Classical Music

Along with Lars-Erik Larsson and Dag Wirén, Erland von Koch was part of a generation of composers who all made their débuts during the 1930s. Active until the end of a very long life (1910–2009), von Koch became one of Sweden’s best loved composers, himself describing his artistic goals as follows: ‘I aim for a simple, clear, melodic style, often with elements of folk tone and with a definite rhythmic profile... The older you get, the more aware you become of the importance of melody.’ One of von Koch’s most frequently performed orchestral works is Nordiskt capriccio, which was inspired by a folk tune from Dalecarlia, and which forms the festive finale on the present disc. The compositions which precede it here are less well known, however – Impulsi (the first part of a triptych later completed with the works Echi and Ritmi) was taken up by conductors such as Sergiu Comis­siona and Walter Weller, but the two symphonies appear for the first time on disc. Especially in Symphony No.3, influences from Bartók and Hindemith can be detected – composed in 1948, it is a work which in its thematic material contrasts defiance with lyricism and, finally, a feeling of release. Sinfonia seria, von Koch’s fourth work in the genre, followed a few years later, undergoing a final revision in 1962. As indicated by the title, the underlying mood of the work is grave and bittersweet – possibly this is reflected in the composer’s own words regarding the thankless task of writing symphonies: ‘They are rarely played – especially if they are Swedish – and it takes a long time before they are “discovered” and accepted, if indeed they ever are.’ With this disc, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Per Hammarström are making their case for a hoped-for, and long overdue ‘discovery’ of Erland von Koch’s symphonies.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

In the spring of 2020, the Covid pandemic caused turmoil in the concert diaries of most musicians, including the conductor Andrew Litton and his wife Katharina Kang Litton, principal violist of New York City Ballet. To find an outlet for their musical expression they began to explore the repertoire for viola and piano together. Having played the sonatas by Brahms they came across the music by two other Viennese composers, Brahms’ near-contemporary Robert Fuchs and his student Egon Kornauth. Fuchs – who the less-than-effusive Brahms called ‘a splendid musician’ – had a long and distinguished career at the Vienna Conservatory where his other students included such composers as Mahler, Wolf, Sibelius, Zemlinsky and Korngold. That the sonatas recorded here were composed around the same time as Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet can be hard to believe – as is the fact that Fuchs’s Phantasiestücke (composed in his 80th and final year) was contemporary with Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 1. But if they are not in any way pioneering, all three works are beautifully achieved: formally both strong and flexible, with a subtle, deeply-felt emotional coloring of their own. The Litton Duo close the recital with a piece that has a personal significance for the two – an arrangement of the Korean folk song Arirang which they received as a wedding present from Stephen Hough.

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Ülo Krigul studied in Tallinn and Vienna, and has written music in a wide variety of genres. Three works on the present release – And the Sea Arose, Aga vaata aina üles (‘But Look Always Up’) and liquid turns – were completed in 2019–20 when Krigul was composer-in-residence with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. Linked by a common concept and the recycling of musical material, the three form a triptych-like set, here preceded by Vesi ise (‘Water Is’) from 2015. The latter is the first piece that Krigul wrote for the choir and its conductor Kaspars Putninš and includes ideas that has been carried over into their later collaboration. If Vesi ise here functions as a prelude, liquid turns is to an extent a summation of the program: the composer has sampled text and music from the two preceding works and random phrases interact and emerge as a new whole. Krigul has chosen his texts from the New Testament, the writings of the philosopher Uku Masing and the sound poetry of Ilmar Laaban.

For his new recital disc, the acclaimed Finnish guitarist Ismo Eskelinen had the aim of creating a programme that works like a story: ‘a modern guitar album that lends itself to continuous listening from beginning to end’. The pieces that he has selected are united by the fact that, with the exception of Tan Dun, Eskelinen has collaborated closely with all the composers. In the liner notes to the album he expresses his admiration for how intuitively they all understood the essence of the guitar, even though none of them is a guitarist. ‘Everyone has found a unique way to bring his own musical style to the guitar, and each of the composers is clearly recognizable.’ Opening the album are Kromos by Sebastian Fagerlund and Solo XI by Kalevi Aho, two pieces that in technical terms come close to the limits of what is possible on the guitar, but with a completely convincing musical logic. Olli Mustonen’s Sonata No. 2 contains drama but also lyricism, qualities which are emphasized in Tan Dun’s multi-movement collage Seven Desires with inspiration from the different traditions and characteristics of Spain’s flamenco guitar and China’s pipa (lute). Jukka Tiensuu is among the pioneers of modern Finnish guitar music and wrote his first work for the instrument as early as 1974. His Daydreams from 2016 is composed for guitar and electronics, but the sound world is strongly guitaristic, as the electronic part is modified from fragments played by Eskelinen on the guitar. Sometimes the use of electronics produces echo effects alongside the live guitar, and sometimes the sound image expands into that of a guitar trio. The very brief closing number is an arrangement, by Eskelinen himself, of Timo Alakotila’s calm and soothing Psalm.

On Remembering, the Danish cellist Jakob Kullberg continues his collaborations with two of the foremost Nordic composers: Per Nørgård and Kaija Saariaho. Praised internationally for his performances of the modern cello concerto, Kullberg regards the concerto form as the encounter of an individual soloist with the sound world of a composer. With living composers this approach often results in an unusual degree of collaboration, as the works gathered here bear witness to. Since 1999, Kullberg has enjoyed a close and unique partnership with Nørgård which has resulted in a large number of works. Between, the opening work on the album, hails from a time before this, but Nørgård’s viola concerto Remembering Child in its version for the cello is very much an example of Kullberg’s process. He has not only transferred the concerto to his own instruments, but has also – in consultation with the composer – written his own cadenza as well as added details to the score. Likewise, at a climactic point exactly halfway through Saariaho’s concerto Notes on Light, Kullberg creates an expressive space of his own, with a two-minute cadenza he has composed himself. In this work, as well as in Nørgård’s Between, Kullberg is supported by the BBC Philharmonic, with Sinfonia Varsovia appearing in the closing concerto.

Following his acclaimed recording of Kurt Weill's symphonies 1 and 2 and excerpts from The Silver Lake (BIS-2579), HK Gruber and his congenial partner, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, present three more works by the famous musical theatre composer, this time featuring sopranos Wallis Giunta and Jennifer France and violinists Katerina Andresson and Benjamin Herzl. This release opens with the ballet-chante satire The Seven Deadly Sins, a scathing critique of capitalist society that highlights the perpetual struggle between money and morality. Anna, a young girl, is sent away from her family with the mission of bringing back enough money to build a house on the Mississippi. The cantata The New Orpheus, which blends the very different styles of aria and song, tells the sad story of the singer who sets out to conquer the dreary walls of modern cities to save Eurydice, and with her, all of humanity. Finally, the Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, a central work from Weill's early creative period, displays a theatricality that heralds the stage works to come. An exciting programme showcasing Weill's inimitable language of mixing the sophisticated and the popular, the melodic and the dissonant, the complex and the streetwise.

One of the truly grand old men on the music scene today, György Kurtág composed his Kafka-Fragmente in the mid-1980s, and these forty settings of text fragments by Franz Kafka remain one of his most often-performed works. Although the cycle contains no single narrative thread and tells no coherent ‘tale’ it has become quite common to present it in staged versions – perhaps because of the hypnotic images that emerge in the texts, as well as in the music. Many of the movements are extremely brief; in the present recording 11 of the movements are less than half a minute long, and the shortest (Es zupfte mich jemand am Kleid / Someone tugged at my clothes) lasts only 13 seconds. However, to quote the insightful liner notes by the musicologist Philippe Albéra: ’Within these miniature spaces, expressivity – as if through a process of crystallization – is pushed to its utmost limits.’ Collected by the composer, the texts have been extracted from Kafka’s letters, diaries and notebooks; shards that together form a mosaic at times sardonic, absurd, lyrical or humourous. Kurtág’s ability to convey a wide range of situations and emotions transforms each fragment into a vision of dreamlike intensity, where the real becomes surreal, and Albéra finds a symbol of the spirit of Kurtág’s music in the 16th fragment, Kein Rückkehr, and Kafka’s aphorism: ‘From a certain point on, there is no going back. That is the point to reach.’ The often highly virtuosic and demanding score is here interpreted by the soprano Caroline Meltzer and the violinist Nurit Stark, both performers with a strong commitment to contemporary music who collaborated with composers such as Aribert Reimann, Sofia Gubaidulina and Viktor Suslin.

Reviews:

Caroline Melzer and Nurit Stark yield nothing to previous performers in penetrating the depth and breadth of emotion that Kurtag conveys, and it helps that this is the best recorded version available, allowing their wide range of tone, colour and dynamics to be heard to full effect.

– BBC Music Magazine

The 40 separate fragments are divided into four groups…linked less by a definable concept than an intuitive sense of what constitutes unity within the author's bleak and fractured world-view. It is in this latter respect that Caroline Melzer and Nurit Stark make so gripping an impression - characterising the many fragmentary shards with an explosive intimacy…a likely first choice for those new to this enigmatic and intriguing work.

– Gramophone

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Classical Music

Up until around 1900 the clarinet repertoire was dominated by music from the German-speaking lands, largely due to the influence of three outstanding clarinettists. Inspired by Anton Stadler, Heinrich Bärmann and Richard Mühlfeld respectively, Mozart, Weber and Brahms composed some of the finest clarinet works ever written. But especially after the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the French cultural establishment became increasingly concerned with cultivating a national voice of its own, and Michael Collins’s new release is a reminder of this. The works recorded here all date from the last years of the 19th century and afterwards, and it is striking that four of them (Debussy, Widor, Messager and Rabaud) were written as competition pieces for the Paris Conservatoire – the institution which played such a decisive role in shaping French musical life. But even though they were commissioned for educational purposes there is nothing academic about them: from Debussy’s seductive Rhapsodie to Messager’s light-heartedly brilliant Solo de concours there is instead a definite French – maybe even Parisian – quality to them. This also applies to the Clarinet Sonata by Saint-Saëns, composed in the last year of his life but full of charm and courtly irony. Closing the disc are two works from either end of Francis Poulenc’s life. While the brief Sonata for two clarinets from 1918 is pure and cheeky fun, the 1962 Sonata for Clarinet and Piano is more conflicted emotionally, as indicated by the first movement’s tempo marking Allegro tristamente. Throughout the greater part of the programme, Collins is partnered by Noriko Ogawa, whose pianism has won her particular acclaim in French repertoire, with Sérgio Pires making a guest appearance in Poulenc’s clarinet duo.

Milhaud’s La création du Monde used to be quite popular, at least on disc, but it seems to have vanished from the discography recently, at least until now. Christian Lindberg has assembled a varied and interesting program built around Milhaud’s jazz ballet masterpiece, and featuring solo saxophonist Claude Delangle. He’s featured in a splendid performance of Paul Creston’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Band (another unfairly neglected work), Roger Boutry’s really charming Divertimento for Alto Saxophone and Winds, John Williams’ rather commercial Catch Me If You Can, and the obligatory Piazzolla arrangement (Escualo).

The Swedish Wind Ensemble by itself stars in Anders Emilsson’s witty and harmonically entertaining Salute the Band, and in the Milhaud, which receives a performance of exceptional virtuosity, but also extreme mellowness. At the opening the sound is simply gorgeous, but as the work proceeds it would have been nice to hear a more “dirty” sound from the ensemble. Today’s players are so technically adept that they can do anything smoothly, but there are times when the music demands a certain edge that’s not generously evident here.

It’s not a huge problem, to be honest, especially when the program is so much fun, and BIS’s engineering is absolutely demonstration quality. In context, the playing is all of a piece, and it’s pretty excellent.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

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Here’s a colorful, sophisticated program showcasing the marvelous alto saxophonist Claude Delangle, who’s collaborated with Piazzolla, Boulez, Berio, Takemitsu, and Salonen and who has been singled out for praise on MusicWeb International before. His new album with the Swedish Wind Ensemble is consistently ear-catching.
 
The appetizer is a suite of three numbers from John Williams’ film score Catch Me If You Can, one of my favorites of Williams - it avoids cliché and captures the movie’s spirit well. Then it’s on to the title work, Darius Milhaud’s La création du monde. Delangle is absent, but some friends of the players join for the string parts. It’s a delightful, jazzy performance with spirited solos.
 
Roger Boutry’s Divertimento for saxophone and band has a seductive French swagger and incredible songlike slow movement which make its appeal instant. Boutry arranged the piece for this recording; it was originally for sax and strings, and the rescoring includes great touches like muted trumpets in the andante.
 
The introduction to Paul Creston’s concerto makes it sound like the American response to Khachaturian (xylophone!), but the solo saxophonist’s lyrical instincts take over the proceedings, including a great duet with flutes. The finale is bursting with wit; it feels like something I know and love and can’t quite put my finger on.
 
Anders Emilsson’s Salute the Band is the odd piece out, a mosaic of ideas: some pulsate, some clash, some have Elgarian pomp, some are tense, some are grindingly dissonant … and Piazzolla’s Escualo is a wonderful encore.
 
With good sound and BIS’s usual classy presentation - although this is not an SACD hybrid - I find this absurdly easy to welcome. Anyone interested in the saxophone or jazzy, snappy modern repertoire will find much to enjoy. It’s a cosmopolitan, sophisticated album to put on while enjoying a glass of red wine and some witty conversation.
 
-- Brian Reinhart, MusicWeb International

Includes recercada(s) by Diego Ortiz. Ensemble: Atrium Musicae. Conductor: Gregorio Paniagua.

'A disc without flaws, a true marvel' is how Jean-Jacques Kantorow's previous recording of music by Édouard Lalo was described in the Spanish magazine Scherzo. The disc in question included three works composed for the great violin virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate: the violin concerto, Fantaisie norvégienne and the perennial favourite Symphonie espagnole. In a review in Gramophone, the soloist was compared to his great predecessor: 'Kantorow, one of today's most individual players, has the measure of Lalo's Sarasate-inspired violin-writing - he's able to toss off the virtuoso passagework in a seemingly effortless manner and his distinctive tone lends a sensuous allure to Lalo's melodies.' On the present disc, Kantorow plays two other works intended for Sarasate, the brief Fantaisie-ballet on themes from Lalo's ballet Namouna, and the large-scale Concerto russe. The latter piece, in four movements, borrows themes from two wedding songs included by Rimsky-Korsakov in his collection 100 Russian Folk Songs. A typically expressive and virtuosic composition, it is also one of the first important French works to draw upon Russian music - many others were to follow. Two shorter violin works are included here, but the disc closes with another concerto, the Piano Concerto from 1888. It was the composer's final major work, and in it he seems to depart from the pattern of his violin concertos, with their prominent solo parts. Lalo rather chooses to integrate the piano into the orchestral texture, and although the writing is redolent of the great Romantic concertos, it offers few opportunities for the soloist to show off - a possible reason for the work's absence from modern concert programmes and its rarity on disc. Championing this solo part is Pierre-Alain Volondat, and as in the other works orchestral support is provided by the eminent Tapiola Sinfonietta, conducted by Kees Bakels.

Classical Music

Classical Music

}Gramophone (2/97, p. 80) - "Here is a glittering centenary tribute to Cuba's King of Charmers....the performances are irreproachable and BIS's presentation and recording are vivid and enthralling..."{

Classical Music

This release features the Rapsodia Cubana with Thomas Tirino on piano. Accompanying him is the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Includes work(s) by Ernesto Lecuona. Ensemble: Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: Michael Bartos. Soloist: Thomas Tirino.

LECUONA TORINO; POLISH RADIO S.O./BARTOS THE PIANO MUSIC

Baldr is Jon Leifs' richest and longest single work, and like most of his larger pieces he never heard it performed. Its two acts last about 90 minutes, and fans of this expert at composing musical natural disasters will be delighted to learn that it contains both a hurricane and a volcanic eruption. Subtitled a "choreographic drama", it would make quite an impression on stage, assuming it ever could be staged as the composer intended; but until then we have this superb second recording (the first, by Paul Zukofsky and a talented band of Icelandic students and "ringers", was very good but no match for this fully professional effort).


The story, such as it is, begins with the creation of life itself, and of man. Baldr, one of those typical Norse hero types, is a favorite of Odin, and thus hated by Loki. In part one, Baldr meets and marries his beloved Nanna despite Loki's attempts to thwart their union (he has the hots for Nanna too) by summoning up a hurricane. In part two, Odin demands that all things on earth, both living and dead, swear not to harm Baldr, and they all do except (there's always a catch) for the lowly mistletoe. In "The Throwing Game", the Gods check out the efficacy of Baldr's protection by throwing all manner of deadly objects at him, and Loki naturally gets someone to hurl the mistletoe at Baldr, who promptly falls to the ground and dies. After his cremation, there's a huge volcanic eruption after which Odin and the chorus pronounce a final benediction.


Leifs conceived the work in the mid-1940s in part as a protest against the Nazi appropriation of Norse mythology for political and racial ends (he was living in Germany with his Jewish first wife for much of World War II), and very consciously wished to reclaim these stories in what he saw as their original form. Aside from using the old Icelandic texts for the brief sung passages, in Baldr Leifs perfected his mature musical style based on the irregular rhythms and primitive parallel harmonies of Icelandic folk music. The addition of hammers, rocks, chains, gunshots, and other such noise-making instruments to the percussion section gives his output a hard, brutal, primal quality unmatched in 20th century music, and conductor Kari Kropsu and the Iceland Symphony have a field day (as do BIS' engineers) bringing this richly evocative score to deafening life. Turn it way up: if you don't risk your speakers, it isn't an authentic Leifs experience.
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music