Classical Music

The pioneering work and unconventional ideas of John Cage deeply affected Western music during the second half of the 20th century. This second of two volumes completes Katrin Zenz's review of his complete works for flute. The earlier chromatic pieces include an incredible variety of extended techniques and a perplexing rhythmic complexity. The elements of chance and experimentation in the later compositions result in music that is constantly undergoing seismic shifts in form and expression. The elegance and purpose of Cage's music rests in a tenderness and devoutness that he stated should "sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences."

Eleanor Cory's music is performed throughout the US and internationally and has been recognized by many awards and commissions including the Aaron Copland and Fromm Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. The shifting musical languages that give her compositions their unique vibrancy include the "modal, tonal, atonal mix" of her First Violin Sonata, as well as jazz elements. All of this and more can be found in Things Are, her memorial for composer Milton Babbitt, and in the Celebration of pianistic virtuosity. Cory's Third String Quartet expresses both "sweet melancholy" and playful dialogue. Epithalamium explores the flute's flexibility in elegantly shaped gestures, while the instrumentation of the Fantasy is light in it's mood and airy textures.

Underscoring the very special relationship between the United States and the Republic of Korea, the 2017 version of Ian Krouse'sSymphonyNo.5performed on this recording with a South Korean orchestra commemorates the 70thanniversary of the Korean War. At the heart of the second movement of this expressively powerful and wide-ranging work Krouse mingles three famous American melodies with the popular Korean tune Arirang. The two Symphonies of Strings show why he is so distinctive a composer: one is scored for strings but without violins and the other is a brilliantly inventive 'geometrical' exploration of La Follia.

Fern Hill is a blithe poem, yet touched by darkness; time finally holds the poet "green and dying"... Poem in October begins in Thomas' seafront town: The poet, marking his birthday, climbs to a high hill, where he reflects on his youth.

David Gompper is an award-winning composer and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. His luminously orchestrated and expressive works have attracted admiration throughout the US, Europe and beyond. Opening with relentless energy, the second movement of the Cello Concerto is spectral and dreamlike, while the Double Bass Concerto explores the light effects of a solar eclipse, using the soloist to suggest shadows, auras and glimpses of sound. A partner work to Sunburst (8.559835), the multi-layered Moonburst reflects the transformational imagery of nocturnal sounds and perceptions. David Gompperhas lived and worked professionally as a pianist, a conductor, and a composer in New York, San Diego, London, Nigeria, Michigan, Texas and Iowa. In 2002-03 Gompper was in Russia as a Fulbright Scholar, teaching, performing and conducting at the Moscow Conservatory. In 2009 he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, and a Fromm Commission in 2013. Gompper's compositions have been performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and Merkin Halls (New York), Wigmore Hall (London), the Konzerthaus (Vienna) and the Bolshoi and Rachmaninov Halls (Moscow Conservatory).

Verdi begun composition on his Messa da requiem on the occasion of Gioachino Rossini's death and finished it following the death of nationally revered writer Alessandro Manzoni; It received a full performance in 1874 and was an instant triumph. The work itself is stylistically varied, dramatically operatic in some parts and tending toward sacred polyphony in others. This classic recording features the excellent Rundfunkchor Leipzig conducted by the famed operatic and symphonic conductor, Giuseppe Patane.

This release is centered around four cantatas taken from the composer's Harmonischer Gottesdienst ('Music for Religious Services'), a collection of cantatas for solo voice, flute, oboe or violin, and harpsichord that, on account of it's idiomatic writing for voice, it's relation to the instrumental parts and the many indications concerning interpretation, rests among the great achievements of the period. One of Telemann's characteristic skills was his ability to imbue the arias with the sort of brilliance that we normally associate with solo concertos (consider the radiance of the initial aria in Deine Toten werden leben), and this extends to his often virtuosic use of the recorder in the works - an instrument with which he was obviously familiar. Indeed, that Telemann was a more than competent player himself can be seen from the quality and quantity of music that he wrote for the recorder, and it is two of his lesser-known creations for the instrument - the E minor Partita and the Trio Sonata in G minor - which form the remainder of this highly engaging disc. Gemma Bertagnolli is widely considered to be one of the leading sopranos in Early Music. She is a favoured soloist of such celebrities as Rene Jacobs, Rinaldo Alessandrini, Fabio Biondi, Diego Fasolis, Trevor Pinnock, Ton Koopman, Ottavio Dantone and many others. Her voice is powerful, lyrical and passionate, always conveying the emotional message of the text. On this new recording (2012) Gemma joins the Early Music group of Stefano Bagliano, also a specialist in the field, in Cantatas for solo soprano, recorder and continuo, drawn from Die Harmonische Gottesdienst, brilliant works displaying vocal and instrumental virtuosity of a high level.

In the course of this highly original programme, Terje Tønnesen and his Camerata Nordica tell us tales of madness and love, of battles and delusions. Building on imaginative scores by Biber, Telemann and Purcell, Tønnesen himself and Mikhel Kerem has fashioned even more colorful arrangements that bring human follies and passions to the fore. In the course of the disc we are treated to rousing drum solos, a trio of Hungarian folk musicians makes a guest appearance in Biber's "joking sonata" and a Swedish nyckelharpa adds color to the plaintive Aria in Battalia, before the listener is telescoped into the famous battle scene itself. Featured soloist soprano Karin Dahlberg gives us memorable portraits of madness in three English "Mad Songs", and throughout the programme the members ofthe ensemble with equal conviction play their instruments, bay as a pack of hounds and groan as wounded musketeers. The result is a pageant fit for a street performance during a carnival - at turns absurd, burlesque, frightening and moving.

Classical Music

Glinka wrote his piano trio of substituting violin for clarinet and/or cello for bassoon. He was a 28-year-old teacher at the conservatoire in Milan when he composed it, having left Russia and travelled south for his health. A note on the autograph score reads: 'I have known love only through the pain it brings,' yet the prevailing mood of the work is genial rather than tragic, full of Mediterranean sunshine rather than icy Russian chill. Glinka's lovely trio makes a unique yet natural coupling on record with three collections of fantasy pieces by Robert Schumann. These are all late works, written between 1849 and 1853 - a generation after Glinka's trio - and yet they share a predominant mood of playful high spirits alternating with wistful reflection that never spills over into outright tragedy. The M�rchenerz�hlungen are fairy tales without words - perhaps a giant appears in the second, a princess in the third - while the trio of Romances plumbs a deeper vein of expression, especially in the popular version for clarinet rather than the original for oboe. Principal clarinet of the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra, Giovanni Punzi made this new album with colleagues from the orchestra alongside the Bulgarian-born, multi-award-winning pianist Galya Kolarova, who is also based in the Danish capital. Punzi's previous album for Brilliant Classics also focused on a German Romantic composer, Max Bruch (BC95673): according to the Fanfare magazine review of May 2019, 'There is a pronounced Italian snap to these performances that provides an intriguing alternative coloration to these works.'

Sergei Prokofiev virtually grew up at the keyboard – he composed for the piano from early childhood, and the instrument was his workshop and laboratory. Well before the end of his student days he had absorbed the virtuoso techniques of Rachmaninov and Scriabin, and to these he added his own brilliant, sharp-edged virtuosity, marked by a keen contrast between dramatic, hard-driven passages and more intimate and gentle lyrical moments. His nine sonatas therefore hold a very special place in his output and represent his language at its most personal, free of any external dramatic, verbal or visual associations: they contain the essential Prokofiev. Freddy Kempf has previously recorded four of the sonatas to critical acclaim: ‘Kempf is joyfully exuberant, flashing through every savage challenge with the assurance and instinct of a born virtuoso’ (Gramophone). With this release, he adds another three sonatas to his discography, starting with Sonata No. 3 in A minor which Prokofiev premièred in Petrograd in April 1918. Three weeks later he left Russia and only returned in 1936, after seventeen years spent in the USA, Germany and France. Premièred in 1944, Sonata No. 8 is the third and last of the so-called ‘War Sonatas’ – possibly less virtuosic than its predecessors, it has a wide emotional range, with unexpected depths. His final, ninth sonata Prokofiev wrote for Sviatoslav Richter, saying: ‘Don’t think it’s intended to create an effect.’ Often almost improvisatory, it was the last work he completed before the infamous 1948 decrees that disciplined many Soviet composers, and the first performance did not take place until 1951.

The works in this collection attest to the high standard of music-making in Naples. The composers here recorded were at the forefront of the achievements of Neapolitan music in the first half of the 18th century, the golden age of music production in the southern Italian centre. And the Neapolitan style at this time was fashionable beyond the borders of Italy, as well. Among all the composers presented, only Mancini lived and worked almost all his life in Naples. The others spent their lives travelling or serving foreign courts. This programme exploits the felicitous pairing of the voice with flute, two instruments similarly tied to the expressivity of human breath. Throughout this programme a baroque transverse flute, or ‘traverso’, is used, either called for specifically or substituted for the recorder. When these pieces were written the two types of flute still existed alongside each other as equals, as they had done for centuries before the transverse variety began to dominate later in the 18th century. Use of the viola da gamba for the bass part also finds justification in Naples. While in Rome the instrument had almost completely disappeared by the first half of the 17th century, it endured in Naples and continued to be used. Several mid-18th-century viole da gamba, preserved to this day, in various sizes by luthiers from the Neapolitan Gaglian family attest to the much later persistence of this instrument in that area.

Often cited as the most distinguished neoclassical composer of post-war America, Robert Muczynski (1929-2010) was born in Chicago to Polish parents. This album of chamber music surveys an output which is always restless and unpredictable thanks to the embrace of both Bartokian harmonies and structures as well as the more lyrical yet open-ended language of Samuel Barber. The Cello Sonata of 1968 is often considered to be Muczynski’s chamber music masterpiece, in which the problems of balance and register inherent to the genre are not only solved but transcended with a mastery especially evident in the central Scherzo. From a year later, the Fantasy Trio Op.26 is a welcome addition to the clarinet-cello-piano trio genre established by Beethoven. Energy and punchy rhythmic interplay are hallmarks of Muczynski’s music, as the earlier Flute Sonata engagingly demonstrates: in its whimsical, abrupt, headstrong progress through a compact four-movement form, it may even be considered the most important such work by an American composer. Muczynski took technical agility and devil-may-care confidence for granted in his interpreters; in this case, an international quartet of musicians based in the US. There is an extended booklet essay by the pianist Dmitry Samogray which places both composer and works in invaluable context. Any listeners curious to fill out their appreciation of American music beyond Copland and Bernstein will want to hear this release.

Alma Mahler-Werfel was born in Vienna 1879, the daughter of a soprano and a landscape painter. Her musical talent was soon recognized and she had lessons with a.o. Zemlinsky. In 1922 she married Gustav Mahler, who explicitly forbid her to continue her composing. Later however, seeing her withering, Mahler allowed her to publish a song cycle in 1910. Alma Mahler was a highly intelligent and cultured woman, surrounded by great artists like Klimt, Zemlinsky, Gropius and Werfel. Her salon in Vienna was the centre of high cultural life. After the war she settled in New York, where she became an iconic figure in the music scene till her death in 1964. Her songs reflect the Zeitgeist of composition: dramatic, brooding, the darkness occasionally lifted by visions of serenity and peace. These are beautiful performances by Catharina Kroeger and Monica Lonero, champions of neglected romantic music. As a bonus they perform a soprano-actress based work called “Penelope” by contemporary composer Patrizia Montanaro.