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 Composed just eight years earlier, his String Quartet No.4, unpublished until 1968, features pioneering, wild outer movements, highly unusual for the time, which foreshadowed the modernist innovations of composers decades later.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)

Michael Haydn’s colorful and inventive music is uplifting and expressive in equal measure, but his music has been eclipsed by that of his elder brother Joseph, and by Mozart. Sacred music is central to Michael Haydn’s oeuvre and was considered by some contemporary critics as superior to Joseph’s. Encompassing a broad range of textures and styles, parts of the Missa Sancti Nicolai Tolentini demonstrate Haydn’s music at its most exhilarating and energetic, and his supreme gift for empfindsames (‘sensitive’) lyrical writing is also to be heard in the Vespers.

In the 1960s and in the decades following, the Budapest String Quartet’s mantle at Columbia was passed on to the Juilliard String Quartet. Over the years, with some changes in personnel, the ensemble repeatedly set down its famously lean, energetic and expressive interpretations of the Beethoven quartets in New York recording studios. These have remained catalogue staples. Less well known is the Beethoven cycle they recorded live in Washington at the Library of Congress in 1982. Gramophone singled out this complete traversal for its special depth and flexibility. Presented here on 9 albums, this is its first Sony release.

REVIEW:

The slow introduction to the C Major Quartet No. 9 is handled wonderfully, which sets up well for the rest of the movement and the work as a whole. These are followed by nice recordings of the “Harp” and “Serioso” quartets, thus bringing the middle period to an end.

The late quartets open with a really nice recording of the Nos. 12 and 13, with the first of these being particularly fine. The final disc of the nine houses the 15th and 16th quartets, which again receive fairly good recordings. Overall, the tempos selected here tend to be slower than in their earlier recording, which is usual for live recordings.

Overall sound quality is, at times, a bit of an issue here, even taking into account the live nature of these recordings, and overall isn't up to the sound quality of the quartet's highly regarded 1960s studio cycle of these works for RCA.

– MusicWeb International

The first volume (8.551400) with Vinzenz Lachner‘s arrangements of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concertos for piano and string quintet already showed that this would be quite a special complete recording of Beethoven’s piano concertos – and not just because it is the first recording to present this version for the first time ever. For the second volume, Hanna Shybayeva chose the piano trio version of the second symphony in D major Op. 36 to be added in the arrangement by the master himself. After all, this chamber music arrangement from Beethoven's pen fits perfectly with those of the piano concertos of later times. Having begun her international career at the age of eleven, Hanna Shybayeva has transformed from a child prodigy to a mature and exciting musician. She won many international prizes and performed at many festivals, as well as giving solo recitals and concert-performances with orchestras around the world. Shybayeva was awarded grants from UNESCO/New Names (Moscow), the George Soros Foundation, the Vladimir Spivakov International Charity Foundation, the Youri Egorov Foundation, Yamaha Music Europe and the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund. Her many recordings include a collection of Tango pieces on the Grand Piano label (GP794).

Franz Liszt inherited strong religious convictions from his father, and the influence of sacred narratives can be found throughout his compositions. Drawn from the so-called Tasso Sketchbook, the Préludes etHarmonies poétiques et religieuses were composed after the end of Liszt’s relationship with Marie d’Agoult, and include the passionately turbulent Langueur? Descriptive titles characterize many of the brief Album-Leaves, while the legend of St François de Paule marchant sur les flots depicts the saint crossing the Straits of Messina using his cloak as a sail after being refused passage by a boatman. Liszt’s famous Harmonies poétiques et religieuses has been visited in other volumes in this edition, but this is not to be confused with the Préludes et Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, which is a set of eight pieces also associated with the poetry of Alphonse de Lamartine, but entirely distinct in character and content. Including fragments, this is a further collection of Liszt rarities that offers fascinating pre-echoes of later masterpieces, exploring the composer’s wider responses to religious themes, Romantic poetry and the intensity of his own circumstances.

To mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, Russian born arranger Paul Struck has arranged two of the composer’s great mid-period chamber masterpieces for soloist and string ensemble. Expanding the sonorities of the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata – Beethoven’s most important chamber work for violin – allows the sonata’s concertante quality to emerge in a new light. The Cello Sonata No. 3 equally succeeds in conceiving the piano part for ensemble, while exploring fullness of sound and maintaining transparency of texture.

Percy Grainger was one of the great “originals” of 20th century music. Australian-born, he studied with his mother while a boy and later went to Germany where his career as a virtuoso pianist began. As a composer he was largely self-taught and strongly influenced by the folk music of Great Britain and Ireland, Many of his “miniatures”-such titles as Country Gardens, Handel in the Strand and Molly on the Shore-established his composing credentials very early on. But Grainger was also an inveterate innovator and experimenter in music, and the kaleidoscopic aspects of his compositional creativity-evident in highly imaginative works often with unprecedented rhythms, harmonies and scoring-are fully represented in the programme heard on this recording. The music was digitally recorded with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in February 1989, at the acoustically excellent South Melbourne Town Hall.

Experience two grand classics, alive with all the excitement and verve of their very first performances. Thrill to one of Haydn’s masterful ‘London’ symphonies that wowed England’s capital – the smash hit ‘Military’, so-called for intense depictions of the clash of arms and ferocious roar of war. In the epic Nelson Mass Handel and Haydn Society's magnificent chorus and soloists join the orchestra in this homage to the heroic admiral who helped to vanquish Napoleon. Of conductor Harry Christophers, BBC Radio 3 Record Review wrote: “What Harry is particularly good at is nurturing the natural beauty of the instruments and voices and, indeed, acoustic that are in front of him. It’s very handsome.”

For the sixth volume of his Chopin project, the Canadian pianist and exclusive Chandos Artist Louis Lortie has built a programme that includes works from the earliest to the latest periods in the composer’s life, all of which have connection with or focus on Chopin’s Polish identity. The Hommage à Mozart, Op. 2 is a brilliant set of variations on ‘Là ci darem la mano’ from Don Giovanni. Chopin composed it originally for piano and orchestra, in 1827, when he was just seventeen, and later made this arrangement for solo piano (a common practice at the time). The two Polonaises, Op. 40 date from the late 1830s, and contain some of his most openly nationalistic writing. The first – nicknamed ‘Military’ – evokes sentiments of national identity and pride, whilst the second, more melancholy work portrays feelings evoked by Poland’s vanished statehood. Lortie concludes the album with Chopin’s Fantaisie, Op. 49, from 1841. This work exemplifies the brilliant improvisatory style of Chopin’s writing for piano. These works are interspersed with four sets of Mazurkas, Opp. 6, 24, 41, and 67. Chopin almost single-handedly introduced the Mazurka to Paris when he arrived there in the late 1820s, and continued to compose them throughout his life, transforming the Polish dance form into some of his most dazzling and memorable compositions.

REVIEW:

At moments on this disc, a seasoned sort of beauty takes hold of our ears, wherein a keyboard’s conjuring casts an airy, aural spell. In the battle of dark and light, Lortie’s own brand of luminescence wins out every time.

– The Whole Note (Canada)

For the last seventeen years of his life – from 2003 to 2019 – Mariss Jansons was chief conductor of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and the Bavarian Radio Chorus. Both ensembles and their conductor appreciated each other deeply on an artistic as well as a human level, and this resulted in numerous unforgettable concerts. Jansons’ unrelenting demands on himself and his musicians, his always respectful treatment of his colleagues, and his great devotion to music all played a lead role in their work together. Mariss Jansons occupies a place of honor in the orchestra’s history, and its players will always revere and cherish his memory. With the death of Mariss Jansons one year ago, the music world lost one of its greatest artistic personalities.

Born the son of conductor Arvids Jansons in Riga in 1943, the young Mariss studied at the Leningrad Conservatory before completing his studies with Hans Swarowsky in Vienna and Herbert von Karajan in Salzburg. In 1971 he was a prizewinner at the Karajan Conducting Competition and began his close collaboration with today's St. Petersburg Philharmonic. From 1979 to 2000, Jansons was Music Director of the Oslo Philharmonic; from 1997 to 2004 he conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; and in the 2003/04 season he became Chief Conductor of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and the Bavarian Radio Chorus. The 2004/05 season marked the start of his tenure at the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, which ended in 2015. As a guest conductor, he worked with all the leading orchestras of Europe and the USA, and his discography includes many award-winning recordings.

Brahms' Ein deutsches Requiem was initially conceived as a 'cantata of grief' - it was the death of his mother and the desire to create a memorial to his friend Robert Schumann that makes this music so intensely personal. With it's radiant messages of humanity, consolation and comfort, the Requiem caused a sensation and made Brahms famous virtually overnight. The work is heard here with it's 'ad libitum' organ and contrabassoon reinstated, enormously intensifying the depth of tone colors and lower sonorities. For the conductor Ralf Otto flexibility, diversity and transparency of sound have always been essential for his work with orchestras and choirs. Otto believes that understanding the compositional structure of a piece of music is an indispensable prerequisite to achieving intensely emotional expression. The conductor's reputation is based on his gift for interpreting different musical styles, from the Renaissance to the music of today. Since the beginning of his career, he has been a strong advocate for the performance of early music according to historically informed performance practices. His numerous recordings and broadcasts are a testament to his artistic achievements.

18th-century Italian violinists trained in the tradition of Arcangelo Corelli, spreading his elegant, expressive and virtuosic style on their travels throughout Europe. Giovanni Mossi’s sonatas retain Corelli’sdramatic contrasts and structure, while Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli also incorporates features found in music by Vivaldi. Both composers’ works combine formal elegance with wild abandon, lyrical charm and virtuosity alongside plenty of room for improvisation from acclaimed soloist Augusta McKay Lodge.

"...Double-stopping is central to this Corellian school of violin writing, and she tackles it fearlessly. No less impressive is her sheer stamina, dashing off extended passages of dense figuration with no audible difficulty. One gets the feeling, from the way she confidently places her final cadences like a winning hand of cards, that there isn’t a single taxing bar on the album she hasn’t enjoyed getting her teeth into — and it’s safe to say the same holds true for those of us with the rather easier task of merely enjoying the results..."
David Smith, Early Music America

"...A delightful selection of Italian violin sonatas is brought to life by Augusta McKay Lodge and her fellow performers. The legacy of Arcangelo Corelli as both a player and a composer is fully on show in this album named in recognition of his influence..."
David Smith, Early Music America

The horn was one of the instruments that Johannes Brahms learned in his youth, from his father who played it professionally. His fondness and familiarity with the instrument is clear from the glorious solos that he provided it with in his symphonies, and he gave it pride of place in the Horn Trio that he wrote in memory of his mother Christiane. Even so, he never composed any other chamber work involving the horn – an oversight that horn players have regretted ever since. Following up on two highly acclaimed BIS albums, Alec Frank-Gemmill decided to rectify this, and enlisted the help of pianist Daniel Grimwood and violinist Benjamin Marquise Gilmore. It goes without saying that the resulting disc includes the Horn Trio – which Frank-Gemmill has chosen to perform on the instrument played by Aubrey Brain on his legendary 1933 recording of the work. But leading up to this are two works originally written for violin and cello respectively. The sometimes controversial subject of transcriptions is discussed by Frank-Gemmill in his liner notes where he also explains his selection of works. In the Scherzo that Brahms wrote as his contribution to the F-A-E Sonata (which also included movements by Schumann and Albert Dietrich), he finds that the very fabric of the piece is made up of horn calls, while the galloping 6/8 theme reminds him of the final movement of the horn trio. Wanting to also include a sonata, Frank-Gemmill settled on the E minor Cello Sonata, Op. 38 as the one best suited for the horn, and together with arranger Daniel Grimwood the decision was made to transpose the work a third up, into G minor. Through their efforts, we are able to present a Brahms recital that hornists – and the rest of us – could only dream of.

Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, begins with the creation of the world – from a duck's egg – and goes on to relate a series of tales of magic and adventure. One of the most memorable characters is Kullervo, a flawed hero whose tragic story is told in the course of six songs or runos. These describe multiple murders, rape, incest and finally suicide – a powerful brew that has inspired several Finnish artists. Among them is Jean Sibelius, who in 1891 was a young music student in Vienna. At home in Finland a wave of nationalism was gaining momentum and the Kalevala was an important symbol in the struggle for independence from Russia. Sometimes called a choral symphony, Sibelius's Kullervo was premiered in 1892, receiving a mixed reception and the work was soon overshadowed by the First Symphony. Only in the 1970s did it became more widely known, at which time the score caused something of sensation. Faithful to the urgency and brutality of the score, the present recording was made at live performances at Symphony Hall in Minneapolis, with Osmo Vänskä directing the forces of the Minnesota Orchestra, joined by their Finnish guests Lilli Paasikivi, Tommi Hakala and the eminent YL Male Voice Choir.

Zoltán Kodály’s later years were dominated by a series of choral works but his early reputation centered upon chamber music, notably two string quartets, a Cello Sonata (8.553160) and the two masterpieces heard on this recording. The Duo for Violin and Cello, Op. 7 combines Classical form with folk influence, while the Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8, with its expanded harmonies and tone colours, is one of the greatest solo cello works since Bach’s Cello Suites. György Ligeti continued the Hungarian lineage with his Sonata for Solo Cello, a succinct but pivotal work in his compositional development. Gabriel Schwabe has established himself among the leading cellists of his generation. He is a laureate of numerous national and international competitions, including the Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann and the Concours Rostropovich in Paris. In 2009, he won the prestigious Pierre Fournier Award in London. He is a regular guest at festivals such as the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival, the Kronberg Academy Festival and the Amsterdam Biennale, and has performed with artists including Isabelle Faust, Christian Tetzlaff, Lars Vogt, Kirill Gerstein and Jonathan Gilad.

REVIEWS:

Schwabe’s magnificent interpretation of Kodaly’s Solo Sonata op. 8, another of the masterpieces of the cello repertoire, is declamatorily expressive and no less excellent for its polished sound. A perfect intonation and a lot of refinement as well as wonderful dynamic and colour nuances make up the richness of Schwabe’s playing.

With this CD, Schwabe has definitely given further proof of his mastery. Highly recommended!

-- Pizzicato

The tonal palette here is expanded by the inclusion of Kodály’s Duo for Violin and Cello, in which Schwabe’s musicianship is matched by that of Hellen Weiss…This is also important music and—in the hands of such players—essential listening.

-- BBC Music Magazine