Music c Calm

Stephen Paulus was an astonishingly prolific fixture of the American music scene, with some 600 works to his credit. His sudden death in 2014 left classical music—particularly the worlds of opera and choral music—significantly the poorer, so it’s inevitable that we should see his legacy memorialised with new additions to the catalogue. Royal Holloway’s ‘Calm on the Listening Ear of Night’ sets Paulus’s music in dialogue with another Midwestern composer, René Clausen. It’s Clausen whose musical personality emerges most strongly here in these precise performances. His works offer a distinctively American spin on the fashionable Baltic sound world of Ešenvalds and Vasks that is as appealing as it is generous. In pace, which opens the disc, offers eight minutes of lushly filmic excess.

To celebrate their 40th anniversary, the revered Emerson String Quartet chose to work on the electric chaconnes and fantasias of English composers Britten and Purcell. The ensemble delves deep, especially into the former, whose chamber works embody the free lyricism and shimmering dissonance of the greatest moments of modernism.

Coco Tomita (violin), Simon Callaghan (piano), Chelsea Guo (piano), George Lepauw (piano), Roman Rabinovich (piano), Vocal Group Concert Clemens, Nino Gvetadze (piano), Edna Stern (piano), William Howard (piano), Jonathan Biss (piano), Dmytro Popov (tenor), Yu Kosuge (piano), Nicholas McCarthy (piano), Gabriela Montero (piano), Bjarke Mogensen (accordion), Ashley Wass (piano), Ron Abramski (piano).

Between 2010 and 2014, the British Emperor Quartet released the three discs gathered here, with all of Benjamin Britten’s published music for string quartet – as well as his one work for string quintet, the Phantasy in F minor. Their performances of the three numbered quartets, undisputed masterpieces of 20th-century chamber music, were variously described by the critics as ‘stupendous’ (Classic FM Magazine), ‘a wonderful homage’ (Ensemble), and ‘a complete cosmos of colours and nuances’ (Fono Forum), and the discs received top marks and distinctions in magazines such as Fanfare, Diapason and International Record Review.

The custom of marking the name-day of Princess Esterházy with a newly composed Mass began in the 1790s and for many years was carried out by Joseph Haydn. In 1807 Beethoven was commissioned and responded with his Mass in C major. Coolly received at court, it is a celebratory work of large-scale brilliance. The cantata Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt is set to Goethe’s poems and contrasts calm with exuberance. In 1803 Beethoven set two numbers from Vestas Feuer, written by Emanuel Schikaneder, the librettist of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte.