Marie-Elisabeth Hecker / Antwerp Symphony Orchestra / Edo de Waart ELGAR Cello Concerto - Piano Quintet

Cellist Marie-Elisabeth Hecker made her international breakthrough with her sensational success at the 8th Rostropovich Competition in Paris in 2005, where she became the first contestant in the event's history to win the first prize as well as two special prizes. Since then Hecker has become one of the most sought-after soloists and chamber musicians of her generation, recognised for her deep expression and natural affinity for the cello, with Die Zeit describing her playing as "heartbreakingly sad and instinctively beautiful". 

After making several discs of chamber music by Brahms and Schubert, the cellist Marie-Elisabeth Hecker now records a large-scale concerto, showing the full range of her talent. Composed between 1918 and 1919, Elgar’s Concerto Op.85 was poorly received at its first performance but has since become established as one of the key works in the cello repertoire. To complete the programme, Marie-Elisabeth Hecker rejoins her chamber music partners, the violinists Carolin Widmann and David McCarroll, the violist Pauline Sachse and the pianist Martin Helmchen, in Elgar’s Piano Quintet, composed at the same time as the Concerto and premiered in London in 1919.

LEE HYLA Riff and Transfiguration

Riff & Transfiguration presents four pieces of truly excellent modern classical music of the strong, dramatic vein. The earliest of Hyla's compositions on this release is "Amnesia Variance," from 1989. It is performed by a small ensemble of strings, clarinet, piano, and hammered dulcimer. Based around the idea of musical memory, or the loss of such, it often leaves out the usual transitions between the active, strongly dramatic sections and the quiet, spacious moments that are led briefly by alternating single instrument solos. The other three compositions -- all composed during the '90s -- are solo piano works, each performed by a different pianist. All of them are extremely accomplished virtuosos, lacking in neither technique nor passion. Judith Gordon and Stephen Drury perform the first two pieces, respectively. It bears repeating that the virtuosic work here is head-turning, not to mention the works' compositional strength. The title piece is a suite for solo piano, and is performed by Mia Chung. The suite's movements range from "very fast, eruptive" (the first movement) to "quietly, con rubato" (the sixth movement), and all are carried off beautifully (Joslyn Layne)

Carolin Widmann / Chamber Orchestra of Europe FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY - ROBERT SCHUMANN

It was not until late in life that Robert Schumann found the path to the violin. A pianist by profession, it almost seems as if his belated interest in the violin had a lasting effect on the performance and reception of his own works for that instrument. His Fantasy for violin and orchestra, op. 131, has never truly found a place in the repertoire; performances of his violin sonatas are relatively rare; and the Violin Concerto had to wait until 1937 for its première, when it was played in a bowdlerized version by Georg Kulenkampff and the Berlin Philharmonic under Karl Böhm. The latter work probably suffered as well from the unjustified verdict of the great Joseph Joachim, who called it 'weak' and spurned it to the end of his days.

As so often in music history, the vitality of a work can only be proved by committed performers. One such performer was Yehudi Menuhin, the first to forcibly elevate the Schumann concerto into the classical-romantic pantheon: 'This concerto is the historically missing link of the violin literature; it is the bridge between the Beethoven and the Brahms concertos, though leaning more towards Brahms'.

Mendelssohn's E-minor Violin Concerto did not face the same problems of genesis and reception as Schumann's. On the contrary: it is one of the most frequently performed of all the great classical-romantic concertos, not least because it refuses to consign the orchestra to a bystander role, as in the virtuoso concerto. Instead, it follows Beethoven's example by achieving a balanced dramatic structure between the soloist and an orchestra with symphonic functions rather than an accompaniment role.

If we pay heed to Menuhin's shrewd assessment and their dates of origin, the combination of Mendelssohn's concerto with Schumann's seems much more convincing than the more popular combination of Mendelssohn's and the Bruch G-minor. This explains why the Munich violinist Carolin Widmann has now chosen the Mendelssohn and Schumann concertos for her new recording with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe for ECM's New Series. Since 2008 her commitment to ECM has led to a number of remarkable CD releases, including a highly acclaimed recording of the Schumann violin sonatas with the pianist Dénes Várjon and a multiple prize-winning Schubert recording with Alexander Lonquich.

But a commitment to classical-romantic music is only one facet in the musical cosmos of this versatile artist, who numbers not only Schumann but Morton Feldman among her 'favourite composers'. She is equally au fait with period performance practice and avant-garde techniques and has presented convincing readings of highly-complex works by Berio and Boulez, Feldman's Violin and Orchestra (released on ECM) and Erkki-Sven Tüür, including his Noesie – Concerto for Clarinet, Violin and Orchestra with her brother Jörg Widmann on clarinet and the Nordic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Anu Tali (likewise on ECM).

Boulez, incidentally, gave an interesting answer to the question of whether one should play the music of György Ligeti to gain a better grasp of the music of the past. Boulez said that one would at least gain a better performance culture. Anyone who masters Ligeti's sonic balance and Stockhausen's rhythms will, he felt, be better equipped to play the classical-romantic repertoire. Carolin Widmann's performances stand as proof of his theory. (ECM Records)

Carolin Widmann REFLECTIONS

Music for solo violin is still mainly associated with Bach in the eighteenth century and Paganini in the nineteenth. Carolin Widmann, the distinguished German violinist, here provides a varied and vivid survey of such music from the twentieth century, from Ysaÿe in the 1920s to Jörg Widmann (her composer brother) at the turn of the millennium. There is nothing at all in the CD booklet about any of these pieces, though they are unlikely to be at all familiar to most collectors. I describe them below, partly because you need this information for a proper appreciation of the range of what is on offer on this disc, and partly in hope that it might pique your curiosity. 

Ysaÿe’s Six sonatas for solo violin, Op. 27, were written in 1923. Each one is dedicated to one of his contemporary violinists, No. 2 to Jacques Thibaud, and No. 4 to Fritz Kreisler. If that was a shrewd way to encourage world-class performances, one hopes it worked, for they are fine works and by no means unworthy of their Bachian inheritance. Indeed No. 2 actually opens with some Bach, the famously arresting first phrase of the E minor partita, no less. However, it is the plainchant Dies Irae that informs much of the work, including the noble variations of the Sarabande. Sonata No. 4 is hardly less compelling, and both are very well played indeed. 

If those sonatas are a homage to Bach, then another set of six, the Sei Capricci (1976) of Salvatore Sciarrino, pay homage to the 24 Caprices of his compatriot and forbear Niccolo Paganini. Each capriccio uses almost entirely the least substantial of all string sounds - harmonics. This includes some harmonics that – apparently – do not exist, since they do not lie on any of the nodes along the string that produce the overtones. They are notated and attempted nonetheless, and the sonic result is part of the soundscape. This near exclusive use of harmonics – normally an occasional coloristic effect – means every piece is filled with ethereal, whistling wisps of sound, evoking a world of shadows, as if some revenant from the great days of Ysaÿe and his dedicatees was playing for us, but his spectral status meant he could produce only a disembodied sound. Eerie it might be, but Widmann’s performance again makes us forget the incredible technical demands this music must make on the performer. 

Pierre Boulez’s Anthèmes was commissioned for the 1991 Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition. The title is a hybrid of the French thèmes (themes) and the English "anthem". The four pages of score (free to download) employ a formidable-looking range of tempi (lent to rapide), expression marks (calme, agité, brusque), dynamics (pppp -fff) and very frequent metrical changes, all punctuated by frequent long trills and glissandi. Widmann manages to observe all this scrupulously, and in so doing, show us that it is a fine piece, by no means as challenging to listen to as it must be to play. Small wonder it is one of those pieces Boulez - as so often - expanded and developed further, as Anthèmes 2 for violin and live electronics. 

Jörg Widmann's solo violin Études I-III are autonomous concert pieces — premiered separately in 1995, 2001 and 2003. The composer wrote of them: “‘Étude' is taken literally here as a compositional exercise … but also as a violinistic study on a certain playing technique: for example, I is some sort of 'sounding out' of the instrument's resonance possibilities, II goes on a journey from a three-part chorale to spirited, unbridled virtuosity, and III is mainly a left-hand étude.' He, perhaps mischievously, does not remark on the element that will strike most listeners to Etude II – one line of the three-part chorale he mentions is for the violinist’s wordless voice. One would like to know what Isabelle Faust — dedicatee and first performer — made of that when she first encountered it, let alone its first audience at the 1995 Cheltenham Festival. The effect is certainly evocative here. Presumably we can take for granted the authenticity of the performance by the composer’s sister and dedicatee and first performer of Étude III, who even contributed the recommended fingering to the score. By the way, Schott’s website has this helpful note for prospective purchasers of the score “Difficulty: Very Difficult”. The only possible criticism of the performer on this CD is that she never makes it sound like that. 

Ysaÿe once wrote that a performer on his instrument "must be a violinist, a thinker, a poet, a human being, he must have known hope, love, passion and despair, he must have run the gamut of the emotions in order to express them all in his playing." I have no idea if Carolin Widmann has experienced all that in her life to date, but surely Ysaÿe would have applauded such virtuosity and expressive range – the playing is often frankly sensational. This recording was first published in 2006 on Telos, and won an award in Germany. It was Widmann’s debut disc, and as a solo violin calling card from a young player it recalls Perlman’s EMI Paganini Caprices from 1972. Its reissue is greatly to be celebrated. (Roy Westbrook)

Anu Tali / Nordic Symphony Orchestra ERKKI-SVEN TÜÜR Strata

“My pieces are abstract dramas in sound, with individual characters and an extremely dynamic chain of events; unfolding in a space that is constantly shifting, expanding and contracting.” Thus Erkki-Sven Tüür, characterising his highly energetic recent works. The fifth New Series release dedicated exclusively to music by the Estonian composer presents world premiere recordings of two large-scale pieces for orchestral forces. “Strata” and “Noёsis” are played by the Tallinn-based Nordic Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Estonian conductor Anu Tali. Both orchestra and conductor make their New Series debuts here.
“Strata”, Tüür’s sixth symphony, which was commissioned and premiered by the Nordic Symphony, consists of one massive 32-minute movement which, in accordance with the geological metaphor of the title, explores the gradual movements and shifting relationship of different musical layers. In the liner notes, fellow composer and musicologist Kerri Kotta emphasizes that for Tüür, who in his earlier work has played with contrasting and contradictory methods and styles, “the symphony is not a post-modern re-enactment of well-known models. Although Tüür carefully avoids direct musical quotations, the traditional aspects of his works become manifest through distinctive rhythmic, melodic, dynamic and affective qualities. These topics articulate the changing surface, where a key or a code gives rise to numerous voices which in their turn make up different textural layers.” Tüür’s compositions since 2002, indeed, follow a new path: “I have invented a method I call "vectorial writing", as the principle of voice-leading in the wider sense follows projections of vectors in different directions. At the same time, the basic material is given by a certain numerical code which acts like a gene in forming the whole composition with all possible mutations and transformations. This technique allows me to achieve much more harmonic variety.”
“Noēsis” was written in response to a commission from Neeme Järvi and premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The solo parts of this concerto for clarinet, violin and orchestra are played on the present recording by Jörg and Carolin Widmann. While Carolin has won unanimous critical acclaim for her renderings of Robert Schumann’s violin sonatas and for her 20th-century music recital “Phantasy of spring”, Jörg Widmann counts among the pre-eminent young composers of our time, as well as one the finest contemporary clarinettists.

Carolin Widmann / Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra MORTON FELDMAN Violin and Orchestra

Carolin Widmann’s widely acclaimed ECM New Series recordings have traversed a broad arc of music – from Schubert to Xenakis. Her award-winning album of contemporary music “Phantasy of Spring”, released in 2009, opened with Morton’s Feldman’s “Spring of Chosroes”; now she returns to Feldman with one of the US composer’s pivotal compositions, Violin and Orchestra, written in 1979. With its almost painterly attention to detail and to texture, this slowly unfolding single-movement work marked a new direction in Feldman’s music. It is not a concerto in the strict sense of the term, not soloist with orchestral support. The violinist must move inside the glowing colour-field of sound. In this exceptional Feldman recording, Widmann does so with great delicacy and feeling, exploring the subtle orchestral texture, crafted together with conductor Emilio Pomàrico and the players of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.
“In the noisiest century in history,” critic Alex Ross has noted, “Morton Feldman chose to be glacially slow and snowily soft. [In his music] chords arrive one after another, in seemingly haphazard sequence, interspersed with silences. Harmonies hover in a no man’s land between consonance and dissonance, paradise and oblivion.” Violin and Orchestra calls for the largest instrumentation Feldman specified – including quadruple and triple winds and brass, four percussionists, two harps, two pianos and a corresponding body of strings. Yet the work is quiet, dreamlike.
“Feldman is a great favourite of mine,” says Carolin Widmann. “His music has in my opinion not only contemporary but everlasting relevance for its unique language and the ways in which it seems to suspend time, to freeze it. Sometimes when I listen to Feldman I’m unsure if a few minutes or half an eternity has passed. As one enters into its spatial dimension you stop thinking about where this music has come from and where it is headed and you become part of it. And that opens up philosophical questions. How does this music change us, as listeners?”
“As a player, you have to immerse yourself in the Feldman cosmos. In Violin and Orchestra, the violin is first among equals. What Feldman brings out of the instrument in terms of sound and colour is very beautiful. But it’s by no means a piece for demonstrating instrumental capacity. This concept is completely abolished (in my view it could usefully be challenged in much classical and Romantic repertoire, too). To play Feldman, you have to take a back seat and make sure that all expression is solely in the service of the music. That’s also a kind of spiritual exercise, and one that obliges the violinist to question the parameters of personal style, peeling away all superfluous gesture.”
Violin and Orchestra was premiered by Paul Zukofsky and the Hessian Radio Orchestra with Cristóbal Halfter conducting, in Frankfurt in 1984. The present recording, with Carolin Widmann and the Frankfurter Radio Orchestra, was aided by the support of the Festival d’Automne à Paris, who also presented the work in the autumn of 2009.

Carolin Widmann / Alexander Lonquich FRANZ SCHUBERT Fantasie C-Dur - Rondo h-Moll - Sonate A-Dur

This insightful recording of Franz Schubert’s music is also a first documentation of the musical alliance between violinist Carolin Widmann and pianist Alexander Lonquich, which has been gathering momentum over the last four years. They first came together to play Messiaen in Salzburg in 2008. The following year a Lonquich solo recital in Rome convinced Widmann that they should collaborate on Schubert’s music for violin and piano.

In this album, recorded at Historic concert hall Reitstadl Neumarkt, the duo plays the C-Major Fantasy of 1827 and the Violin Sonata in A-Major of 1817, as well as the B-minor Rondo of 1826. If the influence of Beethoven is still marked in the 1817 sonata, the 1826 and 1827 pieces remain striking in their originality. Written at the request of Viennese virtuosi Josef Slawik and Karl Maria von Bocklet, they are pieces that transcend ‘mere’ virtuosity.

Lonquich describes them as “paradoxical”, compositions conceived as technical which nonetheless feel “thoroughly metaphysical”: “Schubert is music’s great Wanderer. He goes through highs and lows and subtle harmonic progressions. He’s invariably spoken of as the great writer of melodies, yet there is always extraordinary harmonic tension at work as well.”

Carolin Widmann: “There is ambivalence in Schubert: pain and beauty expressed with the same intensity. I can hear the Austrian countryside in his music when I’m playing and at the same time this feeling of reaching for the heavens. Great art is made out of this combination of rootedness and transcendence…”

Widmann and Lonquich’s empathetic reading casts aside conventions of violin and accompaniment, responding instead to the changing needs of Schubert’s music.

Carolin Widmann, who received praise and awards both for her accounts of Schumann’s violin sonatas and for the recital disc “Phantasy of Spring” (with music of Feldman, Zimmermann, Schoenberg and Xenakis) now applies her acute interpretive sensibilities to Franz Schubert. Widmann and Alexander Lonquich (whose own New Series disc with music of Schumann and Holliger was also a critical success) play the C-Major Fantasy of 1827 and the Violin Sonata in A-Major of 1817, as well as the B-minor Rondo of 1826 (the only one of these works published in Schubert’s lifetime). This is duo playing at a very high level, as Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich emphasizes in the liner notes: “Not once does Carolin Widmann and Alexander Lonquich’s intelligent and empathetic reading devolve into the trivial state of music for a domineering violin with piano accompaniment. Instead we are treated to a magically iridescent poem of changing colours, melodies and counterpoints.”

Carolin Widmann / Dénes Várjon ROBERT SCHUMANN The Violin Sonatas

ECM debut for two outstanding young soloists playing with vigour and temperament. Carolin Widmann’s reputation as a both committed and exciting performer of contemporary music has constantly spread in recent years. Her first CD with unaccompanied violin works ranging from Eugène Ysaÿe to Salvatore Sciarrino met with unanimous critical acclaim and was immediately awarded an annual prize at the German Record Critic’s award (Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik). Composers such as Matthias Pintscher, Erkki-Sven Tüür and her brother Jörg Widmann write pieces for the Munich-born violinist and in summer 2008 she is giving first performances of no less than five new violin concerti including, in September in Leipzig and Lucerne, a piece by Wolfgang Rihm with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly’s baton.

Of equal importance to Widmann is the preoccupation with the repertoire from the Baroque to the romantic era and the conception of programmes that highlight affinities between composers from different epochs. Together with Dénes Várjon whose formative influences in his native Budapest included masters such as Ferenc Rados, György Kurtág and András Schiff – his career took of after a sensational first prize at the Zurich Géza Anda competition, in 1991 – she has worked on Schumann since the start of their collaboration in 2004. Especially on the three violin sonatas from his last years of his life, highly-demanding scores which clearly reflect the composer’s difficult mental situation in the 1850s.

“I had always been under the impression that certain traits of these pieces had never been thoroughly explored, and this applies most of all to the third sonata which was virtually unknown for decades and was only recently published in a reliable critical edition. We wanted to contribute to the understanding of this music, revealing just how fantastic, crazy and modern these compositions are. Schumann has been one of my favourite composers for many years, everything I know out of his works grips and touches me. Dénes shares this passion, and he completely understands the mental attitude of these pieces”, says Widmann who has been a professor at the Leipzig Musikhochschule since fall 2006 thereby getting even closer to Schumann and the localities the latter’s artistic activities.

In retrospect, the violinist describes the recording session at Lugano Radio Auditorium – a venue which Manfred Eicher has as well chosen for several important jazz productions in recent years – as a very lucky constellation. “Once the hall, the piano and the mutual trust with your partners both in front and behind the microphones fit so well together you can really play in a way you wouldn’t have thought possible”, Widmann confesses, not so much alluding to technical perfection but rather to the courage to take risks in the rendition of the scores: “It was Dénes who always wanted to go still a step further, saying ‘we can surprise each other much more!’ And he was absolutely right: There is this enormous variety of characters in these sonatas, each tone has a different colour, each bar a new pulse. Maybe Schumann, as opposed to so many other composers, really is the one whose black dots on white paper represent the least that is actually to be said. No traditional triple meter can properly express the right kind of rhythmic inflection and that’s why, in our playing, I wanted to virtually make the bar-lines disappear, suggesting rather some kind of three-dimensional notation. In this respect, too, Dénes, with his incredible flexibility, has been an ideal duo partner to me. With many Schumann interpretations I miss this ‘edgy’ feeling and the constant quest of the meaning of every detail.”

Part of this questioning and digging is the work on very specific sound hues and timbres which should always be related most closely to the respective expressive qualities. “It’s terribly sad when we violinists reduce our spectrum to one or two colours, so I’m consciously looking for the sombre and rather grim shadings but also for some very bright, even piercing sonic qualities. I like to use open strings because this can be so painful: It hurts much more when this open E-string shrieks than when it’s appropriately muffled – the second finger on the A-string ... this really eschews all tragedy!”

The unusual sequence of the three sonatas on the record arouse from extensive experiments and ruminations between the two musicians and producer Manfred Eicher. “Even from today’s perspective I somehow understand why Clara Schumann held back the third sonata and some other of Robert’s late compositions for such a long time” says Widmann. “She must have feared that they would expose just too much of this mentally ill man whose – then quite unstable – reputation she had to protect. Me, too, I sense a certain emotional decay in the course of this cycle, that’s why we didn’t conclude the album with the chronologically last sonata. For a while we were even thinking about a reverse order, putting the first sonata last. But this way one would have sensed even more how Schumann was drawn down within the years between these pieces.” This is not to express as judgement over artistic or compositional qualities: After her thorough work on this ragged third sonata, Widmann doesn’t share the communis opinio of this piece as a deficient Schumann whose creativity is almost extinguished. “You really have to accept the conflict of antagonistic energies, this constant back and forth between a rather strained classicism and complete unleashed passion. It’s essential for late Schumann to be uncomfortable – which might account for the difficult reception of this repertoire. But if you take the challenge a completely new world opens up. In such a world there is always a way to solve the technical and instrumental problems of certain passages.”