Anton Dolgov

Franz Benda (1709-1786) worked for much of his life at the court of Frederick the Great. He was a prolific composer but very few of his works were published. His brother Georg (1722-1795) received a similar education as choirboy, violinist and harpsichordist. Il Gardellino was founded in 1988 and its members are specialists in performance on early instruments.

The orchestra l'arte del mondo under the direction of Werner Ehrhardt presents two world premiere recordings of the Silesian composer Anton Zimmermann (1741-1781) on its new CD. Not much is known about the composer's short life, which lasted barely 40 years. What is certain, however, is that Zimmermann lived in Bratislava in the early 1770s and became a key figure in the cultural upswing there. He founded and organized the court orchestra of the prince primate of Hungary, Joseph von Batthyányi. His orchestra quickly developed into one of the best sounding bodies in the entire Danube region. Zimmermann composed a large number of works for the regular concerts. His impressive compositional oeuvre includes sonatas, concertos and stage works as well as some 40 symphonies.

In 1875, The Demon had the greatest success of any of Rubinstein operas, both in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Other compositions included the E flat Piano Concerto, Fantasia for Two Pianos, and the opera Nero". After a concert tour of England, he was made a Hereditary Nobleman by the Tsar, and in 1883 he was awarded the Cross of St. Vladimir for his contribution to musical education in Russia. He also gained a new student named Alexander Glazunov, whose talent at the piano greatly impressed him.

World premiere recording of Anton Rubinstein monumental opera 'Moses'. The recordings were made by Polish Sinfonia Iuventus Orchestra under Michail Jurowski together with Warsaw Philharmonic Choir and Artos Children’s Choir and a tremendous cast (staring Stanisław Kuflyuk (Moses), Torsten Kerl (Pharaoh, king of Egypt), Evelina Dobračeva (Asnath, Pharaon‘s daughter) and Małgorzata Walewska (Johebet, Moses’ mother)). The libretto was originally written in German and this recording maintains this language version.

The ultimate CD for friends of the clavichord: On this recording, Bernhard Klapprott, a pupil of Bob van Asperen and today Professor of Early Keyboard Instruments in the Bach city of Weimar, exploits all the technical and tonal possibilities offered by the original clavichord by Joseph Gottfried Horn (1788).

The G major Anton Rubinstein violin concerto is a fine and powerful work, quite as good as many a lesser-known Russian example in the same genre, and easily as deserving of wider currency as, say, the Taneyev Suite de Concert, which is just as rarely heard these days. Nishizaki gives a committed and polished reading, though you often feel that this is music written by a pianist who had marginally less facility when writing for the violin. Still, here’s a well-schooled performance, full of agreeable touches of imagination (the Andante shows Nishizaki’s fine-spun tone to particularly good effect) delivered with crisply economical urgency that makes good musical sense even of the work’s plainer and less idiomatic passages.

This plunge into the steady stream of Biber releases comes from violinist Anton Steck, an alumnus of the Musica Antiqua Köln period-instrument group. Austria's Heinrich Ignaz von Biber was a brilliant, iconoclastic violinist and composer of the late seventeenth century, hardly known 25 years ago but now the recipient of attention from violinists and casual listeners alike. His Mystery Sonatas collectively depict the Passion story through the unique device of scordatura, or retuning of the violin, which forces the instrument into strange, unearthly textures and moods.

For his project of recording the complete symphonies of Anton Bruckner on CPO, Mario Venzago has chosen to record each symphony with a different orchestra to re-create the sounds that Bruckner would have heard. Considering that Bruckner's experiences with orchestras spanned three decades, he would have witnessed growth of the orchestra's size and the introduction of new instruments, which clearly influenced his decisions when he composed and revised each work. Venzago performs the Symphony No. 8 in C minor with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, following the 1890 version and employing the same instrumentation and ensemble scale, as well as traditional practices that are documented in performances from that period. The result is an Eighth that sounds strikingly different from the other symphonies, quite far removed from the early Romantic orchestra he used in the First, and considerably expanded from the ensembles he would have expected for the Fourth or even the Seventh symphonies.

Anton Rubinstein was a towering figure of Russian musical life, and one of the 19th century’s most charismatic musical figures. Rivalled at the keyboard only by Liszt, he was near the last in a line of pianist-composers that climaxed with Liszt, Busoni, and Rachmaninov. Like them, Rubinstein’s reputation as a composer in his day was more controversial than his reputation as a performer. But unlike them, his vast compositional output, much of it containing music of beauty and originality, still remains relatively unexplored territory. Rubinstein was one of the most prolific composers of the 19th century, with a catalogue of works ranging from several hundred solo piano compositions, to concertos, symphonies, chamber music, operas, choral works, and songs.