If you’re into the guitar, then you’ll lap up every minute.

"Born in Florence, Castelnuovo-Tedesco studied with Pizzetti and was helped in his early career by Alfredo Casella. He met Segovia in 1932 and this inspired him to write his 1st Guitar Concerto, subsequently he wrote nearly 100 works for the instrument. He left Italy in 1939, just before the outbreak of war, and found himself, through the good offices of Jascha Heifetz, for whom he had written his 2nd Violin Concerto in 1931, in Hollywood with a contract from Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer where, over the next fifteen years he wrote over 200 scores. He was also an influential teacher and among his pupils are Jerry Goldsmith, Louis Ballard and John Williams. Castelnuovo-Tedesco is probably best remembered today for his guitar music, especially that 1st Concerto, which has received many recordings, the solo guitar music and a handful of Shakespeare overtures.

The Sonatina Canonica is a pleasant miniature, which fills the time. It’s delightful but without depth. But what else would you want from such a piece? After a short time you don’t really notice that you’re listening to canonic writing, and the mind can simply enjoy the interplay between the instruments.

Les Guitares Bien Tempérées is a much more serious work, by which I mean that it is not light in the way that the Sonatina is light. These pieces are not primarily for entertainment, but there is much music here which is truly enjoyable. I would never have thought that it was possible to get so much variety from two guitars. Castelnuovo-Tedesco fills his pieces with every emotion imaginable, from pathos to, almost, belly laugh (is that an emotion?) There are light and breezy pieces, serious inventions, dance type pieces - very holiday advertisement time - and all this wide variety of invention adds up to a very satisfying and pleasurable whole."

-- Bob Briggs, MusicWeb International

HAYDN Organ Concertos: in C, Hob XVIII:1,8,10. Harpsichord Concertos: in C, Hob XVIII:5; in F, Hob XVIII:7 • Helmut Müller-Brühl, cond; Harald Hoeren (org); Ketil Gaugsand (hpd); Cologne CO • NAXOS 8.570486 (72:46)


These early concertos—from the 1750s, although some were revised in the 1760s—were written to be played by either organ or harpsichord, which is why this disc is entitled “Keyboard Concertos.” In Brilliant Classics’s recent 150-CD “Haydn Edition,” all five of these works were played on an organ. The music is conventional, having elements both Baroque and rococo, but it is still Haydn, which means spirit and quality as well as competence. The only lack is individuality; I would hate to face a blind audition of each movement—especially if you switched solo instruments. These performances are also conventional, too much so. The modern-instrument band produces very little color, and less variety of it. Bland, tubby recorded sound reinforces that feeling; trumpets in the C-Major pieces are barely noticeable, and drumbeats are little more than extra reverberances. By contrast, Brilliant’s period-instrument Ensemble Dolce Risonanza produces vibrant colors and violent explosions. The tables are turned with the soloists, however; Brilliant’s Anton Holzapfel can hardly get a note in edgewise among all those dolce risonanzas, whereas both Hoeren and Gaugsand take the lead when called upon and give imaginative, well-rounded performances. The best things here are the Allegro finales, which are taken at spirited, upbeat tempos.


This disc is in no way necessary, but you’re sure to enjoy it.


FANFARE: James H. North

Gioachino Rossini
IL TURCO IN ITALIA

Selim – Marco Vinco
Fiorilla – Alessandra Marianelli
Geronio – Andrea Concetti
Narciso – Filippo Adami
Prosdocimo – Bruno Taddia
Zaida – Elena Belfiore
Albazar – Daniele Zanfardino

Prague Chamber Chior
Orchestra Haydn di Bolzano e Trento
Antonello Allemandi, conductor
Guido De Monticelli, stage director

Filmed at the Teatro Rossini, Pesaro, Italy, 18 August 2007.

Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: Dolby Digital 2.0 / Dolby Surround 5.0 / DTS 5.0
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Running time: 165 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

Award winning American keyboard-player Glen Wilson follows up his acclaimed releases of Buxtehude' harpsichord music "strongly gestural and rhetorical", Couperin' Tombeau de M. de Blancrocher "considerable technical virtuosity", Farnaby' Harpsichord.

One of the most important composers of opera and sacred music between Mozart and Rossini, and Donizetti' teacher, Johann Simon Mayr also composed several major oratorios, including David and the Marriage of Tobias. Like Haydn' more famous Il Rito.

Indulgently romantic piano concerto performed with bravura assurance.

Does Marco Polo still exist as a label? Created under the mantle “the label of discovery” it used to be the Naxos main outlet for music from the world’s highways and byways. Now that Naxos seems to embrace all and every style of music and at a bargain price I’m guessing Marco Polo has quietly slipped away. Over the years Naxos has reissued many earlier Marco Polo discs and this is one such – a straight reissue of the 1999 disc. I missed it first time round and I am sorry that I did – it is a CD of rare but instantly appealing music convincingly performed.

Ildebrando Pizzetti is one of a group of Italian composers – the others included Respighi, Malipiero and Casella - who sought to modernise Italian opera as well as establishing a body of non-operatic Italian music. All of the music presented here is intensely dramatic – not surprising in a composer who produced more than a dozen operas as well as incidental and film music. Even the piano concerto here Canti della stagione alta is intensely pictorial. The disc opens with the prelude to Pizzetti’s first Opera Fedra. This opens with a strangely hypnotic sinuous melody (monody really) from the violas that immediately flags up one of Pizzetti’s great interests – Gregorian Chant yet this seamlessly moves into an impassioned lyrical outburst for the full orchestra within half a minute – it is powerfully dramatic and makes one want to hear more of the full opera. If you think that Puccini had yet to write Il Trittico or Turandot at the time Fedra was first performed you can hear what a new path Pizzetti was trying to forge. It is still very romantic and lyrical but quite different from the music of his more illustrious contemporary.

The major work presented here is the piano concerto of 1930 Canti della stagione alta (Songs of the High Season). Keith Anderson’s erudite - as usual - notes capture the sound world of this piece well. The music is immediately ‘open-air’, modal in flavour and with a rhapsodic feel - the long singing lines of the strings show a composer of a naturally lyrical bent. The way the woodwinds ornament and muse over their opening material is very beautiful. It doesn’t grab your attention by the use of great arching melodies instead it creates its effects by use of texture and atmosphere – Pizzetti handles the orchestra and soloist with great confidence. Certainly if you like your piano concertos big-boned, tonal and of a romantic cut this is for you. Running at a shade under thirty minutes this is not a huge work but it feels bigger than that. Not to imply that it outstays its welcome – far from it. As the first movement develops it moves away from the pastoral to something altogether more dramatic with double octave passages in the piano tossed off with conspicuous ease. There is a heraldic quality to some of Pizzetti’s brass writing that I really enjoy. Yes it could be argued there is a cinematic element to it but it works for me! The slow second movement is altogether simpler although once again the central climax is heavily brass led but I do like the way this immediately gives way to a quietly modal string passage with some distant brass figures – sounding deliberately archaic – decorating the music. Not having seen a score it is hard to know exactly how Pizzetti achieves the effect but the metre of the work is very flexible with a strong sense of regular predictable bar-lines removed. Instead we can feel the underlying basic pulse – once again this seems to be a stylistic nod towards the melodic fluidity of plainsong. The finale is played attacca leaping straight from the final notes of the second movement. This is a true rondo which – again I agree with Keith Anderson here – has echoes of an Italianate Rachmaninov although the quirky string led fugal passage and a final exciting brass peroration are uniquely Pizzetti’s own. This proved to be a very pleasurable discovery indeed. The disc is completed by music Pizzetti wrote for a silent movie in 1914 – Cabiria. What an extraordinary event this must have been – the bulk of the music for this two and a half hour epic was assembled - as was so often the case with early silent film scores - from standard orchestral repertoire. However for a key sequence – involving the sacrifice of 100 children to the God of Carthage Moloch! – Pizzetti was commissioned to provide this ten minute sequence involving large orchestra, baritone soloist and chorus. That it is pictorial is clear from the very first bars and again benefits from a performance of great flair. To be honest it is the piece on this disc I would least often return but it is not trying to be anything but colourful and illustrative – there is none of the subtlety or emotional weight that marks out the other pieces here. Conversely I cannot think of another example of so early a dedicated film score of this originality and power. Well worth a listen in that historical context alone. Quite how it sat next to excerpts of Mozart Mendelssohn and Gluck I do not have a clue!

The price of discovery for many of the early Marco Polo discs was the dubious quality of the performances and recordings. I’m pleased to say that this is not the case here. The Robert Schumann Philharmonie play this unfamiliar repertoire with great sensitivity and technical assurance. Only a couple of brief moments of string edginess in the second movement shows that the concerto was taken from live performances but in fact the balance and sound stage is excellent and the audience is totally inaudible. The rapport between the husband and wife team of Oleg and Susanna Stefani Caetani is excellent and the liner notes make clear that the concerto is part of her active repertoire. This clearly benefits the piece with a thoroughly convincing performance in every respect. Likewise the two filler pieces which are studio recordings from the same period – powerfully performed and well recorded.

Running to less than fifty minutes this is a rather under-filled disc although we would have been happy with that in the days of LP’s and at Naxos’ bargain price given the quality on offer I don’t really feel I can complain. All in all a disc of far greater musical and technical quality than I was expecting. It makes me want to hear the recently released Concerto dell’estate (Naxos 8.572013) as well as the complete Fedra.

Indulgently romantic piano concerto performed with bravura assurance.

-- Nick Barnard, MusicWeb International

An excellent Metamorphosen and a disc well worth the purchasing.

This disc is a follow-up to the same team’s superb performance of Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie . I considered that disc to be possibly the single finest achievement in Naxos’s considerable crown - a performance both epic and humane aided by a superb recording and a magnificent orchestra steeped in Straussian tradition. So it was with considerable expectation that I listened to this performance of the Symphonia domestica. Strauss’s two big programme symphonies are the pieces most often dragged out by his detractors as the ultimate examples of his over-weening ego and penchant for excess. Certainly they are scored for huge orchestras and last over three quarters of an hour. The thing that jars for many people - particularly in the case of Symphonia Domestica - is the public flaunting of private, even intimate, details - some considering the passionate love music of the adagio voyeuristic and tasteless. I have always felt this is to miss the point - Strauss was a virtuoso of the orchestra in the way others are of the violin. Clearly he delighted in being able to bend it and the rules of form and composition to fit whatever musical plan he had in mind. I feel we as listeners should focus more on the Symphonia element and less on the Domestica. After all, we are quite happy to listen to the extended unconsummated passion of Tristan and Isolde which we accept because it is a story but reject the Strauss because it is considered reportage. This is all a red herring we have been thrown. If we knew nothing of the “programme” behind this piece we would be little worse off. This piece works symphonically better than many other works so labelled. It is down to Strauss’s brilliance that he creates a series of inter-related themes thereby showing a family relationship. These is then able to treat both dramatically and musically in a coherent manner which is logical to both creative strands. As I say, a virtuoso showing off! I absolutely adore this piece. For its unbridled passion and vigour and thrilling orchestration it has few equals; not all great music has to be profound.

So to the current performance, Many of the virtues that graced the earlier disc remain. The Weimar Staatskapelle is a magnificent orchestra. They have a rich burnished tone building on a resonant dark-hued bottom end that is ideal for this style of music. All solos are taken with great style and musicality. To my ear they combine the best of the warmth of the Berlin Philharmonic with the tonal personality of the Dresden Staatskapelle; this is an orchestra I would love to hear perform live. Wit’s approach to the work is essentially similar to that of the Alpine Symphony. He eschews passing drama in favour of a longer more epic stance. This paid dividends in the earlier recording - there was a cumulative power to his interpretation that felt absolutely right. Part of the explanation for that could be that that piece, in following one day in the mountains, could be seen as a metaphor for the traversal of life from birth to death. Symphonia domestica is about a single day and the hustle and bustle that is part of it. Hence there does need to be an urgency about much of the writing. Timings alone are never a good way to judge a performance but Wit, at nearly forty-seven minutes in length, is by some measure the slowest performance I have compared. Szell blazes his way through in just over forty-one - technically stunning - but a rather regimented household one can’t help but feel! Even that most affectionate of Straussians, Kempe, is a good couple of minutes faster.

Everything starts well with the character of the orchestra both corporately and individually immediately apparent. I see that this performance was recorded about two years after the earlier one - the Metamorphosen actually dates from the same group of sessions as the Alpine Symphony - with a different engineer. He has not quite caught the inner detail with such a miraculous combination of detail and beauty as his colleague. It is from the central portion of the symphony that the performance as a whole begins to lose its way. Somehow the music seems to become becalmed. This is in part due to the loss of some of the inner detail. The contrapuntal writing in this work is remarkable even by Strauss’s standards so that even when the tempo slows there is an inner energy driving the music forward. This piece was for me one of Järvi’s greater successes in his Chandos cycle. This was due in no small part to the engineers managing to delineate the numerous lines in the musical texture. The extended love-scene lies at the heart of the work and to succeed it does need to overwhelm the listener with a series of climaxes that sweep away reserve and reservations. Sadly, in this, Wit does not succeed - it is beautiful where I want passion and considered where I want wildness. The symphony’s final section with its curious double fugue - the use of such an intellectually rigorous form after the abandon of what has gone before has always mystified me - is in many ways the piece’s weakest element and works best when played with unbuttoned good humour. It features some of the most remarkable horn writing that even Strauss produced which whilst it does register here does not overwhelm as I wish it would; once again Järvi and his SNO horns have a field day here. So I would have to say a worthy performance and an ongoing delight to hear this orchestra but not the automatic first choice I had rather hoped it would be.

Metamorphosen is a very substantial filler. The key to the approach here - and I’m sure that Wit is absolutely correct - is that this is a piece for 23 solo strings. Hence it is in effect a piece of large-scale chamber music. Other performances such as those by Karajan and his Berlin players produce a wall of tone that is remarkable - to the point you wonder how 23 players can produce that much sound - but in doing so the personal nature, the individual character of the loss that is being mourned vanishes. There is a lean quality to the Weimar sound that allows each line to be clearly followed and this reinforces the genius of the contrapuntal writing. It is a sombre performance as befits a piece written as a musical oration for a lost city and culture. Wit again directs a performance that sits at the slower end of a range of timings. Interestingly no performance I have heard clocks in at the 30 minutes indicated in the score. Of those I possess Zinman is slowest at 28:57 with Wit second at 28:16. The broad lamenting approach pays dividends here. Also the recording is splendid, beautifully balanced across the sonic range but with a richness to the bass lines that lets this extraordinary music sit on an harmonic bedrock above which the multitudinous polyphonic lines swoop and intertwine. The hardest element of this work is sustaining the single arc from gentle opening through contorted climax to desolate resolution. Wit’s pacing is excellent; never once do you feel he has allowed the music to peak too soon or conversely to sag. Listen at the very end when finally the Eroica motif in the basses appears unadorned how the accompanying upper strings blanch away their tone and vibrato to produce a final descent into oblivion. Quite superb. There is a sustained intensity to the music-making here that belies it being “just another session”. Clearly the creative fires were burning brightly in Weimar in July 2005! Metamorphosen has been fortunate in receiving many fine performances so I think it quite impossible to single out one as being first amongst equals. However, to my ear this new version is worthy of being considered up there with the very best. Listening several times to both performances on this disc I have no doubt that the earlier engineering of the string work is finer than that accorded the symphony although the latter is by no means poor.

Worth mentioning at this point Keith Anderson’s typically fine liner-note which explains with concision and clarity the genesis of both works. He points out, among many interesting facts, that Metamorphosen was composed in less than one month first note to last (13 ^th March - 12 ^th April 1945) - an astonishing burst of creativity for any composer producing a work of such complexity let alone one some 77 years old.

All in all another powerful disc of Strauss from Wit and his Weimar orchestra. For a Domestica of sheer delight I would turn elsewhere but an excellent Metamorphosen is more than compensation and at the price a Naxos disc well worth the purchasing.

-- Nick Barnard, MusicWeb International

MUSICAL JOURNEY (A) - ROME: Piazzas, Fountains and the Remains of Empire (NTSC) ROME

The Places

Starting from the Pantheon and the Colosseum, our tour takes us to the Forum of Augustus and the Forum of Trajan, the Arch of Constantine and the Capitol, with the later city represented by the Piazza di Spagna, the Trevi Fountain, and the great piazza before St Peter's in Vatican City.

The Music

The music chosen for this tour of Rome is by Franz Liszt, who divided the last 25 years of his life between Rome, Hungary and Weimar, after an early career as a travelling virtuoso, one of the greatest pianists of his time, and a period settled in Weimar as Director of Music Extraordinary to the Grand Duchy. In Rome he took minor orders and developed further his interest in the music of the Church.

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: Dolby Digital / DTS Surround
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Running time: 59 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

I’m not sure you could do better than this.

Naxos has collated its Haydn Masses series into a single box [8.508009] so if you fancy having the full works in a single handy collection these performances, conducted by J. Owen Burdick and Jane Glover, may fit your bill, and price bracket. Single discs are still available, and this one is no exception; a 2003 recording of the once-neglected 1767 Stabat Mater.

The forces are familiar ones, given their prominence in the Naxos series. The direction and execution are able, the singing generally good, phrasing attractive. An affirmative spirit courses through the performance and it mitigates the sometimes funereal performances that we used to hear. The orchestral forces, the Rebel Baroque Orchestra, employ period instruments and practice, which gives a not unwelcome astringency to some - but by no means all - of the playing. The balance between solo voices, orchestral solos and the choir is a just one.

There is, in fact, little with which to cross swords in a performance as attractive as this. Comparing older, conventional performances with one such as this is not comparing like-with-like, but if one were to do so, one should point out that the famous old Laszlo Heltay recording, with a stellar vocal line up of Augér, Hodgson, Rolfe-Johnson and Howell, is invariably a minute slower in all the more extensive movements, which adds considerably to the total timing, and also the sense of incipient gravity and contemplation generated by such tempos.

Here we find articulation is bright and tight. Stephen Sands has a quite light tenor, but it’s mobile and relatively flexible. He starts the work, soloistically, with the Stabat mater dolorosa and when he follows bass Richard Lippold in the Virgo virginum praeclara - and before the other two voices enter - he blends well with his colleagues. Luthien Brackett has an attractive, well focused alto, and Ann Hoyt sports a bright, youthful soprano. She makes a fine showing in Quis non posset contristari where spruce winds and a well balanced organ are strongly to the fore. Understandably perhaps she snatches at breaths a touch in the Sancta Mater, istud agas. Lippold is a pleasantly sonorous bass, doing well by Pro peccatis suae gentis. The chorus, which is the Trinity Choir, come into its own in the concluding Paradisi Gloria where the bases don’t over-part the tenors - and indeed all sections sing well.

The acoustic works in favour of the performance, though there is some ambient noise floating about, audible at higher levels. I didn’t find it especially distracting. So if you fancy an original instrument performance with good soloists, band and choir and a brisk, attractive tempo, and all at a bargain price bracket, I’m not sure you could do better than this.

-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

Aleksandr Tsiboulski is first-prize winner in numerous competitions including the 2006 Tokyo International Guitar Competition. His playing, which transcends the image of the technically flawless competition winner, has been praised by the Age for it's '

Challenges even the best - a bargain alternative to Trevor Pinnock.

Naxos already had a decent recording of the ‘Nelson’ Mass (8.554416, with the ‘Little Organ’ Mass, Hob.XXII/7) on which soloists, the Hungarian Radio Chorus and the Nikolaus Esterházy Sinfonia were conducted by Béla Drahos. The new recording, Volume 3 of the Naxos series of the Haydn Masses, is also available in an 8-CD.

The Nikolaimesse, recorded in 2002, gets the new recording off to a very good start. The music is lighter, less vintage Haydn than its more familiar companion, with mainly brisk tempi much in the manner of the short early Masses which Mozart composed for his Salzburg patron Archbishop Coloredo. It also receives a fine performance and recording. The soloists don’t merit a listing on the rear insert, but they are named inside the booklet, as they deserve to be. If I select Ann Hoyt, the soprano, for special praise, that should not be at the expense of the others.

To be honest, I had not expected much from this CD - I hadn’t heard of any of the performers and I’d forgotten the warm reception which the complete box had received - but the performance of the Nikolaimesse alone makes it worth the modest price. All concerned convince me that this early work is at least the equal of any of Mozart’s Masses, with the exception of the Coronation (K317) the ‘Great’ Mass (K427)and, of course, the Requiem (K626).

The ‘Nelson’ Mass is, I think, at least the equal of the three best Mozart Masses. I shall continue to give it that name as a kind of shorthand, though it has very little to do with Lord Nelson: Haydn nicknames have a habit of sticking even when they are inappropriate - there is at least enough evidence to doubt that it was at a performance of Symphony No.96 that the heavy chandelier narrowly missed causing serious injury, yet the name ‘Miracle’ continues to be attached to that work. Haydn himself called it Missa in angustiis, Mass in straitened times, but it’s easier and shorter to continue to call it the ‘Nelson’.

The opening Kyrie announces that this is a more serious work than the Nikolaimesse. As Jennifer More Glagov notes in the excellent booklet, the lack of wind players - the Prince had just dismissed them as an economy measure - apart from three (specially hired?) trumpets gives the work an undeniably martial tone.

The performers again give an excellent account of themselves. Only Ann Hoyt remains from the earlier line-up and continues to sing impressively - my wife came in as I was listening and was very surprised to discover that this was the voice of a singer whom neither she nor I had heard before. Naxos and others please note, we want to hear more of her. The other soloists and the choir also step up to the plate and the recording, though thicker than for the earlier work, recorded five years earlier, is more than adequate. The last semi-professional performance of the ‘Nelson’ that I heard was spoiled by a soprano who out-sang everyone else, but that is certainly not the case here. I understand that all the soloists are members of the Trinity Choir, which must make it a formidable place for the musically inclined to worship.

John Sheppard (hereafter JS) complained of Burdick’s habit of slowing at certain points, but some of these are traditional. In the Creed, for example, the slowing at the end of track 16 on the words descendit de cælis prepares for the more marked traditional emphasis on et incarnatus est in the next section, where it used to be expected that all would kneel or bow deeply. In any case, JS soon began to be as untroubled by this practice as I was.

William Hedley (hereafter WH) commented on the reverberant acoustic of the Trinity Church but I really was not troubled by this - different audio systems react differently to reverberant recordings. Nor was I really troubled by the other detailed criticisms which he makes. Rather than repeat these here, I refer you to his review. Whilst I admit the validity of just about all of them, I cannot consider them a serious handicap to an overall recommendation.

WH is more than a little hard on the diction - the syllables are frequently chopped up in the wrong places, but the demise of Latin in the school curriculum makes it almost inevitable that a choir’s familiarity with that language can no more be taken for granted than a knowledge of Japanese. (Actually, the latter is a more frequent visitor to the modern UK secondary curriculum). Haydn would have expected to hear the harder Austro-Germanic pronunciation of Latin, with hard ‘g’ in virginis, and ‘c’ in crucifixus, for example; I’m pleased to report that all concerned here take the softer Italianate course.

JS raises the possibility that the set as a whole is superior even to Hickox (Chandos CHAN0599, also available separately) or Guest (Argo/Decca). I’m not quite sure that I would go that far, but I was impressed enough by the single CD under consideration to wish to sample more of the set via the Naxos Music Library.

I’ve already praised the quality of the Naxos notes. One small complaint concerns the absence of texts, but the Tridentine Latin Mass is pretty well known and the texts and translations are available online, as indicated above: they can be yours even without buying the CD.

Overall, I think that WH is right to prefer John Eliot Gardiner (Philips 470 2862, with the Theresienmesse) and Trevor Pinnock (DG Archiv 423 0972, with the Te Deum). I recommended the Pinnock version of the ‘Nelson’ Mass as Download of the Month in my May 2009 Download Roundup) and thoroughly agree with WH that it offers a life-enhancing experience, but I can’t imagine purchasers of the present CD being disappointed with J Owen Burdick’s performances. Having heard the recording right through once, I couldn’t wait to hear it all again, instead of taking the usual time out to gather my impressions. Go for Pinnock for the best - even at full price and rather short value - but the new Naxos makes a very fine and less expensive alternative.

-- Brian Wilson, MusicWeb International

Whether or not you follow a particular form of meditation, meditate for a specific reason, or simply need some quiet time to yourself, the music selected for Classical Meditation can help you to relax your mind and body, focus your thought, and refresh your spirit. The music in this collection is grouped into ‘sessions’, each of which may take you on a different imaginative journey. The first disc features choral music of radiant beauty, which seems to float freely outside time and space, inviting you to enter a realm of inner peace. The second disc presents music inspired by natural landscapes from around the world, celebrating our place in the world.

Gerda Struhal's clean fingerwork and ornamentation, strongly projected yet never exaggerated bass lines, and her solid rhythmic sense and good taste bode well for Scarlatti. Among this release's high points include a lyrically shaped and crisply delineated F major K. 151, the subtle use of dynamics for harmonic coloring in the C major K. 309, and the F minor K. 186's musically purposeful distinctions between legato and detached articulation. To be sure, Struhal may not match more forceful and inspirational personalities in certain works. Compare, for example, Maria Tipo's hushed tonal magic in the G major K. 425 alongside Struhal's relatively matter-of-fact reading, and you'll understand what I mean. At the same time, Struhal will split the difference between interpretive extremes like Tipo's gentle, dulcet E major K. 381 and Christian Zacharias' far brusquer, aggressive antipode. A fine addition to Naxos' ongoing Scarlatti cycle.

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849) was born in the village of Zelazowa Wola in Mazovia, the son of a French father and a Polish mother. This mixed heritage would weave like a double helix through Chopin's career as a composer-pianist. Following studies at Warsaw Conservatory (1826-29) and 've given concerts in Warsaw and Vienna (1829-30), Chopin settled in Paris in 1831. His most famous romantic liaison was with Aurore Dude Vant (aka novelist George Sand), the years 1838- 1847 coinciding with his most productive period. Their relationship ended shortly after, Chopin visited Britain in 1848, where his already precarious health Deteriorated. Almost 3,000 people attended his funeral the following year at the Madelaine in Paris though he Remained a Polish patriot Throughout his short life, he Became a French citizen. Although educated in the tradition of Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Clementi, and a great admirer of Bach, his music includes works based on both French and Polish models, as well as some innovations. Among the former May be Counted his piano sonatas; Bach's counterpoint found it's way (albeit metamorphosed) into his own multilayered music; his many Viennese Waltzes are more Parisian than; Polonaises and Mazurkas raised his thesis Polish dance forms to Unprecedented Heights or artistic achievement. Similarly, he transformed, the Nocturne, Initially popularized by the Irish-born Russian-based John Field, into a form much more Closely associated with himself. His Ballades, Preludes and Etudes were path-breaking and immensely influential. Two piano concertos, some songs and chamber works aside, he composed Exclusively for the solo piano and preferred to perform at salons privately rather than in public concerts.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was most famous during his lifetime as a keyboard virtuoso, principally as an organist but also as a harpsichord player, and he composed a significant body of keyboard music. Many of these works (including transcriptions of his organ music) occupy a central place in the repertoire of pianists both amateur and professional, delighting players and listeners alike to this day. The keyboard music that Bach published falls into four anthologies, each titled Clavier Übung (Keyboard Practice), a rather dry title for what turns out to be an amazing wealth of music! Other works, such as The Well-Tempered Clavier Books I and II, while not published by Bach, circulated widely in manuscript form and have been influential on composers and performers: Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Reger, Schumann, Busoni and many others have fallen under Bach's spell, using his music to develop their own and their students' techniques, and inspired by Bach's extraordinary achievement when composing their own works. Books I and II of The Well-Tempered Clavier each contain preludes and fugues in all the 24 major and minor keys, from C major to B minor, and are collectively known as 'the 48'. Sometimes referred to as the 'Old Testament' of keyboard music (Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas being the 'New'), the preludes explore an astonishing variety of musical forms (including the famous toccata-like Prelude No 1 in C Major from Book I, various dance styles and concerto- or fantasia-like movements) while the fugues range equally broadly from rather formal examples in 'old fashioned' academic style to others based on more up-to-date musical forms. The term 'well-tempered' refers to the system of tuning, new in Bach's day, which allowed music to be played in any key and has become the standard in Western music. Bach's 15 two-part Inventions and 15 three-part Sinfonias BWV 772-801 were originally written as educational pieces for the notebook Bach prepared for his second wife, Anna Magdalena, herself an accomplished musician. During the Baroque period collections of 'overtures' or 'dance suites' were particularly popular. Bach composed three sets of six suites: the so-called 'English' Suites BWV 806-811, the 'French' Suites BWV 812-817 and the keyboard Partitas BWV 825-830. Each suite comprises a basic set of dances based on different national models, Allemande (German), Courante (Italian or French), Sarabande (Spanish/Latin American) and Gigue (French, based on the British Jig) with additional dances included. The Goldberg Variations BWV 988 presents an aria (that is, a song-like movement) with thirty variations based on the aria's bass line rather than it's tune (Beethoven would work similar wonders with his 'Diabelli' Variations Op. 120). The Italian Concerto BWV 971 was inspired by the exciting new music that was finding it's way north during Bach's lifetime. Bach also transcribed for keyboard several orchestral concertos by Vivaldi and other Italian composers. In addition, several shorter pieces, including the famous hymn Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring and dances from the Wilhelm Friedemann Bach Notebook are included.

KREUTZER Violin Concertos: No. 17 in G; No. 18 in e; No. 19 in d • Axel Strauss (vn); Andrew Mogrelia, cond; San Francisco Conservatory O • NAXOS 8570380 (71: 52)


From a position of relative neglect (only his 40 studies for violin remained really active in the repertoire), Rodolphe Kreutzer has risen to greater prominence with recordings of his studies (by Elizabeth Wallfisch, cpo 999901, Fanfare 32:5) and concertos (No. 19 in D Minor, No. 18 in E Minor, and No. 15 in A Major, with violinist Laurent Albrecht Breuninger and Alun Francis conducting the SWR Radio Orchestra Kaiserlautern, on cpo 777188, Fanfare 33:6; and No. 9 in E Minor, No. 13 in D Major, the Variations on “Nel cor più non mi sento,” and Montanyas Regaladas , with violinist Saskia Lethiec and José Ferreira Lobo conducting the Orquestra do Norte, Porto, and the Versailles Conservatory Instrumental Ensemble, Talent 2911 126, Fanfare 33:1) now being frequently issued. In fact, Breuninger’s recording included Kreutzer’s last two concertos, the 18th and 19th, which Axel Strauss now offers along with the roughly contemporaneous 17th.


The slow movement of Kreutzer’s 17th concerto provides ample—and poignant—melodic relief from the bold thematic statements and technical passagework that mark much of its first movement. If Giovanni Battista Viotti, who’s often linked with Kreutzer (the French “Viotti-Rode-Kreutzer Concerto”) introduced Haydn’s symphonic orchestration into the violin concerto’s armamentarium, Kreutzer approached the sound of Beethoven’s orchestra, as Bruce R. Schueneman’s notes point out. But Kreutzer kept the violin at the forefront, a position that Axel Strauss and his 1845 J. F. Pressenda violin commandingly occupy. He’s snappy and alert in the passagework, as well, delivering impressive barrages of double-stops and sharply characterizing, both stylistically and rhythmically, the Rondo finale’s thematic material. And, as in the first movement’s second theme, he imparts an almost nostalgic sweetness to his reading of the second movement. Those who expect a clone of Viotti’s more familiar concertos (a greater number of them have remained in print) may be pleasantly surprised by Kreutzer’s inventiveness and keen ear for orchestral timbres.


The 18th and 19th concertos begin with Moderato movements, both almost double the length of the six-odd-minute affair that opens the 17th Concerto. As does the 17th, the 18th begins with a movement that explores the passagework, notably in double-stops, that must have stood near the avant garde of violinists’ technical capabilities at the time Kreutzer wrote it; although hardly a virtuoso vehicle in today’s terms, it exploits the instrument’s idiomatic possibilities with a canniness that the trailblazing composers of the era seemed to possess in abundance (else, how could the violin have achieved the prominence it did?), presenting them in the context of dramatic orchestral statements and barnstorming tuttis. Strauss hardly plays this work, or the 17th Concerto, for that matter, dismissively, as many might do (hear how seriously he takes the recitative passages in the middle of the first movement); perhaps the sense of history developed by period instrumentalists has opened the eyes even of world-weary and everything-but-masterpiece-disdaining conservatory students to the merits of compositions like this one. Strauss once again brings a plausible plaintiveness to the second movement with its melody flowing over a light accompaniment and an exuberant if dignified vitality to the final Rondo. Like the first movement of the 17th Concerto, that of the 19th (which Schueneman cites Boris Schwarz as considering, with Viotti’s celebrated 22nd, as one of the outstanding examples of the French Violin Concerto—Joachim admired these two concertos as well, placing Viotti’s just after Beethoven’s and ahead of Mendelssohn’s and Brahms’s) develops the contrast between the lyrical and the dramatic, which continues, in its way, into the second movement, while the finale provides the usual good-natured conclusion (often, as here, with the principal theme in dotted rhythms).


Those who consider Kreutzer’s studies mere drudgery that a violinist has to endure on the way to the Paganini caprices should discover in these concertos, as well as in the others that have been recorded, a composer of unsuspected talent, even one worthy of Beethoven’s dedication of the famous Ninth Sonata. The engineers have placed the violin in the forefront of the San Francisco Conservatory Orchestra, which plays with vibrant and sonorous enthusiasm. Strongly recommended.


FANFARE: Robert Maxham