Award-winning Lithuanian, London-based pianist Indre Petrauskaite makes her AVIE label debut with a selection of Mozart’s piano works with a twist: she uniquely brings together the composer’s solo keyboard works written in minor keys. The nine works offered here represent a fraction of the composer’s overall oeuvre, yet they span a gamut of genres – including improvisatory and emotional fantasies, enigmatic miniatures and complex sonatas. Indre showcases these pieces – much loved staples of stage and studio alike – in a novel and stunning album. “Strong and well-played performances.” (MusicWeb International)

REVIEW:

Petrauskaite has an original voice in Mozart, not something that's so easy to accomplish. She is what's called a strong pianist, generally avoiding the delicately lyrical style in Mozart except in small details. Although this certainly isn't a historically oriented performance, Petrauskaite avoids Romantic gestures and extensive use of the pedal except in the fantasies; her playing is clean, tough, and insightful. The album, as a whole, offers an emotional journey that's rare in Mozart recordings, yet in Petrauskaite's hands, it seems to make sense. A superior Mozart recording.

– AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

“When you realize how quickly Mozart developed during the early years of the 1780’s it makes you ask: why did this happen? What was going on? It’s about the momentum of his creativity at this time” says Leif Ove Andsnes

In 1781, aged 25, Mozart made the bold move of going freelance, “Vienna is piano land!” he exclaimed in a letter to his father, Leopold, in an attempt to argue his case for resigning from the employment of the Archbishop of Salzburg. With both public and private concerts taking place on a daily basis, Vienna was the place to be for an ambitious young composer and performer, and Mozart was quick to realize the opportunities on offer. Within a couple of years he had established himself as one of the most famous musicians in Vienna but by 1785 he had competition on his doorstep. As more and more talented composers and musicians arrived in the city, freelancers like Mozart had to become ever more inventive to distinguish themselves and win over the public’s affection. It was in these two years - 1785 and 1786 - that Mozart’s musical imagination flourished like never before.

Mozart wrote a series of masterpieces and revolutionized the nature of the piano concerto. The five piano concertos, no.20-24, are game-changers in the history of the form. Mozart began to re-examine the roles of the soloist and orchestra and created a dialogue between the two entities in a way that had not been heard before. “It changes completely with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 20 [in D minor K466],” says Andsnes. “He separates the soloist more from the orchestra. The first entrance of the soloist in this piece is very different music from what you have heard the orchestra present. This is the moment, which points to the future and the development of the piano concerto and of the beginning of the Romantic piano concerto, which is so beloved. Everything from Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Rachmaninov, where the soloist has a sort of “heroic” role. It starts here with Mozart.”

In the four works that followed, Mozart tested concerto form to its limits and made extreme emotional demands on his Viennese subscribers. “There was new creative energy in the air,” says Andsnes; “Mozart seems to have gone deeper and deeper into the idiom and its possibilities and tried new techniques. I don’t know any music that offer such emotional diversity.”

Mozart Momentum 1785 is the first of two releases exploring those especially remarkable years. It includes piano concertos Nos 20-22, the Piano Quartet in G minor, Masonic Funeral Music and Fantasia in C minor for solo piano.

“The idea of this project was to explore the diversity of what was going on in Mozart’s creative life at the time – to show that a separation between solo playing, chamber music playing and concerto playing isn’t really relevant,” says Andsnes. “You find that some piano parts in the chamber music are more virtuosic than those in the concertos. It all goes hand in hand.”

Leif Ove Andsnes will embark on this new chapter with a trusted partner: The Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Their previous concerto project – the five piano concertos by Beethoven – produced recordings that won BBC Music Magazine’s Disc of the Year, were nominated for Gramophone Awards and hailed as new benchmarks. “There’s so much more to this partnership than just exceptional playing; there’s a palpable sense of discovery, of living the music”, says Gramophone Magazine. The Guardian raved “You’d be hard-put to find a pianist and orchestra better matched.”

The award-winning French pianist Pascal Rogé presents a program of music by Gershwin and Ravel in a recording with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra under Bertrand de Billy. Rogé’s affinity for the French style and empathy with jazz make him particularly suited to this repertoire. His recordings of French piano music have received Gramophone, Grand Prix du Disque and Edison awards. In addition to the classical-romantic repertoire of the Viennese and German schools, 20th-century French music is also one of his specialties. “An intelligent, richly enjoyable performance of the ravel Concerto.” (BBC Music Magazine) “Roge’s playing of Ravel’s Left-Hand concerto is masterly. He has complete technical regard for the work; more importantly, he appreciates the range of the music, its darkness, menace, anger, other-worldly escape, introspection and defiance.” (International Piano Magazine)

REVIEW:

The team of Pascal Rogé and Bertrand de Billy, with some outstanding playing from the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, bring much to this music. The pianist makes easy work of Ravel’s tremendously difficult writing and clarifies a number of problematic textures in the Gershwin.

-- Fanfare

“He was out to create something ‘unheard-of’,” observed conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt beforehand. And true to form: What the conductor had to offer as he commenced his Mozart/Da Ponte cycle in the Theater an der Wien was something we “had never before heard like this” (Kurier). Nikolaus Harnoncourt, “master” of period performance practice, realized a project that had long been one of his dearest wishes: for the first time, he and his “original-sound orchestra” Concentus Musicus and his personal choice of singers were presenting the complete Mozart/Da Ponte cycle and harvesting the fruits of his Mozart research – an “enthusiastically acclaimed cycle!” (news.at). During an intensive phase of rehearsal and preparation, he was in search of a Mozart hermeneutic resting on historical sources and yet anchored in our own time, in order to stage the whole Da Ponte “trilogy” – Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte – in a matter of a mere six weeks. “The culmination of Harnoncourt’s involvement with [Mozart’s Da Ponte operas] – A Mozart drawn from historical sources and yet anchored in our own time.” (Die Presse)

What we know as ‘Handel’s Opus 3’ is most likely little more than a brazen attempt by the London publisher John Walsh to make some quick money. In 1715, Walsh had issued a pirated edition of Corelli’s 12 Concerti Grossi Opus 6 which proved an instant success and left him constantly looking for similar opportunities. Almost 20 years later, perhaps in the knowledge that the royal protection granted to Handel’s musical output was about to expire, Walsh assembled a set of six orchestral pieces for a wide range of instruments. He prefaced them with a wholly misleading title-page – based on Corelli’s style-defining collection – and advertised them as Handel’s ‘Opera Terza’. It is likely that Handel never took part in the selection and organization of the individual movements, although he may have been involved in the revisions made when a reprint was necessary a few years later. Selected from various sources, the six concertos certainly don’t form an organic cycle – in complete contrast to the future Op.?6 concerti grossi, which Handel carefully conceived as a set. The fact remains that Opus 3 contains some of Handel’s best-loved music, in instrumental combinations that are colorful and often unexpected – aspects that Martin Gester and his musicians in the Tasmanian period band Van Diemen’s Band make the most of.

REVIEW:

Handel's op. 3 collection is a test for any group: staying true to the letter & spirit of the score, while keeping the music sounding fresh and alive. Martin Gester and his Tasmanian group Van Diemen's Band have done exactly that, in this wonderful new album from BIS. There's plenty of fire burning here, but it's within the context of impressive musical discipline and lightly-worn Historically Informed Performance scholarship. BIS provides the kind of direct and transparent sound that allows Early Instruments to flourish. This is a highly recommended release!

-- Music for Several Instruments

Schubert moved to Vienna in early 1817, which was the center of musical activities in Europe at that time. Schubert focused strongly upon composing piano sonatas, and the result was these four superb works. Korean-born pianist Sookkyung Cho brings these sonatas truly to life. Noted for her sensitive and imaginative (New York Concert Review) playing, Sookkyung Cho has been captivating worldwide audiences with her personal, thoughtful expressionist style. She has appeared in venues such as Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Chicago Cultural Center, Sarasota Opera House, Baltimore Museum of Art, Montreal Conservatory, Beaux concerts de la releve in Quebec, Château de Fontainebleau in France, and Zijingang Theater at Zhejiang University in China, among others, and was recently heard on Chicagos WFMT.

Following an acclaimed debut recording of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake with the Philharmonia in 2020, Santtu-Matias Rouvali returns with a recording of Sergei Prokofiev’s iconic Symphony No. 5. Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 was first performed in 1944, 14 years after his previous symphony. Prokofiev described his Fifth Symphony as a “hymn to free and happy Man, to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit,” explaining that, “I cannot say that I deliberately chose this theme. It was born in me and clamoured for expression. The music matured within me. It filled my soul.”

Only now are we fully aware of the true immensity of Vivaldi’s concerto repertoire. The violin is by no means the only instrument he favored: the place of the bassoon in his work catalogue is remarkable for its size and stylistic homogeneity, as well as for his solistic treatment of an instrument previously confined to the continuo. Seven new concertos here join the twenty-six already recorded in the first four volumes of the Vivaldi Edition, an anthology Sergio Azzolini embarked on in 2009 with L’Aura Soave, and now builds on with L’Onda Armonica.

Hector Berlioz‘ Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie was a sequel to his Symphonie fantastique, the second part of the Episode of the life of an artist, which had premiered in 1830 at the Paris Conservatory. The piece that is made up of six sections was written and composed during his travels to and in Italy; for this he made use in part of material that he had already prefabricated for the prestigious Rome Prize. Berlioz and the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, whose rejection he had tried to compensate in the Symphonie fantastique, got married in 1833. (It should be noted that marriage by no means turned out to be the fulfillment of all dreams.) In his memoirs about Lélio’s premiere performance in December 1832 at the Paris Conservatory, Berlioz noted the following phrases about his future wife: “... the passionate character of the work, its ardent melodies, its exclamations of love, its outbursts of anger [...] must have made an unexpected and deep impression on her sensitive nature and poetic imagination. [...] When in the monodrama the actor Bocage, who recited the role of Lélio (that is, myself), pronounced the following words: ‘Oh, if I could only find her, the Juliet, the Ophelia for whom my heart is searching!’ […] she thought to herself: ‘My God! ... Juliet, Ophelia ... there’s no doubt, he means me ... And he still loves me as before …’” Michael Gielen conducts the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Wiener Singakademie with Herbert Lippert and Geert Smits as highly acclaimed soloists and Joachim Bissmeier as narrator in an absorbing live capture that took place on 7 Dec 2000 at the Vienna Concert Hall.

It was natural for virtuoso performer Franz Liszt to expand his repertoire by transcribing his songs for solo piano. The human voice is the purest of musical instruments, and composers have always been inspired by its warmth, expression and emotional power. Liszt’s masterful command of the piano and his ability to transform vocal lines into purely instrumental sounds is evident throughout this album: the dramatic narrative in both versions of Die Loreley, the watery, arpeggiated texture of Am Rhein im schönen Strome and the orchestral qualities of Gastibelza being only a few examples of these pianistic treasures. Considered an ‘extraordinary musician’ by Martha Argerich, critically acclaimed Steinway Artist Alexandre Dossin enjoys active performing, recording and teaching careers. A prizewinner of several international piano competitions, Dossin received First Prize and the Special Prize at the 2003 Martha Argerich International Piano Competition in Buenos Aires. Other international awards include the Silver Medal and Second Honourable Mention at the Maria Callas Grand Prix, and Third Prize and the Special Prize at the ‘W.A. Mozart’ International Piano Competition, in addition to several awards from competitions in Brazil. An active recording artist, his discography comprises 15 albums released across several labels, including seven albums with Naxos.

This Blu-ray Disc is only playable on Blu-ray Disc players and not compatible with standard DVD players.

Also available on standard DVD

“He was out to create something ‘unheard-of’,” observed conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt beforehand. And true to form: What the conductor had to offer as he commenced his Mozart/Da Ponte cycle in the Theater an der Wien was something we “had never before heard like this” (Kurier). Nikolaus Harnoncourt, “master” of period performance practice, realized a project that had long been one of his dearest wishes: for the first time, he and his “original-sound orchestra” Concentus Musicus and his personal choice of singers were presenting the complete Mozart/Da Ponte cycle and harvesting the fruits of his Mozart research – an “enthusiastically acclaimed cycle!” (news.at). PART I - Le nozze di Figaro + Documentary: Nikolaus Harnoncourt - Between Obsession and Perfection (Le nozze di Figaro)

Sonate a Quattro are the brilliant compositions from Italian composer Gioachino Rossini, written during the summer of 1804 at the young age of 12. These works, at the time, were commonly performed by wind quartet and it wasn’t until 1954 when the original manuscripts were discovered in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. showing their original arrangement for string quartet. The world premiere recording of Rossini: 6 Sonate a Quattro features two of Canada’s most respected and beloved performers - Mark Fewer (violin), and Joel Quarrington (bass) - and two of North America’s rising stars - Yolanda Bruno (violin), and Julian Schwarz (cello) and produced by JUNO award-winning producer John D.S. Adams. These performances, from November 2017, were recorded in collaboration with the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance using the newly released (2014) Critical Edition published by the Fondazione Rossini Pesaro.

Wife of Robert Schumann, Clara Wieck Schumann was a great piano virtuoso. She also was a wonderful composer of piano works. Korean-born pianist Junghwa Lee brings these works to life with vital performances. Junghwa Lee performs actively in solo recitals, chamber concerts and lecture recitals, and has frequently appeared in concerto performances as a soloist including those with the Korean Symphony Orchestra, Salina Symphony Orchestra, Hutchinson Symphony Orchestra and Greeley Philharmonic Orchestra among others. Lee has presented solo performances in Korea, Holland, France, Hungary, Romania, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, China, the United Kingdom and the United States, including appearances at the Arts Center Concert Series at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, Shenyang Music Cultural Exchange Exhibition Between China and Foreign Countries Festival in China, Beethoven 32 Sonatas Recital Series in Singapore, the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concert Series at the Chicago Cultural Center and her New York debut recital at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall as a winner of Artists International’s Special Presentation Award.

Antonín Dvořák’s music, imbued with the spirit of Bohemia, reflects a love of his native land. His String Sextet, written in the distinctive style which brought him international fame, was an immediate success at its premiere. Composed just eight years earlier, his String Quartet No.4, unpublished until 1968, features pioneering, wild outer movements, highly unusual for the time, which foreshadowed the modernist innovations of composers decades later. A moving Andante religioso, which Dvořák made use of in future works, lies at its heart. The Polonaise exploits both the soulful and virtuoso character of the cello.

REVIEW:

It’s about time that Dvořák’s fascinating and gripping Fourth Quartet got some individual attention apart from big boxes of the chamber works. A single movement more than 30 minutes long, in three extended sections, the music reveals the influence of Wagner and the New German School. It represents a road not taken, as Dvořák never followed it up, and immediately afterward returned to a path at once more “classical”, formally speaking, while pursuing its harmonic audacities within the bounds of a Czech nationalist style. This last point is important. Dvořák never gave up his love for adventurous harmony. He merely ceased imitating Wagner’s particular version of it, and in the process he found himself.

In any case, the central Andante religioso survived to become the lovely Notturno for string orchestra. It sounds like a cross between Rachmaninov and the Siegfried Idyll, only it predates both! There’s no question that Dvořák was very good at what he was doing. The quartet’s outer sections also invite comparison to late Beethoven, with their sometimes gnarly counterpoint and sense of struggle. In short, the work deserves to return to the repertoire, and the only reason I can see that it hasn’t is because it doesn’t sound like typical Dvořák. Happily, the Fine Arts Quartet does an excellent job allowing the music to unfold on its own terms, offering sensitive, well-balanced, and timbrally vibrant playing that sustains the piece over its entire length.

The Sextet of 1878 (eight years after the Fourth Quartet) shows the composer in full nationalist mode, with a “Dumka” slow movement and a “Furiant” for a scherzo. Its concluding theme and variations is especially outstanding. Here is yet another work that, however frequently recorded, has not received the attention that it deserves in concert, perhaps because sextets are awkward to program. The concluding Polonaise in A major makes a fine encore to an unusually well-rounded program, one that presents Dvořák as a composer of much wider range than many would have us believe. The title of the disc, Spirit of Bohemia, is typically silly and not entirely relevant, but with fine engineering I can recommend this release without hesitation.

– ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)

Camille Saint-Saens was involved in every aspect of French music during his long lifetime, and his frequent travels led to a fascinating mixture of Western music with Moorish and African elements in works such as Orient et Occident and the Suite algérienne. Saint-Saëns wrote few works for winds, but the grand biblical themes of Samson et Dalila, patriotic military traditions and the dignity of a British coronation all lend themselves perfectly to arrangement. In The Carnival of the Animals, the roaring lions are superbly evocative; while his perspectives on English and Scottish dances in ballet movements from Henry VIII are brilliantly imaginative.

In 2005 Igor Levit and Xiaohan Wang performed, together with the Kolner Kammerorchester under Helmut Müller-Brühl, as outstanding talents of the semi-final of the “International Beethoven Competition for Piano Bonn”. The competition had been initiated in the same year by the then President of the Federal Republic of Germany Horst Kohler. The young pianists, today successful all over the world, performed on that occasion Beethoven's piano concertos nos. 1 and 2. On this recording, Igor Levit performs the First Concerto, and Xiaohan Wang the Second.

Mozart’s Violin Concertos need little introduction from No. 3 in G major featuring the 19-year-old Mozart at his elegant, witty and beguilingly changeable best, to the Sinfonia Concertante – the string concerto masterpiece – with its masterly mixture of noble strength and tender lyricism, these are some of Mozart’s most well-known and best-loved works. Handel and Haydn Society with their inspirational Concertmaster, Aisslinn Nosky, bring Mozart’s musical magic to life in these live recordings from Boston’s glorious Symphony Hall. “The music crackled with a feeling of playful rivalry and delight. With the two vigorous virtuosi leading the performance...the soloists kinetically engaged with their fellow players, sometimes looking behind as if to rally their allies... musical magic in the making.” (THE BOSTON GLOBE)

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra celebrates its 20th anniversary by giving a concert at the Berlin Philharmonie with world-renowned artists: Anne-Sophie Mutter and Yo-Yo Ma perform Beethoven’s Triple Concerto together with Maestro Barenboim and the young musicians. Yo-Yo Ma, who played with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra at their first concert 20 years ago, and Anne-Sophie Mutter, who made her debut with the orchestra only this year, were named as honorary members of the orchestra on the occasion of this event. “It is fascinating to experience how brilliant, concentrated and at the same time relaxed these three world stars make music together and listen to each other. A masterpiece of harmony“ (RBB24). The second part of the concert features Bruckner's 9th Symphony, transcendental music which the composer himself dedicated to “the dear God“. The symphony is unfinished not only because Bruckner died during the process of composition, but especially because it seems to perish in nothingness. The musicians of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra are excellently prepared and play technically and tonal flawlessly. A magic moment.

Award-winning Vibraphonist Lewis Wright returns to Signum following the success of his recording 'Duets' in 2018, with a selection of new compositions this time performed with Matt Brewer (Double-Bass) and Marcus Gilmore (Drums). "The Colour of Intention refers to the creative process itself: that in order to express yourself honestly in music, you have to generate clear intentions developed from thoughts and emotions which then color the work rather than explaining every aspect of it. In the moment of performance, the goal then becomes to put all these previous investigations out of mind and exist in the present. The color of intention is describing everything except performance; the slower processes of development, reflection and refinement and how they'll seep, often unpredictably, into everything that ends up being realized. Working with Matt (Brewer) and Marcus (Gilmore) adds the last and most engaging dimension. How they interpret the music, interact and bring their own highly developed languages to bare, creates something that's both a reflection of my intentions and also infinitely more sophisticated than it's possible for me to conceive of. I think in this sense, human connection is the greatest element of what it is we do as musicians." (Lewis Wright)

The extant music for violin by Franz Schubert fits comfortably on two discs, and Ariadne Daskalakis released the first disc of her survey in 2019, to critical acclaim. The disc included works for violin and piano as well as three pieces with orchestral accompaniment, in performances described in The Strad as having ‘a litheness and shimmering delight that capture the music’s innate charm and dance-like vivacity with a beguiling sureness of touch.’ The second installment focuses on the chamber music with piano, and once again Daskalakis is joined by Paolo Giacometti, playing a fortepiano by Salvatore Lagrassa. The instrument, of the Viennese school, was built around 1815 and is thus almost exactly contemporary with the sonatas recorded here, the ones in D major and A minor dating from 1816 and the Sonata in A major from the following year. Schubert, who was around 20 years old at the time, had learned the violin from an early age, but the sonatas were probably intended for his older brother Ferdinand, who led the family string quartet in which Franz played the viola. The disc opens with a later work, however – the so-called Rondeau brilliant, from 1826. As the nickname indicates, the B minor Rondo is virtuosic, composed for Josef Slavík who before his early death was hailed as Paganini’s successor by the Viennese critics. In her liner notes, Ariadne Daskalakis describes the piece as ‘in turn dramatic, playful, gentle, seductive and wild’ and together with Paolo Giacometti she brings out each of these aspects.

The four works on this release, all composed in the 1940s, embrace the lingering end of one musical tradition and the vigorous upsurge of another. Mellifluous, retrospective and playful, the Duet Concertino and Prelude to Capriccio were works from Richard Strauss’s final phase – an old man’s refuge from the barbarism of war and its aftermath. What the public thought of them was incidental, even irrelevant. In the same decade, Aaron Copland and other younger American composers were reaching out, via radio, recordings and film, to a new mass audience. The European influence of Appalachian Spring and the Clarinet Concerto, though inescapable, was minimized in a populist, vernacular idiom that absorbed folk music and jazz.

Richard Stamp unites some of the finest instrumentalists from the UK and Europe in these performances – featuring celebrated orchestras the Academy of London and the Royal Northern Sinfonia with renowned Austrian soloists Ernst Ottensamer and Stepan Turnovsky. Stepan Turnovsky joined the Vienna State Opera and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1978 and has kept the position of Solo Bassoonist there since 1985, performing with conductors such as Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Karl Böhm, Carlos Kleiber amongst many others. The late Ernst Ottensamer was a former principal clarinettist at the Vienna Philharmonic and an avid performer of chamber music – founding numerous ensembles and collaborating with musicians such as Sir Simon Rattle, André Previn, Daniel Barenboim and Rudolf Buchbinder amongst others. In 2005 he found a clarinet trio with his sons Daniel and Andreas Ottensamer – themselves the Principal Clarinettists of the Vienna Philharmonic and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras. This present performance represents his last concerto recording.

REVIEW:

It is for the two Strauss performances that I can offer an enthusiastic thumbs up. Ernest Ottensamer died suddenly in 2017 at the age of 61, and the Copland was his last concerto recording. That, too, adds to the value of this release. Signum deserves gratitude for saving all four performances from being lost and forgotten.

– Fanfare

Following up its recent box of his 78 and early LP recordings for RCA, Sony Classical is now issuing a 5-album set of Chopin recordings made by the Ukrainian-American pianist Alexander Brailowsky in stereo for American Columbia in the early 1960s. The new reissue contains the complete Preludes, Waltzes, Mazurkas, Polonaises, Andante spianato, B minor Sonata, Fantaisie-Impromptu, Berceuse as well as numerous other works.

REVIEW:

If Brailowsky's Polonaises don’t match Arthur Rubinstein’s finesse and red-blooded ardor, they’re at least idiomatic and shapely, as are the sensitively turned-out Chopin/Liszt song transcriptions and the Berceuse.

– ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)