What Classical Music Are You Listening To Tonight?

[ehoove]

Violin Concertos
Tchaikovsky
Mendelssohn
Christian Ferras - Violin
Philharmonia Orchestra
Constantin Silvestri Conducting
Excellent play on this LP!
Angel Records S 356606
Regards,
Jim

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Some harpsichord early on a Sunday...

Armand-Louis Couperin - Pièces de clavecin
Christophe Rousset
Qobuz 24/96




In the booklet, they write: "Swan song of the French harpsichord: the 'Pièces de clavecin' of Armand-Louis Couperin".
Members of the Couperin family had held the post of organist at St Gervais in Paris ever since April 1653, when Armand-Louis’s great-uncle, Louis Couperin, had taken up the position. One of his sons would be the last.

Rousset has offfered us some amazing albums lately, solo, and with his ensemble Les Talens Lyriques.

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Mahler - Symphony 7
Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä
Qobuz 24/96




While doing some work, this is uplifting!

In an effort to arrange the first performance of his Seventh Symphony, Gustav Mahler declared it to be his best work, ‘preponderantly cheerful in character’. His younger colleague Schönberg expressed his admiration for the work, and Webern considered it his favourite Mahler symphony. Nevertheless, it remains the least performed and least written-about symphony of the entire cycle, and has come to be regarded as enigmatic and less successful than its siblings.
One reason for this has been the huge – even for Mahler – contrasts that it encompasses: from a first movement which seems to continue the atmosphere of the previous symphony, the ‘Tragic’ Sixth, to a finale that has been accused of excessive triumphalism, and which Mahler himself once described as ‘broad daylight’. Between these two poles, he supplies no less than two movements entitled Nachtmusik framing a Scherzo to which the composer added the character marking "schattenhaft" (shadowy).
Mahler famously said that ‘a symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything’. The Seventh is as true to this dictum as any other of the symphonies, offering a wealth of emotions, moods and colours. The composer makes full and imaginative use of the orchestra’s extended wind and percussion sections – including cowbells, whips and glockenspiel – as well as a mandolin and a guitar, adding a troubadour-like aspect to the nightly serenade of the fourth movement.
All of this is brought to life by the players of the Minnesota Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä, as they continue a cycle praised for the performances as well as the recorded sound. © BIS Records

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I listened earlier to this:

Penderecki - St Luke Passion
Kraków Philharmonic Choir - Warsaw Boys' Choir
Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Kent Nagano
Qobuz 24/96




Not for the faint of heart!
I'll have to listen to this a couple of times, to let it sink in.

The St Luke Passion (“Passio et mors Domini nostri Iesu Christi secundum Lucam”), composed in 1966 by a thirty-two-year-old Krzysztof Penderecki, dates back to the composer’s earlier style. Penderecki is one of the most widely played contemporary composers and millions will recognise his music in films such as The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1980), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), Fearless (Peter Weir, 1993), Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010) and Twin Peaks (2017).

It’s too early to look back over the life of this giant of twentieth-century music who passed away in 2020, but some of his major works such as this Passion or his opera, The Devils of Loudun, have made a lasting impression and are still played by orchestras today. Completely atonal from start to finish and filled with avant-garde techniques of the time, The St Luke Passion still has considerable power of expression and a profound emotional impact when played today. Penderecki’s aesthetic has been the subject of debate throughout his entire career as opinions differ over whether his work should be regarded as avant-garde or traditional, but the composer disregards them, stating that his work is “Simply genuine, and that suffices”.

Recorded for the opening of Salzburg Festival in 2018, this particular version of The St Luke Passion was first performed for the composer in Krakow by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kent Nagano, with two brilliant Polish choirs. Penderecki himself is an excellent conductor and he conducted his work on over sixty occasions, but he was in complete accord with this version, even claiming that it made him feel “The mystery of spirituality and faith for the very first time”. © François Hudry/Qobuz

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I needed something lighter afterwards:

Mozart - String Quintets K.515 & 516
Quatuor Van Kuijk
Adrien La Marca
Qobuz 24/96




The 'Quatuor Van Kuijk' has rapidly become one of my favourite string quartets.
Their albums are also of consistently excellent sound quality.

As in its Schubert recording in 2018, the Quatuor van Kuijk likes to delve into a composer’s youthful output and then measure his evolution by confronting it with his mature works. Hence, after recording two of Mozart’s early string quartets in 2016, the French group, here joined by violist Adrien La Marca, now offers the String Quintets K. 515 and K. 516. These two large-scale works dominate Mozart’s instrumental output in the year 1787, which ended with the premiere of Don Giovanni. They show us a composer at the height of his creative powers, in a genre to which he had not returned for fourteen years and which he herebrought to a high degree of formal perfection. © Alpha Classics

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A bit more adventurous again:

Schönberg - Webern - Berg - String Quartets - 'Vienna 1905 - 1910
Richter Ensemble
Mireille Lebel, mezzo-soprano
Qobuz 24/96




Wow!
This is good!
What a good label Passacaille is.
These pieces show what you can do with only 4 string instruments: full sound!
This is no easy listening, but oh so rewarding.
Excellent sound.

I'm looking forward to their next albums, as this seems to be a first in a series to come.

If the Richter Ensemble is a new name to you, then that's because in the grand scheme of things it's relatively new on the block, formed as recently as 2018 by British-Brazilian Baroque violinist and former Academy of Ancient Music concertmaster, Rodolfo Richter. Its other members are equally drawn from across the world of Historically Informed Performance, and while HIP credentials may not at first glance seem an obvious fit for a debut album of Second Viennese School repertoire, they actually point both to the group's mission statement and its unique selling point – to highlight hidden connections between repertoire ranging from the seventeenth to the twenty first centuries, with all of that repertoire played exclusively on gut strings.

Back to the recording in hand, and this is the first installment of a project to record the complete Second Viennese School string quartets on gut strings, and it is very fine indeed. Repertoire-wise, they take us through chronologically, beginning with Webern's ardent one-movement Langsamer Satz of 1905, couched in the language of late Romantic chromaticism; then Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2 of 1907-8, one of his first forays into atonality which features a mezzo soprano for its latter two movements setting poems by Stefan George; after which comes Berg's two-movement String Quartet Op. 3 of 1910, equally exploring atonality.

Sound-wise, beyond super-glued chamber playing and wonderfully rich-toned and emotive vocal performances from mezzo Mireille Lebel, what really makes these interpretations stand out is the way they place the works in their immediate Viennese context: the fact that it wasn't a hard-edged brand of modernism that was in everyone's heads during these early ventures beyond tonality, but instead the music of Brahms, Mahler and Wagner; and all this amid a wider expressionist and symbolist artistic context that equally blended Romanticism and modernism – think of Gustav Klimt's paintings. So, beyond the greater softness and wider coloristic palette offered by those aforementioned gut strings, we also get tonal sheen, subtle “portamentos”, and a singing freedom to their lines. We are also at a period pitch slightly lower than today's standard: A=432Hz compared to the current 440Hz. Yet all this Romantic gorgeousness is still sounding clean as a whistle – just thanks to the nineteenth century practice of using vibrato only sparingly.

Even if Second Viennese School isn't your usual bag, I urge you to give it a spin. This is likely to be a very covetable series indeed. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz

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Schumann - Zuidam - Ravel - Nox
Hannes Minnaar, piano
Qobuz 24/44.1




The Schumann, and the Ravel (oh how I love these solo piano pieces by Ravel!) are well known off course.
The Zuidam work is a very nice discovery.
This recording was made using a Chris Maene Straight Strung Concert Grand, one of the best if not the best grand piano in the world.
Minnaar is a fantastic musician.



"Nox", the Latin word for "night". In the world of art, the night of Schumann's Nachtstücke, Robert Zuidam's Nox and Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit creaks open its doors like a haunted castle for romantic poets and composers. Night-time visions became the foundations of a pre-Freudian subconscious in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Some of the great writers discovered their dreams and anxieties, seeing themselves and the magic of imagination in the mirror of fantasy.

It was no coincidence that their work provided intellectual sustenance for Robert Schumann (1810-1856), who also had a literary gift. His earliest works, which were entirely for piano up until his Nachtstücke, Op. 23 (1839), originated in psychological impressions gained from literature. Schumann wrote to his beloved, Clara Wieck, that the work stemmed from a premonition. During the composition, he kept seeing visions of funeral processions, “Coffins and miserable, despairing people”. His instincts had not deceived him: on completing the work, with tears in his eyes, he heard that his brother Eduard was on his deathbed. Listening to the Nachtstücke again and knowing this, one can hear the shadows falling over light and life, depicted by the pianist's defeated irony.
For Dutch composer Robert Zuidam (b. 1964), night is the night of toil. Nox (2020) is a night owl's ode to the hours of his creativity. Ravel had done everything he could in his piano cycles Jeux d'eau (1901) and Miroirs (1905) towards de-romanticising the 19th century character sketch, but he took an important step forward in Gaspard as regards both virtuosity and idiom. His aim was to produce something that was even more difficult to play than Balakirev's notorious Islamey. Gaspard is a deranged combination of abstract pianistic hyper-virtuosity with derailed eruptions of waltzes, peppered with raging, flamenco-style note repetitions and unplayable cascades of clusters of seconds, betraying the signature of Ravel's exceptionally dextrous thumbs.

But, in essence, Gaspard is a symphonic poem for piano. The work is subtitled "Trois Poèmes pour piano d'après Aloysius Bertrand", and these poems are also printed out in full in the score. They are drawn from the collection of prose poems entitled Gaspard de la Nuit, Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, which were published in 1842. The infernal degree of difficulty is a metaphor for their contents; as Ravel himself stressed in one of his letters, Gaspard is in fact the devil. © Challenge Records

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J.S. Bach - Motets
Pygmalion, Raphaël Pichon
Qobuz 24/96




Although I do prefer smaller choirs to bring Bach's vocal works, this is a fine performance.
It also offers a couple of extras.


Much as, for many listeners, the mere fact that this new Bach motets recording is from Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion will be reason enough to give it a spin, there's actually an even more noteworthy draw to this particular programme: that interspersed between the six Bach motets are three sixteenth century masterpieces drawn from the Florilegium Portense, a collection of almost 365 choral works from 58 leading sixteenth century Italian and German composers which was first published in 1618, and which in Bach's day was on the shelves of most central German choir schools – regularly used within the services, and a constant source of compositional inspiration too. What's more, the relationship with Bach himself is proven, because as Leipzig kantor he purchased new copies of the collection both in 1729 and 1737; and if you narrow in on Bach's handful of motets then the link deepens, because while the composition of his hundreds of cantatas was dictated by the liturgical calendar and often involved working with a librettist, his motets were composed under no such strictures, leaving him genuinely at liberty to draw on the Florilegium Portense in whichever way he fancied.

So the first beauty of Pygmalion's programme is the connections you're hearing at every turn between these deeply expressive motets of Bach's, and those of his forebears. Take the way his emotionally potent double-choir Komm, Jesu, komm BWV 229 comes off the back of the sensuously soaring antiphonal writing of Osculetur me osculo oris sui by Vincenzo Bertolusi (c. 1550-1608). Or the way the peacefully sombre homophony of Jacobus Gallus's (1550-1591) Ecce quomodo moritus Justus is followed by the equally homophonic chorale opening to Jesu, meine Freude BWV 227.

Add crisp, supple and silvery choral delivery, exuding understanding of and passion for the texts, plus warmly delicate and unobtrusive instrumental accompaniments, and in the Bach always the ghost of its dance roots, and it's hard to imagine how Pichon and his gang could have made this one any more enjoyable. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz

[Portioli]

Mahler - Symphony 7
Alexandre Bloch, Orchestre National de Lille
Alpha Records
Hi-Res Flac 24/96

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Originally Posted by Portioli

Mahler - Symphony 7
Alexandre Bloch, Orchestre National de Lille
Alpha Records
Hi-Res Flac 24/96

Portioli, welcome to the classical music thread!