Max Tegmark L'universo Matematico

Last year’s Magdeburg Festival Days were marked by an extraordinary event: the revival of Telemann’s last known extant passion composition, the St. Luke Passion of 1748, by the Rheinische Kantorei and the Kleines Konzert under Hermann Max. In the mid-nineteenth century the autograph made its way to Berlin, where it today is preserved as the only source for this composition. The historical edition was prepared especially for the modern repeat performance in Magdeburg. Every four years Telemann returned to the same passion narrative, always employing the language of music to occupy himself in new ways with the gospel message of each of the four evangelists.

Most piano duet arrangements were meant for the home rather than the concert hall. When you sight-read orchestral reductions at the piano, your physical involvement with the material “fills in” the missing instrumental color. Even with skillful four-hand “de-orchestrations” like Max Reger’s of the Bach Orchestral Suites, listeners run the risk of “registral fatigue”. In the main, the Speidel-Trenkner piano duo circumvents these limitations through canny pianistic means. In the C major Suite’s Forlane, for example, the oboe’s hornpipe-like melody bounces on a featherweight accompaniment.

Max Bruch has never made things easy for fond listeners or performers of music; his contemporaries found him hard to handle, and so have later generations. The reason behind this has nothing to do with the superlative, worldwide renown of the first of his violin concertos, or with his musical language, which had already fallen out of fashion when he died exactly a hundred years ago. Instead, Bruch himself much too quickly and all too often lost his faith in his "musical progeny" because he did not have the patience to let them mature in peace and to secure a place in the broader public consciousness. This applies to the opera Die Loreley, which offers a rewarding listening experience, as well as to his three symphonies composed between 1868 and 1882 and originally intended as a series of works forming a trilogy.

A decade on from the release of his mesmerising Recomposed album, trailblazing composer Max Richter returns to the sound world of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Recorded with violinist Elena Urioste and the musicians of Chineke! Orchestra, The New Four Seasons sees Richter create a new version of his Recomposed score for period instruments – using gut strings and vintage synthesisers to create a “grittier, more punk rock sound”.

The pop-minimalist music of Max Richter has been gaining followers beyond his native Germany and his residence of Britain thanks to some highly successful soundtracks and energetic promotion by the Deutsche Grammophon label, which recorded Exiles in 2019 and released it in 2021. Here, he is interpreted by the Baltic Sea Philharmonic and its conductor, Kristjan Järvi. Richter selected the group himself, and it was a good choice. The Baltic musicians have plenty of experience with the glassy, precise textures of minimalism, and they deliver accomplished readings. Exiles comprises 18 short sections with a simple pulse, slightly modifying – in classic minimalist fashion – a pattern laid out at the beginning.

Having made a gradual switch during the 15 years since his first album was published from electronica to instrumental variations on ambient and minimalism, Max Richter is among the most commercially successful composers of our time. This album of his solo piano music belongs in the genre explored so thoroughly for Brilliant Classics by Jeroen van Veen, whose prolific recording history includes hugely popular albums of Philip Glass (BC9419) and Michael Nyman (BC95112), Ludovico Einaudi (BC94910) and Yann Tiersen (BC95129) and his fellow Dutch musician Jakob ter Veldhuis (BC94873) and himself (BC9454). The appetite for slowly moving, unchallenging, post-Minimalist music is apparently infinite, and so this new album is sure to be a success.