 by Johannes Brahms is one such work and one of music history’s greatest cases of good fortune: it has been transmitted in two versions. As we know, the overly self-critical Brahms otherwise completely destroyed all the early versions, sketches, and drafts of his works. The Vienna Piano Trio’s new Brahms edition in superior Super Audio sound on MDG opens with the late version of this work from the composer’s youth and then confronts it with his mature op. 87.

The piano part is of extraordinary difficulty – which is hardly surprising since the gifted pianist wrote it around the time of his Piano Concerto No. 2. The haunting scherzo in particular has what it takes and is a rewarding task for Stefan Mendl, who with his Viennese colleagues celebrates the spirit world on a venerable “Manfred Bürki” Steinway D.