Music is the key

Lisa Batiashvili begins by working on the notes on the printed page. It is as pure and simple as that. “I prefer scores that contain as little additional information as possible,” she says. “Ideally, no fingering, no commentaries – I want to work on a new piece myself; it has to grow and eventually to become a part of me.” For the Georgian violinist, notes are the most perfect language, a language in which emotions, desires and states of mind are revealed, none of which can be expressed in words. Such thoughts take us beyond our historical knowledge of the works’ composers and their lives. “Only when you accept their music as art”, she says, “does it become possible to create a link between the composers and our own day – only then can you fill your own work with thoughts and ideas and associations.” From a historical point of view, it is, of course, very tempting to speculate about Brahms’s Violin Concerto and Clara Schumann’s Three Romances . What wa...

Sir Neville Marriner here collects a miscellaneous group of popular classical and Baroque pieces in characteristically polished and elegant performances. The only roughness – and that deliberate – is in the extra toy percussion of Leo­pold Mozart’s Cassation , with its long- misattributed Toy Symphony . The anonymous extra soloists enjoy themselves as amateurs might, not least on a wind machine, but what’s very hard to take is the grotesquely mismatched cuckoo-whistle, an instrument which should readily be tunable.  Eine kleine Nachtmusik brings a performance plainly designed to caress the ear of traditional listeners wearied with period performance. The second-movement Romanze is even more honeyed than usual on muted strings. The oddity of the Pachelbel item is that the celebrated Canon – taken unsentimentally if sweetly at a flowing speed – is given a reprise after the Gigue. The recording is warm and well balanced. (Gramophone)

Sir Neville Marriner here collects a miscellaneous group of popular classical and Baroque pieces in characteristically polished and elegant performances. The only roughness – and that deliberate – is in the extra toy percussion of Leo­pold Mozart’s Cassation , with its long- misattributed Toy Symphony . The anonymous extra soloists enjoy themselves as amateurs might, not least on a wind machine, but what’s very hard to take is the grotesquely mismatched cuckoo-whistle, an instrument which should readily be tunable.  Eine kleine Nachtmusik brings a performance plainly designed to caress the ear of traditional listeners wearied with period performance. The second-movement Romanze is even more honeyed than usual on muted strings. The oddity of the Pachelbel item is that the celebrated Canon – taken unsentimentally if sweetly at a flowing speed – is given a reprise after the Gigue. The recording is warm and well balanced. (Gramophone)

French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky astonishes once again with a program of arias associated with castrato Giovanni Carestini. At the peak of Carestini's career, his supremacy was challenged only by that of Farinelli, the other reigning castrato of the era. Frédéric Delaméa's extremely informative booklet note relates that contemporary opinion, while it held that Farinelli had more technical facility, was that Carestini used his voice more expressively than Farinelli. Charles Burney wrote, "Carestini gratified the eye as much by the dignity, grace, and propriety of [his] action and deportment, as the ear by judicious use of a few notes within the limits of a small vocal compass." Carestini, who was born in 1700, enjoyed a 38-year career, which is impressive even by modern standards. As a teenager, he acquired the patronage of Cardinal Agostino Cusani of Milan. From his debut in Milan, he traveled to Rome, Parma, Naples, and the other major mu...

This is not a record for the purists but, accepted for what it offers, it is an enjoyable one. The Marcello has long topped the baroque-oboe pop charts and has plenty of recordings, even on CD: Holliger's embellishment of its famous slow movement is fluent but perhaps over-elaborate for a melody whose lines are beautiful enough in their own right. The booklet tells us about Sammartini's ''Concerto No. 1 in F'', in four da chiesa movements, but not the fine Concerto (three movements, in D) on the recording, a newcomer to the catalogue. The Albinoni is a new recording not taken from the CD of six concertos from his Op. 9 by the same artists which are remasterings of originals from 1968. Lotti's small corpus of instrumental works includes only one concerto—for the oboe d'amore his preoccupation with vocal music is reflected particularly in the delightful affetuoso, a gentle siciliana and by far the longest single movement on the ...

Elīna Garanča’s personal choice of her greatest tracks, released to coincide with her receiving an Echo Award (6 October) & the publication of her memoirs in December Ten years ago she made her sensational début at the Salzburg Festival, singing the role of Annio in Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito. Since then Elīna Garanča has become one of the greatest, most sought-after mezzo-sopranos in the world. As an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist , she has made four solo albums for the label, and collaborated on many CD and DVD releases. Now, with the artist’s help, we have brought together favourite tracks from her discography – the Seguidilla and Habanera from Carmen, the Flower Duet from Lakmé (with Anna Netrebko), the Barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann and many more, including Annio’s aria from Clemenza di Tito, some of her great bel canto roles and the touching Lullaby (Nana) by de Falla. The CD booklet includes a newly-commissioned interview with Elina, where ...

The music on this recording demonstrates how composers in Germany, Italy, Austria and England responded to the challenges of writing for violin senza basso. Music for violin senza basso had a distinguished history before Bach and was widely cultivated by his contemporaries. Violinistic virtuosity was extraordinarily experimental in the late seventeenth century, with novelties in the tuning of the strings (scordaura), bowing techniques, chordal playing and contrapuntal textures (with the development of sophisticated double-, triple- and quadruple-stopping techniques) and playing in high positions. This disc of solo violin music is a real mixture of some of Rachel's favourite pieces. Rachel Podger is one of the most creative talents to emerge in the field of period performance. Over the last two decades she has established herself as a leading interpreter of the music of the Baroque and Classical periods. After beginnings with The Palladian Ensemble and Florile...

At Westminster Abbey there are three Carol Services each year. The first takes place on Advent Sunday (at the end of November), the next on the Feast of St. Stephen (26 December), and the last on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (28 December). On these occasions, Evensong is replaced by a special liturgy which retells the events surrounding the birth of Our Lord. The choir of twenty-two boys and twelve men, led by their choirmaster, begins the service by singing at the west end of the Abbey church. Then it moves in procession throughout the building, performing pieces whose words reflect the Christmas story. The custom of performing carols in this way dates back to the 15th century. The carol, which was originally a song for dancing to, had gradually become a religious song, and had begun to replace some of the ancient processional hymns which were sung in church on feast days. Because the most important feasts of the church year were those at Christmastime, the carol...

Hille Perl is widely regarded as one of the leading viola da gambists in the world. Because of the prominence of her instrument in the Baroque era, her repertory is rich in works from that period, with the names, J.S. Bach, Telemann, Marin Marais, Sainte-Colombe, and other 17th and 18th century composers headlining her concert programs and recordings. Perl also plays the treble viol, the seven-string bass viol, Baroque guitar, Lirone, and Xarana. She often performs with her husband, lutenist Lee Santana, in duo repertory, and together the pair have formed two other ensembles: Los Otros, with guitarist Steve Player, and the Age of Passions, with violinist/conductor Petra Müllejans and flutist Karl Kaiser. Perl has also appeared with some of the leading Baroque ensembles in Europe, like the Freiburger Barockorchester and the Harp Consort. She has made numerous recordings, many of them available from Deutsche Harmonia Mundi (DHM).  Hille Perl was born in Bremen, Germany, in 1965....

Although German composer Johann Sebastian Bach entitled his work Weihnachtsoratorium (Christmas Oratorio), it is in fact closer to a cantata cycle than an oratorio. Composed and compiled for the Christmas season as celebrated in Leipzig in 1734 and early 1735, the six parts of the Christmas Oratorio were intended to be performed on the six major feast days over that 13-day period from December 25 through January 6: the "First Day of Christmas," the "Second Day of Christmas," the "Third Day of Christmas," the "Feast of the Circumcision," the "First Sunday of the New Year," and the "Feast of the Epiphany." Furthermore, each part of the work is designed to function as an independent musical unit; each part (except the second, which starts with a "Pastoral Symphony") begins and ends with choruses in the tonic key, and each part tells a separate part of the Christmas story. However, Bach also clearly intended the music ...

Here's another of Paul McCreesh's "as it might have been" reconstructions, this time of the First Mass of Christmas in Venice's St. Mark's church "around 1600". McCreesh's customary focus on bringing to life the pomp and ceremony of a huge celebratory occasion offers huge rewards for the listener as musicology, the finest performing forces, and first-rate sound engineering combine to deliver a bold and beautiful "you are there" experience. The whole thing centers around Cipriano de Rore's seven-part mass Praeter rerum seriem, a parody on a six-part motet by Josquin. It's a gorgeous setting, and McCreesh's vocal ensemble really digs into the emotional and spiritual heart of this music. The Sanctus and Agnus Dei are particularly affecting, but the entire mass has a rich textural voluptuousness and structural grandeur that certainly would be enough to make any music lover glad to attend church the day...

I'm very proud of the first solo disc that I did which was recorded for Proprius, a Swedish label, with songs and arias by Telemann, Monteverdi, Roman and Handel. It was in 1983, and I was comparatively young - 27, I think - and I was so inexperienced. But I was sort of in charge. It was all done rather instinctively. I'd never sung a whole Handel opera but one of the coaches at the Guildhall said I should look at the aria "Where shall I fly" from Hercules, and then I heard on the radio Piangerò from Giulio Cesare and I thought that was divine. We had no conductor, no rehearsals: we just got on with it. I stood in front of the ensemble and made signs with my pencil where they should play faster or slower or stop. Miraculously, it all worked very well and this disc is still on sale . It was used by my agent as a sort of business card. That's how Georg Solti, for instance, heard of me and why he booked me. (Anne Sofie von Otter / BBC Music)

In 1760, Rameau composed Les Paladins, a lively, witty and imaginatie comédie lyrique. In taking its name from a work by the greatest French composer of the eighteenth century, Les Paladins its aim: to explore lesser-known works of this operatic repertoire, which it performs in chamber versions. The ensemble has presented L'Europe Galante by Campra at the Festival du Haut-Jura, Iphigénie en Tauride by Desmarest at versailles, La Grotte de Versailles by Lully in Paris (tercentenary of the death of the great French landscape gardener Le Nôtre), as well as Grands Motets by Bernier at the Ambronay Festival and in Geneva, and Cantatas by Bach and Telemann at the Musicales d'Oppède and at the Lourdes Festival. Jérôme Correas and Les Paladins are very interested too in the virtuoso Italian repertoire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and have performed cantatas and serenades by Handel , Stradella, Cesti, Carissimi and Bononcini at Chartres ("Samedis Musicaux")...

The Welsh soprano won a choral scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge where she read Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. Thomas joined the Monteverdi Choir in 2000 and has sung with The Sixteen, Polyphony, Cambridge Singers and the Gabrieli Consort. Increasingly she is in great demand as an international soloist. Thomas has specialised in performing early music especially with the choral group The Sixteen. Her release titled Eternal Light on Universal covers music from the Renaissance and the Baroque period. The release titled Byd Y Soprano - Soprano World comprises mainly music from the Romantic period with some Classical and a Baroque piece. Late-Romantic music is not repertoire that one usually associates with Thomas in solo performance. It is not surprising that this highly talented singer will want to show her versatility by singing a wide range of repertoire. This stance will naturally invite comparisons with the finest singers in world. I cannot think of a finer exponent of ea...

Dorothee Oberlinger trained to become a music teacher and also attended a course in German studies before studying the recorder in Cologne, Amsterdam and Milan. Having won the first prize in the Moeck/ SRP Solo Recorder Competition in London, she made her professional début in the capital’s Wigmore Hall in 1997, subsequently winning many other prizes, including an Echo Klassik Award. Since 2004 Dorothee Oberlinger is teaching at the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg, where she runs the Institute for Early Music. In the concert hall she has appeared as a soloist with such distinguished Baroque ensembles and orchestras as I Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca, Musica Antiqua Köln, the Akademie für Alte Musik in Berlin, the Academy of Ancient Music and Zefiro. In 2002 she formed Ensemble 1700, a specialist group that performs chamber music of the 17th and 18th centuries. Within the context of numerous concert projects and CD recordings , Ensemble 1700 has worked with many leading figur...

There have been recordings where I've had terrible colds and gone ahead anyway - you have to. But I still wouldn't want to redo them because once it's done I don't want to look back. And being me, I quickly look forward to getting my teeth into the next project! After so much time spent on preparation, rehearsal, getting my creative mind round the specific repertoire, I truly don't feel the desire to go back. When I did my Brahms Lieder recording in the early 1990s, I had a nasty cold and you can hear a sort of nasal twang. I was also coughing the whole time which is extremely bad for the voice. It was hard and we had to do many retakes because of it. But again, once it's done it's done. I don't quite understand why one would want to re-record an already familiar work when there is so much wonderful music left to sing. There have been rare occasions where the mood has been tense which is not good for recording, but you just have to get through it unfo...

Angela Hewitt turns to two of Mozart’s greatest and most popular concertos for her latest album. Together with her frequent collaborators, the Orchestra da Camera di Mantova and brilliant Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu, she presents these works in performances which are both elegantly stylish and profoundly felt. This release is completed by a personal reflection on the music by Hewitt herself in the accompanying booklet. 'The sound is wonderfully clean and focused, with an ideal balance between Hewitt's customary Fazioli piano and the orchestra. … [K453 finale] Here Lintu starts the movement with light-footed grace, using minimal vibrato on the strings, Hewitt taking her cue with playing of elegance and buoyancy … The attention to musical contrast and stylistic integrity is similar throughout. Hewitt's own illuminating notes in the booklet are a bonus, making this a Mozart release to cherish' (The Daily Telegraph) The success of her performances...

 A brilliant specialist in the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach, which she has recorded to great critical acclaim, Angela Hewitt proves herself equally attuned to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in this first installment of the complete piano concertos. While beginning with the Piano Concertos No. 6, No. 8, and No. 9 might be an unusual opening gambit, jumping ahead of the earliest and least compelling concertos, they are still youthful works and more than competent examples of Mozart's budding mastery. Indeed, t he Piano Concerto No. 9 in E flat major , "Jenamy" ("Jeunehomme"), is his "coming of age" work, though it shows only the beginnings of Mozart's mature concertante style and promises much greater things to come. Hewitt performs with Orchestra da Camera di Mantova, demonstrating her polished skills and exquisite taste in refined and robust strokes with full-sounding accompaniment. Even though she plays a modern piano and the g...

France's Naïve label has heavily promoted the career of the young pianist Lise de la Salle, who was 22 when this recording was made. Her fashion-spread good looks fit with Naïve's design concepts, and she has the ability to deliver the spontaneous, unorthodox performances the label favors. How does she fare in a field extremely crowded with Chopin recitals? Her performances certainly aren't derivative of anyone else, and this live recording from the Semperoper in Dresden (you get a one-minute track of just applause at the end) has a good deal of attention-getting flair. The standout feature of De la Salle's performance, in the four ballades at least, is her orientation toward slow tempos, inventively deployed. The ballades are somewhere between moderately slow and much slower than normal, but De la Salle is not trying to create a deliberate mood. Instead the operative adjective is "dreamy." She applies a good deal of rubato in the quieter passages, and again...

In the early 1980s Pauta magazine (Journal of Theory and Musical Criticism) appeared in Mexico, thanks to the interest and initiative of composer Mario Lavista. Pauta provided, for the first time in Spanish, access to information on contemporary techniques of instrumental performance. As a result of the work of a group of young Mexican musicians who decided to specialize in contemporary music, articles devoted to the oboe, the flute, the clarinet, the double bass, the guitar, the harp and strings were published in Pauta during the early years. In 1982, along with Pauta magazine, the Da Capo Quartet was founded. With Maria Elena Arizpe on the flute, Leonora Saavedra on the oboe, Lilia Vazquez at the piano and Aaron Bitran on the cello, they recorded Between 1982 and 1984 three albums of music by Mario Lavista, Manuel Enriquez, Federico Ibarra, Daniel Catan, Joaquín Gutiérrez Heras, Rodolfo Halffter, Stephen Montague, Lilia Vazquez and George Crumb. Throughout personnel changes in th...

Franco Fagioli is one of the leading countertenors of the new generation. His performances as Handel heroes have been unanimously acclaimed. Born in San Miguel de Tucumán (Argentina) in 1981, he studied the piano in his home town, then singing at the Instituto Superiore de Arte of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. In 1997 he founded the choir of San Martín de Porres for the adolescents of his region. He then began to specialise in the countertenor register. In 2003 Franco Fagioli won the prestigious Bertelsmann singing competition Neue Stimmen in Germany, which marked the start of his international career. Since then, he has appeared at the Teatro Colón, the Karlsruhe, Bonn, Essen, and Zurich operas, the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa, and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, among others. He has enjoyed immense success with his interpretation of the title role of Giulio Cesare in Zurich, Helsinki, Oslo, and Karlsruhe. In 2011 he was awarded the Premio Abbiati in Italy and ...

For Tolstoy, love meant preferring others to oneself. That notion also sheds light on Bach, another of those who, in the deepest sense, entrusted their heart to love. He loved so fully, with all his being, in the most carnal, indeed incarnate way, that his self-effacement has caused us forever to perceive in that something resembling a revelation of life, something that explains his universality: it is as though Bach’s music were the awareness of music itself, its assurance and its promise. Perhaps no one –Shakespeare excepted – was comparably able to transform every atom in the universe, every particle of the world into such profound yet also intimate emotion. Bach is the composer who unites, in their truest sense, the plenary tenderness of prayer with the solitary echo of the divine. He grasps space and makes it an infinite curve; he takes time and makes it a possibility of the future; he seizes a dance and it becomes a betrothal to celebrate. For those of us who see so dimly, he...

Handel was a prolifically ‘green’ composer who constantly recycled much of his best music. For Deborah he borrowed movements and themes from numerous compositions including the Brockes Passion, the Coronation Anthems, the Chandos Anthems, the Birthday Ode for Queen Anne and a number of early Italian works including Dixit Dominus . Many of these would have been new to London audiences. The scoring of Deborah was splendidly expansive, requiring an eight-part choir (all the more novel to eighteenth-century audiences who were used to operas with little ensemble work) and a large orchestral body of strings, oboes, bassoons, flutes, three horns, three trumpets, timpani, harpsichord and two organs. The scoring was unusually detailed, often providing ripieno lines for cellos and bassoons (rather than combining them all on the continuo line), and giving clear instructions for the disposition of keyboard instruments. Reports from the first performance on 17 March 1733 state t...

Andor Foldes was born in Budapest on Dec. 21, 1913, and began his studies privately with his mother, Valerie Ipolye, and with Tibor Szatmari. He made his public debut performing a Mozart concerto with the Budapest Philharmonic when he was 8 years old. The next year he entered the Budapest Academy of Music to study the piano, composition and conducting, but he continued to perform publicly. During his student years, Mr. Foldes worked with several important Hungarian composers, among them Ernst von Dohnanyi, with whom he studied until 1932, and Bartok, whom he met in 1929. Bartok's music became a central part of his repertory. He gave the New York premiere of Bartok's Second Piano Concerto at Carnegie Hall in 1947. His 1948 recording of the work, prized by collectors, was recently reissued on compact disk, as was a set of Bartok works he recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, which won the Grand Prix du Disques and other prizes. A New York Premiere. Mr. Foldes made h...

HARLEKIN is a remarkable, and successful, extreme of variation form. A great deal of the long-lasting fascination of Stockhausen's music is produced by its exploration of the extreme boundaries of music, of what music can be. This work explores the extremes of music within a seemingly traditional framework, extensive variation of melody, a feature that provides a special fascination of its own. Over a span of 45 minutes, the listener is confronted with nothing but one single melodic formula, with innumerable variations (in its original form the formula lasts about one minute, but mostly it is contracted to a much shorter duration). Broadly speaking and a little simplified (as will become clear later), the entire work consists of just a single chain of successive, yet varied, repetitions of this formula, connected like pearls on a string. This alone would be remarkable enough, yet even more striking is the variation technique employed in relation to the duration of ...

"For the love of Bach and the glory of God," René Jacobs states in a sleevenote for his recording of the St Matthew Passion. A performance of overwhelming sincerity, it's not without controversy. Jacobs argues that at the first performance in Leipzig's Thomaskirche, the two groups of musicians were placed, not side by side as originally thought, but at opposite ends of the building, and that the second group was smaller than the first. The recording itself accordingly aims to approximate the spatial sound as it might have been heard by someone sitting near the front of the church. Not everyone will care for it, and some might also be surprised its sensuous immediacy and by Jacobs's ornate way with the recitatives. But the mix of drama and meditation is breathtakingly sustained and the choral singing astonishing in its beauty. Werner Güra is the impassioned Evangelist, Johannes Weisser the noble, charismatic Jesus. The classy lineup for the arias includes Bernar...

Hyperion is thrilled to be able to unite the remarkable talents of The Florestan Trio, deemed by Classic CD as 'among the finest chamber ensembles of the present day', with one of Schubert's greatest masterpieces, the magnificent Piano Trio in B flat major, D898 . Of all the large-scale works of his last years, D898 is one that reflects the popular image of the carefree, companionable Schubert, pouring out a stream of spontaneous melody. From its soaring opening theme to the sublimated echoes of Viennese popular music in the finale, the music exudes life-affirming energy. The 'Notturno' (so titled by the publisher) in E flat was the original slow movement of the B flat trio. Schubert's reasons for its eventual replacement remain unclear, but the work now stands alone most effectively as an entity of sustained melody and tranquillity. The last work, the single-movement 'Sonate' (the composer's designation) was written when the compo...