The era of hi-fi and stereo recordings has brought forth a bumper crop of flute recitals, and at least two flutists whose recordings in number and sales rival those of our foremost piano and violin virtuosos, Jean-Pierre Rampai and James Gal way. But to the best of my knowledge neither they nor a host of other men and women who expertly toot the flute have brought forth such a thoroughly interesting and musically satisfying disc as this one. High praise must go to András Adorján (born in Budapest in 1944), whose fine technique is equaled by a profound sympathy for the extraordinary shifts in style and mood demanded by this novel program. More remarkable still is the playing of Alfons Kontarsky, whose realization of the piano part in Schubert's Introduction and Variations is a sort of revelation. He also plays with the light touch and simplicity required by the popular offerings of Philipp Friedrich Sucher (1789-1860), Beethoven, and (attr.) Chopin, and the subtleties of tonal shading required for the post-Debussyian composition by the late great pianist Walter Gieseking (1895-1956). At 21:34 it is the longest work here, exceeding Schubert's (easily the most famous and frequently played) by half a minute.

Tudor's elegantly natural digital recording took place in December 1991. Notes in English, French, and German are a model for such things, and the print is reader-friendly. The program is as generous in timing as it is interesting in concept. It is always a pleasure to have a mixture of old favorites and worthy novelties, especially when performed and presented with all-pervading excellence. An outstanding release.

-- Robert McColley, Fanfare

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

"The oft-recorded Haydn Concerto is vividly recorded with the signal completely unclouded. This reveals Tarkövi’s peach-tender full fat tone. This is on best display in the Andante of the Haydn which paves the way for the lickety-split allegro. The charmingly decorous two-movement Leopold Mozart Concerto features harpsichord continuo. Neruda’s Trumpet Concerto - like the Hummel work - returns us to the conventional three movement template. Prague-based Neruda wrote 18 symphonies, 10 violin concertos, one bassoon concerto, 34 trio-sonatas and, among much else, this trumpet concerto. It is a fluent work with some very eloquent noble invention in the opening Allegro and many touching and original turns in the solo line in the final Vivace. Hummel opens with sturm und drang before making way for some witty light-on-the-feet material. It is good to be reminded that Hummel wrote such a sweetly inclined concerto. Tarkövi is always pleasingly ripe-toned though he is not always ideally attentive to staccato demands. On the other hand mechanical noise from the pistons is imperceptible except once during the trills at the end of the first movement of the Hummel. There is much to enjoy here among these four concertos written between 1762 and 1803.

It is typical of Tudor that their booklet which is in three languages is a joy to use. It affords plenty of information about the music and the sensible font design and size is kind to the eyes."

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Schubert’s music is a natural human phenomenon, a simultaneous expression of unfathomable creation and the human soul; hope, reason and particularly longing exist in perfect happiness: an almost inconceivable wealth of melodies, rhythms and harmonies create a heartfelt musical world from which any unkindness is banished. Gilbert Schuchter’s outstanding merit lies in the fact that he is the first and so far only musician to play these works for piano in the full awareness of Franz Schubert’s lied creations, with their lyric and epic foundation and their dance element- in particular the waltz. Bar lines play no dominating role in Schubert, and freely modulating tempi are an indispensable component of any interpretation; this music is not elitist, knows no boundaries, “speaks all languages”. This is why this recording, made in 1968/1970 on a Bosendorfer grand piano in Vienna’s Casino Baumgartner Studio, is still as valid as ever in 2017.

As a performer on the hautboy, Giuseppe Sammartini, 'Londinese', was undoubtedly the greatest that the world had ever known. He contrived to produce such a tone as approached the nearest to that of the human voice. His Concerti grossi and his later sets of Concertos have a breadth of invention and sureness of purpose second only the music of Handel. (General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 1776). This album presents neglected works by the lesser-known, younger brother of Giovanni Battista Sammartini, Giuseppe Sammartini.

It is a shame that this unhackneyed collection of French music for oboe and piano has been overlooked. The Swiss company Tudor apply their usual exemplary production standards to recording and documentation. Artistic matters are in the hands of two dedicated musicians. Bamberg-born Mayer produces a full-throated quality, but going by the initial Fauré tracks, tends to scout over emotional expression. The Sicilienne could have been touching if the emotional agenda had been painted in. The Pavane feels rushed. The Berceuse is on the other hand quite pleasing with the note production being both curvaceous and penetrating. Wisniewska’s piano sound is rounded; not harsh. The Saint-Saens Sonata seems congealed in the first movement but in the other two is perfectly gracious. There is a gamin cheeky finale with strange echoes of Beethoven’s Fifth. Is Saint-Saens lampooning Beethoven?

Then we are back to Fauré with a sequence of five song transcriptions. Après un rêve is heavy-lidded and weighed down with sleepy contentment. Le secret is suitably grave with the music carrying a faintly melancholy tincture. Au bord de l'eau explores an elusive mood though the faint clicking of the oboe’s key mechanism can be heard and does return you to earth. Clair de lune is a brisk and pleasant stroll of a piece; not ardent. Mayer’s oboe here takes on the opulence of its cousin up the road, the clarinet. There are two Pierné’s represented in this recital Gabriel’s Serenade has an Iberian accent – more Massenet than Ravel. The Pièce sounds rather Tchaikovskian with a surprisingly brusque role for the piano. Fantasie Pastorale is by Paul Pierné. It radiates elysian calm – superbly done by the two players. The Satie pieces are well enough known. Here that sentimentality deficit I mentioned earlier is again in evidence though I did note that Wisniewska’s insight provided emotional contrast – listen to the way she gives face to a simple note cell in Gymnopédie 2. Bozza’s Fantaisie Pastorale is so much more than the shallow display piece I had braced myself for. It surveys stygian Bax territory, moves into showers of fanciful curlicues and culminates in a magically poised and elfin close. Koechlin’s Au Loin is for English horn and piano. It is splendidly ermine-dark and languid. The melodic material might remind some listeners of Bax’s In The Faery Hills.


-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

Classical Music

RAFF Violin Concertos: No. 1, op. 161 (ed. Wilhelmj); No. 2, op. 206. Cavatina, op. 85/3 (orch. Singer). Ungrischer (à la Hongroise), op. 203/5 • Michaela Paetsch Neftel (vn); Hans Stadlmair, cond; Bamberg SO • TUDOR 7086 (70:05)

Swiss-born Joseph Joachim Raff (1822 82) occupies an ambiguous position in music history. He was a hugely prolific composer of symphonies (12), quartets (7), songs, operas, sonatas, suites, and concertos, but even so his 216 opus numbers are swollen with loads of salon pieces. He had the reputation of being difficult, but managed to be personally and professionally respected by Liszt as well as Clara Schumann, Brahms, as well as Tchaikovsky. Somehow he combined the influences of Mendelssohn and Wagner. In his time he was regarded as a great composer, but upon his death was reduced to being the author of the Cavatina and The Mill, a string quartet excerpt. His reputation revived a bit in our time, when some conductors became interested in a few of the symphonies. Now we have this recording of two large-scale, technically very demanding violin concertos.

Inventive without being actually tuneful, both are marked by robust, even brassy orchestration, and solo parts then get right to business after brief orchestral introductions. And, alas, both soon clog really fine melodic ideas with unyielding and bombastic technical violin passagework, some of a difficulty to suggest that Raff looked to Spohr, Ernst, and Paganini for ideas about violin-writing. The Concerto No. 1 in B Minor of 1870-71 has a second movement that at first sounds truly inspired. It opens with hushed, muted strings, rich and colorful chords, and a soaring violin heard over a wind choir. But alas, Raff soon dissipates this sumptuous effect with tiresome violinistic embroidery. The third movement opens with a trumpet blare, lapsing into a mock-serious march that the violin mocks even more by it playing straight against a totally effete pizzicato accompaniment. An odd, novel passage for drum leads into a short cadenza, followed by a grand finale of octaves, double-stops, fast scales, and other such virtuoso fireworks. An inconsistent but entertaining work, and an impressive showcase for the American-born soloist.

The Concerto No. 2 in A Minor of 1877 has a pretentious program—the struggle of the soul— but the listener mostly hears the calisthenics of the violinist. Again, Michaela Paetsch Neftel has truly mastered this bristling solo part to the point of audible comfort, with nothing cautious or tentative about her approach. The second movement, meant to convey consolation, warmth, hope, and peace, is tender, wistful, and really lovable, and it is prettier than that of Concerto No. 1. The third movement's program, joy and pleasure, ends up sounding mostly just frothy, but with contrasting passages of great emotional warmth and impact (Raff could support a theme with affecting harmonies worthy of the best of Bruch or Saint-Saëns), but again a tendency for the solo part to simply be overloaded with difficulties rather than just sing. In the cadenza there is a high-flying reminder of Paganini's Concerto No. 1. On balance, a successful display work but not music of the first rank. The disc is filled out with nicely turned performances of the Cavatina of 1859 and Raff's own orchestration of a charming piece from his Volker Suite.

Both concertos have their exasperating moments, and I'll be tempted to just skip the first movements in future hearings; but they hang together structurally, melodically, and as show-off pieces, with many excellent opportunities for Paetsch Neftel to shine. She came in ninth in the 1985 Queen Elisabeth of Belgium competition, not, as the notes say, third, but she certainly sounds like a topflight artist on this release, which provides a welcome revisit to the entire genre of the Romantic violin concerto.

-- David K. Nelson, Fanfare

Includes work(s) by various composers.

Classical Music

Classical Music

BRAHMS Piano Sonata No. 2. Scherzo, op. 4. 4 Ballades, op. 10 • Eric Le Van (pn) • GALLO 1203 (60:56)


RAFF Sonatillen for violin and piano, op. 99. 6 Morceaux de salon for violin and piano , op. 85 • Michaela Paetsch Neftel (vn); Eric Le Van (pn) • TUDOR 7109 (67:45)


I’m reviewing these two CDs under cover of a combined double headnote because neither of them is new—the Brahms dates from 2001, the Raff from 2003. The Brahms, however, is a follow-up to an earlier Gallo disc containing Brahms’s First and Third sonatas, which was reviewed by Bernard Jacobson in 22:2. As for the Raff Tudor disc, to the best of my knowledge, this was the first, and thus far, only recording of the composer’s op. 99 Sonatillen and op. 85 Morceaux complete. Spread over two CPO CDs, violinist Ingolf Turban recorded the Sonatillen Nos. 4 thru 7 (on 999769) and the Nos. 1 thru 3, 9, and 10 (on 777006). Both were reviewed by Robert Maxham in 28:2 and 31:3, respectively; but as you can see, No. 8 is conspicuously absent. As for the Morceaux —there are six of them—only the third in the set, the “Cavatina,” shows up on a Profil recording by Patrice Fontanarosa, which was likewise reviewed by Maxham in 32:5.


Let me address Le Van’s Brahms CD first. I haven’t heard the prequel containing the First and Third sonatas, but this album containing the Second Sonata, the E?-Minor Scherzo, and the Four Ballades is a real stunner. Launching into the powerful opening of the Sonata with hands and fingers of steel, Le Van commands enormous muscular strength as well as fearless musical conviction. Brahms may have been only 20 when he composed this formidable score, but it strides with a manly swagger that would turn into a somewhat more modest bearing in his later works for solo piano. Le Van pulls out all the stops and goes full throttle in the big, showy passages, but he also demonstrates he’s capable of sustaining the long line in Brahms’s gloriously sweeping Romantic gestures. The recording, too, made in Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts, with Le Van playing a Hamburg Steinway D, is simply amazing, one of the best piano discs I’ve heard. The instrument’s bass has tremendous depth to it, and the acoustic of the hall is open and spacious without imparting any blurring reverb.


The E?-Minor Scherzo actually predates the Second Sonata by a year or two, though it was published with a later opus number. Many of Brahms’s recognizable fingerprints are on the score, but it seems to be a bit lacking in the formal discipline and coherence the composer would soon come to impose on his works. The piece is said to be influenced by Chopin’s scherzos, an allegation Brahms denied. Le Van certainly plays it as brilliantly as anyone I know, which would include Julius Katchen, Wilhelm Backhaus, and, more recently, Hardy Rittner, who has been working his way through Brahms’s solo piano music on instruments of the composer’s day.


The Four Ballades offer more recorded versions to choose from than does the Scherzo, and while Le Van’s performances are beautifully done—caressed by an obvious love of the music and the Romantic poetry that inspired it—I can’t say that his readings surpass those by Nicholas Angelich, one of my favorite Brahms pianists, on Virgin. Still, Le Van is quite wonderful in what is some of Brahms’s most lyrical writing, and his knockout performance of the Second Sonata makes this a must-have disc for all fans of Brahms’s piano music.


Moving on to the Raff violin and piano album on Tudor, I freely admit to not having heard the above-cited CPO CDs featuring violinist Ingolf Turban, and to having had no prior knowledge of these pieces. So, naturally, my inquisitive mind wanted to know, “What in the heck is a sonatille ?” Was it some sort of fanciful term coined by Raff to describe a diminutive sonata? And if so, was a sonatille bigger or smaller than a sonatina? Or, was it an entirely different species having no relation to a sonata at all, just as a tomatillo is unrelated to a tomato?


The answer, dear reader, is that Raff originally composed these 10 movements in 1861 for piano solo, publishing them as three separate mini-sonatas in A Minor, G Minor, and C Major, containing three, four, and three movements, respectively. It wasn’t until 19 years later, in 1880, that he disjoined them into individual numbers arranged for violin and piano, and published them as the Sonatillen , op. 99.


At first I was a bit hesitant to categorize these pieces as salon music, though some of the movements, like the Cavatina (No. 3), would substitute in a pinch for a sugar fix if you were hypoglycemic. Other movements, however—mainly the fast-paced ones—are quite virtuosic and technically tricky sounding for both violin and piano. But then I realized that my hesitation at calling these pieces salon music was based on the unfounded notion that there’s something second-rate and bourgeois about the genre. Nothing could be further from the truth, when you consider that great composer/performers, such as Chopin, Paganini, and Liszt dazzled European salon audiences with highly virtuosic works.


So yes, Raff’s Sonatillen are salon pieces in the best sense of the term, and even more so are the Six Morceaux , op. 85, whose official title is Six Morceaux de Salon . Today, of course, Joachim Raff is not held in the same high esteem he enjoyed in his own day. He was very prolific, some would say too prolific, producing over 200 works with opus numbers, and another 50-plus without opus numbers, in just about every musical genre imaginable. Yet, his music often falls short of genuine inspiration and originality, and his importance in the historical scheme of things rapidly declined after his death. By the 20th century, Walter William Cobbett (1847–1937), an admirer of Raff, could write of the composer in his Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music , “He composed at rare intervals music which alternates between extreme brilliance and sentimental tenderness, but he also poured out incessantly masses of pot-boilers with which, unfortunately, his name is only too often associated.”


Violinist Michaela Paetsch Neftel is a native of Colorado Springs. After early home training by her parents, she studied under Szymon Goldberg at Yale University and at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She made her debut as a soloist at the age of 11, playing the Mendelssohn Concerto. A Wikipedia entry claims that Neftel is the first female violinist to record Paganini’s 24 Caprices. That appears to be true. Her recording, originally released on Teldec, was made in 1987, a year before Midori made her recording for Sony. I haven’t heard Neftel’s Paganini, but based on this 2003 Tudor recording of works by Raff, I’d have to say that she certainly possesses the technical wherewithal to play anything she likes; for as indicated above, these Raff pieces are quite virtuosic sounding, and not just for the violin. There’s quite a bit of fancy finger-work for the pianist as well, which Eric Le Van tosses off with stylish aplomb.


No claim is made that the pieces on this disc constitute great music, but taking them for what they are, they make for over an hour’s worth of pleasurable and entertaining listening. Or, to quote from Eric Le Van’s self-authored album note, “It becomes possible to set aside everything that Raff was not, and simply appreciate him on his own terms.” Amen to that, and recommended.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Classical Music

MUDGE Concertos: No. 1 in D; 1 No. 2 in B?; No. 3 in G; No. 4 in d; No. 5 in B?; No. 6 in F. 2 Non nobis, Domine 3,4,5 • Dominik Kiefer (vn, cond); Henry Moderlak (tpt); 1 Marc Meisel (org); 2 Michael Feyfar (ten); 3 Raitis Grigalis (bar); 4 González Arroniz (bs); 5 Capriccio Basel (period instruments) • TUDOR 7173 (75:41)


A graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford, Reverend Richard Mudge (1718­–1763) was appointed curate of both Great and Little Packington in 1741. He may have been private chaplain to Lord Guernsey, who would later become the Earl of Aylesford. The family had significant musical connections, the best known being Handel’s friend and librettist, Charles Jennens. In 1750, Mudge obtained a position at St. Martin’s, Birmingham, where he became a popular preacher. In 1756, we find him in the post of rector at Bedworth, where he lived until his death. Even though Mudge’s liturgical career is well documented, there is almost nothing pertaining to his musical pursuits.


Two collections of Mudge’s music have recently been discovered; both seem to have their origins during his years in service to Lord Aylesford. Most of the material appears to be preliminary versions of this set of concertos, published in 1749. Concertos for strings were quite popular at the time, selling well in a market geared to the desires of talented amateur performers. While the solo parts require performers whose skills are well above the mean, many provincial music societies included collections such as this in their repertoire. The set is scored in seven parts: a concertino of two violins and cello and a ripieno of two violins, viola, bass, and basso continuo . The First Concerto adds a trumpet to the ripieno and the Sixth includes a solo organ part that is modeled along the lines of Handel’s organ concertos. The remaining concertos follow the slow-fast-slow-fast pattern found in the concertos of Corelli and Geminiani, indicating that Mudge may have spent some time studying works by those composers in Lord Aylesford’s collection.


The text of the three-part motet, Non nobis, Domine , comes from the opening of Psalm 113. The two melodic components­—by Belgian Phillip van Wilder and Englishman William Byrd—were quite popular with Jacobites who refused to attend services of the Church of England. It expressed their solidarity with the Stuart dynasty and their rejection of the reigning monarch. As a footnote of sorts, the first appearance in English of both the music and text was around 1620.


The Baroque orchestra Capriccio Basel was founded in 1999, and their first decade has included concerts in France, Hungary, the United States, and appearances at several German festivals. Their collaborators include Andrew Parrott, Monica Huggett, and Gottfried von der Goltz. The orchestra’s Web site includes other releases, including one of concertos by William Hayes, which I hope to have in hand in the near future.


The music is not revelatory; it walks down a path that has been previously traveled by the likes of other Englishmen including John Stanley, Charles Avison, and John Hebden. But to Capriccio Basel, Mudge’s music is singular, and their beautifully manicured interpretations compel much admiration. Under the direction of Concert Master Dominik Kiefer, the orchestra and soloists exhibit a fine sense of elegance and generous vitality as well. Capriccio Basel displays a rare sense of dedication in this release; it is apparent at every turn by way of their meticulous attention to each and every detail, be it written or implied. Impeccable ensemble and precise intonation are the hallmarks of these praiseworthy sessions. These passionate and sympathetic interpretations have brought belated credit to this consistently charming music, music that has been awaiting rediscovery for far too long.


FANFARE: Michael Carter

Classical Music