SYMPHONY NO. 5 L'ASSEDIO DI C

Lionel Tertis (1876-1975), a great genius of the viola, is little known to today's public. Timothy Ridout pays tribute to this key figure in his instrument's history with a flamboyant program featuring music by Tertis's friends, teachers and students alongside some of his own original works and transcriptions. A marvelous musical journey, rich in discoveries.

One’s first impression of this CD, in an aria from Orlando comparing Love to the Wind, with its bouncy coloratura and light attitude, might mistakenly be that soprano Amanda Forsythe is “one of those coloratura songbirds,” albeit a very good one. This would be selling her short: yes, she’s most certainly a superb singer, with staggering agility and high notes perfect and free, but she uses every note in her well placed, many-hued voice. Sudden plunges into a not-quite chest voice on words like “dolor” (sadness) color and vary the experience of the aria.

And the next aria, “Geloso tormento” from Almira, with its obbligato oboe and aggressively unhappy strings, gives Forsythe even more emotional room: like any good “early music” soprano, she can sing without vibrato, but what she does with the first two words of the aria are special. The second syllable of “geloso” is attacked white and she sings a crescendo on it, adding vibrato; “tormento” finds a rolled “r” and a shudder on “men”. She embellishes freely and dramatically in the da capo section (here and in each other such aria).

It is a joy to hear a singer rethinking much of this familiar music without ever distorting it, such that the CD’s 55 minutes of singing (broken up with four expertly played orchestral excerpts from Terpsichore) truly impresses like a first hearing. And you never tire of Forsythe, as you might with other light-and-high-voiced singers. A bauble such as Atalanta’s flirtatious “Un cenno leggiadretto” from Serse has such character that it enchants anew. She has no fear of leaning on her voice but she never forces or makes an ugly sound; drama comes from inflection and diction.

Armida’s enraged recit “Dunque I lacci” and the anguished “Ah! crudel” that follows from Rinaldo are tragic in scope and sound, heavy with rage and sadness. The brief, insane B section that pops out of Armida’s deranged mind, “O infidel”, filled with tommy-gun coloratura, is a spectacular display, and Forsythe sadly lopes into the da capo with a voice filled with desolation. Morgana’s “Tornami a vagheggiar” from Alcina is sung for fireworks, and they light up the sky.

Jeanette Sorrell leads the period instruments of Apollo’s Fire devoid of any affectations, and the band plays smoothly and expertly. This is clearly Forsythe’s show and the orchestra and conductor offer great support. I could go on but find no need to; I hope you get my point. This is a knockout recital by a major American soprano.

-- Robert Levine, ClassicsToday.com

Leopold Stokowski's transcriptions have been getting a lot of attention on disc lately. Most particularly, DG reluctantly released an excellent disc of Mussorgsky pieces featuring Oliver Knussen and the Cleveland Orchestra, magnificently played and very different in conception from Stokowski's own. That disc vindicated his work by showing convincingly that these arrangements can have a successful existence independently of the great old wizard himself. José Serebrier's interpretations, while not quite so radical in their emphasis on laser-like clarity of texture, achieve much the same sort of validation while preserving more of the physical excitement and cinematic flamboyance of the original recordings.


This isn't just a question of the exceptionally splashy and colorful use of heavy percussion at the end of A Night on Bare Mountain or Pictures at an Exhibition, impressive (and necessary) though that is. Serebrier, who worked as Stoki's assistant conductor at the American Symphony Orchestra for about five years, brings a keen ear for those luscious string sonorities that also give these editions much of their magic at lower dynamic levels. I'm thinking, for example, of the shimmering closing pages of the Boris Godunov Symphonic Synthesis, among other places. Serebrier also captures the tragic intensity of the Khovanshchina Entr'acte as well as Stokowski ever did: he's slower, darker, and heavier than Knussen, more raw and "Russian" sounding, as he also is in the terrifying Catacombs section of Pictures at an Exhibition.


There's further icing on the cake that you won't find on the Knussen disc: the two lovely Tchaikovsky transcriptions (the Humoresque will be familiar to knowledgeable listeners from its use in Stravinsky's The Fairy's Kiss), and Stokowski's own Traditional Slavic Christmas Music, a setting where once again Serebrier shows himself able to conjure a truly authentic "Stokowski sound". Mind you, these aren't mere imitations. Serebrier's flexible approach to tempo and willingness to inject a jolt of extra electricity make something quite special out of the climaxes in A Night on Bare Mountain, and it's very clear that the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is having as much fun playing this music as you will have listening to it. The engineering stands among the best from this source as well. Spectacular, sensational, skirting the boundaries of "good taste"--this is the real deal. [6/17/2005]
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

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Hot on the heels of Principal Conductor Edward Gardner's triumph at the 2023 Gramophone Awards where Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage (LPO-0124) won the Opera Award, comes Gardner's second release on the LPO Label - Berlioz's spectacular The Damnation of Faust. Audiences have been captivated by Gardner's artistry, all ears are poised for this anticipated follow-up release. Half grand opera, half roof-raising choral-orchestral spectacular, Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust caused a scandal in 1846 when it was first performed, and with it's supernatural story and thumping good melodies, it's still one of 19th-century music's most rivetingly sinful treats. Recorded live at the Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall on 4 February 2023 with three-massed choruses and all-start cast, this release captures the drama of the opera. The performance and recording of The Damnation of Faust�took place 4 February 4, 2023 and features an outstanding cast:�Karen Cargill�as Marguerite;�John Irvin�as Faust;�Christopher Purves�as Mephistopheles; and�Jonathan Lemalu�as Brander. Joining them is the�London Philharmonic Choir, �members of the�London Symphony Chorus, and the�London Youth Choirs.

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Mieczyslaw Karlowicz's six symphonic poems feature gobs of Straussian sonority in loosely organized forms, and while Antoni Wit's performances are actually a touch slower than the competition on Chandos, the playing of the Warsaw Philharmonic is so much more atmospheric, richly textured, and knowing than that of the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda that the music is transformed. In classic Romantic fashion, the programmatic basis of all of this music is darkly tragic (for example, Stanislaw and Anna have an incestuous love affair and the story naturally ends in death). Wit clearly understands the idiom and milks the music for all it's worth. Thus, the celebratory sequences in Episode at a Masquerade have an extra degree of feverish brilliance, and the repetitious opening of Lithuanian Rhapsody is spellbinding rather than merely monotonous--in short, these forces make the best possible case for Karlowicz.

This is a young man's music--he was only in his early 30s when he died in 1909--full of self-indulgent excess; but it's also brimming with promising talent. This sumptuously engineered production reminds us of just what a loss his early death represented for 20th-century Polish music, while allowing us to savor his all too meager legacy.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

This third volume of our Michael Gielen Edition is devoted to music by Johannes Brahms, with all the recordigns taken from the archives of the Southwest German Radio. These recordings were made between April 1989 and January 2005. Michael Gielen enjoyed a felicitous involvement with Brahms' chamber music, particularly the late piano works where, in Schoenberg's words, the "progressive Brahms" is most evident. Maybe that's why Brahms' first piano quartet, orchestrated by Arnold Shcoenberg, sounds so ravishingly sharp under Gielen's direction. The solemnity of Schicksaslied calls for sincere commitment on the part of the conductor. Working as one, the Symphony Orchestra of Baden-Baden and Freiburg and Michael Gielen achieve an interpretation of this work that is both balanced and comforting.

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REVIEW:

Gielen proposes we listen to Brahms for the sake of his musical arguments rather than for the lustrous sounds that he's capable of conjuring, an approach that seems eminently sensible, and a valid alternative to various fleshier interpretive options.

– Gramophone

These arrangements for string orchestra of works by Alban Berg take their cue from Berg himself: he arranged three of the six movements of the Lyric Suite for string orchestra; the Dutch composer Theo Verby arranged the other three. The CD includes an arrangement of Berg’s Piano Sonata for strings by Wijnand van Klaveren. Ernst Kovacic arranged Berg’s early works especially for this recording. The arrangements chart Berg’s development as a composer, from prentice pieces composed under the tutelage of Schoenberg to the rich, mature style of one of his masterpieces, the Lyric Suite, written to express an impassioned and illicit love. Ernst Kovacic is one of Austria’s best-known violinists as well as a conductor. Among the composers who have written works for him are Krenek, Holloway, Gruber and Schwertsik. Ernst Kovacic and the NRM Leopoldinum Chamber Orchestra’s previous Toccata release of music by Ernst Krenek (TOCC 0199), was received with universal enthusiasm, the reviewer for Fanfare writing: ‘This Toccata Classics CD is a model of fine production values…(and) magisterial performances…an absolute must for Krenek fanciers’.

REVIEW:

The Lyric Suite is played complete. It gains from the extra players, not only in obvious richness of sound, but in nuances of phrasing. The arrangements accomplish a broad range of expressive tonecolor, with nearly every conceivable string effect on display. In the trickier parts where there are several extremely chromatic legato lines playing against one another, they play accurately and in tune. The album is a curiosity for a limited audience, but they’ll be happy.

-- American Record Guide

Kali Malone's anticipated new album "All Life Long" is a collection of music for pipe organ, choir, and brass quintet composed by Kali Malone, 2020 - 2023. Choral music performed by Macadam Ensemble and conducted by Etienne Ferschaud at Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-L'Immacul�e-Conception in Nantes. Brass quintet music performed by Anima Brass at The Bunker Studio in New York City. Organ music performed by Kali Malone and Stephen O'Malley on the historical meantone tempered pipe organs at �glise Saint-Fran�ois in Lausanne, Orgelpark in Amsterdam, and Malm� Konstmuseum in Sweden. Kali Malone composes with a rare clarity of vision. Her music is patient and focused, built on a foundation of evolving harmonic cycles that draw out latent emotional resonances. Time is a crucial factor: letting go of expectations of duration and breadth offers a chance to find a space of reflection and contemplation. In her hands, experimental reinterpretations of centuries-old polyphonic compositional methods become portals to new ways of perceiving sound, structure, and introspection. Though awe-inspiring in scope, the most remarkable thing about Malone's music is the intimacy stirred by the close listening it encourages. Malone's new album All Life Long, created between 2020 - 2023, presents her first compositions for organ since 2019's breakthrough album The Sacrificial Code alongside interrelated pieces for voice and brass performed by Macadam Ensemble and Anima Brass. Over the course of twelve pieces, harmonic themes and patterns recur, presented in altered forms and for varied instrumentation. They emerge and reemerge like echoes of their former selves, making the familiar uncanny. Propelled by lungs and breath rather than bellows and oscillators, Malone's compositions for choir and brass take on expressive qualities that complicate the austerity that has defined her work, introducing lyricism and the beauty of human fallibility into music that has been driven by mechanical processes. At the same time, the works for organ, performed by Malone with additional accompaniment by Stephen O'Malley on four different organs dating from the 15th to 17th centuries, underscore the mighty, spectral power that those rigorous operations can achieve. All Life Long simmers in an ever-shifting tension between repetition and variation. The pieces for brass, organ, and voice are alternated asymmetrically, providing nearly continuous timbral fluctuation across it's 78-minute runtime even as thematic material reiterates. Each composition's internal framework of fractal pattern permutations has the paradoxical effect of creating anticipated keystone moments of dramatic reverie and lulling the listener into believing in an illusory endlessness. On an even more granular level, the historical meantone tuning systems of each organ used, and the variable intonation of brass and voice, provide further points of emotional excavation within the harmony. The titular composition "All Life Long" appears twice on the album, first as an extended canon for organ and again in the final quarter, compactly arranged for voice. In the latter, Malone pairs the music with "The Crying Water" by Arthur Symons, a poem steeped in language of mourning and eternity. For organ, "All Life Long" moves with a patient stateliness, the drama concentrated in moments when shifting tonalities generate and release dissonance and ecstasy. For voice, each word is saturated with feeling, the singers swooping gracefully downward to capture the melancholy of the narrator's relationship to the timeless tears of the sea. "Passage Through The Spheres," the album's opening piece, contains lyrics in Italian pulled from Giorgio Agamban's essay In Praise of Profanation. In it, Agamban defines profanation as, in part, the act of bringing back to communal, secular use that which has been segregated to the realm of the sacred, a process Malone enacts each time she performs on church organs. This is not music of praise, or of spiritual revelation, but it is an artistic enactment of translating the indescribable. It carries the gravity of liturgical chant, and it's fixation on the infinite, but draws it's weight from the earthly realm of human experience. A music that draws the listener into the present moment where they can discover themselves within the interwoven musical patterns that can come to resemble the passage of days, weeks, years, a lifetime.

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Includes work(s) by Antonín Dvorák.

Vrenelis gärtli - Neue Schweizer volksmusik

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Surging sounds of the sea, over them the whistling or even the calling of birds - or so it might seem. An instant later, we only hear the ebb and flow of choral sounds, with individual male voices whistling rubato glissando tones over them. These sounds are typical of Martin Smolka's style. He evokes magically realistic sounds with his compositions.

With this fourth volume, Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen completes his cycle of Sibelius' numbered symphonies.

Ein Deutsche's Requiem, Brahm's majestic masterpiece, in a definitive performance: Christian Thielemann and the Munchner Philharmoniker are a synonym for excellence in the German late-Romantic repertoire.

One of Respighi’s masterpieces, Gli uccelli (The Birds) includes transcriptions of birdsong and music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in writing of evocative, captivating lyricism. Trittico botticelliano, an illustration of three paintings by Botticelli, employs dance rhythms, modal melodies and a variant of the medieval hymn Veni, Veni Emmanuel in deft, often sublime fashion. The Suite in G major, cast for strings and organ in the form of a Concerto grosso, is heard on this première recording in its original edition.

Hector Berlioz remains to this day the arch Romantic composer. His imagination knew no bounds and through his often-extreme visions, he revolutionized the way composers would approach the orchestra in the future. Spooky, wild, tender and utterly without inhibition perfectly describes the "Symphonie fantastique". But even some of his overtures are not for the faint-of-heart, especially when two masterful conductors at the helms of two of Europe's finest orchestras give these colorful scores full rein. Unquestionably, Berlioz at his best! - Hänssler Classic

Roger Norrington and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra SWR continue their survey of the major works of the 19th Century symphonic repertoire with two symphonies by Schubert. Throughout his decade of working with the RSO, Norrington has transformed the sound of a modern symphony orchestra into an ensemble capable of delivering authentic historically informed music making. By employing both the benefits of authentic performance practice and technically superior modern instruments, Norrington has left a legacy that has opened the ears of romantic "purists" as well as delighting devotees of authentic performance practice.

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Charles Ives 150 (1874-1954)

REVIEW:

Of all the composers on whom modern musicology is inflicting its current "completion mania", the cause of Ives makes more sense than most. His manuscripts were a mess, his decision-making random, and much of his music consists of "works in progress". He was working on a Third Set for orchestra in the late 1920s when he gave up composing, and with the exception of the last movement--that at 12 minutes lasts way too long--this collaboration between David Gray Porter and Nors Josephson comes across as pretty convincing. Certainly this is true of Porter's reconstruction of the first two movements (of three).

James Sinclair conducts Ives with unflagging confidence and expertise. He uses the first version (1914) of Three Places in New England--less angular than the chamber orchestral revision, with its prominent piano part--and the result sounds markedly less radical, more "late Romantic", and that's a refreshing change. Now that the shock value of Ives has largely worn off, we need to be able to experience his works simply as good music, and Sinclair makes that case here, as he also does in the Second Set. This neglected piece is every bit as fine as the more popular Three Places, and it deserves as much attention. Warmly detailed engineering keeps the often dense textures clear, and the Malmö orchestra plays with an easy naturalness that goes hand in hand with Sinclair's sure guidance.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Johannes Brahms is considered Beethoven’s successor in terms of his orchestral output, but for chamber music it was more the Romantic mantle of Robert Schumann that he assumed, vastly expanding its scale and ambitions in the 19th century and remaining a towering influence until well into the 20th. The First Piano Quartet has a deeply felt Andante con moto at its heart, and a sprightly ‘Gypsy Rondo’ finale. Brahms started writing the Third Piano Quartet in the difficult period of Schumann’s final illness, later re-composing it to create a work of symphonic proportions, distinctive power and striking beauty.

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The players have the feel of a group who have become welded together by years of mutual performances, the balance between them, as melodies are woven, being so perfectly weighted. The tempos also have that natural feel with scherzos that are never rushed, while the string intonation is impeccable.

– David Denton's Review Corner (November 2016)