Music is the key

Want to stretch your ears? This disc is one of the best introductions to the world of microtonal music. The program consists of six works, each with its own approach to defining and using tones outside standard notation and keyboard configuration. To many listeners some of these pieces will seem simply out of tune, but others will find them merely strange-sounding. Just a touch of music theory to explain things: You can get microtones by slicing the equal half-step intervals of a piano scale into narrower equal fractions. Since the equal half-steps are really a slightly-out-of tune compromise to accommodate our modern system of equal temperament, such "quarter-tone music" exaggerates the out-of-tuneness but creates remarkably tangy harmonies. This is best illustrated here by Julian Carrillo's Prelude to Columbus , a work for voice, flute, guitar, harp, and string quartet. Carrillo, one of the true pioneers of this kind of music, uses quarter-t...

This release marks the world-premiere recording and rediscovery of Antonio Caldara’s La Concordia de’ pianeti , a musical serenade of operatic magnitude composed for the court of Austrian Emperor Karl VI, featuring the creme de la creme of the day’s singers, including the legendary castrato Carestini (Franco Fagioli’s part). Unearthed and edited by Andrea Marcon, the piece offers a series of virtuosic arias, breath-taking cantilenas and ethereal duets performed by some of the finest singers of today. Franco Fagioli and Daniel Behle, two of today’s hottest vocalists, lead a distinctive cast of early music “shining stars”, including soprano Veronica Cangemi in a welcome return to Deutsche Grammophon / Archiv. The dynamic La Cetra Barockorchester, one of the most coveted period ensembles active today, lends an idiomatic touch to the program. This is a major new release under the Archiv imprint featuring a world-class cast of singers. The opera is new to the...

Romina Basso's new album examines the 17th-century Italian lamento, a chamber cantata on an ostensibly tragic subject that is capable of embracing wider territory than a formal outpouring of grief. The prototype was Monteverdi's psychological work Lamento d'Arianna, drawn from a now lost opera of 1608. For his successors, however, the form had political potential. Carìssimi's Lamento in Morte di Maria Stuarda makes Counter-Reformation hagiography out of Mary, Queen of Scots, while Rossi's Lamento della Regina di Svezia mourns the death of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, killed in battle in 1632. The genre wasn't necessarily serious, either. Francesco Provenzale's Squarciato Appena Avea, for example, takes the Gustavus Adolphus story as point of departure for a scabrous study of his widow's sexuality. Among the greatest of all baroque interpreters, Basso is breathtakingly expressive and persuasive. The Greek period ensemble Latinitas Nostra is directed fr...

In February 2013 Andreas Ottensamer entered an exclusive recording partnership with Deutsche Grammophon/Mercury Classics, making him the first ever solo clarinettist to sign an exclusive agreement with the Yellow Label. His first album,  Portraits – The Clarinet Album , has been released in June 2013 and features concertos by Copland, Spohr and Cimarosa, plus arrangements of short pieces. His partners are the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin. He said of the recording: “ This album poses the challenge of jumping between different styles and ways of playing, but at the same time I set a high priority on maintaining my personal interpretation and sound.” For a man who is so dedicated to music, Andreas Ottensamer is also passionate about sport. For many years he was a tennis tournament player, and together with his brother he founded his own football club, the Wiener Virtuosen, in 2007. The team plays successfully in the Wiener DSG ...

Stefano Scodanibbio, contrabass soloist and composer (Macerata, Italy, June 18th 1956 / Cuernavaca, Mexico, January 8th 2012). In the 1980s and 1990s his name has been prominently linked to the renaissance of the double bass, playing in the major festivals throughout the world dozens of works written especially for him by such composers as Bussotti, Donatoni, Estrada, Ferneyhough, Frith, Globokar, Sciarrino, Xenakis. He has created new techniques extending the colours and range of the double bass heretofore thought impossible on this instrument. In 1987 , in Rome , he performed a four hours non-stop marathon playing 28 pieces by 25 composers. He collaborated for a long time with Luigi Nono ("arco mobile à la Stefano Scodanibbio" is written on Prometeo's score) and with Giacinto Scelsi. He regularly plays in Duo with Rohan de Saram and, furthermore, with Markus Stockhausen. Since the 1990's, Stefano Scodanibbio has taught Master Classes and Sem...

This is a charming disc of popular Latin American music. The disc opens with a suite of dances by the Brazilian composer Mozart Camargo Guarnieri. They are characteristic dances bearing the titles Brazilian Dance, Savage Dance and Negro Dance, which sounds like it could have been written by Elmer Bernstein. They were composed over a twenty-year period and were originally written for piano. The orchestral textures are rich and colorful. Guarnieri studied in Paris with Charles Koechlin and was a guest conductor at the Boston Symphony. Guarnieri composed Encantamento in 1941. The music comes close to his the evocative music teacher Koechlin. It begins with an atmospheric melody evocative of nature, but the music quickly builds into languid dance and then to the percussive rhythms of Brazilian folk music. The first hypnotic melody returns and the work ends quietly. The short piece by Alberto Ginastera - Overture to the creole Faust - was based on the story by Estani...

Beethoven’s first published works—his Opus No.1—were three trios for piano, violin and cello and already they show a marked advance on Haydn’s trios in the comparative interdependence of the three parts. Their freedom from Haydn’s oppressive formality looks forward to the first mature trios, the pair that comprises Opus 70, displaying all sorts of harmonic twists, thematic innovations and structural idiosyncrasies, these trios make much of the piano part and contain plenty of dramatic outbursts that are typical of Beethoven’s middle period. Even more arresting is the first of the Opus 70 trios (1808) nicknamed ”The Ghost” because of its mysterious and haunting Largo. Its sibling boasts a cheerful bombastic finale that is the most entertaining music that Beethoven composed for this combination of instruments.  The “Archduke” Trio Opus 97 (1811) was Beethoven’s last full – scale work for piano trio and is typically conclusive. The third movement is its centre of gravity, a highl...

Ukrainian pianist Valentina Lisitsa has taken an unusual path toward career development: she posted her Chopin performances to YouTube, gained a strong following there, and then hired the London Symphony Orchestra for a set of Rachmaninov concerto performances. The gambit seems to be working: Lisitsa's performances of late Romantic repertoire have been reasonably well received, and now she's earned the right to implement what one imagines was the point of the whole exercise in the first place: the pursuit of the crossover audience centered above all in Britain. There is no denying that Chasing Pianos works well. British composer Michael Nyman has made a long specialty out of minimalist music that shades in the direction of melodic pop. Although Nyman has stated that opera is his favored genre, the style is ideally suited to film scores, and his music for The Piano (1993) is a classic of the genre. That score, adapted for solo piano, is heavily featured here, along with music ...

Replete with all the Angela Hewitt virtues—among them, unfailing clarity, innate elegance, an unerring sense of proportion, a finely honed mastery of style, melodic finesse and an unobtrusive grasp of harmonic rhythm—these are exemplary performances. Stylistically, they are very much of their time, falling midway between the 'Beethovenian', 'revisionist' tendency of the mid-20th century, repudiating the earlier essentially miniaturist 'Dresden China' tradition, and the sometimes rather antiseptic, musicologically-'enlightened' approach of the century's final third. The prevailing tonal palette, from soloist and orchestra alike, is appropriately lean but always beautifully focused and elegantly applied. Operatic in the best sense, Hewitt is more concerned with dialogue, not only between the two hands but within all levels of the texture, than with conventional notions of 'vocal' cantabile. But what finally renders Mozart'...

New York native and avant-garde composer Morton Feldman composed this work just two years before his death in 1987, and it haunts the listener into a prism of melancholy. Shifting, unsettling, and yet every bit hypnotic, pianist Aki Takahashi and the world-renowned Kronos Quartet conjure up the ghost of Feldman to wander the streets of New York as if they were abandoned. This single piece, over 79 minutes in length, is like an icy flower that blooms almost undetected. Takahashi is so delicate on the piano as to whisper quiet clusters of notes, reverberated by the Kronos Quartet for further contemplation. Feldman often preferred his performances and recordings to be very quiet, almost inaudible at times. Truly, it would make no sense to play a Feldman piece at volume ten on the stereo -- it would be like shining huge spotlights on a Rothko painting. The beauty is in the shadows, and the chill of "Piano and String Quartet" opens it's vast arms and pulls the listener in...

This is a live recording, made at a pair of concerts in May, and ‘live’ is undoubtedly the word for it. All the performances have an improvisatory quality, interpretative decisions seemingly made before your very ears. At the beginning of the Prokofiev it is as though Mutter and Orkis, realising that the audience in the Beethovensaal are already uncommonly silent and attentive, had decided after a quick glance at each other to begin the Sonata almost confidingly, with quiet tenderness and muted colour. Once or twice they take risks: the third and most epigrammatic of the Webern pieces is played with a mere thread of tone; in the hall it must have approached the limits of audibility. But this approach powerfully distils the intimate but intense emotions of these pieces; there is something close to pain in the second of them. Once in a while the risks show. Not long after the opening of the Prokofiev there is an abrupt, stabbed accent that you suspect Mutter would have ha...

With her multi-faceted playing described as “dazzling”, Valentina Lisitsa is at ease in a vast repertoire ranging from Bach and Mozart to Shostakovich and Bernstein. Her orchestral repertoire alone includes more than 40 concertos. She admits to having a special affinity for the music of Rachmaninov and Beethoven and continues to add to her vast repertoire each season. Born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1973, Valentina Lisitsa began playing the piano at the age of three, giving her first solo recital a year later. She gained a place at the Lysenko Music School for Gifted Children and later studied at the Kiev Conservatory under Ludmilla Tsvierko. In 1991 she won the first prize in the Murray Dranoff Two Piano Competition together with Alexei Kuznetsoff. She now resides in the USA. Lisitsa has performed at such leading international venues as New York’s Carnegie and Avery Fisher halls and the Vienna Musikverein. In May 2010, she made her debut with the Rotterdam Philharmonic playin...

Classical music has always been very much about performance and interpretation - about that moment, in concert, when the performer interprets the composer s music in his own way. Then recording technology came along, and in classical it was all about capturing the live performance in the most accurate way. But I believe that when music has been channeled through all the machinery and processes that are part of making a recording, it is no longer all about that moment. It can t be. The act of recording becomes a ghost performer in itself, reflecting on the result in a way that is often unaccounted for or ignored. While The Beatles dragged pop music along by starting to use the recording technology as a part of the composition and performance, classical music was left to still somehow aim for the impossible. And the idea of what is considered an accurate and true sound became an unbreakable norm in itself. This norm never made much sense to me. Why not use the technology w...

Ukraine-to-North Carolina transplant Valentina Lisitsa has gained tremendous popularity by using YouTube (75 million views and counting) to market her music. No one should say that Lisitsa is merely an Internet phenomenon; more like her, taking the music directly to potential listeners through contemporary media, are sorely needed. The Internet has propelled her to a spot on the roster of the major Decca label, and she has played mostly mainstream Romantic repertory with a diversion, on her last release prior to this one, into the piano music of Michael Nyman. Here she takes on some real standards, the 24 Chopin Etudes, Op. 10 and Op. 25, and the technically even more perilous Symphonic Etudes, Op. 13, of Schumann, rendered with five extra variations in the middle excised by Schumann from the work and published posthumously (the work is essentially a set of variations that spills over its boundaries, something like the Diabelli Variations, Op. 120, of Beethoven). The Schumann fits L...

'[Fourth Quartet] is arguably Bridge's most rivetingly cogent and harmonically bracing statement, evincing a deftness, compassion, and unerring intellectual scope that beg comparison with the greatest 20th-century examples in the medium … these unfailingly sympathetic, flexible and exhilaratingly assured performances (that of the Quartet, on balance, the finest to date) have been most truthfully captured by the microphones; Bridge's cataloguer Paul Hindmarsh provides the scholarly annotation … this is clearly a release to investigate, as well as a distinguished addition to the steadily growing Bridge discography' (Gramophone) 'Bridge's musical personality shines through in the sweeping phrases, tinged with a certain brooding quality … the performance by Piers Lane and the Goldner Quartet is very fine, with a particularly strong sense of musical line … this newcomer on Hyperion is especially welcome' (International Record Review) 'T...

“Her playing of Britten’s powerful 1938 concerto has an allure that is anything but sexy; it’s urgent and occasionally darkly sinister, a perfect reflection of the nervous year in which it was written. And Roe is more than a match for the demands of Samuel Barber’s exuberantly difficult 1962 concerto.” (The Observer, 8th March 2015) This solo release, a unique coupling of two of the 20th Century’s greatest piano concertos marks Decca’s first-ever recording of the Barber concerto and the first of the Britten since the classic Richter account conducted by the composer in 1970. Elizabeth Joy Roe has been performing both works since a student at Julliard and has written extensive booklet notes which detail the intriguing parallels between the two composers. Her New York concerto debut was in the Britten conducted by James Conlon at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center and in 2003 she was invited to replace the Barber concerto’s dedicatee, John Browning, at a performance with...

Born in Luxembourg in 1985, Cathy Krier began taking piano lessons at the Luxembourg Conservatoire at the age of five. In 1999 she was admitted to Pavel Gililov’s masterclass at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne. In 2000 she recorded Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in G major with the Latvian Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra conducted by Carlo Jans. In 2003 the Prix Norbert Stelmes was awarded to her by the Jeunesses Musicales du Luxembourg and, in the following year, the IKB International Foundation Prize. In 2005 Cathy joined Cyprien Katsaris for a four-hand performance at the inauguration of the Philharmonie Luxembourg. In 2006 she played at the Ruhr Piano Festival following an invitation by Robert Levin to join his masterclass. Further stepping stones in Cathy’s training as a professional pianist were an invitation to the Académie musicale de Villecroze and her participation in masterclasses with Dominique Merlet, Homero Francesch and Andrea Lucchesini under whom...

Hilary Hahn’s newest album, Mozart 5, Vieuxtemps 4 – Violin Concertos, is her first recording with The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and Paavo Järvi, after performing and touring with the ensemble and conductor for many years. The disc releases on March 31, and is Hahn’s first orchestral offering since her 2010 pairing of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto and Jennifer Higdon’s Pulitzer-prize winning violin concerto, which was written for Hahn. With this new album, she returns to core violin repertoire, hot on the heels of her critically-acclaimed, Grammy-winning album of 27 commissioned short pieces, In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores, and an improvised recording with prepared pianist Hauschka, titled Silfra. Mozart 5, Vieuxtemps 4 also brings Hahn full circle, after more than three decades of violin playing, to two concertos that have been part of her repertoire since she was ten years old. Vieuxtemps’s Violin Concerto No. 4 was the last large piece she learned with Klar...

Born in Israel, composer Chaya Czernowin has lived in Germany, Japan and the U.S. Her teachers included Dieter Schnebel, Joan Tower, Brian Ferneyhough and Roger Reynolds. Czernowin's sound occupies a unique world. Often many instruments are used to become one "composite" instrument. Time is slowed down, so that the slow flow of sound enables one to perceive the smallest details of a texture or a sound. The resulting music can feel fluid , dense or agitated, at times echoing that of Xenakis and Ferneyhough. She has been awarded numerous international prizes including: Gaudeamus Composer's Workshop, DAAD Scholarship (Berlin), Stipendium Preis and Kranichsteiner Musikpreis (Darmstadt), Asahi Shimbum Fellowship (Tokyo), NEA Composition Commission Grant, ISCM and IRCAM commissions. Czernowin is on the composition faculty of the University of California at San Diego. This is the debut recording of her works. A special opportunity to hear an exciting voice in N...

Years have passed since György Kurtág’s last ECM recording, which incorporated his “Jatékok (Games)” and “Bach Transcriptions”, made with Kurtág and wife Márta playing piano together. The birth of this newest album has been an arduous one, with the composer intensely and meticulously involved at every step of the way. And if “Games” are at the centre of this recording, too, they are often life-and-death games - echoing the endgame humours of Samuel Beckett’s universe and the anguish of Hölderlin - in a programme in which two song cycles are bridged by the “Signs, Games and Messages” for strings. (As England’s The Independent has observed, “György Kurtág never writes a note lacking musical intent, and never writes a note with which he has not lived and suffered.”) “Kurtág’s described all three cycles as “Works In Progress” and their formal boundaries are particularly fluid, even within the context of an oeuvre in which labyrinths of connecting threads (musical, literary,...

One aspect of the polymorphously polyrhythmic music of Conlon Nancarrow is its lack of practicality in live performance. Nancarrow didn't have, in his time, access to electronics, and as his interest in hearing multiple levels of rhythmic activity increased he turned to the only medium capable of delivering the goods -- the pneumatic technology of the player piano, driven by the "digital software" of a paper roll punched by hand. About the time his work began to gain attention, Nancarrow started to receive commissions for works from real, flesh-and-blood players. One of them, the late pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, created a number of arrangements of Nancarrow's studies for various live ensembles, including a four-hand version of Study No. 15. Duo pianists Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams have taken Mikhashoff's work as the point of departure, resulting in this disc, Conlon Nancarrow: Studies and Solos .  Ten of Nancarrow's studies are heard combined with six othe...

The Mexican composer Arturo Fuentes (born in 1975) arrived in Europe in 1997; his musical path led him from Milan, Paris and Vienna to his current home in Innsbruck. He has studied with Franco Donatoni in Milan and Horacio Vaggione in Paris. Arturo Fuentes composes instrumental music, electronic music and conceives new musical theater projects that combine dance, video and electronics. His music is characterized as a meticulously organized kaleidoscopic chaos that explores the frontiers of dynamics, color, texture and virtuosity. This music unveils a constantly evolving sculptural design; you perceive a sonic space occupied by constant agitation – it’s research into an aerial tonality. Regardless of the form, the creative process for the piece is always “ongoing”. Arturo Fuentes likes to define his work as an “emerging form”. In a paraphrase of the painter Paul Klee who claimed to “take a walk with a line”, Fuentes writes: “I select a sonorous line and walk with it. Th...

ECM New Series presents the first full album devoted to the music of Dobrinka Tabakova, a composer born in Bulgaria in 1980 but raised from a young age in London and educated there. In Tabakova’s music – richly melodic, texturally sensuous, often emotionally radiant – there resides the new and the familiar, or rather the familiar within the new, and vice versa; there are the spirits of East and West coursing through the pieces, usually hand in hand; and just as the composer’s technical virtuosity is apparent, she possesses a desire, and a talent, for direct communication that can be heard in virtually every measure. The recording features Tabakova’s Concerto for Cello and Strings , plus the Rameau-channelling Suite in Old Style for viola and chamber orchestra. Then there are three chamber works: the string trio Insight, the string septet Such Different Paths and a trio for violin, accordion and double-bass, Frozen River Flows . The performers include violinist Janine Jan...