Symfonische muziek

Alexei Lubimov chose to play these works by CPE Bach on a tangent piano, a very rare keyboard instrument with an unusual sound. From the middle of the eighteenth century the tangent piano became popular because it could offer more a expressive and intense sound than the harpsichord, and thereby could respond to the changes in the Zeitgeist. It is no accident that all three of the great Viennese composers – Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven – named the ‘Hamburg Bach’ (Carl Philip Emanuel Bach), as their model. As he grew into maturity, CPE’s interest in keyboard music increasingly came to hone in on three genres: the fantasy, the rondo and the sonata. The present album is devoted to all three, plus a few lesser pieces to which the composer gave the title solfeggi. Six of the major pieces proposed by Alexei Lubimov are taken from the great collections known as “für Kenner und Liebhaber”, for connoisseurs and amateurs written between 1779 and 1787. The smaller pieces are taken from other printed collections Keyboard pieces of various kinds and Musical miscellany, published 1765. The listener may thus compare styles of works written at the very end of the Baroque period, and others composed during a time when Haydn and Mozart were already  stars. Lubimov plays a modern copy of a Späht und Schmahl tangent piano built between 1794.

Christina Pluhar has long been interested in the vocal music of the 17th century, in particular that of composer Luigi Rossi born around 1597 in the beautiful province of Puglia. He was the titular composer to the Medicis in Florence before taking a job with Cardinal Barberini in Rome. In France, Cardinal Mazarin commissioned him to produce the first Italian opera written specifically for the French court. In a manner of speaking, Rossi is at the root of the productions that another Italian, Lully, would later write for Louis XIV.In 2005, Christina Pluhar had recorded the Lyra d'Orfeo, taken from Rossi's desk drawer, with her ensemble L'Arpeggiata, with the voice of Veronique Gens in all its splendour. But a legal problem arose which prevented its production as a record for nearly 15 years. With the lawsuit ongoing, Christina Pluhar completed her project with Arpa Davidica, a new original compilation of works by Luigi Rossi, which she and her assistants discovered in various libraries.Pluhar has selected a series of virtuoso, theatrical pieces geared closely to the lyrics, as Rossi would set to music the most beautiful poems of his day. Taking on the best voices of the moment, Cécile Scheen, Giuseppina Bridelli, Philippe Jaroussky, Jakub Józef Orliński and Valer Sabadus, Christina Pluhar has pulled out all the stops to bring enchanting and incredibly musically-rich material back to life. The few indications relating to the instrumental accompaniment left on the manuscripts leave the performers almost total freedom. They can imagine all sorts of instrumental combinations to link complicated melismas with the virtuosity of the vocal lines that the composer intended. The interpretation also works as a complete recreation. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Joseph Haydn composed around 15 masses between 1748 and 1802. The Missa Cellensis in honorem Beatissimae Virginis Mariae, presented here in this new release from the Akademie für Alte Musik and the excellent RIAS-Kammerchor Berlin conducted by Justin Doyle, is better known by the later name Missa Sanctae Caeciliae ("Mass for Saint Cecilia").It's the most vast of Haydn's masses and his only mass-cantata in the solemn Neapolitan style, whose numbers alternate between arias, ensembles and choirs. It seems that Haydn had intended the composition of this mass to be a great coup: it is a deft mix of the "modern" writing of his day and the "baroque" writing of his predecessors. In his monumental biography of the composer, Marc Vignal notes correctly that Haydn's masses are first-rate, not only set against the production of his quartets or symphonies, but also when set against the religious music of his times. This recording, taken at a June 2018 concert at the Berlin Konzerthaus, completes a RIAS-Kammerchor discography which is already rich in choral works but which hadn't yet tackled Haydn's masterpieces. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Recording Ravel's music on period instruments is the kind of thing that might raise a smile... until you realise just how much the production of instruments has changed in less than a hundred years: it's the return of catgut strings, skin drum heads, the French basson (and not the German system bassoon which is used across all the world's orchestras today), shaper tips, trumpets and trombones of French manufacture. At the head of his orchestra Les Siècles, François-Xavier Roth gives a new, orthodox, historically-informed version of Ma Mère l’oye (complete ballet), the Tombeau de Couperin and Shéhérazade, the long-neglected "ouverture de féérie" [Fairy Overture] which is pure Ravel. This return to the roots is clearly easier and more straightforwardly authentic for this period of music history, because, unlike earlier works, we possess recordings which date back to the 1920s, and even earlier, which can tell us about the style, the colours, the phrasing and the tempo. But it isn't enough just to have all this historical information to hand to make something interesting. What makes this record thrilling is that all the musicians in the Siècles are excellent, and François-Xavier Roth is a talented artist himself, who knows this music inside out. At which point, his complete recording of Stravinsky's Firebird has already struck us with its quality. This rediscovery of Ravel resounds with clarity and finesse; it is a feast of well-defined timbres which cuts against the "beautiful sound" which prevails in orchestras around the world today. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Pärt's four symphonies stretch across a period of 45 years, from 1964 and 1966 respectively for the first two, 1971 for the third, and 2008 for the fourth. His first steps into the works of the symphony were still marked by dodecaphonism, although Pärt would not resist the gradual appearance of tonal poles in his work and "accidental" encounters between consonant notes and the harmonies that resulted; but the discourse remains very much linked to modernist principles, while exploring older forms of prelude and fugue, or indeed polyphony. With the Second, Pärt's avant-gardist period came to an end. From the 1970s, Pärt would completely revise his language, and come to concentrate on religious and medieval music, in such a way that his Third Symphony throws out dodecaphonism and all its theories, developing in their place a tonal, melodic, modal idiom (the old ecclesiastical styles, in fact). And within this personal revolution, Pärt would take a step into "tintinnabulum", which formed the basis of the Fourth Symphony, written for strings, harp and percussion: a wide world of meditation, stunning, unreal, intangible, and fundamentally tonal, in which the movements from one phenomenon to another move immensely slowly, allowing the listener to savour every moment. © SM/Qobuz

The six sonatas by Jan Dismas Zelenka ZWV 181 are among the most noteworthy pieces of chamber music of their day and are some the most difficult works in the Baroque oboe and bassoon repertoire, while also being key works of Zelenka’s musical legacy. Nowadays, Zelenka, a Czech composer who spent most of his life in Dresden, no longer needs much introduction because he finally has a firmly established place among the greatest composers of the first half of the eighteenth century. That, however, has not always been the case. His nearly forgotten music did not attract wider attention until the latter half of the twentieth century, and it was these sonatas that played an important role in this. In Zelenka’s day, collections of trio sonatas were a traditional form of presentation of a certain maturity of compositional artistry, and as a matter of fact the composer was here entering the fourth decade of his life – recent musicological research has placed their composition around the years 1721 and 1722. His sonatas likewise are not early works dependent on models. Five of the six sonatas have a four-movement layout and other external features of a sonata da chiesa in the Corelli manner, but the Fifth Sonata has a three-movement structure, quick movements in ritornello form, and other features directly alluding to Antonio Vivaldi’s chamber concertos or to the special sonata of the “auf Concertenart” type. In the application of four- part writing “con due bassi obligati”, manifesting itself in the more or less independent bassoon part or in the abundant use of counterpoint, the sonatas are exceptionally long, so they make great demands on the technical skill and endurance of the players. Zelenka’s writing, however, takes the chosen instruments into consideration by employing suitable keys, keeping in mind the need for places to breathe, etc. Another striking feature is the enormous intensity of expression. Although the composer makes plentiful use of sophisticated contrapuntal techniques and forms for the construction of broadly striding themes and for the combination of the individual voices, this “learnedness” is never at the expense of musical spontaneity. The Czech early music ensemble Collegium 1704, founded 1991 by harpsichordist and horn player Václav Luks (was formerly horn soloist of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, an excellent school for historically informed performance) plays on period instruments, as may be expected. © SM/Qobuz

Although Shostakovich's Third Quartet and his Piano Quintet have long been a part of the Belcea Quartet’s and Piotr Anderszewski’s repertoires, they had never recorded any of the composer's material. There is an interesting analogy between this point in the careers of the quartet and the pianist on the one hand and the composer's own life on the other: it was at the age of 32 that, although he was already onto his fifth symphony, Shostakovich wrote his first string quartet. For a long time his demanding attitude towards himself held him back from attempting what he saw as "one of the most difficult of all the musical genres". The impetus came – against the composer's will – from the dastardly Stalin, who had sparked the greatest crisis in Shostakovich's career: in 1936 the dictator had attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which later got an ominous review in Pravda, which growled about "chaos replacing music" and denounced "hysterical, degenerate music". The young composer ran the risk of arrest and execution: and so it should come as no surprise that after that experience he turned to the more private genre of the string quartet. Every listener can make their own between-the-lines reading of political protests or humanist messages in the work: at any rate it is very hard to see "just" pure music here, for all its fluency. That applies just as much to the Third Quartet of 1946, in which passages recalling Haydn rub shoulders with rather more violent material. The Quintet for Piano and Strings dates back to 1940, and it received the Stalin Prize – which was symptomatic of the unpredictable relations between Shostakovich and the regime, which saw him at once as traitor to the people and a model artist. The composer claimed that he added the piano part to his quintet so as to be able to play it himself, and to take advantage of whatever travel opportunities might come his way as a result...© SM/Qobuz

The tenor Julian Prégardien joins Alpha Classics for several recording projects that will showcase every facet of his talent, notably lieder and oratorio. His first album on the label is devoted to one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of music, Winterreise in a version with orchestra composed by Hans Zender in 1993. He scored the work for orchestral forces very different from the ensembles used in the nineteenth century (including, for example, a soprano saxophone, an accordion, a harmonica, a wind machine, a guitar and a very large percussion section). Hans Zender describes his work as a ‘creative transformation’: ‘My own reading of Winterreise does not seek a new expressive interpretation, but systematically takes advantage of the freedoms that performers normally allow themselves in an intuitive way: slowing down or accelerating the tempo, transposition into different keys, emphasising and nuancing colours.’ © Outhere Music

This recording of music by Ernst Krenek (1900–91) covers almost half a century of his compositions, and shows the sheer range of his creativity: from early piano fugues written for his teacher, Franz Schreker, via elegant fin de siècle Viennese lyricism to a relaxed application of Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic technique – often enlivened with a surprising degree of charm and a knowing sense of humour. © Toccata Classics