When Radio Was

The life and works of the Danish composer Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) present one of the odder stories in the annals of classical music. He was a child prodigy of enormous talent who grew into a man of breathtaking fecundity. His music was largely ignored by his contemporaries and was left in a state of near-chaos by the composer himself, as he kept returning to his music, revising and recycling it. The music itself varies from the self-indulgently banal at the bottom end of the scale to the blazingly original and powerful at the top.

This new album conducted by Nicholas Collon continues Ondine’s award-winning series of orchestral works by Witold Lutosławski (1913–1994) together with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. The series has gathered several accolades, including a Grammy nomination, a BBC Music Magazine Awards nomination, as well as several recording of the month awards and best recordings of the year nominations. This album includes the composer’s early hit, his folklorish masterpiece Concerto for Orchestra, which is among his most performed compositions. The album also includes Partita for Violin and Orchestra (with Christian Tetzlaff as soloist), a virtuosic 5-movement work which in its orchestral version is not short of a Violin Concerto. The rarity in the album is Lutoslawski’s Novelette from 1979, which, although fragmentary, is already pointing toward the ideas of his 3rd Symphony.

Ewelina Novicka came across Weinberg's traces while researching Shostakovich, and Laks was brought to her attention by pianist friend Milena Antoniewicz, with whom she recorded her own composition Kaddish in the version for violin and piano in 2011. The Polish-born violinist Ewelina Novicka was not only deeply touched by the fact that Laks and Weinberg had escaped the Shoah, but above all by the connection with the fate of her own family, which gave rise to her desire to place her artistic work in the service of the works of these two composers.

This is the second and final disc in a cycle of Sergei Prokofiev’s piano concertos with pianist Olli Mustonen and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu. Of the first volume, Gramophone wrote: 'How many times have I regretted a shortage of fantasy, flair and fairy-tale imagination in recordings of the Prokofiev piano concertos? Well, here is a disc that takes all those qualities to the top'.

It would very much seem that the 19th- and 20th-century Czech piano concerto repertoire begins and ends with Dvořák and Martinů. The present recording, however, serves to prove that this is far from being the case. It contains three piano concertos that have been – undeservedly – overlooked. Vítězslava Kaprálová wrote the Piano Concerto in D minor, characterised by brilliant instrumentation and an engrossing solo part, at the age of 20 as her graduation work.