Music is the key

The genesis of Anton Bruckner's Eighth Symphony was probably affected by a bout of sudden fame that boosted the composer’s constantly shaky self-confidence. After the performance of Bruckner’s Seventh, the famous conductor Hermann Levi had hailed him as "the greatest symphonist since the death of Beethoven". Frequently ridiculed in Vienna, Bruckner had finally been taken seriously in Munich: his importance had been recognized, and the Austrian emperor had awarded him the Order of Franz Joseph – something that filled Bruckner with very special pride. In the summer of 1884 he set to work on a new symphony, and in August 1887, after three years of work, the symphony was completed. Because of energetic objections from Levi, however, it was not immediately performed. Bruckner revised his work thoroughly between October 1887 and March 1890, and the premiere of the Eighth Symphony in its new version finally took place on December 18, 1892, performed by the Vienna...

The origins of this CD are unique. e story begins a few years ago, when I met Rex Lawson, an imaginative musician who is probably the world's foremost pianola virtuoso. The day I visited his studio, which contained thousands of pianola rolls, I felt as though I was entering a cave of Ali Baba. All these old rolls, all this forgotten music, were enough to leave any musician dumbfounded! Rex immediately piqued my curiosity by telling me that a piece for pianola and orchestra composed by Milhaud and first performedin Paris in 1928 , on the same evening as Ravel's Bolero, had fallen into oblivion. That's when a kind of treasure hunt began. Rex found the orchestra score (the original!) at Northwestern University, in the United States. Meanwhile, the publisher Universal came up with the orchestral material, which of course matched up perfectly with the score. Last, but by no means least, Rex Lawson heroically produced a new roll for the pianola part. Next, a conductor ha...

Clarinetist Jürg Frey performs two works, one composed by Antoine Beuger and one by John Cage, both related to time, or of becoming and of unceasing becoming, pieces using silence in powerful sound structures, contrasting empty moments with the complexity of individual sound.   "The movement which occurs throughout the program played here by Jürg Frey, is one of becoming, of unceasing becoming; that means: of time. Becoming has no starting point and no desire to reach a close. lt cannot be localized. lt is unseizable, even in the smallest interval between two points in time. lt occurs imperceptibly, in the simultaneity of "not yet" and "already gone". Becoming is never presence. That is why becoming occurs in silence. lt appears as though nothing takes place - then, as it turns out, something irreversible has happened. In "dialogues (silence)" by Antoine Beuger ; this concept is made perceptible. Each sound structure is preceded and fo...

This disc comprises three live performances from Munich’s Musica Viva Festival: the works by Ustvolskaya and Bernd Alois Zimmermann from the same concert in December 1998‚ the Rihm – a world première – from November 1999. The rather raw recorded sound reflects the constraints of these occasions‚ as do the rough edges of the orchestral playing‚ but the strong‚ and very strongly contrasted character of these compositions is arrestingly immediate. Zimmermann’s Photoptosis (1968) is the earliest piece‚ a reflection on the biblical phrase ‘and there was light’ which opens up an increasingly dazzling range of textures while – 1960s­style – incorporating a range of quotations and allusions on its way to a turbulently ecstatic conclusion. Markus Stenz homes in on the music’s broad effects‚ and the result is far more than a mere revival. Photoptosis remains highly contemporary‚ and also offers the strongest possible contrast to the primitive yet forcefully characterised austerity...

Concertante recording of Helmut Lachenmann’s groundbreaking opera, and the first to feature the revised version, the so-called “Tokyo-Fassung” which the composer now regards as definitive. The opera, while loosely based on Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale is not a work that admits of a single “meaning”, its plotline is multiple and diffuse, but an undercurrent of social criticism is implied as Lachenmann views the pauper (The Little Match Girl), the terrorist (Gudrun Ensslin)and the visionary artist (Da Vinci) all as outsiders, figures on the fringes of society, driven to the margins by circumstances and by society’s coldness, and, in consequence, playing with fire in their responses. Coldness, figuratively and literally, is one of the opera’s subjects. Extreme cold and burning desire, as attitudes and conditions, counterpoint each other in the music. The action evolves through the suggestibility of the sounds which Lachenmann deploys like no one else and with a poetr...

Clara Schumann's recently recovered G-Minor Sonata['s]...bold gestures and the strong development of its ideas, especially in the substantial and stormy first movement, offer plenty of rewards, both emotional and intellectual... And while the excerpts from Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel's The Year fit more comfortably into the orthodox parameters of music for (advanced) domestic use, they do so with exquisite polish... Highly recommended to anyone intrigued by the repertoire. ( Peter J. Rabinowitz) Lasting a shade under twenty minutes, Zwilich's Third Symphony is large in scale. Sinewy, assertive and confident, it is very much in the tradition of the Great American Third Symphonies of the 30s and 40s. As is the case with some of her music from the past decade or so, Shostakovich is the muse in some of the symphony's timbres, rhythms, power, and intensity... Marked Largo, the third movement cyclically revisits the first. Its midsection is str...

It has often been said that Western composers came into contact with percussion and percussion music at the time of the Paris World Fair at the very end of the 19 th Century. From this time, so called exotic instruments made their way into Western music thanks to composers such as Stravinsky, Milhaud (who may well have composed the first percussion concerto of all times), Bartók, Varèse, Jolivet and Messiaen, to name but a few. Since then there have been many works for percussion, often drawing their musical inspiration from the East and the Far East. This is the common feature shared by the four pieces recorded here. Hovhaness’s interest in Eastern cultures is well-known and many of his numerous works, both small and large, have been inspired by Japan or Bali. His xylophone concerto Fantasy on Japanese Wood Prints Op.211 composed in 1965...

Inner Cities are where you go to get debriefed, to dance a tarantella with Gurdjieff; to see Italo Calvino greet Giordano Bruno in Campo De’ Fiori; to play low C 78 times and low D-flat once for Giacinto Scelsi’s 79th birthday; to hear Louis Armstrong fuse time and space in Providence, and Ella, Peanuts Hucko, and Brubeck fill a Newport stadium unamplified; to watch Cage and Braxton play chess in Washington Square Park; to roll around in a pile of rags with Pistoletto and Simone Forti; to listen to Ezra Pound’s silence by the Grand Canal; to hear Julian Beck say "Paradise Nooow....." and years later on film say "I wuz bawn in a garbage can"; to become a composer in the Coolidges’ apple tree; to hear Miles and Coltrane blow minds at Storyville (price, one coca-cola); to listen to Cy Twombly just back from the Gobi desert; to meet Diana in her temple on Lake Nemi; to hear Art Tatum play the whole world from memory; to record, for Perlini’s "Otello", a tin...

Nicolas Capron dedicated his First book of sonatas for violin solo and basso continuo to the Count of Lauraguais, a man of intelligence and extravagant figure, immensely rich and learned. Here, we are continually impressed and moved by the composer’s extraordinary abundance and expressive variety of musical motifs; were there words, it would be akin to taking part in a musical drama displaying a complete range of emotions, from tragical to comical. Capron chisels each of his propositions by finely combining mode, range, rhythm, accompaniment, and then multiplies its expression by juxtaposing motifs with contrasting affects. He enhances his writing with numerous technical prowesses that also contribute to its expressivity, in particular the use of the highest pitch of the violin, which can produce the effect of an echo , of surprise or moving fragility. Graceful and unexpected passages in staccato-legato also appear here and there to charm the listener. Often, his fast movements incl...

Two Twenty-first century concertos written for guitar duos from Latin America’s foremost composers, the Cuban, Leo Brouwer, and from Brazil, Paulo Bellinati. Almost an octogenarian, Brouwer has been hugely prolific in his supply of music for guitar, and in the past I have been rather ambivalent towards his deluge of scores that include twelve guitar concertos. His first concerto for two guitars, named The Book of Signs , was completed in 2003, and I would unhesitatingly describe it as the finest work I have heard from him. Rather unusual in construction, and relying on Beethoven’s piano work, 32 Variations in C minor , for the first movement’s thematic material, his skill in creating the complexity in interweaving the two instruments is continually intriguing. Enclose this in Latin American rhythms and a pro-active string orchestra, and the score certainly needed a slow movement to reduce the radiant temperature. With more than a passing relationship to a romantic Holl...

Voces Suaves, which performs Renaissance and Baroque music with solo voices, is a vocal en- semble based in Basel (Switzerland). Taking into account the insights of historical performance practice, the ensemble strives for captivating rhetoric combined with a warm and full overall sound that makes the music come alive with emotion. By virtue of the intensive collaboration, a great familiarity within the musical work has evolved.  The ensemble, founded in 2012 by Tobias Wicky , is made up of a core of eight professional singers of whom most have a connection with the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. The ensemble’s character has been shaped together with Francesco Saverio Pedrini, who directed it until 2016. Since then it works without a permanent director, but maintains frequent collaborations with Jörg-Andreas Bötticher and Johannes Strobl.  The repertoire contains a broad selection of Italian madrigals, works of the Early German Baroque, and larger-scaled Italian oratori...

Following his First Prize at the Bruges Competition and his first album, devoted to the Forqueray family (Choc of the Year in Classica, Editor’s Choice in Gramophone, Grand Prix de l’Académie Charles Cros), the Franco American harpsichordist Justin Taylor has recently been awarded the Révélation Musicale Prize of the French Critics’ Circle. His career has developed rapidly, both as soloist (harpsichordist and also fortepianist) and as director of his ensemble, the Taylor Consort, with which Alpha will soon be recording... For his second recital, Justin Taylor juxtaposes Scarlatti and Ligeti, two composers whose periods and universes seem so remote from each other, yet who show numerous affinities: in their inventiveness, the virtuosity of their respective languages and their common urge to push the keyboard to its very limits. Continuum builds a bridgehead between these two hypersensitive composers by intertwining Ligeti’s three emblematic (and spectacular!) pieces fo...

In recent years it has become commonplace to attribute the 1747 Forqueray Pièces (issued in two versions – one for bass viol, the other for harpsichord) mainly to the son, Jean-Baptiste, who published after his father Antoine’s death. This superbly conceived and produced debut recording suggests we should think again. Even the young, Franco-American harpsichordist Justin Taylor himself attributes the two 1747 suites on this disc– at least in their final form – to Jean-Baptiste Forqueray. Yet Taylor’s own polished arrangement of a manuscript three-movement Suite pour trois violes by ‘Monsieur Forcroy’ (an earlier spelling often used to refer to Antoine) – if it is indeed by the father and not the son – bears many of the same musical fingerprints. Within the ingratiating Allemande lurks a popular song. The seductive Courante has such exuberance and momentum that evokes the mercurial Antoine. The piquant harmonic progressions in the poetic Sarabande presage those f...

Swiss composer Jürg Frey's six hour long electronic tape piece L'ame est sans retenue I was recorded and assembled in 1997/98 and is now being released for the first time. It is the longest piece Frey has ever composed in his over 40 year career.  In this piece, Frey utilized the sounds of field recordings he made in Berlin in 1997 as the source materials, alternately inserted between long stretches of silence. Frey was particularly focusing around that time on how the dynamic relation between sound and silence can affect our perception of the silence in a frame of space and time. By using the environmental sounds of field recordings and silence as materials, which was an unusual method of composing music at that time, Frey created a subtle but captivating flow over the six hours in which nearly imperceptible pitches, rhythms, dynamics, textures, overtone - all emanating from the natural environment - are faintly consonant with each other. “It’s about how ‘nor...

The ubiquitous presence of the Bach cantatas in posthumous reception and present-day performance practice easily obscures the fact that the Central German church music of the Baroque distinguished itself through a preponderantly different appearance. Bach’s aspiration to develop all the combinatorial possibilities and his quite problematic equalisation of orchestral compactness and vocal lines rather represent a special case that, not by chance, came into con ict with new ideals of comprehensibility and definitude. The extensive cantata oeuvre of Christoph Graupner, only parts of which have been apprehended until now, is audibly orientated towards a different goal: to promote devotion through emotional clarity, thus gratifying the connoisseur without making undue demands on amateurs. Graupner’s music aims to grab hold of the listener without losing intellectual elegance and the composure which is a courtly public’s due. His credo of the utmost possible “Simplicität”, laid down in...

An exciting new collaboration between Somm Recordings and the Tippett Quartet begins with striking performances of early and late string quartets by Mendelssohn. Fiercely imbued with the spirit of Beethoven, Mendelssohn’s Opp. 12, 13 and 80 quartets brim and boil with an innovation, dynamism, emotional sincerity and technical flair some would deny the composer. These deeply felt performances from the Tippett Quartet present Mendelssohn in a new light and challenge Hans von Bülow’s notorious observation that he “began as a genius and ended as a talent.” All three quartets – Op. 13, composed when Mendelssohn was just 18-years-old, and Op. 80, his last major work, completed two months before his death at 38 – speak movingly of loss. Op. 12 laments the passing of Beethoven, Op. 13 regrets unrequited love, Op. 80 an inconsolable response to the death of Mendelssohn’s sister, Fanny. The earlier works, the Tippett Quartet says, “command an astounding expressive power and techni...

The outstanding musical significance of Johann Rosenmüller, who was said to be able to merge Italian sensuality and German “gravitas” in his compositions in the most harmonious way, was already undisputed among his contemporaries. He studied in Leipzig, and quite soon the town council realized that he was a musician of an immense talent. Rosenmüller therefore received a position at the famous Leipzig Thomasschule, and was considered as the future successor of the ill Thomaskantor, Tobias Michael. His future would actually have been secured at that point if a scandal had not shaken the Leipzig music scene in the spring of 1655: Johann Rosenmüller was imprisoned due to alleged homosexual activities. But he could escape from prison and flee to Italy; he lived in Venice for 25 years before he could return to Germany. But also during the time of his exile he went on composing for German courts; Rosenmüller’s music was so highly esteemed that hardly any court orchestra in th...

The New York Times recently asked the question "Who is the most influential European composer of the moment?" and answered that no name "comes to mind more immediately than that of Helmut Lachenmann: The best of his work takes you by the hand and will not let you go until it has shown you things you could not have suspected." The first New Series disc by the great German composer/inventor resounds with startling sound-events, realized brilliantly – and dramatically – by the Ensemble Modern and the Ensemble Modern Orchestra, under the inspired direction of Peter Eötvös. These compositions from 1974/75, 1983/84 and 1992 represent key moments in Lachenmann's restless voyage of sound-discovery. But as he reminds us, uncovering "new" sounds is but the beginning of the process: "The discovery of a sound, or even a new soundscape ... does not merely open up a new creative paradise to the composer; at the start it generates 'problem...

French composer Yann Tiersen has written music for various instruments, including guitar, piano, synthetizer, violin, accordion, xylophone, and melodica. Some of his compositions have been used in film scoring, such as “Amélie”, whose soundtrack primarily features excerpts from his first three studio albums (“La Valse des monstres”, “Rue des cascades”, and “La Phare”). The present recording features Tiersen’s original solo piano works selected from his very first album, but also from “L’Absente”, “Les Retrouvailles,” and from his last work - “EUSA”. It also includes some piano works found in the soundtracks for “Amélie” and “Goodbye Lenin!”. Described by Eric James (music associate of Sir Charles S. Chaplin) as "a tremendous natural talent," Alessandro Simonetto gives a soft touch and poetical sense to the music. Similar assessments were expressed about his latest recording. But in this new recording we also find a particular rhythmic approach not only to wh...

Cyril Auvity heads the cast in a new recording of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers in a production being released by Glossa. Auvity is the lovelorn Orpheus who ventures, with his lyre, into the Underworld to plead with Pluto (Etienne Bazola) for the return of his Eurydice (Céline Scheen), struck down in her prime by a snakebite, being encouraged in his efforts by Proserpine, the wife of the ruler of Hades (Floriane Hasler). This is a two-act chamber opera, written in 1686, and it is not known whether Charpentier ever composed any more music for the piece (the drama stops at a tantalizing moment in the well-known story). Even still, the composer appears to have invested substantial inspiration into the work, which will have been performed in front of the composer’s patron, Mademoiselle de Guise by a group of singers working within the limitations imposed by Jean- Baptiste Lully’s “musical monopoly” of the time. For this recording, ke...

In different ways the music of György Kurtág and Jörg Widmann can be described as an individual, productive dialogue with musical stimulations of the past. This is evidenced in Kurtág’s works by the great breadth of musical forms that he references, extending from the traditional triad by way of highly diverse canonic techniques onto the use of noise – mostly articulated in fragment-like miniatures or in cyclical compositions consisting of such miniatures. In contrast, Widmann is gravitated to the musical expressions of Romanticism and tends to connect their possibilities to his personal ways of sound exploration.  Kurtág’s cycle Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova for soprano and chamber orchestra, op. 17 (1976–1980), which treats of the failure of human relations, is based on the poems by the Russian poet Rimma Dalos . In language as grotesque as it is drastic and at the limits of self-respect, it lays out one woman’s ideas about loneliness, exhibitionism, and deprivation...

Violinist Miranda Cuckson and pianist Blair McMillen have already proven themselves an estimable duo for works by American Modernists such as Shapey and Martino. Their latest outing features Elliott Carter’s Duo for Violin and Piano (1973), a formidable piece written in the midst of Carter’s most compositionally rigorous period. And while the twosome emphasize the brittle, cutoff phrases that frequently appear in the work, they also do a deft job of pointing up the places in which violin lines melt into the resonance of piano chords (and viceversa). Thus, theirs is a rendition that juxtaposes rigor and grace, violence and gentleness; this versatility makes it one of my favorite outings with this piece I’ve thus far heard. Composed in 1953, Sonata for solo violin is one of Roger Sessions’ first large-scale attempts at 12-tone composition. Clocking in at over thirty minutes, it is a bear of a piece, demanding both virtuosity and considerable thoughtfulness from the vio...

Mutations is Vijay Iyer’s first album as a leader for ECM, and a recording that will widen perceptions of the pianist-composer’s work. At its centre is “Mutations I-X”, a composition scored for string quartet, piano, and electronics. A major piece built out of cells and fragments, it veers through many atmospheres, from moment to moment propulsive, enveloping, lyrical, luminescent, and strangely beautiful. Through thematic interactivity, the interweaving of acoustic and electronic sound-textures, and some decisive improvisational interventions in notated music, Vijay Iyer has created a multi-faceted suite whose very subject is change. Iyer gives a positive value to the concept of ‘mutation’ in this music , and variously appears in it as an interpreter of notated elements, as an improviser, and as “a sort of laptop artist, mixing in noise and different sounds,” encouraging the transformative processes: The suite is framed by three solo statements: "Spellbound and Sa...

Seldom has one heard one of the best known works of Mendelssohn, the brilliant Hebrides Overture, so wild, gruff and raw, so fissured even, as in this concluding installment of Mendelssohn symphonies with Jörg Widmann. This is without question a thoroughly contemporary interpretation; we get the now universal sense of hearing anew that comes with period instruments, even though none are being played here. It must have been a real stimulus to the composer at the conductor’s desk – a music analyst in the highest degree – to take this music tamed by over-familiarity and strip it of everything that is pseudo-obvious and safely middle-of-the-road. And it is that principle, faithfully followed in the earlier releases, of quite deliberately comparing and contrasting Mendelssohn’s works with the clarinet-playing conductor’s own that must have been what struck the spark and audibly kindled the music-making spirit of the Irish Chamber Orchestra. A drama otherwise res...

It is not without reason that the most recent album of French pianist Jean-Claude Henriot is dedicated entirely to Schumann’s music. The artist considers him to be the first composer who explored the musical areas discovered by Beethoven. Through precise and sensitive interpretation of works by both composers, the pianist devotes himself to the search of a beautiful sound as reflection of speech and its transcending qualities. The pieces presented on the album vary in terms of style, form and atmosphere. Kreisleriana, Op. 16, composed on the basis of contrasts and written under the influence of meetings with Chopin, refers to the literary output of E.T.A. Hoffmann and constitutes an opposite to both dark, ordered according to a completely different principle Nachtstücke, Op. 23 (Schumann wrote, “While composing, I kept seeing funeral processions, coffins, unhappy, despairing people. While I was composing I was often so overcome that tears came forth...”) and Geisterva...

This recording is an invitation to immerse ourselves in the musical inner circle of the Bach family. We are familiar with Johann Sebastian Bach as a composer of genius, but we know little about his family life, with the exception of the famous Clavierbüchlein (Little keyboard book) that the forty-year-old composer gave as a present in 1725 to his second wife Anna Magda-lena, his junior by sixteen years. This manuscript is a unique document of the music the family played together. It provides us with a point of reference for the ‘programmes’ of these domestic concerts: it contains short keyboard pieces and songs alongside extended arias taken from the church cantatas, as well as chamber music. Bach and his two eldest sons were not only virtuoso harpsichordists but also excellent violinists, while the composer’s son-in-law Bach, J. C. Altnic-kol, played the cello and was an outstanding double bass player. Anna Magdalena Bach and her oldest stepdaughter both contributed as singers. And...

If I hear a piece of music on the radio that I don’t immediately recognise I try to guess first of all roughly when it was written. Then I try to identify the part of the world it is from. I do this before trying to determine any traits that might indicate who it might be by. In this way I can at least narrow down a few possibilities before waiting to find out the answer.  I don’t know enough of Latvian composer Peteris Vasks’ music to be able to identify it precisely as being by him. On the other hand I might have managed the rest of my own criteria and narrowed down the part of the world in rough terms. There does, after all, seem to be a commonality of sound world shared by composers from the Baltic States and Finland. I find that there is a wonderfully ethereal quality to the music of composers from that area of Europe that is ...

As most readers will know, the saxophone’s association with the emergence of jazz in the early years of the last century tainted its reputation for decades as a vehicle for serious music. Judging from this and many other releases of contemporary, often jazz-inflected, compositions, old prejudices are just about gone. In fact, the composition and recording of saxophone works is almost a growth sector in a classical music industry far too focused on recycling. Here, for those attuned to it, is relatively new music—all of the composers are living—much of it drawing upon the vitality of the improvisational genre, all of it accessible without being simplistic or pastiche.   Saxophone aficionados will likely know the 1970 Sonata by veteran composer Robert Muczynski. His Concerto for Alto Saxophone garnered a Pulitzer Prize nomination, and this is a piece in the same mold: well-structured, sensitive to the capabilities of the instrument, and full of engaging inventi...

Graham Ross and the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, have released a series of albums on Harmonia Mundi that outline the liturgical year, with programs devoted to Advent, Christmas, Passiontide, Easter, All Saints and All Souls, and Epiphany. This 2018 album, O lux beata Trinitas, rounds out the series with music on the subject of the Trinity, featuring works from the British and Russian choral traditions. The increasing popularity of Orthodox Christian chant and liturgical music by Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky, Sergey Rachmaninov, and to a lesser extent Alexander Grechaninov, Mikhail Glinka, and Pavel Cesnokov, may have revitalized the Western choral repertoire, but the core of most English church music still depends on the customary mix of Renaissance masters (represented here by William Byrd and John Sheppard), Victorians (Charles Villiers Stanford, John Stainer, and Charles Wood), and modern and contemporary composers (Benjamin Britten, James Macmillan, Gabriel Jac...

Claude Debussy left a profound mark on music history when he dissolved functional harmony under the influence of the music of the Far East.  Tōru Takemitsu had to distance himself from his own culture in order to listen to Japanese music with the ears of a Western-trained musician – adopting, for instance, the approach of John Cage. He came to realize that Japan’s venerable musical tradition had long been highlighting individual notes as complex sonorities in their own right, instead of treating them as part of a series of several notes.  From the human need for sound as well as silence, John Cage drew the most extreme conclusions. The concept of a “beautiful” sound was never static in music history: it has changed over the centuries, and it differs from one culture to another. Western musical aesthetics tend to differentiate between “noises” and “notes”: the latter feature well-ordered harmonics. The concept of “dissonance” has also changed throughout diff...

Exuberant, colourful and edgy concertos for orchestra by Bartók and Kodály are brought together in spirited and vivid performances from the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by the podium sensation Jakub Hrůša on this PENTATONE release. Bartók’s landmark Concerto for Orchestra is not only a thrilling orchestral tour de force; it’s also a striking and deeply expressive work which effortlessly assimilates Hungarian folk melodies and rhythms in its compelling and polished score. At times brooding and mysterious, it’s Bartók’s most popular and uplifting work, and it ends in a flurry of high spirits. With its lush and vivid orchestration and a healthy rhythmic swagger, Kodály’s lesser-known Concerto for Orchestra is a captivating and buoyant work. Inspired by the Baroque concerto grosso but updated with a romantic sensibility, the result is a sure-footed, rousing and energetic showpiece for orchestra.

Since her debut as a soloist with conductor Zubin Mehta at the celebrations concert of the 70th birthday of Her Majesty the Queen of Spain, Ana María Valderrama has established herself as one of the most acclaimed Spanish violinist of the moment. Víctor del Valle, who enjoys a special connection with the world of chamber music, is involved in active collaboration with various musical groups and soloists. However, his growing prominence on the musical scene is undoubtedly due to his career as a concert pianist together with his brother Luis. Winners of the Pablo Sarasate and the ARD Competitions respectively, Ana María Valderrama and Víctor del Valle team up to offer a very personal and insightful rendition of two masterpieces in 19 th century chamber music: Brahms’s Third Violin Sonata and Franck’s Violin Sonata. Two musical gems open and close the recording: Brahms’s Scherzo movement from the F.A.E. Sonata and Franck’s Mélancolie.

Their point of departure and focus is his String Quartet no. 1 in A minor. Robert Schumann always had difficulty with this particular genre, and in 1842 he brought his "attempts at writing quartets" to an end in a headlong burst of creativity that produced his opus 41, comprising three quartets. The Schumann Quartet musicians concentrate unconditionally on the vocal part-writing, and rather than merely overcoming the technical challenges choose to simply ignore them. The music of Felix Mendelssohn is suffused with what Schumann envied as "ease" or "facility".  The String Quartet no. 1 in E flat major was written in the late summer of 1829, when the younger composer was not yet 20. The correlations, corresponding references and tributes are all in evidence – Mendelssohn's string quartet is the perfect match for Schumann's equivalent work. There is a kind of cross-fertilization between the attention to detail and fresh approach ta...