Only a few, famous jazz bassists have ever gone beyond the limitations of their instruments and sought new opportunities on the cello. The cellist Valentin Radutiu turns the tables to show how well the cello suits jazz - at times taking the role of the traditional string bass, at others a resonant tenor guitar while at others giving it's voice wings. The repertoire on Remembering The Rain: A Jazz View, comes mainly from the "Great American Songbook", supplementing that glorious heritage with standards by John Lewis (MJQ) and Bill Evans, both of whom had their own anchors in classical music as well.

Classical Music

Complete Recording of Mozart’s Violin Concertos - Lena Neudauer belongs to the most famous violinists of her generation - In combination with the Deutschen Radio Philharmonie - Lena Neudauer already inspired with the complete recording of Schumann’s Works for Violin and Orchestra: „The sonorous voice of the Guadagnini-Violin of Lena Neudauer fills the whole sound stage.“ HifiRecords 2011 zu CD 93.285 At age 15, the young violinist Lena Neudauer had already won the famous Leopold Mozart International Competition in Augsburg, where she not only was awarded 1st prize, but also took home the Mozart Prize, Richard Strauss Prize for the best interpretation of Richard Strauss' Violin Concerto and the Audience Prize. Yet despite this spectacular accomplishment, she refused to be pushed into becoming another “child prodigy.” This well-balanced, clear-thinking side of her being plays a special role with her interpretations of Mozart's music. We are reminded of what father Leopold wrote to his son Wolfgang Amadeus in 1777: „You yourself do not know how well you play the violin; if only you will do yourself credit and play with energy, with your whole heart and mind...“. Lena Neudauer‘s beautiful, pure violin tone perfectly fits the spirit of these less-than-virtuoso, but supernaturally lovely concertos, her sensitivity illuminating these works from the inside. She is joined by conductor Bruno Weil, an expert in the music of the Viennese classicists and period instrument specialist, who transforms the German Radio Philharmonic into an aural carpet, upon which the soloist can move with quiet expression and grace.

Classical Music

SHOSTAKOVICH New Babylon. A Year Is like a Lifetime • Frank Strobel, cond; Kai Adomeit (pn); Southwest German RO Kaiserslautern • HÄNSSLER 93.188 (2 CDs: 135.49)


New Babylon is not one of Shostakovich’s standard, propagandistic, political potboilers. This is the music of the enfant terrible of Soviet music. Composed in 1928 immediately following his satirical opera, The Nose , the score for the silent film New Babylon reflects Shostakovich’s lifelong fascination with the cinema and his experience as a piano accompanist for silent films. The film’s directors, Grigori Kosintev and Leonid Trauberg, were considered to be avant-garde, if that were possible at the time. New Babylon deals with the rebellion of the Paris commune in 1870–71, with a superimposed tragic love story between a working girl and a bourgeois soldier. Shostakovich had recently completed his brilliant First Symphony, and the directors immediately wanted him to score the film. Shostakovich’s music is laced with dissonance, acerbic wit, bitonality, and flirts with atonality. The composer utilizes numerous fragmentary quotations from sources as disparate as Offenbach, Tchaikovsky, and the Marseillaise.


An abridged Melodiya version conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky was released in 1976 by CBS, and a more-or-less complete recording has been recently available on Capriccio conducted by James Judd. That was the most definitive recording, at least in terms of completeness, prior to the appearance of this one. The program notes state that this complete reconstructed version—including all the music cut from the film—is based on the composer’s personal manuscripts stored in the Glinka museum in Moscow and the orchestral parts and piano score printed for the premiere. The manuscript was edited by the D-S-C-H publishing house and cross-referenced to a proof copy from the composer’s personal estate. In addition, Frank Strobel synchronized the newly edited music with the 1929 premiere version of the film. All of this is not surprising when you consider Strobel’s incredible reconstruction of Prokofiev’s complete score for Alexander Nevsky ( Fanfare 28:3).


There appears to be no reason to doubt the authenticity of this version, but it really doesn’t matter because Strobel’s performance and Hänssler’s sound are superior to the previous Capriccio recording. Capriccio’s soft edged, more distantly miked sound does not serve the music as well as the more brash, brassy, and closely miked sonics on this recording. There is over an hour and a half of outrageous, funky, melodic but gently dissonant music reminiscent of The Nose and his impish ballets. Strobel’s conducting, aided by incisive and dynamic sound, is flamboyant as befits the music. Shostakovich’s bad-boy early style is an acquired taste for some, but if you have any interest in this aspect of Shostakovich’s art, New Babylon will be a treasure.


A Year Is like a Lifetime is an entirely different story, but is not without interest. It begins with three cues featuring straightforward, bombastic statements of the ubiquitous Marseillaise (as opposed to the fragmentary references and variations in New Babylon ), urgent low strings, strident brass, and slashing snare drums. But at the end of the “Intermezzo” a strange thing happens. The music subsides into pianissimo quivering strings and tolling bells from the sound world of the 11th Symphony. Then a 15-minute subdued, atmospheric, and introspective “Farewell” featuring a plaintive French horn solo is clearly the emotional and musical heart of the score. It is followed by a delicious, tongue-in-cheek waltz and a brief reappearance of some faceless battle music. The suite concludes with the horn solo and music of the “Farewell,” now more upbeat in a surprisingly understated way, with wind and brass chords embellished by lush, rising and falling string configurations building to a climax that Golden Age film music fans will love. Thus the noisy bombast offers contrast rather than dominating a score that remains cinematic, but is predominantly subdued and eminently likeable in the style of The Song of the Forests oratorio.


This album is a clear winner in every conceivable way. The music, performance, and sound make it required listening for any adventurous listener interested in the music of Shostakovich beyond the symphonies and string quartets.


FANFARE: Arthur Lintgen

The Amadeus Quartet was founded in 1947 in London, by three musicians and an Austrian, who had studied together in Vienna, and were later joined by the English cellist, Martin Lovett. Soon after their formation the ensemble won an international reputation and throughout the 70's became one of the most important chamber ensembles in the world. Today the Amadeus Quartet is still remembered for its sensitive and sonically beautiful interpretations of the classical and romantic repertoire. In addition to other works, one of the quartet's most frequently performed pieces was Schubert's famous "Death and the Maiden" - a composition that they delivered with an overwhelming impression. Even if contemporary music did not have a major place in the repertoire of the Amadeus quartet, they did perform and record the Second and Third String Quartets of Benjamin Britten.

REVIEW:

Though a little extreme around the edges, it is hard to resist this recording of the Amadeus Quartet's 1977 recital at the Schwetzinger Festspiele. The principal reason is Britten's Third String Quartet. Written in November 1975, with the Amadeus Quartet in mind, the Third Quartet was Britten's last work in the form, as well as his next-to-last work, and a spirit of leave-taking suffuses the score. The Amadeus prepared the work under the composer's guidance but gave the premiere in December 1976 in his absence; Britten had died two weeks earlier. This recording comes from five months later, and one can still feel the love and loss in the Amadeus' performances. With a ripe but bright tone and tight but supple ensemble, the Austrian-English quartet is a perfect fit for the work, and its interpretation is so deeply felt that it almost, but not quite, exceeds the boundaries of good taste. Like the hard-driven account of Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet, the ensemble's performance is not always entirely together, with some occasional intonation problems and a certain roughness of tone wholly unlike the group's smooth tone in its DG recordings. But so impassioned is the reading that it is all but irresistible. Hänssler Classics' live recording is likewise a bit extreme, but also vivid, immediate, and very, very present.

-- AllMusic.com (Jim Leonard)

REVIEW:

Furtwängler famously considered himself a composer who conducted, rather than vice versa, and his most familiar surviving work is without question his Second Symphony. It’s a lovable outpouring composed in the last year of the Second World War but that has both its head and its heart buried among the dying embers of late Romanticism. Bruckner, Strauss, Brahms and Reger are all there in attendance and, although the work is well worth sampling, one laments the fact that, while we have at least four recordings of Furtwängler conducting it, we have none of him conducting the Missa solemnis or Parsifal. The 1954 Stuttgart RSO recording of Furtwänger’s Second, reissued here by Hänssler Classic, comes paired with a typically marmoreal account of Beethoven’s First. Both performances are characteristic...it’s nice to have seven minutes’ worth of Furtwängler in (German) conversation with the conductor Hans Müller-Kray, a privilege included only on the Hänssler Classic set.

-- Gramophone

When the Darmstadt teenager Volker Kriegel (1943-2003) officially debuted his first chords in the late 1950s, the guitar was still an outsider instrument in jazz. It could boast a few luminaries, but actually everything was still open when, in 1963 and 1964, the autodidact from Hessen won first prizes as guitarist and soloist at the amateur jazz festival in Düsseldorf. The debut recordings in 1963, which Südwestfunk (SWF) recorded with the nineteen-year-old guitarist in trio at the Deutschhaus in Mainz, and the 1969 studio sessions in the Kammersaal Studio, are worlds apart. For one thing, the guitar itself had carved out a career. On top of this, Kriegel had gained in self-confidence. But above all, he had found a counterpart in Claudio Szenkar, who opened up perspectives not only in terms of communication and composition but also through Kriegel’s own instrument. The combination of vibraphone and guitar was then still fairly new. In 1968, Kriegel decided to make music his main profession. Thanks to "With A Little Help from My Friends" and an appearance at the German Jazz Festival in Frankfurt, he achieved the breakthrough into public recognition. Together with the vibraphonist Dave Pike, the bassist Hans Rettenbacher and the drummer Peter Baumeister, he founded the Dave Pike Set, which became for four years his artistic center and a beacon combo of European jazz rock. And for the SWF (Südwestfunk, today SWR) he went twice into the sound studio. With the exceptions of The Beatles’s anthem "Norwegian Wood" and "Mother People" by the young guitar berserker Frank Zappa, hardly any pieces by other musicians are still to be heard in these recordings.

A legend of progressive jazz, Stan Kenton led one of the most influential, innovative, and controversial jazz orchestras of the twentieth century. This album is a live recording from January 17, 1972, taken during the Stan Kenton Orchestra’s European tour. This release contains staples of the repertoire, including Rhapsody in Blue, Malaguena, Malaga, and Love Story.

This release is the 10th in a unique collection of popular German songs, performed by Fritz Wunderlich, this album focusing on recordings from the 1950's and 60's. It is well known that Wunderlich was an exceptional singer, yet it never fails to surprise when hearing him singing works from different genres and discovering how he developed from his early performances to later in his career. This album focuses on the recordings which began his career and the sames repertoire which he later returned to with a more mature sound and approach. Both this release and all future volumes contain recordings that Wunderlich made for the company from which SWR grew. They are only available here.

This concert, which has lay forgotten for almost fifty years, is now available on CD. This concert, recorded June 22, 1964, established Albert Mangelsdorff as Germany’s international jazz star. Along with his quintet, he performs works such as Set ‘em Up, Far Out Far East, Okaka, and more.

The latest release in hänssler CLASSIC's Historical SeriesNicolai Gedda was one of the most famous singers of the 20th centuryA valuable compilation of recordings of the great Nicolai Gedda from the SWR archives

St�phane Den�ve, Chief Conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (SWR) leads his orchestra on this recording in interpretations of the music of French composer Arthur Honegger (1892-1955), works that count among Honegger's best known, including his Second and Third (the 'Liturgique') Symphonies, Rugby and Pacific 231, the latter two works brief bursts of considerable energy and impact. Honegger's mingling at the outer edges of the "Les Six" group of composers and his admiration, in this sense contradictory, of German music, including Wagner, gives his works peculiar piquancy.

The German composer Johann Adolf Hasse was born in Bergedorf on 25 March 1699 and died in Venice on 23 December 1783. He chose Italy as his adopted country: there he was nicknamed “the dear Saxon”. He was a pupil of Nicola Porpor and Alessandro Scarlatti, from whom he learned the typical composition style of the Neapolitan School. In 1727 he was appointed Kapellmeister of the Conservatorio degli Incurabili of Venice, the city in which he met his bride, Faustina Bordoni. He was engaged as a composer by the Polish court, for which he composed a great number of operas that were staged in Dresden and in other European countries, particularly Italy. The arias presented here by Elena De Simone belong to the genre of the opera seria and have been chosen among the most representative ones in Hasse’s unpublished production, which is based on texts – most of them by Metastasio and Apostolo Zeno – that were a great source of inspiration for the major European musicians of that time.

Antonio Salieri’s (1750-1825) catalog of instrumental music is not particularly extensive. +The symphonic works known from available recordings include two symphonies, several concerti, serenades and the like. +There is, also, a small body of chamber works, including those present on this disc. +Oboist Paolo Pollastri (b. 1960) has been first oboe of numerous orchestras and performs often as a soloist. +The Canadian Amati Quartet made its international debut in 2005 and indulges in a diverse repertoire.

Angelo Berardi (1636–94) maintained in his day that modern music had reached “greater perfection compared to the past” and that the practice of music was more important than theory; he asserted, moreover, that a good composition should also elevate the soul to virtuous thoughts. In terms of his stylistic profile, Berardi shows great richness of inspiration, so much so that this, his only work assigned to the violin, seems to cover the entirety of the instrument’s abilities and expressive variety.

Three composers, Tedeschi, Galeotti and Mortari, with three completely different musical styles: what they share is the sound of the harp and the rediscovery of its late-Romantic, early-modern Italian repertory, which is mostly still unknown, or very nearly so. Completing with highest honors her diploma and post-grad work at the Conservatory of Parma, prize-winning harpist Eleonora Valpato was until January 2011 was First Harp Philharmonic Orchestra of Santiago de Chile. Since 2009 she has played with Nicholas Vaiente in the unusual harp and marimba ensemble Step Two.

The pieces recorded in this release stem from an all-pervading performance practice that deeply marked out the musical taste of the nineteenth century: that of “transcription”. This practice enabled a widespread dissemination of the most popular opera passages, well beyond the official circuits of the great theatres, and above all into the sphere of holy rites. Arias, cavatinas, cabalettas and symphonies were plentiful everywhere: in many cases they were transcriptions of pieces by well-known composers (it was sufficient to give them a “liturgical” title); more often they were homely elaborations. Almost all these pieces are being performed here for the first time in the modern age; the composers are practically unknown; in their music, famous opera themes are freely mixed with fanciful variations on those themes. The purpose was to reproduce this atmosphere, at once theatrical and sacred, in its entirety, by means of period instruments: a wonderful nineteenth-century organ and a series of precious original brass instruments. In fact Marco Arlotti is sitting the Adeodato Bossi Urbani 1874 organ, and Michele Santi, a specialist in nineteenth-century trumpets, is playing seven different period instruments delivering the best and most characteristic sound to each track.

The second half of the 18th c. and beyond witnessed the widespread popularity in Germanic and Hapsburg regions of a particular type of wind ensemble of varying forces known as Harmonie. The repertoire consisted of divertissements, cassations, serenades and nocturnes, performed for the most part outdoors, as well as “dining music” played at important banquets, and Harmoniemusik heard at parties and ceremonies. Original pieces were performed together with transcriptions of celebrated works, such as this adaptation by Wenzel Sedlak of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia.

Renewed interest in outstanding Italian organ works of the 19th and 20thc. explains the decision to dedicate recordings to the work of Polibio Fumagalli, a prominent and prolific figure in 19th c. Italy and a link between the old and the new concept of organ construction and composition in Italy. An organ teacher at the Conservatory of Milan (among his students was Marco Enrico Bossi), Fumagalli succeeded in moving from the Italian opera style to the neoclassical, symphonic tendencies of the German and French style. Organist Fabio Re plays the monumental Valenza cathedral Serassi (1852) organ.

When Brooklyn-born, NYC native Kenny Werner came on stage for his concert in Stuttgart in 1992, he had just begun experimenting with the possibilities of solo piano programs. Over time he grew into the role of a high-quality craftsman who drew his strength not from the struggle for innovation, but from the elegance and finesse with which he incorporated the pianistic possibilities of the keyboard tradition into his music. In artistic self-understanding he was one step ahead of his era.

Werner’s advanced position was also evident in the repertoire that he brought with him to the studio room of the SDR (Süddeutscher Rundfunk) in Stuttgart on 10 June 1992. Most of the compositions were standards associated with the “Great American Songbook”, which he took as a starting point for letting his own creativity play on familiar melodies and forms. It didn’t interest Werner to have the material fall apart in the postmodern fashion typical of the time. On the contrary, for him it was about the perfection of an interior design of the songs, which allowed him to savor the freedom within the set frame of classical jazz patterns. The evening in Stuttgart thus becomes a link in the canon of Werner’s style.

Born in Brooklyn, NY on November 19, 1951 and then growing up in Oceanside, Long Island, Kenny Werner began playing and performing at a young age, first recording on television at the age of 11. Although he studied classical piano as a child, he enjoyed playing anything he heard on the radio. In high school and his first years of college he attended the Manhattan School of Music as a classical piano major. His natural instinct for improvisation led Kenny to the Berklee School of Music in 1970. There he sought tutelage of the renowned piano teacher Madame Chaloff. Her gracious wisdom and inspiration became a driving force in Kenny’s conception: A music conscious of its spiritual intent and essence. From Boston, Kenny traveled to Brazil with the saxophonist Victor Assis Brasil. There he met Victor’s twin brother, Brazilian pianist Joao Assis Brasil. He studied with Joao, who provided another piece of the puzzle for Kenny’s conception that would lead to Effortless Mastery, his landmark opus on how to allow the master musician from within to manifest. Kenny Werner has been a world-class pianist and composer for over forty years. His prolific output of compositions, recordings and publications continue to impact audiences around the world.

Classical Music

At Puccini's time, transcriptions were very important and widespread, you just need to take a look at the some of the scores published by Casa Ricordi to get an idea: in fact, on the back cover you would be able to read an astonishing list of transcriptions, of fantasias and potpourris, either rewritten for piano solo (or four-hands) or for the most various ensembles, for piano and mandolin, violin, flute, guitar, or for other instruments, either in a solo or in combination with many others. It was the result of a publishing policy that was in full swing at that time and that was addressed to a large public of amateurs, a public keen to learn the repertoires meant to be played by many instruments, like opera scores. These pieces were played at home, in front of a very small and selected audience, the amateurs often wanted to perform operas that they had attended to. But that is not all, these performances were also able to popularize compositions that would have be left unknown otherwise. In the XIX century, the transcriptions for piano, especially for piano four hands, were an important vehicle for the diffusion of musical knowledge. Purposely thought for this formation, in this album the piano duo by the spouses Fabrizio Datteri and Nadia Lencioni is performing compositions inspired by the famous works and the immortal melodies of Giacomo Puccini.

A complete edition of all Gaspare Spontini’s vocal chamber-music pieces currently known is presented here for the first time. These pieces were composed for all sorts of purposes and performed in the circles of private drawing rooms. This recording, which is the outcome of an extensive, meticulous work on the sources, includes the collections, the independent tunes and, in the appendixes, the modified or translated pieces, the drafts and sketches, and the original contemporary arrangements.

The Codex of Guardiagrele includes several compositions by artists (from Abruzzo and other regions) that worked in Guardiagrele at the Santa Maria Maggiore church. These compositions expose the then-richness of polyphonic music in this region. The Codex includes several early 15th c. manuscripts of liturgic missals conserved until 1979 in Guardiagrele. Directing the De Bon Parole ensemble in this world premiere recording is Marco Giacintucci, who also realized the reconstructions.