In the history of recording, there have been literally dozens and dozens of recordings of Hector Berlioz's monstrous masterpiece "Symphonie Fantastique", a work that is arguably the first musical masterpiece of terror. Judging by the performance given here on Naxos by Yoav Talmi and the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, plenty! With the recording quality as high as it is, and the recording itself very well priced, this version of Berlioz's nightmarish masterpiece has much to show, including the piece de resistance, the "Witches Sabbath" in the fifth movement, with the use of the ancient chant "Dies Irae" ringing out in the trombones (a chant that would find it's way into the music of such chilling movies as A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Poltergeist).

"...intelligently scored and very well played, from the solo flute Partita in A minor BWV 1013 to the keyboard Preludes in E and C and the solo violin sonata in G minor BWV 1001 (here transposed to A minor). Equally ambitious is guitarist Enno Voorhorst's transcription of the harpsichord concerto BWV 974, which originally was an oboe concerto by Alessandro Marcello... Voorhorst is unquestionably a fine musician whose mastery of the guitar in this repertoire is beyond doubt; perhaps he will offer some performances of original guitar works on his next recording. The sound is fully supportive of the solo instrumental setting and affords a natural, intimate acoustic." - David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

"The playing is technically sound, stylishly embellished, and in general a model of refinement, taste, and restraint. Voorhorst's tone is consistently round and full." - American Record Guide

Naxos has released a second collection of Russian tenor arias by Vladimir Grishko. Like the first volume, we have a beautiful tenor voice treating us to some rarely heard arias from operas not often performed outside of Russia. Probably the only familiar pieces to non-Russian listeners would be the brief orchestral excerpts from Glinka's A Life For Tsar and Polovtsian March from Borodin's Prince Igor so listening is a treat in and of itself.

John Rutter's own recording of his beloved Requiem--with his Cambridge Singers on Collegium--already has been reissued on a CD that includes the Magnificat. That performance, in its setting for choir and orchestra, remains the Requiem of choice, although this new version--with Rutter as recording producer--offers a first-rate rendition of the composer's alternative chamber arrangement of the Requiem along with several rarely-heard--or never-before-recorded--choral and organ works. The Clare College Choir, with whom Rutter has a history both during his days as a music student and later as the choir's director, gives the kind of technically solid and interpretively meaningful performance that we would expect, considering the composer's hands-on involvement and well-known concern for accuracy, both musical and sonic. Like Caroline Ashton on Rutter's Collegium disc, Clare's Elin Manahan Thomas delivers the soprano solos with a clear, ringing, effortlessly natural quality, and the choir is a model of responsiveness and sensitivity in phrasing and dynamics, preserving ideal balance across registers and among vocal sections.


The reason Rutter fans will have to have this is for the premieres and for the handful of rarely-heard organ works--and any listeners who believe this composer to be rather predictable and one-sided in style will find numerous surprises to jar their impressions. Two of the premieres--the anthems Arise, shine and Come down, O Love divine--show a more complex Rutter, whose harmonic style and concept of textual development takes us into richer and far more intellectually/musically challenging territory than we're used to, a nod both to Howells and to Britten. The organ pieces--both for solo (Toccata in seven) and duet (Variations on an Easter theme)--show a thorough command of the idiom and are laced with Rutter's usual catchy rhythms and inventive melodic twists. One of the highlights is the anthem for choir and flute, Musica Dei domum, with its beautiful instrumental solo and organlike choral utterances. The sound, from Berkshire, England's Douai Abbey, provides ideal space and resonance for these eminently singable--and listenable--pieces, works that belong in the collection of every true lover of choral music. [4/26/2003]
--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

REVIEW:

If your contact with Passion music is Bach’s St. John or St. Matthew, you’re in for a shock. This score contains no dynamic markings except in the first and last minutes. The story is told with no dramatic outbursts, no overt drama, no complex rhythms, and the effect is hypnotic and ritualistic rather than theatrical. The role of the Evangelist is taken by a quartet of voices—soprano, alto, tenor, bass—and they are accompanied by, in different groupings, one each of violin, cello, oboe, and bassoon, playing on short note values. Jesus, a bass, is accompanied by organ, and all of his utterances are slow and deliberate. Pilate is a tenor. Given the strictures of tempo and dynamics, you might suspect a lack of involvement, but this is not the case.

If you don’t know the phenomenon that is Arvo Pärt, this inexpensive, stunning release of what may remain his masterwork will open your ears and heart. Bass Robert Macdonald sings Jesus’ lines with utmost dignity and rich, dark tone; tenor Mark Anderson as Pilate begins sounding puzzled and moves into clean-hands irony as the situation becomes clear. The four voices of the Evangelist are ideally matched and they sing as one; the instrumental soloists are similarly superb. There are problems, though. Tempos tend to be rushed at times, and at others, Pärt's silences can last too long. But I’m nit-picking as one who has known the work only from the Hilliard performance for 15 years; I dare say a newcomer will be bowled over by the work's exquisite austerity in this performance by Tonus Peregrinus. The sonics are superb—spacious, clear, with pure silences and no artificial, “churchy” ambience.

-- Robert Levine, ClassicsToday.com [8/2011]

The Sinfonietta is entitled 'Symphonic Phantasy' on the unpublished manuscript (echoes of the original title of Sibelius's Seventh Symphony) and it remained unperformed during the composer's lifetime. He was unsure of it and told the conductor Christopher Whelen, to whom he gave the manuscript in 1950, that he didn't want it played. Whelen faithfully obeyed this injunction until 1983, when he was very reluctantly persuaded to let it be performed during Bax's centenary year. (He had previously refused a request from Robert Ponsonby to allow it to be premièred at a Prom in 1980, where it would have shared the program with the first performance of Rubbra's Eleventh Symphony under Nicholas Cleobury.) Vernon Handley and the BBC Welsh Orchestra eventually gave the first performance at a recording session in Llandaff on 25 June 1983 for broadcasting later that year. (Odd to think that it has only ever been played in Wales and Czechoslovakia.)

There's nothing like Christmas to bring out a composer's more unapologetically clever and enthusiastically indulgent, prodigiously inventive ideas, in apparent realization of childhood's most extravagant fantasies and enchanted imaginings, to say nothing of providing a wonderful excuse for an artist to simply go happily and uninhibitedly wild. The collection of Christmas-inspired orchestral "fantasies" on this CD is certain to become one of your favorite holiday listening traditions as you join these five composers in an upbeat--and sometimes unconventional--celebration of some of the season's most familiar Christmas carols and songs.

Of course, you can treat the material in a variety of ways, from the more straightforward yet impressively adroit fantasias on easily recognizable (if often rhythmically or melodically altered) tunes offered in Bryan Kelly's five-movement Improvisations on Christmas Carols to Victor Hely-Hutchinson's more deliberate attempt at symphonic style and structure in A Carol Symphony, where he actually incorporates carols such as Adeste fideles, God rest ye merry gentlemen, The Coventry Carol, The first nowell, and Here we come a-wassailing into a legitimate four-movement theme-and-development framework

At the program's mid-point we're treated to a string-orchestra arrangement (by composer and liner-note writer Philip Lane) of Peter Warlock's famed carol Bethlehem Down, followed by Lane's own three-movement Wassail Dances from 1973. This latter work shows a fine command of orchestral color and a healthy respect for the power of rhythm and momentum. Finally, we hear Patric Standford's A Christmas Carol Symphony, a big, robust, ruddy-cheeked tribute to this most happy and optimistic of holidays that proudly and relentlessly exerts its sparkling, brassy, brightly colored atmosphere through a mélange of at least a dozen carols, from Deck the hall and Es ist ein Ros' entsprungen to Ding dong merrily on high, The holly and the ivy, and We wish you a merry Christmas. The City of Prague Philharmonic proves a first-rate interpreter of these scores, conveying all the music's exuberance and spirit with flawless technical prowess and Technicolor-grade contributions from the winds and brass. Conductor Gavin Sutherland deserves credit for inspired leadership in these all-too-rarely performed works--any one of which would make a guaranteed audience-pleasing addition to a holiday concert. Having these together on one budget-priced CD is truly a gift worthy of the season it celebrates. And Naxos complements the whole production with top-grade sound. Adeste fidelis!

-- David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

Britten's cantata St. Nicolas is another of the great modern pieces on a Christmas theme. Dramatic, even dark in places – as in the best music from Bach on down, a glimpse of the shade helps us better appreciate the light – Britten's tale of St. Nick is utterly enthralling, especially in this beautifully recorded performance. Conductor Steuart Bedford assisted Britten at the end of the composer's life and became one of his most sensitive interpreters, leading the premiere of the opera Death in Venice and directing the Aldeburgh Festival for decades. The late English tenor Philip Langridge, the soloist in St. Nicolas, does his stirring best here, as do the BBC Singers in Christ's Nativity. Like many of Britten's later scores, his festive setting of Psalm 150 was designed for a mix of professional and amateur players; the children's chorus here shines brightly.

– Bradley Bambarger, Listen [Winter 2011]

Naxos’s program of Scandinavian violin concertos represents both night and day in the works of former violinists and composers Jean Sibelius and Christian Sinding. Sibelius’s rhapsodic concerto bears the impress of the young man who improvised on the violin in the craggy fastnesses of his native country; Sinding’s (the first, from 1898, of three) pays tribute to the late Romantic virtuoso tradition, with the soloist’s opening gesture curiously suggestive of a finale theme from Bruch’s First Concerto. If Sibelius’s dimly lit Serenade and Sinding’s expansively cinematic Romance (there’s a touch of the cinematic in the concerto as well, although both works antedated the era) don’t suggest night and day, they make almost as strong a contrast. Henning Kraggerud plays with great virtuosity in Sibelius’s violinistic magnum opus, and the recorded sound, though balanced, captures even the snap of his bow in the inky vortex of the first movement’s swirling passagework. His tone on the 1744 Ole Bull Guarneri del Gesù, lent to him for this recording, sounds as runically eldritch as Sibelius’s music itself. Kraggerud makes the most of this sinuousness, playing the second movement’s sinking double stops moodily rather than ecstatically. He affects the same mysterioso in the recitative-like sections of Sibelius’s Serenade. Sinding’s concerto, on the other hand, turns out, as its opening foreshadows, to be an extroverted romp (although the slow movement provides its share of somber, resonant musing); and as the music’s tension relaxes, so does the edge on Kraggerud’s virtuosity (he seems more at home in the danse macabre than in the tantoli). But he’s ardently songful in Sinding’s Romance from 1910, of which this recording’s proclaimed by its label to be the first. Bjarte Engeset and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra provide a sonorous and allusive (and appropriately abrupt, where necessary) backdrop to Kraggerud’s dark divagations in Sibelius’s works and a lush romantic one for his more extroverted gambols in Sinding’s.

Kraggerud faces Olympian competition in Sibelius’s concerto, but his dark-hued yet brilliant reading compares favorably on its own terms with Heifetz’s cold light or Vengerov’s highly personalized meanderings. He has Sinding’s works pretty much to himself. The release can therefore be recommended all round: a strongly competitive, eerie Sibelius concerto, a Serenade that, while it may not match Mutter’s languid yearning (Deutsche Grammophon 447-895-2), provides the requisite subdued colors in its less histrionic way, and two unfamiliar works by Sinding.

Robert Maxham, FANFARE

Like Mozart's, the two string quintets of Brahms are scored for two violins, two violas and cello. The choice is characteristic. The register of the violas and the richness of texture that such an instrumentation can impart, whether in chamber music or in orchestral writing, was very typical of Brahms, and reflected in his music for the piano. He had first attempted the form in 1862, using two cellos, as Schubert had done, but had destroyed it, replacing it first with an arrangement for two pianos, and later, in a final version, as a piano quintet. Brahms had intended his String Quintet in G major, Op. 111, as his last chamber music composition. He wrote it in the summer of 1890 at Bad Ischl, following his usual custom of composing during summer holidays spent away from the city. It was, in the event, to be followed by four further compositions, the Clarinet Trio, the Clarinet Quintet, and two Clarinet Sonatas, the last also known in an effectively autumnal version for viola, an instrument offered in the other works as an alternative to the clarinet. The G major Quintet was first performed in Vienna on 11th November in the year of it's composition. It starts with a movement derived from sketches for a fifth symphony, allowing the cello an orchestrally conceived first subject. For the second subject Brahms turns to Vienna for inspiration. There is a shift to B flat major in the central development, further modulation leading to the return of the original key and thematic material in recapitulation. The D minor slow movement allows free variations on the opening material, until the theme returns in a simpler form, originally played by the first viola. The third movement opens in a melancholy G minor, the feeling dispelled by a G major trio section, which has the last word, after the re-appearance of the G minor material. The quintet ends with a Vivace ma non troppo presto, a rondo that finds a place for much else that is thoroughly Austrian or Austro-Hungarian in mood, ending in an energetic Hungarian czárdás.

If you're very comfortable with your favorite Christmas carol choral arrangements, be prepared to adjust your ears and your sensibility as you listen to these newly commissioned--and sometimes very different--settings by Antony Pitts (who also happens to be a composer, radio producer, and the conductor of the vocal ensemble Tonus Peregrinus). Although Pitts strove to honor the original tunes and to preserve certain familiar aspects of carol singing forms and customs, he wasn't afraid to shake tradition with new harmonies and a few unusual melodies. Of course, how many ways can you harmonize "Lo, how a Rose e'er blooming" and still have it recognizable and singable? Pitts chooses not to tinker very much with this beloved hymn, instead substituting a completely different translation ("Lo, there a Rose is blooming") set to very familiar harmony, gradually introducing dissonances and changing the texture, carefully ornamenting the non-melodic lines. Other pieces are more daring--the melismatic inner parts and flatted sevenths in "While shepherds watched", for example, or the stark, open, fourth- and fifth-oriented harmonies in "O come, o come, Emmanuel".


While Pitts shows fertile imagination and often impressive resourcefulness in rethinking these 24 mostly well-known carols and hymns, some of his ideas are better than others, and occasionally we're left thinking that, well, maybe the traditional version really is the best after all. Among the offerings, which are presented in four thematically organized sections: a "Silent Night" that's just too schmaltzy for its own good; a plodding, tedious "O little town of Bethlehem" (to a tune many won't recognize, complete with theatre-organ tremolo!); a wonderfully dancing "Good King Wenceslas" that enlivens this usually routine song; a weirdly chaotic "Hark the herald angels sing"; a beautiful realization of the 15th-century "Alleluya--a new work"; and an unusual "Away in a manger" that features some delicious harmonies that cleverly illustrate the sound of the "lowing" cattle and the baby awaking. However, rather than describe these as I hear them, you should get this and judge for yourself. You may find some of these arrangements will become your new favorites--or at least welcome alternatives to the ubiquitous Willcocks/Rutter/Oxford Carol Book "standards". At the Naxos budget price, it's a great buy and, if you're interested, the arrangements are available online. [11/30/2004]
--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

Here is a fine mixed assortment of music by Arnold Schoenberg. All of the performances are high quality, and two of them are now my reference recordings. Even if this were a full-price disc, the expert performances, clean engineering, and wide sonic range (including particularly solid bass) would make it a top choice.


The performance of Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten is notable for lovely, accurate singing by Jennifer Lane and sensitive, fluent support by pianist Christopher Oldfather. Lane produces a more beautiful tone, with more consistency between registers, than the major rival performance by Jan DeGaetani and pianist Gilbert Kalish on Nonesuch. But DeGaetani exploits register differences to create a wider range of effect and knows when some vocal harshness is called for. Lane may excel in presenting the love music's lyricism, but DeGaetani makes the loss and anguish more keenly felt. Although my reference here remains DeGaetani/Kalish, Lane's rendition is still excellent, and I dare say that some listeners will prefer hers because of its sheer vocal beauty.


The Piano Suite Op. 25 occupies a pivotal spot in music history as Schoenberg's first completely 12-tone work. Again the top contender is a classic Nonesuch CD, this time played by Paul Jacobs, who projects more angst. Oldfather presents a clarified, even witty approach that makes this music sound less "difficult" than usual while demonstrating that Schoenberg used neo-classical form and texture to support his radical melodic/harmonic technique. Since the Nonesuch disc's sound is a little fuzzy by today's standards, it's an easy nod for the new disc.

Lied der Waldtaube is a song from Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder. Schoenberg stripped the original lush full-orchestral accompaniment down to a 15-piece ensemble to create the arrangement recorded here. Jennifer Lane returns as soloist, again displaying her creamy mezzo-soprano in particularly sensitive singing. This is definitely worth hearing--and acquiring as an alternative. In the end though, fans of this music will want the late-Romantic original orchestration for its stronger emotional punch.

Schoenberg, who was not a particular fan of Handel, felt free to mess around with the Baroque master's Concerto Grosso Op. 6 No. 7. Often altering Handel's harmonization, and with downright loopy "wrong" notes scattered around the score, this strange piece is Schoenberg's funniest composition. Robert Craft, a friend of Schoenberg's in his later days and a pioneer in conducting the composer's music in America, leads the Fred Sherry String Quartet (formed for the occasion of this recording) and the Twentieth Century Classics Ensemble in a recording of this piece that's unprecedented in clarity and wit, with full-bodied sound to match. The disc concludes with a rather charming 1949 interview of Schoenberg by American composer Halsey Stevens.
--Joseph Stevenson, ClassicsToday.com

Given the popularity of Schumann’s A-Minor Piano Concerto, I’d be willing to wager there are readers out there who have amassed recordings of it in double-digit numbers. If you are one of them, you may already have this one in an earlier incarnation, for the performances on this disc are not new. The concerto comes from a 1988 Budapest production; the Introduction and Allegro appassionato, from a 1992 Belgian production; and the Introduction and Allegro, from a 1996 Polish production.

The current release, however, can be recommended for joining this trilogy of Schumann’s concerted works for piano and orchestra on a single disc. In fact, it is the identical program I praised to the heavens in a review of an MDG DVD-A with Christian Zacharias. If you heeded my advice and acquired that disc, the present Naxos recording, and all others, for that matter, are superfluous. Nonetheless, Jenö Jandó, who has become a well-known Naxos commodity, is a very fine pianist whose playing here is technically flawless and interpretively orthodox. Translation? You can’t go wrong.

One minor editorial correction: the note states that Schumann’s two single-movement concert pieces for piano and orchestra, coupled here with the concerto, are his only other works for this combination. Not so. In 1839, he wrote a Konzertsatz in D Minor for piano and orchestra that predates the works on this program. There is a recording of it on a Koch International Classics CD.

Jerry Dubins, FANFARE