Together with it's artistic director Julian Azkoul, the United Strings of Europe develop engaging programmes with the aims of finding threads between different works and epochs, musical cultures and backgrounds, of blending the familiar with the new and of encouraging people to listen to works in different ways and discover new repertoire. For it's new release entitled Hommages, the ensemble celebrates musical traditions, from the myth of Apollo and the muses of Greek Antiquity to legends of the 20th century, Carlos Gardel and Astor Piazzolla, renewed by contemporary voices. Inspired by dreams and recollections of the past, this imaginative programme features recent works alongside the world premiere recording of Julian Azkoul's arrangement of Igor Stravinsky's neo-classical ballet Apollon musagete, composed during the 1920s. While Dobrinka Tabakova's Organum Light, here recorded for the first time, was inspired by Einstein's theory of quantum light, Osvaldo Golijov has returned to his Argentinian roots for Last Round, a tribute to two legendary compatriots. As for Olli Mustonen (who can be heard as a pianist on several other BIS recordings), his Second Nonet is a timeless work in which we hear echoes of the Balkans, music from the Romantic period and Nordic moods. A further work by Mustonen, Apotheosis, another world premiere recording, concludes this varied programme on a dramatic note, inspired by Bach's chorale preludes.

Classical Music

Classical Music

This recording presents the entire output to date for guitar of Toshio Hosokawa, one of Japan's most prolific composers for the instrument. His affinity for the guitar stems from his familiarity with popular songs accompanied by the guitar and from his knowledge of the koto, a traditional Japanese instrument from which he has adopted certain playing techniques. Although the works gathered here call for a variety of forces - guitar solo, guitar and voice, guitar and instrumental ensemble - they all present a fundamental aspect of Toshio Hosokawa's output: the music seems to be born like a calligraphic line 'at the limit of time and space'. Here, the guitar is no longer just an instrument familiar to both classical and popular music: in Hosokawa's works it is a medium that transmits the primordial motion of the soul, which has woven poems and songs since ancient times. Familiar with Hosokawa's world, guitarist Jacob Kellermann, together with Christian Karlsen (with whom he has already recorded works by Toru Takemitsu on BIS-2655), the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and soprano Ilse Eerens, presents a soundscape on the edge of dreams, both seductive and subtle, modern and timeless.

Some of the most colourful music to come out of Sweden - and indeed some of the most Swedish music there is! - was composed by Hugo Alfvén (1872- 1960). Take for instance the Swedish Rhapsody No. 1 - also known as Midsummer Vigil. This evocation of Sweden's most important seasonal festival combines all the dancing, aquavit, wild-flowers, folk costumes and eroticism one could possibly ask for. Indeed, this work went out into the world as a brightly coloured picture-postcard, becoming a test case for the newly formed Society of Composers, which used it to ascertain the efficacy of the copyright laws in view of the various unauthorised arrangements which soon cropped up. Another well-known work is the brilliantly orchestrated Suite from the Mountain King - one of the most frequently performed pieces of Swedish music. But Alfvén is also highly regarded as a symphonist and himself claimed that his Symphony No.1 was the first to be written 'in the Swedish language.' This attractively priced box brings together all of the symphonies, the three Swedish rhapsodies as well as several other works - all in all a large part of Alfvén's output for orchestra. Previously released on five separate CDs, these recordings by Neeme Järvi and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra were greeted with great enthusiasm by the reviewers. The playing was deemed to be 'marvellously responsive and committed', 'of total distinction' and - according to one critic - sounding as if the orchestra was 'having a ball'. Järvi's readings were 'spectacularly vivid', 'superb', 'finely honed' and standing 'head and shoulders above its rivals'. And, finally, the recordings were described as 'state-of-the-art' and 'superlative'. All in all, the original discs were 'indispensable' and 'recommended with enthusiasm' - and we still believe they are worth every word of praise. But don't take our word for it - please try this very special issue for yourselves!

This recording brings together four Hungarian composers who, each in their own way, contributed to the development of a new national musical style at the beginning of the twentieth century. They managed to write music that was respected internationally and that both nurtured them and raised the general standard of music in Hungary.

Leó Weiner’s (dubbed the ‘Hungarian Mendelssohn’) and Erno Dohnányi’s string trios were composed during their student years, yet both works have become significant milestones in the limited repertoire for this instrumental combination. Elegant and occasionally reminiscent of Brahms, they also incorporate subtle touches of local folklore. Zoltán Kodály, alongside Béla Bartók, one of the most important Hungarian musicians of the century, composed relatively little chamber music, but his Intermezzo, also an early work, evokes the folk music that the composer had begun to collect for his ethnomusicological research. The least familiar and youngest of the composers represented here, László Weiner, met a tragic fate. His Serenade, composed while he was studying with Kodály, reveals the exceptional talent of a composer whose body of work remains small. Less ‘Magyar’ than the other works presented here, his Serenade recalls the intense and concentrated atmosphere of Viennese ‘modernist’ works.

Finnish Kaija Saariaho and Estonian Helena Tulve, two composers with highly individual voices, both explore instrumental color as a core element of their work. Saariaho's vocal works particularly reveal the full expressive richness of her music. Early pieces like Suomenkielinen sekakuorokappale and Nej och inte established her unique grammar of disintegrating sonic and semantic units; later works such as Lumen valosta and Kesapaiva further develop this approach with extended vocal techniques. Tulve's music "grows out from simple primary impulses, being influenced by natural patterns, organics and synchronicity." I Am a River, based on verses by the 13th-century Persian scholar, poet and mystic Rumi, explores the connection between choral music in resonant church acoustics and sensorial mysticism. Nachtliche Gesange, based on texts by exiled German-speaking Jewish poets, draws it's sonic material from the phonetic properties of the German language. These works of unusual beauty are entrusted to the expert voices of the Helsinki Chamber Choir under Nils Schweckendiek. This GRAMMY-awarded collaboration, previously heralded for their Saariaho album Renaissance (BIS-2662), promises a profound interpretation of these contemporary works for choir.

Already well known to opera audiences worldwide, Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling is also a dedicated and acclaimed recitalist, as noted by reactions in the Sunday Times and Gramophone, among other publications, to her two previous BIS releases with pianist Paul Rivinius that feature songs by Richard Strauss and Franz Schubert. This new, third BIS disc of songs by Edvard Grieg, Jean Sibelius and Wilhelm Stenhammar takes its title from Stenhammar’s I skogen (In the forest), with many of the selected songs either played out in or depicting natural settings, in a manner familiar to Nordic composers.

When deciding on the repertoire for his début disc, James Newby’s first choice fell on An die ferne Geliebte, songs that he had been performing ever since the beginning of his career. But Beethoven’s song cycle – and perhaps even more so the quasi-operatic Adelaide – also sets a tone for the entire disc, that of longing and of wanting to be elsewhere, near the distant beloved. These are emotions that Schubert, perhaps more than any other composer, has plumbed in depth, and Newby went on to select five of his songs that in various ways depict the restlessness and loneliness of the eternal wanderer. Mahler is another composer who knew something about longing – for instance that it can be deadly, which he demonstrated with his Zu Straßburg auf der Schanz, in which a soldier awaits execution after trying to desert to his homeland while the piano imitates the muffled rolling of drums. The military theme continues in the high-strung Revelge, as a young soldier marches towards his death, thinking about his sweetheart with ever-greater desperation. The final song by Mahler, Urlicht, expresses the anguish and pain of earthly life, and the longing for Heaven and, in effect, death. Framing this programme with five folk song arrangements by Benjamin Britten, James Newby and Joseph Middleton explore Man’s never-ending search (geographical or psychological) for that distant object of desire: who, what or wherever it may be.

Classical Music

Classical Music

On her first solo recital for BIS, Gramophone Award-winner Helen Charlston performs a selection of songs by the English composer Henry Purcell, some very well-known, others less so, as well as pieces by other composers of the period such as John Blow, John Eccles, Christopher Simpson and Daniel Purcell, Henry's son. Her choice focuses on songs that tell stories exploring the struggle between heart and mind: do we fall in love through reason or because fate destined it to be so? Concerning her special relationship with Purcell, Charlston explains that she finds herself making space for his songs in almost every programme she creates. She adds that his addictive music holds a power over her she cannot and does not want to escape, and this specific programme is a special acknowledgement of the fact that Purcell's music has become an essential part of her identity as a singer. For this release, Helen Charlston is joined by the ensemble Sounds Baroque: Julian Perkins (harpsichord/organ), Jonathan Manson and William Carter (theorbo/baroque guitar), three musicians whose expertise and love for this music, she says, overflow in every note they play.

Although highly productive and respected in his lifetime as a Lied composer, Robert Franz (1815–92) has since become a peripheral figure in music history. As they began to explore the songs of Franz, Georges Starobinski and baritone Christian Immler were moved by their findings to devise a program including twenty-three of the composer’s often quite brief songs. Using the poet Heinrich Heine as their guiding star, they present these – all Heine settings but from different opus groups – in the form of two ‘imagined’ song cycles, framed by further settings of Heine poems by Schumann and Liszt.

An active composer in the former Soviet Union from the 1960s until 1981, Viktor Suslin (1942–2012) also formed the important improvisational ensemble Astrea with fellow composers Sofia Gubaidulina and Vyacheslav Artyomov in 1975. As a composer, Suslin used a wide variety of compositional methods, was content with simple elements as basic compositional material and form-wise retained a balance between classicism and innovation. The première recording of Sofia Gubaidulina’s 2013 So sei es (‘So be it’), subtitled 'in memoriam Viktor Suslin', was composed especially for this disc.

BLOCH Schelomo 1. BRIDGE Oration, Concerto elegiaco 1. HOUGH The Loneliest Wilderness 2 • Steven Isserlis (vc); 1 Hugo Wolff, cond; 1 German SO Berlin; 2 Gábor Takács, cond; 2 Tapiola Sinfonietta • BIS 1992 (SACD: 67:40)


Steven Isserlis joined Richard Hickox and the London Symphony Orchestra in 1988 for a very fine and critically well-received recording of Bloch’s Schelomo for Virgin Classics. Also on that disc was a more than respectable account of Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Except for the benefit of surround-sound audio and improved sonics on this new BIS release, I’m not prepared to say that Isserlis betters his previous account. At 58, he’s still in his prime and at the height of his game technically, but the years seem not to have aged Isserlis’s ancient King of Israel. If anything, Isserlis and Hugo Wolff now put a bit more spring into Solomon’s step, though the difference of only 23 seconds—21:45 in 1988 vs. 21:22 in 2012 is simply too small to notice over the given timespan.


The album comes with a title, In the Shadow of War , and a theme. Bloch, as is well known, was deeply depressed over the grim events unfolding during World War I, and for solace and understanding, he turned to the words of despair and wisdom in the Book of Ecclesiastes, believed to have been authored by Solomon 2,000 years earlier. It was from this that in 1916 Bloch drew inspiration for his magnificent rhapsody-cum-tone poem, Schelomo , for cello and orchestra.


Frank Bridge’s Oration, Concerto elegiaco for Cello and Orchestra is far less well known than Bloch’s opus, but it, too, has received a previous recording by Isserlis and Hickox with the City of London Sinfonia on EMI. Unfortunately, I don’t have that disc, so I can’t compare the performance to this new one, but it doesn’t go back as far as Isserlis’s Virgin Classics Schelomo . The Isserlis/Hickox/EMI CD, coupled with Britten’s Cello Symphony , was released in 2007. We don’t have a description of Bridge’s Oration in the composer’s own words, as we do a description of Schelomo from Bloch himself, so we can only speculate on Bridge’s motives for writing the piece and its precise meaning. In 1930, the date of Oration ’s composition, World War I had long ago ended and World War II was yet to come. Yet everything about this work paints the most grisly, gruesome portrait imaginable of war’s death and destruction. Isserlis, who has written his own album note, describes the music minute by minute, evoking images of “men hurling themselves into enemy fire” and “the leaden march of doomed soldiers.” The solo cello is the fallen soldier who, in the end, is left to expire alone, “his final desolate thoughts fading into empty nothingness.”


Nearly 30 minutes in duration, Bridge’s Oration is not an easy work to listen to, or to play, I’m sure, so it’s not surprising that it hasn’t achieved anything close to the popularity of Bloch’s Schelomo . Besides Isserlis’s own previous recording of the piece, it hasn’t received much attention on disc, but the attention it has received has come from major-league cellists, namely, Rafael Wallfisch, Alban Gerhardt, and Julian Lloyd Webber.


I have to admit that before listening to it, Stephen Hough’s The Loneliest Wilderness shouted, “Raise shields! Raise shields!,” as would any piece for me dated 2005. Well, it only took a matter of seconds before the music cried out to me, “Lower shields! Lower shields!” I would buy this disc for The Loneliest Wilderness alone. The piece was originally composed for bassoon and orchestra, but Isserlis persuaded Hough, composer, pianist, and good friend, that the lyrical nature of the solo part was ideal for cello. Since the ranges of the two instruments are reasonably close to each other, I don’t know if it was necessary for Hough to make any adjustments in the solo line or not, but this is one gorgeous outpouring of poignant, moving, heartfelt music. Bless Stephen Hough for composing it, and bless Steven Isserlis for including it on this disc. The work, according to the note, was inspired by Herbert Read’s poem My Company , and I can’t think of any other way to describe it than to say it’s a rapturous rhapsody in full neoromantic bloom.


This may prove to be the best cello and orchestra recording of the year, and it’s urgently recommended.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Austrian mezzo-soprano Sophie Rennert, accompanied by expert pianist Joseph Middleton, presents a selection of Schubert lieder blending beloved masterpieces with lesser-known gems. Sophie Rennert's extensive operatic repertoire spans Baroque to contemporary works, encompassing Purcell, Rameau, Handel and Vivaldi, through Mozart and operetta - numerous recordings with leading figures in the early music scene further highlight the quality of her voice. Hailed by critic David Nice as "a mezzo of many colours, subtlety, dramatic intelligence and a crucially brilliant top", it was only a matter of time before she lent her voice to Schubert's highly dramatic songs. The title of this recital, Irrlichter (will-o'-the-wisp), her first for BIS Records, comes from Rennert's favourite song, "Des Fischers Liebesgluck". And much like a will-o'-the-wisp, the composer leaves us in a state of uncertainty. Is the song a memory or just a deep, unfulfilled longing? This feeling, which permeates all of Schubert's music, is in a sense the thread that runs through this collection of songs with their twilight atmosphere. Every single one of these Schubert settings depicts a different dream, a different longing to be discovered.

At the end of a career spent between his native Korea and Germany, during which he produced works that span the musical traditions of both countries, Isang Yun expressed a wish to limit himself ‘to what is substantial, in order to transmit more peace, more goodness, more purity and warmth into this world’.

With Silla (1992) the composer pays tribute to the origins of Korean culture and philosophy, to the court music introduced from China, and to the period when Korea’s political unity was established (676–935 AD). Describing its mood, Yun provided such keywords as ‘nocturnal, festive…mirthful but also melancholy’. From the same year, Violin Concerto III was composed after a stay in hospital, and Yun once described it as a birthday present to himself. At the age of 75 he no longer felt the need to take contemporary currents, aesthetic trends or technical restraints into consideration. The work holds in store a wealth of musical occurrences that could perhaps be deciphered in the context of its composers own life, and is here performed by the young South Korean violinist Sueye Park. Closing the disc is Chamber Symphony No. 1 from 1987, a work in one movement but with three distinct sections. In it, Yun combines instruments that forge changing musical alliances while engaging in rivalry or complementing each other. The mood is evocative of an, at times, animated conversation.

REVIEW:

This is a superb disc of wonderfully expressive, thoroughly accessible music, and is immensely welcome for several reasons. Firstly, for turning a spotlight on the music of the composer’s last decade, which includes some of his most powerfully communicative compositions. Secondly, it is heartwarming to hear the late flowering of a composer of utterly assured compositional expertise, writing the music that flowed spontaneously out of him from a situation of creative and personal freedom – not complacency, but with nothing to prove, no particular school or doctrine to follow – after a lifetime of personal and musical turmoil and searching re-invention...The final race to the finish [of the Chamber Symphony] is as exciting and robust as anything in the Romantic literature.

-- Records International

The lute flourished for more than five hundred years, until it's decline towards the end of the eighteenth century, and for large parts of that time it was the most important instrument in all of Western music. Some of the most exciting developments took place in the 1500's, including the first instances of printed lute music as well as changes to the instrument itself. On this release, Jakob Lindberg, one of the great lutenists of our time, pays tribute to three colleagues from 600 years ago: Francesco da Milano, Marco dall'Aquila and Alberto da Mantova.

My attention was won by the cover. There’s Jakob Lindberg holding the most enormous stringed instrument I’ve ever seen. The long neck of the instrument extends off into the distance and Lindberg himself looks completely unintimidated. There’s no way to resist that. Then I put on the first track, Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger’s “Arpeggiata,” and was enthralled. It’s an extraordinary little piece, building with the minimalistic drama of a Philip Glass piece across chords and seemingly across the centuries. 

There are more gems to be had here. Kapsperger’s “Passacaglia” is a masterwork, the compact frame and starkly simple bass line concealing a work of enormous emotional fervor. I was going to call it “haunting” until I saw that the booklet - written by the artist - already does, and yet there really is not a better word. As always in the baroque byways, there are composers exploring harmony in interesting ways; most intriguingly, Alessandro Piccinini contributes a “Toccata cromatica” and Bellerofonte Castaldi a “Cromatica corrente”. Castaldi’s “Cecchina corrente” is more of a scene-stealer, bounding in with a burly, jovial dance but then, halfway through, breaking down into a more intricate rhythmic pattern. That said, it’s really Kapsperger who dominates this recital, since there is next to no music here better than the arpeggiata, passacaglia, or rowdily witty “Colascione”.
 
The main competition is from Paul O’Dette on HM Gold, a mid-price recital of nothing but Kapsperger. O’Dette uses a chitarrone for some works and a lute for most. He somehow misses out on the passacaglia, but his Kapsperger is well worth having too. In fact I purchased it after hearing the CD being reviewed here. A disc on Hänssler I haven’t heard, featuring Joachim Held on a lute, combines these three composers with the amusingly named Michelangelo Galilei. Castaldi’s songs with voice can be heard on Toccata Classics, and on a CD which was one of MusicWeb’s 2012 Recordings of the Year. For the neophyte this excellent BIS CD is a good sampler; depending on what you like you can move on to the composer-specific albums elsewhere, although I warn that you really will want to collect Kapsperger if you don’t already. If you do, I hear nothing which will let you down here.
 
A minor irritation: if you’re intending to add this to your computerized collection, you have your work cut out. The Gracenote (iTunes) database doesn’t have information on this CD, which means you’ll be typing in all 27 track names yourself.
 
-- Brian Reinhart, MusicWeb International

Of the two large piano sonatas composed by Charles Ives, No. 2 (’the Concord Sonata’) is by far the best-known, overshadowing its sibling. The First Piano Sonata is comparably ambitious, however, and with a playing time of more than 40 minutes, similarly expansive. Like many works by Ives it had a long gestation period, beginning in 1901 with additions and revisions being made well into the 1920s. In contrast to the Concord, Ives didn’t provide the work with an explicit programme, but wrote that it was ‘mostly about the outdoor life in Connecticut villages in the 1880s and 90s.’ This can to an extent explain the various borrowings from hymns, but New York City, where Ives was living, has also left a clear mark with a liberal use of ragtime rhythms. Ives composed a third ‘sonata’ for the piano, the so-called Three-Page Sonata, cast in three brief but challenging movements. The two works are both included on this recording by Joonas Ahonen, who released the Concord Sonata in 2017 to critical acclaim, with the French magazine Classica praising ‘his youthful impetuosity and technical prowess’. Ives’ sonatas frame the third work on the disc, the Austrian composer Bernhard Gander’s Peter Parker from 2004. It is the alter ego of the superhero Spider-Man that has lent his name to Gander’s highly virtuosic and original piano piece which presents a panorama of the superhero’s patterns of movement, transformed into music.

REVIEW:

The Piano Sonata No. 1, begun in 1901, represented an underappreciated breakthrough for Ives, even if he did continue to tinker with it into the 1920s. The work encompasses the polyphonic weaving of many strands of American music that would occupy Ives for much of his mature compositional life. Ahonen is a pianist with a fine feeling for Ives, catching the way he can turn on a dime from weighty matters to a kind of sly humor. The passages where many streams of life flow through the music are clear and confident, the rhythmic shifts that suffuse the music and that make up the backbone of the concluding Three-Page Sonata are crisp.

That work is joined in bringing down the curtain by composer Bernhard Gander's Peter Parker (a.k.a. Spider-Man), depicting the superhero's kinetic repertory. This is a very strong and thoroughly enjoyable Ives release.

-- AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

Charles Ives’s ‘Concord Sonata’ is often described as one of the greatest of American piano works. Published in 1920, at the composer’s own expense, it contains radical experiments in harmony and rhythm and would have to wait until 1939 for its first public performance. In the course of its four movements, Ives depicts some of the famous inhabitants of the small town of Concord in Massachusetts, a centre of the mid-19th century transcendentalism movement. Luminaries of the movement such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are alluded to in various ways in music that includes references to Beethoven, religious and patriotic hymns and circus marches, as well as brief ‘guest appearances’ by a viola and a flute. Lasting 47 minutes on the present recording, it is a massive work of a staggering complexity, and a true challenge for any performer – a challenge more than readily accepted by the young Finnish pianist Joonas Ahonen, who has previously recorded Ligeti’s piano concerto for BIS.

For the opening work on the disc, the much shorter Violin Sonata No.4, Ahonen is joined by his compatriot, the celebrated violinist Pekka Kuusisto. Composed during the same period as the Concord Sonata, this piece also has an extra-musical background, namely the composer’s memories as a child of the so-called camp meetings held during the Christian revivalism of the late 19th century.

This disc is a double tribute. The first work, Pictured Within, is a collective effort conceived as a major project to mark the 60th birthday of conductor Martyn Brabbins, whose reputation in new music and British music is beyond reproach.

Following the pattern of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Pictured Within is a series of 14 variations on a theme, each of which takes up the character of the equivalent variation in Elgar’s work, the difference being that here 14 different composers have each contributed a variation in tribute to Brabbins.

Also on the SACD is Jaakko Kuusisto’s Symphony, a fitting tribute to the composer, conductor, and violinist who passed away in 2022. Illness left Jaakko no time to complete his work, so it fell to his brother Pekka – who conducts here – and Jari Eskola to finish it. The result is a powerful piece, full of familiar themes and melodies derived from Jaakko’s existing compositions, to which are added autobiographical extra-musical elements. The moving conclusion is a collage of fragmented phrases inspired by the signals emitted by lighthouses and ships, as if Kuusisto’s spirit had been sent out to sea.

Swedish Baroque composer Johan Helmich Roman (1694-1758) has been called both “the father of Swedish music” and “the Swedish Handel.” He led the Swedish Opera throughout Sweden’s Age of Liberty, and enjoyed a successful compositional career. During Roman’s lifetime, the most common wind instrument in Stockholm was the recorder. The instrument was utilized in every aspect of musical life. The transverse flute, however, was reserved for the noble and upper classes. While Roman’s sonatas were originally composed for a bourgeoisie performance on transverse flute, Dan Laurin performs these beautiful works on the recorder. In his liner notes, he describes his affection for Roman’s music: “complex emotional contexts are contrasted with folk music forms such as the villanelle or piva - the music is asymmetrical, irregular and full of unexpected twists, sudden pauses and cadences.”

Classical Music

Bach's music has always attracted arrangers and orchestrators - such as Stokowski, Elgar and Busoni, to name just three. Regardless of it's original version, Bach's music has an expressive power, drama and architectural logic that lend themselves well to expanded orchestral sonorities. Bassoonist and conductor Robin O'Neill buried his head in the Goldberg Variations, which he had discovered through Glenn Gould's recordings, during the first months of the Covid lockdown. Soon after that, the idea of making an arrangement for orchestra began to obsess him as he began hearing instrumental and orchestral sonorities in the keyboard work. Since the main challenge was to reclothe the music without damaging the subtle intricacy of the piece, and after much thought and experimentation, O'Neill chose instruments that Bach himself would have recognized for the solo parts. His reinterpretation of the Goldberg Variations offers a mixture of full orchestral variations interspersed with concertante ones involving two, three or four solo instruments, at times close to St Matthew Passion-style writing. Completed during a difficult period, this arrangement was made, in the words of O'Neill, in the hope that it expresses the joy and solace that Bach's music gives both performer and listener.

This is the seventh disc in the Bach Collegium Japan and Masaaki Suzuki’s series of secular cantatas by J. S. Bach. The best known of these cantatas is featured on this installment, the ever popular “Peasant Cantata.” The piece was written in broad dialect, and set to music which was based around folk songs, making it accessible to the greater population rather than the educated elite. The soprano cantata BWV 209 was composed as a musical farewell to one of Bach’s pupils upon his departure from Leipzig. Finally, Amore traitor for bass solo follows the story of a lover who accuses Amor of betrayal and deception. The closing aria is distinct, utilizing both the voice and the harpsichord in virtuosic passages.

Classical Music

Following his recording of the first book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier released last year (BIS-2621), which was praised as 'a pleasurable benchmark for anyone seeking a traversal that honours every detail of the music' (Gramophone), harpsichordist Masato Suzuki now offers us his interpretation of the second book of Bach's masterly cycle of preludes and fugues. No other works from the baroque period have been as cherished, performed and studied as these collections, the objectives of which were musical, theoretical and didactic. Like the first, the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier features a prelude and fugue in each of the 12 semitones of the chromatic scale, covering all of the 24 major and minor modes. Produced almost twenty years after the first book, this collection is a sort of follow-up. Though less frequently heard than it's predecessor, it nevertheless contains pieces of great beauty covering a wide stylistic range, and demonstrates a mastery of counterpoint that never outweighs emotion, beauty and aesthetics. Occupying a key position in Bach's output, the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier points ahead to the major cycles of Bach's last years and presents 'sheer masterpieces from beginning to end', to quote Johann Nikolaus Forkel, the composer's first biographer.

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

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The lute music from this period represents some of the best ever written for the instrument. Under Lindberg's fingers, and on his beloved Sixtus Rauwolf lute (c. 1590), even the relatively straightforward anonymous Scottish pieces included here are imbued with the same affecting lyricism he lavishes on the [other] works.

– Gramophone

***** (out of 5)
The sound of Jakob Lindberg's lute, made by Sixtus Rauwolf in the last decade of the 16th century, is unusually warm. A meticulously voiced recital that moves between court, theatre, and tavern. Lindberg conjures an age that was as perilous as it was rich in musical invention.

– BBC Music Magazine

JACOBEAN LUTE MUSIC • Jakob Lindberg (lt) • BIS 2055 (81:12)

Works by: DOWLAND, ROBINSON, R. JOHNSON, BACHELER, HELY, J. GAULTIER, ANONYMOUS

Jakob Lindberg here turns to familiar territory, and deals with it in exemplary, historically informed fashion. His phrasing is impeccable, and the articulation of multiple lines, always clear and balanced. Great reserves of color can be heard in the slower, longer works, such as the pavans by Robert Johnson and Danile Bacheler, while all the divisions in the many faster pieces are tossed off with deceptive ease, and on occasion, an appropriate dash of humor. Not the least of the disc’s charms is the program itself, cleverly varied by length, character, complexity, and textures over a succession of works.

In short, this is one of Lindberg’s most immediately accessible releases to date. I’ve heard him accused in the past of too great a sense of restraint, but never found this true, myself; and here there certainly is no room for that complaint. Without ever waxing sentimental, a rich vein of expressiveness should be obvious to all on this generously timed disc. Highly recommended.

FANFARE: Barry Brenesal

Making their first appearance on BIS, Margaret Batjer and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) cross great distances in both time and space in this programme of concertante violin works. The disc opens with a Violin Concerto by the American composer Pierre Jalbert (b. 1967), whose music has been described as ‘rich in instrumental color and harmonically engaging’. Composed in 2017, the 26-minute concerto was a commission from the orchestra and here makes its first recorded appearance. The next work takes us to 18th-century Germany, where Johann Sebastian Bach had been busy studying the concertos of his Italian colleagues, and especially Vivaldi. His Concerto in A minor is thought to have been composed around 1730, at a time when Bach had freed himself from his models, producing works richer in both texture and sentiment. For the second half of the programme we return to our own time, travelling northwards to the Baltic countries, as Bach is followed by one of his great admirers in modern music, the Estonian composer Arvo Part (b. 1935). Margaret Batjer and the orchestra offer us their performance of what is probably Part’s most famous piece, Fratres from 1977. Originally written for chamber ensemble ‘without fixed instrumentation’, it soon became a modern classic and exists in numerous versions. The one heard here, for violin, string orchestra and percussion, was made by the composer in 1992. The closing Lonely Angel is by Part’s slightly younger colleague Peteris Vasks (b. 1946) from Latvia. Reworked from a movement for string quartet, the piece was inspired by a particular image: ‘I saw an angel, flying over the world; the angel looks at the world’s condition with grieving eyes, but an almost imperceptible, loving touch of the angel’s wings brings comfort…’