Music is the key

Carolin Widmann’s widely acclaimed ECM New Series recordings have traversed a broad arc of music – from Schubert to Xenakis. Her award-winning album of contemporary music “Phantasy of Spring”, released in 2009, opened with Morton’s Feldman’s “Spring of Chosroes”; now she returns to Feldman with one of the US composer’s pivotal compositions, Violin and Orchestra , written in 1979. With its almost painterly attention to detail and to texture, this slowly unfolding single-movement work marked a new direction in Feldman’s music. It is not a concerto in the strict sense of the term, not soloist with orchestral support. The violinist must move inside the glowing colour-field of sound. In this exceptional Feldman recording, Widmann does so with great delicacy and feeling, exploring the subtle orchestral texture, crafted together with conductor Emilio Pomàrico and the players of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra. “In the noisiest century in history,” critic Alex Ross has...

For his third album on Mercury Classics/Deutsche Grammophon, international chart-topping classical guitarist Miloš Karadaglić takes the world-famous Concierto de Aranjuez as the starting point for a journey across the Spanish landscape, paying tribute to the great composers and musicians who placed the modern classical guitar firmly on the international stage. The Concierto de Aranjuez was written by Joaquín Rodrigo for the Spanish guitarist Regino Sainz de la Maza and very soon became not just the most famous Spanish guitar concerto but also the most famous guitar concerto of all time; its ravishing slow movement was taken up and arranged by musicians of all genres, from Miles Davis, Chick Corea, Jim Hall to Herb Alpert, from Frank Sinatra to José Carreras. And now, Miloš has produced a standalone new interpretation of Aranjuez; the definitive version for our time. Miloš sees the work as “the holy grail of the guitar repertoire and an endless source of inspiratio...

This new album from Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica and soloists, recorded at Neuhardenberg and Lockenhaus in 2012 and 2013, makes a strong case for Shostakovich’s assertion that Weinberg was one of the great composers of his era. He was certainly amongst the most prolific, with a work list that includes seven operas, twenty-two symphonies, ten concertos, seventeen string quartets and a vast output of chamber and vocal works. Born in Warsaw in 1919, Mieczysław Weinberg studied at the Polish capital’s conservatory. His plans for further study in the United States were thwarted by the outbreak of World War II: when the Nazis invaded Poland, Weinberg fled first to Minsk and then to Tashkent. He moved to Moscow in 1943 where, his troubles far from over, he was targeted both for his modernist musical leanings and his Jewish background. (With some of his works blacklisted, Weinberg’s only income for years came from incidental music written for local theatre productions.) In ...

Sofia Gubaidulina’s 80th birthday in October 2011 generated much press coverage around the world, appropriately stressing the uniqueness and the variety of her compositional approaches. Both are in evidence on these recordings from Lockenhaus. Gidon Kremer is the soloist and Kremerata Baltica the ensemble on the premiere recording of “The Lyre of Orpheus”, dedicated to the memory of Gubaidulina’s daughter. Kremer has long been a committed advocate of Gubaidulina’s work, and the composer has praised the way the violinist seems to unleash music from the soul. In this work of austere beauty and raw lyricism, violin, string orchestra and percussion intermingle in new ways. At a subterranean level, the piece is also an exploration into acoustic phenomena and the physics of sound, with pulsating difference tones part of its underlying structures. “The Lyre of Orpheus” was recorded in 2006, a month after Kremer gave the first performance. “Canticle of ...

Kim Kashkashian and Robert Levin have been playing together since the mid 1970s. Their debut ECM release was “Elegies” recorded in 1984, with music of Britten, Vaughan Williams, Carter, Glasunow, Liszt, Kodály and Vieuxtemps. This was soon followed by the Sonatas for Viola/Piano - and for Solo Viola - of Hindemith. In 1990 they recorded Shostakovich’s Sonata for Viola and Piano op 147 for the New Series, in 1996 the Brahms viola sonatas in a recording that won the Edison Award. Kim Kashkashian’s international career was given impetus by her early success at the Munich ARD competition. From the outset she was much in demand as a chamber musician and as a guest at festivals including Marlboro, Spoleto, Mostly Mozart, Lockenhaus und Salzburg. Previously a music professor in Freiburg and at the Hanns Eisler Academy in Berlin, she teaches today at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Robert Levin is renowned for his restoration of the classical period practise of impr...

This album has been years in the making. I first played some of these works more than a decade ago, and ever since then I have worked toward assembling an integral project of this repertoire. My first exposure to Bach for violin and voice came when I was four, just a couple of months after I began to play violin. My father sang in a local choir in those days, and my mother and I went to see his group perform. In the middle of a cantata by Bach, a member of the choir suddenly stepped forward with a violin and played a duet with the soprano. I was mesmerized. The way the instrument's sound wove in and out of the vocal line - sometimes plaintive, sometimes playful, always supple and alive - seemed magical beyond belief. The amazement broadened to appreciation as I grew older. Encouraged by my childhood teacher, Klara Berkovich, to find models of expression that appealed to me outside of violin, I absorbed much from the recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Peter Pe...

Named “world’s best flute and guitar duo” by Classical Guitar Magazine UK, Similia has recorded 4 CDs under the Analekta label ( Cantabile, Nota del Sol, Fantasia, Dolce Vita ). Winners of the coveted Félix Award for Best Instrumental Album of the Year awarded by ADISQ (Quebec Recording Industry Association) in 2004 for Nota del Sol , Similia was also nominated in 2006 ADISQ’s Félix Award for Best Classical Recording for their Fantasia CD. For 15 years, Similia has gained international recognition by providing nearly 500 concerts in 13 different countries including Japan, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Bosnia-Herzegovina, France, Mexico, Guatemala, United States and Canada.   They recently sold out the Palais Montcalm at their world premiere of the Concerto tradicionuevo by Patrick Roux under the direction of Yoav Talmi and accompanied by the Quebec Symphony Orchestra. Annie also interpreted the Concerto de Aranjuez (Adagio...

I saw this young American violinist from Baltimore playing Mozart’s Fourth Concerto, K218, at a Prom. This was a very good performance but, for me, the finale did not quite come off. And, with respect, it is Mozart’s fault. He keeps changing the tempo. First, 15 bars at andante, then 57 at allegro, 15 at andante, 43 at allegro, 59 at andante, 33 at allegro, 7 at andante and 25 at allegro. This is stop and start music. She was persuaded to play an encore at this Prom and she choose Bach. I was impressed with her Bach and this CD reinforces that first impression. I was seriously deterred from Bach’s solo violin music because of some really awful performances that I had to endure and from leading professionals. I also determined never to hear it again. But along came Hilary . I adore her Bach playing and in a few years time it will...

Bartók’s music seems to be less popular than it was a few decades ago; at least it has been a while since major new recordings of these iconic works have seen a new release. That wait has been worth it. Bartók’s First violin concerto never will enjoy the popularity of the second, not just because it sat unperformed until after his death, but because its thematic material suffers from what might charitably be called “chromatic drift”. In other words, it can sound pretty ugly, at least until you get to know it well. Happily, Isabelle Faust really knows her Bartók, as her very sympathetic and intelligent booklet notes demonstrate. She plays the dreamy opening movement with a pure tone and sure sense of direction, while the second movement exudes just the right kind of purposeful energy, even in the music’s most gnarly passages. The epic Second concerto is even better. This is surely one of the great recordings of the piece. The long first movement flies by without a single dead spot,...

American violinist Anne Akiko Meyers has charted out an independent career by dint of unusual programming, an intensely lyrical style, and connections that have allowed her to play a really striking group of violins. Here the programming is adventurous only in the inclusion of Arvo Pärt's Passacaglia in an album devoted to Vivaldi, and indeed the Pärt work seems to come out of left field. Vivaldi's Four Seasons violin concertos are perhaps the most common item in the entire classical repertory, and the accompaniment here by the English Chamber Orchestra, which must have played these pieces hundreds or thousands of times, is standard. But the other arrows in Meyers' quiver don't fail her. The star of the show here is perhaps the violin, an instrument by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù that, Meyers notes, is considered one of the finest in existence, and it's never been heard on recordings before. It was owned by Romantic-era violinist-composer Henri Vieuxtemps, and lege...

Written for large orchestra and solo piano, and commissioned for a series of live events at Tate Modern, “Lamentate” was inspired by Pärt’s encounter with the enormous sculpture “Marsyas”, by Bombay-born artist Anish Kapoor. 150 metres long, “Marsyas” filled the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for a year. Named for the Greek satyr flayed alive by the god Apollo, the piece consists of three enormous steel rings joined by a single span of dark red PVC membrane. The colour was intended by the artist to suggest blood and the body, and the sculpture dwarfed the viewer, too large to be viewed in its entirety from any single position: “I wanted to make body into sky”, says Kapoor. For Arvo Pärt the dimensions of the work were breathtaking: “My first impression was that I, as a living being, was standing before my own body and was dead – as in a time-warp perspective, at once in the future and the present. ... In this moment I had a strong sense of not being ready to die. And I was ...

When does the incandescent become ephemeral? When does the evanescent become artificial? When do the expertly crafted, the gracefully sculpted, and the radiantly beautiful become simply a matter of style and taste? It is impossible to say for certain. For some listeners, Mitsuko Uchida's recordings of Beethoven's piano concertos with Kurt Sanderling conducting either the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra or the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks will be the epitome of aesthetic pleasure. For others, her performances will be instantly forgettable. Uchida certainly has the clear tone, the strong technique, and the necessary heroic-poetic sensibility to play Beethoven's concertos , and Sanderling surely has the depth, the soul, and the experience to conduct Beethoven's concertos, but they don't seem to touch either each other or the music, much less the eternal in Beethoven's music. The witty humor of the First, the easy elegance of the Second, the powerfu...

  Beethoven's music is ideally suited to the Eroica Trio's vigorous style, and, for this release, the group has chosen two works that offer ample opportunities to flex its musical muscles--the Triple Concerto and the Opus 11 trio. The Triple Concerto is a study of contrasts and textures , an exploration by the composer of all the possibilities available through various instrumental, thematic, and harmonic combinations. The members of Eroica play with their usual intensity, determination, and skillful musicianship. The work has long been a staple of their repertoire, and their complete familiarity with the piece is apparent as they adroitly move through it with confidence and a sense of purpose. The conductor-less forces of the Prague Chamber Orchestra prove themselves to be capable, responsive collaborators. Beethoven originally composed his Opus 11 trio for clarinet, cello, and piano, but later created a version for the standard piano trio instrumenta...