Carlos Chavez Chamber Music Vol. 1 (2003)

Poulenc - Complete Chamber Music, Vol.1 - Alexandre Tharaud et al. (2000) {Naxos 8.553611}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 208 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 134 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 67 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2000 Naxos / HNH International | 8.553611
Classical / Early Modern / Early 20th Century / Chamber Music

This excellent first volume in what promises to be a two-disc collection of Poulenc's complete chamber music offers performances that compare favorably with the best available. All of the musicians are superb, but several deserve special mention. Alexandre Tharaud plays Poulenc's piano parts with great flair, wit, and a true feeling for the music's manic shifts from raucous high spirits to nostalgia and melancholy. Since all of these works feature the piano, the importance of his contribution can't be overestimated.

Poulenc - Complete Chamber Music, Vol.1 - Alexandre Tharaud et al. (2000) {Naxos 8.553611}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 208 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 134 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 67 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2000 Naxos / HNH International | 8.553611
Classical / Early Modern / Early 20th Century / Chamber Music

This excellent first volume in what promises to be a two-disc collection of Poulenc's complete chamber music offers performances that compare favorably with the best available. All of the musicians are superb, but several deserve special mention. Alexandre Tharaud plays Poulenc's piano parts with great flair, wit, and a true feeling for the music's manic shifts from raucous high spirits to nostalgia and melancholy. Since all of these works feature the piano, the importance of his contribution can't be overestimated.

When Germany invaded Austria in 1938, Robert Fürstenthal, born in 1920, took the path of many Viennese Jews and fled to the United States, where he made his living as an accountant; the fact that he had written music in his youth was soon forgotten. Reconnection, after 35 years, with the woman who had been his first love rekindled both that flame and his urge to compose, and from then on songs and chamber music flowed from his pen, preserving the spirit of fin-de-siècle Vienna under the Californian sun – ‘When I compose, I am back in Vienna’, he explained. He died in November 2016, aged 96, knowing that his lyrical, eloquent music was at last attracting the attention of both musicians and microphones.

The music of the Edinburgh composer William Beaton Moonie (1883–1961) is as good as unknown. This firstever album devoted to his piano music reveals a figure downstream from Schumann, Brahms and Grieg, writing in a conservative Romantic idiom coloured by echoes of the folk-music of his native Scotland. Many of these pieces, indeed, are concerned to evoke images of the Scottish countryside or suggest aspects of Scottish history.

The case of the composer Hans Winterberg (1901–91) is a strange one. A survivor of the Terezín concentration camp, where he had been interned as a Czech Jew, after the War he settled in Munich as a German citizen, and his music enjoyed a number of broadcasts – but after his death, his estate disappeared into the vaults of the Sudeten German Music Institute, where it was placed under embargo, emerging only in 2015. This first album of his music reveals an unusual and individual voice, an idiosyncratic blend of Stravinsky, Janáček and Hindemith, with touches of Poulenc, often expressed with brittle humour and rhythmic verve.

It may be a cliché to write of the clarity of Gallic writing for the flute – the kind of elegance found in the music of composers like Debussy, Fauré, Gaubert, Jolivet, Messiaen and Taffanel – but French music for flute does indeed have a sound of its own. The flute works of Nicolas Bacri, born in Paris in 1961, uphold the proud tradition of his predecessors with textures of crystalline transparency and poised, almost weightless, melodic lines – and reserves of sardonic bite and freewheeling energy as required.

It may be a cliché to write of the clarity of Gallic writing for the flute – the kind of elegance found in the music of composers like Debussy, Fauré, Gaubert, Jolivet, Messiaen and Taffanel – but French music for flute does indeed have a sound of its own. The flute works of Nicolas Bacri, born in Paris in 1961, uphold the proud tradition of his predecessors with textures of crystalline transparency and poised, almost weightless, melodic lines – and reserves of sardonic bite and freewheeling energy as required.

A true spate of recordings in recent years has illuminated the best qualities of Georg Philipp Telemann's chamber music, which is instrumentally colorful, adept in its combination of styles, and often possessed of sheer imagination and a delightfully cheeky sense of humor. For a great example of the kind of thing Telemann does all the time that Bach would rarely if ever do, hear the Entrée from the Ouverture for oboe d'amore, two violins, viola, and continuo in E major, TWV 55:E2 (track 6), where the music unexpectedly shifts into triple meter and back again.