Los Angeles Philharmonic / Esa-Pekka Salonen / Nora Fischer LOUIS ANDRIESSEN The Only One

 

THE ONLY ONE

Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra ANDERS HILLBORG Eleven Gates

ELEVEN GATES

Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra ANDERS HILLBORG Sirens - Cold Heat - Beast Sampler

SIRENS - COLD HEAT - BEAST SAMPLER

Wilhelmina Smith ESA-PEKKA SALONEN - KAIJA SAARIAHO Works for Solo Cello

WORKS FOR SOLO CELLO

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts STRAVINSKY

                                    ESA-PEKKA SALONEN CONDUCTS STRAVINSKY

Hélène Collerette NORIGINE

                                                                        NORIGINE

Sinfonia Grange au Lac / Esa-Pekka Salonen BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 3 "Eroica" STRAUSS Metamorphosen

                                   SYMPHONY No. 3 "EROICA" - METAMORPHOSEN

Wilhelmina Smith ESA-PEKKA SALONEN - KAIJA SAARIAHO Works for Solo Cello

This solo album by cellist Wilhelmina Smith features works for solo cello by Esa-Pekka Salonen and Kaija Saariaho. Both composers belong to a generation of modernist Finnish composers whose work has gained broad acceptance in musical culture throughout the world. While each composer has a clear individual artistic persona, as a group they are known for pushing sonic boundaries. In writing for strings and, in particular on this recording, the cello, Salonen and Saariaho exploit the outer reaches of the technical possibilities for both the instrument and the performer. Wilhelmina Smith is an artist of intense commitment, poetic insight and dazzling versatility. As a soloist and recitalist as well as a collaborative musician and festival director, Smith has consistently advocated for composers with whom she has developed vital relationships, to have their music creatively positioned within an intellectually engaging context and performed with the utmost passion and technical assurance.

Lise Davidsen / Philharmonia Orchestra / Esa-Pekka Salonen LISE DAVIDSEN

Lyric dramatic soprano Lise Davidsen has attracted serious attention since she was crowned winner of both the Operalia and the Queen Sonja competitions in 2015. Growing up in Stokke, a rural town in south-eastern Norway, Lise has been an artist to watch since she began her musical training.

Lise began studying guitar and singing at age fifteen. At first she favoured the guitar but, with more training, singing took prominence. Lise’s early teachers included Mona Skatteboe and Runa Skramstad, who gave her an excellent foundation in classical music.

Lise achieved her bachelor’s degree in classical singing in 2010 from the Grieg Academy of Music in Bergen, Norway. During this time she worked with many notable singers including Bettina Smith and Hilde Haraldsen Sveen and joined the Norwegian Soloists Choir as a mezzo soprano, under artistic director Grete Pedersen.

While studying for a master’s degree at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Lise’s teacher, Susanna Eken, urged her to develop her voice for the world of opera as a soprano. Lise’s first major engagement as a soprano was in 2011 at the Young Talent Concert in Bergen, singing arias by Strauss and Wagner with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Rory Macdonald.

Yo-Yo Ma / Los Angeles Philharmonic / Esa-Pekka Salonen SALONEN Cello Concerto

In his program notes for the Cello Concerto Salonen writes, “I have never — not even during the quite dogmatic and rigid modernist days of my youth — felt that the very idea of writing a solo concerto would in itself be burdened with some kind of dusty, bourgeois tradition. A concerto is simply an orchestral work where one or several instruments have a more prominent role than the others.”

The Cello Concerto, however, does follow the traditional three-movement layout. But within the piece, Salonen develops remarkably diverse and contrasting landscapes of orchestral coloration, rhythmic intensity, and instrumental by-play.

The opening movement emerges, like the dawn, with shadows in the low strings accented by pure pitched glimmers from the celesta and glockenspiel. When the cello makes its entrance, establishing itself as a middle voice, the effect is like a gracefully evolving aria, evoking the brooding atmosphere of Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande. 

“I like the concept of a simple thought emerging out of a complex landscape,” Salonen writes. That is certainly the way the opening movement develops: As the cello lines gain strength, accentuated by a trio of flutes, the scene takes on more and more vibrant coloration. Debussy came to mind, again, but now in the richly textured world of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.

The second section begins with an orchestral wake-up call accented by the first full statement from the brass. But, like a sudden storm passing, the thunder gives way to an elegiac, deeply reflective statement from the cello, its arching lines hovering over the denser orchestral fabric.

Then, in what comes as a genuine surprise, Salonen uses a loop effect, in which a computer records Yo-Yo Ma’s performance then repeats the cello’s most ethereal passage allowing it to hang suspended, like the glitter of the Northern Lights.

A long sonorous solo section for the cello begins the final section. But somber reflection quickly gives way to an impressive, technical display, brilliantly executed by Yo-Yo Ma, with accentuating rhythmic punctuations coming from conga drums and bongos.  

“An acrobatic solo episode,” Salonen writes, “leads to a fast tutti section where I imagined the orchestra as some kind of gigantic lung.”

I can honestly say the cumulative giant lung of the audience held its breath until the final notes faded away. Then the ovation began, as well as a series of hugs and genuine beaming smiles between Salonen and Yo-Yo Ma.

Tillmann Höfs / Akiko Nikami AIR

For more than thirty years there had not been an individual prizewinner in the discipline of horn at the German Music Competition, that is, until Tillmann Höfs came from Hamburg in 2017. He won the hearts of the audience and literally blew the jury against the wall. His qualities, technical superiority, and great musical genius also distinguish his GENUIN debut CD, which was produced in the Primavera series in cooperation with the German Music Council. Höfs shows the entire breadth of his youthful, slim yet festive horn playing with works by Richard Strauss, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Paul Hindemith and Jörg Widmann. Outstanding repertoire and interpretation!

Esa-Pekka Salonen / Finnish National Opera STRAVINSKY Perséphone

Stravinsky’s Perséphone (1934) is a dynamic musical-theatrical narration of the myth of Persephone’s abduction to the underworld and return to earth. The transparent, sober but evocative music epitomizes Stravinsky’s sensuous take on Neoclassicism, and the piece showcases Stravinsky’s eclectic, original and highly personal approach to music and musical drama through a playful mixture of several genres – melodrama, song, chorus, dance and pantomime. Ultimately, Perséphone offers Stravinsky’s second ode to spring, albeit without the brutal excesses of Le Sacre.

This album was recorded live during the Helsinki Festival 2017 with a star cast featuring English tenor Andrew Staples and French actress Pauline Cheviller. They join forces with the Finnish National Opera’s chorus, children’s chorus, and orchestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, in a breathtaking performance that emphasizes the piece’s transformative power. (PENTATONE)

ARVO PÄRT Symphony No. 4

Nobody, I think, would have predicted a Symphony from Arvo Pärt nearly 40 years after his last one. But since No 3 he has developed a vocabulary of a singular intensity and cohesion, which is something he was grasping for, and not quite finding, while still in his native Estonia in 1971. That vocabulary has been established by means of an extended series of choral works, linked ever more clearly with his Orthodox faith but employing an ever-expanding range of musical and linguistic colour. That confidence – evinced most clearly, perhaps, and most recently in the majestic Kanon Pokajanen, fragments of which complement the new Symphony – has transferred itself in no uncertain terms to his instrumental work.

There has probably never been a symphony like this, though one can in some way imagine Bruckner approving of it, and it has a precedent in La Sindone from 2006. Inspired by the Canon to the Guardian Angel (an Orthodox devotional text), it harks back to a Bachian pre-tintinnabuli history, but with the slow lushness characteristic of the composer’s recent work. I find it difficult to comment on the work structurally, so much of a continuous stream is it, but it is important precisely to emphasise the astonishing feeling for that very continuity that the LAPO under Salonen clearly has. The sheer beauty of the sound – and the silence – also does not escape them (I wonder if there is any orchestra on the planet that can make pizzicatos sound as sensuous as this?), but that is also part of the work’s never-ending line. Repeated listening brings great rewards: this is a true symphony for the 21st century. (Ivan Moody / Gramophone)

Alice Sara Ott WONDERLAND

On her new album Alice Sara Ott takes us into the world of mountain trolls and elves, hills and fjords through a selection of Grieg’s works – his Lyric Pieces, as well as through selected piano versions of pieces from the Peer Gynt Suites, and one of the most famous works of piano literature: Grieg’s piano concerto in A minor, for which she teams up with one of the top orchestras, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, under star conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen at a live recording. Alice has always been fascinated by the fantasy world Grieg has created and the fairy tale like characters that lend the title to Grieg’s musical miniatures: “This album represents my own very personal journey through Grieg’s ‘wonderland’. I should like to take this opportunity to invite you to leave behind your everyday lives for a moment and enter Edvard Grieg’s magical and imaginary world with me. Without our really noticing it, we are taken on a journey into a daydream, a ‘wonderland’ from which we return only reluctantly to our own everyday reality.” (Deutsche Grammophon)

Hilary Hahn / Esa-Pekka Salonen / Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra SCHOENBERG - SIBELIUS Violin Concertos

Some years ago RCA's ace producer Jack Pfeiffer told me how, every now and again, Jascha Heifetz would open the score of Schoenberg's Concerto only to close it again with a perplexed shrug. Years earlier Schoenberg had personally sent Heifetz the score and the reaction was much the same. Heifetz just didn't get it, but he did at least try. What I wonder would he have made of this magnificent recording by Hilary Hahn? When the last chord sounds its full stop, the sense of satisfied finality is exhilarating. Hahn has the full of measure of the piece, its gawky lyricism, ethereal filigree and cripplingly difficult cadenzas (awkward chords galore), all rendered seemingly effortless. Wisps of old-world Vienna echo from the Andante, whereas in a performance of this calibre the finale's complex acrobatics suddenly have musical meaning. Of course having a first-rate orchestra and conductor helps: Esa-Pekka Salonen's direction is in the very best sense of the term “slick”, a perfect example of musical badinage, alert, crystal-clear and superbly recorded. Which makes the CD mandatory listening both for lovers of the work who crave an appreciative performance and for doubters who still await conversion.

The Sibelius performance is fascinating but less wholly convincing although as with the Schoenberg Hahn weaves a seductive, evenly deployed tone and her technique is impeccable. But while in the Schoenberg you sense a palpable level of emotional engagement Hahn's approach to Sibelius is cool, sphinx-like one might say, the first movement's many solo passages broadly drawn but somehow remote. No violinist currently performing makes a lovelier sound and although time and again I would note some illuminating phrase (not to mention Salonen's immaculately groomed accompaniment) the sum effect is of a strangely cold beauty. But the Schoenberg performance is, as I say, magnificent. (Rob Cowan / Gramophone)

Esa-Pekka Salonen / Los Angeles Philharmonic LUTOSLAWSKI The Symphonies

This complete set of Witold Lutoslawski's symphonies is a mixture of old and new. The second, third, and fourth symphonies are reissues of recordings made in the 1980s and 1990s during Esa-Pekka Salonen's tenure with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; all were acclaimed readings, and the 1985 version of the sizzlingly orchestrated Symphony No. 3, by now Lutoslawski's most commonly programmed and recorded work, has held up well against newer recordings. What's new is the Symphony No. 1, recorded in the new Walt Disney Hall to round out the set in commemoration of the composer's 100th birthday. (The entire recording of the symphony is new, although the bizarre numbering of the tracks makes this difficult to figure out.) This work is not often played. Lutoslawski wrote it in occupied Warsaw and managed to physically carry the score out of the city during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and hide with it in an attic for eight months. Later he expressed a negative attitude toward the piece, but it's well worth hearing. It might be described as overgrown neo-classicism, with short sonata-form movements and strong traces of Prokofiev and Albert Roussel, but with harmonic density, Lutoslawski's complex orchestration, and his characteristic bristly counterpoint breaking out everywhere. Salonen still ranks as Lutoslawski's foremost champion, and these four symphonies, evenly distributed over 50 years of the composer's career, form an arresting portrait of the figure in whose work modernism and the traditional symphonic medium seem most closely reconciled. If there's a complaint here, it's that the remastering, although quite good, cannot compensate for the sonic differences between Walt Disney Hall and the earlier recordings in a studio and in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The set makes you want to hear all four symphonies conducted by Salonen in the new hall, which seems tailor-made for Lutoslawski. (James Manheim)

Leila Josefowicz ESA-PEKKA SALONEN Violin Concerto

The initial impulse for writing a concerto for violin was a very inspiring and enjoyable collaboration with Leila Josefowicz on a number of contemporary works in Los Angeles and Chicago. She plays new music with the same kind of dedication and panache others reserve for Brahms, Beethoven and the rest of the gang.

My long and very happy tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic was coming to an end. After 17 years I had decided it was time to move on and try to devote more time for composing. It felt like a seismic shift in my life, and during the composing process of “Violin Concerto” I felt that I was somehow trying to sum up everything I had learned and experienced up to that point in my life as a musician. This sense of having reached a watershed was heightened by the fact that I turned 50, the kind of number that brutally wipes out any hallucinations of still being young.

There is a strong internal, private narrative in my concerto, and it is not a coincidence that the last movement is called "Adieu.” For myself, the strongest symbol of what I was going through is the very last chord of the piece; a new harmonic idea never heard before in the concerto. I saw it as a door to the next part of my life of which I didn't know so much yet, a departure with all the thrills and fears of the unknown. (Esa-Pekka Salonen)

Esa-Pekka Salonen / Barbara Hannigan / Anssi Karttunen / Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France DUTILLEUX Correspondances

The initial idea of the work consisted in making a choice of some letters from various authors and susceptible of engendering different forms of lyrical expression conveyed by the soprano voice and the large symphonic orchestra.

Short interludes are sometimes used as bindings between these letters, the first of them is preceded by a poem by the Indian author Prithwindra Mukherjee, "Cosmic dance", poem which may itself appear as a kind of address (ode), of message to Shiva…

The following episode is based upon the main passages of a letter from Soljenitsyne to Mstislav and Galina Rostropovitch (1984, February 9th), evoking his trials, the one in the camps, ten years before, and overcame thanks to the heroic support of his friends Slava and Galina, and to his own faith as well.

It is from the letters of Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo that excerpts such as: "I have a great need of religion, so I go out at night to paint the stars…" are drawn out. This episode is preceded by the evocation of a very short poem by Rainer Maria Rilke named Gong.

So different are these texts, in their form and in their content, in common they reflect an equal inclination toward the mystical thinking by their authors. Together with the idea of the Cosmos, this is what seemed a unifying element to the composer.

The work's general title, "Correspondances", beyond the different meanings which could be given to this word, refers to Baudelaire's famous poem, "Correspondances" and to the synaesthesias he himself evoked. On another hand, the "baudelairian" idea that in our world, the divine finds inevitably its image in a devilish world, catches up Van Gogh's thought when, from Arles, he wrote to his brother that "next to the sun (the good Lord), unfortunately there is the Devil Mistral".

Each of these episodes is object of a slightly peculiar orchestration privileging such or such family of instruments. So, the evocated images, colours in Vincent Van Gogh's letter will mainly find their echo in the wood timbres and in the brass section as well. Soljenitsyne's letter to Slava and Galina will be backed in a dominative way by the strings, especially by the celli, often in a celli quartet. As for "Danse Cosmique", it's the whole orchestra which will surround the singer. On the contrary, the piece III Gong, sort of interlude hardly includes half of the large orchestra.

Finally, a remark: at the very end of Soljenitsyne's letter, as a watermark, as in a mist is a quotation from "Boris Goudounov" when is heard the Holy Fool (Innocent or Simpleton)'s grief about the misfortunes of the Russia.

In the same way, in the centre of the pages devoted to Van Gogh's letter, the composer used, as a quotation, the main motive of his own score "Timbres, Espace, Mouvement ou la Nuit étoilée " written in 1978 under the influence of the famous painting "The starry Night". (Henri Dutilleux)

Hélène Grimaud / Esa-Pekka Salonen CREDO

Beethoven: Choral Fantasy op. 80
The piano's crashing opening chords herald what seems for the first three minutes like a solo work. Then comes a tentative dialogue with the lower strings, after which - equally tentatively - the woodwind enter. Human voices arrive almost as an afterthought. This was a fantasy indeed, written at such speed that the musicians got their parts with the ink wet. As the piano reworks the simple musical ideas on which the whole edifice is based, we get a strong whiff of what Beethoven's celebrated improvisations must have been like. In 1808 he'd earned little, and his friends encouraged him to put on a four-hour concert of his own works in order to refill his coffers. But this late addition was no mere space-filler: bringing order out of chaos, moving from darkness to light, and prefiguring the final theme of his Ninth Symphony, it reflects Beethoven's genius at full tilt. 

Beethoven: Sonata in D minor, op. 31 no. 2 "The Tempest"
Beethoven himself didn't give this work its name - according to his early biographer Schindler, the composer declared that the work could be understood by reading Shakespeare's play - but from the moment the first theme breaks free from the cavernous opening chord, it certainly is tempestuous. That chord seems to pose a question, to which - after a long journey through darkly dramatic landscapes - the last notes come like an answer. This sonata was one of three composed in the village of Heiligenstadt in 1802, at a time when Beethoven was growing deaf, and in near-suicidal despair. Here he was at his most heroic: on the one hand, his "Heiligenstadt Testament" confided his woes to posterity (while concealing them from his contemporaries); on the other, he was creating masterpieces of coiled energy like this. 

John Corigliano: Fantasia on an Ostinato
As one of the American composers finding a way forward without abjuring tonality, Corigliano is blazing a fascinating trail. In this work from 1985 his aim has been "to combine the attractive aspects of minimalism with a convincing structure and emotional expression". The foundation is the famous theme of the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, with Corigliano exploiting the repeated rhythmic motive as well as the harmonic pattern. (Michael Church)

Music is about emotional communication. Give it a try, and don't think you have taken the wrong road when perhaps you just have not gone far enough. After all, what is to come does not need to be discovered so much as invented. (Hélène Grimaud)

Dawn Upshaw - Esa-Pekka Salonen KAIJA SAARIAHO La Passion de Simone

Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of a group of Finnish composers and performers who are now, in mid-career, making a worldwide impact. She studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, where she has lived since 1982. Her studies and research at IRCAM have had a major influence on her music and her characteristically luxuriant and mysterious textures are often created by combining live music and electronics. Although much of her catalogue comprises chamber works, from the mid-nineties she has turned increasingly to larger forces and broader structures, such as the operas L’Amour de loin and Adriana Mater and the oratorio La Passion de Simone.

I have been reading Simone Weil’s writings since my youth. The Finnish translation of her book Gravity and Grace was one of the few things I packed into my suitcase when I travelled to Germany in 1981 to continue my studies in composition. Later, I began to read her writings in the original French and also learned more about her life.

The combination of Weil’s severe asceticism and her passionate quest for truth has appealed to me ever since I first read her thoughts. La passion de Simone was specifically the result of collaboration with Amin Maalouf and Peter Sellars; together we chose the different parts of Weil’s work and life for the libretto before I began composing. Whereas I have always been fascinated by Simone’s striving for abstract (mathematical) and spiritual-intellectual goals, Peter is interested in her social awareness and political activities. Amin brought out the gaping discrepancy between her philosophy and her life, showing the fate of the frail human being amongst great ideas. In addition to Simone Weil’s life and ideas, many general questions of human existence are presented in Amin’s text.

La Passion consists of 15 stations. The idea for the form of the text and the entire work came from the Passion play tradition. This outer form is, however, the only similarity to the traditional oratorio, at least in my opinion. The 15 movements are different in character and structure, and they shed light on different moments in Simone Weil’s life and interpret some of her ideas. The soprano has the crucial role of the narrator. Weil’s own texts are presented in the electronics surrounding the audience. The choir and orchestra create the world in which live both the soprano part and the spoken words in the electronics part.

La Passion de Simone is dedicated to my children Alex and Aliisa.
(Kaija Saariaho)