This is the second volume in pianist Cedric Tiberghien's survey of Beethoven's variations for piano. The pieces here are mostly youthful ones, written while Beethoven was still a touring pianist. Beethoven composed a lot of variation sets, although he didn't always speak well of them later; when he heard someone playing the 32 Variations in C minor, WoO 80, he asked who had written it, and then, learning that it was himself, exclaimed, "Oh, Beethoven, what an ass you were back then!" Yet, it is an entertainingly varied piece that is not unconnected to Beethoven's transcendent late variation style. Tiberghien also includes some rarely heard pieces, such as the 24 Variations on "Venni amore," WoO 65, variations on Rule, Britannia! (WoO 79), and God Save the King (WoO 78), as well as assorted other early works. These often contain examples of Beethoven's rough humor, nicely caught by Tiberghien, and, while not profound, are probably worth hearing more often. As on his first volume, Tiberghien includes variations by other composers as intermezzi. This is the sense of the curious "Variation(s)" title; here, the works are more contemporary, and the ones by John Cage and Morton Feldman seem to come out of left field. The Beethoven performances, however, are solid, and one hopes that perhaps a third volume, containing the Diabelli Variations, Op. 120, is still on the way. The album made classical best-seller lists in early 2024.© James Manheim /TiVo

Composer Józef Koffler was the first Polish champion of Schoenberg's 12-tone system and a modernist whose work, based on this fascinating transcription of Bach's Goldberg Variations for harpsichord, BWV 988, is likely to be worth further investigation. He ran afoul of Stalin's Soviet Union and then, worse, of the Germans when they took over Poland, and he disappeared in the Holocaust. The Goldberg arrangement, composed in 1938, was perhaps intended as something palatable to Soviet conservatives, but it is in no way done by the numbers. For one thing, when Koffler composed the work, the Goldberg Variations were quite new in the public consciousness; they had received their first recording, from harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, just five years earlier. Koffler's version, for a small orchestra of strings and winds, was forgotten and was premiered only in 2019, by many of the forces on this recording: it is extremely artfully done. Koffler deploys his ensemble, generally speaking, in three different ways: with the strings taking Bach's melody line, with wind-and-strings atomization of the melody, and with counterpoint mainly in the winds. He is inspired by the broadly tripartite structure of the variations, with canons mostly making up every third variation, but he departs from this where Bach does, and the entire set retains the unity and growth of the original, with complexity and expressivity growing as if inevitably as the music proceeds. The work would make an ideal complement in concert to Anton Webern's arrangement of the fugue from Bach's Musical Offering, BWV 1079. Historical performance veteran Trevor Pinnock leads a mixed ensemble of young musicians, consisting of members of the Royal Academy of Music Soloists Ensemble and students at the Glenn Gould School in Canada, and they play with precision and a fine edge. The Linn label delivers superbly detailed sound from the Britten Studio in Snape Maltings, UK, and the album graphics, showing a Chagall-like shtetl painting by the similarly doomed artist Chara Kowalska, are haunting. A unique release, fully deserving of the commercial success it has received.© TiVo

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“I like challenges,” says the 23-year-old Italian pianist Beatrice Rana. Specifically, she enjoys studying and performing music that allows her to embark on a process of deep exploration. The scores for her first Warner Classics recording, released in late 2015, were two formidable and spectacular Russian piano concertos – Tchaikovsky No 1 and Prokofiev No 2. Her performances with Sir Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia led Gramophone to describe her as “a fully developed artist of a stature that belies her tender years,” and to conclude that “I can’t think of another recent concerto release that, beginning to end, affords greater pleasure.” For her new Warner Classics release she has taken on a very different challenge in the form of quieter, less obviously virtuosic masterpiece from an earlier era. It also happens to stand as a pinnacle of the solo keyboard repertoire: Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Bach was the composer who most obsessed Beatrice Rana as a child, and in a recent interview with Pianist magazine, she confessed that it would be his music, and above all the Goldberg Variations, that she would choose if she had to devote her life to a single composer. As she said: “I’m very happy to be going back to Bach … It’s best to avoid Bach in competitions … you can’t expose yourself to be totally killed by the jury! But Bach is my first love; now I am allowed to play it in public and I’m really looking forward to that.” When it comes to competitions, she speaks from experience. She first came to international attention in 2011, when she won First Prize and all the special jury prizes at the Montreal International Competition. Two years later she won the Silver Medal and the Audience Award at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Her exceptional achievement and promise has also been recognised by BBC Radio 3, which has named her one of its New Generation Artists, and by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, which has awarded her a fellowship. Le Monde, France’s most authoritative newspaper, observed that “Beatrice Rana certainly has nothing left to prove when it comes to technique, but what makes an impression are her calm maturity and her sense of architecture.” When she played the Goldberg Variations at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in October 2016, the Bachtrack website – which gave her performance a five-star rating – highlighted her capacity for turning her dazzling technique to interpretative ends and praised the way the apparently instinctive fluidity and energy of her playing was combined with articulacy and an elegant sense of discretion. In her native Italy La Repubblica has described Rana as “the world’s point of reference for excellence among Italian pianists”. When she performed the Goldberg Variations in Vicenza in November 2016, OperaClick wrote that “Rana showed that she had understood the intimate dual essence of the Goldbergs, which oscillates between conceptual abstraction and emotional sensation, and had miraculously found a point of contact between two apparently antithetical worlds.” The previous month, she had played the work in Pisa. The Tuscan newspaper La Nazione spoke of her as a pianist who “amazes with her virtuosity, technical precision and mastery of her instrument”, while the writer for Tutto Mondo described the concert as “one of the most extraordinary performances I have ever witnessed ... her technical control, the crystalline purity of her touch, her clean execution, her deep and intelligent understanding of the score and her splendid musical taste permeated every page, every phrase, every note of the Goldberg Variations.”

This album celebrates a musical rapport that has lasted for twenty years and, above all, a true friendship: "We’re like two sisters, on stage and in life", as Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Sol Gabetta like to say. In parallel with their dazzling solo careers, they have frequently got together for concerts in trio or double concerto formation (like the one written for them by Francisco Coll, recently released on Alpha Classics). But they have conceived this recording for a rather rare combination, the violin-cello duo – with the aim of choosing pieces they found interesting either stylistically or for the way they use the instruments. The programme includes the Duo written by Zoltán Kodály in 1914, which was not premiered until 1924, two years after Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello, along with a few forays into the Baroque period (Leclair, Scarlatti, Bach) and, of course, works by twenty-first-century composers to whom the two soloists are very close: Jörg Widmann, Francisco Coll and Julien-François Zbinden are on the itinerary of this introspective journey into the generous world of two total artists. © Alpha Classics

The gestation of this project lasted two years. Anna Prohaska and Julius Drake finally concentrated their research on the themes of Eve, Paradise and banishment. Some songs were obvious choices, such as Fauré’s Paradis, in which God appears to Eve and asks her to name each flower and animal, or Purcell’s Sleep, Adam, sleep with its references to Genesis. But Anna Prohaska also wished to illustrate the cliché of the woman who brought original sin into the world and her status as a tempter who leads man astray, as in Brahms’s Salamander, Wolf’s Die Bekehrte or Ravel’s Air du Feu. In Das Paradies und die Peri, Schumann conjures up the image of Syria’s rose-covered plains. Bernstein also transports us to the desert with Silhouette.. John Milton’s seventeenth-century masterpiece Paradise Lost was the inspiration for Charles Ives and Benjamin Britten, also featured in this very rich programme that constitutes an invitation to travel and reflection. © Alpha Classics

Franz Schubert’s masterpiece, his song cycle Winterreise, was written shortly before his death in 1828, at the age of only 31. On his winter journey, the singer wanders as a lost soul in harsh terrain, wracked by conflicting emotions, but consoled by his memories of kinder times. Benjamin Appl commented: "Every time I perform it, Winterreise feels like a new and different journey, depending on my own mood, the atmosphere in the hall, and of course the shared creativity with the all-important pianist. For singers, Schubert’s wanderer is a lifetime companion, yet a daunting one as we confront all the great recordings and performances that are already out there. The challenge for every singer is not to be inhibited, but to find fresh ways of understanding and transmitting both words and music to their own generation". Somehow, in Winterreise, Schubert has made space for that potential. As Benjamin Britten said: “Every time I come back to it, I am amazed not only by the extraordinary mastery of it, but by the renewal of the magic. Each time, the mystery remains”. Winterreise is Benjamin Appl’s first release for Alpha Classics as part of a multi-album deal. In this recording he is joined by long-time collaborator and pianist James Baillieu. © Alpha Classics

Along with Handel's Messiah, which was greatly admired by Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), the oratorio The Creation is one of the few works of this genre written before 1800 that from the outset has enjoyed uninterrupted popularity with audiences and choirs alike. In this timeless classic dating from 1798, Haydn creates a musical world with such a variety of different expressive means that its radiant charisma is irresistible. Hans-Christoph Rademann describes it with the words: "if it is possible to convey our gratitude for God's glorious creation through music, then I believe that Josef Haydn has succeeded brilliantly with this oratorio. I see Haydn's Creation as a reminder to preserve our earth. Out of the note C he creates a resonant world for us". The work opens with a symphonic "representation of chaos", a setting of "Nichts" (nothingness) verging on the hideous, which is then swept away by the powerful setting of the word "light" sung by the chorus. They then sing "Und eine neue Welt entspringt auf Gottes Wort" ("a new created world springs up at God's command"), radiating joy, and a vivid musical story begins. In this work Haydn teaches us to "see with the ears", we hear the emergence of the elements, see the whole range of animals in our mind's eye, and experience the birth of the first humans: the wonder of creation. © Accentus Music