Rias Kammerchor Wolfgang Rihm Astralis & Other Choral Works

It hardly seems creditable that not one but two multi-disc sets of the piano music of Wolfgang Rihm could be released within months of each other. But so it is: Telos Music released a three-disc set of Rihm's complete output for solo piano from 1966 through 2000 featuring Udo Falkner in late spring 2008, while here Neos Music has released a two-disc set of much of Rihm's music for solo piano written between 1970 and 2000, plus a couple of more recent pieces featuring Markus Bellheim in the summer of the same year.

It hardly seems creditable that not one but two multi-disc sets of the piano music of Wolfgang Rihm could be released within months of each other. But so it is: Telos Music released a three-disc set of Rihm's complete output for solo piano from 1966 through 2000 featuring Udo Falkner in late spring 2008, while here Neos Music has released a two-disc set of much of Rihm's music for solo piano written between 1970 and 2000, plus a couple of more recent pieces featuring Markus Bellheim in the summer of the same year.

This is a beautiful, heartwarming record. Schubert's part-songs, originally written for friendly gatherings at home, have never received the recognition they deserve, perhaps partly because he himself underrated them. Yet their extraordinary variety of mood, character, and texture, (often within a single song) and the inspired melodies, harmonic surprises, and magical modulations, are vintage Schubert.

It was a real treat to revisit this recording—to be reminded how exuberant the celebratory sections, how crisply articulated both the choral and orchestral performances, how perfectly calibrated and lively the tempos, how buoyant the spirit of the playing and singing. And the solo singing is pretty fine too. Made in Berlin’s Jesus-Christus-Kirche in 1993, the production offers superb sound that conveys a natural presence of singers and instruments while capturing proper balances among the various performance components—there’s a surprising vibrancy to the sound that I don’t recall from the original recording.

The Minguett Quartet recorded nearly the full cycle of Wolfgang Rihm's string quartets for Collegno, and it's a shame these discs are now out of print. The Minguett Quartet are Ulrich Isfort and Annette Reisinger (violins), Aroa Sorin (viola) and Matthias Diener (cello). On this volume of the cycle, we find three quartets from the 1990s and early millennium, a time when Rihm returned to the effusive expressionism that had first made him famous, after a few years of wispy, piannissimo music imitative of Nono and Lachenmann…….

Christopher Culver @ Amazon.com