Roscoe

Italy's Alfredo Casella has been talked up as the great unknown composer of the first half of the 20th century. He was influenced by Debussy, Mahler, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky in turn, yet he mixed and matched elements of their styles with a distinctive formal imagination. Casella was largely responsible for the reintroduction of Vivaldi to the musical world, and some of the neo-classic music he composed later in his career had direct Baroque references. This album lacks that aspect of his work, but these three pieces, each made up of short chunks of music, probably offers an easier introduction to Casella than do the weightier symphonies. The Concerto for Orchestra, loosely neo-classical, appeared in 1938 and thus lay between Hindemith's and Bartók's works with the same title.

Review by James Manheim

In this series featuring ‘The Romantic Piano Concerto’, Dohnányi’s two works in this form are fitting examples of the genre because he was throughout his life a romantic both at heart and in his musical language. Although he died as late as 1960 he had little to do with the musical developments of the twentieth century. The two Concertos on this recording evoke a world which belongs to the nineteenth century. Dohnányi continued to compose in a style deeply rooted in the Austro-German classical tradition exemplified by Brahms. His merit as a composer is that he was able to prolong meaningfully the classico/romantic past, of which he was one of the last practitioners, well into this century, both in his chamber and orchestral music. This he did with elegance, wit, and stylish virtuosity. The two Piano Concertos are fine examples of his fluent mastery of form and instrumentation.

This disc of music by Arvo Pärt offers a generous representative sampling of his orchestral and chamber works from early in his holy minimalist (or, as he preferred, tintinnabuli) phase, mostly from the late 1970s but some as late as 1990. The pieces include some of his most popular works, notably Fratres (which exists in nearly a dozen incarnations), Spiegel in Spiegel (of which there are nearly half as many versions), Summa, and Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten.

The violin and piano sonatas of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel draw on foreign idioms: gypsy music in Debussy's case and African-American blues in Ravel's. But they remain completely French works, spiced with something exotic, and British violinist Jennifer Pike forges interpretations that keep this in mind. Start with the "Blues" slow movement of the Ravel Violin Sonata in G major: Pike and her accompanist, Martin Roscoe, avoid exaggerating the bluesy qualities of the music and instead emphasize the odd, almost tense disconnection between violin and piano that, combined with the languid blues melodies, gives this piece its special piquancy.

Volume 20 of our Romantic Piano Concerto series features Ignaz Brüll's two Piano Concertos and the Andante and Allegro, Op 88. The first of the concertos was amazingly composed when Brüll was just 15, the second when he was 22.

This meeting took place at ScienSonic Laboratories in Teaneck, NJ on April 21, 2015 (the day after the Heliosonic Toneways session). This recording is significant in that it presents the first music Roscoe Mitchell ever played with either Marshall Allen or Milford Graves. It also represents a bit of a departure for me personally, as Milford Graves is so far the only artist to appear on ScienSonic with whom I have not previously performed as a sideman. It has long been a dream to play music with Professor Graves, so I took the plunge or perhaps "lift-off" would be a better term. As the professor said to me after the date, "Man, at one point you went so far out there, we weren't sure if you were coming back!" Well, it took 4 ½ years, but at least I made it back in time to finally mix and present this music. Everything was recorded in one open room with no separation or barriers of any kind, as suggested by Mr. Graves, and is presented here in the order it was played.

Of all the Italian composers born toward the end of the 19th century, Alfredo Casella (1883–1947) was the most cosmopolitan in his dogged efforts to drag his country’s music into the 20th century. But before this could start happening sometime around the First World War, he first had to drag himself out of the 19th century, as these two early symphonies (and, to a lesser extent, the much more consistently magisterial Third Symphony, available now on a cpo CD) vividly illustrate.