•This year’s 90th anniversary of Ferruccio Busoni's (1866-1924) death provides the occasion to present an album mostly of his transcriptions. Pianist David Theodor Schmidt (b. 1982) is one of the young generation of musicians who already enjoy great acclaim in the musical world. His busy concert schedule includes recitals and concerts at prestigious venues in Germany and the rest of Europe. “... (he is) new idol of all piano enthusiasts.” - Süddeutsche Zeitung

Johann Sebastian Bach: The Collection

Classical Music

"The quintessence {of his greatness} seems to me to be in the exceptionally light handling of the rhythm, an art in which no one else is his equal, and to lie in what the English refer to as humor, a word which does not really have an exact German equivalent. This latter characteristic explains his propensity for comic twists and the greater achievement of explaining away such features as serious …" (Albert Christoph Dies: "Biographische Nachrichten von Joseph Haydn") The release of Haydn´s Complete Piano Sonatas on 9 albums in 2013 was critically acclaimed throughout the world and nominated 2014 for the International Classical Music Award. The Boston Globe, USA, wrote: “Ekaterina Derzhavina's name was new to me, but this 9-album set of Haydn's complete piano sonatas should broaden her recognition considerably. Her playing is elegant, stylish, and above all imaginative, showing just how creative the composer was ...her feel for Haydn's originality comes through brilliantly.“ She continues her Haydn exploration with this new release, Variations and Pieces for Piano.

The career of conductor Rafael Kubelik (1914 – 1996) provides an interesting insight into the world of music in the twentieth century. Born the eighth child of the then world-famous violin virtuoso Jan Kubelik and his wife Countess Marianne Csaky-Szell, he was already commanding attention while he was studying piano, violin and composition at the Prague Conservatory between 1929 and 1933. In 1935 he embarked on a tour of the United States as his father's accompanist. The Czech Philharmonic Orchestra (which Vaclav Talich raised to the status of a top European orchestra) hired him as its conductor in 1936. When, the following year, Talich fell ill during a tour of western Europe, Kubelik filled in for him and began consolidating his international reputation. Despite his tendency towards subversive programming (he often included works by banned composers), he was able to retain the post after taking it over in 1941. In the post-war period Kubelik’s work with the orchestra enriched the cultural life of his country and in 1946 he became one of the founders of the Prague Spring Festival. Kubelik defected in 1948, though, in protest against the communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia. His three-year term as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra ended as a result of the ill will born him by the music critic Claudia Cassidy. His time as Music Director of The Royal Opera at Covent Garden was brought to an end because of opposition from Sir Thomas Beecham. Nevertheless, among orchestra musicians he was one of the most well-liked and esteemed conductors. His openness, fair moral principles and the friendly working atmosphere he created brought him a degree of recognition which even produced award-winning results in the recording studio.

Christian Thielemann writes: “I see Die Meistersinger as the pivot and central point of Wagner’s entire oeuvre. On the one hand it is a reaction to Tristan; on the other, he had found himself in a blind alley with Siegfried, and together those two works showed him the way out of it. The fascinating thing about Die Meistersinger is that you can find everything in it. Hero and anti-hero, comedy and tragedy, upperclass and lower-class lovers, burlesque and reflection, the old and the new, in short a whole world. The magic words summing it up for me are ‘atmosphere’ and ‘poetry’. How can I, as a conductor, make the music glitter in its exaggerations and parodies, and at the same time lend it authority? Conversely, how can I make its emotionalism sound not false but genuine, emphasizing the deeply felt popular note in the music? Wagner is fundamentally asking his interpreters to square the circle, which is what makes Die Meistersinger such a difficult work to perform. Perhaps it can succeed only by osmosis, if we open ourselves up entirely to all its moods, colours and aromas, inhaling them so deeply that they naturally emerge from us again at the right moment.”

Till well into the 1960s it was common practice to perform operas in the language of the country where they were being performed. What now seems strange to us, with our reverence for the original, was taken for granted then – except perhaps by those who knew not only the music but the language originally set to it and were annoyed by more or less inappropriate translations. Today we have long since grown used to being distracted from the action on stage by subtitles, or surtitles, and thus being at least able to follow the crude, implausible or totally incomprehensible plot of this or that opera by reading the libretto. Whatever the language, the artistic value of the performance depends very much upon its exponents. And that was where the German-speaking nations of the 1950s and 1960s, when the recorded-music market had not yet succumbed to globalization, had a lot to offer. The proof is in the five complete recordings – complete, that is, but fo the cuts so often made in those days – that make up this box set. The cast lists read like a Who’s Who of contemporary vocalists. We can count ourselves lucky to have these audio documents – edited to the highest possible technical standards – at our disposal. They offer us a reunion with a great series of irreplaceable and unforgettable soloists.

Hermann Abendroth (1883–1956) was just three years older than Wilhelm Furtwängler. These two great conductors of the German Romantic orchestral tradition remained in their senior posts during the Third Reich – Furtwängler in Berlin, Abendroth in Leipzig – and suffered the consequences in the early post-war period of not having openly opposed the Nazi regime. After working in Munich, Lübeck and Essen in the early years of his career, Abendroth was from 1915 to 1934 leader of the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne and from 1925 director of the city's conservatory and of the Music Festival of the Lower Rhine, becoming director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig in 1934 after Bruno Walter was forced out by the Nazis. Even as late as March 1945 Abendroth was conducting what were presumably the last symphonic works performed there, to be heard on the albums of this collection alongside Bruckner's Seventh recorded in February 1956, just a few months before his death on May 29 of that year. When his work at the Gewandhaus came to an end in 1945 Abendroth initially found a new field of activity with the newly constituted Radio Symphony Orchestra of Leipzig, later assuming a similar position in Berlin, where he was able to pass on to the post-war orchestral generation the experience of his successful conducting career. He had gained the requisite know-how in the early years of his training, since one of his teachers was Felix Mottl, who from 1886 to 1906 was one of the most important conductors in Bayreuth, to whom posterity is indebted for the orchestral arrangement of Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder.

Classical Music

Antonio Janigro (1918-1989), the founder and long-term conductor of the Zagreb Soloists, which developed over time into one of the world’s best string orchestras, lives on in the memory; as an outstanding cello virtuoso he set benchmarks with his recordings. He began his studies at the conservatoire in his native city of Milan. Pablo Casals recommended he then go to Paris, where in subsequent years he won six national and international prizes, and where, in 1933, his worldwide career was to begin. After the end of the Second World War Janigro went on to study orchestral direction, and made his debut as a conductor in 1948. In 1954 he founded the Zagreb Soloists, whose reputation grew at such a mercurial pace that the ensemble was given permission, even at the height of the Cold War, to perform on international stages. Janigro was also conductor of the Radio Zagreb Symphony Orchestra (1954-64) and of the Orchestra Dell’Angelicum di Milano. As successor to Karl Ristenpart he headed the Chamber Orchestra of Saarland Radio. He taught at the music universities of Düsseldorf and Stuttgart and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and was conductor of that institution’s Camerata. Antonio Janigro compiled a wide repertoire both as a soloist and with the Zagreb Soloists, encompassing works by Vivaldi, Corelli and Boccherini as well as the great works of the Viennese Classical School by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven through to Brahms. He simultaneously ensured that works by contemporary composers were well represented in his concert programmes and as a result premiered some very interesting works by the likes of Krzysztof Penderecki, György Ligeti and Milko Kelemen, who was involved in this very collection, both as composer and arranger.

Classical Music

Soon after the end of the Second World War, works by Richard Strauss were taken back into the repertoire of the Dresden State Opera. As early as 1945 the provisional venue of the Tonhalle (later the “Kleines Haus”, the small auditorium of the Staatstheater) was the location for a new staging of Ariadne auf Naxos and at the same place in 1946, another sign of restitution was seen in the revival of Die schweigsame Frau, which had lasted for only a few performances after the premiere in 1935 on account of the Jewish origins of writer and librettist Stefan Zweig. The following year was memorable for the legendary 1947 staging of Salome in Kurhaus Bühlau. 1948 brought a new production of Rosenkavalier in the new and larger Staatstheater auditorium known as the “Grosses Haus”. At all these Strauss operas from 1945 to 1948, General Music Director Joseph Keilberth was in overall charge of the music. Subsequent to Keilberth’s departure, the next new Strauss production was directed by newly appointed GMD Rudolf Kempe: Daphne on June 11, 1950, the source of the performance to be heard on this album (a live recording of the broadcast that day by the Dresden station of Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk).

Gerd Schaller writes of this new release: “Although extremely numerous and insightful, the surviving fragments of this movement, which were left at various stages of development, present a very incomplete picture of Bruckner’s Ninth. Nevertheless, throughout the decades in which I have theoretically and practically (as a conductor) studied Bruckner’s works, I have always found it regrettable that these fascinating sketches and ideas might never be played at all simply because they were not left in a playable form. Before I embarked on the task of filling in and completing the final movement, I did of course have to consider whether aspiring to finish such a masterpiece as Bruckner’s Ninth might be seen as somewhat presumptuous. A further exploration of the Ninth Symphony in the run-up to a performance is what eventually prompted me to assemble the final movement. Whilst it might be seen as presumption, I believed it to be altogether possible and even desirable to incorporate Bruckner’s incredibly daring and fascinating sketches and drafts into a playable and, most importantly, musically convincing form.“

“If all his compositions were to be destroyed except for two, I would say: rescue the last two symphonies.” Such were Antonín Dvořák’s words about Schubert in 1894, and such is the attitude of many today. While Schubert’s six earlier symphonies were esteemed, his last two are known as works of immense beauty and complexity.

Maurice Gendron (1920–1990) played on an instrument that now bears his name. It is a Stradivari cello of 1693, and in honour of this great cellist it is now known as the “Gendron, Lord Speyer” cello. Gendron felt himself born under a lucky star. After studies in his birthplace Nice, where he already showed exceptional promise, he moved to Paris. His stupendous ability and charming manner soon spread his reputation, and in the artistically inclined French capital he attracted the attention of such prominent figures as Picasso, Mauriac and Cocteau. The end of the Second World War opened the doors of the world’s concert halls to him. One early highlight was the European first performance of the Prokofiev Cello Concerto op. 58 with the Philharmonic Orchestra under Walter Süsskind in London in 1945. Pablo Casals himself, the revered role model of all twentieth-century cellists, invited Gendron to make music with him. So did the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who invited him to make up a trio together with his sister Hephzibah.

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REVIEW:

He plays the Dvorak faster even than Casals did in his recording around that time, but with enough attention to the details to make it work. The Haydn and Boccherini are under the direction of cellist Casals, the Schumann and Tchaikovsky under composer Dohnanyi. What a year! Gendron restructures the Boccherini, adding such a lot to the cello line that I hardly recognize the piece in places. The same goes for the Rococo Variations. Cellists will find this interesting, but as an introduction to this music it may not be ideal.

– American Record Guide