Gottlieb Garvo

JEFF ARTHUR, MICHAEL HURLEY and NEIL GOTTLIEB shared an interest in music at the University of South Florida in the early '70s, until CBS signed them through CLIVE DAVIS. This here is their debut album from 1973.

The Viennese composer and pianist, Wilhelm Grosz, was also a renowned conductor, orchestrator and recording director – a musician of remarkable versatility and wide-ranging influences. This first volume of his complete piano music reflects his immersion in the stylised dance music of his time, with the two Tanzsuites being distinctive examples. He sought novel ways to bring individuality to the Classical sonata, and in the 12 Improvisations, Op. 45 his music is full of innovation with evocations of gospel singing and tango.

The singer of Thales" is written on a memorial stone for the composer Johann Gottlieb Naumann. One could hardly have appreciated him more aptly.

»Dem Sänger des Thales« steht auf einem Denkstein für den Komponisten Johann Gottlieb Naumann. Treffender hätte man ihn kaum würdigen können. An die drei Dutzend Opern, knapp zwei Dutzend Messen, dazu italienische Oratorien und deutsche Kirchenmusik in Hülle und Fülle sowie einiges an Kammermusik: Der Mann aus Blasewitz bei Dresden, der an der Königlich Schwedischen Oper reüssierte, bevor er dauerhaft in seiner Heimatstadt wirkte – der wusste nicht nur, wie man auf der Bühne und im Gotteshaus singen sollte. Seine Klavierliedsammlungen sind reich an kleinen Juwelen, um die sich jeder Musenalmanach gerissen hätte. Einen solchen haben Marie Luise Werneburg und ihr Akkompagnist Sebastian Knebel hier zusammengestellt: Geschmackvoll durchflochten von drei kleinformatigen Quartetten, entführen die Gesänge in die Regionen der intimen Salons, in denen die häusliche Musikpflege zu einer immer stärkeren Kraft heranwuchs.

Gottlieb Muffat, youngest son of composer and Kapellmeister Georg Muffat, was a keyboard virtuoso whose career was based around the Viennese Imperial Court. Muffat, with his own elegantly ornamented style, absorbing influences from Germany, France and Italy, is remembered as a composer from whom Handel borrowed extensively – a common practice of the period. These premiere recordings represent the remarkable rediscovery of manuscripts sequestered and dispersed after the Second World War. Naoko Akutagawa’s previous recordings from Muffat’s Componimenti musicali (8572610) were described by MusicWeb International as ‘galvanically virtuosic’.

Gramophones and radios brought the voice of America, its fashion, its carelessness and joie de vivre into every corner of Europe during the Roaring Twenties, and no composer could remain immune to the hot jazz influences of the Foxtrot, Shimmy and Charleston. This third volume of jazzy piano dances features composers from nine Central and Eastern European countries, from Misha Spoliansky’s hypnotising Valse Boston "Morphium" to Leonid Polovinkin’s extremely entertaining and refreshingly futuristic approach to the genre. Gottlieb Wallisch continues his "most surprising and consistently charming recording project" (The New York Times about the second volume). This recording was made on a Steinway D piano.

The first volume in this series traced the inter-war craze for carefree dance music in Austria and the Czech Lands (see GP813). This latest album focuses on Germany where jazz-influenced music flourished from the mid-1920s onwards even in the face of some social, political and racial opposition. Cabarets and dancehalls rejected this nationalist resistance and the Weimar Republic rejoiced in a cross-pollination of symphonic jazz and Kunstjazz – a fusion of dance and classical elements.