""Julian Bliss and Joby Burgess combine forces for these recordings made during the 2020 UK lockdown. Working from their homes (although only a few miles apart from each other), each performer combines multiple layers of clarinet and percussion to create these exciting and dynamic new arrangements of much-loved standards of the American Band Music world.

Composer John Mackey describes Asphalt Cocktail as “a five-minute opener, designed to shout, from the opening measure, “We’re here.” With biting trombones, blaring trumpets, and percussion dominated by cross-rhythms and back beats ... Picture the scariest NYC taxi ride you can imagine, with the cab skidding around turns as trucks bear down from all sides.”

The composer’s favourite month, Eric Whitacre’s October contains “simple, pastoral melodies and subsequent harmonies inspired by the great English Romantics (Vaughn Williams, Elgar) ... perfectly suited to capture the natural and pastoral soul of the season.”

Frank Ticheli’s Blue Shades is a love letter to blues and jazz music, mixed through the composers own compositional voice: “Blue notes (flattened 3rds, 5ths and 7ths) ... Blues harmonies, rhythms, and melodic idioms pervade the work; and many “shades of blue” are depicted, from bright blue, to dark, to dirty, to hot blue.”"

Following their acclaimed recordings of Schoenberg with Sara Jakubiak and Britten’s Peter Grimes with Stuart Skelton, Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic turn their attention to the music of Sibelius. Written in 1913 for the diva Aino Ackté, the tone poem Luonnotar draws on text from the Finnish national epic poem, the Kalevala. Its virtuosic demands are ably met here by award-wining soprano Lise Davidsen, who also feature in the Suite from Pelléas and Mélisande, music re-worked by Sibelius from his incidental music written for the first performances of Maeterlinck’s play in Helsinki, in 1905, in Swedish. The tone poem Tapiola, from 1926, is Sibelius’ last great masterpiece and evokes the forests of his native Finland. The programme is completed by a pair of much earlier works, Rakastava (the Lover) and Vårsång (Spring Song).

REVIEW:

Here’s a mostly excellent disc, smartly programmed to offer an appealing mix of familiar and less-known music. Soprano Lise Davidsen seems to be all over the place these days. She’s the real deal, an intelligent and affecting singer with the vocal heft and secure technique to do justice to just about anything she tries. Let’s hope her current popularity doesn’t result in a premature vocal blowout. Her Luonnotar is beautiful, but just a hair too fast. This of course makes it easier to sing, but there’s more mystery and atmosphere in the music than Gardner and Davidsen realize here. It’s my only quibble about this otherwise wholly desirable program.

As for the rest: this Tapiola has all of the eerie strangeness missing in Luonnotar–and let’s face it: Is there a more alien and spooky sounding work out there, by anyone? Gardner is so adept at easing the music from one section to another that you have to wonder why he was in such a rush in Luonnotar? The Pelleas and Melisande music goes splendidly, each of its numbers played to the hilt, with Melisande at the Spinning Wheel and the following Entr’acte especially memorable. Rakastava (The Lover) is an odd arrangement for strings (with triangle and timpani) of an original vocal work. Seldom performed and melodically elusive, it’s good to hear a fresh new version. Spring Song is another rarity. It’s hymn-like opulence sounds strangely un-Sibelian, although it represents perhaps the most extended example of a very characteristic aspect of his musical personality. It’s splendidly done, its successive climaxes especially well-judged by Gardner.

As you might have guessed, the Bergen Philharmonic sounds terrific, as do the sonics. Never mind the unfortunately zippy Luonnotar. This is great stuff.

– ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)

Bach's cello suites are an immovable milestone and touchstone for every cellist. Six weighty monologues in Bach's unmistakable language, to which the playing technique was only gradually able to fully respond. To follow the genius's train of thought through this musical microcosm is a unique attraction, presented by Martin Ostertag with fine nuances and great sensitivity. Martin Ostertag studied with Leo Koscielny at the University of Music Karlsruhe and with André Navarra in Paris and Detmold. In 1967, he was laureate of the International Competition of the City of Vienna and in 1968, made the Young Concert Artists national selection by the German Music Council. After that, he was first principal cellist of the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra, the Amati Ensemble Berlin, Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and finally, starting in 1974, the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra of Baden-Baden and Freiburg. Since 1980, Martin Ostertag has been professor of cello at the University of Music Karlsruhe.

Created by pianist and composer Michael Harrison, Seven Sacred Names is meant as a companion album to the book Nature’s Hidden Dimension by author, astrophysicist and modern Sufi mystic W.H.S. Gebel. The Seven Sacred Names, according to the mystical cosmology of Sufism, tell the story of "...an awakening primal Self," as Gebel writes in the album's liner notes. Taken together, Harrison's seven pieces (with the prologue and epilogue of "Kalim" comprising two distinct movements) foster a listening environment that is ethereal, meditative and at times almost tentative, but also rife with the anticipation and promise of glimpsing hidden truths about ourselves. Featuring a diverse range of artists that includes the Grammy-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, vocalist Ina Filip, cellist Ashley Bathgate, violinists Tim Fain and Caleb Burhans, tabla percussionist Ritvik Yaparpalvi and Harrison himself on piano, the recording moves hypnotically through a subtle but ever-changing suite of tranquil moods and colors — with each stage defining a sacred or exalted state meant to inspire awareness, self-knowledge and self-expression.

Could Bach’s Suites be most representative of his French identity? Composed in Germany around 1720 at the Court of Köthen, like the Brandenburg Concertos, for a Francophile and gambist, they find in Myriam Rignol’s vision and vibrant embodiment an unmistakable French flavor, transcended by the viola da gamba! When an exceptional talent meets the instrument that makes Bach resound in Versailles, lending it the rhythm of the dances so dear to Louis, in a polyphony like no other, Johann-Sebastian dazzles in the Palace of the Sun King…

This is the final release in the Danacord tribute to the Danish cellist Erling Blöndal Bengtsson. This volume features a BBC broadcast from the 1973 Aldeburgh Festival in which Bengtsson is joined by violinist Manoug Parikian and pianist George Malcolm in concertos by Brahms and Beethoven. Bengtsson was invited to Aldeburgh by Benjamin Britten after hearing him perform one of his Cello Suites in Copenhagen. Thanks to Merete Bengtsson’s indefatigable detective work this amateur off-air recording was discovered in the British Library and is issued here for the first time. Substantial audio restoration work was undertaken by David Lord. While the recording quality is somewhat short of ‘Hi-fi’ It remains a valued testament to Bengtsson’s craft and his historic appearance at Britten’s legendary festival.

The three pieces on this release have one thing in common: they combine dances with contrasting musical pieces to form a large whole - the suite. This tradition goes back as far as the Baroque period, where Bach, Handel and Rameau, among others, established this form. Later, from the Romantic period on, sequences of character pieces as well as compilations of larger works were also called suites. An interesting fact: all three composers of the suites on this album were 27 years old at the time their pieces were written.

The c/o chamber orchestra is a collective of thirty young musicians from a dozen different countries. Playing without a conductor, the orchestra is dedicated to that particular collaborative process which is the essence of chamber music. For their first album, the members have chosen to highlight a genre more difficult to pin-point than one might think. Its very name, divertimento, implies that it is simply a diversion, light music for entertainment – but many of the best-known examples of the form transcend that definition. And as many composers have learned, even light-hearted music should be taken seriously: humor requires a master’s touch. The four works recorded here offer different perspectives on the genre, starting with Ibert’s seven-movement suite in which the composer constantly plays with the listener’s expectations. Some forty years before Ibert, his compatriot Émile Bernard composed a very different Divertissement. It is scored for double wind quintet, reminiscent of Mozart’s divertimenti and serenades for winds. But even though the music is melodious and carefree, the debt owed by Bernard to the German romantic composers is never far from the surface. A very special case is Bartók’s Divertimento for strings, composed just before the outbreak of World War II. The closing work on the album reunites the winds and strings of the c/o orchestra in a work written especially for this project by the American composer Michael Ippolito, who in his Divertimento pays full tribute to the contrast-rich nature of the genre.

Ferdinand Rebay (1880–1953) was active at one of the most fascinating periods of European music and taught by one of the most respected musicians of the time – Robert Fuchs, at the Vienna Conservatoire. Fuchs was both a composer and a pedagogue, and among his esteemed pupils were Mahler, Wolf, Sibelius, Zemlinsky and Schreker. Fuchs considered Rebay to be one of his best pupils, although the young composer found it impossible to flourish within the environment of the Second Viennese School and continued to work within the late Romantic idiom. Rebay turned to the guitar due to the influence of his friend Jacobus Ortner, Professor of Guitar at the conservatoire. Aware that the neglect of guitar repertoire for over half a century had led to a decline in the quality of writing for the instrument, Rebay set out to write complex, serious music that continued in the tradition of Giuliani and Sor.

This new recording contains the complete music for viola and guitar: The Sonata in D minor, Kleine moderne Tanz-Suite, Three Russian Folk Songs and the Lyrische Suite, beautifully played by the Duo Impérial: Joël Impérial (viola) and Gilbert Impérial (guitar).

His first teacher was his father, who gave him his first violin lessons when Martin Stegner was eight. After studying with Roman Nodel at the Mannheim Musikhochschule, he switched to the viola and then went for training to Neithard Resa and Wilfried Strehle in the Berliner Philharmonikers Orchestra Academy. His first engagement was in 1993, as principal viola of Berlin\x27s Deutsches Symphonie\-Orchester. Three years later he moved to the Berliner Philharmoniker. Martin Stegner performs as a soloist and chamber musician in Europe, America and Japan. He also works with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester and the Orquesta Juvenil Centroamericana and has given courses at Yale University and the Academy of Music Hanns Eisler in Berlin. He is actively involved in expanding the violas repertoire. Together with the pianist Tomoko Takahashi, he has released several highly acclaimed albums of transcriptions of lieder by Robert Schumann. He has been a keen jazz musician since his youth, and has appeared at numerous festivals, performing with artists such as Herbie Mann, Diane Reeves, Thomas Quasthoff and Nils Landgren. A co\-founder of the Berlin Philharmonic Jazz Group, he founded the ensemble Bolero Berlin in 2008 in which he and soloists of the Berliner Philharmoniker dedicate themselves to South American music. In 2015, an album was released together with the German\/Persian singer Cymin Samawatie on the ECM label. Martin Stegner is involved in other projects with, among others, Simon Stockhausen and the Chinese sheng virtuoso Wu Wei. His work has been documented on 18 albums.

The award-winning French pianist Pascal Rogé presents a program of music by Gershwin and Ravel in a recording with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra under Bertrand de Billy. Rogé’s affinity for the French style and empathy with jazz make him particularly suited to this repertoire. His recordings of French piano music have received Gramophone, Grand Prix du Disque and Edison awards. In addition to the classical-romantic repertoire of the Viennese and German schools, 20th-century French music is also one of his specialties. “An intelligent, richly enjoyable performance of the ravel Concerto.” (BBC Music Magazine) “Roge’s playing of Ravel’s Left-Hand concerto is masterly. He has complete technical regard for the work; more importantly, he appreciates the range of the music, its darkness, menace, anger, other-worldly escape, introspection and defiance.” (International Piano Magazine)

REVIEW:

The team of Pascal Rogé and Bertrand de Billy, with some outstanding playing from the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, bring much to this music. The pianist makes easy work of Ravel’s tremendously difficult writing and clarifies a number of problematic textures in the Gershwin.

-- Fanfare

Gilbert Rowland is one of Europe’s most senior and accomplished exponents of the harpsichord. Following his critically acclaimed 6-album series of the Harpsichord Suites of Handel for Divine Art, he moved to the Athene imprint which now specializes in baroque music and ‘period’ instruments for his well-received album of Suites by Johann Mattheson and his first volume of Froberger’s Suites. This 2-album set is the second volume in a projected complete survey of the Harpsichord Suites by Johann Jakob Froberger, whose organ and harpsichord music is individual in nature and ground breaking – he was one of the first composers to settle the ‘dance-movement’ style of Suite taken up by Couperin, Bach, and Handel among many others. There are 12 Suites in this collection. Gilbert Rowland plays a 2 manual French style harpsichord made by Andrew Wooderson after an instrument by Goemans (Paris, 1750)

In this seventh volume of Music for Brass Septet, Septura survey two of America’s greatest and most representative composers. Gershwin’s An American in Paris charts a visitor’s stroll around the French capital, absorbing the city’s atmosphere and charm, whereas the synergy of classical form and jazz animates Gershwin’s unique Preludes. Copland’s Quiet City depicts a contrasting and more understated cityscape, while the suite from the ballet Appalachian Spring displays Septura’s luminous virtuosity.

REVIEW:

This disc is a quite remarkable achievement of adaptation. The recording, made in 2019, is of outstanding quality, and is a ‘must have’ for all lovers of brass music.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

Nikos Skalkottas was the foremost Greek composer of the 20th century, and his 36GreekDancesisundoubtedly the most popular work of Greek art music today and a monument to the nation’s rich cultural heritage. The Sea describes the experiences of a trawler on waters both calm and stormy, while the Suite No. 1 is a cornerstone of Skalkottas’ symphonic output that balances the worlds of atonality and neoclassicism. The piece was amongst manuscripts Skalkottas left behind in Berlin in1933, and he later reconstructed it from memory. The first volume in this series from the Athens State Orchestra (8.574154) was considered ‘a revelation’ by ClassicsToday.com.