Throughout his life, from his very beginnings right up to the end, Telemann wrote for the basse de viole (as the French called it) and especially in chamber music. Of course, the viola da gamba also plays an important role in works intended for larger formations, such as concertos and orchestral suites, church cantatas and, lastly, oratorios. According to the custom of the time, Telemann also used the viol in funeral cantatas. Furthermore, he wrote for it as a solo instrument: for example, the Sonata in D major, TWV 40:1, recorded here, or sonatas for two viols or for viol and basso continuo. The present recording brings together various works with solo viol, selected from different periods of the master’s output. Here one will find a double concerto for recorder, viol, strings and continuo, two solos with basso continuo, a sonata for solo viol and two quartets.

Dick van Gasteren is the founder-conductor of the Ciconia Consort, a chamber orchestra based in The Hague since 2012. To mark 400 years since the Pilgrim Fathers left the Netherlands for America, he devised this programme of music from the first half of the 20th century, reflecting the particular character of ‘New World’ music as well as its roots in European romanticism. The result is a collection unique on album, in beautifully sprung new recordings full of vitality and sympathy. Arthur Foote (1853-1937) numbered among the first generation of classical composers to be educated primarily in the US, and in the arching phrases, transparent textures and rich harmonies of his E major can be heard the Romantic heritage of Brahms and Wagner which exercised a dominant influence over American conservatoires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before pioneers such as Ives and Antheil loosed the cultural bonds between the two continents. The Hymn is the second of ‘A Set of Three Short Pieces for String Orchestra’ written by Ives in 1904: way ahead of its time, we might now think (and composed three years before Foote’s Suite), in its probing harmony which ventures deep into and even beyond the expressionist world of Arnold Schoenberg, while retaining a solemn, devotional quality in the slow-moving textures and the passionate viola melody at its heart. In contrast to the darkness and uncertainty of Ives’s Hymn, the Shaker music quoted by Aaron Copland in Appalachian Spring radiates quiet content and security. The Ciconia Consort are joined here by Dutch colleagues to present the final version of Copland’s ballet, originally written in 1944 to a commission by Martha Graham for a piece with a distinctively American theme.

REVIEW:

Least known of the composers represented on this attractive anthology is probably Arthur Foote, yet he was a significant figure in the development of American classical music. His Suite is an attractive work, in three movements, the last a fugue.

Antheil can be a forbidding composer, but in later years his work softened, as in this delightful, romantic three-movement Serenade. One senses a mellowness and a gift for melody, and, as a whole, it is thoroughly worth exploring: a little charmer.

For me, any Ives is a treat, and the three-minute Hymn is a lovely little piece in his earlier, less experimental style, warm and appealing. Beginning in the double bass, slightly grimly, it opens into broader and generous writing with a sustained nobility.

The best-known work is the Suite from Appalachian Spring, in the original form for 13 instruments. One of the advantages of this reduction, compared with the lusher suite for full orchestra, is that it brings out the angularity of much of the writing. Fine as the new recording is, Copland does give us the complete ballet, which is only 8 minutes longer than the suite, and could have been fitted on this CD.

The Ciconia Consort, resident at the Hague, are a fine ensemble, and this collection will not disappoint.

– MusicWeb International

Music in the 1800s, as in earlier times, was influenced by the instruments for which it was written. As far as the organ is concerned, traditionally there was the influence of the piano, but also, to an ever increasing extent, the orchestra. Beginning in the mid-1700s, the Mannheim School’s introduction of variable dynamics led to a paradigm shift, and the attitudes this represented were also evident in organ music. In his book of study for the organ from 1795–98, Justin Heinrich Knecht (1752–1817) described how one could achieve a crescendo on the organ from pianissimo to fortissimo, and he indicated the specific sequence of stops to be used. Nonetheless, most organs of the time were distinguished by the ideals of the past and were not always well suited for a new registration practice. The norm, as documented in published organ music in the first decades of the nineteenth century, implied that the registration was not changed while playing, thus limiting one to terraced dynamics by the dynamics that the number of manuals permitted. This album’s intention is to present examples of developments characterizing German organ music in the mid- 1800s.

This cd contains two 20th century masterworks for 2 pianos and orchestra: the Scottish Ballad by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) and the Concerto for 2 Pianos and Orchestra by Francis Poulenc.

The Concerto for two pianos and orchestra is one of the most famous pieces by Francis Poulenc (1899-1963). Here we find the summary of the author's style, which from the very first movement plays with formal elements, loosening the schemes of the traditional sonata form to adapt to that kaleidoscope which is his stylistic signature. From Javanese gamelan to Mozart's atmospheres, from the childish nursery rhyme to the passionate impulse, from primitive percussiveness to café chantant. Benjamin Britten wrote his Scottish Ballad in 1941. The works is rhapsodic in character and nostalgic in tone, exploring folkloristic material.

Concluding this program the piano duo plays the First Orchestral Suite by Debussy, in an arrangement for two pianos by the composer.

Mattia Ometto and Leonora Armellini are two young and brilliant Italian pianists. Their perfect pianistic ensemble brings out all the humour, wit and melancholy of these wonderful works for two pianos.

Together with photographer Mat Hennek, French star pianist Hélène Grimaud devises a multimedia concert project at the Grand Hall of Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. Grimaud’s virtuosic piano performance is accompanied by Hennek’s highly praised photo series “Woodlands”, which depicts genuine portraits of trees, Grimaud’s piano recital includes works by Romantic and impressionistic composers. They are connected by seven “Transitions”, written exclusively for Grimaud by British composer and DJ Nitin Sawhney. The motives of Hennek’s Woodlands series create an extraordinary visual backdrop, which in combination with Grimaud´s pianistic “impeccable clarity and articulation” (Hamburger Abendblatt) and the Elbphilharmonie’s splendid acoustics grants a concert experience of a special kind.

REVIEW:

Grimaud is a pianist ideally suited for the repertoire included in this program. She possesses a prodigious technique, the ability to evoke a broad palette of instrumental colors, and a patrician sense of phrasing. Grimaud can also summon a prodigiously focused and powerful sonority in the grand climaxes. The artistic level of this collaborative recital is of a very high order. Both the video and audio quality of the Blu-ray/DVD are superb.

– Fanfare

When Beth Levin released her third live album seven years ago, she summed up Ludwig van Beethoven's last three piano sonatas under the motto 'A Single Breath'. At the time, a critic called her a titan and wrote that she played as if she was a contemporary of Eduard Erdmann, Artur Schnabel, Wilhelm Backhaus and Walter Gieseking. This has not changed. Since then, colleagues, admirers and connoisseurs have repeatedly asked her to present her interpretation of the Hammerklavier Sonata. She has now complied with this request, also with a 'Live in Concert' recording. And again she plays in a highly explosive manner, spontaneously as in an improvisation and at the same time with an incorruptible inner logic, with inexhaustible power and an immense dynamic spectrum of expression. The Hammerklavier Sonata forms the symphonic climax of Beethoven's piano work with its final fugue that transcends all boundaries. This concert program is introduced with a suite of George Frideric Handel, including a set of wonderful variations. Handel was Beethoven's favorite composer, and the motto "All power to the dominant" could stand above both composers. Between the works of the two old masters is the 3rd Disegno by the great Swedish composer Anders Eliasson, who died in 2013, entitled 'Carosello'. This free-tonal cantabile study in 5/4 time creates a sphere of weightlessness in contrast to the cadential purposefulness of Handel and Beethoven. "One may agree with it or not. No one plays Beethoven like Beth Levin." (Christoph Schlüren, 2013)

American violinist Jennifer Koh’s Bach & Beyond Part 3 concludes her critically acclaimed series of recordings based on her groundbreaking, multi-season recital series of the same name that The New York Times has called “indispensable.” Koh, “a virtuoso with quirky and wonderful ideas” (San Francisco Chronicle), again pairs two of J.S. Bach’s landmark Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin with Bach-inspired 20th- and 21st-century works. On this series-finale album, Bach’s florid and fanciful Sonata No. 2 in A minor and Sonata No. 3 in C major, celebrated for its colossal Fuga movement, frame Luciano Berio’s expressive, chaconne-like Sequenza VIII and Pulitzer Prize winner John Harbison’s alluring For Violin Alone, a dance suite inspired by Bach’s partitas, written for Koh (a world-premiere recording).

REVIEW:

Jennifer Koh returns, with the third and final installment in her Bach & Beyond series. With Part 3, we have another two-disc program, framed by two Bach sonatas–No. 2 in A minor BWV 1003, and No. 3 in C major BWV 1005–and filled out by Luciano Berio’s 15-minute-plus Sequenza VIII and John Harbison’s For Violin Alone, composed in 2019 for Koh and here receiving its world-premiere recording. Koh’s Bach, as noted in my two previous reviews, is polished, passionate, and presented with requisite attention to notational detail, but also with a lived-in, well-thought-out sense of phrasing and melodic flow that arises from the score, from an understanding of the all-important harmonic underpinning–an approach practical and just a bit personal, but never with a hint of posturing.

For this series we especially appreciate how carefully and purposefully Koh has chosen her program partners. We’re not expecting direct stylistic similarity, of course–Bach joining hands with Berio and Harbison is not the point. Rather, what Koh is interested in is some manner of influence or inspiration, arising either in some indirect, complementary way from Bach (Harbison), or by means of a more symbolic, technically oriented tribute to the master’s revolutionary, matchless conceptions (Berio).

Berio’s focus is not Bach per se, but rather takes off, sets its trajectory, and develops its very specific “violinistic” gestures and effects from the well-laid platform of virtuoso solo-violin technique established by the German genius in his ground-breaking sonatas and partitas. There’s no direct reference to Bach, yet the liner notes reference Berio’s comments that this work “becomes inevitably a tribute to that musical apex that is the Ciaccona from J.S. Bach’s Partita in D minor where…past, present, and future violin techniques coexist.” Not surprisingly, this is not a sit-back-and-relax experience; it’s a sit forward and hear the not always “pretty” expressions and explorations of a modern composer putting an instrument through its paces.

Harbison’s For Violin Alone hews closer to solo-violin Bach, its six movements plus epilogue more suite than sonata, its structural elements and integral melodic and harmonic components providing the fertile material for often wide-ranging, albeit tonal, thematic exploration, single lines punctuated by pertinent double-stops that anchor the harmony. Koh is especially effective in the way she articulates these double-stop passages, notably one extended sequence at the end of “Ground”, and throughout Duet and Epilogue.

Ultimately, for me the takeaway from these programs is the ingenuity, the majesty, the audacity of Bach’s imagination and the un-improvable manner in which he realized it. Whatever comes after, by however accomplished a composer, owes a huge debt to Bach’s inimitable and totally original conceptualization and realization of the instrument’s technical and expressive capabilities. Throughout these first-rate performances, Koh takes her time, to the benefit of the music–no rushing, no gratuitous theatrics–and yet is fully capable of exploding into an energetic fury of bow and fingers that leaves you impressed with both the violin and Koh’s command of its unique voice and power.

– ClassicsToday.com (10/10; David Hurwitz)

An emblematic figure of her time, Nadia Boulanger taught and inspired several generations of musicians, from Igor Stravinsky to Quincy Jones. Her musical and pedagogical philosophy, demanding yet highly stimulating, influenced the entire twentieth century. Astrig Siranossian, a rising star of the cello who now joins Alpha for several recordings, is fascinated by this musical personality whom everyone respectfully called ‘Mademoiselle.’ She met some of her most illustrious students, including the late Michel Legrand, and Daniel Barenboim who has agreed to accompany her in a piece on the album. With the pianist Nathanael Gouin, she has devised a very eclectic programme, including the three pieces for cello and piano written by Nadia Boulanger in 1915, three years before the death of her sister Lili. A wide-ranging album, featuring Igor Stravinsky’s Suite italienne, Elliott Carter’s Cello Sonata, Astor Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango, Tissue No. 7 by Philip Glass, Soul Bossa Nova by Quincy Jones, and music by Michel Legrand and others. Merci, Dear Mademoiselle!

Erich Korngold was described as ‘arguably the most remarkable prodigy in history’, whose transition into artistic maturity was almost seamless. The successes of his youth continued with works such as the Piano Quintet, Op.15, in which the brilliant interplay of the instruments, songful expressiveness and dramatic power create a masterpiece of weight and sub-stance. The Suite, Op.23 is a highly virtuosic piece in which Korngold leads us on a monumental stroll through a gallery of European musical history, from Bach via Beethoven to the early 20th century. Spectrum Concerts Berlin has also recorded Korngold’s Piano Trio, Op.1 and String Sextet, Op.10 for Naxos.

Percy Grainger was one of the great “originals” of 20th century music. Australian-born, he studied with his mother while a boy and later went to Germany where his career as a virtuoso pianist began. As a composer he was largely self-taught and strongly influenced by the folk music of Great Britain and Ireland, Many of his “miniatures”-such titles as Country Gardens, Handel in the Strand and Molly on the Shore-established his composing credentials very early on. But Grainger was also an inveterate innovator and experimenter in music, and the kaleidoscopic aspects of his compositional creativity-evident in highly imaginative works often with unprecedented rhythms, harmonies and scoring-are fully represented in the programme heard on this recording. The music was digitally recorded with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in February 1989, at the acoustically excellent South Melbourne Town Hall.

J.S. Bach’s Cello Suites are believed to have been written in the Saxon town of Cöthen between 1717 and 1723. They stand near the apex of Bach’s compositions for a single instrument and contain some of his most beautiful and vivid writing. Jeffrey McFadden’s guitar arrangements augment these elements with their own harmonic complexity, creating a new string medium for these epochal works. Volume 1, containing the first three suites, is on 8.573625. ‘McFadden’s ability to make the guitar sing is second to none’ (Daily Telegraph, UK). J.S. Bach’s six Cello Suites have been arranged for guitar in the past, with Francisco Tárrega starting this tradition in the 19th century, followed by the likes of Andrés Segovia and John W. Duarte. Each new arrangement brings contemporary thinking and fresh insights and research, and Jeffrey McFadden’s superb transcriptions have been applauded at numerous concert performances in which he was able to refine and hone his approach in advance of these recordings.

Richard Strauss was appointed co-director of the Vienna State Opera in 1919 and soon set about composing a new ballet for the refurbished historic Redoutensaal in the city. At carnival in February 1923 the work was unveiled – a delectable series of eight arrangements of music by François Couperin called Tanzsuite. For the Divertimento, an orchestral suite that includes characteristic Straussian orchestration, and which was written many years later, Strauss rearranged six movements from the earlier work and added two further dances. About Jun MärklJun Märklis a highly respected interpreter of core Germanic repertoire and has become known for his refined and idiomatic explorations of the French Impressionists. His long-standing relationships with the state operas of Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Semperoper Dresden and the Metropolitan Opera have been complemented by his music directorships of the Orchestre National de Lyon and the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra. Among the more than 50 albums Märkl has recorded are the complete Schumann symphonies with the NHK Symphony Orchestra; Mendelssohn and Wagner with the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra; and a highly acclaimed Debussy series with the Orchestre National de Lyon. He is currently working on a cycle of works by Saint-Saëns, R. Strauss and Hosokawa.

Rosario Scalero began his career as a violinist, in which guise he gave the first Italian performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. Moving to Vienna in the 1890s he studied composition with Brahms’s friend Mandyczewski, and both his surroundings and his study inspired his chamber music. The D minor Sonata Op.12 was dedicated to Mandyczewski’s wife Albine, and it made a huge impression on the violinist and influential educator David Mannes, who duly invited Scalero to head up the composition department of his conservatoire in New York. In August 1919 Scalero sailed to the New World, and in 1924 he began teaching at the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, becoming its head of theory and composition three years later. In this guise he taught the likes of Barber, Menotti and Rota, but his own music fell from view. The present issue allows us to hear for the first time the musical mind that directed the creative impulses of his students. His violin and piano output shows that his music brought together three distinct strands of inspiration. There was his background as a virtuoso violinist, which comes to the fore in the Op.2 Capricci for solo violin and the Op.15 Variations on a theme of Paganini (not the famous one immortalised by Rachmaninov), and his native feeling for a cantabile melody, so evident in the Op.4 Romance. Then there is his life-long allegiance to his Italian roots to be enjoyed in the sets of Danze Napoletane Op.27 and the Danze Piemontesi. But equally his Viennese training yielded not only long-form structures such as the Sonata but also a trio of Waltz-Caprices Op.16 and neoclassical pieces in a lighter style such as the Suite of dances ‘im alten Stil’ and Eine kleine Suite of pieces ‘after’ Scarlatti.

The horn was one of the instruments that Johannes Brahms learned in his youth, from his father who played it professionally. His fondness and familiarity with the instrument is clear from the glorious solos that he provided it with in his symphonies, and he gave it pride of place in the Horn Trio that he wrote in memory of his mother Christiane. Even so, he never composed any other chamber work involving the horn – an oversight that horn players have regretted ever since. Following up on two highly acclaimed BIS albums, Alec Frank-Gemmill decided to rectify this, and enlisted the help of pianist Daniel Grimwood and violinist Benjamin Marquise Gilmore. It goes without saying that the resulting disc includes the Horn Trio – which Frank-Gemmill has chosen to perform on the instrument played by Aubrey Brain on his legendary 1933 recording of the work. But leading up to this are two works originally written for violin and cello respectively. The sometimes controversial subject of transcriptions is discussed by Frank-Gemmill in his liner notes where he also explains his selection of works. In the Scherzo that Brahms wrote as his contribution to the F-A-E Sonata (which also included movements by Schumann and Albert Dietrich), he finds that the very fabric of the piece is made up of horn calls, while the galloping 6/8 theme reminds him of the final movement of the horn trio. Wanting to also include a sonata, Frank-Gemmill settled on the E minor Cello Sonata, Op. 38 as the one best suited for the horn, and together with arranger Daniel Grimwood the decision was made to transpose the work a third up, into G minor. Through their efforts, we are able to present a Brahms recital that hornists – and the rest of us – could only dream of.

Bernard Herrmann was famous for his film scores, but he was also a leading figure in music for radio, to which he brought his inimitable palette of mood and sonority. Whitman, whose subject is Walt Whitman’s collection of poems Leaves of Grass, was a 1944 radio drama, a genre now much neglected but revived in this newly restored version. Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra is not a suite or excerpts from the film but a concert work, re-ordered and re-composed, while Souvenirs de voyage is one of the most polished and seductive of all American chamber works.

-----

REVIEWS:

Gil-Ordóñez and the PostClassical Ensemble have plenty of experience with Herrmann and perform the music with the proper heated quality. The result is an album that will be essential for Herrmann fans but also of great interest to general listeners.

– AllMusic Guide

With a narrator as Whitman, and a chamber sized orchestra to add impact and color, these many years after the end of the WWII (around the time of its original broadcast), it still carries a profound message. Souvenirs de voyage came towards the end of Herrmann’s life, and was proof of his range of genres that today are overlooked in favor of his film scores. It is a beautiful score, blessed with attractive melodic material and couched in subtle colors. Herrmann was to re-compose music from Psycho years later to form a concert work. It was rediscovered by conductor John Mauceri in 1999.

It would be difficult to imagine finer performances from a number of performers, Whitman, being a World Premiere Recording with the conductor, Angel Gil-Ordonez and the Washington-based PostClassical Ensemble, William Sharp the ideal narrator. Top quality sound, and It comes with an excellent booklet.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)