Bruel Kjaer

Performances of the music of Richard Wagner will for many be associated with Ivбn Fischer's elder brother Adam who has conducted complete Ring cycles at Bayreuth & in Budapest. Those, however, who follow the concert schedules of Ivбn Fischer & his phenomenally hard working Budapest Festival Orchestra will know that they have performed the Wagner programme featured on this SACD – or variations on it - to great acclaim in many of the major European cities over the past couple of years.

With the Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 7, published by Artaria “for harpsichord and piano” in 1797, Beethoven expands the scope of keyboard technique and structural proportions. Indeed, some of the passagework in the outer movements must have been prohibitive to most amateur pianists; and the length of the sonata, at the time, made it the longest work for piano ever published, and the second longest sonata Beethoven composed (the record goes to the Sonata in B-flat Major, Op. 106 “Hammerklavier”). Metric displacements and violent dynamic contrasts inform the opening movement, while the prayer-like Adagio is possibly one of the most extraordinary achievements of Beethoven’s youth. The Allegro that follows, light and playful, is interrupted by a stormy “minore” section that was most likely the inspiration for the first of Schubert’s Klavierstücke, D 946. The melodious but challenging Rondo closes the sonata, unexpectedly, in a murmur.

In 1815, barely eighteen years old and filled with enthusiasm, Franz Schubert ventured into writing his first sonata for piano. As a form, the sonata was seeing a marked decline in the early nineteenth century. But Schubert was honing his craft, and writing sonatas was part of both a creative process and an exercise in compositional skills. In this first sonata, in the key of E Major and catalogued as D 157, Schubert makes use of features that may mirror the concerns with technical dexterity that were pervasive at the time: the first movement, brilliant in character, opens with arpeggios and scales, but the entire structure in strict sonata form is characterized by a keen curiosity in exploring different technical devices. The second movement opens with a melody of lyrical simplicity that foreshadows some of the composer’s later inspirations, eventually gaining polyphonic complexity in its development. The third and last movement, a Menuet and Trio in the key of B Major, re-proposes the brilliance of the first movement, but leaves us wondering whether a fourth movement was planned, not only because a closing rondo may be expected, but also because of the unusual use of the dominant key to close the sonata.

As orchestras and conductors have been demonstrating for more than a century, you don't have to be Bohemian to play Dvorák. All you need is profound musicality, a deep love of life, and an overwhelming urge to communicate. These are all qualities that Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra demonstrate in full in this 2000 Channel Classics recording of the composer's Eighth and Ninth symphonies. In these performances, one hears not only edge-of-the-chair excitement from the Hungarian musicians, one hears joy, happiness, and good old-fashioned fun. Listen to the rollicking horn trills in the Eighth's Finale, the thundering timpani in the Ninth's Scherzo; the interplay between winds, strings, and brass in the coda of the Eighth's Scherzo; the lush string tone in the Ninth's Largo; the headlong rush of the Eighth's opening Allegro con brio; or the awesome power of the Ninth's closing Allegro con fuoco.

It is hard to fathom how Franz Schubert’s career as a composer lasted only a decade when we consider how extraordinarily prolific it was. And it is ever more astonishing that the evolution of his language would be so immense, guided by harmonic and structural explorations that would have continued well into the nineteenth-century – were it not that death untimely claimed him at age thirty-one. Penned in March 1817, when Schubert was twenty years old, the Sonata in A Minor D 537 is the first successful effort in the genre, having been written after a number of attempts either as multi-movement compositions that often lack a closing rondo, or as standalone movements in sonata or A-B-A form that are today understood as abandoned projects. The opening movement proposes an original approach to key relations, with the second theme in the key of F major and a recapitulation in the key of D minor.