A revolution in art and literature swept through Europe and by the early 1800s Romanticism dominated the musical landscape. Such figures as Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Brahms exemplified the ideals yet maintained highly individual approaches. Now, our finest historically-informed musicians and scholars present this incomparable repertoire in a series destined by become an essential part of every serious music lover’s collection. Robert Schumann, the “herald of a new poetic age”, in the words of his biographer, John Daverio, carved out a unique position for himself in the world of German Romanticism, especially in the creation of a new genre of solo piano music, which consisted of a cycle of miniatures, often provided with evocatively poetic titles. The present recording features Schumann’s three-movement Fantasie in C major, Op. 17 and the playfully mysterious and kaleidoscopic Carnaval, Op. 9, a series of miniature character portraits with a wide range of moods and textures. Chi-Chen Wu performs these works on a copy of a 19thcentury Viennese fortepiano by Rodney Regier.

This album brings together a selection of religious compositions by Giacomo Meyerbeer, including several works presumed lost until their recent discovery. These rediscovered pieces stand out for their masterful quality and highly individual style, such as the Hymne An Gott, which demonstrates Meyerbeer’s sensitivity and skill with text. Other gems include the luminous Pater Noster and the melancholy Prelude et Cantique, which draws on the spirituality of the late Middle Ages and was of great significance to the composer. The soprano Andrea Chudak studied at the Hochschule fur Musik ‘Hanns Eisler’ in Berlin as well as the Institute Musiktheater of the Staatliche Hochschule fur Musik in Karlsruhe, and attended masterclasses with Peter Schreier and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, among others. She has won many prizes in national and international competitions, and has sung as a soloist at the opera houses in Karlsruhe, Kaiserslautern, Stuttgart, at the Staatsoper Berlin, and the Theater an der Wien since 2001.

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Saint-Saënss' favorite pupil, Gabriel Faure, wrote in his obituary of his teacher of the "serene regions" his music often inhabited, "where violence and paroxysms are unknown, where gravity, wit, charm, and smiling tenderness rule side by side." In this, he was echoing his teacher's own response to the world around him: "Are smiles and graces to be ignored by all"... Happiness is disapproved of in the music of our time... Long live sadness! Long live boredom!" To which Roger Nicholas responds, "Long live keys, tunes, clarity, and playfulness! Long live the music of Camille le Grand!" This release is the second of two volumes of original compositions and arrangements for piano duo and duets by Camille Saint-Saëns. "The two pianists are perfectly in tune with one another at all times. This is thoroughly enjoyable and well recorded with some interesting cover notes. I really look forward to hearing volume 2..." (Jonathan Welsh)

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Founded in 2009, Trio Shaham Erez Wallfisch is made up of three of the best classical musicians performing today: violinist Hagai Shaham, pianist Arnon Erez, and cellist Raphael Wallfisch. Alongside the trio, performs the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie, conducted by Daniel Raiskin. For this two disc release, the works of Brahms have been chosen.

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Saint-Saëns’ operatic works contain instrumental music of vivacity and charm but have been undeservedly overlooked. Ascanio contains a substantial and elaborate divertissement that fellow composer Reynaldo Hahn termed ‘the entire Renaissance in a few pages’. Les Barbares, a tale of conquest and revenge, includes a vivid Prologue and joyful ballet, while La Princesse jaune with its pentatonic writing, and La Jota aragonese laced with Spanish vitality, show the composer at his most generously carefree. Jun Markl is a highly-respected interpreter of core Germanic repertoire and has become known for his refined and idiomatic explorations of the French Impressionists. His long-standing relationships with the state operas of Vienna, Berlin and Munich, the Semperoper Dresden and the Metropolitan Opera have been complemented by his music directorships of the Orchestre National de Lyon and the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra. In recognition of his achievements in Lyon, he was honoured in 2012 with the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Märkl has an extensive discography – among the over 50 albums he has recorded are the complete Schumann symphonies, works by Mendelssohn and Wagner, Ravel, Messiaen, and a highly-acclaimed Debussy set with the Orchestre National de Lyon. He is currently working on a cycle of works by Saint-Saëns and Hosokawa.

REVIEW:

Of Camille Saint-Saens's eleven operas only one, Samson et Dalila, still enjoys a place in the international repertoire. That was premiered in 1877, three years before Ascanio. That opera's thirty-minute ballet suite contains much that is pleasingly tuneful and suitably pictorial. The Les Barbares Prologue included here has the length and content of a movement from a very serious symphony. There is still more more music here, and all of it is played with the high quality of performance we have come to expect from the Malmo orchestra.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

Vladimir Feltsman, one of the most versatile and interesting musicians of our time, presents an insightful recital of famous and rarely heard works by Franz Liszt:

1 Liebesträume, No. 3 in A flat major (1850) 4.53
2 Ballade No. 2 in B minor (1853) 14.47
Six Consolations (1850) 16.20
3 I Andante con moto 1.11
4 II Un poco piu mosso 3.08
5 III Lento placido 4.01
6 IV Quasi adagio 2.31
7 V Andantino 2.37
8 VI Allegretto sempre cantabile 2.52
9 Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude (1853) 17.26
10 Berceuse in F sharp major (1876) 3.34
11 Elegia (1874) 5.19
12 La lugubre gondola (2nd version) (1885) 8.34
13 En rêve, nocturne (1886) 2.25

Total playing time 73.16

Beethoven: Missa Solemnis, Choral Fantasy & Symphony No. 5 (

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The operatic overture is the composers “hook” to enthrall the audience immediately as the house lights dim and the first notes sound from the orchestra pit. Some of the most popular overtures are featured here, and come from powerhouse composers like Strauss, Smetana, and Verdi. William Boughton conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra for this recording. He has been with the ESO since he founded the ensemble in 1980. Since its inception, the ensemble has built an extensive discography with Nimbus Records.

A celebrated student of Beethoven, virtuoso pianist Ferdinand Ries established an innovative technical approach to the interpretation of the fortepiano. The decade he spent in London (1813-24) was his most successful. The majority of the variation sets, fantasies and rondos on this recording were composed then. The emergence of the new square pianos created a hunger for domestic music-making and Ries responded with catchy variations on popular themes and technically challenging fantasias that gave full rein to his musical imagination. They add another dimension to the appreciation of the man Robert Schumann praised for his "remarkable originality".

Karel Mark Chichon leads the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie through a passionate, colorful and meticulously prepared interpretation of Dvorak's Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4. This release is the third installment of SWR Klassik's Dvorak Symphony Cycle.

Claire Huangci went from being "clearly a pianist to follow" to the status of internationally established and acclaimed young pianist even before winning the Mozart Prize at the Concours G�za Anda in 2018. Following on from four successful solo albums from arrangements of Russian ballet music through Scarlatti to Chopin's complete Nocturnes and all of Rachmaninoff's Preludes she now releases her first orchestral album with Berlin Classics. Together with the aspiring young South Korean conductor Shiyeon Sung and the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie she plays Chopin's Piano Concerto No 1 and contrasts it with Paderewski's concerto. Chopin's Piano Concerto No 1 is well established on the world's concert platforms. Huangci is well aware that there are two sides to Chopin the man who composed the piano concerto and the creator of the Nocturnes In comparison to Chopin, Paderewski is relatively unknown, yet he was an intensely interesting man and his piano concerto is rich in ideas and resources. The configuration of the recording is ideal- two artists who composed their works early in their careers, interpreted by an equally young pianist. Huangci perceives the youthful verve of the compositions:"Both composers exude a true joie de vivre, a love of life, attributable to their youth. The concertos were clearly written by men who looked with hope to the future." She brings the same youthful elan to her interpretation.

MENDELSSOHN: Flute Concerto in D Minor / Flute Sonatas

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TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 4 / Romeo and Juliet

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Tchaikovsky: Complete Piano Works

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MERCADANTE Flute Concertos: No. 2 in e, op. 57; No. 4 in G; No. 1 in E, op. 49 • Patrick Gallois (fl, cond); Snf Finlandia Jyväskylä • NAXOS 8.572731 (57:34)


Saverio Mercadante’s flute concertos are apparently more popular than I’d have thought—the one in E Minor especially—for not a few recordings of them have been previously reviewed in these pages. How memorable are they? Well, for me, they must not have made any lasting impression at all, for it wasn’t until I checked the Fanfare Archive that I realized I had reviewed a two-disc set of the composer’s flute concertos on Dynamic, performed by flutist Mario Carbotta. What’s interesting, though, is that in only three instances, going back to the early 1990s, have these works been taken up by players with names familiar enough to be recognized by general listeners outside of flute circles: James Galway, Jean-Pierre Rampal, and Peter-Lukas Graf. This new release on Naxos thus appears to be the first in two decades to feature an internationally renowned flutist with a name readers are sure to know, Patrick Gallois.


Giuseppe Saverio Raffaele Mercadante (1795–1870) was primarily a composer of operas. No surprise there; if you were a composer in 19th-century Italy, that’s what you did for a living, and Mercadante must have lived well, for his output of operas was prodigious—at least 60 that we know of. He was also long-lived enough to have witnessed the comings and goings of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, and to have been around for a good portion of Verdi’s life. While in Paris at Rossini’s invitation in 1836, Mercadante attended performances of operas by Meyerbeer and Halévy, and is said to have been strongly influenced by the French emphasis on grand, dramatic spectacle. After spending some time in Vienna, Spain, and Portugal, Mercadante returned to Italy, settled in for the long haul, and set to work.


Unlike most of his opera-composing Italian contemporaries, Mercadante seems to have had more than just a passing interest in instrumental music. His flute concertos and chamber works that include a flute can be explained by his majoring in the instrument as a student at the Naples Conservatory, but orchestration became a lifelong passion for him. He took special pains with the instrumental scoring in his operas, and during the last 30 years of his life, while director of the Conservatory at which he’d been a student, Mercandante composed a goodly number of non-operatic works. During his last seven years, from approximately 1863 on, he became nearly totally blind.


Sometimes it’s harder than other times to intuit why one composer’s works survive while another’s lose their appeal. Certainly, in his day, Mercadante rivaled Rossini and Donizetti in the field of opera. But for the very first time ever in these pages, I reviewed an opera in 36:6, and that opera happened to be Mercadante’s Don Chisciotte alle nozze di Gamaccio , categorized as a melodramma giocoso . I didn’t come away from it with a very positive opinion, describing the piece as “an Italian singspiel , and not a very good one, with nary a single memorable tune in this over an hour-and-a-half-long jocularity fit for whistling while you work.” I’m sure it’s not fair to judge Mercadante by this one opus, especially since it may not be representative of his operatic output as a whole, but in a 14: 4 review of Mercadante’s Il reggente , David Johnson wrote: “He was a composer of great gifts, but they were not great enough to survive direct comparisons with the triumvirate of Rossini, Donizetti, and Verdi, whose styles are all reflected in his operas. And he had the unlucky fate of choosing subjects that other composers had or were about to treat more memorably.”


To the extent that Mercadante is remembered today it’s mainly for his seven or so flute concertos, which, in their musical style and virtuoso demands on the soloist, are strongly reminiscent of Paganini’s violin concertos. If the flute could only play double-stops and chords and had the range of a violin, you could almost substitute one for the other. Each begins with an imposing introductory exposition that prepares for the grand entrance of the prima donna. Only in this case, she turns out to be a slip of a thing, a mere mouse, compared to the lioness the orchestral set-up has led us to expect. No disrespect intended towards Patrick Gallois and his brilliant fluting, but there’s something almost comical when the soloist enters twittering and tweeting away after such grandiloquent promises of things to come. It reminds me of the LOL jew’s harp concertos by Albrechtsberger.


Anyway, if you’re a flute fancier, you are guaranteed to find Mercadante’s concertos scintillating entertainment, and Gallois’s performance of them will take your breath away. It’s a miracle they don’t take his breath away, as he twirls and twizzles his way through a seemingly endless triathlon of rapid runs, arpeggios, and register leaps without ever once missing a beat or showing the least sign of strain. This is flute playing on an epic scale, and it’s matched in kind by the 38-member-strong Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä, amazingly well-led by Gallois as he’s playing.


Truth be told, the flute is not high on my list of favorite instruments, but if even I can appreciate the works on this disc and marvel at the execution, think how much you’ll love it if you actually like the flute. A two-thumbs-up recommendation.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins    

TCHAIKOVSKY / BALAKIREV / GLAZUNOV: Arrangements for 2 Piano

DVORAK, A.: String Quartets, Vol. 7 (Vlach Quartet) - Nos. 1

Wagner' epic music dramas revolutionized the operatic repertoire, drawing upon famous legends and history to create a completely new art form of unprecedented spectacle and intense psychological power.

This is not to be confused with the (rightly) famous Philips recording with almost the same cast from a year later, also from Bayreuth. I find this performance somewhat more compelling–it has an energy that the ’62 does not: rarely have I heard the choral moments sound so passionate, whether in outrage or prayer, and I’ve always thought that this opera, more than any other of Wagner’s, needs all the energy it can get. In addition, Grace Bumbry, in her Bayreuth debut (at the moment when the color barrier was lifted) is even better here, singing with a wild security and insinuation that ravishes the ear and, yes, Tannhäuser’s soul. She’s an intensely interesting Venus, sneaky, believable, and somewhat terrifying.

Wolfgang Windgassen is a bit better as well after a really bad off-key start; the voice seems darker than the following year. And his Rome Narrative is riveting, pathetic, and a true tour de force–and he has plenty of voice left, even so late in the evening. His operatic voyage from entranced to rueful to loving to crazed and then to more crazed is shatteringly portrayed.

Victoria de los Angeles preceded Anja Silja as Elisabeth, and she is in her full glory here. Nobody sounds like de los Angeles; arguments were made at one time that her Carmen sounded as if she had just come from a convent–but could that be any more perfect for Elisabeth? Her tonal purity is ideal for “Dich teure Halle” and the last-act prayer, and she lacks only the last smidge of desperation and grandeur for her supplications near the end of Act 2. But what a sound–so gentle and loving, so unadulterated! The other cast difference is the inclusion of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Wolfram. Again, can anyone sing or feel this music better? The empathy, the dignity, the gorgeous tone are all unique.

Josef Greindl, who seems to have sung every performance of everything throughout the 1960s, is a gruff Landgraf who nonetheless is fair and loving. And popping up from ensembles and offering the occasional solo is Gerhard Stolze, singing with an instantly recognizable timbre as Walther, and happily sounding nothing like either Mime or Herod. The rest are superb. Wolfgang Sawallich’s contribution needs no vote from me; this is his opera, brilliantly formed. The hybrid edition used may trouble some listeners: It’s essentially the 1845 Dresden, but with the 1861 Venusberg music. It doesn’t bother me a bit. The sound, by the way, is excellent mono.

My first choice for this opera remains Solti’s for Helga Dernesch’s Elisabeth and Christa Ludwig’s Venus, as well as René Kollo’s youthful Tannhäuser, not to mention the recording itself and Solti’s passion. But this one, at half the price, is very tempting.

-- Robert Levine, ClassicsToday.com