DVOŘÁK, SHOSTAKOVICH & TOWER Piano Trios

Founded in 1982 by distinguished faculty members at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the Oberlin Trio has performed to enthusiastic acclaim throughout the world for more than 30 years. Since 2008, the tradition has been carried forward by pianist Haewon Song, violinist David Bowlin, and cellist Amir Eldan. Together, they have presented recitals and master classes across the United States, Korea, and China. In keeping with the ensembles commitment to educating young artists, members of the Oberlin Trio enjoy teaching at top music schools in the U.S. and abroad. 

Release date: 8th Jan 2016

EINAUDI Elements

His first album of new recordings for almost 3 years and follow up to In A Time Lapse sees Einaudi influenced by the world around him. Nature’s elements (earth, water, air, and fire), mathematical and scientific elements, musical forms and works of arts including those by Kandinsky. This album brings these seemingly disparate elements together into one concept. Performed by Einaudi and his band the album includes his trademark piano melodies and stirring ensemble playing on tracks including Night, Elements and Four Dimensions.
Release date: 16 Oct. 2015

HOSOKAWA Landscapes

“Ethereal music centred on the textures of the shô, either expertly played by Mayumi Miyata, or evoked by the orchestra.” --BBC Music Magazine, December 2011

“sho soloist Mayumi Miyata takes a decidedly anti-virtuoso approach, shunning conventional measures of instrumental mastery in favour of almost pure tone and texture. This ends up setting the pace for the performances as a whole...Leibreich essentially guides his musicians - particularly the strings - in sounding as much like the sho as one would ever imagine.” --Gramophone Magazine, April 2012

Mayumi Miyata (shô), Münchener Kammerorchester, Alexander Liebreich

ECM’s ongoing series of recordings with the Munich Chamber Orchestra continues with an intriguing album of new and recent pieces by Japan’s leading composer Toshio Hosokawa. Amongst the compositions are Sakura für Otto Tomek and Cloud and Light, both written in 2008, and Ceremonial Dance (2000). These 21st century pieces are brought together with Landscape V (originally from 1993 and for string quartet, meanwhile expanded into an orchestral version). Three of these feature the shô, a traditional Japanese instrument played by its leading exponent, Mayumi Miyata.

Born in Hiroshima in 1955, Hosokawa was initially inspired by Western art music from Schubert to Schoenberg. He went to Germany in the 1970s to study with Isang Yun and Klaus Huber. As he strengthened his standing in European avant-garde he also put down deeper roots in Japanese traditional music. His work increasingly suggests a dialogue between East and West, between the archaic and modern, between ceremonial music and concert music. Hosokawa considers his compositional process instinctively associated with the concepts of Zen Buddhism and its symbolic interpretation of nature.

Hosokawa’s involvement with traditional music led him to study the shô, the ancient Japanese mouth organ with 17 bamboo pipes. In contemporary music the best known shô player is undoubtedly Mayumi Miyata who is featured here. She was previously heard on ECM in Helmut Lachenmann’s opera Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (4761283).

On the present disc Mayumi Miyata solos in Hosakawa’s music for strings and shô, and plays unaccompanied shô on Sakura (Cherry Blossoms), Hosakawa’s adaptation of a traditional Japanese piece.

Landscapes is ECM’s second reckoning with Hosowaka: his music was previously featured on the critically acclaimed Yun/Bach/Hosokawa album of Thomas Demenga (4618622), issued a decade ago.

At present Hosakawa is a name very much in the news in Europe, as his opera Matsukaze, with choreography by Sascha Walz, is at the Berlin Staatsoper and is receiving much positive media attention.

This recording is released simultaneously with another recording featuring music by a major Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu’s Distance de fée – on the debut CD by Duo Gazzana (4764428)

ANDERSON Fantasias, The Crazed Moon & The Discovery of Heaven

“[The Discovery of Heaven] combines the spacious and the frenetic, timelessness and urgency, within an overall sense of luminosity. Fantasias (2009) is a magnificent showpiece for 21st-century orchestra, especially in this terrific performance...This is stunning music, played superbly and captured in good sound.” BBC Music Magazine, January 2014 *****

“The players sounds as if they are enjoying what is, at the very least, a glittering workout...Neither effete nor vulgar, this might just be the new music you've been waiting for, its wow-factor surface fluency only part of the story. Strongly recommended.” Gramophone Magazine, January 2014

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Recorded live at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, London, on 19 March 2011 (The Crazed Moon), 3 December 2011 (Fantasias) and 24 March 2012 (The Discovery of Heaven).

Julian Anderson is one of the UK’s most exciting living composers. He has been described by The Times as ‘a composer to cherish’ and by the Evening Standard as ‘one of the finest composers of his generation’. His work Harmony opened the 2013 BBC Proms and his opera Thebans will be premiered at English National Opera in May 2014. This season he also starts a three-year post as Composer in Residence at Wigmore Hall.

Anderson has been the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Composer in Residence since 2010. This is the first album of his works performed by the Orchestra, and includes one world premiere performance and two world premiere recordings.

This world premiere performance of The Discovery of Heaven won a 2012 Sky Arts Award in the Classical category.

This disc is conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, the LPO’s Principal Conductor; and young British conductor/composer Ryan Wigglesworth, who is rapidly making a name for himself on the international scene.

BRETT DEAN Water Music

Violist Brett Dean’s journey with composition started in the late 1980s in Germany, where he was a member of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, but also appeared as an improvising performer and worked on experimental film and radio scores.

“The Australian composer's music is rendered with powerful immediacy…” --Gramophone Magazine, November 2009

“The performances are all terrific, and Bezaly earns double kudos for her agility and tone…BIS’s engineering is outstanding” --International Record Review

Violist Brett Dean’s journey with composition started in the late 1980s in Germany, where he was a member of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, but also appeared as an improvising performer and worked on experimental film and radio scores. Dean’s growing success as a composer encouraged a shift away from performing to composing as well as a return to his native Australia. Recent works include the violin concerto The Lost Art of Letter Writing which recently earned Dean the prestigious Grawemeyer Award. Dean’s Viola Concerto has been recorded with the composer himself as soloist on BIS-CD-1696, a release described as a ‘superbly recorded … absorbing portrait of an imposing and very engaging creative voice in Australian music’ in International Record Review.

The present disc includes the work Carlo for fifteen solo strings, sampling keyboard and tape, inspired by the music and life of Carlo Gesualdo, the Italian renaissance prince and composer of madrigals. At the centre of Dean’s suggestive piece is the tension and contrast between choral Gesualdo, appearing sampled and on tape in the form of the celebrated madrigal ‘Lasso moro’, and Dean’s own string writing. Pastoral Symphony and Water Music are both inspired by Dean’s environmental concerns, and feature natural sounds as part of the scores. In his Pastoral Symphony these are primarily bird calls, appearing through the medium of a sampler, while Water Music also includes bubble-blowing, splashing and pouring sounds created live by four musicians ‘playing’ aquariums.

Water Music was written specifically with the Raschèr Quartet in mind, and the middle movement, 'Coursing', was inspired, Dean writes, by the ensemble’s ‘extremely fluid playing style and extraordinary tonal blend’. The work was given its première by the Raschèr Quartet and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra in 2004. The fourth work on the disc is The Siduri Dances for solo flute and string orchestra. Named after a character from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the piece originates from a piece for solo flute and is dedicated to the present soloist, Sharon Bezaly. It is here conducted by the composer, with the Austrian composer/conductor HK Gruber conducting the other three works.

GREGSON Orchestral Works

“Wissam Boustany and Richard Watkins play with superlative technique and verve in the two concertos...There really is something for everyone in this disc - glorious Arnoldesque tunes, stimulatingly serious expression, brilliant orchestration: a very Gregsonian cocktail. Enjoy!” --Gramophone Magazine, September 2014

“…Gregson’s music is impressive … this album has grown on me the more I’ve listened to it, and I look forward to hearing more from him. The musicians are invested in the work, and their playing is clean; the sound is quite complimentary to the orchestra…” --American Record Guide, January/February 2015

Edward Gregson is one of Britain’s most versatile and prolific composers, his approachable and engaging music having gained recognition worldwide. With the BBC Philharmonic, Bramwell Tovey conducts works that take inspiration from an array of musical and extra-musical sources, revealing the breadth of Gregson’s musical imagination.

The Horn Concerto, originally written in 1971 for soloist with brass band, is here heard in a recent orchestral arrangement, played by Richard Watkins, a leading horn player of his generation. Each of the Concerto’s three movements displays a different facet of the French horn’s character: serious, lyrical, and playful. Aztec Dances began as a substantial piece for recorder and piano; it was reworked for flute and piano at the request of Wissam Boustany, who here performs the final version, for flute and ensemble. Its vivid colours and ritualistic character were inspired by a British Museum exhibition exploring Aztec culture. Like Aztec Dances, the Concerto for Orchestra was revised twice. Its interim title, ‘Contrasts’, conveys the essence of the work, varieties of character and orchestral colour being key to it. Dream Song was commissioned to share a concert programme with Mahler’s Symphony No. 6. The essence of Mahler pervades the whole of this work which aims to create a parallel musical world to that of the Symphony.

“Disc four in a series of Gregson’s flinty, sharply imagined music includes excellent solo work in the two concertos, and gritty ensemble playing in the Concerto for Orchestra.” --BBC Music magazine, December 2014 ****

TURNAGE Fractured Lines

"This is stunning and strongly recommended. Turnage"s unique sound-world - as distinctive in its way as Mahler or Messiaen - springs to life on every level." --BBC Music Magazine - Performance***** Sound ***** ‘Best of 2002’

"Slatkin is clearly enjoying himself and soloists and orchestra come together to provide one of the most vivacious CDs to be released in a long time." --Observer

"Exciting and challenging." --The Independent

JOHN ADAMS Absolute Jest

“[Grand Pianola Music] is an exuberant, larger-than-life freefall through musical history, the off-the-leash arpeggios typical of Beethoven's late piano sonatas bumping into Liszt then, controversially, ending up glittering like Liberace's candelabra…Absolute Jest is…an entertaining diversion and the San Francisco SO respond winningly to Adams's tailor-made if, at times, disappointingly generic orchestration.” --Gramophone Magazine, September 2015

“Here is wit, rough passion, gravity and playfulness...the dialogue between the St Lawrence String Quartet and the San Francisco Orchestra is brilliantly cogent and clear. Absolute Jest is a bravura experiment that will delight Adams's champions and appall his detractors.” --BBC Music Magazine, October 2015 ****

“Adams’s Grand Pianola Music succeeds in its referencing of Beethoven’s cascading arpeggios, but the Absolute Jest is limited by the shards of scherzos...As this new, superb live recording, with Orli Shaham and Marc-André Hamelin as the two swashbuckling pianists shows, Grand Pianola Music...was a manifesto, a statement of intent.” --The Guardian, 29th July 2015 ****

“a fantastic performance by all concerned, not least the wordless female vocal trio that Adams employs, and a terrifingly high but immaculately performed tuba solo in the slow movement. A great disc, then, for all Adams fans!” --Presto Classical, 14th August 2015

“there’s no disputing its brilliance and audacity. Absolute Jest (2012) is an energetic concerto for string quartet (the St Lawrence) and orchestra, a hyper-scherzo whose ingeniously developed themes are lifted from Beethoven and performed here with glittering swagger.” --Sunday Times, 16th August 2015

MONUMENTS Wind Band Music

This much lauded series continues with a sequence of four première recordings played by the elite Illinois State University Wind Symphony.

"This much-lauded series continues with a sequence of four premiere recordings played by the elite Illinois State University Wind Symphony, featuring Roy Magnuson’s House Plants in Terracotta Pots; Sydney Hodkinson’s expressive Duae Cantatae Breves; Jayce John Ogren’s richly imagined Evening Music; and Francesco José Martínez Gallego’s exciting, monumental Sinfonía No. 1 ‘Kaprekar’." --Midwest Tape, January 2016 

"American music for wind orchestra in a modern idiom composed during the past twenty-five years, here gathered together with the album name, ‘Monuments’. Composed last year, the disc opens with the oriental sounds of Roy Magnuson’s brief and uncomplicated three minute crescendo and diminuendo that pictures House Plants in Terrcotta Pots. Still living in the atonal world of his mentors, Elliott Carter, Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt, the Duae Cantatae Breves, was written by Sydney Hodkinson in 1995, and belongs to an era that internationally seems to have died a death in its own lifetime.

In two movements it is an experiment in the quiet and meditative sounds that can be produced by a wind ensemble. Very different is the other extended work on the disc—Francisco Gallego’s Sinfonia No.1 ‘Kaprekar’. Loaded with noisy brilliance, it reflects ‘Kaprakar’s Constant’, a mathematical formulae that always ends up with the figure 6174. In one continuous movement divided into several sections and written for a band of around one hundred, it thereby gives the album its title. As an interlude in the disc, Jayce Ogren’s Evening Music is scored for a soprano voice and wind ensemble. Better known as a conductor, Ogren’s piece is the disc’s jewel in its delicacy and refinement, the words translated into English from Abend, by the 20th century German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke.

Often high in the register, Allyss Haecker deals admirably with the challenge. The Hodkinson and Gallego scores are taxing, and one must admire the spirited response from the Illinois State Univerisity Wind Symphony, though I wish the recorded sound had been more detailed in densly scored passages." --David's Review Corner, December 2015

GUBAIDULINA Complete Guitar Works

"This is a rather special program that I recommend to your attention. It is full of imaginative use of the instruments and produces many beautiful sounds of scoring and unusual techniques such as using a drinking glass to produce a glissando on the guitar strings. Fill ‘er up! The recording is excellent." --American Record Guide, November 2015

"This is a very fine release, and I have no reason whatsoever to complain about it. Gubaidulina’s creativity is matched by her integrity, and while these works don’t leap into the listener’s ear all by themselves, they repay the effort made on their behalf." --Fanfare, November 2015

Sofia Gubaidulina has found a soulfulness and freedom in the guitar which speaks to her musical language of expressive mood and often mysterious but precise sonorities. In both Repentance and Sotto Voce she combines guitars with lower stringed instruments, creating a virtuosic, multi-dimensional and deeply poetic role for each voice. Fascinating new sounds from the guitar are produced,

from the most eloquent chorales to remarkable effects using a drinking glass. The earlier Serenade is ‘music for pleasure’, while this première recording of the Toccata reveals a work with a driving momentum that hardly stops.

Album Reviews

The SOUND of the 20s

The three fine, substantial 20th c. works, and the brief 21st c. piece reflective of the program's mission, all composed for violin and piano duo, offers an instrument-specific look into the musical world of the 1920s. With the exception of Jacques-Alphonse De Zeegant (b. 1955), all the composers represented here - Bloch, Ravel and Enescu - were born during the final third of the 19th c. The idea behind the selections on this new Ars Produktion recording presented by Stefan Tarara and Lora Vakova-Tarara is to make audible a cross-section of the many tone colors, contrasts and emotions of the era.
Release date: 15th June 2015

Children’s CELLO

“Steven Isserlis and Stephen Hough open with a beginners' open-string solo (Ludwig Lebell's Berceuse orientale) and continue with increasingly challenging material that culminates in Gaspar Cassadó's bravura Requiebros. The contemporary selections are especially satisfying. Gavin Bryars's With Miriam by the River pays homage to the composer's cello-playing mother in music of quiet, lyrical intensity. Howard Blake's Archangel's Lullaby, written to celebrate the birth of Isserlis's son Gabriel, has a Fauré-like sensibility... Hough's Angelic Song (yet another gift to Gabriel Isserlis) is a ravishingly simple meditation. 

Isserlis père's own The Haunted House may not merit repeated hearings but its silliness is sure to provide a chuckle or two, aided by Simon Callow's sly narration, and the cello's role a sound-effects machine could motivate many youngsters to pick up instrument. Delightful.” --Gramophone Magazine, July 2006

REFLECTIONS

“A whole disc of unaccompanied violin may seem daunting — and mainly modern music, too — but Widmann’s items are intriguing and her playing is magnificent.” Sunday Times, 9th November 2014

“More Sciarrino here – six caprices written for Accardo and dispatched with winning panache by Widmann. Boulez’s Anthemes is knottier but satisfyingly rigorous, as are Widmann frère’s etudes. These are interspersed with two of Ysaÿe’s solo sonatas, dedicated to Thibaud and Kreisler respectively, and here dazzlingly played. Warm, clear German Radio sound.” Classical Music *****

When writing for a solo instrument like the violin, a composer is confronted with the limitations and the possibilities of the instrument on the one hand, but also with physical limits of the player on the other hand. In the end, only the reciprocal relationship between the soloist and the instrument defines the direction of sound, the musical process and the shape of composition.

This might be the reason why pieces for solo violin frequently were written by violinists who were very well acquainted with the possibilities of their own instrument. Apart from a plethora of acrobatic exercises, only a handful of masterworks prevailed.

Before Ysaÿe's six solo sonatas (written 1923/24) or Hungarian violinist and composer Zoltán Székely's solo sonata (written 1919/20), the established repertoire was limited to Bach's sonatas and partitas and Paganini's 24 Caprices.

Even though these works are more or less present in the minds of composers nowadays, the works for solo violin that were written in the second half of the 20th century and today experiment with new playing techniques and a new territory of expressivity.

Carolin Widmann plays a G B Guadagnini violin from 1782.