Billboard chart-topping violinist Rachel Barton Pine releases her 36th album and fourth for AVIE with her first recordings of two repertory staples, violin concertos by Edward Elgar and Max Bruch. The two works – Elgar’s only concerto for violin and Bruch’s first – straddle the turn of the 20th century but have in common a Romantic hue which Rachel probes with her rich, soulful tone.

The album is dedicated to “the memory of a musical hero and generous friend, Sir Neville Marriner,” who was to have reunited with Rachel on this album. She was fortunate to work with him on the scores, with Sir Neville vividly relating accounts of his teacher Billy Reed, former leader of the London Symphony Orchestra, who collaborated with Elgar on the creation of his violin concerto. Grammy Award-winning conductor Andrew Litton brings his own Romantic pedigree to the recording, as does the BBC Symphony Orchestra and celebrated producer Andrew Keener who himself has overseen award winning versions of the Elgar and Bruch concertos.

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REVIEW:

Pine’s interpretation of the Elgar is as emotionally satisfying as it is dazzling. The slow movement is mysteriously veiled and luminous, providing a palpable sense of the music’s darker undercurrents. She is most impressive, perhaps, in the finale, where her easy virtuosity sends sparks flying, though never at the expense of the long line.

Her performance of the Bruch is wholly persuasive in its mittel-European heartiness. The outer movements abound with snap and spice, and the Adagio has a warm solemnity that, one might argue, offers a foretaste of Elgarian nobilmente. The recorded sound is glorious, with a near-ideal balance between soloist and orchestra.

– Gramophone

From the moment Karen Gomyo first heard Astor Piazzolla on album, at the age of fourteen, she was spellbound: ‘I had never heard such a combination of sensuality, fierceness, playfulness, sadness and nostalgia.’ As a violinist she found the role of the violin in Piazzolla’s music especially inspiring, and soon started playing it herself – first in various group combinations, and eventually together with Piazzolla’s longtime pianist Pablo Ziegler and his Tango Quartet. For the present disc she has chosen to record strings-only versions of three works originally for tango quintet (Seasons), guitar and flute (Histoire), and solo flute (Études). Piazzolla’s Cuatro Estaciones were initially conceived neither as a suite nor as a tribute to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Verano porteño (Summer) was composed first, as part of the incidental music for a play, with the other three following several years later. If the Seasons provide a soundtrack to the year as it unfolds in Buenos Aires, Histoire du Tango describes the development of the tango itself in four chapters – from the brothels around year 1900 to the concert halls where Piazzolla himself performed his tango nuevo. These two works frame three of Piazzolla’s Tango Études, which Karen Gomyo performs solo, while otherwise being partnered by the strings of the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire (Seasons) and the guitarist Stephanie Jones (Histoire).

On this release, the Trondheim Sinfonietta, founded in 1998, has gathered four works from the three decades encompassing the ensemble’s existence. All four seem to be haunted by an even deeper past: Bent Sørensen’s Minnelieder is the composer’s third version of a work originally sparked-off by a book about the 14th century, while Toshio Hosokawa’s Drawing, from a decade later, was inspired by the very start of life. Kristin Norderval’s Chapel Meditation began its existence as an improvisation, but looks back to music from centuries earlier, while the most recent work, Mantra by Ellen Lindquist, also mines a venerable musical tradition, that of the age-old Indonesian gamelan orchestra that for over 100 years has had an influence on Western composers such as Debussy, Britten, Steve Reich et al. Set for varying forces and numbers of performers, the four works together form a fascinating picture of the kaleidoscopic possibilities open to composers around the turn of the millennium.

The c/o chamber orchestra is a collective of thirty young musicians from a dozen different countries. Playing without a conductor, the orchestra is dedicated to that particular collaborative process which is the essence of chamber music. For their first album, the members have chosen to highlight a genre more difficult to pin-point than one might think. Its very name, divertimento, implies that it is simply a diversion, light music for entertainment – but many of the best-known examples of the form transcend that definition. And as many composers have learned, even light-hearted music should be taken seriously: humor requires a master’s touch. The four works recorded here offer different perspectives on the genre, starting with Ibert’s seven-movement suite in which the composer constantly plays with the listener’s expectations. Some forty years before Ibert, his compatriot Émile Bernard composed a very different Divertissement. It is scored for double wind quintet, reminiscent of Mozart’s divertimenti and serenades for winds. But even though the music is melodious and carefree, the debt owed by Bernard to the German romantic composers is never far from the surface. A very special case is Bartók’s Divertimento for strings, composed just before the outbreak of World War II. The closing work on the album reunites the winds and strings of the c/o orchestra in a work written especially for this project by the American composer Michael Ippolito, who in his Divertimento pays full tribute to the contrast-rich nature of the genre.

Very little is known about the origin of J. S. Bach’s seven Toccatas (BWV?910–916) or of their use. They are believed to have been written before 1717 or the end of Bach’s Weimar period – but it is quite possible that at least some of them were drafted before he arrived there in 1707, at the age of 22. The Toccatas are usually performed on harpsichord or piano – but even though they are ‘manualiter’ (intended to be played by the hands only) and do not call for pedal parts, they are also occasionally heard on the organ. In terms of style they are examples of the so-called stylus phantasticus – ‘the most free and unfettered method of composition’ – and belong to the North German organ tradition of the late 17th century. Each piece consists of several distinct and contrasting sections, interweaving strict counterpoint and fugal passages with freely rhapsodic material, and as such the toccatas differ from the two-movement prelude-and-fugue format which Bach later would put his own, indelible stamp on. With this disc, Masaaki Suzuki takes on some of the earliest of Bach’s extant harpsichord compositions, after having released acclaimed recordings of a wide range of later works, from the two-part Inventions to the two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier. However, he also brings his experience in performing the music of Bach’s North German predecessors to bear, for instance Buxtehude (BIS-1809) and Nicolaus Bruhns.

REVIEW:

Since completing his Bach cantata cycle, conductor and keyboardist Masaaki Suzuki has turned to Bach's keyboard music. The results have been consistently satisfying, as one would expect from this great contemporary Bach interpreter, but even Suzuki fans might have wondered what he would do with these six rarely played toccatas. There are more purely dramatic readings of these works, mostly played on piano, but Suzuki is attuned to this music, and his performances are not in the least colorless. Bach's intense Adagios, like that of the Toccata in E minor, BWV 914, and the irregular structures of the music have snap and surprise. Suzuki's 1982 harpsichord, based on an enlarged Ruckers instrument, is an excellent choice for the music, and anyone whose Bach collection is missing these remarkable works can do well with this choice.

-- ALlMusic.com (James Manheim)

This release grew out of the fascination of Robert von Bahr, founder and managing director of BIS Records, for the television series House of Cards. It wasn’t only – or even primarily – the script or the acting that grabbed him, however, but just as much the music. Said and done – Jeff Beal, the composer of the House of Cards soundtrack, was contacted and it was soon decided that he should compose a Flute Concerto for the virtuosic Sharon Bezaly. To complement the concerto a selection of music from the series was agreed upon, but with five seasons worth of installments to choose from, this quickly grew into a large-scale House of Cards Symphony which at 83 minutes takes up an album all on its own. So now the decision was made to record and present a lavish release, with three further works: Six Sixteen for guitar and orchestra (performed by Grammy winner Jason Vieaux), Canticle for strings and a brand new House of Cards Fantasy for flute and orchestra. The Norrköping Symphony Orchestra has received international acclaim for its recordings of the hyper-intense music of modernist Allan Pettersson, but here, under the direction of the composer himself, it has taken to the new idiom and welcomes the additional instruments necessary to bring out that House of Cards feeling: electric guitar and bass guitar, drum kit, piano and flugelhorn.

Seventy years ago, on the 29th July 1951, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 at a concert marking the reopening of the Bayreuth Festival after seven years of silence following the Second World War. It was a momentous occasion, and the concert was broadcast by Bavarian Radio and transmitted across the world, for instance by Swedish Radio. Using the analogue mono tape as digitized by Swedish Radio, the present disc reproduces the broadcast as it would have been heard by listeners in Sweden: we have chosen to not change anything, not to ‘brush up’ the sound, not to clean and shorten the pauses or omit audience noises within the music, but to keep the original as it was. In this way we hope to recreate the feeling of actually sitting in front of an old radio in 1951, listening to this concert – a true historical document.

REVIEW:

Nothing else in the realms of recorded music is quite like it and I would urge you to share the experience...I’m not claiming that this performance will suit every mood or even every taste, but if and when it does hit target it will leave you changed for ever.

-- Gramophone (Editor's Choice, March 2022)

At the age of 20, Henry Purcell entered his 14 Fantasias and two In Nomines into an autograph bearing the title ‘The Works of Hen; Purcell, A.D. 1680’. Despite his youth Purcell was already making his mark as a composer, writing music for the London theatres and holding posts at Westminster Abbey and at court. But unlike his works for the theatre and the church, which were intended for specific occasions, very little is known about the impulse behind fantasias. Composed for between three and seven parts they are a consciously anachronistic distillation of an old style at a time when the reigning taste was for more modern sounds – for dance-based music with lively rhythms and hummable tunes. It isn’t even clear what kind of ensemble they were intended for: given the association with older music, one might assume that Purcell had viols in mind, but the distribution of the parts is not always in keeping with the standard sizes of the viol consort – nor for that matter those of the violin consort.

Were the fantasias in fact ever performed? None of these questions has a satisfactory answer, and in this respect the Purcell Fantasias resemble Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, because of their quality and inventiveness but also owing to the mysteries that surround them. The collection is here performed by Chelys Consort of Viols, following up on three previous and acclaimed releases on BIS featuring the music of Michael East, John Dowland, and Christopher Simpson.

REVIEW:

The Chelys readings, clean and rather circumspect, merit strong consideration for those interested in these youthful and intellectual Purcell works. Nicely recorded by BIS at Girton College Chapel, Cambridge, they don't overdo the mystery: the sound is clean and the polyphony clear. The pungent dissonances scattered through these works, which were a feature of the tradition (not just of Purcell's pieces), emerge with the proper emphasis, but the Consort does not lean into them unnecessarily.

-- AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

The Kalevala is a compilation of mostly original folk poetry, arranged into fifty extensive runos (‘poems’) by the Finnish physician and folklorist Elias Lönnrot. Beginning with the creation of the world, it develops into a series of separate episodes which nevertheless form a rich whole, introducing epic characters such as Väinämöinen, Lemminkäinen and Kullervo. The collection first appeared in 1835, with a final, extended version being published in 1849, and was soon hailed as Finland’s ‘national epos’ – a sensitive matter given that the country had been subjected to Russian rule since 1809. It came to play a major part in Finland’s national awakening and had a massive influence on Finnish art in the late 19th century, but its role in the national consciousness remains important even today. The present album, from the Lahti Symphony Orchestra and Dima Slobodeniouk, brings together Kalevala-related works spanning the period between 1897 and 1943. No such collection could overlook Sibelius, who composed several works inspired by the epos. Included here is a rarity – the first recording of the 1897 version of Lemminkäinen in Tuonela, from the Lemminkäinen Suite. Finnish composers from later generations all had to find a way out from under Sibelius’s shadow – especially so when composing works based on the Kalevala. The portraits of Kullervo which bookend the disc, by Leevi Madetoja and Tauno Pylkkänen, are both compact works in contrast to Sibelius’s large-scale ‘choral symphony’ on the same theme, and when Uuno Klami used bold and primitive colors in his five-movement Kalevala Suite, he was looking towards Stravinsky rather than his countryman.

Between 1791 and 1804, Joseph Haydn arranged some 400 traditional songs for publishers in Scotland and England. Almost all of the songs were Scottish and the most common setting was for voice and piano trio. There have been numerous recordings and performances of the arrangements by these forces, but on this disc The Poker Club Band offer their listeners something quite different. Taking its name from one of the Edinburgh clubs at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment, the ensemble consists of four early music specialists and a traditional singer. They have retained Haydn’s violin and cello, but the keyboard part has been adapted for harp and guitar following indications that the harp was commonly used for contemporary performances of Scottish traditional repertoire. The Gaelic singer James Graham, with his idiomatic Scottish timbre, and the period instruments – of which Masako Art’s single-action pedal harp from 1809 is known to have been in Scotland around the time – brings us that much closer to what a performance in an Edinburgh salon might have sounded like around 1800. The songs themselves range from the cautionary tale of a girl who married for love and now is doomed to a life of hard and dirty work on her husband’s farm (The Mucking of Geordie’s Byer) to love songs such as Oran Gaoil, with a text by Robert Burns. Providing variety, some instrumental 18th century arrangements of Haydn originals are included while the album ends with the well-known atmospheric Lament by the Scottish fiddler Niel Gow.

Along with Vivaldi’s ‘Seasons’ or Beethoven’s ‘Fifth’, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos belong to those works that are so well-known that we risk taking them for granted. In order to (re-)discover the special qualities that can inspire us today, in 2001 Thomas Dausgaard and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra decided to contact six contemporary composer, asking each of them to compose a companion piece to one of the concertos. Seventeen years later, in 2018, it was time to present the result, with a performance at the BBC Proms of all the works – new and old. Recorded over a period of 18 months leading up to this event, the present boxed set provides a unique opportunity to experience six very different musical minds and idioms entering into conversation with Bach: Mark-Anthony Turnage, Steven Mackey, Anders Hillborg, Olga Neuwirth, Uri Caine and Brett Dean. Bach’s concertos are remarkable in that they are all scored for different instrumental combinations, and part of the brief to the group of composers was to reflect this. In her Aello, Olga Neuwirth has for instance used several ‘instruments’ to stand in for Bach’s harpsichord, including a synthesizer, a milk frother and a typewriter. Brett Dean, on the other hand, has stayed very close to Bach’s instrumentation, but has chosen to write his work as a preparation for Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 – an Approach to Bach’s extremely tight canonic writing. In performing the twelve works the orchestra and Dausgaard are joined by leading soloists including Clare Chase, Mahan Esfahani, Håkan Hardenberger, Pekka Kuusisto and Tabea Zimmermann.

Having begun their collaboration in 1997, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and its conductor laureate Thomas Dausgaard have developed an unusually tight partnership. Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in their cycles of the symphonies of Schumann, Schubert and, most recently, Brahms – performances which have been characterized by reviewers as variously ‘fresh’, ‘vivid’, ‘transparent’ and ‘invigorating’. Of Mendelssohn the team has previously recorded the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a release described as ‘capturing Mendelssohn’s inimitable spirit’ on the website Crescendo. The same disc included The Hebrides, and now the SCO and Dausgaard return to Scotland, with Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony. This was begun in 1829, after a stay in London during which the composer conducted his Symphony No. 1, also included on this disc. Mendelssohn’s imagination was often fired by impressions from nature, and Scotland was the Romantic landscape par excellence, celebrated for its rugged Highland scenery and melancholy tunes. ‘I think that today I found the beginning of my ‘Scottish’ Symphony’, he wrote to his parents after a visit to the ruined chapel at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. It took more than a decade for him to complete the symphony – but ever since its first performance, in 1842, it has been a staple of the symphonic repertoire.

REVIEW:

With the 38-member Swedish Chamber Orchestra, conductor Thomas Dausgaard here offers an ensemble probably quite similar in size to that which played Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 56. The size fits Dausgaard well, for his readings are crisp and restrained, without a lot of vibrato (as is his trademark with this group) or big emotional climaxes. Dausgaard's quick, high-tension approach works well here. BIS contributes fine engineering from the Örebro Concert House in this fresh Mendelssohn release.

-- AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

After appearing on a quartet of very different BIS releases, ranging from early baroque arias to orchestral songs by Alban Berg and Mahler’s ‘Resurrection Symphony’, the British soprano Ruby Hughes has devised a song recital, together with her regular Lieder partner Joseph Middleton. The process began in 2018 when the two gave the world première of Helen Grime’s Bright Travellers, a set of five poems charting the interior and exterior worlds of pregnancy and motherhood. Ruby Hughes soon set about planning a programme which would converge with Grime’s music and the themes of new life and of love in all its aspects. The recital is bookended by two song cycles by Gustav Mahler which explore love, grief, loss and reconciliation through quite different lenses. In the opening cycle we experience Mahler as solitary wayfarer and hear of unrequited love. In Kindertotenlieder, the second cycle, the poet Friedrich Rückert pours out his pain as a grieving father in songs about the beauty and innocence of children. Completing the programme is Charles Ives – described by Ruby Hughes as Mahler’s ‘musical kindred spirit’ – with a selection of love songs, prayers and lullabies.

:"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

The collaboration between composer Philippe Leroux and the husband-and-wife team of Claude and Odile Delangle began in the early 1990s and has grown ever closer over the years. In October 2019 the three met up again for a few intense days, in order to record Noûs, a programme of works for soprano saxophone and for solo piano. The album is bookended by two duos for the instruments – the opening SPP a reworking by the composer of an earlier score, and the closing Noûs that Leroux wrote for the Delangles only a few months before the recording. In both of these – albeit in different ways – the composer explores a couple of his favorite principles, namely those of continuity and transformation. Between them we hear works from the past decade, beginning with AMA for solo piano, from 2009. The other two piano works, Répéter… Opposer and Dense… Englouti are both tributes to Claude Debussy, a composer who occupies an important place in the musical universe of Philippe Leroux. At the centre of the disc, finally, is the highly virtuosic Conca Reatina for soprano saxophone. Loosely inspired by the contours of the mountains surrounding the Rieti Valley (Conca reatina), the piece is a dizzying sonic Möbius strip which keeps returning the listener to his point of departure.

After two stylistically diverse anthologies – In Motion and Renewal – the United Strings of Europe and their director Julian Azkoul have chosen to devote their latest project to a single composer: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. They open with the composer’s Serenade, a tribute to Mozart’s divertimentos, but infused with Tchaikovsky’s characteristic pathos and melancholy. It is one of his most popular works, with the especially beloved Waltz as its second movement, and a finale featuring Russian folk songs. The other works included on this recording are arrangements tailor-made for the ensemble by Julian Azkoul. Andante cantabile, the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s First String Quartet, is a piece of great emotional power, based on an old folk song which Tchaikovsky reportedly heard in the Ukrainian town of Kamenka. Composed following a stay in Florence, the Sextet is brooding in temperament and despite its title arguably more Russian than Italian in character. Like the Serenade, it makes use of classical forms and devices but also includes passages evoking traditional Russian music. After completing the work, Tchaikovsky – who was otherwise his own harshest critic – wrote: ‘it’s frightening to see how pleased I am with myself’. The album closes with At Bedtime, an early composition for mixed choir with a meditative quality reminiscent of Eastern Orthodox chant that lends itself well to the string orchestra textures.

Towards the end of the 19th century, ´several composers were taking a new interest in folk music. Folk tunes, or imitations of them, had previously mainly been used in order to provide ‘local colour’ or as a way of catering to nationalist sentiments, but it was now seen as a means to revitalize art music itself, opening up for new possibilities in terms of rhythm and harmony as well as melody. At the forefront of this development was Béla Bartók, who also considered the use of folk elements as a tool to transcend boundaries – to achieve a ‘brotherhood of peoples’. For his new recital disc, Can Çakmur has devised a program which juxtaposes four composers’ different responses to folk music. Bartók’s Piano Sonata is followed by Passacaglia, Intermezzo e Fuga with which Dimitri Mitropoulos made a clean break with earlier works in a more nationalistic vein. Next comes Çakmur’s compatriot, the Turkish composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun, who in 1936 accompanied Bartók on a field trip in Turkey collecting music. His Piano Sonata was composed some fifty years later, however, and refers to folk music primarily on a theoretical level. Closing the disc is George Enescu’s Piano Sonata No.?3 in D major, which Çakmur in his own liner notes describes as ‘radiating a natural affinity for the village, without sacrificing the compositional value of the work.’

All World Premiere Recordings

Grammy Award-winning Third Coast Percussion, whose artistry blends “creative fearlessness with reverent precision” (BBC Music Magazine), offers an album of enterprising collaborations and world-premiere recordings of works written or arranged expressly for the Chicago-based percussion quartet, representing four different approaches to composing concert music.

Danny Elfman’s Percussion Quartet, structured like a four-movement symphony, shares distinctive traits heard in his Grammy-winning, Oscar-nominated films scores, as well as hints of African balofon, Indonesian gamelan, and Shostakovich. Great admirers of composer Philip Glass, Third Coast arranged Glass’s solo piano Metamorphosis No. 1 for marimba, vibraphone, glockenspiel, and melodica. Rubix emerged from Third Coast Percussion’s improvisational collaboration with virtuosic, cutting-edge flute duo Flutronix, who also perform on the recording. Critically acclaimed electronic musician and composer Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) composed her seven-movement Perspective as electronic tracks, without music notation. Third Coast transformed this work of “beautiful complexity” into a version they could perform live as a quartet.

REVIEW:

Unlike a lot of academic music for percussion ensembles, Danny Elfman makes his quartet sing sweetly, leaning heavily on the warm sounds of the marimba interlocking with tinkling tubular chimes and pitched metal pipes.

The flute duo Flutronix's piece, Rubix, features punchy flutes dancing over a chilled out vibraphone, and foggy episodes where marimba, whirly tube and bowed flexatone provide an evocative backdrop of light and shadow.

Footwork is the hyper-beat music born in Chicago's underground dance competitions and house parties in the late 1990s. On Third Coast Percussion's album, the style undergoes a mesmerizing transformation in a seven-movement suite called Perspective, by Jerrilynn Patton, who goes by Jlin.

Third Coast Percussion, with albums like Perspectives, continues to push percussion in new directions, blurring musical boundaries and beguiling new listeners.

-- NPR. org (Tom Huizenga)

Engage, Exchange, Connect. That is what this young American piano trio is all about, on stage as well as on this album, it's very first. Experience the group at it's revelatory best in these idiomatic and fresh interpretations of early-twentieth-century American piano trios, by Foote, Korngold and Bernstein. As reported by WXQR radio, "Neave is actually a Gaelic name meaning 'bright' and 'radiant', both of which certainly apply to this trio's music making." Praised for their "heart-on-sleeve performances" (Classical New Jersey), the Neave Trio has been described as "A consummate ensemble" (Palm Beach Daily News), "A revelation" (San Diego Story), and "A brilliant trio..." (MusicWeb International), one that has "exceeded the gold standard and moved on to platinum" (Fanfare).

Another re-release from Hickox’s classic recordings finds us knee-deep in lesser-known and widely varied works of Gustav Holst. The Suite de Ballet is one of Holst’s lighter orchestral pieces, worked colorfully with a slightly French flair. Song of the Night for solo violin shows the composer in a confident and imaginative Romantic frame of mind. Finally, the comic chamber opera The Wandering Scholar was one of Holst’s latest works, stripped down to only the barest necessities. Hickox’s lively performance was hailed as inspiring “full-blooded music-making” throughout.

Ivan Ilic came across these transcriptions, scarcely known at all, through the most unlikely and serendipitous sequence of events. Carl David Stegmann (1751 – 1826) was a tenor, keyboard player, conductor, and composer, who worked mostly in the field of opera. Employed by the Court Theatre in Mainz (where he sang in the first German-language production of Don Giovanni), he also gave a number of acclaimed performances in Frankfurt. Trained as an organist, he made transcriptions of string quintets by Mozart and Beethoven’s Trios, Op. 9 as well as keyboard transcriptions of twenty-five of Haydn’s symphonies. Ivan Ilic writes: ‘It is unclear to me whether these transcriptions were ever meant to be played as concert repertoire, in public. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm I have encountered wherever I have played them has persuaded me to make this recording, to allow more people to hear Stegmann’s idiomatic arrangements.’

This re-release of Herbert Howells’ Hymnus Paradisi and A Kent Yeoman’s Wooing Song forms part of the new Hickox Legacy series commemorating the life and career of that great conductor. Mestro Richard Hickox’s lifelong commitment to British music in general is well-known, as is his work with the challenging, intricate music of Howells. This disc displays extremes of Howells’ emotional language - from the intense and powerful Hymnus to the sprightly and rather flirtatious Wooing Song – communicated masterfully by Hickox and his associates.

After a highly successful recordings of works by Brahms, the Schumanns, and Chopin, Imogen Cooper plunges into the world of another great romantic, Franz Liszt, and places him alongside that other giant, Richard Wagner. This is an evocative programme of original compositions and intimate transcriptions, ranging from poetic movements from the Années de Pèlerinage: Italie to dark and deeply elegiac pieces, including Liszt's La lugubre gondola I and Wagner's Elegie. It also features a transcription by Zoltán Kocsis of the intensely passionate prelude to Tristan und Isolde. The famous pianist and conductor died prematurely in November, 2016. It was his work that inspired this recording to begin with, and Imogen Cooper dedicates the album to his memory. Breathtaking music in unique interpretations: romanticism without melodrama, virtuosity without fuss.

If Chopin ‘invented’ the Mazurka, then surely by the same token Grieg ‘invented’ the Lyric Piece. Over his lifetime he published ten volumes of Lyric Pieces, containing 66 individual works.

Born in Bergen, Grieg studied in Leipzig and became established as Norway’s leading composer, successfully synthesizing Norwegian folk music with the forms and conventions of the German tradition. While he was internationally acclaimed for his Piano Concerto and the incidental music to Peer Gynt, the vast majority of his output lies not in large-scale works, but in smaller, more intimate forms, especially songs and, of course, his Lyric Pieces.

Peter Donohoe writes: ‘as a teenager I expanded my knowledge of the music of Grieg to include many solo piano pieces as well as the better-known orchestral works. I was beguiled by his style, and the reason remains somewhat intangible. Although one is able to identify the originality of Grieg as a composer – the Norwegian folk element in his music, his natural gift for memorable melodic lines, his occasional diversions into unique and extraordinarily forward-looking harmonies, and, to some degree, his emotional naïveté – there is a unique, unidentifiable kernel in his output that defies analysis, as is true of the work of all the great composers... All these works are pristine examples of his diverse and original style – Norwegian with a Germanic flavour – and it has been a huge and satisfying pleasure to return to them to create this and future recordings.’

REVIEW:

Donohoe, with a devotion to Grieg’s music dating back to his early years, clearly has the measure of this repertoire. He gets inside the gentler pieces, such as ‘Melancholy’ and ‘Summer Evening’, with beautifully poised playing. Grieg in his more overtly national mood, as in the famous and virtuoso ‘Halling’, is presented with infectious enjoyment and the simpler pieces are never patronized.

-- BBC Music Magazine

British pianist Imogen Cooper has studied with some of the finest in the piano world, including with Kathleen Long in London, with Jacques Fevrier and Yvonne Lefebure in Paris, and with Alfred Brendel, Jorg Demus and Paul Badura-Skoda in Vienna. She is widely recognized for her interpretations of Schubert and Schumann. This release follows her three very successful recordings of Schumann. For this album, Cooper has chosen some of the greatest works of Chopin. The album programme makes up an outstanding recital. Coopers virtuosity and emotional wisdom creates a new lense through which to view this frequently performed repertoire. Following this release, Imogen Cooper will embark on a world tour, performing recitals that will include the repertoire included here, and visiting several of Europe’s most prestigious venues before venturing to other continents.