Stockholm Syndrome Ensemble VOICES OF ANGELS

VOICES OF ANGELS

Elsbeth Moser / Boris Pergamenschikow / Münchener Kammerorchester / Christoph Poppen SOFIA GUBAIDULINA

"Seven Words" addresses that most difficult of subjects, Christ's suffering and death on the Cross. Not many composers have felt equal to the challenge although Haydn's Seven Words of "Our Saviour on the Cross" is one of the enduring works to approach this theme.

Hermann Conen in the CD booklet: "Sofia Gubaidulina has accepted the challenge of attempting to capture the great mystery in sound. Although the seven movements are, at least initially, clearly separated by string passages, there is no parallelism of word and sound in the traditional sense. It is more a matter of the instruments 'uttering' what cannot be sung or said; they 'speak' with 'instrumental, metaphorical gestures' (Gubaidulina).The cross symbolism palpable throughout the 'Seven Words' begins on the instrumental level: the cello, coming from the art music of 'high culture', stands for what is 'lofty'; the bayan, a button accordion from the sphere of Russian folk music. Although the sound production is totally different (bowed strings, metal reeds vibrated by air), the two instruments reveal astonishingly similar sonorities, sometimes to the point of indistinguishability...The music of the string orchestra is devised as a contrast to the harsh chromaticism of the cello/bayan and remains clearly separated during the first two movements. The presto and pianissimo string passages soaring from a note played in unison open up a tonal sphere that rises and falls like the sweep of wings ... From the very first sound a ritualised musical meditation begins, its individual core elements unfolding almost imperceptibly at first and then growing inexorably towards one another."

Elsbeth Moser, who plays the bayan on this recording, is one of Gubaidulina's closest musical associates and dedicatee of several works (including the landmark "Silenzio") and understands the composer's intentions. Her performance of "De Profundis" (composed 1978) is astonishing. Writing of a recent concert, critic Richard Whitehouse noted that the bayan, "in the hands of Elsbeth Moser on the solo 'De Profundis', effortlessly combined the provocation of a new sound resource with the timelessness of a traditional instrument."

The "Ten Preludes" (1974, revised 1999) for cello began life as a set of teaching pieces, with each of the Preludes addressing a different technical consideration, but there is space in these fascinating pieces also for the interpreter to make his own mark. Gubaidulina: "Particularly the last prelude in the cycle gives performers an opportunity to make the work their own . There, improvisatory passages, which every player can interpret in a different way, are interposed in the composed score. I planned this deliberately, to illustrate how an instrumentalist's creative imagination alters musical content."

Boris Pergamenshikov gives his creative imagination free rein here. The Leningrad born cellist has been an important contributor to international concert activity since emigrating to the West in 1977. His varied soloist or chamber music experience has included work with Claudio Abbado, the Amadeus and Alban Berg Quartets, Gidon Kremer, Witold Lutoslawski, Yehudi Menuhin, Krzysztof Penderecki, Mstislav Rostropovich, Andras Schiff, and Sándor Végh.

Pergamenshikov first recorded for ECM in 1985, appearing on a recording from the Lockenhaus Festival where he played music of Shostakovich with Gidon Kremer, Thomas Zehetmair, and Nobuko Imai.

Iveta Apkalna LIGHT & DARK

For Iveta Apkalna, the organ is the queen of instruments. The now released recording "Light and Dark" from the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg brings the wide sound spectrum of this queen to you!

The wide-ranging programme offers contemporary organ music by Thierry Escaich as well as works by Leoš Janáček. This first recording on the organ of the Elbphilharmonie not only shines with a program rich in contrasts. Titular organist Iveta Apkalna also gives the album a personal touch with "Hell und Dunkel" by Sofia Asgatowna Gubaidulina.

"It's true that our whole life consists of contrasts, but often we don't even notice it. Of course life is colourful, but the basic colours are black and white, and these are my favourite colours too," told Iveta Apkalna at NDR Kultur.

Iveta Apklana is no stranger in her native Latvia. From there she conquered the world with her talent for the great instrument. On 27 January 2017 she was honoured to inaugurate the organ of the Elbphilharmonie with a Mozart recital. With the new organ album "Light And Dark", the charming instrumentalist will be able to inspire even more people with her "Queen".

This gem of classical music is an enrichment for any collection. Whether physical or digital, the album is a listening experience for conscious connoisseurs.

WOMEN OF NOTE

Clara Schumann's recently recovered G-Minor Sonata['s]...bold gestures and the strong development of its ideas, especially in the substantial and stormy first movement, offer plenty of rewards, both emotional and intellectual... And while the excerpts from Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel's The Year fit more comfortably into the orthodox parameters of music for (advanced) domestic use, they do so with exquisite polish... Highly recommended to anyone intrigued by the repertoire. (Peter J. Rabinowitz)

Lasting a shade under twenty minutes, Zwilich's Third Symphony is large in scale. Sinewy, assertive and confident, it is very much in the tradition of the Great American Third Symphonies of the 30s and 40s. As is the case with some of her music from the past decade or so, Shostakovich is the muse in some of the symphony's timbres, rhythms, power, and intensity... Marked Largo, the third movement cyclically revisits the first. Its midsection is strikingly dark and somber... This CD is a release of a major importance. Top recommendation. (Benjamin Pernick)

The great find of this release, however, and reason to rush out and buy it, is Galina Ustvolskaya. Born in 1919, one of the most important students of Shostakovich, and longtime resident of St. Petersburg, her music is fiercely original. I find myself almost at a loss for words to describe it. Simple motives are reiterated and developed with a sort of hypnotic force, but the os.tinati are never “cheap.“ Every gesture seems won through a titanic struggle. This is deeply spiritual music, but informed as much by anguish as transcendence... [B]y the 1988 sonata, Ustvolskaya is completely her own composer. It is only six and a half minutes long, but its thunderous, relentless low clusters (brutal sound-masses, yet still full of harmonic meaning) make it unique among piano music I have heard over the last decade, and its intensity suggests a piece far larger than its real-time duration. Though I have heard some of her music over the radio, and though I know a boomlet of her music is emerging on CD, this is my first encounter with Ustvolskaya on disc, and it has been shattering, the type of discovery that adventurous listeners dream of. (Robert Carl)

Olga Andryushchenko 20th CENTURY PIANO WORKS

Olga Andryushchenko was born in Moscow and educated at the Central Special Music School, and the Faculty of Historical and Modern Performing Arts of the Moscow Tchaikovsky State Conservatory under Alexei Lubimov. She also studied organ. She completed her postgraduate studies at the same conservatory, and was also a DAAD scholarship-holder at the Cologne Hochschule für Musik.

She has won a number of important prizes and awards, including the 4th International Piano Competition “Franz Schubert and the Music of Modernity” in Austria (2000), the Premium Piano Seiler 2nd International Piano Competition in Germany (2001), the Premio Vanna Spadafor International Piano Competition in Italy (2004), the Bach Competition in Leipzig (2006), the Musica Antiqua International Fortepiano Competition in Belgium (2007), the A. Scriabine International Piano Competition in Paris (2008), the N. Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Paris (2008), and the Fortepiano Competition in Schloss Kremsegg (2011).

She was a soloist of the Moscow State Philharmonic Society (2002–2004), and performs both as a soloist and in ensembles, playing piano, organ, fortepiano or harpsichord. She has also given a number of piano recitals and played with orchestras in many cities of Russia, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Italy, the United States, Belgium, Finland, Great Britain, Canada, France, Japan and elsewhere.

David Tanenbaum SOFIA GUBAIDULINA Complete Guitar Works

One of the most surprising things about working with great composers is that they can find completely new sounds from an instrument to which you have dedicated your life. When I was called to perform the premiere of Repentance during Sofia Gubaidulina’s residency with the San Francisco Symphony in 2009, I had to come up with what the score called a “friction beater”, which was “a small ball of rubber or elastic plastic… fastened onto a springy, resilient steel string (e.g. a piano string)”. That prompted quite a few trips to different stores, and a lot of puzzling over how exactly one can fasten a piano string onto a small ball. But this was Sofia Gubaidulina. She hadn’t written for the guitar since she produced the two early, short pieces heard here, but in the interim she had become celebrated as the great and fearless composer that she is. The rest of the score had fantastic and unusual sounds, and it all made sense, so I figured that she must have a very specific idea here that I just didn’t get. I experimented with this ‘friction beater’ sound, and remained baffled. I finally showed up to the first rehearsal with a variety of options, which she found curious. But then she pulled out her own version, which she had brought all the way from Germany. It made a sound unlike any of mine, and in fact unlike the many devices I had hit strings with in the past. When she heard it, she smiled.

Sofia Gubaidulina has spent much time in the last ten years writing and revising the two big pieces heard here that use multiple guitars. She has clearly found in the guitar a kind of soulfulness and freedom that has spoken to her, and in each case she combines the guitars with the lower strings she frequently favours. Of the Sotto Voce instrumental combination, the composer writes: ‘It fascinated me on account of its dark colour and its potential for contrast between a muted, almost whispered sotto voce sound and that particular sort of expressivity that low-pitched instruments possess’. She has written prolifically for bass in her career, and the bass parts in both of these pieces are virtuosic and multi-dimensional. The cello in Repentance and the viola in Sotto Voce play a kind of lead, with the most searching melodic material, but one comes away with the sense that each instrument has been fully developed as an individual and a society member.

The guitar writing in both pieces is multi-dimensional as well. She writes: ‘The constant endeavour to penetrate the mysterious consonance in the guitars’ chords of harmonics is forever proving itself to be fruitless. And thus we always have to return to the darker shades.’ The guitars act often as a mega instrument in these pieces; there are chordal chorales, hard driving rhythmic sections and longer, free passages where the wheels come off. Guitar 1 has long improvisations in both pieces—in Repentance it is a lightly guided exploration of a ninth fret barré chord, played normally, plucked behind the chord, or done as harmonics on that fret; in Sotto Voce it is with a slide—and in both cases what you hear are my single take and unprepared improvs, complete with a few production noises. (David Tanenbaum)

Gidon Kremer / Boston Symphony Orchestra / Charles Dutoit SOFIA GUBAIDULINA Offertorium

This entry in DG's Echo 20/21 series of contemporary music reissues is outstanding for its musical quality, engineering, and remarkable performances. Offertorium is aptly subtitled "Violin Concerto" to reflect the role of the solo violin, here played with brilliance and understanding by Gidon Kremer, for whom it was written. It's in three continuous sections, each headed by a fascinating Webernesque deconstruction of the theme from Bach's Musical Offering. The extensive violin part is technically demanding, and the vigorous orchestral interjections range from the hauntingly wispy to the aggressively colorful. "The Homage à T.S. Eliot for Octet and Soprano" can be described as "mystical with backbone," perfectly complementing the texts, drawn from Eliot's Four Quartets. The music itself is haunting, rhythmically alive, and forward-moving. Its 33 minutes fly past, thanks to the Kremer-led all-star octet, Gubaidulina's inventive scoring, and the tension-filled vocal lines. Soprano Christine Whittlesey, a noted performer of modern vocal music, who sings in three of the work's seven movements, offers outstanding vocalism and interpretative intensity. (Dan Davis)

Roman Mints / Evgenia Chudinovich TRANSFORMATIONS 20th Century Works for Violin & Piano

This album brings together some of the best music for violin & piano written in the last century. Alongside with the such well-known masters Penderecki, Lutoslawski, Gubaidulina and Schnitttke we can hear works of their younger collegues Elena Langer and Artem Vassiliev. Both performes demonstrate their virtuosity in interpretating this extremly demanding repertoir. 5 pieces by Artem Vassiliev take us on a journey trough modern styles from minimalism to jazz.

The title work, "Transformations" by Elena Langer is very romantic, fresh and impressive piece which changes from a dream world of first movement through an agressive and ecstatic mood of the second to the "new light" in the end. The work is probably the most appealing on the disc. Lutoslawski's Subito is a demanding virtuoso piece which gives Mints a chance to show his seductive tone and his command of the instrument. Part's Fratres is a religious meditation executed with great feeling. Works by Gubaidulina and Penderecki involve pianist playing inside piano and thus, explore new sound dimensions. In general, this album is outstanding and is a joy to listen to. (Amazon)

SOFIA GUBAIDULINA In the mirror

To my mind the ideal relationship to tradition and to new compositional techniquesis the one in which the artist has mastered both the old and the new, though in a way which makes it seem that he is taking note of neither the one nor the other. There are composers who construct their works very consciously; I am one of those who 'cultivate' them. And for this reason everything I have assimilated forms as it were the roots of a tree, and the work its branches and leaves. One can indeed describe them as being new, but they are leaves nonetheless, and seen in this way they are always traditional and old. 

Dmitri Shostakovich and Anton Webern have had the greatest infiuence on my work. Although my music bears no apperent traces of it, these two composers taught me the most important lesson of all: to be myself. (Sofia Gubaidulina)

Basque National Orchestra / José Ramón Encinar GUBAIDULINA Kadenza

Sofia Gubaidulina’s religious nature, specifically Russian Orthodox, finds expression in each of these pieces. Each also makes use of her much-loved bayan, the Russian button accordion played here with great virtuosity by Iñaki Alberdi. Kadenza is a solo tour de force; Et exspecto, based on the closing words of the Creed (‘I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come’) is an impressive five-movement sonata in which, the booklet-note tells us, the performer’s interpretation goes, with her encouragement, well beyond the composer’s notation.

In the other works, much is made of the combination of the accordion sounds and Asier Polo’s cello. With In croce, a number of cross-like ideas derive from the title – crossing of registers, crossing of lines and textures and so on – which are essentially private creative stimuli for the composer. But in the major work on the record, the half-hour Seven Words, the sentences spoken by Jesus on the cross are graphically, even fervently implied. Gubaidulina’s love of short motifs, here often using very close intervals, produces in her hands music of strong and even painful intensity, seizing and gripping the attention, sometimes with fiercely punched chords on the accordion or with soaring harmonics on the cello that vanish into silence after the final Word. The longest movement is the central No 4, Jesus’s cry, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’, a powerful and deeply affecting invention. This is a remarkable, compelling work. (John Warrack / Gramophone)

SOFIA GUBAILUDINA Repentance

Repentance and Sotto voce are the downbeat titles of two recent compositions by Sofia Gubaidulina but there’s nothing apologetic or retiring about the music. Now in her early eighties, Gubaidulina is exploring ever more unusual instrumental combinations: viola, double bass and two guitars in Sotto voce, cello, double bass and three guitars in Repentance. In both there are dramatic confrontations involving moods that shift between heartfelt lament and forceful defiance by way of textures that relish the full spectrum of possibilities available when such disparate string instruments are brought together; Repentance is particularly imaginative in the way – without electronics – it evokes a mixture of acoustic and what sound like electro-acoustic sonorities.

Gubaidulina’s strength has always been to rhapsodise without rambling: even on the tiny scale of the two-and-a-half-minute Serenade for solo guitar from 1960 she creates an intriguing soundscape with a disconcertingly traditional final chord. The Piano Sonata (1965) is even bolder, reflecting awareness of the Western European and American avant-gardes in its use of percussive effects alongside jazz-inspired riffs to create a remarkably convincing rethinking of time-honoured sonata principles.

With Alfred Schnittke and Galina Ustvolskaya no longer on the scene, Gubaidulina shows how viable the post Shostakovich explosion of Russian compositional activity has remained. It’s a pity that this admirable disc couldn’t have included her still more recent So sei es for violin, double bass and percussion (2013). But even without that, this release is a must for its substantial additions to the still-expanding Gubaidulina discography. (Gramophone)

Anna Gourari DÉSIR Scriabin - Gubaidulina

Anna Gourari was born in Kazan, Russia. She began piano lessons at the age of five, and from 1979 attended a special school for gifted children in her home town, studying with Kira Shashkina, the teacher of Mikhail Pletnev, and giving her first recital in the same year. Several master classes with Professor Vera Gornostaeva at the Moscow Conservatory stand out among Anna Gourari’s early and some of the most influential musical experiences; then, in 1990, she moved to Germany and continued her piano studies with Professor Ludwig Hoffmann und Gitti Pirner in Munich. She has won several distinctions including the first prizes at the Kabalevsky Competition in Russia (1986) and the first International Chopin Competition in Gottingen (1990), a bursary from the “Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes”, the “Staatliche Förderungspreis” for young musicians etc.

Since then Anna Gourari has built up an excellent reputation as soloist and chamber musician in the most important centres of music. She regularly performs at international music festivals like the Salzburg Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Festival Pianistico Internazionale Bergamo-Brescia, the Gustav Mahler Festival in Dobbiaco, the St Moritz Festival, the Bad Kissingen Summer Festival, the Lockenhaus Festival, the Rheingau Music Festival, the Festival of Flanders, the Ruhr Piano Festival, the Septembre Musical Montreux, the European Weeks in Passau, the Musica Insieme festival in Bologna a.o., performing with renowned orchestras such as the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra, the Solistes Européens in Luxembourg, the Russian State Academic Symphonic Orchestra, the SWR Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Chamber Orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra with conductors like Lorin Maazel, Roger Norrington, Zubin Mehta, Colin Davis, Marco Armiliato and Iván Fischer.

“You do not make music, you are music!” That was the opinion of the legendary film and opera director Werner Herzog, who cast Anna Gourari in the lead part in his cinema film “Invincible”, in which she portrays a pianist. The acclaimed premiere of the German-American co-production took place at the Venice International Film Festival in the autumn of 2001.

In February 2007 Anna Gourari returned to Russia for the first time after many years to film six TV articles on art and culture in Moscow for Deutsche Welle.

Numerous radio and CD recordings document her wide-ranging repertoire, including her special interest in twentieth-century music. The album “Désir”, released on Decca, presents works by Alexander Skryabin and Sofia Gubaidulina. Composers like Rodion Shchedrin and Jörg Widmann have dedicated works to her.

Kronos Quartet NIGHT PRAYERS

To a Cold War generation reared to believe that only official arts could flourish in the harsh cultural climate of the Soviet Union, the discovery of a vast and fantastically varied world of music came as not just one surprise, but many. Even during the dark Brezhnev years, the part-Tatar, part Russian Sofia Gubaidulina was improvising with a group of unapproved folk musicians and developing a musical language for her even more strenuously unauthorized Russian Orthodox faith. In Georgia, Giya Kancheli was producing music of quiet theatricality, and explosive reverence. In Azerbaijan, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh was charging down two simultaneously un-Soviet paths: Viennese modernism in the spirit of Arnold Schoenberg, and mugham, the classical folk music of her homeland. In the 1990s, after the Soviet empire collapsed, the Kronos Quartet was quick to capitalize on the newly popular rubric of Eastern European mysticism, which included, somewhat awkwardly, composers who had little more in common than a spirit of non-materialistic transcendence. Night Prayers is not so much a collection of religious music as a mood album, a document of a time when composers found refuge from their historical era in an elaborately constructed sense of timelessness. (Justin Davidson)

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica SOFIA GUBAIDULINA Canticle of the Sun

Sofia Gubaidulina’s 80th birthday in October 2011 generated much press coverage around the world, appropriately stressing the uniqueness and the variety of her compositional approaches. Both are in evidence on these recordings from Lockenhaus. Gidon Kremer is the soloist and Kremerata Baltica the ensemble on the premiere recording of “The Lyre of Orpheus”, dedicated to the memory of Gubaidulina’s daughter. Kremer has long been a committed advocate of Gubaidulina’s work, and the composer has praised the way the violinist seems to unleash music from the soul. In this work of austere beauty and raw lyricism, violin, string orchestra and percussion intermingle in new ways. At a subterranean level, the piece is also an exploration into acoustic phenomena and the physics of sound, with pulsating difference tones part of its underlying structures. “The Lyre of Orpheus” was recorded in 2006, a month after Kremer gave the first performance.

“Canticle of the Sun”, recorded in 2010, revisits the celebrated piece that Gubaiduilina wrote in tribute to Mstislav Rostropovich on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 1997. Rostropovich’s famously sunny disposition was an inspiration, by association prompting Gubaidulina to set St Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of the Sun” for choir. In this recording, Nicolas Altstaedt, one of the most accomplished cellists of his generation, takes on the highly expressive lead role. A further, timely, Lockenhaus connection here: as of this year, Altsteadt takes over from Kremer as the new director of the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival.