Music is the key

There are some interpreters’ albums in which a certain vision stirs our admiration. There are complete works , famous composers , different generations,  schools and conceptions that outline the landmark  of certain  parts of  this kind of literature. It is argued whether the musician was good or not. It is then compared with other versions. Or, as it is the case of this album, Davide Perez, it gets discovered – a name, a work, an age – of transition in this case, as the Italian born in Naples, in Pergolesi’s generation, was part of a particular longevity line, by dying in Lisbon in the year when Mozart composed   Symphony no. 31, Paris. An album released in 2014 – Mattutino de ' Morti by Davide Perez, in a fundamental interpretation – Ghislieri Choir and Consort , conducted by Giulio Prandi along with the soprano Roberta Invernizzi and the bass Salvo Vitale, as soloists. It is an album through which one of the 18 th  century’ masterpieces is retu...

You have to look inside the booklet to discover this, but it appears that the material on this CD is about 17 years old. Stephen Scott's prior New Albion CDs ( Minerva's Web and Tears of Niobe on NA026, Vikings of the Sunrise on NA084) must have found an audience and created demand for new material faster than the composer could supply it. I have no problem with this, but I think New Albion could have been more forthcoming with this information. The title of this disc certainly implies something else. Stephen Scott's interest in bowed piano dates from 1976 when he heard the striking effect created by drawing a nylon fishing line across piano strings. He quickly began to imagine what the effect might be if several players did this at the same time. Within a year, he had completed Music One for Bowed Strings , which appears on this CD. Ten players perform each piece. They bend over the instrument's exposed innards like surgeons performing ope...

Gustavo Dudamel has always had a special relationship with the music of Beethoven, as have many Venezuelan musicians. In 2006, Dudamel and what was then the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela recorded the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies for DGG. It was a remarkable disc. “Since 2006,” Dudamel noted “we’ve taken out the word ‘youth’ from our name but the young soul remains. It’s the same orchestra, you can still see very young people, but it’s a step in a new direction. Our commitment to the core repertoire, and also to the great genius of Beethoven, remains, as well.” Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the “Eroica”, which Dudamel and his orchestra have been touring of late, was completed in 1803. The previous autumn the 31-year-old Beethoven had drawn up his so-called Heiligenstadt Testament, the confessional statement in which he confronted the trauma of his growing deafness, contemplated suicide, and stoically rejected it. It was against this background that he began work on th...

As time passes, achieving true originality and distinction in the field of music becomes an increasingly difficult task as musical boundaries become eroded, genres overlap and merge and techniques grow ever more experimental. Finding space to genuinely stand out is something that evades many artists. Yet, it is something that Kazakh violinist Aisha Orazbayeva has shown is still possible. Her name may not be particularly well known outside the circles of contemporary classical music but her career to date has seen her accumulate a range of impressive achievements. She’s performed at some of the world’s most acclaimed classical and experimental venues (Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, Cafe OTO), worked with some of the most respected composers of modern, leftfield classical music ( Sir Harrison Birtwistle , Helmut Lachenmann  and  Pierre Boulez ) and is also a co-director of the London Contemporary Music Festival (which this year focuses on the works of pioneering ...

Claire-Marie Le Guay is established as a major international soloist. She recently performed in venues like Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Atheneum in Bucarest, Avery Fisher Hall in New York’s Lincoln Center for the Mostly Mozart Festival, toured with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Civic Orchestra in the United-States, the Tonhalle in Zurich, the Montreux Festival, Luxemburg’s Philharmonie and major festivals including La Roque d’Anthéron, la Folle Journée, Klavier festival Rühr, Festival Enescu.. Claire-Marie   has performed as a soloist with a great number of major orchestras throughout the world such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the New Japan Philharmonic, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, the Bayerische Rundfunk Orchester, the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestre National de Lyon, The Orchestre Philharmonqiue du Luxembourg, the Residentie Orkest in the Hague, the Rheinland-Pfalz Philharmonie, the Kölner Kammerorchester, the Orchestre de Cham...

Sony Classical released pianist Simone Dinnerstein’s newest album, Broadway-Lafayette , in February 2015. The music on this album celebrates the time-honored transatlantic link between France and America through the music of George Gershwin ( Rhapsody in Blue ), Maurice Ravel ( Piano Concerto in G Major ), and Philip Lasser ( The Circle and the Child: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra , written for Dinnerstein). The album was recorded with conductor Kristjan Järvi and the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, by Grammy-winning producer Adam Abeshouse. Of Broadway-Lafayette , Simone says, “Over the centuries, France and America have influenced and supported each other in many ways, and this music explores the link between the two cultures. George Gerswhin is the quintessential American composer. He immortalized his own trip to France in American in Paris and his music broaches aesthetic boundaries in a way that few other composers have managed – he combines the tunefulness...

The latest in Hervé Niquet's 'reinvigorations' of French operatic music from the Baroque and beyond for Glossa is Rameau’s 1747 'Les Fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour'. A ballet heroïque in a prologue and three entrées, the whole work was designed to comprise a complete theatrical spectacle. Music for dancing – as befits a ballet – is given a prominent role and Rameau is able to create especially expressive symphonies and to give the choruses – even a double-chorus – an integral role in the action. Added to this are supernatural effects, and plots for the entrées which explored the then uncommon world of Egyptian mythology (including a musical depiction of the flooding of the River Nile). In his vocal music Rameau deftly switches between Italianate style and the French mode, current in the mid-18th century, allowing the distinguished team of vocal soloists to demonstrate their accomplished talents. Overseen by the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, ...

Adriana Hölszky’s own comments concerning her music reveal her fascinating use of parameters such as “space” and “time”. She prefers to describe her works as individually structured “sound spaces”. There are “expanding and shrinking spaces”, and there are shifts from one sound area to another, which she compares to film editing with its sharp cuts or gentle fades. There are sudden “intrusions” of one sound area into another, and sometimes two or more sound areas are superimposed. Also, the concept of time does not exist for her as a single entity: Temporal processes appear in multiple strands in her music: cosmic time, terrestrial time, and an endless variety of experiential times that permeate one another and are superimposed. The title of Hölszky’s “apocalyptic” work for organ “... und ich sah wie ein gläsernes Meer, mit Feuer gemischt ” [And I saw what looked like a sea of glass mixed with fire] describes extremely contrasting realities: "sea of glass" and ...

To call the music on this album "barroco hispanoamericano" is to stretch the truth. A few of these Spanish Baroque composers worked in the New World; a few are represented in Spanish American archives stretching from California to Montevideo; and some do not even have that tenuous connection. The Mexican Urtext label's presentation is beautiful, with an epigraph from Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz supplying the album's title. But what we have here is essentially a century's worth of Spanish Baroque music, showing the gradual ascendancy of the Italian styles that conquered Spain and its American dominions as surely as they did France. Many of them are unfamiliar to listeners outside the Spanish-speaking world, so this recording of mostly sacred soprano arias (as the liner notes nicely put it, "the very life of composers during this time is often a game of mirrors between the sacred and the mundane") is a welcome addition to the literature.  The question mar...

For her first Bach recording, Lisa Batiashvili has chosen not to run through all the concertos or the solo violin works but to be selective, choosing the E major Concerto, the A minor Sonata and the Violin and Oboe Concerto (with husband François Leleux), and adding in a concerto movement from a cantata and an arrangement of ‘Erbarme dich’ in which Leleux’s oboe d’amore takes the contralto’s place. For good measure there is a trio sonata for flute and violin by CPE Bach in his 300th anniversary year. No one could call it a lazily made programme, though whether it is one that really hangs together is a little questionable. What it does do is allow Batiashvili to demonstrate her refined musicianship and technical skills in a range of contexts, as well as her good taste. In the concertos’ quick movements she offers a sweet, light tone and clearly but gently detailed articulation, using vibrato only when there seems good reason to. You sense a self-effacing and meticulous ...

Unfortunately, Deutsche Grammophon may be striking an all-too-effective blow against its own catalog with this two-disc compilation of Renaissance dances. With just one inexpensive purchase we can acquire some great background music and get a mostly delightful and generous sampling of works “representative” enough of the period to satisfy the most casual listener’s needs or desires. There’s plenty of period instrument color and courtly elegance here, and anyone who has even the slightest notion of Renaissance (and early Baroque) instrumental music will feel in familiar territory. Among the selections are six dances from Michael Praetorius’ famous collection known as Terpsichore and three suites from Johann Schein’s Banchetto musicale. A large portion of the program features works by anonymous composers, and many others may as well be–few listeners will know anything of Hans Neusidler, Joan Dalza, Erasmus Widmann, or Luis der Milán. But in this two-hour-plus program, we d...

If I were a betting man, I'd use my money to back the success of an ECM disc of music by the Russian composer Alexander Knaifel - the Piano Quintet "In Air Clear and Unseen" but more particularly a work for soprano and sampler, "Svete Tikhiy". It's music that's steeped in the spirit of the Russian Orthodox liturgy ... wonderfully evocative... Simplicity itself, but ethereal and haunting. (Rob Cowan, BBC Radio 3) ECM's documentation of outstanding music from the former Soviet Union continues with Svete Tikhiy, the first of several albums from the Uzbekistan-born and St Petersburg-based composer, Alexander Knaifel. This recording - featuring the distinguished Keller Quartett with pianist Oleg Malov, and the voice of Tatiana Melentieva processed by Andrei Siegle - brings together important new developments and impulses in Knaifel's music . The Keller Quartet play with the conviction and imagination they also brought to their prize-...

On Tuesday, March 10, Centrediscs, the label of the Canadian Music Centre, releases Tundra Songs, featuring Kronos Quartet in a trio of works by Canadian composer Derek Charke. Guest artist Tanya Tagaq, the charismatic Polaris Prize-winning Inuit throat singer, appears on the 30-minute title track, which David Harrington, Artistic Director of Kronos, describes as “really one of the major, spectacular pieces that has ever been written for Kronos.” The disc also includes Cercle du Nord III which, like Tundra Songs, incorporates environmental sounds from northern Canada; and four of Charke’s series of Inuit Throat Song Games. All of these pieces were commissioned and premiered by the Kronos Quartet to critical acclaim in North America and Europe.  Born in 1974, Charke is noted for works that address current environmental issues, including climate change and the impact of oil exploration in the tar sands. Tundra Songs and Cercle du Nord III both feature field recordings he made ...

The inspired bringing together of Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble has resulted in consistently inventive music making since 1993. It was the groundbreaking “Officium” album, with Garbarek’s saxophone as a free-ranging ‘fifth voice’ with the Ensemble, which gave the first indications of the musical scope and emotional power of this combination. “Mnemosyne”, 1998’s double album, took the story further, expanding the repertoire beyond ‘early music’ to embrace works both ancient and modern. Now, after another decade of shared experiences, comes a third album from Garbarek/Hilliard, recorded, like its distinguished predecessors, in the Austrian monastery of St Gerold, with Manfred Eicher producing. Aptly titled, there is continuity in the music of “Officium Novum” and also some new departures. In ‘Occident/Orient’ spirit the album looks eastward, with Armenia as its vantage point and with the compositions and adaptations of Komitas as a central focus. The Hilliards ha...

With the order for the expulsion of the Society of Jesus issued by the King of Spain in 1767, the utopia of the Jesuit missionary villages of the Southern Cone of Latin America vanished forever. The breaking of the agreement governing the ‘reductions’ or missions – under the terms of which the indigenous peoples surrendered their souls to the God imported from Europe, and in exchange saved their lives, henceforth protected by express provision of the Spanish crown – opened the way to a long night of oppression for the converted peoples of the Moxos plains. First of all they fell under the yoke of the priests of unhappy memory who replaced the Jesuits in the administration of the missions; later they suffered from the greed of the republican period, which found among the native peoples slave labour to oil the wheels of the capitalist system that took possession of Bolivia. But the Jesuits left an indelible mark, because the indigenous peoples, without any obligation to do so, conti...

Berlioz's ecstatic Les nuits d'été has been recorded many times. It is curious, however, that so few of the work's prominent recordings feature French sopranos. After the great Régine Crespin, I draw a blank. Gens is French (I assume), attractive, and still quite young. Until now, I've encountered her only on period instruments recordings, where she made a positive and characterful impression. Predictably, she and Langrée embody the French virtues of charm, grace, and evenness in these works. It would be hard to find performances less gauche and obvious than these. Langrée's tempos throughout this CD are unusually fast. His Nuits d'été requires 26 minutes, in contrast to Crespin/ansermet (just under 31 minutes) and Janet Baker/Barbirolli (well over 31 minutes). His "Villanelle" is breathless, and several of the movements are more than a minute faster than ansermet's. As a result, the music gains freshness but loses some o...

In addition to fine program notes by our former colleague Robert Kirzinger, Hillary Hahn writes about her and her duo partner’s experiences learning and playing Ives sonatas. In two pages, Hahn says more about learning and performing Ives, and about performing music in general, than I have seen in any book. I would quote her entire essay, except that you are going to buy this disc and so can read it yourself. “A piece of music eventually has to get onstage, in front of audiences, for its performers to see its true colors.” After taking the Third Sonata around the world: “The more we played it for various audiences, the more the details and refinements Ives wrote into his score became ingrained into our musical consciousness, and the freer we became to explore additional expressive possibilities.” I think of Hahn as a very “classical” artist, although she plays and has recorded everything from J. S. Bach to Jennifer Higdon. Her tone here is very clean and a t...