Comparable to the likes of Prokofiev, Shoenberg, Bartok and Shostakovich, the piano concertos of Ernst Krenek (1900-1991) are important contributions to twentieth century piano repertoire. The first three piano concertos, featured here, were written between 1923 and 1946. Krenek displays an impressive use of twelve-tone technique. Pianist Mikhail Korzhev is active as an orchestral soloist, solo recitalist, and chamber musician. He has been a faculty member at Beverly Hills International Music Festival since 2008.

Throughout his long career Liszt’s songs – perhaps the most neglected part of his enormous output – took a radical approach to form: he eschewed convention in his search for a sincere musical response to each text. His free-spirited creativity meant that a single song would often call on a range of stylistic devices, among them bel canto vocal lines, unaccompanied recitative, orchestrally conceived piano textures and audacious harmonic procedures. This first recording of his songs by a bass voice brings out both the power and poetry of Liszt’s remarkable imagination. The American bass Jared Schwartz was born in Berne, Indiana, where he began piano lessons at the age of three, violin at seven and French horn at ten. He began a double major in pre-med and music at Bethel College, Indiana, then studied piano with Alexander Toradze and voice with Victoria Garrett, earning a graduate degree from the Eastman School of Music. For Toccata Classics he has already recorded albums of songs by Faure and Flegier.

REVIEW:

Schwartz's forte singing is most impressive, and his voice remains lustrously smooth and elegant in all registers. His vocal coloring, use of contrasting dynamics, and feeling for the text combine to make his readings thoroughly engaging. When he sings with gentleness and lyricism he weaves a magic spell, as in ‘Des Tages Laute Stimmen Schweigen’, which ends sublimely as he delivers the final line of the text (“As night embraces you with gentle silence”). It is stunning.

Mary Dibbern, who collaborated with him in his Flegier album and in preparing his Fauré album, does a superb job with Liszt’s often challenging accompaniment. She also wrote the comprehensive and informative notes for the release.

I learned to enjoy Liszt through his songs, especially his early high-flying Schiller and Petrarch settings, sung by tenors. I am now enjoying a voice that plumbs the sonic and textual depths of the songs.

-- American Record Guide

Ernst Krenek’s seven piano concertos – four for solo piano, one for two pianos, one with violin and one with organ – is one of the major concerto-series of the twentieth century, but perhaps also the least familiar. This second installment in their first complete recording reveals breath-taking bravura writing – in the virtuoso piano technique, the dazzling orchestration and the stylistic integration of serialism and good-natured recollection of Viennese tradition. Mikhail Korzhev is a pianist that “projects strength, atmosphere and the ability to tangle even the knottiest passages…” (International Record Review). He is equally active as a solo recitalist, performer with various chamber groups, a soloist with orchestras, and as a recording artist. The first installment in this series received enthusiastic reviews in Gramophone, Diapason, and many other sources, and instantly made it to the shortlist of best new releases by Sunday Times (London) and Fanfare magazine.

Joly Braga Santos (1924–88) was one of the most important composers in twentieth-century Portugal. In his early works his fondness for modal harmony, absorbed from the Portuguese masters of the Renaissance, and his busy counterpoint combine to make him sound surprisingly close to such particularly English composers as Vaughan Williams and Moeran. Although his harmonic language became more astringent with time, it retained a burly sense of humor and a powerful charge of energy, often infused with the spirit of Portuguese folk-dance.

Adolf Jensen (1837–79) is one of the major figures of German Romanticism, the composer of a large corpus of songs and piano music. Jensen’s musical language fuses the heritage of Schumann, Chopin and Liszt into an individual style distinguished by its melodic and lyrical appeal, and yet he has been almost entirely forgotten. This second in a series of recordings of his music hopes to restore his name to circulation. Erling Ragnar Eriksen was, until recently, professor of piano in the Department of Music and Dance at the University of Stavanger. This is his fourth album for Toccata Classics. Of the first, a recital of Alnæs piano music (TOCC0067) Peter Burwasser wrote in Fanfare: ‘Eriksen plays it with great panache and affection’; and in The Guardian Tim Ashley commented on the second, a recital of Alnæs songs (TOCC 0124): ‘They’re exquisitely performed by ultra-refined mezzo Ann-Beth Solvang and pianist Erling R. Eriksen’. In recent years Eriksen has given master-classes in Guangzhou, Nanjing, Paris, Pescara, Rome, Stockholm and Weimar. In 2000 was awarded the Grieg Prize for services to Edvard Grieg and his music.

Friedrich Gernsheim (1839–1916), born in Worms, on the Rhine, grew up to be one of the most formidable musicians of his age: composer, pianist, conductor and teacher. Even as a teenager, Gernsheim was attracting attention as a virtuoso-composer, earning comparisons with Mozart. The works here document the emergence of his own musical personality, from an early sonata, which has a Mozartian opening and a Beethovenian slow movement, via a dalliance with Schumann, until he reaches a mature style comparable to Brahms in its emotional range and depth.

Die helle Nacht (‘The Bright Night‘), the second opera by the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967), enjoyed only a single radio broadcast in 1935, the year of its completion, and then remained unheard until this recording. It is revealed as a passionate mixture of sexual jealousy, obsession and murderous revenge, until love and reason ultimately prevail. Flury responded with some of his most ardent music, poised between the late Romanticism of Richard Strauss and occasional more modernist touches that reveal an admiration for Alban Berg – with a further link to Vienna in Flury’s fondness for waltz rhythms.

The piano music of the Estonian composer Heino Eller (1887–1970), a total of 206 works, is not only the largest part of his output: it is also the largest body of works in Estonian classical music. But most of these pieces are unknown, even though the best of them are original contributions to the piano repertoire of the twentieth century, with Eller’s sensitive lyricism underpinned by gentle humor and an occasional epic tone. This seventh volume brings music from half a century of music, from 1912 to 1961 – mostly miniatures but each of them full of atmosphere and personality.

The four works for symphonic wind band composed by Peter Fischer – born in 1956, across the bay from San Francisco, in Martinez, California – are almost textbook examples of American eclecticism, mixing urban vibrancy with a sense of the timeless outdoors, bringing in flavors from jazz and rock and moving easily between vigorous dance-rhythms and sultry nightscapes. Dance, indeed, lies at the heart of most of this music, which gives the mambo, the tango, the tarantella and the waltz a new and spirited twist amid echoes of Stravinsky, Revueltas and Bernstein. In Fischer's Trumpet Concerto, soloist Jens Lindemann plays trumpet, cornet, and flügelhorn.

Henri Hardouin (1727–1808) was a chorister in Rheims Cathedral, rising swiftly through the ranks to become maître de chapelle – until the French Revolution disbanded religious establishments. As a priest he was in potential danger and seems to have gone into hiding until, in 1794, the death of Robespierre allowed him to resume his duties. Hardouin’s six four-part masses, published in 1772, are unusual for their time in being a cappella, and they enjoyed wide circulation in pre-Revolutionary France. Since then they have been roundly neglected – an omission this first complete recording intends to rectify.

It might seem that modern classical music rarely expresses happiness – but Aviv, a piano concerto by Joel Feigin (born in New York in 1951), suggests the warmth and optimism of the coming of spring. The angular, even anguished, essay for strings Surging Seas, by contrast, was inspired by the devastation wrought by the tsunamis of 2004 and 2011. The Two Songs from Twelfth Night have their origins in the tradition of American orchestral song established by Samuel Barber. And in the diptych Mosaic, also for strings, a first ‘panel’ of heartfelt lyricism is succeeded by an outburst of buoyant energy.

Grigory Krein (1879–1955), a member of an astonishing dynasty of Russian-Jewish musician-composers, was recognized by his contemporaries as one of the major composers of his day. His piano music charts a stylistic evolution from the early influence of Grieg, Reger (with whom he studied) and Debussy towards a more complex and chromatic language with harmonies that synthesize the sound-worlds of Skryabin and Szymanowski; there’s also an echo of the rhapsodic Celtic wildness of Bax. Indeed, all of these pieces are informed by a remarkable sense of energy – latent in some and given its head in others.

Three recent works by the English composer Arnold Griller (b. 1937) are joined here by the earliest music he still acknowledges, the gentle and touching Concerto Grosso for string orchestra (1955), which is informed by a serenity and wisdom uncommon in such a young composer. Like Berg’s Violin Concerto, Griller’s (2017) was born of his response to the loss of a young life, and shares Berg’s elegiac awareness of dying beauty; the Trumpet Concerto (2018), by way of deliberate contrast, accumulates energy and vivacity as it proceeds. Dances under an Autumn Sky (2017), subtitled ‘Orchestral Music in Six Scenes’, is a balletic blend of joie de vivre and intense instrumental drama, which shares Stravinsky’s fondness for rhythmic surprises and Tippett’s for angular, primal energy.

When Germany invaded Austria in 1938, Robert Furstenthal, born in 1920, took the path of many Viennese Jews and fled to the United States, where he made his living as an accountant; the fact that he had written music in his youth was soon forgotten. Reconnection, after 35 years, with the woman who had been his first love rekindled both that flame and his urge to compose, and from then on songs and chamber music flowed from his pen, preserving the spirit of fin-de-siecle Vienna under the Californian sun – ‘When I compose, I am back in Vienna’, he explained. He died in November 2016, aged 96, knowing that his lyrical, eloquent music was at last attracting the attention of both musicians and microphones.

Robert Fürstenthal's story is an extraordinary one, a kind of "fairy-tale" of the twentieth century. Born in 1920, when Germany invaded, Fürstenthal took the path of many Viennese Jews and fled to the United States where he made his living as an accountant. The fact that he had written a few songs in his youth was forgotten but after 35 years, he rediscovered the woman who had been his first love, it rekindled both the flame of love as well as the urge to compose. Hundreds of songs - achingly lovely songs, laden with an autumnal sense of loss - flowed from Fürstenthal's pen from that moment on, preserving the spirit of fin-de-siecle Vienna under the Californian sun. Just before Fürstenthal died in November, 2016, at the age of 96, he had the satisfaction of hearing his songs in these wonderful performances - a last-minute vindication by two young musicians carrying his music into the future.