Kate Lindsey / Baptiste Trotignon THOUSANDS OF MILES

 

THOUSANDS OF MILES

 

Emmanuel Pahud / Paul Meyer / Daishin Kashimoto / Zvi Plesser / Éric Le Sage VIENNE 1900

VIENNE 1900

Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra / Marc Albrecht ZEMLINSKY Die Seejungfrau

DIE SEEJUNGFRAU

Hanna-Elisabeth Müller / Juliane Ruf REINE DE COEUR

                                                                   REINE DE COEUR

Quatuor Arod THE MATHILDE ALBUM

With this album of works by Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Webern – key figures in Vienna’s musical life in the early 20th century – the Quatuor Arod honours the woman who became Arnold Schoenberg’s wife in 1901. Mathilde was Zemlinsky’s sister and the dedicatee of her husband’s String Quartet No 2, an innovative work in both its tonal language and its integration of a soprano – here Elsa Dreisig. It was completed in the summer of 1908, a tumultuous period in the Schoenbergs’ marriage.

Gianluca Cascioli 900

Gianluca Cascioli attended the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in his hometown of Turin, where he studied composition with Alessandro Ruo Rui and Alberto Colla, and piano with Franco Scala. As the winner of the Umberto Micheli International Piano Competition in 1994, Cascioli was awarded a contract to record for Deutsche Grammophon. As a pianist, Cascioli has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the English Chamber Orchestra, Camerata Salzburg, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, among many others. He has also conducted the Deutsche Kammerorchester Frankfurt, and performed chamber music with Yuri Bashmet, Mstislav Rostropovich, Maxim Vengerov, Sayaka Shoji, Sabine Meyer, Stefano Mollo, the Alban Berg Quartet, and the Berlin Philharmonic Octet. In addition to recording for Deutsche Grammophon, Cascioli has released CDs on Decca. (Blair Sanderson)

Marlis Petersen / Camillo Radicke DIMENSIONEN - ANDERSWELT

The Otherworld... The human being rooted in the world that sees only what the eye can see… Does he at once dare a glance to the side where nature, spirits and elemental beings reside? Not many of us have kept the ability to view them and get in contact. This release offers you the ‘Otherworldly’ eye from the early Romantic period up to the classical modernism, including the Northern countries (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland), and now hope you allow yourself to be "lost to the world"… Plunge into the magical world of twilight - populated with elemental spirits, elves, waterlilies, nymphs and merman. The creatures of the unseen are the protagonists of this classical song album and tempt the listener into their legendary realms. Carl Loewe, Johannes Brahms, Max Reger, Nikolai Medtner, Hugo Wolf, Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, Hans Sommer and many more engaged themselves in this mystic world and set it in music in a very sensual and playful way!

William Youn SCHUMANN - SCHUBERT - LISZT

This album is a musical journey through popular romantic pieces: from Schumann's "HumoreskeOp. 20 ", a selection of Schubert's" Valses sentimentales", Liszt's "Soirées de Vienne ", works by Clara Schumann such as the" Scherzo no. 2 " to works such as" Ständchen" by Schubert / Liszt or " Ichhabe'in IhrAuge" by Clara Schumann / Liszt.

The award-winning pianist William Younhas been described by critics as a “genuine poet” with “sovereign, bravura technique of touch”. After early studies in Korea and in the USA, William again changed continents to study at the Hanover University of Music and at the Piano Academy Lake Como, where he worked regularly with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling, Dmitri Bashkirov, Andreas Staier, William Grant Naboréand Menahem Pressler. Based now in his adopted hometown of Munich, Germany, William performs internationally from Berlin via Seoul to New York with major orchestras, including Cleveland Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, the National Orchestra of Belgium, the Mariinsky Theater and the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra.

As chamber musician, William enjoys close collaborations with Nils Mönkemeyer, Sabine Meyer, Julian Steckel, CarolinWidmann, Veronika Eberle, Johannes Moser and the Signum Quartet. He also performs increasingly on fortepiano, including at the Mecklenburg Vorpommern Festival and the Mozart Festival in Würzburg. William has recorded for Sony Korea and ArsProduktion. Other recordings include a first disc of works by Brahms with Mönkemeyer, and 'Mozart with Friends' with Sabine Meyer, Julia Fischer and Mönkemeyer, which was named Chamber Music Recording of the Year at ECHO Klassik2017.

Carion Wind Quintet DREAMS OF FREEDOM

The award-winning Carion Wind Quintet returns with Dreams of Freedom, featuring the world-premiere recording of Borderless by Syrian refugee Moutaz Arian, alongside Mozart, Zemlinsky, Hindemith, Stravinsky and Pärt.
The rich variety of music on this album is unified by each composer’s ‘dream of freedom’. All of these composers experienced exile of one kind or another, travelling far from home in order to pursue their vocation. Mozart left the stifling confines of Salzburg for the cultural riches of Vienna. Stravinsky, Hindemith, Zemlinsky and Pärt all left unsympathetic or even hostile regimes, and Kurdish composer Moutaz Arian escaped Syria and now lives in China; he dedicated his piece, Borderless, to Carion. Yet despite the profound, sometimes painful origins of this music, this is an album full of joie de vivre: music full of hope, intellect and even humour.
Mozart’s delightful Serenade No.11 in E flat, KV 375, was his first known foray into the Viennese tradition of wind band music, and Stravinsky’s Suite No. 2, derived from earlier piano pieces, features a March, Waltz and Polka which are all wonderfully skewed takes on convention, while Stravinsky’s unmistakeable harmony, reminiscent of Petrushka, imbues the quirky Galop.

Zemlinsky represented an important link in the evolution of music from Brahms to Mahler to the Second Viennese School; dating from 1939, his Humoresque was one of the last pieces he wrote. Hindemith’s Kleine Kammermusik features a witty march followed by a wry waltz which parodies overly sentimental music. In the fourth movement each instrument enjoys cadenza-like passages before the demanding swagger of the finale. Arvo Pärt’s Quintettino dates from 1964, before his “holy minimalism” style emerged, and so represents a fascinating example of his earlier experiments in sound.

Moutaz Arian is a Kurdish composer from northern Syria who now lives in Beijing, performing his compositions in China and Japan. Arian’s Borderless is a powerfully pertinent and hugely topical work. He says of this piece that it expresses “our desire to live more freely in a world without the borders that separate us, not only borders of land, but physical and human barriers, too.”

Barbara Hannigan / Reinbert de Leeuw VIENNA FIN DE SIÈCLE

After the huge success of her GRAMMY Award-winning first album for Alpha, Crazy Girl Crazy, Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan is back with her longtime collaborator and mentor, the great figure of twentieth-century music, Dutch pianist Reinbert de Leeuw.

For this new recital album, the duo explores the roots of modern music with composers who went on to lead a musical revolution: Arnold Schoenberg, Hugo Wolf, Anton Webern, Alexander Zemlinsky, Alma Mahler and Alban Berg. Vienna: Fin de Siècle presents a vision of Vienna at the height of late Romanticism, when music was at its most lush and decadent, at the edge of tonality and full of voluptuous beauty. Featuring composers for whom text and song were inseparable, the album captures the rich and intense moment before the disruption of the harmonic language of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hannigan and de Leeuw have long championed the exquisite repertoire from this époque.

Tenebrae / BBC Symphony Orchestra SYMPHONIC PSALMS & PRAYERS

While this intriguing Judaeo-Christian programme may not fit too well on the shelves of old-style, repertoire-led collectors, it lives up to Tenebrae’s stated core values of “passion and precision”.

Symphony of Psalms, which opens the anthology, seems less concerned with the first of those attributes, at least initially. The expert choir (featuring the female voices which Stravinsky viewed as second best) is relatively modest in size, the instrumental cohort placed further back than you might be used to. Nor is there any attempt to disguise the relatively confined acoustic. That said, everything is wonderfully clean and sharp-etched so that you never feel short-changed. And the timeless, implacable quality of the invention is not the only aspect highlighted as the music proceeds. The second movement brings not only flawless intonation from the woodwinds of the BBC Symphony Orchestra but eruptive, even muscular passion from the singers. The Psalm 150 setting works wonderfully too, finally combining glinting clarity with the trance-like rapture which can get lost in squeaky-clean performances.

Next up is the Schoenberg, notoriously difficult to bring off, especially when performed as here without the instrumental doublings for strings and wind the composer added in 1911 on the advice of Franz Schreker. The writing has probably never sounded less strained, nor more perfectly in tune. By 1923 Schoenberg was describing this final work in his original tonal style as “an illusion for mixed choir, an illusion, as I know today, having believed … when I composed it, that this pure harmony among human beings was conceivable.”

Tricky in a different way, Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms is marginally less successful if only because the balance sometimes seems to mute the strings unduly (this is not after all the reduced, economy version Tenebrae use in concert). Sentimentality is banished but so is some of the music’s escapist charm. Well to the fore is the countertenor of David Allsopp, a former Tenebrae singer. Some might have preferred a less forthright boy treble whatever the threat of sugariness. The final movement’s big tune is taken rather swiftly so as to make a bigger contrast with the psalmist’s subdued farewell.

Ascetic rigour is even less of the essence in Zemlinsky’s Psalm 23, a mildly chromatic pastoral dating from 1910 in which Michael Oliver detected “an ambience half-way between Hollywood and the Three Choirs Festival.” Taking its cue from one of the cutesier passages in the second movement of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony the invention is never hugely memorable but certainly makes for grateful listening, the scoring brightening at the very end in a tinkling recreation of the shepherd’s biblical soundworld of pipe, harp and timbrel.

Teodora Gheorghiu / Jonathan Aner ART NOVEAU

No, she’s not Angela’s sister, cousin, or secret daughter, although being called Gheorghiu can’t have hurt a young singer’s lonely path of rejections, rigged auditions, and raised hopes. There’s even a nice photo of both singers hugging on Teodora’s website. Teodora Gheorghiu is a rising name in major European opera houses, like Vienna and Geneva, and she crops up in Naïve’s Vivaldi series. Discovered by José Carreras, she gained some attention with her intriguing first album of music written for Anna de Amicis, and with this second album, she seems still keen not to flood the market with yet more Puccini arias. Although darkish in timbre, hers is a very different lyric soprano to Angela’s, with less covering and with a pleasing Slavic edge to the sound. The latter could become strident if she is not careful, but here it is a delight, compared to the watery, neither-here-nor-there sopranos that colleges are churning out. More than once in this enterprising multilingual album, her detailed, lively approach reminded me of the versatile Sicilian soprano Nuccia Focile, and for me compliments don’t come higher.  

This program is a pan-European take on Art Nouveau, with four contemporary but seemingly disparate composers. The Strauss items are familiar enough. We start with his early set, Mädchenblumen , where the florid, sensual texts are tastefully handled, with that clean, refreshing tone of hers keeping any sugariness at bay. I have heard more involved accounts of the later Ophelia songs, but it is hard not to admire Gheorghiu’s taste and refusal to overplay these “mini operas.” Although steeped in a similar romanticism, the lovely set of Zemlinsky songs brings out the best in this young singer, her simple, direct approach being ideal for what are essentially sophisticatedly written arrangements of Tuscan folk texts. Although an early work, there are clear hallmarks of what Zemlinsky’s romantically developed Modernism would become.
We step back a bit, tonally, into Ravel’s Five Popular Greek Melodies, sensually done and providing a good introduction to the four single Ravel songs that follow. Her Rêves is poised and sincere, but the florid and dramatic Tripatos takes Gheorghiu’s voice to its limit, with the runs not bang on. Her strengths lie in the more smoothly poised songs like the Ballade de la reine morte d’aimer . The early Respighi cycle Dieta silvane is a light but utterly delightful discovery, with the texts of his artist/contemporary, Antonio Rubino, depicting a very modern take on classical imagery such as fauns and Pan. The final song, Crepuscolo (Twilight), is as fine a lament as any for the Art Nouveau movement in general.
Gheorghiu’s Italian and French are excellent; in fact she is convincing in all three languages, although I would like her German diction to be placed more forward vocally, as that gets cloudy. Perhaps Gheorghiu missed a trick by not visiting Spain on this European journey of early 20th-century song writing, as there is just enough room for some Falla items, for instance. Jonathan Aner’s playing is superb throughout, never cloying in the Ravel, nor overbearing in the Strauss songs. The Respighi, though, is what makes this album extremely valuable. Aparte is spending money on her with a lavish presentation and booklet, which contains not only full texts and translations but also biographies and an interview. Sound is excellent, airy but focused. We vocal collectors end up with hundreds of pleasing but same-y recital programs, so it is nice to see this singer stick out for mainly the right reasons. (FANFARE / Barnaby Rayfield)

Sandrine Piau / Susan Manoff ÉVOCATION

This is a beautiful recital--a complete, well-thought-out, gorgeously sung program that combines compatible, complementary works with a singer who knowingly, sensitively interprets them. Although the songs span the period from the 1880s to the 1930s and are the creations of six composers who, albeit contemporaries, are not customarily joined together stylistically, there's an inexplicable camaraderie of spirit that illumines and threads through these songs whose subjects are love's longing and hope, pain, pleasure, and danger, conveyed through images of flowers, birds, trees, water, colors. Color may be the key word here, for each composer treats voice and piano with such careful concern for timbre, for the effects of upper-register brightness, textural density and transparency, and for the inherent tonal qualities, rhythms, and inflections of language, be it French or German.
Soprano Sandrine Piau has an ideal voice for this music--true and lovely across her range, with no points of harshness, no weakness of technique. And especially in the French repertoire, her ability to phrase and impart feeling is consistent with her statement in the notes that this is her "most personal and intimate" album. Although she does a nice job with the Strauss songs, they don't seem to flow as naturally as, for instance, those by Chausson (of which Le Colibri--"the hummingbird"--for me was the highlight of the disc). Piau is fortunate to have such a musical soul-mate in pianist Susan Manoff, a superb partner who also knows about nuances of color, from the softest shades to tones more bold and emphatic.
There's much to savor here--it would be difficult to name an inferior song among the program's 30 selections--but the rarely-heard Strauss Mädchenblumen, Schoenberg's beautiful and affecting Vier Lieder Op. 2 (from 1899), and Koechlin's Sept Chansons pour Gladys (to his own very strange texts) are of particular interest. And you've never heard a more gently endearing song than Zemlinsky's Frühlingslied or a more perfectly evocative musical creation than Debussy's Fleur des blés, depicting a breeze rippling through a cornfield, a whispering bird, cascading hair, sunshine, and flowers. The sound is nicely balanced and complementary to both voice and piano, with a comfortably positioned listener perspective (not always the case with voice/piano recitals!). Highly recommended. (David Vernier / ClassicsToday.com)

Kate Lindsey / Baptiste Trotignon THOUSANDS OF MILES

Closing the distance between classical music and Broadway, between the old and new worlds, between opera and jazz... Thousands of Miles is born out of an encounter between two extraordinary performers: opera star Kate Lindsey and jazz pianist Baptiste Trotignon.

For their debut joint album, Kate Lindsey and Baptiste Trotignon have produced a rich and varied programme around the songs of Kurt Weill, from Nanna’s Lied and Trouble Man, to classics from The Threepenny Opera and Lost in the Stars. The journey through three European languages brings the listener to the very beginnings of jazz, and features new arrangements and deft improvisations by the award-winning Trotignon. They also pay homage to three composers who, like Weill, were forced to leave their homelands in Germany and Austria, emigrating to the ‘new world’ of the United States of America and taking their stories and styles with them: Alma Mahler, Zemlinsky and Korngold. The disparate group are united by a shared narrative, their songs all speaking of intense longing and homesickness. Several songs have rarely been recorded before.

London-based, American mezzo soprano Kate Lindsey has thrilled audiences around the globe with her performances of Mozart and Purcell, but grew up steeped in the music of Broadway, from Gershwin to Cole Porter. She comments “the works on Thousands of Miles all share a deep, complex search for a sense of belonging, for a collective spirit, for a physical and emotional home. In exploring this idea, Baptiste and I brought together our two very different musical worlds. It was a journey where we both had to open ourselves up and make ourselves vulnerable, myself as a classically-trained singer, and Baptiste, who has rhythm in his DNA. Together, I hope we developed a deep mutual understanding of each other's musical language and used it to enrich our own.”

Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra / John Storgards ZEMLINSKY Die Seejungfrau - Sinfonietta, Op. 23

Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau has been recorded at least seven times, but this newcomer has some special qualities. It is without question the most gorgeously played and opulently engineered, which is saying a lot. After all, Chailly and the Concertgebouw (Decca) aren’t exactly slouches, and neither for that matter is Zemlinsky authority Antony Beaumont with the Czech Philharmonic (Chandos). It was Beaumont, in fact, who produced this new critical edition, restoring some five minutes of music to the central movement, including perhaps the work’s most convincing climax and interesting harmonies. So for that reason alone this performance, conducted by Storgards with 100% conviction and confidence, is worth having.
The work itself remains problematic. Thematically it owes quite a bit to Tchaikovsky–Francesca da Rimini in its “motto” theme, and the slow movement of the Fifth Symphony elsewhere. Its three movements can very easily come off as relatively undifferentiated sonic blobs due to Zemlinsky’s habit of immediately resorting to lyrical noodling just as things start to get moving. Each part seems to end five or six times before it actually stops, with the loud closing bars of Part Two sounding especially gratuitous. But the music is so beautiful from moment to moment, and so brilliantly scored, that in a performance like this one the defects hardly matter. If you’re a fan of Seejungfrau, this is now the version to own, and if you aren’t a fan, this one might make you one.
As to the coupling, well, here’s a story. At least two other very good recordings of Seejungfrau come in tandem with the Sinfonietta–Dausgaard’s and Conlon’s. This version, though, is the premiere recording of a recent rescoring for chamber orchestra by one Roland Freisitzer. I am not going to accuse Freisitzer of parasitically attaching himself to the coattails of the great (like Anthony Paine, for example, with his abominable Elgar Third Symphony), because no one is making a living creating alternate versions of works by Zemlinsky. On the other hand, the justification offered for disfiguring a late masterpiece by claiming to make it more playable by chamber orchestras just won’t wash, for several reasons.
First of all, there’s plenty of great music already written for chamber orchestra. No one needs Zemlinsky’s Sinfonietta any more than we need the recent silly, pint-sized arrangement of Mahler’s Second Symphony and other such curiosities–especially on recordings. Second, Zemlinsky’s Sinfonietta is scored for a fairly modest ensemble as it is–basically only double winds and standard brass, with no tuba. Freisitzer eliminates the three percussion parts, but adds a piano, pointlessly. His choices beg the question of just what constitutes a “chamber orchestra.” After all, if the Tapiola Sinfonietta under Mario Venzago can play Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony, then Zemlinsky’s Sinfonietta certainly stands squarely within the realm of possibility. Finally, it seems singularly strange, not to say conceptually confused, to couple a carefully prepared critical edition of Seejungfrau with a mongrel deconstruction of the Sinfonietta. Do Zemlinsky’s own ideas matter or not? The scoring of the Sinfonietta, even more than with Seejungrau, constitutes one of the most telling and original aspects of the work. This was a bad idea, despite the fact that the arrangement is excellently played by Storgards and members of the Helsinki Phil.
So because the recording of Seejungrau is so terrific, and perfectly fine recordings of the Sinfonietta are not that hard to find (including Beaumont’s, differently coupled), I am going to base the rating for this release mostly on the former, and largely ignore the latter. Seejungfrau really is that good. (ClassicsToday.com)