One quick glance through the tracks on this disc will quickly dispel the notion that this is merely another compilation of well trodden and over-sampled "greatest hits" of classical music. Buy this CD and spend a couple of hours "cooling down" with some classical music this summer. You'll find a remarkably varied and eclectic set of repertoire, some familiar, but a number of surprising discoveries all blended into a seamless stream of scintillating sounds!

CALDARA: Christmas Cantata

BRITTEN: A Ceremony of Carols / Friday Afternoons

Jennifer Pike was the youngest-ever winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2002. She has given performances throughout the UK and around the world and, now aged twenty-three, is widely regarded as one of the finest violinists in Britain. The pianist Tom Poster who performs alongside her is well known for his artistry and versatility, equally in demand as a soloist and as a chamber musician. This recital features violin sonatas by Brahms and Robert Schumann as well as Three Romances by Clara Schumann. Robert Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 1 is very much a ‘Duo’, the two instrumentalists performing in equal partnership. It was written in 1851 at quite a stressful time in Schumann’s life. There is certainly an air of robustness, even roughness, in the baroque-style finale. By contrast, in Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 1, the violin is always the principal voice, the piano never a competitor but rather a subtle accompanist. Brahms wrote the work in memory of his godson Felix Schumann who had died of tuberculosis at the tragically young age of twenty-four. Clara Schumann’s Three Romances was her only work for violin and piano, but whilst the violin is allowed to sing throughout, the complexity of the piano part testifies to its having been composed by a pianist of the first rank.

Reviews

Performance (Brahms) **** (R & C Schumann) ***** Recording *****

“...this is a refreshingly projected performance which boasts an almost ideal fluidity in terms of manipulation of tempo and nuance in the first movement [Brahms]... warm-hearted performances of the Clara Schumann Romances ... the distinction of the performances is never in doubt.”

Erik Levi – BBC Music magazine – May 2013

Johannes Brahms is considered Beethoven’s successor in terms of his orchestral output, but for chamber music it was more the Romantic mantle of Robert Schumann that he assumed, vastly expanding its scale and ambitions in the 19th century and remaining a towering influence until well into the 20th. The First Piano Quartet has a deeply felt Andante con moto at its heart, and a sprightly ‘Gypsy Rondo’ finale. Brahms started writing the Third Piano Quartet in the difficult period of Schumann’s final illness, later re-composing it to create a work of symphonic proportions, distinctive power and striking beauty.

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The players have the feel of a group who have become welded together by years of mutual performances, the balance between them, as melodies are woven, being so perfectly weighted. The tempos also have that natural feel with scherzos that are never rushed, while the string intonation is impeccable.

– David Denton's Review Corner (November 2016)

One of our day’s most legendary performers, pianist Rudolph Buchbinder has been appearing on stages all over the globe for the last fifty years. Later this year, in celebration of his 70th birthday, he will be honored in numerous concert halls, including Carnegie Hall, Suntory hall, and the Berliner Philharmonie. The Kurier newspaper described this performance with rave reviews. “It is not every day that Brahms sounds so perfect as this.” (Kurier) They also praised Buchbinder as a “phenomenal piano virtuoso.” In the Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein, under the baton of Maestro Zubin Mehta, Buchbinder performs for this release the First and Second Piano Concertos of Johannes Brahms. These works demand a soloist with a wide range of both interpretal refinement and technical skill, both of which Buchbinder brings to the table. “What Rudolph Buchbinder, the Vienna Philharmonic and conductor Zubin Mehta delivered at the Musikverein easily deserves the accolade ‘milestone’.” (Kurier)

After a period as a court composer at Detmold, Brahms returned to the city of his birth, Hamburg, in January 1860. Here, in relative tranquillity, he explored the then rare piano quartet repertoire. The Piano Quartet No. 2 received a very sympathetic hearing in Vienna, Clara Schumann even preferring it to its immediate predecessor, the Piano Quartet, Op. 25 (Naxos 8572798). Its lyricism is heightened by a romantically beautiful Adagio. Mahler's vibrant Piano Quartet in A minor dates from 1876, the end of his first year at the Vienna Conservatory, where the only completed movement was first performed.

Described by Saint-Saëns as "the most remarkable of the young British composers," York Bowen was widely known as a pianist and as a composer, his fame reaching its zenith in the years immediately preceding the First World War. The writer and composer Thomas Dunhill described Bowen’s chamber music as "an essentially healthy and breezy phase in modern art." This is especially true of the 1922 Carnegie Trust Award-winning Second Quartet, and while both quartets are based on clear-cut classical models the Third is more elusive and intimate in feeling, revealing the composer’s rarely displayed private side. The atmospheric Phantasy-Quintet provides a rare opportunity to hear the beauty of the bass clarinet in a truly eloquent and expressive soloist capacity.

"There is nothing like Songs of Innocence and of Experience in all of American music...the score is a multicultural stew of idioms, from rigorous modernism to Mahler-like Romanticism, Appalachian folk songs, madrigals, country, ragtime, show music, rock, soul and reggae...Monstrous, indeed...an influential landmark in both the development of Bolcom's eclectic aesthetic and recent American musical history, documenting the liberating shift from high-modernist orthodoxy to an all-embracing post-modern collage of styles...In a coup for UMS and U-M, the feisty classical label Naxos has agreed to issue the first recording of the piece. Naxos engineers will tape Thursday's performance, along with follow-up sessions Friday and Saturday. Despite ecstatic reviews and cult status, the piece has never been commercially recorded...Naxos is covering engineering, production, conductor, soloist, copyright and other fees related to recording. " -- Mark Stryker, Detroit Free Press, April 6th, 2004

"William Bolcom's gigantic, well-more-than-two-hour setting of William Blake's complete "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" poetic cycle is enormously difficult and expensive to perform. Looking down at the forces assembled for the University of Michigan performance in Hill Auditorium here on Thursday night was a mega-Mahlerian experience, with a stage extension needed to accommodate the nearly 500 musicians (bigger than the forces of any Mahler "Symphony of a Thousand" I have encountered). All that was missing were lighting effects and projections of Blake's engravings, suggested in the score. But they were on display in the lobby. So visually it was awesome, and musically it was pretty awesome, too. Mr. Bolcom, who is now 65, has taught at the University of Michigan since 1973. He first became interested in Blake's visionary poems - written in the late 18th century and full of Christian mysticism and a horror of modern life and human cruelty - in 1956, from when his first sketches date. Composed sporadically, the piece received its world and American premieres in 1984 and has been performed intermittently since. At its second appearance in New York, with Leonard Slatkin conducting the St. Louis Symphony at Carnegie Hall in 1992, Edward Rothstein ended the first paragraph of his review in The New York Times with the words, "It should be recorded." Now, at long last, it has been. Thursday's performance was again conducted by Mr. Slatkin and, with patching sessions, will be released on the Naxos label."

-- John Rockwell, New York Times, April 11, 2004

The sparkling overture to Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 musical Candide immediately found a prominent place in concert programs all over the world and is now one of his most frequently performed pieces. Many of Bernstein’s best loved works drew inspiration from the city of New York, and this is true both of the three sailors pursuing female conquest in the ballet ‘Fancy Free,’ and of the rip-roaring swing rhythm and big tunes from the musical ‘Wonderful Town.’ Bernstein celebrated his friends and family with his ‘Anniversaries’- piano vignettes heard here for the first time in colorfully expanded orchestrations. Marin Alsop is an inspiring and powerful voice in the international music scene who passionately believes that “music has the power to change lives.” She became music director of the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra in 2012 and made history in 2013 as the first female conductor of the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms, which she returned to conduct in 2015. As a student of Leonard Bernstein, Alsop is central to his 100th anniversary celebrations, conducting Bernstein’s ‘Mass’ at the Ravina Festival, where she serves as musical curator for 2018 and 2019.

Berio had an abiding fascination with reconciling the past and the present, which can be seen in his orchestral realisations of works by Mahler and Brahms, and most notably, in Rendering (1990), his typically creative completion of unfinished symphonic sketches by Schubert. In Rendering, Berio - in his own words - sets himself the target of 'following those modern restoration criteria that aim at reviving the old colours without, however, trying to disguise the damage that time has caused, often leaving inevitable empty patches in the composition'. In the 'restoration', Schubert's sketches have been beautifully orchestrated in period style, and the 'empty patches' have been filled with music composed by Berio himself, in his own voice - thereby successfully combining the musical worlds of the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries into one convincing whole. The Clarinet Sonata by Brahms embodies the composer's taut and concentrated compositional style. In transcribing the work, Berio felt that, when experienced in the less intimate surroundings of today's concert halls, the extreme compression of Brahms's late chamber music style was in need of some additional support, and his version, recorded here, includes a fourteen-bar orchestral introduction to the first movement, leading into Brahms's own, much shorter opening phrase, as well as five additional bars at the beginning of the second movement. Berio completed his orchestration of six early songs by Gustav Mahler in 1987, and conducted the first performance with the Toscanini Orchestra on 7 December that year,with Thomas Hampson the baritone soloist. The six songs in this orchestrated set are 'Hans und Grete', 'Phantasie', 'Scheiden und Meiden', 'Erinnerung', 'Frühlingsmorgen', and 'Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald'. The Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra is conducted by Edward Gardner, with Roderick Williams the baritone soloist in the songs by Mahler and Michael Collins the soloist in Brahms's Clarinet Sonata.

This release features a live concert recording from St Petersburg. Beethoven composed a total of eight works for cello and piano, whose sheer joy and ingenuity are hard to beat and are wonderfully captured in this live recording. The French cellist Marc Coppey and Peter Laul, his St Petersburg partner at the piano, perform these works with great character and energy, creating an impeccable, sparkling sound in the popular variations and substantial sonatas. Even in a live situation, the technical perfection of the performers is impressive. As a venue for their "Beethoven marathon", they opted for the Small Hall of the St Petersburg Philharmonia: its historical ambience, steeped in tradition, and the supremely attentive audience create atmosphere as well as inspiration. Both are features of this recording, setting it apart from other complete recordings of these popular works, most of which are studio recordings. The hall's resident Steinway and the recording equipment from the former Melodya studios complete the Saint Petersburg ensemble.

REVIEW:

Coppey and Laul put forward a highly effective case for this great music. Their sound is well balanced, the recording much more satisfying. There seems very little audience noise and no applause, and the players are technically remarkable. These two musicians play together as one, and their sensitivity for when to pause and how to make the most of Beethoven’s music is just as I would wish to play it myself. In a word, these are outstanding interpretations of some of the greatest cello music.

– American Record Guide

BEETHOVEN Piano Trio in Bb, op. 97, “Archduke.” SCHUBERT Piano Trio in Bb, op. 99 • Tr di Trieste • INSTITUTO DISCOGRAFICO ITALIANO 6678, mono (69:52)


These recordings are taken from radio air checks in Cologne on March 12, 1958 (Schubert) and September 23, 1959 (Beethoven). I do not believe these are the same performances by this long-lived, estimable ensemble that can be heard in Deutsche Grammophon’s five-disc compilation of the Trio di Trieste’s complete recordings, but I wouldn’t swear to it since I don’t own that set.


The Trio di Trieste was one of the 20th century’s longest-surviving piano trios, and one that has often been compared to the Serkin-Busch and Cortot-Thibaud-Casals Trios. The comparison is more apt, I think, to the latter than it is to the former, for these are readings of a fairly Romantic persuasion, with tempos, dynamics, and phrasing undergoing frequent adjustments to fit the mood of the moment. Within that interpretive paradigm, however, it has to be said that the playing of Renato Zanettovich, Lebero Lana, and Dario De Rosa is of a beguiling beauty that simply silences any criticism of the ensemble’s stylistic approach.


My only regret is that I never got to see and hear the Trio di Trieste perform live—though I suppose these air checks are the next closest thing to it—for whatever one might point to that the players don’t do right in terms of observing the absolute letter of the scores, one cannot cite a single thing they do wrong in terms of intuiting the music’s spirit and emotional core. These performances simply transcend any mundane considerations as they ascend into the realm of the sublime. For a glimpse of the starry firmament Beethoven reveals to us, listen to the hushed, almost trembling awe the players convey in the closing measures of the “Archduke” Trio’s great Andante . It will make you want to fall to your knees in wonderment. This is the performance of this movement I have sought my entire life, and finally I have found it. All else, as the sage said, is mere commentary.


In closing, let me just say that the sound of these recordings is so good it’s not even necessary to qualify it with an excuse about their source. If I were not writing this review for the regular composer section of the magazine, I could easily see submitting it as an entry to the Classical Hall of Fame. Is further recommendation needed?

FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Decades before World Music became an established category, Béla Bartók was roaming the Eastern European countryside, collecting folk tunes with fellow composer Zoltan Kodaly. He snapped up songs from his native Hungary, but also toted his phonograph on tune-gathering trips to Romania, Slovakia and Turkey. He spent much of 1943 on a research fellowship at Columbia University transcribing Serbo-Croatian folk songs.

As violinist James Ehnes and pianist Andrew Armstrong demonstrate on this new recording, Bartók fashioned some vibrant and colorful arrangements from his folk journeys.

Ehnes has been a familiar face in New York lately; last summer, he performed on a New York Philharmonic broadcast from Van Cortlandt Park and also made a stop for a WQXR Café Concert. He’s been busy in the recording studio too; this wraps a three-part Bartók cycle.

The three sets of folk songs on this recording illustrate how Bartók embraced the tangy exotic modes and wild irregular rhythms of the countryside, which freed him from "the tyranny of major and minor scales," as he put it. Two sets of Hungarian Folks Songs features some jaunty dialogues with the piano and some added effects – pizzicato, harmonics – to make a splash. The Romanian Folk Dances ratchet up the momentum further, particularly in the final “Polka” and the rollicking “Fast Dance.”

The sonatas offer a striking contrast but there's much to admire here too. A Bach-like grandeur underscores the unaccompanied Sonata (1944), written in the in the final months of Bartók's life for Yehudi Menuhin, and yet more traces of Hungarian folk melodies turn up in the Violin Sonata in E minor, written a half-century earlier.

-- WQXR, Album of the Week [1/20/2013]

Four years after a highly successful Bartok recording with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Edward Gardner here returns to the composer on SACD, with James Ehnes as solo violinist, and his Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. The central piece in this recording is the Concerto for Orchestra, the largest work that Bartok completed during the last five years of his life and described by the composer, in the program notes for its 1944 premiere, as ‘a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.’ It is joined by the Dance Suite, the immediate predecessor, among Bartok’s few works for full orchestra without a soloist, of the Concerto for Orchestra, though by more than two decades; and by the violin Rhapsodies, the colorful folk influences of which are revealed by James Ehnes, a specialist in the repertoire, who already has recorded the complete sonatas as well as the concertos for violin and for viola to critical acclaim.