Rimsky-Korsakov: Maid of Pskov (The) / Fairy Tale

RIMSKY-KORSAKOV: Sheherazade / The Tale of Tsar Saltan

RIMSKY-KORSAKOV: Pan Voyevoda / Sadko / May Night

This is a Spoken Word album:
"Sinbad" and other exotic tales narrated by Bernard Cribbins over music by Rimsky-Korsakov.

The violin works of the leading German composer Wolfgang Rihm encompass almost his entire career and reflect the variety of his stylistic thinking. ‘Lichtzwang,’ the earliest of his concertos, draws on chorale-like sequences and piercing outbursts alike in its memorializing of the writer Paul Celan. ‘Dritte Musik’ begins almost imperceptibly before growing in intensity and eventually slipping beyond audibility. Defter and more subtle than the preceding pieces, ‘Gedicht des Malers’ (Poem of the Painter) was inspired by an imagined painting of the great Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaye. As Rihm has written: “The soloist virtually embodies the painter’s brush as it moves over the canvas in sometimes faster and sometimes more deliberate ways.”

-----

REVIEW:

Lichtzwang is one of the great elegaic works for violin and orchestra, in the same class as Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto. Dritte Musik, his third violin concerto, also has its contemplative moments, but overall it has a wider range of emotions. His most recent violin concerto, from 2014, is his Gedicht des Malers (Poem of the Painter). The painter is Max Beckmann, an important figure in Rihm’s music. This is a wonderful album.

– Music for Several Instruments (Dean Frey)

Wolfgang Rihm is one of the world’s most eminent and prolific composers. His works for violin and piano encompass almost his entire compositional career, from Hekton in 1972 to the solo violin Über die Linie VII in 2006. Each draws on a wide range of influences, from folk-like moments, embedded quotations and dazzlingly virtuosic episodes. They reflect the breadth of Rihm’s various changing styles, which are almost unique in today’s music in marrying contemporary technique with emotionally powerful resonances.

REVIEW:

Although a prolific composer, Wolfgang Rihm is hardly a household name. You could scarcely do better than this CD for an introduction to some of Rihm’s more intimate pieces: at Naxos’s better-than-reasonable price, it is virtually risk-free. Tianwa Yang and Nicholas Rimmer sound quite at home, even in the most difficult passages, and imbue these works with emotion, as well as meeting their technical challenges with aplomb.

Despite his ascetic and often hard-hitting approach, Rihm’s music is neither overly formalist nor over-cerebral. It makes you feel as well as think. Nor is it unaccommodating and forbidding, though it does make you work a little. Turbulent episodes alternate with passages on the edge of audibility, neo-Romantic gestures jostle the sparsest textures, or transform and tame fierce outbursts.

Yet again, Naxos deserves praise for making contemporary music accessible at reasonable cost, and through excellent performances.

-- BBC Music Magazine

The astounding technique of Yang and Rimmer bring these pieces vividly to life. My impression of Yang as a blisteringly incisive and stylish musician is only bolstered by this recital and she’s well served by Naxos’s clear recording.

-- International Record Review

The second volume of Ferdinand Ries’s violin sonatas furthers our exploration of music by a gifted composer who enjoyed a close and productive relationship with Beethoven as student, friend, and colleague. Filled with elegance and refinement, these three sonatas display the range of Ries’s creative gifts as a composer, skillfully synthesizing the clarity and discipline of Mozart’s Viennese Classical style with the inventiveness and freedom of the new Romanticism developing in the early 19th century. Volume 1 was regarded as ‘simply too good to miss’ by MusicWeb International. Eric Grossman is a versatile performer hailed for his flawless technique, superb musicianship, and commitment to a wide range of repertoire. A graduate of The Juilliard School, where he studied with Dorothy De Lay, Grossman enjoys an active performing career. He has performed across the US, Europe, Korea, Japan and Cuba in recital and as a soloist.

Ferdinand Ries grew up in the same musical environment that nurtured Beethoven, both counting Ferdinand’s father Franz as one of their teachers and the two of them becoming the closest of friends. Ries was a gifted and prolific composer in every instrumental genre. His Violin Sonatas are based on the Viennese Classical style established by Mozart but with a freshness and originality that includes movements such as the Adagio of the Sonata, Op. 38, No. 3, one of Ries’s loveliest creations. The Sonatas Op. 38, Nos. 1 & 2 can be heard on the 2nd volume of this edition, which was “unreservedly recommended” by Fanfare magazine. Violinist Eric Grossman is a versatile performer hailed for his flawless technique, superb musicianship, and commitment to a wide range of repertoire. Grossman has performed across the US, Europe, Korea, Japan, and Cuba in recital and as soloist under such conductors as Zubin Mehta, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, and Michael Gielen.

RIES Piano Sonatas: in C, op. 1/1; in a, op. 1/2. Piano Sonatinas: in B?, op. 5/1; in F, op. 5/2 • Susan Kagan (pn) • NAXOS 8.570743 (73: 45)


Up until recently, it has pretty much been the job of the excellent German record company, cpo, to provide the interested collector with recordings of music by Ferdinand Ries (1784–1838). Susan Kagan, a Fanfare contributor herself, has been furthering the cause on the Naxos label, though, and the present disc is the second volume of a projected series of the composer’s piano sonatas and sonatinas.


Ries was a tremendously popular composer in his lifetime. Virtually everything he wrote was published. Famously, he was Beethoven’s piano pupil (he was under Albrechtsberger for composition), and he was remarkable for his fusion of Beethovenian elements with foreshadowings of later composers such as Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Chopin. Thus, proto-Schubertian elements jostle with Beethovenian shadows in the first movement of the C-Major Sonata, op. 1/1 (the two sonatas, op. 1, were published in Bonn in 1807). On an immediate level, there are similarities between this sonata and Beethoven’s C-Major Sonata, op. 2/3; melodic decoration in the Adagio ma non tanto generally reflects the influence of Beethoven’s early piano style, also. Op.1/1 is the only sonata on the disc in four movements as opposed to three. It includes a charming Menuetto that, in a lesser performer’s hands, could degenerate into mere teaching material. Kagan lavishes it with all the affection she can muster, though, elevating its stature somewhat. The Rondo plays with meter (2/4 and 6/8) and is rather subdued in character.


The Second Sonata of the op. 1 set is in three movements. The minor mode immediately establishes a contrasting mood to the preceding C-Major. There is charm, and wit aplenty in the hybrid second movement, though, and the finale has a sort of subdued grazioso feel to it. The two sonatas actually work well as a pair, and listening straight through is an eminently satisfying experience.


The gap in expressive intent between “sonata” and “sonatina” is immediately apparent when Kagan launches into the slight B? Sonatina. An infinitely sweet bonbon, this Sonatina reaches back to early Haydn. The Andantino central movement is of a controlled stateliness. Nothing here is seriously going to disturb the general delicacy; the same goes for the companion F-Major Sonatina, despite a more determined second theme in its first movement. The first movement of this Sonatina effectively evaporates; out of the silence comes the charming D-Minor Andantino. And if you don’t smile at the finale, you haven’t got a pulse.


The piano sound (Kaufman Astoria Studios, Queens, New York) is well judged without being exceptional. What is exceptional is Kagan’s fervent, eloquent advocacy of Ries. She writes her own booklet notes, and they exude the air of someone steeped in this music. More, she coedited the editions used for the sonatinas (with Allan Badley, who single-handedly edited the sonatas—www.artaria.com).


The disc comes with a free download—follow the instructions and you too can have the Larghetto e cantabile from Hummel’s Fantasie, op. 18, played by Midoka Inui (from Naxos 8.557836, which I reviewed at the time of issue for an online journal and gave a mixed welcome).


FANFARE: Colin Clarke

Includes work(s) by Ferdinand Ries. Soloist: Susan Kagan.

RIES Piano Concerto in A, “Farewell Concert for England.” Grand Variations on “Rule Britannia.” Introduction et Variations brillantes • Christopher Hinterhuber (pn); Uwe Grodd, cond; Royal Liverpool PO • NAXOS 8.570440 (66:02)


Ferdinand Ries has been receiving lots of attention on record and in these pages of late. Fanfare ’s own Susan Kagan has been working her way through the composer’s piano sonatas for Naxos, and this is the label’s third volume of his concerted works for piano and orchestra, numbering eight concertos and two sets of variations, the latter of which are included on the present disc. My reaction to the sonatas in a 32:3 review—not to Susan’s playing of them—was lukewarm, leading me to conclude that while “good, solid musical ideas aplenty fly by, one senses that something more significant would be made of them by a composer of a more gifted muse; but in Ries’s hands tuition never quite seems to achieve fruition.”


Ries’s chamber works, with which I am admittedly more familiar, and these works for piano and orchestra, however, tell a rather different story. Perhaps the mother of Ries’s invention was the necessity of mass appeal. Writing to accommodate the tastes of the less musically sophisticated middle-class audiences that were increasingly finding the means to attend public concerts required a different approach. I hate the term “dumbing-down,” but we see it even in Beethoven, whose solo piano sonatas and string quartets, which were aimed at a smaller, more musically cultivated and elite audience, were more experimental and listener challenging than his concertos and symphonies, although here, too, he pushed the envelope. Likewise, Ries’s concerted works are immediately engaging, melodically and harmonically fluent, and filled with wonderfully imaginative and memorable turns of phrase.


The grand orchestral tuttis clearly take Beethoven as their model, but the piano-writing is something else. In the A-Minor Concerto there is an exquisite prefiguring of Chopin and Mendelssohn, with its arabesques and filigree anchoring and sustaining the pivotal notes that constitute the melodic arc. This is gorgeous stuff that you will never tire of listening to. All three works on this disc date from Ries’s London period, the concerto—the seventh in order of publication and obvious from its title—was written in London in 1823 and marks the end of the composer’s period in England. The Introduction and Variations brillantes bears a higher opus number than the concerto only because it wasn’t published until later. This and the Grand Variations on “Rule Britannia” show Ries to be a thorough master of the variations style and technique.


At present, there is little to no competition on CD in this repertoire, so Christopher Hinterhuber pretty much has the field to himself—all the more reason then to rejoice at his lively and beautifully turned performances. Uwe Grodd and the Royal Liverpool band accompany and complement him admirably. If you add to the equation over an hour’s worth of really enjoyable music, excellent playing, an outstanding recording, and Naxos’s budget price, you have a gold star winner.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

This disc offers you satisfying performances of satisfying music. How can you refuse?

This second instalment in the continuing cycle of Ries's piano concertos from Naxos is a disc for your wish-list.

Ries is more famous today for being Beethoven's pupil and biographer than for his own career in music. In his day he ranked with Hummel and, yes, even with Beethoven himself as one of Europe's greatest composer-pianists. Thanks to the efforts of Naxos and Allan Badley's Artaria Editions, we can now hear for ourselves what it was that so excited nineteenth century audiences.

All three works here show Ries to be a composer of originality, though one with a respect for his musical forebears. It would go too far to call him daring or revolutionary. Nonetheless, despite the backward glances at Mozart, his facility for contrasting grand orchestral statements with piano writing of a free, rhapsodic lyricism bridges the gap between Beethoven on the one hand and Chopin and Schumann on the other.

The Swedish National Air with Variations opens with a proud and darkly coloured orchestral flourish, which is immediately contrasted with a gently glittering statement from the piano. This pattern of contrasts is repeated throughout the 15 minutes of this piece, as Ries plies his skill at conjuring variations, first dazzling, then soulful. He casts the orchestra as chorus rather than as equal partner in dialogue, but he knows how to use its tone colours – listen to the lovely clarinet commentary about five minutes in, for example.

The Piano Concerto in C sharp minor is a delightful work, written largely on the road as Ries toured and then fled Russia in 1812. It is natural to want to draw comparisons with Beethoven's C minor concerto of 12 years earlier, but similarities are few and comparisons unhelpful. Apart from a few blustery tuttis, Ries uses the minor mode to spice harmonies and lend interest rather than to generate Beethovenian drama. The material is predominantly lyrical but virtuosic in the outer movements. The central slow movement lasts for less than five minutes, but is the heart of the concerto. Here Ries'sw gentle lyricism calls for a Chopinesque rubato and lightness of touch. His writing for orchestra, though, is better than Chopin's and full of interesting details and colourings.

The Introduction and Polonaise may have been composed 21 years after the other two pieces in this programme, but it demonstrates a remarkable consistency in Ries's idiom across the years. This piece is full of Mozartean turns of phrase, but with harmonic touches that point to Schumann. Again, there is some charming writing for the clarinets and flutes as they comment on the piano's discourse.

The Austrian pianist Christopher Hinterhuber plays with commitment and is a fine advocate for these works, just as able to command attention with flashes of fire as he is to lead the ear through the most delicate figurations. Grodd and the Gävle Symphony Orchestra support him well enough, though there is a little raggedness in the upper registers of the violins towards the close of the Introduction and Polonaise. The recorded sound is fine and the booklet notes by Allan Badley are interesting, though they hint at but do not explain the reconstruction of the score of the C sharp minor concerto.

All up, this disc offers you satisfying performances of satisfying music. How can you refuse?

Tim Perry, MusicWeb International

Includes work(s) by Ferdinand Ries. Ensemble: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: Uwe Grodd. Soloist: Christopher Hinterhuber.

Ferdinand Ries’s life and work are inextricably intertwined with those of his friend and teacher Beethoven, and both Cello Sonatas, Op. 20 and 21 were dedicated to cellist Bernhard Romberg, who performed regularly with Beethoven. Ries exploits Romberg’s extraordinary sound quality in the lower register of the cello in music that resonates with references to colleagues such as Haydn and Hummel. Ries’s final Cello Sonata, Op. 125, completes a triptych that richly deserves its place in the cello repertoire. This release joins an ongoing program of releases of music by neglected composer Ferdinand Ries. This has included an edition of his complete piano sonatas and sonatinas played by Susan Kagan, to whom “classical music lovers owe a debt of gratitude for rescuing these attractive keyboard creations from the undeserved obscurity that they’ve been languishing in for the past two centuries or so.” (Halesowen News) Acclaimed cellist Martin Rummel has recorded widely for labels including Paladino Music and Capriccio. His recordings for Naxos include works for cello and piano by Joseph Merk and Reinhold Gliere. Recordings by pianist Stefan Stroissnig include Beethoven’s Second and Fourth Piano Concertos with the RSO Wien conducted by Heinrich Schiff on the Gramola Records label, and his recording of the Four Impromptus Op. 90 by Franz Schubert and the Sonata in B minor by Franz Liszt was awarded the ‘Pasticcio Prize’ by Austrian Radio.

Recording of the Month

Ferdinand Ries was Beethoven’s student, close friend and biographer, but until quite recently was very much one of those composers living in the shadow of his Bonn master, rather than as the gifted and prolific composer he in fact was.

American pianist, author and educator Susan Kagan has explored the music of those composers associated with Beethoven and his musical scene. In fact she has researched the music of Archduke Rudolph – Beethoven’s composition student for more than twenty years – for her Ph.D. This was subsequently published by Pendragon Press back in 1988. More recently she has almost single-handedly championed the cause of Ries’s piano music, with five CDs of his Sonatas and Sonatinas on the Naxos label.

Kagan explains: ‘Ries studied piano with Beethoven (both were natives of Bonn, Germany) and was entrusted by him with such work as making transcriptions and piano arrangements, and copying orchestral parts of Beethoven’s new works. Ries moved to England in 1813, married an Englishwoman, and had a successful career touring as a virtuoso concert pianist. At the same time he was composing prodigiously and virtually everything he wrote was published. His thorough knowledge of Beethoven’s music undoubtedly helped shape Ries’s style, but his piano sonatas, from 1809 on, show an adventurous turn toward an expressive keyboard style anticipating that of the first generation of Romantic piano composers – Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann. His gift for melody is like Schubert’s, and he is ever inventive in creating and developing beautiful themes. While his symphonies and concertos are ‘public’ works, intended for large audiences and concert halls, the piano sonatas are his most personally-expressive works, revealing an individual outlook on a genre of music cultivated by that great triumvirate of the Classical period – Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.’

Ries also composed eighteen violin sonatas, which were brought out by Bonn music-publisher, Simrock, who also published much of Beethoven’s music. On this latest release from Naxos, Kagan is joined by violinist and fellow-American Eric Grossman, in an exploration of three of Ries’s violin sonatas, two from his op. 8 set, and his op. 19, all world-première recordings. However, unlike the piano sonatas, which have been released as part of a series of volumes, by starting here with a well-chosen selection from the eighteen extant examples, it gives the record company the option of releasing further violin sonatas in the future, or just letting this present single CD speak on behalf of the other fifteen.

It is interesting that the opening movements of the Sonata in F, Op. 8 No. 1, recorded first, and the Sonata in C minor, Op. 8 No. 2 that follows, have more than just a passing acquaintance with movements by Beethoven himself. While the latter first movement is very reminiscent of the corresponding movement from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in the same key, Op. 10 No. 3, the F major Sonata opens in a pastoral vein, with a main theme which immediately hints at Beethoven’s ‘Spring’ Sonata for violin and piano in the same key. Rather than reinforcing the idea that Ries is merely mimicking his teacher – what follows, in both of Ries’s sonatas, after the initial ‘homage to Ludwig’, really does confirm that the younger composer has an individual voice, and subsequently embarks on quite a different musical journey from his master.

Of the violin sonatas as a whole, Kagan continues: ‘(They) are models of the Viennese Classical sonata style established by Mozart: most are in three movements, with first movements in sonata-allegro form, lyrical slow movements in ternary (ABA) form, and rondo finales. Like Mozart, Ries divides the material to provide equal interest for both instruments.’ The Sonata in F largely adheres to this pattern, though is, in fact, a four-movement work, with a sprightly Scherzo and Trio in the tonic minor (F minor) following the opening ‘Allegro ma non troppo’, before a conventional, though short slow movement, leads to the finale, with its essentially rustic theme. However, this soon contrasts with the central episode, where staccato triplets evolve into a vigorous fugato section (like a fugue, but not fully played-out), and something which, according to Kagan in her compact, yet succinct and informative sleeve-notes, is an unusual event in Ries’s music, where polyphonic writing is ‘generally avoided’.

The characteristic dotted rhythms and robust dynamics of the ‘Allegro con spirito’ that open the Sonata in C minor, imbue it initially with an almost martial character, but this soon turns lyrical, in which vein the ensuing ‘Adagio cantabile’ slow movement continues, and which also then acts as the perfect aperitif to the lightness of the closing rondo, with its staccato texture and preponderance of rapid repeated notes.

The so-named Grande Sonata in F minor, while the shortest of the three works on the CD, is nevertheless conceived in large scale, both with regards structure and content, and with its key, and the dramatic insistence of the opening movement’s main theme, link it in character to Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ piano sonata, written some five years earlier. Unlike Beethoven’s work, Ries’s sonata begins with a short and poignant ‘Largo espressivo’ introduction – not unlike the opening of Beethoven’s earlier ‘Pathétique’ sonata, but providing nowhere near as dramatic a lead-in. Ries maintains the feverish mood of the ‘Allegro agitato’ throughout, despite the occasional sections away from the over-arching minor tonality, and the movement’s calmly-understated close. The following slow movement, in a gentle triple measure, and in the relative major key (A flat major), has a simple charm and eloquence that makes it extremely endearing and pleasing on the ear, but with sufficient contrast within, to hold the listener’s attention throughout. The overall playful mood of the final rondo also has more than enough variety, both rhythmically and melodically in its main theme and episodes, to sustain it, with some real fireworks in the central episode. The music has a decidedly Schubertian feel, both thematically, and in Ries’s use of tonality, where more remote keys figure, and there is often a characteristic shift from major to minor and back. Yet again Ries chooses to finish like a lamb, rather than a lion – something Beethoven does in the opening movement of his ‘Appassionata’, but not in the work’s tumultuous and clattering coda to the finale.

Whichever way you look at this latest Ries CD from Naxos, you will surely not be disappointed. The playing, positioning and recording are first-rate, and the three pieces recorded are charming, entertaining and with a good feel for motivic development. Whether they form part of a more extended investigation into the composer’s repertoire for violin and piano, or remain just a one-off sampler, at the bargain price offered, they are simply too good to miss.

– Philip R Buttall, MusicWeb International