Jules Massenet is famous for his series of 27 operas that include Manon and Werther, but he also wrote a significant portfolio of orchestral music which include ballets, orchestral suites and incidental music. The works presented here show his versatility and lyricism and include the one-act ballet Espada, saturated in Iberian color and beguiling rhythms, as well as Les Érinnyes (‘The Furies’) with a vivid sequence of contrasting themes. Modeled after Liszt, Visions is a poème-symphonique of both ethereal and dramatic power.

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REVIEW:

Between JoAnn Falletta and Jean-Luc Tingaud, Naxos seems to be cornering the market when it comes to unusual but worthy repertoire. Tingaud’s specialty, unsurprisingly, has (thus far) focused on French music, and this Massenet collection includes some pretty nifty and rare titles. Visions, for example, is a symphonic poem in Lisztian style dating from 1891, and it’s an imposing and impressive fourteen-minute hunk of good, romantic music. Brumaire is a powerful, militant overture that belies the composer’s reputation as little more than a soft orchestral voluptuary.

The Espada Suite is another in the seemingly endless series of French works with a Spanish flavor, and it’s none the worse for that. Best of all, perhaps, is the incidental music to Érinnyes (The Furies). Dating from 1876, this substantial half hour of music features an extended “Scène religieuse” and a three-movement divertissement full of memorable and vigorous ideas. The program concludes with the darkly dramatic overture Phèdre–like all of the music here very well played and conducted with real conviction. The sonics, too, do the music proud. I love this stuff, and I suspect that you will too.

– ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)

100 years ago the composer Max Bruch died. His remarkably long life of 82 years covered a period in contemporary history that was determined by scientific progress and comprehensive industrialization, developments that also found expression in art. Shortly after the turn of the century the scandals concerning the compositions by Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg were already rocking the musical world, however, Bruch met the tide of events as stoically as a rock: conservative, patriotic and above all unconditionally beholden to Romanticism in music. The present program was recorded during a Max Bruch Jubilee Concert in Halle and focused besides the famous Suite on Russian Themes also on the rarely performed Concerto for 2 pianos and orchestra.

REVIEWS:

This fine disc presents two Bruch rarities, composed towards the end of his life, both of which started out in other guises. The five-movement Suite on Russian Themes is an adaptation (with new material added) of his Songs and Dances Op. 79, originally for violin and piano. It is remarkable (even for a composer in his mid-60s) that music of such Mendelssohnian deftness and sparkle could have emerged during the first decade of the last century. But putting aside issues of chronology, those who delight in the charming rusticity of, say, the Scottish Fantasy, should find these well-crafted miniatures enchanting.

-- BBC Music Magazine

Peter Breiner is one of the world’s most performed composer/arrangers, with a boundless musicality that has led him to create fusions of music from a variety of genres. Drawing on traditions established by Brahms and Dvo?ák and showcasing leading folk music soloists, his Slovak Dances are an exuberant and kaleidoscopic monument rooted in Slovak musical folklore. It comprises 16 symphonic fantasias on songs that evoke varying emotions with an autobiographical element that follows Breiner’s life from his origins in Humenné and Košice to New York. Peter Brenier boasts over 200 albums released and multiple streams and downloads. Known as a conductor, composer, pianist and arranger, he has conducted, often doubling as a pianist, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bournemouth, Jerusalem, New Zealand, Moscow and Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestras, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the Slovak Philharmonic and the Orchestre National de France, to mention just a few. His compositions and arrangements have been played in concerts and broadcast worldwide, and some of the most prestigious ballet companies have used his music in numerous performances.

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REVIEW:

The basis of Breiner’s suite is native folksong and one might easily suppose, therefore, that its themes might be catchy and easily remembered. Slovak listeners, certainly, will be humming happily along as they recognise such traditional ditties as My father is but one big headache, My mother told me not to sit in the dark, I must have been crazy and Oh, mother dear, it itches (Slovakian peasant life was clearly no bed of roses).

Anyone born west of Bratislava or east of Humenné is, however, unlikely to be familiar with the original melodies and, bereft of that anchor, may well find that the dances come and go without making that much of a memorable impression. Moreover, I’d imagine that the composer’s distinctly contemporary musical palette risks disconcerting or even alienating a few tradionally-minded listeners who prefer their music delivered in an orchestration more characteristic of the late 19th century.

In spite of any such potential issues, the suite certainly offers plenty of pleasurable moments. Many of them occur, as already suggested, during the dances featuring the “domestic ethno-traditional” solo instrumentalists whose contributions deliver frequent titillation to ears unfamiliar with the sound of fujaras or jew’s harps. Thus, no. 3, the jaunty You enchanting girl, you…, is marked by effective and attractive contributions from the violinist, the accordionist and Ms Friedl’s whistles, as too is no. 9 My little whistle – ititi, ititi. Meanwhile, no. 11 I must have been crazy exhibits an engaging and sinuously oriental atmosphere that perhaps reflects the influence of intermittent Mongol and Ottoman invasions of Slovakia over the centuries. The final dance You little gate with bars is the shortest of the whole set but brings the suite to a close with an appropriate burst of vitality.

– MusicWeb International

Zoltán Kodály’s later years were dominated by a series of choral works but his early reputation centered upon chamber music, notably two string quartets, a Cello Sonata (8.553160) and the two masterpieces heard on this recording. The Duo for Violin and Cello, Op. 7 combines Classical form with folk influence, while the Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8, with its expanded harmonies and tone colours, is one of the greatest solo cello works since Bach’s Cello Suites. György Ligeti continued the Hungarian lineage with his Sonata for Solo Cello, a succinct but pivotal work in his compositional development. Gabriel Schwabe has established himself among the leading cellists of his generation. He is a laureate of numerous national and international competitions, including the Grand Prix Emanuel Feuermann and the Concours Rostropovich in Paris. In 2009, he won the prestigious Pierre Fournier Award in London. He is a regular guest at festivals such as the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival, the Kronberg Academy Festival and the Amsterdam Biennale, and has performed with artists including Isabelle Faust, Christian Tetzlaff, Lars Vogt, Kirill Gerstein and Jonathan Gilad.

REVIEWS:

Schwabe’s magnificent interpretation of Kodaly’s Solo Sonata op. 8, another of the masterpieces of the cello repertoire, is declamatorily expressive and no less excellent for its polished sound. A perfect intonation and a lot of refinement as well as wonderful dynamic and colour nuances make up the richness of Schwabe’s playing.

With this CD, Schwabe has definitely given further proof of his mastery. Highly recommended!

-- Pizzicato

The tonal palette here is expanded by the inclusion of Kodály’s Duo for Violin and Cello, in which Schwabe’s musicianship is matched by that of Hellen Weiss…This is also important music and—in the hands of such players—essential listening.

-- BBC Music Magazine

Navona Records presents PAINTED MUSIC from Quatra Duo. This album of works for flute and guitar by four heralded contemporary composers unlocks the imaginative, expressive power of these beloved instruments. The first piece, commissioned as a Christmas gift by Quatra Duo’s Jeff LaQuatra for his then soon-to-be wife and duo partner Michelle Stanley, is James McGuire’s Suite for Flute and Guitar. The six-movement piece reveals the composer's affinity for jazz, popular music, and even impressionism; all the while it demonstrates the performers’ virtuosic range on their instruments. Painted Music from composer Bryan Johanson is a sonata, once again broken into six movements. Each of these is inspired by a different painting from early 20th-century, Swiss born artist Paul Klee. Fish Tale is a surreal and eclectic piece that imagines the journey of a fish from the ocean, to the fish bowl, and far beyond; the music recounts these piscine adventures through a dazzling array of musical styles and colors, from African thumb piano, samba, folk music, and more. From the Dreaming is the work of Australian visual artist, classical guitarist, and composer, Phillip Houghton. The music, inspired by Houghton’s visit to the Australian outback, reflects the grandeur and raw power of the country’s climate and ecosystems. Searing heat, ancient riverbeds, scurrying geckos and violent storms are all reflected in the dynamic twists and turns of the flute and guitar. PAINTED MUSIC, as its name suggests, utilizes these two instruments to imprint a gallery of images onto the canvas of the mind. Far from being limited by the duo format, here Quatra Duo seems to relish the challenge. The listener is left with a new sense of what can be accomplished with merely two instruments—in the hands of the right musicians, that is.

In rendering homage to the master of Padua on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of his death, the choice proved to be delicate given the abundance of music of constant and acceptable quality. David Plantier and Annabelle Luis have selected the 5 unpublished sonatas in this programme from Manuscript 9796, preserved in the Bibliotheque nationale de France, and taken from the Italian city in 1796 by Napoleon’s army as a prize of war. Four of these date from the latter years of Tartini. They all have in common an extreme virtuosity necessary for performance, yet also the necessity of a perfect mastery of the instrument for producing a natural, musical version, the reflection of the composer’s typical cantabile. David Plantier is without question the baroque violinist most suited for this mission, having been a passionate defender of Tartini and his music for years. Giuseppe Tartini often performed in duets with his cellist friend the abbé Vandini. The destiny of these two formidable musicians was indivisible, and it is this historic duet that the Duo Tartini aims to bring back to life; the violin and the cello give this richly diverse music a setting of velvet tones, they revitalize the beauty and modernity within so as to touch the hearts of contemporary listeners.

A double concerto is quite unusual. It is a concerto featuring two performers, as opposed to the usual single performer in the solo role, and the Orchestra. Hence, this represents one of the most interesting traits of this release. The album opens with a Concerto by Marco Nodari, Brescia composer, who in this work proposes to innovate the consolidated forms, reshaping them with musical situations coming from music history and with contaminations from other kind of music, thus creating an inclusive and unique style. The “Double concerto” for cello, guitar and Orchestra by Marco Nodari has a particular subtitle: “romantic” intended as “possible balance” between tradition and modernity. The work continues with Piazzolla, who has been defined as El asesino del Tango by the conservators of the Argentine dance who wanted to denigrate him through that title. However, he is one of the most remarkable compositors in the international panorama. Piazzolla created the innovative nuevo tango, characterized by various rhythmic and sound interweaving, resulting from Piazzolla creativity and previous other experiences. All of this stands for this beautiful album’s theme. “Secretos de Buenos Aires” by Miguel Bareilles is a suite for cello and guitar composed in 2014 and arranged by Bareilles himself for duo and symphonic Orchestra in 2017. The Argentine composer loves merging different genres such as chamber music and classical orchestral music with elements from Jazz, Tango and South American rhythms.

A 2021 GRAMMY Nominee for Best Classical Vocal Solo Album!

Star mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton presents a recital of songs by American composer Jake Heggie, with the composer at the piano. UNEXPECTED SHADOWS is a celebration in words and music of powerful, exceptional women. The program contains four song cycles, a single song, and an opera aria. The Work at Hand, set to poetry of the late Laura Morefield, contemplates on the brave fight against cancer that she, and millions with her, went through. Matt Haimovitz’ cello playing adds an extra layer to this profoundly moving song cycle. Iconic Legacies, on texts by Gene Scheer, offers four portraits of remarkable First Ladies. Scheer also wrote texts for Statuesque, inspired by five iconic sculptures of women and the deeply human stories within them. Of Gods & Cats, based on poetry by Gavin Dillard, offers playful parodies on religious allegories. Music, on a text by Sister Helen Prejean, addresses the transformative, healing, and humanizing power of music, while the so-called Ice Cube Aria from Heggie’s opera If I Were You, on a libretto by Gene Scheer, shows the female demon Brittomara reflecting on the delicious predictability of human nature. Multi-award-winning mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton makes her PENTATONE debut. Jake Heggie has a vast discography with the label, including the opera It’s a Wonderful Life (2017) and song recital albums by Melody Moore, Lisa Delan and Joyce DiDonato. The same applies to Matt Haimovitz, who has released several albums on PENTATONE, from contemporary classical and jazz and rock covers to Bach’s complete cello suites.

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REVIEWS:

Everyone is in peak form on this recording. Barton purrs, croons, divas, and screams her way through four complete song collections along with the song “Music” from The Breaking Waves collection to texts by Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking), and the short “Ice Cube Aria” from Heggie and Gene Scheer’s recent opera, If I Were You. Her huge range and power allies with a larger-than-life personality. Heggie, who was clearly encouraging Barton to perform at her best, holds his own with stellar pianism whose ferocious vitality must have kept Skywalker Studio’s piano tuner very busy. Unexpected Shadows makes the best possible case for the necessity and relevance of modern American classical song.

– San Francisco Classical Voice (sfcv.org)

Barton’s solo album is devoted to Heggie’s art songs and it’s a tribute to his output that he sustains the interest for over an hour with a variety that stands comparison with, say, Poulenc in the 20th century, lavishing sumptuous tone on the cycle written for Barton, The Work at Hand.

– Sunday Times (UK)

Brilliant Classics proudly present 5 new albums in this series: QUINTESSENCE, attractively priced compact box sets containing essential core classical repertoire in outstanding performances. Aimed at attracting both the discerning classical connoisseur and the classical newcomer it presents the pillars of classical music: Brahm’s Complete Symphonies & Concertos, Beethoven’s Complete Piano Trios, Mozart’s Music for Violin, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Orchestral Suites & Violin Concertos and Schubert’s Piano Trios, String Quintets and String Quartets. World class performers include Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra with Jaap van Zweden, Hungarian Chamber Orchestra with Kristóf Baráti and conductor Heinz Bongartz as well as the Berliner Sinfonie-Ochester with Günter Herbig.

Two previous albums of pan-flute arrangements on Brilliant Classics have served to showcase the technical brilliance and musical sensitivity of the Swiss pan-pipe virtuoso Hanspeter Oggier, and accordingly been met with critical acclaim. In partnership with the Swiss organist Sarah Brunner he now presents an original combination of folk tunes from the home of the pan-pipe with slow arias and quick dances by masters of the Baroque. Panpipes are difficult to tame, but have an incredibly rich palette of timbres. Hanspeter Oggier plays on a pair of soprano and tenor panpipes built by his father Christoph. Having been fascinated by traditional Romanian music since childhood, Oggier grew up with the records of the Romanian panflutist Gheorghe Zamfir, and he studied with the Romanian panflutist Simion Stanciu, alias Syrinx, for ten years in Geneva. Thus he is familiar with the uniquely irregular rhythms of Romanian folk music. The album opens with Cântec vechi bucovinean, a melancholy-laden song from Bukovina. The round-dance Hora Niculinei makes a lively contrast before the Doina din Transilvania, a rhapsodic love song. Such contrasting expressions also infuse the juxtapositions of Handel’s sublime lament Lascia Ch’io Pianga from Semele with one of Vivaldi’s most typically brilliant concertos originally written for flautino and with a merry dance by Purcell. Not all the Romanian pieces have folk origins, however: Lume, lume (in English: Earth, Earth) was written by the Romanian singer Maria Tanase, known as the ‘Piaf of the East’ who died in 1963. The song is full of sorrow for the passing of life and its drifting qualities are ideally suited to the mysterious, airy sounds of the pan-pipes.

In 2016 Alessandra Ammara won high praise for an album of Mendelssohn duets with her husband Roberto Prosseda. The following year her Piano Classics debut of Debussy inspired no less glowing reviews. The sequel elegantly completes her recordings of the Préludes and Images with their second volumes, coupled with the more innocent pleasures of the Suite Bergamasque. Thus the album spans Debussy’s first and penultimate published piano cycles, for while the Suite appeared in print only in 1905, it was composed back in 1890. In their titles, three of the four movements – a Prelude, Minuet and Passepied – invoke the formal elegance of a Baroque dance suite, but the elusive character and freedom of the music owes more to the poetry of Verlaine, who used the archaic ‘bergamasque’ term in his poem Clair de lune, which as the suite’s third movement became Debussy’s single greatest hit. In both the Images and Préludes, Debussy invested their second volumes with darker, gloomier tone-colors and higher contrasts with wild outbursts and even manic humor. The portraits of individual characters and landscapes are more sharply drawn, more charged with private intensity. They make accordingly greater demands upon the interpreter, nowhere more so than in the dark, wild magic of the ‘Feux d’artifice’ – Fireworks – which close out the Préludes. The three Images in Book 2 are linked by their association with the Debussy’s friend Louis Laloy, and by extension with their mutual fascination with China and the alien world of East-Asian culture. The bells in ‘Cloches à travers les feuilles’ ring from the church in Laloy’s home-town; the title of ‘Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut’ was proposed by Laloy himself, and the goldfish – ‘Poissons d’or’ of the triptych’s final panel – swim and shimmer through much Chinese lacquer artwork.

Brilliant Classics proudly present 5 new albums in this series: QUINTESSENCE, attractively priced compact box sets containing essential core classical repertoire in outstanding performances. Aimed at attracting both the discerning classical connoisseur and the classical newcomer it presents the pillars of classical music: Brahm’s Complete Symphonies & Concertos, Beethoven’s Complete Piano Trios, Mozart’s Music for Violin, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Orchestral Suites & Violin Concertos and Schubert’s Piano Trios, String Quintets and String Quartets. World class performers include Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra with Jaap van Zweden, Hungarian Chamber Orchestra with Kristóf Baráti and conductor Heinz Bongartz as well as the Berliner Sinfonie-Ochester with Günter Herbig.

Brilliant Classics proudly present 5 new albums in this series: QUINTESSENCE, attractively priced compact box sets containing essential core classical repertoire in outstanding performances. Aimed at attracting both the discerning classical connoisseur and the classical newcomer it presents the pillars of classical music: Brahm’s Complete Symphonies & Concertos, Beethoven’s Complete Piano Trios, Mozart’s Music for Violin, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Orchestral Suites & Violin Concertos and Schubert’s Piano Trios, String Quintets and String Quartets. World class performers include Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra with Jaap van Zweden, Hungarian Chamber Orchestra with Kristóf Baráti and conductor Heinz Bongartz as well as the Berliner Sinfonie-Ochester with Günter Herbig.

The music of Michal Spisak was much more recognizable and available to a wide audience during the composer’s lifetime than nowadays. This album contains three compositions of this artist: the Piano Suite (a piece with a transparent texture in which Spisak clearly refers to the Baroque tradition), Sonata for violin and piano (for a change, very rich, diverse texture, full of violin dyad passages, varied in terms of harmony and sound color) and Concerto for two pianos (very spectacular work, extremely diverse, as far as the sound is concerned; highly demanding for the pianists). The aforementioned pieces are a cross-section of the compositional techniques typical of Michal Spisak’s musical language; they also introduce a whole range of neoclassical features confirming the composer’s stylistic affiliation. The music of Michal Spisak broadens the horizons of the musical imagination of both the performer and the recipient-listener, and this album attempts to show its phenomenon, consisting in expressing naturalness and straightforwardness using an extremely wide range of various compositional techniques.

The piano duet was an opportunity to have fun and make music with friends for Mendelssohn as it was for many other 19th-century composers, who wrote pieces that far transcended their domestic origins and often arranged their larger-scale works for the medium so that it could be appreciated by listeners where full orchestral performances were much harder to come by. In 1844 Mendelssohn made his own piano-duet arrangement of the Incidental music he had composed to accompany a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Potsdam two years earlier, a suite which itself drew on the precociously immortal Overture he had composed as a 16-year-old. The magical purity of the orchestral score is here translated into a limpid graininess which renders each phrase even more crystalline than in the symphonic version, especially in its most rapid passages. The relationship between the two versions might be likened to that between a sketch and a painting, though with no certainty as to which had been composed first. A comparison of the full-colour orchestral score with the ‘black and white’ of the piano-duet arrangement reveals how the timbres of Mendelssohn’s orchestral imagination stem from the conceptual outlines and regular forms first devised on a keyboard. Thus the arrangement has plenty to reveal about the score to even to listeners intimately familiar with the fully scored original. Having given the triumphant premiere of the overture to The Fair Melusine in Leipzig in 1836, Mendelssohn then arranged it for piano duet the same year. Again, every phrase of the symphonic original resounds with greater emphasis: the yielding swell of the waves is evoked by a delicacy of touch rendered almost liquid by brushing of the damper pedal.