Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 1, "Winter Daydreams" - The Snow M

Carl Heinrich Graun’s “The Death of Jesus” was first performed on 26 March 1755 at Berlin Cathedral. The sister of King Friedrich Wilhelm II, Princess Anna Amalia, provided the impulse for the text and character of the work. Its popularity remained strong until Bach’s St. Matthew Passion supplanted it in the late 19th c., the work succumbing to a lengthy and unjustified obscurity. A passion oratorio in the galant style, this new OehmsClassic recording features the Arcis Vocalists and the Baroque Orchestra L’arpa festante led by Thomas Gropper.

In Tchaikovsky’s final opera, the king’s blind daughter Iolanta gains her sight because she falls in love… although the whole thing is actually a bit more complicated… Tchaikovsky composed the music for Iolanta, Op. 69, to a libretto by brother Modest, during the second half of 1891. The Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg commissioned two pieces using fairytale motives to be performed on the same evening – a one act opera and a ballet; the latter was to become his famous Nutcracker ballet. Dmitrij Kitajenko leads the Gürzenich Orchestra in this live Köln Opera production.

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This Rheingold production, directed by Claus Guth, was acquitted by the audience with waves of applause (in the role of Wotan: Falk Struckmann). This opened a new RING Cycle in Hamburg. Just in time for the premiere of the second evening of Wagner‘s tetralogy in the Hamburg Opera House, OehmsClassics released this Rheingold production on CD. The extensive booklet also includes color photos of various scenes to give the listener a visual impression of the Hamburg production. In addition, the complete libretto is provided in German and English.

REVIEWS:

Young is an alert accompanist of voices and brings a special menace to all the Nibelheim music. A plus here…is the ensemble performing - the Rhinedaughters evidently "know" each others' voices; the giants, Mime and Loge sound like they're used to dialoguing with each other. Koch's Alberich has power and imaginative use of the text... I have found this new Rheingold - an event to hear whole, rather than sample - increasingly compelling in the insights provided by the conductor and the recording.

-- Gramophone

Simone Young conducts all the crucial confrontations with fierce energy, and relaxes the tempo for orchestral passages. This orchestra is exceptionally fine, and it's hard to believe that they played so flawlessly without any 'patching'. The whole thing is a thrilling, involving experience.

-- BBC Music Magazine

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PIANO TRANSCRIPTIONS • Jura Margulis (pn) • OEHMS 545 (78:41)


GLUCK (trans. Sgambati) Orpheus and Euridice: Melody. BACH (trans. Busoni) Violin Partita No. 2: Chaconne. SCHUBERT (trans. Liszt) 4 Songs. CAPLET (trans. Margulis) La Masque de la mort rouge. WAGNER Tristan und Isolde: Liebestod (trans. Liszt). Götterdämmerung: Trauermarsch (trans. Margulis). SAINT-SAËNS (trans. Liszt/Margulis) Danse macabre. RIMSKY-KORSAKOV (trans. Rachmaninoff) Tsar Sultan: Flight of the Bumblebee. PROKOFIEV (trans. Anon) Love for Three Oranges: March


The present release marks this reviewer’s introduction to the work of pianist Jura Margulis—born in St. Petersburg, trained under Leon Fleisher at the Peabody Conservatory, and currently on the music faculty of the University of Arkansas. A welcome introduction it is.


As annotator Elizabeth Hellmuth points out, “Transcriptions can be relatively tightly or loosely connected to the original, running the gamut from a bar-by-bar reproduction to a free paraphrase based on the motivic material; this CD offers examples from both ends of the spectrum.” Margulis’s technical and emotional range is thoroughly up to the varied challenges presented by this varied repertoire. To take but one example, it’s a famously formidable test for a solo singer to differentiate the four characters represented in the narrative text of Schubert’s Erlkönig —much less for a solo pianist in the Liszt transcription. It’s hard to imagine this challenge being brought off more successfully than it is here.


Hellmuth’s annotations are notably informative and persuasive—particularly an introductory essay on the aesthetics of transcription ,which could actually succeed in changing the minds of one or two transcription-phobes who might chance to read it. Engineering, too, is irreproachable. The recording acoustic is close-up, more that of a parlor than of a recital hall. I could do with just a teensy bit more reverberation, but this is little more than a personal quirk; given the dense textures of much of this music, too little is vastly preferable to too much.


This release does provide a new spin on the concept of “bonus track,” closing with a rendition of the March from Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges that is nowhere mentioned in any of the accompanying annotation. But it would be a perverse listener indeed who would pass up this disc on such petty grounds as that. Recommended.


FANFARE: James Carson

Includes work(s) by Franz Anton Hoffmeister. Ensemble: Gulbenkian Foundation Chamber Orchestra Lisbon. Conductor: Christopher Hogwood. Soloist: Ashan Pillai.

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