The piano concerto in D minor was composed between 1931–1935 and premiered on November 23, 1935, by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Toivo Haapanen, with Ernst Linko as the soloist. The concerto is preserved only as a piano reduction and instrument parts, but the original score is lost. The piano part contains several cuts and facilitations by the 1935 soloist, while the instrument parts show no omissions. The most probable result was that the orchestra played some passages without the soloist.

For this recording, Leiviskä’s original solo part was restored. Several reviews, mostly under pseudonyms, discussed the symphony after its first performance. The reviews were mostly favorable. It was both praised and criticized for its structure and the inclusion of the waltz motive, and comments of the themes and melodies were also ambiguous. After 1948, the symphony was performed three more times until 1951. After 70 years of silence, the symphony was resurrected in 2022.

As a young man, the composer Hans Gál witnessed an artistic turning point, for it was during the First World War that late Romanticism met the modern musical era. Everything was in motion. He himself was however critical of many musical initiatives and admitted: “I had too little in common with my contemporaries”. Indeed, the orchestral surges of the Wagnerites were just as alien to him as the atonality of the Second Viennese School championed by Alban Berg and Anton Webern. The pared-down sounds of Neoclassicism and the “new objectivity” of the likes of Paul Hindemith were likewise of little use to Gál. Therefore, in his adherence to tonality and use of sophisticated formal progressions, he created a distinctive style of his own that he steadfastly embraced throughout his life.

“In addition to working together with living composers, the rediscovery of undeservedly forgotten works is an immense enrichment for us instrumentalists, who all too often find ourselves in the role of reproducing a few well-known pieces. It is for this reason that my joy was all the greater when one day Oliver Triendl told me about a genuine treasure: during his extensive research on composers from the Balkan region, he had unearthed a number of completely unknown works for bassoon and piano and immediately had the intuitive idea of recording them on CD.

However, the result of his research was so extensive that several CDs could have been filled with the works he had found, and so we played through piles of sheet music for half a night until we finally arrived at our selection for this CD. With this CD, I hope to contribute to the expansion of the repertoire of my instrument, and also to promote a wider dissemination of the classical musical tradition of the Balkan region, which has so far been under-represented, and not only in the bassoon repertoire.” Theo Plath

Rudolf Moser composed works across a wide range of genres for a variety of instrumentation. He was particularly interested in historical musical styles and borrowed forms and phrases, ecclesiastical compositional modes, and historical instrumentation from the past. This CD focuses on Moser's orchestral music. The compilation of works from his middle and late periods reveals a mature artist who has found his style.

“Now I have come across someone who really has a great creative talent.” (Peter Tchaikovsky) Although the originality of his musical language paved the way for Russian modernism, Catoire's work still followed the artistic ideals of Russia and not the new culture of the Soviet Republic. His work is highly expressive and of enormous polyphonic density, greatest expressiveness, fine colors, rhythmic and harmonious scope. Catoire's music was almost never performed and his name remained almost unknown also to expert circles. He left behind 36 works including some symphonic pieces, a piano concerto, chamber music, songs and piano cycles. This music was written in the “fin de siecle”, with its shine and nobility, but also with its fragility.

REVIEW:

Catoire's works are attractive and well worth hearing. These performances certainly make an excellent case for them: the pianist Oliver Triendl has no problems with the often demanding piano writing. In the concerto Roland Kluttig and his radio orchestra provide good support and in the two chamber works the Vogler Quartet make excellent partners and play with a will. No complaints about the recording, though different teams and venues were used for the concerto from the chamber works. The disc is handsomely presented with a cover sleeve and altogether this is a quality production.

– MusicWeb International

The chamber music of Johanna Müller-Hermann is distinguished by its focus on pure melody, which often gives the music a lyrical character, but which she is quite willing to interrupt with stringent use of rhythm and contrast. The Austrian composer Johanna Müller-Hermann (1868-1941) was born in Vienna on January 15, 1868, to government official Alois von Hermann and Antonia Freiin von der Decken zu Himmelreich, who was eighteen years his junior. Known in her girlhood as Johanna von Hermann, she was the second of three children. The growing family enjoyed the life of the upper middle class in the inner city of Vienna. Johanna Hermann learnt the piano with Heinrich von Bocklet, who was later made Professor. She attended the Vienna Conservatory, studied musicology with Carl Navratil and historical counterpoint with Josef Labor, took violin and piano lessons, and participated in the exercises of Guido Adler.

Müller-Hermann also enrolled for the composition class of Josef Bohuslav Foerster. She published her first opus in 1903, “Seven Lieder for solo voice and piano”. The premiere of one of these songs the following year drew public attention to Müller-Hermann, and her Violin Sonata was first performed in 1905, attracting a good deal of positive comment. Critical interest was increased by the publication of her String Quartet op. 6, which celebrated its premiere six years later. The quartet was written during a period of instruction from Alexander von Zemlinsky. There is no known evidence of this teaching, nor are there any drafts, but the quartet is dedicated to Zemlinsky “in gratitude”. Public recognition came in 1917, when she was appointed Professor at the Vienna Conservatory in succession to her former teacher Josef Foerster. Her public profile benefited from her two orchestral works and even more from her choral works with orchestral accompaniment.

Johanna Senfter (1879–1961): Works for viola and piano – In the male-dominated world of the time, in which women who performed and composed required special assertive skills, Johanna Senfter consciously refrained from a career in the wider world and limited her creative field to her birthplace of Oppenheim am Rhein near Mainz, not least because of her unstable health as a result of a severe bout of diphtheria in her childhood. This pragmatic self-limitation has given way to an interesting, decades-long debate, not least because her compositional legacy at the Cologne Musikhochschule is available to all interested researchers and musicians and has led to new editions or first recordings of her compositions.

Constantinescu stands out among the composers who followed George Enescu into the Romanian musical limelight during the first half of the 20th century. On the one hand, through his diverse oeuvre, which encompasses almost all of the genres from chamber music to film music, and on the other hand, through his own musical language, consisting of great color and harmonic variety. Skilfully adapted ecclesiastic Byzantine modes and chants, modal scales, and the authentic and fascinating melodies of Romanian folk music merge within Constantinescu's oeuvre, which stands balanced somewhere between Western tradition and a national musical idiom.

After being forced out of his Soviet-occupied home in Bukovina (Chernivtsi), Radu Paladi was an exceptional, extraordinary talent, whether as a composer, pianist, conductor, or lecturer. In the 1950s, a time that was politically as well as artistically particularly tricky, Radu Paladi managed to find his artistic path and own distinctive voice, incorporating and elevating Romanian folklore in his highly elaborate compositional technique to fascinating effect. His music, combining depth, brilliance, and vitality, spoke to listeners with an immediacy that made hearing his music an exhilarating experience.

REVIEW:

Radu Paladi (1927-2013) was an important musical personality in Romania—as a composer, conductor, interpreter, and pedagogue.

We are dealing here with very expressive music that focuses on emotion.

The piano concerto, with Oliver Triendl as soloist, starts like a whirlwind, and all the musicians put their full energy into this at times ecstatic bundle of music. A wonderful contrast is provided by the second movement, a lament in which soloist and orchestra listen very delicately into the silence. Eugene Tzigane stretches the tension to bursting point and shapes the climax of the movement passionately and stirringly. The finale, in turn, is a single bubbling fountain of virtuosity and tonal brilliance.

No less expressive is the Violin Concerto from 2002, which begins with a moving elegy that suddenly leads into an orchestral outcry. Here, too, the performers live the music with every fiber of their souls, especially again in the slow middle movement. There is a little wink in the finale with the surprising reminiscence of Vivaldi’s Seasons as well as lively folk dances, brilliantly played by Nina Karmon.

The two concerti are accompanied by Eugene Tzigane’s colorful and rousing interpretation of the symphonic suite ‘Das Zauberflötchen’.

-- Fanfare

In the wake of World War I and the October Revolution, countless artists emigrated from Eastern Europe to Paris. Alexander Tcherepnin was soon welcomed and adopted by groups of artists such as the École de Paris, a loose gathering of emigrants from several countries that included Bohuslav Martinů and Romanian composer Marcel Mihalovici. Diyang Mei has held the position of principal viola of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra since the fall of 2019. In October 2022 he will start the position of principal viola with the Berliner Philharmoniker.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

There is only anecdotal evidence of how the composer Hans Schaeuble discovered music. He evidently learnt the piano at an early age: he was writing out pieces of music even in his childhood. For his years in Lausanne, there are copious accounts of his attendance at concerts by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under Ernest Ansermet, which led him to the conclusion that he should be a composer himself. Against the wishes of his parents, particularly his stepfather (his father having died in 1922), he prepared himself for a course of study in music. From no later than 1927 until the end of 1930, he studied piano with Karl Adolf Martienssen and composition with Hermann Grabner at the Landeskonservatorium in Leipzig. Schaeuble moved to Berlin on December 15 or 16, 1930. He was now a freelance composer and remained so until the end of his life; he never held any official position.

The Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra op. 50 of 1967 is Schaeuble’s fifth work for piano and orchestra. His first essay in the form dates from 1931, his first year in Berlin: the Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra op. 9, which remained unperformed. The Concertino for Oboe and String Orchestra op. 44 of 1959 is the first of three wind concertos that Schaeuble composed in succession between 1959 and 1962. On September 9, 1956 he wrote his first note about preliminary studies; on November 11, 1956, he signed off on his Serenade in B flat for String Orchestra op. 42. Although the piece appears to have been a commissioned work, there is no record of any performances.

Joy of discovery and perpetual reaching for new horizons are the traits that best describe the Grammy-winning State Chamber Orchestra Sinfonietta Riga. Since its foundation in 2006, the orchestra's artistic director and chief conductor has been Normunds Šne. One can hardly imagine a more devoted champion of neglected and rarely played composers than pianist Oliver Triendl. His tireless commitment – primarily to romantic and contemporary music – is reflected in almost 150 CD recordings. The scope of his repertoire is surely unique, comprising more than 100 piano concertos and hundreds of chamber music pieces. In many cases, he was the first to present these works on stage or to commit them to disc.

To browse more of Josef Labor's chamber music recordings available on the Capriccio label, click here.

The positive response to Capriccio’s first recording of his Piano Quartet and Piano Quintet (C5390) has enabled this series to be continued now with three works representative of Labor's oeuvre from the early 1890s. In Vienna, Labor was part of Johannes Brahms’s close circle of friends. Brahms particularly valued his composer colleagues who went their own way without copying him. Labor’s music is very skillfully composed, always sensuous, and first and foremost melodious; it does not require a too complete concentration on itself. A total of around eighty compositions have survived. Among them are practically no occasional works, which is connected to the fact that he was blind: for him composition was a luxury, insofar as he had to rely on the help of a scribe who had to commit the work to paper.

REVIEW:

Josef Labor’s work list is relatively small in number, not much more than 80 compositions in total. Largely this is as a result of his concert career as an esteemed organist, and pianist—in which capacity he made a tiny number of recordings—and his extensive teaching practice.

His Violin Sonata No 1 dates from 1891 and its flowing lyricism indicates Brahms as a primary influence, not unsurprising in the case of the Vienna-based Labor. Thematically attractive, this well laid out four-movement work enshrines a rather ‘antique’ element in its slow movement, as its indication of Tempo di Menuetto-Quasi Sicilienne would indicate though, in this performance at least, there seems too little tempo contrast between the opening two movements. The finale shows Labor at his best in its quasi-improvisatory way but, true to form, though he prioritizes lyricism it’s never forceful; Labor remains a genial, generous composer. In terms of recorded balance I think Oliver Triendl’s piano is privileged over violinist Nina Karmon.

The Cello Sonata No 1 was written a few years later. Again, there is a feeling of free-flowing unimpeded lyricism, the piano busy, the cello serenely lyric, that marks out Labor’s priorities in sonata repertoire. There is plenty of Late Romantic ardor, as well as lissom frolicsome material in the Scherzo with the piano—Labor’s own instrument—leading. The compact third movement is a Quasi andante that functions much as an intermediary bridge to the finale which is energetic and has plenty of athletic esprit. The balance between the instruments is better here.

The final work is the Theme and Variations for Horn (or cello) and piano, written soon after the Cello Sonata. There’s Beethovenian precedent for the structure of this work, and its alpine warmth, finely brought out by Přemysl Votya, its metric changes and varied characterization of its variations are all most attractive and so too is the confident end to this eight-minute work, a fine addition to the horn-and-piano repertoire, though Labor sanctioned the use of a cello as well.

Labor was a genial composer who never aspired to empyrean realms. There is a lyric practicality and a self-containment of means and expression that ensure that nothing disturbs the dappled calmness of his music-making. There’s a smallness, perhaps, to much of his writing but it’s affectionate and well crafted.

-- MusicWeb Internaional (Jonathan Woolf)

Harald Genzmer was a composition pupil of Paul Hindemith in Berlin from 1928 to 1934. Whoever studies Genzmer’s enormous oeuvre in detail will recognize in the pupil’s music many Romantic gestures and a sensual imagination rarely occurring in the teacher’s works. What Genzmer adopted from his mentor was the masterly craftsmanship, an awareness of classicism and form and joy in performing in itself and in the colours of the most differing instruments. The broadly educated scion of an academic family never regarded himself as a genius transcending boundaries, but as the servant of performers and the public: ‘Music should be zestful, artful and comprehensible. As practicable, it may win over the interpreter, and then the listener as graspable’. Musicians have always enjoyed performing Genzmer’s inspired music, which is affectionally adapted to the most varied instrumentations, and are now continuing to do so in increasing measure.

This CD - significantly only the second CD dedicated exclusively to von Zieritz - presents a longitudinal section of her oeuvre. It begins with the Japanese Songs, written in 1919, here in the version for soprano and chamber orchestra from the 1980s. The centrepiece is Le Violon de la Mort, composed in 1953 for violin and piano and arranged for violin, piano and orchestra in 1957, as well as the trumpet double concerto of 1975, the final piece and, as it were, a satyr play. Like Hans Bethge's collection Die chinesische Flöte (The Chinese Flute) from 1907, the poetic model of the Japanese Songs belongs to the context of interest in exotic art of the fin de siècle. Gustav Mahler made Bethge's poems the basis for a large symphonic work; Grete von Zieritz took the opposite approach with the Japanese Songs. These are a kaleidoscopic sequence of the briefest miniatures. It would hardly be possible to do otherwise, since the Japanese models are not song texts in the European sense, but poetically condensed sayings that defy conventional song settings. Aphoristic brevity was the order of the day.

After the signal event that was World War I, gifted young composers trooped into the French metropolis full of hope. In 1925, the publisher Michel Dillard coined the term L’École de Paris (‘The Paris School’) in reference to the foreign composers then living in Paris, principally the Hungarian Tibor Harsányi (1898–1954), Poland’s Alexandre Tansman (1897–1986), Bohuslav Martinu from Czechoslovakia (1890–1959), Russia’s Alexander Tcherepnin (1899–1977), and the Romanian Marcel Mihalovici (1898–1985), all of whose works he specialised in disseminating. These composers came to Paris from Eastern Europe and all, with the exception of Martinu [and Swiss composer Conrad Beck (1901–1989)], died there. All five initially addressed the difficult task of translating their countries’ folk music idioms into standard musical notation. Several works on this programme are heard in their world premiere recordings.

Focusing attention on forgotten composers of the classical and romantic periods, the new Joachin Wollenweber Edition utilizes new sheet music editions which are created in collaboration with musicologists and top artists, which are published at the same time as the CD recordings. This release is the fourth album in the series and is dedicated to the late Romantic composer Philipp Scharwenka, who despite his lack of popularity today, gained the respect of his contemporaries such as Max Reger. Natalia Prischepenko is the featured violinist on this album. Hailing from Siberia, her mother, a famous USSR teacher, brought her up in music, and remains her mentor even today. After winning multiple national competitions, she began touring the globe as a soloist.

This Coproduction of TYXart and the new Joachim Wollenweber Edition refocuses the publics attention on forgotten composers of the classical and romantic periods. This second album of the Joachim Wollenweber Edition series introduces a trio and two duos by the Austrian composer Robert Fuchs (1847-1927), representing gems of chamber music Iiterature that are performed much too seldom. Famous pupils such as Gustav Mahler, Jean Sibelius and Richard Strauss studied with him in Vienna. The great artists Mate Szucs (viola), Noah Bendix-Balgley (violin) and Oliver Triendl (piano) bring these works to life through a balance of virtuosity and well-developed musical sensibility.

Hermann Goetz (1840-76) had observed Wagner and Liszt, the avant-garde of his times, with interest, yet there is almost nothing of it in his musical language, firmly anchored in the First Viennese School and early Romanticism. + His melodies often have a seductively lyrical charm. + Of all his generation’s recognized masters, he is to be found most appropriately placed at the side of Edvard Grieg. + This TYX Art CD release marks the launch of new series based upon publication of new sheet music editions dedicated to refocusing attention on forgotten composers of the classical and romantic periods.

With this album series, TYXart in co-production with the new Joachim Wollenweber Edition refocuses the public’s attention on forgotten composers from the baroque period all the way into the modern age. New sheet music editions are created in collaboration with top artists, musicologists and radio stations, with recordings being published at the same time. This sixth album of the series introduces an especially active and unconventional representative of neo-romanticism with a horn quintet, a clarinet sonata, and two works for horn and piano: Felix Draeseke. In spite of suffering from a hearing defect, he created not only chamber music, but also virtuoso concertos and sacred compositions the styles of which are truly remarkable. These chamber music recordings with wind players and strings available again for the first time are a true treasure in this edition.

The double bass is an instrument that can all too often be misunderstood and is often lightly dismissed: due to its impressive size it is assumed that the instrument is only capable of ponderous, heavy, grumpy sounds. The fact that there is not a grain of truth in either of these urban myths is borne out by the double bass sonatas on the present album and the soloist, Romanian double bassist Petru Iuga: music is innate to this instrument that is anything but cumbersome; it is in fact capable of producing sensuous melodies, virtuoso forms of expression suit it just as well as contemplative ones do, and its spectrum ranges from the deepest gruff growl to the brightest, most heartfelt burst of laughter. And (as with all other musical instruments) it requires a fully trained, experienced and attentive performer to elicit all of those characteristics from the instrument. What’s more, it requires a repertoire that makes demands both on the musician and the musical instrument and inspires them to give their very best – only then can those ethereal sounds be heard, even on a double bass.The Romanian double bassist Petru Iuga is one of the most successful classical musicians of his generation. During his musical training in his homeland, the 20-year-old student came to the attention of Yehudi Menuhin, who enlisted him for his International Menuhin Music Academy in Gstaad (Switzerland). One can hardly imagine a more devoted champion of neglected and rarely played composers than pianist Oliver Triendl. His tireless commitment – primarily to romantic and contemporary music – is reflected in more than 100 recordings. The scope of his repertoire is surely unique, comprising some 90 piano concertos and hundreds of chamber music pieces.

After the signal event that was World War I, young, hopeful, gifted composers trooped into the French metropolis. In 1925, the publisher Michel Dillard coined the term École de Paris (School of Paris) for the foreign composers then living in Paris, especially the Hungarian Tibor Harsányi (1898-1954), Pole Alexandre Tansman (1897-1986), Czech Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959), Russian Alexander Tcherepnin (1899-1977), and Romanian Marcel Mihalovici (1898-1985), whose works he specialized in disseminating. All five composers came to Paris from Eastern Europe and all, with the exception of Martinu, died there. All five initially attempted to translate the principal aspects of the difficult-to-notate idioms of folk music from their homelands into standard musical notation. Some works can be heard in a World Premiere Recording.