For their fourth release with BIS, the United Strings of Europe with their director Julian Azkoul present another innovative programme, dedicated this time to the night, a source of wonder and fascination, rich with metaphorical associations. The ensemble’s varied, tailor-made programme features counterpoint, aching dissonance and chromaticism from across a range of styles spanning nearly 500 years, from the Renaissance to the present day.

The album is built around two post-romantic masterpieces: Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen (here in an arrangement by Éric Mouret), a work composed during the final months of the Second World War that evokes destruction, mourning, nostalgia, but also hope for progress and transformation, and Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, based on a poem by Richard Dehmel, which, in a nocturnal dialogue between a man and a woman, shows the power of love that can overcome the greatest challenges. These two major works are joined by arrangements for strings of vocal pieces by Maddelena Casulana, Carlo Gesualdo and Henry Purcell, as well as a new work by Daniel Kidane, Be Still, featuring percussionist Beibei Wang, a reflection on recent years marked by lockdowns during which everyday markers, such as meeting with friends and family, travelling or attending concerts vanished.

Taking its title from a poem by the sixteenth-century Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell, Times go by Turns comprises three masses composed during a period when the conditions for English Catholics – and Catholic composers – underwent radical change. Active at a time – the 15th century – when the Catholic Church flourished in England, John Plummer’s death roughly coincided with the ascension of the Tudors, a dynasty that would irreversibly alter religious traditions. As a consequence, the bulk of Plummer’s music was destroyed during the Reformation, the remainder surviving almost exclusively in sources from the continent. Born a century later than Plummer, Tallis witnessed the separation of England from the Catholic Church and his Mass for Four Voices displays a simple lyricism and economic use of polyphony which may well have been driven by liturgical necessity. Such constraints had grown even stronger by the end of the century, when his student and colleague William Byrd composed his own four-part Mass, intended for clandestine worship at a time when dissidents were dealt with by cruel means. The vocal quartet New York Polyphony released endBeginning (BIS-1949) in 2012, a disc which focused on Franco-Flemish polyphony. Meeting with international acclaim, the ensemble’s first collaboration with BIS received top marks on website ClassicsToday.com and in the French magazine Diapason, as well as being included on the Best-of-2012 lists in The New Yorker and Time Out New York. While dedicated to the works of the great age of polyphony, New York Polyphony is also noted for its performances of contemporary music. For this disc the ensemble has commissioned two modern works, with Andrew Smith contributing a Kyrie – the movement which Tallis’ mass leaves out – and Gabriel Jackson providing the closing Ite missa est (‘The mass is ended’). The programme also includes one of the last compositions by Richard Rodney Bennett (1936–2012). A Colloquy with God, the setting of a poem by Sir Thomas Browne for four male voices, was dedicated to New York Polyphony.

Three major works for piano and orchestra by English composers, all eschewing the traditional nineteenth- century model of a bravura virtuoso soloist pitted against an orchestra, in distinctive ways. Together with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under George Vass, Clare Hammond presents an original programme that provides a unique perspective on how the piano concerto reflected musical currents in mid-twentieth-century Britain. William Walton's Sinfonia Concertante for Orchestra with Piano Obbligato began as a ballet score. After it was rejected by Sergei Diaghilev, Walton arranged his score into a leaner, more direct and more effective work that reveals the influences of Stravinsky, Poulenc, Rimsky- Korsakov, Borodin and, at times, Elgar. Benjamin Britten's Diversions was commissioned by the left-hand pianist Paul Wittgenstein. Enthusiastic about the challenge of writing for the left hand, Britten devised a work in variation form; he did not seek to conceal the soloist's one-handedness, but revelled in it while still retaining emotion and grandeur. Michael Tippett's Piano Concerto completes the programme. Inspired by a performance of Beethoven's Fourth Concerto, Tippett was convinced that a contemporary concerto could be written, 'in which the piano is used once again for it's poetic capabilities'. In his work, the orchestra does not merely accompany; the principal players shine when they get their opportunity for solos or close dialogue with the soloist.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

After his latest recording, devoted to Bach's Sonatas and Partitas in his own arrangement, Franz Halasz returns to Spanish music with this recital devoted to Federico Moreno Torroba. The composer of many of the best-known zarzuelas, Moreno Torroba did not initially seem destined to specialise in guitar music. It was his symphonic poems that caught the attention of the legendary guitarist Andres Segovia, who commissioned Moreno Torroba's first compositions for guitar despite the composer's unfamiliarity with the instrument. The compositions gathered here showcase a composer who, although deeply rooted in the Spanish musical tradition, was attuned to what was being done elsewhere, including the music of Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky, and who created a personal language marked by impressionism that would later influence guitar music throughout the twentieth century, from Heitor Villa-Lobos to Leo Brouwer. The winner of a Latin Grammy, Franz Halasz is a highly acclaimed guitarist who has himself contributed to the repertoire of his instrument by making arrangements of Manuel de Falla and Isaac Albeniz. On a guitar built in 1936 by the legendary luthier Hermann Hauser, Halasz turns the instrument into a multi-faceted prism through which the musician can 'break the light of music' into orchestral sound, in the words of Segovia.

Although born in Sweden, Klas Torstensson has spent most of his working life in the Netherlands following his studies in Utrecht in the early 1970s. Stylistically, he may call to mind Varèse, Xenakis and – perhaps more distantly – Stravinsky. First and foremost, however, Torstensson’s music is personal and distinctive. It is often nourished by his experiences of nature: rough granite, the sea, ice in the frozen Baltic inlets, the polar ice cap. His Lantern Lectures were composed in the aftermath of his opera The Expedition, about an ill-fated journey to the North Pole. While occupied with the opera he had received commissions from several different ensembles, and he therefore decided to write a cycle of works for these ensembles – compositions to be performed separately or as ‘movements’ forming a greater whole. The four lectures portray fundamental elements and phenomena in Nordic nature: bedrock with stratified memories of its violent origins (Solid Rocks I & II), traces of the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) and potholes, cylindrical holes drilled into the bedrock under glaciers (Giant’s Cauldron). They all involve 12 to 15 players, and are connected by Brass Links, brief interludes for trumpet, horn and trombone. Lantern Lectures is here performed by Norrbotten NEO, an ensemble dedicated to the promotion of contemporary chamber music, conducted by Christian Karlsen.

Includes song(s) by various composers. Ensemble: Orphei Drängar. Conductor: Robert Sund. Soloists: Olle Persson, Folke Alin.

In the early 19th century, while Haydn and Mozart remained revered, many of their once admired contemporaries quickly fell into oblivion and with them much delightful, finely crafted music. In a recital centered on songs of parting, Carolyn Sampson and Kristian Bezuidenhout seek to make some amends to this. They open with August Bernhard Valentin Herbing's Montan und Lalage, a miniature opera for one singer, with the keyboard-as-orchestra providing the scenery and stage action. Giving Bezuidenhout's fortepiano the recognition it deserves, the program also includes no less than two songs dedicated to the instrument, by composers we rarely hear of today: Friedrich Gottlob Fleischer and Christian Michael Wolff. But even though Mozart and Haydn are still household names, it isn’t on account of their solo songs, which makes the performers’ decision to also throw light on their less familiar work a welcome one. The program features four songs each by them, including Mozart’s Lied der Trennung (Song of Parting), which has lent its name to the entire program, as well as Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos, a dramatic cantata in which the Cretan princess Ariadne expresses her love of the Greek hero Theseus … and her agony when he sails off, leaving her alone on the island of Naxos.

REVIEW:

This a program cleverly designed, as they so often are today. The theme is separation, but the opening extensive song is by August Bernhard Valentin Herbing, a long narrative to be balanced by Joseph Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos at the other end. In between are other songs by composers both familiar and not: 4 by Mozart, 3 other ones by Haydn, interspersed with 2 by Friedrich Gottlob Fleischer and one by Christian Michael Wolff. It should be noted that the Haydn songs, apart from Arianna, aren’t from his late English settings, but are German-language pieces written a couple of decades earlier. Sampson is a “known quantity”, a pure and well-controlled soprano whose home is more or less exactly where she is here: late 18th- and early 19th Century lieder. Bezuidenhout (on loan to BIS from Harmonia Mundi) is a firstclass fortepianist, quite capable of pushing his instrument past its reasonable limits, as he does at the end of Arianna.

-- American Record Guide

Classical Music

Emilia Amper, one of Sweden’s most exciting young folk musicians, is also one of the finest nyckelharpa players in the world today. (In fact, she can even boast of being a World Champion on the instrument, a title she won in 2010.) For Trollfågeln, her first solo disc, she has devised a programme which demonstrates the numerous facets of her own musical personality, and of her instrument. With its roots stretching back to medieval Europe, the nyckelharpa (‘keyed fiddle’) almost died out in the middle of the twentieth century, but has made a remarkable comeback and is attracting an increasing number of performers in Sweden and around the world. Firmly grounded in Swedish traditional music, Emilia Amper has also worked with musicians from many other backgrounds, and regards folk music as a common international language, and a way of combining tradition with spontaneous improvisation in a playful reflection of our own times. Consequently, on Trollfågeln (‘The Magic Bird’) a traditional dance tune such as Bredals Näckapolska stands next to Emilia’s own take on rock music, Kapad (‘Hijacked’). Similarly, Ut i mörka natten (‘Into the Dark Night’), a song about budding love that she’s written and composed herself, is contrasted with Herr Lager och skön fager, her setting of a poem from the late 1800s describing the sad outcome of a love affair. Solos are mixed with settings in which Emilia is joined by a string ensemble from the famous Norwegian chamber orchestra the Trondheim Soloists, or by another well-known virtuoso on the nyckelharpa, Johan Hedin, as well as by some of her regular collaborators: Anders Löfberg, Dan Svensson and Olle Linder. In turns hypnotic, melancholy and meditative, groovy and jubilant, Trollfågeln is a breathtaking roller-coaster of a disc.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Between 1791 and 1804, Joseph Haydn arranged some 400 traditional songs for publishers in Scotland and England. Almost all of the songs were Scottish and the most common setting was for voice and piano trio. There have been numerous recordings and performances of the arrangements by these forces, but on this disc The Poker Club Band offer their listeners something quite different. Taking its name from one of the Edinburgh clubs at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment, the ensemble consists of four early music specialists and a traditional singer. They have retained Haydn’s violin and cello, but the keyboard part has been adapted for harp and guitar following indications that the harp was commonly used for contemporary performances of Scottish traditional repertoire. The Gaelic singer James Graham, with his idiomatic Scottish timbre, and the period instruments – of which Masako Art’s single-action pedal harp from 1809 is known to have been in Scotland around the time – brings us that much closer to what a performance in an Edinburgh salon might have sounded like around 1800. The songs themselves range from the cautionary tale of a girl who married for love and now is doomed to a life of hard and dirty work on her husband’s farm (The Mucking of Geordie’s Byer) to love songs such as Oran Gaoil, with a text by Robert Burns. Providing variety, some instrumental 18th century arrangements of Haydn originals are included while the album ends with the well-known atmospheric Lament by the Scottish fiddler Niel Gow.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Conceived under the sign of the sun, this is a series of works for saxophone and orchestra by French composers with a specific affinity for the Mediterranean, its atmosphere and culture(s). Painting these varied landscapes is Claude Delangle, joined by the forces of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra led by Lan Shui.

VALEN Symphony No. 1. Violin Concerto. Sonetto di Michelangelo. Cantico di ringraziamento. Pastorale • Christian Eggen, cond; Elise Båtnes (vn); Stavanger SO • BIS 1522 (58:06)


One of the great pleasures of collecting recordings is the occasional discovery of an exciting, previously unknown, work. Well, here are five of them, by a composer that has been neglected for far too long. Norwegian composer Fartein Valen (1887–1952) may be, as one biography has it, “one of the few Norwegian composers with an international reputation,” but that doesn’t seem to be saying much. He was a modernist in a country much taken with its nationalist musical tradition and not particularly receptive to Valen’s innovations. His own apparent indifference to recognition and his withdrawal to the isolation of a rural farm for much of his creative life only added to his obscurity. One can hope this release, the first in a promised series of recordings of orchestral works from BIS will help to rectify this situation.


Valen studied with Max Bruch in Berlin and stayed to absorb the many other influences of that important musical capital in the second decade of the 20th century. He fell under the spell of Bach, Bruckner, and Brahms, but was also captivated by the progressives of that era, especially Arnold Schoenberg. When Schoenberg introduced his first works using serial techniques in the early 1920s, Valen was already home in Norway, developing his own type of serialism. It became the basis for all of his compositions written from 1925 on. Unlike Schoenberg, who developed a whole new theoretical system of music using tone rows of all 12 chromatic pitches, Valen worked intuitively and far less strictly. His point of departure was Bach’s rich polyphony, from which he developed comparably rich tone row-like chromatic melodies. Valen applied this technique of “dissonant counterpoint,” as he called it, in a variety of classic forms during the remainder of his career. The result is not the sometimes hard-edged dissonances of Schoenberg’s thornier scores. Rather, while there are no keys in Valen’s music, there is always a sense of vague tonality. The lines are incredibly long, but one never gets lost. There is a feeling of wandering, which is undoubtedly the desired effect. This is music of ambiguity and melancholy—a beautiful uncertainty which Valen packages in clear, familiar structures. It sounds vaguely like Berg, another important influence, but the overall effect is different.


Valen’s Symphony No. 1, op. 30 (1939), is, of course, classical in form. After a beginning of dark foreboding, the opening Allegro movement is tense and energetic, with moments of exaltation. El Greco’s painting Christ on the Mount of Olives is the inspiration for the second, Adagio, movement. The building of the line is ecstatic and the anguish palpable. The third movement provides contrast in the form of a playful scherzo and clouded trio before we are plunged back into the tensions of the rondo-form finale. It is an exhilarating journey.


The Violin Concerto, op. 37 (1940), is Valen’s most-played work and the one that finally brought him some recognition at its premiere in 1948. It was written as a memorial to his godson, Arne Valen, who had died of tuberculosis several years earlier. In it he expresses his profound sense of loss and his deep Christian faith, the latter especially in his use of the Bach chorale Jesu meine Zuversicht in the concluding section of the work. It bears a superficial similarity to the Berg Violin Concerto, of which Valen was aware, though he had not actually heard it. The work is intensely beautiful and deeply, often tenderly, moving.


The other works on the disc— Pastorale , op. 11 (1930), a meditation on his beloved rose garden, Sonetto di Michelangelo , op. 17/1 (1932), in which he contemplates the religious longing and pain in the great Italian artist’s poetry, and Cantico di ringraziamento , op. 17/2 (1932), in which Valen expresses Psalm-like thanksgiving in a beautifully constructed fugue—are equally rewarding experiences.


The Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, the excellent resident orchestra of Valen’s birthplace, has made a mission, on CD at least, of rescuing Norwegian composers from undeserved obscurity. Valen joins Geirr Tveitt and Harald Sæverud in their debt. Christian Eggen, who edited the often-faulty published scores to restore Valen’s intentions, is well known in Scandinavia for his performances of contemporary music. He conducts with admirable strength and sensitivity. Elise Båtnes, one of the foremost violinists of Norway, plays the difficult, soaring lines of the Concerto with silvery tone and great concentration. The recorded sound is very fine and the documentation excellent. This is not music of loud affirmation and major-key celebration. Look elsewhere for that. This is music of great emotional depth and asks a fair amount of the listener. It rewards in kind. Highly recommended with that caveat.


FANFARE: Ronald E. Grames

Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and conductor Christian Eggen continue the survey of their compatriot Fartein Valen's orchestral music with a programme spanning the years 1932-1946. Valen had by then already established his distinctive tonal language, an atonal counterpoint based on his studies of Bach with inspiration from Schoenberg and from Alban Berg. The three single-movement orchestral pieces recorded here were written in the space of just over a year, and all have titles that are rich in extra-musical associations. They are not, however, examples of romantic programme music: the titles reflect the underlying inspiration rather than the content of the works. Nenia, from the Latin, is a lament - or 'funeral march' as Valen termed it - inspired by the expressive Roman marble figure known as the 'Dying Gaul'. For An die Hoffnung it was the poem 'To Hope' by John Keats which provided the creative impetus, and it is known that Valen owned a copy of Edmund Spenser's Epithalamion from 1595, as he was composing the work which he intended as a wedding gift to his nephew. These shorter works may be seen as preliminary studies for Valen's symphonies, of which No.2 and No.3 were composed from 1941 to 1946. During this time - which more or less coincides with the German occupation of Norway - Valen led a reclusive life on the family farm, spending his time composing and tending his beloved rose garden. As a symphonist, Valen was not interested in the traditional symphonic development but he did want to preserve the character of the extended lines with long spans through polyphony. To quote the liner notes by Valen specialist Arvid Vollsnes, 'many of the movements are like gigantic fugues. They have a dynamic, rather than an architectural form even though we encounter sonata form, Lied form and rondos.'.

This third and final disc of our survey of the complete orchestral music by Norwegian composer Fartein Valen includes three shorter one-movement works from the 1930s, as well as his last two orchestral compositions, his Fourth Symphony and the Piano Concerto. Kirkegården ved havet ('The Churchyard by the Sea'), which opens the disc, is among the most played of Valen's works and has been the inspiration for ballets as well as for a poetic film. As so often with Valen's shorter pieces, the composer had found inspiration in another work of art, this time the celebrated poem Le cimetière marin by Paul Valéry. The piece was conceived during a journey to Majorca, a journey which also bore fruit in La Isla de las Calmas ('The Silent Island'), based on a view of Palma de Mallorca, as the ship Valen was on departed for the mainland. Ode til ensomheten ('Ode to Solitude') is firmly based in the Norwegian landscape, however, its title referring to the solitude Valen sought at his isolated family homestead on the coast of Norway, where he spent his time composing and tending his beloved roses, but also worrying about the state of the world in the late 1930s and 40s. Christian Eggen and Stavanger Symphony Orchestra continues with Valen's last symphony, which contains something of a greeting to Johannes Brahms: like Brahms Valen ends his Fourth Symphony with a chaconne. For the final work - and Valen's last completed composition - they are joined by Einar Henning Smebye, the soloist in the piano concerto. Valen prepared for it by studying concertos by Mozart, and the three-movement work is classically simple in structure. It is restrained, almost anti-virtuosic with a solo part that is woven into the music.

For her fifth release on BIS Clare Hammond has constructed an adventurous programme of twentieth and twenty-first-century variations for piano. From the imposing Chaconne by Sofia Gubaidulina, to the tender grief of Paul Hindemith’s variations or Aaron Copland’s bold and uncompromising proclamation, the disc presents a fresh perspective on the genre. Hammond opens with Karol Szymanowski’s Variations on a Polish Theme from 1904, a virtuosic and intensely Romantic outpouring that contrasts strikingly with the wit and irreverence of Helmut Lachenmann’s set on a theme by Schubert. The most recent works in the programme are Harrison Birtwistle’s mercurial elegy and its polar opposite I Still Play, a lyrical waltz composed in 2017 by John Adams. Described as ‘a star interpreter of contemporary music’ (The Observer), Clare Hammond has developed a reputation for imaginative concert programming. As she herself admits in her liner notes, variation form may on the surface appear to be both limiting and limited, but the works she presents here transcend the form in myriad creative, and at times daring, ways.

Classical Music

This disc offers the world première recording of Viatore ('The Wanderer', 2001), which may be described as a representation in sound of 'becoming' or 'passing' - a spiritual journey in familiar Vasks territory. All the works were recorded in the presence of the composer by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra - an ensemble whose previous BIS recordings have all been highly acclaimed. The orchestra's performances on one of their latest offerings - H.K. Gruber's Manhattan Broadcasts BIS-CD-1341) - were termed "masterful" (Gramophone), "a triumph" (BBC Music Magazine), and "superb" (The Times). Under the direction of the orchestra's leader Katarina Andreasson, who also performs the solo part of the violin concerto, the playing on the present disc is no less committed.