Joseph Fontenrose

Nearly every setting of the poems by Kerner, Chamisso, Andersen and Heine heard in this recital dates from 1840, the year Schumann found himself totally engrossed with the song genre, producing no fewer than 138 individual lieder. This creative vein seems to mirror the inner torments that gripped the young composer at the time, while revealing the extraordinary range of his musical invention and unequalled talent of storyteller, as Samuel Hasselhorn demonstrates here, after winning first prize at the 2018 Queen Elisabeth Competition: the young German baritone’s first recording for harmonia mundi is a veritable love letter to this most intimate of art forms.

Encore is a new album produced from previously unheard archival recordings by the legendary Bahamian guitarist Joseph Spence, made in 1965 at the height of his career. Spence’s radically innovative guitar style transformed elements of Bahamian traditional music into adventurous, joyful improvisations and influenced players worldwide. His powerful singing stemmed directly from the rhyming tradition created by Bahamian sponge fishermen early in the 20th century. The music is punctuated by Spence’s unique, sometimes otherworldly vocalizations including humming, short bursts of lyrics, and near-scat singing. Some of the recordings include singing by Spence’s sister Edith Pinder and her family members Raymond and Geneva Pinder. Producer Peter K. Siegel captured these performances at Spence’s only New York concert, at the performer’s cottage in Nassau, Bahamas, and at Siegel’s apartment in Manhattan.

Renowned performers Iestyn Davies and Joseph Middleton perform Schubert’s tragic song-cycle Die schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Maid of the Mill).

After appearing on a quartet of very different BIS releases, ranging from early baroque arias to orchestral songs by Alban Berg and Mahler’s ‘Resurrection Symphony’, the British soprano Ruby Hughes has devised a song recital, together with her regular Lieder partner Joseph Middleton. The process began in 2018 when the two gave the world première of Helen Grime’s Bright Travellers, a set of five poems charting the interior and exterior worlds of pregnancy and motherhood. Ruby Hughes soon set about planning a programme which would converge with Grime’s music and the themes of new life and of love in all its aspects.

This CD presents a complete recital given by the master violinist Joseph Szigeti in the Hancock Auditorium at the University of Southern California on 13 January 1957. This concert originally formed the last of a series of three concerts featuring works by 20th-century composers entitled ‘Eleven Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century’, which Szigeti performed at numerous college campuses throughout the United States in the late 1950s. He described this three-part series was ‘an incentive to break with the “one-programme-each-season” type of concertizing that the organized audience movement demands.’

Joseph Moog, after recording both Brahms piano concertos for Onyx Classics, turns his attention to one of the most demanding and forbidding of piano concertos. Max Reger's concerto dates from 1910. This rugged giant of a concerto displays all Reger's formidable skill at using large orchestral forces with great clarity, making the piano part of the orchestral fabric. The concerto has much music that is both brilliant and poetic as well as passages of great turmoil. The album includes the 6 Intermezzi, which display a different facet of this complex composer. These are delightful pieces, tender, romantic with much poetry.

By the time he was twenty, Joseph Tawadros had already received a significant music fellowship and an ARIA nomination for his first album. He's gone on to become one of the most respected Oud players in the world, performing a concert of his original music at the BBC Proms and being awarded the Order of Australia medal along the way. For the last few two years he's been stuck in London during the pandemic, finishing off an album that he began in New York, but in the Drawing Room he's looking forward with a tour and mystery new project on the way.

Joseph Keilberth conducts Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 with a stern lyricism not unlike that found on George Szell’s Cleveland recording. Keilberth’s quick tempos, sensitive yet unsentimental phrasing (particularly so in the first movement), and clear textures make the music sound with a compelling freshness and vibrancy that you would better expect from a modern authentic-style performance than one from December, 1966. If anything, the Brahms Second is even finer. A wholly natural flow characterizes this reading, as if the music were a living thing, devoid of any need for interventionist interpretation. Under Keilberth the first movement’s melancholy tinged with joyfulness emerges freely, while the Adagio emerges as a single rapturous, cogent paragraph. Even the studied finale relaxes and sounds less rigorously Beethovenian.