An interesting big symphony coupled with a shorter work that represents Casella at his considerable finest.

To my mind one of the most interesting and successful current Naxos series is that devoted to the orchestral music of Alfredo Casella. The current release is the fourth and contains Casella’s third and last symphony. Suffice to say all of the excellent values of performance and engineering/production of the first three volumes are duplicated here so admirers need not hesitate.
 
I had no knowledge of the major works prior to collecting these discs but I was mightily impressed with the scale and power of the earlier two symphonies. Casella’s third and final essay in the form is actually – and rather confusingly – simply titled Sinfonia and dates from 1939 making it a full three decades younger than the earlier pair. All three are big works; Nos. 1 & 3 clock in around the ¾ hour mark and No.2 is a full 55 minutes. Although the influences are different it is clear to hear that Casella was a man who was willing to let his admiration for the music of others infuse his own. So where the earlier works are epically Mahlerian the later work echoes Shostakovich and Nielsen as well. I would have to say that this Sinfonia has not made as immediate an impact on me as the earlier works. The central pair of movements seem to contain the most cogent and well argued music. In the excellent liner-note by David Gallagher it is pointed out that the work is truly symphonic in that nearly all of the melodic material in the entire work derives from the opening germinal material. This I suppose reflects the experience gained through his career but it does not necessarily make for as compelling a listen as the excitingly confident indeed bravura music he wrote in his twenties. The first movement in particular suffers from extended passages of musical material being ‘worked’ without the sense of it creating an emotional landscape for the listener. After the rather appealing sparse opening the scoring suffers from being rather heavy and unrelenting. That being said the final pages of the movement flutter away into quiet inconsequence. These are all impressions that are based on a relatively brief acquaintance with the work and without the benefit of the score.
 
The Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma under conductor Francesco La Vecchia continue to make the good impression they formed previously – the strings play with good ensemble and a well balanced tone. Italian brass players are always game to play with plenty of edge and attack and so they do here. I have not heard the other available version on CPO from the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln under Alun Francis but I cannot imagine they have much to fear from it in purely technical terms. Having heard very little ‘war’ music in the opening movement the second movement Andante molto moderato opens with a string-led threnody that is instantly much more engaging and powerful than anything in the opening movement. The Rome strings are good but I can imagine this movement being even more powerful if played with the weight and unanimity of Vienna or Berlin. I like the way the music slowly builds a momentum becoming a rather lop-sided yet unrelenting march underlying some lovely lyrical lines for the strings and woodwind. It is rather quirky and individual before the mood lightens towards a calm major key resolution. The third movement Scherzo has a mechanistic (rather than militaristic) feel and while it has some of Shostakovich’s stamping energy it lacks the nightmarish malice of that composer’s writing that makes his scherzi in particular so remarkable. I wonder if it would benefit from a slightly more unleashed tempo than here? I’m sure La Vecchia’s choice is dictated by the complex filigree writing that surrounds the main material but it does result in a basic pulse that plods.
 
The Finale is altogether more buoyant indeed optimistic which might seem at odds with the wartime context. But as Gallagher points out repeatedly Casella was an enthusiastic indeed sycophantic supporter of Mussolini and his fascist agenda and since the war was still going relatively well for the regime in 1939/40 why not be optimistic? Again, I find there are passages which I suspect appeal more to the academics who admire the way in which the material is developed – to my innocent ear they lack a huge amount of melodic interest. But there are several passages which allow the impressive Rome horns and brass to shine excitingly. This is the movement that sounds most heroically filmic. After the bombast of the opening ten minutes of the movement there is a coda/epilogue that is rather beautiful in the way the musical lines grope upwards sinuously in a mood of hymn-like reflection which just as it is fading away with elegiac solo strings is flattened by a raucously noisy conclusion. Given that that ending lacks any of the irony or forced good-humour of a Shostakovich one is left assuming that Casella was feeling pretty good about things in 1940 after all!
 
If the symphony was the only work on offer here I would direct collectors to the earlier works. However, it is this disc’s ‘filler’ which proves to be the absolute jewel here and indeed one of the finest works by Casella I have yet encountered. This is also a work written in time of war – 1916 – but here the presence of tragedy and sorrow is unmistakeable. This Elegia eroica is subtitled “alla memoria di un Soldato morto in Guerra”. The very opening is magnificently striking in a way that eluded the symphony totally. Tolling horns, ominous tam-tam, skirling wood-wind and disconsolate strings immediately plunge the listener in a world of loss and despair. It feels much more modern and challenging than the later work. This is how Casella described it; “a heroic funeral march, a more intimate deeply sorrowful central episode; and finally a fusillade of death that thunders through the orchestra [and] subsides into a tender lullaby evoking an image of our country as a mother tenderly cradling her dead son”. The musical means Casella uses for this are actually considerably more modernistic than the potentially maudlin narrative might imply. It reminds me of the expressionist scores being written in Germany around this time and certainly quite unlike any other contemporaneous Italian score I can think of. The Rome orchestra are superb here relishing the extremes of dynamic and range the piece demands. Casella’s particular coup-de-théâtre was lost on the work’s first audience. The final lullaby is given to the solo oboe which plays fragments of the 19 ^th century patriotic song Fratelli d’Italia over a string-led rocking berceuse accompaniment – definite echoes of The Firebird here. It is a passage of tender beauty and poignant rapture – all drowned out in 1916 by “a tidal wave of indignation … not a single note could be heard.” Casella pares his orchestration right back to a skeletal minimum to stunning effect. In its quasi-minimalist way this passage pre-echoes Holst’s Uranus or the finale of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No.6. Even the way Casella avoids any ‘comfortable’ ending adds to the impact and sincere power of the work.
 
So a conundrum for the collector to consider – a big symphony that is interesting but not the place to start your symphonic investigation of the composer coupled with a shorter work that represents him at his considerable finest. On balance, at the Naxos bargain price point, I would say worth buying for the Elegia alone. Hopefully Naxos will continue to use this creative team for further projects and indeed more Casella.
 
-- Nick Barnard, MusicWeb International

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Francesco La Vecchia’s recordings of modern Italian music for Naxos have been impressive, nowhere more so than in his discs dedicated to the finely crafted works of Alfredo Casella. The Third Symphony, written for Chicago, is a late piece (1940), but still an ambitious essay in the grand tradition. It’s beautifully put together, melodically pungent (maybe a touch of Honegger), colorfully scored, but also austere, even severe in places. It’s clearly the work of a mature master. Elegia eroica is a funeral march dating from 1916, a passionate threnody “to the memory of a soldier killed in battle.”
As with the other discs in this series, the performances are wholly convincing, well played and recorded. In the case of the symphony, though, there’s very strong competition, even better engineered, from Alun Francis and the slightly finer WDR Symphony Orchestra on CPO, coupled to the tone poem Italia. La Vecchia does present a legitimate alternate view, of course, with some strikingly different bits of instrumental detail, and a work of this richness ought to be heard in more than one interpretation. So if you’ve been collecting this series, by all means grab this release without qualms.
-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

Led by Music Director Franz Welser-M�st, The Cleveland Orchestra releases a new audio recording featuring music by George Walker. The album offers an exploration of the composer's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Lilacs" for voice and orchestra with soprano Latonia Moore, as well as Antifonys for string orchestra, and Sinfonias No. 4 and No. 5. "George Walker's music is so dense that ten minutes are as emotionally exhausting as other music which is three times as long. It's tricky, it's difficult, it's demanding, it's challenging, and there is an intensity and a real voice which I enjoy enormously." says Franz Welser-M�st. This recording further expands on The Cleveland Orchestra's perpetual drive to learn and promote new works. The Walker album features four works spanning fifty years by a pioneering American composer, showcasing his singular vision and meticulously crafted sound world.

1711 saw the publication of what was to become one of the most important musical collections of the first half of the 18th century: Antonio Vivaldi’s L’estro armonico (‘The Harmonic Fancy’). Scored for one, two, or four violin soloists, the twelve concertos in the set fuelled a burgeoning fashion for new Italian music in northern Europe, and were soon being avidly performed and enjoyed in major musical centres, inspiring younger composers including Bach, Handel and Telemann. Vivaldi’s set – represented here by the Concerto in B minor, RV 580 and Violin Concerto in A minor, RV 356 – established a vogue for a virtuosic and brilliant type of writing, with fast movements characterized as much by their propulsive basses as by conventional melodiousness and with central slow movements often exuding a mesmeric, almost ghostly calm. Fourteen years later another collection of concertos – Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (‘The Contest of Harmony and Invention’) – would secure Vivaldi’s reputation for eternity. The first four concertos of this collection form what has become one of the most widely spread classical compositions in the history of music: Le Quattro Stagioni. Countless violinists have recorded Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, not to mention the many arrangements of the pieces for other instruments. Now Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, a team internationally recognized for its virtuosity, energy and individuality, has recorded their take on Vivaldi’s springtime birdsong, summer thunderstorm, autumn hunting and chattering teeth of icy winter. The programme also includes two typically Vivaldian slow movements, a Largo and a Grave, as well as a Sinfonia for strings originally intended as the overture of the opera La verità in cimento (‘Truth in contention’).

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

It was during the winter of 1900–01 that Elgar began to sketch what he hoped would turn into a symphony – his first. But the sketches were quickly absorbed into several shorter pieces, one of which was the Cockaigne overture. Although composed in the rural area of the Malvern Hills, the work is nevertheless an unashamedly populist portrait of ‘old London town’, complete with references to whistling errand boys and a marching band – the composer himself described the music as ‘cheerful and Londony’. As for the First Symphony, seven years would pass before its première in Manchester and subsequent London performance – a triumphant occasion, as described by Elgar’s publisher: ‘After the first movement E.E. was called out; again, several times, after the third… people stood up and even on their seats to get a view.’ For Elgar, the success must have come as an immense relief - the symphony is hugely ambitious in scale and scope, but also seems to have had a personal significance to the composer, who summarized it as follows: ‘There is no programme beyond a wide experience of human life, with a great charity (love) & a massive hope in the future.’ Conducting this all-Elgar programme is Sakari Oramo, the Finnish conductor who has been all but adopted by English music-lovers and orchestras – for ten years he was music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and since 2013 he holds the post as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Playing here, however, as on the acclaimed 2013 release of Elgar’s Second Symphony, is his ‘Swedish orchestra’, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. But lovers of Elgar’s music can rest assured: in the words of the reviewer on the British web site classicalsource.com ‘there is no need to be concerned that a Finnish conductor and a Swedish orchestra do not “get” Elgar’s music. They do – with power, passion, compassion and authority…’

To many, the Lahti Symphony Orchestra has become synonymous with excellence in Sibelius repertoire. Its numerous recordings with the previous chief conductor Osmo Vänskä have received countless distinctions and awards, and the orchestra is universally regarded as having a very special affinity for the music of their great compatriot. On the present disc it is Okko Kamu, Vänskä's successor as chief conductor, who wields the baton. Kamu has been a presence on the international scene ever since the early 1970s, when he made a highly-acclaimed set of Sibelius symphonies in partnership with Herbert von Karajan. Here three other works by Sibelius make up the programme, which opens with music for Shakespeare's play The Tempest, for which the composer in 1925 wrote the most ambitious of his several theatre scores. For concert use he later selected the Overture and two Suites recorded here. In 1926, a year after The Tempest, Sibelius again turned to the realm of magic in his masterful evocation of the forest, the symphonic poem Tapiola. The title can be translated as 'the domain of Tapio', god of the forest in Finnish mythology, and according to Walter Damrosch, who conducted the first performance, the audience was 'enthralled by the dark pine forests and the shadowy gods and wood-nymphs who dwell therein'. From the start the work has been regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces from Sibelius' pen. These two large-scale works are here separated by the seven-minute long symphonic poem The Bard from 1913, a work which in its treatment of the thematic material and the chamber-music-like quality of its scoring invites comparison with the Fourth Symphony of two year's earlier.

You might subtitle this disc “The Dark Dvorák” since it consists of three of his most turbulent (but also greatest) works. First there’s Othello: guy kills girl. Next, The Wood Dove: girl kills guy, then offs herself. Finally, there’s the tragic Seventh Symphony: everyone kills everyone, but metaphorically, of course. I actually love the concept. Usually, Dvorák gets treated as a sort of “Brahms lite”, a cute Bohemian purveyor of alluring, pastoral tunes full of charm and ethnic high spirits. Even the frequent use of minor keys can be explained by his frequent recourse to Czech folksongs, dances, and other equally adorable (and non-threatening) accoutrements of his native land.

Claus Peter Flor is obviously having none of it. Not only has he chosen three of Dvorák’s most impassioned works, he plays them so as to make damn sure that we feel the same way about them that he does. First the really good news: both Othello and The Wood Dove are stunning. Indeed, this is hands down the most exciting performance of the former yet committed to disc, bar none. Hearing this performance, you will be stunned that this thrilling, dramatic work remains one of the most neglected of all Dvorák’s late masterpieces. The Wood Dove is every bit as brilliant: gaunt and grim in the funeral march that brackets the lilting wedding scene, and crushing in the subsequent suicide music. One curiosity: Flor prefers the kazoo-like sound of muted trumpets to Dvorák’s requested instruments offstage just before the party sequence—an odd choice.

The performance of the Seventh Symphony will be more controversial. It has magnificent moments—indeed whole movements. The Andante receives as lovingly shaped a reading as any on disc, but there are moments when Flor’s eagerness to underline the music’s darkness leads him dangerously close to mannerism. I’m thinking of the first movement’s opening (and coda), treated more as a slow introduction than as the plunge into the main tempo that Dvorák wrote. As a postlude, the tempo makes more sense. The scherzo, too, is swift and urgent, but somehow just slightly lacking in rhythmic bite, while the finale, played for all that it’s worth, does not benefit from Flor’s decision near the start to hold back the tempo at the ends of phrases to underscore just how grim the music is supposed to be.

Once the movement gets going, though, Flor builds in excitement right through to an incredibly powerful coda. He adds horns to the final chorale, as so many performances do, but Neumann’s trumpets avoid that slightly vulgar portamento that always seems to accompany the horn option, and their brighter tone is arguably more apt. And why, finally, does Flor have the timpani drop out on the final chord? That’s just weird. Is he afraid that a more emphatic ending might persuade us that the work isn’t as despairing as he believes it to be?

It may be that the engineering exacerbates some of these impressions. Don’t get me wrong: the basic sound is very good in and of itself, but in this music, especially, we need to hear more from the woodwinds, and a sharper rhythmic bite from the brass and timpani. These are subtle points, but listeners familiar with this music will notice immediately the difference between these and other, more brightly engineered versions. And make no mistake: a brighter mean sonority can be captured without compromising the music’s expressive intensity, its “dark” energy.

So to summarize: the commitment and vision on evidence here are extremely impressive. Even the symphony, for all my various reservations, receives a performance like no other, magnificent in parts, impressive overall, and one that collectors will surely want to hear. Flor has the orchestra playing extremely well, and unlike so many time-beaters taking up podium space these days he has both good ideas and the talent to execute them. He takes risks. Whether or not they all pay off will be a matter of opinion, but there’s no question that when they do the result is the most gripping Dvorák to come along in many years.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and Richard Strauss’ Metamorphoses represent late, great works by two composers whose geniuses were once more expressed in unprecedented intensity. + The WWII era Metamorphoses for 23 strings is characterized by profound grief, but ultimately expressing hope for the future. + Commemorating the outbreak of WWI, young Austrian composer Flora Marlene Geisselbrecht (b. 1994) joins in on the appeal for peace with Die Waffen nieder! ("Lay Down Your Arms!"), giving credit to Bertha von Suttner by incorporating citations of the first female Nobel peace-prize winner.

Ravel' masterpiece, Daphnis et Chloe, was composed for the Ballets Russes and premiered in 1912. Ravel described his sumptuous score, for large orchestra, wind machine and wordless chorus, as "a choreographic symphony in three parts�.

Africa Sings is a probing celebration into African music, through classical music and jazz, through legacy and tradition. The recital begins with Ang�lique Kidjo singing Bella Bellow's Senye, segueing into the premiere recording of Philip Glass's orchestral song-cycle Three If� Songs, composed for Kidjo in 2014. The focus goes then to American music with Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige in Maurice Peress orchestral arrangement, before shifting to Europe and Alexander Zemlinsky's Symphonic Songs sung by Martin Achrainer which set, in translation into German, the poems of the great Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Frank Horne. Kidjo joins the venerable Bruckner Orchester Linz and conductor Dennis Russell Davies who cruise through the Ellington before digging deep into the Zemlinsky with baritone Martin Achrainer in tour-de-force performances from beginning to end.

Long champions of new music, pianist Robert McDuffie and violin virtuoso Elizabeth Pridgen fix a spotlight on three masterpieces of the violin piano repertoire by three of the most celebrated American composers of the past half century: Philip Glass, John Adams and John Corigliano. On Icons, the artists extend their expertise in the music of Philip Glass with his Violin Sonata from 2008, infusing the work with an energy and charm. John Adams, hailed by the New York Times in September 2022 as "arguably our greatest living composer," wrote his seminal Road Movies for violin and piano in 1995. It quickly became a staple of the repertoire. Evoking the vast expanse of the American continent and the archetypal American road trip, the piece captures the landscape as it passes by your car windows. McDuffie and Pridgen's performance embodies the sleek rhythmic precision required to appreciate that imaginary journey. Perhaps his most famous piece, John Corigliano's Violin Sonata was written in the 1960s when the composer was in his mid 20s, and his father, the famous violinist John Corigliano Sr., was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. Despite writing the sonata for his father, years would pass before he would take on the piece and only then because the sonata had organically become an unmitigated success. Since then, it has continued to be one of the best pieces written in the past 50 years for violin and piano. Joy and expertise are in abundance in these recordings, and the end result is a contextualizing of three works by these great masters. Each composer is tremendously different from one another, but united in the artistry of Robert McDuffie and Elizabeth Pridgen.

Pianist Sam Post has been a Bach acolyte since his earliest years behind the keys. His study and development have led Post down many musical avenues, but Bach's lessons remain ever present in his work, as can be heard on Post's new release, Post Bach, a collection of the pianist's unique interpretations of a number of the maestro's preludes and fugues, as well as original pieces that blend Bach's harmonic ideas with syncopated styles that have become Post's focus of late.

Beginning his first (never completed) symphony in 1951 and working on his 17th when he died in 1980, Allan Pettersson during three decades concerned himself almost exclusively with the symphonic genre – and this at a time when many composers considered the symphony (and indeed the symphony orchestra) to be hopelessly old-fashioned. Pettersson, however, was deeply committed to the genre, something which in Sweden during the early 1960s was so unusual that he was called ‘the last symphonist’. He completed his Symphony No.13 in August 1976, as a commission by the Bergen Festival for its 25th anniversary the following year. The complexity and large scale of the work was such that the first performance was postponed for another year, however – and in fact the work had never been performed in Sweden until Christian Lindberg and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra played it in concert in 2014. As the majority of Pettersson’s symphonies it is in one movement, harbouring the great contrasts between an atonal and a traditional, tonal idiom that characterize the composer’s musical language. A noteworthy feature in the present work is the presence of many brief allusions to other composers – from Beethoven (with the theme to the Fifth Symphony) to D-S-C-H, the musical cryptogram of Shostakovich’s name. Over the course of four previous discs, Christian Lindberg and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra have demonstrated a true affinity with Pettersson’s music, an affinity that deepens with each new recording.

Review:

The Norrköping Symphony Orchestra articulate the music's 'soaring melodies and grippingly searing polyphony' [convincingly] and Lindberg shapes the structure compellingly. Lindberg seems to feel keenly the work's intense range of mood - the ferocity and depth of its emotion, the consolation that this engenders - and communicates this to his orchestra in masterly fashion.

– Gramophone

Gordon Chin is one of Taiwan’s leading composers, and increasingly honored by commissions and performances from major ensembles in North America, Asia and Europe. Featuring an array of exotic Chinese percussion instruments, Symphony No. 3 ‘Taiwan’ is a dramatically powerful work cast in three movements that explore his native country’s turbulent history. Specific literary quotations from Shakespeare, Blaise Pascal and Samuel Johnson elucidate the expressive moods of the three-movement Cello Concerto No. 1.

COPLAND; BRAHMS; FROST; LUTOSLAWSKI; PIAZZOLLA; HILLBORG; HOGBERG AUSTRALIAN CHAMBER ORCHESTRA; FROST (CLAR.); TOGNETTI (DIR.) DANCES TO A BLACK PIPE- CONCERTO FOR CLARINET AND STRING ORCHESTRA WITH HARP AND PIANO; HUNGARIAN DANCES NOS 1, 12, 13 & 21; KLEZMER DANCES FOR CLARINET AND STRINGS; DANCE PRELUDES (2ND VERSION); OBLIVION FOR CLARINET, SOLO VIOLIN AND STRINGS; ETC.

Dynamic presents the second volume of a series of three releases dedicated to Overtures and Symphonies spanning three centuries of Italian opera. The first volume was dedicated to the eighteenth century, while this second features the early nineteenth century. The great popularity of Italian Opera in European courts and theatres transformed this music genre, which had first appeared at the beginning of the seventeenth century as a court entertainment, into a product of wide international circulation, universally loved. In the wake of its success, other European nations developed a local operatic tradition but Italian opera kept a predominant role in Europe throughout the entire 19th century. That being the case, it was natural for foreign composers to want to study in Italy where they sometimes remained indefinitely, becoming, for all intents and purposes, composers of Italian opera. Two such composers were Mayr and Arrieta, who join in this program, their most important Italian colleagues of that period: Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini.

Despite it's title, Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence, composed in 1890, owes more to the Russian tradition than to the Italian school. Full of strong contrasts, very intense, and extremely demanding for the performers, it is one of the cornerstones of the string sextet repertoire. Nine years later, with a vigor rivalling that of Tchaikovsky's work, Schoenberg composed another masterpiece of the genre, Verkl�rte Nacht. This dark and feverish musical tableau, inspired by Robert Dehmel's poem of the same name, takes Romantic expression to it's apogee. The Oistrakh Quartet, featuring four of today's most outstanding Russian musicians, is perfectly at home in these two great works, recorded with the violist Daniel Austrich and the cellist Alexander Buzlov.

Mainly known today for his violin concerto, during his lifetime the Hungarian composer Karl Goldmark was praised for the quality of his instrumentation, his skilful use of folk music and his own Jewish heritage, and his evident gift for melody. The author of several operas, among them The Queen of Sheba, Goldmark wrote music in most genres, and although largely self-taught he was sought out as a teacher of composition by Sibelius, among others. Composed in 1875, his ‘Rustic Wedding’ Symphony was his most popular orchestral work. At the first performance the audience hailed it as a triumph, and Goldmark’s friend Brahms said about it: ‘clear-cut and faultless, it sprang into being a finished thing, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter.’ The five-movement symphony has sometimes been described as a suite of tone poems, including a wedding march with variations depicting the wedding guests, a nuptial song and a bucolic wedding dance. Even though the work is now a rarity in concert, conductors such as Sir Thomas Beecham and Leonard Bernstein demonstrated their belief in it by performing it on many occasions. Composed some ten years later, Goldmark’s E flat major symphony, Op.35, is far less well-known. Although its form is more traditional than that of its predecessor, it is similar in mood – bucolic and high-spirited – and provides rich opportunities to sample Goldmark’s skill as an orchestrator and musical colourist. Performing these unjustly neglected works is the Singapore Symphony Orchestra – a band which under its principal conductor Lan Shui has impressed reviewers in repertoire as diverse as Debussy’s La Mer (‘an unequivocally world-class performance’, BBC Music Magazine), Zhou Long (‘utterly compulsive… orchestral playing of the highest calibre’, International Record Review) and Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony (‘a moving, completely satisfying performance’, allmusic.com).

BARBERCTO & SONATA FOR CELLO & ORCH.POLTERA (CELLO); BERGEN P.O. POLTERA (CELLO); BERGEN P.O./LITTON; STOTT (PIANO) CTO & SONATA FOR CELLO & ORCH.; ADAGIO FOR STRINGS

'My apotheosis of the dance' is how Kalevi Aho describes his Symphony No.15. With two dance movements and rhythm a central element, the score calls for numerous percussion instruments, including non-Western ones such as bongos, darbuka, djembe and the riqq, an Arabian tambourine. The composer's interest in non-Western music and instruments has been evident in several recent works, such as his Symphony No. 14 (recorded on BIS-1686) and Oboe Concerto (BIS-1876). It also played an important part during the creation of Minea, composed as a concert opener for the Minnesota Orchestra on the initiative of Osmo Vänskä, who also conducts the work here. Mentioning Indian ragas, Japanese shakuhachi music, Arabian rhythms and Eastern scales, Aho explains that his aim has been to expand his own sound world with elements of other classical music cultures, and to try to view the Western musical tradition from other perspectives. Minea and Symphony No.15 frame the composer's Concerto for Double Bass, composed in 2005 for Eero Munter. In order to be able to write idiomatically for the instrument, the composer borrowed a double bass, and as work on the piece progressed, he actually grew proficient enough to try out most of the solo part - albeit at a very slow tempo, as he freely admits! The concerto offers the opportunity to hear the solo instrument in highly unusual contexts, for instance in the two accompanied cadenzas - the first a pizzicato duet with the harp, and the second a trio with two percussionists. Throughout the disc we hear the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, which for more than 20 years has made a remarkable commitment to the composer, performing and recording a large number of his works. The orchestra is conducted by Jaakko Kuusisto and Dima Slobodeniouk, as well as by the above-mentioned Osmo Vänskä.

SMETANA Má Vlast • Claus Peter Flor, cond; Malaysian PO • BIS 1805 (SACD: 76: 00)


There is something about Bed?ich Smetana’s Má Vlast that defies interpretation by anyone other than a Czech conductor. You have undoubtedly heard the names: Václav Talich, Karel An?erl, Václav Neumann, and most prominently in this case, Rafael Kubelík. His 1952 mono Mercury Olympian LP recorded with a single Telefunken microphone was an interpretive and sonic landmark, and its sound still holds up well today except for an inevitable lack of stereo spatial information. In fact, over the last 50 years, there has never been a better recorded performance of Má Vlast , even by Kubelik himself in several newer versions on different labels. His hugely anticipated and much-hyped remake with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon) was especially disappointing sonically and interpretively.There have been numerous other significant recordings of Má Vlast , primarily by Czech conductors released by Supraphon, that have had consistently mediocre sound. Má Vlast doesn’t work well with Supraphon’s typical dry and harmonically threadbare sound. It is great to see performances by non-Czech conductors, but recent high-profile releases by Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO Live SACD) and Nikolaus Harnoncourt with the Vienna Philharmonic (RCA) have good sound but the interpretations are somewhat problematic. With this background, you have to wonder about the competitiveness of Claus Peter Flor conducting the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra. The orchestra has already made some good-sounding and critically acclaimed Bis recordings of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music, but it is the stunning SACD of Josef Suk’s “Asrael” Symphony, also conducted by Flor, that made me eager to hear this Má Vlast.


Comparing the timings of Kubelík and Flor is encouraging and instructive. There is only a 20-second difference in a work that is more than 76 minutes long. I can’t imagine a case that better illustrates the uselessness of timings to predict a conductor’s interpretive approach. Flor takes a hard-driving, propusive, dry-eyed, and at least ostensibly fast approach to Má Vlast . He also has no clue about the emotional content of this music that is so striking in interpretations by Kubelík and other Czech conductors. You can usually tell how Má Vlast is going to evolve from the opening of “Vy?ehrad.” Flor’s short, clipped, opening harp phrases and lean orchestral textures emphasize forward motion and play down any sense of grandeur. The end of “?árka” is almost hysterical, and is immediately followed by the initial chords of “From Bohemia’s Meadows and Forests,” which hit like a bulldozer. Flor does not shy away from pounding out those repetitive triplets in “Tábor,” and the timpanist is predictably aggressive in “Tábor” and “Blaník.” It is all very exciting where underplaying the bombast would induce boredom, as it does with Harnoncourt. On the other hand, Flor’s central nocturne in “Vltava” is gorgeous and atmospheric, and he also handles the tricky rhythms in the second half of “From Bohemia’s Meadows and Forests” better than other virtuosic internationalized interpretors like Davis and Harnoncourt. Flor’s finale comes closest to but does not match Kubelík in cumulative impact as they both broaden their tempo for the final statement of the ubiquitous Hussite hymn and the principal theme.


Kubelík’s (Mercury) remains unchallenged as a performance, but it is a mono recording and the CD will be difficult to find. In modern stereo sound, this recording ranks with the best except in terms of orchestral execution where I prefer Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra. The Vienna Philharmonic is on autopilot in Harnoncourt’s soporific version, but is much better with James Levine (Deutsche Grammophon). For a more modern stereo version by Kubelík, go with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (Orfeo).


FANFARE: Arthur Lintgen

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Claus Peter Flor directs a tremendously exciting performance of Má Vlast, one that compares favorably to any in the catalog. He takes great pains to characterize each piece, and each section, to the fullest extent possible. In The Moldau you won't find a more vivid contrast between the scenes of the hunt, the peasant dance, the nocturne (exquisite soft brass), and the rapids (ferocious!) anywhere. The violent conclusion of Sárka is absolutely thrilling, the opening of From Bohemia's Woods and Fields terrifying. While not entirely disguising the episodic nature of Tábor (probably an impossible task), Flor keeps the last two tone poems moving forward purposefully to the work's heroic closing bars. It's a great interpretation, one that surely deserves to be documented and enjoyed by collectors.

Technically, the playing of the Malaysian Philharmonic is good, but not perfect. The trumpets at the climax of The Moldau don't quite match timbres as they should (a common problem). Toward the end of Tábor, Flor pushes the triple-forte galloping rhythm in the strings so hard that the result sounds more like Mahler's "struck with the bow" effect. The wild string triplets in Blaník are exciting, but not always ideally together, and there is a cymbal crash missing around measure 214. Some of the climaxes also suffer from an over-enthusiastic timpanist, and as a percussionist I don't make that accusation lightly. Still, Flor's own concept is so powerful, and the orchestral response so committed, that this vivid SACD production deserves very serious consideration.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

The arresting clarinet glissando at the start of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue is probably the most famous opening in American music. It also serves as a symbol for an important current in 20th century music - that of merging popular genres and art music into something wholly new - and as such becomes even more significant through the fact that it wasn't even in the score when the composer first started rehearsals with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, before the première in 1924: this particular feature, oozing of smoky jazz clubs, was arrived at in collaboration with the clarinettist of the orchestra. At the time, Gershwin was was a mere 25 years old, but already a celebrated jazz pianist and songsmith, with a string of hits to his name. Due to a lack of time, he entrusted the orchestration to Ferde Grofé, the regular arranger of Whiteman's jazz band. The immediate success of the work created a demand for a version for symphony orchestra, however, and for a long time that was the one most usually heard in concert and on disc. On the present recording, Freddy Kempf and the conductor Andrew Litton - himself a noted soloist in Gershwin's works for piano and orchestra - have opted for the original orchestration, allowing the musicians of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra to revel in the role of a classic American big band. Following the première of Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin was commissioned to write a 'proper' piano concerto. He did so the following year, this time providing his own orchestration. Also highly successful with its original audience, Concerto in F employed the rhythms, melodic structures and bluesy harmonies of popular music, but its form is resolutely classical. Also included on the disc are Gershwin's two remaining works for piano and orchestra, the Second Rhapsody (here in his own, original orchestration) and the infectious Variations on 'I Got Rhythm'. The performers on this disc have previously collaborated in a highly acclaimed recording of works by Prokofiev - a disc shortlisted for a Gramophone Award in 2010. The reviewer in International Record Review found it 'an exciting performance, with soloist and conductor working as one' with 'wit as well as virtuosity in Kempf's playing' - qualities that are in rich evidence in this new release too.

Classical Music

Classical Music

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

BEETHOVEN Piano Concertos: in E?, WoO 4 (reconst. Brautigam); No. 2 in B?. Rondo in B? • Ronald Brautigam (pn); Andrew Parrott (cond); Norrköping SO • BIS 1792 (58:04)


Few piano recording buffs will have missed the remarkable career trajectory of Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam. Particularly since his association with the Swedish label BIS began in 1995, the releases don’t seem to quit. Now in his mid-fifties, it’s natural that Brautigam should be at the peak of his powers. His recorded repertoire, if not catholic, demonstrates a healthy musical curiosity. Canonic figures are amply represented alongside those less frequently encountered: Haydn and Mozart with Joseph Martin Kraus; Mendelssohn with Gade; Shostakovich and Hindemith with Duruflé, Martin, and Hahn. But it’s not Brautigam’s enviable technical polish that sets him apart from many of his colleagues, nor his lofty musical grasp. It is his individuality. He has a searching musical intelligence, a disarming self-effacement before the score, and an astonishing conscientiousness that, in combination, make him sound like no one else. Witness, for instance, his complete Haydn set, some 15 discs (BIS 1731) representing essentially all the master’s solo keyboard works currently known, recorded over five years, beginning in 1998. Here the same care and imagination are lavished on the earliest experimental sonatas from the lean, free-lance years that are accorded the mature works representing the summit of Haydn’s achievement. Finally, Brautigam has the uncanny ability to turn in consummate performances, equally compelling in stylistic terms, whether he plays replicas of historical instruments or the modern concert grand. In this aspect he seems an entirely new type of pianist. His on-going Beethoven project with BIS, demonstrates this parallel track aptitude with stunning artistic results: the sonatas are being recorded on period-appropriate fortepiano replicas, while the concertos are played on the modern piano, fully informed by cutting-edge performance practice.


Following the release of the First and Third Concertos (BIS 1692) last year, Brautigam and Parrot turn their attention to the earliest known works of Beethoven for piano and orchestra. Only a manuscript of the piano solo part of the E? Concerto survives, dating from around 1784. Fortunately for posterity, Beethoven incorporated the orchestral tutti into the piano part, along with some subsequent editorial changes. Thus a speculative reconstruction of the lost orchestral score is possible, based on the composer’s unusual instrumentation (calling for strings with two flutes and two horns, but no oboes or bassoons). The reconstruction recorded here is Brautigam’s own, as are the candenzas for both WoO 4 and the Rondo. (Beethoven’s 1809 cadenzas are used in the Concerto No. 2.)


Given its sparse representation in the catalogs, the E? Concerto is of special interest. Little in this charming piece suggests that it is the creation of a 13-year-old. Brautigam brings an air of naive exuberance to the difficult solo part; the delicate fiorituras of the Larghetto are breathtakingly poetic. Here, in Brautigam’s superbly reconstructed orchestral score, as indeed throughout the recording, Parrott and the Norrköping musicians are responsive partners of remarkable sensitivity. Moreover, in the Rondo of No. 2, the give-and-take between soloist and orchestra is nothing short of sublime, imbued with an exhilaration that’s utterly infectious. It follows an Adagio of ethereal tenderness. Without doubt, this is the most dynamic, shapely, and vivid recording of the Beethoven Second one is ever likely to hear. It’s worth mentioning that the Steinway D used here, with lid removed, was placed in the middle of the orchestra, continuo style, which does a lot to explain both the cohesive ensemble and the beautifully blended sound of the recording.


Comparisons? This canonic repertoire boasts more than a few canonic interpretations—Schnabel’s revelatory musicality, Rubinstein’s aristocratic poise, Serkin’s modest edginess, and the lofty humanism of Backhaus come immediately to mind. Let me put it this way, without any denigration of artists whom I respect and admire immensely: listening to two recent wonderful Beethoven cycles, those of Plentnev with Gansch and the Russian National O (DG) and Goode with Fischer and the Budapest Festival O (Nonesuch), I hear the glorious recent past, ripe, insightful, often brilliant, immensely pleasurable; listening to Ronald Brautigam, Andrew Parrott, and the Norrköping SO, I hear the future.


FANFARE: Patrick Rucker

Ronald Brautigam is an excellent Beethoven pianist, and he turns in a performance of the Second concerto's solo part that's as lively and attractive as anyone has yet recorded on a modern instrument. It's especially nice to hear the finale taken at a tempo that permits all of the main theme's rhythmic bounce to register without it ever sounding breathless or frantic. The same holds true of the Rondo in B-flat, the Second concerto's original finale. Indeed, the only caveat in these performances concerns the slow movements, where Andrew Parrott, evidently with the acquiescence of his soloist, encourages the orchestra to indulge in that dry, vibrato-less string tone that is the very opposite of stylishness (and utterly contrary to what their own sources say about sustained lyrical music in slow tempos).

The E-flat concerto is an early work in Mozartian style, here very nicely reconstructed by Brautigam from the existing piano score. Indications of scoring in the keyboard part point to an orchestra of strings, two flutes, and two horns, a very unusual combination, and I'm not convinced that two oboes ought not to have been added as a matter of course. Still, there's no denying the distinctive tone color that the absence of double reeds gives the work's overall sonority, and it would be hard to imagine a more sympathetic performance than this one (never mind Parrott and his scratchy strings). I look forward to further releases in this (so far) very rewarding edition.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com