Besides Czech folklore, the influence of Mozart is also omnipresent in Smetana's opera, in its verve and melodic freshness. This is obvious here in the ideal pairing of Irmgard Seefied and Waldermar Kmentt as the two lovers. The stand out, even amidst a lively, outstanding all-round ensemble

Recordings of arias by Haydn are scarce compared to, say, those by Mozart, and so this release is almost self-recommending; luckily, it's also very good. The arias are wonderfully scored, with mostly prominent winds, and throughout this CD Alessandro de Marchi leads the NDR Radio Philharmonie in large-scaled but brisk and animated performances. And Slovakian soprano Simona Saturova, a name new to me, is another in the increasing breed of agile, expressive sopranos with more heft to their voices than the canaries of yore.

She begins with Genio's aria from Orfeo ed Euridice, a showpiece of such stunning garishness that it's a tough act to follow; Sutherland appropriated it when she sang the role in the 1950s and it's easy to see why. Endless roulades and plenty of very high notes, all well-placed, combined with fine diction, particularly in the warmer, slower, brief middle section of the aria, make this opener one to recall. Euridice's first aria opens sweetly and gently--an expression of grief--and Saturova exhibits a fine ability to sing softly. She soon unleashes runs and divisions that challenge the singer; if truth be told the one or two low notes are just glanced at. Euridice's death aria is handsomely phrased, the long lines musically sculpted and the life-extinguishing breaths very effective.

With Armida's Act 1 recit we hear the uncertainty of the character at first; the aria bursts forth with more certainty, with more pressure on the voice and more conviction, and the finale is another fiorature-filled show-stopper, although top tones can turn hard--this becomes unappealing after a while and is the case in many of the arias.

The most frequently recorded of all Haydn's arias for soprano, Metastasio's emotional roller-coaster Scena di Berenice, is a fine centerpiece. The nervous opening gives way to greater conviction and agitation, which in turn grows into a slow, lovely cavatina (with harpsichord and winds prominent), and Saturova captures each change handsomely. Of course it ends in mania, and again she is up to the challenge.

And so the CD goes. Flaminia's aria from Il mondo della luna features great bassoon and horn obbligatos. The archangel's aria from Il Ritorno di Tobia is more generic but nice and showy, and both arias from Orlando paladino are marvelous (the first is lovely and slow until the final 90 seconds).

I don't recommend listening to this CD all at once or at high volume--Saturova's voice is not quite mellow enough to focus on at full throttle for so long. There are too many notes and the tessitura of the arias is too high for an hour's worth of sitting still. But don't be dissuaded; this is a marvelous collection, valuable for both repertoire and performances.

--Robert Levine, ClassicsToday.com

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Classical Music

Daniel Muller-Schott ranks among the most distinguished cellists of our era, captivating audiences on the world's leading concert stages. In this remarkable recording, Daniel Muller-Schott blends masterful cello artistry with a deeply personal musical journey. Together with Irina Zahharenkova and Anderson Fiorelli, he brings works by Bach, Vivaldi, Geminiani and Boccherini to life - performed on the very harpsichord his mother played, whose sound has accompanied him since childhood. The sonatas unfold with a captivating mix of Baroque elegance, emotional warmth and technical brilliance. Each interpretation reflects intimacy, nostalgia and the timeless power of music. An album that resonates: authentic, poetic, and radiant with Baroque expressiveness.

Arrau at 80 – as vital and virile as ever

Recorded at the Salzburg Festival in 1982 when he was already 80, this epic recital (Beethoven’s Op 81a Sonata is omitted for reasons of length) comes as a reminder of Claudio Arrau’s unique stature. His grandeur is overwhelming, his rich saturated tone unmistakable. True, expressive points may be stretched to their limit, yet even if you feel that the intensity with which he endows even the simplest phrase is over-bearing, his daunting mastery is never in doubt. Here, surely, is the final fruit of years of blazing commitment to his art and to two composers central to his vast and encompassing repertoire.

Fortunately the time is long past when Beethoven and Liszt might have been considered strange bed-fellows (the one profound, the other flashy and meretricious). And in Arrau’s magisterial hands you are made more than aware of the influence of Beethoven on Liszt (‘His work is like the pillar of cloud and fire which guided the Israelites through the desert’), an inspiration which led to the symphonic weight, breadth and quasi-orchestral sonorities of the the B minor and Dante Sonatas. Certainly when Arrau opens Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata – muffled, distant and alive with menace – you may well look ahead to the sotto voce start to the Liszt Sonata. Again, every part is strenuously rather than elegantly argued (surface elegance played no part in Arrau’s musical make-up) and time and again there is an almost palpable sense of the pianist’s strength and vision, his thunderous and rhetorical close one of many examples of recreation on the grandest, loftiest scale.

Turning to Liszt, Arrau is grandioso indeed at 2'00" in the B minor Sonata and overall his generosity of spirit is such that it makes many recent performances seem sadly constricted in scope by comparison. Similarly in the Dante Sonata, Arrau’s response to a term such as disparato, is of an emotionalism that few would risk today and which he might have regretfully qualified in the recording studio. Seemingly hewn out of rock, these performances form a deeply personal, mesmeric and exhausting experience and are entirely what Peter Cosse, in his heartfelt review for the Salzburger Nachrichten, called ‘The Sum of a Pianist’s Life’.

Bryce Morrison, The GRAMOPHONE

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Classical Music

Classical Music

Germany’s oldest Mozart festival celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2021. The present jubilee boxed set presents previously unpublished treasures from the archive of the Bavarian Broadcasting. All live recordings from the Baroque Imperial Hall at Würzburg Residence are digital remasters.

Even a quarter of a century after the end of his active career as a singer, nothing has changed concerning Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s preeminent status in the history of performing song. It is above all the Lied performer Fischer-Dieskau who set standards that have remained valid far beyond his time. The anthologies compiled in Vol. 3 of the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau Lied-Editon testify to the singer’s never-waning curiosity and to his responsibility towards the history of the present genre. In conjunction with Hartmut Höll, his favorite accompanist in later years, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau presents a highly attractive program to the songs by Maurice Ravel, which only sporadically appear in concert halls outside France. In the overall œuvre by German composer Paul Hindemith, too, the song does not play a dominant role. In this recording, a major role in the both natural and haunting interpretation of the songs is played by accompanist Aribert Reimann, who had composed the four-movement cantata Unrevealed for Fischer-Dieskau only a few years earlier. It was also in co-operation with Aribert Reimann, who headed a song class in Berlin, that the song anthologies devoted to Hermann Reutter and Wolfgang Fortner were compiled and that complete our edition.

Mozart composed his violin concertos in 1773 (K 207) and 1775 (K 211, 216, 218 and 219). These five works and the three single movements recorded here have been passed down complete and verified as authentic. The genesis of these works is closely linked to Mozart’s work as Kapellmeister at the Salzburg court, ending with the probably most important kick-out in music history. Mozart scored no solo cadenzas for his violin concertos; in the practice of the time, they were improvised. All the cadenzas on these recordings derive from Baiba Skride. Eivind Aadland writes: “Baiba is such an intuitive player. She has this rare quality of discovering the music as we play. So she never plays exactly the same. There is a wonderful sense of creating, discovering, of going finding new ways.“ Baiba Skride about her new album: “I know that there are so many different and super recordings of Mozart, but I think it is important to enjoy the music you have heard a thousand times and will hear a thousand times more with new eyes and simply allow the music to play.”

Today, there is no doubt that Johann Sebastian Bach took Baroque music to its sublime zenith. Just how much Bach was ahead of his time can be gauged by the fact his ‘piano’ music engaged the greatest among his successors: Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Debussy and Shostakovich. Four pianists perform Bach on this album. They stand for different periods in interpretational history, beginning with the ‘New Objectivity’ of Carl Seeman, born in 1910, up to the highly virtuoso art of Konstantin Lifschitz, born in 1976 and also taught by Alfred Brendel. The four personalities of the pianists on this album merge with Bach’s music, giving a notion of why it is accorded universal magnitude.

Leoš Janácek composed the song cycle The Diary Of One Who Disappeared at a time when many people already considered him on a par with the other two masters of Czech national music, Smetana and Dvorák. The inspiration for the autobiographical ‘Diary’ came from a few enigmatic lines of poetry in two editions of the “Lidove noviny” (People’s Newspaper) of May 1916. Although this work is Janácek’s most important original song cycle, his keen interest in the folk songs and dances of his Moravian homeland resulted in a plethora of arrangements, making this music also accessible to the classical concert hall. These include the Six Folk Songs Eva Gabel Sang (Šest národních písní jež zpívala Gabel Eva) and the Songs from Detva (Písne detvanské). Quite unlike the songs of the ‘Diary’, which chiefly make reference to the Moravian dialect, the arrangements evince the typically ethnic-sounding music Janácek refined, so to speak, by adding to adaptations of the existing song lines a sophisticated piano part in the tradition of the great song compositions of the 19th century.

REVIEW:

The Diary of One Who Disappeared, written in 1921, is one of Janáček’s finest yet strangest song cycles. It is not, as the title would suggest, about secret police or undercover spies, but about a young man who falls in love with a dark gypsy woman who lives in the woods, has an affair with her that produces a child, and eventually runs away from home to go and live with her. Because of this, it is not sung just the tenor but also by a mezzo or contralto who does the part of the gypsy woman Zelka. Moreover, there is also a small chorus of three female voices who also sing in two of the songs. This, I think, must be the only reason why it is seldom performed, because the music is simply wonderful.

Young tenor Pavol Breslik has a very fine voice marred only by a prominent vibrato, albeit a steady and well-controlled one. He sings with energy and tosses out a few excellent high notes near the end of the cycle. Mezzo-soprano Ester Pavlu is also an excellent singer; she, too has a vibrato, but a more regular and contained one, and her vocal timbre puts you in mind of a gypsy singer. The three ladies who perform in the chorus all have pure, lovely voices, and pianist Robert Pechanec is also very fine.

This is an excellent representation of wonderful music.

-- The Art Music Lounge (Lynn René Bayley)

The Skride Piano Quartet is made up of four likeminded musicians who have each achieved success as a soloist at the highest levels. The 2016-17 season included performances at the Schubertiade Schwarzenberg, Musikverein Wien, Laeiszhalle Hamburg, Malmo Chamber Music Festival, and BASF Ludwigshafen. Upcoming performances include the Concertgebouw, Philharmonie Essen, Great Guild Hall Riga, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Making their North American debut in the 2018-19 season, the Quartet offers programs featuring highlights from the piano quartet repertoire. The quartet is violinist Baiba Skride, violist Lise Berthaud, cellist Harriet Krijgh, and pianist Lauma Skride. This debut album includes the most famous Piano Quartets of Classical literature, by Mozart and Brahms as well then the unique Quartet movement by Gustav Mahler.

Antonín Dvorák’s Cello Concerto is one of the absolute masterpieces of the genre, and every world-class cellist naturally takes it into his repertoire. This is also the case for Daniel Müller-Schott, who will be performing it in the great concert halls of Europe in 2014 and in the Lincoln Center in New York: thus in the very same city where Dvorák worked as conservatory director and where he wrote the concerto. Dvorák began his work in passionate, stormy mood, but completed it in lyrical, elegiac vein under the shadow of the illness and death of his sister-in-law Josefina, who had been his own first love. Müller-Schott’s new recording also includes several chamber music works and arrangements that offer insight as to how Dvorák gradually accustomed himself to the cello, up to the point when he composed his concerto in 1894-5. There is the catchy 'Rondo' that Dvorák wrote in 1892 for a chamber music tour, and 'Silent Woods', an arrangement made for the same tour, heard here in Dvorák’s own orchestral versions. Together with the pianist Robert Kulek, Müller-Schott has also recorded arrangements of the four Romantic Pieces op. 75 and of 'Songs my mother taught me' from the Gypsy Songs cycle. The latter is perfectly suited to the cello’s cantabile character and Daniel Müller-Schott’s interpretation.

Sharon Kam is one of the world’s leading clarinet soloists and has been working with renowned orchestras in the United States, Europe, and Japan for over 20 years. Mozart’s clarinet masterpieces have been an object of artistic focus for Ms. Kam since the beginning of her career. At the age of 16, she performed the Mozart Clarinet Concerto in her orchestral debut with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and Zubin Mehta. A short time later, she performed the Clarinet Quintet with the Guarneri String Quartet in Carnegie Hall, New York. As a passionate chamber musician, Sharon Kam regularly works with artists such as Lars Vogt, Christian Tetzlaff, Enrico Pace, Daniel Müller-Schott, Leif Ove Andsnes, Carolin Widmann and the Jerusalem Quartet. She is a frequent guest at festivals in Schleswig-Holstein, Heimbach, Rheingau, Risør, Cork, Verbier, and Delft, as well as the Schubertiade festival. On this newest release, she performs the works of Weber, Kurpinski, and Crusell alongside the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.

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REVIEW:

Sharon Kam is one of the finest clarinettists in the world. Her approach and variability of tone are always surprising. She also masters the gentlest pianissimi, but can likewise strike dramatically more expressive tones.

– Online Merker (translated from German)

Hector Berlioz‘ Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie was a sequel to his Symphonie fantastique, the second part of the Episode of the life of an artist, which had premiered in 1830 at the Paris Conservatory. The piece that is made up of six sections was written and composed during his travels to and in Italy; for this he made use in part of material that he had already prefabricated for the prestigious Rome Prize. Berlioz and the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, whose rejection he had tried to compensate in the Symphonie fantastique, got married in 1833. (It should be noted that marriage by no means turned out to be the fulfillment of all dreams.) In his memoirs about Lélio’s premiere performance in December 1832 at the Paris Conservatory, Berlioz noted the following phrases about his future wife: “... the passionate character of the work, its ardent melodies, its exclamations of love, its outbursts of anger [...] must have made an unexpected and deep impression on her sensitive nature and poetic imagination. [...] When in the monodrama the actor Bocage, who recited the role of Lélio (that is, myself), pronounced the following words: ‘Oh, if I could only find her, the Juliet, the Ophelia for whom my heart is searching!’ […] she thought to herself: ‘My God! ... Juliet, Ophelia ... there’s no doubt, he means me ... And he still loves me as before …’” Michael Gielen conducts the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Wiener Singakademie with Herbert Lippert and Geert Smits as highly acclaimed soloists and Joachim Bissmeier as narrator in an absorbing live capture that took place on 7 Dec 2000 at the Vienna Concert Hall.

Classical Music

Born into a musical Latvian family violinist Baiba Skride won First Prize at the 2010 Queen Elisabeth Competition, held annually in Belgium. Ms. Skride’s natural approach to her music making has endeared her to some of today’s most important conductors and orchestras. Following her debut at the BBC Proms with the Oslo Philharmonic and Vasily Petrenko playing the Szymanowski Concerto No. 1, The Times noted, ‘Latvian violinist Baiba Skride sailed over the orchestra with long lines of melody, silver and sweet.’ She was immediately re-invited, and at the 2014 Proms played the Stravinsky Concerto with the BBC Symphony and Ed Gardner. Baiba Skride debut recording with Orfeo of the Szymanowski Concertos and Myths was nominated for the 2015 BBC Music Magazine Awards in the Concerto section. For her Orfeo CD follow up she has recorded two Scandinavian violin concertos truly exciting, fresh and innovative – Jean Sibelius’s well-loved concerto and Carl Nielsen’s unjustly neglected companion work – with the Tampere Philharmonic and conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali.

Andris Nelsons, today simultaneously Principal Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, was discovered by Orfeo for the album. Christiane Delank, the long-standing artistic director of the label had taken him on to conduct the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in the recordings of the two violin concertos by Dmitri Shostakovich with Arabella Steinbacher and realized that in him one of the great conductors of his generation was maturing, a development that took place at breath-taking pace. When he was entrusted with conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, she won him over for the ambitious projects of a complete recording of the symphonies by Tchaikovsky (the first three symphonies were recorded, but no longer released following Nelsons’ departure to Boston) together with symphonic poems and other orchestral works by Richard Strauss and works by Stravinsky and Shostakovich. So, Orfeo had the privilege of documenting on album the Birmingham period, the first major international stage in Andris Nelsons’ career.

Excerpts of reviews from previously released volumes included in this set:

Strauss: Also Sprach Zarathustra; Don Juan; Till Eulenspiegel / Nelsons:

Don Juan has all the sparkle and the flood of testosterone that you might expect, dissolving into a string theme that is radiant with extrovert ambition. This is a reading full of passion and drive. Nelsons refuses to linger where some others do but keeps the adrenaline rushing throughout.

– MusicWeb International

Tchaikovsky: Francesca Da Rimini, Symphony No 4 / Nelsons:

In the last movement of the symphony Nelsons is just as blistering in tempo and febrile excitement as Svetlanov, and I never thought I would hear a living conductor equal that kind of intensity. These are great performances by a great conductor.

– Fanfare

Stravinsky: The Firebird, Symphony Of Psalms / Nelsons

Nelsons' interpretation of The Firebird has much in common with Boulez's New York recording for Sony--hyper-detailed (those three harps really tell), yet never at the expense of excitement. Emphasis on clarity also flatters the Symphony of Psalms, particularly in the central fugue. His fleet tempos come close to Stravinsky's own and project the quick outer movements with plenty of punch. This is a very good performance by any standard, and the sonics are impressively natural. If the coupling suits, then don't hesitate.

– ClassicsToday

Welser-Möst conducts the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in this 1989 recording of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. The interpretation by these young performers was astonishing in its transcendence and manner of outlining the work’s musical contrasts. It’s no surprise that the press greeted the conductor and orchestra as a sensation and great hope for the future.

On her debut album with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and Roberto Paternostro, Selina Ott presents an exciting selection from the opulent range of 20th century trumpet concertos that have been written in close temporal proximity to one another.

When the ORFEO label was established in Munich 40 years ago, few would have predicted that the record company would develop into a firmly established player in the classical music market. One of the label’s priorities in the early years was vocal music, with opera rarities top of the list and, since the mid 1980s, the re-use of historic tape recordings. Big names featured on the label’s own productions, while ORFEO also developed into a talent factory for discovering and nurturing young artists. This Legendary Pianists 10-disc boxed set continues the series marking ORFEO’s 40th anniversary and features nine pianists in historical and modern recordings dating from the 1950s to the 2000s.

REVIEW:

This edition should be quite intriguing to collectors who surely will find a set of names quite different from what they might have chosen. It does not claim to be definitive; a collection, not the collection. There are ten CDs in the box featuring nine artists recorded live or recorded for broadcast, giving a sense of hearing an actual performance that contributes a heightened sense of you-are-there. Repertoire consists of mainly concertos from Bach to Brahms, via Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann. Also, a handful of variations, etc. This is a most attractive collection of pure pleasure.

-- The Whole Note

But for Kempff at his most unbridled you need to hear 1956 WDR Cologne radio recordings of Beethoven’s Op 111 and Schumann’s Fantasie, where bass chords are augmented and the sense of uplift is so acute that you could as well be listening to Schnabel, Cortot, or Fischer live. The disc is one of 10 in Orfeo’s Legendary Pianists, which opens with the player Furtwängler described as ‘the troubadour of the piano’, Géza Anda, who fits that description like a glove in Beethoven’s First Concerto recorded in Munich under Rafael Kubelík, whereas Brahms’s Second Concerto with the same artists fans the flames with consistent intensity, the second movement especially. In the same collection, Gulda plays concertos by Beethoven and Schumann, a rather brittle-sounding Oleg Maisenberg is compelling in Schubert (including the Wanderer Fantasy), Konstantin Lifschitz brings a Gouldian tautness to the seven Bach keyboard concertos (greatly extending the cadenza in BWV1052’s finale), Carl Seemann is characteristically considered in Mozart’s Concertos K449 and 503, Gerhard Oppitz plays Brahms’s Third Sonata (the second movement being significantly broader than on his RCA recording) and we’re given the Third and Fifth Beethoven Concertos from the cycle that Rudolf Serkin and Kubelík recorded in 1977, a much-underrated set.

-- Gramophone

Taking a phone call, Miklós Rózsa could scarcely believe that the legendary violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz really was seriously interested in his Violin Concerto and ready to give the work its premiere – but so he did in 1956, and the first recording of the work, with its extreme technical challenges, was also made by Heifetz. And it had been just the same with the Violin Concerto by Korngold: the 1947 premiere and the brilliant first recording of this 20th-century classic again showcased Heifetz as soloist.

In the new generation of genuinely American musicians, one outstanding figure was Leonard Bernstein, an all-rounder whose early success led on to even greater heights. Bernstein rated his Violin Concerto of 1954, “Serenade,” inspired by Plato’s Symposium, as his best work ever, and this work too in its imaginatively slimmed-down scoring is now acknowledged to be an important 20th-century concerto for violin.

As an “encore,” this compilation includes the masterly Symphonic Dances from the immortal “West Side Story.”

REVIEWS:

This set of American concertos sees her widen her recorded repertoire still further and her performances of all three are highly successful. She’s very well supported by the young Finnish conductor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali who here appears with the two orchestras of which he’s currently Music Director. The Gothenburg Symphony does the honors on the first disc while disc two features the Tampere Philharmonic. Both orchestras make first rate contributions.

— MusicWeb International