After Robert Holl’s outstanding recent disc of Brahms Lieder, Marjana Lipovsek, a singer of no less searching musical sense and sensibility, adds her own selection to the catalogue. Her strong and spirited Eastern European mezzo-soprano brings an appropriate inwardness and intensity to four of the five Op. 105 songs. Purposeful phrasing runs gently through the senses in ‘Wie Melodien zieht es’, like the song’s eponymous melody, and penetrates the very heart of the soul’s winter in ‘Immer leiser’. All, though, is not angst. Lipovsek and her accompanist Charles Spencer are sensitive to the rapidly shifting moods within a group of songs, so that the numb darkness of Heine’s cool night of death is recreated as evocatively as the light-filled morning of his ‘Es schauen die Blumen’. Later, a steely vocal strength for ‘Von ewiger Liebe’ can dissolve to the lunar evanescence of ‘Die Mainacht’. Lipovsek’s thrilling grasp of the regional idiom of the final three folksongs is in glaring contrast to the infelicitous English (American) translations in the accompanying text: I doubt that Brahms’s poets would own up to an ‘incalibrate glow’, a ‘cute little child’ or, still worse, ‘a together time’.

-- Hilary Finch, BBC Music Magazine

ROSSINI: IL TURCO IN ITALIA C

PAGANINI: VIOLIN CONCERTOS 1 &

MENDELSSOHN: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT

Music for Lute, Violin & Violincello

WEBER: SYMPHONY NO 1 MENDELS

LISZT: PIANO CONCERTOS 1 & 2,

This collection is intended more as a memorial to the remarkable gifts of Thomas Schippers (1930-77) than as an anomalously filled-out anthology of music by Samuel Barber. But it could hardly avoid being the latter as well: among conductors Schippers was Barber’s pre-eminent interpreter in the latter part of both their lives, and his rhetorical, impassioned, even rather wild eloquence demonstrates how much of that quality is to be found in Barber himself, unrevealed by more temperate interpretations. Indeed, if you wanted to make a case for Barber’s orchestral music, as a corrective to the widespread current view that the best of him is to be found in his songs, you could scarcely do better than with this disc. Even the Adagio is richer, much more intensely emotional than usual, while Andromache’s Farewell (with Arroyo in vibrantly exciting voice) has an almost expressionist vehemence to it. Medea’s Dance of Vengeance also receives an unsparingly eloquent, full-throated reading, and Schippers finds turbulent passion as well as nimble neo-classical qualities in the Second Essay. Barber’s music is neither miniature nor urbane in these readings, but troubled, dark, at times nobly tragic.

As you might imagine, the interlude from Wozzeck is almost overwrought in its histrionic eloquence, but d’Indy’s prelude suggests that Schippers’s gifts were not narrow: he sees how Wagnerian this music is, but underlines also its characteristically French sobriety and economy of means. The recordings are brilliant, with an impressive dynamic range but a tendency to highlight wind soloists. As a tribute to the most gifted American conductor of his generation it is striking and impressive.

-- Michael Oliver, Gramophone [6/1997]

With the ghost of Glenn Gould gently hovering above, Martin Stadtfeld’s dry-point articulation, rhythmic incisiveness, and sparkling trills significantly contribute to the mix (incidentally, Sony ought to release Stadtfeld’s excellent Goldberg Variations in the U.S.).

-- Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com
reviewing Stadtfeld and Jan Vogler's recording of Bach's Gamba Sonatas, Sony 757519

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Stadtfeld plays the aria..., as well as all 30 variations in between, once through absolutely to the letter... But in the repetitions - and in all 32 sections of the work the played da capos are stipulated - time and again Stadtfeld allows himself a few personal notes, in which he illuminates Bach’s sound in an unusually bold and newly measured way, through strengthened contrasts, tonal broadenings and doublings. In doing so, he also doubles the fun: he plays Bach and plays with Bach. The result is pure class.

-- Der Spiegel [9/6/2005]

My Fair Lady (Original Broadway Cast Recording)

STOLTZER: FOUR GERMAN PSALMS

Schumann: Carnaval, Op. 9 - Piano Sonata No. 1

BAROQUE IN ITALY MALGOIRE, SC

Will Boulez record Pli selon pli a third time with one of his currently preferred American orchestras in Chicago or Cleveland? As his longest complete composition to date, this 'portrait of Mallarmé' seems more and more like a definitive testament to that peculiarly French kind of expressionism which Boulez has made his own, and it is already 15 years since his second recording, with Phyllis Bryn-Julson and the BBC SO, indicated a more expansive approach to its intricately woven textures, and to the tensions and balances that can be found between its strongly contrasted movements. The earlier CBS/Sony version, now reissued on CD for the first time, has a special historical status as embodying the composer's view of the work near the time of its actual completion, when forcefulness, and even ferocity, seemed to count for more as foils to the music's moments of relative restraint than the sustained densities so strongly emphasized in the second recording. Even if you have the later disc, this one is of great significance, and its value is enhanced by the addition of the potently expressive Livre pour cordes. This is only a part of what Boulez intends as a complete recasting of his youthful .work for string quartet, and, as it happens, the first of the two movements we hear in this recording was superseded in 1989 by another reworking, as yet unrecorded. Such are the delights and frustrations of the Boulez project: fortunately he has not forbidden reissue of this initial and far from negligible version of Livre.

-- Gramophone [7/1996]

GERSHWIN: RHAPSODY IN BLUE, AN