Mdg "scene"

Triadic Memories is one of Morton Feldman's most popular and frequently performed works for piano. Here, more than is usual in his music, Feldman uses the repetition of patterns and gestures. The repetitions are rarely exact – they are characterized by very subtle rhythmic variations – but almost every gesture, whether large or small, is repeated a few or many times. The repeated figures, while all being quiet and relatively simple and brief, vary in their length, structure, and texture. The unpredictability of the number of repetitions, the asymmetry of the repeated figures, the avoidance of a regular pulse, and the subtlety with which Feldman alters the repetitions keep the music continually intriguing for the attentive listener.

This is Timothy Richards’ first solo SACD. This Welsh tenor has been enchanting the European opera public for the past ten years and is currently at the Comic Opera in Berlin and the Semper Opera in Dresden. He began his professional career as a rugby player but eventually studied singing at Royal Northern and made his debut as Alfredo in La Traviata at the Welsh National Opera.

With superlative recordings of Dvorák's unfairly neglected Sixth Symphony by Vaclav Talich with the Czech Philharmonic, Rafael Kubelik with the Berliner Philharmoniker, and Istvan Kertész with the London Symphony, this version featuring Jac van Steen and the Dortmund Philharmonic certainly faces stiff competition, and while it may not be the very finest, it ranks with the best recordings of the piece in the 30 years prior to its release. Van Steen has the strength, energy, and sympathetic understanding to put the best face on Dvorák's unendingly cheerful Sixth.

With this disc, Austrian pianist Hardy Rittner takes time out from his series of recordings of the complete piano music of Brahms to record the complete piano music of Schoenberg. The stylistic leap is not as far as some might think, because while Schoenberg went on to "invent" atonal and serial music, he was born into late Romanticism, and his earliest music is clearly written in that style. This stylistic development is demonstrated in Schoenberg's seven published works for solo piano: the atonal Opp. 11 and 19, plus the serial Opp. 23, 25, and 33a and 33b, as well as his early Drei Klavierstücke. No matter what the style, Rittner makes a strong case for each work.

Many German composers of the early 17th century went to Italy to study the newest musical trends. Samuel Scheidt, one of the main representatives of the North German organ school, did not do this. He went to Amsterdam instead, to study with the famous organist and composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. But although Sweelinck, as far as we know, never left the Netherlands, he was very well aware of everything that was happening all over Europe.

An hour of music for solo oboe, anyone? Don't knock it until you try it. This album is an exemplary effort not only by the somehow appropriately named oboist Yeon-Hee Kwak but also by the engineers at Germany's MDG label, who provide a resonant castle-hall setting that perfectly illuminates (resonates?) the registral effects on which oboe music depends. The program is diverse and challenges both Kwak's technical and expressive abilities, opening with Bach, whose absolute music transcended the distinction. The Partita for solo oboe, BWV 1013, is a transcription of a partita for solo flute, and the concluding Tango-Etudes of Astor Piazzolla were also originally flute works.

Grechaninov tends to be remembered rather tepidly as a conservative relic from Imperial Russia. Yet his progress as a child of the 1860s went as far as one might reasonably expect, from the healthy absorption of 19th-century Russian masters in the Op. 2 Quartet, his self-styled ‘first large independent work’, to the chromatic experimentation of the D minor Quartet, composed in 1913. They make a pretty pair. The warm, slightly laid-back approach of the likeable Utrecht Quartet fits the simple folksiness of the earlier piece like a delicately fashioned glove, making modest claims for a humble offshoot of Borodin’s glorious Second Quartet, with a discreet dash of Tchaikovskian melancholy. A more urgent, forward-moving approach would surely make a better case for the seemingly fragmented gestures of Op. 70’s opening movement; but first violinist Eeva Koskinen’s unaffected way with the Largo melody before fugal earnestness takes over is ideal, and an equally natural robustness highlights Grechaninov’s instinctive if hard-fought goodbye to chromaticism in much the more successful and meaningful of the two finales. Worth investigating, but there’s no doubt that Taneyev is a long way in front of Grechaninov as master of turn-of-the-century Russian chamber music.

First Bach, then Reger, and now Bach/Reger: the present disc is Christoph Schoeners third MDG recording on the four organs in St. Michaels Church in Hamburg. The attractive program featuring Johann Sebastian Bachs seven toccatas, five of them in gripping arrangements by Max Reger, embodies the best and fullest opulence of sound. The MDG sound engineers rely on the very finest three-dimensional SACD technology, the big sound of this musical event, including the echo division and its extra spatial effects, can be enjoyed at home an audiophile highlight of a special kind! The seven toccatas were originally intended for the harpsichord.

Amid the never ending list of available recordings of Bach's organ works, it's nice to see a new SACD being released that brings all of his brilliant Toccatas together on one disc. These works, which capture a snapshot of Bach letting his hair down, showcase the essence of the composer at his best. Highly spirited music, brimming with expressive freedom bordering on the ecstatic. Organist Christoph Schoener certainly perceives these elements within the music and delivers up-tempo, animated and exuberant readings of all the pieces that call for it. The highlight for me on this disc is the account of the Toccata in F, BWV 540. A brilliant work, even by Bach's standards, with outstanding harmonic development throughout, underpinned by solid and long-sustained pedal notes upon which Bach constructed cathedrals of sound.

Anyone who has ever worked in any aspect of classical music retailing has been asked the question "Did Pachelbel write anything else besides the Canon?" The answer is yes, and some of it is just as pleasing to the general listener as the Canon in D major, originally for three violins and continuo. Finding recordings of these works has been the tough part, but with growing interest in German music of the late seventeenth century, more choices are beginning to appear. This release by German audiophile label MDG is somewhat geeky in looks, but anyone who's ever wanted a Pachelbel disc should check it out. Not least for the sound; MDG has devoted itself mostly to chamber music, but the results the engineers obtain from the organ at St. Peter's church in the German city of Freiberg are really startling.