A year and a half after Alexander Liebreich succeeded Christoph Poppen as artistic director of the Munich Chamber Orchestra, their first recording is about to be released. As always the orchestra, cited twice this decade by the German Music Publishers Association for the best-programmed season, is striking out on challenging and unconventional paths. Each season is governed by a guiding theme; new concert formats are put to the test; and new works are commissioned on a regular basis. (In early December 2007 it gave the world premiere of Erkki-Sven Tuur's ‘Questions…’ with the Hilliard Ensemble in Frankfurt.) This new release, the orchestra’s eighth album for ECM, reflects not only its precept to keep its repertoire deliberately open-ended, but Liebreich's special predilection for Isang Yun, a composer whose music he came to understand in its cultural context during an extended stay in Korea.
Jongen's Etude of 1920 and Deux pieces for Piano op.33 of 1908 are wonderful, substantial works totaling over 16 minutes. Debussy is an influence but Jongen no more of a cheap imitator than Seurat is of Monet. All three are colorful, exquisite, and not miniature in scope. Reger's "Fireside Dreams" have the charm his corpus otherwise lacks. As Amazon's rip off does not include notes, I would refer the avid reader to Fanfare magazine issue 34.3 Jan/Feb 2011 and a rave review by Boyd Pomeroy for additional detail and guidance. .
We tend to think of Johann Mattheson (1681–1764) as a theorist first and foremost, and as a composer almost as an afterthought. To be sure, he competed in a world in Hamburg that at one time or another featured Reinhard Keiser, Georg Philipp Telemann, and George Frederick Handel; indeed, all of these were friends, sometimes rivals, and in one case, he and Handel even fought a duel over an opera, Cleopatra (Mattheson would have won, but a metal coat button deflected his sword, fortunately both for posterity and Handel). As a singer, he was well regarded, but by 1705 he had traded his performance chops for a real job as private secretary to the English ambassador.
Willem de Fesch (1687-1761) was a virtuoso Dutch violone player and composer. The pupil of Karel Rosier, who was a Vice-Kapellmeister at Bonn, de Fesch later married his daughter, Maria Anna Rosier. De Fesch was active in Amsterdam between 1710 and 1725. From 1725 to 1731 he served as Kapellmeister at Antwerp Cathedral. Thereafter he moved to London where he gave concerts and played the violone in Handel's orchestra in 1746. In 1748 and 1749 he conducted at Marylebone Gardens. He apparently made no public appearances after 1750. His works included the oratorios Judith (1732) and Joseph (1746), as well as chamber duets, solo and trio sonatas, concertos and part songs. Both oratorios were thought lost until 1980 when a copy of a manuscript of "Joseph" was found in London's Royal Academy of Music.
This transcription of Don Giovanni for string quartet by an anonymous arranger perfectly conveys the symbiosis of voice and instrument – a hallmark of Mozart’s genius. Throughout the opera, the deft arranger recreates the balance between the purely musical aspects of the work, without detracting from its theatrical qualities. In short, drama and buffoonery are both preserved.
Composed in feverish bouts interrupted by long periods of inaction, Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch was brought to completion in 1896. The 46 songs are settings of poems in German by Paul Heyse, after Italian folk songs – miniatures with a duration of less than 2 minutes in most cases. Heyse’s collection numbered more than 350 poems, but Wolf ignored the ballads and laments, and concentrated almost exclusively on the rispetti. These are short love poems which chart, against a Tuscan landscape, the everyday jealousies, flirtations, joys and despairs of men and women in love. Heyse’s translations often intensify the simple Italian of the original poems, and in their turn, Wolf’s settings represent a further heightening of emotion. Miniatures they may be, but many of the songs strike unforgettably at the heart.
After appearing on a quartet of very different BIS releases, ranging from early baroque arias to orchestral songs by Alban Berg and Mahler’s ‘Resurrection Symphony’, the British soprano Ruby Hughes has devised a song recital, together with her regular Lieder partner Joseph Middleton. The process began in 2018 when the two gave the world première of Helen Grime’s Bright Travellers, a set of five poems charting the interior and exterior worlds of pregnancy and motherhood. Ruby Hughes soon set about planning a programme which would converge with Grime’s music and the themes of new life and of love in all its aspects.