Janácek was one of the most distinguished composers of the 20th century, with his operas enjoying particular renown all over the world. Yet he has bequeathed us precious few pieces for independent symphony orchestra. Hence, a number of conductors have striven to expand this limited repertoire by creating suites from his operas. This album features such treatments of his three major musical dramas. Jenufa was the first opera to be set to a prose text. The globally celebrated piece reflected the sorrow Janácek felt after the death of his two beloved children and gave rise to a deep person crisis. Similarly to Jenufa, it too met with rejection and would only be premiered thirty years after the composer's death. Katya Kabanova is one of the greatest Janácek works and one of the most beautiful lyric operas of the twentieth century and beyond.

Bergen Barokk's second release on the LAWO Classics label Suite Life, takes us to the French court during the reign of the Sun King. Elegant conversation, music, painting, fencing and dance - the arts performed with a certain nonchalance - were the true test of aristocrats. The leading musicians during the Sun King's reign composed obligingly within the confines of strict protocols of style, though they were allowed to give their own personal touch. The suites on this recording are largely taken from the many great musical publications from the Paris of the early 1700's. The publications, which were released "avec Privilege du Roy" reflect the grand balls, concerts, opera and ballet performances at the court and were well-received by a bourgeoisie filled with reverence for the luxurious and illustrious court life.

This outstanding new live recording brings together groundbreaking works by Arnold Schoenberg and Dmitri Shostakovich, two of the twentieth century’s most monumental composers. Arnold Schoenberg’s Kol Nidre is set to the Jewish prayer which is said on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The work premiered in Los Angeles in 1938, four years after Schoenberg fled Europe, and one month before the anti-Jewish Kristallnacht took place across Nazi-occupied Germany. Philip Huscher described the work as a “stark, strong modernist statement.” Shostakovich’s Suite on Versees of Michelangelo Buona explores themes just as weighty, including love, morality, death, and the resilience of the human spirit, all shown through the poetry of Renaissance great, Michelangelo. The work was originally conceived to honor Michelangelo’s 500th birthday. The Chicago Tribune commented on these performances, “Such was his textual penetration that [Abdrazakov] was able to extract the full emotional weight of the words and music, abetted by Muti’s finely detailed exposition of the spare orchestral fabric.”

Bruce Levington has a long association with composer Philip Glass. In 2004, the composer wrote his musical tribute to Chuck Close expressly for Levingston who later premiered the piece at Lincoln Center in New York City.” The next year, Levingston and Glass joined again in the same venue for a concert of piano duets which also featured Levingston’s longtime friend, Ethan Hawke. This group of artists has joined together once more for this release of Glass’s works. Levinston is an internationally recognized concert pianist and recording artist, whose last album, “Heavy Sleep,” garnered the praise of audiences and critics, being named one of New York Times’ “Best Recordings of the Year.” This release includes the world premiere recording of “The Illusionist Suite,” as well as ten of the composer’s deeply moving Etudes. This two disc set has already been praised by media outlets. The New York Times recognizes “Mr. Levingston’s mastery of nuance and color,” and MusicWeb International praised his “extraordinary gifts as a colorist and performer who can hold attention rapt with the softest playing.”

Matt Haimovitz’s continuously-evolving and intense engagement with the Bach Cello Suites reaches a new zenith with Overtures to Bach, six new commissions that anticipate and reflect each of the cello suites. The new overtures expand upon the multitude of spiritual, cross-cultural, and vernacular references found in the Bach, building a bridge from the master’s time to our own. The solo cello recital has been a Haimovitz trademark since the year 2000, when he made waves with his Bach “Listening-Room” Tour, in unconventional venues throughout the US. In the fall of 2015, he released his profound new interpretation of the Bach Suites, The Cello Suites According to Anna Magdalena, inspired and informed by an authoritative manuscript by Bach’s second wife, and performed on period instruments.

The new album, Overtures to Bach, pairs each new work with the Prélude from the suite it introduces, with Haimovitz performing on cello and cello piccolo. Philip Glass simply and eloquently prepares the audience for the first Suite with his Overture, encouraging an open and calm frame of mind. For the second suite, Du Yun creates a heartbreaking quilt of cries in The Veronica, mingling a Russian Orthodox prayer for the dead, Serbian chant, and central European gypsy fiddle music. Vijay Iyer’s Run responds to Bach’s third suite with infectious energy and kinesthetic rhythms that celebrate the natural resonance of the instrument as well as the composer’s jazz roots. Then, Roberto Sierra’s La memoria plays on our memory of Bach's Suite IV, seamlessly referencing motivic fragments and creating a kaleidoscopic mirage with the exotic flavors of Caribbean bass lines and salsa rhythms. David Sanford’s Es War, a response to the fifth suite, opens with a tour de force of pizzicato, then wrestles with Bach’s epic fugue with a saxophone’s wails. For the sixth and final suite, Luna Pearl Woolf is inspired by pre-Western Hawaiian chant, taking full advantage of the virtuosic properties of the cello piccolo and treating it operatically, from the low bass to the soprano stratosphere.

Overtures to Bach spans more than time, linking us to far-flung corners of our musical world and offering an entrée into six distinct compositional voices. Then, as Philip Glass writes, “Just let Bach’s music begin. It’s there for the listening.”

REVIEWS:

It is difficult to pin down just what makes this opera so appealing; let’s just say that it is an opera, like Nixon, in which everything works. This performance is a fine one; in particular, the two men speak and sing so clearly that an English speaker needs no libretto.

– Fanfare

This performance is a fine one; in particular, the two men speak and sing so clearly that an English speaker needs no libretto. “Neurology’s favourite term is deficit. The word denotes impairment, or incapacity of neurological function. Loss of language, memory, vision, dexterity, identity and a myriad of other lacks and losses of specific function.” One could not find many opera libretti that begin with words that would seem more at home in The Lancet; but, then again, Michael Nyman’s The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat is no ordinary opera. It is based on an essay of the same name published in 1985 by the distinguished neurologist Dr Oliver Sacks (1933?2015), who, alongside Christopher Rawlence and Michael Morris, was also responsible for Nyman’s libretto. Largely dependent as it is on notes made by Sacks about an actual case, the opera has no real plot as such. It simply depicts two meetings between a neurologist (called Dr S.), a patient, and his wife. The first meeting takes place in the neurologist’s surgery, the second, longer one in the patient’s home. During these encounters it gradually becomes clear that the patient, a distinguished singer and teacher called Dr P., is suffering from a condition called visual agnosia, which in essence prevents him from recognizing or understanding what he sees. Both his hearing and, bizarrely, his actual eyesight are fine, his voice and musicality are undimmed, and he can play a mean game of imaginary chess; but his “mental blindness” results, for example, in him asking directions of a parking meter, trying to shake hands with a music stand and, heartbreakingly, thinking his wife is actually his hat. At one point in the opera the neurologist asserts that there is “no trace of dementia” in Dr P.’s behaviour; but Oliver Sacks subsequently stated that the symptoms suffered by the real-life patient on whose case the work is based were related to the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease – an insight which, for many listeners, will lend this twenty-year-old opera an eerily contemporary feel.

Knowledge of this clinical background might lead the prospective listener to expect an unrelievedly grim work. But that is not really the case. Not only are there moments of black, indeed Kafka-esque humour, but there is much also about compassion and love. The neurologist, for example, could hardly be more different from, say, the cruel, inhuman sawbones of Berg’s Wozzeck. At the very beginning he expresses dissatisfaction with neurology’s tendency to focus on “everything that patients aren’t, and nothing that they are”, wishing instead to “restore the human subject at the centre”; and he retains a genuine interest in and compassion for Dr P., assuring him, for example, at the end that “I cannot tell you what is wrong… But I know what is right.”

Then there is Mrs P., the singer’s wife. She emerges as a thoroughly sympathetic character, who is forced to undergo an emotional journey into which the listener is drawn and with which he or she can fully identify. Initially Mrs P. seems in denial (or perhaps is simply being over-protective), when she tells the neurologist that her husband is “as fit as a fiddle” and just “makes silly mistakes, more like practical jokes”. Later on, though, we become more clearly aware of her very real love and admiration for her husband: she continually praises him and his singing, expresses vicariously hurt pride when the neurologist suggests that changes in his painting style are due to his illness rather than any process of artistic maturation, and cannot hide her all too understandable fears for his future.

Finally, this opera is to some extent also a hymn of praise to the power of music. Music is, quite literally, all that keeps Dr P. going: his musical gifts are still very much intact; he sings to himself all the time; and, as the neurologist says at the end, in essence he uses music to organize his life, so that the only relevant prescription can be: “More music”. Not, of course, that this can lead to an entirely happy ending. The opera’s last words, spoken by the neurologist in retrospect, are: “To this inner soundtrack he moved, he acted, Fluently. Cogently. But, when the music stopped… so did he”. So music can’t be or do everything; but while there’s music, there’s hope.

As to Nyman’s music ? well, predictably enough, it consists in the main of recitative-like vocal lines supported by a repetitively chugging chamber group consisting of two violins, a viola, two cellos, a harp and a piano. But there is much more to it than that. There are certainly some operatic subject-matters to which a basically minimalist style would not be suited; but here it works well. Nyman’s steady rhythms and additive processes here create a sense of inexorable nervous tension, which has the effect of reflecting very vividly the gradual but relentless loss of Dr P.’s powers of cognition. By way of contrast, this nervous tension is frequently interrupted by slower, more lightly scored passages, which tend to accompany reflections on proceedings by the neurologist, but can also involve less predictable elements, such as a full performance of Schumann’s ‘Ich grolle nicht’ from Dichterliebe, which Dr P. delivers to his wife’s piano accompaniment. A particularly good example of Nyman’s ability to vary his musical material within a consistent style comes in a five-minute passage towards the end of the scene in the neurologist’s surgery: the tempo accelerates as Dr P. describes the “darting details” (a sunflower, a snowflake, a map of Dresden, a dinosaur) that flash fleetingly into his mind; this gives way first to an almost arioso passage where he imagines a river and an idyllic guest house, and then to a more heavily scored, faster one that climaxes in his bizarre yet humanly tragic misidentification of his hat. Cumulatively, the music gives expression to a mixture of ongoing tension and emotional ups and downs which will strike many listeners as sensitively reflecting the experience of observing and accompanying a person afflicted with a degenerative illness.

The new Naxos performance of Nyman’s work is based on a production given by Nashville Opera in November 2013. Indeed, one of its functions is clearly to provide a souvenir of that occasion: there is a brief note by the director, John Hoomes, and a veritable smorgasbord of credits naming everyone even remotely associated with the production, from the pianist’s page turner through the make-up artist to every conceivable luminary of the Nashville Opera Association. That said, there is nothing to suggest that the CD itself was recorded ‘live’: the sound is of excellent ‘studio’ quality, and there are no audience or stage noises.

The three young singers generally acquit themselves well. Curiously, given that one sings the Duke of Mantua and the other Sparafucile, the (pleasingly) baritonal tenor, Ryan MacPherson and the bass, Matthew Treviño initially sound rather like each other – a situation which isn’t helped by the seeming misattribution of some of their lines in the online libretto. But that impression doesn’t really last, and both clearly have the measure of their roles, combining expressiveness with excellent diction. The rather brittle, fluttery soprano of Rebecca Sjowäll will not please all ears, but she gives a vivid performance as the unfortunate wife, rising well to her occasional ‘big moments’ ? such as her anguish when, following a period of relative lucidity, Dr P. fails to recognize a photograph of his mother, and her anger when the neurologist speaks seemingly unkindly of her husband’s painting. Dean Williamson and his musicians give a thoroughly sound and sensitive account of the score, though one which seems to me rather to underplay its humour.

Overall, it would be idle to pretend that this new recording supersedes that on CBS Masterworks (MK 44669) featuring such seasoned campaigners as Emile Belcourt and Frederick Westcott, and conducted by the composer. I have seen no evidence, however, to suggest that this 1987 issue remains generally available, or that there have been any other recordings since. In that context especially, the Nashville recording can be warmly welcomed and recommended. One could do with slightly older singers, and the performance as a whole perhaps lacks something in characterful individuality; on the other hand, there is nothing seriously wrong with it, the sound is good, and – above all – it restores to the catalogue a highly unusual work of real craftsmanship and considerable depth.

– MusicWeb International (Nigel Harris)

STRAVINSKY, I.: Soldier's Tale Suite / Octet / Les Noces (Tianwa Yang, Virginia Symphony Chorus, Virginia Arts Festival Chamber Players, Falletta) The three works on this recording were composed at a crucial juncture in Stravinsky's musical life. The Soldier's Tale, a small-scale theatrical work for instrumental septet, narrator and two speakers completed in 1918 [Naxos 8.573537]. It is performed here in the suite premi�red in 1920. The Octet marked a new element in Stravinsky's writing, inaugurating a turn to neo-classicism, whilst Les noces (The Wedding) is a ballet cantata impelled by dramatic motor rhythms, and once again saturated in his Russian background. Scored for pitched and unpitched percussion, vocal soloists, and mixed chorus, it is a pivotal work in Stravinsky's development.

The title of this release, Triangle of Resistance, is taken from the three-part suite by Miya Masaoka which opens this album. During World War II, under Executive Order 9066, Masaoka’s family was imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp, which was the inspiration for the piece. The final work, Four Moons of Pluto, explores musical intervals like orbits of planets. The detuned bass used for this piece delves into sonic depths that mirror the music of the spheres. Miya Masaoka is based in New York City. She has written works for traditional instrumentations as well as pieces for solo koto, laser interfaces, laptop and video, and sculpture installations. She frequently works with the sonification of data, and has mapped the behavior of plants, insect movement, and brain activity to sound.

This release is a re-issue of a 1992 recording, when Richard Hickox was serving as Associate Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Elgar wrote his Caractacus in 1898 for the Leeds Festival. The work shows his invention and orchestration skills, foreshadowing his most famous work, the Enigma Variations. A review by Gramophone asserted that “There can be nothing but praise for Richard Hickox’s fluent, sensitive direction and enthusiastic, full-blooded backcloth provided by the LSO… A typically ripe, wide-ranging Chandos recording into the bargain.”

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REVIEW:

Although the work itself is uneven, this 1992 recording is yet another classic recording from the late maestro, and well worth hearing when done as brilliantly as this.

– MusicWeb International

In 1971, Richard Hickox founded the Richard Hickox Orchestra, which in 1979 became the City of London Sinfonia. Fifteen years later he made this highly praised recording of orchestral works by John Ireland, now made available at ‘classic Chandos’ price.

Gramophone featured this recording in its 2010 Classical Music Guide, stating in its original review that ’Chandos have been doing John Ireland proud over the last few years, and Richard Hickox’s new anthology is well up to the high standards of previous instalments in this valuable series. With rich, refined Chandos sound, this remains a most enjoyable collection... Hickox gives a sensitive account of the Downland Suite and extracts great expressive intensity from the glorious second movement “Elegy”. The Concertino Pastorale is another fine work, boasting a most eloquent opening “Eclogue” and tenderly poignant “Threnody”, towards the end of which Ireland seems to allow himself a momentary recollection of the haunting opening phrase of his earlier orchestral prelude, The Forgotten Rite.‘

This fifth volume of the Prokofiev’s complete symphonies joins a series of acclaimed recordings from the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra with its principal conductor and music director Marin Alsop. Critics have warmly welcomed each release of this edition, from volume 1 with the Fifth Symphony from 2010, which “comes up trumps in a dramatic yet highly polished performance… an outstanding achievement” (BBC Music Magazine), to the “unfailingly good string playing, often more sensitively nuanced than that of her rivals…” (Gramophone) of volume 4’s Third Symphony.

REVIEWS:

Marin Alsop turns up with an excellent reading of the Sixth almost in spite of herself. Something in the work speaks, if not to her, then to the orchestra, which plays with fervor and intensity fully befitting the music and with considerable sensitivity to the many shades of darkness that Prokofiev here puts on display. Alsop seems more to be carried along with the music than to shape it—her overly fast finale, indeed, almost derails the movement’s effectiveness. But the performance as a whole turns out to be very successful indeed, with the gradations of Prokofiev’s anti-triumphalist writing coming through clearly and the sectional stability of the orchestra allowing the symphony’s many themes and unusual balances to emerge to fine effect. The reality must be that Alsop is responsible for shaping this very fine performance, but it almost feels as if the orchestra is playing without a conductor, with suppleness and sectional sensitivity that bring forth, all in all, a very impressive reading.

Alsop seems a stronger presence in the six-movement and altogether lighter Waltz Suite, in which Prokofiev recycled three pieces from Cinderella, two from War and Peace and one from an abandoned film project, Lermontov, into a half-hour suite that explores three-quarter time from a wide variety of angles and with numerous emotional high and low points. Again the orchestra delivers first-rate playing, and the result is a highly interesting juxtaposition of a 1945–47 symphony that is very serious indeed with a 1946–47 suite that remains determinedly on the frothy side.

– Infodad.com

Marin Alsop and the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra continue their Prokofiev series for Naxos with his sixth symphony, written as an elegy for the victims of the second world war but condemned as anti-Soviet and banned in 1948, a year after its completion. Alsop and her players handle the great climactic moments with elan but the central threnody lacks the compassion of, for example, Sakari Oramo’s recording with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. The vibrant Waltz Suite, however, really swings, with some stylish solo playing in all sections of the orchestra.

– Guardian

German violinist and composer Johann Jakob Walther (1650-1717) was one of the most important German violinists of the 17th century. His works feature virtuosic techniques including arpeggios and doublestops. This album includes some of Walther’s best works, including his Suite XX in E minor, Sonata VII in A major, and Sonata VII in d minor. All of these works are performed by Eco dell’Anima on period instruments.

Listen to the Naxos Podcast to learn more about this release

These three works represent the first recording for Naxos by the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic, which is composed of elite conservatory students from across the United States and abroad. The chosen works reflect the richness and variety of the American repertoire. A work of immense poignancy and power, John Corigliano's Symphony No. 1 is a commemoration of friends of the composer who died during the 1980s and '90s. Michael Torke's Bright Blue Music evokes rich lyricism couched in the composer's favorite key of D Major. The suite from Copland's Appalachian Spring is one of the great, quintessential American works.

Review:

Large-limbed, vivid, and intense, John Corigliano’s 1989 Symphony No 1 commemorates the Aids crisis, memorialising some of the composer’s friends who succumbed at a time when diagnosis meant death. It has also stood the test of time simply as good music, here performed superbly.

– Sunday Times

Enrique Granados is best-known for his piano music, especially the ‘Danzas Españolas’ and ‘Goyescas.’ Little regard is given to his chamber music, songs and orchestral works. Earlier this year I reviewed Volume 1 of the present series of orchestral music for MusicWeb International and concluded that it was a worthy project that explored beyond Granados’s normal repertoire and I looked forward to hearing the second installment.

The CD opens with what is probably the only one of the composer’s orchestral works to become a hit – the ‘Intermezzo.’ It was derived from his opera Goyescas (1915), which was premiered in New York on 28 January 1916. It was a by-product of the great piano suite. The composer described his opera as displaying in the ‘rhythm [and] colour, a portrait of quintessentially Spanish life and a sense of emotion that leaps from the amorous to the passionate, the dramatic or even the tragic…just as in Goya’s works you find aspects of both love and tragedy, and both quarrels and flirtations.’ The delightful ‘Intermezzo’ was composed very quickly just before the premiere, to accommodate a longer than expected scene change between the first and second acts of the opera. Its mood is of passion, drama with a hint of sultry sunshine and romance in the ‘big tune.’

The delightfully named ‘Danza de los ojos verdes’ (Dance of the green eyes) was first heard in New York’s Maxine Elliot Theatre just a few days after the opera’s premiere. It was presented as a part of an ‘evening of dance’ performed by Antonia Merce (1890-1936), who was billed as ‘La Argentina.’ The present short dance was written for, and dedicated to, Merce. It is an uncomplicated little piece that uses the usual ‘mechanics’ of a Spanish dance – tambourines, castanets, and ‘gypsy tinged orientalism’. It is a magnificent little tone-poem that depicts the flamenco celebrations in the Sacromente district of Granada.

The mood of celebration continues in the Danza gitana (Gypsy Dance), which was composed in 1915 and was dedicated to the dancer Carmen Tórtola Valencia (1882-1955). It is full of vibrancy, instrumental colour and Iberian rhythms. The liner notes point out that the composer used a large orchestra for this short work, which succeeded in ‘limiting its opportunities for performance.’ This three-and-a-half-minute dance would make an ideal ‘encore’ for any symphony orchestra, in Spain or elsewhere.

A very different mood is evoked in the major symphonic poem La nit del mort (Night of the dead man). It was subtitled ‘poem of desolation.’ The work, which includes a tenor solo and a chorus, was composed in 1897. As I understand it, La nit del mort was left unfinished by the composer and remains unpublished. I can only assume that it was completed by someone unknown. It is very much a work of two parts. The first section, as Rob Barnett has pointed out, is almost Delian in its subtlety and soft impressionistic mood. However, about halfway through things change. It becomes almost a mini-opera, with a tenor aria ‘I am death, my girl…’ The chorus insists that the ‘horns of war are sounding’ and that ‘those who die defending their country will be glorified and will not die.’ The ‘libretto’ is by Apel-les Mestres (1854-1936). As a piece, I am only partially impressed. The first section (which I love) is beautiful; the second (which I do not like) is bombastic, over the top and sub-Verdi in its effect.

‘Dante’ was premiered during June 1908 in Barcelona’s then new Palau de la Música Catalana. It was remarkably successful at the time, with performances in the USA, as well as at the Queen’s Hall, London with Sir Henry Wood. It subsequently fell into neglect. As the titles of the two ‘movements’ suggest, Granados took two important themes from Dante’s great poem: the meeting with the great Roman poet Virgil and the tragic love affair between Paolo e Francesca. In this latter movement the mezzo-soprano sings beautifully Francesca’s story. The composer suggested that it was not ‘my intention to mirror The Divine Comedy line by line, but to give my impression of a life and a work; the lives of Dante and Beatrice and The Divine Comedy are, for me, one and the same thing.’ The listener must not look for an Iberian influence in the pages of the two-part symphonic poem. The liner notes quote Carol A. Hess, who has pointed out that this is ‘a vast and sombre work with little hint of the traditional images of a lively, sunlit Spain…’ There are influences from Richard Wagner, César Franck, Alexander Scriabin and even the romantic side of Arnold Schoenberg. The harmonies are chromatic, rich and ‘voluptuous’. Tantalisingly, there exists a third movement of this massive tone-poem, ‘La Laguna Estigia’ (The Stygian Lake) but unfortunately there are only sketches. The work was originally planned to be in four movements.

All the music is finely played and performed by the soloists, the chorus and the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra under Pablo González. Mezzo-soprano Gemma Coma-Alabert gives a stunning performance in the ‘Dante’. The liner notes are helpful in approaching this little-known music. They are written by Justo Romero and well-translated by Susannah Howe. They are also given in Spanish. The text of La nit del mort and ‘Paulo e Francesca’ are presented in both languages. Details of the performers are included.

– MusicWeb Internationsl (John France)

The first section shows González and his orchestra at their best, with grainy strings, piquant soft-edged woodwinds and a natural, musicianly way of shaping a phrase. Those qualities are all in evidence in two short gypsy dances and the familiar Goyescas Intermezzo; the slightly hazy Naxos sound complements performances that are affectionate and characterful.

– Gramophone

Johann Joachim Quantz, in his handbook for transverse flute written in 1752, wrote of the composer Georg Philipp Telemann: “I wish to especially recommend Telemann’s trios written in the French style, many of which he had already fashioned thirty or more years ago.” Georg Philipp Telemann not only gained the admiration of Quantz, but his pieces are still frequently performed and recorded today. For this album, his Concerto di camera in G minor, Double Concertos in A minor and E minor, and Suite in A minor have been recorded. Performing these timeless works are three outstanding period instrumentalists, Bolette Roed, Reiko Ichise, and Alexis Kossenko.