Armas Järnefelt (1869-1958) was a member of a family which made a profound mark on Finnish culture. One of his brothers was a painter, and another an author - and their sister Aino married Sibelius. For Armas, whose chosen field was music, the close proximity of Sibelius must have been quite overpowering - in old age he himself spoke of the stifling influence of Sibelius's unique genius. Maybe this is one reason why Järnefelt's most ambitious compositions were written in relatively close succession in the 1890s, just around the time when Sibelius had his first great break-through, and also why he soon changed direction and became a conductor first and foremost. Completed in the spring of 1893, Järnefelt's Serenade was composed in Paris, and the French influence - especially that of his teacher Massenet - can be clearly heard. Its six movements encompass a wide variety of moods, with many instrumental solos adding touches of colour, for instance in the emotionally charged Adagio for violin and strings. Two year's later, in the Symphonic Fantasy, composed after a momentous visit to Bayreuth, the influences are rather Wagnerian, and especially obvious in the central slow section with its clear reminiscences of Parsifal. The programme closes with Berceuse for violin and orchestra, which in 1904 marked the end of Järnefelt's most active period as a composer for orchestra. The piece is a beautifully atmospheric miniature which has found a place in concerts of lighter music all over the world. Conducting his compatriot's music - as well as performing the violin solos - is Jaakko Kuusisto, well-known to a wider audience for his recordings as a violinist of music by Sibelius, Rautavaara and Kalevi Aho. He stands in front of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, whose performances of the music of Sibelius have earned them world-wide recognition.

Bruckner, A.: Symphony No. 4, "Romantic"

Beethoven Live: 9 Symphonies

Review quotes about "Lyric for Strings" by George Walker:

"Deserves to be as popular as the string elegies by Grieg, Faure and Elgar". Classical New Jersey
"Intense, haunting, lyrical beauty" News Journal, Mansfield, OH
"Hushed beauty and passionate intensity" American Record Guide
"A gorgeous find" Cincinnati Enquirer
"A finely crafted and deeply felt piece" Philadelphia Inquirer
"Intensely moving and beautiful" High Fidelity
"It reminds one of Barber's Adagio for Strings, only less sentimental and ultimately, more profound" Baltimore Evening Sun
"A Masterpiece" Fanfare Magazine
"One of the most beautiful pieces ever written" News Journal, Wilmington, Delaware
"A Gem." Baltimore Sun
"As a piece of gentle art . . . it has few peers." Philadelphia Inquirer

SYMPHONY NO. 8 IN C MINOR, OP.

"Gerard Schwarz offers a solid interpretation of the Seventh Symphony that merits attention from start to finish." - Opera Today

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MAHLER Symphony No. 7 • Gerard Schwarz, cond; Royal Liverpool PO • ARTEK 43 (76:00)


Generally speaking, Mahler’s late symphonies—except for No. 8, which is extremely popular because of its splendid exhibitionism, despite its complexity—are not only unpopular but also extremely difficult to bring off well, and the Seventh has always been considered the most difficult of all. Only a handful of conductors, among them Kubelík, Abbado, and Boulez, seem to have managed to solve this hardest of Mahler’s musical puzzles. All three of the conductors named were able to do so because they reveled in its grotesqueries, yet were able to knit its disparate elements together, and even they do not always succeed (or succeed equally) in each of the performances they lead.


As I write these introductory words, I am in fact listening to Rafael Kubelík conduct the symphony, the performance of February 28, 1981, with the New York Philharmonic that is generally considered to be his finest. All the swirling details of the score are brought out clearly, yet each and every element is knitted together splendidly and woven into a tapestry that touches the spirit and evokes a world of different moods. Kubelík’s tempos, in this performance especially, were rather slow, yet they never sound slow; he maintains momentum, no matter how convoluted the texture or how difficult the rhythms, and sustains tension despite his slowness.


Switching to Schwarz, one hears a performance 10 minutes faster than Kubelík’s. There is less rubato, more of a linear concept. It is played with great feeling, however—something I did not hear in Schwarz’s readings of the First and Ninth symphonies—and although not quite as fiery as Abbado’s second, more successful, recording, it works very well. Like Kubelík, Schwarz revels in the music’s grotesqueries, albeit in stricter tempo. There is sufficient relaxation in the soft string passages to offset this drama, and the Royal Liverpool orchestra responds with verve and great feeling to Schwarz’s every shift of mood.


The first “Nachtmusik” movement plays off the dark and light elements in perfect equilibrium. The lyrical middle section has just the right tenderness and gemütlich for the music. The music sings—and how it sings! One almost expects a soprano to come swooping in at any moment. The Scherzo has proper bounce and swagger, with a light touch that makes the odd violin glisses sound like aerial acrobats riding above the ebb and flow of the music. There is also a touch of humor, so important in this score. The second “Nachtmusik” continues this mood in a most charming vein. In the finale, Schwarz pulls out all the stops: the music leaps from the speakers and grabs you by the shoulders. There is an almost Baroque feeling to the counterpoint, though dressed in modern harmonic clothing, that Schwarz, an expert Baroque conductor, understands very well.


Gerard, you scored a hit with this one! The sound quality is nothing short of fantastic. Five stars, easily.

FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

Award-winning conductor Kazuki Yamada leads Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in an all French program of highly melodious music. Most recently Kazuki Yamada was the winner at the 51st Besancon International Competition for young conductors in 2009, receiving the audience award as well as the Grand Prize.

MEDITATION CLASSICS

Orchestral Music - ROSSINI, G. / MOZART, W.A. / BERLIOZ, H.

Click here to view all 13 volumes of The Sibelius Edition


This set contains almost all of Sibelius' incidental music written to accompany spoken theater (King Kristian II, Swanwhite, Pelléas and Mélisande, Belshazzar's Feast, Kuolema, Jedermann, The Language of the Birds, and The Tempest), as well as his ballet-pantomime Scaramouche. Missing are the two movements for strings from The Lizard, which presumably will be included in a later release--but in all respects that matter BIS offers an embarrassment of riches. Indeed, you get to hear most of this music twice, since the complete edition includes both the original theatrical scores (from Vänskä) as well as the later concert suites drawn from them (featuring Järvi). Not everything is duplicated: Everyman, for example, never got turned into a suite (it's a bit too fragmentary), but it's well worth hearing.

The performances are all splendid and extremely well-recorded. There's not a weak link in the bunch. The original scores, with the exception of The Tempest, have no competition on disc, while Järvi's versions of the suites all rank with the best. His is still the only complete recording of Scaramouche, a patchy but fascinating piece. It's true that perhaps only diehard Sibelians will want to compare the arrangements side by side, but at a special price (6 CDs for the price of 3) anyone can afford to sample. This extremely well-executed project certainly deserves your support, and will reward it amply.

– David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

SONG OF JOY:DIE SCHÖNSTEN CHÖR

HÄNDEL:DER MESSIAS (Q)/KOCH

Selection recorded August 31-September 4, 1992.

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"I don't think I can write a piece of music, no matter what I do and what I will try, that does not have the stamp of my Jewish existence," said Herman Berlinski during the recording session for his masterpiece Avodat Shabbat, one of only three complete Sabbath services ever written for soloists, chorus, and large orchestra. The eighty-nine-year-old Berlinski returned to his native Germany to attend the world-premiere recording of this major 20th-century sacred work, which he created during the course of many years in America.

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

Includes work(s) by Arnold Rosner. Ensemble: Ukrainian National Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: John McLaughlin Williams.

Classical Music

CASCARINO Pygmalion. Portrait of Galatea. Blades of Grass. 1 Prospice. Meditation and Elegy. The Acadian Land • JoAnn Falletta, cond; Geoffrey Deemer (Eh); Philadelphia Philharmonia • NAXOS 8.559266 (76:02)


Here we go again. A good man spends his life writing music for the love of it, putting bread on the table by teaching harmony and counterpoint at a small local institution. During his lifetime, he gets a few performances, writes a bassoon sonata that’s a modest hit among bassoonists, and then spends 25 years writing an opera, which gets two performances. The good man dies at 80, unknown outside of local musical circles. A few years after his death, his music is finally recorded.


Romeo Cascarino was a fine but almost completely unknown midcentury American composer in the great Copland-Barber-Bernstein tradition who wrote delicious music obviously meant to be enjoyed rather than edified. His inspirations may be a little musty (Greek mythology, 19th-century romantic poetry) but they provide ample raw material for rich music that runs the emotional gamut from, say, C to V. (The wildest extremes are absent from his gracious music.) He’s not Beethoven, but by not trying to be profound, he manages to avoid writing the kind of pedantic, grey music that makes the music of many midcentury Americans more dutiful than beautiful. The music on this CD is beautiful from beginning to end, some of it exceptionally so. Its clarity, wit, and unabashed lyricism put me in mind of Francis Poulenc, although the sound is more 1950s Leonard Bernstein (including the more symphonic theater music), with a splash of the more overt populism of some Copland or, say, Morton Gould. Some of it is so tasty I found myself listening to it two or three times in one sitting.


Tom DiNardo’s brisk, informative notes include a rather concise biography of Cascarino in which even the high points are modest. Born in Philadelphia (in the venerable Italian community of “South Philly”), he was an autodidact. At 17, he “was invited to Tanglewood after Aaron Copland looked at some of his early works.” (Just looked at? This is where the standard issue composer bio says “was impressed by.”) In 1945, while still in the army, he won a prize in the George Gershwin Memorial Contest. (I assume that had it been first prize, it would have been so mentioned.) This was a small contest sponsored by two Jewish organizations, although later winners included Peter Mennin and Harold Shapero. A 1947 Bassoon Sonata for (hometown) Philadelphia Orchestra bassoonist Sol Schoenbach once circulated on a Columbia recording, and he received two Guggenheim Fellowships. He refused commercial music work, and remained loyal to a low-paying local college despite having better offers. His first orchestral score, the ballet Prospice —which, along with everything else on this CD except for Pygmalion , is recorded here for the first time—was only ever performed in a two-piano arrangement. The later Pygmalion was “intended” for a ballet, with a libretto that “would appeal to a choreographer like Anthony Tudor, whom [Cascarino] greatly admired.” This reads like a composer whose dreams exceeded his grasp. Cascarino was evidently not naive about this, however; as DiNardo points out, Cascarino described himself as “an idealist, which for me is a realist who’s learned what to live for.” But the whole story seems rather sad.


Well, happily both pieces are much, much better works than their performance history intimates. Why any conductor who saw this appealing, lively, vividly drawn, and wonderfully scored music would not want to perform it is beyond me. Pygmalion is, indeed, the pick of the litter, as its prior recording suggests, although it appears to have been an extremely modest recording from the 1950s or 1960s, based on a fuzzy photo of its cover that I found somewhere in the musty corners of the Internet. No performers were indicated. The rich harmony, tidy orchestration, and stateliness of this music remind me of a John Ireland work. Portrait of Galatea is intended to be more impressionistic, and it is more loosely constructed and not as memorable. Prospice is based on a stiffly proud Browning poem, and is appropriately inspirational.


Cascarino was also commissioned by what DiNardo terms the “Benjamin Tranquil Music Project” which elsewhere is termed the Benjamin Award for Tranquil Music. In either version, it sounds like a parody, but the resulting work, The Acadian Land (based on Longfellow) is, for me, the other high point of this CD. It holds up well after many playings.


Alas, there’s nothing from Cascarino’s magnum opus , the opera William Penn, based on the life of the Quaker statesman who established Pennsylvania and founded Philadelphia. Cascarino worked on this from 1950 until 1975, and it was finally staged for two performances at the venerable Academy of Music, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Tom DiNardo (who doesn’t credit himself in his booklet notes). Evidently, this CD, too, owes its existence in part to DiNardo’s efforts. (Listed as executive producer, he’s also the music critic for Philly’s “second” newspaper, which doesn’t give him as much space as he deserves.)


This CD makes me want to hear more of Cascarino’s music. According to DiNardo, the composer’s output is small. His dates are 1922–2002, but the music on this CD is mainly for orchestra or chamber orchestra, and spans the years 1945–1960. (The Meditation and Elegy was written for piano in his teens and transcribed for string orchestra in 2000 by one of his pupils.) Did he write any other orchestral music after 1960, or did the opera take up all his energy? Did he write anything after completing the opera in 1975? Is there any chamber music besides the Bassoon Sonata? I wish the booklet notes provided more information. And there’s no further information online. I guess I’ll just have to check out Cascarino’s childhood haunt (and mine), the music division of the Free Library of Philadelphia, whose Fleisher Collection is the world’s largest orchestral lending library and holds Cascarino’s scores. Regional orchestra conductors: hint hint.


It remains only to praise enterprising conductor JoAnn Falletta for shaping immaculate performances. The orchestra of record is the “Philadelphia Philharmonia” which, as a lifelong Philadelphian, I’d never heard of until I read the note in the booklet that reveals its secret identity as the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, a venerable local organization not to be confused with the Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra (which also has done a couple of CDs for Naxos) or the late Philadelphia Chamber Symphony (which did some lovely LPs for RCA in the 1960s). Even though it’s a major part of Philadelphia’s musical life, the COP has evidently never recorded under its own name. Why they didn’t take credit for this CD is beyond me. Except for a couple of minor trumpet slips, the playing is quite fine. The recorded sound is decent, with good orchestral balances. And thank you to Naxos for making it possible for this lovely music to be heard by millions worldwide, even if the composer didn’t live to see it happen.


FANFARE: Eric J. Bruskin

REVIEWS:
American Record Guide (7-8/00, p.75) - Recommended
Fanfare (1-2/00, p.195) - "...Fine performances from the Moscow Symphony Orchestra....Nadine Asin makes a lovely job of the Flute Concerto, and Avshalomov 'fils' and 'petit fils' keep the music moving along brightly and buoyantly..."

Classical Music

This CD of light music for string orchestra seems just right to usher in the summer. It starts with a suite by John Rutter based on folk tunes, its four movements devoted to "A-Roving," "I have a bonnet trimmed with blue,""O, Waly, Waly," and "Dashing away with the smoothing iron." Those familiar with Rutter's Christmas discs will know what a clever arranger he is, and not be a bit surprised that he manages to work in several other folk songs in counterpoint to the featured ones. Orr's pastoral piece smacks, in a good way, of Delius, and Melachrino's composition is idiomatically written for strings, as one would expect from the creator-conductor of the "Melachrino Strings." Two of the works, by Cordell and Gibbs, are compositions of a type that English composers do so well: tributes to earlier times. The Gibbs is reminiscent of Peter Warlock's Capriol Suite in its harmonic "modernization" of consonant tunes set to old-fashioned dance rhythms, such as the Minuet and Sarabande. The Royal Ballet Sinfonia plays all this music with confidence and charm, not to mention good tone. David Lloyd-Jones, one of my favorite underrated English conductors, paces performances that are just right and beautifully phrased, and the recorded sound is generally excellent, if a bit bass shy and remote. --Rad Bennett, ClassicsToday.com