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Through Puccini represents the late-Romantic apex of the Italian operatic tradition, his songs are much less well known and, in their pared simplicity and emotional restraint, could hardly be more different from his stage works. The nineteen complete songs for soprano (two in duet with a mezzo) and piano cover themes typical of lyric poetry including life, death, personal resolution, love, nature, home and religious faith. There are also rare salon pieces and examples of Puccini's secular juvenilia, written between 1875 and 1880.

Tchaikovsky wrote music for the piano throughout his life, many of these pieces being dedicated to family members or close friends and musical associates. Rich in variety, the Douze morceaux range from playful dances to a substantial Marche funebre, as well as lyrical jewels such as the Chanson triste and a Danse russe that found its way into the ballet Swan Lake. A background of romantic entanglements permeates the Souvenir de Hapsal which concludes with the well-known Chant sans paroles, while charm and virtuosity reside side-by-side in the Valse-scherzo and Capriccio.

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Soustrot’s Saint-Saëns symphony cycle was quite good, and this new project looks to be similarly successful. For my money, the five piano concertos remain one of the most underrated groups of major works in the entire romantic repertoire. Yes, Nos. 2 and 4 get played more often than the rest, but there isn’t a dud in the bunch. It’s really only prejudice against the French aesthetic–the formal freedom, love of color, flash, and the dance–that prevents the music from getting the recognition that it deserves. That, and perhaps the fact that the melodious ease that informs all of Saint-Saëns’ writing makes a mockery of German pretensions to ownership of instrumental music in large forms.

These performances demonstrate a thoroughly “French” sensibility. Romain Descharmes savors the music’s charm and brilliance without indulging in excessive sentimentality. The First Concerto, with its surprising wiring for horns, has a breezy freshness that completely disarming. It’s played with joyful directness and a complete lack of affectation. I enjoy fast and dazzling versions of the Second Symphony, with its whirlwind finale, but Descharmes treats the piece with almost epicurean relish, nowhere more so than in this sassy, witty account of the central scherzo. There’s no lack of virtuosity, but also time to savor the music’s many harmonic delights.

Through it all, Soustrot accompanies with total confidence, and the sonics are terrific. A disc to savor.

– ClassicsToday (David Hurwitz)

This new release is the eighth and final volume in this superlative cycle of the complete Haydn Piano Trios, performed by The Mendelssohn Piano Trio. Four works are featured, including Piano Trio in F Major, Hob. XV: 37, Piano Trio in E-flat Major Hob. XV: 29, Piano Trio in C Minor, Hob XV: 13, and Piano Trio in G Major, Hob XV: 32. The Mendelssohn Piano Trio was founded in 1997, and since their inception have performed more than 500 concerts in the United States, Europe, and Asia. They have also recorded an impressive fifteen albums, including the present cycle. The trio is pianist Ya-Ting Chang from Taiwan, violinist Peter Sirotin from Ukraine, and cellist Fiona Thompson from England. “…the fine young Mendelssohn Piano Trio presented a program so lush, substantial and richly flavored you wanted to eat it with a knife and fork.” (The Washington Post)

Fresh interpretation and technical brilliance imbue "Mendelssohn: Sonatas from Childhood, Adolescence, and Adulthood," the first period instrument recording of this repertoire. This debut recording by the New York City based Karr-Yang Duo features three relatively unknown Mendelssohn Piano and Violin Sonatas, including the duo's own version of the unfinished 1838 F major sonata, and the stunning albeit incomplete Fragment in D. As a whole, the works tell the story of Mendelssohn's development as a composer, spanning his artistic life beginning at the age of 11, through the teenage years, and into his mature period. In this recording, the sumptuous tone and refinement of a fully restored Conrad gRaf piano from 1825 converses in equal partnership with the warm, resonant sonority of the violin's gut strings and historical set-up, revealing Mendelssohn's full-blooded, lyrical, and colorful music at its fullest realization. The Karr-Yang duo bridges the divide between musicological research and communicative performance, and presents an album which will appeal to the period instrument aficionado as well as the Mendelssohn lover.

Michael Endres plays a wide-ranging repertoire including such rarely performed composers as Leopold Godowsky, Gabriel Fauré, Charles Ives and Eduard Tubin. The leading US critic Richard Dyer (Boston Globe ) described Endres as "one of the most interesting pianists who appear nowadays on CD". Michael Endres has recorded an equally wide-ranging repertoire for OehmsClassics, including releases with works of Schumann, Mendelssohn, Gershwin, Weber and the sonatas of Arnold Bax. The present album features works by Franz Schubert, including a special treat entitled the Kupelwieser Waltz. Endres’s playing has often been described as subtle, elegant, and refined, never taking the dramatic elements of the music to the extreme.

Jean-Claude Malgoire conducts his Parisian ensemble, La Grande Ecurie et La Chambre du Roy, in a complete 1979 recording of Handel’s delightful comic opera Serse, best known for its universally familiar opening aria “Ombra mai fu”. The distinguished cast includes Carolyn Watkinson, Paul Esswood and Barbara Hendricks.

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REVIEW:

This is one of the milestone recordings in the history of Handel opera. At the time few of the canon had been recorded, and still fewer in historically-informed practice, as here. Nearly forty years later the recorded sound remains clear and crisp.

Malgoire’s cast is distinguished and creditable, led by Carolyn Watkinson’s assured Serse. Generally she is radiant, but sometimes she is steely, though that means her whizzing cadenzas are well controlled. There is a slightly brittle wobble in Paul Esswood’s singing as Serse’s brother Arsamene, and there are times when he projects more confidently, though there is haunting forlornness in Act One’s ‘Non so se sia la speme’ and his coloratura is accomplished too. Ortrun Wenkel’s Amastre is sometimes foursquare, but elsewhere there is greater colour in her realisation. More distinguished are Barbara Hendricks’s pure-toned Romilda (sounding almost like a treble in some instances) and Anne-Marie Rodde’s coquettish Atalanta. The Ariodate of Ulrik Cold is languid, but Ulrich Studer as the comic servant Elviro is characterful.

– ClassicalSource.com

The Overture is played with a sombre foreboding, the Peasants' March has a good raw sound, and the Wolfs Glen is vividly characterized. Among the singers, the most distinguished performance comes from Sharon Sweet. She has a most expressive sense of phrasing, always feeling the words and varying her rich, warm tone to convey them. Her two main numbers, ''Leise, leise'' and ''Und ob die Wolke'', are beautifully contemplative; and she joins sensitively in the Trio and the other ensembles. Ruth Ziesak's Aennchen sounds indeed a relation, with a family kinship in manner: she is less soubrettish than most singers of the role, but lively enough, and she makes an amusing success of the silly song about the dog. There is a magnificent Kaspar from Kurt Rydl, who glitters darkly in the Drinking Song, delivers ''Schweig! Schweig!'' with appalling menace, and speaks his lines in the Wolfs Glen more powerfully than any other performer of the role. Peter Seiffert brings to Max a good reputation as a Heldentenor in Wagner and Strauss; but there is an edge to his voice, and he can sound strained and even tremulous, as if he is trying too hard with melodic lines that for much of the time owe more to French example.

– Gramophone

Members of the Brodsky Quartet meet the internationally famous flautist Lisa Friend in an album of key works of the flute repertoire: Mozart's flute quartets. Highly praised for previous recordings, her own compositions, solo recitals in Europe, the US, and Asia, as well as appearances with prestigious orchestras, Lisa Friend devotes her very first recording on Chandos to witty, colorful interpretations or Mozart. The flute quartets of Mozart are central to the classical flute repertoire - and deservedly so: the composer's characteristic charm, wit, beauty, and elegance are in evidence throughout. These works convincingly embody Mozart's desire to compose music that engages trained musicians, while also entrancing lay listeners without their necessarily knowing, precisely why.

Two highly dramatic short works by Monteverdi, Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and Ballo delle ingrate are performed by distinguished French soloists with Jean-Claude Malgoire directing La Grande Ecurie et La Chambre du Roy.

Since adopting a new artistic profile, the Hague Philharmonic is demonstrating more than ever that symphonic music can still be meaningful to large and diverse audiences in the 21st century. At the new Zuiderstrandtheater in Scheveningen, the orchestra's home venue, prior to concerts audiences are treated to a lively RO-starter pre-program of live music and interviews. Everything on this recording fits like a glove - musicians, conductor and sound technique are at the highest of their abilities. Soprano Renate Arends and baritone Thomas Oliemans are internationally acclaimed soloists with both beautiful and strong careers in opera, oratorium and song.

Concertos for two pianos and orchestra by Felix Mendelssohn and Max Bruch belong to the standard German romantic repertoire for piano duos. Genova & Dimitrov have recorded them as well as the concertos of Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, and Robert Casadesus. If until these composers the piano above all functioned to develop complex melodic and harmonic relations, then the Hungarian composer, pianist, folk music researcher, editor, and teacher Béla Bartók moved the piano or pianos closer to the percussion family. Here his Concerto for Two Pianos is presented along with the Concerto for Two Pianos by Victor Babin. This highly effective work, in its substance hardly needing to hide behind other classically inspired concertos of the twentieth century, is heard in a world-premiere recording. The American Victor Babin (Viktor Genrikhovich Babin), who died in 1972, made music history primarily as the member of a famous piano duo. With his wife this strapping, strong son from a Jewish Russian family formed the Vronsky & Babin Duo. Newsweek described it as the most brilliant piano duo of its time. Babin studied composition under Franz Schreker in Berlin and piano under Artur Schnabel. His Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra breathes a neoclassical spirit from the tradition of the Russian dynamo Stravinsky and even more so of Prokofiev, mixed with the mirthful and grotesque musical impact of a Shostakovich. Listeners may also detect Influences from the Groupe de Six. In this marvelously transparent score Victor Babin proves to be a dazzling instrumentator.

In the third installment in their acclaimed series, Harry Christophers and the Handel and Haydn Society present a new live recording devoted to the master of the symphony – Joseph Haydn. This release showcases Haydn’s Symphony No. 8 Le soir, which completes the trilogy written for Prince Paul Anton Esterházy. Also included is the later Symphony No. 84 which shows just how much Haydn’s symphonies had transformed from those early years. Not only is it an incredible fusion of grace, brilliance and warmth but it also contains one of the most striking wind band solos in all of his Paris symphonies. Completing the programme is the Violin Concerto in A major performed by H+H’s fiery and expressive Concertmaster, Aisslinn Nosky.

Leonard Bernstein’s legendary 1943 Carnegie Hall conducting début brought his name to national attention, and the event was followed a few months later by the triumphant reception of his Symphony No. 1 ‘Jeremiah.’ This major symphonic statement explores a crisis in faith and employs Jewish liturgical sources, its final movement, Lamentation, being an anguished cry at the destruction of Jerusalem. Sharing the theme of loss of faith, Symphony No. 2 ‘The Age of Anxiety’ takes W.H. Auden’s poem of the same name and follows its four characters in their spiritual journey to hard-won triumph.

REVIEW:

It’s great to see this music being played with such conviction. We all know that Alsop is a superb Bernstein conductor, and Naxos already has a terrific account of the First Symphony from James Judd and the New Zealand Symphony, but this newcomer is, if anything, even finer–certainly sonically–and conducted with even more pizzazz. In the central Profanation movement, Alsop really does outdo Bernstein himself; the playing of the Baltimore Symphony here is sensational, and in the finale Jennifer Johnson Cano sings with great sensitivity and a beautiful tone. The tragic climaxes hit you right in the gut.

In the Second Symphony, Jean-Yves Thibaudet offers a first class account of his solo part. The Masque is especially outstanding–virtuosic but at the same time nicely “cool.” Prior to that, in the opening variation sets, Alsop knits the music together expertly, ensuring that the glum bits never bog down, and that the entire first part builds inexorably to its exciting conclusion. The following Dirge is is a barn-burner, and somehow after all of this the Epilogue never turns hollow. Again, I don’t think that Bernstein could have done better, and as suggested above the engineering is also rock solid and brilliant by turns. A marvelous release by any standard.

– ClassicsToday (David Hurwitz, 10/10)

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Composed for Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Ravel’s ‘symphonie chorégraphique’ Daphnis et Chloé is based on a classical Greco-Roman love story set on the island of Lesbos. He described the work as ‘a vast musical fresco’, and with its extraordinarily passionate music, lush harmonies and orchestration, is considered both his masterpiece and the epitome of Impressionism in music. Orchestrated from the third of his Miroirs for piano, Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan is an evocative portrayal of the ever-changing moods of the sea.

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REVIEWS:

This performance and recording comes close to fulfilling all of Ravel’s requirements. Slatkin paces the score admirably, even when he sets a spanking pace for the opening of the pirates’ dance. The orchestra find no difficulties in coping with the articulation of the notes here or in the final dance. I would put this Daphnis high on the list of currently available recordings.

– MusicWeb International

The shimmering orchestration and lush harmonies that epitomize impressionism are lovingly rendered by Slatkin and the French orchestra. While Daphnis et Chloé is most often presented as two suites for orchestra, this performance also includes the atmospheric choral parts, sung by Spirito, a body consisting of the Choruses and Soloists of Lyon and the Britten Chorus. Naxos provides remarkably clear and deep sound, so the finer points of Ravel’s scores are easily heard.

– All Music Guide

Canadian-born Joel Hastings was the winner of the 2006 8th International Web Concert Hall Competition and the 1993 International Bach Competition at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. He won particular acclaim for his performance at the 10th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas. Reviewers described his playing as passionate, mesmerizing, hypnotic, and transcendental. A Steinway Artist, he performed solo recitals and orchestral engagements across Canada, the United States, and in Europe. His discography includes live recordings of Liszt’s song and operatic transcriptions and Chopin’s 24 Etudes. His recordings received Canadian critics’ awards, and were praised in publications such as American Record Guide, Limelight magazine, and Musicweb International. His playing was featured on CBC national radio and numerous stations throughout the United States. In August 2014, Naxos released his recording of solo piano music by the American composer Carter Pann to much critical acclaim (8.559751). Joel Hastings died in 2016 at the early age of 46.

The legacy of the Cypress String Quartet, which celebrated its 20th anniversary and valedictory season in 2016, is sealed by the ensemble’s final recording – the two String Sextets by Johannes Brahms in which they are joined by long-time collaborators, violist Barry Shiffman and cellist Zuill Bailey. True to form, the Cypress String Quartet applied innovation to its last recording: live in front of a studio audience at Skywalker Sound Studio. "A tender, deeply expressive interpretation" - The New York Times

Following on from his acclaimed Resonus debut of solo works by Bartok and Kurtag, virtuoso violinist Simon Smith returns to the label with an enticing programme of chamber works for strings by Zoltan Kodaly and Erno Dohnanyi. Joined by colleagues Clare Hayes (violin), Paul Silverthorne (viola) & Katherine Jenkinson (cello), Smith presents three seminal chamber works from the first half of the twentieth century, performed with considerable elan by this exceptional collaboration.

Classical Music

The Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne with its Conductor Laureate Dmitri Kitaienko proudly present magical music illustrating the story of Nutcracker and Mouse King by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Alexandre Dumas. A Nutcracker performance can hardly be more authentic than this – especially since the artists are presenting us here with the entire ballet, not merely the Suite (Op. 71a). The ballet is complemented by the Suite from The Fairy’s Kiss by Stravinsky – composed in 1928 and arranged a number of times. It became world famous through the choreography by George Balanchine for the old New York Metropolitan Opera in 1937, later also for the City Center of Music and Drama as well as Lincoln Center, New York.

Grammy Award-winning clarinetist Todd Levy, who holds the principal chairs with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and Santa Fe Opera, presents Rhapsodie, an astonishing array of classic 20th century works for his instrument. The rich palette of colors and immense versatility of the clarinet is on full display in impressionistic Debussy and Ravel, Cubanisto-style Bernstein, pastoral Finzi, the folk idioms of Bartok, klezmer inspiration by Bela Kovacs, blues-infected Libby Larsen and genre-bending Paquito D’Rivera. Todd’s technical wizardry is flawless throughout and is matched by his collaborators, pianists Jeannie Wu and Elena Abend, and guitarist Rene Izquierd. Todd Levy has received critical acclaim throughout his career. “It takes but a single solo at a Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra concert to fall under the spell of principal clarinetist Todd Levy’s fluid tone and expressive phrasing. In his new CD, Brahms/Schumannn… the Avie label has given the classical music world compelling evidence of an artistic treasure that belongs to Milwaukee.” (Milwaukee Magazine)

Experience the transcendent glory of Messiah in Sir Andrew Davis’s majestic, must-hear edition of Handel’s beloved classic. Recorded live on SACD, this unique version makes use of all the colours available from the modern symphony orchestra to underline the mood and meaning of the individual movements. Without detracting from the innate power of the original, the conductor’s score calls for moments of drama, pathos, and even, sometimes, whimsicality. It is supported by substantial brass and woodwind forces, and several percussion instruments (including marimba!).

REVIEW:

The performance is lightly cut, mainly toward the ends of Parts II and III, and both da capo arias (‘He was despised’ and ‘The trumpet shall sound’) have only the A section. Most of the ornamentation, including simple appoggiaturas, is omitted, as well as most occasions for what I call justified rhythms, where, say, upbeat eighth notes are taken as sixteenths to match other parts. Where choices are available, the common ones prevail, as in the 4/4 ‘Rejoice’ and the duet version of ‘He shall feed his flock’.

Tempos are crisp and modern, and the performers are all very good. The four soloists (with mezzo, not countertenor) are first rate; and the choir, which must number around 150, sings with the agility of much smaller groups. This is a “big” Messiah with none of the problems we normally associate with such endeavors. I guess we could call it “historically informed” because tempos are brisk and the spirit is not at all romantic. It also struck me as a gentle repudiation of Musicological Correctness—and that is no doubt a good thing. I dare say that if you had a contest lining up all the approaches to Messiah and had a review panel consisting of people with no musicological prejudices, this would be the winner.

-- American Record Guide

Launched by its prologue Das Rheingold (8660374-75), Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) - one of the supreme works in the history of music - continues with Die Walküre. Part II of the tetralogy centres on the young lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde, whose relationship angers Ficka, goddess of marriage, and on the disobedience of the Valkyrie Brünnhilde who is sent to carry out Fricka’s wishes. Performed by an all-star international cast, the work features thrilling set-pieces such as Wotan’s Farewell and the Ride of the Valkyries.

Despite the limitations of life in his Salzburg birthplace - and the patronage of a new and somewhat unsympathetic Prince-Archbishop - opportunities nevertheless presented themselves to Mozart. Following a commission for Il re pastore in 1775, he wrote a sequence of violin concertos that reveal his own performer’s understanding of the instrument. The concertos are suffused with elegance and refinement and charged with vivacity and wit. His mastery of solo violin cantilena is matched by prodigious melodic invention and moments of exotic colour, such as the Turkish episode in the Rondeau finale of K.219.

Launched by its prologue Das Rheingold (8660374-75), Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) - one of the supreme works in the history of music - continues with Die Walküre. Part II of the tetralogy centres on the young lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde, whose relationship angers Ficka, goddess of marriage, and on the disobedience of the Valkyrie Brünnhilde who is sent to carry out Fricka’s wishes. Performed by an all-star international cast, the work features thrilling set-pieces such as Wotan’s Farewell and the Ride of the Valkyries.