These young musicians from Egypt, Turkey, Portugal and Italy bridge the distance between the shores and sonic worlds of a rapidly changing region. Their first album, recorded in Paris, blends both timbres and backgrounds in a unique artistic collaboration with Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, supported by Abu Dhabi Festival. Cairo Jazz Station was born from the desire of four friends — from different parts of the world, with different musical traditions and different personal experiences — to establish a personal, inclusive and shareable musical environment. Their music is influenced by the folk music of each country and by much improvisation and jazz, and uses melodies from the European classical tradition blended with rhythms and instruments of the Middle East.

Born in 1994, bassoonist Mathis Stier not only won second prize at the 2019 ARD Competition, but was also awarded the coveted Audience Prize. Mathis Stier has a natural affinity with the music of the 18th century and the three works which he has chosen for his ALPHA debut demonstrate it's principal characteristics: Baroque, Empfindsamkeit / Sturm und Drang and Viennese Classicism. The composers J.S. Bach, Johann Wilhelm Hertel and W.A. Mozart represent three generations: father, son and grandson. The conventions of each previous generation are questioned, musical boundaries are broken down and new paths are taken, until the generational revolt finds it's way back to more conventional channels. This is how Mathis Stier describes the phenomenon: "Musically, the Mozart Concerto represents the classical bassoon and is probably the best-known work in the original literature. Hertel's concerto, on the other hand, is unusual and fairly unknown even among bassoonists. It deserves to be more widely known, however, because it is an exceedingly remarkable and idiosyncratic piece. Finally, the Bach Concerto, while a very well-known work, is extremely rarely performed in this version and thus represents an addition to the repertoire. The adaptation for the bassoon is obvious, since the (reconstructed) original was probably composed for the similar-sounding oboe d'amore. Moreover, setting pieces in a different key was common practice for Bach."

One of the New York Times' 5 Classical Albums to Hear Now!

“What if a woman wrote the song?” This question drives a recital of songs by female composers performed by soprano Golda Schultz and pianist Jonathan Ware. Opening with works by Clara Schumann and Emilie Mayer (including her setting of the ballad "Erlkönig"), this recital weaves stories of women’s experience with fantastic tales of powerful sirens like the Lorelei. The great American-British violist and composer Rebecca Clarke’s arresting William Blake settings offer a woman’s perspective on texts also set by Benjamin Britten. Devotional works from Nadia Boulanger reveal a compositional master in her own right, in addition to her legendary status as pedagogue to innumerable greats including Aaron Copland and Daniel Barenboim. This be Her Verse, a song cycle by poet-librettist Lila Palmer and composer Kathleen Tagg was directly commissioned by the artists to conclude the program and add an important contribution to the repertory: songs written by women, about women, highlighting the female experience.

The Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Mikko Franck continue their collaboration with Alpha Classics and here invite the Maîtrise and Chœur de Radio France to join them in a Debussy program. This recording couples La Damoiselle élue, a work described by the composer as a ‘little oratorio in a mystical and somewhat pagan vein’, the Nocturnes for orchestra, composed between 1897 and 1899, and the ’symphonic fragments’ from Le Martyre de saint Sébastien fashioned by André Caplet less than a year after the work’s first performance, and which ensured it would not be forgotten by posterity.

Sandrine Piau and Véronique Gens have a longstanding rapport and dreamed of making a recording together. Here they pay tribute to two singers who, like them, were born within a year of each other, Mme Dugazon (1755-1821) and Mme Saint-Huberty (1756-1812): both enjoyed triumphant careers in Paris, inspiring numerous librettists and composers. Gluck even nicknamed Saint-Huberty ‘Madame-la-Ressource’, while ‘a Dugazon’ became a generic name for the roles of naïve girls in love, and later of comical mothers. Rivals? They very likely were, given the quarrelsome spirit of the operatic world of the time, even if they never crossed paths on stage. Intermingling airs and duets, Piau and Gens here play the heroines of Gluck, Grétry, Monsigny, J. C. Bach, Piccinni, Edelmann and Cherubini. Developed in collaboration with the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, this program on the cusp between Classicism and pre-Romanticism is very much the heart of the repertory championed by Julien Chauvin’s Le Concert de la Loge.

REVIEW:

I don’t know about any rivalry here, but Gens and Piau, both of whom have complete mastery over this repertoire, function extremely well individually (as one might expect) and in duo. They are backed up by a fine and sensitive instrumental ensemble which outlines the highly dramatic content of these arias with a fine sense of the style and good sound that never overwhelms. To be sure, we can obtain the Gluck and Sacchini elsewhere, but the remainder consists of little-known but equally dramatic and well-composed music. Still, this glimpse into the repertoire of the Parisian opera world of the 18th century is well worth obtaining, not only for the premieres of pieces but the artistry of both sopranos as well.

-- Fanfare

The French baritone Florian Sempey has established himself as a key player on today’s operatic scene. For his first solo recital, Rossini was the obvious choice, first of all because he has already performed the title role in Il barbiere di Siviglia in the leading opera houses, from Paris to London, and of course by way of Orange and Pesaro. But there is another reason: ‘Rossini was the first composer’s name I heard in my life. At my grandparents’ house, there was a bust above the piano, on a little rococo display stand’ – the bust that appears on the cover of this album. ‘Rossini’s music is a challenge for singers and also a great and very strict technical training for them. It calls for the highest standards and degree of precision.

This program presents arias in French and Italian, mingling the most famous (including Figaro’s ‘Sono il factotum’) with rarities such as Germano’s aria from La scala di seta and Don Parmenione’s from L’occasione fa il ladro. It also includes magnificent duets with two dream partners, Karine Deshayes and Nahuel Di Pierro. And who better to conduct the Orchestre de l’Opéra National Bordeaux Aquitaine than the accomplished Rossinian Marc Minkowski, who gives this music an inimitable sparkle?

Giovanni Battista Bononcini (1670-1747) and his younger brother, Antonio Maria (1677-1726) were considered by their contemporaries to be among the most outstanding cello virtuosi of their time; today, however, they are best known not only as composers of vocal music but also as two of the greatest representatives of the galant style. It is to their music, often unpublished, that Marco Ceccato and his Accademia introduce us here. Accademia Ottoboni is an ensemble specialized in baroque and classical repertoire, playing on historical instruments. Founded in Rome in 2004, it gathers the soloist and orchestral experiences of some among the most active musicians on the international scene.

Giulia Semenzato, already renowned for her interpretations of the Baroque repertory and her Mozartian roles, presents here her first solo album. The program, entitled Angelica diabolica, is devoted to the female protagonists of Ludovico Ariosto, author of the epic poem "Orlando furioso," whose emblematic figure is Angelica, a revolutionary heroine, ready to resort to any trick in order to regain her freedom. After the Baroque Rome of Luigi Rossi and his opera Il palazzo incantato (1642), we turn to the galant style of Naples with Nicola Porpora’s serenata Angelica (1720), then to Milan in 1702 with the warlike heroine of Bernardo Sabadini’s opera Angelica nel Catai, before a more melancholy take on the character by Agostino Steffani (1691). These rare numbers rub shoulders with more familiar arias by Georg Friedrich Handel, sung by the heroines of his operas Orlando, Ariodante, Amadigi di Gaula, not to mention the famous enchantress Alcina. Alongside the Kammerorchester Basel, Giulia Semenzato deploys all her virtuosity, vocal agility and feeling for words to slip into the shoes of these women, by turns angelic and diabolical.

The Estonian conductor Paavo Järvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich continue their journey through Tchaikovsky’s symphonic works. This fourth volume opens with the Symphony no.1 (1866), subtitled ‘Winter Daydreams’. He wrote his first essay in the symphonic genre just after his appointment to a teaching post at the Moscow Conservatory, and it earned him lasting success. Indeed, he retained a lifelong attachment to the piece, asserting that it was superior in substance to all his more mature symphonic works. The program continues with one of the Russian composer's most famous pieces, the Capriccio italien (1880). Conceived as a musical travelogue, this symphonic poem is a genuine tribute to Italian folk melodies. The triptych offered by this volume is rounded off by the Waltz from the opera Eugene Onegin (1879).

Debussy and Messiaen regarded Iberia as THE piano masterpiece of the twentieth century: ‘One’s eyes close, as if dazzled from having gazed upon too many images’, wrote Debussy in 1905. For Nelson Goerner too, this suite in four books, which evokes Andalusia and the working-class districts of Madrid, is a work of major stature: ‘I am of Argentinian origin, this music touches me, it is like an arrow that pierces me... From the sublime incantation that is Jerez, an invocation of the mysteries of night, to Lavapiès, famous for the pianistic difficulties posed by its polyphonic convolutions and hand-crossings, Albéniz’s music exudes a panache and a joie de vivre that, in my view, make it a milestone of supreme importance.’

George Antheil called himself a ‘Pianist-Futurist’. A lover of speed, cars and airplanes, the American composer settled in the Paris of the Années Folles, where he frequented Picasso shows and Stravinsky concerts, and composed works such as the Sonate sauvage and Jazz Sonata, which caused a scandal: during a concert in Budapest, he even brandished a pistol to restore silence in the hall . . . He hero-worshipped Beethoven, whose pieces he played in the first part of his recitals before moving onto his own music. In 1933, he returned to the United States, where he met John Cage and Morton Feldman. Patricia Kopatschinskaja and the young Finnish pianist Joonas Ahonen – whom The Times, following what the journalist described as ‘one of those concerts you remember for ever’, presented as the violinist’s ‘doppelgänger’! – pay tribute to the self-proclaimed ‘Bad Boy of Music’.

Critical acclaim from the New York Times:

"George Antheil (1900-59) was a technophilic, self-declared bad boy of music; regardless of whether that’s true, he didn’t please his way into the canon. Here, however, this American composer gets a tribute that places him in a lineage of innovators from Beethoven to the mid-20th century — traced by the daredevil violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and an enthusiastic partner in the pianist Joonas Ahonen.

"...Antheil would perform his works alongside, say, something from a century earlier, and Kopatchinskaja and Ahonen do the same by programming Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 7 in C minor. It is a fiery and freely interpreted account reminiscent of Gidon Kremer and Martha Argerich’s fearless, unpredictable, at times unwieldy recordings from the 1990s.

"Like the Beethoven, the Antheil is in four movements, but it blends traditional form with a thoroughly modern sound that, in this reading, bustles at a breakneck pace with percussive and metallic timbres. Looking beyond Antheil’s generation, the album also includes pieces by Morton Feldman and a nocturne by John Cage, works that subtly recall the sonatas but also stand alone as studies in sound-making and extremity — of strength and softness, of overtone-rich expanses. Executed with discipline that borders on mechanical, they couldn’t be better suited to a world according to George." --The New York Times (Joshua Barone)

With this final volume of their Tchaikovsky cycle, Paavo Järvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich complete their exploration of the Russian composer's symphonies. Symphony No. 3, also known as the "Polonaise" (1875), is notable as Tchaikovsky's only symphony composed in the major mode. It is followed by another Polish-inspired piece, the Polonaise that opens the third act of Eugene Onegin (1879), his opera based on Alexander Pushkin's novel of the same name. The program ends with a work commissioned by the city of Moscow for the coronation of Tsar Alexander III, the Festival Coronation March (1883).

Review

This is the fifth release in the survey of the Tchaikovsky numbered symphonies by Paavo Järvi and the Zurich Tonhalle-Orchester (it is not known if the Manfred symphony will follow). The series has been well received but I have not heard all the recordings and was disappointed by the orchestra’s lack of familiarity and feeling for this Russian Romantic music in the First Symphony. However, I should advise that this latest release shows more emotional affinity with Tchaikovsky and the standard of performance and recording in general makes this a very fine series, so this latest release should be an obligatory purchase for those who have already acquired the other CDs in this cycle.

I much admire Järvi’s Beethoven and Schumann symphonic cycles with his Bremen Kammerorkester and his interesting talks on the music included with the series. Apart from being an outstanding orchestral trainer, he is a distinguished interpreter of a wide repertoire and his surveys of that will be of great interest in coming seasons. He has that magical touch displayed by his father Neeme Järvi - the talent to get the best out of any ensemble, a gift not granted to every conductor.

Uniquely, Tchaikovsky’s Third is the only symphony in a major tonality and is perhaps the most popular of the composer’s early symphonies, particularly for its dance-like movements heralding the composer’s great ballets. Yet with its five movements it is often argued that it is more of an orchestral suite than a real symphony. If I had some misgivings about Järvi’s handling of the First Symphony, my doubts are dismissed by the opening bars of this ‘Polish’ symphony. From the start, it is clear that he has a feeling for this music. He brings out all the glorious Romanticism of the opening movement, Moderato assai (Tempo di marcia funebre), with the marvellous shift to allegro brillante, in which the woodwind and the brass departments of the orchestra reveal superb musicality. I particularly like the playing of the bassoonist Matthias Racz and the clarinettist Michael Reid in this movement, and the glorious strings are beautifully cushioned against the colourful wind playing.

The second movement, Alla tedesca (German style) is based on an Austrian/Moravian folk theme. It offers stunning playing between strings and woodwind in the waltz of the third, middle movement and the Scherzo is delightful; Järvi gives us all the magical charm of Tchaikovsky’s score, while in the Finale, yet another beautiful dance adorns the polonaise that allowed August Mann to give its name to the symphony in one of his Proms concerts at the Crystal Palace in London. In all, this is an excellent interpretation and performance of Tchaikovsky’s symphony embellished by a superb recording.

Another polonaise decorates the dance from Eugene Onegin, which is just as well performed, as is the other ‘filler’, the rarely performed Festival Coronation March with the theme of the Danish National Anthem quoted in the Russian Anthem ‘God Save the Tsar’. The booklet notes are in English and German with informative articles on the music, the conductor and orchestra, and a useful list of orchestra members. This disc is an essential addition to those collecting Järvi’s Tchaikovsky cycle, and very much worth considering as a one-off purchase.

--MusicWeb International (Gregor Tassie)

Collectif9, well-known for its innovative programming and its unique arrangements of the classical repertory, here tackles the music of Debussy, following a first recording devoted to Mahler (ALPHA770). With Clair de lune, La Mer and Des pas sur la neige, the Montreal collective invites us into a sumptuous theatre of shadows and waves: ‘Could we, as nine string players, perform Claude Debussy’s La Mer and do it justice? In a musical style where timbre and color are paramount, attempting to interpret this emblematic work seemed outrageous; but come to think of it, we like a challenge. This is certainly a reinterpretation. Being fewer in number allows us to otherwise reveal a rich rhythmic interplay already present in the work while shedding new light on the balance of voices and harmonies.’ A work by composer Luna Pearl Woolf completes the program: Contact, ‘a sonic view into the underwater world of beluga whales in the St Lawrence Estuary’.

Nothing is as it appears in the old English manor house of Bly. A new governess takes up her post and discovers that the children who are her new charges are under the influence of the ghosts of the previous governess and her depraved lover. As one disturbing event unfolds after another, the questions become more pressing: What horrors happened here before her arrival? Are the children innocent? Do we really see what we are seeing?

Based on Henry James’s strange ghost story, Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw is a psychological thriller in the form of a chamber opera. The Orchestre de la Monnaie, under the British conductor Ben Glassberg, took up this masterpiece in a staging which, despite the Covid crisis, received rave reviews. We now present a version recorded in studio conditions immediately after the performances. The two leading singers, Ed Lyon and Sally Matthews, are utterly convincing: together they push the audience’s imagination to unbearable levels of tension…

‘But what are we going to do with all these pleasures?’ A question sung tête-à-tête by the Princess and the Prince in Jacques Demy’s film Peau d’âne, and a more bothersome question for harpsichordists drawn to the age of Louis XV. What to do with all the pleasures that the composers of the time distributed so extravagantly, how to live today in this ‘kingdom of the pleasant’? The usual option is to stick to the most perfectionist of these masters (Couperin), the most ambitious (Rameau) or the most adventurous (Forqueray) in programs focusing on one of them at time. But that means setting aside a whole swathe of the repertory, which Céline Frisch here restores to the limelight, following an original method. From Couperin’s Le Réveil-matin to Corrette’s Les Étoiles, she retraces a day at the court of Louis XV, making full use of the sound palette offered by an exceptional harpsichord, a replica by Andrea Restelli of an instrument by Goujon.

The orchestral suite, sometimes simply called ‘overture’ because of the imposing dimensions of its opening movement, enjoyed great popularity in the early eighteenth century, especially in central Germany. Bach had discovered the genre in his youth and cultivated it until his late period in Leipzig. This recording assembles his four overture-suites, including the famous Suite no.2 BWV 1067, which belongs among the late works. Numerous copying errors in the instrumental parts suggest that this piece was originally written a tone lower – in A minor – and therefore probably for a solo instrument other than the transverse flute: in the present recording, this first version, reconstructed from the clues mentioned above, is performed with solo oboe. ‘This is a work of austere beauty, in which contrapuntal skill and melancholic expression are combined in a highly original way with the carefully calculated dance rhythms’, writes Peter Wollny in the accompanying booklet article.

REVIEW:

I really like the spirited performances here. The tempos are brisk and the articulation of strings and winds is crisp. I particularly enjoy listening to the continuo. Their sound is vigorous; and the definition in Julien Debordes’s bassoon playing is remarkable. Having her take the lead in fast movements helps to keep the ensemble together, pushing the tempo forward. Notes are in English.

-- American Record Guide

After two recordings released on Alpha Classics (including a monograph devoted to Erkki-Sven Tüür – ALPHA595 – that won a Diapason d’Or in 2020), the Estonian Festival Orchestra and Paavo Järvi present six works by five internationally renowned Estonian composers: Tõnu Kõrvits, Ülo Krigul, Helena Tulve, Tauno Aints and Lepo Sumera. Four of these pieces were commissioned by the Pärnu Music Festival, founded and directed by Paavo Järvi. This traversal of six original sound-worlds highlights the richness of Estonian musical creation and its multiple facets.

Forty years have passed since Gidon Kremer created a little musical oasis in the Austrian town of Lockenhaus in 1981. The violinist’s open-minded attitude has left its mark on this event, which has become a must in the concert calendar, and the cellist Nicolas Altstaedt, who took up the torch in 2012, continues the same philosophy. For this fortieth anniversary, he has decided to call on composers who have come to Lockenhaus or had works performed there in the past ten years. Hence the program contains two premieres – the cello concertos of Raphaël Merlin and Helena Winkelman – but also short pieces by Erkki-Sven Tüür, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Lera Auerbach, Patkop, Maja Ratkje, Matan Porat, Kurt Schwertsik and Johannes Fischer. Musical postcards that celebrate the anniversary while foreshadowing the next forty years!

The twelfth volume in the Haydn 2032 series, in which Giovanni Antonini conducts the Kammerorchester Basel, is devoted to ‘games and pleasures’. The symphonies recorded here, nos. 61, 66 and 69, were composed for the daily theatrical performances held at Eszterháza Palace in the spring of 1776. For Haydn they marked the end of a festive period, before he had to return to the serious business of writing operas. The ‘Toy Symphony’, attributed to Haydn for 200 years before it was discovered that it was in all probability composed by a Benedictine monk, completes the program in a similarly light and cheerful atmosphere.

A few years after the success of her album crossing Baroque music with folk, Love I Obey (ALPHA538), the Franco-American singer Rosemary Standley visits Schubert, this time with the complicity of the ensemble Contraste: ‘We all have a few notes of Schubert buried deep inside us’ say the artists, who have got together around his music and brought to it an original sound texture, the result of their varied influences – classical, pop, jazz, folk. They have picked some of the best-known lieder (Ständchen, selections from Winterreise, etc.) and universally loved instrumental pieces, incorporating in them rhythms from other countries and instruments unusual in this repertory: the jazz trumpet of Airelle Besson, the guitar of Kevin Seddiki, the percussion of Jean-Luc Di Fraja join forces with the piano, violin, viola and cello of Contraste – not forgetting the exceptional participation of the soprano Sandrine Piau, who joins Rosemary Standley for several duets. The arrangements are by Johan Farjot.

‘Well, what a surprise – a divine surprise! I have delighted in immersing myself in the world of Handel for more than forty years now. But I must admit that I experienced yet another lesson in strength and joy when I toured and recorded the Dettingen Te Deum and the Coronation Anthems’, says Hervé Niquet. As a lover of large orchestral formations, he has assembled a number of instrumentalists and singers close to the (gigantic) forces used at the premiere, with a large band of oboes, bassoons and trumpets, and assigned the solo arias to the entire ‘chapel’. Niquet speaks of ‘the glittering power of this ceremonial music concocted by a Handel conscious of placing the best of his genius at the service of the crown and of history’, and he in turn invests all his enthusiasm and expressiveness in these works combining ‘grace and strength’. Fans of Champions League football will recognize in "Zadok the Priest" the theme of that competition’s anthem!

REVIEW:

Niquet’s fluid lines heighten the drama by drawing out crucial words in long, upswelling crescendos, punctuated at climaxes by pungent brass and woodwinds. His performers apply dynamics with authority and precision, fashioning an intricate fabric.

-- BBC Music Magazine

 

The great Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk makes a triumphal return to chamber music with his regular piano partner Håvard Gimse. The program features two English composers, Benjamin Britten and his teacher Frank Bridge, whose Cello Sonata was written during the First World War and is tinged with despair and searing emotional force. Britten composed his Cello Sonata in 1961, following his meeting with Mstislav Rostropovich, to whom he dedicated the work. Another person traumatized by the Great War was Debussy, who wrote: ‘It was cowardly to think only of the horrors being committed, without trying to react by rebuilding, insofar as my strength allowed, a little of that beauty which is currently under attack.’ His Cello Sonata (1915) was the first of a series of six sonatas for various instruments that he planned to compose, only managing to write three before his death. As a determined Moravian nationalist, Janácek did not entitle his three-movement work of 1910 ‘sonata’; he called it Pohádka (Fairy tale) and based it on a poem by Vasily Zhukovsky.

REVIEW:

What one notices from the very start of the Bridge sonata, with which the disc begins, is Mørk’s fulsome tone. He is partnered very well throughout by Gimse and the recorded sound is really present, upfront, so much so that it is best to lower the volume for a realistic perspective. That said, I have found much to like in these accounts.

This is an excellently programmed disc, admirably performed and well recorded. It should provide plenty of pleasure. Alpha are also to be commended for their cardboard product with sleeves for inserting both CD and booklet.

-- MusicWeb International

Four of the 20th century’s greatest works for cello and piano: three of them famously recorded back in the 1960s by Rostropovich and Britten – a hard act to follow. Yet the Norwegian duo, Truls Mørk and Håvard Gimse, rise fully to the challenge in close yet lucid recorded sound that achieves an exemplary balance between cello and piano. Marginally less juicy of tone and idiosyncratic of phrasing than Rostropovich, Mørk brings a classical poise and eloquence to his phrasing and a marvellous sensitivity to detail, while Gimse is fully alive to the very different styles of piano writing in these four works.

The qualities of the new recording are especially favourable to Frank Bridge’s big two-movement Sonata – composed athwart the outbreak of the First World War, which horrified him – where the old recording suffered from slightly cloudy piano sound. As Mørk soars through the fraught lyricism of its first half, one hears clearly how Bridge subtly inflected even the most seemingly conventional piano figuration with his own individuality. And if the new recording of Debussy’s war-time Sonata is less dark and rhapsodic than the Rostropovich-Britten, it exemplifies the more enduring characteristics of French culture he sought to uphold.

The fugitive flights of melody and figuration comprising the three whimsical movements of Janáček’s Pohádka (Fairy Tales) demand a glancing, mercurial response which they certainly receive here, while the Britten Sonata somehow emerges as a weightier, more substantial work than in the original recording by its dedicatee and composer – special though that will always remain.

-- BBC Music Magazine

Joachim Du Bellay (1522-1560) stormed onto the Parisian literary scene with the resounding avant-garde manifesto Défense et illustration de la langue française. Ronsard and Du Bellay are the great French poets of the sixteenth century, but while the former has been set to music hundreds of times, Du Bellay inspired only about thirty compositions. Denis Raisin Dadre and his ensemble Doulce Mémoire celebrate the Angevin poet on the occasion of his 500th anniversary with works by the leading composers of the period, among them Arcadelt (who set nine chansons to his texts, including Je ne puis dissimuler a year before Du Bellay’s death), Lassus, Chardavoine and Verdonck. It was also established practice at the time to declaim poems accompanied by a musician who improvised on the lyre, an instrument and usage imported from Italy (recitare a la lira). Denis Raisin Dadre has decided to pay tribute to these sixteenth-century ‘slam poets’ by asking a modern equivalent, Kwal, to ‘slam’ some of Du Bellay's sonnets, including the famous "Heureux qui, comme Ulysse."

This recording presents one of the most lucid and well-programmed portraits of john Adams to emerge, well, in a long while.

In this program, Paavo Järvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich celebrate a composer of our time with works from different periods and citing a wide range of references, whether autobiographical or typically American. John Adams has assimilated numerous musical influences, and his personal style cannot be reduced to one of them: he is neither Minimalist, nor post-Minimalist, nor neo-Romantic. Some of his works can of course be said to belong to one or other of these movements, but he does not consider himself to be the representative of any particular tendency. If he refers to musical tradition in his works, it is always in a critical way and at the same time open to the influences of pop music, rock, and jazz.

REVIEW:

Paavo Järvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich mightn’t be the first pairing one associates with the music of John Adams. But, as their new album – simply titled John Adams – attests, they’ve pretty much got the iconic American composer’s style down pat.

Rhythmically, the Swiss band really digs into the proceedings here. That’s especially true of their account of Lollapalooza, a whimsical 1995 curtain-raiser dedicated to Simon Rattle. Järvi’s tempo is notably slower than either Kent Nagano’s or Michael Tilson Thomas’s, yet, if the reading is less overtly edgy, it’s perhaps jazzier than its forebears. And it certainly doesn’t want for energy or textural clarity.

Similar qualities mark Slonimsky’s Earbox, another mid-‘90s effort. It’s brilliantly energetic, yes, but Järvi’s command of its structure is the real story: this is as coherent a Slonimsky as has been played, clearly drawing on all the threads of Adams’ style up to about 1996 while also suggesting what was to come in pieces like Naïve and Sentimental Music and Son of Chamber Symphony.

Also, My Father Knew Charles Ives, Adams’ semi-autobiographical 2003 tone poem that, last year, was the highlight of a disc from the Nashville Symphony. Järvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester are, generally, a bit more relaxed in their tempos than their counterparts in Tennessee, especially in the first movement. But the performance never slogs; rather, it overflows with atmosphere and color.

Rounding things out is a carefully-balanced account of Adams’ 1986 fanfare Tromba lontana. Perhaps less familiar than its more vigorous companion piece, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, Tromba lontana, with its delicately dancing textures, potently complements My Father Knew Charles Ives.

The end result is one of the most lucid and well-programmed portraits of Adams to emerge, well, in a long while. As such, it’s an excellent way to mark the composer’s 75th birthday this year – or just his general contributions to contemporary music, which, as this disc reminds, have been anything but commonplace or predictable.

-- The Arts Fuse (Jonathan Blumhofer)

After Franck, Debussy and Strauss, Mikko Franck and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France here continue their collaboration with Alpha Classics, this time with the spotlight on Igor Stravinsky. The program begins with two pieces from his so-called ‘neo-classic’ period: his Capriccio and Octet. In the first, in which Stravinsky sets up a dialogue between piano and orchestra, the soloist is one of the great stars of the new generation, the French pianist Nathalia Milstein. Then the mood darkens, with the primitive rhythms and ferocious chordal attack of The Rite of Spring, a work that Mikko Franck has long since wanted to immortalize on album: a major masterpiece of the 20th century and an essential milestone for every orchestra. Every single player seems to be on fire in this recording, which puts the seal on seven years of collaboration and achievement with its Finnish Music Director.