Let’s hope this disc represents the start of a series. Mercadante wrote a lot of orchestral music: concertos, fantasias, and whole series of quasi-programmatic pieces that he called, probably for want of a better term, “symphonies.” There’s a tendency, in considering 19th-century Italian symphonic music, to begin and end with Martucci, “the Italian Brahms,” on account of that composer’s Germanic orientation. Mercadante’s style, though, was Italian through and through, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The works on this disc are unflaggingly entertaining. Omaggio a Bellini, based on themes from Norma, is delightful – sort of the equivalent of a Liszt operatic piano fantasy, only for orchestra. The Seconda Sinfonia caratteristica napoletana is basically a vivacious tarantella, while the title of the Gran Sinfonia sopra motivi della Stabat Mater del celebre Rossini speaks for itself. As with the Bellini homage, the arrangement is unfailingly well-made and not a note too long (13 minutes in this case).

Mercadante’s Second Clarinet Concerto is a charming piece in two movements, an opening Allegro maestoso followed by an inventive theme and variations finale. You might think that the concluding work, the “Garibaldi” Sinfonia, would be a trashy pot-boiler. It’s based on a popular tune, The Hymn of the Alpine Hunters, and is dedicated to the Italian nation. So a pot-boiler it might be, but trashy it is not–tuneful and energetic rather. There’s no bass drum or cymbals roughing up the texture, and the piece is basically just good fun.

So are these performances, well executed and decently enough recorded, even if the sonics are a mite studio-bound. Giammarco Casani plays the clarinet very attractively in the concerto, and the orchestral contribution, direct and gutsy if not the last word in finesse, suits the idiom. Keep it coming, Naxos!

– David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

A contemporary of Rossini and Donizetti, Saverio Mercadante was one of Italy’s most productive 19th-century operatic composers. Don Chisciotte alle nozze di Gamaccio was written during the composer’s stay in Spain, and is based on a chapter of Cervante’s Don Quixote in which the hero prevents the forced marriage of a poor farm girl to the wealthy Camacho. Magnificently entertaining and dramatically innovative, Don Chisciotte combines fashionable Neapolitan style with Spanish folk music elements in an unforgettable melodramma giocoso. It is heard on this recording in its first modern performance.

Earning the admiration of the most eminent composers of his time, from Brahms and Tchaikovsky to Liszt and Sarasate, Emile Sauret occupies a significant place in the history of the violin. His lively genre pieces were augmented by an extensive cycle of Etudes-Caprices that remain a testament to his finesse and command. Written to span all twenty-four keys, they encompass subtle expressive qualities as well as drama and technical virtuosity. The Azerbaijani-born British violin virtuoso, soloist, recitalist, chamber musician and orchestral director, nazrin Rashidova made her solo debut at the age of three in Baku and was awarded a gold medal by the Cairo Opera House for an exceptional violin recital three years later. Establishing FeMusa in 2008, Britain’s first female chamber orchestra in 60 years, is the latest in a series of achievements.

Ahhh, the sweet sound of the Romantic (that’s with a capital “R”) violin. These are the sorts of pieces that from the latter 19th century until, oh, sometime in the 1950s were played and taught and loved by almost anyone who enjoyed classical music. Émile Sauret (1852-1920) was a virtuoso—a prodigy who began publicly performing at age eight—who also could write some pretty decent pieces for his instrument, ones that didn’t just show off technique but turned out some fine melodies and showed a capacity for developing ideas into cohesive, attractive miniatures and some extended pieces as well—the Souvenir de Los Angeles, Scherzo fantastique, and the delightful Farfalla (butterfly) that nicely integrates the piano with the violin in a true fantasy of lepidopteran aerobatics.

Michi Wiancko is certainly comfortable in this repertoire, dashing off runs, arpeggios, multiple-stops, and all manner of fancy bowing with the ease we’ve come to expect these days from fearless young performers. But she and her able partner, pianist Dina Vainshtein, really make music out of it all, relishing the style and expressive possibilities whether evoking ringing bells, the “orient”, a gondolier’s song, or, as mentioned, a butterfly. And Wiancko can really dig into or barely alight on a string as required—and at a second’s notice. These works are described as “lyrical, playful, ethereal, and ecstatic,” and that just about describes both the music and the playing here. The sound is excellent too. Terrific!

-- David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

A supreme virtuoso, the French violinist, composer and teacher Emile Sauret was acclaimed by the greatest musicians of the century, including Sarasate and Liszt. He wrote a series of charming genre pieces (available on Naxos 8.572366) but also a sequence of 24 Etudes-Caprices which marry virtuosity with every expressive opportunity available to the instrument. The result is one of the unsung but major cycles for solo violin spanning all twenty-four keys. The Azerbaijani-born British violin virtuoso, soloist, recitalist, chamber musician and orchestral director Nazrin Rashidova made her solo debut at the age of three in Baku and was awarded a gold medal by the Cairo Opera House for an exceptional violin recital three years later. Establishing FeMusa in 2008, Britain’s first female chamber orchestra in sixty years, is merely the latest in a series of achievements. She entered the Royal Academy of Music in London at the age of fifteen, where she had the privilege to play on a rare collection of violins by Antonio Stradivari. She studied with professors Erich Gruenberg, Felix Andrievsky and Lydia Mordkovitch. A prizewinner in several international competitions, she has appeared on international television and radio, played for royalty and other dignitaries, and has also performed in the US, Japan, Europe, and the Middle East.

Satie’s personal eccentricities have never masked the fact that his music was both revolutionary and anticipatory of later artistic movements, principally Minimalism, Surrealism and Theatre of the Absurd. His piano music offers a perfect distillation of these elements. The Allegro is his earliest known work, offering his first use of quotations, a favored device. The extended pieces Le Fils des etoiles and uspud derive from incidental music, glorying in parodic and grotesque scenes, while his ‘humoristic’ phase of the 1910s is explored in Cinq Grimaces. Only Satie could attempt to fuse a fugue with a waltz, as he does in the Fugue-valse. Duanduan Hao was born in China in 1990. He began his piano lessons when he was four and by the age of six was already drawing attention to his precocious ability. He then studied in Shanghai and in Paris, going on to win many prizes in international piano competitions. He currently lives in New York and studies at The Juilliard School and Columbia University.

Satie: Piano Works (Selection)

The finale to this critically acclaimed four-disc series contains some of Sarasate’s greatest—and also some of his rarest—transcriptions and arrangements, some of which have been in the repertoire of violinists since they were published. They include a delectable Chopin sequence, arrangements inspired by the music of French Baroque violinists, an early and beautifully constructed Souvenirs de Faust based on Gounod, and Sarasate’s own favourite concert piece, Raff’s La fée d’amour. “Yang throws off merciless chains of double stops and finger-crippling arabesques with scintillating aplomb…simply inimitable…Bravo!” (BBC Music Magazine on Volume 3, 8.570893)

If you want to hear some very well-played Sarasate violin music, performed on a disc devoted solely to that composer's Spanish Dances, then this new release from Chinese violinist Tianwa Yang and Naxos will do the job splendidly. Yang was in her 17th year in 2004 when she recorded these stylish, dazzling showpieces--chamber works that also contain an inherent sensual, sultry physicality that requires a soloist with a keen sense of the rhythms and a true feeling for the passion--sometimes playful, sometimes athletic, sometimes erotic--embodied in these dances. Virtuoso they certainly are--and Yang delivers in this aspect of her performances; that is, her technique, which helped her win the prize of "Best Young Violinist in China" in 2004, is sharply developed, confident, and articulate.

Highlights include the energetic, triple-time Jota Aragonesa Op. 27, with its insistent down-beat, varied melodic twists and turns (including a section in harmonics), and sudden fiery outburst at the end. "Zapateado" (Spanish Dance Op. 23 No. 2) also is very exciting in terms of Yang's command of various bowing and fingering techniques--but this also is one place where she shows her occasional tendency to play under pitch, especially (and most unfortunately) on many of the harmonics (here and elsewhere). Because the pitch of unstopped harmonics (which many of these are) is determined by the tuning of the open string and cannot be altered simply by a fine finger adjustment, it suggests that Yang's violin was not always precisely in tune with the piano. At other times (in several places in the Op. 23 No. 1 ("Playera") an occasional note lies a bit flat at the end of a phrase, seemingly due to momentary inattentiveness, not to any fundamental failure of technique.


Aside from these spotty lapses, when you compare Yang's interpretations, which are basically solid and technically very impressive, with other versions, you realize the limitations of her emotional, experiential input to the pieces' expressive aspects. There's plenty of fire but not much heat; and there's undeniable vitality but the seductive, romantic spirit is missing.


For the most accomplished modern performances of many of the works on Yang's program, turn to James Ehnes' CBC recording, released the same year Yang's was made, which also includes works by Wieniawski. Ehnes seems to have thought more carefully about (or at least sensed) proper tempos relative to the particular nature of a given dance--his slower Playera, for instance, and considerably faster Jota Navarra and Zapateado, in each case ideally capturing the innate spirit of the dance in question. Ehnes also supplies the romantic depth and understanding these pieces need--a knowing turn of phrase, a clever shift of dynamics, a particular rhythmic emphasis here, a pulling away there. It's great stuff, and the Wieniawski selections are just as good.


The sound on the two discs also offers different choices--more edgy and gritty for Yang, making no compromise in presenting the instrument's natural character, and warmer, brighter, a bit more distant for Ehnes, yet no less realistic. Another consideration: Yang's program offers several works difficult or impossible to find elsewhere on disc.
--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

SARASATE Introduction et Tarantelle. Jota de San Fermin. Fantaisie sur le Don Juan de Mozart. Fantaisie sur Der Freischütz de Weber. Jota de Pamplona. Airs écossais. Le Rêve. L’Esprit follet • Tianwa Yang (vn); Ernest Martínez, cond; OS de Navarra • NAXOS 8.572276 (67: 08)


Tianwa Yang’s exciting series of Pablo Sarasate’s music for violin and orchestra (she’s devoted another series to his music for violin and piano) comes to an end with this fourth volume, containing many items that may be unfamiliar to some listeners. The program opens with the Introduction and Tarantella , a favorite of Nathan Milstein, who played it with great élan with piano (Sarasate himself also recorded it, without the Introduction, in 1904). This performance by Yang, alternately smoldering and coruscating, additionally may reveal to some listeners, in Ernest Martínez Izquierdo’s accompaniment with the Orqesta Sinfónica de Navarra, not only an additional brilliance in the violin part, but also a skillfully wrought orchestration that enhances the work’s ethnic vibrancy. Even Joseph Gold, who once again for this volume writes especially perceptive notes, isn’t inclined to praise the Jota de San Fermin , but Yang plays it perhaps as convincingly and offers listeners as many choice violinistic pleasures as anyone today might do.


If Sarasate’s Fantaisie sur le Don Juan de Mozart , less frequently performed than the composer’s well-known fantasy on Carmen , doesn’t treat musical themes of equally inherent dash, La ci darem la mano should be equally familiar to many listeners; and Sarasate embellishes it in his own unmistakable way, by turns liquidly brilliant and hauntingly insinuating. Yang delivers the aria-like themes with a rich, smooth tone. Sarasate’s Fantaisie sur Der Freischütz de Weber explores the opera’s more suggestive moments as well as its barnstorming ones, all translated into Sarasate’s violinistic idiom without doing violence to their musical and dramatic identity.


Gold deems the Jota de Pamplona one of composer’s best pieces, and it sports the Spanish finery familiar from Sarasate’s more familiar works. The Airs écossais , which Gold suggests might have been a response to Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy and Alexander Mackenzie’s Pibroch Suite , declaims its strutting Scottish tunes with a crackling energy (notable in Yang’s performance) that could place it in time among the composer’s most popular works. Le Rêve takes the form of an expressive tone poem, lasting more than 11 minutes in Yang’s performance. It may not explore so many hidden psychic corners as do Eugène Ysaÿe’s works in the genre—or Ernest Chausson’s Poème , inspired by them—but its less shifting harmonic terrain still creates shadowy enough impression of interplay between light and dark to place it on firm footing among them, and Yang’s performance should help to cement its position there. L’Esprit follet brings the program to a close in a performance that’s both fey and affecting.


The engineers have captured Yang up flatteringly close, but they’ve lost none of the orchestral detail. Does she sound as brilliant as did Sarasate? She surely sounds different—hers isn’t Sarasate’s easy elegance. But she’s authoritative and thoroughly convincing in her own way, which, in any case, might be more appealing than Sarasate’s to modern audiences raised listening to violinists who endowed his works with an almost Slavic personality. Urgently recommended, like the rest of Yang’s series (there’s a complete collection of Sarasate’s works, by violinists Gabriel Croitoru and Manuel Guillén Navarro with Jacques Bodmer conducting the Orquestra Ciudad de Málaga on Regis 010/1/2/3, which I reviewed Fanfare 19:6 but judged in 34:4 to fall below Yang’s mark), to listeners of all kinds.


FANFARE: Robert Maxham

Dazzlingly virtuosic fireworks, spirited passion and astonishing technique combine in the youthful Chinese violinist Tianwa Yang who leaves the critics grasping for superlatives whenever she plays. In this second volume of Naxos’s cycle of Sarasate’s complete works for violin and orchestra she again teams with the orchestra founded by the legendary Spanish violinist-composer in 1879 to present two of his orchestral masterpieces, the famous Carmen Fantasy and the sadly neglected Romeo and Juliet Fantasy, as well as several other utterly delightful, and fiendishly difficult, concert pieces.

An amazing violinist does wonders with Sarasate.

Anyone interested in stunning violin artistry should buy this amazing disc straightaway. It’s one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time. I hadn’t come across Tianwa Yang’s Sarasate series for Naxos before but I will certainly search out the other discs as a matter of some urgency. Her playing is simply extraordinary - no wonder she’s been described as “A Pride of China”. This isn’t one of those flashy, hollow, 20-notes-a-second recitals that quite frankly drive me to distraction. You know the sort of thing, the ones that are all about technique and nothing to do with music. This playing is supremely musical. Dazzling, all the same, but it’s the musicianship that’s the primary focus. Tianwa Yang’s sound is beautiful. At no point in this 79 minute programme is there a hint of strain. The tone remains perfect even during the harmonics, double-stopping passages and those dazzling displays of bowing contained in the fiendishly difficult Fantaisie-Caprice. All the notes are perfectly in place but it’s all so lyrical, sensitively shaped and touching. Intonation is impeccable. It really is that good.

Many of the works on the disc are new to me. Sarasate has certainly written some really memorable, tuneful pieces. I will regularly return to them again. He’s Spain’s answer to Paganini in terms of his accomplishment as a violinist. Listening to his music, I find it more enjoyable and elegant than that of Paganini. It’s obviously very taxing from a technical standpoint. On the other hand it never reaches the point where you feel that the writing is right on the edge of becoming unplayable with those uncomfortable sounds that can emanate even from the bows of the world’s finest players. I am thankful that Ms Yang, very ably supported by Markus Hadulla, has committed this wonderful music to record. There’s a great variety in Sarasate’s writing, ranging from the dazzling virtuosity of Fantaisie-Caprice to the lyrical elegance of Boléro and the singing melodic inspiration to be found in Rêverie and Prière et berceuse.
 
The recording is warm, detailed and resonant with a nice, beefy piano sound. A joy to listen to in fact.

A final thank you and a plea to Naxos and their engineering team: I would love to hear Ms Yang in the Nielsen and Sibelius concertos. More please!

– John Whitmore, MusicWeb International

Joly Braga Santos was Portugal’s greatest orchestral composer, and this recording presents eight world premiere recordings including his very first work for orchestra, the Symphonic Overture No. 1. This and the Symphonic Overture No. 2 share a unified structure and lyrical themes, contrasting with the somber Prelude, originally written for an intensely tragic opera. Braga Santos’s characterful four ‘miniatures’ are brought together to form an attractive suite, while his only Piano Concerto is a virtuoso spectacle with a large part for percussion and a gloriously anarchic approach to timbre and tonality. Born in Rijeka in 1981, Goran Filipec studied at the Ino Mirkovich Academy in Croatia, at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, and the Conservatoire national superieur de musique et de danse de Paris. During his early career, he was a top prizewinner of several international piano competitions. He performs across Europe, the US, South America and Japan as a recitalist and as a soloist with leading orchestras.

Includes pavane(s) by Thomas Tomkins.
Includes work(s) by Marc-Antoine Charpentier.

WESLEY Ascribe unto the Lord. O give thanks unto the Lord. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace. Wash me throughly. O God, whose nature. Let us lift up our heart. Blessed be the God and Father. Cast me not away from Thy presence. The Wilderness • Christopher Robinson, cond; Clare College Ch, Cambridge; James McVinnie (org) • NAXOS 8.570318 (75:14 Text and Translation)


Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810–1876) was the “natural son” of the elder Samuel (also a musician of no small note) and held a variety of musical posts at English cathedrals, including those of Hereford, Winchester, and Gloucester. Of him the Oxford Dictionary of Music observes that he “cherished high ideals in church music in days when the general standard was low and engaged in constant warfare on behalf of his views. Many of his church compositions are in regular use and are highly admired.” No wonder, based on the evidence presented here.


The work of the Clare College Choir was praised, albeit too briefly, by this writer in a compilation of works by the contemporary composer Tarik O’Regan in the September/October 2006 issue of Fanfare ; and one need hardly listen past the first track of the present release, Ascribe unto the Lord, to be thoroughly impressed by both the range of Wesley’s style and the interpretive resources brought to bear thereon by the performers. In the former connection, the piece ranges from an appropriately hushed setting of “Let the whole earth stand in awe of Him” to a highly agitated and (for Wesley) considerably chromatic treatment of “As for the gods of the heathen, they are but idols.” The adjective “scornful” has never before occurred to this writer as a description of a passage of music; but it seems highly apropos here.


As to execution, the work of both full choir and soloists (heavily used in many of these pieces) is a model of perfect intonation, blend, and text declamation. The same virtues remain in consistent evidence throughout the program, notably in the exuberant polyphonic penultimate movement of The Wilderness, which demonstrates how much benefit Wesley derived from his study of J. S. Bach.


The recording acoustic is pleasantly forward and transparent without being microscopic. Special praise is due to organist McVinnie for his supportive but discreet accompaniments, and to the Naxos engineers for the exemplary balance between organ and voices. Excellent program notes by the eminent church-music scholar Nicholas Temperley, than whom no better choice can be imagined for this assignment.


A quick check of a number of alternate performances of Thou wilt keep him, the most popular and most-recorded selection on this program, reveals that those performances are, without exception, included in multi-composer compilations. Ergo, while I can’t swear that the present disc is the only all-Wesley collection on the market, the evidence does suggest that such compilations are at best few and far between. Moreover, two of the selections appear to be only-available recordings: Our God, whose nature and Let us lift up our heart— the latter really a small-scale cantata, at 18 minutes plus. For lovers of 19th-century English church music, this release is not to be missed.


FANFARE: James Carson