Mischa Maisky / Lily Maisky 20TH CENTURY CLASSICS

                                                         20TH CENTURY CLASSICS

Virgil Boutellis-Taft / Royal Philharmonic Orchestra INCANTATION

                                                                  INCANTATION

Sheku Kanneh-Mason / Simon Rattle / London Symphony Orchestra ELGAR

                                                                              ELGAR

Dana Zemtsov / Cathelijne Noorland ROMANTIC METAMORPHOSES

The term ‘Romantic’ has always been something of a mystery to me due to its many and often subtle definitions. On this CD I invite the listener to re-explore this phenomenon, so often evident in day-to-day life, from different perspectives. T he programme takes as its point of departure the nineteenth-century classical romanticism of the beautiful ‘Sonata’ by Henri Vieuxtemps. This is the lyrical, sensitive type of romanticism so typical of that period. In contrast to this is ‘Suite for viola and piano’, Ernest Bloch’s romantically fantasized adventure through savage nature and tribes under the sun in the jungle. Waxman’s ‘Carmen Fantasy’, which probably needs littleintroduction, is a strong depiction of Bizet’s dramatic opera.

For me personally, however, the most ‘romantic’ and personal piece on this CD is the ‘Melodie im alten Stil’ by Evgeni Zemtsov. The nostalgic style in which this modern piece is written, with its lyrical melody, ornamented in Baroque style, imposed on fresh, contrasting harmonies, is just one reason to admire it. A second one is the story behind it: during his studies in Moscow the composer fell in love with a beautiful girl. She played the viola, and he wrote this beautiful piece for her instrument as a declaration of love. One year later their first child – my father – was born. (Dana Zemtsov)

Dana Zemtsov / Estonian National Symphony Orchestra / Daniel Raiskin ESSENTIA

One of the biggest dilemmas of our generation is where are we from, who are we, what is our identity? Globalization has made the whole world closer, bringing our cultures more and more together. I myself am a product of this mix, being born in Mexico to Russian parents with a Jewish background, having studied at a French school in Norway and grown up in Holland. Consequently I have often thought about these questions: which culture is closest to me? What am I? I could feel at home and relate to all these cultures and yet I am not really part of any of them.

The music on this album explores the opposite perspective; each piece is very strong influenced by the composer’s culture. One can immediately smell the Hungarian landscape in Bartok’s Viola Concerto, Italian roots in the Carnevale di Venezia, the Jewish soul in Bloch’s Nigun and Russian Orthodox chants in Kugel’s Preghiera. However, there is a deeper meaning to the title of this album, as the programme also touches the spiritual and carnal nature of the human being. During the process of compiling this programme I suddenly realized the strong religious connection between the second movement of the Bartok concerto and the two prayers that follow. This is followed by the contrasting ‘danse macabre’ in the third movement, which for me is very much associated with the carnal ritual of a carnival, when one is allowed to release one’s most primitive instincts. I believe each of these pieces explores the deepest roots of humankind, that core that will be there, no matter where we go or what we do.

I am eternally grateful, primarily to Jared Sacks, for the opportunity of going through this unforgettable experience. I could not be happier to have done so with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and one of the best musicians I could have wished to collaborate with, the conductor Daniel Raiskin. (Dana Zemtsov)

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Yulia Berinskaya / I Musici di Parma / Stefano Ligoratti THE VOICE OF VIOLIN

The center of this album is not only the “song” of the violin but also its “voice”. The violin becomes the vehicle for a talking expression so strongly rooted in the Yiddish culture that when the Jews want to congratulate a violinist they say “You speak the violin well”. Violinitistically growth on the shape of his father Sergei Berinsky, important Muscovite composer of a Yiddish family, Yulia Berinskaya in this anthology is looking for the archaic origins of the music itself (song and dance), declining them according to her personal violinistic Voice, a sort of alter ego of the soprano. Furthermore, the peculiarity of this project is the fact that new transcriptions have been properly made for violin and chamber orchestra by Giovanni Dettori (Falla, Bloch, Piazzolla) and Stefano Ligoratti (Stravinsky).

Ophélie Gaillard EXILES

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States, land of freedom, open to the world, a democracy concerned with human rights, attracted emigrants of all origins. Rightly or wrongly, the young nation, in full economic expansion, embodied a land of redemption for the composers brought together by Ophélie Gaillard.

After Alvorada, her globe-trotting cello leads us in the footsteps of Bloch, Korngold, Prokofiev, Chava Alberstein and Giora Feidmann, singing their exile, whether suffered or deliberately chosen. She makes us vibrate to the sound of a film score (Korngold’s Concerto), a prayer (From Jewish Life), an Hebraic narrative (Schelomo), a lullaby, a wedding dance… The spirit of celebration, tenderness, religious meditation: so many facets of daily life and the culture of several generations of Jewish immigrants, related by Ophélie Gaillard’s humanistic bow.

Natalie Clein BLOCH Suites for Solo Cello DALLAPICCOLA Ciaconna, Intermezzo e Adagio LIGETI Sonata for Solo Cello

Despite the appeal and popularity of Bloch’s Schelomo, his three solo cello suites have not been widely recorded. They were written late in the composer’s life, in 1956-57, after he had retired from teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, and were inspired by the Canadian cellist Zara Nelsova. Unfortunately, Nelsova, who worked closely with Bloch in the years after the end of the Second World War, left no recording of the pieces. The German cellist Peter Bruns recorded them in 1997, on a disc that also included key cello works from earlier in the composer’s career, including From Jewish Life and Baal Shem, when Bloch was self-consciously interested in discovering within himself what it meant to be a Jewish composer.

The late-in-life solo suites are very different in tone from those earlier works, more meditative and introspective, and while listeners will easily detect similar melodic contours to the music Bloch was writing in his Jewish Cycle works, these suites lack the long, ardent lines of Schelomo, though none of its expressive power. Cellist Natalie Clein keeps the expressive range within autumnal parameters: melancholy, lightly fretful, inward and dignified. Whereas Bruns is more forcefully rhetorical and demonstrative, Clein plays intimately, as if for herself alone. But there is nothing hermetic about her approach. Gently, insistently, quietly, she draws the listener into Bloch’s music and the results are thoroughly absorbing.

Rather than pair these relatively short works—made up of four or five movements each, most lasting only a few minutes—with other works by Bloch, Clein couples them with Dallapiccola’s 1945 Ciaccona, Intermezzo e Adagio, thorny but powerful, written at the same time as he was working on his tremendously bleak opera Il prigioniero, and Ligeti’s 1948-53 two-movement Sonata for solo cello. Clein is every bit as commanding in the formidably difficult Dallapiccola as she is retiring in the Bloch, and her performance of the Adagio theme in the Ligeti is four minutes of pure, concentrated beauty. This lovely disc reveals the cello as a kind of private sketch pad, or journal, capturing big emotions on a small scale, with a poetic concentration in sharp contrast to the larger, more furious musical gestures of the post-war moment. (Gramophone)

Sol Gabetta PRAYER

On her new album "Prayer" Sol Gabetta takes the listener with her on a meditative musical journey. Accompanied by the Amsterdam Sinfonietta and the Orchestre National de Lyon, she has recorded a selection of Classical music inspired by Jewish melodies. It was Ernest Bloch's (1880-1959) piece "Prayer" that first gave Sol Gabetta the idea for this album: "I often played 'Prayer' as an encore in concert, and could feel that many people in the audience were greatly moved by it. This is music that is both sensual and reflective." In addition to the three-part cycle "From Jewish Life", of which "Prayer" is the first movement, Gabetta's CD recital includes Bloch's "Meditation hebräique", "Nigun", and the famous "Schelomo" for cello and orchestra. The programme is delightfully rounded off by four songs Gabetta has chosen from Dmitri Shostakovich's cycle "From Jewish Folk Poetry" and a Catalan folk song full of yearning by the famous cellist Pablo Casals.
Sol Gabetta recorded "Prayer" together with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta. In Bloch's "Schelomo" she is accompanied by the Orchestre National de Lyon under Leonard Slatkin; it was with this conductor that she originally played the work, which dates from 1916. Gabetta says: "This is a sweeping, large-scale cello concerto in which the cello takes the role of King Solomon".
The Jewish pieces by Bloch with their religious undertones contrast with folk songs from the pen of Shostakovich, which he published in 1948 under the title "From Jewish Folk Poetry". From the total of 11 songs, Sol Gabetta chose four for her recital which were then specially arranged for cello and string orchestra by Mikhail Bronner. The original poems that Shostakovich set to music tell of the hardships of Jewish life in tsarist Russian. The Catalan folk song "Song of the Birds" is a tale of human longing. The Spanish cellist Pablo Casals arranged it for his instrument, and from 1939 onwards he used it to open many of the concerts he gave in exile. Gabetta has recorded the piece together with the cello ensemble of the Amsterdam Sinfonietta.