Bartok Fischer

Composer: Béla Bartók
Conductor: Iván Fischer
Orchestra/Ensemble: Budapest Festival Orchestra, Slovak Folk Ensemble Chorus, Hungarian Radio Chorus

Neither too nationalist nor too internationalist, this 1995 recording of Béla Bartók's two violin concertos featuring Thomas Zehetmair with Ivan Fischer leading the Budapest Festival Orchestra is just right. Austrian-born Zehetmair has a fabulous technique, a warm but focused tone, and lively sense of rhythm, all of which make him an ideal Bartók player. His interpretations are less about showing off then about digging in, and his performances are more about the music than they are about the musician. Hungarian conductor Fischer and his Hungarian orchestra are not only up for the music in a technical sense, they are also down with the music in an emotional sense, and their accompaniments ground Zehetmair's coolly flamboyant performances. Captured in white-hot sound that is almost too vivid for its own good, these performances deserve to stand among the finest ever recorded.

Baiba Skride - Bach Bartok Ysaye
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 387 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Sony Classical # SK 92938 | Country/Year: Germany 2004
Genre: Classical | Style: Violin, Romantic, Modern

The Latvian violinist Baiba Skride won the 2001 Queen Elisabeth competition at the age of twenty. This is her debut recital for Sony, and probably the only SACD of her playing for the indefinite future, as her follow up has only been released on plain CD. (…) This disc is one of the most intelligently planned violin selections currently available…

One might call this delightful collection “Richard Strauss in Hungary”, so obvious – and nourishing – is the German master’s influence on both composers. Bartok’s two early essays are, like Beethoven’s first published piano concertos, catalogued in reverse order – the ‘Op. 1’ Rhapsody having been composed after the ‘Op. 2’ Scherzo. Both combine Lisztian exuberance with a notably Straussian sound-palette.

First there was rhythm - pulsing, driving, primal rhythm. And a new word in musical terminology: Barbaro. As with sticks on skins, so with hammers on strings. The piano as one of the percussion family, the piano among the percussion family. The first and second concertos were written to be performed that way. But the rhythm had shape and direction, myriad accents, myriad subtleties. An informed primitivism. A Baroque primitivism. Then came the folkloric inflections chipped from the music of time: the crude and misshapen suddenly finding a singing voice. Like the simple melody - perhaps a childhood recollection - that emerges from the dogged rhythm of the First Concerto's second movement. András Schiff plays it like a defining moment - the piano reinvented as a singing instrument. His "parlando" (conversational) style is very much in Bartók's own image. But it's the balance here between the honed and unhoned, the brawn and beauty, the elegance and wit of this astonishing music that make these readings special.

Bluebeard's Castle is a difficult opera to cast. Bluebeard himself must either be a bass who can get up to a high F or a baritone who can get down to low G. In the former category, to which Samuel Ramey belongs the usual risks are that he will sound unsuitably fatherly or will be uncomfortably tense in the upper register. Ramey avoids both hazards with ease: he combines gravity with believable youth, and has no problems with the upper reaches of the part. His is a slightly cool reserved, soft-grained Bluebeard, there is no swell of homage in the last scene when he hails his former wives as ''immortal, unforgotten'', but you may well prefer his sobriety to Fischer-Dieskau's meticulous but at times melodramatic expressive shading of every syllable.

A new recording of a work as often recorded as the Concerto for Orchestra should offer something unusual, as well, and this disc does. Kossuth, a 20-minute symphonic poem, was the 22-year-old composer's first major orchestral composition. The conception owes much to Richard Strauss and the style to Liszt, but there are plenty of hints of material that show up in his mature works. The Village Scenes is a particularly exciting choral-orchestral expansion of a work originally for voices and piano, and the Concerto of course, is enormously popular.

This set of Annie Fischer’s complete EMI recordings represent her during a particular decade, when she had made her European reputation. These recordings helped spread that reputation and increased her prominence among pianists. As studio recordings, they form an unusual part of Fischer’s legacy – during most of her time as a performer, she avoided recording studios as she did not believe in playing in a studio without the presence of an audience. She shared this view with her eminent colleague Sviatoslav Richter, who said of her, ‘Annie Fischer is a great artist, imbued with a spirit of greatness and genuine profundity.