Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks / Daniel Harding CARL ORFF Carmina Burana

CARMINA BURANA

 

OLGA NEUWIRTH ...miramondo multiplo... - Remnants of Songs ... An Amphigony - Masaot / Clocks without Hands

OLGA NEUWIRTH

Isabelle Faust / Swedish Symphony Orchestra / Daniel Harding ARNOLD SCHOENBERG Violin Concerto - Verklärte Nacht

                                       VIOLIN CONCERTO - VERKLÄRTE NACHT

Christian Tetzlaff / Daniel Harding / Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra JÖRG WIDMANN Violin Concerto - Insel der Sirenen - Antiphon

For this 2013 release from Ondine, violinist Christian Tetzlaff, conductor Daniel Harding, and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra present three exciting works by Jörg Widmann, a German composer who possesses an impressive talent for orchestration. The Violin Concerto is the most imposing piece on the program, at nearly a half hour in duration and of an exceptionally wide range of techniques and sonorities, and it serves as a powerfully expressive vehicle for Tetzlaff. Long lines predominate, and the tonal inflections of the chromatic writing make it quite accessible to listeners who don't normally listen to contemporary works. Antiphon is a vivid display of the orchestra's sections in call and response, and the interplay of these groups is transparent to the attentive listener and fascinating on repeated listening. The closing work, Insel der Sirenen (Island of the Sirens), was inspired by Homer's Odyssey, and Tetzlaff's violin is pitted against 19 strings, often grouped in cluster formations, in an extraordinary competition of sounds. Because Widmann's music is uncompromising and decidedly adventurous, audiences may find it a bit challenging, though the coherence of his compositions and the freshness of his orchestral colors go a long way toward making this music appealing. (Blair Sanderson)

Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra / Daniel Harding GUSTAV MAHLER Symphonie Nr. 5

For the second installment in his Mahler cycle for harmonia mundi, Daniel Harding revisits a symphony which clearly represents a turning point in the composer's output. The years following Mahler's early period (marked by Des Knaben Wunderhorn) saw the production of works of ever greater complexity and sardonicism, which show no trace of naïveté. Within a framework of utmost intricacy, the themes, musical gestures, and building blocks (for instance, the interval of a minor third which opens the Fifth Symphony's famous Adagietto) trace a journey from darkness to light which culminates in the striking modernity of the finale.

Antoine Tamestit / Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks / Daniel Harding WIDMANN Viola Concerto

Antoine Tamestit's recording of Jörg Widmann Viola Concerto is released on Harmonia Mundi on 23 February 2018. Tamestit gave the world premiere of the concerto in 2015 with the Orchestre de Paris and Paavo Järvi. “One of the most gifted French musicians of the era,” wrote Le Figaro, “the work is made to measure for Tamestit, his style of playing, his tone, his personality.” The work was co-commissioned by the Swedish Radio Symphony and Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks with conductor Daniel Harding, who play on the recording. 
As well as Widmann’s Viola Concerto, the disc features chamber works performed by Tamestit and Bruno Philippe, Marc Bouchkov and the Signum Quartet. 
The theatrical concerto sees the soloist exploring a range of positions on the stage. Initially seated behind the harp players the soloist moves towards the centre of the orchestra and eventually ‘front and centre’ assuming the traditional position for the soloist. 
Tamestit has already performed the concerto widely, and it has proved popular with audiences at subsequent performances with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra / Daniel Harding GUSTAV MAHLER Symphonie Nr. 9

As the last completed symphony that Mahler wrote, the Ninth has often been heard by audiences as the composer’s swan song: a nostalgic, moving farewell from a composer conscious of his own mortality. This interpretation is of course easily justifiable, as etched into the musical fabric of the symphony are references to the tragedies that befell the composer in the years before his death. Furthermore, it is wholly plausible that for a man as melodramatic as Mahler, the idea of a symphony that centres around themes of loss and finality would surely have been an appealing prospect.

Nonetheless, although the symphony certainly has its fair share of poignant and contemplative moments, it is much more than just a musical epitaph. Indeed, one should bear in mind that when the Ninth was written, Mahler was already preparing for various conducting commitments in the USA, and began work on the Tenth soon after the Ninth was completed. This was not a composer on the cusp of death.

Composed over two summers at the composer’s Alpine retreat in Toblach (now Dobbiaco) between 1908 and 1909, the Ninth was written in the wake of several life-changing events for Mahler. In 1907, his eldest daughter Maria Anna died from scarlet fever at only 4 years old, and soon after Mahler was diagnosed with the heart condition which would ultimately kill him come 1911. Furthermore, in the same year Mahler resigned from his position as the director of the Vienna Court Opera, a role he had cherished during his tenure despite mounting criticism. For a composer who so consistently composed the world around him into his symphonies, it is no surprise that references to these events found their way into the Ninth, and arguably imbue the drama of the first and last movements in particular with an additional degree of poignancy. The symphony opens tentatively, with a stuttering rhythmic motif which might easily be heard as a depiction of the composer’s failing heart, and, four movements later, closes with a ‘dying away’ (ersterbend) chord of Db major which teeters on the edge between sound and silence, love and loss, life and death. The poetic narrative between these two events encompasses many of the tropes of Mahler’s late style, as well as an array of subtle references to his life and world in these troubled years. (Harmonia Mundi)

Matthias Goerne / Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra / Daniel Harding THE WAGNER PROJECT

When does an album become a project? Perhaps when it is spread over two CDs, as Matthias Goerne and Daniel Harding’s collaboration is, or when it is devoted to a sole composer, in this case Wagner, whose work you cannot really dip into track by track but have to fall into head first.

Collections of Wagnerian extracts used to be called ‘bleeding chunks’ and it isn’t just Goerne’s wounded Amfortas from Parsifal who is dripping here. There isn’t a wholly satisfactory way to explore the characters of Wotan, Sachs, Amfortas et al with corresponding orchestral interludes – just as you’re building up the existential agony, it’s time for another opera – but this selection is particularly disjointed and the labels given to the album’s two parts, ‘Of Gods and Men’ and ‘Redemption’, are so vague as to be more or less irrelevant.

And the jump-cuts really chafe. The Tristan Prelude and Liebestod are the strange sandwich wrapping to King Mark’s monologue. The Valhalla monologue from Rheingold ends before Wotan can actually join his family on the Rainbow Bridge, and there’s no coda to Wolfram’s Evening Star from Tannhäuser, just a cliff-edge. As for sending us out on a high, Goerne’s final contribution is Amfortas’s Act 3 lament over the corpse of his father Titurel. Redemption is left to the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra for the Good Friday Music which marks Project Wagner’s finale.

Still, Goerne does misery masterfully. The brief taster from Parsifal makes one long for a complete Amfortas, so completely does Goerne soak up the character’s misery. His Dutchman, too, queasy with self-loathing, is a frightening portrait of a broken mind. Mark’s monologue, though it lies low for an essentially baritonal voice, is lacking in kingly fury but high on wounded melancholy, with Goerne’s partner in woe the SRSO’s bass clarinettist, lowing alongside.

The flip side to Goerne’s magisterial introspection is that sometimes the characters deserve bigger personalities. His lyrical phrasing and Lieder-like unspooling of Hans Sachs’s ‘Was duftet doch der Flieder’ from Die Meistersinger is impeccable but missing is Sachs’s geniality and warmth. As Goerne’s Wotan kisses Brünnhilde to sleep, the moment is so intimate that (depending on your speakers) you might even feel a peck on the cheek. Yet this isn’t a god to terrify or awe you.

Once heard, however, Goerne’s Wagner is hard to shift from your mind: he has something new to bring to this repertory and his next steps with it onstage should be fascinating if he can find the right partners. Here, Harding offers him space and breadth and draws clean, bright textures from his players. In orchestral passages recorded by all the greats, that isn’t always enough: the strings lack some depth and colour, and tempos, particularly in the extracts from Parsifal, tend to the slack. Orchestra and conductor are at their most imaginative in a shimmering, almost playful Liebestod. (Neil Fisher / Gramophone)

Paul Lewis / Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra / Daniel Harding JOHANNES BRAHMS Piano Concerto No. 1 - Ballades Op. 10

Brahms planned his First Piano Concerto as a sonata for two pianos, but the music’s stormy grandeur soon needed bigger forces. He dreamed of composing a symphony, but the Beethoven’s shadow loomed too large, so the concerto plays out a massive wrangle: an intense, self-questioning young artist meets the corpulent orchestral sound of Brahms’s future symphonies. Some pianists go one way or the other in interpretation; Paul Lewis masterfully spans both. His account has clarity, muscle and steely pride, but also intimacy, vulnerability and volatility: the combination is magnetic. Conductor Daniel Harding goes for full-out symphonic bulk from the start and his Swedish orchestra sounds hearty and brooding – fuzzier-edged than Lewis’s metallic attack, but generally the partnership works. As a bonus, Lewis plays Brahms’s four Ballades Op 10; quiet, urgent and full of singing lines. (Kate Molleson / The Guardian)

Dorothea Röschmann / Daniel Harding / Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra MOZART Arias

20 years after her critically acclaimed début at the Salzburg Festival as Susanna In Mozart’s Le Nozze Di Figaro, Dorothea Röschmann releases her first solo Mozart album, including famous arias from Don Giovanni and Le Nozze Di Figaro. Dorothea Röschmann is in the prime of her voice and referred to "as one of the leading Mozart sopranos today“ (Der Tagesspiegel). The CD track list not only reflects her at her glorious best, but is also a dream come true for Dorothea: “Mozart is the reason I wanted to do opera,” she says. “To be able to embody Mozart figures on stage, that was my dream. His characters are real human beings, with sadness and joy and wit. It’s the whole picture that you get. It sounds strange, but signing Mozart really is a dream come true.” (Dorothea Röschmann in interview with the Guardian). The album is recorded with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by their music director Daniel Harding. (Presto Classical)

Isabelle Faust / Daniel Harding BRAHMS Violin Concerto - String Sextet No. 2

The booklet of Isabelle Faust’s new recording includes an essay written by her regarding the performing editions used and the significance of the violinist Joseph Joachim in the string works of Johannes Brahms, as seen from a performer’s point of view. Since Brahms did not belong to a generation of composers who mastered several different instruments – as had Bach or Mozart – and composed from the perspective of a pianist, his exchange of ideas with Joachim, which in the case of the Violin Concerto lasted almost a year, was of decisive importance for the final form of the piece, one of the most difficult in the repertoire. Isabelle uses the rarely played cadenza by Ferruccio Busoni, which dates from 1913. Brahms got to know Busoni as a child prodigy and recommended the young pianist in a number of artistic circles: ‘What Schumann did for me, I will do for Busoni.’ The spirit of Joseph Joachim also hovers over the second work on this recording, for the composer regarded the violinist as his most important adviser in the realm of chamber music too. In the case of his Sextet, however, the most perceptible influence is that of the doomed love affair between the composer and the soprano Agathe von Siebold. That Brahms was unable to overcome their separation with a light heart is clear from the monument in sound to his lost romance in the lyrical second theme of the first movement. ‘A-GA- D/H-E’1 proclaims the sequence of notes making up the motif (bars 162 ff). Isabelle generously credits Christopher Hogwood, Robert Pascall, Stefan Weymar and Douglas Woodfull-Harris for their active support in all questions relating to the manuscript and the first edition of Op.36 and for generously making available a prepublication copy of the new Bärenreiter edition. Gramophone Magazine gave Isabelle Faust its Young Artist of the Year Award for her first recording of sonatas by Béla Bartók, in 1997 [now reissued on hm gold with volume 2].

The year 2010 marked a new stage in her recording career: Diapason voted her CD of Bach Partitas and Sonatas a Diapason d’Or of the Year, while her complete set of the Beethoven Sonatas with Alexander Melnikov, received the Gramophone Award for Best Chamber Recording. Composed of around 40 musicians from 20 different nations, and independent of external sponsorship, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1997 by the players themselves and Claudio Abbado. In 1998, at the age of 22, Daniel Harding became Principal Guest Conductor; in 2003 he was named Music Director and he has served as Principal Conductor since 2008, conducting around a quarter of the orchestra’s projects each season. He is also Music Director of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the LSO and Music Partner of the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra. (Presto Classical)

“a poetic player with an irresistibly warm sound, a tightly controlled vibrato and an athletic technique." BBC Music Magazine

Maria João Pires / Daniel Harding / Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra BEETHOVEN Piano Concertos 3 & 4

The role of interpreter is a delicate one: he, or she, is faced with the score as the sole point of contact with the composer. It is the interpreter’s job to bring a work to life, across distancesin time and space, by making a connection between a personality – often an exceptional one – and ordinary mortals. To achieve this he has to put mind and body at the service of a considerable task: the transmission of art. In music, the word ‘interpretation’ is prone to a number of misconceptions, frequently with unfortunate consequences. Thus we often see two positions set against each other: either the performer must ‘project himself’ in order to give life to the score (to ‘show personality’), at the risk of betraying the spirit of the work; or, on the contrary, he must show the score the utmost respect, so trying to suppress his own personality to give a reading of the work which may well be perfect – but lifeless.

Logically speaking, one might think that the correct approach would be halfway between these two extremes, but such logic would be crude compared to the subtlety of the question. Indeed, these two approaches both fall prey to the same fallacy, through the disproportionate importance they attach to personality. Whether through excess or shortage of personality, this concept gets in the way of music’s essential power to bring out a primal simplicity, so often forgotten, which is present deep inside each one of us, waiting to respond when summoned. Music’s capacity to suggest a stretch of time and yet still exist in the moment amounts to the capacity to reshape every aspect of our sensibility anew. So the act of ‘interpreting’ ceases to be one of simple personal will, to become that civilized conversation where composer and performer lend each other their ears, so to speak, across centuries and borders, with the aim of achieving an eminently simple miracle: for the work to open up, yielding to the source of all music. (Maria João Pires)

Yundi Li / Berliner Philharmonker / Daniel Harding BEETHOVEN Emperor - SCHUMANN Fantasy

Young Chinese pianist Li Yundi announced in London on Saturday that his new album would be released on Feb. 25, the day of his first concert of a European tour.

The new album, Emperor I Fantasy, includes Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 (Emperor) and Schumann's Fantasie in C. It is his second recording with conductor Daniel Harding and the Berlin Philharmonic.

Li will play these works as well as traditional Chinese pieces on a European tour that will take in 25 cities from February to April, including St Petersburg, Warsaw and Prague. The first concert will be hold at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Feb. 25.

"The Emperor Concerto is one of my favorite compositions, which not only expresses Beethoven's uniqueness and confidence but is also filled with romanticism," said the pianist.

Known as the "prince of piano" in China, Li said the core of his new album is to tell people that "everybody has an emperor inside themselves. To become one, people have to face challenges, make progress and break through barriers. One day, they will become their own emperor."

He added, "Playing the Beethoven concerto is a breakthrough for me. I hope I can achieve more and perfect my musical skills to become my own emperor. I hope I can bring more beautiful music to people in the future."

The young pianist rose to prominence after he took first place at the 14th International Chopin Competition in 2000 at the age of 18, making him both the youngest pianist and the first from China to win. (Xinhua and Staff Reporter / 2014-02-11)

Isabelle Faust /Daniel Harding / Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra BÉLA BARTÓK Violin Concertos Nos. 1 & 2

Bartók’s music seems to be less popular than it was a few decades ago; at least it has been a while since major new recordings of these iconic works have seen a new release. That wait has been worth it. Bartók’s First violin concerto never will enjoy the popularity of the second, not just because it sat unperformed until after his death, but because its thematic material suffers from what might charitably be called “chromatic drift”. In other words, it can sound pretty ugly, at least until you get to know it well. Happily, Isabelle Faust really knows her Bartók, as her very sympathetic and intelligent booklet notes demonstrate. She plays the dreamy opening movement with a pure tone and sure sense of direction, while the second movement exudes just the right kind of purposeful energy, even in the music’s most gnarly passages. The epic Second concerto is even better. This is surely one of the great recordings of the piece. The long first movement flies by without a single dead spot, despite (or because of) huge contrasts in tempo between sections. Bartók’s suggested timing for this movement—12 minutes—never has been followed slavishly, and Faust’s 15 minutes exactly match the reference recording of Zehetmair/Fischer, as do the remaining movements for that matter. Perhaps the most telling evidence of Faust’s mastery occurs around measure 304, the passage in quarter-tones that leads into the big cadenza. Her purity of intonation makes sense of a moment that often sounds queasily out of tune, while the cadenza itself emerges naturally from what has come before, and leads inevitably to the orchestra’s return. The central slow movement is again impressively cogent, its scherzando section deftly integrated, and the finale is really exciting. Faust and conductor Daniel Harding opt for the work’s original (and superior) ending, without the solo violin in the final bars, giving Harding and the excellent Swedish Radio Symphony a moment to shine. Apropos Harding, I have to say that this strikes me as some of his best work on disc: precise, attentive to matters of color and texture, considerate of his soloist but also nicely detailed. He’s very much an equal partner in these proceedings, and just as fine a one. Harmonia Mundi provides ideally balanced sonics that flatter Faust’s sweet tone without sticking a microphone inside the instrument. This is a wonderful recording in every respect. (David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com)

Patricia Petibon AMOUREUSES Mozart / Haydn / Gluck

Barbarina and Susanna, Armida and Zaide, Giunia and Iphigénie: these complex portraits of several different kinds of women provide the theme for French soprano Patricia Petibon’s debut recital for Deutsche Grammophon. Above all, however, they are portraits of women in love. The range of emotions and situations could hardly be greater, extending from the first innocent thrill of love to despair and feminine guile to the end of love, attended by anger and even hatred. “It’s a musical and vocal approach”, she explains, “but also a theatrical and dramaturgical one. Amoureuses depicts various characters who may in fact represent no more than facets of a single figure. On the one hand, we have Barbarina in Le nozze di Figaro, a character of great purity who could even be described as angelic, while on the other hand we have the Queen of Night in Die Zauberflöte, a mature woman who once knew love but who has now lost her way and who loves only herself and power.” It goes without saying that such contrasts, emotions and passions demand a response that goes far beyond mere beautiful singing. Patricia Petibon uses vocal colours and shadings, risking extremes of expression and emotion and exploiting her voice’s fullest potential in order to reveal the countless facets of these roles. “If the text demands a certain sharpness, harshness or roughness, then vocally, too, I choose to go down this particular path. What I do not want is aesthetic homogeneity and superficial beauty”, she describes her approach to the music. She owes this search for the artistic truth to two great conductors above all. “I come from two different schools: those of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and William Christie; both have strongly influenced me and have taught me to interpret music in my own, highly distinctive way and to be true to myself and to others.” (Excerpts from the booklet text accompanying the album)