What Classical Music Are You Listening To Tonight?

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Sergei Rachmaninoff - Piano Concerto NO. 1 - Preludes - Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen, Modestas Pitrenas
Anna Fedorova, piano
Qobuz 24/192




I quite liked this!

Low-key might not be what listeners, imagining the great composer-pianist with the giant hands, come to Rachmaninov for, but it's worth hearing this interpretation from pianist Anna Fedorova, and letting it sink in. These readings, with the little-known Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen under Modestas Pitrenas, might qualify as offbeat in more ways than one. Compare Fedorova's tempos in the Piano Concerto No. 1 in F sharp minor, Op. 1, with those of Denis Matsuev, to take a muscular Russian reading from the years before this one, and the contrast is striking: Fedorova is more than two full minutes slower in the first movement, and in general, she favors not only slow tempos but quiet dynamics. Her playing is elegant, and in the upper registers, it has an unusual sparkling quality deployed to excellent effect in the four Preludes that form the central act of the program. She is also attractively reflective in the quieter passages of the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43. Again, Fedorova is not for everybody: the appearance of the "Dies irae" melody toward the end of this work is here more a passing mood than a warning, but her playing grows on the listener. Myra Hess rarely played the Russians, but if she had, it might have come out something like this.

© TiVo

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Hans Rott - Orchestral Works Vol. 2: Symphony No. 1 - Symphony for Strings - Symphonic Movement
Gürzenich Orchester Köln, Christopher Ward
Qobuz 24/96




I knew the first symphony from a CD I own.
It is the premiere recording with the Cincinnati Philharmonia Orchestra.
Will compare it soon to this album.

The premiere of the Symphony No. 1 in E major by Hans Rott, written more than 100 years earlier, in 1989 introduced the international music world to a composer who had been unknown or known only by name even to most pundits. His colleagues and friends included the one or two-year younger composers Gustav Mahler and Hugo Wolf. Besides Wagner, Bruckner was the most important model for Rott’s first symphonic work. The symphony is the summum opus the not quite twenty-year-old left behind. It is his first and final finished major work. It is the synthesis of what he had written to date and a proclamation of what might have come. © Capriccio

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Originally Posted by bart

Willem De Fesch - Concerti Grossi and Violin Concerto

La Sfera Armoniosa, Mike Fentross

Lidewij van der Voort, violin

Qobuz 24/44.1









Another unknown composer who wrote beautiful baroque.

Impeccable sound (Bert van der Wolf!).



Willem De Fesch was born in Alkmaar in 1687. He deserves an honorable place alongside such greats as Vivaldi and Handel, as his works sound at least as colorful, playful, inventive and sparkling as those of his contemporaries. Sometime after 1700 his parents returned with him to Amsterdam. By then, the city had become an epicentre of music publishers. Many Italian composers published their work in the city; Vivaldi made public appearances and in 1729, Pietro Locatelli even opted to move there. In 1708, De Fesch was appointed violinist in the orchestra of the Amsterdam City Theatre. He composed a lot of music for stage performances himself, such as the concerts in C and A minor of this recording. As far as we know, orchestral works only started to appear again in 1741: the audibly matured Opus 10, also on this recording. [emoji767] Challenge Records

Excellent!

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Spohr - Fauré - Pierné - Saint-Saëns - Verdalle - Snoer - Roussel - Glière - Fantasies & Impromptus
Lavinia Meijer, harp
Qobuz 24/192




She doesn't do only minimalist music.
Marvellous on all accounts.

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Hans Rott - Symphony in E major
Cincinnati Philharmonia Orchestra, Gerhard Samuel




Comparing my CD to the album I played earlier this evening.
The performance is absolutely fine, but the sound is so inferior to the modern recording that we'll something else.

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Amy Dickson
Glass
via Qobuz




Glass, arranged for saxophone.
You can play Glass on the piano, harp and saxophone, it'll always be good.
I do prefer harp and piano though.

I wouldn't mind attending a live concert of hers...

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Domenico Gabrielli - La Nascita del Violoncello
Les Basses Réunies, Bruno Cocset




Spinning one of our favourites.
Very well recorded, and fantastically played.

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Mieczysław Weinberg - Violin Concerto, Op. 67 & Sonata for 2 Violins, Op. 69
Gewandhausorchester, Daniele Gatti
Giidon Kremer
Madara Pētersone
Qobuz 24/96




This was recorded just before the lockdowns.
Gidon Kremer is a promotor of Weinberg's music, and we're lucky he is.

While Mieczyslaw Weinberg's instrument was the piano, he wrote extensively and wonderfully for the violin, which makes sense both on artistic and personal levels – the violin was both the perfect vehicle for the elegiac, Jewish folk-inspired melodies that flowed from his pen, and also the instrument played by his father, who along with Weinberg's mother and sister perished in a Polish concentration camp during the Second World War (Weinberg was spared that fate, having fled to the Soviet Union upon the outbreak of war). What's more, it's arguably Weinberg's love for the violin we now have to thank for his music's recent rediscovery, given that this has been spearheaded by violinist and Kremerata Baltica director Kidon Kremer. So on to Kremer's latest Weinberg-shaped offering, and while the symphonic-proportioned, four-movement Violin Concerto of 1959 is actually a rare Weinberg work which isn't too badly underrepresented in the recording studio – its dedicatee Leonid Kogan recorded it in 1961 with Kirill Kondrashin and the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, and there's a handful of more recent efforts too – the fact that this one is from Kremer should make us sit up and take note.

The concerto recording is a live one, made in February 2020 with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig under the baton of Daniele Gatti as part of a series of Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts in honour of Weinberg's birth centenary. Those who know the Kogan reading may initially be surprised at the much steadier speed taken by Kremer and Gatti for the opening Allegro molto, because it's a different world to Kogan and Kondrashin's supercharged gallop. However these readings aren't short on drama – angry orchestra fortissimos are suitably shattering, and Gatti also achieves tense, floating magic in the moments when suddenly Weinberg makes time stand momentarily still. Kremer himself meanwhile is as sweet-toned and lyrical as ever, his violin holding its singing quality through the spikiest of moments, and coming across most arrestingly of all in the keening laments, meaning the slow third movement is every bit as strong as you'd hope.

Paired with the Concerto is another 1959 violin work of Weinberg's, the Sonata for Two Violins, for which Kremer has been joined by Kremerata Baltica concertmaster Madara Pētersone, and their combined folk flair, range of colours and technical finesse make this perhaps an even more compelling listen than the Concerto – although please read that as praise for the Sonata rather than as criticism of what Kremer and Gatti have given us! © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz

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Hans Rott - Orchestral Works - Vol. 1: Hamlet Overture - Pastoral Prelude - Prelude to 'Julius Cäsar' - Orchestral Suites
Gürzenich Orchester Köln, Christopher Ward
Qobuz 24/96




I was curious to hear the first volume, after having enjoyed the 2nd yesterday.

Hans Rott was a composer from Gustav Mahler’s environment who had been unknown or known only by name even to most pundits. Many people have expressed the opinion, perhaps justifiably, that only his tragic fate prevented him from going down in the annals of music as Mahler’s equal and establishing a permanent position in the repertoire. A member of Bruckner’s circle within the music scene in Vienna, he developed a pronounced antipathy towards Johannes Brahms. In view of many of his works, it is difficult to comprehend that during Rott’s lifetime presumably not one of them was performed in public, but that only presentations took place under the aegis of internal conservatory events. With these recordings Capriccio attend to fill the gap with his (some of them reconstructed) orchestral works and document these fascinating world of music for the eternity. © Capriccio

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Originally Posted by bart

Florent Schmitt - Orchestral Suites from 'Antoine et Cléopâtre 1 & 2 - Symphony No. 2
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo
Qobuz 24/96




What a delight!
I didn't know this composer (1870-1958).
The Suites are from 1920, he composed the Symphony when he was well into his 80s ('57-'58).

Revisiting this album.

Florent Schmitt made his name in his mid-thirties with such rich, resplendent scores as La Tragédie de Salomé and Psalm 47. Their brilliance, however, should not have overwhelmed so much the rest of his output, for he lived another half century, and, as his Second Symphony demonstrates, retained his creative energy to the end. The initial occasion for the two Suites from Antoine et Cléopâtre recorded on this album was one of the extravaganzas put on in Paris by Ida Rubinstein, a woman whose sheer cold beauty gained an extra lustre from the vast wealth she inherited, and who was ready to display both – the looks and the lucre – majestically in the theatre. Having arrived in the French capital with Diaghilev’s company, she soon went independent. In June 1920 she took over the Paris Opéra for five gala performances of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, with herself as Cleopatra opposite the flamboyant Édouard De Max in a new translation which she had commissioned from André Gide. The titles of the six movements that Schmitt extracted in his two suites generally tell us where to place them within the action. In December 1957, 37 years later, Schmitt completed his Second Symphony, his last major work, at the age of eighty-seven. As lavish as his earlier music and as rhythmically sophisticated, emphatically bounding in fast passages and supple in slow, the symphony has nothing valedictory about it. Happily, the composer was there in Strasbourg in June 1958 for the first performance, conducted by Charles Munch. He died two months later. This was Schmitt’s only symphony in the strict sense, and it is not clear why he called it “No.2”. Of the two possible candidates for the “No.1” spot – his Symphonie concertante for piano and orchestra of 1931 and Janiana, a symphony for strings a decade later – neither is altogether convincing. Maybe the numbering was just an old man’s whim. © SM/Qobuz