Cesar II

Cui, a member of the original Russian 'Five', was a dedicated encourager of the other members of the group (and indeed of all living Russian composers) to aim at less imitation of the West; and instead to write, without inhibition, more obviously independent Russian-style music. Nevertheless, he seemed to exempt himself from the encouragement, tending to write his own music in a pretty well accepted western European mould.

This CD features two quite lovely piano quintets, beautifully played by a quartet of players from the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra with Clifford Curzon at the piano. The first piece is by Antonin Dvorak, who composed two piano quintets. The first of these is a relatively early work that Dvorak composed in 1872 when he was 31. The second of his quintets was composed only 15 years later and remains one of his most popular chamber works. The other piece on the CD is by César Franck and, along with his other major chamber works - the violin sonata and the string quartet - reminds the listener of the atmosphere of Franck's best known work, the symphony in d minor.

Cesar Franck's passionate and sunny Violin Sonata has long been regarded as one of the greatest in the repertoire, and is the work of a composer at the height of his powers. Richard Strauss's Violin Sonata, composed a year after Franck's in 1887, is the work of a young composer on the cusp of discovering his mature voice; lyrical and sumptuous, it has all the hallmarks of his later style. Performed here by distinguished violinist and conductor Augustin Dumay and French-Canadian pianist Louis Lortie, this recording marks the duo's recording debut. In addition to the sonatas, this album includes two Franck rarities - Melancolie and the Prelude, Fugue and Variation Op.18 for organ, heard here in an arrangement by Dumay and Lortie. The recording concludes with the wonderful Heifetz arrangement of Strauss's song Auf stillem Waldespfad.

César Cui, one of the group of five nationalist Russian composers of the second half of the 19th century known as The Five or The Mighty Handful, was the son of a French officer who had remained in Russia after the retreat of Napoleon in 1812. In common with other composers of his generation and background, he had a career apart from music, in his case as a professor at the Academy of Military Engineering, an expert in fortification. This did not prevent him from ambitious activity as a composer and an important career as a critic, often harsh and intolerant in his judgements. He is best known for his colourful short piano pieces.

The gifted Belgian Quatuor Danel turn to two masterpieces by César Franck: his passionate Piano Quintet and the String Quartet. The three-movement Quintet, like Brahms’s op. 34 an expansion of the Schumannian model, is one of Franck’s most infamous works. It immediately established itself, and a second performance with the pianist Marie Poitevin, the later dedicatee of the Prélude, Choral et Fugue, convinced the members of the Société Nationale. Franck’s String Quartet, his last major work, was similarly acclaimed by its first listeners. After its first performance in April 1890, with tears in his eyes, César Franck is said to have told his pupil Vincent d’Indy, “Now you see: at long last the public is beginning to understand me.”

Given the paucity of César Franck's piano music on disc, Nikolai Lugansky's focus on this composer is to be commended. On his third release for harmonia mundi, the Russian pianist reveals an organ master strongly attached to the musical forms inherited from J.S. Bach: the prelude, the fugue, and the chorale. Translated to the piano keyboard, Franck's music, with its expansively conceived structures, requires a completely fresh approach that puts the greatest performers to the test: here, Lugansky took on an additional challenge by preparing his own transcription (a brilliant one, at that!) of Franck's celebrated Choral pour grand orgue No.2.

This recording marks the beginning of the collaboration between the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and its new music director, the French conductor Alain Altinoglu, who conducts the leading European and American orchestras and has made a reputation for himself in every repertory – not forgetting opera at Salzburg, Bayreuth, and La Monnaie in Brussels, where he is music director. Their first disc pays tribute to a composer whose bicentenary is celebrated in 2022, César Franck, with the famous Symphony in D minor and two less well-known works, presented in new editions: the symphonic poem Le Chasseur maudit (1882) and the large-scale symphonic interlude from the oratorio Rédemption, composed in 1872 after the Paris Commune, performed here in its first version, long considered lost.

With so many versions of the Symphony and the Symphonic Variations available, it's surprising that these two favourite orchestral works aren't coupled more often. Here Tortelier adds an attractive bonus in the evocative tone-poem Les Eolides.