What is important for the lucid ordering of the work—for its crystallization—is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the life-sap rise must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally be made to submit to the law: Apollo demands it. (Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music)To the Russian master of modernism, the four piano sonatas of Carl Maria von Weber stood tall among the best-formed works of the nineteenth century. Citing their ‘instrumental bearing’, he praised them for exhibiting ‘the constant and alert control of the subjugator’. In this, Stravinsky recognized Weber’s achievement, as he crystallized his sonatas’ forms, in reconciling the Dionysian and Apollonian sides of art. Thanks to this opinion, to renewed interest generally in the early Romantic era, and to the talents of pianists such as Garrick Ohlsson, these works can be reassessed and fully appreciated, having been undervalued for most of the twentieth century.Once deemed to be, next to Beethoven’s piano sonatas, ‘unquestionably the most important and valuable of the whole newer period, often even surpassing those in grandeur and make-up’ (A B Marx, 1824), Weber’s sonatas have suffered from their composer’s greater reputation as the founder of German Romantic opera. Der Freischütz (1820), Euryanthe (1823) and Oberon (1826) became so famous that musicians, critics and audiences almost lost sight of the composer’s symphonic works, concertos, songs, cantatas, masses and piano music. Weber’s shining sonatas, glittering variations, ebullient polonaises and delightfully written character pieces, in particular, were simply eclipsed. True, Weber’s Konzertstück for piano and orchestra (1821), did become a popular parade-piece with virtuosos, as did the piano solos Momento capriccioso (1808), and the Rondo brillante and of course Aufforderung zum Tanz, both from 1819 (though the last—perhaps the era’s first tone poem—enjoyed the boosts of regular performances by Liszt, beginning in 1828, and a sumptuous orchestration by Berlioz, from 1841).By the time the first two of Weber’s piano sonatas appeared in print, his older contemporaries had already seen many such works published: seventy sonatas of Clementi, thirty-five of Dussek, twenty-seven of Beethoven and four of Hummel were already in wide circulation. Weber was twenty-six when he composed his Sonata No 1 in C major Op 24 in early 1812. The work’s technical demands were so extraordinary that despite the composer’s efforts to teach it to the talented dedicatee, his pupil the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Weimar, the lady could not master it. Part of the problem lay in the size of Weber’s hands. Julius Benedict, another pupil, wrote that they were ‘able to play tenths with the same facility as octaves’ and, further, that with them ‘Weber produced the most startling effects of sonority, and possessed the power … to elicit an almost vocal tone where delicacy or deep expression were required’. Hands of the sort that wrote the music were advantageous to its performance. The requirements include flashing scales and arpeggios, toccata-like double notes, daredevil leaps, driving rhythms and, musically, a sense of dramatic passion.Written in reverse order, the four movements contain suprises at every turn. Forms, textures, colorations and other elements are contrasted and brought into balance with the virtuosity of a young master—orchestrating at the keyboard with a skill not unlike Beethoven’s. Most spectacular is the finale, dubbed by Weber L’infatigable but now better known by Alkan’s title for it, Perpetuum mobile. Its whirlwinds have never failed to sweep audiences off their feet. Intoxicated by the movement’s potential for elaboration, such composers as Czerny, Henselt, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Godowsky made arrangements of it.Weber began his Piano Sonata No 2 in A flat major Op 39 in 1814 and completed it two years later when he was thirty. Its composition was divided between Prague, where Weber was Kapellmeister of the theatre, and Berlin, where he moved with his fiancée, the soubrette Caroline Brandt, for her ‘star singing engagement’, and the Sonata was undoubtedly meant as a personal performing vehicle. Benedict tells us that the composer was ‘wrapped up in the love of his future partner for life’ when he wrote it. Certainly the work’s spacious, warm lyricism, intimate sentiment, woodland atmosphere and flowing modulations suggest greater personal maturity and a vastly different inner life than the extroverted deftness of the Sonata No 1. Movements one, two and four seem to share the special grace of human love while the third, Menuetto capriccioso, is a tour de force of delicious whimsy contrasted with heart-on-sleeve romantic gesture. To Benedict, Weber’s Op 39 was ‘the grandest and most complete composition of the master’ because of its ‘originality of form, deep pathos and poetical feeling’.The Piano Sonata No 3 in D minor Op 49 also belongs to 1816, but shows its composer in a darkly dramatic, Beethovenian mood. Weber wrote it in just twenty days of feverish inspiration. Conceiving the work less as a composer-pianist and more as a composer-conductor, he explored new ways to develop his themes through counterpoint, used a broad range of tonalities and probed his instrument’s resources more deeply than before. All three movements seem imbued with orchestral sonorities and textures. No extra-musical connotations exist to colour the listener’s perception of this classically abstract, fascinating work. If Beethoven’s shadow seems to fall over each of its three movements, no one should be suprised. So odd was its originality that Weber’s cataloguer, F W Jähns, thought the Sonata ‘demonic’.The Piano Sonata No 4 in E minor Op 70 was produced in 1822 after a three-year gestation period. Weber was thirty-six and smarting from a bad performance of his incidental music to Wolff’s Preciosa. Benedict claimed that: ‘The first movement, according to Weber’s own ideas, portrays in mournful strains the state of a sufferer from fixed melancholy and despondency, with occasional glimpses of hope which are, however, always darkened and crushed. The second movement describes an outburst of rage and insanity; the Andante in C is of a consolatory nature and fitly expresses the partly successful entreaties of friendship and affection endeavouring to calm the patient, though there is an undercurrent of agitation and evil augury. The last movement, a wild, fantastic tarantella, with only a few snatches of melody, finishes in exhaustion and death.’ Schubert seems more the model here than Beethoven, which may account for the work’s subtleties and lieder-like delicacy of expression. But Weber’s use of motifs rather than long-spun melodies and the restrained economy of the pianism involved evince greater expressive mastery and control than before. The Sonata is dedicated to J F Rochlitz, a critic who had praised the two preceding sonatas.In the course of listening to Weber’s four sonatas, it becomes evident that a refining process was at work. The dazzling virtuoso of 1812 who penned the Sonata No 1 had gradually become, over the decade which separates that work from the last sonata, more reflective and less showy. By 1822 superabundant pianism occupied Weber’s mind hardly at all. Although the works continued to be difficult to execute, their challenges derive from the multiple strands of their counterpoint and a growing sense of quasi-orchestral texture. Weber’s genius lay in unifying form, content and expression with telling effect.Of Weber’s numerous short pieces, three found popular favour with pianists and audiences throughout the nineteenth century. Momento capriccioso Op 12, dating from 1808 and dedicated to Weber’s friend Giacomo Meyerbeer, flickers scherzo-like over the keyboard, its swiftly repeating, lightweight chords giving the performer’s wrists a good workout. Four decades later, it inspired another study for the wrists, Anton Rubinstein’s famous ‘Staccato’ Étude.The Rondo brillante Op 62, also known as La gaîté, belongs to the same year, 1819, as Aufforderung zum Tanz Op 65. An excellent example of what has been called Weber’s ‘glass chandelier style’, the Rondo brillante’s crystalline brilliance exploits the piano’s upper treble range (and the pianist’s right hand) to great effect. Exuberant, even breathtaking, it is a true showpiece by a virtuoso who, at thirty-three, was in the full flush of love for Caroline Brandt, whom he had married two years earlier.Less dazzling but musically more substantial, the perennial favourite Aufforderung zum Tanz evokes, as Weber tells us, a ball. A dancer approaches a lady, who evades him. He presses his invitation and she relents. They converse sympathetically, take their places for the dance, then swirl happily away. At the end, they thank each other and withdraw—leaving only silence and the memory of an exhilarating experience. The work’s terpsichorean charms inspired later versions for the piano, both increasingly elaborate, by Tausig and Godowsky, as well as a ballet made famous by Nijinsky, The Spectre of the Rose.The pleasure of hearing this music today derives in general from its marked individuality and freshness of invention, from its daring inspiration and superb pianism, but more particularly from Weber’s adroit imagination in harmonizing the conflicting demands of both Dionysus and Apollo. Stravinsky was right—and not mere craft but art is the result.

• Wykonawca Ohlsson Garrick
• Data premiery 2011-01-10
• Nośnik CD

This new release from Chandos’ early music label, Chaconne, focuses on Buxtehude’s seven cantatas, collectively known as Membra Jesu nostri. These are among Buxtehude’s best-known works, and perfectly exemplify the seventeenth-century preference for musical structures that are broadly symmetrical, but subtly varied in detail. Each of the seven cantatas has roughly the same shape: Biblical passages are set for the whole ensemble and enclose stanzas from the mediaeval poem Rhythmica oratio, which are set as arias for reduced vocal forces and interspersed with instrumental ritornelli.Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu nostri takes the form of a sequence of seven meditations on the crucified body of Jesus, beginning with the feet (‘Ad pedes’), followed by the knees (‘Ad genua’), the hands (‘Ad manus’), the side (‘Ad latus’), the breast (‘Ad pectus’), the heart (‘Ad cor’), and the face (‘Ad faciem’). As such, the work is written from the perspective of a penitent kneeling at the foot of the cross and gradually extending his gaze upwards, meditating on each part of the body in turn. The keys chosen for the cantatas seem to have added symbolic meaning. As the gaze rises, they move from flats to sharps, from C minor to E minor, before finally returning to the opening key to produce a beautifully unified cycle.On this release the cantata cycle is complemented by Matthias Weckmann’s Kommet her zu mir alle, a setting of the words from St Matthew’s Gospel (11: 28 – 30), in which the composer gives the words of Jesus to a virtuoso bass singer with an impressive range of nearly two octaves, a part here performed by Peter Harvey, and provides him with an accompaniment of two violins, three bass viols, and continuo.The works on this disc are performed by an excellent ensemble of early music specialists. As exclusive artists, The Purcell Quartet is today popularising the cantatas of Buxtehude in concerts and recordings involving a fabulous quartet of soloists – Emma Kirkby,Michael Chance, Charles Daniels, and Peter Harvey – to which, for the occasion, the group is joined by the soprano Elin Monahan Thomas. The Quartet has also recorded a huge range of music exclusively for Chandos, including works by Purcell, Corelli, Lawes, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Weckmann, Buxtehude, Leclair, Schütz, Couperin, and Biber, to outstanding critical and public acclaim. The early music specialists Fretwork, the viol ensemble, also performs on this recording.

• Wykonawca Purcell Quartet , Kirkby Emma , Chance Michael , Daniels Charles , Harvey Peter
• Data premiery 2010-11-01
• Nośnik CD

Priest, scholar, mystic, singer, organist and composer - six persons all rolled into one. That is, quite simply, why Victoria is the most outstanding composer of the Renaissance. Although he began and ended his life in Spain, Victoria spent most of his working years in Rome, soaking up the great tradition of polyphonic writing and immaculate counterpoint but always preserving his Iberian roots and bringing to his music a richness of texture and a perfect sense of line. Five years ago, Harry Christophers and The Sixteen recorded a brand new version of Victoria’s Requiem and toured it to sold-out venues across the UK. The ensemble will continue its exploration of the music of this great Spanish composer in 2011 bringing his unique sound to ever wider audiences. To mark the 400th anniversary of his death, a brand new recording of works by Victoria will be released in February. On this recording, The Sixteen explores some of the sumptuous music Victoria wrote in honour of the Virgin Mary. Whilst his glorious Missa Alma Redemptoris Mater forms the central part of the disc, it is the intensely beautiful Marian motets which define Victoria as the greatest composer of the Renaissance.

• Wykonawca The Sixteen
• Data premiery 2011-03-01
• Nośnik CD

A major release at the start of Britten’s anniversary celebrations. Britten’s long friendship with cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was one of the most inspiring and fruitful musical collaborations in history. It led directly to the composition of some of the most important works for cello of the twentieth century.Alban Gerhardt, among the greatest living exponents of the instrument, performs this body of works in its entirety. In the Cello Sonata he is partnered by Steven Osborne, whose Hyperion recording of Britten’s Piano Concerto received a Gramophone Award. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Andrew Manze join Gerhardt for the Cello Symphony, Britten’s only substantial piece of absolute symphonic music.The astonishing music for solo cello—the three suites plus the miniature Tema ‘Sacher’—completes the set. The suites are repositories of a huge number of compositional and string-playing techniques, acknowledging their debt to Bach but also demonstrating all the imagination and emotional scope for which the composer is revered.

• Wykonawca Gerhardt Alban , Osborne Steven
• Data premiery 2012-11-01
• Nośnik CD

Original Works and Piano Transcriptions: Piano Sonata in F major; Six Impromptus; Kyllikki; Ten Pieces, Op. 24 (including Romance in D flat major); Bagatelles; Pensées lyriques; Finlandia; Karelia; Valse triste; Youth production, student compositions and other works

• Wykonawca Grasbeck Folke
• Data premiery 2008-06-15
• Nośnik CD

Maurice Ravel’s mature works for violin and piano have established a central place in the core recital repertoire and are considered among the most popular of the genre. These diverse works acknowledge the influences of a range of musical styles from jazz to Impressionism and fuse the tonal colours of Debussy with the lyricism of Franck. The posthumously published one-movement Violin Sonata, written by Ravel as a student, is a lyrical precursor to the composer’s stunning Violin Sonata in G major with its unique character and adoption of the ‘blues’ idiom. The spontaneity, tonal colours and exotic soundscapes in Ravel’s violin music call for immense skill in interpretation, and passages in the frenzied Tzigane test the limits of the performers’ virtuosity. Violinist Alina Ibragmiova rises to these challenges with extraordinary verve. Recent winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s prestigious ‘Young Artist of the Year’ award, she displays a vast expressive range and interpretative maturity. She is accompanied by pianist Cédric Tiberghien, who gives elegant and flawless performances and relishes Ravel’s iridescent piano parts. The addition of Guillaume Lekeu’s masterwork, the extensive and engaging Violin Sonata, makes this major new release a chamber disc to treasure.

• Wykonawca Ibragimova Alina , Tiberghien Cedric
• Data premiery 2011-06-01
• Nośnik CD

Double bill of performances of works by Greek-French composer Iannia Xenakis. The works included are 'Linaia-Agon' and 'Zythos'.

• Data premiery 2016-01-18
• Nośnik DVD

Alfred Eschwé conducts the Vienna Johann Strauss Orchestra in this live performance of works by Johann Strauss and Johann Strauss II. Recorded in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein Vienna in 2016, the concert celebrates the 50th anniversary of the orchestra.

• Data premiery 2019-01-28
• Nośnik Blu-ray Disc

Album został wydany przez wytwórnię LSO Live (LSO 0826). Tracklista: CD 1 1. Symphonies Nos 1-5 CD 2 1. Symphonies No 2 CD 3 Symphonies Nos 3 & 4. Overture: Ruy Blas CD 4 1. A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Hebrides CD 5 Blue- ray 1. All works

• Wykonawca London Symphony Orchestra , The Monteverdi Choir , Pires Maria Joao
• Data premiery 2018-10-01
• Nośnik CD+Blu-ray Disc

Rachmaninov’s Études-tableaux explore a plethora of colours, textures and sonorites and demonstrate the emotional range of the composer’s expression. Howard Shelley gives authoritative performances of these studies and tackles the technical challenges with an easy brilliance. ‘In Shelley’s Rachmaninov series, I think this the finest achievement among them’ (Gramophone) ‘The performance, to say nothing of the sound, is transcendental’ (Acoustic Sounds Catalog, USA) ‘Peerless command and inimitable insights’ (Hi-Fi News) ‘The refinement of the playing reminds one of Rachmaninov’s own classic interpretations: few contemporary pianists can equal Shelley’s elegant phrasing in pianissimo passages or his imaginative and resourceful use of the pedal. Strongly recommended’ (The Monthly Guide to Recorded Music)output reveals him to have been a far more complex artist than such a superficial description suggests. The emotional range of his expression was, in fact, surprisingly wide, and his objectivity—the very antithesis of subjective Romanticism—marks him out as an exceptional composer, doubly so for one of his generation and nationality. As a late nineteenth-century Russian, Rachmaninov exhibits some curious features: he had nothing to do with the nationalist movement and he was a world-famous composer whose influence was negligible. A further paradox is that although he was one of the most popular composers of all time the majority of his works remained virtually unknown for decades after his death. Consequently, his work was—and still is, in some quarters—frequently misunderstood. A clue to his true artistic character can be found in one of the rare interviews he gave, for The Étude in 1941, when he said:In my own compositions, no conscious effort has been made to be original, a Romantic, or Nationalistic, or anything else. I write down on paper the music I hear within me, as naturally as possible. I am a Russian composer, and the land of my birth has influenced my temperament and outlook. My music is the product of my temperament, and so it is Russian music; I have never consciously attempted to write Russian music, or any other kind of music …Romanticism in music centres upon extra-musical thought, and reached its zenith in the nineteenth century with a kind of obsessive self-regarding individualism, a state of mind utterly alien to Rachmaninov’s restrained and profoundly civilized art. Rachmaninov knew that he was not, at heart, a Romantic composer, as were his great pianist-composer predecessors Schumann and Liszt, yet he did not remain entirely aloof from the movement.Although it is tempting to consider the Études-tableaux as the epitome of Rachmaninov’s Romanticism in piano music, he was reluctant to reveal any extra-musical programme to them. Such reticence is foreign to the true Romantic, and in Rachmaninov’s case amounts almost to an anti-Romantic stance.The use of the word ‘tableaux’ is misleading in the present context. Although we know Rachmaninov was inspired by extra-musical subjects in some of them, he said: ‘I do not believe in the artist disclosing too much of his images. Let them paint for themselves what it most suggests.’ The programmes he supplied in 1930 to the Italian composer Ottorino Respighi, who orchestrated five of the Études-tableaux for Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, seem contrived and full of post hoc justification, without being entirely inappropriate. The ‘tableaux’ are not first and foremost ‘pictures’ in the Musorgskian sense, rather are they successors to Chopin’s Ballades in that they permit poetic interpretation whilst at the same time being composed entirely from musical (and also technical) ideas. The ‘character’ of each piece is dictated by the material, and it is the ‘character’ which is the ‘tableau’.The first set, Op 33, followed immediately upon the thirteen Préludes of Op 32, being written before the Préludes were premiered. Thus they follow a succession of large-scale masterpieces: two operas, the first piano sonata, second symphony, the symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead, the third concerto, the Liturgy of St John; and after this exclusive concentration upon big works during almost the whole of the previous ten years, Rachmaninov doubtless felt the need to express his compositional mastery and newly developed artistic strength in works of the smallest scale. He found the task exceptionally difficult, as it ‘presented many more problems than a symphony or a concerto … after all, to say what you have to say, and say it briefly, lucidly, and without circumlocution is still the most difficult problem facing the creative artist.’ Rachmaninov composed nine Études-tableaux in 1911, but they were not published until 1914, when three were removed—the original No 3 in C minor, No 4 in A minor and No 5 in D minor. Of these, No 4 was revised in 1916 and incorporated (as No 6) into the second set (Op 39), which was written between September 1916 and February 1917. Nos 3 and 5 from the first set remained in manuscript and were found after Rachmaninov’s death, being ultimately published in 1948 when they were reinstated as parts of his Opus 33. As a result, the form in which we hear the first set of Études-tableaux today is one which was unknown to the composer, and goes against his express wishes. Whilst it is generally conceded that Rachmaninov’s first thoughts are almost invariably preferable in regard to those works which he subsequently allowed to be cut (second symphony, The Isle of the Dead, third piano concerto—consecutive works), his Opus 33 presents an insoluble problem: do we restore the C minor and D minor pieces to their original place, or do we play the set in the first published form? As the question did not arise during Rachmaninov’s lifetime, we have no direct evidence, but there is a curious connexion between the two previously unpublished Études: they both use material from other works.In April 1914 Rachmaninov revealed he was working on a new concerto (his fourth). It was uncharacteristic of him to announce work in progress. The war interrupted the concerto, and the work did not appear until 1926. The opening of the concerto, and a subsidiary theme in the slow movement of the same work, were both—as Geoffrey Norris has pointed out—taken from the discarded C minor Étude. The D minor Étude is based on material from the first movement of the first piano sonata (1907). At the suggestion of Konstantin Ignumnov, Rachmaninov excised fifty bars from the movement before publication: it must have been that Rachmaninov constructed this Étude from the music he discarded from the sonata. And so it is likely that the two unpublished Études-tableaux, using material already in hand for other works, were withdrawn by the composer for this very reason. A further point is that the six as originally published give the impression of a Schumannesque organic unity, akin to the procedures of Schumann’s Études symphoniques: there are melodic-cellular connexions between the six which the C minor and D minor do not share.It is possible to discern a more elliptical, laconic manner in Rachmaninov’s post-Revolutionary works, and this change of emphasis is already apparent in the Études-tableaux. As we have seen, Rachmaninov admitted that such brevity presented him with considerable compositional problems, but, apart from their brevity, these pieces are virtuosic in the extreme. They make cruel demands of unconventional hand positions, immense physical strength and energy from the player and, combined with the impacted character of each piece and the often wide leaps for the fingers, such problems place these works outside the scope of any but the most formidable virtuoso technique. Rachmaninov’s Études-tableaux mark the virtual end of the nineteenth-century tradition of virtuoso writings of the great composer-pianists.In addition to their unique qualities must be mentioned their unusual harmonic language, already foreshadowed in parts of the third concerto: modal harmonies and melodic characteristics can be frequently found in the Études, together with the absence of the third in the traditional major and minor modes; the flattened seventh, and Rachmaninov’s use of thick chordal clusters in contrary and parallel motion. These features account for the less obviously ‘Russian’ nature of the music, placing the composer more firmly in the Central and East-European tradition. The Études-tableaux of Opus 39 were the last works Rachmaninov composed in Russia.Detailed comment on each piece is unnecessary, but note particularly the modal aspect of the melody in Op 33 No 1, and how the quiet ending of this piece is echoed in the opening of No 2, being a variation upon it, and how this is carried through the remainder of the set. The final C sharp minor is almost a parodia of the most famous of Rachmaninov’s Préludes. Op 39 can also be perceived as a hidden set of variations on this composer’s idée-fixe, the Dies irae, parts of the plainchant being quoted directly in all of the nine studies, particularly obviously in the first five. The Dies irae is quoted in Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead, which was inspired by Böcklin’s painting, and Rachmaninov claimed two other Böcklin paintings, ‘The Waves’ and ‘Morning’, were the inspiration behind the first and eighth respectively.One final point on the entire collection is the vivid rhythmic life of the music: at times virile and commanding, at others subtle and understated, it is an aspect of Rachmaninov’s compositional skill which helps to ensure the immortality of his music.Robert Matthew-Walker © 1983

• Wykonawca Shelley Howard
• Data premiery 2011-06-01
• Nośnik CD