Album został wydany przez wytwórnię Challenge Classics (CC 72791). All works originally composed for piano arranged for two romantic Viennese guitars by Duo Morat-Fergo.
LISZT WORKS PIANO & ORCH 3CD
Tracklista: CD 1 Franck Variations symphoniques Royal Albert Hall Orchestra /Landon Ronald 1. Solo Works by Albéniz, Chopin, Grétry/Greef, Grieg, Liszt, Moszkowski, Ronald, Rubinstein, Schumann CD 2 1. Liszt Piano Concerto No 1 Royal Albert Hall Orchestra/ Landon Ronald 2. Liszt Piano Concerto No 2 London Symphony Orchestra/ Landon Ronald 3. Liszt Fantasia on Hungarian Folk Themes Royal Albert Hall Orchestra/ Landon Ronald 4. Liszt Polonaise in E major 5. Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No 12 CD 3 1. Chopin Sonata No 2 in B flat minor, Nocturne in F sharp major, Four Waltzes 2. Solo Works by Moszkowski, Raf & Schubert/Liszt CD 4 1. Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No 2 New Symphony Orchestra/ Landon Ronald 2. Grieg Piano Concerto New Symphony Orchestra/ Landon Ronald 3. Solo Works by Grétry/Greef, Grieg, Prokofiev
On this disc, the exclusive Chandos artist, Michael Collins, plays the clarinet in three works for clarinet and orchestra by Weber, as well as conducting the City of London Sinfonia. The disc also includes Weber’s horn concertino, featuring the soloist Stephen Stirling. The two concertos and the concertino for clarinet and orchestra are considered among the repertoire cornerstones for today’s clarinettists. Weber wrote the works for his personal friend Heinrich Bärmann, the principal clarinettist of the Munich court orchestra, whose own embellishments of the works (changes of articulation, extra grace notes, and even an added accompanied cadenza in the first concerto) have been incorporated in the performances recorded here. Michael Collins suggests that these changes ‘do not make the music any easier to play, but they do make it more thrilling’. Each of the works displays a well-balanced mix of virtuosity, daring, humour, and sheer beauty, and throughout, the role of the orchestra is much more than a mere accompaniment. The woodwind solos, a trio of horns, blaring trumpets, and dashing violins contribute greatly to making these works so captivating. Written in 1806, when Weber was just nineteen years old, the virtuosic Horn Concertino pushed known horn techniques to new limits, requiring the soloist among other feats to produce a ‘four-note chord’, the technique known as multiphonics. The work is today considered a gem in the horn repertoire, and our soloist, Stephen Stirling, is ‘a player gifted with the utmost sensitivity and imagination, which is shown through the beautiful way he shapes musical phrases and the extraordinary range of colours he employs’ – in the words of the late Richard Hickox.
This is the fourth disc in our series dedicated to the orchestral works of Mieczysław Weinberg, performed by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under Thord Svedlund. The cello soloist is Claes Gunnarsson, one of Sweden’s leading cellists, who combines the post as Principal Cello of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra with a brilliant solo career.After the Second World War, along with many other composers, Weinberg was subjected to a series of campaigns against so-called Formalism in the Soviet arts. As a result he turned his attention to concertante works, a medium less prone to censure than symphonies, sonatas, and quartets. The first movement of the Cello Concerto shares the tense, pensive lyricism found in the opening Nocturne of Shostakovich’s almost exactly contemporaneous First Violin Concerto. This later gives way to the rhythms of a habanera and some impassioned passages of Jewish klezmer, almost as if to guarantee a healthy quota of folk-rooted intonations (a required antidote to charges of Formalism), while at the same time allowing for deeper emotions too.In the 1970s, Weinberg’s symphonic production went in two distinct but complementary directions. One of these was at the patriotic end of the Socialist Realist spectrum, while the other was much more abstract. Weinberg’s highly austere five-movement Symphony No. 20 clearly falls into the latter category – challenging, perplexing, and unpredictable. In the second scherzo Weinberg quotes from his opera The Portrait, based on a short story by Gogol. In fact, the finale perfectly captures the mood of the opera’s closing scenes, in which the artist protagonist realises that he has betrayed his calling, and sinks into delirium and eventual death.A previous volume in our Weinberg series (CHSA 5089: Symphony No. 3 and Suite No. 4 from The Golden Key) was nominated for a Grammy this year, in the Best Engineered Album category.
Mathias Reumert performs contemporary percussion works in this programme which combines live footage with visual aspects. Among the works are Iannis Xenakis's 'Psappha', Pierre Jodlowski's 'Time and Money' and Brian Ferneyhough's 'Bone Alphabet'.
The closing disc in London Baroque’s survey of the rise and fall of the trio sonata takes us to 18th-century Germany, and includes works by no less than two Johann Gottliebs: Johann Gottlieb Goldberg – who rose to posthumous fame by being associated with J.S. Bach’s celebrated set of variations – and his namesake Johann Gottlieb Graun, violinist and composer at the court of Frederick the Great. Next to them in the list of contents are also more familiar names, such as Graun’s colleague at the Prussian court, C.P.E. Bach, and the ubiquitous G.Ph. Telemann, here represented with an unusually scored trio for violin, gamba and basso continuo. The programme straddles the divide between late Baroque and Classical music, and several of the included works point clearly at what was to come. One of these is the trio sonata by C.P.E.’s younger brother Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, of whom it is known that he became a great admirer of Mozart after encountering his music during a visit to London in the 1780’s. Looking back over this eight-disc series, which opened with three Fantasias composed before 1620 by Orlando Gibbons, it becomes clear how far London Baroque has travelled, on a journey that has taken in both staples of the repertoire and more or less unknown jewels, by composers still revered today or awaiting rediscovery.
BULL ORGAN & KEYBOARD WORKS
Symphony for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 68 Each of the four creative periods of Britten’s prolific career culminated in a major large-scale work. His full maturity was signalled by Peter Grimes (1945), the second and third creative periods ended with the War Requiem (1961) and Death in Venice (1973), and his brief Indian summer flowered in one of his very finest chamber works, the Third String Quartet. The two works featured on this disc frame his third creative period. After the War Requiem Britten embarked on a period of experimentation and expansion of techniques – a period that saw the composition of some of his most original works: the Cantata Misericordium, the Three Church Parables, the Songs and Proverbs of William Blake and A Poet’s Echo. Two considerable masterpieces belong to these years, Curlew River (the first of the Parables) and the Symphony for Cello and Orchestra The Cello Symphony was completed in May 1963 and was one of a series of works (including the Sonata in C and three suites for unaccompanied cello) that Britten composed for, and dedicated to, Mstislav Rostropovich. It was the first purely instrumental work of such imposing scale that Britten had composed since the early 1940s. The opening D minor Allegro maestoso is also Britten’s most substantial sonata-allegro in terms of scale and content. The contrapuntal G minor scherzo (Presto inquieto) exploits a three-note scalic motif contained within a minor third. Thirds also predominate in the intense, elegiac Adagio, in which the principal theme is constructed entirely from a descending sequence of melodic thirds. The second subject, shared between the cello and solo horn, anticipates the Passacaglia finale, where the trumpet tune (shades of Prokofiev and Janáˇcek) is subjected to six variations and a coda over a ground bass. The most important distinction to be made between Britten’s early concertos and the Cello Symphony is in the relationship between the soloist and the orchestra. Whereas in the bravura Piano Concerto (1938) and even in the more intense Violin Concerto (1939) the soloist assumes the traditional stance, being removed from and in dramatic conflict with the orchestra, in the Cello Symphony the soloist is a virtuosic yet integral part of a coherent symphonic design. The relationship is that which Britten had already explored in the Sonata for Cello and Piano that he had composed for Rostropovich in 1960. An age-old problem in writing for the cello as a solo instrument in the context of a full symphony orchestra is the difficulty of balancing the textures in such a way that the soloist can be heard. But the cello’s most expressive range is that which corresponds with the tessitura of the tenor voice, and Britten certainly knew how to discipline orchestral forces to allow the tenor voice to carry without force. A remarkable feature of the orchestration of the Cello Symphony is the melodic importance of the bass-Iine and the upper woodwind. The middle register of the orchestra is freed for the soloist. In this respect the orchestral palettes of the Cello Symphony and Death in Venice (whose principal protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, is sung by a tenor) have a great deal in common. © John Evans
Chicago-based ensemble Third Coast Percussion perform a collection of pieces composed by John Cage. The works comprise: 'First Construction (in Metal)', 'Second Construction', 'Third Construction', 'Quartet', 'Trio' and 'Living Room Music'.