The 'Württenberg' Sonatas are very demanding, clearly intended for skilful, professional keyboard players. The sonatas have almost symphonic or even operatic dimensions and attitudes; in fact they may almost be called romantic, conjuring up fantastic and colourful landscapes. The first three of the set are here performed on Bach's own favourite instrument, the clavichord, by Miklós Spányi, whose indefatigable work in bringing the keyboard music of C.P.E. bach to a wider audience has impressed both critics and music lovers alike.

In these five sonatas from the 1760s, the period prior to C.P.E. Bach's departure from Frederick the Great's court in Berlin, we find some of his most attractive writing, in the opinion of Darrell M. Berg, author of the liner notes to this disc and general editor of the complete edition of the composer's works. The fabulous landscapes and high drama of so many earlier works (such as the Württemberg Sonatas on volumes 16 and 17 of this series) are left behind, as are the lyrical intimacy and simplicity of the so-called 'easy' sonatas. Or rather: these qualities are incorporated in the 'new' style and a certain synthesis is achieved. The result is a style featuring Bach's familiar energy and vivacity but with greater equilibrium, resulting in compositions we might - for want of a better term - call more 'classical'. Miklós Spányi has acquired a reputation as a leading interpreter and firm advocate of this music that stands between the Baroque and the Classical period, and which is less well-known than it deserves partly because of the difficulty of classifying it. He has here chosen to perform it on C.P.E. Bach's own favourite keyboard instrument, the clavichord. Spányi's ground-breaking work in this series, and in the parallel one of the same composer's keyboard concertos, will be familiar to many lovers of early keyboard music. It has been called 'a major contribution to recorded keyboard literature' in American Record Guide, to single out one single disc, Volume 17 of this series was selected as Editor's Choice in Gramophone, and described as 'the answer to clavichord fans' dreams'.

Classical Music

Miklós Spányi is one of the world’s most acknowledged scholars and performers of the works of C.P.E Bach. On this release he splits Bach’s large “Fortsetzung” Sonatas over two discs and includes the embellished versions that Bach may have intended as study material for his students.

This disc completes the set of CPE Bach’s Fortsetzung Sonatas, Wq51 that began in Volume 26 in this series. Although the sonatas were not published together with the composer's own variants on them, such alternative versions exist in manuscript, and splitting this set of large-scale works over two discs, Miklós Spányi also includes recordings of these varied or embellished versions that may represent the composer's revisions but could equally well have been intended as study material for his students.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach published the first collection in his series 'for Connaisseurs and Amateurs' in 1779, at the age of 65, and the sixth and final in 1787, a year before his death. Throughout the series he continues to develop the three genres which are featured in it – sonata, rondo and fantasia. In the sixth collection, the fantasias and rondos continue to resemble each other in structure and in stylistic features: abrupt tempo changes, disruptive rhythms, and constant harmonic non sequiturs. Bach gives them ample dimensions, but as in previous collections he continues to reduce the length of the sonatas, to the point that Sonata No. 1 is the shortest work of the collection, although it is in three distinct movements. On this amply-filled album, Miklós Spányi also includes four other works from Carl Philipp's last decade which in various ways underline the composer's boundless curiosity. The Sonata in G major, Wq 65/48 was composed for an experimental keyboard instrument with a bowing device coupled to it – a 'Bogenclavier' – while Bach in the set of variations Wq 118/9 gives us his own take on La Folia, the harmonic scheme that almost a century earlier had inspired composers such as Corelli, Marin Marais and Vivaldi, as well as his own father, in the famous ‘Peasant Cantata’.

This disc features solo keyboard arrangements of works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach originally scored for other instruments. In the second half of the eighteenth century the demand for keyboard music increased rapidly, as musical skills became a social requisite for young ladies of the upper classes. Providing compositions for these new keyboard players was financially profitable, but Bach also had another reason for welcoming arrangements: keyboard instruments were his favourite medium. The seven short pieces on this well-filled disc all exist in versions for various small groups of instruments or, in some cases, for mechanical instruments. In his comments, Spanyi suggests that they could in fact be the original versions, perhaps written down in keyboard notation as drafts for further versions, and later arranged by Bach on for various ensembles. Miklos Spanyi has grouped these short pieces around four larger-scale works, of which two are arrangements of symphonies, probably not arranged by or for the composer himself. The solo keyboard arrangements of the two concertos, made by Bach himself and easier to play than the original concertos, were intended for amateurs. On this disc, Spanyi uses an extremely versatile and colourful tangent piano, a very popular instrument in the second half of the 18th century. This particular instrument was built in 1998, after a model from 1799.

With this recording, volume 42 of the complete music for solo keyboard by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Miklos Spanyi continues his exploration of transcriptions of concertos originally written for keyboard and orchestra, to which he adds some movements from early versions of sonatas (the standard versions of which appear on earlier volumes in this series). Four of the six concertos from the Wq 43 collection are featured here (the remaining two appear on the previous volume, BIS-2397). When Bach published this set of six concertos for keyboard and orchestra in 1772, he also prepared a version for solo keyboard intended for moderately advanced amateurs who could then play them at home, without orchestra, thus opening up a much larger market. A smart move by the shrewd businessman that Bach was. About his decision to record these works on a clavichord rather than a tangent piano as previously, Spanyi says that it allows 'nearly infinite possibilities for fine dynamic shadings' and that 'the required dynamic contrasts can be emphasized even better than on other keyboard instruments of the period'. Spanyi adds that this release is a tribute to the clavichord, and especially to his own instrument, built by Joris Potvlieghe.

C.P.E Bach's 'Zweyte Fortsetzung' Sonatas are a sequel to his famous Sonatas with Varied Reprises (1760). Of the six 'Fortsetzung' Sonatas, the first three appear here. The pre-sequel set had proven successful, possibly because it included written-out ‘improvisations’ for repeated sections - a feature, oddly, more or less absent from its two sequels. However, an alternative version exists of the first movement of Sonata No.3, which Miklós Spányi includes here, together with two unrelated 1760s sonatas. The second sequel also includes two stylistically contrasting 1740s era sonatas.

Some of C.P.E. Bach’s large number of single-movement pieces for solo keyboard were published in collections, beginning with the Probestücke (Study Pieces) of 1753, included on Vol. 22 in this series. Here Miklós Spányi presents three other sets intended primarily for didactic use: the two collections of Kurze und leichte Clavierstücke and the 6 Sonatine nuove. Of the 28 pieces contained in them, only one is longer than 3 minutes, the majority being less than two minutes long. Not all his shorter pieces were intended for studying; the closing Abschied for one has an almost private character.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach had begun his series für Kenner und Liebhaber – ‘for Connaisseurs and Amateurs’ – with the traditional formula of a set of six sonatas, but became more unconventional in the second and third collection in which he alternated three sonatas with three rondos. With the fourth instalment, published in 1783, he went further still as he increased the number of pieces to seven and added ‘free fantasias’ to the sonatas and rondos. Continuing his survey of Bach’s keyboard music – and the Kenner und Liebhaber series – Miklós Spányi performs the collection on a tangent piano, an early form of the piano with strings that are struck by small wooden slips (‘tangents’). The basic sound of the instrument is reminiscent of the harpsichord, but this can be modified in a number of ways through the use of various devices. Spányi rounds off the programme with two further works, of which the Sonata in F major, Wq 65/19 may be the very last keyboard composition that Bach completed during his lifetime.

This album features solo keyboard arrangements of works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach originally scored for other instruments. In the second half of the eighteenth century the demand for keyboard music increased rapidly, as musical skills became a social requisite for young ladies of the upper classes. To provide compositions for these new keyboard players was financially profitable, but Bach also had another reason for welcoming arrangements: the keyboard instruments were his favorite medium, and he devoted himself to making them into solo instruments as important as the violin and other melody instruments. The eighteen short pieces on this well-filled disc all exist in versions for various small groups of instruments or, in some cases, for mechanical instruments such as the barrel organ. Miklós Spányi has grouped them around three larger-scaled works, of which two are arrangements of symphonies while the Concerto in F major for solo keyboard may in fact be an original composition: a version for keyboard and orchestra exists, but is possibly a later development. In the case of several of the arrangements it is uncertain who made them – some of them only survive in the hand of one of Bach’s admirers. In his liner notes to the disc, Spányi proposes that they could in fact be the original versions, however, as he sees a striking similarity to Bach’s other, indisputably genuine small keyboard pieces.

On the 3rd January 2019, only a few weeks after winning the 10th Hamamatsu International Piano Competition, Can Çakmur returned to the ACT CITY Concert Hall in Hamamatsu in order to record his début release. Can’s chosen programme reflects his wide-ranging musical interests – from Haydn’s late F-minor set of variations and Schubert’s early Sonata in E flat to Sacrifice from 2017, composed by Fuyuhiko Sasaki for the competition. Also included on the album are Liszt’s transcription of the Beethoven song Adelaide, and Black Earth by Can’s compatriot, the Turkish pianist and composer Fazil Say. Born in 1997, Can Çakmur (pronounced Djahn Tchakmur) studied in his native Ankara as well as in Paris, and is currently a student at the University of Music Franz Liszt in Weimar. He has performed widely in Turkey and has a particular interest in spreading classical music to a wider audience. But recent successes, which include a first prize at the 2017 Scottish International Piano Competition, are leading to an increasingly international career with appearances at prestigious venues such as the Salle Cortot in Paris and Usher Hall in Edinburgh, as well as an extensive tour of Japan in the spring of 2019. For the present release, Can Çakmur has chosen to perform on the same instrument that he chose to play throughout the Hamamatsu competition, a Shigeru Kawai SK-EX full concert grand.

That Baïlèro, a shepherd’s song from the highlands of Auvergne sung in the Occitan dialect of the area, should become a favorite with singers ranging from Victoria de los Angeles to Sarah Brightman by way of Renée Fleming and Karita Mattila, is all because of Marie-Joseph Canteloube de Malaret. As a budding composer in Paris in the 1900s, Canteloube was unable to interest himself in the various musical cliques and currents. Instead he looked for inspiration in Auvergne in central France where he was born, starting to collect the songs of the farmers and shepherds that lived in the mountainous region. But he did so as a composer rather than a musicologist, and between 1923 and 1954 he published a total of thirty Chants d’Auvergne, arranged, harmonized and sumptuously orchestrated. The result is, one might say, idealized folk music: Canteloube largely respects the melodic line of the originals, but adds instrumental introductions, interludes and postludes, and gives an important role to the woodwind section. For the present disc, Carolyn Sampson and Pascal Rophé have selected 25 of the songs – ranging from love songs and lullabies to working songs and laments. They perform them together with Tapiola Sinfonietta, bringing sparkle to Canteloube's luxurious scores halfway between the impressionism of Debussy and the bucolic lyricism of d'Indy.

Classical Music

For her debut album, Karen Gomyo has joined forces with guitarist Ismo Eskelinen in a programme offering fireworks as well as graceful tenderness. A violin virtuoso as well as an expert guitar player, Niccolo Paganini wrote a number of works for the two instruments together. He thus forms a natural point of departure as Gomyo and Eskelinen embark on a journey some hundred years backwards in history, and offer works by three other famous Italian violinist-composers. Neither the violin sonatas by Vivaldi and Locatelli nor Corelli’s celebrated ‘La Follia’ were written specifically with the guitar in mind. They are instead provided with so-called basso continuo accompaniments, to be performed on various chord-playing instruments, such as the harpsichord or the organ. Larger continuo ensembles might also include a lute or a guitar, and it is to this tradition that Ismo Eskelinen harks back as he performs his own realizations of these accompaniments. With one exception, the works by Paganini are on the other hand intended for the combination of violin and guitar – or, in the case of the Grand Sonata, ‘per chitarra e violino’. The centrepiece of the disc is formed by the famous 24th Caprice, provided by the composer with a guitar accompaniment and renamed Variazioni di bravura. Another favourite closes the disc, as Karen Gomyo and Ismo Eskelinen perform their version for violin and guitar of Il carnevale di Venezia, Paganini’s take on a Neapolitan folk song.

Classical Music

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Naples’ fame as a musical center attracted travelers, composers, instrumentalists and virtuoso singers alike. Among the aspiring musicians, the most highly-trained and sought-after were the castrati, promising boys aged between 8 and 12 who were subjected to an operation intended to preserve the exceptionally pure timbre of their treble voice. Forever virginal beings whose superhuman voices mesmerized their listeners, they were nicknamed angiolilli, ‘little angels’, and sang in the most important churches and theatres of ‘Castrapolis’, a term coined to describe the southern capital and its high concentration of castrato sopranos.

Nicolò Balducci is one of the rapidly rising countertenors and sopranists of his generation. Together with the ensemble Dolci Affetti, directed by the renowned recorder player Dan Laurin, he here performs arias and cantatas by Hasse, Porsile, Sarro and Alessandro Scarlatti. All four composers were associated with Naples and knew how to highlight these extraordinary voices, at a time when opera and the chamber cantata represented the most fashionable musical genres both in Italy and abroad. The program is completed with a concerto for harpsichord by Domenico Auletta, with Anna Paradiso performing the solo part.

Classical Music

With his tango nuevo, Astor Piazzolla has been welcomed into the world of classical music in a way that no other ‘non-classical’ composer has experienced. His music is played in concert halls around the world, and has been arranged for the most varied forces: symphony orchestra, string quartet, brass ensemble, mandolin orchestra, harpsichord… Taking their name from Piazzolla’s Escualo (‘Shark’), written in 1979 for his Quinteto Tango Nuevo, the five musicians that make up ESCUALO5 have a different approach, replicating the formation that Piazzolla performed with for much of his career: bandoneon, violin, piano, guitar and double bass.

The aim isn’t to recreate Piazzolla’s own performances, however – based in Munich but hailing from respectively Brazil, Germany, Greece and Belarus, the members are soloists in their own right, bringing their individual talents as improvisers and arrangers to the recordings. The program that ESCUALO5 have devised for their first album includes some much-loved as well as less familiar pieces for the quintet setup – Primavera Porteña, Soledad, Adiós Nonino, Fracanapa – as well as arrangements of Tango Suite and Histoire du Tango, originally for two guitars and flute and guitar, respectively.

REVIEWS:

Several of the pieces are arranged for new combinations, the Tango Suite for guitar and piano, and the Histoire du Tango, the masterful tracing of tango styles since 1900, for accordion, guitar, and double bass. The biggest thing is that without violating Piazzolla's musical texts, the group brings to his music a new and intense spirit. It is as if, having been established as part of the classical canon, Piazzolla's music is now subject to what has been called the chain of interpretation. It's a tremendously exciting release, consisting of Piazzolla standards like the Primavera Porteña from the Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas and lesser-known pieces like Fracanapa; Escualo5 adds something new to every single one, and the album will appeal to heavy Piazzolla collectors and newbies alike.

-- AllMusic.com

The release of a new recording of music by Piazzolla is, in my opinion, always a very welcome occurrence. Here we have passionate performances from the ensemble Esucalo5 which consists of violin, accorion, guitar, piano and double bass. Alongside the more familiar and extensive Tango Suite and Histoire du Tango is another longer piece Contrabajisimo (unknown to me) and a number of shorter pieces. A lovely production.

-- Lark Reviews

Classical Music

Luigi Cherubini was the Napoleon of the music world. Like the "little corporal" (who was, by the way, a great admirer), he was a Frenchified Italian who for years reigned at the helm of the Paris Conservatoire, the most prestigious institution of its kind in Europe, just as Napoleon dominated France. Unlike his less fortunate compatriot, however, Cherubini survived the restoration of the monarchy, living out his 82 years in honor and comfort, becoming one of the first composers to actually write his own Requiem Mass (in our own century, Frank Martin was another). As a composer, his reputation is kept alive solely by the opera Medea, one of Maria Callas' major vehicles, and in the instrumental realm, by his six late string quartets. Fastidiously crafted and supremely musical, these quartets recall Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart in their superior thematic workmanship and classical sense of balance. They've ranked among the best-kept secrets of quartet lovers for years, and only the comparative dearth of recordings has kept them from a wider public. The complete set appeared on Deutsche Grammophon for about 15 minutes several years ago--if you blinked you probably missed it--so kudos to BIS for not only undertaking this worthy project, but also for the determination to keep it in print! The Quartetto David sounds like the best group to come out of Italy since the old Quartetto Italiano, and they do the music proud, playing with sensitivity, taste, and a real singing tone. --David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

REVIEWS:
Fanfare (1-2/00, pp.232-233) - "...The Third Quartet has an unusually bouncy opening movement for a minor-key work, and the playing here is a beath of fresh air....As a Cherubini enthusiast, I welcome the David Quartet recordings wholeheartedly..."

After Songs of Solitude (BIS-2553), a project designed by Hiyoli Togawa at a time when Covid forced people across the world into isolation (released in March 2021), the Japanese-Australian violist now presents another themed album focusing on the situation of children. During the pandemic, she kept thinking of the many children who do not have a loving home and were forced to stay at home, and so were exposed helplessly to violence, hunger and poverty.

As with her previous disc, she commissioned works on the theme of childhood from composers around the world. Thirteen of them, from Europe, Asia, North America and Australia, answered the call and embarked on a journey into childhood. The result is a collection of lullabies, childhood memories and adventures. Playful, wild, silent, funny, serious or dreamy, these works are musical pleas for the rights of children around the world. Hiyoli Togawa combines them with the Allemandes from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for solo cello. Each of these Allemandes presents a new character, opening a very special dance universe. They invite us to surrender ourselves to the genuine and undisguised joy of playing and perhaps, almost, to lose ourselves in it – to find ourselves.

Includes work(s) for cello and piano by various composers. Soloists: Steven Isserlis, Stephen Hough, Simon Callow.

Rather than an attempt to depict a reality-based musical view of China, pianist Jenny Lin's program seems designed to show how fantasy tends to mix with reality in many Western composers' attempts to evoke the flavor of a far-off, exotic land that held strong fascination. Of course, this fascination with the Orient in general began centuries ago with Europeans' first awareness of music, styles, food, and art, an awareness that grew to spawn periodic fads and influence fashions. Rulers stocked their palaces with treasures brought from the far east; Puccini and Gilbert and Sullivan celebrated this attention and many other composers included or tried to include elements of what they thought was oriental "flavor" in some of their works. Most often, however, the result was as much like real Chinese as the Moo Goo Gai Pan from your local takeout.


Lin has chosen a varied and eminently colorful program that includes many unfamiliar works--but no one can complain that this isn't one of the more engaging, intriguing, original, and entertaining piano recordings to come along in the past year. And pianist Lin is a wonderful musician, in total technical command of this long (nearly 80 minutes) and formidable program. And (as long as we're on the subject) she imbues the music with an enticing mix of variously scented spices that truly bring out the unique, if rarely authentic flavors of each composer's creation. As you might expect the pentatonic scale and its permutations are a ubiquitous presence, a feature that may have seemed merely curious a century ago but now comes off as more than a little cartoonish and hackneyed. But it still can be made charming and even pretty, as in Martinu's The Fifth Day of the Fifth Moon, or sensuous, as in the surprising, Debussyian Lotus Land by Cyril Scott. Morton Gould's Pieces of China is a kind of Pictures at an Exhibition for the Kodak age. The idiom is a hybrid of borrowings from popular music styles (especially jazz) and the Western composer's "do-it-yourself Chinese music fake book"--but it's an absolutely charming condensation of cliché and postcard images, from "The Great Wall" to "Puppets" to "Slow Dance-Lotus".


Other highlights include Anton Arensky's Étude sur un theme chinois Op. 25 No. 3, a great encore piece that whirls and swirls its way through four exciting minutes; Percy Grainger's Beautiful Fresh Flower, loaded to overflowing with open fourths and pentatonic melodies; John Adams' predictably busy-but-going-nowhere evocation of China Gates; and Albert Ketèlby's In a Chinese Temple Garden, complete with gong. The prize for most authentic goes to Alexander Tcherepnin's Five ('Chinese') Concert Études Op. 52. The composer not only lived in the Far East for nearly three years in the 1930s, but he married a young Chinese concert pianist, Lee Hsien-Ming, for whom the etudes were written. Inventive and artful in their use of real Chinese melodies and impressions of Chinese instruments, these pieces have been virtually ignored by pianists but, especially as Lin presents them, they also deserve serious attention by others. Lin's fluid legatos, skillfully calibrated dynamics, and polished rapid fingering technique really shine here.


In the "works that have Chinese names but nothing to do with China" category are Abram Chasins' Rush Hour in Hong Kong, which from the sound of it just as well could be San Francisco or London or any other city; Ferruccio Busoni's Turandots Frauengemach, which is based on the folk tale Turandot, but whose theme is the very English tune "Greensleeves" which, according to the excellent liner notes, Busoni mistakenly thought was Chinese; and Rossini's Petite Polka chinoise, in which amusingly you can hear lots of Chopin but virtually no chinoiserie. Lin plays this with knowing humor and understated flair.


Lin's Steinway benefits from an acoustic that complements and naturally captures its full range and character, from robust lows to ringing highs. This is a release that every piano enthusiast should own. Those looking for a quirky but unfailingly delightful visit to China will enjoy it too. [7/1/2000]
--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

The pianist Anna Zassimova offers us a musical journey through most of Chopin’s creative periods, bringing together miniatures and some larger scaled, highly structured works. We can thus follow the composer’s stylistic evolution: slightly whimsical at first, then works that are often tragic and violent, evolving in his final years towards great luminosity and relative calm.

Highlights of this recital include the Ballades Nos 2 and 4, the Mazurkas, Op. 41 and Op. 50 and the Scherzo No. 4 in E major. The mazurkas can be seen as a kind of diary that Chopin kept throughout his life as an artist, reflecting his deep-rooted attachment to Poland. In them, folklore was entirely recreated and stylized. Considered the finest of Chopin’s creation and among the most representative of romantic music, the Ballads are pure music in its finest form. Without any specific programme, they are said to have been inspired by the poetic ideas of one of his friends, the poet Adam Mickiewicz. Finally, the Scherzo has an almost fairy-tale, luminous atmosphere, although there are more passionate and intense moments, and it thus appears close to the character of the scherzo as it was once conceived.

Classical Music

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

Classical Music