Ligeti's works on this disc provide an excellent cross-section of the metamorphosis in his compositional technique over a period of 30 years. The Violin Concerto incorporates influences from Medieval and Renaissance music, from late Romantic music and various contemporary styles.

REVIEWS:

Lintu’s Lontano shimmers with ever-shifting colours, he highlights the awe-inspiring grandeur of Atmosphères, and his gorgeously shaped San Francisco Polyphony is vibrant and lyrical—all matched by Ondine’s rich, warm, detailed recording. And Lintu’s vision has the ideal Violin Concerto soloist in Benjamin Schmid, who manages to make Ligeti’s strange, mischievous writing sound sweetly expressive, even touching. His clear sense of line leads the ear effortlessly through the second movement’s eerie microtonal textures, complete with natural horns and ocarinas, and he has superb articulation and rhythmic bite in the tricksy opening movement.

-- The Strad

The selections on this disc are as good a place as any for the newcomer to this composer to get an appreciation for what is so exciting about Ligeti’s way of expressing himself in music. Schmid[’s]…is a committed performance…Lintu and a reduced Finnish Radio Symphony accompany very well and the sound allows much wonderful detail to come through. The performances…are all worthy in their own right. The programme on this CD would seem to be an ideal place to obtain a good sampling of Ligeti’s music.

-- MusicWeb International

Ondine proudly presents a release of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin with Sirkka-Liisa Kaakinen-Pilch. On the present disc Kaakinen-Pilch performs Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas on a violin from the 17th century. This collection of works for solo violin was the pinnacle and culmination of the violin’s 200-year history in its day.

• With this release Ondine presents two dramatic works by Dmitri Shostakovich, The Execution of Stepan Razin and the Zoya Suite, coupled with his Suite on Finnish Themes.
• The Execution of Stepan Razin, premiered in Moscow in 1964, got a mixed reception. The execution scene and the final, tragic vision is simply spine-chilling: Stepan Razin’s bloody head rolls to the ground and bursts out laughing at the Tsar. Capturing rich intonations and melodies of the text, the bass soloist and the chorus engage in a multi-layered dialogue of this very theatrical work.

Featuring Midori, the NDR Symphony Orchestra and Christoph Eschenbach, this release commemorates the anniversary of Hindemith's death 50 years ago. Midori is an extraordinary artist, a devoted and gifted educator and a community engagement activist. Her enthusiasm for playing music of different times is seen on her CDs and concert repertoire. This recording is her first for Ondine.

This is the first of two releases of Chamber Works for Strings by Kaija Saariaho, and also a tribute to the composer Kaija Saariaho who turned 60 on 14th of October 2012. Saariaho is renowned across the world for her vivid orchestration. Her chamber works highlight her ability to create unique sound worlds with only a few instruments. Here she also adds live electronics to create a unique colour.

With this new release the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Daniel Reuss pay tribute to Max Reger (1873-1916) and Rudolf Tobias (1873-1918), a composer of the classical-romantic tradition and associated with the beginning of professional composition in Estonia.

Ondine proudly presents the first CD with works by German composer Jörg Widmann (born 1973) only. This release features his Violin Concerto (2007), Insel der Sirenen for Violin and 19 Strings (1997) and Antiphon for Orchestral Groups (2007-08).

REVIEW:

"In 1915, just two years before the Russian Revolution, Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote the breathtaking All-Night Vigil, a high-water mark for Russian Orthodox choral music. But the work had a short shelf life as the Bolsheviks cracked down on religion. These days, recordings of the work abound, but this new version by the Latvian Radio Choir and conductor Sigvards Klava is among the best. There's no orchestra, just voices, yet Rachmaninoff applies terrific coloristic and orchestral effects. In one section, sopranos ring out like tolling church bells. And here, listen for the rich, symphonic layering he gets with groups of voices shining like rays of light through stained glass." – Tom Huizenga, NPR Music

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

SAARIAHO La Passion de Simone • Esa-Pekka Salonen, cond; Dawn Upshaw (sop); Tapiola CCh; Finnish RSO • ONDINE 1217 (SACD: 66:32 Text and Translation) Live: Helsinki 10/19–20/2012


La passion de Simone is a one-person oratorio by Kaija Saariaho based on the writings of philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943). Unlike many assimilated Jews from Europe, Weil was lucky enough to be able to escape Nazi-occupied France and left for New York. Later she moved to London, where she worked from across the channel with the French Resistance, but died of tuberculosis in 1943, largely by refusing food or treatment. Although Weil was a German Jew, the text of this work is in French. The text, though including quotes from Weil, is as much a commentary on her life and work written for the composer by Armin Maalout.


I was deeply impressed with both the seriousness and textural beauty of Saariaho’s music. She creates an almost prismatic web of sound that underlines the solo and choral writing like a low-lying mushroom cloud; even when the music gets busy, as in the “Second Station,” the wind and brass figures seem subjugated to the overall ambience of the orchestral sound. Indeed, the chorus often seems to be a part of the orchestra, not something external or independent of it.


No one would ever claim that the solo vocal writing is tonal or melodic in the strict sense of the words, but as a friend of mine likes to say, the music does “begin.” There is a definite directionality to its progression. He and other listeners attuned only to tonality, however, may not appreciate the dark shards of brass playing tone clusters that interrupt the musical flow here and there, but I found it intensely interesting. Moreover, Saariaho has the gift of being able to match the music to the mood of the text, even though I personally felt that the words of the “Third Station” do not entirely evoke nightmarish brass explosions. The text here is:


Another person would have


Turned away from the world


To care for his own suffering.


You turned away from yourself


To fix your gaze upon the world.


Over the years, soprano Dawn Upshaw’s voice—never entirely steady to begin with—has become even more fluttery in tonal emission and a bit thin in sound, but her musicality and phrasing are beyond question. More importantly, Salonen’s conducting—so very familiar to American listeners from his years with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (where he is still Conductor Laureate)—is simply magnificent, leaving no detail unattended to in his progression from beginning to end. He even manages to find rhythmic cells within this largely amorphous music that help propel it and give it forward momentum, a task I do not envy him in. In the very busy Fifth and Sixth Stations, for instance, the music becomes exceedingly busy, with a battery of percussion driving the brass, wind, and string figures as well as chorus, which is now separate in sound from the orchestra. Salonen finds exactly the right mood and tempo for this, which then blends into the Sixth Station where the percussion moves away temporarily and the stabbing brass is confined to occasional chords, driving a sonic wedge between voices and instruments. I should also mention that every so often, certain lines are spoken (actually whispered) rather than sung. At first I thought it was Upshaw, since no one else is credited on the CD back insert, but in small print on the first page of the booklet, Dominique Blanc is credited as speaker.


By Stations 13 and 14, which discuss Weil’s illness and death, the orchestra all but falls away as the (whispering) speaker and singer dominate the proceedings. Only in the 15th and “Final Station” does the orchestra return in full force, summing up the piece musically as the text sums it up dramatically “By your death, everything that you had said/Was transformed into a testament/You walked towards your own annihilation/And you won a resurrection.”


It isn’t often that I say anything about SACD sonics (particularly in solo piano or chamber music) because I don’t have an SACD player, but in this case the sound is absolutely fantastic. Even on a conventional CD player (and this may be due as much to Salonen’s conducting as to the recorded sound), the orchestra and chorus seem to “spread out” and envelop you from the very first note, and this feeling never leaves you at any point throughout the cantata. Thus I simply must give big kudos to the recording engineers, Antti Pohjola and Enno Mäemets, the latter of whom also did the sound mixing. Not only did they capture the full ambience of Saariaho’s sound world, but they also managed not to blur the orchestral details when it was important for the inner voices to be heard. You really feel that you are sitting in the hall where this piece is being performed and recorded as you listen to it; in many places, the sound is so rich that it is almost tactile—you almost feel that you can reach out and touch it.


On the last page of the booklet, it says that La passion de Simone originally premiered as a stage work directed by Peter Sellars. I can only pray that he didn’t do to it what he did to conventional opera 30 years ago, which is to ruin it, but since it included choreography (by Luca Veggetti) my fears are compounded. Why the heck would anyone dance to this music or, even worse, to these lyrics? How do you dance through a life of misery, selflessness to others, and a personal search for spirituality in a dark and ugly world? More importantly, why would you dance this? But no matter. Although it is noted that this recording “was made in connection with this live concert performance,” the medium of a CD happily spares us these unnecessary images except for the photos on the cover and CD inlay. We are, then, happily free to imagine the music and words as separate entities, which indeed they are, and to marvel at the skill that Saariaho used in creating this marvelous work.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

Ondine is pleased to announce a long-term recording collaboration with German violinist Christian Tetzlaff, internationally recognized as one of the leading soloists of his generation. The selection of these sonatas for piano and violin by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart demonstrate distinctly the composer's ingeniousness and show a wide range and strong ambiguity of emotions.

Ondine is pleased to announce the first release with Austrian violinist Benjamin Schmid with a performance of Reger’s Violin Concerto and the Chaconne for Solo Violin. This release invites to listen to a captivating performance of Reger’s Violin Concerto, a hugely charming big romantic work with broad sentimental gestures.

Ondine is pleased to announce the new release of legendary Strauss-singer Soile Isokoski. A multiple award-winner, her recording of Strauss Four Last Songs won a Gramophone Award in 2002. The rarely recorded Three Hymns are coupled with opera arias from Ariadne auf Naxos, Der Rosenkavalier and Capriccio. All of those arias are part of Soile Isokoski's standard repertoire, performing those roles regularly at opera houses like Vienna State Opera, Covent Garden, and Milan’s La Scala.

Ondine is pleased to announce the debut release of charismatic mezzo -soprano Virpi Räisänen. Following her recent career change from a successful violinist to a concert and opera singer, Virpi Räisänen has already appeared at the Staatsoper in Berlin, the Netherlands Opera, and the Salzburg Festival. Virpi Räisänen is admirably multifaceted being equally at home with contemporary as well as with baroque music, her beautiful timbre seems to fit well in all genres.

This CD features Finnish pianist Henri Sigfridsson with piano works by Finnish composer Selim Palmgren. Palmgren is regarded as the most important post-romantic piano composer in Finland. The core of his output is formed by his five piano concertos and more than 300 small pieces for piano. The Sonata in D minor is Palmgren's most extensive work for piano and it was hailed as a milestone in Finnish music.

For their second release on Ondine, the acclaimed Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under chief conductor Daniel Reuss perform Psalm settings by Felix Mendelssohn and Estonian composer Cyrillus Kreek. The first release of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir was given an ‘Editor’s Choice’ accolade by Gramophone. Cyrillus Kreek, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and a collector of folk songs, laid the foundation for Estonian professional music. The unique coupling highlights the familiarity between Mendelssohn and Kreek in terms of vocal and harmonic setting.