Search results: Search results
1002 results
Products
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
SaleSchicklele: A Year In The Catskills / Wang, Rose, Blair Woodwind Quintet
Naxos · Aug 2011CD$19.99$9.99 -
Great Ballets from the Bolshoi, Vol. 2 / State Academic Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra
BelAir Classiques · Dec 2018DVD$42.99 -
-
-
-
-
-
-
Bernstein: Serenade After Plato; Music of Bloch & Barber / Gluzman, Neschling
BIS · Nov 2009SACD$21.99 -
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Fedele: Phasing / Orvieto, Bellocchio, Richelli, Beneventi, Savron
Stradivarius · Jan 2017CD$18.99 -
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
SaleBeethoven: Symphonies Nos. 4-6; Barry: Viola Concerto / Adès, Britten Sinfonia
Signum Classics · Oct 2020CD$27.99$13.99 -
-
-
Mozart: Requiem & Ave Verum - Bruckner: Motets / Marschik, Vienna Folk Opera Symphony
Capriccio · May 2017CD$16.99 -
-
-
Tippett: Child Of Our Time / Robinson, Walker, Et Al
The oratorio, written at the dawn of World War II, is (in Tippett's words) "a Passion, not of god-man, but of man whose god has left the light of the heavens for the dark of the collective unconscious." Its text, written by the composer, begins: "The world turns on its dark side. It is winter." And from there we are confronted with questions, emotions, and often perplexing aspects of our humanity, specifically the nature of good and evil and the individual's responsibility, expressed in words near the work's end: "I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole." Amid the rousing, powerful choruses, poignant solo sections, and vibrant orchestral scoring, Tippett injects several Spirituals, which serve as commentary and help expand the work's reach and message, from "a Europe...stretching out through its torments toward Russia in the East, and even America in the West." It's a brilliant creation (its three-part structure loosely modeled after Handel's Messiah) whose sentiments and questions certainly haven't lost their relevance--and the music sounds with an originality and spiritual force that's as fresh as ever, from the stirring, ominous orchestral opening to the closing strains of the choir and soloists singing "Deep River".
There hasn't been much interest in Tippett's music for quite a while, but as things tend to go with great but neglected composers, it's only a matter of time before performers and record companies "rediscover" his orchestral and chamber music, his choral works and songs, and his five operas. If you don't know Tippett, here is an ideal place to begin; if you're a choral music fan and somehow missed this the first time around, don't hesitate.
--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com
Belevi: Cypriana - Works for Violin & Guitar
Kemal Belevi’s works for the guitar, either solo or in combination, as heard on this album, exude the color and allure of the eastern Mediterranean. Without alluding to any specific tunes, he evokes Cypriot folk music in Cypriana, while the linked Four Sketches show his variety in the work’s bracing modernity. Belevi is at heart a romantic and a melodist of touching beauty as can be heard in Catch 22 and in the subtle color study Clouds. The poignant Suite Chypre is heard in this special arrangement made for Silvia and Livio Grasso.
Dalberg: The String Quartets / Nordic String Quartet
Nancy Dalberg (1881-1949) completed three string quartets, and they hold a place of their own among her compositions. No. 1 in D minor was the very first instrumental work that she presented at a public concert (1915). No. 2 in G minor, op. 14 (1922), was the first work that was published and played outside Denmark, while No. 3, op. 20 (1927), which is dedicated to her teacher, Carl Nielsen, was not published during her lifetime. The present release of the three quartets features two world premiere recordings. Nancy Dalberg is considered one of the first female composers in Denmark, and she was the first woman in Denmark to compose a symphony. This release sheds new light on one of the world’s finest female composers, who due to her lifetime never got the acknowledgement she deserved.
-----
REVIEW:
This is a genuinely exciting release, and not only for the devotee of Scandinavian music. These are string quartets of genuine quality, revealing a distinctive compositional voice, here in very fine performances and transparent recording. The music is serious, often very muscular, both strong and rewarding, tonal and assured.
Nancy Dalberg is not well-represented on record, though there is an interesting compilation from 1999 (Da Capo 8224138) which contains orchestral pieces, including Capriccio for orchestra, Scherzo for String Orchestra ,eight selected songs, Fantasy Piece for Violin and Piano, and a performance of String Quartet No. 2 by the esteemed Carl Nielsen Quartet. Interestingly, the second quartet is something of a staple for Nordic and—especially—Danish quartets, yet the other two, no less worthy, are here receiving world premiere recordings. The earlier performance has many delights, is generally swifter than the new, yet the Nordic Quartet lose nothing in urgency while being served by superior sound. The new recording has the extra merit of being heard in the context of the other two, and my preference is for the new one.
Nancy Dalberg’s output was relatively small, consisting largely of songs and these quartets. Her orchestral works, mentioned above, also included a symphony—the first written by a Danish woman. Contemporaries commented that her symphony had nothing specifically feminine about it (why should it?). It would be good to have a modern recording—a cursory search revealed no sign of one.
The First Quartet was performed privately—among the players was Carl Nielsen, her friend and teacher. It follows the usual four movements with a cheery scherzo in second place. A strong sense of rhythm is evident in all three faster movements. The cello-led Adagio is both dark and intense, despite its brevity. Though written when Dalberg was still Nielsen’s pupil, this is no prentice work but a significant contribution to the medium.
The more familiar Second Quartet is very spirited, more instantly attractive, but the slow movement, Andante con moto e cantabile, again in third place, touches many depths in stern elegance.
The final quartet is in only three movements and is musically the most advanced and tightly constructed. There is no slow movement, but an intensity of feeling and some sense of sadness is evident throughout. Instruments often appear in high pitches (most notably the cello) and there is confident handling of the most complex polyphonic forms.
Recording quality is as fine as we might expect from this source, and my recommendation is unreserved.
– MusicWeb International (Michael Wilkinson)
Schumacher: LUNA
Martucci, Casella & Clementi: Chamber Trios / Hèsperos Piano Trio
A plunge among the sunken composers of Italian chamber music and the salvaged ones. The program recorded in this album is a ticket for a journey of a century and a half, that is the distance between the composition of the Sonata “con accompagnamento” by Muzio Clementi (1792) and its transformation into the Trio ortodosso by Alfredo Casella (1936). An intermediate stop is represented by the Trio op. 59 by Giuseppe Martucci (1882). The route of this journey retraces a history that is not unimportant or unsurprising: it summarises the significance and vicissitudes of the chamber music produced by Italian composers from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. In many texts of music history this topic is relegated in a note, or at most is dealt with in a paragraph, not even a chapter: an upgraded echo of the Fascist nationalism and dislike for Puccini that, for ideological reasons rather than for a historical or critical conviction, made themselves useful in raising the issue in the twentieth century. This recording, which presents a performance for piano, violin and cello, is a tiny artistic compensation, and an aesthetic and formal clarification. It leads us to consider and understand the role that Italian composers played also in the specific area of non-theatrical music.
Christvesper Des Dresdner Kreuzchores
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring - Sibelius: Symphony No. 5
Schicklele: A Year In The Catskills / Wang, Rose, Blair Woodwind Quintet
SCHICKELE A Year in the Catskills. Gardens 1. What Did You Do Today at Jeffrey’s House 2. Dream Dances 3. Diversions • Blair Wind Qnt members; 1,2 Melissa Rose (pn); 3 Felix Wang (vc) • NAXOS 8.559687 (52:03)
The Blair Wind Quintet is a faculty ensemble of the Blair School of Music of Vanderbilt University. Though a woodwind player myself, I am not familiar with their work, so this release, the second on which this ensemble appears, is a pleasant introduction to these fine musicians. Their performances here are mostly solo and in smaller groupings, with only the title work, A Year in the Catskills, played by the whole quintet. This last is one of a trio of works for resident ensembles funded by the Blair Commissioning Project. Peter Schickele’s quintet was joined by a piano trio from Susan Botti and a string quartet by György Kurtág; one can but imagine what a wildly incongruent faculty recital that could have made.
Schickele is, of course, best known in his persona of the researcher and exhumer of works by “the youngest and oddest of J. S. Bach’s 20-odd children.” Since 1965, the year of his first public concert, he has created a body of entertaining musical parodies of familiar musical forms for his fictional P. D. Q. Bach. There is another aspect of the composer, though, as many will know. Under his own name, he composes concert works for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, and vocalists, as well as scores for film, theater, and television. This disc presents a nice sampling of pieces for wind instruments, written over a 46-year period. They cross boundaries of genre and style with consummate skill, and are uniformly clever, lightweight, and charming. Even when fleetingly serious, they are never more than melancholy. They are more often humorous. In fact, minus the more obvious burlesquing that goes on in a P. D. Q. Bach pastiche, his serious works sound remarkably akin to his comedic bread and butter. The unexpected instrumental colors are a bit more subdued, the odd cadence more integrated, and the stylistic incongruities less outrageous. What is played for laughs when acting The Professor is quirky and playful in the realm of the serious composer, but the singular identity can never be in question.
Consider the four seasonal portraits of A Year in the Catskills (2009), presented in Baroque canons and a fantasy, and rounded out with a fifth movement called “Fast Driving,” which bebops the listener back to more modern urban surroundings. Or What Did You Do Today at Jeffrey’s House? (1988) for horn and piano, which remembers childhood games (one is relieved to learn, given his compositional credits for O! Calcutta! ) with a piano-stride parade and a boogie-woogie carnival with dancing bears framing a very brief compulsory nap. Finally, there is Dream Dances (1988), a suite for flute, oboe, and cello, which juxtaposes a not very Baroque minuet and sarabande with a jitterbug, a demented French gallop, and a waltz that only needs John Ferrante and some silly lyrics to become one of the Diverse Ayres on Sundrie Notions.
The two remaining earlier works give some idea of where Schickele might have headed if the fictional “minimeister of Wein-am-Rhein” had not been such a huge success. In these we hear a composer still working in academia, creating works that reflect seriously (well, all right, more seriously) on relatively contemporary styles. Gardens (1968) for oboe and piano is an atmospheric triptych with overtones of Messiaen, though this is more obvious in New York Philharmonic oboist Joseph Robinson’s recording on Cala. Diversions (1963) for oboe, clarinet, and bassoon channels neoclassical Stravinsky in portraits of the bath, a game of billiards, and a New York bar. It is all very engaging, and wonderfully presented by musicians and engineers. Naxos has a winner here, and I hope we hear more from the Blair Wind Quintet. Meanwhile, woodwind fanciers are hereby alerted to a must-buy release.
FANFARE: Ronald E. Grames
-----------
It is a good and joyful thing to see a nice collection of Peter Schickele’s concert music. Not that he is unduly famous for his P.D.Q. Bach character, but as a composer of serious music he shines as one of the most original voices of his generation. Schickele has not invented a new wheel, rather he has managed to take traditional musical gestures and season them with his own invention with the skill of a master chef. This collection of chamber music, deftly rendered by members of the faculty of Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music, is a showcase of the composer’s unique wit and creativity.
Commissioned by the Blair Quintet, A Year in the Catskills was brand new at the time of this recording. It is a picturesque work; full of the kind of interesting twists of melody that make Schickele’s music so fascinating. He is prone to shifting one or two notes in a tune by a semitone here or a semitone there to make what could sound quite ordinary into something that is unique and quirky.
The brief triptych Gardens, for oboe and piano is a study in colors. One of Schickele’s outstanding features is his ability to say so much in a very short time. I wouldn’t call him a miniaturist, but he can get his point across with little fuss. Such are these elegant little pieces that depict a garden at the three parts of the day. Jared Hauser plays with a sweet unforced tone, and is sensitively accompanied by pianist Melissa Rose.
What Did You Do Today at Jeffrey’s House? is a bit of nostalgia based on memories of the composer’s playtime with a childhood friend. These are whimsical pieces, pulling from a number of styles including a rollicking boogie-woogie ending. Scored for horn and piano, Leslie Norton and Melissa Rose find all the charm of these brief episodes. I can’t say that I was completely in love with the pieces themselves, as they came across to these ears as a bit contrived.
The outstanding work in this recital is the lovely set of Dream Dances. Scored for flute, oboe and cello, Schickele combines the old and the new by creating a suite that is reminiscent of a Baroque partita, but just for fun he throws in the semi-modern by replacing the Courrant with a Jitterbug and the Allemande with a Waltz. It is pretty much genius really, and Jane Kirschner, Jared Hauser and Felix Wang deliver an elegant performance full of wit.
Diversions, scored for oboe, clarinet and bassoon are again whimsical, and depict three specific scenes, a hot bath, a billiard game, and a New York bar. Although I felt that the composer captured his scenes well, I can’t say that I was particularly moved by these little snapshots, in spite of their being very well played.
Peter Schickele is reported to be one of the most performed composers in America, and it is easy to see why. The term accessible gets too much airplay, but his music is almost always captivating, mainly due to his double ability to color within the lines while choosing shades that don’t come from just any box of crayons. A good listen.
Colorful, original, whimsical, and adventuresome, this collection of musical short stories from one of America’s most diverse composers has something to please every ear.
-- Kevin Sutton, MusicWeb International
Great Ballets from the Bolshoi, Vol. 2 / State Academic Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra
The second volume in Bel Air Classique’s collection “Great Ballets from the Bolshoi” is a four-ballet limited edition release, featuring the Bolshoi Ballet’s most recent successes: La Bayadere, Marco Spada, Swan Lake, and The Golden Age. Marius Petipa’s exotic ballet La Bayadere is set in legendary and mysterious India. It is a story of love, death and vengeful judgement. Yuri Grigorovich presents a sumptuous recreation of Petipa’s choreography. Recreated specifically for the Bolshoi by French choreographer Pierre Lacotte, Marco Spada, or the Bandit’s Daughter, is a grandiose and unique ballet both on a technical and dramatic level: it includes complex choreography, five lead roles created for five principals, and several changes in scenery. With Tchaikovsky’s famous, lyrical score, Swan Lake depicts the tragic love between Princess Odette and Prince Siegfried, and is performed to perfection by the unparalleled virtuosity of Russia’s great Bolshoi Ballet. A modern and visionary work, The Golden Age, set to music by Shostakovich, was created in 1930. Its central theme was the highly moralized battle and triumph of the proletariat against the decadent bourgeoisie, set in Europe during the roaring twenties. All performances were recorded in high definition at the State Academic Bolshoi Ballet of Moscow.
Jacobsson: Hearbaricum Fields / Karlsson
Ewa Jacobsson is a composer and visual artist. She has been sound collecting since the early 80s. She also collects visual castaway elements from actual sites, and uses materials such as marzipan, oil, steel, wire, photographs, drawings. Her work includes site-specific installations with visuals, sound and preparation of spaces, pure sound composition, collaborations with musicians, physical sounding objects and live performance at exhibitions, museums, concert spaces and in other contexts, including works for public spaces or participatory works. Advanced techniques and materials combined with the lowtech is a reflection of her interest in the transmission of importance and meaning, existentially or politically, through different media, ignoring the hierarchies commonly used. On this recording we're presented with two works: Jarring Sounds for piano and electronics, performed by Jacobsson and pianist Kenneth Karlsson and recorded live, and Hearbaricum Fields (electronics/samples), performed by Jacobsson.
1892 Reflections / Uta Weyland
Bernstein: Serenade After Plato; Music of Bloch & Barber / Gluzman, Neschling
The three works for violin and orchestra gathered here testify both to the versatility of Vadim Gluzman as a performer and to the richness and variety of the influences at play in American music during the 20th century. Like the text by Plato which inspired it, Bernstein's Serenade, from 1954, is a series of statements in praise of love. Musically it is typical of its maker, with allusions both to his own music and to works by Bartók, Mendelssohn and Stravinsky, and with a hint of jazz in the finale. Composed some thirty years earlier, Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem turns to the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe, dealing specifically with aspects of the Chassidic movement. Its second movement, Nigun (Improvisation) is probably Bloch's most famous work for the violin, an attempt to recreate the ecstasy generated by fervent religious singing. Samuel Barber, on the other hand, was deeply fascinated by the music of J.S. Bach and Brahms, although this is not always obvious in his music. His Violin Concerto, which he began to compose in Switzerland in 1939, while war was breaking out in Europe, has been described as having 'a chastened and aristocratic classic style'. That violinist Vadim Gluzman possesses the musical convictions and the supreme command of his instrument to do justice to all of these works will be clear to anyone who has encountered his previous concerto disc, with works by Tchaikovsky and Glazunov. The recipient of numerous distinctions, it was glowingly reviewed, for instance in International Record Review: 'The variety of tone, lithe, sinuous and febrile ... is truly exceptional.' Gluzman is here supported by the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP) under John Neschling, a team that has demonstrated its versatility on a number of recordings ranging from Villa-Lobos' Choros to Liszt's piano concertos.
Polarity / Hoff Ensemble
Kalman: Die Bajadere / Daumm, Bonynge, WDR Funkhausorchester
The Bayadere celebrated its premiere in Vienna in December, 1921. A few months later, in February, 1922, the Metropoltheater in Berlin staged this operetta by Emmerich Kalman. His music brings together Hungarian folk melodies and the Viennese waltz, displays operatic and melodramatic elements, and illustrates the American dance rhythms of its times. In addition, it offers exotic tone colors like those of the tarogato and specific rhythms designed to satisfy the longing for the faraway, foreign India. These ingredients came with the guarantee of musical success. This work numbers among the genuine highlights in the Hungarian composer Kalman's oepretta oeuvre. In 2014, the WDR presented a concert performance of The Bayadere and then went on to produce this work in the studio. The great Richard Bonynge opened the operetta's vibrant introduction with plenty of energy and stormy drive, astonishing for this world-renowned Australian conductor who is now in his seventies. The elegant, slender gentleman with a full head of white hair who has always loved the operetta and whose discography includes many recordings in this field led the WDR Orchestra and the WDR Chorus with precisely trimmed conductor's gestures, so that here Emmerich Kalman's famous Bayadere experienced the right interpretation.
Tiersen: Island (Biovinyl)
An audiophile LP transfer for an
immersive tribute to a remote island
off the coast of Brittany.
Having become celebrated for his score
to Amélie (2001), the French composer
moved to the island of Ushant
(Ouessant/Eusa), and this album is a
musical tribute to his home, comprising
ten pieces about ten specific places on
the island. In 2016, Tiersen published a
collection of pieces called Eusa, which
Jeroen van Veen has combined with his
2021 collection, Kerber, named after a
chapel on the island, to produce Island.
The album has been a best-seller on CD
for its contemplative mood and beauty.
Among the 10 tracks, some offer the
perfect soundtrack for contemplation on
a long walk or staring out of a window on
a train journey. Others seem predestined
to be background music for study or
relaxation. The pieces sound at times
dreamy and wistful, at times bittersweet,
at other times happily playful. With each
song, your imagination can easily conjure
a scene from a movie: a breakup after a
fight in a cosy café or a nature
documentary showing two baby birds
opening their eyes for the very first
time.
This isn’t a collection about isolation;
it’s more an expression of awareness of
your own environment and your place
within it: a sonic encapsulation of the
hyper-local. Tiersen relates this
approach to a night spent studying the
stars – which he himself does. ‘You can
look at things that are thousands of
light years away and relate your own
existence to this really cosmic element,’
he says. ‘But you get that same feeling
with the things all around you.’
Paul Ben-Haim: Music for violoncello
Traditions And Transformations / Yo-Yo Ma, Wu Man
Intriguing; the Harrison and the Bloch are outstanding.
This is a very miscellaneous collection, but then followers of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road project will have come to expect nothing less. This particular CD was recorded as the climax of the Project’s year-long association with the city of Chicago. During that year Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road ensemble interacted with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This involved a series of events which celebrated and explored many kinds of intercultural musical exchange, going beyond the specific cultural meetings and transferences which the Silk Road itself facilitated.
Here we have a sampling of such interactions, some rather more familiar and ‘mainstream’ than others. Of Jewish background, born in Switzerland, and a student in Belgium, Germany and France and resident in the USA from 1916 until his death - bar a return to Europe in the 1930s - Ernest Bloch was something of a one-man intercultural ‘event’ in himself and his music was always open to a variety of influences. Subtitled a ‘Hebraic Rhapsody for cello and orchestra’, Schelomo (Solomon) was written between December 1915 and February 1916. Bloch’s own programme notes for the piece spoke of the cello as “the reincarnated voice of King Solomon” and suggested that the orchestra was “the voice of his age … his world … his experience”. The languorous dances and slow, meditative music of much of the work’s first section are well and expressively played by Ma and the CSO under Harth-Bedova, the note of despair, of the all-embracing sentiments of Ecclesiastes (of which Solomon was, traditionally, the author) – “Vanity of vanities, all is Vanity” – never far from the surface. But perhaps this performance doesn’t quite do justice to what Bloch called the “complete negation” which characteries the work’s conclusion, where the playing seems a bit too ready to settle for rhetorical effect rather than substance. But, overall, this is a performance which puts a good case for the work and is well worth hearing.
The other familiar work is Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite - in which the CSO is conducted by Alan Gilbert - which grew from the young composer’s fascination with the nomads of the steppes, without too much in the way of direct borrowings from the music of such tribes. The modern listener is most likely to find in it a slightly politer, more westernied version of The Rite of Spring and indeed this work, like Stravinsky’s, was grounded in the composer’s collaboration with Diaghilev. Prokofiev’s rhythms are less complex and fierce than Stravinsky’s, the sense of ritualistic violence less intense, though the orchestration is brilliant and striking. The reeds of the CSO are particularly impressive in ‘The Adoration of Veles and Ala’, the first movement, while there is disciplined orchestral power galore in the opening of the second movement, ‘The Enemy God and the Dance of the Black Spirits’. Somehow, though, the performance doesn’t quite do full justice to the ominous, distinctly ‘Russian’ music of this movement, lacking the ultimate in intensity and drive. The dark evocativeness of the first part of ‘Night’ is more convincing and the final movement, ‘’Lolly’s Glorious Departure and the Ceremonial Procession of the Sun’ catches fire in the closing imagery of the rising sun. For all the efforts of orchestra and conductor, it is hard to see Prokofiev’s ballet music - striking as much of it is - as more than superficially involving any real cultural interaction.
From that point of view, Lou Harrison’s Pipa Concerto is more richly suggestive. The pipa is, to put it crudely but briefly, a kind of Chinese lute, with a pear-shaped wooden body. Harrison’s ‘concerto’ is very obviously the work of a man who, by the date of its composition, was steeped in oriental musical traditions and had given real thought to how they might exist creatively alongside western instruments and conventions. For Harrison the interface between oriental and occidental musics is familiar territory, a territory in which he can be unaffectedly and unpretentiously creative. As a result there is an ease and certainty of purpose to this concerto, which is beautifully played by Wu Man – some will have heard some of her other collaborations with, inter alia, Kronos Quartet and Yuri Bashmet. The concerto – which is perhaps better described as a suite than as a concerto if one insists on using western terminology – is various in mood and a thing of considerable beauty. In four movements - though one of them consists of four more or less distinct sections - the opening allegro balances eastern and western formality in a dialogue that has dignity and substance, while the fertility of Harrison’s eclectic imagination is evident in much of what follows. In ‘Troika’ the pipa sounds almost like a balalaika and in the brief ‘Neapolitan’ there are, perhaps unsurprisingly, but quite delightfully, echoes of the Italian mandolin tradition. In ‘Three Sharing’ the orchestra drops out and we are treated to a percussive conversation between the pipa of Wu Man, the cello of John Sharp and the double bass of Joseph Guastafeste. The most conventionally oriental episode comes in ‘Wind and Plum’, where the pipa’s cadences, against a lush orchestral background, are incisive and evocative. The penultimate movement is a lament, a ‘Threnody for Richard Locke’, a five minute elegy, powerfully melodic and exquisitely grave. By contrast the ‘concerto ends with an ‘Estampie’, in which medieval and renaissance dance rhythms meet (very fruitfully) the sounds of one of the lute’s ancestors. This whole concerto – the last of Harrison’s large-scale works – is the high spot of this disc.
In ‘Legend of Herlen’ the Mongolian composer Byambasuren Sharav draws on both native Mongolian traditions and instruments and on Western music. Western brass, in the shape of three trombones, and percussion - along with a piano - sit alongside the morin khuur, a two stringed fiddle and the sound of Khongorzul Ganbaatar, an exponent of the Mongolian tradition of ‘long song’, full of sustained and richly ornamented phrases. The results are intriguing and at times very beautiful, but perhaps most satisfying when Ganbaatar’s voice is accompanied solely by the morin khuur; the writing for western instruments is relatively pedestrian and predictable and actually seems to add very little to the Mongolian essence of the piece.
How far the Silk Road project has really succeeded – with anything like consistency – in uniting disparate musical traditions is a matter for debate. What is surely undeniable is that all their recordings have, at the very least, been stimulating, engaging and challenging. This new recording is no exception.
-- Glyn Pursglove, MusicWeb International
Fedele: Phasing / Orvieto, Bellocchio, Richelli, Beneventi, Savron
In Ivan Fedele’s long, rich artistic career of (this catalogue opens in 1980 and since then has added more than 160 titles) it is not possible to distinguish true phases. We do not know periods in which his creative interest has been concentrated predominantly, still less exclusively, on a linguistic context or a specific instrumental ensemble. We can perhaps consider as exceptions the extraordinary flowering of concertante pieces between 1996 and 1999, or that of orchestral works in the last few years, mostly concentrated in two series of pieces entitled Lexikon and Syntax. Otherwise, it has been a continuous intertwining of forms and formations, the physical substances that from time to time have best responded to the results of Fedele’s uninterrupted research. However, it is true that in the last four years (starting from 2012) he has developed a “feeling” (as the composer himself described it) for percussion, which is accompanied by a renewed interest in the piano (above all in the more complex two-piano structure) and a new, intense flowering of his never neglected “electronic” vein. This CD testifies to this absolutely contemporary vein of Ivan Fedele.
Hugh Aston: Three Marian Antiphons / Blue Heron
Blue Heron has made the Peterhouse repertoire a specialty ever since its first concerts in 1999, in which the ensemble performed Aston's Ave Maria dive matris Anne, the opening track of the new disc. It is safe to say that Blue Heron has sung more of Nick Sandon's tenor lines than any other ensemble in North America, and never in ten years has any one in the group felt that a note he composed felt wrong. His quite amazing accomplishment is to have recreated a musical line that is utterly idiomatic, not merely to the general language of English music in the early sixteenth century, but to the local dialect and accent of one composer and, even more specifically, to that one composer's voice as heard in one piece in all its particularity. We-and Aston and Jones and Mason and all the other Peterhouse composers-owe him grateful thanks for restoring this marvelous music to us in singable form.
The CD booklet includes extensive notes by Nick Sandon on the Peterhouse partbooks, their place in history, and the process of restoring the missing music, as well detailed information concerning historical performance practice by Scott Metcalfe.
Neidhart: A Minnesinger And His Vale Of Tears / Ensemble Leones
This superb CD proves that time travel is possible. To listen to these outstanding performances by Ensemble Leones of Neidhart's beautiful music and witty, sophisticated, sometimes outrageous poetry is to be transported back eight hundred years to an incredible period in the history of music and civilisation in general. Everyone who cares about that heritage should hear this recording.
All the Neidhart songs in Leones' recital, both music and texts, are taken from the so-called Frankfurt Neidhart Fragment, dated to around 1300 and housed at Frankfurt-am-Main University. The eight surviving pages of a larger manuscript reveal - at least to the patient and trained eye of a scholar like Lewon - six songs by Neidhart, five with more or less complete melodies. This is the first complete recording and performance, made possible by Lewon's painstaking reconstruction of the surviving material, necessitating in one case the borrowing of appropriate melodies from elsewhere. The results may or may not be entirely authentic, but the songs are compellingly evocative and utterly convincing. The instruments employed by Leones are recent reproductions but they sound terrific, especially when played with the delicacy and intuition of Lewon and Romain.
Thanks to Lewon and his ensemble - whose ranks swell or shrink according to the current project, incidentally - 21st century audiences can enjoy Neidhart's peerless musicianship, specifically his maverick take on the generally more deferent Minnesang tradition. His Dörperlieder ('bumpkin songs') take the themes of the usual hohe Minne ('high love') - the courtly ideals of love from afar and chivalry - and transfer them to rough rustic settings. The real joke is on the gentry who laugh at the buffoonery and coarseness of the peasants in his songs - they are the implied object of Neidhart's insinuations and sarcasm.
It was a bold decision by Leones to perform the nearly ten-minute long song 'Ich claghe de blomen' without instrumental support - over 100 lines in nine stanzas - but such is the power of Neidhart's music and poetry that time flies past. In any case, the alternation of male and female voice, as well as the interpolation of purely instrumental items, makes listening to this recital as varied an experience as it is aesthetic.
The CD ends with a rather out-of-place song by Adam de la Halle, billed as a 'bonus track' and certainly sounding like an afterthought. The preceding song by the great Walther von der Vogelweide is at least no anachronism, but its inclusion is not really explained in the booklet.
As the notes explain, the German of Neidhart is not strictly Middle High German (MHG) but a Low version of the same, reflecting where the texts were written, and explaining why some of the sounds are reminiscent of modern Dutch. At any rate, Neidhart's language should prove at least as intelligible to modern Low German speakers as Geoffrey Chaucer's is to those familiar with today's English.
On the subject of pronunciation, both Marc Lowen and Els Janssens-Vanmunster sound entirely authentic, and their excellent diction only heightens the listener's joy. Their singing style is folk-like but not 'rustic', emotional without affectation, plaintive or humorous as appropriate without recourse to melodrama. Practically impeccable, in other words.
In his interesting notes Neidhart expert Marc Lewon points out that the 'von Reuental' still frequently attached to his name is erroneous, founded on "a nineteenth-century misapprehension". Curiously he, and Naxos in their title, set about perpetuating another of those with a mistranslation of 'Reuental' - 'riuwental' in MHG - as "vale of tears". In MHG tears is 'trene', 'Tränen' in modern German, whereas 'riuwe' equates with modern German 'Jammer' or 'Schmerz' - the minnesinger's 'lament' or 'pain'. The Nithart of these poems is a knight, not a cry-baby!
In his acknowledgements Lewon also thanks the proof-reader for checking his translations from German into English, but some of the phraseology is decidedly shaky for all that. For example, "in his Bavarian sphere" for "in seiner bairischen Heimat" ('in his Bavarian homeland'); "but from which the German Minnesang of Neidhart’s time was yet but far"; or "Neidhart only played the fool" for "Neidhart [...] spielte nur vordergründig den Narren" ('Neidhart only played the fool ostensibly'). Sometimes the language is so inapt as to misrepresent the original: "They show the distinctive trademarks of Neidhart’s oeuvre and touch on many aspects of his lyrical portfolio, featuring content, form, and musical modes typical to his work" is only tangentially equivalent to the German, quite apart from the linguistic horror that is "lyrical portfolio". Punctuation is also inconsistent and sometimes appears almost randomly applied.
Full sung texts, with translations into modern German and English, are downloadable for free from the Naxos website. The German translations are good, the English somewhat clumsier, with numerous misjudgements of term and register, as well as a few, sometimes meaning-changing typos - but perfectly serviceable nevertheless.
This CD was briefly reviewed here last year, when Naxos released it as a download only. Pace that review, no harp is used in this recording.
-- Byzantion, MusicWeb International
American Classics - Copland: Works For Violin And Piano
Copland seemed to have two separate sides, the populist and the aesthete. The Sonata for Violin and Piano seems to fall in between the two, being jaunty and full of good tunes, but also based on sophisticated harmonies and unorthodox musical schemes. The piece is dedicated to Lieutenant Harry H. Dunham, a close friend of Copland’s who died in battle, and the date of its première (17th January 1944, with violinist Ruth Posselt and the composer at the piano) shows that war was probably very much on the pacifist Copland’s mind. Cast in three movements with traditional titles (Andante, Lento and Allegretto giusto) this is truly a neo-classical work, but it is also pure Copland; as with everything, he took what he needed of the theoretical conceits, but ultimately composed to his instincts.
Two Pieces for violin and piano, which Copland wrote in the mid 1920s for himself and violinist Samuel Dushkin to play in a Boulanger-sponsored concert in Paris, is a chance to see Copland playing with new ideas, including a new fascination with jazz (this is also the period he was writing his heavily jazz-influenced Piano Concerto). Much of this music would be mined for later scores, but they do hold interest on their own. This is music that is bitonal (in more than one key at once), undoubtedly influenced by Darius Milhaud, whom Copland esteemed highly. In the Ukelele Serenade Copland is having a good time trying to make the fiddle sound like something it is not.
Copland’s piano trio Vitebsk, one of his few "Jewish" works, is here arranged for violin and piano. It is a startling piece, full of wailing dissonances, even using microtones, notes which fall in between the cracks of piano keys, not of the "Western" well-tempered system. It is based on The Dybuk, a Jewish folk-tale, which also fascinated George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein, about spirits and doomed love in a small Hasidic community, and Copland hoped the music would, in his own words, "...reflect the harshness and drama of Jewish life in White Russia." It is, therefore, a lean, almost angry work, with many moods contained in its taut single movement.
Dipping even further into the well of Copland’s juvenilia, Two Preludes for Violin and Piano are attempts to translate poetry into music, as Liszt had done in his tone poems. The poets in whom Copland found inspiration were Witter Bynner and Wallace Stevens, both contemporaneous and American. Here we see the seed of the Copland yet to come, the off-kilter rhythms, the stark harmonies, and the sparseness of texture. The titles offer their own explanations; these are musical moment pieces, composed to a single-focused and specific idea of mood.
Originally scored for flute and piano, Copland’s Duo was re-scored by the composer in 1977 at the request of Robert Mann, the violinist for the Juilliard Quartet and Copland enthusiast. The "all-but" sonata was therefore transcribed into this version, which took a good deal less time than the composition - Copland worked for three years on the Duo, commissioned by William Kinkcaid. The famous flautist wanted something that would work "...like a sonata," and Copland certainly delivered the goods, offering a tightly formed work in three movements. The second movement in particular, the composition of which took most of the three years, evokes, in the composer’s own words "a certain mood that I connect with myself - a rather sad and wistful one, I suppose."
The ballet Rodeo was a divisive moment in Copland’s career, a complete smash hit, and yet the piece that managed to alienate him from much of his community. Copland, they thought, had sold out. Copland even incorporates some memorable American folk-tunes. It is a cowboy romance, full of wranglers and cowgirls, and culminating in a hoedown. The choreography and scenario were by Agnes de Mille, who, on the strength of her work on Rodeo, was hired to choreograph a new musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein called Oklahoma!, and Copland composed dutifully to her vision, though he preferred his idea for a ballet about Ellis Island. The 1942 première at the Metropolitan Opera was an enormous success, with a standing ovation. The suite from the work is one of Copland’s most recognizable achievements, with hundreds of performances and countless wonderful recordings.
Daniel Felsenfeld
Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 4-6; Barry: Viola Concerto / Adès, Britten Sinfonia
Volume 2 in Thomas Adès and the Britten Sinfonia's collaborative performances of the works of Beethoven and Barry; specifically the Beethoven Symphony Cycle and a selection of Barry’s works. This CD features Beethoven’s 4th, 5th and 6th symphonies, interspersed with Barry’s 'Viola Concerto' (featuring Lawrence Power) and piece for orchestra and bass 'The Conquest of Ireland' (featuring Johsua Bloom).
Gerald Barry grew up in rural Ireland. His music shows us how his upbringing had an effect on his compositional style - giving a piece a title such as Beethoven would suggest an attempt at emulating his legacy nearly two centuries after his death. Do not be fooled by this however; his music shows his major influence from radio, moving from the sublime and the ridiculous with carefree abandon. "...the most striking orchestral contribution to this year’s anniversary celebrations that’s come my way." (Presto Classical) "This set cuts pristine interpretations of Beethoven’s early symphonies with Gerald Barry’s 21st-century zesty homage ... Adès and the Britten Sinfonia present tightly knit performances [of the Beethoven Symphonies], and dynamic subtleties are largely preserved in the concert recordings." (BBC Music Magazine)
REVIEW:
Volume two of Thomas Adès’s Beethoven symphony cycle with added Gerald Barry continues to illuminate both composers. Under Adès, the Britten Sinfonia provide lean, though certainly not mean, performances of Beethoven’s middle three symphonies. There are a few scrappy moments, the wind almost getting ahead of themselves in the Fourth’s slow movement, but generally this is stylishly incisive Beethoven. Barry’s pieces are no mere filler.
– BBC Music Magazine
Mozart: Requiem & Ave Verum - Bruckner: Motets / Marschik, Vienna Folk Opera Symphony
Capriccio Encore is a series of re-releases of the most famous recordings from Capriccio's back catalogue, fully re-mastered. The legendary recordings of artists such as Sandor Végh, Ton Koopman, Sir Neville Marriner and the Vienna Boys' Choir also contain repertoire highlights that have a particularly special appeal, from the baroque to the present day. This specific Encore album features the Vienna Boys' Choir alongside the Symphonieorchester der Wiener Volksoper, performing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Requiem in D minor and Ave verum corpus. Also on the album is Anton Bruckner's Motetten.
A Tribute to the Mighty Handful
The Mighty Handful, also known as The Five, were a group of prominent nineteenth century Russian composers who strived to produce a specifically ‘Russian’ style. The group consisted of Mily Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin. The Russian Guitar Quartet has chosen works by The Mighty Handful for this new release, reviving the lost tradition of seven-string Russian guitar quartet. These accomplished performers, all with solo careers of their own, perform these arrangements with purpose and passion, leading the listener on a journey through nineteenth century St. Petersburg.
