James MacMillan is one of today's most successful living composers, also internationally active as a conductor. His musical language is flooded with influences from his Scottish heritage, Catholic faith, social conscience, and close connection with Celtic folk music, all blended with influences from Scandinavian and Eastern European music. MacMillan is currently Principal Guest Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, and has conducted orchestras such as the Baltimore Symphony, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, and Los Angeles Philharmonic. In 2012, he was presented with the prestigious ABO Award at the Association of British Orchestras' annual conference.

Classical Music

This recording draws together some truly great choral pieces - Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms through to Barber's Agnus Dei, the moving choral setting of his ever-popular Adagio for Strings. Here the most prominent new world composers of the time, Ives and Barber, are brought together with old world counterparts, Poulenc and Stravinsky, in a disc of deeply felt music expressing each composers' perception of the spirituality of life. Straddling the two worlds is Michael Tippett's set of spiritual settings from "A Child of Our Time".

Although the timings for this recording are about as typical as one will find, the performance is distinctive. Russian-born and American-trained conductor Jakov Kreizberg gives us a rather subdued first movement, beautifully paced and carefully balanced, with the Vienna Symphony drawing close to its senior rival, the Philharmonic, in the beauty of its playing. The mood becomes downright solemn in the Adagio, the most important movement in this symphony. The first subject is funereal, suggesting that Kreizberg recalls that Bruckner intended it as a memorial to Richard Wagner, seriously ill when the composer began his work on it, and deceased before its completion. The contrasting second subject, which can be played as a cheerful contrast, here maintains the original air of seriousness, while realizing in unusually high degree Bruckner’s splendid part-writing in the strings. The build-up to the movement’s climax is unhurried, making the outburst of the full orchestra, complete with crashing cymbals and thunderous drums, even more effective than usual. The long coda comes across as the lamentation Bruckner intended.

Kreizberg then demonstrates that this symphony, unlike several by the composer, changes from solemnity to robust affirmation in its two shorter and concluding movements. After a fast and boisterous Scherzo, we hear a suitably Haydnesque finale, full of playfulness and affirmation. In sum, this is a first-rate Bruckner Seventh, sounding very good in stereo and even better in multichannel SACD mode. Its measured pacing in the first two movements, along with the use of modern instruments, make it a quite different affair from the recent and highly praised Herreweghe recording for Harmonia Mundi, also available as an SACD, with its original instruments and brisk tempos. More dramatic recordings exist, to be sure: one thinks of several deceased masters—to name a few, Eugen Jochum, Günter Wand, Georg Tintner, Hans Knappertsbusch, Kurt Eichhorn, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer, and Kurt Sanderling. But Kreizberg’s thoughtful and superbly executed interpretation deserves a wide hearing.

Robert McColley, FANFARE

Classical Music

Charles Ramirez is a guitarist of rare skill. A preeminent performer in the generation of guitarists that followed Segovia, he has held the post of Professor of Guitar at the Royal College of Music since the age of 25, raising the profile of the instrument through his concerts and education activities since mid-1970s. This disc is the first in a new series of recordings featuring Charles Ramirez and sees him perform works by Joaquín Rodrigo with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe - the Concierto de Aranjuez and Fantasia para un gentilhombre - under conductor and founding member of the orchestra Douglas Boyd. The programme is completed with Rodrigo's enchanting solo-guitar piece Elogio de la guitara.

This selection is a Hybrid Multichannel Super Audio CD. The Stereo Hybrid SACD program can be played on any standard compact disc player. The DSD Surround and Stereo programs require an SACD player for playback.

At long last, Franz Schmidt’s magnificent Fourth Symphony is becoming a staple of the CD catalog, if not the concert hall. The mournful, nostalgic, yearning score, an elegy for a dead daughter and a dying culture (Vienna, 1934), is one of the last great gestures of the Romantic era. It’s Strauss without the bombast, Mahler without the neuroses. This 45-minute dirge received only one recording during the mono era, and then only one pre-digital stereo treatment—one of its best versions, by Zubin Mehta and the Vienna Philharmonic. That Decca recording, from about 1971, remains one of the finest things Mehta has ever done. I don’t mean that to sound like damning with faint praise; Mehta is far from my favorite conductor, but with this score and the Vienna Philharmonic he drew on emotional resources that would elude him later in his career. For its balance of sorrow, anguish, and uneasy peace, the Mehta recording has never quite been bettered. L’udovít Rajter and the Bratislava Radio Orchestra made the symphony’s first digital recording, in 1987, as part of an Opus cycle that produced the first decent versions of Schmidt’s first two symphonies (they and the Third are much sunnier works than the Fourth). Rajter’s Fourth was honorable, but was no longer necessary when Mehta finally appeared on CD and other better-played versions came along. Those latter include Franz Welser-Möst and the London Philharmonic (EMI, 1994), followed within a couple of years by Martin Sieghart and the Bruckner Orchestra of Linz (Chesky) and Neeme Järvi and the Detroit Symphony (Chandos). Members of the London Philharmonic nicknamed Welser-Möst “Frankly Worse than Most,” which is surely an overstatement, although in this lineup he’s better only than Rajter; even so, his disc is valuable for its inclusion of Schmidt’s Variations on a Hussar’s Song, otherwise available only on a hard-to-find Preiser CD. Sieghart is surprisingly competitive, perhaps edging out Järvi to come in a close second to Mehta.

Now, just at the dawn of the SACD era, we already have a first-rate new version of Schmidt’s Fourth in superb surround sound from Yakov Kreizberg and the Netherlands Philharmonic on PentaTone. The recorded sound is a bit distant, but detailed (clear enough to reveal an occasional grunt from the podium). More important, Kreizberg’s performance breathes nicely, with a natural rubato that makes its effect over large musical paragraphs more than through individual phrases. It isn’t quite my Schmidt ideal; the big climax about six minutes into the Molto vivace, which is effectively the third movement, could be marginally more cataclysmic. (An aside: The chorale just after this point would have been a better place than three minutes from the end to begin track 4, since the chorale introduces what is essentially the symphony’s recapitulation if you regard the work as one massive sonata-allegro movement.) Also, Kreizberg could have wrung more passion out of the little climax about two-and-a-half minutes from the end, the symphony’s last cry before it dies away into the bereft trumpet solo with which it began. But these are small points, and Kreizberg joins Sieghart just marginally behind Mehta.

Perhaps tipping the judgment to Kreizberg, besides the modern five-channel sound (the CD can also be played in two-channel stereo on a regular player), is the inclusion of three orchestral bits from Schmidt’s opera Notre Dame (as in the Victor Hugo novel known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame). The lush, string-centered, harp-haloed Intermezzo has been recorded many times before, most notably in a voluptuous, daringly slow Karajan version on EMI, but the Introduction and “Carnival Music” are comparative rarities. I’ve encountered these three pieces together as a suite only on an Opus/Musical Heritage Society LP by Rajter and the Slovak Philharmonic, where the music was inexactly billed as “Carnival and Intermezzo.” The suite is a welcome addition to this disc, but it should have come first rather than last; Schmidt’s devastating Symphony No. 4 should be followed only by silence.

James Reel, FANFARE

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

Mikhail Pletnev remains a cypher. Remember how rapturously his first major recording as a conductor, Tchaikovsky's Sixth on Virgin, was greeted? Then he went on to do all the symphonies for DG, and the result was the dullest cycle in history. His Beethoven, on the other hand, was simply perverse: not interestingly perverse, but stupidly perverse. Of course this didn't stop equally stupidly perverse critics from praising it, but that's another story altogether.

Now he turns in a very fine Shostakovich 15th. It has something of the balletic grace that made his initial Pathétique so attractive. The lyrical passages in the second movement and the main theme of the finale have a poised beauty that really is quite striking. Similarly, his light textures in the first movement's "toy" music, as well as the scherzo, tickle the ear and keep the music buoyant.

There is a price, of course, in terms of sharpness of focus and power at the climaxes, not to mention emotional intensity. The xylophone and whip don't cut as they might, and the Wagner quotations in the finale lack a certain atmosphere, but the otherworldly textural clarity that Pletnev achieves in the movement's central passacaglia remains very special. In fact, his relative coolness suits this "spacey" music particularly well.

The coupled Hamlet excerpts do not come from the more familiar film score, but comprise a suite taken from the much earlier incidental music. It's typical youthful Shostakovich: pithy, bright, angular, and lots of fun. It requires little beyond sprightly tempos and a literal reading of the notes to make a fine impression, and that's just what the music receives here. PentaTone's sonics are, like the performance, clear, well-balanced, and a touch lacking in body, whether in stereo or multichannel surround formats. A very recommendable disc.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Signum’s fourth disc with the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra continues their series of the great core Russian repertoire. Featuring the Orchestral suite of one of Tchaikovsky’s most famous ballets Swan Lake, complemented with Rachmaniov’s final composition Symphonic Dances.

This recording follows the St Petersberg Philharmonic’s 2010 releases of Verdi’s Requiem (SIGCD184), Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 "Leningrad" (SIGCD194) and Prokofiev’s Cinderella and Romeo & Juliet Orchestral Suites (SIGCD214).

“This is a full-blooded performance of Verdi?s late work … Full marks for passion” The Telegraph, January 2010

“Temirkanov is good, noble and intense, gripping our attention with Shostakovich?s sustained lines.” Musicweb-International, June 2010

REVIEW:

Gerard Schwarz's David Diamond symphony recordings originally appeared on the Delos label in the early 1990s. They remain impressive (though unfortunately still rare) documents of this composer's uniquely engaging music. In contrast to Symphony No. 1's ebullient opening, Diamond's Second begins with a wistful Adagio funebre, one of the work's longer and more profound movements, another being the beautiful Andante expressivo (with its evocative string and woodwind writing). The harmonic and melodic style occasionally recalls Copland, who comes most immediately to mind in the brass and bass drum play of the scherzo. However, the finale brings that unique blend of folksy Americana and classical rigor that marks much of Diamond's work.

Symphony No. 4's finale uses a similar rhythmic structure and even shares the same key as the Second, but otherwise the two works are quite different. Diamond compacts a lot of material into three brief movements. The musical language is less overtly tuneful than in No. 2, but the composer's expanded harmonic and textural palette ensures ever-captivating sounds, just as his sense of dramatic contrast and well-timed climaxes provide substantial emotional impact throughout. Schwarz conducts both scores with keen sensitivity, while the Seattle Symphony (particularly the brass in No. 4) relishes the challenge of this then-unfamiliar music. The low-level recordings require a volume boost to register fully, and they retain some shallowness, but not enough to detract from full enjoyment of the performances.

--Victor Carr Jr, ClassicsToday.com

SKALKOTTAS Concerto for 2 Violins (orch. Demertzis). Concertino for 2 Pianos. Characteristic Piece, “Nocturnal Amusement” 1 • Vassilis Christopoulos, cond; Georgios Demertzis (vn); Simos Papanas (vn); Maria Asteriadou (pn); Nikolaos Samaltanos (pn); Dimitris Desyllas (xyl); 1 Thessaloniki St SO • BIS 1554 (55:02)


BIS has lavished a great deal of attention on Nikos Skalkottas (1904–1949), a former student of Arnold Schoenberg, who, like Alban Berg, took dodecaphony in a somewhat different direction from that of Schoenberg’s or Anton Webern’s. Kostis Demertzis’s booklet notes describe Skalkottas’s efforts to combine the system with popular elements that would entertain its listeners. He did so, for sure, in his Concerto for Two Violins (an unorchestrated version of which appeared on BIS 1244), a piece from 1944 that he never completed (or heard performed) and that he apparently intended to finish after he had completed his Second Symphonic Suite in the last year of his life. The Concerto’s first movement integrates the two bustling violin parts into an orchestral web (not only that of Kostis Demertzis’s orchestration but that of the engineers) more in the manner of Bach’s Double Concerto than in that of, say, Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola. As did Berg’s Violin Concerto, Skalkottas’s slow movement incorporates a borrowed tonal melody, this one, according to the notes, a rebetiko by Vassilis Tsitsanis that Skalkottas had chromatically enhanced. This popular-style melody slinks, if not as suggestively, in the sultry manner of the Blues from Ravel’s Violin Sonata, though the outer, fast, movements have been influenced by, and pay tribute to, a popular idiom of a different kind—folk music. The Concerto is substantial in both length (almost 38 minutes in this performance) and in substance, despite its emphasis on accessibility and entertainment. While the ardent violin lines in the slow movement emerge, as do those in the outer movements, from sonorous, highly colored tuttis, the third movement returns to the whirlwind manner of the first, with the violins emerging now in bands of melody reminiscent of Corelli’s trio-sonata textures, and now in sharply articulated folk-inspired thematic statements. A brilliant cadenza about two-thirds of the way through the finale showcases the two violins’ virtuosity. The soloists play with great energy and élan in the outer movements and an appropriate sultriness in the slow one; Christopoulos and the Orchestra provide highly colorful, enthusiastic orchestral support.


If anything, the Concertino for Two Pianos (from 1935) sounds even lighter and chattier in its first movement, affecting a boulevardier’s breeziness (as did Poulenc’s) but couched in the rigorous procedures of serialism. Demertzis’s notes trace some of the tone-row manipulations, while the lighthearted style will—especially in this engaging performance by Maria Asteriadou and Nikolaos Samaltanos—tempt a willing listener’s ear away from those compositional elements.


The Characteristic Piece (from 1949), almost—almost—firmly tonal, serves as a sort of fireworks display that brings the program to a close in an intoxicating performance with all the carnival appeal of George H. Green’s Fluffy Ruffles . It’s like musical licorice, and it’s hard not to listen again several times.


Charles Warren Fox, the Eastman School’s protomusicologist, used to insist in his classes on the 20th century that dodecaphony didn’t necessarily imply any particular compositional style. Skalkottas’s music, placed beside that of Webern, seems to reinforce the point of view upon which Fox so vehemently (and disdainfully) insisted. In any case, even in an era in which serialism’s sun may be setting, Skalkottas’s music, for its energetic forging of a novel, syncretistic, idiom, should appeal to a new generation of listeners. Recommended.


FANFARE: Robert Maxham

Conceived under the sign of the sun, this is a series of works for saxophone and orchestra by French composers with a specific affinity for the Mediterranean, its atmosphere and culture(s). Painting these varied landscapes is Claude Delangle, joined by the forces of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra led by Lan Shui.

PROKOFIEV: Peter and the Wolf / BRITTEN: Young Person's Guid

For anyone new to Hanson’s works this CD is a brilliant introduction to a really inspirational composer.

This is the fifth volume in Gerard Schwarz’s fervent traversal of the seven Hanson symphonies for Delos. The three pieces are drawn from DE 3160, 3092 and 3130. As with the earlier volumes Schwarz brooks no dilution of the music. Nothing is routine or careless.

The old passionate munitions and the aggressive air-burst energy is still there in the six-movement Sixth Symphony. Hanson was writing way against the prevailing current of the times – it was 1968 – but the fuel still ignites! This work initially took a while to take a hold on me but now its swaying Nordic romance will not let go. The music has exuberance, chattering Sibelian zest, an epic stride and the benefit of a resplendent recording. It was dedicated to Leonard Bernstein and the NYPO. Schwarz takes things at a faster lick than Siegfried Landau and the Music for Westchester Symphony Orchestra version from the early 1970s. Landau was first issued on Turnabout LP TV-S34534, revived on CD on Excelsior and also as part of a VoxBox CDX5092.

Lumen in Christo growls with awe. Somewhere in there we are told that there is material by Handel and Haydn. It is deeply subsumed. The choir sings texts with light as their subject from the Latin Requiem and from The Bible. The music has a symphonic mien so do not expect much in the way of relaxation after the rippling power of the Sixth Symphony.

The Seventh also uses the Seattle Symphony Chorale. It’s a setting for choirs and orchestra of texts by Walt Whitman. Hanson – then within four years of his death - sticks to his last. The style essays no change. Indeed he even incorporates that long-breathed treasure of a melody – the grand theme from The Second Symphony. He first set Whitman’s verse in 1915 and latterly in Drumtaps (1935), Song of Democracy (1957) and The Mystic Trumpeter (1970; rec. Delos DE3160). This is not the work’s first recording. That honour rests with the World Youth Symphony Orchestra Interlochen and the National Music Camp High School Choir who recorded it in August 1977 on Bay Cities BCD 1009. Atmospheric though that original is it cannot hope to compete with Schwarz’s fully professional version.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed for a final Schwarz Naxos disc including the Piano Concerto and The Mystic Trumpeter. In due course I would guess that Naxos will also issue a boxed set as they did for Barber and Schuman.

– Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

RUSSELL: Rhapsody for Horn and Orchestra / Middle Earth

AMRAM Symphony, “Songs of the Soul.”1 Shir L’erev Shabbat; Excerpts.2 The Final Ingredient: Scenes 5, 9, 103 -- Christopher Wilkins, cond;1 Berlin RSO;1 Richard Troxell (ten);2 Christopher Bowers-Broadbent (org);2 Kenneth Kiesler, cond;2 BBC Singers;2 Kenneth Kiesler, cond;3 Deborah Selig (sop);3 Pei Yi Wang (mez);3 Sarah Elizabeth Williams (mez);3 Thomas Glenn (ten);3 Brian Pfaltzgraf (ten);3 Nicholas Phan (ten);3 Jesse Blumberg (bar);3 Tyler Oliphant (bar);3 Mark Kent (bass);3 Univ of Michigan SO & Ch3 -- NAXOS 8.559420 (63:12 ?)

Here we have three works by Philadelphia-born composer and “Renaissance man of American music” (according to the Boston Globe), David Amram (b. 1930). His biography is long and colorful, and, as always, fully documented by Neil Levin’s encyclopedic notes. In a nutshell, Amram has had a mixed musical and cultural background, studying at the Manhattan School of Music under Vitttorio Giannini, Gunther Schuller, and Dimitri Mitropoulos, while simultaneously becoming involved with a number of prominent jazz musicians and ensembles. He has written a considerable amount of music, from incidental scores to Shakespeare plays, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Camus’s Caligula, and plays by Eugene O’Neill and T. S. Eliot; to the sound track for an experimental documentary film by Jack Kerouac; to a number of well-known film scores, including Splendor in the Grass, the Manchurian Candidate, and The Young Savages; to over 100 orchestral and chamber works. Amram’s 1987 Symphony, subtitled “Songs of the Soul,” is in some respects similar to Weisgall’s T’kiatot discussed above. Programmatic movement titles notwithstanding, it is a three-movement orchestral score that may be heard as purely abstract music. The work reflects Amram’s interest in authentic Jewish/Oriental ethnic musical modalities. Put that together with the composer’s film-score background, and you have a richly Romantic, exotically perfumed work that could play well as the sound track for a Biblical docudrama. Don’t get me wrong. This is gorgeous sounding music. I’m just trying to describe it and put it into context so you’ll know what to expect. It is performed here by Christopher Wilkin conducting the Berlin Rundfunk Orchestra, in co-production with German Radio and the ROC Berlin.

In 1960, Amram became yet another recipient of one of Cantor Putterman’s commissions to write a liturgical work for his long-running Sabbath Eve Service program. For more information on Putterman and his program, please see the entry under Diamond noted above in Fanfare 27:7. From Amram’s Shir L’erev Shabbat we hear five numbers. According to Neil Levin’s notes, the work was premiered in 1961, but the CD back-flap dates it 1965, perhaps referring to a subsequent performance at the Hebrew Congregation in Washington, DC. Make no mistake about it, Amram is at heart a Romantic composer. The melodic and harmonic language is liberally spiced with 20th-century seasonings, but the idiom remains essentially tonal.

Much the same can be said of the three excerpts heard here from The Final Ingredient (1966), Amram’s second opera. In fact, passages from scene 5, the first of the three excerpts, kept reminding me of the section near the end of Verdi’s Requiem where the solo soprano is set against a cappella choir. The literary reference at least may be an appropriate one in that Amram’s opera is a Holocaust story that tells of the indomitable spirit of a group of Belsen concentration camp inmates determined to observe the ritual of the Passover Seder. The “final ingredient” refers to the egg, one of the items required for the traditional Passover plate, and the one that symbolizes the renewal and continuity of life. As the headnote indicates, a large cast is involved in the production. I hesitate to single out any individual vocal soloist, for all are outstanding, but I will give special mention to Kenneth Kiesler and the University of Michigan Opera Chorus and Orchestra, who do a superb job of cementing together what might otherwise turn unwieldy.

Jerry Dubins, FANFARE

Click here to view all available releases in the Milken Archive Series at ArkivMusic.

REVIEWS:
International Record Review (3/00, p.54) - "...Fialkowska brings us the first budget-price version [of Paderewski's concerto] and lavishes her considerable resources on both the concerto and the lively, attractive 'Polish Fantasy'..."

Although celebrated as the father of German Romantic opera, Carl Maria von Weber is today generally known for one opera alone: Der Freischütz. Most of his other works for the stage - including the incidental music for several plays - are nowadays rarely performed. But their overtures have survived the test of time and are popular fillers at orchestral concerts, imbued as they are with Weber's particular mix of Romantic drama and lyricism and Classical lightness of touch. Striking is also the inimitable, colourful instrumentation, which is given free reins in these scores for librettos and plays that are set in China and Arabia, and among Spanish gypsies and knights in 12th-century France. The present disc includes ten of these gems, from the overture to Weber's first surviving opera Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn - composed at the age of fifteen - to that of Oberon, written in London for Covent Garden less than two months before his death from tuberculosis, aged 39. The team of Jean-Jacques Kantorow and the Tapiola Sinfonietta have recorded numerous discs for BIS, by composers as diverse as Saint-Saëns, Mozart, Shostakovich and Rautavaara. Acclaimed releases have also been dedicated to the music of Weber, most recently his symphonies on a disc which was described as 'without doubt among the finest additions to the Weber discography in recent years' by the reviewer of the German magazine Fono Forum. His French colleague in Diapason was equally enthusiastic, remarking upon the dramatic qualities of the recording: 'Kantorow stages a theatre of sounds in which each instrument is an actor...'

Includes work(s) by William Yeates Hurlstone.

Includes work(s) by William Grant Still. Ensemble: Fort Smith Symphony. Conductor: John Jeter.

Diamond dedicated his Symphony No. 8 to his friend and mentor, composer Aaron Copland on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. The work was completed in November 1960 and received it's premi�re with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic on 27th October, 1961. While essentially tonal in harmonic language, Diamond incorporated highly chromatic elements and even a twelve-note tone row, not unlike what the Symphony's dedicatee was doing during this same period in his Connotations, though Diamond's work is far less aggressively dissonant in overall sound. The composer provided these notes for the premi�re performance: I. Moderato-Adagio-Allegro vivo. The basic row is proclaimed in the very opening bars of the introduction; it is in two halves. The first, a forceful rhythmic theme of five notes (4/4), is thundered out by the orchestra tutti. The second, a more lyric theme of seven notes (3/4), is sung softly by a single clarinet. Thematically, the second phrase is destined to be the more important; in fact, the row is immediately rearranged and presented by a solo horn, which starts with this second phrase in an even more lyric version, and concludes with a lyric transformation of the thundering five-note opening. The fast body of the movement, a free sonata-allegro structure, starts with a heavily syncopated version of the row as presented by the French horn. This is the principal theme; a contrasting second theme is presented at a more relaxed tempo by a solo clarinet, ben cantando, over a soft counterpart of strings. Both themes are developed, and return in very nearly their original form during the course of this long but highly concentrated movement. The conclusion is a stunning climax compounded of the essence of both themes. II. Theme (Adagio), Variations and Double Fugue. After a two-measure introduction, which turns into a sequential accompaniment, the first violins begin a high, flowing melody that is the theme (3/4). Soon the orchestral basses and cellos enter with this same melody, while the violins continue the forty-measure theme. Variation No. 1 is a canon, in which the violins lead and cellos follow with the same melody, always at a distance of one measure. There are seven variations in all, the last of which repeats a long section from No. 1, and then leads without pause into the lively double-fugue. The first principal theme of this is derived from the principal theme of the first movement. Other themes from the first movement make their appearance, too, as the Symphony moves on to it's climax and conclusion.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Following a series of acclaimed recordings of 19th-century music including complete cycles of the symphonies by Schubert and Schumann, Thomas Dausgaard and his Swedish Chamber Orchestra turn to Felix Mendelssohn. The team’s latest offering unites three of the composer's four celebrated concert overtures, written between 1826 and 1835 and setting new standards for this emerging genre: Mendelssohn’s overtures are also tone poems, combining a Classical conception with Romantic expressivity. The earliest of the three – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Mendelssohn composed at the age of seventeen, and his sister Fanny later remarked how Shakespeare's play had been a constant presence at their home, and ‘how at various ages we had read all the different roles, from Peaseblossom to Hermia and Helena…’ The overture immediately became one of Mendelssohn’s signature pieces, and seventeen years later he returned to it, composing additional incidental music for a stage production of the play. Written for soloists, women's choir and orchestra, the complete Midsummer Night score is included here. The disc opens with the last of the four overtures to be composed, however: The Fair Melusine, which Mendelssohn wrote after having heard an opera based on the old French tale of the water spirit Mélusine and her sad fate. Actively disliking the opera, Mendelssohn was provoked into his own musical setting of the subject matter in the form of a concert overture. Water – and its depiction in music – also plays an important role in The Hebrides, the closing work on the present recording. Inspired by the poems by Ossian – which captured the imagination of an entire generation at the beginning of the Romantic era – Mendelssohn visited Scotland and the Hebrides in 1829, and already during this trip he sent a postcard to his family, with the overture's famous opening written down in a four-part setting.

"26 centers around the concept of violists performing and sharing their own compositions. As a violist/composer, I am inspired by the legacy of others who have picked up both bow and pen to create music. 26 was my way of gathering some of my favorite musicians who share a love of the viola, and a love for the new. This album features performances and works by violists Atar Arad, Garth Knox, and myself. Our trio of violists/composers is joined by composer Richard Karpen and violinist Michael Jinsoo Lim. The title of the recording comes from the number of strings on the instruments used: four strings each for the violas of Arad and myself and Lim’s violin; and 14 strings (seven playing and seven sympathetic) for Knox’s viola d’amore. As a student of Atar Arad’s, I had the opportunity to experience his artistry through his teaching, viola playing and his compositions. It was, indeed, Atar’s example that helped lead me to composing myself, along with the experiences culled from my performing career filled with new music and improvisation. I first got to know Garth Knox as an admirer of his work as violist of the Arditti Quartet. I have since had the good fortune to perform with him on a number of occasions, and to get to know him as a composer. Richard Karpen’s sense of experimentation was one of the initial draws for me to join the faculty at the University of Washington, where I am very happy to be his colleague. Michael Jinsoo Lim has been my partner in crime since we met in college. As co-founders of the Corigliano Quartet and members of Frequency, Mike is the musician I most often perform with." - Melia Watras