In their long history the SWR symphony orchestras (one covering the Southern part, the other the South-Western part of the federal state Baden-Würrtemberg) have changed their names several times. In 2016 they merged and are known today as the SWR Symphonieorchester. Over the years these orchestras have performed with many legendary conductors who either were in charge as chief conductor or occasionally invited as guest conductor. On this 10 album boxed set the listener will find 12 of the greatest conductors of the 20th century. Some, such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Leopold Stokowski, Hans Knappertsbusch, Karl Böhm, Kirill Kondrashin, Carlos Kleiber and Kurt Sanderling, appeared only sporadically on the podium of the two leading Baden-Württemberg orchestras. But all, including Carl Schuricht or the chief conductors represented here, Hans Rosbaud and Michael Gielen (Baden-Baden), George Prêtre and Roger Norrington (Stuttgart), have left a lasting legacy with the respective orchestras.

Joseph Achron (1886-1943) was born in Lodz and studied in Warsaw and Russia. A virtuoso violinist, he was a pupil of Leopold Auer, who also taught Heifetz and Elman, but he studied composition under Anatoly Liadov, and his music (or at least his later music) was respected by no less than Arnold Schoenberg. Before Achron came to compose "Jewish" works he wrote in a Slavic/European style, and Miriam Kramer and Simon Oliver's all-Achron CD for ASV focused on that aspect, although it included the Hebrew Melody and the Hebrew Lullaby. Solomon Rosovsky introduced Achron to the Society for Jewish Folk Music at a time before World War I when notions of a Jewish nation and Jewish nationalism were in the air. For a time Achron focused exclusively on "Jewish" music, and helped to form what Nemtsov's notes refer to as a New Jewish School. Robert Maxham reviewed an all-Achron CD by Hagai Shaham (20:6) that focuses on that repertoire, including the Suite from music for Stempenyu, a play taken from a novel by Sholom Aleichem about a klezmer violinist with a hypnotic and (to judge from the music, including a hair-raising sequence of left-hand pizzicatos) somewhat sinister power over women. Szigeti premiered this suite, one of the most interesting aspects of this recital.

The New Jewish School wrote everything from folk-song arrangements to original compositions that incorporated the harmonic and expressive features of folk song, Hasidic, and cantorial music. Some sought to preserve and illuminate the music; others were interested in a portrayal of the Jewish character or soul. As with any form of nationalist music, what makes it all recognizable is the use of a common vocabulary, which of necessity relies on elements of cliche. Bloch's Baal Shem has that element, as do the other works on this release. In spite of a certain basic sameness to many of the works here, there is also plenty of variety on this disc.

Alexander Weprik's (1899-1958) Suite from 1925 is an immediate ear-opener, for its three movements share the intensity, harshness, and dissonance of the Bartók Rhapsodies; this is a real discovery and potential addition to the repertoire. Also modernist in harmony but traditional in melody are the three works by Alexander Krejn (Kreyn, or Krein), fervid in their intense expression. Lazare Saminsky (1882-1959) utilized a far more conservative and traditional harmonic sense as an underpinning to more-or-less pure Hasidic melodies. The results are rich, totally accessible, beautiful, and somewhat cinematic. Joel Engel (1868-1927), the earliest composer here, also used Hasidic vocal melodies as a basis, but with a less embellished accompaniment that is starker in its purity.

Violin recitals of Jewish music are hardly a new concept; Mischa Elman recorded one years and years ago, and Aaron Rosand recorded a honey of CD for Audiophon (14:4). Klezmer bands have maybe brought mainstream listeners closer to the wild and uninhibited sources; the composers represented on this disc were obviously expecting performances keeping to concert norms of deportment, and I cannot deny that a certain sameness sets in before this disc has been fully heard. Also it must be admitted that Turban could have done much more to capture the expressive gestures taken from vocal technique. But for the chance to hear attractive short pieces for violin, for the invaluable exposure to Weprik's magnificent Suite, and for a reminder of just how effectively Achron wrote for his instrument, this release should attract many collectors. Nemtsov's notes themselves are quite valuable. The sound is close and on the dry side.

-- David K. Nelson, FANFARE [9/2001]

Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony sums up the composer's legacy in all its purity. Ferdinand Leitner conducts this towering masterpiece in its original form, free from speculative edits to the unfinished fourth movement. The noted German conductor, Ferdinand Leitner, studied at the Music School in his home city under Fritz Schreker and Julius Prüwer from 1926 to 1931, as well as receiving instruction from Artur Schnabel and Karl Muck. Leitner became known mainly as an opera conductor. He promoted 20th-century German opera, especially the works of Carl Orff and Karl-Amadeus Hartmann. He also promoted the works of Ferruccio Busoni. His premieres include the operas Oedipus the King by Carl Orff (1959), Don Juan und Faust (1950) as well as Hamlet (1980), both by Hermannn Reutter. He succeeded Erich Kleiber as conductor of the German operas at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 1956. From 1969 to 1984, he was senior musical director of the Zürich Opera and from 1976 to 1980 principal conductor of the Residence Orchestra in The Hague at the same time. From 1988, he was principal guest conductor of the RAI Symphony Orchestra in Turin.

This release features Mahler’s First Symphony in a historically informed performance that features a large, modern orchestra and includes the Blumine movement, which was part of the original version of the symphony, the one preferred by the conductor, Sir Roger Norrington. With the inclusion of the Blumine, the listener can appreciate the return of pastoral motifs in the finale movement. Mahler’s First symphony, sometimes titled “Titan,” was written mostly in February and March of 1888, incorporating music that had been written much earlier. The first performance wasn’t well received, but after several revisions over the following years the work has become a staple in symphonic repertoire. Originally, Mahler called the work a “Symphonic Poem in two parts.” But finally he began to refer to the work as a symphony.

This is the fifth and final installment of the Strauss Complete Tone Poems Cycle performed by the Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg under their chief conductor Francois-Xavier Roth. The other volumes in this cycle have been positively reviewed all over the world. The orchestra and conductor are a perfect match for Richard Strauss’ lively and ecstatic music. Completed on New Year’s Eve, 1903, Strauss’ Symphonia domestica, like his ensuing final tone poem, Eine Alpensinfonie, are paradoxically termed ‘symphonies.’ Symphonic poems are usually based on an extra-musical programme, while the genre of the symphony embodies the concept of absolute music, intended as a counter-world to reality. Strauss disregarded this separation and designed the Symphonia domestica as a symphony, but with a programme, namely “a symphonic self-and family-portrait.” The composer depicts both himself, his wife, and his son in various musical tableaux. Revolving around the banalities of everyday life, the music has a twinkle in its eye.

Shostakovich’s Fourth presents the elements that were to burst upon the Soviet scene in his next symphony, but without the Fifth’s tidier, simpler form, emotional unity, and morally uplifting finale to act as a buffer between the composer and the Composer’s Union. The enormous first movement alone, lasting nearly a half-an-hour in performance, offers both delicately spectral and crudely overblown waltzes, lyrical recitatives of intense beauty, parodies of ceremonial marches and polkas, learned counterpoint, violently dissonant climaxes, gentle solos, and brass riding the percussion like the Czar’s galloping army carving down a field of peaceful protestors without mercy. This is Shostakovich come into his own full, focused symphonic power for the first time, and reveling in it.

To complaints of sectionalism, both in the first and final movements, Boreyko’s reply might well be, “Your point?” He doesn’t downplay any of it. Instead, he uses its often dissociative blocks of content to deliberately create juxtapositions that shock, moments of quiet melancholy followed by instrumental screams or taunts. It’s as if he were shouting (with Shostakovich) at the audience to pay closer attention, to consider each panel in the triptych of brutality, mockery, and sullenness that he’s placed upon display. When the time is right, nothing is held back, and this becomes among the most uninhibited of available Fourths. At other moments, Boreyko reminds me occasionally of Jansons (Avie 2096) in the silken beauty he coaxes from the Stuttgart strings. But where Jansons makes that sound an end in itself, this conductor uses it to better conjure those points of relative emotional stability that Shostakovich repeatedly creates, and quickly destroys.

If I have a criticism, it is that the Scherzo is too deadpan. The coarse sarcasm of the winds and brass are taken straight, and the dissonances in the subsequent string fugue are slightly downplayed. The conductor builds an impressive climax to the movement, but he clearly views it as an emotional intermission between two lengthy, harrowing events. While sympathetic to the need to interject some ray of hope into the proceedings, I don’t find that this treatment works especially well. In the coda to the third movement, certainly; and Boreyko makes something powerful out of the side glance Shostakovich takes there at Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. But the Scherzo requires something darker and more incisive, in my opinion.

The rest of the album is given over to a short three-movement orchestral suite drawn from the composer’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. It is described on the jewel box cover as the world premiere recording of the original version, but nowhere inside is this discussed; and it’s the same suite present on Deutsche Grammophon 650702, issued last year. I find these three tiny excerpts tell us far less about the work than the lengthier conductor-arranged suites of Conlon and Runnicles. Still, as filler goes, they make light-hearted listening. Boreyko makes more of the score’s spikiness than Thomas Sanderling, and the Stuttgart RSO runs rings around the Russian PO.

Despite my expressed reservations, Boreyko’s Fourth moves in among my favorites. There it joins Kondrashin/Moscow PO, Rozhdestvensky/Bolshoi Theater Orchestra, and Sinaisky/BBC PO, all currently out of print. I find it slightly superior to Gergiev/Kirov Orchestra (Philips 470 842), where momentum trumps detail, but these are matters of personal taste. Both treatments are in excellent sound, and either will do for the modern Shostakovich collector looking for a first-rate performance of this fascinating work.

-- Barry Brenesal, FANFARE [11/2007]

SHOSTAKOVICH New Babylon. A Year Is like a Lifetime • Frank Strobel, cond; Kai Adomeit (pn); Southwest German RO Kaiserslautern • HÄNSSLER 93.188 (2 CDs: 135.49)


New Babylon is not one of Shostakovich’s standard, propagandistic, political potboilers. This is the music of the enfant terrible of Soviet music. Composed in 1928 immediately following his satirical opera, The Nose , the score for the silent film New Babylon reflects Shostakovich’s lifelong fascination with the cinema and his experience as a piano accompanist for silent films. The film’s directors, Grigori Kosintev and Leonid Trauberg, were considered to be avant-garde, if that were possible at the time. New Babylon deals with the rebellion of the Paris commune in 1870–71, with a superimposed tragic love story between a working girl and a bourgeois soldier. Shostakovich had recently completed his brilliant First Symphony, and the directors immediately wanted him to score the film. Shostakovich’s music is laced with dissonance, acerbic wit, bitonality, and flirts with atonality. The composer utilizes numerous fragmentary quotations from sources as disparate as Offenbach, Tchaikovsky, and the Marseillaise.


An abridged Melodiya version conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky was released in 1976 by CBS, and a more-or-less complete recording has been recently available on Capriccio conducted by James Judd. That was the most definitive recording, at least in terms of completeness, prior to the appearance of this one. The program notes state that this complete reconstructed version—including all the music cut from the film—is based on the composer’s personal manuscripts stored in the Glinka museum in Moscow and the orchestral parts and piano score printed for the premiere. The manuscript was edited by the D-S-C-H publishing house and cross-referenced to a proof copy from the composer’s personal estate. In addition, Frank Strobel synchronized the newly edited music with the 1929 premiere version of the film. All of this is not surprising when you consider Strobel’s incredible reconstruction of Prokofiev’s complete score for Alexander Nevsky ( Fanfare 28:3).


There appears to be no reason to doubt the authenticity of this version, but it really doesn’t matter because Strobel’s performance and Hänssler’s sound are superior to the previous Capriccio recording. Capriccio’s soft edged, more distantly miked sound does not serve the music as well as the more brash, brassy, and closely miked sonics on this recording. There is over an hour and a half of outrageous, funky, melodic but gently dissonant music reminiscent of The Nose and his impish ballets. Strobel’s conducting, aided by incisive and dynamic sound, is flamboyant as befits the music. Shostakovich’s bad-boy early style is an acquired taste for some, but if you have any interest in this aspect of Shostakovich’s art, New Babylon will be a treasure.


A Year Is like a Lifetime is an entirely different story, but is not without interest. It begins with three cues featuring straightforward, bombastic statements of the ubiquitous Marseillaise (as opposed to the fragmentary references and variations in New Babylon ), urgent low strings, strident brass, and slashing snare drums. But at the end of the “Intermezzo” a strange thing happens. The music subsides into pianissimo quivering strings and tolling bells from the sound world of the 11th Symphony. Then a 15-minute subdued, atmospheric, and introspective “Farewell” featuring a plaintive French horn solo is clearly the emotional and musical heart of the score. It is followed by a delicious, tongue-in-cheek waltz and a brief reappearance of some faceless battle music. The suite concludes with the horn solo and music of the “Farewell,” now more upbeat in a surprisingly understated way, with wind and brass chords embellished by lush, rising and falling string configurations building to a climax that Golden Age film music fans will love. Thus the noisy bombast offers contrast rather than dominating a score that remains cinematic, but is predominantly subdued and eminently likeable in the style of The Song of the Forests oratorio.


This album is a clear winner in every conceivable way. The music, performance, and sound make it required listening for any adventurous listener interested in the music of Shostakovich beyond the symphonies and string quartets.


FANFARE: Arthur Lintgen

"Seldom do we find a pianist such as the young German keyboard master, Florian Uhlig, who has the ability to take the music to its very limits, transforming it into something one never suspected it could be. [...] Uhlig unleashed a rush of pianistic brilliance, underpinned by a rock-solid rhythmic pulse [...]. He interspersed this effusion with the tenderest interludes of dreamlike reflection, as moments of respite in a joy ride that left the house breathless at the dazzling close of the concerto's [Schumann Piano Concerto in A minor op.54] glorious Allegro vivace. No amount of pre-concert hype could have prepared listeners for such a marvellous revelation." -- Daily News Durban [reviewing Florian Uhlig in concert]

As a very special companion disc to the haenssler CLASSIC recording of Schumann's complete works for violin and orchestra, we are proud to present an integral recording of the composer's works for PIANO and orchestra - including a World Premiere! For the first time, Schumann's own orchestration of his Abegg Variations, Opus 1, which the composer wrote under the inspiration of Chopin's Variations on "La ci darem la mano". Also included, of course, is the famous Piano Concerto in A minor, the Konzertsatz in D minor, originally conceived as the first movement of an unfinished piano concerto as well as to later concert works that Schumann wrote later in his life. The program on this disc has been organized chronologically. Thus Robert Schumann's complete concertante works for piano can be experienced as a documentary process of the composer's development. Florian Uhlig is not only young a pianist of international stature, but also one who knows Schumann's oeuvre very well. He is currently engaged in recording Schumann's complete works for solo piano - the first volume of which is already available. When complete, Uhlig's cycle will bring to light many forgotten and never-before-recorded masterworks.

This latest release in the Premium Composers Series features a program of the most famous and most beautiful symphonies of Franz Schubert.

This recording of the 1993 Schwetzingen Festival has already achieved cult status. The then, 78 year old Sviatoslav Richter plays for the first and last time in public Gershwin's jazzy Concerto in F-sharp. Gershwin's works had always been suspect under the Soviet regime. All the more surprising was Richter's decision to perform this work in his maturity. Needless to say, Richter never made a formal, studio recording of this work. It is not only a unique recording, but also a document of Richter's expansive interest in all musical repertoires than came under his purview. The Fifth Piano Concerto by Camille Saint-Saëns was eclipsed by the same composer's more popular "Second" Concerto throughout Richter's performing career. With the exception of one album, he never again recorded this work and there is no record that he ever again performed it internationally. With this concert, there can be no dispute that we are dealing with a real rarity.

This delightful new release easily takes its place as the reference edition for these works, not that we're spoiled for choice in anything but the First cello concerto. Johannes Moser plays with consummate technique, gorgeous tone, and a rhythmic kick that seems tailor-made for these elegantly crafted pieces. He and his admirable colleague, conductor Fabrice Bollon, launch the First concerto with irresistible verve, and their winsome handling of the slower central episode practically defines the word "charming". They are just as successful in the hardly-less-appealing Second concerto; Moser's double-stopping at the start is immaculately in tune, his articulation in the dashing finale neat as a pin.

The Suite for Cello and Orchestra, in five brief but hugely appealing movements, lasts as long as either of the concertos and ought to be trotted out now and then in concert. Where has this music been? Try the lovely second-movement Serenade, or the delicious Romance. It's not as if there are many such works in the repertoire. The three shorter pieces make perfect encores. Ever notice how much the main theme of the Allegro appassionato resembles (rhythmically at least) the prelude to Carmen? Moser closes the disc with an orchestral arrangement of The Swan, the icing on this positively scrumptious musical cake. The sonics are perfectly balanced and as vivid as the interpretations, while the Stuttgart Orchestra sounds excellent. This is a major release, and Moser is without question an artist worth watching.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToay.com

Classical Music

In the technical language of music, increasing the tempo is referred to as “accelerando.” If this kind of regular rhythmic acceleration is provided with the appropriate sounds along with the actual musical tones, then a perceptible imagine arises of a steam engine starting up, or a train going faster and faster. Beginning around the mid-nineteenth century, everything suddenly seemed to be running on steam, machines as well as human beings. Both work and play sped up. All of the works on this release- which is a re-release of a SWRmusic bestseller- are focused around the theme of “Railway.” The works chosen represent a variety of composers, styles, and countries of origin, meeting under a singular compositional idea- the train.

Stéphane Dénève, the new principal conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony of SWR makes his debut recording with a thoughtful program of Poulenc. The charmingly frivolous Les Biches, a ballet with chorus, is balanced by the hauntingly passionate Stabat Mater, a medieval hymn meditating on the suffering of Mary during the crucifixion.

Classical Music