Chandos

Peter Donohoe CBE is acclaimed as one of the foremost pianists of our time, for his musicianship, stylistic versatility, and commanding technique. On this first volume of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, he writes: "When I first became conscious of my desire to be a musician, Mendelssohn meant more to me, personally, than almost any other composer – he certainly ranked alongside Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. My choice of programme for the present recording is based around a large selection from the Lieder ohne Worte, which I preface with the Rondo capriccioso, Op. 14 and the three wonderful Fantaisies ou Caprices. The Rondo capriccioso and Trois Fantaisies ou Caprices are exquisite examples of the extraordinary facility of Mendelssohn (implicitly as a pianist, but also as a composer), of his originality and inspiration, at an age that allows us, in my view, to place him in the same group of wonderfully natural and prodigious composers as Haydn and Mozart. It is always a pleasure to play these works, and they go to the heart of why I became a musician in the first place". © Chandos

Elena Urioste is a musician, yogi, writer, and entrepreneur, while Tom Poster is a musician whose skills and passions extend well beyond the conventional role of the concert pianist; they are musical and (now married) life partners. "From Brighton to Brooklyn" is an exploration and celebration of their British and American backgrounds and mutual fascination with music from each-other’s home country. They comment: "All the pieces by English and American composers on this recording deserve to be heard far more often than they are: none would be considered core repertoire, yet every one of them captivates through its composer’s distinctive voice. Some of the pieces have been known to one or both of us for many years; others we discovered only when we were dreaming up this recording. With the exception of Coleridge-Taylor’s soaring, impassioned Ballade, this is a collection of miniatures and character pieces. Some, such as the works by Beach and Bridge, transport us to a world of elegant salons; others, such as the pieces by Britten and Schoenfeld, are colourfully virtuosic and certainly gave us a shot of adrenaline in the recording studio! Bridge’s Heart’s Ease, with which the album closes, perfectly encapsulates a more general tendency among our chosen pieces to convey the listener to another world, using relatively few notes, and it has become a particular favourite of ours. We hope that you, too, will discover some new treasures here". © Chandos

Born in Bergen in 1985, the Norwegian saxophonist and composer Marius Neset has earned countless nominations and awards for his performances and recordings, and has performed with jazz musicians all over the world. He is increasingly in demand as a composer of works for the concert hall; these range over a wide spectrum of performing forces, many featuring the saxophone. This album features four world première recordings, three of which feature the composer as saxophone soloist. Manmade is a concerto for saxophone and symphony orchestra in which the form and the structure are inspired by the climate change which our times are experiencing. The work is divided into five movements which concern themselves with man-made historical innovations that have contributed to the development of society, but that in many ways have also brought us step by step to the great global challenges facing the world today. Originally scored for flute, string quartet, and piano, Windless is a piece that Neset was keen to re-score for saxophone and orchestra. Similarly, A Day in the Sparrow’s Life started out as a piece for solo saxophone that has grown (via saxophone and string quartet) to the full orchestral score recorded here. Every Little Step was composed during lockdown when we all had to maintain a distance, and spend time by ourselves. It was also a period when we had to stand together in making all the small but crucial changes that would get us to the finish line. To Neset, it also offered the possibility of spending a lot of time with his new-born daughter and following her development from day to day. © Chandos

Following an exceptional critical reception of their first volume of Mendelssohn's Quartets, the Doric String Quartet now completes the project. As in the case of the previous volume, the players juxtapose one of the early quartets (No. 2) with two of the later compositions (No. 3 and No. 4), composed a decade or so later. Composed in 1827, the Second Quartet pays homage to Beethoven’s outstanding contribution to the genre (Beethoven died in March of that year), but this is no simple pastiche. It is a confident work, Mendelssohn’s individual voice already clearly present. The later quartets are perhaps less overtly revolutionary – Mendelssohn was now an established figure and a recipient of Royal commissions – but nevertheless remain clear milestones in the development of the genre. © Chandos

Following successful appearances at the Opéra-comique, in Paris, Grand Théâtre de Genève, Oper Frankfurt, Komische Oper Berlin, and Teatro alla Scala, in Milan, the Norwegian soprano Mari Eriksmoen joins the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Edward Gardner for a interesting album of orchestral songs, coupling Britten’s Les Illuminations and Four French Songs with a selection of Canteloube’s inimitable Chants d'Auvergne. Eriksmoen spent a year studying in Paris, and proves an effective and natural singer in the French language. As she mentions in her programme note: "It is highly demanding to sing in French when it is not one’s native tongue, but I have always felt at home when singing in French and nurture an emotional attachment to the French language". © Chandos

"Evoke" is the third album of the Ferio Saxophone Quartet, following their previous albums "Flux" and "Revive". In this recording the Quartet are joined by the pianist Timothy End for a programme of original works and arrangements for piano and saxophone quartet. Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite opens the proceedings, followed by Iain Farrington’s extremely descriptive Animal Parade. Next is Carmen-Suite, a virtuosic arrangement of excerpts from Bizet’s opera, before the programme closes with the quintet Memorias by the Spanish composer Pedro Iturralde Ochoa. All the arrangements are by Iain Farrington and recorded here for the first time. © Chandos

Recognised as one of the world’s leading viola players, Philip Dukes has enjoyed a career spanning over thirty years as an accomplished concerto soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician. He joins forces with Peter Donohoe, acclaimed as one of the foremost pianists of our time, for this extraordinary recording of works by Brahms and Schumann. As he writes in his booklet note, Philip Dukes wanted to find a new approach to these works: "I wanted [my interpretation] to sound fresh and alive, almost as when I was looking at the scores for the first time all those years ago, but with the secret benefit of all that subsequent experience under my belt. So, I did just that. I purchased a new, excellent, well researched edition, I listened to all manner of different recordings (of the versions both for clarinet and for viola), and I devoted three months to the project, the culmination of which is what you will hear". © Chandos

There is no surviving autograph manuscript of Bach’s English Suites, and for such a set of magnificent pieces, an important and well-loved part of the baroque keyboard "canon", surprisingly little is known about its history. What we do know is that the suites are amongst Bach’s earlier works – probably written in the second decade of the eighteenth century – and that the appellation "English" was not given to them until the 1750s. In order to understand these fascinating works on a deeper level, we have to appreciate the importance of dance in the cultural context of eighteenth-century Europe. As a social skill, the ability to dance correctly was considered so vital that every court had a dancing master, often French, who taught the different types of dances to aspiring courtiers. Because of this, dancing, and by extension the instrumental dance suite, was one of the factors contributing to French taste’s becoming a defining characteristic of the baroque style. As we know that the Dancing Master traditionally taught by playing tunes on the violin, it is quite possible that Bach’s own renditions of the dance forms were influenced by the playing of Jean-François Monjou – Dancing Master at the Cöthen court, where the young Johann Sebastian worked from 1717 until 1723. On that basis, acclaimed early keyboard specialist Sophie Yates has recorded these works on a double-manual Flemish harpsichord by Andrew Garlick, a copy of the petit ravalement instrument by Ioannes Ruckers, 1624, now at the Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France. © Chandos

As a successor to the first volume, released in 2019, this album continues to explore a breadth of repertoire that includes some rarely heard gems. The Violin Sonata, one of Szymanowski’s earlier compositions, is a work brimming with late-romantic intensity. His Trois Caprices are a tribute to Paganini, and the famous themes are here reinvented in a visionary way: the treatment of them is not only virtuosic in nature, for both violin and piano, but also displays extremes of contemporary technique, texture, and mood that take us a world away from the concept of the originals. Grażyna Bacewicz is one of the most important figures in twentieth-century Polish music – and it is my hope that the inclusion of her Caprice might serve as an introduction to further exploration of her music in recordings to come. The Kaprys polski is a favourite of Jennifer Pike to perform in concerts, especially as Bacewicz manages to say so much in such a short space of time. As she was herself a virtuoso violinist, it is no surprise that the piece is masterfully written for the violin. The Violin Sonata and Tango by Poldowski (Régine Wieniawska) have been tremendous discoveries for Jennifer Pike. Her fascinating background, of mixed Polish and Belgian heritage, and the fact that she became an immigrant to Britain seem to find resonance in her music, particularly in the variety of her use of harmony. Like many other violinists, Jennifer Pike grews up performing the music of her father, the famous violinist Henryk Wieniawski, so it was a revelation for her to discover Poldowski’s unique compositional voice’. © Chandos

Krzysztof Meisinger is one of the most fascinating and charismatic classical guitar players of our time. Born in 1984, he has seen his artistic development benefit from the immense influence of such teachers and music authorities as Aniello Desiderio (Italy) and Christopher Parkening (USA), his talent compared to that of the pianist Piotr Anderszewski and fellow guitarist Pepe Romero. He has performed all over the world – from Tokyo to Los Angeles and Buenos Aires – in such halls as the Wiener Musikverein, Berliner Philharmonie, Wigmore Hall, London, and Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris. For this, his Chandos début, he has selected a diverse programme of Spanish, Italian, and Argentine works that demonstrate both his technical mastery and his innate musicianship. Rodrigo’s Invocación y danza and Elogio de la guitarra were composed a decade apart, and written for the guitarists Regino Sainz de la Maza and Angelo Gilardino, respectively. Miguel Llobet Solés was a pupil of Tárrega and the teacher of Segovia, thus playing an important role in the Spanish guitar tradition. Segovia was the dedicatee of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Capriccio diabolico, a homage to Paganini. Although much music by Piazzolla has been arranged for guitar, his Cinco Piezas, published in 1981, are the only works he wrote specifically for the instrument. Krzysztof Meisinger plays a copy of a guitar by Ignacio Fleta Pescador (1897-1977), built by Anders Sterner and equipped with Knobloch strings. © Chandos

Working in an era before Arts Council grants, public sponsorship, recording royalties, and long-term publishing deals, Elgar had to write for the public demand as much as personal satisfaction. The effort required for his large-scale works was rarely reflected in profitable income, so writing songs could be a useful way to earn money. The England of Elgar’s time favoured popular ballads, sung by well-known singers. These were then sold as sheet music, the singer’s name emblazoned on the cover, for performances given in middle-class homes. There was little demand for lengthy song cycles, or song recitals consisting entirely of "serious" repertoire in the German tradition. As a result, Elgar’s songs are often individual works, sometimes adapting instrumental works into songs (such as Land of Hope and Glory) when the commercial opportunities arose. Elgar also chose poetry that was popular and straightforward, rather than drawing on the established classical masterpieces. These songs were then transposed into numerous keys to allow performance by any voice type, designed for mass appeal and profitable sales. Making her Chandos début, Julia Sitkovetsky is a British-American lyric-dramatic coloratura soprano with a flourishing, exciting international career. Having trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she made her professional operatic début at the age of sixteen, at Glyndebourne Festival Opera and English National Opera. Since then, she has appeared all over Europe. © Chandos

The ARC Ensemble (Artists of The Royal Conservatory) is among Canada’s most distinguished cultural ambassadors. It focuses on researching and recovering music suppressed under the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and marginalised thereafter. Exile is generally associated with geographical displacement, but the idea of "internal exile" has long had currency. There was a protracted variety of this exile in the Soviet Union: State oversight of musical style and substance began in the 1920s and persisted until well after Stalin’s death, in 1953. Unlike the Central European composers who were murdered or exiled under National Socialism, and whose music is now being assessed and revived, a great number of the musical casualties of the Soviet era still await serious attention. The Ukrainian-Jewish composer Dmitri Klebanov was something of a prodigy but fell foul of the authorities with his first symphony, of 1945 (based, like Shostakovich’s Thirteenth, on the slaughter of Jews at Babi Yar). His professional rehabilitation began during the Khrushchev era when, in 1960, the Kharkiv Institute appointed him associate professor. In addition to the works recorded here, Klebanov’s legacy includes nine symphonies, two concertos each for violin and for cello, various works for violin and piano, several operas and ballets, around a hundred songs (most of which remain in manuscript), and nearly two dozen film scores. © Challenge Classics

Borrowing from the title of Proust’s great novel, the latest recital by Imogen Cooper features a collection of pieces that she learnt as a teenager in Paris, or in her twenties working with Alfred Brendel in Vienna, but none of which she has performed on the concert platform, or really played at all in the intervening years. Cooper studied in Paris from 1961 to 1967 with Jacques Février (who had known Ravel well), Yvonne Lefébure (who had known Alfred Cortot), and Germaine Mounier. She started to wonder about the messages from her teachers she would find on her scores, and about the nature of memory. She was also interested to see if the repertoire she has acquired since she learnt these pieces would change her view, or shed new light on them. This highly personal recital is an exemplar of Imogen Cooper’s outstanding pianism and musicianship. © Chandos

The virtuoso violinist Francesca Dego joins forces with the legendary conductor and period performance pioneer Sir Roger Norrington for this recording of Mozart’s Third and Fourth Violin Concertos – the first time either soloist or conductor has recorded the works. The outstanding musicians of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra provide the accompaniment, with reduced numbers of strings and antiphonal violin seating to replicate the size and seating of the Salzburg court orchestra which gave the first performances of these works. Norrington’s attention to detail and style is enthusiastically embraced by soloist and orchestra, resulting in a beautifully fresh and captivating interpretation of these well-known works. Dego completes the album with the Violin Sonata in E minor, with her regular recital partner, Francesca Leonardi. © Chandos

The legendary British oboist Leon Goossens inspired all the composers represented on this recording, and all but one of the pieces were written for his oboe, on which he premièred the works by Delius, Bax, Bliss, and Finzi. The piece by Vaughan Williams is arranged for cor anglais, but it was on his own precious instrument that Goossens would première Vaughan Williams’s Oboe Concerto, in 1944. Nicholas Daniel has, with special permission from Goossens’s daughter Jennie, recorded Delius’s Two Interludes on Goossens’s (now 110-year-old) oboe, rather than his own modern oboe, and contributes a fascinating booklet note on the influence and experience of playing this instrument. © Chandos