Music is the key

The estimable Florestan Trio completes its "cycle" of Schubert Piano Trios with this recording of the E-flat major trio , a performance as wonderfully incisive as its earlier rendition of the trio in B-flat major. While the present recording was made in late December 2001, a full year after the first, Hyperion still managed to secure the services of the same engineer (Tony Faulkner) to work his magic with these terrific players, so there is a uniformity to the sound that is comforting and will smoothly pave the way for a two-disc set at some point. In the meantime, anyone who loves this work may still want to shell out full price for this disc, as it represents Schubert performance at the highest level. While the Florestan members play with impeccable unity, pianist Susan Tomes still stands out slightly, thanks largely to her amazingly graceful phrasing. Listen to the way she manages a pianissimo in the feather-light background triplets in the dev...

Continuing the Handel series from Le Concert d’Astrée and Emmanuelle Haïm is La resurrezione, composed during the young Handel’s period in Rome and first performed there in 1708. The work recounts the events of Easter and the solo singers portray Lucifer, Mary Magdalene, an Angel, St John the Evangelist, and St Mary Cleophas. It calls upon a large orchestra, led and directed at the first performance by the master violinist Arcangelo Corelli. The role of Mary Magdalene, here performed by the lush-voiced young British soprano (and EMI Classics artist) Kate Royal, was sung at the first performance by the celebrated Margherita Durastanti, even though the Pope had forbidden female singers to perform in public. In April 2009, Emmanuelle Haïm led a performance of La resurrezione at London’s Barbican Centre, part of a tour which also covered Paris, Dijon, Aix-en-Provence, Lille, Pamplona, Valladolid and Salzburg. The Guardian reported that: “Emmanuelle Haïm's understand...

In February 2007 the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina – she was born in Chistopol in Tatarstan in 1931 and has lived in Germany since 1992 – was awarded Hamburg’s prestigious Bach Prize: as a “pioneer of contemporary classical music” who has forged a link between Eastern and Western music. Her own music has been inspired by that of Johann Sebastian Bach in more ways than one, with the result that it seemed obvious for Anne-Sophie Mutter to record two of Bach’s concertos alongside her worldpremiere recording of Gubaidulina’s most recent violin concerto, a piece dedicated to Mutter. “There is a profound spiritual affinity between Gubaidulina and Bach,” says the violinist. “Like Bach, she too draws not only a great deal of strength from her faith in God, but ultimately also a musical language all of her own.” Written in 2006 – 07, the violin concerto is the first piece by the Russian composer that Anne-Sophie Mutter has recorded . “I knew about Paul Sacher’s commissio...

This delightful disc offers a selection from the wealth of piano transcriptions of Bach's music. The Bach revival that gathered momentum during the nineteenth century created a climate for many composer-pianists to interpret his works through their own piano transcriptions, whether of chorale preludes, organ works or other instrumental music. Much of Bach's music was made domestically available via such arrangements (and the tradition continued well into the twentieth century, even after Bach originals were well known). Indeed, the practice of such transcriptions was widely used by Bach himself, who freely adapted his own and others' music for different instrumental settings. One of today's finest Bach pianists, Angela Hewitt concentrates primarily on those arrangements of Bach that keep pianistic elaboration and virtuosity in proportion: whatever instrument his music is played on, Bach should still sound like Bach. Eugen d'Albert's magnifice...

The story of her success requires no further recounting here: beginning with a sensational Salzburg début in 2002 as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni , she's become an almost unrivalled presence among classical artists. Her first aria recital entered the German pop charts, and with the video clips for this album she stands to become the first opera diva for the MTV generation. The clips have already provided her with a key to the gates of Hollywood. It is in the scene from the Traviata that Anna Netrebko will be making her feature film début in Garry Marshall's Princess Diaries II with Julie Andrews. Anna Netrebko knows what she can do and where (at least for now) her limits lie. Most of all, she knows what the others can, or could, do. With the greatest respect she speaks of Callas (“She is and will remain unique, there's no one else like her"), of Mirella Freni (“After I've listened to her, I sing better"), and of Renata Scotto, from whom she has le...

Familiarity with the famous galop from Orphée aux enfers and the finale of La Vie parisienne has tended to obscure Offenbach's early career. Failing to see the wood for the trees, we have all too often forgotten that before creating the French opéra bouffe, Offenbach was one of the greatest cellists of his day, and that far from restricting himself to making his Parisian audiences laugh, he was also an impassioned Romantic gifted with an astonishing melodic vein. His grand opera Die Rheinnixen , the delicate Fantasio, Les Contes d'Hoffmann of course, as well as the works included in the present release should be enough to convince listeners of this claim's validity. Thanks to his almost fiendish virtuosity, Offenbach was known to his contemporaries as the "Liszt of the cello". Indeed, he even appeared on the same concert platform as Liszt, as well as with Anton Rubinstein and Friedrich von Flotow, both in Paris and in his native Germany. It was ...

“In Freundschaft” (“In Friendship”) was composed as a birthday gift for Suzanne Stephens in 1977. It was already from the beginning envisioned as a solo piece for different instruments. On this CD Stephens performs on a clarinet , but the piece can also be played on bass clarinet, basset-horn, flute, oboe, bassoon, recorder, saxophone, violin, cello, horn & trombone! This makes it as applicable and easily utilized as, for example, “Tierkreis”, which has also been performed in numerous instrumental versions. Stockhausen works with three layers in “In Freundschaft”. He calls his method here “horizontal polyphony”, and indicates that it requires “a special art of listening”. This is surely true, but you can also dip into the flow and enjoy without any special preparations. Any set of sensitive ears hooked up to a sensibly sensible brain and mind will open up the world of “In Freundschaft” to the splendor of Stephens’ garlands of spiraling clarinet tones, in waves and vibrations of c...

Beethoven: Choral Fantasy op. 80 The piano's crashing opening chords herald what seems for the first three minutes like a solo work. Then comes a tentative dialogue with the lower strings, after which - equally tentatively - the woodwind enter. Human voices arrive almost as an afterthought. This was a fantasy indeed, written at such speed that the musicians got their parts with the ink wet. As the piano reworks the simple musical ideas on which the whole edifice is based, we get a strong whiff of what Beethoven's celebrated improvisations must have been like. In 1808 he'd earned little, and his friends encouraged him to put on a four-hour concert of his own works in order to refill his coffers. But this late addition was no mere space-filler: bringing order out of chaos, moving from darkness to light, and prefiguring the final theme of his Ninth Symphony, it reflects Beethoven's genius at full tilt.   Beethoven: Sonata in D minor, op. 31 no. 2 "The...

The Muses have been revered as a source of divine inspiration since the time of classical antiquity and are said to encourage artists to give of their exceptional best. From this point of view, the Hamburg soprano Mojca Erdmann seems like a figure from the distant past. Although she is still at the beginning of what promises to be a major international career, she has already inspired a number of contemporary composers, including Aribert Reimann and Wolfgang Rihm. Indeed, Rihm even wrote the main role in his operatic fantasy Dionysos with the young soprano in mind. Her performances in the world premiere at the 2010 Salzburg Festival proved a tremendous personal success. For her debut with Deutsche Grammophon, however, Mojca Erdmann has chosen a very different type of programme in the form of works by Mozart and his contemporaries: “Mozart has accompanied me all my life. Although my father is a composer and contem­porary music has always played a major role in...

When England was famously snubbed as the ‘land without music’ in the early 20th century, there was one name mentioned as our saving grace – Henry Purcell. He was, said one critic scornfully, the last great composer this country had produced in 250 years. This year’s 350th anniversary of his birth is, then, perhaps particularly special for the British – although this disc of Purcell songs, by the French label Naïve, has a noticeably French flavour. As tenor Paul Agnew and violist Anne-Marie Lasla write in the sleeve notes, Purcell’s music comes with a “distinctly continental twist” – today, apparently, Purcell is very popular with the French, perhaps because in him they can hear something of their own style. On this disc, we hear the continental influence not only within the music, but in the programme: Purcell’s secular songs are punctuated with instrumental works by the composer’s contemporaries, one Italian, one French and one English. Purcell’s songs are ...

Stefano Scodanibbio (1956-2012) was a musician active on many fronts. As an innovative virtuoso bassist and a pioneer of extended technique for his instrument he collaborated with composers including Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, Brian Ferneyhough and Terry Riley, inspiring each of them to new works. With Riley, with Markus Stockhausen and with others, he gave concerts of improvised music. He founded the Rassegna di Nuova Musica Festival in Macerata, his Italian hometown, and directed it for more than 30 years. He taught master classes from Darmstadt to Stanford. And as a composer his works for strings, for contrabass in particular were heard around the world: they were challenging pieces which – as Irvine Arditi wryly notes – avoided “traditional avant-garde trends”. Arditti, a friend and associate of Scodanibbio, brought the present project to ECM’s attention . It documents a ‘dream project’ which fired Scodanibbio’s imagination in the last years of his life...

Lettera amorosa is the name of a song by Monteverdi, but in plural form it provides an apposite title for this collection of Italian love songs from the 17th century. “I grew up with this music, and wanted to come back to it”, says Magdalena Kožená. As a result of the weight accorded to music education in communist Czechoslovakia, she was just six when she joined the Children’s Choir at the Philharmonic of her native Brno, where this repertoire was part of the programme. When she was 16 and studying at the conservatory in Brno, she teamed up with a lutenist to perform secular songs by Monte­verdi and his compatriots, and revelled in the creative freedom their music allowed her. “I find its simplicity very attractive”, she says. “And a simple song can go very deep. This music speaks to people who don’t regard themselves as classical specialists. It comes from a time when there was no equivalent to our divide be­tween classical and pop music: it was simply ...

Anna Gourari is a young musician steeped in the venerable Russian piano school, its technical verities and Old World glamour. She has “a very physical, even visceral quality to her music-making that conjures the sound of such golden-age figures as Horowitz and Cortot,” declared Fanfare. With her ECM debut, Gourari offers a set of “Canto Oscuro” : dark songs. The pianist performs two of the most affecting of J.S. Bach’s chorale preludes – “Ich ruf’ zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ” and “Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland” – in arrangements of quiet sublimity by Ferruccio Busoni. Gourari also includes his iconic version of the gripping “Chaconne” from Bach’s Partita No. 2 for solo violin. From her native Russia, she adds Alexander Siloti’s Bach- transcription “Prélude in B minor”, as well as Sofia Gubaidulina’s early “Chaconne”, a vessel for ghosts of the Baroque. The album’s centrepiece is Hindemith’s Suite “1922”, a work influenced by both Baroque models an...

This insightful recording of Franz Schubert’s music is also a first documentation of the musical alliance between violinist Carolin Widmann and pianist Alexander Lonquich, which has been gathering momentum over the last four years. They first came together to play Messiaen in Salzburg in 2008. The following year a Lonquich solo recital in Rome convinced Widmann that they should collaborate on Schubert’s music for violin and piano. In this album, recorded at Historic concert hall Reitstadl Neumarkt, the duo plays the C-Major Fantasy of 1827 and the Violin Sonata in A-Major of 1817, as well as the B-minor Rondo of 1826. If the influence of Beethoven is still marked in the 1817 sonata, the 1826 and 1827 pieces remain striking in their originality. Written at the request of Viennese virtuosi Josef Slawik and Karl Maria von Bocklet, they are pieces that transcend ‘mere’ virtuosity. Lonquich describes them as “paradoxical”, compositions conceived as technical which nonetheless feel “t...

Stravinsky’s relationship with the string section of the orchestra, and with the violin in particular, was a love-hate affair. For a long time during and after the First World War he more or less gave up writing for strings altogether, finding their tone ‘much too evocative’, as he put it after completing The Rite of Spring , ‘and representative of the human voice’. Then suddenly, in 1928, he came out with a ballet score, Apollo , written exclusively for strings and uninhibitedly tender and expressive in precisely the way he had previously so pointedly rejected. Apollo seems to have ‘corrected’ his attitude in general, and within four years he had composed two major works for violin solo, the concerto with orchestra of 1931 and the Duo concertant with piano of 1932. Soon after that he made most of the transcriptions recorded here. Why Apollo turned out as it did is one of the great Stravinskian mysteries. But the violin works that followed had a clear and specific orig...

An album that bridges musical worlds, with the Molto Adagio of Samuel Barber’s String Quartet No. 1 offered as tonal terra firma between György Ligeti’s restlessly shifting first and second quartets. Mid-20th century, Barber and Ligeti would have been considered aesthetic opposites. “Ligeti was all about leaving what for Barber was solid home”, Paul Griffiths notes in the liner text. From a contemporary perspective both composers are voices from the past, their present-day relevance emphasised in these committed performances. “ Physically actualized in the recording , the music is being all the time remade by the performers searching for what a motif can convey and finding an abundance of expressive contours in Ligeti’s quartets as much as in Barber’s. The gesture of lament is common to both.” The first of the recordings heard on this album was made in 2007 on the first anniversary of Ligeti’s death, Hungary’s foremost string quartet paying tribute to the great innova...

Acclaimed as one of the greatest interpreters of Mozart, Portuguese pianist Maria-João Pires is an artist who combines exquisite stylistic refinement with a serious effort to plumb the intellectual complexities and spiritual depths of music. Refusing to conform to the traditional image of a concert virtuoso, Pires emphasizes the spiritual dimensions of music, always searching for hidden meanings which may elude the analytical performer. This remarkable reverence towards works of music, clearly manifested in her performances of Mozart, was made explicit by her remark that, as a performer, she acts as a channel for the composer's ideas. Interestingly, Pires views both the composer and the performer as conduits for a transcendent force. However, while approaching the work of music with immense awe, Pires is acutely aware of its formal structure, finding a certain transparency in the most intricate formal constructions. In her performances of Romantic masters, particularly Chopin a...

Martha Argerich's involvement with chamber music has dominated the later part of her career, so it's easy to think of her name with the words "and friends" tacked on, and to visualize the large and diverse retinue of famous musicians who have recorded with her. This triple-disc box set from EMI Classics presents live recordings from the 2010 Progetto Martha Argerich in Lugano, several of them collaborations with Argerich, notably in works by Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, and Béla Bartók, as well as a performance of Frédéric Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, where she is the featured soloist with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana. Fans of Argerich, for whom money is no object, may buy this set on the strength of these four recordings, overlooking the eight other performances that do not include her. But other listeners may balk, feeling that the packaging is misleading and the program is lopsided, offering much less of Argerich than the title and co...

The sound of Shostakovich belongs to Lisa Batiashvili’s earliest memories. During her childhood, she often heard her father’s string quartet rehearse Shostakovich’s music, and at home and in concert his was the sound world which shaped her sense of cultural context. Lisa Batiashvili and her family left their Georgian homeland when she was eleven years old, but the music of Shostakovich travelled with them. Mark Lubotsky, her teacher in Hamburg, was a student of David Oistrakh, for whom Shostakovich wrote his violin concertos, and to the young Lisa Batiashvili, this felt like a direct line to the source. “When my teacher started telling stories about the First Violin Concerto, I completely fell in love with this piece. David Oistrakh had shared very emotional and precise information about every movement. Somehow the piece became symbolic of the time in the Soviet Union, which I had also experienced myself during the first ten years of my life. Musicians d...

The Martha Argerich Project, presented annually at Lugano, Switzerland, has yielded many exciting sets of live recordings for EMI, all starring its namesake but prominently featuring many musicians she enjoys working with, both established artists and rising talents. Live from Lugano 2011 encapsulates the tenth of these festivals, and this three-disc package offers selections by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Ravel, and a name new to many of the participants: Juliusz Zarebski. This 19th century Polish composer is represented by a piano quintet he composed a few months before his death in 1885 at age 31, and Argerich has recorded this piece for the first time here. The obscurity of the work may compel some listeners to play it first, and that's not a bad way to explore the set, which need not be appreciated in sequential order. Zarebski's music is not widely known, but the quintet's brooding Romanticism and passionate outpourings hol...

Spain, and its music and art, have long had a special appeal for Patricia Petibon: “From an early age I was intrigued and fascinated by Spanish culture, by the way the excessive and the subtle are inextricably linked. It glorifies emotions with pride and, at the same time, refinement. It’s a culture that comes from the earth, from the people. Everything about it appealed to me, and in my early recitals I liked to insert some Spanish songs into my American and French programmes. Then, when I went to Madrid to sing in Dialogues des Carmélites , I met the stage director Emilio Sagi, and that led to my opportunity to enter the world of zarzuela. It was Sagi who directed me in Torroba’s Luisa Fernanda in Vienna, where it was wonderful to be singing alongside Plácido Domingo. I found myself surrounded by performers from all kinds of Spanish-speaking backgrounds; they noticed how interested I was in their culture, and that’s how we made a connection, and I learned...

The greatest privilege for a musician such as myself is the opportunity to create and record wonderful music with fellow musicians and composers. I first met John one afternoon at a London hotel where we sat down for a cup of tea to discuss the possibility of his writing a work for me. Out of this conversation came the Suite Lyrique , which I performed shortly afterwards. It became obvious that we should record it and so I approached DG with the idea. We were overjoyed that they were keen to get involved. So this CD was born . The music is a collection of some of John's more popular works, some traditional Welsh folk songs, two wonderful lullabies for my girls, and the Suite Lyrique . As we were discussing and preparing the recording, I had started work on a small concerto for harp and strings. It was the first time I had put pen to paper, as it were, and written some music down properly. I was naturally very excited when it was decided to include this work as wel...

Magdalena Kožená's multi-lingual recital shows this singer's formidable talent for performing widely varying musical styles. Beginning with her idiomatic French (of which we had a substantial sampling on her previous French arias disc . . . she uses her light but well-placed and penetrating mezzo to illuminate Ravel's seductive Madagascar Songs. Listen to how Kožená creates a nearhypnotic effect with her passionate repeated cries of "Nahandove". In Shostakovich's Satires (5 Romances for Soprano and Piano ) Kožená embodies the composer's varied emotional states, from bemusement to sarcasm, and, in the concluding "Kreutzer Sonata", repressed frenzy . . . After Shostakovich's sharp edges, Respighi's lush romantic rhapsody "Il Tramonto" allows Kožená the opportunity to luxuriate in long, expansive melodic lines as well as in the resonance of pure Italianate vowels, for which the singer provides an engaging fullness...

All too often, chamber music collaborations between established, accomplished soloists do not yield favorable results. Merely putting together virtuosic musicians does not mean they will play well together. Such is not the case with this recording of Martha Argerich's 2006 festival in Lugano. This album represents an amazing synthesis of well-known artists, musicians just coming into their own fame, as well as compositions ranging from standard repertoire to rarely heard works. Argerich's decision to include violinist Renaud Capuçon and brother Gautier Capuçon was wise indeed, as their energetic and fiendishly virtuosic playing is nearly enough to carry the CD on its own . All of the music-making is simply top-notch, yet there are still ensembles that truly stand out. The first such remarkable performance is of Schumann's Piano Quartet, Op. 47, with Argerich herself at the helm joined by brothers Renaud and Gautier Capuçon and Lida Chen. The quartet breathes amazing new...

Young pianist Jan Lisiecki has been studying at the Glenn Gould School of Music in Toronto and it seems the Canadian genius’s flair and sense of adventure has rubbed off on the 18-year-old. When Deutsche Grammophon decided to record Chopin’s Études as a follow-up to his debut album of Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos 20 and 21, the Calgary-born youngster felt firmly on home ground. He had already recorded Chopin’s Piano Concertos in F and E Minor in Poland for the Fryderyk Chopin Institute and has a natural affinity for the music. What showed Gould-like daring however was his decision to do each of the 24 pieces in one take. Not only that but he would warm up before each take by playing something completely different – a Bach Goldberg Variation or a little Messiaen. “That would change the mood, in the same way as a different piece would in a live performance,” Lisiecki says. This latest disc shows why he was so quickly snapped up by the German label. Lisiecki’s touch is light and ...

For a long time I have wanted to record my favourite solo piano works by Gabriel Fauré. I was first introduced to his music at the age of fifteen when my teacher, Jean-Paul Sévilla, gave me the Ballade to learn. He was a great lover of Fauré’s music, and we were privileged to hear him perform so much of it in Ottawa, where I grew up. He introduced all his students not only to Fauré’s piano works, but also to the chamber music and especially the songs. I vividly remember buying the LPs of the complete mélodies and listening to them time and time again, following the words and translations (being an avid student of French). I passed many a happy hour in Fauré’s company. All of the works on this album I learned by my mid-twenties, and most of them much earlier. They are old friends. When you mention the piano music of Fauré to people, whether they are professional musicians or not, you usually get one of two responses: either they don’t know it, or else they consider it to...