Distinguished international pianist Jorge Federico Osorio brings his flair for French music to works of the Baroque, Romantic, and early 20th century eras by Jean-Philippe Rameau, Emmanuel Chabrier, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel. Fittingly, Osorio opens The French Album with Fauré’s exquisite Pavane and concludes with the ever-popular Pavane pour une enfante défunte by Fauré’s student, Ravel. The Mexican-born, European-trained pianist offers eight of Debussy’s pictorial Préludes, each with its unique sound world, including the mystical La Cathédrale engloutie, one of the most stunning pieces ever composed for piano. Another audience favorite is Debussy’s evocative Claire de lune from his Suite bergamasque. Providing contrast, Rameau’s whimsical Les Tricotets conjures the back-and-forth motion of knitting needles. A set of Spanish-flavored works include Chabrier’s Cuban-inspired Habanera; Debussy’s lively La Puerta del Vino, depicting sailors carousing and enjoying their wine, and La soirée dans Grenade, where the piano imitates the sound of a guitar; and Ravel’s Alborado del gracioso, brimming with Iberian rhythms.

REVIEW:

What appears to be a hodgepodge of French pieces actually emerges as a carefully crafted program. Pianist Jorge Federico Osorio begins with Fauré’s famous Pavane, where his elegant phrasing and fluid “walking” tempo assiduously segue into a well-contrasted Debussy group. He brings a strong rhythmic profile and dry-point clarity to works dominated by rapid passagework such as Les collines d’Anacapri, Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest, and Feux d’artifice, as well as Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso.

While Osorio certainly embraces the sensual undercurrents in Clair de lune, Voiles, Feuilles mortes, and La cathédrale engloutie, the climaxes have plenty of backbone. The pianist similarly integrates curvaceous lilt and unsentimental grit in Chabrier’s Habanera and Debussy’s habanera-like La Puerta del Vino and La soirée dans Grenade. Three selections from Rameau’s G major Suite stand out for Osorio’s care over ornaments, although his slightly heavy way with the final selection, Ravel’s Pavane, misses the animation and flexibility of the old Gieseking and Casadesus recordings. All told, an enjoyable and well-put-together recital.

– ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

Silvius Leopold Weiss was acknowledged as the greatest lutenist of his age, composing over 600 pieces for the instrument organized into suites or sonatas. In these arrangements for guitar, Danijel Cerovi? has selected the only two of Weiss’s sonatas to have been given poetic titles, Sonata No. 29 ‘L’Infidèle’ (‘The Infidel’), with its bell-like sonorities and triumphant conclusion, and Sonata No. 28 ‘Le Fameux Corsaire’ (‘The Famous Pirate’), thought to refer to the buccaneering pirate Blackbeard. Cerovi? also includes two of the great Tombeaux, elegies of profound and poignant depth. Danijel Cerovi? is an internationally acclaimed recording artist, touring musician and pedagogue from Montenegro. He is frequently invited to play at international festivals and concert halls, as a soloist or chamber musician, and performs with orchestras all over the world. He has also given masterclasses at international conservatoires, festivals and competitions.

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REVIEW:

A delight; early lute music meticulously and lovingly arranged for guitar seemingly without any loss in the innate musicianship of the original. Mood changes impress by their subtlety and inner charm rather than any attempt to impress.

– Lark Reviews

Yellowbird features the sensational tuba virtuoso Aaron Tindall in an album that defies categorization. Tindall's latest recording includes jazz pianist (Grammy-nominated Shelly Berg) on the ballad, "The Peacocks"; Claude Bolling's "Suite for Cello & Jazz Trio" in Tindall's breathtaking transcription for tuba; and a swinging rock band accompaniment to Fred Tackett's "Yellowbird". Prepare to be entertained and astonished! With his solo playing described as being "remarkable for both it's solid power and it's delicacy" and his orchestral playing praised as "a rock-solid foundation," Aaron Tindall is the associate professor of tuba and euphonium at the Frost School of Music located at the University of Miami, and the principal tubist of the Sarasota Orchestra. In the summers he teaches at the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, NC, where he also serves as Principal Tuba with the EMF Festival Orchestra under the direction of Gerard Schwarz.

The six Cello Suites represent J.S. Bach’s genius at its most distilled, with the composer confronting the enigma of writing counterpoint for a monophonic instrument at its core. Jeffrey McFadden’s arrangement for guitar enhances the music, adding a harmonic dimension and making the implied interaction of voices explicit. The Suites contain some of the most fascinating and beautiful movements in all of Bach's oeuvre, and remain one of the most important works in the history of Western music. ‘Jeffrey McFadden not only is an extraordinary guitarist – he’s also an inspired musician’ (ClassicsToday.com on Naxos 8.554354, works by Napoléon Coste).

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REVIEW:

McFadden avoids the result coming too close to a version for harpsichord, though the guitar can never equate to the range of tonal colours available from a solo cello, nor, for that matter the dynamic range of the instrument. Though we do hear fingers moving around the fret, let me conclude this short review by admiring the clean-cut playing of this world famous Canadian guitarist. We can now look forward to the second disc.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

On the occasion of its 25th Birthday Anniversary, the Piano Duo Genova & Dimitrov realizes this year a fervent wish with a genuine mammoth project taking the pianists to their emotional limits in a form that has never been witnessed in the music world before: the two exceptional artists have recorded on cpo Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Complete Works for Piano Duo as a double album. The manifold colors in these pieces full of musical ideas are just spectacular… truly a captivating affair of the heart and an hommage to their idol Rachmaninoff. But nobody can describe this music better than the pianists themselves: "Rachmaninoff's Second Suite, Schubert's Fantasy, Mozart's Sonata!, this was the authoritative answer that we, being Postgraduate students at the Hanover University of Music, received at the end of 1995 from our teacher, the piano legend Vladimir Krainev, to our question which works we could prepare for our first piano duo competition. At that time, we would have never imagined that almost 25 years later from these few words the idea for this grand project would develop – a project we are now so particularly proud of." And justifiably so. Their impressive interpretations of the whole wide range of diverse compositions display Rachmaninoff’s multifacetedness in all its emotionally incredible, supercharged glory.

REVIEW:

This is a useful release from a discographical standpoint in that it accounts for every Rachmaninov two-piano and one-piano-four-hands composition or arrangement. The Genova & Dimitrov Piano Duo plays the Suite No. 1’s opening Barcarolle with less rubato leeway compared to Trifonov/Babayan and Ashkenazy/Previn. Although comparable strictness prevents the second movement from spilling all over the place, the players still allow the busy decorative background writing plenty of breathing space. The final two movements are excellently balanced, and it’s nice to hear the finale’s persistent “bell” ostinato roll out in long lined fashion, rather than hammered away.

The duo’s superb ensemble and careful balances make Rachmaninov’s early tone poem The Rock sound especially plausible and idiomatic in the composer’s “de-orchestrated” four-hand arrangement, although his Capriccio on Gypsy Themes loses some spice in translation, so to speak; it would have helped had Rachmaninov retained some of his original percussion parts! However, the ubiquitous C-sharp minor Prelude frankly gains little via its two-piano expansion.

I prefer the Genova/Dimitrov duo’s broader and lyrically inflected rendition of the not-so-interesting Russian Rhapsody to the heavier, emphatic Previn/Ashkenazy, while their expressive restraint in the Six Morceaux for Piano Duet contrasts to the Owen/Apekisheva duo’s slightly fussier approach. The Symphonic Dances stand out for Genova/Dimitrov’s wonderfully lithe and impetuously phrased finale.

Unfortunately the popular Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos proves this collection’s one real weak link. The Introduction transpires heavy-handedly, while the Waltz falls into predictable square-cut patterns and Tarantella lacks sufficient dynamic contrast. You’ll find far more flexibility and character in any of Martha Argerich’s Second Suite recordings (my favorites are the studio version with Nelson Freire and the live Gabriela Montero collaboration). Eckhardt van den Hoogen provides informative yet eccentric and stylistically convoluted booklet notes. Recommended on the whole, but make sure you’ve got an Argerich Second Suite handy.

– ClassicsToday (Je Distler)

Around 1800 Vienna was, alongside Paris, one of the European centers for guitar performance. The instrument was well suited for the idiom of Viennese classicism and ideal for domestic music-making and it was promoted by figures such as the virtuoso Mauro Giuliani and the composer/publisher Anton Diabelli. But Beethoven, the towering giant of musical Vienna, seems to have been unmoved by the charms of the guitar – while instead composing for its sibling, the mandolin. Duo Halász, the husband and wife team of Franz and Débora Halász have now rectified this, by appropriating Beethoven’s four extant pieces for mandolin and piano (WoO?43 and 44) as well as adapting some other early compositions, including the Serenade in D major for flute and piano and the Variations on Mozart’s ‘Se vuol ballare’ for violin and piano. In doing so they follow the example of an eminent guitarist and contemporary of Beethoven, namely Ferdinando Carulli, whose 1825 arrangement of the Variations on Mozart’s ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ closes the programme. Franz and Débora Halász have made a number of recordings for BIS, together and separately, to critical acclaim, including a Latin Grammy Award for their disc Alma Brasileira with chamber works by Radamés Gnattali.

This first extended survey of the piano music of Ernst Krenek (1900–92) continues with a range of works showing his craftsmanship and imagination – and humor. The early Toccata and Chaconne, Op. 13, has its origins in a joke intended to pull the legs of musicologists and music critics, but it develops into a massive contrapuntal essay of astonishing ambit. Krenek’s treatment of Baroque and contemporary dances in the three early suites reveal a fondness for learned whimsy – and that wry dispassion informs even the elegiac and brittle Fifth Sonata, written a quarter-century later in American exile. The closing Sechs Vermessene are kaleidoscopic miniatures with an improvised quality, as if advanced musical modernism were meeting the freest of free jazz.

Francesco Galligioni obtained a Diploma in cello at the C. Pollini Conservatoire in Padua under G. Chiampan, then he then studied with Franco Maggio Ormezowski at both the Accademia Nazionale di S. Cecilia in Rome and at the A. Toscanini Foundation in Parma in the courses for soloists and orchestra leaders. He has taken part in courses specializing in baroque cello held by W. Vestidello and G. Nasillo, and worked with famous soloists and conductors (Anner Bylsma, Giuliano Carmignola, Cecilia Bartoli, Max Emmanuel Cencic, Magdalena Kozena, Sergio Azzolini, Sara Mingardo, Victoria Mullova, Angelika Kirschlagher, Andrea Marcon, Federico Guglielmo, Sir J. E. Gardiner, Diego Fasolis, Pedro Halffter, Bob Van Asperen, Michael Radulescu, Gustav Leonhardt, Christopher Hogwood), both in concert performances and recordings. On his latest release he plays the Suites No. 4 and 5 by Johann Sebastian Bach.

While he was still a student, Rudens Turku established the Starnberg Music Days. Over the past twenty years this renowned festival south of Munich featuring an attractive combination of master classes and top-quality concerts has become a highlight of the musical spring season. To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, Turku has brought together an illustrious company of teachers and soloists for an ambitious project: chamber music on the large scale and with musicians numbering among the best in their fields. The Nonet by Louis Spohr is only rather rarely heard in the concert hall; here nine outstanding chamber musicians perform in extraordinary circumstances. In addition, the violin part is of daredevil virtuosity – which is no problem for Rudens Turku. Ulf-Guido Schäfer arranged Antonín Dvorák’s uncommonly popular American Suiteespecially for thisoccasion, and it is astonishing how a mere eight musicians can and do make Dvorák’s orchestral colors shine. Wolf Kerschek’s “Festival Rhapsody” composed for a festive occasion seems to have been made to order for Turku on the violin. This native of Albania shares his solo part with the star trumpeter Matthias Höfs in this genuinely festive arrangement with influences from Star Wars to Stravinsky. The sound experience offered by this nobly produced Super Audio album is also of festive opulence. A magnificent virtual space unfolds in a genuine three dimensions, even in the smallest living room. Filled with splendid music, spatial bounds seem to vanish. An audiophile musical listening experience of special excellence!

Also available on Blu-ray

In 2018, Yo-Yo Ma began a two-year journey, setting out to perform Johann Sebastian Bach’s six suites for solo cello in one sitting, across 36 locations on 6 continents. For Yo-Yo, Bach’s 300-hundred-year-old music is one extraordinary example of how culture connects us and can help us to imagine and build a better future. In an unforgettable experience the 19 times Grammy ® Award winner and internationally acclaimed cellist performed the Cello Suites at the overwhelming Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens. Yo-Yo Ma says: “These suites are so meaningful. They’re not only companions and friends, but they’ve also been reference points in my life.” “Soft sounds around me suggested that others were caught up in similarly strong emotions. How Ma has this effect on people is a mystery: I suspect it has to do with the warmth he brings to music that is fundamentally beyond comprehension. He makes the godlike human.” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker)


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REVIEWS:

He doesn’t ‘ham-up’ his Bach, but there is more spontaneity here than I’ve heard from Ma before in his studio recordings, and playfulness and profundity alike are communicated with more directness and a feel of risk which is quite bracing. Every recording is a captured moment in time, and this is a unique document of a consummate artist performing the greatest of music composed for his instrument. If you are a fan of Yo-Yo Ma and/or of Bach’s Six Suites then you will want this.

– MusicWeb International

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma brings a lifetime of experience and sensitivity to the works, maintaining their intimacy even within this vast arena, and not a note is out of place. If you don’t know the suites well just listen to the third which is so full of life and joy. A recording to treasure.

– Lark Reviews (Dr. Brian Hick

This release features a collection of works for flute and piano written by a group of contrasting French composers during the exciting Belle Époque period, which occurred between the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. ‘Chant dans la nuit’ is the outcome of a ten-year project which has involved flautist Filippo Mazzoli and pianist Nathalie Dang in intense, pioneering research conducted within the music section of the Paris Bibliothéque Nationale. Quite a number of these works are recorded here for the first time, including Fontbonne’s Chasse aux papillons Op. 30, Louis Masson’s Trois pièces, Xavier Leroux’s Le Nil, Moret’s Nuit de langueur, nuit de mensonge, Coedès-Mongin’s Suite Op. 5, Lefort’s Sur l’Eau, and Guilmant’s Romance sans paroles Op. 85. To quote Filippo Mazzoli, these are ‘evocative titles, like the music they feature. They are positive sensations that precisely reflect the years in which they were composed [and they express] the desire for wellbeing, and the desire to always be proactive and positive.’ Several musical associations flourished in the French capital between 1871 and 1939. They enthusiastically supported the dissemination of new works and promoted the presentation of original, unpublished ones, encouraged by musicians such as Saint-Saëns, Bussine, Duparc and Castillon. The works on this programme are dedicated to the great French flautists who were active in these music societies, not least in the Société de Musique de Chambre pour Instruments à Vent and the Société moderne pour Instruments à Vent. The entire programme is in the Belle Époque style and comprises a variety of the period's main genres: the morceau de salon, the fantasia on operatic themes, the song without words, and the melodies or album pages.

Kemel Belevi’s music is steeped in the colors and atmosphere of the eastern Mediterranean, and his aim is ‘to create beautiful music’ based on melodies and rhythms that have been absorbed from the folk music of Greece, Turkey and the Middle East. Belevi’s own arrangements of works such as the evocative Suite Chypre and the richly varied Cyprian Rhapsodies have significantly extended the repertoire for two guitars. The Duo Tandem are drawn towards this composer’s skillful modernity and his celebration of traditional heritage reimagined within the sound world of the classical guitar.

“For many years Denis Severin has been mulling over the idea of recording a Romantic programme for cello and string orchestra. After all, a large number of concertos for cello and strings were written in the Baroque era. Many such compositions were written in the Classical era as well. The age of Romanticism gave birth to a lot of charming examples of concertos for cello and large symphony orchestra, including the works of Dvorak, Saint-Saëns, Lalo, Elgar and others. For reasons that we can no longer ascertain, the composers of the Romantic era, with a few rare exceptions, wrote little or no material for cello and string orchestra. This genre, which flourished so abundantly in the 17th and 18th centuries, all but disappeared just a hundred years later. The choice of works for this album is quite deliberate. It occurred to the performers that the compositional style of Robert Schumann, the Romantic composer par excellence, tends in his chamber music towards almost orchestral fullness and complexity of timbre, be it in his piano trios, duo sonatas or Lieder. The Five Pieces in Folk Style op. 102 by Robert Schumann, his sole original work for cello and piano, is, in his view, well suited to be performed with a chamber orchestra and I commissioned an arrangement. This first successful venture inspired Denis Severin to do further research, which confirmed my intentions.” (Dorian Keilhack)

Generally acknowledged as one of the great masters of the late-Romantic symphony orchestra, Richard Strauss understood like few others how to use the rich palette of instrumental colours to portray larger-than-life passions and emotions. He did so in a series of pioneering symphonic poems – often choosing as his subject extraordinary characters such as Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel and Don Quixote. But before either of these, in his very first tone poem, he composed a portrayal of Macbeth, his ferociously ambitious wife and their downfall. It is with this rarely played work that Lan Shui and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra open their all-Strauss disc. Also included is another early tone poem, Tod und Verklärung, which Strauss started composing very shortly after Macbeth, and which was actually premièred before that work. In his new work, Strauss didn’t make use of an existing character or story – instead he set out to depict the emotions of a man struggling against and finally giving in to death. These two works, which both end in death, frame a suite from one of the composer’s most lighthearted ventures – the opera Der Rosenkavalier, set in mid-eighteenth century courtly Vienna. Premièred in 1911, this sophisticated aristocratic comedy, proved a perennial favourite and towards the end of his life, Strauss gave his blessing to the Suite recorded here, which manages to include a fair selection of the opera’s best-loved moments.

Two-time Grammy Award-nominated harpsichordist Jory Vinikour plays historically groundbreaking works by François Couperin (1668–1733) on an album comprising three inventive Couperin suites — the composer called them “Ordres” — combining traditional French Baroque dance movements with witty and atmospheric character pieces — miniature tone poems for solo harpsichord. Couperin’s suites “are elegantly composed, concealing a complex, allusive and varied emotional world behind their highly wrought surface” (Norton Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music). Chicago-born, French-trained harpsichordist Vinikour is especially enamored of Couperin’s Ordres Nos. 6, 7, and 8, calling them “remarkable” for their harmonically driven melodic invention and atmospheric unity within each suite. Highlights include the celebrated Les Baricades Mistérieuses from Ordre No. 6, which England’s The Guardian calls “shimmering, kaleidoscopic and seductive, a sonic trompe l’oeil.” The compelling Les Amusemens from Ordre No. 7 is irresistibly sweet and melancholic. Order No. 8 offers masterful examples of established forms, culminating with a dramatic Passacaille.

REVIEWS:

L’Unique presents all the wit and melancholy of Vinikour’s distinctive interpretations of the sixth, seventh, and eighth suites.

– BBC Radio 3 Record Review Extra

Playfully and decorously brought music to life by American harpsichordist Jory Vinikour. The recording places the instrument in a really lifelike perspective.

– BBC Record Review