Symfonische muziek

Created in 1804 in Vienna before an audience of French officers, none of whom understood any German, Beethoven’s only opera, Leonore, was not successful. Based on a true story which took place during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution -- the story of an intrepid young woman who dresses up as a man in an attempt to rescue her husband, a victim of arbitrary arrest and imprisoned in a dark cell -- Beethoven took his inspiration from several sources. The story, very in keeping with the troubled times, was indeed put to music in 1798 by the French composer Pierre Gaveaux from a libretto by Nicolas Bouilly, then again a little while later in Italian, in 1804 in a smaller-scale work by Ferdinando Paër. The Italian-German composer Simon Mayr then created a “sentimental farce” in Padua not long after Beethoven’s Leonore. Having dreamed of a tragically utopian level of universal human fraternity his whole life, as well as the image of a couple whose relationship is ideally based on marriage and loyalty, Beethoven had found a story which perfectly corresponded to his own political opinions, formed as a result of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution (before the emergence of Napoleon’s power). We now know that he reworked this lyrical work twice, turning it into the format we know it as today with its new name Fidelio. For René Jacobs, the original 1804 version is preferable to the successive amendments and deletions which were made. And we can’t blame him for this, his new recording highlighting all the beauty and modernity of this unfortunately destined first version of Leonore. In 1804, Beethoven has all his resources at his disposal: it’s the year of the Eroica symphony and the Appassionata sonata. By means of his directorial verve, his acute sense of theatrics and a distinguishably well-chosen cast, René Jacobs does this original version of Leonore justice in all its wonder, with all the delights which Beethoven, worried about being portrayed at the opera, ruthlessly scored from his work. © François Hudry/Qobuz

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

A bit of an oddball in the world of music to say the least, Charles Ives grew up in Connecticut in a culture that was very open-minded about music. His father was a bandmaster for the US Army and delighted in simultaneous musical clashes that most people would find unbearable, whether it was a melody played in a key with false relation or the sounds and rhythms of different marching bands overlapping during a parade. Asynchronism therefore made total sense to a young Ives growing up in this environment.After graduating from Yale with some difficulty, Ives preferred the financial stability that came with working as an insurance agent and became quite the astute businessman, only composing music in his spare time. He stopped writing music in 1927 at the age of fifty-three as he was fed up with the lack of interest in his work, however it was at precisely this time that people began to take an interest in it.His music was often inspired by the hymns sung in New England and tended to blend rhythms and harmonies, making it difficult to understand. Symphony No. 3, subtitled The Camp Meeting, is derived from a Protestant hymn tune and is a clear evocation of a religious-assembly in 19th century America. This religious element has been emphasized in the album conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas as he added around ten choral contributions of the same genre. As for Symphony No. 4, it didn’t have a complete performance for quite some time due to the sheer complexity of its rhythms and when it was finally performed it required multiple conductors, which is why during its première, war veteran Leopold Stokovski was assisted by two young colleagues. Michael Tilson Thomas is a true champion of American music and has already devoted a number of monographs to the brilliant work of Charles Ives, showcasing him as a musical pioneer notably through the complete symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra (Sony Classical). He returns here to conduct the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for whom he has been Music Director since 1995, but will be leaving in 2020. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Awarded for his Mozart recital in a Qobuzissime, the soprano Regula Mühleman continues her discographic journey with Sony with an album dedicated to an outstandingly romantic theme. Lieder der Heimat is an ambitiously conceived musical work as it merges masterpieces (Schubert, Liszt), unexpected rarities (Rossini) and rarities (Baumgartner, Frey and the very French Marguerite Roesgen-Champion) around a typically German concept. We could translate Heimat as motherland, but we would then be neglecting the affectionate aspect of the German term where one would wander the German countryside in their youth. The atmosphere and expression of feeling in this lied are very much tied to this privileged place. Schubert produces art where melodic and harmonic sophistication are forgotten in the place of natural poetry that speaks straight from the heart. The album also opens with the sound of the pastoral instrument par excellence, the clarinet, here played by Daniel Ottensamer. Its velvety house-hold fireside sound acts as the opener for Regula Mühlemann. The program unravels without warning as her clear, warm voice settles into the repertoire – in German, French, Italian and even Alemannic. We are all awoken from a dreamlike state as La Vieille Chanson de Guggisberg begins. The singer adjusts her timbre to provide colour thanks to supple inflections and an almost subdued vibrato. This a cappella section starts with one voice that is joined by a second then a third – it’s a shame the booklet doesn’t give more details about the additional participants. Be that as it may, Regula Mülemann forms a perfect duo with the pianist Tatiana Korsunskaya. The latter also plays a solo of a rippling page from Années de pèlerinage: Le lac de Wallenstadt. While Konstantin Timokhine signals a return to Schubert with a stroll-like accompaniment of the sound of a natural alpine horn (Auf dem Strom, D. 943), it is two, more operatic pieces that close the record. Schubert’s La Pastorella al prato wraps things up with clarity and luxury along with one of Rossini’s Soirées musicales, La Pastorella dell’Alpi. The composer of Guillaume Tell (Switzerland again!) offers a somewhat butterfly-minded conclusion to the recording. The incredible Regula Mühlemann suits, unquestionably, all outfits. © Elsa Siffert/Qobuz

As one of the finest pianists of his era and an improviser of genius, Ludwig van Beethoven’s preferred vehicle for musical exploration was the piano. His earliest composition, from 1782, was a set of piano variations and he continued to compose for solo piano until the last years of his life. His interest in the concerto form diminished as his deafness forced him to retire from performing. Nonetheless, with his five piano concertos composed between 1788 and 1809, Beethoven not only achieved a brilliant conclusion to the Classical piano concerto, but also established a new model for the Romantic era: a sort of symphony with obbligato piano which remained a reference point well into the beginning of the twentieth. Ronald Brautigam has already recorded these seminal works with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra, in acclaimed performances released between 2008 and 2010. Since then he has also released all of Beethoven’s solo piano music on the fortepiano to universal praise. When Brautigam now returns to the concertos, it is in the company of conductor Michael Alexander Willens and Die Kölner Akademie playing on period instruments. The same team has previously partnered him in an 11-disc survey of Mozart’s piano concertos and it is plain to hear that all involved clearly relish the opportunity to congratulate Beethoven on the eve of his 250th anniversary. © BIS Records

Together with the Berlin-based Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester (DSO) Mari Kodama and her husband Kent Nagano have now completed the recording of all of Beethoven's piano concertos by jumping, as it were, back in time twice: the last element of this recording series that has spanned more than 13 years was Beethoven's concerto "number nought" (WoO 4) – personally edited by Mari Kodama from the autograph score. The original manuscript of this piano concerto is kept at the State Library in Berlin. This is not a completed score, because there is no orchestration. That said, Beethoven annotated the short score, especially in the first two movements, with indications as to which instrument was to play which part. The orchestra score which is available today was written in the early twentieth century based on those annotations. The only problem is: "Today, armed with the knowledge we now have acquired about the young Beethoven, we would perform this concerto quite differently in places," explain Mari Kodama and Kent Nagano in unison. They therefore present a very personal adaptation that emerged during rehearsal with the orchestra and at the recording sessions, and which reflects Kodama's and Nagano's individual image of Beethoven. They aim to make audible the exuberant freshness and urgent sense of awakening in the young, almost childlike Beethoven's writing shortly before his artistic powers were to burst forth, the joie de vivre and vital energy in a style that owes something to the playfulness of both Haydn and Mozart. That is Mari Kodama's intention, and she plays it in precisely such a versatile manner. Combined with the classical canon of the piano concertos nos. 1–5, the resulting comprehensive edition is complemented by the Triple Concerto for piano, violin and cello op. 56, the Rondo WoO 6 and the Eroica Variations op. 35, offering insight into the artist's longstanding involvement with her musical companion Ludwig van Beethoven. And the recordings of his works seem to lead the listener through the composer's life. "If you play all of them, it is like accompanying Beethoven on a journey through his life," explains Mari Kodama, and Kent Nagano adds: "You acknowledge the musical genius and at the same time you recognise the development of European music, because Beethoven was undoubtedly its pioneer." He led the way in changing the structure, form and harmony of music, just as there was an equally radical shift in the world around him; after the French Revolution society and business and the incipient industrial revolution began to alter the way people lived. "He is and remains an optimist, someone who can do no other than believe in what he wishes to communicate to us through his music," explains Kodama. She says this helps her. The fact that she herself is an optimist can partly be attributed to Beethoven. Kodama, Nagano and the DSO – one might imagine them almost as a trio where all the musicians have blind faith in each other and are therefore able to produce a degree of musical intensity that brings the young Beethoven back to life. © Berlin Classics

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birthday with the entire world in 2020, the Carnegie Hall chose the French ensemble the Ébène Quartet to perform Beethoven’s Quatuors in their entirety. Honoured by this prestigious invitation, the four musicians decided to prolong this exceptional moment by playing this globally recognised music around the world, on all five continents in seven concerts between April 2019 and January 2020. The intellectual and emotional strength of Beethoven’s opus remains a force to be reckoned with, a humanist vector carried by the spirit of the Enlightenment. Over the course of this fantastic journey, the Ébène Quartet will record the quatuors in concerts given in Vienna, Philadelphia, Tokyo, São Paulo, Melbourne, Nairobi and Paris, their home ground. A film crew will follow the musicians on their world tour and will thereafter produce a documentary. The first milestone of this Beethoven around the World journey makes up this album, and was recorded in June 2019 in the Mozartsaal of the Vienna Konzerthaus. It contains the first two Razumovsky Quatuors, performed in the very city where they were composed in 1806. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Two hours of the most intense, disturbed and erotic piano music ever written, recorded by a pianist renowned for his mastery of even the most vertiginously challenging piano repertoire from the late-Romantic era. Scriabin’s cycle of ten piano sonatas charts a wild and unpredictable journey from the apotheosis of Romantic piano writing in the first two sonatas through narratives of stars, sky, light and darkness, desire, fire and flight, and the tormented yearning of the artist in the middle-period works, to a state of visionary grace in the Tenth and final sonata. Relatively compact works, several of them cast in a single movement no longer than ten minutes, they each nonetheless inhabit a discrete and intoxicating sound world of their own, and great pianists throughout the last century have stamped their own authority and personality upon them. Now comes the Italian pianist Vincenzo Maltempo, already garlanded with critical praise for his concert performances and discography on Brilliant Classics. Maltempo contributes his own, thoughtful essay to this new recording, and it reveals him giving full value to Scriabin the mystic, the composer who attempted to understand the entire universe through his own compositions. He relishes the dark and unsettling qualities of works such as the Sixth Sonata, so full of languid themes, sudden flashes and moods of disturbing violence that even the composer himself never dared to perform it in public. Maltempo has made his name as an interpreter of Alkan, with an impressive collection of recordings for Piano Classics such as the collection of shorter works ‘strongly recommended’ by Fanfare magazine, as well as the composer’s more monumental collections of Etudes and Preludes. But the pianist’s sympathies extend beyond Alkan to the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt and early works by Schumann. All Scriabin collectors will want to give this recording of the sonata cycle serious consideration. After his epic recordings of piano works by Alkan, Lyapunov and Liszt, Vincenzo Maltempo immerses himself into the cosmic and metaphysical world of the Piano Sonatas by Alexander Scriabin. His superhuman technique and hyper sensitive musical intuition bring out the hidden depths of beauty and terror in these individualistic master pieces. A fascinating journey, from the romantic, Chopin-inspired Sonatas 1-4, towards the later sonatas, written in the unique “Scriabinesque” atonal language, inspired by his theosophical ideas, and megalomaniac metaphysics. © Piano Classics

The cello has always been favoured by French musicians, ever since its invention in the 1660s in Italy, where it gradually supplanted the viola da gamba. Two Parisians, the Duport brothers, wrote the first sonatas for the new instrument and published an Essai sur le doigté (Essay on Fingering) which laid the foundations of cello technique. It is still a touchstone work today. And so, the "French cello school" conquered the world, with, in the 20th Century, figures like Maurice Maréchal, Pierre Fournier, André Navarra, Paul Tortelier and Maurice Gendron: and today it is doing if possible even better, as many new talents hatch. An heir to this long line and herself a radiant and warm character, Emmanuelle Bertrand is passionate about all music: she worked on Tout un monde lointain with the composer (Dutilleux), and is inspiring and creating new works. For this recording, she has chosen a baroque cello, with gut strings, and a 415 Hz tuning. Here it is the instrument that sets the agenda, not the performer. She has discovered a new freedom in this approach to the pages that she has played, like all cellists, since her childhood. Matured over long years, her performance of Six Solo Cello Suites crystallises perfectly around this fine Venetian instrument of the early 18th Century. © François Hudry/Qobuz

This album brings together two of the most exceptional chamber musicians of the contemporary scene, whose elegance and natural flair do wonders for the works of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Scottish pianist Alasdair Beatson plays a beautiful 1837 Érard from the Collection Edwin Beunk, a similar instrument to the one that Mendelssohn owned in his Berlin residence, where the major works of this luminous programme were first performed. Johannes Moser, on the other hand, has borrowed a sumptuous Andrea Guarneri cello of 1694 from a private patron, and its fine autumnal tones can be heard here. Not only do the partners offer up what must surely be the finest version of the two cello solos by Felix Mendelssohn on period instruments, but also they allow us to reconsider to talent of the composer's sister, Fanny Hensel, thanks to two fairly short works of hers, one Fantasy in G Minor and one Capriccio in A Flat Major. A magnificent album, which makes one hope that the duo will soon start a regular collaboration with Pentatone. © Pierre-Yves Lascar/QobuzGerman-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser and Scottish pianist Alasdair Beatson present a moving portrait of the Mendelssohn family with this recording of pieces by the siblings Felix and Fanny. Once composed for the popular "Sunday Sessions" at the Berlin Mendelssohn family house, these works fit into the typically nineteenth-century tradition of domestic music-making, albeit at the highest thinkable level. Beatson plays an 1837 Érard fortepiano, identical to the instrument that belonged to the Mendelssohn household when these pieces were composed. Besides Felix Mendelssohn’s two sonatas for cello and piano, his Variations concertantes, Op. 17, Lied ohne Worte, Op. 109 and Albumblatt in B Minor are featured. Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn’s Fantasia in G Minor and Capriccio in A-flat Major show what could have become of this talented female composer if societal conventions had not restricted her musical activities to the private salon. © Pentatone

“The piece is unlike no other of its kind”, Béla Bartók affirmed: “the world of ideas it contains is entirely new”. Timbre acquired an unusual, novel dimension by having the two lowest strings tuned one half-step down, to B and F#, respectively. Thus the three lower strings form a B Minor chord, which Kodály places in particular prominence at the onset of the sonata… Julian Steckel was inspired to tackle this “Everest of cello literature” for the first time at the age of fifteen. The technical challenge was certainly exciting in itself, but he was also fascinated by the music’s beauty, and by Kodály’s special musical language – “even though at that time I didn’t yet know what was Hungarian about it, or what came from Debussy or other sources”, he remarks. Steckel proceeded to work on the sonata with several cellists including the venerable Hungarian-American legend Janós Starker, who made sensational recordings of the work. © CAvi-Music