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.”

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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)

The best of instrumental Eternal Organ accompanied by Aurora Duo under the direction of Schaab-Gottschalg bring such classics as Amadeus' Andante in F Major, K. 616 and Bach's, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565 to life.

This premiere recording of master percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie's new international ensemble offers a programme of fourteen improvised pieces that push the boundaries of spontaneous music-making. The group brings together musical traditions from four varied cultures (Scotland, Serbia, the United States and Denmark) but with a common goal: to create spontaneous music of great beauty and power which utilizes the basic formal elements of musical composition- melody, harmony, rhythm, and form.

French composer Francois Devienne enjoyed great esteem with his successful operas in the Revolutionary years of 1792-97, but it was as a composer for wind instruments that he has won his place in musical history. The four Flute Concertos in volume 2 of the complete set show a combination of melodic elegance and graceful virtuosity that characterizes much of his work. Especially notable in this respect is No. 6 in D major, a compositional tour de force, rich in thematic material and panache, and one of the finest wind concertos of its epoch.

The Guerra Manuscript, named after its copyist José Miguel de Guerra y Villegas, is a repository of one hundred of the greatest secular songs (tonos humanos) circulating in the Madrid court of seventeenth-century Spain. The songs were composed by the leading figures of the Spanish Baroque and include many by the most prestigious of all, José Marín and Juan Hidalgo. Ideally accompanied by one of the principal Spanish baroque instruments, the arpa de dos órdenes (double harp), they explore ideas of love, praise, and beauty. This volume includes perhaps the best-known song of all, Corazón que en prisión.

Carl Maria von Weber's achievements as a composer were considerable and influential, demonstrating new possibilities in opera and orchestration, particularly in the handling of wind instruments. His attractive, lyrical style is ideal for the making of arrangements, and the impressive and beautifully proportioned Flute Sonata is a virtuoso masterpiece, as is the operatic Grand Duo Concertant. There is a feeling of solemnity in the G minor Trio, an unusual work with an enigma at it's heart: the song-like Schafer's Klage or 'Shepherd's lament'- the origins of which remain a source of conjecture.

Brahms' fascination with music of the 16th to the 18th centuries was nurtured during his appointment in Vienna as conductor of the Singakademie. His own choral compositions had gradually moved from an almost pastiche Renaissance style towards a fully mature, Romantic approach, culminating in his large-scale choral masterpiece Ein deutsches Requiem. This performance is sung in a new English translation prepared by Lara Hoggard that fits the original German declamation and with the piano four-hands accompaniment written by Brahms himself.

These three recordings cement the bond between the award-winning composer Richard Danielpour and the conductor Misha Rachlevsky, one of the composer’s most dedicated and perceptive interpreters. It was Rachlevsky who gave the American premiere of Symphony for Strings, a transcription of the Sixth String Quartet- a work saturated in farewells, complete with a hymn and variations. Talking to Aphrodite is the result of a collaboration between Danielpour and the writer Erica Jong, while Kaddish addresses the eternal issues of life, death and eventual peace.

Winner of several important international competitions, including the 2006 Michele Pittaluga Guitar Competition, Alessandria, Italy, Artyom Dervoed started playing guitar at the age of six.

This series is as addictive as ever, and for newcomers to some of the finest baroque-era lute music, Volume 11 would be a good introduction.

I ask to review each new issue of Robert Barto’s series, comprising the complete lute sonatas of Silvius Leopold Weiss, even though I know every review is going to sound exactly the same: this is at or near the pinnacle of baroque lute music, nearly every sonata generous with its lyrical breadth, emotional engagement, and dance elements, and there could hardly be a better performer for the music than Robert Barto. By now, on the eleventh volume, the uniquely piquant sound of his thirteen-course baroque lute, constructed by New Yorker Andrew Rutherford, is as familiar to the series’ devotees as the sensitivity with which Barto plays it. Familiar, too, is the close miking which yields maybe the only gripe I’ve had about these discs: turn the volume up too much and you’ll hear the performer’s every breath.
 
The three sonatas on this disc present Weiss in his happier, more placid vein. Sonata No 96 packs seven tiny movements (mostly peppy court dances) into fifteen minutes, posing fewer challenges to the performer but offering the listener bite-sized delights. No 39 in C, by contrast, is known as the ‘Partita Grande’ because it takes up nearly a half-hour. In it Weiss takes care to work out his material to an unusual degree of development, including a courante with a long, leaping main theme which seems to flow as one stream through the movement, and a weighty presto finale whose complexes of motifs are dispatched with Barto’s typical unruffled clarity. Sonata No 30 opens with a free-form prelude which the booklet says is representative of Weiss’s improvisatory way with the form. The improvisational feel returns at the end, in a sprightly movement titled ‘Le Sans Souci’ that bounds along for just two-and-a-half minutes.
 
The sound is intimate and warm; the breathing mentioned earlier doesn’t much bother me, to be honest. This isn’t concert-hall music anyway. The booklet essay provides a very good introduction to the enterprise. To sum up: Weiss’s sonatas may not always feature the concentrated intellectual and emotional power of the solo sonatas by Bach, but each has its own delights and pleasures. I am a hopeless addict to this music and to the outstandingly high quality with which it is presented; there are a great many sonatas left to record even after eleven CDs, and if MusicWeb International doesn’t keep sending me review copies the alternative may be bankruptcy.
 
-- Brian Reinhart, MusicWeb International

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Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750) wrote approximately 83 billion lute sonatas, and this release constitutes Volume 11 in Naxos' ongoing complete series. The tray card describes them as "prodigiously attractive works of great emotional power." Attractive they certainly are, very much so, but "great emotional power"?--not so much. Let's face it: there's only so much that you can do with an overture or prelude and a standard suite of baroque dances--unless you're Bach, of course, and Weiss may have been an exact contemporary but he was no Bach.

That said, there is a wide range of size and shape to these three sonatas. No. 39, the "Partita Grande", is indeed substantial, lasting nearly half an hour and containing some extensively developed movements (including the virtuosic concluding Presto). The other two works, while ostensibly lighter in tone, pack a lot of variety into their respective groupings of seven movements apiece. Certainly Robert Barto plays beautifully, with crystal clear articulation and sweet timbre on a lovely-sounding baroque instrument.

I wouldn't listen to all 20 tracks at a sitting, but this well recorded disc does make great background to a Sunday drive (I tried it), and will keep you entertained whenever your attention becomes engaged. Really, there's no need to make greater claims for this music than it deserves: it's good stuff, performed with great insight and sympathy. Surely that's enough.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

D’ALBERT Aschenputtel Suite. Overtures: Esther; Der Rubin; Die Abreise. Preludes: Die toten Augen; Gernot. Das Seejungfräulein 1 • Jun Märkl, cond; 1 Viktorija Kaminskaite (sop); MDR Leipzig RSO • NAXOS 8.573110 (75:11)

The extravagantly gifted pianist and composer Eugen d’Albert had one of those improbably full, cosmopolitan lives spanning the 19th and 20th centuries. Born to a family of French and Italian origin in 1864, the same year as Richard Strauss, he grew up in Scotland. Taking on German nationality as a young adult, d’Albert studied with Liszt, who called him “Albertus Magnus,” and had a significant association with Brahms. A leading pianist of his time, he later turned to composition and was a prominent figure in Berlin’s extraordinary musical flowering in the 1920s.

D’Albert’s style isn’t easily pinned down, since he adopted differing stylistic approaches in different works. All of his music that I have heard is very well crafted, and some of it is inspired. It tends to be lively, affirmative, and light, at times, more like Humperdinck (traditional) than Busoni (progressive), to mention two of his contemporaries. Harmonically, it’s usually less adventurous than that of Liszt or Strauss. One of d’Albert’s teaches was Arthur Sullivan, for whom he composed the Overture to Patience . The writing for female chorus in Tiefland reveals this unusual influence.

D’Albert composed 19 operas in all manner of genres, changing his style from work to work, as Mascagni also did, in the quest for popular success. He found it with Tiefland , which is sometimes called a German verismo work, and is still occasionally performed. (Recordings of the Jewish-themed Der Golem , and the brief domestic comedy Die Abreise , have been issued in recent years.) Musically, Tiefland is compelling, and in it, one hears that d’Albert’s text setting and writing for the voice are as confident as his orchestration. It’s a very satisfying work to listen to, and I can recommend the Janowski recording with Marton, Kollo, Weikl, and Moll.

There’s a lot of music in this collection, all of it unfamiliar, and some of it very impressive. D’Albert’s colorful, sumptuously orchestrated preludes and overtures aren’t brief, and not all of them make a strong individual impression, but two stand out. The overture to Grillparzer’s play Esther from 1888 resembles a fully developed symphonic movement, majestic, with contrastingly playful sections, and perhaps modeled on Brahms. The prelude and introduction to Die toten Augen (1916), a biblical tale, sounds completely different, an atmospheric combination of a Korngold movie score mixed together with La mer.

Das Seejungfräulein (The Mermaid), an extended scene for soprano and orchestra, after Hans Christian Andersen, was composed in 1897 for one of d’Albert’s six wives, the soprano Hermine Finck. (Another was the pianist Teresa Carreño.) This intensely chromatic, surging music certainly shows the influence of Wagner, but manages not to sound derivative. Though it maintains more traditional harmony, it reminds me a little of the soprano “songs” in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, and it’s the most impressive composition on the CD. In the strenuous vocal part that requires the power and range of an Isolde or Brünnhilde, the Lithuanian soprano Viktorija Kaminskaite has a warm, attractive voice, and a committed delivery, but she strains and loses tonal support on some sustained high notes.

Finally, the disc’s featured work, the 1924 Aschenputtel (Cinderella) Suite , after the Brothers Grimm, is a deftly scored set of five brief, programmatic dances. Keith Anderson’s notes don’t identify the suite as a ballet, but it would certainly lend itself to choreography. This tuneful, entrancing score is a masterpiece of its kind, and like Ravel in Ma mère l’oye —there’s a French feel to Aschenputtel —d’Albert had the gift of creating captivating, childlike music.

Jun Märkl leads lively, flexible performances, and the Leipzig Radio Symphony plays well, particularly in the Aschenputtel Suite , with its many solos. I highly recommend this disc for the chance to make the acquaintance of Die Seejungfräulein , although I hope that there will be future recordings of it with more technically assured singing, and especially Aschenputtel , a delightful find.

FANFARE: Paul Orgel

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Eugen D’Albert was a tremendously gifted musician, and even had he not been we would owe him respect for being married six times and inspiring his second wife, the also multiply married Venezuelan pianist Teresa Careño, to utter that immortal line, “Darling, your children and my children are quarreling with our children again!” Aside from multiple marriages, D’Albert composed multiple operas, nineteen at least, and the overtures and preludes contained on this disc are very enjoyable. They range from the moody prelude to Die toten Augen, to the the luscious The Ruby (his first opera), to the jolly comedy The Departure.

The Overture to Grillparzer’s Esther is actually a robust, early concert work, while the delightful Cinderella Suite has plenty of the requisite fairytale atmosphere. The Little Mermaid is a brilliant, post-Wagnerian scena for soprano and orchestra, and it’s quite beautifully sung by soprano Viktorija Kaminskaite. Her voice rides the orchestra effortlessly, while her tone remains consistently smooth and lovely throughout its range. Jun Märkl leads the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony with plenty of verve and a conviction often missing from his prior recordings of Debussy.

D’Albert’s style lacks the ultimate in individuality, but it’s unflaggingly attractive, and he clearly evolved from his Wagner/Liszt origins to something more contemporary, if not more personal. Anyway, the only way to find out is to listen, so let’s get to it.

– David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

The final volume in this revelatory song series charts a twenty-year period during Bohuslav Martinu’s life. The early The Three Virgins, H 73 exudes an impressionist atmosphere enhanced by Martinu’s advanced harmonic language whilst the New Slovak Songs, H 126 was the result of a highly successful rapprochement between Czech and Slovak art, reflected in music of beauty and inventiveness. Nursery Rhymes, H 283bis, though composed in perilous times, is full of wit and joy. American Record Guide wrote of Volume 3: ‘[Jana Hrochova] has a golden tone and crisp diction, and Koukl plays with warmth and clarity.’

Jacques Loussier achieved immense worldwide popular success combining the music of J.S. Bach and jazz improvisation with his Play Bach Trio. + Loussier’s focus has since turned more towards composing, his predilection for fusing jazz and classical elements expressed at its most economical in these two Violin Concertos. + Eloquent expressiveness and colorful use of percussion characterize the First Concerto, while the Indian influence in the Second Concerto emerges through violin improvisation and rhythmic counterpoint from the tabla. + Like Loussier, Paderewski was a piano virtuoso who turned to composition in later life, the Violin Sonata being one of his finest earlier works.

MCKAY: Suite for Viola and Piano / My Tahoe Window / An Apri

Mendelssohn wrote his Second Symphony or Lobgesang ('Hymn of Praise') in 1840, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Gutenberg's invention of movable type. This symphony-cantata, as the composer termed it, is duly permeated with a rich and often jubilant spirit, and patterned after Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in it's solo vocal and large choral forces. The rich orchestral palette is supplemented by thrilling and expressive vocal writing, which includes solos and duets of great beauty, and culminates in a blazing fugal ending.

This re-release by Naxos brings together music from two of Prokofiev’s best known film scores on one disk. The cantata came from the original film score for Eisenstein’s film, Alexander Nevsky, and the suite from the Alexander Feinzimmer film Lieutenant Kijé.

The first thing to note is that this CD was in fact recorded live, although it’s not clear until the applause at the end that this is the case. There is no audience noise and the recording is very sharp, clear and close to the orchestra.

Alexander Nevsky opens with “Russia under the Mongolian Yoke”, with harsh open octaves setting the scene perfectly. This is followed by a song about Alexander Nevsky recalling an earlier battle. The chorus in this recording are the Latvian State Choir and, although I am not a Russian speaker myself, the words seem to be very clear and the choral singing excellent. The song about Nevsky is beautifully interpreted with a clear contrast being drawn between the more reflective parts of the song at the start and finish and the recollection of battle in the central section. The third section suggesting the appearance of Teutonic knights in the city of Pskov, with brass and percussion blaring out a bleak warning, is performed in this recording with enough gusto to bring a chill to one’s spine!

I had a chance to hear the recording of this work by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and it is interesting to note that Reiner adopts a much slower tempo than Casadesus for the second and third parts, which seems to me to work better, even if there is the slightly off-putting factor of Reiner’s recording including the text in English.

The fourth section (Arise, ye Russian People), allows a distinct contrast to be drawn between the different emotions; the call to arms which opens this song, along with the more reflective middle section. Again these contrasts are handled excellently in this recording.

It is the fifth section (The Battle on the Ice), which is the longest. In fact this section took up a large part of the film. The performance is clean and precise. Perhaps it is this precision that takes away a little from the tension that one would expect in a battle scene; for me there is still enough there to get the adrenaline going. Special mention should go to the percussion section, who are able to drive the music on without overpowering it, no mean feat with such music. On balance, I would have to say that the Reiner/Chicago SO recording narrowly wins in terms of building tension, but there’s not a lot in it.

The sixth section (The Field of Death) is where we hear the mezzo-soprano, Ewa Podles, lamenting the lives lost in battle. Her wonderful deep voice carries these sentiments perfectly, assisted by some sensitive playing.

The final section (Alexander’s Entry into Pskov) ends the work on a triumphant note, aided by another excellent piece of chorus singing; they are able to hold their own to the very end and are not overpowered by the orchestra.

Overall, this is an excellent performance of Prokofiev’s colourful and exciting score, which I would recommend highly.

-- Euan Bayliss, MusicWeb International

BEST OF OPERA, VOL. 5

Acclaimed as ‘one of the best opera composers of the moment’, American composer-librettist Mark Adamo has also ventured into symphonic composition and other fields in each of which his theatrical sensitivity, political commitment and musical mastery are equally evident. The vivacity of his Overture to Lysistrata accentuates the play’s anti-war theme, while Alcott Music rethinks the music from his hit opera Little Women. Regina Coeli pays tribute to the Queen of Heaven and Late Victorians is dedicated both to the memory of those who have died and to those who have survived AIDS.

Aleksandr Tsiboulski is first-prize winner in numerous competitions including the 2006 Tokyo International Guitar Competition. His playing, which transcends the image of the technically flawless competition winner, has been praised by the Age for it's '

Composer and Latin Grammy-winning flautist Nestor Torres has inspired a generation of composers to write music that has made vivid contributions to the instrument’s repertoire. This album represents his first foray into classical recording and his own unique fusion of Caribbean virtuosity and classical training can be savored in his own composition, “Marta y Maria.” Tania Leon’s “del Caribe, soy!” encapsulates the pulsing rhythms, vibrant color and improvisatory elements that represent the key features of the album and contrasts beautifully with the seductive allure and expressive depth of Miguel del Aguila’s “Miami Flute Suite.”

Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849) was born in the village of Zelazowa Wola in Mazovia, the son of a French father and a Polish mother. This mixed heritage would weave like a double helix through Chopin's career as a composer-pianist. Following studies at Warsaw Conservatory (1826-29) and 've given concerts in Warsaw and Vienna (1829-30), Chopin settled in Paris in 1831. His most famous romantic liaison was with Aurore Dude Vant (aka novelist George Sand), the years 1838- 1847 coinciding with his most productive period. Their relationship ended shortly after, Chopin visited Britain in 1848, where his already precarious health Deteriorated. Almost 3,000 people attended his funeral the following year at the Madelaine in Paris though he Remained a Polish patriot Throughout his short life, he Became a French citizen. Although educated in the tradition of Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Clementi, and a great admirer of Bach, his music includes works based on both French and Polish models, as well as some innovations. Among the former May be Counted his piano sonatas; Bach's counterpoint found it's way (albeit metamorphosed) into his own multilayered music; his many Viennese Waltzes are more Parisian than; Polonaises and Mazurkas raised his thesis Polish dance forms to Unprecedented Heights or artistic achievement. Similarly, he transformed, the Nocturne, Initially popularized by the Irish-born Russian-based John Field, into a form much more Closely associated with himself. His Ballades, Preludes and Etudes were path-breaking and immensely influential. Two piano concertos, some songs and chamber works aside, he composed Exclusively for the solo piano and preferred to perform at salons privately rather than in public concerts.

Scored for as few as three marimbas or as many as a hundred percussion instruments plus celesta, harp and piano, these five striking works by contemporary American composers abound in fascinating rhythms, ingenious combinations and juxtapositions.

In the history of recording, there have been literally dozens and dozens of recordings of Hector Berlioz's monstrous masterpiece "Symphonie Fantastique", a work that is arguably the first musical masterpiece of terror. Judging by the performance given here on Naxos by Yoav Talmi and the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, plenty! With the recording quality as high as it is, and the recording itself very well priced, this version of Berlioz's nightmarish masterpiece has much to show, including the piece de resistance, the "Witches Sabbath" in the fifth movement, with the use of the ancient chant "Dies Irae" ringing out in the trombones (a chant that would find it's way into the music of such chilling movies as A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Poltergeist).

Includes work(s) by Antonio Vivaldi.

International chess virtuoso François-André Danican Philidor’s fortunes as a musician at the court of Versailles were transformed when he turned his attention to the new genre of opéra-comique. Sancho Pança, gouverneur dans l’isle de Barataria derives from Cervantes’s famous novel Don Quijote, covering Sancho Panza’s adventures as governor of a fictitious island on which a succession of characters plot to cure him of his delusions of grandeur. Opera Lafayette’s production of this comedy revue is a ‘sparkle of shining surfaces’. (Washington Post)

BAX: String Quartet No. 3 / Lyrical Interlude

Vienna was a magnet for musicians across Europe in the 18th century, and among the most successful and influential were composers from Bohemia. Credited with developing idiomatic piano performance in the city, Leopold Koželuch also wrote choral music of considerable individuality. Joseph der Menschheit Segen ('Joseph, Mankind's Blessing') is a powerful Masonic cantata that unusually includes Melodrama, where spoken text is followed by instrumental passages. The two sacred arias are masterful compositions and the Missa in C, though small in scale, is unusually lavish in it's scoring. Klage auf den Todt Marien Theresien ('On the Death of Maria Theresa') possesses a grave and subtle beauty. This new release also features the Naxos debut of the Czech Boys Choir Boni Pueri. Founded in 1982, it has become one of Europe's most famous vocal ensembles and have given more than 3000 performances in Europe, North America and Asia.

Includes work(s) for gtr by Mauro Giuliani. Soloist: Marco Tamayo.

In 1757 the young Catalan composer Antonio Soler was appointed to a distinguished position at the Escorial, the palace of the Spanish Court. The keyboard sonatas he wrote there, many specifically for the son of King Carlos III, Don Gabriel, constitute his best known achievement as a composer. The Sonatas heard on this fifth volume once again reflect the influence of Domenico Scarlatti and the latest central European models but Sonata No. 57 also draws inspiration from Spanish folk music while Sonata No. 61 ends with use of the Scotch snap rhythm.

Leopold Stokowski's transcriptions have been getting a lot of attention on disc lately. Most particularly, DG reluctantly released an excellent disc of Mussorgsky pieces featuring Oliver Knussen and the Cleveland Orchestra, magnificently played and very different in conception from Stokowski's own. That disc vindicated his work by showing convincingly that these arrangements can have a successful existence independently of the great old wizard himself. José Serebrier's interpretations, while not quite so radical in their emphasis on laser-like clarity of texture, achieve much the same sort of validation while preserving more of the physical excitement and cinematic flamboyance of the original recordings.


This isn't just a question of the exceptionally splashy and colorful use of heavy percussion at the end of A Night on Bare Mountain or Pictures at an Exhibition, impressive (and necessary) though that is. Serebrier, who worked as Stoki's assistant conductor at the American Symphony Orchestra for about five years, brings a keen ear for those luscious string sonorities that also give these editions much of their magic at lower dynamic levels. I'm thinking, for example, of the shimmering closing pages of the Boris Godunov Symphonic Synthesis, among other places. Serebrier also captures the tragic intensity of the Khovanshchina Entr'acte as well as Stokowski ever did: he's slower, darker, and heavier than Knussen, more raw and "Russian" sounding, as he also is in the terrifying Catacombs section of Pictures at an Exhibition.


There's further icing on the cake that you won't find on the Knussen disc: the two lovely Tchaikovsky transcriptions (the Humoresque will be familiar to knowledgeable listeners from its use in Stravinsky's The Fairy's Kiss), and Stokowski's own Traditional Slavic Christmas Music, a setting where once again Serebrier shows himself able to conjure a truly authentic "Stokowski sound". Mind you, these aren't mere imitations. Serebrier's flexible approach to tempo and willingness to inject a jolt of extra electricity make something quite special out of the climaxes in A Night on Bare Mountain, and it's very clear that the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is having as much fun playing this music as you will have listening to it. The engineering stands among the best from this source as well. Spectacular, sensational, skirting the boundaries of "good taste"--this is the real deal. [6/17/2005]
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com