The British-born Henry Litolff (1818–91) maintains a toehold on the repertoire thanks to the enduring popularity of the Scherzo of his Concerto symphonique No. 4 for piano and orchestra. Litolff’s substantial output of music for solo piano – mostly virtuoso salon miniatures – has entirely slipped from sight, even though in his prime as composer and pianist he was often compared with Liszt, a personal friend. This first album devoted to Litolff’s piano music reveals a fondness for atmospheric character pieces and vigorous dances, not least the polka, mazurka and waltz.

These three works by the Romanian composer Livia Teodorescu-Ciocanea (b. 1959) show her approach to three of the central genres of the western classical tradition: symphony, concerto and cantata. The powerful and programmatic Archimedes Symphony was inspired by the death of Archimedes in the siege of Syracuse in 214 bc; the Rite for Enchanting the Air – a concerto for various flutes and orchestra – is a kind of magical journey into a dizzying world of sound and colour; and the cantata Mysterium tremendum aims to reconcile Byzantine and Catholic liturgical traditions. All three make clear her fascination with orchestral timbre and texture – and have distant roots in Romanian folk-music.

Abram Chasins (1903–87) began his career as a pianist and composer but as broadcaster and writer soon became one of the best-known cultural commentators in the USA. His output of music for solo piano – recorded here complete for the first time – dates from his first years in the public eye, and although he made little attempt to promote it himself, one sees instantly why it was so well received at the time: sweeping keyboard textures and grand Romantic gestures expressed in a style somewhere between Rachmaninov and Prokofiev, sometimes with echoes of Chopin and Gershwin. The works here range from witty character pieces, some intended for children, and affectionate tributes to other pianists to more serious abstract essays – and Chasins, too, was a member of the club of composers who wrote 24 preludes in all the major and minor keys.

In its mix of tonality, Expressionism and Schoenbergian serialism, the late chamber music of Egon Wellesz (1885–1974) marries the mid-century radicalism of his native city with the lyricism of his adoptive homeland. In the first part of his career Wellesz was best known as a composer of operas, and these chamber works were audibly written by someone with a keen sense of drama.

The youthful agility of Samuel Adler – born in Mannheim in 1928 but long since regarded as the dean of American music – would appear to contradict the fact that he reached his 95th birthday in March 2023. This celebration of his productive life – as composer, teacher, writer and conductor – testifies to his ongoing vigour with a programme of songs and piano works composed, for the large part, after his 90th birthday, many of them tributes to musician friends. His music has its roots in the Neo-Classical clarity of composers like Copland and Hindemith, who were among his teachers, but has a raunchy energy entirely Adler’s own – and which would be remarkable in a composer half his age.

The life of the Prague-born composer Hans Winterberg (1901–91) reads like the outline of a detective novel. Having survived internment in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto as a Czech Jew, after the War he settled in Munich as a German citizen, and his music enjoyed a number of broadcasts – but after his death his estate disappeared into the vaults of a research institute and was placed under embargo, emerging only in 2015, since when recordings and performances have revealed him as one of the major Czech voices of the twentieth century. This first recording of three of his four string quartets – their language downstream from Janácek and Schoenberg, with folk-music roots refracted through mid-century Czech modernism – confirm Winterberg’s standing, and underline his importance as a lone survivor of the group of young Czech composers whose infinite promise was extinguished in the Holocaust.

The organ works of Axel Ruoff, born in Stuttgart in 1957, constitute one of the most important contributions to the literature for the instrument by any composer since Messiaen, with Ruoff often using its unparalleled resources to write music of extraordinary power and dramatic flair. This fourth volume in Jan Lehtola’s complete recording presents three large-scale compositions: a set of chorale variations, a sardonic suite and a monumental organ symphony, all displaying the wild sweep of Ruoff’s imagination.

The First and Fourth Symphonies of the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967) both have a strong sense of place. They retain a hint of Bruckner but are fluid rather than monumental. The First is lyrical and grandiose in equal measure, reflecting the grandeurs of the Swiss landscape. The Fourth was inspired by memories of childhood visits to Liechtenstein and spins out tunes and atmosphere with the profligacy of a Hollywood film score.

If Mieczyslaw Weinberg had lived for another decade or so after his death in 1996, he would have seen his status change from poorly known outlier to general acceptance as one of the major twentieth-century composers. His violin works have likewise been recognized as major additions to the repertoire. Since Yuri Kalnits and Michael Csányi-Wills began what will be a four-volume survey of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s music for violin and piano, other musicians have discovered and recorded many of these masterworks, but on its completion this cycle will still be the first to record all of Weinberg’s works for solo violin and violin and piano.

REVIEW:

The most ingratiating music comes right at the start, with the first movement Allegro moderato of the Violin Sonata No.3 from 1947. Its four minutes begin with a lyrical theme of varying phrase lengths which the players keep flowing as it were “in one breath”. The fugato style second subject is a perkier counterweight and the sonata form progression is coherently delivered, and the lowish emotional temperature feels just right as there are two movements each twice the length of this one to come. The Andantino is cooler still, and David Fanning’s booklet note informs us that the additional phrase for that marking molto rubato and all other expression marks were removed by Weinberg, so that the players could find their own way of presenting the flexibility he wanted. He could certainly trust this pair whose interpretation makes much of the movement sound questing and improvisatory.

The Allegretto cantabile finale has clear Shostakovich chamber music echoes, as Fanning mentions, specifically the klezmer elements. In fact, in his book on Weinberg, Fanning cites this work of being “one of the comparatively few…that bear out the criticism that (Weinberg) occasionally sought shelter in the shadow of Shostakovich” and mentions “near-literal borrowings”. Nonetheless most of it is still quite individual, not least the slow violin cadenza that closes the work, in which Yuri Kalnits is very commanding.

The other violin and piano sonata here, Weinberg’s sixth and last, was discovered only in 2007, twenty years after the composer’s death, and given the opus number 136bis. Its fifteen-minute single movement, on the template Moderato - Allegro – Moderato – Allegro, opens with a long violin solo. David Fanning notes its similarity to the bell theme in the finale of Rachmaninov’s First Suite for Two Pianos, and although bells often resound in Russian music from Boris Godunov to Stravinsky’s late Requiem Canticles, not many are found in a violin solo! The piano does not enter until two minutes in, and then has its own long solo at the end of this opening Moderato. This is almost texture as three-part form – solo violin, piano and violin duo, then solo piano. Whether playing together or alone, Kalnits and Csanyi-Wills hold the attention throughout this spare and haunting piece.

Arguably the most important work on the disc is the one-movement Sonata No. 3 for Solo Violin from 1979, dedicated to Weinberg’s father. Its nearly twenty-four minute continuous span make for a demanding listen, but Kalnits’s excellent performance makes a persuasive case.

-- MusicWeb International

The choral music of Galina Grigorjeva – born in Simferopol in Ukraine in 1962 and based in Tallinn, in Estonia, since 1994 – is deeply rooted in the traditions of the Orthodox Church and in ancient Russian and Slavonic folklore. Although clearly by a contemporary composer, her works have a timeless, even hypnotic, quality that seems to reach back through the ages. She has been working with the Estonian National Male Choir – one of the finest in a country full of choirs – for some years now, and some of the works here were composed or arranged specifically for this recording.

The music of Arnold Cooke, born in Yorkshire in 1906, had already fallen into neglect by the time of his death 99 years later. Cooke was a prolific composer, with two operas, six symphonies, numerous concertos and a generous amount of chamber music to his credit – nor did he neglect the organ, as this album of his major organ pieces reveals. Cooke’s style owes much to his teacher, Hindemith, not least since both men were natural contrapuntists, although there are also points of contact with Bartók and Shostakovich, and occasional touches of Walton’s ceremonial sparkle and no-nonsense grandeur.

The turbulent life of Arthur Lourié (1891–1966) – student of Glazunov, friend of Blok, lover of Akhmatova, commissar of the Soviet regime, exile in Germany, France and the USA, ghost-writer for Koussevitzky – is reflected in the wide range of references in his music, from echoes of the ceremonies of ancient Greece to Neo-Baroque and Neo-Classical procedures perhaps inspired by his collaboration with Stravinsky in Paris. Some of the works in this first of two albums surveying his chamber and instrumental music have an almost ritual formality; in others a mischievous grin is not far from the surface.

REVIEWS:

The personnel is spearheaded by flautist Birgit Ramsl and they all play with commendable accomplishment and verve that serve Lourié well. There are also four premiere recordings. However you sum him up, stylistically, his remains a cultured, cultivated and agreeably cosmopolitan voice, drawing on Russian and French traditions to irradiate the ritual formality of his music.

-- MusicWeb International

Whether in his original home of Vienna, as a conservatoire director in Germany, or as an émigré in Edinburgh, where he became one of the mainstays of musical life, Hans Gál (1890–1987) championed choral singing as a way of directly involving people in making music: he founded and conducted a number of choirs and provided an extensive output of choral compositions. This second album of Gál’s choral music offers a vivid cross-section of his music for chamber choir, featuring mixed voices, women’s voices and male-voice choir, both a cappella and with piano, and ranging across five decades.

The fascination of the Swedish composer Martin Skafte (b. 1980) with the 24 Préludes of Claude Debussy inspired 24 preludes from Skafte himself, with occasional oblique references to Debussy’s originals but using Skafte’s own musical language. Like Debussy, Skafte exploits the colors and sonorities of the piano but also he requires Lisztian virtuosity and pulls in a range of further influences, among them ragtime and Ligeti – and a sly sense of humor can often be detected in the background.

Heinrich Sutermeister (1910–95) belongs to the generation of Swiss composers after Bloch, Honegger, Martin and Schoeck. His operatic version of Romeo and Juliet soon spread his reputation far afield, and conductors as prominent as Bohm, Karajan and Sawallisch championed his works, although since his death his music has not had the attention it deserves. These four big-boned works – a powerful setting of Boethius, an extract from Romeo und Julia and two sets of moving love-letters from genuine historical figures in Renaissance, Baroque and Enlightenment Germany and Switzerland – attest to the acuity of his ear in balancing voice and large orchestra and confirm his instinct for drama.