Bohemian Grave

Leos Cepicky graduated from the East-Bohemian Conservatoire in Pardubice in 1985 under Professor Ivan traus. He started his promising career in his early teens, when he won the first prize and Laureate title at the Jaroslav Kocian International Violin Competition.

The six works on this disc are, as in the rest of the series, extremely diverse. Unlike his contemporary Vivaldi, Telemann does not use overarching stylistic trademarks with his concertos that define authorship in a particular way. Rather, he carefully writes music that is uniquely suited to the tonal qualities of his soloists, and sometimes the usual generic descriptions hardly apply. Such is the case with the Concerto for trumpet, two oboes, and continuo, which is a virtual trio sonata, to which a solo clarino trumpet has been appended. Here, the composer uses the oboes as replacements for the usual string orchestra, but the trumpet enters as a primus inter pares rather than the dominant solo.

It’s always tempting to draw conclusions as to why a musician feels drawn to a certain style or sound. In Dustin O’Halloran’s case, one can’t help but wonder whether it has something to do with a childhood spent in Phoenix, Arizona, one of America’s most populated cities, yet one buried in the Sonoran Desert. Does this sparse yet vivid music reflect an early desire to escape from the hustle of urban life to the peace of the desolate wilderness? Or is it connected to Los Angeles, where he continued to grow up beneath clear blue skies in a thriving cultural metropolis? Perhaps, though, it’s indicative of seven years spent living in the rural Emilia Romagna region of Northern Italy, where O’Halloran developed his idiosyncratic piano skills following time spent in the underappreciated but critically acclaimed band, Devics. Maybe, even, it’s symptomatic of his current existence in Berlin, a city famed for its bohemian nightlife, but whose wide streets and plentiful parks offer a rarely celebrated tranquillity that’s unusual for a capital city. In all honesty, the answer’s probably not important. What really matters is the music.

For the fourth instalment in its "Music in Exile" series, the Toronto-based ARC Ensemble turns its attention to the music of Walter Kaufmann. Despite a very promising start in Prague and then Berlin, and friendships with Albert Einstein and with Franz Kafka’s circle, Kaufmann’s career become a casualty of the Nazi regime that forced scores of Jewish musicians to flee Germany – in his case for Bombay in India.

For the fourth installment in its Music in Exile series, the Toronto-based ARC Ensemble turns its attention to the music of Walter Kaufmann.

Franz Peter Schubert was among the first of the Romantics, and the composer who, more than any other, brought the art song (lied) to artistic maturity. During his short but prolific career, he produced masterpieces in nearly every genre, all characterized by rich harmonies, an expansive treatment of classical forms, and a seemingly endless gift for melody. Schubert began his earliest musical training studying with his father and brothers. Having passed an audition, Schubert enrolled at the Stadtkonvikt that trained young vocalists to eventually sing at the chapel of The Imperial Court. Schubert began to explore composition and wrote a song that came to the attention of the institution's director, Antonio Salieri, who along with the school's professor of harmony, hailed young Schubert as a genius.

This will be quite a discovery for those who know the music of Bedrich Smetana only through his grand and nationalistic cycle of tone-poems, Ma Vlast, even if they are yet familiar with his more painfully intimate string quartets or his folkloristic operas. For Smetana, like most composers, needed to eat; and to do so he was happy to make his own contribution towards satisfying the seemingly insatiable appetite of the bourgeois 19th-century public for piano music that they could perform at home. Music of no great difficulty but boundless charm, these miniatures are now seldom heard and even less often recorded, and this is a shame, for works such as the Op.3 Characteristic Pieces show how the pianistic extroversion of Brahms and Liszt (who was a great admirer and supporter of the young Smetana, giving him valuable introductions to publishers) could be adapted to a domestic context, and with the particular inflection of Czech and Bohemian character, derived not only from simple and song-like melodies but also irregularly stressed dance-rhythms that the young Italian pianist Roberto Plano relishes to the full on this welcome new survey.

SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce the second volume of Romantic Revolution, a revelatory exploration by pianist Michael Dussek of the musical relationship between his ancestor, Jan Ladislav Dussek, and Fryderyk Chopin. Volume II focuses on music composed during the period 1789 to 1846 spanning the early years of Dussek’s compositional career and the final years of Chopin’s.