Zemlinsky

Gianluca Cascioli is an Italian pianist, conductor, and composer. He studied composition at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Turin and piano with Franco Scala. In 1994, Cascioli won the Umberto Micheli International Piano Competition, whose jury included Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter, Charles Rosen, and Maurizio Pollini. The prize included a record contract with Deutsche Grammophon, for whom he recorded three CDs in his late teens.

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the lied increasingly took on orchestral garb. The boundary with opera became almost impalpable. That is what Samuel Hasselhorn and Łukasz Borowicz demonstrate here, in a splendid programme mingling smiles and disillusionment, where some of the most characteristic orchestral lieder and operatic arias of this Austro-German ‘fin de siècle’ era blend perfectly together.

A rare and important discovery: 2 quartets (one for guitar and strings, the other featuring the flute) by Ferdinand Rebay, a Viennese composer of the first half of the 20th century. Rebay’s music (unlike his contemporaries of the Second Viennese School) remained in the Late Romantic idiom.The fact that he composed for guitar doesn’t mean his music is light- weight, on the contrary, these are serious and complex masterworks, in which the guitar is explored as an equal and independent instrument.

In 2003, six former students from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris founded the ‘Capriccioso’ Ensemble. The group varies in number according to the repertory, but is generally based on the work of six instrumentalists, including violin, viola, cello, clarinet, horn and piano, who recently performed Krzysztof Penderecki’s Sextet.

Here’s a genuine rarity: Ferdinand Rebay (1878-1953) has been hitherto unknown outside a small circle of guitar connoisseurs, but that should change thanks to this attractive set of sonatas and dances, all receiving their first recordings at the hands of two talented young Italian musicians. Rebay was Viennese born and bred. In 1901 he entered the piano class of Joseph Hofmann at the Vienna Conservatory and studied composition with the eminent pedagogue Robert Fuchs, who counted Mahler, Wolf, Sibelius and von Zemlinsky among his students. Four years later, when leaving the Conservatory with a distinction in composition, Rebay's catalogue already numbered around 100 works, including a piano concerto dedicated to Prof. Hofmann. He continued to compose prolifically, mainly in the area of vocal music, producing around 100 choral works, 400 Lieder and two operas.

Alexander Borodin - Chamber Music Vol. III
Kinsky Trio Prague / Prazak Quartet
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 250 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Praga Digitals # PRD/DSD 250 288 | Country/Year: Czech Rep. 2011
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic

…This disc offers music that is appealing if not top-drawer, and I recommend it, especially to those wishing to complete their collection of Borodin’s chamber music or explore his early efforts as a composer.

Ondine's series of Erkki Melartin's (1875-1937) symphonies is an invaluable addition to the catalogue of recorded music (one of several invaluable projects from Ondine - think of their coverage of Raitio, Englund and Merikanto, for instance). Stylistically, the influence of Sibelius is clearly audible, but not oppressively so. Rather, Melartin's music (at least in the first four symphonies) strikes me as a lushly late-romantic, Mahlerian and Brucknerian take on Mendelssohn and Raff, fused with folkloristic elements ………Strongly recommended.

G.D. @ Amazon.com

It is good to welcome this set of the extravagantly brooding orchestral music of the Dutch composer Alphons Diepenbrock.

‘The dreamer! That double of our existence, that chiaroscuro of the thinking being’, wrote Gaston Bachelard in 1961. ‘The old is dying, the new cannot be born, and in that chiaroscuro, monsters appear’, adds Antonio Gramsci. Sandrine Piau has chosen to use these two quotations as an epigraph to her new recording: ‘My family and friends know about this obsession that never leaves me completely. The antagonism between light and darkness. The chiaroscuro, the space in between…’ This programme, recorded with the Orchestre Victor Hugo under its conductor Jean-François Verdier, who is also principal clarinettist of the Paris Opéra, travels between the chilly Rhenish forest of Waldgespräch, a ballad by Zemlinsky composed for soprano and small ensemble in 1895, the night of the first of Berg’s Seven Early Songs (1905-08), and the sunlight of Richard Strauss’s Morgen, which are followed by the Four Last Songs, composed in 1948, the first two of which, Frühling and September (evoking spring and autumn respectively) are also, as Sandrine Piau concludes, ‘the seasons of life’.