Recorded in: Orchestra Hall, Chicago 27, 28 November 1989 Producer(s) Brian Couzens Sound Engineer(s) Ralph Couzens Mitchell Heller (assistant)

Karl L. King wrote more than one hundred and fifty marches over his lifetime, many of which live on and are frequently performed to this day. His name exists among a pantheon of American march composers, including John Philip Sousa, Henry Fillmore and others. King’s work is unique in its combination of the quick precision of circus marches, with the regality of a military parade. Now, the highlights of Karl King’s work are available on one CD.

Karl King’s Greatest Hits includes the very best marches from the composer’s repertoire, including Barnum and Bailey’s Favorite, The Big Cage and The Melody Shop, all performed by the bands of The United States Military. This album is one of the few collections of Karl King’s marches, and may rank the best among them.

“[Ehnes] is the protagonist in this all-Berlioz programme, but the disc is equally distinguished by the lucid, exhilarating, smoothly contoured playing of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under that experienced Berliozian Sir Andrew Davis.” - The Daily Telegraph (UK)

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The nine-time Juno-winning Canadian James Ehnes is centre stage in a new recording of orchestral works by Berlioz, with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew Davis. This recording was made following an extraordinary concert in November 2014 with the same forces, in which James Ehnes played two instruments made by Stradivarius, respectively a viola in the solo part of Harold en Italie – ‘symphony with a principal viola part’, in Berlioz’s words – and a violin in the solo of Rêverie et Caprice, both of which works feature here.

Berlioz was never ashamed to recycle his music from one work to another, especially when the earlier work had been rejected by the public or by the composer himself. In 1834, Paganini asked Berlioz for a work in which he could display his prowess on a fine Stradivarius viola. Berlioz then composed the four-movement symphony Harold en Italie, incorporating passages from the Rob-Roy overture which he had recently rejected.

Similarly, Rêverie et Caprice was the form eventually given to an aria from the opera Benvenuto Cellini, unceremoniously booed in Paris in 1838. Berlioz transformed the aria into a piece with solo violin three years later. It is the only piece Berlioz ever wrote for solo violin. - Chandos

Digital CD 16Bit 44.1Khz and originally recorded in: 24Bit 96Khz.

John Burge is a JUNO Award-winning composer and a passionate advocate for Canadian music who has a strong affinity with writing for string instruments. All of the works in this recording were commissioned and premiered by the Thirteen Strings Chamber Orchestra. Opening with the joyous and celebratory Sinfonia Antiqua, the mood shifts to an evocative and impressionistic atmosphere in Forgotten Dreams, while One Sail captures the compelling power of poetic imagery. The Upper Canada Fiddle Suite blends tradition and nostalgia with entirely original inventiveness, and concludes an album that perfectly represents Burge’s eloquent and deeply expressive compositional style.

:"Crepuscolo" is the final song in Ottorino Respighi’s song cycle Deità silvane (‘woodland deities’), but as an album title it also stands for the twilight during the interwar years of everything that Respighi represented, as various trends such as atonality, spiky neoclassicism, and Italian futurism flourished. In reaction to these developments, Respighi in 1932 famously signed a manifesto calling for music with a ‘human content’ – in other words, a continuation of Romanticism. His songs certainly live up to this: as Elsa Respighi, the composer’s wife, once said, it was to his songs that he ‘entrusts his heart’s hidden secrets, when he lets his soul sing freely.’ From L’ultima ebbrezza, composed when Respighi was only 17 years old, to the Four Scottish Songs from 1924, the songs recorded here attest to the variety of his musical interests, influences and styles, and are at turns lyrically operatic, expressionist, impressionist or symbolist. Respighi’s love of the Renaissance is also manifest in the Cinque canti all’antica, settings of poets including Boccaccio.

Timothy Fallon and Ammiel Bushakevitz have previously released a Liszt recital described as ‘superb’ in Gramophone. They have now devised a varied program which takes in three complete groups as well as a selection of individual songs, including Respighi’s most popular songs (Nebbie, Stornellatrice) as well as less well known ones.

REVIEWS:

With every new exposure to Respighi’s vocal music – whether opera or song – I find that his much better-known orchestral works fade in significance, especially with this new cross section of the composer’s songs...this newcomer makes a great case for a single-disc collection thanks to a smart sense of musical variety in the sequencing plus the passionate, elegant performances by lyric tenor Timothy Fallon and his longtime collaborator, pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz.

Fallon is no newcomer...but maintains a youthful sensibility that takes the poems at face value, never looking outside of them, aided by a warm, Italianate tone that lends itself to the musical simplicity of the Scottish folk songs as well as the operatic histrionics of ‘Stornellatrice’ (‘Balladeer’)...Bushakevitz’s sonority and sense of comprehension suggest the lilac-scented, silk-upholstered parlours seen in Luchino Visconti movies, but make such a good case for the more distilled piano versions that, at least for the moment, you wouldn’t want to hear the music any other way.

-- Gramophone

GRAMMY® Award-winning composer Michael Daugherty creates colorful musical portraits in this recording, featuring larger-than-life personalities drawn from 20th-century American culture. Tales of Hemingway is a dramatic cello concerto, evoking the turbulent life, adventures and literature of author Ernest Hemingway. American Gothic is a dynamic concerto for orchestra, reflecting on the creative world of Iowa artist Grant Wood. Once Upon a Castle is a virtuosic sinfonia concertante for organ and orchestra, inspired by the rich history of the Hearst Castle, built lhigh upon the California Pacific coast by billionaire Randolph Hearst, the subject of Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane. Under the baton of Music Director Giancarlo Guerrero, the GRAMMY® Award-winning Nashville Symphony is joined by Zuill bailey, one of the leading cellists of his generation, and GRAMMY® Award-winning organist Paul Jacobs.

The Dover Quartet, “the young American string quartet of the moment” (The New Yorker) unveils the second installment in its critically acclaimed Beethoven quartet cycle on Cedille Records. The Dover’s three-album set of Beethoven’s “Middle Quartets” includes the three Op. 59 “Razumovsky” Quartets, infused with Russian folk tunes; the graceful “Harp,” Op. 74, named for its plucked string figures; and the intense Op. 95 “Serioso,” a forward-looking experiment that Beethoven originally intended “for a small circle of connoisseurs.” The Dover Quartet’s first Beethoven release, a traversal of the Op. 18 quartets, has garnered international praise. England’s The Strad said the ensemble exhibits “a beguiling freshness and spontaneity that creates the impression of these relatively early masterworks arriving hot off the press.” Toronto’s The Whole Note cited “performances of conviction and depth. This promises to be an outstanding set.” Utah-based CD Hotlist remarked, “The Dovers stand out from the pack by playing with utterly perfect intonation, a near-telepathic sense of ensemble, and a lovely balance of passion and clarity.” New York’s WQXR proclaimed, “It’s hard to imagine a group better suited to recording these works than the Dover Quartet.” In concert, the quartet has presented three complete Beethoven cycles, including the University at Buffalo’s famous “Slee Cycle” — which has offered annual Beethoven quartet cycles since 1955 and has featured the likes of the Budapest, Guarneri, and Cleveland Quartets. The Dover Quartet serves as the inaugural Penelope P. Watkins Ensemble in Residence at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music and holds residencies with the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, among other prestigious posts.

The music of Samuel Adler – born in Mannheim in 1928 but long since one of the leading figures of American music – has its roots in the Neo-Classical clarity of composers like Copland and Hindemith, who were among his teachers. The works on this album arose from a range of impulses: a Neo-Baroque concerto grosso and a tribute to Bach encase a series of tributes to lost individuals and traditions; and two jeux d’esprit – Ives’ tongue-in-cheek Variations on America and Holst’s ‘Jupiter’ from The Planets – both bring jollity in Adler’s idiomatic arrangements for string orchestra.

REVIEW:

Adler’s arrangements not only provide string orchestras the opportunity to perform these works, they offer considerable excitement and impact in their own right. The performances by the New York Classical Players and conductor Dongmin Kim are excellent throughout. The playing is incisive, tonally rich, and phrased with great care. The featured soloists are first-rate as well. Jürgen Thym’s excellent liner notes, including commentary from the composer, are brimming with information offered with erudition, clarity, and enthusiasm. Samuel Adler: Music for Chamber Orchestra is a marvelous tribute to an American musical treasure who has long distinguished himself as a composer, teacher, and writer. Recommended.

-- Fanfare

A MusicWeb International Recording of the Month for July 2022!

All in all Maria Bach left more than 400 works to posterity. Most (about 80%) are Lieder and choral works, followed by smaller-scale piano works; not unlike Edvard Grieg or Hugo Wolff, she was an expert in that field, though she did also compose three ballets, made up of small, orchestral piano pieces. Her most ambitious works then, are the few excursions she made into the realms of chamber music (solo cello sonata, cello sonata, piano quartet and quintet, string quintet and two string quartets), in which she ventured a confrontation with the traditions of the grand, established genres. On the present release, Oliver Triendl, Marina Grauman, Nina Karmon, Öykü Canpolat, and Alexander Hülshoff showcase Maria Bach’s chamber works, including the Piano Quintet “Wolga-Quintet”, the Cello Sonata, and the Suite for Cello Solo.

Review

[Maria Bach's] music is infused with French and Russian elements and one can quite hear why it was so appealing to Roger-Ducasse who ensured that her 31-minute Piano Quintet was performed at the Paris Conservatoire when she visited Paris in 1930-31. Like all good music it’s clearly susceptible to strongly divergent interpretive stances. The Hänssler team is anchored by Oliver Treindl, who in my experience is probably one of the most hard-working and often recorded of players. He’s also an athletic figure who ensures forward-moving tempi.

The eminent cellist Paul Grümmer was a family friend and Bach was fortunate he liked her music and played the Cello Sonata frequently. It’s modestly structured – three movements and 19 minutes in this reading by Alexander Hülshoff and Treindl – and has a ripe Brahmsian rhapsodic feel, with a warmly curvaceous lyricism in the Romanze second movement. As with the Piano Quintet the finale is full of dextrous animation.

The final work in the disc is the Suite for cello, a crisp four-movement affair that looks back to Popper, as the notes indicate, rather than [J.S.] Bach. After a sonorous, chordal Praeludium come the registral leaps of an etude-like Scherzo, an expressive Air and then another of her favoured variations for a finale – including a Tango-like one – which call for supple bowing. It’s a deft work, all the more so in not honouring [J.S.] Bach’s legacy in any obvious fashion.

In terms of amplitude and density of sound this disc is an impressive one. The players sound firmly engaged in what must have been unfamiliar repertoire. They’ve been backed up by some classy notes. For overt expression, choose this[.]

Jonathan Woolf 

Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937) and Victor Hugo (1802-1855) were towering figures in their respective disciplines, both in France, and in the world, during their lifetimes. These songs by Widor, to Hugo texts, cover a variety of emotions, from sweet introspection to quiet desperation. Rebecca Hays is perfect for these works. She and pianist Jeffrey Peterson make the most of these marvelous songs.

Rebecca Wascoe Hays' lush, full-bodied soprano and commanding stage presence have brought her diverse critical acclaim. She brings an innate dramatic intensity and musical intelligence to all of her repertoire. In past seasons season, she has sung the title role in Tosca with Louisiana Opera, been heard as the Wife in the world-premiere performance of The Breath of Life at Texas Tech University and been featured as the soprano soloist in Verdi's Requiem with the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra.  Additional concerts have included recitals/masterclasses at Brigham Young University, Central Oklahoma University and The University of Texas at Arlington. She was heard as the soprano soloist in the Brahms's German Requiem in May 2017 at Alice Tully Hall in New York City's Carnegie Hall.

REVIEW:

Soprano Rebecca Hays sings the Widor/Hugo songs with a rich and attractive lyric soprano, even if she is occasionally pressed by Widor’s excursions into the upper register. She sings with admirable commitment, and sensitivity to the ebb and flow of the narrative. Jeffrey Peterson is an attentive collaborator, one who shines on the rare occasions when Widor injects some variety into his keyboard writing. The liner notes include Peterson’s essay and his English translations of the Hugo verses (the original French texts are not provided). Widor’s songs would benefit greatly from performances and recordings by artists steeped in the world and tradition of French song (Régine Crespin would have been marvelous in these, I think). But Rebecca Hays and Jeffrey Peterson make a strong enough case for the repertoire.

-- Fanfare (Ken Meltzer)

Fourteen years ago, Till Brönner - one of Germany's leading trumpet soloists - won hearts with an album of favorite holiday melodies adapted for his instrument. In 2021, he returns with a new look at the music of the Christmas season in intimate arrangements for trumpet, bass, and drums.

Experience the transcendent glory of Messiah in Sir Andrew Davis’s majestic, must-hear edition of Handel’s beloved classic. Recorded live on SACD, this unique version makes use of all the colours available from the modern symphony orchestra to underline the mood and meaning of the individual movements. Without detracting from the innate power of the original, the conductor’s score calls for moments of drama, pathos, and even, sometimes, whimsicality. It is supported by substantial brass and woodwind forces, and several percussion instruments (including marimba!).

REVIEW:

The performance is lightly cut, mainly toward the ends of Parts II and III, and both da capo arias (‘He was despised’ and ‘The trumpet shall sound’) have only the A section. Most of the ornamentation, including simple appoggiaturas, is omitted, as well as most occasions for what I call justified rhythms, where, say, upbeat eighth notes are taken as sixteenths to match other parts. Where choices are available, the common ones prevail, as in the 4/4 ‘Rejoice’ and the duet version of ‘He shall feed his flock’.

Tempos are crisp and modern, and the performers are all very good. The four soloists (with mezzo, not countertenor) are first rate; and the choir, which must number around 150, sings with the agility of much smaller groups. This is a “big” Messiah with none of the problems we normally associate with such endeavors. I guess we could call it “historically informed” because tempos are brisk and the spirit is not at all romantic. It also struck me as a gentle repudiation of Musicological Correctness—and that is no doubt a good thing. I dare say that if you had a contest lining up all the approaches to Messiah and had a review panel consisting of people with no musicological prejudices, this would be the winner.

-- American Record Guide

With orchestral works at the core of his output, the supreme melodic gift that distinguishes the music of Eric Coates earned him a reputation as the ‘uncrowned king of light music’. It was the London Suite that made Coates a household name, with the Cockney exuberance of its third movement, Knightsbridge, capturing the nation’s imagination as a BBC theme tune, as did the rousing march Calling All Workers. Cinderella and The Selfish Giant were inspired by his son’s bedtime stories, the latter absorbing the jazzy dance rhythms of the day. The Dambusters March was one of Coates’ last pieces, and remains one of the most iconic movie themes ever written.

Symphonic thinking dominated Mieczysław Weinberg’s final decade, and these chamber symphonies are part of an interrelated sequence that reworks and cites earlier pieces. The Second Chamber Symphony draws on a string quartet from 1944, reflecting the sombre and fatalistic tone of the period. The Fourth Chamber Symphony was Weinberg’s last completed work, and uses a haunting chorale melody that he once referred to as a constant presence throughout his creativity. Weinberg’s First and Third Chamber Symphonies(8.574063) ‘blossom in vividly colorful performances’ (Pizzicato).

Boris Begelman, the highly acclaimed leader of Concerto Italiano, frequently takes on the role of soloist in the many concerts that Rinaldo Alessandrini’s celebrated orchestra devotes to the music of Vivaldi and his contemporaries. High time then for Begelman to take centre stage in one of the Vivaldi Edition’s solo violin recordings. This ninth concerto volume sees the welcome return of Rinaldo Alessandrini’s ensemble, which already features in thirteen albums of the Vivaldi collection. In this purely instrumental repertoire they excel as much as they do in vocal music, deploying generously sweeping melodic lines, inspired dynamics, and a musical language already mastered to perfection yet always interpreted anew.