The three works presented on this installment (Vol. 23) in Naxos' ongoing series of Haydn symphonies (using three different orchestras) usually appear only when somebody does a complete cycle. This is not surprising with so many great works in his symphonic output. Still, symphony No. 31 is very entertaining. The opening horn call which gave the work its 'Hornsignal" nickname quickly gives way to a beautiful movement featuring solo lines from the violin, cello and double bass, just like an old fashioned concerto grosso. The music is much more interesting than the other two works, and the excellent soloists play very tastefully. Some listeners may have slight objections to the Eastern European sounding winds and horns (all four of whom get plenty of action), but they actually lend a rustic quality, which is quite appropriate. Symphonies 27 & 28 are less remarkable by Hadyn's high standards, but both feature his usual high-spirited Allegros and Presto finales. The Nicolaus Esterházy Orchestra plays cleanly and brightly, if occasionally a bit stiffly. For example, the Menuet of No. 28 is a bit heavy-footed, and the following Trio could have used a slightly brisker tempo for contrast. These and a couple of other spots are just a bit too homogenous. Naxos' recorded sound is very good, and the balance is fine throughout, making this disc a nice way to get acquainted with some little known music.

--David Preiser, ClassicsToday.com

SIBELIUS: Finlandia / Karelia Suite / Lemminkainen Suite

Bruckner: Symphonies No. 8, WAB 108 & No. 0, "Nullte", WAB 1

VIVALDI: Flute Concertos (Famous)

Field: Piano Concertos, Vol. 3

GIANTS OF JAZZ

LEE, Peggy: It's a Good Day (1941-1950)

This album was nominated for the 2002 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental
Soloist(s) Performance with Orchestra.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was at the forefront of the Impressionist revolution in painting. Together with a small group of like-minded friends, he scandalized the critics by devising a new way of representing the world in all it's bewildering variety of light and shadow. Here, the world of Monet is given a musical perspective with a carefully chosen selection of pieces by the finest composers of his time. We may enjoy here some of the greatest moments in musical and artistic development in the late nineteenth century, as Impressionism was emerging triumphant. On this CD, Monet's incredible foresight and breathtaking depictions of natural beauty are musically complemented by such landmarks as Debussy's graceful Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and Bizet's daring masterpiece Carmen. 1 CD with full-color, illustrated, explanatory booklet.

Weiss, S.L.: Lute Sonatas, Vol. 4 - Nos. 21, 37, 46

DUPRE: Works for Organ, Vol. 13

SCHNITTKE: Cello Concerto / Stille Musik / Cello Sonata

Charpentier, M.-A.: Sacred Music, Vol. 4

When Franz Krommer wrote the three wind partitas presented on this recording (between 1808 and 1810) the Harmonie-Musik tradition was waning, making these some of the last examples of this once widely-practiced genre. Scored for pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons, they gain added ceremonial nobility with the addition of contra-bassoon. Listeners new to this music also will note the high, penetrating clarinet parts in C for the Op. 76 Partita and the many flamboyant arpeggio passages for second horn throughout Op. 69. Both techniques recall outdoor styles of the late 1700s.


These new performances by the Michael Thompson Wind Ensemble are of very high order and have been pleasingly recorded in a bright-sounding church acoustic that suits this extrovert music particularly well. This account of Op. 79 supplants an older analog version by the Nash Ensemble, with well-focused if quite closely miked sound and playing that's more technically refined and better blended. Op. 76 has been recorded previously by the Meyer Wind Ensemble for EMI, but that performance is outclassed here by superior playing and a brilliant sense of comedy. For an enticing sample, try the final Rondo! Highly recommended.
--Michael Jameson, ClassicsToday.com

What's a critic supposed to do? The last thing you want is to go around just handing out top ratings, but what choice do you have when you hear a disc such as this one? On the surface it's got very little going for it--obscure repertoire, esoteric instruments, and it's chamber music to boot! And for the whole disc, all you hear is two solo bass violas da gamba--no orchestra, no keyboard, no exotic winds or percussion. But I'm willing to bet that if you hear this, if you have even the remotest appreciation for beautiful melody, for the richly-colored, reedy sonority of ideally matched stringed instruments, and a fascination with the essence of chamber music--a real dialogue between players--you will be pleased and happily surprised. It's not Bach or Marais, and it's not masterpiece-caliber music, but these six sonatas by 17th-century Dutch-born composer Johannes Schenck (1660-c. 1712) show an unusually accomplished facility for dramatic, interactive part-writing as well as a thorough command of the gamba's technical limits and possibilities. Schenck was a virtuoso player himself (he was one of the many stars at the Düsseldorf court from about 1696 until his death), and the two performers on this recording, members of the Quebec-based Les Voix Humaines, not only grasp the music's considerable technical demands, but fully embrace its more or less free-flowing style, weaving and tossing and shaping their lines, playing with and against each other in a spirited, sometimes improvisatory-like conversation. Le Nymphe di Rheno (The Nymphs of the Rhine) is the title of Schenck's Op. 8 collection of 12 sonatas of which half are presented on this Volume 1. I'm actually looking forward to more of this music from these very fine musicians on Volume 2. And the full-bodied sound makes the whole thing just about perfect. --David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Opera Explained: BIZET - Carmen (Smillie)

Bach's concertos for multiple harpsichords and orchestra are beloved by some and drive others crazy. Perhaps no other music so graphically illustrates Beecham's famous description of the sound of the solo instrument as "two skeletons copulating on a tin roof." The performers must exercise great care in selecting instruments that are not too "clangy" sounding, and the recording has to balance a need for warmth and roundness of tone with contrapuntal clarity. In fact, most of this music was originally composed for melody instruments (violin and oboe, principally), and Naxos has obligingly reconstructed the original versions on another disc in this excellent series. One of the nicest things about this particular disc is the presence of the original version (by Vivaldi) of the Concerto for Four Harpsichords, an impossible work that is performed here about as well as it ever has been. In fact, all of these performances are uniformly propulsive, tasteful, and above all genuinely comfortable to listen to. A good listen, then, but best enjoyed one work at a time. --David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

SAINT-SAENS: Carnival of the Animals / RAVEL: Mother Goose (

CLERAMBAULT: Triomphe d'Iris

American Neo-Romantic composer, David Del Tredici has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. His recent energetic output for piano solo is due partly to a close artistic collaboration with Marc Peloquin, resulting specifically in S/M Ballade, a “pianistic terror”. The finale of Gotham Glory is another virtuoso test, Del Tredici’s celebration of New York closing with a Grand Fantasy derived from a waltz by Emil Waldteufel. This is the first of three volumes of David Del Tredici’s complete piano music, with its generously rewarding combination of achingly expressive romanticism, subtle references and ever-present sense of covert and overt drama.

This first-ever recording of the original version of Anton Bruckner's sweeping Symphony No. 1 marked the final great achievement of the acclaimed Bruckner conductor, Georg Tintner, who died in 1999. Following the premiere of the symphony in 1868, Bruckner's devoted conductor friends, all of whom were die-hard Wagnerians like Bruckner himself, championed the work (and Bruckner's other compositions) while subjecting it to their own modifications in order to make Bruckner sound more Wagnerian! Regrettably, the trusting Bruckner sometimes allowed and even abetted these interventions. With the advantage of twenty-twenty hindsight, one can see that Bruckner was, from the beginning, a majestically individual composer and should have been left to his own devices. Under the knowing hand of Tintner, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra reveals this symphony's sprawling orchestral architecture as it was first conceived. The first two movements are surprisingly novel for a fledgling essay in the genre. The second movement already sets the standard for those otherworldly adagio movements, with their glacially unfolding melodies, that populate Bruckner's symphonies.

James Sinclair is always an excellent guide to this music, even through Ives' most complex textural thickets. The Fourth of July has real celebratory fervor and a sense of fun, while the climax of Thanksgiving, so often a muddle, here achieves real transcendence, with the choir perfectly integrated into the ensemble. I have to confess that I love this piece particularly, even though it's often considered the weakest part of what would later become the "Holidays" Symphony. I attended Hopkins Grammar in New Haven, as did Ives, and every Christmas the Glee Club gave a concert on the New Haven green at Trinity Church, right next to Center Church at which Ives served as organist. One of the hymns we often sang was "Duke Street", which forms the climax of Thanksgiving. So it has personal resonance, and it's also a great tune.

For this reason, and because of the similarities in tone and structure among the other three movements, I see no reason why the movements of "Holidays" should not be enjoyed separately, as they are presented here (the first, Washington's Birthday, already has been released). Interspersed between the better-known works are some real novelties. First, The General Slocum, a brief portrait of a tragic shipwreck, followed by two student works that sound totally Romantic, and completely unlike Ives: the Overture in G minor, and the Postlude in F. Finally, the Yale-Princeton Football Game, a two-minute riot of a piece that will make any fan of (American) football smile.

As already suggested, Sinclair's conducting gets everything right: tempos, textures, balances, and colors. He allows Ives' boisterous high spirits to emerge naturally, effortlessly, and where necessary, raucously. The Malmö orchestra plays all of this music with complete confidence, and the sonics are unaffectedly crisp and clean. An essential release for Ives fans.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Quincy Porter was one of a diverse generation of American composers who played a significant role in shaping and directing American musical culture in the mid-twentieth century. Although his orchestral works attracted considerable attention in. Quincy Porter: String Quartets Nos. 1-4 CD music contains a single disc.

John Corigliano is one of the finest and most widely recognized American composers. He has won several Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and an Academy Award for his score for the film the Red Violin. Corigliano' nostalgic Snapshot.

Every Friday for two years between 1942 and 1944, a group of teenage boy prisoners in the Terezin concentration camp shared their poems, stories and artwork in a secret magazine they called Vedem. Most of those boys perished in the Holocaust.

SCHUMAN Symphony No. 6. Prayer in Time of War. New England Triptych • Gerard Schwarz, cond; Seattle SO • NAXOS 8559625 (60:51)


I was working as office administrator for a church at the time of 9/11, and can still remember the shock and angst following the attack and its aftermath. The minister came to me one day and mentioned how horrible things were. I remarked that at times like this I thought of Olivier Messiaen and his three fellow musicians, held prisoner in a Nazi POW camp, thinking that not only their own ends were near but the end of the world, and how Messiaen responded, artistically, with his masterly Quartet for the End of Time. The minister looked at me as if I had just said I came from Mars and said, “Well, I don’t know how to rock and roll any more!”


Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. I respond more to Messiaen and those other works written as a response to the angst of a war that shattered mankind to the very depths of its soul. William Schuman’s response was his 1943 Prayer in Time of War and, afterwards, his abstract but darkly soul-shattering Symphony No. 6. The Prayer met with good critical response when it first appeared, the symphony with antipathy bordering on outright hostility. Its premiere with the Dallas Symphony conducted by Antal Dorati on February 27, 1949, incensed the audience so much that, in Schuman’s words, “They questioned whether they should even complete payment of the commission.”


The symphony, following the dark music he wrote for ballets by Antony Tudor ( Undertow ) and Martha Graham ( Night Journey ), is similarly black and angst-ridden. Like Vaughan Williams’s own Sixth Symphony, it is a highly personal reaction to a postwar world in which so many thousands of lives were ended or disrupted, a world dominated by power struggles with the Soviets, the atomic bomb, and the intense effort it took to pick up shattered lives and move on. The fact that Vaughan Williams’s work was understood and appreciated in England while Schuman’s was vilified in America probably has something to do with the level of property destruction the former country suffered. America itself was largely protected, at least physically, and like the onset of the Depression, the postwar years created a market for soft, soothing music. Schuman’s existentialist bombshell was not what audiences wanted to hear.


Even today—perhaps especially today, in an uncertain world caught between Islamic jihads on one side and an economic freefall on the other—Schuman’s symphony and Prayer speak to us deeply unless, of course, you are one of those who just don’t know how to rock and roll. The Prayer is gentler in expression. Despite a dangerous-sounding Più animato section in which the storm of war is depicted, its overall mood is soothing in its multitonal, Ives-like expression. The second outburst, consisting of brass fanfares and animated strings, is more hopeful than nihilistic, and it ends with the same soft chord with which it began. Conversely, the symphony is consistently dark, a tunnel with no light at its end but only the quietude of resignation and emotional defeat. One of the more furious outbursts at about the 20-minute mark didn’t seem to me as well composed as the rest of the work, but even this somewhat spurious moment seemed to me to indicate our powerlessness against forces too strong to fight.


Gerard Schwarz has developed over the years into an outstanding conductor, with only a few of his recordings sounding emotionally shallow. This music is very much his métier as, apparently, was the Mahler Seventh he recorded a while back. These performances lack nothing in drama, feeling, or outstanding orchestral balance. Schwarz’s only rival in the symphony with which I’m familiar is the recording by American conductor Hugh Keelan with the New Zealand Symphony (Koch 7290), a fine performance as well if, to my ears, a little less seamlessly joined than Schwarz’s. The Prayer is combined with Schuman’s Fourth Symphony and Judith on First Edition 11, played by Jorge Mester and the Louisville Symphony, but the splendidly professional polish of the Seattle Symphony surpasses Louisville’s playing capacity of that time.


After two such melancholy works, Schwarz ends this CD with one of Schuman’s most popular pieces, the New England Triptych , three pieces for orchestra after William Billings. Here the language is also bitonal but the overall mood more positive. It’s a wonderful way for the disc to end and, again, Schwarz gives a performance comparable to the best available, including Howard Hanson’s classic account for Mercury Living Presence (432755) and Leonard Slatkin with the St. Louis Symphony (RCA 61282). Their versions have, perhaps, a trifle more swagger, but Schwarz is not eclipsed; and, when combined with these shattering performances of the symphony and Prayer, it makes for an indispensable disc for those who admire Schuman’s unique musical aesthetic.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley


If we set to one side the disavowed first two symphonies Gerard Schwarz has now completed recording the Schuman symphonies. Only the Schwarz-Seattle-Naxos Eighth awaits issue. The series began with a handful of Schuman symphonies recorded by Delos in the 1990s. Naxos has picked up the baton dropped when the gloriously ambitious Delos project stumbled and fell. That they are doing this at bargain price is remarkable as with so much that Naxos does. Naxos have reissued all the Delos session symphonies and continued and completed the cycle in Seattle. This disc mixes the Delos-originated 1990 session for the Triptych with newer Naxos fixtures in 2005 and 2008. The transcript of an interview with Gerard Schwarz can be found on the Naxos website.

The Sixth Symphony was first recorded by Ormandy in the 1960s on CBS AML 4992 and reissued on Albany TROY256. It’s a work of nocturnal reclusion; not at all restful. Although Schuman has his lyric heart on display it is not close to his sleeve. The song is sweet but haunted and darkly clouded with Bergian strands – even a touch of Allan Pettersson about it. Barber in his most introspective brown study comes to mind and the tension never lets up. Kinetic fury has usually been part of the Schuman palette and so it is here (try. 20:00 onwards) although occluded lyricism dominates and acts as an indefatigable magnetic pull. The work is presented in a single half hour track. The Sixth was commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra League and the Dallas orchestra premièred it with Antal Doráti conducting on 27 February 1949. It’s an impressive piece if without the compulsive concentration that bowls over listeners to the Third Symphony and the Violin Concerto.

Prayer in a Time of War first saw light of day with Fritz Reiner and the Pittsburgh Orchestra on 26 February 1943. It’s a substantial movement of symphonic bearing and unyielding seriousness as befits the subject. The language is touched with some bleakness but it is less convoluted than that of the Sixth Symphony. This is the Schuman of the Third Symphony admitting and radiating facets that recall Roy Harris and Aaron Copland. The brass writing is gaunt, statuesque and excoriating; the drum-taps and cold fanfares referencing Lincoln and Whitman. It’s is a grand statement to put alongside his works of similar concision: Credendum, In Praise of Shahn and American Hymn. This is not its first recording; that honour goes to the Louisville and Jorge Mester – still to be had on Louisville First Edition.

New England Triptych is in three movements: I. Be Glad Then, America [5:05]; II. When Jesus Wept [7:53] III. Chester [3:08]. The outer movements are redolent of Tippett in zest, springiness and riotous exuberance. The Triptych was premièred in Miami on 28 October 1956, with Andre Kostelanetz conducting the University of Miami Symphony Orchestra. The next month Kostelanetz took it to the New York Phil. It is one of Schuman’s most accessible works despite its date. The three movements are based on hymns by the Revolutionary period figure, William Billings (1746– 1800). Schuman refers to “a fusion of styles and musical language”; acidic-epic Schuman meets devout Hanoverian. The middle movement recalls RVW’s Tallis and Bliss’s Blow Meditations.

Let’s not write off those first two symphonies (1935, 1937). I have heard the Second Symphony in a 1930s broadcast by Howard Barlow and the CBS orchestra and it’s by no means negligible. Then there are other works which will be worth revival – principally theConcerto on Old English Rounds and the spectacular symphonic cantata Casey at the Bat, superbly revived by Dorati in Washington as part of the American centennial event diary.

It’s a pleasure to report that this disc was generously supported by the National Endowment for the Arts who seem to have moved away from a policy that appears at one time to favour only the work of the adherents of academic dissonance.

The notes are by Joseph W. Polisi, currently sixth president of The Juilliard School and author of “American Muse: The Life and Times of William Schuman” (Amadeus Press, 2008).

Keep watching for the Naxos Schuman Eighth secure in the knowledge that Schwarz and his Pacific Edge orchestra are fully equal to the challenges set by Schuman. Naxos will again, I am sure, provide a stunning recording as they have done here across a span of eighteen years – session to session.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

It's hard not to like Leroy Anderson, a skilled orchestral craftsman with a rich supply of clever ideas, an ingratiating musical imagination, and, thank heaven, a sense of humor. Most of his music embodies the term "American light classical", and you can't listen to pieces such as Sleigh Ride or Bugler's Holiday without a smile and feeling just a bit lighter of spirit. The selections featured here, billed as a "collection of Leroy Anderson's holiday music", are taken from Naxos' excellent multi-volume series devoted to Anderson's orchestral music. Although it's not clear why such numbers as Horse and Buggy, The Waltzing Cat, and The Golden Years are here, in style and mood they take nothing away from the more obvious Christmas/holiday pieces. And while it's possible to imagine just a bit more personality and panache in the articulation in some places (à la Boston Pops), Leonard Slatkin is an unqualified expert in this repertoire, and he leads his British orchestra with consummately entertaining style, all of it most favorably recorded.

Four years ago Decca released A Leroy Anderson Christmas, which contains many of the same works featured on this program--performed both by the Boston Pops and Arthur Fiedler (Sleigh Ride) and by Anderson conducting his own orchestra. Although that one is worthy for its historical aspects, this one is superior for its consistently high-quality performances, much more satisfying ambience, and first-rate sound. Highly recommended.

--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com