It's an initially disorientating experience to hear Sea Pictures in a version with choir. The Rodolfus Choir are an elite SATB group and have a wonderfully smooth and often lulling sound; there's a lot of that mood in Sea Pictures. The choir's diction is a marvel although the sung words are in any event at the back of the booklet. The singers are attentive to dynamic contrast and register some superbly poetic effects. Open-minded Elgarians who can get over the heresy of unfamiliar forces will find much to enjoy here. Where Corals Lie is a delight and works exceptionally well with choir.

A lazy unobservant glance at the details of this disc had me assuming that the Piano Quintet had been re-engineered into a Piano Concerto to join the Elgar/Walker. No such thing. What we have here is something of symphonic proportions and character. While there are some dark and dramatic moments and even some hints of the Second Symphony this now comes across as reflective and in the same territory as Falstaff. The first movement has an air of halting even fearful uncertainty. It's all very smooth though, suave even. A Viennese lilt at 10.00 is one of several instances where things become quite Brahmsian. The second movement is almost Finzian as details entwine much as they do in the woodland Interludes in Falstaff. The finale has its exciting moments but is overall quite nostalgic, philosophical, and regretful.

These two works in new colors should give many more opportunities to hear this music although ironically each requires a greater number of performers than the originals. Of the two Sea Pictures strikes me as the more attractive.

– MusicWeb International (Rob Barnett)

The 2020 GRAMMY Award winner for Best Classical Solo Vocal Performance, honoring Sarah Brailey and Dashon Burton!

August 18th marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Constitutional Amendment, granting women in the US the right to vote. A fitting time then for our release of the World Premier Recording of Ethel Smyth’s late masterpiece The Prison. Smyth left home at nineteen to study composition in Leipzig. In the company of Clara Schumann and her teacher Heinrich von Herzogenberg, she met and won the admiration of composers such as Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Dvorák, and Grieg. Smyth was the first woman to have an opera performed at the Met, in 1903. (The second was Kaija Saariaho, whose L'Amour de loin appeared there in 2016!) Smyth later became central to the Suffragette movement in England, writing the March of the Women. Her gender politics and sexuality were cause for attacks by critics, and she famously went to prison herself for throwing a stone through an MP’s window. Composed in 1930 and premiered in 1931 in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, The Prison is a Symphony in two parts, ‘Close on Freedom’ and ‘The Deliverance’, set for soprano and bass-baritone soloists, chorus, and full orchestra. The text is taken from a philosophical work by Henry Bennet Brewster and concerns the writings of a prisoner in solitary confinement, his reflections on life and his preparations for death.

REVIEWS:

Ethyl Smyh's late work, The Prison (1929-30), is uncategorizable. The 64-minute “vocal symphony” for bass-baritone (The Prisoner) and soprano (his Soul), with chorus (philosophical commentary) is in two parts: Close To Freedom and The Deliverance. The heavy-ish text, by Smyth’s dear friend (and perhaps lover, though her relationships tended otherwise to be lesbian) Henry Bennet Brewster centers on the gloomy ruminations of a prisoner considering the end of his life, and his soul, which is guiding him toward peace. In Part 1, He, for instance speaks of his anxiety and inability to sleep, and wonders about immortality and if he will be emancipated; in Part 2, the Soul tells him the end of his struggle is near and he learns to “disband his ego”. The chorus has a further calming effect: immortality is everywhere, human passions remain. He finally finds peace. As you can see, a regular Offenbachian satire–not.

From the very opening moments – “I awoke in the middle of the night” – the mood is weighty with disquiet. The bass-baritone voice of Dashon Burton has both substance and gentleness, his attention to the text that of a Lieder singer. Violin and harp circle his words. Sarah Brailey’s Soul, from the start, sings with subtlety and a type of fleeting loveliness. She opens the second part with a solo on the words “the struggle is over”, intoning much of her words on one note while first a trio of winds, then a solo violin, then the full body of strings and chorus–all pianissimo–join her above and below. Chant? Hymn? Both, really. Smyth layers the orchestra; a brass choir during a passage about immortality makes a grand effect. Later, a painfully beautiful pastoral section precedes the Prisoner’s feeling of metaphysical freedom.

While much of it is gripping, its slow pacing and didacticism can dehumanize the story that the Prisoner and Soul are stuck in. The Prisoner’s “prison”, both metaphorical and real, is presented with such humanity and openness by Burton that his eventual spiritual freedom makes a glorious sound, despite–rather than due to–the orchestrally and chorally weighted underpinnings. Some Elgar shows up, and is not very welcome.

The performance, I suspect, could not be bettered. The New York City-based Experiential Orchestra and Chorus both perform with luscious tone and poise. James Blachly’s leadership brings the work’s lyricism to the forefront; it would be easy to over-emphasize passages but he works best within the dramatic arc of the narrative. Much of The Prison is gorgeous and unexpected – who does Smyth sound like? And while some moments seem inert, they are few and far between.

– ClassicsToday.com (10/10; Robert Levine)

Smyth’s haunting music, given here in conductor James Blachly’s new edition, is beautifully constructed and highly evocative (with quotes or allusions to earlier Smyth scores). Her orchestration is limpid and masterly, rendered lovingly here by Blachly with the Experiential Orchestra. The choral contribution is relatively minor, the focus rightly on the two soloists, but again superbly performed. The only miscalculation is Smyth’s use of ‘The Last Post’ in the concluding pages, adding a martial resonance that may jar to modern ears; to Smyth, a major-general’s daughter, it may just have been an echo of (her) youth which she wanted at this point. Magnificent sound from Chandos, too. Very strongly recommended.

– Gramophone

Listen to the Naxos Podcast to learn more about this release

These three works represent the first recording for Naxos by the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic, which is composed of elite conservatory students from across the United States and abroad. The chosen works reflect the richness and variety of the American repertoire. A work of immense poignancy and power, John Corigliano's Symphony No. 1 is a commemoration of friends of the composer who died during the 1980s and '90s. Michael Torke's Bright Blue Music evokes rich lyricism couched in the composer's favorite key of D Major. The suite from Copland's Appalachian Spring is one of the great, quintessential American works.

Review:

Large-limbed, vivid, and intense, John Corigliano’s 1989 Symphony No 1 commemorates the Aids crisis, memorialising some of the composer’s friends who succumbed at a time when diagnosis meant death. It has also stood the test of time simply as good music, here performed superbly.

– Sunday Times

Muzio Clementi’s legacy to pianists lies not only in his teaching studies and in his exploration of new levels of virtuosity, but in compositions that were widely admired by contemporaries such as Beethoven. This album explores a variety of pieces, a number of which focus on variations. ‘The Black Joke’ was a popular English tune garnished by Clementi with 21 successive variations. Musical Characteristics captures the styles of leading figures of the time, including Mozart, Haydn and Koželuch, while the Variations on ‘Batti, batti’ is a virtuoso transcription. Nicholas Rimmer plays on an original fortepiano made in Clementi’s own workshop around 1806. A pianist with a keen interest in chamber music, Lied, as well as in historical keyboard instruments, Nicholas Rimmer has appeared in many major concert venues in Germany and the UK, among others. His collaborative partnerships have resulted in acclaimed recordings of Brahms and Wolfgang Rihm; the latter (8.572730) received a Diapason d’Or, a Pizzicato Supersonic Award and an International Record Review ‘Outstanding’ Award.

It was natural for virtuoso performer Franz Liszt to expand his repertoire by transcribing his songs for solo piano. The human voice is the purest of musical instruments, and composers have always been inspired by its warmth, expression and emotional power. Liszt’s masterful command of the piano and his ability to transform vocal lines into purely instrumental sounds is evident throughout this album: the dramatic narrative in both versions of Die Loreley, the watery, arpeggiated texture of Am Rhein im schönen Strome and the orchestral qualities of Gastibelza being only a few examples of these pianistic treasures. Considered an ‘extraordinary musician’ by Martha Argerich, critically acclaimed Steinway Artist Alexandre Dossin enjoys active performing, recording and teaching careers. A prizewinner of several international piano competitions, Dossin received First Prize and the Special Prize at the 2003 Martha Argerich International Piano Competition in Buenos Aires. Other international awards include the Silver Medal and Second Honourable Mention at the Maria Callas Grand Prix, and Third Prize and the Special Prize at the ‘W.A. Mozart’ International Piano Competition, in addition to several awards from competitions in Brazil. An active recording artist, his discography comprises 15 albums released across several labels, including seven albums with Naxos.

Who was Marco Antonio Centorio? Given how little attention has been paid to his music in modern times, a surprising amount is known about him. Born around 1600 in the Piedmontese town of Vercelli, Centorio was blessed with a fine treble voice that secured him an education at the town’s Collegio degli Innocenti. When his voice broke he moved to Milan and studied both organ and theory there, before moving back to his home-town, where he became the titular organist by the age of 18. A decade later he became maestro di capella, and held the post until his early death in 1638. Most of his extant music was preserved in the Vercelli Chapter Archive, which supplied the manuscripts for these world-premiere recordings. The album opens with the elegant chant La Centoria, ‘to be played on two organs’ (with the option of adding string instruments), a singularly fine piece in the style of the late 16th-century Milanese canzone that was already in decline. There are several pastoral canzone: non-liturgical music written for the enjoyment of the aristocracy and clergy, which display Centorio’s melodic gifts and contrapuntal skills. They alternate here with instrumental interludes and with accompanied motets, of the same character as the pastoral works but composed to sacred texts. The performances here enjoy unparalleled authenticity, having been made by modern heirs of the very ensemble which Centorio once directed, and in the fine domed basilica of Vercelli cathedral for which these works were conceived four centuries ago. Collectors of late-Renaissance era rarities will not hesitate to add the name of Centorio to their libraries.

At first glance, the musical worlds of Frédéric Chopin and William Bolcom would seem strange bedfellows. But on his solo debut recording, Israeli American pianist Ran Dank makes a convincing case for pairing the two composers. The former, Poland’s national composer, is synonymous with pianistic panache. The latter, a leading American, possesses one of contemporary music’s most bold and inventive voices. Juxtaposing the works of these two pianist-composers reveals their common affinity for the keyboard and ear for sound and sense of structure. William Bolcom’s Twelve New Etudes won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Wonderfully eclectic, they move effortlessly between one musical idiom to another with endless ingenuity, exhibiting all the traits of Bolcom’s compositional craft. Chopin equally excelled with his Etudes, but Dank turns to his plentiful Polonaises, Mazurkas and Waltzes which range in style from heroic, to dark and brooding, haunting and beautiful. Ran Dank, a Van Cliburn International Competition finalist and winner of the New York-based Young Concert Artists auditions, has been significantly influenced by these two composers who have shaped his trajectory as a pianist and musician. As a child to two parents from Poland, Chopin played a meaningful part in his upbringing, and he became mesmerized by the composer’s music at an early age. Bolcom’s music was a much later discovery, but one that has become equally valuable and fitting, following Dank’s move to America.

At the age of 21, Leonard Bernstein wrote what he described as a ‘Hebrew song’ using a text from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Three years later the song became the final movement of his Symphony No. 1 and in January 1944 Bernstein himself conducted the première of the work. What is being lamented is the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC, but according to the composer, he primarily wanted to convey the text’s ‘emotional quality’. The first movement thus aims to parallel in feeling the intensity of the prophet’s pleas while the scherzo gives a general sense of the destruction and chaos. Being a setting of the biblical text, the third movement is naturally more literary: the cry of Jeremiah, as he mourns his beloved Jerusalem. During the next few years, Bernstein’s career as a conductor took flight, while the musical On the Town made his name on Broadway. Towards the end of the 1940s he returned to the symphonic genre, however – once more with an extra-musical inspiration. W.H. Auden’s poem The Age of Anxiety is set during the recently concluded war, and falls – like the symphony – into six sections during which four characters express their anxieties, hopes and the quest for meaning and identity. Bernstein chose to portray all four characters via a single instrument, the piano, but he did not want to label the work a piano concerto. The instrument does however come to the fore at various points and in one of the final sections Bernstein supplies what is arguably the most exuberant and rhythmically dazzling display of piano writing in the symphonic literature. For this Christian Lindberg and the Arctic Philharmonic have enlisted the aid of Roland Pöntinen, while Anna Larsson is the soloist in Jeremiah.

The French composer Camille Saint-Saëns was prolific and lived a long time, although by the time of his death in 1921 music had changed beyond anything he could have conceived. He was a gifted pianist and, in common with many other well known French composers, found employment and distinction as organist at one of the principal churches in Paris. The popular Carnival of the Animals, described as A Zoological Fantasy, was written in 1886, originally for two pianos and a small chamber orchestra, to celebrate that year's carnival. The composer forbade further performances of this occasional music, except for The Swan, which enjoyed immediate and irresistible popularity.

The Soviet composer Sergey Prokofiev wrote his Peter and the Wolf in 1936 to introduce to children the instruments of the orchestra. He had taken his two sons to see performances at the Moscow Children's Music Theatre and this had suggested to him the possibility of a composition of this kind. The boy Peter, represented by the strings, is playing in the meadow, forbidden territory. A bird, shown by the flute, sings in a tree: a duck, the oboe, swims in the pond, and a cat, the clarinet, comes onto the scene, sending the bird up to a higher branch. Peter's grandfather, the bassoon, warns the boy not to venture out, but meanwhile a wolf, the French horns, comes into the meadow, 
and adventures ensue with spoken narration.

Ten years later, in 1946, the English composer Benjamin Britten was asked to write music for an educational film introducing the instruments of the orchestra. For the purpose he chose a theme by the great 17th century English composer Henry Purcell and wrote a set of variations, each of which shows the characteristics of a particular instrument or group of instruments. The alternative title of the work, Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, is an exact description. The other title, The Young Person's Guide to the 
Orchestra, makes fun of the titles much favored by writers of moral tales in the 19th century, providing "young persons" with advice on how to regulate every aspect of their lives. At the most exciting part of the concluding fugue, the brass instruments play again the original theme, leading to a grand conclusion. 

Three examples of Leonard Bernstein’s vocal art can be heard in this recording. His Symphony No. 3 ‘Kaddish’ shuns traditional symphonic ideas in favor of an eclectic theatrical and oratorio-like form with a prominent rôle for speaker. For this recording, Marin Alsop has returned to the work’s original narrative text, heard before the 1977 revision. The Lark – heard in a concert version with added narration – derives from Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of L’Alouette on the life of Joan of Arc, and it was this music that Bernstein reworked into his Missa Brevis many years later. Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony since 2007 and Principal Conductor the São Paulo Symphony since 2013, the NYC-born Marin Alsop is recognized across the world for her innovative programming as well as her bold, audience-expanding community and education outreach initiatives.

REVIEWS:

Under Alsop's baton, the Baltimore Symphony realizes Bernstein’s extraordinary orchestral effects in ways that will both scarify you and tug at your heartstrings; and while the text is still the embarrassment it always was, narrator Claire Bloom delivers it as if it were Shakespearian prose. She believes in the part and gives it a powerful reading. Soprano Kelley Nassief will melt your heart in her “Kaddish 2” movement solo, and both the boy and adult choirs are superb. I’m really glad to have this performance, especially since my Columbia LP has disappeared and this is now the only recording I have of the original 1963 work. It’s a fantastic performance and a spectacular recording.

– Fanfare

Kaddish is recorded here in a performance of great conviction from Marin Alsop, with the wonderful Claire Bloom achieving a happy medium between the declamatory and the confidential. There are instances of pure gold - a consoling lullaby at the heart of the piece (featuring limpid soprano Kelley Nassief) which Bernstein called his 'Pietà'.

- Gramophone Magazine

Prolific in every aspect of music throughout his long and distinguished career, Carl Reinecke represented the complete musician with the belief that art should bring happiness to mankind. His imaginative transcription of Beethoven's bravura Triple Concerto sees the three instruments retaining their solo essence and sharing in the orchestral tutti to create a quintessential addition to the piano trio repertory. Heard here in its world premiere recording, Reineckes First Piano Trio inhabits the passionate and expressive sound world of Schumann and Mendelssohn.

Born in Strasbourg, Elizabeth Sombart studied piano from the age of seven. She studied all over the world with various teachers, including Bruno-Leonardo Gelber, Peter Feuchtwanger, Hilde Langer-Rühl and Sergiu Celibidache. Elizabeth received the rank of Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite in 2006 and then was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2008, both in reference to her career in music. Elizabeth has a strong relationship with the RPO and will be continuing this Beethoven Piano Concerto cycle with them over the coming months. This third installment of this series features Beethoven’s mighty fifth piano concerto as well as his ever popular triple concerto, featuring Duncan Riddell on violin and Richard Harwood on cello.

Beethoven and Hummel’s relationship was one of fractious beginnings, but ultimately true friendship. Between 1825 and 1835 Hummel arranged his contemporary’s Symphonies Nos. 1-7 and Septet, Op. 20 for his favored combination of pianoforte, flute, violin, and violoncello. Beethoven would surely not have objected- arrangements were, after all, a perfectly normal part of the 19th-century musical landscape. To audiences today his symphonies need little introduction but, thanks to the musical sensitivity and sheer brilliance of Hummel’s arrangements, it is possible to experience the thrill of hearing these extraordinary pieces afresh.

The compositions on this new release by The President’s Own Marine Band were all composed during the last century. They draw, however, on traditional American spirituals, ballads, folk tunes, and rags from the American Revolution to the present. The title of this release, “Be Glad Then, America,” is taken from New England Triptych by William Schuman, which is included on this album. Particularly notable are the three world premiere recordings: “For The President’s Own,” by John Williams, Aaron Copland’s “Third Symphony,” and a set of songs by Charles Ives set for this world class ensemble.

Arthur Schoonderwoerd and his Ensemble Cristofori are taking on Beethoven’s Symphonies but in a very different style. Tempo, accentuation, phrasing, or structural architecture are not the first thing that strikes us when we listen to Arthur Schoonderwoerd’s performances of Classical orchestra music for the first time. Instead, the first thing we notice is that the music sounds different. The orchestra is unusually small. Ensemble Cristofori plays as an orchestra- string quartet, double bass, and winds- and the effect is stunning. The orchestral sound is present, but each voice can be heard specifically as well. Arthur Schoonderwoerd is a well established pianist and powerful conductor, and is widely known as a consistent advocate for Early Music performance. He is also a powerful conductor of 21st century music.