Music is the key

Paul Lewis spent much of the two-year period from 2011 to 2013 performing and recording the late piano music of Franz Schubert, focusing on pieces written during the last six years of Schubert's life, from 1822 to 1828. After previous instalments in the series which included various sonatas and other pieces such as the 'Wanderer' Fantasy and the Impromptus, we now have a new volume of four sonatas, including the final three which were written in the last months of Schubert's life. The significance of the chosen time period is that it was in 1822 that Schubert contracted syphilis, and for Lewis this marked a complete change in the composer's musical voice. You can hear this, I think, in the A minor Sonata D784, composed in February 1823, and therefore the first of the sonatas to be written after his diagnosis. Although usually when one thinks of the late Schubert piano sonatas, it's often just the final three that come to mind, I'm glad that...

Estrada was born in Mexico City, where his family had been exiled from Spain since 1941. He began his musical studies in Mexico from 1953–65, where he studied composition with Julián Orbón. In Paris from 1965-69 he studied with Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen and attended courses and lectures of Iannis Xenakis. In Germany he studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1968 and with György Ligeti in 1972. He completed a Ph.D in Musicology at Strasbourg University from 1990–1994. Since 1974 he became researcher in music at the UNAM Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, where he was appointed as the Chair of a project on Mexican Music History and as the head of "Música, Sistema Interactivo de Investigación y Composición", a musical system designed by himself. He is the first music scholar to be honored as member of the Science Academy of Mexico, and by the Mexican Education Ministry as National Researcher since 1984, and since 1985 at the top level. He created the Laboratorio de...

 Two new Christmas Oratorio recordings in time for Christmas, and both from forces that give regular concert presentations of the piece, one at St Thomas’s Church, Leipzig, and the other at St John’s Smith Square in London. As such they are not greatly challenging to ‘normal’ expectations, but then that is the point: what you get here are good, sound performances that will not upset anyone and will surely give pleasure to most who hear them. I mean that about not upsetting anyone: not so long ago a recording of this music by the 84-strong Leipzig Thomanerchor and the Gewandhaus Orchestra would have stayed many a buying hand, but things are different now. Germany has become the place where ‘modern-instrument’ orchestras play Baroque music best; and, except for a slight blandness in the continuo, the once-stodgy Gewandhaus’s grasp of current Baroque stylistic orthodoxy under Thomas cantor Biller seems total, while their technical ease (particularly in the brass) i...

Jean Mouton was a Renaissance French composer and choirmaster, much acknowledged but more rarely recorded, who wrote a body of music that’s both technically inventive and immediately appealing. Here Stephen Rice and The Brabant Ensemble—renowned exponents of sixteenth-century Franco-Flemish repertoire—perform all Mouton’s eight-part music, two four-part motets, and his only five-part Mass setting, the Missa Tu es Petrus . The latter is characterized by light, clear textures and a soaring cantus firmus, while the double-choir Nesciens mater is rightly famous for its ingenious canon. Sheer compositional skill aside, all these works demonstrate Mouton’s vivid and original imagination—one that has the ability to speak directly to our time. 'This gorgeous album presents all the works for eight voices which are certainly attributable to Mouton, plus one for five and two for four voices … these pieces are refreshingly airy and transparent. Mouton's exquisite music an...

When I'm so deeply absorbed in a composer, as I have been with Beethoven, then I physically and mentally begin to feel like him. Beethoven changed me as a person. There are composers who enrich you and uplift you - Beethoven is the best example. As a composer and as a person, I feel he has a lot of generosity, I have enormous choices. (András Schiff, The Guardian, September 2008) In his final program Schiff unflinchingly abandoned his principle of live recordings. Beethoven’s music, he maintains, “needs great moments and spontaneous instants that only happen ‘live’ – if we’re lucky. And what happens if the concert doesn’t work? Then you don’t have to issue the results. For this reason I decided to record the last three sonatas again in the empty hall of the Reitstadel in Neumarkt, Germany, a few months after the Zurich performance. The recordings of all the other sonatas took place at the matinees in Zurich, with small corrections from the rehearsals. What we w...

Trio Mediaeval offers a collection of music from the medieval to the modern with the group’s sixth ECM New Series release, Aquilonis , titled after the North Wind. One can sense a reference in that title to the Nordic roots of the three Scandinavian singers, as well as to the bracing purity of their voices; moreover, the album’s repertoire travels from Iceland to Italy, from north to south like the Aquilonis wind. Trio Mediaeval re-imagines Icelandic chant and early Italian sacred songs, along with performing custom arrangements of timeless Norwegian folk melodies – with the vocalists often accompanying themselves with textural instrumentation. The group also sings 15th-century English carols, as well as contemporary works written by the Swede Anders Jormin, American William Brooks and Englishman Andrew Smith. The trio’s own composing can be heard in a sequence of atmospheric interludes. In his liner notes to Aquilonis , John Potter aptly describes the group’s ability t...

Three years after the release of the first volume, András Schiff‘s highly acclaimed Beethoven cycle is now complete. In his afterword to the eighth installment he described the challenges he faced with this project: “Like picture restorers, we performers have to scrape off the layers of convention, have to remove the dust and dirt, in order to reproduce the work in all its original freshness.” Only now is it fully clear why he waited until his fifth decade before embarking on a complete survey of what Hans von Bülow once called the “New Testament of piano music,” a body of music that has occupied him since his youth. The veneration that this celebrated interpreter of Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Schubert has felt toward such works as Beethoven’s final two sonatas involved above all the aspect of sound: “Beethoven’s piano sound is hugely complex : it’s less a matter of loudness, as of inner intensity and strength, and these qualities are also a question of richness. A ‘piano...

Silvestre Revueltas, the "great free spirit of Mexican music," was born on the very eve of the 20th century, on December 31, 1899. His work as a composer came relatively late in his life, beginning when he took on the duties of associate conductor of the Mexico Symphony Orchestra (1931–34). Before that he played violin in a theater orchestra in San Antonio, Texas, and conducted an orchestra in Mobile, Alabama. He also studied in the United States (in Chicago, IL and Austin, TX), building on his early training in Durango and Mexico City. In the last years of his life, which ended early due to complications of alcoholism, he taught at the conservatory in Mexico City. The music of Revueltas is striking in its use of distinctive tone colors and complex rhythmic structures, often showing the influence of European composers such as Igor Stravinsky. More importantly, however, Revueltas strove to create a music that reflected the indigenous Mexican culture. To do this, he often u...

András Schiff’s Beethoven cycle, recorded live in chronological order at Tonhalle Zurich, continues to collect critical praise as it moves forward to the later “middle” period. Lorenzo Arruga, writing in Italy’s Il Giornale on Volume V (including the three sonatas Op. 31 and the “Waldstein”) billed it as “sublime and revelatory”, while Philip Clark (Classic FM Magazine) spoke of a rendering that “isn’t for the faint-hearted who like their Beethoven all cosy and neat”, particularly admiring “bold brushstrokes” and “vivid inner details”. Egon Bezold in Klassik.com pointed at the “extraordinary representation of the overall architecture and expressive variety”, and Gramophone’s Jed Distler highlighted the “remarkable timbral distinctions, fastidious execution of turns and other ornaments, plus painstakingly differentiated accents, articulation marks and dynamics.” Michael Stenger commented in FonoForum: “Schiff achieves clarity and yet a magic of atmospheres which is far ...

Always full of surprises, CPE Bach sharply puts the brakes on in the first movement of his D major Concerto, halting the music’s helter-skelter sprint to accommodate a second subject in the shape of a minuet. As in the conventional way of things, he does it twice, so second time round in the recapitulation it is not quite so alarming. A third tug on the reins leads directly into a slow movement typical of CPE’s Empfindsamkeit (‘sensibility’), with lots of keyboard decoration embellishing the simple melody, and then we’re off again at full tilt for the finale. This music is an apt vehicle for Anastasia Injushina’s limpid pianistic facility and taste, but the touches of individuality in the writing and the work’s significance in the development of the keyboard concerto are outweighed by reams of stock, note-spinning gestures. For repeated listening? Probably not. The two JC Bach concertos are neat products of their time (1770), elegantly shaped and, particularly in the...

When András Schiff performed the “Waldstein sonata” in New York’s Avery Fisher Hall in November 2005, Jeremy Eichler, writing in the New York Times, spoke of a “breathtaking reading”: “This music of great depth and surface complexity seemed to unite Mr. Schiff’s strengths as a pianist. Even the most densely layered keyboard textures became a pellucid frame for the work’s tense and swirling energy.” In the interview with Martin Meyer which is printed in the booklet to the present recording, Schiff himself emphasizes the special character of this famous op. 53: “The ‘Waldstein’ sonata is certainly an overwhelming work that was not only of great significance to the composer, but also occupies a special place in the history of piano music. Its spatial dimensions alone are enormous, and were only exceeded later by those of the ‘Hammerklavier’ sonata. Furthermore, Beethoven takes a giant stride forwards in respect of new-found pianistic sonorities, at the same time creating ...

“Alfred Zimmerlin is interested in the heterogeneity of musical phenomena, in temporal layers within the present, in ‘cultural memory’. His music is the result of an ongoing confrontation with musics from a very wide range of times, places and realms.” This is how the Swiss composer Alfred Zimmerlin, in a self-portrait, outlines his personal aesthetic. Born in Zurich in 1955, early in his career he became well-known far beyond the borders of Switzerland for his improvisations on the cello and guitar. More recently he has earned a reputation as a voluminous and deeply reflective composer. His more than 70 works reveal a subtle sense of timbre, profound craftsmanship and great aesthetic open-mindedness. This CD, with three major new pieces of chamber music, is the first to present his art to an international audience. Some time around 2000 Manfred Eicher heard a broadcast of Zimmerlin's Concerto for Piano and Strings on Swiss Radio. He was immediately struck by it an...

 The first three instalments of András Schiff’s Beethoven cycle in chronological order have met with great critical acclaim. “This will be one of the great Beethoven sonata sets” was the verdict of ‘Fanfare’ while ‘Die Zeit’ saluted an “outstanding Beethoven interpreter”. On volume III released last autumn, Anthony Holden wrote in Britain’s ‘Observer’: “As always, Schiff is a master of detail, often rephrasing bars you thought you knew well, coming up with fine nuances while never losing sight of the work’s overall architecture. Recorded live in Zurich’s Tonhalle, thanks to Schiff’s belief that it’s vital to play in front of an audience, this is a distinguished instalment in an outstanding cycle.” Volume IV includes four masterworks of strong individual features dating from 1800 and 1801 which in Schiff’s view conclude his “early” period. “Between 1795 and 1801 Beethoven establishes himself as a superb master of the art of characterisation, and is also revelling i...

It's difficult to explain why Morton Feldman's music is so hot these days. Quiet, uneventful, dissonant, and often extremely lengthy, his works don't seem all that accessible on paper. But hearing is believing, as they say, and unlike some avant-garde music, appreciation of Feldman's art requires no understanding of arcane forms or compositional techniques. Perhaps this is because Feldman was influenced more by the abstract paintings of Philip Guston and Mark Rothko than by the music of any of his contemporaries. Listen to "Coptic Light" 1986 -- one of the composer's final works and his orchestral masterpiece -- a hypnotic kaleidoscope of slowly shifting colors, with no melody and no discernible rhythmic patterns, just wave after wave of gorgeously gauzy sound. This music is so colorful and finely textured that you can almost see and feel it. In fact, experiencing it fully requires your visual and tactile senses as much as your hearing. Conductor Micha...

Having recorded more than 20 albums for ECM since the mid-’80s, the Hilliard Ensemble caps its sublime discography before retirement with a final release: Transeamus : English Carols and Motets , a collection of polyphony – in two, three and four parts – from the 15th-century. The album’s main title translates as “we travel on,” fitting as a nod of goodbye from one of the most venturesome and beloved of classical vocal groups. Also fitting is the fact that this British vocal quartet’s very first recording included music from the court of Henry VIII, so Transeamus brings their odyssey through the ages full circle. The album includes many of the group’s favorite pieces from this era, including previously unrecorded items from its concert programs by the likes of John Plummer, Walter Lambe and William Cornysh. More of the album’s works are by composers rendered anonymous by time, yet all of this music is rich with enduring personality. Hilliard Ensemble countertenor D...

International critics writing on the first two volumes of András Schiff’s Beethoven cycle have praised a particularly “sharp attention to detail” (Jed Distler in Gramophone on volume II) and expressed their high expectations for the edition as a whole, with Le monde de la musique saluting Schiff as one of the “great Beethoven interpreters of our time.” Michael Church’s remark on Volume II of Schiff’s cycle in The Independent applies no less to this third instalment: “These are early works, but he shows them to be fully fledged masterpieces: their contours are sharpened, and their emotional depths plumbed, with each becoming a musical drama.” Schiff’s concept to approach the sonatas in strict chronological order proves especially successful in this volume which combines the four smaller sonatas opp. 49 and 14 with the brilliant op. 22, all composed between 1796 and 1800. “It’s fascinating for me to reconstruct this creative arc as though I were taking an overview o...

Jonathan Biss and the Elias Quartet deliver highly assured performances of these two marvellous chamber works. The opening of the Schumann is projected with suitably impetuous energy, and Biss brilliantly negotiates the tricky piano-quaver passagework in the first movement’s development section, balancing a growing sense of unease with exciting forward momentum. Occasionally, however, I find the players’ use of rubato a bit self-conscious. For instance, there seems no logically musical reason for the cello to elongate the first note of the lyrical second subject to such an extent. A similar issue resurfaces in their phrasing of the contrasting major-key idea in the second movement, the tendency to hold back the resolution of a particularly poignant harmonic progression becoming an irritating mannerism. In general, this warmly recorded performance is most compelling when Schumann explores the extrovert side of his musical personality. The Scherzo’s sequenc...

International press reactions to the first volume of Schiff’s Beethoven cycle released in October 2005 were unanimous in their praise and critics expressed high expectations for the edition as a whole. “If the first volume (superbly recorded and annotated by ECM) is anything to go by, this Beethoven cycle will not only provoke and illuminate but give the lie to those who wonder if there is room for yet another”, wrote Jeremy Nicholas in Gramophone while Hugh Canning, in the Sunday Times , drew a similar perspective: “If the results match this volume we are in for a memorable cycle“. And in the German weekly Die Zeit Wolfram Goertz spoke of “an integral that deserves our most thorough attention as the beginning is spectacular”. Le monde de la musique on the other hand quite laconically greeted one of the “great Beethoven interpreters of our time.” Schiff who early on played and recorded comprehensive cycles of Bach, Mozart and Schubert, has taken his time with Beethoven. Unt...

It says a lot for this disc that, when Gramophone's Editor chose it as his Recording of the Month and asked me for five listening points, I came up with nearly four times that number. No single interpretation of Chopin's Preludes will ever be enough but - just as she demonstrated in her previous disc of the two Chopin concertos (3/14) - the Argentinian Ingrid Fliter seems to be able to achieve individuality seemingly effortlessly, with cherishable and memorable results. Truly innate Chopin players are rarer than you might think. From obvious examples such as Rubinstein and Cortot via Argerich and Freire (what is it with these South Americans?) I would add to that illustrious list Fliter. She has that magical way of creating an easeful rubato without ever sounding studied, and holds Classicism and freedom in perfect accord. Add to that a clarity of vision and a tremendous sense of purpose and you have a mesmerising set of Preludes. She doesn't ever sweeten ...

ECM now presents Schiff’s long awaited first cycle of the complete 32 sonatas. The pianist opted for live-recordings. The concert situation not only facilitates communicative immediacy, but also creates musical suspense. András Schiff uses two different grand pianos: a Bösendorfer, which, as he says himself, “is adequate to the Vienna dialect”, which he likes in the early Beethoven, and a Steinway maintained by the internationally renowned piano technicians Fabbrini from Italy. Schiff rates the Steinway as the more objective and powerful instrument he prefers in the more dramatic sonatas. His approach to Beethoven is characterised by utmost conscientiousness: The pianist, who will be touring this fall (with a programme including the Sonatas op. 31 and the “Waldstein” Sonata), not only scrutinizes the composer’s manuscripts kept in various libraries and institutes, but also studies the sound and playing techniques of the pianos Beethoven had at his disposal. The reco...

Jean Françaix was born on 23.5.1912 in Le Mans in France. He received his first music lessons at home: his father was a composer and pianist and also director of the Conservatoire and his mother a singing teacher and the founder of a renowned choir. In 1922 at the age of only 10, Françaix received his first tuition in harmony and later also counterpoint from Nadia Boulanger. The young composer wrote his first composition the very same year: a piano piece entitled “Pour Jacqueline”, dedicated to a cousin, which was printed two years later. Encouraged by Maurice Ravel, he continued his studies at the Paris Conservatoire. Alongside his compositional training, Françaix embarked on a career as concert pianist. At the age of 18, he received the first prize in the piano class of Isidore Philipp. Two years later, he represented the young French school of composition together with Claude Delvincourt at the international music festival in Vienna where his Huit Bagatelles were performed. Jean ...

 Both the piano work “Hamamuth – Stadt der Engel”, premiered at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 2006, and the piano concerto “Wer sind diese Kinder”, premiered at the Donaueschingen Music Festival three years later, are two of the major artistic attempts of the past decades which try to substantially broaden the spectrum of political music. In “ Hamamuth – Stadt der Engel ”, the composer Rolf Riehm intends to respond as an artist to the omnipresence of violence experienced during the Iraq War. “This is about prevailing perceptions. 'Stadt der Engel' [City of Angels]: They refer to the pictures of devastation in Iraq which can be regularly seen on TV” – this is the beginning of Riehm's detailed introductory text which is incorporated in the score of the work. In “Wer sind diese Kinder” [Who are these children], this approach is continued. Both works show that it would be insufficient to look for their political facets exclusively on a semantic level. The ...

The Diabelli Variations have long been considered a magnum opus in Beethoven's piano music and a towering historical contribution to the genre, with Bach's Goldberg Variations as their forebear and Brahms's Handel Variations as their heir. Yet many pianists, even great pianists, have been intimidated by their sheer immensity. Throughout their careers Edwin Fischer and Wilhelm Kempff gave a wide berth to this allegedly unwieldy masterpiece, a work that sometimes sounds like a melancholy or grimly humorous commentary on the whole of music history and seems to cast an avant-gardist glance at 20th- or even 21st-century music. Hans von Bülow called this musical monument a microcosm of Beethoven's genius. It is not a set of variations in the traditional sense, for rather than weaving ornamental garlands around its simple theme, it dissects it in order to develop an entire encyclopaedia of pianism from its material. Now András Schiff has followed up his pr...

Deutsche Grammophon have certainly worked on the principle of saving the best until last when it comes to Richard Strauss’s 150th anniversary: it doesn’t get much starrier than Daniel Barenboim and Anna Netrebko taking on the mighty Four Last Songs with Barenboim’s long-term collaborators the Staatskapelle Berlin. As I’ve discussed in reviews of her recent Verdi recordings, the Russian-born soprano’s voice has expanded and gained exciting new colours over the past few years – her operatic work has seen her moving away from the Susannas and Manons with which she made her name and into heavier repertoire such as Verdi’s Lady Macbeth. German repertoire has yet to play a part (the only such music I’d previously heard from her was a radiant, sensual Morgen! at the Last Night of the Proms in 2007, though there are rumours of a forthcoming Elsa in Lohengrin under Christian Thielemann), so I was intrigued to see what she’d do with Richard Strauss’s late, great meditations on...

Two mature pianists, both renowned for their Bach interpretations and with numerous acclaimed recordings to their names—but both of whom, until now, have fought shy of Bach’s final, uncompromisingly contrapuntal masterpiece. In the booklet notes with their respective new recordings, Angela Hewitt and Zhu Xiao-Mei both admit to having put off the inevitable: coming to terms with The Art of Fugue. Unlike the rest of the established Bach keyboard repertoire, The Art of Fugue’s scoring is ambiguous, each line written out on a separate stave. For the first edition published in 1751, a year after Bach’s death, his son Carl Philipp Emanuel is clear: ‘everything has ... been arranged for use at the harpsichord or organ’—yet it has been argued that the occasional awkward leap means the work is not fully renderable on a keyboard (opening the door to some highly effective performances by all manner of instrumental ensembles). Interestingly, though, neither Hewitt nor Xiao-Mei c...

Recorded live in Lucerne, Switzerland, in 2013, shortly before the death of conductor Claudio Abbado (who must have been quite ill at the time), this pair of Mozart piano concertos stands as a fitting valediction to his legacy. The liquid playing of star pianist Martha Argerich is a major contributor to the success of the performances, it's true. But really this is a Mozart performance shaped by the conductor, and Abbado's subtlety in his old age is remarkable to hear. In the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor , K. 466, he generates a great deal of tension without resorting to the Beethovenian mode of expression that is the norm for this concerto these days. The turn to D major at the end of the finale is utterly delightful in the hands of Abbado and Argerich, not a Romantic conceit like sunlight breaking through storm clouds but a quintessentially ingenious Mozartian ornament. The Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K. 503, Mozart's longest concerto, offers a lot to chew on...

This latest disc from mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli is full of arias you have never heard from unknown operas by obscure composers, but that is nothing new. In her recent discs, Bartoli has showed a knack for discovering and re-animating forgotten repertoire. On this disc from Decca, recorded with Diego Fasolis and I Barocchisti , investigates the music written for the opera in St Petersburg in the 18th century. During this period the Russian Court relied on foreign models for much of its high culture and for opera they looked to Italy. On this disc there are arias from operas by Francesco Araia, Hermann Friedrich Raupach, Vincenzo Manfredini, Domenico Dall'Oglio and Luigi Madonis, and Domenico Cimarosa. This latter being the best known of the group. The music is all taken from manuscripts houses in St Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre Library, coming from the Italian Collection.

 Kim Kashkashian’s third disc for ECM is a curiously mixed bag. Although the liner notes give some delightful anecdotes and insider’s information, I am torn over how much said information enriches my experience of the whole. For example, Kashkashian points to the percussiveness of Shotakovich’s piano writing in his Sonata for Viola and Piano op. 147 as justification for the two companion pieces scored for “actual” percussion and viola. To be sure, this is a fascinating connection, though one that perhaps only the performers can intuit with such immediacy. Either way, the knowledge does guide my listening in new directions and pushes me to burrow into the music wholeheartedly. We begin with Pourtinade by Linda Bouchard, consisting of nine sections that may be rearranged at will and which are otherwise meticulously notated. Each chapter breeds freshness in this indeterminate order and points to a hidden vitality behind the deceptively ineffectual surface. This is ...