Dmitri Shostakovich is known for his symphonies, his chamber music, maybe the popular Suites, and to some extent even his film. Largely unknown, however, is his vocal symphonic music, of which only the cycle on Jewish Folk Poetry, Op. 79, has gained some wider popularity. Here these hidden gems are brought together in authoritative interpretations under Michail Jurowski and the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne with it's rich Shostakovich tradition under Semyon Bychkov and Rudolf Barshai, among others, from the Six Romances on words by Japanese poets to the Suite on Verses by Michelangelo Buonarroti.

One of the foremost vocal chamber ensembles active today, New York Polyphony is renowned for it's innovative programming ranging from Gregorian chant to contemporary commissions. On Sky of my Heart, the selection spans over four hundred years of musical history and bears witness to this vocal ensemble's commitment to discovering and developing new works that augment it's core early music repertoire. Some of the works performed here deal with the essential themes of life, death and the afterlife and have been inspired by personal bereavement (Smith) or by the impact of Covid confinement (Moravec). Others are steeped in a spiritual atmosphere, whether religious (Byrd, Moody, Tavener and McGlade) or meditative (Naito). The contemporary works, some of which were written at the behest of New York Polyphony, are firmly rooted in the rich history of plainsong, while at the same time featuring some very contemporary harmonies. The vocal ensemble is joined by LeStrange Viols in three pieces: My Days by Nico Muhly, a ritualized tribute to the early 17th-century English composer Orlando Gibbons, The Silver Swan by Gibbons himself, which brings the programme to an appropriately quiet and poignant close, and Byrd's Agnus Dei. The viol ensemble adds a colour that is both appropriate for Gibbons and original in it's treatment of sound.

Lars Forssell's lyrics are both lyrical and down-to-earth and often deal with love experiences, exposure and vulnerability. They can be provocative, politically pronounced, mix light and dark and can be both shimmeringly beautiful and agonizingly black. Evert Taube had great significance for tango in Sweden during the 20th century. Lars Forssell was a close friend of the family and played an important role in how the view of Evert Taube changed from a slightly odd troubadour to the role of popular national poet. Sven Bertil Taube and Lars Forssell went to Argentina together in 1988 and experienced Argentine tango. When they got home, they recorded a tango LP. I have chosen some of these songs with Lars's ingenious lyrics. Our last cafe depicts how painful it is to be abandoned. In Lost Birds we meet the deceived man and the broken love. In Again, the lost love is portrayed. Belgrano is nostalgic and invites us to "play the piano of the past".

The world premiere recording of Durey's L'Offrande lyrique (Op. 4), six songs set to texts by Rabindranath Tagore (recipient of the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature) in French translation by Andre Gide, is a highlight of this collection. Musically inspired by the atonality of Arnold Schoenberg's The Book of Hanging Gardens, and often credited as the first piece of free twelve-note technique in French music, L'Offrande lyrique navigates a harmonic language which can hold clarity and vivid colour in Lumiere ! ma lumiere !, or blur into dark heavy clouded gesture in Les nuages s'entassent, effectively supporting Tagore's language. At times, the words seem to muse over seemingly unconnected piano motifs, before meeting- sometimes harmonically, sometimes not-sometimes walking the same path, other times meandering separately again. For Paris 1913 to include a world premiere recording of such important music, written over a century ago, is thrilling, and places Durey firmly alongside his contemporaries in the cafes and salons of pre-war Paris. Far from being overshadowed by the better-known composers in this anthology, these songs stand as a testament to the strength of French melodies of the era. � Andrew Matthews-Owen & Claire Booth

Periodically someone decides the time is ripe for a re-appraisal of the music of the Ukrainian-born Polish composer Karol Szymanowski. Among his most persuasive advocates have been such eminent conductors as Pierre Boulez and Simon Rattle, both of whom have committed much Szymanowski to disc. But, for one reason or another, he remains a name known to many while his music remains largely unknown. Possibly the Etude in B flat minor for piano – one of the most deeply moving of all piano études, with its powerful echoes of Rachmaninov – will be familiar to pianists, but little else from his broad output finds its way into the consciousness of music lovers. This latest disc devoted to Szymanowski on Capriccio’s “Modern Times” series does all it can to keep Szymanowksi obscure, but the music succeeds where Capriccio fails, and I would recommend this most strongly to all of those for whom Szymanowski is merely a name that sounds like a Russian transliteration of Schumann or a spoof composer with a name derived from a cross-fertilization of Schumann and Tchaikovsky. These are not the best performances you will find, and the packaging is grim, but the music is wonderful and for those whose idea of hi-fidelity is listening to music through their computer speakers, the flat recorded sound will not unduly disturb the pleasure of an encounter with this gorgeous music.

The trouble with describing the music of an unfamiliar composer is that one reverts to comparisons with better-known ones – as if originality of voice is given only to those whose music has crossed the fickle threshold of popular taste.

With the Concert Overture which opens the disc, one can possibly be excused this, for if any music ever sounded like a Richard Strauss tone poem, this does. From its boisterous opening to its triumphal conclusion, it is a feast of Straussian gestures and ideas, a wonderful orchestral romp and a stirring musical journey. And this is what Szymanowski intended, for in 1904 when he wrote it, Richard Strauss was the dominant figure. If the booklet notes are to be believed, Szymanowski deliberately aped the style of Strauss “as a provocation to the, in his view, completely fossilized structures of Polish music”.

At this point we must break off to mention those booklet notes, tightly compressed into a distinctly unappealing booklet which seems designed to put off potential buyers. Christian Heindl’s German text is dense enough, striving to place Szymanowksi in some sort of context with Polish music at the start of the last century. But the English translation (claiming to be the work of one Ian Mansfield) is a disgrace. Seeming to have done little more than run the original German through a free online translator, and not even having made the effort to check the spelling afterwards, Mansfield comes up with such incoherent nonsense as; “he ranks as one of the many tone wolves and practically outsiders in music”, “the composer instrumented the cycle for chamber orchestra”, and “meaningful for the concert hall and fathoming it to the depths”.

Soprano Marisol Montalvo is, thankfully, infinitely more eloquent in the cycle of five songs, Slopiewnie, which bears the same opus number as Szymanowski’s great opera, King Roger but is otherwise unconnected. Exotic, sometimes harmonically brittle, sparsely orchestrated but highly effective, these are a world away from the lush world of Strauss’s orchestral songs and present a musical voice which is both distinctive and accomplished. There is nothing identifiably Polish about these settings of Polish texts by Julian Tuwim, but the booklet note suggests the musical idiom is derived from Gorals, an ethnic group which “has its area of distribution in the Polish Tatra and the Beskids, but also in parts of Slovakia”. It also observes some stylistic parallels with Stravinsky and Les Noces. Montalvo has a pure, shining vocal quality with an innately focused sense of pitch.

The major work on the disc is the Fourth Symphony, subtitled Sinfonia Concertante, but which is, to all intents and purposes, a fully-fledged piano concerto. Szymanowski wrote the work for himself to play (although he dedicated it to Artur Rubinstein) and called it a Symphony to disguise his shortcomings as a concerto soloist. Ewa Kupiec is the fleet-fingered soloist, delivering the almost Ravelian delicacy of the first movement with a refreshingly light touch supported by the kind of clear-textured orchestration which seems such a feature of Szymanowski. Even as the movement builds up to its great climax, the feeling of delicacy and suppleness Kupiec brings to the performance is never lost, and Karl-Heinz Steffens seems to have an instinctive feel for the balance which comes across even when the recording engineers have done little to assist. A gentle, fluttering second movement introduces all manner of magical orchestral effects, much in the manner of a Bartók night-music movement but built around Polish rather than Hungarian folk songs. And in the final movement it is the spirit of Polish dances which seems to dominate in music that sounds like Ravel and Bartók holding hands but is, in reality, uniquely the voice of Szymanowski – stunning orchestral writing, impeccably crafted moments of climax and repose and an exotic musical language which is utterly enthralling. Steffens maintains a wonderfully incisive rhythmic momentum which his German players throw themselves into with great gusto.

The Nocturne and Tarantella is an orchestration, made two years after Szymanowski’s death by Grzegorz Fitelberg, of a work originally written for violin and piano. It draws attention to Szymanowski’s fondness for the exotic, combining Spanish and Italian elements in a scintillating dance-like display, where only the final cadence seems indicative of a composer not quite of the very first rank, but with a voice all his own.

– MusicWeb International (Marc Rochester)

Alpha Classics continues its collaboration with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and presents a programme devoted to compositions by its conductor and artistic director, Matthias Pintscher. bereshit, ‘in a beginning’ in Hebrew, is a piece on the subject of divine creation. The architecture of the work refers to the idea of the growth of the elements out of nothingness to their finished state: the colours, the harmonies are therefore always redefined by what precedes and follows them. Songs from Solomon’s garden – still in a highly spiritual dimension – explores amorous passion through the shir ha shirim (Song of Songs). The poetic density of this text is underlined here, with the only repeated phrase of the work taking on a quasi-incantatory signification: ‘she-cholat ahava ani’ (for I am sick of love).

The young tenor Reinoud Van Mechelen, whose career is currently in full flower, appears as a guest soloist with today’s leading conductors of Baroque music. He has decided to devote his first solo album to a composer whom he interprets with elegance and contagious joy: Johann Sebastian Bach. The title ‘Erbarme dich’ naturally evokes for music lovers the celebrated alto aria from the St Matthew Passion; but it is also the incipit of a sorrowful, sensuous aria for tenor and flute from the Cantata BWV 55. In fact, a substantial corpus of cantatas written by the Kantor in Leipzig between 1724 and 1726 feature a close dialogue between tenor voice and flute. Bach excels in this art of discourse and enjoys underlining or contradicting the text by sketching with the flute lines full of exacerbated vocality. This art of interweaving voices attracted Reinoud Van Mechelen and the flautist Anna Besson, who have chosen, along with the organist and harpsichordist Benjamin Alard, to structure their programme around Bach arias featuring obbligato organ and traverso. This album marks the birth of the ensemble founded by Reinoud Van Mechelen, A Nocte Temporis, and the start of his collaboration with Alpha, which will extend over several years.

Heinrich Finck was born in Bamberg and quite probably spent his formative years at the court chapel in Cracow or Warsaw in Poland. In any case, this is what can be gathered from comments by his grandnephew, Hermannn Finck, in his Practica Musica of 1556. Here we also read that his granduncle was famed as a master already in the 1480's. After a short period of study in Leipzig he then was active as the church music director at the Polish court in Cracow for a number of years. He interrupted his activity there in 1490 in order to accept a position at the Hungarian royal court, but this arrangement was not permanent. When the ducal ensemble was disbanded in 1514, Finck probably became a member of the imperial court chapel. He later served the Salzburg Cathedral chapter, then at the Scottish Abbey in Vienna, where he contributed to the development of the choral and instrumental ensemble, and finally as the chapel master of Emperor Ferdinand I's court ensemble.

Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton burst upon the global opera and concert scene in recent years after having won many of the world’s most prestigious prizes for vocal excellence and accomplishments. Delos has scored a major coup in releasing her debut album. Jamie’s well-chosen program of late-Romantic repertoire begins with eight of Gustav Mahler’s finest lieder- including his wonderful Five Ruckert Songs- before treating us to the rare delights of Antonin Dvorak’s song cycle Gypsy Songs. Her album concludes with even more seldom-heard selections from the many lovely Swedish-language songs of Finnish master Jean Sibelius. This sublime release- further graced by pianist Brian Zeger’s peerless collaboration- will take your breath away, and leave you hungry for more from Jamie Barton, considered by many of the world’s top vocal and operatic experts to be the rising mezzo of our time.

An outstanding violinist of the 20th century - Wolfgang Schneiderhan, born in Vienna in 1915, was concert master of the Vienna Philharmonic for many years before turning to his solo career entirely. Although Schneiderhan possessed enormous technical prowess, he never entered the territory of pure virtuoso concertos or sensational solo pieces. Instead, his dexterity always underpinned a well-articulated tone, a cultivated breath of modulation and a highly differentiated dynamic pallette. The natural and genuine nature of his playing was, justifiably, praised again and again. The range of Schneiderhan's repertoire is also displayed in these three Lucerne live recordings, now released for the first time. His commitment for the music of his time becomes particularly evident: he performs Henze's highly virtuosic First Violin Concerto alongside Martin's Magnificat.

For the 500th anniversary of the Reformation a collection of all 35 hymns by Luther is being released on a double CD for the first time. The Lutheran hymns in choral settings and chorale cantatas from the 16th century to the present day (including works by Praetorius, Scheidt, Bach, Mendelssohn, Jennefelt, and Schwemmer) are performed by the Kammerchor Stuttgart under the direction of Frieder Bernius and the Athesinus Consort Berlin conducted by Klaus-Martin Bresgott. These choral settings are complemented by chorale arrangements for organ. Margot Kassmann, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Markus Meckel, Judith Zander, and others have offered extensive liner notes with meditations on the selected hymns, and Johann Hinrich Claussen, Cultural Officer of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, has provided a knowledgeable forward.

Italian organist and composer Andrea Gabrieli was busy creating this collection of music for over thirty years of his life. Consisting of thirty-one compositions in total, many consider this collection Gabrieli's most important work. Tastar de Corde and Speculum Ensemble guide listeners through these historically accurate and skillfully played works.

American composer Marty Regan specializes in composing music for traditional Japanese instruments, a fascination he has developed since 2000. Regan describes his Japanese-style compositions as "hybrid musical soundscapes that reflect the age in which we live, an era based not necessarily on globalization, but of partnership based on global cultural interaction." In contrast, Splash of Indigo features a complementary side of Regan's output, containing only works for Western orchestral instruments and voice. Despite the album's instrumentation, Regan's connection to Japan remains strong in Splash of Indigo. Splash of Indigo proves Regan is more than capable of inventing and developing charming and complex networks of musical ideas. In it's varied collection of chamber and large ensemble works, Splash of Indigo shows Marty Regan is a composer of considerable breadth and skill beyond his dedicated efforts to build a bridge between American and Japanese musical culture.

This album presents secular Christmas carols from Europe and South America. These traditional songs have been newly arranged by Manfred Frankel for voice, accordion, violin and percussion instruments. The carols are intended to sound as natural as possible and yet offer something unusual. Older and more recent songbooks from a wide variety of countries served as the basis for the adaptions - in some cases the original languages were retained, and in others the texts have been translated into German. The result is an impressive kaleidoscope of folkloristic, international Christmas carols. The different musical orientations from which Ursula Fielder and Manfred Frankel originally come - she from a "classical music", he from "folk music" - made them curious about each other. At first, they developed a Breton-Celtic programme: the success of this encouraged them to produce this somewhat different Christmas album with newly found, rather unconventional repertoire.

Munich composer Max Beckshafer invites us on a fantastic roller coaster ride filled with moving moments on his new Genuin release, where each piece is a world premiere recording. Beckschafer presents settings of new and old poetry from the Middle Ages to the post-modern era, bridging the gap over several centuries. Sometimes we feel like we are listening to a medieval troubadour, sometimes we hear the disconcerting sound clusters of our time. A pupil of Killmayer, Beckschafer collaborated with brilliant countertenor Franz Vitzthum, the Ensemble Stimmwerck, and the Ensemble Il Capriccio for this production- artists who truly make the dazzling colors of his music shine. This release is inspiringly different!

Baritone Andre Schuen and pianist Daniel Heide were brought together through serendipity. They both took part in the 2008 Salzburg Mozarteum Summer Academy and performed during the prizewinners’ recital When Daniel heard Andre’s voice for the first time, he immediately knew he wanted to collaborate with the spectacular musician. This is the duo’s debut release, and the purpose is to present the entire scope of their repertoire. Andre Schuen has been exploring different facets of his voice. “The three personalities we encounter on this CD represent three different generations. In Robert Schumann we meet the enraptured youthful lover; in Frank Martin we meet a man caught in the midst of life but pushed to the brink of despair by fear of death. And Hugo Wolf draws our gaze to Mignon’s father, the old harpist, full of melancholy, approaching the end of his life.”

Carlo Gesualdo’s music is characterized by extravagant harmonies, chromatic modulations, wide intervallic leaps and sometimes hardly catchy melodies, which not only reflect the drama of the text or the mannerism of his time, but also the emotional disorder of his creator. The LuciSerene ensemble and the equally distinguished Mauro Borgioni counter the long-established traditions, characterized by their homogeneity and beauty of sound, with a welcome freshness. In honor of the 450th anniversary of the composer, the ensemble has chosen the music of Carlo Gesualdo.

Today regarded as one of the most innovative and active Baroque ensembles on the international scene, Cappella Mediterranea has already made several distinguished recordings for the Ricercar label. Leonardo Garcia Alarcon will continue his diverse collaborations with Ricercar, but will also release several projects with Alpha Classics, beginning with this original program of music by one of his favorite composers, Claduio Monteverdi. On the occasion of a music theater piece performed at the Doge’s Palace in Venice which was centered on Poppea, whom her nurse Arnalta warns against the vices, Cappella Mediterranea recorded this anthology of arias and madrigals alternating between sins and virtues, performed by the singers who have made the ensemble’s reputation, including Francesca Aspromonte as Poppea, Mariana Flores in Si dolce e’l tormento among others, and the tenor Emiliano Gonzalez-Toro.

For almost two thousand years people around the world have been gathering to celebrate the Christmas season. These celebrations are as varied as their countries of origin but share at least two common threads, the birth of Jesus and the desire to celebrate this event in music. Carols such as Silent Night, O Holy Night or Ave Maria are sung throughout the world and need little introduction. Many of the tracks on this disc are less known but great Christmas carols.

This new release is a bouquet of traditional hymns taken from 18th and 19th century hymnals. These beloved works have been passed down from generation to generation, and remain some of the most sung hymns in churches across the globe. The Mellstock Band & Choir perform music from the Hardy family and Puddletown Church manuscripts using authentic instruments as they would have been performed by a village band in Hardy’s Wessex. Maddy Prior and The Carnival Band were formed in 1984 for a BBC Radio 2 broadcast of Christmas carols. The broadcast became an album, which was enthusiastically received by the public. Each member of the ensemble enjoys their own career, but the group is always happy to come together for a project like this, with opportunities to combine styles and talents.

The musical content of this album presents a cross-section of the typical aesthetic features and diversified representative expressions that were most appreciated by the public during the late Renaissance and early Baroque. The style of In Tabernae Musica's performance stems chiefly from the study of the iconographic sources, from which there emerges an artistic production that is targeted not exclusively at the educated class, but also, at the people.

Soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian is the originator for this project which was her fulfilment of the promise she made a couple of years ago in prayers offered to save her mother’s life when she committed to produce a collection of hymns and chants written in praise of the Virgin Mary. She has brought together 18 of these that amazingly cover a period ranging from a composer who died only 30 years ago back to one who died well over 1500 years ago! Of course it is almost impossible (I say almost because I don’t know) to be sure that anything written that long ago would sound as it is interpreted here but suffice it to say that those about which we can be more certain (13th-17th century) are not so very different in their sound world to those written much nearer our time. They are all connected by a sound that is intoxicatingly ethereal. The occasional use of a cello or percussion accompaniment works very well but it is the unaccompanied voices that are so wonderfully evocative as well as incredibly restful, just the thing to effect a detox for the mind after a stressful day. Isabel Bayrakdarian is the key to this for her voice is an extraordinary instrument that is crystal clear with pinsharp diction and I say this despite the fact that I know no Armenian once I located the place in the text, which is not just given in English but is transliterated into Latin characters, I could follow the words so clearly an Armenian speaker would have no difficulty in doing so. Her accompanying singers, whether the vocal group Coro Vox Aeterna, her two sisters or the other two sopranos, give great support while the cellist, Ani Aznavoorian, also of Armenian origin, has a wonderfully rich tone which so perfectly complements the voices and her brother provides percussive support using instruments that are traditionally used in Armenian church services adds yet another layer to the proceedings when called for.

It is an interesting fact that hymns and chants that in several instances go back so long into what can truly be called ‘ancient history’ are the mainstays of today’s Armenian Orthodox church worship for I certainly know of no such parallels in other strands of Christianity and it shows the strength of undiluted tradition. I wouldn’t try to pick out any of these mesmerising items out for singular praise as they are all equally magnificent in their affecting power.

Anyone who enjoys the experience of the voice as instrument cannot fail to find this issue a fascinating and captivating listen. If you find the other-worldly sounds of Russian or Bulgarian Orthodox Church choirs with their rich basses addictive then the correspondingly high voices of these Armenian voices will weave their magic just as powerfully translating into a heady brew that will keep you spellbound.

– MusicWeb International (Steve Arloff)

This reissue is a very useful reminder that there is much more to the world of early seventeenth century Florence than just the great work of Monteverdi, who composed Orfeo as a court opera in 1607. Sung drama was a special development in Florence, and music lovers looked for the right combination between poetry and music. The role of the camerate would have considerable significance in that development, which would lead, in full development, to opera as we know it.

There are special problems of setting words to music which remain potent for composers of all times. Is the priority music or text? In a preface of 1605, Monteverdi contrasted prima prattica with seconda prattica. In the former, the word must subordinate itself to the music, with emotional compass limited by musical values. In the latter, things are the other way about (a bit of a simplification, but sound enough), even if the expressiveness of the text means an unevenness in balance and harmony. Monteverdi’s Orfeo exemplifies seconda prattica. So too, in its own way, does Belli’s L’Orfeo Dolente, of 1616, the main piece on this recording, supplemented by extracts from contemporary works.

Belli’s work is not an opera in the sense that Monteverdi’s Orfeo is. Rather, it has the character of incidental music to Tasso’s play, Arminta, a set of numbers to draw out and heighten the key moments of the drama. The text of these verses is not by Tasso, but by Gabriello Chiabrera. Belli is today not well-known, but he was clearly a composer of distinctive voice; he worked at the Florentine Basilica of San Lorenzo from 1610 until 1613.

But this music is not just a piece of archaeological interest; it stands on its own very well in performances as varied, as musical and attractive as those on this disc. Singers are uniformly fine, both individually and in ensemble, with good diction and security of tone. Performances are informed, both musically and historically, as one would expect from such fine musicians.

– MusicWeb International (MusicWeb International)

At the height of the Renaissance, the music of Orlande de Lassus frequently combines the emotion of secular music with sacred compositions. With their erotic connotations, the texts of The Song of Songs are an ideal source for bringing together sacred and profane feelings. Based on his most famous song, Lassus wrote one of his unitary masses: Suzanne un jour. Along with the Magnificat that he composed on De Rore's madrigal Ancor che col partire, here are two religious compositions of which the themes are borrowed from evocations of amorous turmoil.

Joseph Haas' Christmas Liederspiel, Christnacht, combines Bavarian and Tyrol folk tunes into an oratorio. His Marian Hymns based primarily on texts from the 13th to the 18th centuries. The composers of the other various carols on this release are either pupils or contemporaries of Haas.