Far from being a treatment of the usual Latin, the Requiem of the New York-based Arnold Rosner (1945–2013) sets spiritual and secular texts on death from a number of the world’s cultures, including Whitman, Villon, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a sutra from Zen Buddhism and the Jewish Kaddish. The work of a young man (Rosner was 28 when he wrote it), this Requiem is both monumental and wildly energetic – but it also encompasses passages of transcendent beauty. His musical language clothes the modal harmony and rhythm of pre-Baroque polyphony in rich Romantic colors, producing a style that is instantly recognizable and immediately appealing. Some of the music was first written for an aborted operatic treatment of Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, where the main character plays chess with Death; in like spirit, Rosner’s Requiem is a major statement of human defiance in the face of mortality, even if its gentle closing pages bring uneasy acceptance.

REVIEW:

Arnold Rosner’s Requiem (1973), no exaggeration intended, is one of the great works of the 20th Century. Rosner (1945-2013) was a postmodernist at a time when modernism was unshakable in academic circles. He studied at SUNY/Buffalo—a notorious hotbed: the faculty laughed at him. They were wrong. They couldn’t deal with his love of Renaissance and early music (Dufay especially), his tonality and post-tonal language. Written when he was 28, the maturity and vision is striking. Inspiration for this work was triggered by his fascination with Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal. He wanted to adapt it for an opera, but Bergman refused permission. He began to write it anyway, and some of it appears in the Requiem. His sources include the New Testament, François Villon, the Kama Sutra, Whitman (When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed), Dante, the Kaddish, and the Dies Irae. All are set with sensitivity and profound musicality. The London Philharmonic is great, but Ms Hollis’s soprano is wobbly. Helpful notes by Rosner scholar Walter Simmons. Texts and translations. Don’t miss this.

-- American Record Guide (Allen Gimbel)

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.

The English composer-conductor Henry Cotter Nixon (1842–1907) had entirely disappeared from music history until this series – presenting all his surviving orchestral music in its first-ever recordings – revealed him to have been one of the most accomplished English composers of his generation, with a style that takes in elements of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Weber, Brahms and Sullivan. This third and final volume mixes music for the concert hall and the stage and adds the Coronation March for Edward VII that turned out to be Nixon’s last composition. Most of the pieces here were left incomplete, but thanks to Paul Mann’s orchestrations they now confirm Nixon’s position as one of the superior tunesmiths of Victorian England.

As composer, pianist and educationalist, the Prussian Philipp Scharwenka (1847–1917) was one of most highly respected musicians of his day, although his star faded soon after his death. His music – more conservative and classical in orientation than that of his pianist-composer brother, Xaver – sits somewhere between Chopin and Brahms, with echoes of Schubert and Schumann. This first installment of a survey of his piano music is intended to put these immediately attractive works before the public once again – for the first time in over a century. They are played here by the Portuguese pianist-composer Luís Pipa, professor of piano and chamber music at the University of Minho, near Porto, following up on his well-received Toccata Classics album of music by his compatriot José Vianna da Motta.

The Polish composer Moritz Moszkowski (1854–1925) is best remembered for a handful of virtuoso piano pieces, but he also produced a substantial body of orchestral music, most of it unperformed for decades. Astonishingly, he was only in his early twenties when he wrote his monumental ‘Symphonic Poem in Four Movements’ Johanna d’Arc – heard here in its first recording – a vast symphonic fresco depicting the life, death and transfiguration of the heroine of Friedrich Schiller’s 1801 play, Die Jungfrau von Orleans. Moszkowski admitted to the influence of Wagner and Raff on the work – but he also managed to prefigure the musical language of the Hollywood epics of sixty years later. As pianist, Ian Hobson has a long-standing relationship with Toccata Classics, and this is the fourth recording he has made in his alter ego as conductor – at the helm of the Sinfonia Varsovia, as with his previous albums, which uncovered the early orchestral music of Martinu. This is the first of a series of Ian Hobson recordings for Toccata Classics that will focus on Moszkowski’s piano and orchestral music.

Roger Smalley (1943–2015) made his mark, first in his native Britain and then in Australia, as composer, pianist, conductor, writer, academic and teacher. Although as performer and commentator he was at the forefront of musical modernism, he was also very fond of nineteenth-century Romanticism, and much of his music bridges the gap between old and new, retaining its roots in the past while reflecting the concerns of his own time, as the works on this album demonstrate.

Piano music forms a large part of the output of the Romanian composer Livia Teodorescu-Ciocanea (b. 1959), as you would expect of someone who has been playing the instrument since she was four. This first album of her music reveals a latter-day Impressionist, sensitive to half-light and petal-delicate tonal color – but she can also generate powerful surges of energy, and her musical portrait of Charlie Chaplin testifies to an impish sense of humor. Teodorescu’s music explores spectralism, neoimpressionism and postmodernism with a powerful lyric and dramatic effect (Oxford music online). She is Professor of composition at the National University of Music Bucharest and Adjunct Associate Professor at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She introduced a new musical poetics called hypertimbralism pursuing intertextuality based on timbre. Teodorescu has lectured at Illinois Urbana Champaign, Oslo, Monash and Huddersfield Universities. She has written over 60 works.

The American composer Richard Moriarty (born in Boston in 1946) spent his professional life as a pathologist, taking up composition upon his retirement as a student of Adolphus Hailstork and Richard Danielpour. His deeply felt orchestral song-cycle We That Wait, using poems from the American Civil War written by women, and the expansive, exuberant Missa Adsum! Celebrating Women, are both grand statements in a proud American tradition of Neo-Romanticism, accessible, direct and sincere. Of the premiere performance, one reviewer wrote: “Adsum-Celebrating Women was a tour de force, whose title comes from the Roman rite of ordination when candidates are called by name and answer “Adsum- Present!” It was sung with passion and beauty…” (M.D. Ridge)

Mexican composer Manuel Maria Ponce is best known for a handful of popular songs and guitar pieces, and yet he left a huge legacy of some 500 works- orchestral, chamber, and piano music, art songs, and folksong arrangements. These works together form the foundation of the Mexican national repertoire, and yet they are as good as unknown. The works recorded here- some for the first time- reveal a composer with a surefooted command of the orchestra: his early impressionism is infused with echoes of Mexican indigenous culture in textures of unsuspected richness. Jose Miramontes Zapata graduated from the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire in Leningrad. He has worked as pianist, choir director, and cultural manager. In 2000 he founded the Orquesta Sinfonica de San Luis Potosi and as artistic director and principal conductor he has promoted many choral and orchestral activities with local young musicians, developing a constant cultural growth in San Luis Potosi with more than 80 concerts per year. The San Luis Potosi Symphony Orchestra occupies an important role in the diffusion of Mexican symphonic music, with concerts in some of the major halls in Mexico, China, and Europe. Further releases of major Mexican symphonic works are in preparation with Toccata Classics.

This recording of music by Ernest Krenek follows on from Toccata Classics’ wildly successful recording, in two albums, of his complete piano concertos. It covers almost half a century of his compositions, and shows the sheer range of his creativity. There are early piano fugues written for his teacher, Franz Schreker, via elegant fin de siècle Viennese lyricism to a relaxed application of Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic technique- often enlivened with a surprising degree of charm and a knowing sense of humor. The Ernst Krenek Ensemble is joined here by three of the finest lieder singers currently active, Laura Aikin, Bernarda Fink, and Florian Boesch. The Ernst Krenek Ensemble has set itself the task of introducing Ernst Krenek’s important and extensive chamber music oeuvre to the programmes of international concert halls, although its repertoire also includes works by composers such as Schubert and Beethoven, who provided Krenek with important stimulus. Its musicians delve with special curiosity into Krenek’s less familiar works and reveal the many colorful facets of his substantial output. Concerts have taken the ensemble throughout Europe and the USA.

The musical language of the New York-based Arnold Rosner (1945–2013) had its roots in the modal harmony and rhythm of pre-Baroque polyphony and evolved in an array of unusual directions, producing a style that is instantly recognizable and immediately appealing – as can be heard in the three works on this recording. Rosner’s Nocturne suggests the immensity – and the implacable violence – of outer space, whereas his overture Tempus Perfectum has its starting point in Renaissance dance. The monumental Sixth Symphony opens with music of volcanic ferocity and vehemence; the central Adagio then provides an island of troubled calm before the dignified opening of the finale presages a symphonic Allegro of wild, freewheeling energy; only when its immense force is spent does this powerful masterpiece sink to an uneasy close.

REVIEWS:

I first came across Arnold Rosner’s music on a 1990 Harmonia Mundi Modern Masters CD of tonal American 20th Century music, reviewed here and here (in a later reissue), and now available only as a download or second-hand. The work recorded there, the Responses, Hosanna and Fugue, was so evidently influenced by Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia that I was intrigued, to say the least.

This disc begins with the Nocturne Op.68, in which Rosner sought to suggest the movement of planetary bodies in the vastness of space. He tried to do this by initially evoking a mysterious swirling atmosphere that is occasionally interrupted by violent outbursts. Melodic fragments gradually coalesce into a melody for strings, which is further developed and intensified by the inclusion of the rest of the orchestra. Like many such ‘descriptive’ pieces composed over the last 150 years, one would never guess at the underlying creative stimulus, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.

It is followed by Tempus Perfectum: A Concert Overture. Its archaic title reflects Rosner’s modern adaptation of a medieval form in 98 metre. Rosner was interested in early music and here he uses a type of canzona notable for its markedly rhythmic material and separation into distinct sections. The effect is of triads superimposed on the main theme at various points, and the work, which sounds markedly antique, gradually achieves a much more modern climax on (predominantly) strings and trumpets, before dying away.

The most impressive work on this superlatively recorded and performed CD, is Rosner’s 6th Symphony. Its first movement is one of extreme emotional turbulence, represented by ferociously explosive rather angular music that lasts for its ten-minute duration. I am strongly reminded of the first movement of the Vaughan Williams Fourth Symphony, although Rosner is not quite so dour.

I don’t think there can be much doubt that throughout the Symphony this influence persists, and the Sinfonia Antartica informs the second, slow movement. In fact, I am indelibly reminded of the ‘Landscape’ movement of the RVW work. Having said that, Rosner doesn’t quite manage to conjure up the stupefying power so evident in the Antartica, despite a slightly more colorful orchestral palette and a willingness to use the tam-tam almost to abandon. RVW brings an organ to the shattering climax of his symphony, but an organ is one instrument not employed by Rosner. The movement begins in a hushed atmosphere, with a slightly oriental sounding theme. This is developed towards the emotional centre of the movement where the composer’s use of strings (to emphasize the melody) is gradually superseded by the appearance of woodwind, brass and percussion to great effect.

His gift of writing impactive and indeed, memorable music, is very noticeable throughout the work, but particularly so in this movement and in the last, where RVW in ‘galumphing’ mode makes an appearance early on. A reliance on the cymbals and later, the tam-tam disturbs me a little – this is a trait that is very evident in the works of some contemporary American tonal composers, perhaps influenced, however subconsciously, by film music. Notwithstanding, since I love the sound of cymbals and tam-tam in a sumptuous orchestral panoply, I will remain only very slightly disturbed and revel in the sheer orchestral splendour of the whole thing. The final five minutes or so of the last movement begin with an ethereal woodwind solo, which appears repeatedly, sometimes on the brass, only to be interrupted by cataclysmic eruptions. The movement fades into silence with quiet recollections of earlier themes.

Throughout this CD the recording is truly splendiferous and the playing of the LPO is virtuosic beyond praise. It must be wonderful to hear these pieces performed live by this top-notch orchestra under the baton of a committed conductor, such as we have here in Nick Palmer. The booklet is detailed and informative in both biographical and musical detail. Toccata Classics are to be congratulated and praised for this release, consisting as it does entirely of first recordings. I look forward to others in the series.

-- MusicWeb International (Jim Westhead)

The piano music of the Czech-born composer Antoine Reicha (1770–1836) – friend of Haydn and Beethoven, teacher of Berlioz, Liszt, Franck and many others – is one of the best-kept secrets in music. He was an important influence on composers of the next generation but apart from an innovative set of fugues his piano works have remained almost unknown since his own day. Encompassing Baroque practices as well as looking forward to the twentieth century, they are full of harmonic and other surprises that show this liveliest of musical minds at work. Reicha’s twenty Études ou Exercices, recorded here for the first time, manage to combine his maverick inventiveness with a considerable degree of charm.