What Classical Music Are You Listening To Tonight?

[PHC1]

Was in the mood for Arias but instead of the typical female soprano came across a Norwegian Boy Soprano voice of Aksel Ryyvkin. This is different. What a voice!

[bart]

Originally Posted by bart

Arvo Pärt
Mullova - Järvi
Qobuz 24/48




All well known works, but brought with passion and power yet delicacy by Mullova and Järvi.

I needed more Pärt.

[bart]

Originally Posted by bart

Rääts - Pärt - Górecki - Kaleidoscopic
Patrick Messina - Henri Demarquette - Fabrizio Chiovetta
Qobuz 24/96





This album has some gripping passages, but also moments that are at first listen a bit hard to digest.
I will need a second listen to evaluate deeper.

I posted this more than 2 years ago, and I believe my taste has evolved. I actually really liked the album this time.



Of the three composers on this album, the Estonian Jaan Rääts is surely less well-known to Western European audiences than Arvo Pärt or Henryk Górecki – even though the latter is mainly famous for a single work, the monumental Third Symphony which is far from representing the majority of his output. That said, this, Lerchenmusik – a pun, as "Lerche" is not only the German for skylark, but also the name of the dedicatee – has plenty in common with the famous symphony: a consistently slow tempo, in fact very, very slow; long, breathtaking, sombre chords; and a very substantial theme. The work for clarinet, cello and piano was written in 1985 in a similar vein: perhaps Górecki had grasped what his audiences liked about his language, at least in terms of symphonies: that is, the incantatory, quasi-religious quality. So why disappoint his public? Pärt, for his part, contributes the Mozart-Adagio in memory of Oleg Kagan, in a first version for violin, cello and piano: the revision was made specifically for the musicians on this recording. The composer took a slow movement from the Mozart and put it through several harmonic and thematic metamorphoses. Finally, the Kaleidoskoopilised etüüdid by Jaan Rääts are presented here as a discographic world-first. Their "kaleidoscopic" aspect is created by juxtaposing short thematic, rhythmic, or instrumental cells, like so many minimalist fragments, all jumbled together: just like the effect of looking through a kaleidoscope. © SM/Qobuz

[bart]

Originally Posted by bart

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

I seem to be coming back to this album.
Fascinating!

[eljr]

released today...



Chopin: Waltzes

Ikuyo Nakamichi

Release Date: 25th Nov 2020
Catalogue No: SICC40084B00Z
Label: Sony
Length: 53 minutes

[PHC1]

[eljr]

Glass: Piano Sonata

Maki Namekawa (piano)

Release Date: 15th Jan 2021
Catalogue No: OMM0149
Label: Orange Mountain

[Antonmb]

Saint-Saëns: Sonates & Trio
Renaud Capuçon (violin), Edgar Moreau (cello), Bertrand Chamayou (piano)
Erato (2020), via Qobuz

From this week’s Presto newsletter. A very nice new release.

[bart]

John Dowland - Complete Solo Lute Music
Jakob Lindberg
via Qobuz




This 4h 20' set is so relaxing.
I don't exaggerate when I say I've played this more than 50 times already.
Today it was in the practice.

[PHC1]

I enjoyed this one.

Composer Józef Koffler was the first Polish champion of Schoenberg's 12-tone system and a modernist whose work, based on this fascinating transcription of Bach's Goldberg Variations for harpsichord, BWV 988, is likely to be worth further investigation.

He ran afoul of Stalin's Soviet Union and then, worse, of the Germans when they took over Poland, and he disappeared in the Holocaust. The Goldberg arrangement, composed in 1938, was perhaps intended as something palatable to Soviet conservatives, but it is in no way done by the numbers. For one thing, when Koffler composed the work, the Goldberg Variations were quite new in the public consciousness; they had received their first recording, from harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, just five years earlier.

Koffler's version, for a small orchestra of strings and winds, was forgotten and was premiered only in 2019, by many of the forces on this recording: it is extremely artfully done. Koffler deploys his ensemble, generally speaking, in three different ways: with the strings taking Bach's melody line, with wind-and-strings atomization of the melody, and with counterpoint mainly in the winds.

He is inspired by the broadly tripartite structure of the variations, with canons mostly making up every third variation, but he departs from this where Bach does, and the entire set retains the unity and growth of the original, with complexity and expressivity growing as if inevitably as the music proceeds.

The work would make an ideal complement in concert to Anton Webern's arrangement of the fugue from Bach's Musical Offering, BWV 1079. Historical performance veteran Trevor Pinnock leads a mixed ensemble of young musicians, consisting of members of the Royal Academy of Music Soloists Ensemble and students at the Glenn Gould School in Canada, and they play with precision and a fine edge.

The Linn label delivers superbly detailed sound from the Britten Studio in Snape Maltings, UK, and the album graphics, showing a Chagall-like shtetl painting by the similarly doomed artist Chara Kowalska, are haunting. A unique release, fully deserving of the commercial success it has received.