Nirlen Saraste

Concluding their series of the orchestral music of Johannes Brahms on Profil, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln present the Symphony No. 4 in E minor, the Academic Festival Overture, and the Tragic Overture on this third volume, thus rounding out a standard set of the seven works that are usually packaged together.

Yes, this disc includes a rarity: a concerto for two bassoons! The bassoonists, Annika Wallin and Arne Nilsson, do a great job. So does the orchestra, the Umea Sinfonietta, from northern Sweden. Jan Vanhal's beautiful two-bassoon concerto is the key work on this disc. And for those who don't know who Vanhal was, well, he wrote plenty of music. In 1777, Mozart played the solo part in a concert performance of a Vanhal violin concerto. In 1784, Haydn, von Dittersdorf, Mozart, and Vanhal played some string quartets together at the home of composer Stephen Sorace (Haydn on first violin, Dittersdorf on second violin, and Vanhal on cello).

Jukka-Pekka Saraste became principal conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra at the beginning of the 2010/11 season. This release features Brahmss Second Symphony, which is often called his 'Pastoral'. It was written during a happy holiday in Pörtschach in 1877. Brahms wrote to his friend in Vienna, the critic Eduard Hanslick: 'The Wörthersee is virgin ground. Melodies fly around there, so that you have to take care not to step on them'. The work was premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Hans Richter in December 1877, where it was a great success.

Igor Stravinsky’s later stage works Mavra (1922), Oedipus Rex (1927/28) or The Rake’s Progress (1951) are more than matched by his early 'lyrical fairy tale in three acts' Le Rossignol, which occupies a special place – due to its brevity at scarcely 45 minutes. It is also unusual for the fairy-tale subject matter, based on a story called The Nightingale by Hans Christian Andersen; for its language – the original was Danish, this recording features the Russian version, yet it was premiered in French in Paris in 1914.

Alban Gerhardt writes admiringly of Rostropovich and the legacy of marvellous works he inspired, but on the evidence of these extraordinary accounts of two of them, he need fear no comparisons with his great Russian forebear.

Alban Gerhardt writes admiringly of Rostropovich and the legacy of marvellous works he inspired, but on the evidence of these extraordinary accounts of two of them, he need fear no comparisons with his great Russian forebear.

Bent Sørensen’s quietly spoken universe incorporates loneliness, nostalgia and a feeling of loss and leave-taking. Of the works on this album, his triple concerto, L’Isola della Città (2015), has a purity that makes it one of the composer’s most immediate and gripping orchestral works. His dramatic Second Symphony (2019) dives into the resonance of music’s classical history, where every sound is considered with the greatest care and refinement.

Although Kairos’s rate of production has decreased in the past few years, the Viennese label still regularly releases discs of music by contemporary Austrian composers. This CD of two recent orchestral works by Friedrich Cerha, celebrating the composer’s 90th birthday, is a welcome addition to Kairos’s four previous albums of his music. While Cerha’s recent chamber music adheres to classical forms, his orchestral music from the same period eschews them, revisiting instead the principles laid out in his sound-mass works from the late 1950s such as Spiegel.