The Naxos Blog: Recent Episodes
Naxos
Irish cellist Gerald Peregrine introduces his latest album of early 20th-century British works for cello and piano, interweaving the classical and folk-based music with a personal narrative of community engagement, in which his live music-making initiatives have achieved truly significant and touching results.
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Catalogue No.: 8.574550
LISTEN TO THE PODCASTThe post Podcast: Gerald Peregrine. A truly mobile music machine. appeared first on The Naxos Blog.
This podcast spotlights Israeli mandolinist Alon Sariel, who provides an entree into the engaging world of the mandolin, an instrument that perhaps enjoys a relatively low profile but commands a fascinating global reach. Alon Sariel’s second album of transcriptions of works by J. S. Bach for mandolin blends technical precision with nuanced artistry and masterly adaptations. The presenter is Raymond Bisha.
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Catalogue No.: PTC5187109
LISTEN TO THE PODCASTThe post Podcast: Plucked and perfectly prepped. Alon Sariel’s Bach transcriptions for mandolin. appeared first on The Naxos Blog.
Marin Alsop discusses her latest release – an album of orchestral works by John Adams – with Raymond Bisha, exploring just what it is about Adams’ music that makes him the leading nominee for the title of America’s greatest living composer, not least for scores that inhabit ‘the groove’ with conspicuous relish.
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Catalogue No.: 8.559935
LISTEN TO THE PODCASTThe post Podcast: Alsop + Adams + The Groove appeared first on The Naxos Blog.
Louis Wayne Ballard (1931–2007) – also known as ‘Honganozhe’, which means ‘Stands with Eagles’ in the Quapaw language – was the first indigenous North American composer of art music, and his extensive knowledge of the music, dance and mythology of this culture informed his compositions. This podcast reviews a new album of his works that are eclectic in style, uniquely varied and thoroughly engaging. The presenter is Raymond Bisha. The guests are conductor John Jeter and Jerod Impichchāachaaha’ Tate, who was a student, friend and colleague of the composer.
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Catalogue No.: 8.559923
LISTEN TO THE PODCASTThe post Podcast: Standing with Eagles. The music of Louis Wayne Ballard. appeared first on The Naxos Blog.
This podcast from the Sounds Interesting series takes a musical week, a day at a time.
Links to the music featured in this podcast:
George Bogatko In a Monday Mood (8.572835)
Richard Danielpour Mardi Gras (8.559669)
Edmund Rubbra Judas mercator pessimus (8.555255)
Kenneth Fuchs Holy Thursday (8.559753)
Benjamin Britten Fishing song (8.553183)
Aaron Copland Saturday Night Waltz (8.571202)
Peter Breiner Sunday Morning on Sunday (8.574257)
LISTEN TO THE PODCASTThe post Sounds Interesting: Day in, day out. appeared first on The Naxos Blog.
This podcast from the Sounds Interesting series considers the roots and branches of trees featured in a selection of traditional Christmas carols in various styles.
Links to the music featured in this podcast:
Roderick Elms Cherry Tree Carol (8.570793)
Bob Chilcott Cherry Tree Carol (8.573159)
Imogen Holst As I sat under a holly tree (8.573991)
Peter Warlock As I sat under a sycamore tree (8.572102)
John Rutter The Holly and the Ivy (8.557581)
Stuart Thompson The Holly and the Ivy (8.573421)
Peter Breiner O Tannenbaum (8.550301)
Javier Hagen O Tannenbaum (MGB-6204)
The post Sounds Interesting: Cherry Christmas appeared first on The Naxos Blog.
This podcast from the Sounds Interesting series spotlights a selection of fanfares composed for a variety of occasions during the last century.
Links to the music featured in this podcast:
Maurice Ravel L’Éventail de Jeanne (8.573354)
Morton Gould Fanfare for Freedom (8.572629)
William Alwyn Fanfare for a Joyful Occasion (8.570705)
David Robert Coleman Fanfare and Palimpsest (9.70202)
Peter Boyer Silver Fanfare (8.559769)
Aaron Copland Fanfare for the Common Man (8.572917)
The post Sounds Interesting: All the Fun of the Fanfare appeared first on The Naxos Blog.
Stanisław Skrowaczewski spent 19 years as music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, from 1960 to 1979, during which time he developed it into one of the finest orchestras in North America. They made many recordings together, mostly for the VOX and Mercury labels, from which Raymond Bisha has selected two remastered albums from the VOX catalogue that demonstrate their distinguished achievements. The programmes of music by Beethoven and Mozart include Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 17 and 27, featuring Walter Klien as soloist.
Featured releases:
VOX-NX-3017CD: Beethoven Overtures and Incidental Music
VOX-NX-3012CD: Mozart Piano Concertos Nos. 17 and 27
The post Podcast: VOX • 3. Stanisław Skrowaczewski and the Minnesota Orchestra appeared first on The Naxos Blog.
Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was also an accomplished guitarist and cellist, and his wonderful music for the latter instrument takes full advantage of the lyrical and dramatic capabilities of the instrument. In this podcast, Raymond Bisha explores a new recording of his two Cello Concertos, together with his Fantasia for Cello and Orchestra, that features solo cellist Antonio Meneses and the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra conducted by Isaac Karabtchevsky.
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Catalogue No.: 8.574531
The post Podcast: Music of Brazil • Villa-Lobos • Works for Cello and Orchestra appeared first on The Naxos Blog.
This podcast features Raymond Bisha in conversation with conductor Kenneth Kiesler about the rediscovery, rescue and reconstruction of two operas by James P. Johnson (1894–1955). Renowned as an influential jazz pianist but with a lower profile as a composer of opera, it was Johnson’s express hope that two of his short stage works, written in the late 1930s, would one day form a double-bill. Which they did, but not until 2006, after a long swathe of tender loving care.
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Catalogue No.: 8.669041
The post Podcast: United at Last. 2 Operas by James P Johnson. appeared first on The Naxos Blog.
Raymond Bisha’s second podcast featuring historic recordings on the VOX label explores those made of Tchaikovsky’s music by the Utah Symphony Orchestra under Maurice Abravanel, who was the ensemble’s music director for more than 30 years. From the performances, to the production team of Marc Aubort and Joanna Nickrenz, the liner notes by Richard Freed, and of course Tchaikovsky’s music itself, there’s a host of engaging reasons to revisit these treasured recordings from the 1970s.
Featured releases
VOX-NX-3020CD: Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 1 / Symphony No. 2
VOX-NX-3022CD: Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4 / Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture
VOX-NX-3023CD: Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 / 1812 Festival Overture
VOX-NX-3024CD: Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 / Hamlet Fantasy Overture
The post Podcast: VOX • 2. The legacy of Maurice Abravanel. appeared first on The Naxos Blog.
This podcast features broadcaster Peter Hall in a conversation with JoAnn Falletta, music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, about her October release on the Naxos label, which is the second of two albums featuring all of Zoltán Kodály’s works for orchestra.
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Catalogue No.: 8.574556
The post Podcast: JoAnn Falletta, the Buffalo Philharmonic and music by Zoltán Kodály appeared first on The Naxos Blog.
This podcast features American composer Jennifer Higdon in a wide-ranging conversation with Raymond Bisha, during which she describes the long swathe of influences on her composing career. The musical spotlights comprise extracts from her latest recording for Naxos of two powerfully engaging works: the Concerto for Orchestra, written in 2002 and demanding virtuosity from principal players, individual sections and the entire orchestra alike; and her pyrotechnic Duo Duel, a concerto for two percussionists written in 2020, that boasts a killer cadenza (during which you should hold on to your hat) and a diaphanous opening (for which you should hold your breath, and with which this podcast begins…)
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Catalogue No.: 8.559913
The post Podcast: Jennifer Higdon. 2 Spectacular Concertos • 1 Sizzling Recording appeared first on The Naxos Blog.
I was once asked what had been the seismic developments in the history of the development of music, equivalent to scientific discoveries that had opened up entirely new vistas for society. I heard myself replying that there hadn’t been any; that from the first Neanderthal sounds on animal bones until the present day, composers had only the same basic musical ingredients to work with (commonly called the ‘elements’ of music), but had mixed them in different proportions like ever-resourceful master chefs to produce a musical smorgasbord that has continued to evolve, endure and entertain.
So, here’s a mini-challenge. I’ve chosen pieces from around the turn of each century, starting circa 1400, and invite you to compare and contrast them with reference to those elements of music that principally include tonality, tempo, texture, timbre, pitch, rhythm, dynamics, metre and form. Then you can throw in the notion of who the pieces were written for – deities, nobility, citizens, bank managers, and so on – to get the feel of what it was like to be instrumental, so to speak, in the process of musical birth. If I mixed all the extracts up, would you be able to put them in chronological order and explain your reasoning?
I live in the shadow of Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, UK. So, my first piece is by the English composer Leonel Power, who died in 1445. Although few details are known about his life, we do know that in 1423 he joined the religious fraternity of Christ Church Canterbury and almost certainly served as choirmaster of the cathedral. Here’s a performance of his Beata progenies, more redolent of an outdoor pilgrimage than a cloistered devotion.
Beata progenies unde Christus natus est;
quam gloriosa est virgo que caeli regem genuit.
Blessed is the parent from whom Christ was born;
O how glorious is the virgin who brought forth the King of heaven.
Beata progenies (8.553132) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/8.553132.Track04.mp3
A more widely documented musician from that same period of transition between the Mediaeval and Renaissance periods is the first truly great English composer, John Dunstable (c. 1390–1453). Writing some 20 years after his death, the musicologist Tinctoris singled him out as the transformer of the old musical style into a “new art”, the forefather of the musical Renaissance. At the same time, the poet Martin le Franc famously described how Dufay (c. 1393–1474), the eminent Franco-Flemish composer, had adopted the English manner championed by Dunstable, la contenance Angloise, that sounded so fresh and joyful to continental ears. We listen to Dunstable’s short motet Quam pulchra es. The text is taken from The Song of Solomon.
Quam pulchra es et quam decora, carissima in deliciis.
Statura tua assimilata est palme, et ubera tua botris.
Caput tuum ut Carmelus, collum tuum sicut turris eburnea.
Veni, dilecte mi, egrediamur in agrum, et videamus si
flores fructus parturierunt, si floruerunt mala Punica.
Ibi dabo tibi ubera mea.
Alleluia.
How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!
This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters [of grapes].
Thine head upon thee [is] like Carmel.
Thy neck [is] as a tower of ivory.
Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field … let us see if … the tender grapes appear, [and] the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves.
Alleluia.
Quam pulchra es (8.557341) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/8.557341.Track01.mp3
Josquin des Prez
© HNH International
Moving on a generation through to the High Renaissance period we have the music of Franco-Flemish composer Josquin des Prez, whose date of birth is unknown, but whose death reliably took place in 1521. His motet Absalon fili mi was written to mourn the death of Juan Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI’s son, who was murdered in 1497. That link to the mediaeval violence associated with the Borgia family name is hardly reflected by the serenity of the music. Note how a falling melodic figure towards the end of the piece portrays the text of descendam in infernum plorans (I will go down into hell weeping).Absalon fili mi, fili mi Absalon.
Quis det ut moriar pro te,
fili mi Absalon?
Non vivam ultra,
sed descendam in infernum plorans.
Absalom my son, my son Absalom.
Who could grant me to die for you,
my son Absalom?
I shall live no longer,
but shall go down into hell weeping
Absalon fili mi (8.553428) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/8.553428.Track09.mp3
On now to the turn of the 17th century and to Emilio de’ Cavalieri (c. 1550–1602), a versatile musician, diplomat and courtier who is credited with the earliest surviving stage work that is set to music throughout: his Rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo (Representation of Soul and Body), a morality presentation first performed at the Oratorio del Crocifisso in Rome in 1600. It’s regarded as the prime forerunner to the genre of opera that was soon to be born. Even his rival Jacopo Peri had to graciously allow that “Signor Emilio de’ Cavalieri, before every other that I know, with marvellous invention had introduced this new method of stage music.” Here’s Act II, Scene 4 of Cavalli’s oratorio, Chi gioia vuol (He who wants joy), featuring the allegorical figures of Pleasure, with Two Companions, Body and Soul.
Chi gioia vuol (8.554096-97) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/8.554096-97CD1.Track12.mp3
John Dowland
Source: Intankabilis / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Back in England, John Dowland was gradually establishing his reputation as the foremost lutenist-composer of his day. Dowland outlived Shakespeare by ten years, dying in 1626. He published his second book of songs in 1600 while in the service of King Christian IV of Denmark. From that collection I’ve chosen Flow my tears to exemplify how Dowland captured the principal affectation of the Golden Age of English music, the fashionable humour of melancholy.Flow my tears, fall from your springs,
Exil’d for ever let me mourn
Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.
Down, vain lights, shine you no more,
No nights are dark enough for those
That in despair their last fortunes deplore,
Light doth but shame disclose.
Never may my woes be relieved,
Since pity is fled,
And tears, and sighs, and groans, my weary days
Of all joys have deprived.
From the highest spire of contentment,
My fortune is thrown.
And fear, and grief, and pain for my deserts
Are my hopes since hope is gone.
Hark, you shadows that in darkness dwell,
Learn to contemn light,
Happy, happy they that in hell
Feel not the world’s despite.
Flow my tears (8.553381) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/8.553381.Track02.mp3
C.P.E. Bach
With the advantage of having actual instruments that have survived the ravages of time, we know pretty well how historic instruments sounded, but conventions of performance practice on such instruments were only infrequently written down. This was especially true of the Baroque period which made great use of improvised ornamentation of the printed score. C.P.E. Bach (1714–1788) prefaced one of his publications as follows: “It is indispensable nowadays to ornament repeats. One expects it of every performer … Almost every thought is expected to be altered in the repeat.”Dating from 1700, here’s part of Arcangelo Correlli’s Sonata IX in A major for violin and continuo. It’s exceptional in that we also have a full set of ornaments by Corelli’s pupil Francesco Geminiani with the repeats notated in full, clearly exemplifying what was expected of a performer’s skill in embellishment. It also suggests a growing equal respect for both composer and performer. Here’s the first movement.
Sonata IX in A major for violin and continuo (8.557799) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/8.557799.Track09.mp3
J.S. Bach
© HNH International
I wanted to pair that example of secular music with an example used for sacred purposes. Unlikely as it may seem, we have a set of variations on a chorale for organ written by a 15-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach to fill the slot. At the time, Bach was a student at the Michaeilisschule in Lüneberg. I would love to know what his teachers might have said of such an achievement over a flagon of ale after school was finished. Here are the final two variations of the teenage Bach’s Partite diverse sopra Christ, der du bist der helle Tag, BWV 755.Partite diverse sopra Christ, der du bist der helle Tag (8.553134) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/8.553134.Track02CUT.mp3
Adalbert Gyrowetz
Source: Bwag at German Wikipedia / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
It’s time to add a composer’s talent to the performer’s skill and then mix in the artistic thirst of audiences, not least of amateur musicians who wanted to purchase sheet music, lining deserving pockets in the process. A sizeable market for music was developing by the time of Adalbert Gyrowetz (1763–1850). Though popular in his heyday, his appeal quickly proved to be transitory, as for many of a comparable status. Towards the end of his life, Gyrowetz summed up the situation as follows: “Who is interested in the the past of a very old man? I had a time when I celebrated triumphs in Paris, Naples, London and Vienna … My operas were sung hundreds of times on all stages … and who knows me now? I live poor and forgotten.”Here’s the second movement of Gyrowetz’s Divertissement in A Major, Op. 50, for piano, flute and cello, first published c. 1800.
Divertissement in A Major, Op. 50 (C10398) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/C10398.Track06.mp3
Johann Simon Mayr
A quick snapshot now of the music of German-born composer Simon Mayr (1763–1845). It wasn’t until the rise of Gioachino Rossini that Mayr’s reputation for being the period’s most successful operatic composer began to be challenged. Mayr also wrote some 600 works for use in church. If you didn’t have the words before you, would you think the following music, written c. 1800, was to be delivered from the choir stalls, or enjoyed from the opera stalls?Regina coeli laetare, alleluja:
Quia quem meruisti portare, alleluja:
Resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluja:
Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluja.
Queen of Heaven rejoice, alleluia.
For he whom thou wast worthy to bear, alleluia:
Has risen, as he said, alleluia:
Pray for us to God, alleluia.
Regina coeli (8.573909) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/8.573909.Track05.mp3
Giacomo Puccini
© HNH International
A century on, and definitely in the opera stalls, here’s an excerpt from Tosca, written in 1900 by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), to compare and contrast with Mayr’s composing style. Tosca, a famous singer, is pleading for the life of her lover Cavaradossi, who has been captured by the chief of police. The policeman offers to spare Cavaradossi’s life only in exchange for sexual favours from her. In this aria, Vissi d’arte (I lived for art), Tosca wonders why God should punish her so cruelly, when all she has ever wanted was to live for art and love.Vissi d’arte (8.578188) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/8.578188.Track16.mp3
Magnus Lindberg
Source: Laivakoira2015 / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
And so to our final staging post, the year 2000, representing a period when composers not only continue to innovate, but also to glance back at traditions that might be incorporated into their clearly contemporary sound worlds, such as jazz and folk music. Here, for example, are two extracts from Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg’s (b. 1958) Jubilees, a set of six short movements for solo piano.
Jubilees I. quarter note = 96 (8.570542) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/8.570542.Track10.mp3Jubilees V. quarter note = 162 (8.570542) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/8.570542.Track14.mp3
Einojuhani Rautavaara
Photo: Reikki Tuuli
We end in a more contemplative mood that might give space to imagine what our music scene will be like in the year 2100. It’s by another Finnish composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara, who died in 2016. Scored for string orchestra and completed in 2000, it’s titled Adagio Celeste. Here’s how Rautavaara himself introduced the work:“Adagio Celeste was prompted – like so many of my works – by a bit of text, in this case verses by Lassi Nummi written in 1982. I believe that the poem itself can say more about the music than the twelve-tone row upon which it is built.”
Then, that night, when you want to love me in the
deep of night,
wake me.
Our sheets are cool, white
like the snow outside in the twilit landscape.
I may have been waiting, may be tired of waiting,
come.
Do not grow petrified, supporting the world, like a black tree
standing alone,
come. Wake me. Let me wake
through old age and death, and wake yourself,
come like the snow, join us
to the communion of the world.
Adagio Celeste (ODE1064-5) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/ODE1064-5.Track04.mp3
Raymond Bisha presents the first in a series of podcasts that explore newly remastered recordings on the VOX label dating from the 1970s. This instalment features four albums by the St Louis Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin, in which the orchestra and solo pianists Abbey Simon and Jeffrey Siegel variously perform works by Rachmaninov and Read More ...
This is the period known in many parts of the world as the silly season, the time when news agencies struggle to post engaging headlines of serious news items during the peak holiday period. So, I thought this blog could follow suit by reminding everyone that 20 August each year marks World Mosquito Day. Actually, Read More ...
It caught my eye that the date of this post would coincide with the anniversary of the birth of Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of England’s finest Romantic poets. Born on 4 August 1792, he didn’t live to see his 30th birthday. He was a radical, and not only in his poetry. His stance on religious Read More ...
A blog on gardens in bloom would normally be appropriate for a readership in only one hemisphere at a time, I thought; but with global warming controlling the hosepipe I’m not so sure. Anyway, encouraged by the beautiful blooms and alluring aromas that currently accompany my morning walks through the park, I decided to clip Read More ...
Brazilian composer Claudio Santoro (1919–1989) proved a dynamic force for his country’s classical music scene. His life was both intertwined with, and deeply influenced by, the political and social events playing out around him, from the building of the Berlin Wall in Europe to political upheavals in his homeland. Through it all, his compositions reflected Read More ...
As a youngster, one knew that the first requirement for playing the piano was to be able to find Middle C. So, I got to wondering if the first requirement for composers was to be able to write a Symphony in C. After all, I thought, Beethoven went on to produce nine symphonies, but his Read More ...
This podcast from the Sounds Interesting series takes repetition as its theme, a musical technique that has long served composers very well, time and time and time again. Henry Purcell, Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten provide the musical examples. Links to the music featured in this podcast: Henry Purcell: Evening Hymn (8.557129) Dmitri Read More ...
The importance of the date may have flown under your radar, but 24 June marks International Fairy Day. Acknowledging just how integrated these treasured tiny creatures of mythic imagination are in everyday life and centuries-old traditions, there will no doubt be numerous festivals taking place around the world in honour of the wee folk who Read More ...
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745–1799) – a brilliant swordsman, athlete, violin virtuoso and gifted composer – might well lay claim to being the most talented figure in an age of remarkable individuals. Raymond Bisha gives an overview of this remarkable life, binding the disparate elements of his career with the constant beauty of his Read More ...
In English, the word ‘sinister’ suggests a touch of evil, taking its cue from the Latin, in which it denotes the adjective ‘left’ and a perception that the left hand is weaker than the right. As a left-hander myself, I prefer the view that we’re noted for being more artistic than right-handers! But, as a rather pedestrian pianist, I do humbly marvel at performances of keyboard works specifically written for the left hand alone.
Felix Blumenfeld
Wikipedia – Public Domain
Although Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand is probably the work that first springs to mind in relation to such repertoire, this blog has lined up a short selection of other pieces for the medium, starting with a Study for Left Hand Alone by the Russian composer Felix Mikhailovich Blumenfeld (1863–1931). He was a concert pianist (his pupils included Horowitz), conductor (he directed the first Paris performance of Mussorsky’s Boris Godunov in 1908) and composer. Blumenfeld’s piano compositions show the influence of Chopin and Anton Rubinstein. He wrote his study for the left hand in 1905; here’s an extract.
Study for Left Hand Alone (8.223656) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/8.223656.Track12CUT.mp3There’s a link between that piece and my next pick, written in 1976 by American composer John Corigliano Jnr (b. 1938). I’ll let the composer explain:
John Corigliano Jnr
“When (pianist) James Tocco chose me to write a work for him, I was delighted, as I had long admired his aristocratic and dynamic pianism. But the shape of the work had yet to be determined, and while weighing possibilities I kept remembering James’ performance of an étude for left hand alone by Felix Blumenfeld. I have always wondered if composers favoured the left hand even before Paul Wittgenstein’s injury forced him to commission concertos for left hand alone from Ravel, Britten, Prokofiev and Strauss.That curiosity led me to the idea of my own left hand étude and taught me why the left hand is really better for solo work than the right. Unfortunately, I realized, one can only play the left hand alone for so long nonstop, and so my ‘major work’ would be quite shorter than the commission expected; however, what about a suite of études in the form of a fantasy, of which the left-hand study would be the first and germinal?”
Corigliano’s 5-movement Étude Fantasy was the result. Here’s the left-hand study that provides the first movement. Music critic Harold C. Schonberg once wrote that it made the Ravel left-hand concerto look like “child’s play”.
Étude Fantasy (8.559930) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/8.559930.Track07FADE.mp3
Gustave Samazeuilh
Photo: Studio Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet
Mention of the Ravel work brings us to the next piece by French composer Gustave Samazeuilh, who was a lifelong friend of Ravel. As the young son of music-loving parents, Samazeuilh was fortunate that Chausson, Fauré, Duparc, d’Indy, Dukas and Ysaÿe were all family friends, some of them regular visitors to the house, and the young Gustave was advised and encouraged by Chausson as soon as he began composing.An excellent pianist, Samazeuilh is still known today for the hundred or so transcriptions for solo piano or piano four hands commissioned from him by composers and publishers. He wrote his Quatre Esquisses (Four Sketches) in 1944. Of the four short movements, the third is titled Sérénade (pour la main gauche seule). With Hispanic accents and endless changes of tempo, it’s based on a guitar work written in 1925 and dedicated to Andrés Segovia.
Quatre Esquisses (GP669) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/GP669.Track15.mp3
Paul Wittgenstein
Wikipedia – CC BY 3.0 nl
As mentioned above, Ravel’s piano concerto for the left hand was commissioned by the pianist Paul Wittgenstein (1887–1961) who was just beginning to establish himself as a concert pianist when he had to undergo amputation of his right arm as a result of a wound sustained in the First World War. He was determined, however, to resume his career using his left hand only, and his family’s considerable wealth enabled him to make commissions from a list of eminent composers that included Britten, Hindemith, Prokofiev and Richard Strauss. Also, Karl Weigl.Karl Weigl
Photo: Weigl Foundation
Born in Vienna in 1881, Weigl was a composition student of Zemlinsky’s and was subsequently hired by Mahler as a répétiteur and vocal coach at the Vienna Opera. He went on to become a well respected composer, but following Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938 he fled with his family to the United States where he continued to teach and compose prolifically until his death in 1949. For some unknown reason, Wittgenstein never performed the Concerto for Piano (left hand) that he commissioned from Weigl. In fact, it wasn’t performed until 2002 in Vienna by Florian Krumpöck, who is the soloist on our recording. Cast in the traditional three movements, here’s the opening of the finale.Concerto for Piano (left hand) (C5232) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/C5232.Track03CUT.mp3
Leopold Godowsky
© HNH International
While I can empathise with brain cell messages telling the left hand to divide its time relatively simply between providing a bass line support and bravura melodies on top, the finger contortions required for performing a fugue are a little beyond me. Even with two hands, ensuring that competing melodies are each given clarity as they go their own way is challenging. To do so with only five fingers is a source of wonder. To demonstrate, here’s a short fugue by Polish-born Leopold Godowsky, one of the world’s greatest piano virtuosos, who wrote a sequence of demanding works for his instrument that fully reveal his exceptional command of the keyboard.Godowsky’s Prelude and Fugue for the left hand alone was published in 1930, with a dedication to the American pianist Arthur Loesser. The elaborate Prelude is followed by an intricate Fugue on the notes B-A-C-H (German nomenclature for B flat–A–C–B natural), a favourite motif among composers that pays homage to the legacy of J. S. Bach.
Fugue for the left hand alone (8.225350) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/8.225350.Track17CUT.mp3
Takashi Yoshimatsu
Photo: Japan Arts
Finally to something in lighter vein and the music of Japanese composer Takashi Yoshimatsu (b. 1953), who often combines elements of jazz, classical, folk and world music with rock formats. Some of Yoshimatsu’s most notable compositions centre on piano works for the left hand, which he wrote for pianist Izumi Tateno, whom Yoshimatsu describes as a ‘sworn friend’. In January 2002, Tateno collapsed on stage after playing the last note of a performance in Finland. He was 65 years old and had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. He survived the stroke, but even after months of intensive rehabilitation, he did not regain the use of his right hand.To play out, I’ve selected a movement from his Gauche Dances, which the composer himself introduces as follows:
“Gauche Dances is a work filled with pop and rhythmical idioms. The work consists of four styles of music. Rock creates heavy and low beats. Blues sounds like luscious jazz music. Tango is the musical style which Mr Tateno is privately fond of. Boogie Woogie brings frenzied rhythms of joy. Anything can happen in these hot dances!”
Here’s that last movement.
Boogie Woogie (8.579121) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/8.579121.Track16.mp3
A reference to sighing in music often reflects the emotional state of the person involved rather than the sound of the sigh itself. Song texts might simply encourage people to refrain from sighing, or probe further the possible reasons behind someone’s weary expression. Other works have more eccentric representations and references. This blog presents a cross section of them, which we’ll visit in random order.
Edward Elgar
© HNH International
We start with Elgar’s Sospiri which he wrote immediately before the outbreak of the First World War. Elgar had moved to live in London in 1911; Sospiri followed in 1914 and was dedicated to W. H. Reed, his close friend and the most distinguished orchestral leader of his time. Reed led the London Symphony Orchestra from 1912 until 1935, the year after Elgar’s death, and was subsequently to write a biography of the composer – Elgar as I knew him.Sospiri is a short work for strings, harp and harmonium. In most performances of the piece, however, conductors choose to replace the harmonium with an organ (but not on our selected recording). It’s not unreasonable to suppose that the emotional intensity of the work reflects the shadow of war that was gathering in Europe at the time of its composition, giving good reason to indulge in some sighing.
Sospiri (8.573250) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/8.573250.Track02.mp3
Samuel Sebastian Wesley
Wikipedia – Public Domain
Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810–1876) was a towering figure in the history of English cathedral music. No other composer between Henry Purcell (1659–1695) and Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924) came close to his achievement. From the numerous anthems and hymn tunes he left us, I’ve chosen an extract from one of the longer anthems, The Wilderness, which he wrote in 1832; specifically, the last of its five sections. The simplicity and sense of emancipation following the drama of the previous four sections is both exquisitely captured by Wesley and beautifully interpreted on our recording: “And sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”The Wilderness (8.570318) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/8.570318.Track17.mp3
Carlo Gesualdo
Wikipedia – Public Domain
Another choral piece now, but one written in a different age and by a man of a completely different temperament and musical individuality. It’s a madrigal by the Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo (1566–1613) that he included in his Fifth Book of Madrigals, published in 1611. We remember him today more for his unconventional music, full of innovative forms of expression and dissonances, than for his pursuit of honour in murdering his adulterous wife and her lover.By the time of his Fifth Book of Madrigals, Gesualdo was exploring a new relationship between text and music. Progressing from simply reflecting the superficial atmosphere of a text and the passing application of word-painting, he plumbs the deeper essence of single words, not least the word sospiri (sighs) at the opening of his madrigal Itene, o miei sospiri.
Itene, o miei sospiri,
precipitate’l volo,
a lei che m’è cagion d’aspri martiri,
ditele, per pietà, del mio gran duolo;
c’hormai ella mi sia
come bella ancor pia,
che l’amaro mio pianto
cangerò, lieto, in amoroso canto.
Begone, o my sighs,
hurry your flight
to she who is the cause of my bitter torment,
tell her, for pity’s sake, of my great suffering;
that henceforth she may show me
both beauty and compassion,
and that my bitter tears
may change, with joy, into a song of love.
Itene, o miei sospiri (8.573147-49) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/8.573147-49CD1.Track03.mp3
Johann Strauss I
Time for a couple of instrumental pieces. First, I’ve selected the Seufzer-Galoppe (Sighs Galop) by Johann Strauss the Elder, which he published in 1828. The galop dance was very popular in several European capitals at the time, often representing a final fling of the evening as the dancers beetled their way around a venue’s various reception rooms. Cue for a brief respite in which the dancers could enjoy a restorative sigh before the dash to the finish. Here’s what I mean…
Seufzer-Galoppe (8.225213) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/8.225213.Track08.mp3Johann Strauss II
© HNH International
Not to be outdone, Johann Strauss the Younger produced his Ligourianer Seufzer, Scherz-Polka (Liguorian Sighs, Joke Polka) twenty years later. It was one of a number of pro-revolutionary works he wrote, inspired by the outbreak of the 1848 Revolution in Vienna. The polka took its name from the Liguorians, a Jesuit religious order known also as the Redemptorists, much disliked in Vienna because they endorsed Chancellor Metternich’s hated police-state. Following their expulsion from the city, Strauss took the opportunity to ridicule its members with his ‘joke polka’, complete with a caterwauling Trio section (“Ligouri ci gouri gouriani ani ani”) which mocked the name of the Ligourians’ founder, Alfonso Maria dei Ligouri. The work quickly found favour with the dancing public but not the authorities, who promptly confiscated the polka’s first piano edition soon after its publication. All the more reason to heave a sigh!Ligourianer Seufzer, Scherz-Polka (8.223216) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/8.223216.Track01.mp3
Gerald Finzi
Photo: Boosey and Hawkes
Finally to a song by English composer Gerald Finzi (1901–1956) who made an unrivalled contribution to British twentieth-century song-writing, especially in his settings of Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), his favourite poet. I’ve chosen the seventh of Finzi’s 10-song cycle A Young Man’s Exhortation (1926–9), titled The Sigh.At the heart of The Sigh is a question: did the poet’s beloved harbour love for another man rather than himself? Finzi, in the piano’s introduction, creates an equivalent musical image for the woman’s ‘sigh’, which, in varied form, sets the closing lines of each stanza, as though resonating with the nagging question that haunts the man over the years. What do you think the answer is?
The Sigh (8.570414) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/8.570414.Track07.mp3
Little head against my shoulder,
Shy at first, then somewhat bolder,
And up-eyed;
Till she, with a timid quaver,
Yielded to the kiss I gave her;
But, she sighed.
That there mingled with her feeling
Some sad thought she was concealing
It implied.
– Not that she had ceased to love me,
None on earth she set above me;
But she sighed.
She could not disguise a passion,
Dread, or doubt, in weakest fashion
If she tried:
Nothing seemed to hold us sundered,
Hearts were victors; so I wondered
Why she sighed.
Afterwards I knew her throughly,
And she loved me staunchly, truly,
Till she died;
But she never made confession
Why, at that first sweet concession,
She had sighed.
It was in our May, remember;
And though now I near November
And abide
Till my appointed change, unfretting,
Sometimes I sit half regretting
That she sighed.
Raymond Bisha introduces Naxos’ new album of the complete works for solo piano by leading American composer John Corigliano Jnr. During their conversation together, the composer gives insight into the creative genesis of all the works on the programme, which span a period of some fifty years: from the 1968 Piano Concerto (“The first piece I ever wrote for orchestra”) to Prelude for Paul, written in 2021 with an unusual conception. The solo pianist is Philip Edward Fisher, hailed by John Corigliano for his “consummate technique and great musical intelligence.”
View album details
Catalogue No.: 8.559930
Raymond Bisha introduces Naxos’ fifth album devoted to the music of leading American composer, Jonathan Leshnoff, who was GRAMMY-nominated for his album Violins of Hope (Naxos 8.559809) and is amongst the most frequently performed of living composers. The themes of this mixed programme of his recent works are remembrance, memorialisation and hopefulness. The soloist in the Second Violin Concerto is American-born Noah Bendix-Balgley, currently first concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
View album details
Catalogue No.: 8.559927
Source: Pexels.com
I know they’re out there somewhere… people who don’t run a mile when confronted with an arachnid’s bulbous body and hairy projections, stoically putting your average blogger to timorous shame. It would seem that some classical composers weren’t afraid of getting up close and personal with spiders, either, judging from the number of pieces spun in their recognition. What follows is a selection of such pieces.Opening the programme is a gentle, condensed nod to Mary Howitt’s 1829 poem The Spider and the Fly, the one that starts as follows:
Source: Mathslinks.net
“Will you walk into my parlour?” said a spider to a fly;
“‘Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy.
The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,
And I have many pretty things to shew when you are there.”
“Oh no, no!” said the little fly, “to ask me is in vain,
For who goes up your winding stair can ne’er come down again.”We hear the take on the poem by Fats Waller (1904–1943), one of America’s jazz greats whose extensive musical talents were often accompanied by a side dish of comedy.
The Spider and the Fly (8.120692)https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/8.120692.Track10.mp3
Source: La Gazzetta Italianna
I have a couple of examples of musical tarantellas next, representing the lively Italian dance in 6/8 time performed by flirtatious partners and bedecked by tambourines. At least, that’s the first interpretation as exemplified by Shostakovich in his Tarantella for two pianos. The short interlude formed part of his film score for The Gadfly, based on a romantic-revolutionary novel by the English novelist Ethyl Lillian Voymich. Set against an Italian backdrop, the central character is eventually pursued by the authorities for his radical ideas. When the militia arrive at an inn, suspecting an undercover meeting, the rebels break into a distracting tarantella, which is cut short by an angry officer.Shostakovich: Tarantella (C71087-88) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/C71087-88CD2.Track01.mp3
Source: Wikimedia Commons
A darker interpretation of the dance derives from tarantism, a form of hysteria said to have been experienced in Italy’s late Middle Ages following a bite from the tarantula spider. Frenzied dancing was apparently the generally accepted cure! That more sinister edge is caught in Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s Nocturne and Tarantella, written in 1915 for violin and piano, but heard here in an arrangement for orchestra.
Szymanowski: Tarantella (8.557981) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/8.557981.Track11.mp3Benjamin Britten
Unlikely as it may seem, my next extract links the Fats Waller piece heard earlier with Benjamin Britten. The titles are the same – The Spider and the Fly – and the period music evokes the same era, 1930s America. During the 1930s and early 1940s, Britten supplemented his income by writing a large amount of incidental music for radio, stage and film. Although he could be rather dismissive of this music in later life, a number of these scores have been published and performed since his death in 1976, shedding valuable light on a previously unknown area of his output.Britten’s score for the J. B. Priestley play Johnson over Jordan was composed during February 1939. Featuring some 35 minutes worth of music, it was one of the longest commercial theatre scores that Britten ever produced. Paul Hindmarsh compiled a 6-movement suite from the score in 1990, the fourth of which is titled The Spider and the Fly, an irresistible 1930s dance-band number written to accompany and reflect a night-club scene.
Britten: The Spider and the Fly (8.557197) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/8.557197.Track10.mp3
Albert Roussel
Source: Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain
My next piece was written some 25 years earlier than the Britten work, but was similarly conceived for the stage. It’s by the French composer Albert Roussel, whose surviving compositions can be divided into three periods: from 1902–13, he absorbed the Impressionistic tendencies found in Debussy and Ravel; works written during 1918–25 explored the new musical territory of a complex harmonic language; from around 1925 onward, he adopted the prevailing neo-classicism of the time.He wrote Le festin de l’araignée (The Spider’s Banquet) in 1912. Designated a ‘ballet-pantomime’ it depicts the lives of insects in a garden, their relationships tacitly though insistently likened to that of the human domain. The section titled The Spider rejoices – Dance of the Spider is alternately quietly restrained then loud and boisterous as the arachnid contemplates and then celebrates its catch.
The Spider rejoices– Dance of the Spider (8.572243) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/8.572243.Track04.mp3
Ernst Toch
Photo: Eckhard Joite
Same period, different country for our next extract, this one by the German composer Ernst Toch (1887–1964) whose output tended to reflect the musical and cultural trends current at any given time. Toch wrote his Cello Sonata in 1929, during what was probably his most productive period. He headed the central movement “intermezzo”, yet it can’t be described as merely a short interlude. The music grows from a short initial idea, which Toch immediately makes more complex, turning it into a kind of open circling; the basic motifs rotate, changing in length, structure, proportions and inner propulsion. Maybe no wonder, then, that the movement is titled Die Spinne (The Spider).Die Spinne (8.559716) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/8.559716.Track06.mp3
Source: Wikimedia Commons CC 2.0
I personally find that music seriously creepy, so let’s clear the air with my final choice for today, by American composer Danny Elfman, who appeared in our Naxos headlines in March with a new album featuring his Violin Concerto, “Eleven Eleven” (8.559925). The work was pitched as a true violin concerto noir, both haunting and compelling, that both illustrates Elfman’s love for the music of Shostakovich and Prokofiev and his background in rock, film and television music. As our concluding shout-out to that versatility, then, here’s the main title theme from Elfman’s score for the 2002 film Spider-Man, where gossamer meets gung-ho.Spider-Man (8.570505) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/8.570505.Track03.mp3
Mandolin
Source: Wikimedia Commons CC0 1.0
Not long ago, when I was living in Hong Kong, there was a curious surge of interest among students in playing the ukulele, an instrument that has many cousins around the world in different cultures: banjo, mandolin, lute, balalaika, and so on. They all have their distinctive sounds and body shapes: banjos are circular, balalaikas are triangular, and the mandolin is pear-shaped. For a long time, my only acquaintance with the mandolin was through one of Vivaldi’s concertos for the instrument and its brief appearance in Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. So, this blog will feature a selection of works for mandolin that might usually fly under peoples’ radar, and which I hope you will enjoy.
Lute
Source: Wikimedia Commons CC 2.0
The mandolin’s predecessor in Europe was the lute family, from which it emerged in Italy in the early 1700s. It went on to enjoy a period of popularity that lasted about a century. Its construction featured 4 ‘courses’, meaning four pairs of strings tuned to the same pitch; but as time went on, the number of courses wasn’t restricted to four, and the strings were made from metal.
Theorbo
Source: Wikimedia Commons CC 3.0
My first extract is from a work by the Italian Carlo Arrigoni (1697–1744), who is little known today but was among the more interesting composers of the first half of the 18th century. He gained recognition, both in Italy and in Europe, for his vocal and instrumental compositions. A skilled lute and theorbo player, Arrigoni also played the mandolin. Here’s the third movement of his Sonata for Mandolin and Violin in E minor.
Arrigoni: Courante adagio (CDS7878) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/CDS7878.Track22.mp3
I’m going to jump straight to the Classical period, when the mandolin’s popularity started to become overshadowed by new developments in composition and performance. Before it did, however, many composers continued to write attractive works for the instrument, including Hoffmann (1770–c.1814), Hummel (1778–1837) and Beethoven (1770–1827).
Around 1800, the six-course mandolin experienced a renaissance in cultivated Viennese circles, fed by a healthy supply of new works for the instrument. Little is known about the life and works of the Viennese mandolin player and composer Johann Hoffmann. It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that his works were rediscovered; the originals are still to be found in Viennese libraries. The extreme difficulty of many of his sonatas shows that he must have been an outstanding instrumentalist. Here’s the last movement of his Sonata in D minor; the accompaniment is provided by the archlute.
Hoffmann: Allegro (8.557716) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/8.557716.Track18.mp3
Johann Nepomuk Hummel
Source: Wikipedia – Public Domain
Hummel was a child prodigy, a pupil and friend of Mozart, a virtuoso concert pianist, and a skilled composer in all genres (except the symphony). His Concerto for Mandolin and Orchestra dates from 1799 (there’s an 1816 version of the work for Piano and Orchestra). We join this performance partway through the finale.
Hummel: Rondo (CDS128) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/CDS128.Track12CUT.mp3
Ludwig van Beethoven
© HNH International
Hummel knew Beethoven during his time in Vienna, though their relationship had its ups and downs. In 1796, Beethoven set out on a journey that took him to Prague, Dresden, Leipzig and Berlin, and it was in Prague that he wrote a group of pieces for mandolin. It’s been suggested that Beethoven may have become interested in the instrument through Wenzel Krumpholz, both a distinguished violinist in Vienna and a mandolin virtuoso. Beethoven is said to have taken violin lessons with Wenzel and was certainly on close terms with him. Carl Czerny, who became a pupil of Beethoven, recalls Krumpholz’s championship of Beethoven, at a time when the latter’s work was often misunderstood. It was Krumpholz who introduced the ten-year-old Czerny to Beethoven, a meeting recalled in some detail by Czerny in his memoirs.
Four of Beethoven’s single-movement works for mandolin and fortepiano survive. Here’s the Sonatina in C major.
Beethoven: Sonatina in C major (9.70289) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/9.70289.Track02.mp3
Raffaele Calace
Source: Wikipedia – Public Domain
We move on in time to music by Raffaele Calace (1863–1934), the son of a mandolin-maker who became a distinguished virtuoso of the instrument, creating new possibilities by technical modifications of the instrument. Calace makes use of just about every mandolin technique available to him: the tremolo, duo-style (two-part writing where the player keeps a tremolo going while simultaneously picking out struck accompaniments), harmonics, arpeggio patterns, left- and right-hand pizzicato, glissando runs, and cadenza passages.
Calace’s concertos, originally written for mandolin and piano, are substantial three-movement works. If a single musical example could demonstrate the range, emotion and expressiveness of the mandolin, it’s probably the slow movement of his Concerto No. 1, which we now hear in this extract.
Calace: Largo tranquillo (8.570434) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/8.570434.Track02CUT.mp3
We finish with two works from the 21st century. The first is American composer Avner Dorman’s Mandolin Concerto, cast in three sections and introduced by the composer as follows:
Avner Dorman
Photo: RR Jones
“One of my favourite things as a composer is to discover and explore new instruments. When Avi Avital approached me to write Mandolin Concerto (2006), my acquaintance with the mandolin was fairly limited. As I got to know the instrument better, I discovered its diverse sonic and expressive possibilities.
Mandolin Concerto’s main conflicts are between sound and silence and between motion and stasis. What inspired me to deal with these opposites is the mandolin’s most basic technique – the tremolo, which is the rapid repetition of notes. The tremolo embodies both motion and stasis. The rapid movement provides momentum, while the pitches remain the same.
The second part is fast and dance-like and alludes to Middle Eastern music. It accumulates energy leading to a culmination at its end. The tremolo of the opening part is transformed into a relentless repetition in the bass – like a heartbeat.”
Here’s that second part.
Avner Dorman: Allegro (8.559620) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/8.559620.Track02.mp3
Thomas Allen LeVines
Photo: Berklee College of Music
Finally, to a popular combination of instruments: mandolin and guitar. I’ve selected the last section from “ … after the quake: 5 Impressions from Murakami” by Thomas Allen LeVines (b. 1954). The work was written in 2009.
Haruki Murakami (b. 1949) is a best-selling Japanese writer whose books have been translated into some 50 languages. His collection of six short stories, … after the quake, was written between 1999 and 2000 in response to Japan’s 1995 Kobe earthquake. It features characters profoundly affected by the quake even if they only saw it on television or read about it in the newspapers. LeVines’ work comprises five musical sketches, the last of which is titled No. 5. Con moto – the locomotive is coming …
The composer says this movement “may allude to how approaching earthquakes have been compared to the sounds and sensations of immense trains rapidly and closely passing by survivors … The guitar surprisingly and unexpectedly repeats the motif of the approaching earthquake, and the repetitions grow always closer while the mandolin, first hesitantly, then furiously and inexorably plays a rapid perpetuum mobile based on Japanese shamisen technique. Musical quotes appear from sources as diverse as J. S. Bach, Olivier Messiaen and Jimi Hendrix. Finally, after a dramatic accelerando the earthquake reaches the end of the work with an enormous sforzando.”
LeVines: No. 5. Con moto – the locomotive is coming… (8.574060) https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/8.574060.Track16.mp3
Conductor and Naxos artist Marin Alsop discusses Robert Schumann’s four symphonies in the wake of her recordings of the works as reorchestrated by Mahler (8.574429 and 8.574430). Following observations about instrumental developments of the time, Mahler’s myriad tweaks to the score, and the somewhat bipolar flavour of the music (with counterpoint always at hand as a periodic stabiliser), she moves on to a detailed appreciation of each symphony, demonstrating Schumann’s distinctive contribution to the development of the genre “with one foot in the past, and one in the future.”
View album details
Catalogue No.: 8.574429
Boris Giltburg
Photo: Boris Giltburg
This blog visits a new album scheduled for release on April 14 that features works for piano and orchestra by Sergei Rachmaninov (2023 marks the 150th anniversary of his birth). The solo pianist is Boris Giltburg, a seasoned Naxos artist noted not only for his outstanding musicianship and technical finesse (witness the numerous glowing reviews he unfailingly receives), but also for his presentation skills in bringing to life the works he performs, both on social media and, as is the case with this latest album, his production of the album’s booklet notes, which reflect authority and insight. The catalogue number of the release is 8.574528.
Vassily Sinaisky
Photo: Jesper Lindgren
I’ll be dipping into Boris’ observations about the three works on this programme: Rachmaninov’s First and Fourth Piano Concertos, and the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini. That latter work, together with Rachmaninov’s Second and Third Piano Concertos, receive significantly more attention in recording studios and concert halls than the First and Fourth Concertos; but it would come as no surprise if this wonderful recording by Boris (together with the Brussels Philharmonic under conductor Vassily Sinaisky) proceeds to significantly raise the stature of those perceived poor relations.
Rachmaninov completed his First Piano Concerto when he was barely 18 years old, giving the first performance a year later. Although it received further performances in this original form, it clearly weighed on Rachmaninov’s mind that the score was in need of some attention, which it finally received in his 1917 revision, the one normally played nowadays. Rachmaninov pulled no punches on himself when contemplating the matter, writing to a friend in 1908:
Sergei Rachmaninov
© HNH International
“Now tomorrow I’m planning to take up my First Concerto and look through it, and then decide how much toil and time a new version would take, and whether it’s worth bothering with at all. I am so often asked about this Concerto, and this Concerto is so horrible in its current form – this is the main thing – that I would love to deal with it and, if possible, bring everything in it into a decent shape. Though, of course, much will have to be written anew, as the orchestration is even worse than the music. So, tomorrow I will decide this question, and I would like to decide it positively.”
Boris’ observations about the revised version include the following:
“Comparing the two versions is fascinating, and shows Rachmaninov’s tremendous compositional growth in the intervening years. The melodies are identical, but almost nothing else remains from the original! … Rachmaninov simplified and clarified the structure, cutting multiple sections. He reworked the orchestration, remaining within the sound world of the original, but filling it with new colours and adding much needed transparency… The finale was basically composed anew – most of the muscular, spiky, fiery music of the outer sections did not exist in the original version.”
Let’s put those comments into context by hearing a couple of extracts. First, the opening of the contemplative second movement.
II. [Andante]https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/8.574528.Track02_CUT.mp3
And secondly, the opening stretch of the finale.
Finale: Allegro vivacehttps://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/8.574528.Track03_CUT.mp3
Rachmaninov had an even tougher time establishing the Fourth Piano Concerto as a work worthy of entering his hall of fame. First performed in Philadelphia in the United States in 1927, it was not at all well received by audience and critics alike, niggles including the length of the piece and the fact that the orchestra was omnipresent. Sadly, success evaded the work throughout Rachmaninov’s lifetime. The revisions made before the work’s publication in 1928 did little to improve its fortunes, so Rachmaninov withdrew the work until his final revision of the work in 1941. Boris Giltburg writes:
“I am very happy to see it start coming into its own in recent years. For me it occupies a unique place in Rachmaninov’s output, with a musical ‘flavour’ unlike any of his other works … From the three versions, the best in my eyes is the last – the leanest and most focused. I do not consider the harsh critical response to the original version to be justified, but I do feel the changes made by Rachmaninov improved the concerto … I would call this concerto, for a lack of a better word, rhapsodic – a captivating tale, freely-narrated, with a somewhat vaguely defined outline, whereby the experience of listening is simultaneously an engaging experience of discovering the shape of the work we are listening to.”
In light of that observation, here’s how the central section of the first movement unfolds.
I. Allegro vivace (alla breve)https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/8.574528.Track30_CUT.mp3
Boris’ comments about the finale include the following:
“The reworked finale is the most fragmented movement of the three … Rachmaninov writes a prolonged coda, which contains three threads loosely linking the finale with the first movement. First, the very opening of the concerto seems to make a return. Then, the coda builds up to a climax which mirrors that of the first movement – perhaps the most important link, as these two climaxes tower over the concerto like mountain peaks, echoing each other across a large divide. And finally, the concluding passages in the piano are built on two sequences of descending scales, to match the ascending scale motif which opened the concerto, before the triumphant G major finish.”
We pick up his performance of the finale in the approach to that allusion to the concerto’s opening.
III. Allegro vivacehttps://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/8.574528.Track32_CUT.mp3
Finally to the work that’s a piano concerto in all but name – Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, written in 1934, and reflecting a happier period in the composer’s life, when the will to compose was strong and the tug of his Russian homeland roots assuaged. Boris comments:
“It is a blast of a piece, its electrifying rhythmical energy working alongside the irresistible catchiness of the source material – Niccolò Paganini’s famous Caprice No. 24 for violin solo. The Rhapsody is in fact a set of 24 variations on Paganini’s theme, with the briefest of introductions, and with the first variation preceding the theme: it outlines the theme’s salient notes, like a melody’s skeleton without any connecting material.”
Here’s that opening section comprising the introduction, first variation, the theme, and variations 2–4.
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, opening sectionhttps://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Rhapsody-on-a-Theme-of-Paganini-opening-section.mp3
“From there on, Rachmaninov takes us on a white-knuckle ride, with an underlying current of danger throughout: as if something dark or even demonic lurked just outside the corner of our eye. And yet, the overriding sense of the music is fun – to which I attribute a significant part of the Rhapsody’s popular success.”
At Variation 7, Rachmaninov introduces a second theme – the Dies irae mediaeval chant with which Rachmaninov was obsessed throughout his career.
Variations 7, 8 and 9https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Variations-7-8-and-9.mp3
Before ploughing onwards to a thrilling (and witty) conclusion, there’s one moment of repose – the celebrated Variation 18, the longest in the set, with which we end this blog. Boris concludes the commentary:
“The glorious Variation XVIII [is] ingeniously derived from the inversion of Paganini’s theme. ‘This one is for my agent’, Rachmaninov said, half-jokingly, but if we disregard for a moment the kitschy baggage which this variation (somewhat unfortunately) carries upon its back, we will find one of the most beautiful, tender and soul-stirring moments to have ever come from Rachmaninov’s mind and heart. Surrounded by the unsentimental muscularity of the Rhapsody, the variation shines even brighter – both in itself, and as a throwback to a different era, bathed in memory’s golden light.”
Variation 18https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/8.574528.Track23_CUT.mp3
(This last audio extract is also available to hear and download on several streaming platforms. Details may be found by following this link.)
8.573629
Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 2 – Études-tableaux, Op. 33
Boris Giltburg • Royal Scottish National Orchestra • Carlos Miguel Prieto
DISCOVER
8.573630
Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 3 – Variations on a Theme of Corelli
Boris Giltburg • Royal Scottish National Orchestra • Carlos Miguel Prieto
DISCOVER
When I was a teenager, I would occasionally try and bash through Poulenc’s Thème varié on my long-suffering upright piano. I loved the lilt of the original theme on which the variations are based. Here it is:
Thème (8.553931)https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/8.553931.Track01.mp3
Francis Poulenc
Source: Wikipedia
But what engaged me more was how the subsequent variations went beyond the usual melodic and rhythmic manipulations to portray human moods in various temperamental makeovers. It seemed to me that this must be quite difficult to achieve: to capture a person’s intangible character, rather than develop an abstraction, paint a scene, or portray a physical event. Here are three of Poulenc’s short temperamental sketches from his set of variations: a trader in sarcasm; a maker of mockery; and a chatterbox.
Sarcastique (8.553931)https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/8.553931.Track05.mp3
Ironique (8.553931)https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/8.553931.Track07.mp3
Volubile (8.553931)https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/8.553931.Track09.mp3
The rest of this blog, then, will offer a selection of what I’ll call examples of temperaments in music. We learn that there are fundamentally Four Temperaments shaping our characters: The Choleric, The Sanguine, The Phlegmatic and The Melancholy. There are two noted works that are actually titled ‘The Four Temperaments’ and ascribe their four movements accordingly. More of those later.
Dan Welcher
Photo: Linda Howard
First, I’ve chosen music by American composer Dan Welcher (b. 1948). His String Quartet No. 1 was commissioned in 1987 by the National Endowment for the Arts for the Cleveland Quartet. The composer explains that “I worked the piece out into a four-movement format, and devised a quasi-program of moods and textures to provide contrast and change. The result is a diversified work that is, by turns, abrasive, melancholy, highly tragic, soothing, darkly comic, and victorious. The first movement is marked ‘Harsh, angry’, and pits the solo cello against the other three instruments as a kind of lone fighter against a machine-made enemy.”
Here’s how that choleric movement opens.
Harsh, angry (8.559384)https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/8.559384.Track05_cut.mp3
Leonardo Balada
Here’s another expression of the choleric in the first movement of Leonardo Balada’s Caprichos No. 6 for clarinet and piano. Born in 1933 in Spain, Balada studied first in Barcelona before moving to settle in the United States. The clarinettist on our recording, Ivan Ivanov, was impressed to note Balada’s association with surrealist artist Salvador Dali, who endorsed the composer with a suitably eccentric comment: “This is to certify that I consider the young composer, Mr Leonardo Balada, to possess a remarkable talent!”How remarkable does Balada’s portrayal of Enojo (Anger) sound to you? Perhaps more tetchy than choleric?
Enojo (8.579056)https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/8.579056.Track05.mp3
Marcel Poot
Clinching a sanguine, cheerfully optimistic musical mood might not seem a huge challenge, but it’s worth remembering that instrumental pieces capable of making one laugh out loud are few and far between. For my sanguine music, I’ve chosen a piece by Belgian composer Marcel Poot (1901–1988), his Vrolijke Ouverture (Cheerful Overture). Poot dedicated the piece to his teacher Paul Dukas, with whom he’d studied in Paris in the 1930s; it became very popular and helped him to become known internationally. If you’re downhearted while reading this post (surely not!), maybe it’ll help gee you up.Vrolijke Ouverture (8.223775)https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/8.223775.Track09.mp3
John Dowland
Photo: thefamouspeople.com
For my melancholy piece of introspection I’m turning to the period of the English Renaissance and a lute solo by John Dowland (1563–1626), who presented the popular image of a musician who was a master of the fashionable humour of melancholy. In terms of character, he seems to have been a most sociable, sanguine and cheerful man, yet in his music he was able to readily capture the spirit of the age, or its most notable affectation. Here’s his Melancholy Galliard for lute solo.
Melancholy Galliard (8.553381)https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/8.553381.Track05.mp3Finally to what must be the most difficult of temperaments to achieve in sound, that of a phlegmatic, self-possessed, apathetic soul.
Carl Nielsen
© HNH International
Danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865–1931) got the idea of writing a symphony based on the Four Humours after seeing a primitive peasant painting in a village inn which chimed with his own particular interest at the time in characterisation, seeing another character from the inside. The Four Humours of early medicine are the four liquids in the human body – yellow bile, phlegm, black bile and blood – a preponderance of any one of which will give rise to a temperament that is choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic or sanguine.
Nielsen’s Second Symphony ‘The Four Temperaments’ takes these characterisations as its template. It premiered in 1902 at a Danish Concert Society event in Copenhagen, with the composer himself conducting. The choleric first movement is followed by the phlegmatic, slower second. But how to cast the unemotionally stolid in musical terms? Nielsen explained that he imagined here a young man of seventeen or eighteen, a trial to his teachers, idle in his lessons, but not to be scolded. His nature leads him to the countryside, where birds sing, fish glide through the water and the sun shines, all depicted in a mood remote from energy or strong feeling.
II. Allegro comodo e flemmatico (SWR19120CD)https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/SWR19120CD.Track02.mp3
Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) is the other composer to have written a work titled ‘The 4 Temperaments’, in 1940, so I thought we would listen to his interpretation of ‘Phlegmatic’ to end this blog. Hindemith’s work is a ballet score for solo piano and strings and is cast in five sections: the first is a tri-partite theme on which the following four present variations reflecting the individual temperaments. Each follows a similar structure: a section for strings; dialogue between solo piano and orchestra; a siciliano for solo violin. Here’s the third variation, Phlegmatisch, in a performance by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Hindemith himself.Variation 3: Phlegmatisch (9.81122)https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/9.81122.Track04.mp3
Music from Finland brings our short survey of Nordic music over the past few weeks to a close. For most people, the country’s reputation for classical music is probably dominated by the name of Jean Sibelius
(1865–1957), so this blog will try and turn the spotlight on works by other composers deserving of air-time.
Fredrik Pacius
Source: Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain
We start with music by a composer born some sixty years before Sibelius, namely Fredrik Pacius (1809–1891). Regarded as the father of Finnish music, Pacius was the composer of the first Finnish opera, The Hunt of King Charles, which had its premiere in Helsinki in 1852. At that time the language of the theatre and the opera house was Swedish, and accordingly the work has a Swedish text, although the opera is often performed in a Finnish translation.
The plot, set in 1671, centres on King Charles XI, ruler of Sweden and Finland, immediately before he reached an age to assume control of his kingdom. The music itself remains close to models such as Weber’s Freischütz and Oberon, and there are also hints of Beethoven, not least in the choice of the name Leonora for the heroine. I’ve chosen a bouncy extract from Act II – the Shanty and Chorus – that translates as A scurvy tar is such a man.
The Hunt of King Charles (8.225317-18)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/8.225317-18CD2.Track04.mp3
Erkki Melartin
© Finnish Heritage Agency
Now to a composer who was a direct contemporary of Sibelius, Erkki Melartin (1875–1937). His studies included two years in Vienna with Robert Fuchs, whose pupils had included Mahler, Sibelius and Korngold. Composition was his life blood, together with pursuits in the field of education. It was thanks to his efforts – in the middle of the 1930s depression, no less – that a purpose-built building for the Helsinki Conservatory, the first of its kind, was completed in 1932. It remains in the use of the Sibelius Academy to this day.The 21st century has brought a revival of interest in Melartin’s music and his importance in the field of Finnish music. Long-forgotten masterpieces, previously unrecorded, have again seen the light of day. One of the most significant of these is the tone poem Traumgesicht Op. 70, written in 1910. Alexander Siloti, one of the big names in the musical life of Russia’s St Petersburg, invited Melartin to provide and conduct one of his shorter works in the city. With nothing suitable available, Melartin set to work immediately on creating a new piece. Six weeks later, he completed Traumgesicht, writing to a friend in late August 1910:
“I have been working terribly hard. The night before last I completed Traumgesicht after 15 hours of work that day. Siloti lit such a fire under me by telegraphing and writing me every so often. When I had told him what I was doing, he wanted to see the beginning, and then he urged me to send ‘taglich mehr, taglich mehr’ [daily more, daily more]! He is very delighted. It is a terribly difficult piece, and such orchestral writing has never before been attempted in this country.”
Lasting some 15 minutes, I’ve selected the opening section of the work to demonstrate Melartin’s distinctive voice.
Traumgesicht (ODE1283-2)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/ODE1283-2.Track01_cut.mp3
Oskar Merikanto
Photo: Salon Strindberg
Smaller scale music now, with a song by Oskar Merikanto (1868–1924) whose works enjoyed enormous popularity from early in his career. Sibelius was seen as an unequivocally ‘highbrow’ composer, appreciated primarily among the upper classes; Merikanto, however, managed to bridge the gap between concert music and the general public during a period when the framework of musical life in Finland was only just being established. In this sense, Merikanto’s efforts were of immeasurable value.Merikanto was not only a composer but also a pianist, the organist of Johannes Church in Helsinki, an organ inspector, a conductor, a music critic and a teacher. Given that he was an active accompanist, it’s unsurprising that solo songs (he wrote about 150) form the best known and most significant portion of his output, many of which remain to this day among the all-time favourite Finnish songs of any genre. Here’s his Myrskylintu (Stormbird).
Myrskylintu (ODE1111-2)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/ODE1111-2.Track08.mp3
Kaija Saariaho
Photo: Maarit Kytöharju/FIMIC
Next, I’ve chosen three pieces by living Finnish composers, the first by Kaija Saariaho who celebrated her 70th birthday in 2022. Orion is one of her largest orchestral works, written in 2002 and cast in three movements. The subject of Orion presents two contrasting essentials: the image of him as the giant hunter of Greek myth, known not just for his great beauty but also for his prodigious strength and bravery; and his placement by Zeus as a stellar constellation, following his death at the hands of Artemis the huntress. Those contrasting characteristics of hyperactive hunter and static heavenly body can be heard in both the frenzy and stasis of the final movement, Hunter.Orion (ODE1130-2)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/ODE1130-2.Track08.mp3
Aulis Sallinen
Photo: Maarit Kytöharju/FIMIC
Born in 1935, Aulis Sallinen’s style of composition has reflected more of a traditional approach to melody, tonality and texture, sometimes described as ‘audience-friendly’. He wrote Sunrise Serenade in 1989 in the wake of the completion of his opera Kullervo, the plot of which embodies a tragic tale of misery. Maybe as both an extension to and redemption from that theme, Sunrise Serenade (scored for 2 trumpets, piano and string orchestra) treads a melancholy transition from darkness to light.
Sunrise Serenade (8.553747)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/8.553747.Track03.mp3Magnus Lindberg
Photo: Sigurd Gartmann
Magnus Lindberg (b. 1958) came to the immediate attention of the world of classical music when he announced his artistic credo as a budding composer in the late 1970s. Together with Finnish contemporaries such as Kaija Saariaho, referred to earlier, he formed a group with the name ‘Ears Open!’ (Korvat Auki!) in 1977 with the goal of reviving the spirit of modernism and innovation in Finnish musical culture. The differences between Lindberg’s piano works dating from that period and those composed in the early years of the 21st century can seem quite stark. Whereas his early works are based strictly on serial procedures, the emergence of a vibrant, more approachable style can be heard in works such as the two Etudes (2001/2004), which even share harmonic, textural and stylistic parallels with Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Rachmaninov, Scriabin and Messiaen.Here are two short pieces to enable that comparison: first, the third of his Tre Pianostycke (1978), followed by the Etude No. 2 (2004).
Tre Pianostycke (8.570542)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/8.570542.Track05.mp3
Etude No. 2 (8.570542)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/8.570542.Track17.mp3
Jean Sibelius
Finally to Sibelius. But, with a composing career that spanned some 80 years, which piece of his to choose? Recalling a concert I once attended given by the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle suggested the answer. I’d been commissioned to write a review of the event, which featured Berlioz’s overture Le corsaire, Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite and an electrifying performance of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. What will they choose for an encore, I wondered, that could top out that sort of programme? The answer was Sibelius’ Scene with Cranes that forms part of his incidental music for the play Kuolema. In describing the performance for the readership, I remember deciding that the best way to convey its mesmerising effect was to write: “Trying to describe the beauty of the piece and the performance would be like cutting the throat of a songbird to find out what makes it sing.” So, I’ll leave you to decide if that resonates to any degree with you following this performance by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra under Pietari Inkinen.Scene with Cranes (8.570763)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/8.570763.Track10.mp3
It’s Norway that comes under the spotlight this week in our Nordic composers survey. Iceland + Sweden and Denmark featured in the first two instalments; Finland will take the finale spot. The seven Norwegian composers in this chapter will be heard in chronological order, with one exception.
Ole Bull
© HNH International
Ole Bull (1810–1880) was the first Norwegian musician to put his country on the map. Known as The Nordic Paganini, he was celebrated as one of the world’s great violin virtuosos, playing thousands of concerts in Europe and America over a span of almost half a century. As late as 1879, the year before he died, he was playing to a full house in Vienna’s prestigious Musikverein. Like other virtuoso musicians of the time, it was his own music that he mostly performed, aiming to impress audiences with his dazzling technique.
Bull put his skill as an improviser to good use when using folk melodies from the countries he visited as the basis of a composition. Los Recuerdos de Habana (Memories of Havana) for violin and orchestra is a good example of how such pieces were put together. It’s one of the earliest examples of the use of Creole/Cuban melodies in classical music (Bull visited Cuba in 1844). The score and solo part are lost, but a complete set of orchestral parts survives. Using these as his starting-point, Henning Kraggerud – the performer on our recording – adapted the habanera melodies and composed the variations and final coda. The resultant format is a potpourri of contrasting sections which we join part-way through the work.
Los Recuerdos de Habana (8.572827)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/8.572827.Track12_part.mp3
Johann Svendsen
Photo: Claus Peter Knudsen
In 1859, while still a teenager, the future conductor and composer Johann Svendsen (1840–1911) met Ole Bull, whose encouragement, by the way, had also set a young Edvard Grieg on a successful career path. When he was 23, Svendsen received a royally-sponsored scholarship to enable him to study violin in Leipzig. He also used his time there to nurture a growing interest in composition. This led to the completion of his Symphony No. 1 in D major, Op. 4 in 1867, a work that Grieg later described as showing scintillating genius, superb national feeling and really brilliant handling of an orchestra; “everything”, Grieg continued, “had my fullest sympathy and forced itself on me with power that could not be resisted.” The experience led Grieg to withdraw his own symphony from further performance and to write on the score the injunction, obeyed until relatively recently: “Must never be performed.”
You can judge for yourself whether Grieg’s admiration for Svendsen’s work was understandable by listening to the third movement.
Symphony No. 1 (8.553898)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/8.553898.Track03.mp3
Johan Halvorsen
© HNH International
Some 25 years younger than Svendsen, Johan Halvorsen (1864–1935) was one of Norway’s most talented violinists and an internationally renowned conductor and composer. From 1899 to 1919, he directed Norway’s largest professional symphony orchestra, which then numbered 43 musicians.
In his late twenties, Halvorsen started to compose in earnest; he went on to complete more than 170 works. In 1907 he mentioned in several newspaper interviews that he was “at the moment … working on a violin concerto”. The world of Norwegian music eagerly anticipated the work’s premiere but, for whatever the real reason, Halvorsen refused to perform it in the spring of 1908, allegedly because he was nervous about how it would be received by the critics. The premiere did, however, receive its premiere in 1909, albeit in the Netherlands. The soloist was the Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow, who told a Norwegian newspaper: “I admire Grieg and Sinding and Halvorsen. I have come here for the sole purpose of playing Halvorsen’s new concerto. It’s very interesting to perform, and also tremendously beautiful. I think it will catch on, but it’s never possible to know that for sure in advance.”
The audience, however, were unequivocal about both composer and soloist, the newspaper reporting that “Both of them were called back 8–10 times, and Halvorsen thanked Miss Parlow with a gallant kiss on the hand.” The score and parts for the work were subsequently lost, and rediscovered only in 2015 in the archive of that original soloist. Here’s part of the second movement.
Violin Concerto (8.573738)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/8.573738.Track02_part.mp3
Christian Sinding
© HNH International
Christian Sinding (1856–1941), a contemporary of Halvorsen, is possibly best remembered today by ambitious amateur pianists for his Rustle of Spring. He was a more important figure in the music of Norway, however, than this might suggest; in his time, he was arguably second only to Grieg. Trained in Leipzig, he fell under the influence of Liszt and Wagner, producing a large quantity of music that enjoyed contemporary popularity. Unlike others, Sinding tried to support himself purely from income derived from his compositions, taking on no other commitments, such as performing, writing or teaching. This frequently required composing to order, particularly piano works. Sinding himself even referred to this as his “piano work conveyor belt.”
Although his large output spanned many genres, it became clear early on that Sinding enjoyed a special relationship with text as a means of artistic expression, something which resulted in more than 250 songs, composed throughout his career. Here’s one of his later songs, Den sorte vin (The Dark Wine), Op. 128, No. 3.
Den sorte vin (8.553905)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/8.553905.Track14.mp3
Geirr Tveitt
Geirr Tveitt (1908–1981) was one of the most individual and prolific of Norway’s 20th-century composers, a leading figure known throughout his musical life as a composer, pianist and teacher. He was captivated as a teenager by local songs and especially by the Hardanger fiddle, the decorated folk violin of western Norway, with sympathetic strings below the fingerboard. During the Second World War, Tveitt collected over a thousand folk-tunes which he incorporated into hundreds of his works.
A decade before his death, Tveitt suffered a terrible blow when both his home and most of his music were destroyed by fire. Thanks to the efforts of his family and fellow musicians, however, Tveitt’s vivid sound world is being rekindled in recent recordings. He wrote five piano concertos, though only the last was published. Tveitt himself was the soloist in a performance of the work in Paris in 1954; the same concert saw him also performing both the Brahms and Tchaikovsky First Piano Concertos! Here’s the second movement of his own Fifth Piano Concerto, titled Danse aux campanules bleus.
Danse aux campanules bleus (8.555077)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/8.555077.Track05.mp3
Arne Nordheim
Wikipedia – CC BY 2.0
Arne Nordheim (1931–2010), the leading Norwegian composer of his generation, studied first at the conservatory in Oslo before moving to Copenhagen, where the composer Vagn Holmboe introduced him to the compositional techniques of Bartók. A visit to Paris in 1955 brought him experience of electronic music, and after further study in Stockholm, where he met György Ligeti, he was able to pioneer new techniques in his native Norway, a country that musically had remained generally conservative in taste.
His 3-movement Rendezvous, originally a string quartet written in 1956, was revised by Nordheim for string orchestra in 1986, with the new title suggesting a meeting with his younger self. Nordheim was initially influenced by Sibelius and, still more, by Mahler, and then by Bartók’s string quartets, and these influences are reflected in Rendezvous. Here’s the second movement, Intermezzo, in the arrangement for string orchestra.
Intermezzo (8.572441)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/8.572441.Track08.mp3
Edvard Grieg
© HNH International
Of course, Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) remains Norway’s most famous composer. Works from his output are so comparatively well-known to music lovers, however, that I decided to lightly pass over him for this blog. Except that I thought you might like to hear an extract from his C minor Symphony, completed in 1864, on which he slapped that ‘never-to-be-performed’ notice after hearing Svensen’s First Symphony, described earlier (his ban was eventually ignored in the early 1980s). Was he right to have been so bashful about the work? You can decide for yourself as we play out with the symphony’s fourth and final movement.
Symphony in C minor (8.557991)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/8.557991.Track04.mp3
The first instalment in our brief survey of music from the Nordic countries – Finland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden [FINDS] – featured composers from Iceland and Sweden. This edition showcases music by a selection of Danish composers, whom we’ll introduce in broadly chronological order.
Friedrich Kuhlau
© HNH International
We start with Friedrich Kuhlau (1786–1832) who, although he was German-born, certainly qualifies as a feather in Denmark’s hat. We’ll hear pianist Jens Lühr perform some of his music in due course, so I’ll let him introduce the composer:
“Friedrich Kuhlau, together with Christoph Ernst Friedrich Weyse (1774–1842), was the most important early Romantic composer in Denmark, where his fame is mainly based on the overture and incidental music he composed for Elverhøj (Elves’ Hill), a theatre piece by Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Outside of Denmark he is better known today for his popular piano sonatinas and flute works.
Born in 1786 at Uelzen in the district of Lower Saxony in Germany, his family subsequently moved to Hamburg, from where he fled in 1810 to Copenhagen in order to avoid conscription into the Napoleonic Army, which occupied Hamburg from 1806 to 1814. In 1813 he became a Danish citizen and was engaged as a royal chamber musician.
Kuhlau’s relatively low income forced him to write a lot of easy-to-play music for piano and compositions for flute, two of the most popular instruments at that time. He went on to be widely considered the ‘Danish Beethoven’ or the ‘Beethoven of the flute’, since his appreciation for the great composer is evident in his style of writing, although this appreciation never approaches plagiarism.”
To demonstrate the point, here’s the exposition of the first movement of Kuhlau’s virtuosic Piano Sonata in E flat major, which he composed two years after settling in Denmark.
Piano Sonata in E flat major (GP797)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/GP797.Track01_part.mp3
Next we have a pair of composers who lived at the same time but engaged in completely different styles of music – Niels Wilhelm Gade (1817–1890) and Hans Christian Lumbye (1810–1874).
Niels Wilhelm Gade
Photo: Hansen, Schou & Weller
Gade started his musical career as a violinist in the Danish Royal Orchestra, his first success as a composer coming in 1840 with his overture Echoes of Ossian. His First Symphony was accepted by Mendelssohn and performed by the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, where Gade met both Mendelssohn and Schumann. He succeeded Mendelssohn as conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1847, returning the following year to Denmark, where he came to assume a leading position in the musical life of the country, writing music in a style greatly influenced by Mendelssohn and Schumann.
Gade melded Nordic spirit with the technique of the Germanic masters, not least in his three violin sonatas: the light-fingered First, dedicated to Clara Schumann; the mercurial Second, dedicated to Robert Schumann; and the weighty Third with its lovely Romanze, which we now hear.
Romanze (8.570524)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/8.570524.Track09.mp3
Hans Christian Lumbye
Source: Wikimedia Commons – Public Domain
Lumbye wrote in a much lighter style. He inaugurated concerts in the manner of Johann Strauss in his native Copenhagen after hearing the Viennese bands of Joseph Lanner and the elder Strauss. Leading his orchestra while playing the violin, he provided entertainment at Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens. He wrote a large quantity of attractive dance music in the manner that Lanner and Strauss had made popular, including waltzes, polkas, galops and marches.
The following story, as handed down by Lumbye’s grandchild, describes the genesis of his Champagne Galop, written in 1845: One evening Lumbye had been invited to a prestigious gathering at the British Legation in Copenhagen, but on his way there he had to pass his favourite hostelry, and decided that he preferred to spend the evening in those familiar surroundings. On returning home late in the evening he had to tell his family how he had wallowed in champagne at the Legation (which he had in fact never visited). To illustrate this for the expectant family he sat down at the piano and improvised his way through what was later to become the world-famous Champagne Galop.
Champagne Galop (8.556843)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/8.556843.Track01.mp3
Carl Nielsen
© HNH International
Carl Nielsen (1865–1931) was the principal post-Romantic Danish composer. Following subsidised study at the Copenhagen Conservatory, he went on to enjoy a long career during which he developed his own personal style of composition, in particular in a series of six important symphonies.These are essentially tonal, emotionally direct works that alternate long melodic lines with passages of blazing energy. Symphony No. 4, ‘The Inextinguishable’, is his most dramatic and conveys ‘the elemental will to live’.
Written between 1916 and 1918, The Fourth employs a large orchestra, including two sets of timpani, which make a particular contribution to the Allegro finale, in which the forces of struggle and conflict are finally resolved, proclaiming music and the will to live as inextinguishable, even though events in Europe at the time might too easily have suggested only despair. Here’s how the symphony draws to a close in a 1966 performance by the Royal Danish Orchestra conducted by Igor Markevitch.
Symphony No. 4 (VOX-NX-2001)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/VOX-NX-2001.Track04_part.mp3
Rued Langgaard
Organist and composer Rued Langgaard (1893–1952) was born in Copenhagen. His father, a pianist and composer, had been a pupil of Liszt. Largely self-taught as a composer, Rued had early success in Berlin, when performances of his works were given by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, while Danish critics remained sceptical. He was successful in Germany, while at home his works were broadcast; otherwise he had little support.
Langgaard’s music shows an affinity with that of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin in that both men believed that through their music they could pave the way for a spiritual revolution. Langgaard explored his youthful fascination with Catholicism in music of fanaticism and ecstasy.
Langgaard’s Music of the Abyss was composed in Venice in March 1921 (where he also gained inspiration for his doomsday opera Antichrist). As in the opera, Langgaard deals with some of the most destructive forces in time and existence. Based on a series of apocalyptic visions taken from The Book of Revelation, he paints the horrors of hell in musical images. The second of the two movements is headed Frenetico, quasi rondo.
Music of the Abyss (8.574312)
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Vagn Holmboe
Vagn Holmboe (1909–1996) is regarded by many as a successor to Carl Nielsen, not least in terms of symphonic repertoire; Holmboe wrote 14 symphonies. But I’ve chosen a work on a much smaller scale, his Moya – 7 Japanese Songs, which is his most distinctive work for voice and piano. Composed in 1952, the music explores a new type of accompaniment which together with the very simple melodic lines creates an exotic effect. In the first four songs the piano sounds almost like a plucked string instrument and the voice like a flute. In Holmboe’s own words:
“Moya is Japanese and means something like ’fog’. I have not attempted to imitate Japanese music, but in some songs there is a slight suggestion of the transparent Koto or Shamisen music which is typically Japanese.”
The first song is titled Foggy evening. Sung in a Danish translation of the original Japanese, here’s an English translation of the text:
Every evening, when the fog spreads over the meadows and the cranes mournfully call out to each other, I think of my beloved.
Jakamosji (8th century)
Foggy evening (8.572728)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/8.572728.Track05.mp3
Per Nørgård
Source: Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 4.0
Finally to a pupil of Holmboe, Per Nørgård (b. 1932), who went on to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. Starting from a style akin to that of Sibelius, he has developed a personal musical language of his own and has exercised a strong influence over younger contemporaries in Scandinavia. We finish with one of his choral pieces, 3 Systrar (Three Sisters). Norgard introduces the work as follows:
“3 Systrar dates from 1993, when the Swedish choral conductor Gunnar Eriksson showed me Solveig von Schulz’s entreating poem about the three sisters in one and the same person – another form of the concept of the ‘simultaneities’ often present in my music. The secretive whispering that complements the unclear insinuations of the sung fragments of the text may express the necessary acceptance that this is a spoken (or rather whispered) concern that I, as a man, can never fully understand.”
3 Systrar (SCD1090)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/SCD1090.Track09.mp3
The next few editions of the Naxos blog will offer a smörgåsbord of music from the Nordic countries, presenting examples from Finland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden (FINDS, my acronym) that may be unfamiliar yet richly rewarding. This edition showcases composers from Iceland and Sweden.
Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnsson
The music of Iceland’s first composer, Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnsson (1847–1927), rather reflects his personality, described by his contemporaries as vivacious and affectionate but at times temperamental. Sveinbjörnsson was born in the year of Mendelssohn’s death and became a piano student of the latter’s friend Reinecke in Leipzig between 1872 and 1873, so it’s perhaps no coincidence that he was influenced by the music of the great German composer.
Sveinbjörnsson’s career as a musician wasn’t a given; he initially embarked on studies for the priesthood. But when he was encouraged by the visiting Norwegian composer Johan Svendsen to study music abroad in 1867, he decided to add a year of private study in piano and harmony with Vilhelm Carl Ravn in Copenhagen following his graduation as a priest in 1868. This decision ultimately directed him towards his true calling as a musician.
Sveinbjörnsson composed Iceland’s national anthem, so let’s hear it. Maybe you can detect an air of religiosity reflective of his priestly training?
Lofsongur (O God of our land)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.225358.Track04.mp3
Sveinbjörnsson’s Icelandic roots didn’t prove a shackle. His career was based outside Iceland for most of his life: he composed, performed and taught piano in Edinburgh between 1873 and 1919; in 1890 he married a Scottish woman, Eleanor, with whom he had two children, Þórður and Helen, before moving to Canada in 1919; they then lived in Iceland between 1922 and 1924 and subsequently made their final home in Copenhagen. To represent Sveinbjörnsson’s output, I’ve chosen the third movement of his (undated) Piano Trio in A minor.
Piano Trio in A minor (8.570460)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.570460.Track05.mp3
Jón Leifs
Source: Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0
Onward a generation now and to music by Jón Leifs (1899–1968) that occupies a radically different sound world. Leifs is one of Iceland’s best known classical composers who wrote a number of works about Icelandic nature. These included titles such as Hekla, Dettifoss and Geysir. I’ve chosen the final section of Hekla, named after an active stratovolcano in the south of Iceland, so you may want to have the volume control to hand.
Hekla (ODE894-2)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/ODE894-2.Track16_part.mp3
Finnur Karlsson
Source: RÚV
Coming right up to date, I’m ending our trip to Iceland with two short movements (there are seven altogether) from Finnur Karlsson’s Accordion Concerto. Karlsson was born in 1988; the concerto premiered in 2020. The first movement (A Dream about Flying) ingeniously quotes two melodies that are well known in Iceland, although they’ve been slowed down and distorted to the point of being virtually unrecognisable. The fifth movement (Bontempi’s Ghost) was inspired by Karlsson’s experiments with the record function of his young daughter’s Bontempi toy keyboard. He recorded a cluster, pressing as many keys as possible, then pressed ‘Play’, at which point the instrument rendered it as a sequence of pitches.
A Dream about Flying (8.226720)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.226720.Track01.mp3
Bontempi’s Ghost (8.226720)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.226720.Track05.mp3
Hugo Alfvén
© HNH International
And so to Sweden, where it was thanks to composer Hugo Alfvén (1872–1960) that the country got its very first recording label devoted purely to classical music. The bond of friendship that existed between him and the recording enthusiast Hans Peter Kempe proved one of the most important in the history of Sweden’s recording industry. The Midsummer Vigil LP, which was the label’s very first release, raised Alfvén’s profile to an international level. From that programme, I’ve selected his Festspel, commissioned for the opening of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm in 1908. Inspiration for the piece deserted Alfvén until a chance conversation about the times of Charles XII brought blaring fanfares and a polonaise to his mind. A day later the piece was finished, since when it’s often been used for official occasions in Sweden.
Festspel (8.555852)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.555852.Track01.mp3
Johan Helmich Roman
Source: Wikimedia Commons – CC-PD-Mark
In 1958, record producer Kempe, mentioned above, was contacted by Claude Génetay, a member of the Stockholm Radio Orchestra. He had researched and written out the parts to a long dormant work by ‘the father of Swedish Music’, aka ‘the Swedish Handel’, aka Johan Helmich Roman (1694–1758), namely The Drottningholm Music (Music for a Royal Wedding). Génetay suggested that Kempe record the work. Even in the 1950s Roman’s music was almost unknown, but this new recording, made appropriately in the Drottningholm Court Theatre, found immediate popularity among a large audience. I’ve selected the suite’s final Allegro movement.
The Drottningholm Music (8.553733)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.553733.Track24.mp3
Franz Berwald
© HNH International
Bridging the gap between Roman and Alfvén, and bringing this blog to a close, is music by Franz Berwald (1796–1868). A violinist by training, he became the most important figure in Swedish music of the 19th century. During his career he enjoyed varying degrees of success in his own country, eventually turning to business, managing a glass works and opening a saw-mill. He was appointed professor of composition of the Swedish academy only in 1867, shortly before his death. Largely unappreciated during his lifetime, Berwald is today recognised as the outstanding Swedish composer of the 19th century, whose greatest and most original contribution was to orchestral repertoire, above all the four symphonies, the last of which we join at the start of the scherzo movement.
Symphony No. 4 (8.553052)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.553052.Track09_part.mp3
This podcast from the Sounds Interesting series spotlights music expressed through the prism of madness in a range of contexts, from the world of fantasy to the theatre of war.
Links to the music featured in this podcast:
Peter Maxwell Davies: 8 Songs for a Mad King (8.558191-92)
William Bolcom: The crazy woman (8.559249)
Gaetano Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor (8.660255-56)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Die Zauberflöte (8.553438)
Robert Jager: Suite from Edvard Munch (9.70023)
Ge Gan-ru: String Quartet No. 5, “Fall of Baghdad” (8.570603)
Robert Schumann: Dichterliebe (8.557075)
Gloucester Cathedral
Source: Wikimedia Commons
I can’t remember the year – it must have been around 1980 – that I attended the Three Choirs Festival in England, held that year at Gloucester Cathedral. What I can clearly remember, however, was the feeling of being in a brief time warp. I had met up with the cathedral’s former organist and composer Herbert Sumsion (1899–1995) for lunch, where we were joined by Joy Finzi (1907–1991), widow of composer Gerald Finzi (1901–1956), and the composer Herbert Howells (1892–1983), the latter joining us post-lunch because he had slipped off to have an afternoon nap! The three families were long-standing, very close friends. So, taking a cue from Naxos’ release this month of a new album of Howell’s piano music, I thought my blog could assemble a selection of works by these three characteristically ‘English’ composers – Howells, Sumsion and Finzi – in a sort of musical Friends Reunited.
Herbert Howells
Photo: Clive Barda
This month’s release of piano works by Herbert Howells is the second volume in pianist Matthew Schellhorn’s survey of that slice of his ouput. Howells claimed he could never write without a person or place in mind, so I’ve selected The Chosen Tune (1920) from the programme to air here. The short piece was named after the hill and village of Chosen in Gloucestershire, where composer-poet Ivor Gurney and Howells would walk to admire the panoramic view of the surrounding countryside. Chosen was also the home of Howells’ fiancée, Dorothy, and this piano version was written for use at their wedding in August 1920. Likewise, A Mersey Tune (1924) was inspired by the River Mersey.
The Chosen Tune (8.571383)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.571383.Track07.mp3
A Mersey Tune (8.571383)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.571383.Track08.mp3
My next extract couldn’t be more different in scope and depth of expression. It was born of tragedy. In the summer of 1935 Howells and his family were on holiday in Gloucestershire, when their nine-year old son, Michael, felt ill; five days later he was dead, struck down by polio. In an attempt to help her inconsolable father, Howells’ daughter Ursula suggested he should commemorate Michael in music. As Howells later wrote: “The sudden loss of an only son … might impel a composer … to seek release and consolation in a language and terms most personal to him. Music may well have power … to offer that release and comfort. It did so in my case.”
The result was Hymnus Paradisi, for soloists, chorus and orchestra. Howells’ original title was too lengthy for practical purposes and so Herbert Sumsion suggested Hymnus Paradisi, having checked with a neighbour who had been Head of Classics at Radley College that his suggested alternative was semantically correct. Howells agreed that it could receive its first performance at the 1950 Three Choirs Festival only after Gerald Finzi, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Adrian Boult had all expressed a high opinion of the work. Our extract is the opening of the Sanctus movement.
Hymnus Paradisi (8.570352)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.570352.Track05_Part.mp3
My final selection from Howells’ output is the second movement of his String Quartet No. 3, ‘In Gloucestershire’. It returns us to his delight in walking around the Gloucestershire countryside for hours on end, and even days at a time. Howells began the quartet in 1916 but left the manuscript on a train. He subsequently revised it several times before it received its premiere in 1920. The short scherzo movement both displays finesse of texture and smacks of homage to Ravel.
String Quartet No. 3 (8.573913)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.573913.Track02.mp3
Herbert Sumsion
Source: Gloucester Music Society
Herbert Sumsion was organist of Gloucester Cathedral from 1928 until 1967, and conductor of the Three Choirs Festival during that time, which brought him into close contact with musical luminaries such as Elgar. Finding myself working very close to his retirement home in the 1970s, he accepted me as a piano student. After each lesson, I would be entertained by reminiscences: how Elgar would invite Sumsion and his wife Alice to tea before proudly showing off his prize gourds in the garden; and how Elgar told them of his brush with death by food poisoning in the precincts of Worcester Cathedral, an incident not mentioned in any biographies and which Alice was keen to perpetuate by word of mouth.
After I left Gloucestershire, I remained in touch with Sumsion through a series of sacred choral works I commissioned from him. These included the anthem There is a Green Hill Far Away. It seemed to me a shame that such a famous hymn had not had the words cast in alternative music. The result was a beautiful anthem for 3-part soprano voices and organ. Sumsion’s publisher subsequently advised him it would sell better if scored for SATB, and that’s the version we hear now.
There is a Green Hill Far Away (DE3125)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/05-There-is-a-green-hill.mp3
A few years before making that commission, I was leafing through a psalter when it fell open at Psalm 107 and a dramatically engaging text that had somehow passed me by. I couldn’t understand why a composer had never set this text to music before. I was wrong, however, since Henry Purcell had already published his They that go down to the sea in ships in 1688! Sumsion’s setting, however, has proved a worthy alternative since the first performance in 1979 at an evensong in Lichfield Cathedral, with myself directing a choir from Repton School in the welcome presence of Herbert and Alice.
They that go down to the sea in ships (8.554823)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.554823.Track05.mp3
Gerald Finzi
Photo: Angus McBean
Gerald Finzi (1901–56) was also among the most English of composers. He spent much of his life in the countryside of Hampshire and later near Newbury, where the string orchestra he founded became an important vehicle for the performance of his music. His interest in earlier English music and in English literature is largely reflected in his own works, which owe something to Parry, to his older contemporary Vaughan Williams, and to Elgar.
Finzi made an important contribution to British twentieth-century song, choral and orchestral repertoire. His acute awareness of the frailty of existence found its musical expression especially in his song settings. His Intimations of Immortality for tenor solo, chorus and orchestra sets Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. It’s a deeply touching lament for the passing of the innocence of childhood. Here’s the final song, And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills and Groves. The first performance was given at the 1950 Gloucester Three Choirs Festival, conducted by Herbert Sumsion, the same festival that also included Howells’ Hymnus Paradisi.
And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born
Day Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills and Groves (8.557863)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.557863.Track13.mp3
In 1951, Finzi was diagnosed as having an incurable form of leukemia and was given only ten years to live; it turned out to be five. During that time, however, he did complete a number of works, including a Cello Concerto, written in two phases: 1951–2 and 1954–55. Writing such a work had long been in his mind; sketches for the slow movement exist from the mid-1930s. The spur to finishing the work was a request in September 1954 from Sir John Barbirolli for a major work that he and the Hallé Orchestra could perform at the Cheltenham Festival the following year. It’s difficult to imagine that the concerto wasn’t a reflection of Finzi’s desperate personal circumstances, as expressed in the turbulent and tragic opening of the work.
Cello Concerto (8.555766)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.555766.Track01_Part.mp3
We end on a more uplifting note, despite the work having been written in that same year of his diagnosis, 1951. Finzi’s anthem God is Gone Up was commissioned for a St Cecilia’s Day service that year, receiving its first performance in London by a massed choir of choristers from the Chapels Royal, St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral. They can’t have sounded more vibrant, however, than the performance we now hear from the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, directed by Christopher Robinson.
God is gone up with a triumphant shout:
The Lord with sounding Trumpets’ melodies:
Sing Praise, sing Praise, sing Praise, sing Praises out,
Unto our King sing praise seraphic-wise!
Lift up your Heads, ye lasting Doors, they sing,
And let the King of Glory enter in.
Methinks I see Heaven’s sparkling courtiers fly,
In flakes of Glory down him to attend,
And hear Heart-cramping notes of Melody
Surround his Chariot as it did ascend;
Mixing their Music, making ev’ry string
More to enravish as they this tune sing.
God is Gone Up (8.557557-58)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.557557-58CD1.Track17.mp3
Samuel Barber
© HNH International
There can be few pieces to rival the popularity of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, be it performed from the ‘original score’ (it was itself an arrangement of an earlier string quartet movement) or in one of the plentiful arrangements of the piece for other forces. Such a level of popularity, however, frequently overshadows other equally attractive works within a composer’s output. Here, then, is a chronological, career-spanning selection of Barber’s perhaps lesser-known orchestral works, to give context and maybe a nudge to further explore his legacy.
Barber (1910–1981) was one of the first students at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he studied piano, conducting, singing and composition. He proved an exemplary student. His classmates would jokingly refer to the ‘Three Bs’ of classical music: Bach, Beethoven and Barber. His comparatively modest catalogue of orchestral works includes 3 operas, 2 ballets, 2 symphonies and 3 concertos and, although he did experiment with 20th-century compositional techniques, his style generally remained anchored in a romantic vein.
Barber made an auspicious debut in 1933 with his overture The School for Scandal, a sparkling evocation of Sheridan’s comedy that won Columbia University’s Bearns Prize in 1933. Here’s how the work opens.
The School for Scandal (8.559024)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.559024.Track01_Part.mp3
Arturo Toscanini
Photo: Tully Potter Collection
Barber consolidated that success with his First Symphony, which was given its premiere in 1937 by the Cleveland Orchestra under Arthur Rodzinsky. A subsequent performance in Salzburg later that year attracted the praise of no less a figure than Arturo Toscanini, who commissioned Barber to write for his newly formed NBC Symphony Orchestra. The resulting Essay for Orchestra, the first of three such pieces, premiered in New York in 1938.
The first part of the work opens with richly divided strings that generate a rather fatalistic mood. This becomes more impassioned, reaching a brief Copland-like climax before returning to the opening pensive mood.
First Essay for Orchestra (8.559024)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.559024.Track05_Part.mp3
Serge Koussevitzky
Source: Wikipedia
Barber’s conscription into the US Air Force in 1943 led directly to the commissioning of his Second Symphony (he was given special dispensation to compose, even as an active-duty airman). The symphony was first performed the following year by Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Barber revised the work in 1947, but the piece failed to establish itself in the concert repertory and Barber withdrew it in 1964. Three years later he took the drastic step of destroying the original score and most of the printed copies. Only after his death did a copy surface, allowing the revival of this, his darkest and tonally most forward-looking of his major works.
In the words of the late conductor Andrew Schenk, who spearheaded the symphony’s revival in the late 1980s: “It evokes the majesty of flight, the terror of war, the loneliness of the skies at night, the triumph of victory. For this reason above all, [it] deserves a better fate than the oblivion assigned to it by its composer.”
Here’s an extract from the first movement.
Second Symphony (8.559024)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.559024.Track06_Part.mp3
From the 1950s, we have two short works that might not strictly fall into the orchestral category. The first is the Intermezzo from Barber’s 1958 opera Vanessa which is heard at the height of the pathos-ridden action in the third and final act. The opera tells the story of a woman whose lover returns to her snowy abode after years of absence and then promptly falls in love with her daughter. The Intermezzo might be taken as a depiction of the two weeks bridging the preceding and following scenes. In context, it depicts Vanessa, the elder, spurned woman; as an orchestral extract, it is both haunting and gorgeous, as beautiful an orchestral fantasia as Barber ever wrote.
Intermezzo (8.559135)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.559135.Track06_Part.mp3
Gian Carlo Menotti
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Also in 1958, Gian Carlo Menotti, the Italian composer and Barber’s life partner, founded the annual Spoleto Festival in his native country and liked to present a cabaret-style programme called Album Leaves, at which artists of varying backgrounds presented short pieces (or poems or plays) composed for the occasion, the most notable of which is Barber’s A Hand of Bridge, a nine-minute witty (and somewhat bitchy) ‘opera’ with a libretto by Menotti himself.
Scored for four soloists and chamber orchestra, the work is a quick psychodrama, with the four characters both playing bridge and playing out, in their minds, what they think of each other. Barber doesn’t shy away from jazzy swung rhythms or overly psychological music, all demanded by the short but cutting drama. Here’s how the piece ends.
A Hand of Bridge (8.559135)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.559135.Track04_Part.mp3
My first pick from Barber’s output in the 1960s, fittingly for the current season, is Die Natali, which was commissioned by the Koussevistky Music Foundation and first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1960. As the title suggests, the piece draws on Christmas carols for its thematic ideas, dressing them in ingenious harmonic and contrapuntal devices. After the intonations of O come, o come Emmanuel, there’s a set of variations on Lo, how a rose e’er blooming; an appearance from We Three Kings; variations on God rest you merry, gentlemen; a brief pop-up from Good King Wenceslas preceding Silent Night; and, over an ostinato derived from Adeste fideles, the work reaches a culmination with Joy to the World, before a final reference to Silent Night.
Our extract picks up at the entry of The Three Kings.
Die Natali (8.559133)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.559133.Track04_Part.mp3
John Browning
Photo: Tully Potter Collection
Barber started work on his Piano Concerto the same year, 1960, and although the first two movements were completed by the end of the year, the death of his sister in July 1961 and an invitation to attend the Congress of Soviet Composers the following year impeded further work on the piece. The finale wasn’t completed until 9 September 1962, just in time for the premiere on 24 September! John Browning was the soloist, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eric Leinsdorf. The concerto marks the zenith of Barber’s public acclaim.
Here’s how the work concludes.
Piano Concerto (8.559133)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.559133.Track03_Part.mp3
Anthony and Cleopatra was Barber’s second opera. In short, it was a catastrophe. Commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Opera, it was withdrawn after a single performance in 1966. In the years following, Barber was more of a reluctant composer. He sank into a depression, into an alcoholic despair, rising only sporadically to write a new piece. One of these, Fadograph of a Yestern Scene (fadograph/fading photograph; yestern/yesterday), borrows a phrase from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, one of Barber’s favourite books. The music seems to reflect Debussy more than his own previous works, built on slow, impressionistic washes of sound, with large forces yet a spare texture. The Pittsburgh Symphony commissioned it and gave the first performance in 1971. It was the last orchestral work of any scope Barber would write.
Fadograph of a Yestern Scene (8.559135)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.559135.Track08_Part-1.mp3
Barber was later diagnosed with cancer and, while succumbing to the illness, he was trying to complete a concerto for oboe and orchestra, requested from him by Harold Gomberg, who played in the New York Philharmonic. Originally Barber envisioned a multi-movement work, but as he knew he would not live to finish it, he settled on a single movement, a Canzonetta – and he did not quite live even to finish this; Charles Turner, Barber’s only student, took up the task of completing it. We play out with a performance of the work in its entirety.
Canzonetta (8.559135)
https://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/8.559135.Track07_Part.mp3
“Samuel Barber, the American composer who twice won the Pulitzer Prize and whose Adagio for Strings became one of the most popular works in the orchestral repertoire, died yesterday in his Fifth Avenue apartment after a long illness. He was 70 years old.
Throughout his career, Samuel Barber was hounded by success. Probably no other American composer has ever enjoyed such early, such persistent and such long-lasting acclaim.”
The New York Times
24 January 1981
Quite by accident, I came across the fact that November 25, the date of this posting, also marks the 1955 premiere of American composer Walter Piston’s Sixth Symphony. Taking the lead from that touch of serendipity, I thought this edition might give a sketch of the composer and his output. Within my own sphere of Read More ...
The previous edition of our Naxos blog focused on two symphonies that Brazilian composer Cláudio Santoro composed in the 1950s – the Fourth and Fifth – the latter written to mark the founding of the country’s new capital, Brasilia. Santoro (1919–89) was a member of the Brazilian Communist Party, which brought him major problems during Read More ...
Cláudio Santoro features significantly in the Naxos Music of Brazil series, which is a joint undertaking with Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to promote music by Brazilian composers in an extensive series of new albums. Santoro (1919–89) wrote fourteen symphonies, all of which feature on the project’s release schedule and represent the most significant set Read More ...
Pater seraphicus is how the 19th-century pianist/organist/teacher/composer César Franck was known to his pupils. It might be fair to suggest that the consonant Panis angelicus, Franck’s setting of a verse from an ancient hymn, is how he’s best remembered by music-lovers with only limited knowledge of his output. Has the passing of time treated him Read More ...
If you’ve already made your will, maybe you’ve also stipulated the music you would like to be played at the assembly for your funeral service. After a lifetime in music, and not once having been able to nominate a favourite piece, I’ve recently opted for a quiet cremation and a silent scattering of ashes. Stirred Read More ...
When a composer’s work is marked as his or her Opus 100, it surely marks a milestone in their development. Some composers didn’t make it that far, of course, leaving us wondering what might have been, had they lived long enough or enjoyed circumstances that better facilitated a freedom to compose. Chopin falls into another Read More ...
This podcast features Peter Hall in conversation with JoAnn Falletta, music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, about her latest release on the Naxos label—a recording of William Walton’s Façades 1 and 2, together with four additional movements heard in their first recordings. The conversation takes us from Walton’s university days to his association with the Read More ...
Labelling Beethoven’s Für Elise a mere trifle might appear insulting to such a household name and piano solo favourite. But that’s exactly what his Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor is, ’une bagatelle’ translating from the French as ’a trifling matter’. This blog examines the recipes composers have used for a selection of bagatelles over Read More ...
Here’s a small selection of works celebrating August, not as an evocative month approaching Autumn, but as a dedicatee (August Bournonville), a composer’s name (August Baeyens, Friedrich August Belcke), a source of literary inspiration (August von Platen-Hallermünde, August Strindberg), and an arranger (August Eberhard Müller). Hans Christian Lumbye (1810–1874) began staging concerts in the manner Read More ...
This podcast from the Sounds Interesting series takes rats as its theme, a topic that, perhaps surprisingly, has caught the attention of composers across the world and down the ages. Links to the music featured in this podcast: Robert Jager: The Pied Piper of Hamelin (9.70023) Anon: The Famous Read More ...
It’s maybe too convenient to restrict references to war to big anniversary dates, so this blog presents a small selection of musical works that paint the subject of conflict in tuneful reminders of how wearisome and worthless the daily pursuit is. There’s no place like home, as they say, so I’m going to start with Read More ...
With so many world events defying logic right now, I thought we might escape briefly into a space where words make no attempt to stack up, but merely divert for a while and lighten the spirit. Welcome to the literary worlds of Lewis Carroll, William Brighty Rands, Hilaire Belloc and someone called Mr Traditional. We Read More ...
While most people tend to seek visions of the future—especially where lottery tickets are concerned—this blog cites four works featuring musical visions from the past. Opening the programme is Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 1956 motet for choir and organ, A Vision of Aeroplanes, which may seem a curious title for a work that’s a setting of Read More ...
Although they have their detractors, national and international music competitions continue to stand the test of time. The process of, and progress through the various qualifying stages, together with the recording and performance opportunities that often prostrate themselves before the ultimate winners, clearly represent an attractive mix. Despite moments of controversy in its history, the Read More ...
The oft-adopted adage “pressure makes diamonds” stems from massive pressure and ferocious temperatures combining beneath the Earth’s crust to produce precious stones of enduring value from the single element of carbon: chemistry and physics ultimately give way to craftsmanship and art in achieving the final product. Fortunately, composers experience more pleasure than pressure in producing Read More ...
King Louis XIV of France, the legendary ‘Sun King’ and victim of the awful play on words in the title of this blog, was born in 1638; he ascended to the throne in 1643, four months before his fifth birthday, and died in 1715. He held court in various locations before moving his centre of Read More ...
This podcast from the Sounds Interesting series examines how a musical composition can be pampered by alternative wardrobes, when an original is dressed in different presentations of style and instrumentation while retaining its core character. Links to the music featured in this podcast: Brahms: Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Read More ...
In 1980, I sat in the Kyiv Opera House enjoying a performance of Verdi’s Il trovatore as one of a handful of British music teachers permitted entry into the USSR under an educational exchange scheme. I understand that the building now no longer exists, and that it didn’t die of natural causes. During that same Read More ...
Living in the northern hemisphere, we’re at that bubbly time of year when I can look out of the window and gorge my eyes on the colourful spectrum of flowers that the month of April brings. For this blog, then, I’ve put together an equally colourful collection of easy-listening pieces of music with April associations, Read More ...
Leading German composer Wolfgang Rihm celebrated his 70th birthday on 13 March. His output over the past fifty years has been immense; he has probably averaged something like one new work per month during his composing career. A couple of weeks ago we gave an overview of the music of American composer George Crumb, who Read More ...
Raymond Bisha introduces us to the eclectic and exuberant imagination of the American composer Aaron Jay Kernis, whose works are inhabited by a host of influences — musical, historical and personal. This disc of three of his diverse compositions features deliciously titled works in delectable performances. (This podcast was first published on 4 April 2015) Read More ...
The American composer George Crumb died on 6 February, aged 92. This edition of the Naxos Blog presents a selection of his works that, collectively, were allusive in style and drew on a wide range of inventive sound sources. Crumb’s haunting scores established him as one of the major representatives of the musical avant-garde in Read More ...
Raymond Bisha’s podcast focuses on two works by William Bolcom recorded for the Naxos American Classics Series. The emotional spectrum of his Canciones de Lorca and Prometheus is reflected in colourful orchestrations and a mix of musical styles that swing between intense drama and surreal humour. (This podcast was first published on 20 November 2015) Read More ...
Definitions of the word ‘fairy’ as perceived down the ages are wide-ranging, with notions of diminutive enchantresses contrasting with images of grotesque goblins. How have composers painted the former into humanly-generated sound? Let’s find out. All the audio selections in this week’s blog will feature at least the tail-end of the work, if only to Read More ...
Raymond Bisha dips into a Naxos recording of works by Jean Sibelius that have been obscured by the popularity of his symphonies and the violin concerto, including many pieces he wrote to complement stage works. Although these might be termed incidental and occasional, they belie such labels by constituting an extraordinary treasure house of the Read More ...
Once in a while you hear such incredibly beautiful music for the first time that you just can’t understand why it has remained under wraps for so long. The Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 by the Italian-born composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco are a case in point. Originally championed in the 1920s and 30s by no less Read More ...
Fantasy, fairy tales and Maurice Ravel’s flair for orchestral colour are all to the fore in this album featuring two examples of the composer’s music for the stage — the scores for his opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges and his ballet Ma mère l’Oye. This highly imaginative music, projected through a childlike lens, is instantly Read More ...
This podcast from the Naxos Sounds Interesting series focuses on a selection of concertos written not for household-name soloists, but for the collective virtuosity of an orchestra’s serried ranks. Links to the music featured in this podcast: Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra (8.571201) Malipiero, Concerto for Orchestra (8.573291) Joan Tower, Concerto Read More ...
In this week’s podcast, Raymond Bisha introduces the 4-CD collection of the complete piano works of Mieczysław Weinberg — from teenage mazurkas written in his native Poland through to his last works for the instrument composed in Moscow. En route, Tashkent, Shostakovich and the Head of the post-Stalin KGB all play a part in the Read More ...
This podcast features Marin Alsop in conversation with Raymond Bisha following the release of her first album for Naxos as chief conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. She assumed the post in 2019 and the programme reflects that of her first public appearance in the role. Marin’s advocacy of Hindemith’s music is rooted Read More ...
Violinist Tianwa Yang marks her fifteenth year as one of Naxos’ leading artists with a new album featuring Prokofiev’s two violin concertos. The works’ stylistic contrasts reflect the fact that they were written some twenty years apart, but they receive the same scrupulous attention to technical and musical details that hallmark every one of Tianwa’s Read More ...
An introduction to the Symphonies and Dances of composer Malcolm Arnold featuring conductor Andrew Penny who recorded all these works for Naxos. Arnold’s orchestral works are a study in contrasts, from his optimistic and tuneful dance suites to his deeply personal symphonies. Join Raymond Bisha and Andrew Penny in this podcast as they chat about the music, the project, and Sir Malcolm Arnold’s presence during the recording sessions.
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Catalogue No.: 8.506041
Raymond Bisha presents an overview of Boris Giltburg’s project to learn and record all of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas, which are now released in a 9-CD box set edition following their inception as critically acclaimed digital releases. The recordings reflect only one facet of Giltburg’s gem of an undertaking, in that performances were also filmed and subsequently fleshed out by his extended and informative notes that accompany the albums. Giltburg’s personal exploration and Beethoven’s panoply of expression unite in a cycle that runs the full gamut of human emotion.
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Catalogue No.: 8.509005
Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was a brilliant swordsman, athlete, violin virtuoso and gifted composer, with a claim to being the most talented figure in an age of remarkable individuals. He was an early and important exponent of the hybrid symphonie concertante, a genre that draws on both the symphony and concerto traditions. In this podcast Raymond Bisha talks with Dr Allan Badley, co-founder of Artaria Editions, the music publishing house that has created performance editions for hundreds of previously unpublished 18th-century works, many of which have been recorded for Naxos.
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Catalogue No.: 8.574306
Raymond Bisha introduces the second volume of string quartets by the Lithuanian composer Jurgis Karnavičius (1884–1941), recorded by the Vilnius String Quartet on the Ondine label. Their first volume comprised the composer’s romantic, folk-music inspired first two quartets. Volume 2 presents the Quartets Nos. 3 and 4, which are more expressive and modern in style. Karnavičius wrote the four quartets in the 1910s and 1920s during his study and teaching years in St. Petersburg, filling the chronological and stylistic interlude between the string quartets of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich.
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Catalogue No.: ODE1387-2