Mario Escudero (October 11, 1928 – November 19, 2004), was one of a handful of Spanish flamenco guitar virtuosos who, following on the footsteps of Ramon Montoya, helped spread flamenco beyond their Spanish homeland when they migrated to the United States in the early 1950s. Along with others such as Sabicas, Carlos Montoya and Juan Serrano, Escudero helped forge the viability of solo flamenco guitar as a concert instrument, with lauded performances at New York's Carnegie Hall, Town Hall, and other venues. Invited to perform at the White House for President John F. Kennedy, Escudero was counted among the best in his era; Ramón Montoya called him "the best flamenco guitarist of this new generation."
Polish-born Mieczysław Weinberg twice escaped from Nazi invasions, finally settling in Moscow, where for more than 30 years he was Shostakovich’s closest musical friend. Composer of 26 symphonies, seventeen string quartets and seven operas, he was also a master of the solo string sonata, a genre not touched by Shostakovich and little cultivated in the Soviet Union. His four sonatas for cello solo were composed between 1960 and 1985 and enshrine some of his most concentrated and poetic inspirations.
Continuing his impressive series of Anton Bruckner's symphonies on CPO, Mario Venzago leads the Bern Symphony Orchestra in period style performances of the Symphony No. 3 in D minor (1889 version) and the Symphony No. 6 in A major (1881 version), using scores edited by Leopold Nowak. Venzago strives for historically informed performances that give varying perspectives on Bruckner's development, employing different orchestras with each release to reveal important differences in the composer's orchestral conceptions and to show that there wasn't one prescription of how the symphonies should sound. Instead, Venzago rejects the massive and heavy-handed interpretations of the early 20th century and tries to re-create the 19th century sound world in all its variety and intimacy. The glistening, vibrato-less string tone, pungent woodwinds, and crisp brass and timpani are easily distinguished from the more homogenized tone colors of a modern symphony orchestra, and Venzago ensures that these distinctive timbres aren't obscured by keeping the orchestral sections lean and discrete.
Following his CPO recording with the Tapiola Sinfonietta of Anton Bruckner's Symphony in D minor, "Die Nullte," and the Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Mario Venzago presents the Symphony No. 2 in C minor, this time with the Northern Sinfonia. Unlike some contemporary conductors who favor the original 1872 version of this symphony, Venzago performs the more familiar 1877 version, edited by William Carragan. This is the first of Bruckner's symphonies where he expanded the form to an hour duration, and the fertile ideas it contains are appropriate to the greater time frame. Yet this work has never been accepted by audiences in the way most of the later symphonies have, such as the Fourth, Seventh, and Ninth, and the music falters over too many starts and stops, indecisive development, and repetitions. Even so, there is much attractive material here, and Venzago brings it off with a light touch, having the orchestra play delicately and sweetly, almost as if this were a Mendelssohn symphony.
Anton Bruckner's early symphonies are not as widely performed or recorded as his mature works, so Mario Venzago's double-disc on CPO of the Symphony in D minor, called "No. 0" or "Die Nullte," and the Symphony No. 1 in C minor is a stand-out from the nearly unstoppable run of recordings of the Fourth, Seventh, and Ninth. Venzago and the Tapiola Sinfonietta give exceptional performances that have technical polish and expressive warmth, and the charm the musicians draw out of these pieces makes one wonder why they aren't more popular. Certainly, both symphonies approach the later ones in expansiveness and seriousness, and there's more than a little Brucknerian sonic grandeur in these fledgling efforts. Yet even though these are works of the late 1860s, the music is still strongly governed by Classical models, and because the influence of Richard Wagner is absent in the symphonies prior to the Third, listeners who ordinarily find Bruckner too complicated, heavy, and ponderous may find these lighter works more accessible and enjoyable.
For his project of recording the complete symphonies of Anton Bruckner on CPO, Mario Venzago has chosen to record each symphony with a different orchestra to re-create the sounds that Bruckner would have heard. Considering that Bruckner's experiences with orchestras spanned three decades, he would have witnessed growth of the orchestra's size and the introduction of new instruments, which clearly influenced his decisions when he composed and revised each work. Venzago performs the Symphony No. 8 in C minor with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, following the 1890 version and employing the same instrumentation and ensemble scale, as well as traditional practices that are documented in performances from that period. The result is an Eighth that sounds strikingly different from the other symphonies, quite far removed from the early Romantic orchestra he used in the First, and considerably expanded from the ensembles he would have expected for the Fourth or even the Seventh symphonies.
This is not exactly the Mario Lanza "best-of" album its title might imply; it consists of recordings made during the last 18 months of the great crossover tenor's life, when he was beginning to suffer serious effects from the health problems that killed him in the fall of 1959. Still, it's hard to hear much of an effect from those problems a diminution of sheer vocal power in the selections from Rudolf Friml's musical The Vagabond King that make up the second half of the disc, perhaps, but no loss of the singer's broad, generous lyric impulse.