Who Festival

First there was rhythm - pulsing, driving, primal rhythm. And a new word in musical terminology: Barbaro. As with sticks on skins, so with hammers on strings. The piano as one of the percussion family, the piano among the percussion family. The first and second concertos were written to be performed that way. But the rhythm had shape and direction, myriad accents, myriad subtleties. An informed primitivism. A Baroque primitivism. Then came the folkloric inflections chipped from the music of time: the crude and misshapen suddenly finding a singing voice. Like the simple melody - perhaps a childhood recollection - that emerges from the dogged rhythm of the First Concerto's second movement. András Schiff plays it like a defining moment - the piano reinvented as a singing instrument. His "parlando" (conversational) style is very much in Bartók's own image. But it's the balance here between the honed and unhoned, the brawn and beauty, the elegance and wit of this astonishing music that make these readings special.

Violinist Arabella Steinbacher studied her first Mozart Violin Concerto in G major at the age of eight. The legendary pianist Arthur Schnabel mentioned that the piano sonatas of Mozart are too easy for children yet too difficult for adults. In Steinbacher’s words: In Mozart one must always make sure that it’s powerful, but at the same time never sounds aggressive and that the sound always remains beautifully pure and almost angelic. And since then the piece has become the underlying theme throughout her career. She played the piece during many important moments of her life. It was also the piece that got Arabella accepted as the youngest students of Ana Chumachenko when she was nine. Yet it never came to a CD recording while listeners regularly ask for it.

Casals was one of the very few conductors, and certainly the first, to record the complete Brandenburgs twice – in 1950 with his Prades Festival Orchestra (Columbia LPs) and in 1964-6 with the Marlboro Festival Orchestra (Sony CDs). Incidentally, don't be fooled by their names into assuming that these were amateur ensembles – both were extraordinary groups of top-flight professionals who would come together to study and play over the summer – the cello section of the Marlboro Festival Orchestra included Mischa Schneider (of the Budapest Quartet), Hermann Busch (Busch Quartet) and David Soyer (Guarneri Quartet). As recalled by Bernard Meillat, while Casals appreciated research into Baroque playing, he viewed Bach as timeless and universal, and insisted that an interpreter's intuition was far more important than strict observance of esthetic tradition.

Casals was one of the very few conductors, and certainly the first, to record the complete Brandenburgs twice – in 1950 with his Prades Festival Orchestra (Columbia LPs) and in 1964-6 with the Marlboro Festival Orchestra (Sony CDs). Incidentally, don't be fooled by their names into assuming that these were amateur ensembles – both were extraordinary groups of top-flight professionals who would come together to study and play over the summer – the cello section of the Marlboro Festival Orchestra included Mischa Schneider (of the Budapest Quartet), Hermann Busch (Busch Quartet) and David Soyer (Guarneri Quartet).

For their fourth recording on Alpha Classics, Paavo Järvi and the Estonian Festival Orchestra - who bring together the best Estonian talent and leading musicians from around the world each year in Pärnu - celebrate composers from Estonia and Poland, two nations closely connected by their history. Eduard Tubin (1905-1982) is a composer whose ten symphonies tower at the top of Estonian orchestral music.

Georgios Axiotis was a leading and historically significant Greek composer who was opposed to the ‘Germanisation’ of music education in Greece. His training in Naples led him to conceive of national music of a mediterranean quality related to the naturalism of Italian verismo. The works on this album are his most important and lasting contributions to Greek orchestral music. Axiotis possessed an exceptional instinct for balance and timbre and was a splendid orchestrator. The lyricism in these pieces exudes Greek late Romanticism, while his nature depictions are strongly atmospheric.

A charismatic presence, [Casals] embraces each work with the passion of a devoted horticulturist tending his most precious flowers … I can't think of any other interpreters who so successfully underline the sheer inventiveness of Beethoven's writing.