HAYDN, J.: Die grossten Werke (Greatest Works)

Grieg: Peer Gynt Suites 1 & 2 / In Autumn / Sakari Oramo Composed by Edvard Grieg / Conductor Sakari Oramo / Orchestra City Of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. As soon as the strings respond to the flute near the beginning of Peer Gynt's 'Morning' you sense this is a quality production. A bolder Grieg than we're used to hearing, less perfumed than dramatic and with impressive orchestral playing from the Birmingham orchestra.

Eugene Ormandy's peerless Ives First Symphony, a singular classic in which the conductor employs all the resources of his fabulous orchestra, comes newly packaged in Sony's latest re-launch of its highly successful budget-priced Essential Classics series. The famous Philadelphia strings make a wonderfully sumptuous sound (particularly as they flesh out the Adagio molto's beauteous melodies), the winds' pointed and colorful playing enlivens the scherzo, while the brass section's signature timbre rings regally at the close of the first and last movements. Ormandy brings to this music the same level of concentration and care he would a Tchaikovsky symphony, conducting with an authority unmatched on other, later recordings.


Zubin Mehta conducts with similar enthusiasm, but his Los Angeles recording is spoiled by disfiguring cuts in the finale, and despite heftily sonorous playing from the Chicago Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas' earnest reading sounds surprisingly stiff after Ormandy's free-flowing, almost impetuous rendition. Ormandy further earns his Ives stripes (and proves the lie to the claim that he was a bland interpreter) with his intense and atmospheric reading of Three Places in New England. Rounding out the program is a bracing performance of the Robert Browning Overture by a very animated Leopold Stokowski, stunningly played by the American Symphony. The remastered sound for the Philadelphia sessions is pleasingly warm and full for its period (late 1950s), while the Stokowski recording is less open and a bit hard-edged. [3/6/2002]
--Victor Carr Jr., ClassicsToday.com

Chamber music by Handel & Stanley played on instruments of the period. A collection of chamber music from Georgian England by the leading composers of the day. The programme includes a chamber version of Handel's 'Water Music' and popular music from London's pleasure gardens.

Classical Music

Classical Music

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

Born in 1972, Sebastian Fagerlund was recently described on the website MusicWeb International as ‘yet another obscenely talented young musician from Finland’. The occasion was the release of his opera Döbeln (BIS-SACD-1780), with a score that the reviewer went on to characterize as ‘both forward-looking and audience friendly’. Composed in 2009, Döbeln is Fagerlund’s first and so far only opera, and on the present disc we hear three orchestral scores. The musicians of the eminent Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra revel in the composer’s striking gift for orchestration, in performances supervised by the rapidly emerging young conductor Dima Slobodeniouk, who has collaborated with Fagerlund on several occasions previously. The clarinettist Christoffer Sundqvist is also well acquainted with Fagerlund’s music, and his playing served as inspiration for the composer as he wrote his colourful and eventful Clarinet Concerto. Following that work here is Partita, consisting of three movements with titles that mirror the composer’s concerns: Cerimonia (Ceremony), Risonanza (Resonance) and Preghiera (Prayer). According to Fagerlund himself, the work is not associated with any specific religion but rather with an inner, spiritual struggle in general; the need for everyone to find his or her own ‘prayer’. Closing the disc is Isola (Island) which sprang from a visit by the composer to an island in the Turku archipelago formerly used to segregate lepers and the mentally ill from the rest of society. On admittance inmates were expected to bring with them the wood for their own coffins, an ‘isle of the dead’ which today is an idyllic holiday location. A similar alternation of darkness and light, of movement and motionlessness, of violence and sensitivity, permeates Fagerlund’s tone poem.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

BACH: BRANDENBURG CONCERTOS P

Italian Orchestral Music

MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO 9 DE WAAR

Music for Ballet Lovers

GALLAGHER Diversions Overture. Berceuse. Sinfonietta for String Orchestra. Symphony in One Movement, “Threnody” • JoAnn Falletta, cond; London SO • NAXOS 8559652 (63:47)


For those who do not know about Jack Gallagher and the genesis of this recording, I refer you to the feature/interview elsewhere in this issue. The four works offered here are an overview of most the American composer’s career so far, from the 1977 Berceuse , written when he was 30 years old, to the Sinfonietta, completed in 2007 and revised the next year.


There probably is no better introduction to Gallagher’s beautifully crafted, accessible music than Diversions Overture , the opener for this CD. The concert overture seems to evoke the open prairies of the old West, complete with sunrise, sunset, and the excitement of discovery. I mean no irony; it is very much in the style of the American school created by Aaron Copland and Gallagher’s first composition teacher, Elie Siegmeister. If there is any irony, it is that Copland and Siegmeister were city boys from New York, and Gallagher was, too, before he took his university job in Wooster, Ohio. It doesn’t matter. In 1986, when Gallagher wrote this, he showed himself a natural heir to the style that his predecessors created. There is poignancy, explosive energy, good-natured humor (love those harp interjections in the middle section), and a warm-hearted directness that is tremendously engaging. This is a feel-good music in the very best sense of the expression.


On the other hand, the earlier Berceuse is so beautiful it could make you cry. How many times does a critic get to say that when reviewing a piece by a living composer? And it works because there is no sense that the composer is trying to make that happen. As is true of all of Gallagher’s music, there is unaffected honesty, the sense of being allowed to look into the composer’s heart. This gentle little lullaby, based on a piano work written for the daughter of friends, is one of Gallagher’s most played and recorded works. I have not heard it better done.


Originally a set of two pieces for orchestra, and expanded in to a full five-movement suite in 2007, the Sinfonietta is occasionally reminiscent of chamber-orchestra works by British composers like Moeran. At other times Britten’s more anxious string works are brought to mind. This is a different side of Gallagher’s art, emotionally more contained—though no less vigorous—and sparer in sound. Throughout there are surprises: an unexpected interval, an unusually timed rhythmic pattern, or a chord that deliciously refuses to resolve. In the Intrada, he uses the octatonic (diminished) scale to create a feeling of uneasy anticipation. In the Intermezzo he frames the melancholy, slowly shifting movement with a concertante opening and closing that is like murmured conversation against the sound of the night. The lively, slightly unsettling central Argentinean Malambo serves as a scherzo, but the bustle never seems joke-like. The Pavane is reminiscent of the Berceuse of 30 years previous, though now the innocence is bittersweet, and the gentleness a touch reserved. The pizzicato opening of the concluding Rondo Concertante brings us back to English pastoral, and the folk dance. Throughout there is a quality of understatement that is deceptive, as greater familiarity with the work reveals a deep complexity that isn’t immediately apparent; very like getting to know the composer, and very moving.


So is Gallagher’s Symphony in One Movement, subtitled “Threnody.” Written, in part, in memory of his mother, who died unexpectedly during its composition, this is understandably the darkest of the works here. The opening section may well remind you of Shostakovich’s wrenching adagios, and echoes of Bernard Hermann will come later, but the way this lament explodes into sudden anger in the second part is clearly Gallagher’s usual kinetic energy, agonized and held too long in check. It subsides eventually, played out in sinister snatches of manic solo violin, and racing piano chromatics, and the roaring of the brass. An eerie harp cadenza provides a release, but no sense of consolation, and the work dissolves into a fractured madness of spent rage and poignant remembrances before collapsing into despair.


As I have said before, this is a most welcome release of some absolutely fantastic music. It is not cutting-edge, nor self-consciously emotive as some neoromantic music is. It is richly and directly communicative. Naxos is to be commended for offering an opportunity to hear these four major works by a composer who richly deserves to be better known. JoAnn Falletta clearly loves these pieces, and brings them vividly to life. The LSO—need I say this?—plays with great conviction and energy. Only an occasional unevenness of ensemble in the swirling figurations of the Sinfonietta, or a moment or two of tentativeness in the brass, hint at any lack of familiarity. The sound is lovely, fully capturing the bloom of that great Abbey Road Studio One. Urgently recommended.


FANFARE: Ronald E. Grames


On evidence here, Jack Gallagher (b. 1947) is a composer of considerable ability. He wrote the notes to this release, not necessarily a good idea, since they read like a job resume and have about as much personality as stale bread, but the music happily says otherwise. The two big works, the Sinfonietta for strings and the Symphony "Threnody", have considerable substance. Among the five movements of the former work is an Argentine Malambo (think of the final dance of Ginastera's ballet Estancia), and a very good one too. The symphony manages the difficult task in a modern work of being turbulent and emotionally affecting without ever sounding petulant or gratuitously miserable. It's also very cogently structured in one movement, part of a long and distinguished lineage stretching back through Samuel Barber and Roy Harris to the Seventh Symphony of Sibelius.

Diversions Overture opens with some lovely modal harmonies in the woodwinds, and for a moment you might feel that you are listening to a lost work from the English pastoral school--not quite Vaughan Williams, but possibly E.J. Moeran or John Ireland. Gallagher's individuality soon reasserts itself, however, in the music's quick sections. The Berceuse is a slight but pretty little intermezzo.

As you may have guessed, this music is harmonically traditional and falls gratefully on the ear, but it never comes across as merely facile or clichéd. JoAnn Falletta and the London Symphony play it all with notable confidence and technical security, as we have every right to expect, and they've been well recorded at Abbey Road Studios. Gallagher is definitely worth getting to know.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

This posthumous anthology consisting of selections from 50 years of work by composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932?2004) includes six world premieres?that is to say, it took 50 years for this man?s lifetime output to be recognized. Perhaps that is not so shocking. After all, how easy was it for a black man in the 1950s to obtain a bachelor?s and master?s degree from Manhattan School of Music, and compose his first major work at the age of 22 within the confines of a segregated society? But Perkinson, the namesake of black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875?1912), didn?t consider himself generically a black composer. Whether or not he allowed himself to be typecast as an ethnic artist, Perkinson?s interpretation of white, WASP, and Western musical convention is spiked with vintage blues and jazz. His music is, therefore, in an uncanny and paradoxical way, the reverse of the cultural plundering associated with Gershwin?s and Dvo?ák?s musical appropriations. Consequently, if Perkinson?s music isn?t especially innovative, we shouldn?t be surprised that a victim of discrimination and ghettoization would not choose to further isolate himself by throwing 12-tone rows into the mix. After all, experimentation is the spawn of prosperity, not the privilege of the hardship.


Perkinson?s Sinfonietta No. 1 for strings, composed in 1955, might have been considered, if composed by a young Caucasian, the work of a wunderkind. The precocious piece is an homage to Bach, and throughout his life Perkinson returned to fugal writing as a religious rite of appreciation for the German master. Two years later, Perkinson began to infiltrate into his technique the echoes of his ancestor slaves. Quartet No. 1 , based on ?Calvary? (Negro Spiritual) weaves together the dualism of his segregated world into one lucid harmonious dream.


The next selection on the disc was composed 20 years later. One wonders what happened in the intervening years, though we know that Perkinson had the opportunity to work with Leonard Bernstein, Max Roach, Alvin Ailey, Jerome Robbins, Marvin Gaye, and Harry Belafonte. He also co-founded and conducted the Symphony of the New World. Blue/s Forms for solo violin (1972) is a deep reverie of black experience as seen through the filter of Paganiniesque writing. Sanford Allen plays it with tender feeling. Equally luscious is Lamentations, a black/folk song suite for solo cello, played by Tahirah Whittington.


Just before his death, Perkinson composed the last selection on the disc, Movement for String Trio. It is a profoundly sweet, sad, Barberesque self-requiem for a man who should have been heard, and one hopes will be heard now?though he won?t be here to enjoy the long overdue recognition.


FANFARE: David Wolman

But even the best high-res classical recordings from other labels pale in comparison to the pitch-perfect presentations found in this collection. - D. Burger Home Entertainment. AIX presents a chamber music masterpiece in real HD-Audio. Bonus features include complete system setup, extensive liner notes, photo gallery, and liner notes. This DVD features a 4 panel "split screen" video of the members of the quartet and a multiple angle of the pianist.

Cedille Records intends its African Heritage Symphonic Series as a follow-up to CBS Records' Black Composers Series from the 1970s, and I'm happy to say Volume 1 makes for a strong start. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), chiefly remembered for his cantata based on Longfellow's Hiawatha, actually was British-born, and his music is understandably more European sounding than that of his African American colleagues, though in some cases you can hear instances of traditionally African harmonic modulations. Thus, the Danse Nègre from the African Suite (1898) sounds sort of like Vaughan-Williams' The Wasps spiced up by Dvorak's Slavonic Dances. Dvorak is a composer who comes to mind again in the Petite Suite de Concert (1910), where Coleridge-Taylor exhibits the same qualities of tunefulness, rhythmic fluency, and sparkling orchestration as the Czech master.


William Grant Still (1895-1978) greatly admired Coleridge-Taylor, but he also was heavily influenced by the great jazz musicians of his time, in particular W.C. Handy, known as the "Father of the Blues". It's the sound of the blues that opens Still's Symphony No. 1, and to hear it in full symphonic dress immediately calls to mind George Gershwin (both composers knew each other's music). Various forms of jazz and blues permeate the symphony, yet Still constructs his work according to classic symphonic principles, and the result is a highly original, thought-provoking, and ultimately enjoyable creation.


From the African diaspora, we turn to the motherland for the music of Fela Sowande (1906-87). Sowande's Africa Suite (1930) utilizes traditional melodies of his native Nigeria, allowing us to hear the actual modes and rhythms of Africa presented in European orchestral timbres--a hybrid that works thanks to conductor Paul Freeman's rhythmic exactitude and to enthusiastic playing by the Chicago Sinfonietta. Freeman and his band give vibrant performances of the Coleridge-Taylor works as well, and show a far less self-conscious demeanor in the Still Symphony than Neeme Jarvi and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, playing with much more relaxed authenticity and "cool". Cedille's recording is a model of three-dimensional realism, making this disc both a sonic and musical treasure.
--Victor Carr Jr., ClassicsToday.com

An excellent reissue of music by a much underrated composer. The sound is excellent … be slightly brighter than the original. A must for all fans of film music and this composer.

The eldest of ten children, Alfred Newman was a musical prodigy, starting piano lessons at the age of five, and studying composition with Rubin Goldmark, who also taught Aaron Copland and George Gershwin. By 1920 he was working as a Broadway conductor, and, in 1930, he accompanied Irving Berlin to Hollywood. There he took private lessons from Arnold Schoenberg and wrote his first film score for Goldwyn’s adaptation of Elmer Rice’s 1929 Pulitzer Prize winning play Street Scene in 1931. Seventeen years later Kurt Weill made an opera from the same play.

Writing in a late romantic idiom, but with a more American voice than either Max Steiner or Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Newman has never received the wider attention of so many of his contemporaries. Writing in 1996, Fred Steiner lamented, “Some of the films (he) scored then don’t have drawing power today. Wuthering Heights (1939) may be OK, but whoever heard of Beloved Enemy (1936)? It’s not like the popularity of The Adventures of Robin Hood (Korngold) or Gone With the Wind (Steiner).” Between 1930 and 1970 Newman wrote music for over two hundred films and acted as musical director for many more. He won nine Oscars and, between 1938 and 1957; he was nominated in twenty consecutive years.

P C Wren’s Beau Geste is a desert drama concering three brothers (played by Gary Cooper, Robert Preston and Ray Milland) and their undying devotion to each other and family. Newman’s score is rumbustious, humourous and tender by turns. The Prelude has a swagger before turning to orientalism, and after some delicate work the March Out is a defiant cue for the Foreign Legion. After the brilliantly scored Battle, with the addition of a female chorus, death spreads through the doomed Fort Zinderneuf in A Viking’s Funeral – the most heart-felt music in the Suite. The Finale is reserved before giving way to a quick reprise of the March for the End Cast.

In his biography of Charles Laughton (Charles Laughton: An Intimate Biography, Doubleday New York, 1976 and W H Allen, London, 1976), Charles Higham wrote that The Hunchback of Notre Dame was “… an operetta without songs, accompanied by … Newman’s crashing chords and celestial choirs, suggesting menace or exaltation.“ Fred Steiner said, “It’s a truly remarkable score, especially in regard to the character of the themes. The great thing about the themes for the hunchback, Esmeralda, the young soldier she falls for and the poet Gringoire is that they all fit their personalities so well … it’s real music.” This is a big, colourful, score; motifs come and go and are developed throughout the film. There’s more orientalism in Esmeralda’s Dance, and, very surprisingly, in Thank You Mother of God, there’s a solo for flute which is uncannily like the flute solo in the final movement of Gustav Holst’s Beni Mora! Celestial choirs, strange, Bernard Herrmann-like timbres from the low woodwinds, delicate string writing and almost Parry-like choral odes abound in this score. Please note that I make these comments not because the music sounds like Holst, Herrmann or Parry but to give some idea of the wide range of the music.

All About Eve doesn’t have a big score and this little suite is tantalizing: a jaunty opening titles sequence, followed by various incarnations of Eve’s theme from tender and innocent to its climactic appearance reflecting envy, lust and the intoxicating allure of the theatre limelight.

The musical performances are assured and if the Moscow Symphony Orchestra doesn’t quite have the verve of the RKO Studio Orchestra they play the music for all it is worth; textures are clear and the various sections acquit themselves well. William Stromberg directs strong, forthright performances with great attention to every detail of the scores.

One thing the notes don’t tell us is exactly what restoration and reconstruction work John Morgan and William Stromberg had to do for these scores. This is odd as the booklet for the original release (Marco Polo 8.223750 – 1997) contains a note by John Morgan, and it is most interesting. He tells us that the All About Eve Suite uses the original orchestrations by Eddie Powell. Stromberg created the Beau Geste suite from “Scantily annotated conductor books” and Morgan himself consulted “… the surviving scores and the piano/conductor short scores …” to prepare The Hunchback of Notre Dame Suite, and orchestrated about half of the music to “… bring it more in line with what is heard on the film soundtrack … I was also able to restore many bars and one entire cue dropped from the finished film.” Also missing from the Naxos booklet are almost all the photographs and Bill Whitaker’s excellent notes have been slightly truncated. The original issue also had a better sleeve illustration.

Incidentally, Newman was born in 1900 not 1901 as stated on the rear of the CD and in the booklet.

Ultimately, it is the music that matters and this is an excellent re-issue of music by a much underrated composer. The sound is excellent and seems to be slightly brighter than the original. A must for all fans of film music in general and this composer in particular.

-- Bob Briggs, MusicWeb International

As this second volume of overtures shows, there really is quite a bit of little-known Schubert orchestral music. Perhaps the biggest discovery for many listeners will be the turbulent Overture in E minor, but there are more than a few substantial pieces here. The two Overtures in the Italian Style are delightful, and so true to their models, and all of the music here is very well played and recorded. Benda and the Prague Sinfonia deliver a particularly vivacious account of the Rosamunde Overture, just the opposite of the thick and heavy "German" approach that we so often hear, while Fierabras also has plenty of energy. The sonics capture the players very naturally, with nicely present woodwinds and excellent balances between brass and strings. No qualms here: Go for it.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

Hisato Ohzawa, one of the foremost Japanese composers of the first half of the twentieth century, studied in the 1930s in Boston and Paris. This second Naxos disc of his music features two works premiered by the composer in Paris.

Consistently enjoyable and exciting, glistens with personal touches.

This is another escapee from Marco Polo [8.225149] newly revivified by Naxos in their Film Music Classics series. There’s an hour’s worth of music here with short cues run together for reasons of continuity in the proper sequence. Steiner’s music is consistently enjoyable and exciting. It glistens with personal touches and little orchestral feats that captivate and evoke in the shortest possible time.

The Train Attack scene sets the pulse racing – all one hundred seconds of it – and Steiner cleverly uses percussion voicings to summon up thoughts of finding gold. There are opportunities for nostalgia and reflection as well – Steiner uses Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms as such a device in the sixth track here, Campfire, and it reappears later. The cave-in scene is excitingly but tersely done – for all Steiner’s symphonic depth and range he maintained a "go for the jugular" precision when necessary.

These are qualities strongly in evidence in the banditry and violence of the score as when, for instance, the remorseless gaining of the bandits is so trenchantly evoked by the slash of the strings and the throb of the rhythm. Steiner builds up tension with inexorable but concise precision. And there are of course plenty of moments for the unleashing of his lyric affiliations; the romantic string curve of the tenth track, Cody’s Letter, leads on to a reprise of Texas Memories and its evocation of the sentiment of Believe Me.

The more horrifying elements of the score are also targeted with his accustomed finesse and compact perception. The cue The Ruins for instance has an abundance of high string and harp writing that has a satisfyingly high spine-tingle quotient. The Chorus is used very sparingly, here to sing the Funeral Chant [track twelve] and it’s done in the usual accomplished way.

Talking of accomplishment the orchestral and vocal forces of the Moscow Symphony sound notably well drilled and on the ball in this performance. John Morgan’s restorations are part of the backbone of the whole series and his written notes are always worth reading. Production values are high, as always.

Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

Following on from the award winning recording of MOZART's violin concertos with Marianne Thorsen, TrondheimSolistene team up once again with the recording company 2L for their new production. This album features a selection of some of the finest and most technically challenging repertoire for string orchestra, and includes repertoire by Benjamin Britten, the Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz, the Norwegian composer Terje Bjørklund as well as Bela Bartok's seminal work for string orchestra the Divertimento. DIVERTIMENTI is the first music-only recording to be made available commercially in the ground breaking format of Blu-ray. A true world premiere!

The divertimento as a musical genre dates back to the nineteenth century. Divertimenti were composed for various social occasions and were intended to be light, uncomplicated and cheerful. Such pieces were often scored for small string ensemble. Over the years this effortless, elegant form has appeared in many different musical styles and, to a large extent, set the standard for the virtuosic chamber music we know today. A number of the most prominent composers of our age have engaged with this most fascinating musical style and have contributed to its further refinement as a chamber-symphonic showpiece.

Hybrid SACD + music Blu-ray
5.1 SURROUND + STEREO produced in DXD (Digital eXtreme Definition)
The hybrid SACD looks like a normal CD and plays on all standard players and computers.