San Francisco Symphony / Michael Tilson Thomas BERG Violin Concerto - Seven Early Songs - Three Pieces for Orchestra

 

VIOLIN CONCERTO

 

Sandrine Piau / Orchestre Victor Hugo / Jean-François Verdier CLAIR-OBSCUR

 

CLAIR-OBSCUR

Richter Ensemble VIENNA 1905 - 1910

 

VIENNA 195 - 1910

Malin Byström / Helsingborg Symphony / Stefan Solyom ORCHESTRAL SONGS

ORCHESTRAL SONGS

Emmanuel Pahud / Paul Meyer / Daishin Kashimoto / Zvi Plesser / Éric Le Sage VIENNE 1900

VIENNE 1900

Yvonne Smeulers / Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt / Peter Kuhn BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH

Olivia Vermeulen / Jan Philip Schulze DIRTY MINDS

DIRTY MINDS

Seong-Jin Cho THE WANDERER

                                                                 THE WANDERER

Orchestre Nationa D'Auvergne / Roberto Forés Veses BERG - WEBERN - SCHREKER

                                                      BERG - WEBERN - SCHREKER

Ruby Hughes / BBC National Orchestra of Wales / Jac van Steen CLYTEMNESTRA

                                                                 CLYTEMNESTRA

Gianluca Cascioli 900

Gianluca Cascioli attended the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in his hometown of Turin, where he studied composition with Alessandro Ruo Rui and Alberto Colla, and piano with Franco Scala. As the winner of the Umberto Micheli International Piano Competition in 1994, Cascioli was awarded a contract to record for Deutsche Grammophon. As a pianist, Cascioli has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the English Chamber Orchestra, Camerata Salzburg, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, among many others. He has also conducted the Deutsche Kammerorchester Frankfurt, and performed chamber music with Yuri Bashmet, Mstislav Rostropovich, Maxim Vengerov, Sayaka Shoji, Sabine Meyer, Stefano Mollo, the Alban Berg Quartet, and the Berlin Philharmonic Octet. In addition to recording for Deutsche Grammophon, Cascioli has released CDs on Decca. (Blair Sanderson)

Raoul Steffani / Gerald Huber DEEP IN A DREAM

Baritone Raoul Steffani undertakes his CD debut, accompanied by Gerald Huber, with a collection of early songs by some major Lieder composers: Schumann, Grieg, Sibelius and Berg.

Many songs on this album have one thing in common: they are mainly early compositions, in some cases even the first songs these composers wrote. They all have a certain spontaneity and freshness which shows that the young men who composed them were still at the beginning of their careers, full of dreams and hopes for the future. Thus, not surprisingly, many of the songs are also about dreams, totally in the spirit of the true romantic soul. 

Dutch baritone Raoul Steffani, born in 1992, has quickly established himself as one of the leading singers of his generation. He was already awarded several prizes and undertaken masterclasses with Lieder masters such as Thomas Hampson, Christa Ludwig and Elly Ameling. Steffani won the Dutch Grachtenfestival award 2018 and will be Artist in Residence during the Grachtenfestival in 2019.

Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester / Chor der Oper Frankfurt / Sebastian Weigle ALBAN BERG Wozzeck

Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, premiered at Lindenoper/ Berlin in 1925, is regarded as one of the key music compositions of the 20th century and an essential work in any connoisseur’s collection – Frankfurt Opera, under the baton of Sebastian Weigle, delivers a razor-sharp and exciting interpretation. With Audun Iversen and Claudia Mahnke in the main roles the recording shows an ideal cast.

Barbara Hannigan / Reinbert de Leeuw VIENNA FIN DE SIÈCLE

After the huge success of her GRAMMY Award-winning first album for Alpha, Crazy Girl Crazy, Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan is back with her longtime collaborator and mentor, the great figure of twentieth-century music, Dutch pianist Reinbert de Leeuw.

For this new recital album, the duo explores the roots of modern music with composers who went on to lead a musical revolution: Arnold Schoenberg, Hugo Wolf, Anton Webern, Alexander Zemlinsky, Alma Mahler and Alban Berg. Vienna: Fin de Siècle presents a vision of Vienna at the height of late Romanticism, when music was at its most lush and decadent, at the edge of tonality and full of voluptuous beauty. Featuring composers for whom text and song were inseparable, the album captures the rich and intense moment before the disruption of the harmonic language of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hannigan and de Leeuw have long championed the exquisite repertoire from this époque.

Jacob Greenberg HANGING GARDENS

Claude Debussy and the Second Viennese composers followed different paths of philosophical development, inspired by the trends of art and literature in their age, but they were aligned by a common embrace of sensuality in music. Theirs was a strongly shared language, and my interest as a pianist is to explore fields of intersection between these two musical worlds often thought to be opposite in character. Writing for the piano, an instrument equally wide-ranging and intimate, helped all these composers to explore decadent dimensions of harmony, form, and sound color.

For this recording, Debussy’s two books of Préludes and selected individual pieces offer a chance to view the music of Arnold Schoenberg’s school, assumed to be arid and formalist, through a tinted lens. The Préludes, influenced by otherworldly Symbolist poetry and the aesthetic of ancient classical art, give snapshots of places, objects, natural phenomena, and fleeting moods. Small musical forms bely the ambition of Debussy’s endeavor: he conjures minutely detailed scenes, each of the twenty-four pieces wholly distinct in feeling.

Both Schoenberg and Anton Webern thrive in similarly miniature constructions. Schoenberg’s song cycle The Book of the Hanging Gardens portrays a doomed, desperate romance in brief tableaus set in a mythic, lush landscape. Featuring some of Schoenberg’s earliest atonal pieces, the cycle is energized by its intentional instability. Its richly ambiguous harmonic language is well-matched to Stefan George’s poetry of emotions stretched to the breaking point. The heightened poetic sensitivity is reflected in the composer’s tactile approach to sound: this can be heard especially in number 11 of the set, which depicts the lovers touching each other lightly in the afterglow of passion. This movement can be compared to the exotic flirtation of Debussy’s Voiles, and the heat of La puerta del vino.

Alban Berg’s whole-tone patterns in his early Sonata draw a clear link to Debussy. The innovative, pervasive development of a simple motive leads Berg to coloristic extremes. And Webern’s Variations finds expressive continuity and intense energy in spare sounds or silence. Webern forges a totally original piano texture: notes become points of light, forming shapes in a gorgeous void. Debussy and the Second Viennese opened music to a sensual, seductive unreality that diverse composers, to our own age, have accepted as a promise of possibility. ( Jacob Greenberg)

Marion Rampal / Quatuor Manfred / Raphaël Imbert BYE-BYE BERLIN

Bye bye… or Berlin for ever? Throughout the 1920s all eyes were turned towards Berlin. Driven by a collective energy, artists of all persuasions (writers, painters, architects, filmmakers and composers) there established the principles of ‘New Objectivity’, which saw the city become the very epitome of modernity, at the same time as following in the footsteps of other great cities worldwide, not least New York, the birthplace of jazz. Life in Berlin was not the stuff of romance however: strikes, poverty, repression, the rise of Nazism… The post-war social context contributed to the craze that swept the capital for cabaret, a kind of safety valve that allowed for a moral and social release. 

It is this ephemeral, underground world of ‘Great Berlin’ as depicted in ‘The Blue Angel’ that Marion Rampal and the Quatuor Manfred invite us to rediscover here, in collaboration with saxophonist Raphaël Imbert: a liberal burst of freedom and humanity delivered with passion.

Andreas Haefliger PERSPECTIVES 7

Since 2004, Andreas Haefliger has been devising a series of recital programmes named Perspectives, presenting them in concert and on disc. Each programme focusses on one or two Beethoven sonatas, juxtaposed with works by other composers (ranging from Mozart to Berio) which in some way or other interact with Beethoven’s music, and with each other. The seventh instalment in the series was premièred at the Edinburgh Festival in 2017, and was described by one reviewer as ‘Inspiringly commanding, thoughtful, lucid and sheerly beautiful’ (The Herald, Glasgow). 

Perspectives 7 opens with Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata, Op. 1, a highly concentrated work in which most of the music can be traced back to the two opening gestures. This is followed by Liszt’s impressionistic Légende No. 1 ‘St. Francis of Assisi: The Sermon to the Birds’, in which we seem to hear a flock of birds chirp warble and sing. At the core of the programme is Beethoven’s Op. 101 Sonata – a work which in Haefliger’s opinion points more clearly towards Schumann than any other of the composer’s sonatas. But the grand finale of this amply-filled disc (86 minutes!) is nevertheless a highly colourful and expressive performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition, recorded – as is the entire disc – in the exceptional acoustics of the Mozartsaal of the Vienna Konzerthaus.

Mookie Lee-Menuhin LIAISON

Following the much-acclaimed duo CD recorded with her husband Jeremy Menuhin, the pianist Mookie Lee-Menuhin is now presenting her debut GENUIN CD as a soloist. The musician has put together a subtle programme which is characterized by numerous cross-references: Berg's early sonata op. 1, Schubert's extroverted Sonata in D Major, the Romanian Folk Dances by Béla Bartók, and the world premiere recording of Éric Tanguy's Toccata (2006). The works describe dealing with the past and traditions - and the break with these. Mookie Lee-Menuhin presents all this with a sophisticated sound and a gorgeous pianistic touch - a real success!

Yeol Eum Son MODERN TIMES

Classical pianist Son Yeol-eum has returned to the limelight with her first album in eight years, “Modern Times.” It  features a wide range of music from jazzy razzmatazz swing tunes to sounds that remind listeners of a dark and desolate night. 

“This musical theme is something I have always wanted to pursue because I think this style of music represents such important and influential times in our history,” said Son, during a press conference held at the Stradeum concert hall in Seoul.

“All of the music selected from the album are from the early 20th century, an era in which I think saw a big shift in both world history and music culture,” she added. 

Son’s new four-track album features Alban Berg’s “Piano Sonata op. 1,” Sergei Prokofiev’s “Toccata in D minor, op. 11,” Igor Stravinsky’s “Trois Mouvement de Petrouchka” and Maurice Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin La Valse.” 

The album is a far cry from other recent releases by her local pianist peers such as Cho Seong-jin, Lim Dong-hyek and Dasol Kim, which have all tended to err on the side of traditional classical pieces from Chopin to Schumann.  

“We are now living in the 21st Century, and it has been 100 years since these pieces were written,” Son explained.

“During this era I think the world has really opened up and there has been some drastic changes in the sounds of classical music … in the process of making this album, I found myself thinking about how much change happened in both the East and the West during the World Wars,” she said, adding that the seismic shift in the world’s cultural and historical climate allowed for the birth of a new generation of classical music repertories.  

Son, who is from Wonju in Gangwon Province, first drew international attention when she appeared as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 2004 under the baton of conductor Lorin Maazel. (Julie Jackson)

Cathy Krier PIANO - 20th CENTURY

“The early 20th century is a period that fascinates me. The prevalent musical aesthetic was disrupted by a new generation of composers who maintained their roots in tradition, but felt a great desire to expand music’s horizons: they formed a multitude of currents and embarked on a number of different paths, all driven by the idea of transfiguring everything they had previously known. For this disc I have chosen to retrace the path originally taken by Arnold Schoenberg. Born in Vienna in 1874, Schoenberg had an atypical career. Upon his father’s death, he had to leave school as the eldest sibling at the age of sixteen to take up a profession. As an autodidact he learned the essentials of composition by sight-reading great repertoire and by playing chamber music on the cello and the violin. Married to the sister of Alexander Zemlinsky, Schoenberg took some counterpoint lessons from that composer and soon started teaching harmony and counterpoint himself, from 1903 on. His teaching activity remained central throughout his life, both in Europe and after having immigrated to the US. Profoundly aware of the continual evolution of Art as a historical necessity, Schoenberg introduced an important change into composition at the beginning of the 20th century. He took it over the brink into the unknown by dissolving the classical functions of harmony, then by eliminating all familiar points of melodic and thematic reference. Schoenberg’s Op. 11 is the first truly atonal work for piano ever written….” (Cathy Krier)