Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

GILSE Symphony No. 4 in A. Funeral Music on the Death of Uilenspiegel. Concert Overture in c • David Porcelijn, cond; Netherlands SO • CPO 777689 (62:33)


CPO here continues apace with its survey of Jan van Gilse’s symphonies. Details of the composer’s life and descriptions of his music can be found in reviews of his first three symphonies in 32:2 and 36:2. The Fourth Symphony in A Major occupied Gilse from 1910 to 1915, and appears to be his last fully completed symphony; only a fragment of a Fifth exists, dating from 1922, and since the composer lived for another 22 years after that, it has to be assumed that it wasn’t death that prevented him from completing it. The Concert Overture in C Minor has received a previous recording by Jac van Steen conducting the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra on an NM CD. It was reviewed in 31:5.


If you acquired one or both of David Porcelijn’s CPO recordings of Gilse’s first three symphonies, you’ll know what to expect of the Fourth, and there’s really not a lot to add. This is well-made music in high romantic style. Commenting on the First Symphony in 32:2, David H. North pegged it as Dvo?ák’s No. 4-1/3. Gilse has advanced considerably beyond Dvo?ák in his Fourth Symphony, but considering its date of composition, it’s still a decade or so behind its time. The most pervasive influence on the score, even more so than on Gilse’s Third Symphony, is Richard Strauss. The music is shot through with much of the same orchestral busyness—the flashes, splashes, and dashes of luminous colors—and the long-arching passages of melodic and harmonic nostalgia familiar from Strauss’s tone poems. If Gilse’s First Symphony was Dvo?ák’s No. 4-1/3, his Fourth Symphony is Strauss’s Don Juanenspiegel.


The Strauss connection is literary as well as musical. In 1941, during the German occupation of Holland, Gilse composed his Funeral Music on the Death of Uilenspiegel , the flip side, if you will, of Strauss’s Till . This, for Gilse, was how things ended for the legendary merry prankster. The music now anticipates the Strauss of Metamorphosen of four years later. If this and previous reviews have not taken Gilse very seriously, his Funeral Music is a score that commands serious attention and perhaps a re-evaluation of his work as a whole. The piece actually was extracted from a section of Gilse’s opera Thijl and then expanded to stand as an independent orchestral work. The Concert Overture of 1900 is Gilse’s first attempt at a piece for orchestra and it, like the First Symphony, contains echoes of Dvo?ák.


Of the three CPO discs released so far in this series, I find myself most impressed by this one. Performance and recording standards remain very high, and this is music anyone who enjoys beautifully crafted and magnificently scored orchestral music of the type and style described will derive much pleasure from. Strongly recommended.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek had a very conflicted relationship with the German symphonic legacy. His First Symphony, subtitled “Tragic,” is anything but. The Second, the “Ironic,” is arguably too cute for its own good. The Fifth is a suite of dances orchestrated from piano originals–it’s not really a symphony at all. The two immaculately crafted works on this release make the best impression so far, while confirming that when it came to dealing with the imposing musical tradition that he inherited, Reznicek basically hadn’t a clue. Even so, there are times when failure can be interesting, especially when it’s done with such craft.

The Third Symphony, subtitled “In the Olden Style” (in the score, not on the tray card), is written for classical orchestra: double winds, two trumpets, four horns, timpani and strings. Its music is pure pastiche. It begins with a 15th century folk song, and continues with a first movement that recalls Schumann, albeit with better orchestration. The third movement is a faux Haydn minuet (sound clip) with tipsy harmonies, while the finale takes the accompaniment of the opening of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony and combines it with the tune of the Scottish Symphony’s scherzo. It tries really hard to be adorable, but winds up sounding forced and tired. The trio of the minuet is a bland Ländler, and the finale fails to sustain the energy of its opening. It’s really a bit sad.

The situation hardly improves in the Fourth. Its slow movement is a “Funeral March for a Comedian,” and might strike you as a bit like Prokofiev, without the melodic character. The scherzo is just a good piece of traditional symphonic writing, but the outer movements are a mess. This work adds trombones,and features two crashes for cymbals and bass drum in the finale, but is otherwise just as conservative, not to say inhibited, as its predecessor. The grand chorale at the end never quite achieves the culmination that Reznicek obviously intends, and like the Third Symphony you get the sense that the medium simply resists the composer’s best efforts to write something plausibly honest and genuine.

In short, these two decadent relics are fun to listen to as desperate attempts to grapple with a tradition that, however vital and vibrant just about everywhere else in the world, was truly dead in Germany. They are fascinating documents of their time (the first decades of the 20th century), and Frank Beermann contrives to offer the most successful release thus far of the three devoted to Reznicek’s symphonies.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

When the symphonic poem The Raven after Edgar Allan Poe celebrated it's premiere in London in March, 1900, the critics showered hymns of praise on his work so rich in unique orchestral colors and on it's young composer Josef Holbrooke. It brought him his breakthrough and firmly established his reputation as an innovative and original contemporary composer. There are certainly many settings of Poe's poem, but Holbrooke was the first composer who did not merely set the text but used it as the poetic basis for his first "Poem for Orchestra." Holbrooke's idiom was the musical language of the late nineteenth century obliged to the primacy of expression, and he enriched it with his constant quest for new tonal effects. In his orchestral variations on the beloved Scottish folk song "Auld Lang Syne" he again displays his extraordinary gift for employing his absolutely inexhaustible inventive talent and fine feeling for harmony in order to endow simple song forms with subtle expressive variety.

With CPO's Volume 15, their comprehensive project featuring organ works of the Northern German Baroque is now complete. On the last release, Friedhelm Flamme dedicates himself to the complete free organ works, that is, to the complete fugues and preludes, of Heinrich Scheidemann, a composer regarded as one of the co-founders of the Northern German organ school. Some of Scheidemann's chorale settings are also presented. Johann Adam Reincken succeeded Scheidemann as the organist at St. Catherine's Church in Hamburg after his mentor's death and is regarded as his most important pupil. Scheidermann's activity and influence on other organists and choirmasters brought him great respect in Hamburg's music world, and he is regarded as one of the most significant composers or organ works from the early seventeenth century. Here we would like to thank our interpreter Friedhelm Flamme for his renderings of Northern German marvels of organ sound. His recordings demonstrate how genuine technique and virtuosity can be combined with intellectual probing to produce sensational results.

Here is how our author describes Jensen’s work: "He towers above most of his colleagues, not only in wealth of invention, thematic coherence, and phenomenal orchestration, but especially in his mastery of nuance and his far-reaching control of the harmonic process. Hardly any of his contemporaries can match his masterly handling of modulation."

Classical Music

The Twenty-Second Magdeburg Telemann Festival Days in March 2014 celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Telemann's godson and successor, with a program entitled "Generations: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann." The festival program offered concertgoers the opportunity to experience the similarities and differences in the music of these protagonists representing two compositional generations and traced lines of development in musical style. The live concert recording presented here features sacred compositions by Telemann and Bach written about the same time for Hamburg, some of which were first performed in modern times at the Magdeburg Telemann Festival Days. The Hamburg music director Telemann maintained intensive contact with composers of the younger generation into the late years of his life, exchanged ideas with them, and was interested in developments in the new musical style being formed by them. For their part, younger composers looked up – not without great veneration – to the "father of music" (Johann Heinrich Rolle, 1767) and intensively studied or performed his compositions, which left their mark on German music life over many decades. Among Telemann's contacts, those with his godson and later successor Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach are especially significant. A great part of the church compositions brought together here, all of them connected with the liturgical performance of music at Hamburg's five principal churches, number among the documents attesting to their relationship.

Hartmut Rohde became the new artistic director and conductor of the Leopoldinum Chamber Orchestra of Wroclaw (Breslau) at the beginning of the 2014 / 15 season. Their debut album featuring symphonic works by Simon Laks and Philipp Jarnach is now being released on cpo. The decision to combine these two composers may seem to be quite arbitrary, and at first glance their origins and musical impulses seem to be very different. "On a second look, however, interesting parallels come into view and make their joint presentation appear to make very good sense. Both grew up during a period of dramatic historical change prior to World War I and enjoyed promising career beginnings in the 1920s, which many important performances document for Simon Laks in France and for Philipp Jarnach in Germany. Both experienced the establishment of dodecaphony, its expansion into serial music, and the first experiments in the field of electronic music. However, both also had in common a strong commitment to the preservation of traditional tonal language. As moderate moderns they firmly believed in the viability and expandability of musical principles that had developed over the centuries and above all in the irrevocability of tonality as the animating and energizing source constituting the substrate of musical design. Moreover, these principles included homophony and polyphony beginning with the seventeenth century, the rhetorical doctrine of the affections, the flow of melos, and the spirit of the historically transmitted compositional genres. Their music is highly emotional, crafted with supreme skill, rich in associations, and fascinatingly diverse in expression." (Hartmut Rohde)

Mahler, G.: Symphony No. 3 / Symphony No. 10: Adagio

The rediscovery of the works of German composer Friedrich Gernsheim continues with this collection, the third from CPO focusing on his considerable output which spotlights his violin concertos featuring the noted chamber violinist Linus Roth with the Hamburg Symphony conducted by Johannes Zurl. Gersheim's long life improbably encompassed meeting Liszt, Brahms and Saint-Sa�ns and extended into World War I when he spent the last years of his life in Berlin. Due to his Jewish ancestry, Gernsheim's music was effectively banned and removed from German music libraries during WWII further burying legacy, a slight that is being slowly corrected with releases such as this. Gernsheim's unique contribution is the sustained beauty and expressiveness of his melodies, informed by the Brahms and Schumann influences yet wholly his own.

Felix Woyrsch (1860-1944) studied music with Ernst August Heinrich Chevallier. In his youth he held posts as a conductor and organist in several German cities in the 1890s and 1900s and by 1917 he was a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts. In 1933 at age 73 he was ordered into "forced retirement" as head of the Altona Singakademie by the Nazis. In 1936 Woyrsch received the Goethe Medal. He lived until 1944.

Woyrsch stated his main influences included his friend Brahms as well as Bach, Palestrina, Lassus, and Heinrich Schütz. As a composer Woyrsch considered himself self-taught by these past masters. He stated: "I have not had a bad teacher, name of a good sound: I have a counterpoint in Palestrina, Lassus, Sweelinck. Schutz and Hassler studied and very often sat quietly at the foot of the Great Sebastian; composition taught me Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn, as well as the masters of modern times, Brahms and Wagner, I have to thank a lot." Historically Felix Woyrsch is part of the group of obscure German late-romantics, such as William Berger, Felix Weingartner, Albert Dietrich and Paul Juon who shared a harmonic language ranging from Brahms to Richard Strauss as well as early Schoenberg and Korngold. Composers who carried on the tradition of the symphony. The CPO label together with the Oldenburg State Orchestra led by Thomas Dorsch have embarked on bringing the colorful, romantic music of this "North German Brahms" successor to greater public awareness. - CPO (Translated from German)

The Magdeburg Sunday Concerts held ever since 1961 focus on chamber music. Not infrequently, as the present release likewise demonstrates, compositions by Telemann are featured and include works again made available for the everyday concert world in Magdeburg following intensive research investigations and the publication of modern score editions. From the 531st Sunday music concert, the GSOConsort led by the soprano and artistic director Gudrun Sidonie Otto now presents Advent cantata arias with a single vocal part and the continuo in a duet. These arias belong to a single annual cantata cycle published by Telemann from the end of 1726 to the end of 1727. They have been excerpted from church compositions designed with this option in mind, that is, the independent performance of the arias. Telemann revised the arias for publication; in particular, he worked on the precision of the ritornellos, shortening, redesigning, or rewriting them, or eliminated them entirely. Just how carefully the arias have been elaborated is shown both on the formal level and in what in part are complicated and unusual melodic, declamatory-rhythmical, and harmonic processes in an impressive spectrum of musical keys (Hirschmann, 2012). Telemann of course pays close attention to the verbal pictures, often also opposing ones, given in the texts – and does so in a most highly nuanced manner.

At long last CPO is now releasing Ernst von Gemmingen’s Violin Concertos Nos. 3 and 4 as world-premiere recordings, again interpreted by one of the most versatile musicians of our times: Kolja Lessing, who both as a violinist and a pianist has lent strong impulses to music culture with his interpretive and musicological insights. CPO also has him to thank for the exemplary interpretation recorded here. In his booklet text he himself writes: "We as yet know only a little or almost nothing about the human being and artist Ernst von Gemmingen, whose extant music library, however, offers eloquent testimony to his select taste. An autodidact and a visionary, borne by a wealth of violinistic invention almost boundless for his times with respect to double-stop and bel-canto playing, no less in view of sophisticated figurations up to the highest registers, in his four broadly dimensioned violin concertos he created what practically amount to theatrical scenarios. The Violin Concertos Nos. 3 and 4 recorded here for the first time reveal these scenic qualities, paired with violinistic character and expressive eloquence surging far head into early romanticism – in even greater measure than in his first two concertos." A symphony by François-Joseph Gossec, Gemmingen’s contemporary and the principal composer of the French Revolution, complements the two concertos.

Following our successful first release featuring symphonic works by Robert Radecke, the Swiss Trio Fontane ensemble now turns to chamber music by this composer. Radecke took up residence in Berlin in 1853 and significantly influenced the city’s music culture through to the turn of the century. He initially performed in public as a chamber musician as the second violinist in Ferdinand Laub’s quartet and as a pianist who created a sensation with his renderings of Beethoven’s last sonatas. His mastery as an instrumentalist is reflected especially in the brilliant piano part of the Trio in B minor, which not coincidentally is dedicated to Anton Rubinstein. Radecke composed the first movement quite likely while he was still in Leipzig (1853) and added the cantabile adagio two years later. However, it was not until 1868 that he supplied a scherzo and a finale to complete the work for publication as his op. 33 by Bote & Bock of Berlin. This work and Radecke’s two piano trios, about whose circumstances of composition and reception hardly anything is known, are being presented in recording premieres on this release. Along with the Fantasy Pieces op. 7, this means that almost all of the composer’s published chamber compositions, that is, three of his total of four such works of this genre, have now been recorded. This beautiful romantic music displays Radecke’s independent talent coupled with consummate compositional artistry and a fine feel for formal perfection.

Jozef Koffler earned a firm place in music history as one of the first Polish and European twelve-tone composers. Born in Stryj, he returned to his home region in 1924 after his education in Vienna and settled in Lemberg, where he was active not only a composer but also as a charismatic teacher and music journalist. The investigation of Koffler's oeuvre has shown that he adopted Schonberg's method of composition with twelve interrelated tones and applied it in a most highly creative manner, often modifying its strict rules in order to achieve the desired artistic result. The piano works and String Trio, Op. 10 presented on this album offer expressive testimony to Koffler's originality. The album concludes wtih Johannes Schollhorn's Spur, a work composed in 2003 and dedicated to Koffler. Here a contemporary composer turns to the traces left behind by Koffler: with creative imagination and sensibility he engages, as it were, in his own play with the original material, whcih, sometimes more strongly, other times more suggestively, manifests itself in the new contents.

We continue our astonishing Bruckner cycle with the rarely performed 2nd Symphony. As in the case in the 1st, Venzago has chosen a top orchestra of relatively small instrumental dimensions. 'After the many new recordings of the Bruckner symphonies, finally an interpretation that genuinely exhibits character and in a very musical way offers the listener the opportunity to complement his picture of Bruckner'(Pizzicato 3/12).

MENDELSSOHN: 6 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 35 / 3 Caprices, Op.

Vivaldi: Cello Concerti, Vol. 3

Vivaldi: Cello Concerti, Vol. 2

It's traditional, and brand new!It is bound, and free! It's heavy, and easy! It is music that goes in through your ears but does not stay in your head, or even your heart without rushing right into your feet and setting your musical world rocking. Get ready for a magical encounter between G�vle Symphony Orchestra and national fiddler G�rgen Antonsson - with music arranged by Karl-Johan Ankarblom.

Includes work(s) by various composers.