Alpha Test

It tends to be Russian performers who capture the dark, emotional undercurrents of Shostakovich's music, but few chamber groups have ever done it as well as the Belcea Quartet, a London-based group of central and eastern European players. Neither the Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57, nor the String Quartet No. 3 in F major, Op. 73, is a commonly played work, but taken together, in the Belcea's more-than-capable hands, they have a powerful impact.

After its first two recordings, devoted to Schubert then Beethoven, highly praised and recommended by the critics, this eclectic, innovative quartet is now celebrating its tenth anniversary by tackling the string quintets of Mozart and Brahms. These two scores, representative of the culmination of a career in the case of Brahms and, for Mozart, the end of a life, are sustained by vigorous inspiration and frothing energy.

Nelson Goerner is not especially known for his Brahms, and this 2018 Alpha release of the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major marks his first commercial recording of a major Brahms work. While he is widely viewed as a poet at the piano, mostly because of his introspective playing of solo piano music by Chopin and Debussy, Goerner's close-to-the-vest approach may be viewed as a liability in such a heroic and powerful work as this concerto, where assertive playing is required and pianists are expected to demonstrate muscular prowess over poetry.

This "collaborative exploration" of Schubert's String Quartet in D minor, D. 810 ("Death and the Maiden"), is experimental even by the standards of violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. It offers the Schubert quartet itself, in an arrangement for string orchestra by Kopatchinskaja herself, that preserves the original quartet forces in some passages; between its movements come other works by Augustus Nörmiger, John Dowland, Carlo Gesualdo, and György Kurtág, along with a piece of Byzantine chant, all of them on the theme of death and often making specific musical reference to the content of the Schubert.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Concerti a flauto traverso obligato Vol. II
Alexis Kossenko / Arte dei Suonatori
EAC+LOG+CUE | WV: 320 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Alpha # 146 | Country/Year: Germany 2009
Genre: Classical | Style: Classical Period

With this new record, the flutist and director Alexis Kossenko, rising star of the young Baroque generation, finishes the integral of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's concertos started in 2006 (Alpha 093, best mark of the magazine Classica at its release). He is once again accompanied by the Polish ensemble Arte dei Suonatori, of which he has been the guest conductor for several years…

Believe it or not, François-Joseph Gossec was the French musical equivalent of Haydn and Beethoven. Under the ancient régime, Gossec established single-handedly the primacy of the string quartet and the symphony in French instrumental music and under the Empire, Gossec created a revolutionary form of massed public music pre-dating Beethoven's Ninth.