Otto Walkes

Otto Klemperer's Beethoven is one of the towering achievements in the history of recordings. By today's standards, these performances are hopelessly old-fashioned: dark, heavy, and frequently very slow. But they are also the grandest, most unsentimental, most purposeful versions in the catalog.

In 2010 the world is celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, whose music – for the most disparate reasons – was for a long time shrouded in oblivion. Many of his works disappeared completely after the Second World War, and it was not until 1999 that they were rediscovered in Kiev. The present world-première recording of four of his cantatas grants us a fascinating insight into the composer’s output and invites us to join him on a musical voyage of discovery. These ambitious works, which were written for Christmas and Ascension, attest to the technical and musical virtuosity of Johann Sebastian Bach’s eldest son.

Twice GRAMMY-nominated composer and performer Derek Bermel studied with Henri Dutilleux, Dutch avant-gardist Louis Andriessen, and ragtime revivalist William Bolcom. In his music, seemingly antithetical qualities – classical and vernacular, comic and serious – merge and transform each other unpredictably, their inspiration ranging from theatre (Ritornello), to gestalt psychology (Figure and Ground), to meditations on cosmology (A Short History of the Universe). Thracian Sketches explores and reimagines Bulgarian folk music, while the Violin Etudes distill Bermel’s intellectual creativity into its purest form.

Otto Klemperer's Brahms needs no introduction. It remains a classic reference edition, one of the very few complete cycles with absolutely no weak links. It's customary to call these performances "granitic", an adjective that certainly applies to the First Symphony but doesn't begin to describe the swift and thrilling finale of the Fourth, the grand but impulsive Third (with its first-movement repeat in place), or the warmly lyrical Second. In general Klemperer's unsentimental but always gripping approach to this music practically defines the word "idiomatic".

J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio was written for the Christmas season of 1734, and although it incorporates music from earlier works it belongs firmly among his timeless large-scale compositions. The development of the oratorio, which was to become a new musical form in Protestant church services at that time, was stimulated by Bach’s compositions, particularly by the unusual form of his six-part Christmas Oratorio. From its famously joyful opening ‘Jauchzet frohlocket’ to the arrival of the Wise Men from the East, this work’s enduring popularity has long proven its status as a choral ‘evergreen.’

Otto Klemperer's Mahler is invariably dry-eyed, yet urgent, a valuable corrective to the number of latter-day interpreters who would either self-indulgently wallow in the music's sentiment or, even worse, treat it as pure sonic architecture, as though it were pre-Schoenberg. If this 1967 reading of the Ninth sounds slightly detached by modern standards, if its expressive points seem slightly understated, it is nevertheless deeply engaged and masterfully controlled. Klemperer was beginning to slow down by this point in his career, and the tempos are just a hair on the slow side, especially in the two middle movements. But the old firmness of conception and rocklike steadiness are still there, even in the stormy weather of the Rondo-Burleske.

The three composers represented here do not stand at the forefront of the history of Danish music, but all three of them have in at least one respect secured themselves a position for which they will be remembered. As the first and only Dane, Otto Malling wrote a textbook on orchestration (1894), Ludvig Schytte published the collection ì45 Sonatinas and Execution Piecesî, which has been a sine qua non for anybody learning to play the piano in Denmark, and Siegfried Salomon wrote the opera Leonara Christina (1926), which includes one of the greatest hits in Danish opera, ìThere are Three Cornerstonesî, for many years a regular feature of Radio Denmarkís request programs, sung by Tenna Kraft. The romantic virtuoso concerto has never been highly thought of in Denmark.