Music is the key

Sven Helbig is a young German composer equally drawn to classical, pop and hip-hop modes, probably most famous for his orchestrations on Pet Shop Boys' Battleship Potemkin and The Most Incredible Thing. That populist spirit informs this debut release, with emotionally expansive pieces restricted to pop-song length. The unnatural compression works in some cases like film music, bringing an evocative potency to the likes of “Gone” and “Eisenhüttenstadt. Elsewhere, ”Am Abend“ is a reflective piano piece akin to Einaudi, the weightless rising triplets of ”Autumn Song“ are like leaves borne on breeze, while the chugging strings and urgent double-time piano of ”Frost“ reflect the industrious rhythmic drive of minimalism.

Heinz Holliger soars through Bach’s music for oboe in his first ECM recital of core classical repertoire since his 1997 account of Zelenka’s Trio Sonatas. Recorded at Radio Studio Zürich in December 2010, “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis” , draws upon Holliger’s long artistic relationship with Camerata Bern and leader Eric Höbarth, the production rendering every detail in the music, the elegance of Holliger’s phrasing, the tactile sound of baroque bows on gut strings, crystal clear. Holliger dedicates this very special recording to the memory of his brother, theatre director Erich Holliger, and Gabriel Bürgin, pianist, friend and colleague. Johann Sebastian Bach relied on the oboe to voice some of the most exquisite instrumental passages in his cantatas and orchestral works, these solo parts adding up to what Heinz Holliger terms a "miraculous wealth" of music for the oboe. Holliger, one of the world's consummate oboists for five decades now, as well as a pr...

This complete set of Witold Lutoslawski's symphonies is a mixture of old and new. The second, third, and fourth symphonies are reissues of recordings made in the 1980s and 1990s during Esa-Pekka Salonen's tenure with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; all were acclaimed readings, and the 1985 version of the sizzlingly orchestrated Symphony No. 3, by now Lutoslawski's most commonly programmed and recorded work, has held up well against newer recordings. What's new is the Symphony No. 1, recorded in the new Walt Disney Hall to round out the set in commemoration of the composer's 100th birthday. (The entire recording of the symphony is new, although the bizarre numbering of the tracks makes this difficult to figure out.) This work is not often played. Lutoslawski wrote it in occupied Warsaw and managed to physically carry the score out of the city during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and hide with it in an attic for eight months. Later he expressed a negative attitude towar...

In 2004 Orange Mountain Music released an album of solo piano transcriptions of Philip Glass’ Oscar and Golden Globe nominated score to The Hours.  These transcriptions were done by Glass’ longtime Music Director and pianist Michael Riesman. Mr Riesman’s solo piano transcription of The Hours score proved so successful that Orange  Mountain Music was inspired to approach Riesman again to make an arrangement of Glass’ haunting score to Todd Browning’s 1931 classic Dracula which starred Bela Lugosi. Glass’ original score was written for string quartet and was recorded and toured by the Kronos Quartet. This new arrangement of the score is treated to a truly virtuosic performance by Michael Riesman and includes a previously unrecorded track which was composed by Glass but was left out of the soundtrack recording. Riesman’s extraordinary playing brings life and phenomenal craftsmanship to a seemingly timeless musical scor...

Dedicated to the memory of musicologist Thurston Dart (or “Thruston Brat” as one of my university lecturers fondly referred to him), Nyman’s First Quartet takes as its basis a piece by the English composer John Bull (a set of variations on the tune Wallsingham ). Yet it is also influenced by the tendency of some quartet music to struggle against the boundaries of its instrumentation (specifically, the point of inspiration was a performance of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge by the Arditti Quartet). Other quotations, including from Schoenberg’s Second Quartet, litter the score in an attempt to make the piece a summation of the string quartet medium this far, all within a minimalist aesthetic. So, huge ambitions for a work that lasts shy of 26 minutes. The movements all have titles, along the lines of “John Bull I,” “Arnold Schoenberg 2,” “Michael Nyman I,” and even “John Bull meets Arnold Schoenberg.” All this is fascinating, and what comes across is a delight in the musi...

MN Records is aiming to record the complete chamber works of Michael Nyman. Here are the first fruits, two volumes that help provide a portrait of this fascinating figure. The first is subtitled, “Piano Trios 1992–2010.” Originally written for the Michael Nyman Band and the film of the title’s name in 2000, this 2010 version of Poczatek is given here in a version prepared specially for the Fidelio Trio . The film was commissioned by the Polish Cultural Institute to accompany the composer’s own choice of excerpts from Polish film. The performance here positively sparkles. Rhythmically skipping unison lines are full of vitality. An objectivized element to the performance only serves to make the listening experience of this sequence of vignettes all the more refreshing. The piece is beautifully varied, and finds Nyman painting in principally primary colors. The Photography of Chance (2004) was commissioned to celebrate the landscape of Utah and is dedi...

I’ve always been an admirer of Arvo Pärt’s music, and certain works I love. But also, at times I’ve started to feel a little burnout with successive releases, which recycle a certain sober, austere, mystical mood. Thus it’s with great pleasure that I can recommend this disc unqualifiedly. It is a complete success, and has some of the composer’s most satisfying music that I’ve heard in quite some time. The reasons for this are: First, the pieces are quite varied, despite all being clearly from the hand of the same creator. The largest work (over 20 minutes) Adam’s Lament , was a joint 2010 commission of the cities of Istanbul and Tallinn, setting a text by the monk Staretz Silouan (1866-1938), and in keeping with its circumstances, seems to use melodic Middle Eastern modes more than I’m accustomed to in Pärt. But then the disc ends with two lullabies that in their gentle folksiness seem almost like Ländler. At times we hear austere chant, which may suddenly erupt in ...

Arcade Fire multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry will issue his new solo album, Music for Heart and Breath , on June 9th through Deutsche Grammophon. It’s his first piece of solo material since 2009′s From Here On Out and follows collaborations with The National, Islands, The Unicorns, and Belle Orchestre, where he plays alongside Arcade Fire violinist Sarah Neufeld. Parry had previously debuted the work live, but this marks the first time it’s been properly released. While the LP’s title might imply it’s a record about love and relationships, it’s actually quite literal: “very soft, very quiet music, played utterly in sych with the heart rates and breathing rates of the musicians performing it”, Parry explained in a statement. “Every note you hear is either in synch with the heartbeat of the person playing it, the breathing of the person (or one of the surrounding persons) playing it,” Parry added. “So what you hear when this music plays is played precisely in time with som...

Pärt Piano Music by Naxos features pianist Ralph van Raat interpreting the Estonian composer’s music spanning over four decades. This retrospective takes us on a stylistic journey that is truly millennial in scope, while remaining reverent in spirit. Ralph van Raat plays the allegro passages with a digital precision characteristic of post-war piano music. He imbues the largo passages…with a touching impressionistic quality. [In] The movements the Partita, Op. 2 …the musical language is decidedly modern…making full use of pitch material while not being constricted by serial techniques. The third movement is a study of chords, growing in complexity and dynamics and adhering to a touching… The guileless simplicity of these diatonic tone-studies enables a very close identification between composer, performer, instrument, and audience, the very essence of effective music. Van Raat is joined here by JoAnn Falletta leading the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, a...

The Harmonia Mundi album Le Violoncelle Parle (The Cello Speaks) takes its name notably from the Pascal Amoyel work for solo cello entitled Itinérance, a slow but evocative work in which the cellist must supplement the cello's own voice with vocalizations from the player him/herself. Beyond that, though, cellist Emmanuelle Bertrand selected her program of well-known works for solo cello as a way of demonstrating her instrument's ability to "speak" and transcend national borders. Her program includes the Russian folk-imbued Third Suite of Benjamin Britten, the Spanish panache and fieriness of Gaspar Cassadó's suite, and finally with the technically taxing and rhythmically exciting Hungarian writing of Zoltan Kodály's Op. 8 Solo Sonata. From start to finish, one thing is abundantly clear: Bertrand is a master of her instrument. Her copious, nearly flawless technique allows her to toss off even the most devilish passages in the Britten and Kodály with seeming...

Over the course of her career, cellist Maya Beiser has continued to transcend the traditional boundaries of her instrument, reaching far beyond mere interpretation of the classical repertoire, indeed beyond classical music altogether, to become a creative performer drawing on a variety of genres and influences: Eastern, Western, and South American folk music, jazz, even rock & roll. "World To Come" finds cellist Maya Beiser at the height of her risk-taking and boundary-crossing ambition. She defies not only cultural differences but also conventional oppositions of artist and medium, music and visual art, live performance and recorded material. David Lang's "World To Come" is written for solo cello, the title piece incorporates pre-recorded cello tracks, theatrical lighting and video projection. A cellist and her voice are separated from the outset and struggle through out to reunite. As Lang describes it, "World To Come" is an int...

Duo Gazzana's second album for ECM New Series unites works from the 20th and 21st centuries with striking narrative character and retrospective glance at music history. Composers from France, Great Britain, Italy, Russia and Ukraine present earlier musical forms - toccata, suite, canons, variations - in the light of new developmental techniques, thereby revealing similarities and relations across centuries, geographical boundaries and contrasting forms of expression. Alfred Schnittke's “Suite in the Old Style” is indeed a playful if unconventional allusion to compositional style of the past. “Hommage à J.S.B.”, by the Ukrainian living composer Valentin Silvestrov, evokes variations on themes of the Leipzig master. Similarly Luigi Dallapiccola, in his divertissement “Tartiniana seconda”, responds with contrapuntal mastery to the music of the Baroque composer Giuseppe Tartini. William Walton's rarely heard “Toccata”, written when he had just turned 20 years ...

The initial impulse for writing a concerto for violin was a very inspiring and enjoyable collaboration with Leila Josefowicz on a number of contemporary works in Los Angeles and Chicago. She plays new music with the same kind of dedication and panache others reserve for Brahms, Beethoven and the rest of the gang. My long and very happy tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic was coming to an end. After 17 years I had decided it was time to move on and try to devote more time for composing. It felt like a seismic shift in my life, and during the composing process of “Violin Concerto” I felt that I was somehow trying to sum up everything I had learned and experienced up to that point in my life as a musician. This sense of having reached a watershed was heightened by the fact that I turned 50, the kind of number that brutally wipes out any hallucinations of still being young. There is a strong internal, private narrative in my concerto, and it is not...

Many of the keyboard works of Thomas Tomkins were written during the troubled years of the Civil War and following the execution of Charles I, though stylistically they bring to mind music of an earlier generation – of Byrd or Dowland, both of whom Tomkins greatly admired. Several pieces were prompted by the ‘distracted times’ of the mid-17th century and their acidulous chromaticisms, static harmonies and wistful turns of phrase create a sense of melancholy nostalgia, as if the composer were looking back to the rarefied atmosphere of Charles’s court. Despite the limitations of a disc devoted to one genre and one composer (and Tomkins’s keyboard works are not his most inspired music), Carole Cerasi achieves variety through a carefully planned programme, including dances, plainsong settings, variations and fancies, and by using two instruments – a harpsichord and a muselaar virginals. This is playing of high refinement: Cerasi combines meticulous keyboard technique with ...

The English Suites (BWV 806–811) refer to a set of six suites written by the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach for harpsichord and generally thought to be the earliest of Bach's 18 suites for keyboard, the others being the 6 French Suites (BWV 812–817) and the 6 Partitas (BWV 825–830). Originally, their date of composition was thought to have been between 1718 and 1720, but more recent research suggests that they are likely to have been composited earlier, around 1715, while the composer was living in Weimar. Bach was obliged to write a new cantata every week during his time at the Weimar court, and the English Suites he composed at this time express Bach's longing for new, instrumental music and held therefore a very special place in Bach's life and work. Later in Köthen and Leipzig he worked on a full-time basis with professional orchestras, providing him an ideal context in which to create orchestral and purely instrumental compositions. Like the French Suites, t...

On his new album from Cantaloupe Music, this was written by hand , David Lang treats the piano alternately as a eulogizer and as a medium to commune with the departed. Pianist Andrew Zolinsky’s technique is well suited to tastefully render these finely wrought improvisatory pieces, to sound out the meditative character of Lang’s postminimalism. The range of piano articulation presented here stretches from use of the instrument as pitched percussion all the way to liquid, dulcet burbles. Piano music in the contemporary classical world often embraces jazz tropes, or world music idioms, or past stylistic genres. Lang’s piano voice sometimes recalls the phase music of Reich but is for the most part quite original in its complete metrical flexibility (or complete lack of meter in some cases, it seems), and in the way it exhaustively explores all the possibilities of a spare musical form. The tracks here are all character pieces in my opinion. There are no grand statements; ...

Having paid tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach in a sequence of New Series recordings of the Well-tempered Clavier, the Goldberg Variations and the French Suites, Keith Jarrett now turns his attention to Bach's near contemporary, Georg Friedrich Händel. The project, in fact, has been in preparation for a long time; Jarrett's liner note informs us that he first began to record Händel's keyboard suites some 20 years ago. The present recording is of particular interest for a number of reasons and not least because it is the first of his albums of baroque music to feature the piano - as opposed to harpsichord - since Book One of the Well-tempered Clavier was issued in 1988. Where, in his Bach recordings, Keith Jarrett has striven to obliterate his musical personality ("This music does not need my assistance"), he feels Händel's "basically unknown" solo keyboard music needs a measure of special pleading. And, though he has gone to "the least...

Brooklyn-born pianist Simone Dinnerstein made her mark with Bach, diverging from time to time into modern crossover experiments. This recording of Bach's well-worn Inventions and Sinfonias, BWV 772-801, follows in the path blazed by her earlier Bach releases and even extends it a bit, for the Inventions and Sinfonias are easier to treat as individual character pieces than, say, the Goldberg Variations. And that's just what Dinnerstein does here. Each piece has a specific atmosphere teased out of its simple counterpoint, and it's a bit hard to imagine Bach's reaction to a few of these. But really Dinnerstein is no Glenn Gould, and her interpretations are personal rather than radical. Mostly they're on the quiet side, and even if you couldn't play them like this on the harpsichord the dynamic range and the variety of tempi are not unduly wide. The trouble with such a subjective reading of Bach is that its reception depends pretty heavily on the individual, bu...

Composed by David Lang, love fail is a meditation on the timelessness of love that weaves together details from the story of Tristan and Isolde with more modern sources. The recording also spotlights the singular and magical sound of the vocal quartet Anonymous 4, whose longstanding commitment to medieval music and historical scholarship has been acclaimed worldwide. The music and libretto pull together narratives of love from such sources as Lydia Davis, Marie de France, Gottfried von Strassburg, Béroul, Thomas of Britain and Richard Wagner. love fail was commissioned by The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2012 Next Wave Festival, The International Festival of Arts & Ideas, The John F. Kennedy Center Abe Fortas Memorial Fund, The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, The Wake Forest University/Secrest Artists Series, and Hancher Performances at the University of Iowa. Reviewing the BAM performance for the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini wrote: “It was Mr. La...

In October 2012 I visited Rachmaninoff's grave. He is buried at Kensico Cemetery in the hamlet of Valhalla, half an hour’s ride from New York City. The cemetery is surrounded by picturesque mountains, well-tended houses, manicured lawns, and idyllic lakes and streams. Rachmaninoff is buried among actors, writers, politicians, military personnel, and business people, together with "ordinary mortals" from all over the world – Americans, Russians, Estonians, Chinese people... A great musician who heard the universe as a powerful, boundless space resounding with the sounds of bells at once both tragic and triumphant, Rachmaninoff left Russia and became a part of a completely different world… As I stood at his grave, I found this space resonating within me. When I returned home, I began writing a piano cycle. In this cycle, Rachmaninoff writes letters to postmodern composers . Rachmaninoff himself was an anti-modernist. He was not a revolutionary, was never "ahead ...

Post production is the stage in making movies, television shows and other sorts of audiovisual "productions" in which music, special effects, and various other “miracles” are added to the picture. The music you hear on this CD was written for films and television. It formed part of the story, part of life on screen. Someone made love or killed someone to the accompaniment of this music. Somebody did something; someone walked, drove, or flew somewhere; someone talked, laughed or suffered… The mood was lighthearted or sad. Everything was just like in a movie. I then made one more post production intervention: I turned these soundtracks into solo piano pieces, retaining only the titles of the films and TV shows from which they derive. It does not matter if you have seen them or not. Let this music be a soundtrack for your imagination – for all that you see right now, or wish to see. (Anton Batagov)

Death is present in so many of Schubert's lieder, and those appearances provide the starting point for the five songs that make up David Lang's Death Speaks . Lang went through the 600-plus texts that Schubert set, extracting all the lines that are either attributed explicitly to death, or to characters representing him, translating them "roughly" into English and creating lovesong-like lyrics. The settings are wonderfully spare and insistent, with accompaniments from guitar, piano and violin. Shara Worden, lead singer of My Brightest Diamond, is the vocalist, recorded in a close perspective, while the other work on the disc, Depart, offers a very different kind meditation on death. It was commissioned to be played in a French morgue, a peaceful setting in which the bereaved could see their loved ones for the last time. A sequence of slowly changing drones for wordless women's voices and cello, makes the perfect foil for Lang's naggingly memorable songs. ...