In Preparation

 

Günter Raphael — Music for Violin

In the first part of his career Günter Raphael (1903–60) enjoyed performances of his music by Germany’s leading musicians, among them the Busch Quartet and Wilhelm Furtwängler. But declared a ‘half-Jew’ by the Nazis in 1934, he was forced from his prestigious teaching position in Leipzig. Confined to hospital by tuberculosis during the War years, he continued to compose while his doctors protected him from persecution. These violin works – strongly melodic and rhythmically vital – continue the mainstream of German Romanticism as refracted through Hindemith; the two solo sonatas have echoes of Bach.

Mieczysław Weinberg — Complete Violin Sonatas, Volume One

Mieczysław Weinberg, born in Warsaw in 1919, became a close friend of Shostakovich in Moscow, after fleeing eastwards before the invading Nazis in 1939. His vast output includes 26 symphonies, seven operas, seventeen string quartets and much other chamber music and some 200 songs. His style has much in common with Shostakovich, as these four violin works show: fluent contrapuntal skill, a keen feeling for melody, often inflected with Jewish cantilena, and an acute sense of drama which combines a natural narrative manner with an extraordinary ability to create atmosphere, often from just a handful of notes. Since his death in 1996, his music is being discovered by musicians and listeners all around the world.

Mario Lavista — Complete String Quartets

The influences on the work of Mario Lavista (b. 1943), Mexico’s leading contemporary composer, range from mediaeval and folk music to modernism. His music has a powerful sense of atmosphere and colour – the Second String Quartet, Reflejos de la noche, is played entirely on harmonics – and a vigorous rhythmic drive reminiscent of the quartet-writing of Shostakovich.

Joaquín Nin-Culmell — Symphonie des Mystères

Joaquín Nin-Culmell (1908-2004) was a student of Dukas and Falla and his early music reflects his Spanish background. The Symphonie des Mystères (1992-4) for alternating Gregorian chant and organ, is a product of the religious devotion of his old age, the chant sections setting in bold relief the austerely passionate organ commentaries, which have an affinity with Messiaen, as Nin-Culmell’s music traces a dramatic arch charting the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

Reinhard Oppel — Piano Music, Volume One

Reinhard Oppel (1878-1941) was a central figure in inter-War Germany, as composer, teacher and theoretician. His rich, late-Romantic music encompasses symphonies, chamber and choral music, songs and works for piano. A determined opponent of Hitler, Oppel also suffered posthumously from the Communist regime in East Germany: when his family fled to the West, they hid his music under the garden shed and there it remained, unknown, until the fall of Communism when his son was able to return and retrieve it. This first CD of his heart-warming, Dvořákian piano music begins a series of releases intended to win Oppel’s music the audience it deserves.

Leone Sinigaglia — Chamber Music

Leone Sinigaglia, born in Turin in 1868, was a friend of Brahms in Vienna and a student of Dvořák in Prague, applying their classical techniques to the inspiration he found in Italian folksong: his music is marked by strong melodies and a sophisticated use of harmony. Championed by musicians of the standing of Barbirolli, Furtwängler, Kreisler, Stokowski and Toscanini, he was also a famous mountaineer, with two first climbs in the Dolomites to his credit. Sinigaglia, who was Jewish, died in Turin in 1944 as he was being arrested, at the age of 75, by the occupying Nazi forces. His tuneful chamber music bears witness to the happy life that preceded that tragic end.

Alfred Schnittke — Discoveries

The output of Alfred Schnittke (1934–98) has been documented in recordings more thoroughly than that of any other Russian composer since Shostakovich. But there are a number of works which have not yet been released on CD, and four of the five here are not only first recordings; they also document Schnittke’s stylistic evolution over more than four decades of creative activity, moving from the relatively traditional Preludes, via the serial Dialogue and the experimental Yellow Sound to the elliptical Variations, one of his last works, written in the teeth of enormous physical difficulty.

Boris Lyatoshynsky — Songs for Low Voice and Piano

The Ukrainian composer Boris Lyatoshynsky (1895–1968) studied with Glière at the Kiev Conservatory, where he remained as a much-loved teacher for the rest of his life. Lyatoshynsky’s songs – a neglected part of his output – meld intense Scriabinesque expressionism with elements of Ukrainian folksong in a language that embraces both the lyrical and the dramatic. His setting of Shelley’s Ozymandias, with its warning of the impermanence of power, was a brave act in the Soviet Union of 1924.

Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst — Complete Music for Violin and Piano, Volume One

Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst (1812–65) was one of the leading musicians of his day, a friend of Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt and Mendelssohn, and for Joseph Joachim ‘the greatest violinist I ever heard’. But the popular encore pieces by which Ernst is remembered today represent only a fraction of his output. This series of six CDs presents his complete violin works for the first time, revealing one of the instrument’s most accomplished and memorable composers. The first disc shows him in a range of moods, from the mystery and grandeur of the Prophet Fantasy and the Chopinesque poetry of the Two Nocturnes to the bizarre whimsy of The Carnival of Venice and infectious high spirits of the Rondo Papageno – the nineteenth-century virtuoso violin both in introspective melancholy and at its most dazzlingly flamboyant.

Heino Eller — Complete Piano Music, Volume One

The Estonian Heino Eller (1887–1970) is probably best known as the teacher of Arvo Pärt – but he was a prolific and idiosyncratic composer in his own right. His substantial output for piano – this series will contain seven CDs – was written over a period of six decades and thus reflects a range of styles. Taking the lyricism of Chopin and Grieg as its starting point, it combines the influence of Estonian folksong, Scriabin’s troubled harmonies, the epic northern colouring of Sibelius and, at times, Prokofiev’s motoric energy into an attractively individual manner.

Telemann — Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst, Volume Three

This is the third CD in the first complete recording of the 72 cantatas from Georg Philipp Telemann’s collection Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst, published in Hamburg in 1726 – the first complete set of cantatas for the liturgical year to be published. The cantatas are designated for voice, an obbligato instrument – recorder (as on this disc), violin, transverse flute or oboe – and basso continuo, and take the form of two da capo arias with an intervening recitative. Although intended for worship, both public and private, Telemann’s cantatas are a masterly blend of tunefulness with skilled counterpoint and vocal and instrumental virtuosity.

Beethoven — Arrangements for Viola and Piano, Volume One

Although a violist himself, Beethoven left nothing for the viola – except for the fragment of a sonata recorded here for the first time. So his contemporaries and successors have ‘helped’ him fill the gaps: it was possibly Karl Xaver Kleinheinz (1765–1832) who arranged – and expanded – the String Trio, Op. 8, gaining Beethoven’s reluctant approval; and a later musician, Friedrich Hermann (1828–1907), transformed the Septet, Op. 20, into an ambitious viola sonata. And now Paul Silverthorne, Principal Viola of the London Symphony Orchestra, expands the repertoire with his own transcription of the Horn Sonata, Op. 17.

Nikolai Tcherepnin — Piano Music

Nikolai Tcherepnin (1873–1945) – a student of Rimsky-Korsakov and teacher of Prokofiev – was a Russian-born composer and conductor, and the first of his family’s musical dynasty. His piano music reveals a diversity of influences: the Three Pieces (c. 1890s) have echoes of Chopin and Rachmaninov; the Fourteen Sketches on Pictures from the Russian Alphabet (1908) are miniature tone-poems inspired by Alexander Benois’ beautifully illustrated alphabet book for children; and The Fisherman and the Fish (c. 1914) is a vivid musical depiction of this Pushkin poem, complete with watery splashes!

Albert Guinovart — Piano Concertos

Albert Guinovart, born in Barcelona in 1962, is one of the best-known figures in the Spanish musical world, both as pianist and as composer of musicals and symphonic works alike, and his accessible style reflects this meeting of two musical worlds. His two piano concertos were written in 1997 and 2005 as vehicles for his own keyboard virtuosity. The lyrical First Concerto, Mar i Cel (‘Sea and Sky’), is based on material from his prize-winning musical of the same name and was first written for piano and cobla, the Catalonian street-band; and the Second, Traces, incorporates a variety of influences, among them Chopin, Rachmaninov and film music. The symphonic poem El Lament de la Terra (2008) is a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria of a piece, beginning in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and swirling through moments of Hollywood grandeur.

Alkan — Complete Piano Duos and Duets

The piano works of Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813–88) are among the most demanding ever written – but they can also gleam with a fierce joy and twinkle with mischievous humour, so it’s hardly surprising to find his works for piano duet bubbling with freewheeling energy. The two works for pedal piano – transcribed here for two pianos by Roger Smalley – show a more solemn side to this devoutly religious composer, though they, too, have their own charge of excitement and Alkan’s trademark eccentric originality.

Bach/Karg-Elert — Complete Organ Transcriptions

During his lifetime the Leipzig-born Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877–1933) was a well-known harmonium player and pianist. It was his organ music that made him internationally famous as a composer, especially in Britain and the USA. Today, too, his own organ music is frequently recorded and heard in recitals, but his many organ transcriptions are less well known. After Wagner, Bach was the composer whose music Karg-Elert transcribed most often, carefully choosing the pieces best suited to the dynamic and colouristic possibilities of the late Romantic organ.