Two Concertos For Organ

Naxos intend to record Vivaldi’s entire orchestral corpus, and Raphael Wallfisch’s integral four-disc survey of the 27 cello concertos inaugurates this visionary, though plainly Herculean undertaking. Soloist and orchestra employ modern instruments; director Nicholas Kraemer contends that authentic protocols can be ably met by contemporary ensembles and, in articulation, style and ornamentation, these pristine, engaging readings have little to fear from period practitioners. Wallfisch’s pointed, erudite and spirited playing is supported with enlightened restraint by the CLS, directed from either harpsichord or chamber organ by Kraemer, whose sensitive continuo team merits high praise throughout. Without exception, these Concertos adopt an orthodox fast-slow-fast three-movement format. Wallfisch, dutifully observant in matters of textual fidelity, plays outer movements with verve, energy and lucidity, such that high-register passagework, an omnipresent feature of these works, is enunciated with the pin-sharp focus of Canaletto’s images of 18th-century Venice, which adorn the covers of these issues.

Issued in 1947, this is the very first recording of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. It won violinist Louis Kaufman (1905-1994) the Grand Prix du Disques, was introduced into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002, and has been credited with reviving interest in Vivaldi's music. Kaufman discovered the other eight concertos in Op. 8, then unknown, in Brussels, and recorded them, plus a two-violin concerto, in Zurich in 1950.

Ton Koopman is not only one of the great fathers of the Baroque-Renaissance revival in the 1970’s, but a true pioneer of our time. After completing the Bach Cantatas survey, was he awarded the Bach Prize 2014 by the Royal Academy of Music. The prize is awarded to outstanding individuals in the performance and scholarship of Bach’s music and none could be more worthy than Koopman, who has been noted as doing ”remarkable work promoting Bach’s music in the last thirty or so years.”

Max Reger just couldn't stop composing. With 131 published works, most of them compendiums of several pieces in the same genre, Reger was relentlessly, even recklessly prodigious as a composer. And apparently when he wasn't writing his own music, the fin de siècle Bavarian composer was arranging Bach's. In addition to arrangements of the Brandenburg Concertos and Orchestral Suites for four-hand piano, Reger also transcribed 22 works for solo piano, four organ pieces, and 18 choral preludes, and all of them are included in this two-disc Hyperion set.

These performances are very authentic, which essentially means misconceived from the start, and often downright unmusical. Using teeny tiny forces (only seven violins), and inaptly named Arte dei Suonatori, they lack just that: the art of making a pleasing sound. The loudest thing here is the continuo, consisting of harpsichord, organ, theorbo, and archlute. Its prominence and enthusiastic improvisational flourishes on what ought to be very subsidiary harmonic support destroy Handel’s balance of tone and wreck the interplay between concertino and tutti. Frankly, the whole approach is so stupid and unstylish that it’s very hard to believe that anyone could associate this kind of playing with “historically informed performance”. It’s like wearing all of your internal organs on the outside of your body, and just about as pleasant.

Idil Biret (born 21 November 1941 in Ankara, Turkey) is a Turkish concert pianist, renowned for her interpretations of the Romantic repertoire. She manifested an outstanding gift for music at the age of three and was trained at the Paris Conservatory under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger. She studied with Alfred Cortot and was a lifelong disciple of Wilhelm Kempff who considered her as her best student. Since the age of sixteen Idil Biret has given concerts throughout the world with major orchestras including the London Symphony, the Philharmonia, BBC Orchestras, Leningrad Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Dresden Staatskapelle, Berlin Radio Symphony, French National Orchestra, Polish Radio Symphony, Orchestre Suisse Romande, Warsaw Philharmonic, Tokyo Philharmonic and Sydney Symphony Orchestra.