John Tilbury / Philip Thomas MORTON FELDMAN Two Pianos and other pieces, 1953-1969

The music featured on these two discs testifies to the intensity of Feldman’s experimentation with notation and sound during the 1950s and 60s. Considering the works chronologically one senses the composer trying out, teasing and developing means of notation to get close to his desired elasticity of time and duration. His experiments with indeterminacy of pitch – whereby Feldman specified only the register (high, middle, low) of sound rather than the exact notes themselves – do not feature here; after trying this method in a series of works in the early 1950s he abandoned the technique, with a few notable exceptions straying into the 1960s, because he was too ‘attached’ to the pitches he wanted. 

All notes are specified exactly in the pieces on these discs – the experiments are instead with duration and time. Durations of sounds are variously free, dependent upon the decay of the sound, worked out in coordination with other players, as well as at times exactly and complexly notated within a specific tempo. Sometimes the freedoms of notating time are worked through in combination with listening closely to the sounds of other players, allowing patterns to emerge without forcing the situation, whilst at other times different ways of notating time are combined, creating false alignments in the score and thus placing greater emphasis upon the individual performer’s journey.

The piano is an inherently indeterminate instrument - any given note will have a very different afterlife dependent upon the touch of the performer, the register of the note, the type and size of the piano, the acoustic of the space in which the piano is situated, and so forth. Put six or seven of these notes together as a chord and the situation becomes complex. In all these pieces Feldman specifies the dynamics to be quiet, or as quiet as possible, or very quiet. However the notion that Feldman’s music is ‘about’ quiet-ness is a misconception: the subject is sound, and in order for that subject to be properly attended to those sounds are quiet. The range of pieces presented here depict very many different types of quietness – from the delicate sounds of Piano Three Hands and Piano Four Hands to the massed complexities of Two Pieces for Three Pianos. Quietness in Feldman’s piano music is a performance instruction which is everything to do with touch and the desire to really hear the instrument. As such these recordings are a celebration of the piano (its tone and its decay) and piano playing, for all its frustrations and challenges – an instrument which is at the heart of Feldman’s music. (Philip Thomas)

London Symphony Orchestra / Valery Gergiev RACHMANINOV Symphonies Nos. 1-3 - Symphonic Dances

This box set brings together Valery Gergiev’s acclaimed cycle of the complete Rachmaninov symphonies, which were recorded alongside the London Symphony Orchestra across 2008 to 2015. These masterful accounts of the Russian’s complete symphonies are accompanied by his 1940 composition Symphonic Dances, while two symphonic poems by Mily Balakirev echo the luxurious textures present throughout Rachmaninov’s music.

St. Lawrence String Quartet / Todd Palmer OSVALDO GOLIJOV Yiddishbbuk

This is an amazing recording. It will leave you drained of emotion and speechless with admiration... Lullaby and Doina incorporates Jewish and Gypsy themes, part slow and sad, part wild and motoric, with a radiant violin solo soaring above the woodwinds. Yiddishbbuk...is inspired by a line from an apocryphal psalm: "No one sings as purely as those who are in the deepest hell..." It's first movement commemorates three children who perished in the Nazi concentration camp Terezin. Golijov evokes their anguish in music that is by turns wild, raucous, slashing, mysterious, eerie, and always heart-rending. Tremolos flutter up above aching dissonances, alternating with organlike, sustained chords; slides and crashes sound like strangled death cries. Dreams and Prayers...are depicted in music that is calm, mysterious, meditative and devout, but intermittently breaks into traditional dance tunes, and builds up to several tremendous climaxes. The clarinet speaks, sings, sobs, screams, and prays in true klezmer style. The playing is fabulous, the total effect mesmerizing, but the real miracle is that this young Canadian quartet and American clarinetist can identify so completely with a culture surely worlds away from their own. (Edith Eisler)

Scottish Chamber Orchestra Wind Soloists WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Divertimenti

Mozart informed his father that he had composed the Serenade K375 ‘rather carefully’ to impress Herr von Strack, a Viennese nobleman sporting the splendid title of ‘Gentleman of the Emperor’s Bed Chamber’. Whether in its original Sextet incarnation, performed here, or its later Octet version, this is music that both celebrates and, as Mozart surely knew, far transcends the tradition of al fresco Harmoniemusik. If you know the more familiar Octet version, you might regret the loss of the oboes’ pungent dissonances near the opening, or of the oboe-clarinet dialogues in the Adagio. But the SCO soloists quickly allay any sense of deprivation. Like all the best ensembles in this music, they strike a nice balance between chamber-musical refinement and rustic earthiness. Natural horns lend a welcome abrasiveness to the tuttis; and the instrument’s variegated colours give added piquancy to the horn tune that sails in out of the blue near the end of the first movement. Clarinets can be dulcet, as in the tenderly phrased Adagio, yet are not afraid to rasp and bite, to specially vivid effect in the sprightly second Minuet. Tempi are aptly chosen (the opening Allegro properly maestoso), and accompanying figuration lives and breathes, not least in the Adagio, where the horns inject delightful touches of jauntiness into the poetic reverie.

The four Salzburg divertimentos for wind sextet of 1776 77 are far slighter. Yet each reveals the craftsmanship Mozart lavished even on trifles for Archbishop Colloredo’s dinner entertainment. The excellent booklet-notes fail to disclose why the Scottish players opt to perform the divertimentos with clarinets rather than the prescribed oboes. Still, while I missed the oboes’ pastoral plaintiveness in movements such as the opening siciliano of K252, the sensuous warmth of the clarinets is fair compensation in the mellifluous A flat major Trio, or the Adagio of K253. Again the players balance polish, poetry and sheer bucolic enjoyment. The rare example of a Mozartian polonaise in K252 goes with a jaunty swagger (other performances I’ve heard are rather more decorous), while the lusty contredanse finales exude an impish glee. I fancy Mozart would have smiled in approval. (Richard Wigmore / Gramophone)

Belcea Quartet / Till Fellner BRAHMS String Quartets & Piano Quintet

Brahms wrote three string quartets – or rather, he wrote three string quartets that he liked enough to let us hear them: we’ll never know how many were burned and abandoned along the way. The survivors are outpourings of angst, ardency and resolute jubilation, all characteristics that the Belceas do brilliantly. This recording features intense and wonderful quartet playing: lucid and agitated, sleek and muscular, with Corina Belcea’s silvery-lean first violin sound balanced by the huge warmth at the centre of the ensemble from violist Kzystof Chorzelski. In the Piano Quintet, pianist Till Fellner’s light touch makes him less of a soloist, more of an integrated texture – he’s a good match for the Belceas in that respect, but it feels like he’s responding rather than instigating. Some listeners might reasonably like their Brahms with a burlier kind of pianism. (Kate Molleson / The Guardian)

Marta Infante / Jorge Robaina DVORÁK Songs

Between 1874 and 1878, the young Antonín Dvorák received help from the Austrian government to compose musical works. At that time, he was a promising composer who, having been brought up in Bohemia, not only spoke German but also demonstrated a profound knowledge of the Central European musical tradition. The composer, with all this, very quickly faced reality: in the Vienna of that time what they wanted of a Czech composer was music that sounded Czech, not German. Of the works he wrote in those years, the one that caught the publisher´s and Brahm´s attention was his song cycle, Moravian Duets. They particularly stood out if we keep in mind, as mentioned by Michael Beckerman, that to the Bohemian composer the Moravian culture was as foreign as any other. This is how history, with its selective forgetfulness, has prolonged for years the European rule that has been to label Dvorak a nationalistic Czech composer and author of various worthy symphonies. That he left more than a hundred songs written, that his inspiration went far beyond Bohemian folklore and that he was one of the most prolific Opera composers of his time are irrelevant questions. This recording from Spanish mezzosoprano Marta Infante and pianist Jorge Robaina gives us an opportunity to hear some songs that seem to have been written out of their time.

Francisco Fullana THROUGH THE LENS OF TIME

The Spanish violinist Francisco Fullana will release his debut recording in March 2018 with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Entitled Through the Lens of Time, the recording brings together four modern perspectives reimagining the Baroque tradition: a dialogue that prompts both composers and performers to explore musical giants of the past and place them in their own lives. ​ 

The recording begins with Max Richter’s daring reworking of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which Fullana first performed in 2016 under Venezuelan conductor Carlos Izcaray, who also conducts this debut recording. Fullana comments: “Richter’s Four Seasons Recomposed awoke a renewed commitment to my musical approach focused on instinct and emotion. It brought me back to my own beginnings, as The Four Seasons was one of the few cassettes that my family would play in the car when I was a young boy. During the performance, Carlos Izcaray and I found that we both shared the same energetic approach to music making. It became clear that we both loved performing this piece too much not to do so again.

” ​ The recording continues with three other works that provide unique takes on the Baroque tradition. The Korean-German Isang Yun’s Königliches Thema pays homage to Bach's Musical Offering, conflating Baroque and modern styles in one densely rich composition that magically surveys Western musical tradition through the lens of Eastern philosophies. Meanwhile, Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style presents a combination of different aspects of the Western tradition from Baroque onward, and is heavily influenced by the musical aesthetic of the composers’ own time. As such, the writing represents a sort of time capsule, portraying what “Baroque style” meant to performers 
in the 1970s, with exaggerated gestures, verticality, and highlighting the sense 
of drama to the point of becoming ceremonial. ​ 

Finally, Salvador Brotons’ Variations on a Baroque Theme hearken to the roots of Fullana's career, and to his first performance before the public as a nine-year-old prodigy soloing in Mozart's Turkish A Major Concerto, under Broton's baton. The one-time mentor composed his set of variations specifically for this project, completing a circle by basing the work on a popular aria from the zarzuela, Acis Y Galatea, by a third Spaniard, the 18th Century Mallorcan composer Antoni Lliteres. (Orchid Classics)