Tilting at windmills. The long-suffering Sancho Panza. Sighs of love for Dulcinea. The familiar and fanciful themes of the Don Quixote legend are brought to life by Apollo’s Fire in Telemann’s imaginative portrayal. The Don Quixote Suite sits alongside other suites and concertos by the composer that reveal his cosmopolitan air and whimsical nature.



REVIEW:

Avie deserves credit for spotting this 2002 Koch International label disc and putting it back into circulation once again, as it remains a sterling release. The Cleveland-based Baroque orchestra Apollo's Fire and conductor Jeannette Sorrell pick a program that shows exactly why Telemann was so popular in his own day. They apply just the right level of broad gesture to the two representational suites, which reflect their subjects but are in no way overdone. A wonderful release that holds up to repeated hearings.

– All Music Guide

Discover Symphonic Music explores compositions which span across three centuries and a part of the most famous orchestral works, including “New World” Symphony, Ravel’s Bolero, the Peery Gynt Suite, “The Firebird,” and more. The Discover Series from Berlin Classic aims to make classics popular, firing people up about the music presented, regardless of musical taste. Rather than focusing on complete works, this series focuses on individual pieces that have rewritten our musical history.

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Silvestre Revueltas’ score for the 1935 film Redes (“Nets”) remains one of his greatest works, full of captivating rhythms, vivid instrumental color, and characteristic melodic inspiration. It is splendidly performed here by the PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez, newly synchronized to a lovely restored version of the original film. The movie itself isn’t much. Although cinematographer Paul Strand’s work is gorgeous as visual art, the story is a leftist morality play at its most primitive.

Villagers in small Mexican fishing community vainly struggle against the evil rich guy (complete with waxed mustache). At the start, the poor fisherman Miro begs for money to take his sick son to the hospital. Evil rich guy refuses. The child dies and is buried in a lavishly decorated coffin that makes one wonder why they didn’t invest the funeral funds in medical care in the first place. The grieving dad organizes the villagers and they go fishing, determined to resist the exploitation of the town’s wealthy business class. They catch fish. As they return with their catch there’s a rumble with the rich guy’s team. Soldiers are called in and the villagers flee, but Miro gets shot in the scuffle. He nobly ignores the pain, but dies anyway. End of story.

The entire film takes about an hour. There are fabulous shots of the Mexican seaside, lots of macho posing, and of course, fishing sequences. Thrilling it is not, but Revueltas’ score is sensational. Not being terribly into visuals, I would hope that Naxos will release a complete soundtrack album. The music is certainly worth hearing beyond the already familiar suite. Indeed, the film is scored almost throughout. Dialogue is minimal. For the last fifteen minutes or so in this new version the dialogue had to be abandoned in favor of the new soundtrack’s continuous music (English subtitles remain). If you want to hear the (few) spoken bits, the original film with its original soundtrack is thoughtfully included.

You also get several bonus features: discussions of Revueltas, his work in film, his politics, and the music, all produced by PostClassical Ensemble Executive Director Joseph Horowitz. I didn’t watch these, as I general ignore all such things. As a matter of principal, I believe that musical works stand or fall on their own merits, as entertainment, and nothing bores me more than being preached at or having the pleasure of listening turned into an academic symposium. I do recognize, however, that there is a time and place for such things, and other listeners/viewers may feel very differently. To see how Revueltas’ music enhances this visually beautiful film is worth experiencing just for itself, and requires no special pleading.

– ClassicsToday (David Hurwitz)

Dan Laurin has released around thirty albums on BIS since the beginning of his collaboration in 1987. Laurin’s recorder music spans the globe and across the years, from England to Japan, and from the Renaissance to today. This latest release journeys to early 18th century France, and features composers such as Nicolas Chedeville, Anne Danican Philidor, Charles Dieupart, Marin Marais, and more.

Classical Music

This program completes the Comédie et Tragédie project with Tempesta di Mare, and consists of suites made up of orchestral excerpts from three dramatic works of the French stage, spanning seventy-three years, all highlighting the importance of dance as a part of drama.

The comédie-ballet was the brainchild of the French comedic actor, singer, dancer, and playwright Molière. After ten years of collaborating with Lully, a Suite from whose Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme features in Volume 1, he turned to Charpentier. The outcome was Le Malade imaginaire whose fourth performance would prove Molière’s last, as he died on stage.

Scylla et Glaucus is the only stage work by Jean-Marie Leclair, the foremost violinist of his generation and a composer whose late opera shows the clarity of his orchestration and places its focal point on the strings, as one would expect.

Les Fêtes de Polymnie is contemporary with Leclair’s opera but more forward looking in its approach, and famous for the ingenuity of Rameau’s colorful orchestration, particularly obvious in the overture.- Chandos

Review:

I particularly liked Tempesta di Mare's vigorous, spiky strings in Leclair's 'Air des silvains' and the 'Premier air de demons'…delightful music, delightfully played.

– Gramophone

Also available on standard DVD

Andris Nelsons conducted the Lucerne Festival Orchestra for the third time in August 2015, the orchestra’s second summer without founder and guiding spirit Claudio Abbado. The first half of his concert was already a highlight: the baritone Matthias Goerne seemed completely at home in a selection of songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. His warm, dark voice allows him to capture the somber and tragic atmosphere of this music like no one else. Its shaded timbre is most perfectly suited to the work’s melancholy and nocturnal moods, where one can directly experience how an artist of this caliber can bring music to the edge of the abyss. The Lucerne Festival Orchestra, renowned for its unique Mahler sound, had last played Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in the summer of 2004 with Abbado – a flowing, transparent, and ethereal interpretation. Nelsons finds a completely different approach to the work. His Mahler is fiery, expansive, and powerful. In spite of the introductory funeral march, his reading is more positive than tragic, radiating an intense vitality. It is breathtaking to observe the orchestra’s response to Nelsons’s energetic, physical, and emotional conducting style. The relationship between orchestra and conductor is one of giving and taking, nothing else.

Picture Format Blu?ray: NTSC 16:9, Full HD

Sound Formats Blu?ray: DTS HD Master Audio, PCM Stereo

Region Code: 0 (worldwide)

Running Time: 123:12 min

Disc Format: BD 25

Subtitles: German (Original), French, English, Japanese, Korean

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Enrique Granados is known for composing some of the most popular Spanish piano masterpieces. Along with these famous compositions, he also wrote a sequence of orchestral works. Marcha de los vencidos, which is the first track featured on this album, evokes the emotion of the painful march of "the defeated" from a lost battle. This album is the first in a series to be released in honor of the centenary of the composer’s death. The compositions on this album are performed by the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Pablo Gonzalez.

Rising-star period keyboardist Julian Perkins makes his solo Resonus Classics debut with a new recording of the French Suites by J.S. Bach. Seldom recorded on the clavichord, thought to be Bach's keyboard instrument of choice, the Suites' versatile, expressive, and lyrical qualities are expertly revealed by Perkins on this, the gentlest and most intimate of all keyboard instruments. Performing on two instruments by the maker Peter Bavington, the program is completed with two further suites: one earlier partita by Johann Jakob Froberger, and one more contemporary suite by Georg Philipp Telemann, previously attributed to Bach himself.

Bach: Suite in C Minor, BWV 997 & Trio Sonatas Nos. 1, 2 & 5

Enrique Granados is today best remembered for his Goyescas suite for solo piano, inspired by the art and times of Francisco de Goya. Granados first came under the spell of Goya in 1896 while viewing an exhibition of his works. In particular, the bohemian characters of the majo and maja that had captivated Goya came to dominate the highly romanticized image of old Madrid embraced by Granados. Although the inspiration from Goya is readily acknowledged it is only two of the six pieces that make up Goyescas that can be related to specific works by the painter: No.1 Los requiebros (The Flirtations) and No.5 El amor y la muerte (Love and Death) were both inspired by etchings from the celebrated series of Caprichos. Another image by Goya, of four young girls playing with a life-sized puppet made of straw, formed the inspiration for El pelele (The straw man), which Granados composed after the suite and gave the subtitle ‘escena goyesca’.

Performing these wonderfully sensuous works is the Dutch pianist Joop Celis, who here makes his first appearance on BIS, but who has earned plaudits for previous recordings, for instance in International Record Reviewer: ‘He dispatches the heroic and virtuosic with ease, yet his playing displays a great sensitivity to the more romantic side…’ On this well-filled disc, Celis also includes Granados’s collection of seven ‘Poetic scenes’ as well as the brief Intermezzo which Granados composed for his opera Goyescas, a work in one act otherwise based on the music from the suite for piano. The opera was premièred in New York in 1916, and it was on his journey home to Spain that Granados died, when the ship he was travelling on was torpedoed in the English Channel.

Review:

Celis unsurprisingly navigates Granados's labyrinthine textures with no sweat and strain, and with a beautiful, evenly modulated sonority to boot…interestingly, the relatively modest technical and musical parameters of Escenas poeticas elicit more consistently inspired and organically poetic playing…in short, Goyescas may get star billing, yet the Escenas poeticas walk away with top honors.

– Gramophone

Track listings
1. JE ME SOUVIENS (AFTER THE GIGUE OF J. S. BACH'S PARTITA NO. 1 IN B-FLAT MAJOR, BWV 825)02:10
2. APARTÉ (AFTER THE ARRANGEMENT BY ALEXANDER SILOTI OF J. S. BACH'S PRÉLUDE IN E MINOR, BWV 855)07:10
3. UTOPIA (AFTER J. S. BACH'S SINFONIA NO. 11 IN G MINOR, BWV 797)06:07
4. ENTRE ÉCORCE (AFTER J. S. BACH'S SONATA IN D MINOR, BWV 964)05:06
5. APRÈS VOUS (AFTER THE ALLEMANDE OF J. S. BACH'S FRENCH SUITE NO. 4 IN E-FLAT MAJOR, BWV 815)04:11
6. PHÉNIX (AFTER J. S. BACH'S GOLDBERG VARIATION NO. 20 IN G MAJOR, BWV 988)05:37
7. À LA SUITE DE JEAN (AFTER THE PRÉLUDE OF J. S. BACH'S CELLO SUITE NO. 1 IN G MAJOR, BWV 1007)05:27
8. ST. MATTHEW PASSION IN E MINOR, PT. 2, BWV 244: 39. ERBARME DICH (TRANSCRIPTION FOR HARPSICHORD AND PIANO BY EDOUARD FERLET)04:09
9. JE ME SOUVIENS PLUS (AFTER THE GIGUE OF J. S. BACH'S PARTITA NO. 1 IN B-FLAT MAJOR, BWV 825)03:15
10. MAGNETIC TANGO05:12
Edouard Ferlet, piano; Violaine Cochard, harpsichord.

Before coming to Sweden, the Italian-born harpsichordist Anna Paradiso knew little about Johan Helmich Roman, often called 'the father of Swedish music'. Here she soon realized that if Roman's music was Swedish, it was also Italian – and specifically Neapolitan: the restlessness of the harmonic idiom, the continuous melodic shifts and the theatrical character. Considering the distance between Stockholm and Naples, this might seem farfetched, but we know that Roman encountered a number of Italian musicians while studying in London 1716-1721, and when in the 1730s he was able take a two-year sabbatical from his post as Kapellmeister at the Royal Court, his goal was Ischia near Naples. Roman's collection of Twelve Keyboard Sonatas was preserved in a manuscript assembled around 1748, but had most likely been composed in the course of the two decades before that. (One movement in Sonata III is labelled 'a Napoli', placing it in the autumn of 1736.) Consisting of between three and seven movements, the pieces have been referred to both as ‘suites’ and ‘sonatas’. Whatever the label, the collection is a fascinating testimony of a period of great stylistic diversity and change, as observed by a composer who, although geographically relegated to the outskirts of Europe, remained wide-open to new developments. In these recordings, Anna Paradiso emphasizes this aspect, performing the sonatas on three different instruments – a French and an Italian harpsichord and a copy of a Swedish clavichord from 1742 – with well-judged ornamentations and use of rubato. A previous release, with the first seven sonatas of the set, was described as ‘exceptional’, by the reviewer on allmusic.com, who went on to hope that ‘the remaining sonatas will be released in short order by Paradiso and BIS.’ That hope is here fulfilled, with the addition of an earlier keyboard sonata by Roman, as well as one by his Swedish contemporary Johan Agrell.

Mingxin Du & Zuqiang Wu: The Mermaid Suite - Wei Qu: Harvest

Dmitri Hvorostovsky's fourth release on Ondine features a program of rarely recorded sonnets by Dmitri Shostakovich and Franz Liszt. Hvorostovsky is accompanied by his longtime duo partner, the Estonian pianist Ivari Ilja. Shostakovich's sonnets, considered one of the achievements of contemporary Russian vocal music, were composed as his health worsened and are filled with ruminations on mortality. Liszt's sonnets are based on love poems by the Italian Renaissance writer Petrarch. Both Hvorostovsky and Ilja brin great empathy to these compositions, matching the contemplative nature of both with quietly powerful and confident performances.

REVIEW:

Hvorostovsky offers searching readings of Shostakovich's rugged, jagged songs which are full of resignation and bittersweet regret, of loss and separation. There are few things finer than Hvorostovsky in full flight and Liszt’s Petrarch Sonnets allow him the chance to open up the Italianate warmth in his baritone, with impassioned accounts, especially of Sonnet 47.

– Gramophone