Zemlinsky

Soprano Barbara Hannigan has become something of a cult favorite with her deep dives into specific and unusual repertories. Her self-presentation in concert is unorthodox and marked by full-scale efforts to communicate the essence of the music at hand, in works ranging from Berio to Gershwin. So it is with this set of songs from the decade and a half on either side of 1900 in Vienna. The enjoyment begins with the physically passionate cover, an example of her way of personifying the music's spirit. Hannigan's is an utterly distinctive voice, edgy and coruscating, and she knows how to tone down her considerable virtuosic powers to the dimensions of the music, such as that here, intended for small rooms.

This new release from The Caladium Trio features Trios by Camille Saint-Saens, Walter Piston, and Alexander Zemlinsky. Violinist Lin He is now serving as the Associate Professor of Violin at the Louisiana State University School of Music and the Associate Concertmaster of the Baton Rouge Symphony. During the summer, he teaches at the Sewanee Summer Music Festival, InterHarmony International Summer Music Festival, Montecito International Music Festival and BayView Music Festival. Daniel Cassin has enjoyed a rewarding and varied career as teacher, performer and producer. As cellist of the Valcour String Quartet, Mr. Cassin has performed in numerous concerts, competitions, master classes and educational programs.

Richard Strauss and the Viennese Trumpet is the latest in Jonathan Freeman-Attwood’s imaginative series of musical reinventions for trumpet and piano. Works by Fux, Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler, Bruckner, Webern and Zemlinsky complement the core work: a newly imagined Strauss trumpet sonata. Building on his highly successful transcriptions of sonatas by Fauré, Grieg, Mendelssohn and Schumann, Freeman-Attwood pushes the boundaries further delivering a fully realised trumpet sonata which Strauss did not write. This innovative approach embraces various levels of transcription, transformation, realignment and composition to create a significant new contribution to the trumpet repertoire, full of the gloriously idiomatic writing for which Strauss is renowned.

Daishin Kashimoto, Emmanuel Pahud, Paul Meyer, Zvi Plesser and Éric Le Sage, who have been close musical partners for years, joined forces once again at the Salon de Provence Chamber Music Festival to record this programme devoted to Viennese composers of the early twentieth century. The most famous and innovative of these are represented: Schoenberg with his Kammersymphonie no.1, Mahler with two lieder transcribed for flute and piano, Zemlinsky’s Clarinet Trio and several pieces by Berg. A disc that encapsulates both the exhaustion of a bygone Romantic age and the avant-garde promises of a modern world still to be built…

Richard Strauss and the Viennese Trumpet is the latest in Jonathan Freeman-Attwood’s imaginative series of musical reinventions for trumpet and piano. Works by Fux, Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler, Bruckner, Webern and Zemlinsky complement the core work: a newly imagined Strauss trumpet sonata. Building on his highly successful transcriptions of sonatas by Fauré, Grieg, Mendelssohn and Schumann, Freeman-Attwood pushes the boundaries further delivering a fully realised trumpet sonata which Strauss did not write. This innovative approach embraces various levels of transcription, transformation, realignment and composition to create a significant new contribution to the trumpet repertoire, full of the gloriously idiomatic writing for which Strauss is renowned.

Alexander Zemlinsky composed his Lyric Symphony, Op. 18 for soprano, baritone and orchestra during his time as musical director of the New German Theatre in Prague, where he had moved in 1911 from Vienna. It was generally regarded as his corresponding equivalent to Mahler’s Lied von der Erde and is based on Nobel Prize laureate and most important representative of modern Indian literature Rabindranath Tagore. The work is combined with the befriended and three years older "phantasmogorist" Franz Schreker’s Prelude to a Drama, which is a version of the overture of his Die Gezeichneten. It might be considered symptomatic for the most notable characteristic of Schreker’s music: the dominance of chordal sounds over the melodic element.