Thirty years after having recorded Dvorák’s complete Symphonies on Chandos, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and its laureate conductor, Neeme Järvi, tackle another romantic Czech composer, Julius Fucík, famous for his more than 400 polkas, marches, and waltzes, a mouth-watering selection of which is featured here.

Fucík studied violin in his early years, switching later to the bassoon, with a subsidiary in percussion and timpani. Playing in Austro-Hungarian regiments, he gained invaluable experience of writing for military band and became a very prolific composer of marches. The most famous of these is of course Entry of the Gladiators, completed in 1899 and soon performed throughout the world. Full of energetic, effervescent Bohemian cross-rhythms, tuneful brass melodies (often now associated with a circus atmosphere), but also more lyrical expressions, this album is a festival in itself. - Chandos

Copland: Orchestral Works

Andrew Litton’s recent recording of Copland’s Billy the Kid and Rodeo with the Colorado Symphony (BIS, 1/16) was notable for offering the rarely performed complete versions of the ballets. John Wilson, in the first in a series of Copland’s orchestral music for Chandos, opts for the slightly shorter suites as well as that of Appalachian Spring. In doing so, Wilson comes into direct competition with Tilson Thomas and Bernstein, not to mention the composer himself. However, none of these recordings, not even BIS’s excellent multi-channel production for Litton, matches the spaciousness, transparency, and weight of the sound on the new Chandos disc. It’s the finest-sounding recording to have come my way for some time.

REVIEW:

Wilson’s performances are similarly impressive, and he secures superb playing from the BBC Philharmonic. The three ballets receive strongly characterized interpretations, as piquant and affecting in the slower passages as they are punchy and ebullient in the faster ones. The poignancy and rapture of the quieter episodes of Appalachian Spring are also strongly conveyed. I enjoyed listening to this disc enormously.

– Gramophone

This selection contains both ADD and DDD recordings.

ROMANTIC PIANO

Classical Music

3 discs for the price of 2!

This is the third reissue of Chandos' set of Hamilton Harty's complete orchestral works, and if you haven't heard this incredibly derivative but equally incredibly charming composer you're in for a treat. The influences range from Dvorák (Irish Symphony) to Rachmaninov (Piano Concerto), with plenty of Irish color in evidence everywhere else--but the one constant is Harty's skill at orchestration and general level of craftsmanship. The performances, featuring Bryden Thomson and the Ulster Orchestra in their first flush of success, have not been surpassed. It's a little sad to hear a set like this and recall just how exciting a label Chandos was at the time, how much new music there was to savor, and what a pace-setter these recordings were technically. Whether you listen out of nostalgia or simply to find something new and interesting, by all means do listen!
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

At the time of his death in April 2011, Peter Lieberson had planned the present recording, a project he was never to hear realized. The present disc fills out our picture of Lieberson’s accomplishments in the concerto genre, placing the spotlight on two previously unrecorded large-scale works, the Piano Concerto No. 3 and the Viola Concerto. The compositions assembled here complicate the perception that Lieberson’s style evolved straightforwardly, the caterpillar of hard-as-nails maximalism metamorphosing overnight into the butterfly of sweet-smelling neo-romanticism, as exemplified in his masterpiece, “Neruda Songs”. The Piano Concerto No. 3 synthesizes elements from Lieberson’s previous efforts in the form, and brings the cycle to a brilliant and dramatic conclusion. Annotator Matthew Mendez calls the Viola Concerto “a big-hearted, eminently songful piece in the Walton mode.” Lieberson wrote that: “My entry into composing the Viola Concerto was through my love of the viola sound itself. It’s difficult for players, but the expression is very direct, so it’s not a difficult piece to hear.”

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

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LEONTYNE PRICE SINGS MOZART

Following on from the tremendous popularity of the two previous volumes, this is Ian Tracey's third symphonic organ works disc for Chandos and the enormous Willis organ of Liverpool Cathedral. Ian Tracey is well-established as one of the leading exponents of this music and his skills are brought out to the fore in this brilliant selection of virtuosic works by some of the greatest masters of this genre, including Saint-Saëns, Guilmant and Dupré. This is a must for organ fans and symphonic enthusiasts alike.

SIBELIUS: VIOLIN CONCERTO SAI

Claudio Abbado's collection of Rossini overtures is flecked with moments of special illumination... With Abbado, the difficult to manage Il Turco in Italia is a rare treat, Tancredi, in Philip Gossett's new revision, is a tour deforce and the liquid-toned cellos at the start of Guillaume Tell are nothing short of miraculous. Abbado's Scala di seta, too, wings into life, sweet and silken, like feathered Mercury.

-- Gramophone [8/1979, reviewing the LP release of the Rossini overtures]

This is not a particularly generous collection: it was originally published in 1983 but never previously issued in the UK. It shows Richard Stoltzman, with his succulent tone and infectious bravura (so easily displayed in the finale of the Weber and the very operatic Rossini Variations), at his best, while the Mozart Andante, if it is to be transcribed for clarinet, needs a lighter touch: here the rich, rather deliberate phrasing loses the music's simplicity and charm. In the Weber the orchestral tuttis are somewhat hefty for a group called the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, but this is primarily the effect of the resonant acoustics of the unnamed hall where the recording was made. One tends to think of Weber's concertos as being rather more than halfway between the classical and romantic traditions; here the romanticism is very much in the ascendent. But overall the performance of the F minor Concerto combines a lively impetus in the outer movements with warmth in the Adagio whilst the orchestra—notably the horns—add much to the listener's enjoyment.

-- Ivan March, Gramophone [10/1989, reviewing RCA 60035]

This performance is also available on RCA Victor 68365.

TOSCANINI COLLECTION VOL 39 -

Firkusny's performances are revelatory, not only of the stature of this music and his love for it, but of a deeply musical pianism... The recording is all that one could wish for.'

Martinu's piano music is rarely heard in recitals and none of it is represented in the domestic catalogue at present. Up to a point, I suppose, this is understandable: on paper it must often look like an alternation of bafflingly plain, even empty pages with others filled to bursting with almost machine-like, pre-minimalist toccata figures. In performance it is nothing at all like that, as Firkusny demonstrates. The toccata figures are often a metaphor for sheer exuberance, as in one or two of the Etudes, where (they alternate with overtly Czech and infectiously high-spirited Polkas) Martinu's happiness at the end of the Second World War and the prospect (vain, alas) of returning to Czechoslovakia is clearly expressed. But in a work like the Fantasie a Toccata (both sections are complex fantasies, both are toccatas) the energy is feverish, disturbed, anxious, and it is no surprise to learn from Firkusny's affectionate note accompanying this recording that the work was written while he and the composer were trying to escape from occupied France in 1940.

The barer pages spring to life in performances like Chinese flowers dropped into water. One of Martinu's most characteristic voices, perhaps his very essence, is a music of intensely pure lyricism made from astonishingly few notes. It is heard at its lightest and most ingratiating in Les ritournelles, a sequence of slight but charming lyrical studies; it emerges momentarily and hauntedly amidst the turbulence of the Fantasie a Toccata; the Etudes and Polkas reveal it to be rooted in memories of Czech folk-music. Rooted, but not really derived: the brief scene from Julietta (Firkusny's own transcription, he often played it to Martinu when they were newly arrived exiles in New York) is saturated in that lyricism, but one would not describe the piece' as 'folksy', nor as simple; it has a passionate eloquence.

Both manners are present in the Sonata, Martinu's last keyboard work, the lyricism exquisitely delicate, the motoric elements achieving a grand almost Beethovenian rhetoric in the finale. Firkusny's performances are revelatory, not only of the stature of this music and his love for it, but of a deeply musical pianism (he studied with Schnabel … and Janacek), the clarity of his left-hand technique, in particular, is a marvel. The recording is all that one could wish for.

-- Michael Oliver, Gramophone [12/1989]

BEETHOVEN: SYMPHONY NO 6, EGMO

Classical Music

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

Gianandrea Noseda continues his Italian series with a recording of works of Wolf-Ferrari. This will be promoted as the March Featured Release. This is a project very close to the heart of the BBC Philharmonic's Principal Conductor, something reflected in the passionate performances he creates. BBC Music magazine commented early on that 'Noseda's affection for the music is evident throughout'. Even at the time of his appointment, he spoke of his ambition to record the works of the twentieth-century Italian composers, and he has since recorded works by Respighi and Dallapiccola. 'Gianandrea Noseda understands the music's lyrical strength and fragile sound-world perfectly; the playing of the BBC Philharmonic is exemplary, too', wrote The Guardian on the Dallapiccola disc. Known mainly for his operatic compositions, perhaps especially the overture to Il segreto di Susanna, Wolf-Ferrari was that rare phenomenon, famously exemplified by Busoni, of an Italian composer better known in Germany than in his homeland. The son of a German painter and his Italian wife, Wolf-Ferrari made his home in Munich and was throughout his life divided by the two cultures, something that provided a foundation of his creative existence, particularly in his attachment to the neo-classical style. Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic present extracts from five operas, I quattro rusteghi, Il segreto di Susanna, I gioielli della Madonna, Il campiello and La dama boba. They are complemented by the Suite-Concertino for bassoon, two horns and strings. The soloist is Karen Geoghegan who recently made her debut on Chandos following her appearance on the television programme Classical Star. With such distinguished and sympathetic advocacy, the music of Wolf-Ferrari should achieve the worldwide recognition that it deserves.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Tempo flexibility, dynamic contouring, and rhetorical gesture are part and parcel of Bruckner's music as promulgated in the first published editions used by Knappertsbusch until the end of his life. John Rockwell wrote that "Knappertsbusch's way with Brucknerian rubato - varying the pulse of the music without undermining Bruckner's solid grandeur - seems to capture the essence of the music time after time, mixing serenity with thrilling urgency." Granted, Kna did not always follow the letter of the first printings in his realizations. His predilections for dramatic underlining reflects the same tradition that infuses the old scores with various refinements of tempi, phrasing, and dynamics. Critics judged the performance on this CD superior to the conductor's VPO recording (on Decca) when it first appeared (in 1998); now it has been completely refurbished.