BBC Symphony Orchestra - CD

This is the fifth and now final volume in our survey of orchestral works by the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski. Gramophone wrote of a previous volume in the series (CHSA5106) that it ‘offers a broad view of Lutosławski’s creative profile, which the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Edward Gardner fleshes out with playing that is as polished as it is animated, and alert to the individuality of Lutosławski’s musical vocabulary and mode of expression’.

Lutosławski wrote his Symphony No. 1 between 1941 and 1947, but interestingly it does not display any obvious signs of his trying to come to terms with the ordeal that befell his people. Quite the opposite, in fact. Lutosławski himself described the symphony as bright and cheerful, ‘because that was the idea of the composition, which was conceived in the period of independence before the war, but brought into being during the terrible wartime and in far from idyllic post-war years’. At the time, one Polish colleague went so far as to call it ‘fauvist’, so wild and vibrant did it appear to the audiences at its first performance in April 1948.

Lutosławski was a meticulous collector of folk materials in the first half of the 1950s, but for him, Dance Preludes was a ‘farewell to folklore’, even though he privately still explored folk tunes for several more years. Here the orchestra and conductor are joined by the clarinettist Michael Collins, an exclusive Chandos artist.

As his career developed in the more open environment that emerged after the ‘socialist-realist’ period, Lutosławski began to receive international recognition, and with the Partita (1984, orchestrated 1988), for violin and orchestra, he presented a newly relaxed, more melodic compositional style to the public. The soloist is the exclusive Chandos artist Tasmin Little.

Chain 2 (1984 – 85) was premiered by Anne-Sophie Mutter on 31 January 1986 with Collegium Musicum, conducted by Paul Sacher to whom it was dedicated. On this recording Tasmin Little leads the orchestra through a succession of ideas, much as the soloist had done in the ‘Episodes’ movement of the Cello Concerto (recorded on CHSA5106 with Paul Watkins).

Mark Obert-Thorn, producer and audio restoration engineer

Three historically significant première recordings of Sibelius symphonies are brought together on this reissue for the first time. Finnish conductor Georg Schnéevoigt was close to Sibelius and a perceptive interpreter of his music, making this lucid and controlled first recording of the Sixth Symphony following the death of Robert Kajanus, who was to have recorded the complete symphonies. Made during the Great Depression, Leopold Stokowski’s compelling performance of the Fourth Symphony reflects the composer’s ‘solitude and pain’. Renowned Russian conductor Serge Koussevitzky directs Sibelius’s final Seventh Symphony in a famously intense live performance.

Just prior to the Second World War, Sir Adrian Boult (1889–1983) single-handedly built the BBC Symphony Orchestra into a world-renowned ensemble that attracted such artists as Arturo Toscanini, Serge Koussevitzky and Bruno Walter to conduct it. After retiring from the BBCSO in 1950, Boult became chief conductor of the London Philharmonic until 1957. He continued to guest conduct and record prolifically until 1978 and enjoyed an ‘Indian summer’ in the studio with both English music (Vaughan Williams and Elgar) and nineteenth-century German repertoire (Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert and Wagner). His early studies at the Leipzig Conservatory with Max Reger and with the charismatic conductor Arthur Nikisch, who knew Brahms, gave Boult a unique understanding of this composer.

Boult’s period in Leipzig also brought him in touch with the music of Mendelssohn, who had founded the Conservatory as well as being appointed as conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

The live 1975 Proms performance of Brahms’s Symphony No.4 has never been issued before. The live account is more electrifying than the studio recording made in 1972. It has been recorded in stereo and fully captures the ‘Indian summer’ that Boult enjoyed at the Proms and in the studio with EMI at the time.

The Mendelssohn Symphony No.4 was recorded live in stereo and has never been issued before. It is a comparative rarity in that Boult’s only other recorded performances were in 1966 (unissued on CD) and in 1954 in mono.

Alexander Goehr is a central fi gure of the post-war Manchester School of composers with Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies. His work is recognized today for its assimilation of intellectual rigour with transparent expressiveness and richly haunting sonorities. This programme ranges from the Gabrieli-inspired virtuoso brass of Pastorals and the labyrinthine structures of Marching to Carcassonne, to When Adam Fell, with its extraordinary descending intervals discovered in Bach. Alexander Goehr’s close association with Oliver Knussen and the musicians on this recording make these performances uniquely authoritative.

This programme of music by Alexander Goehr is of works unavailable elsewhere on recordings. We have had huge success with our reissues of recordings by Goehr’s Manchester School colleague Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, and this release is also something of a coup for Naxos, including as it does Goehr’s most recent orchestral piece When Adam Fell. With Goehr’s relative recent mainstream neglect this release seeks to help reposition his work as a core element in European contemporary music.

This recording of orchestral works by Karol Szymanowski form part of the Polish Music series on Chandos, and is performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Edward Gardner. These performers have impressed in their Lutosławski survey, which is part of the same series; in a review of volume 1, Gramophone described them as a veritable ‘dream team’.

Symphony No. 2 by Szymanowski is a work of great power and ingenuity, with many passionate and varied contrasts in its use of solo instruments. Composed in 1909 – 10, it is widely considered the greatest orchestral work of the composer’s early period, not to mention one of the most important Polish symphonic compositions to date. Szymanowski himself thought very highly of it, and in August 1911 wrote in a letter to his fellow Polish composer Zdzisław Jachimecki: ‘How happy I am that this Symphony impressed you as I had wanted. I will frankly admit that I feel somewhat proud about its value. In some miraculous way I have managed during my work on it to resist all those garish phantoms which seduce “young and inexperienced” artists and to produce pure and uncompromising beauty in the way I personally understand it.’

The internationally acclaimed pianist Louis Lortie joins the orchestra and conductor in Symphony No. 4 of 1932, which the composer subtitled ‘Symphonie concertante’ in recognition of the near-soloistic role played by the pianist. Whereas Szymanowski’s early and middle works clearly reflect Wagner, Strauss, and Scriabin, this work is strongly influenced by Prokofiev, particularly in the finale, an agitated and daring movement reminiscent of the Russian composer’s Piano Concerto No. 3, composed about a decade earlier.

Written in 1904 – 05 in a style recalling Wagner and Strauss, the Concert Overture is characterised by enormous expressiveness and gusto in the way it handles the expanding themes. Szymanowski inscribed the original score with part of the poem Witeź Włast by his friend Tadeusz Miciński: ‘I will not play you sad songs, O Shades! but will give you a triumph proud and fierce…’. This vivid imagery is perfectly in keeping with the music’s exuberant and vivacious character.

Sir Adrian Boult conducts the London Philharmonic and BBC Symphony orchestras with soloists Alfredo Campoli and Pablo Casals in Elgar’s two great string concertos.

This is the fourth volume in Chandos’ series devoted to the music of the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski.

Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, described by Gramophone as a ‘veritable dream team’ in a review for Vol. 1, are joined on this recording by the cellist and exclusive Chandos artist Paul Watkins.

Lutosławski drew his main thematic material for Little Suite (Mała suita) from folk melodies from the village of Machów in south-east Poland. As such he was following one of the paths recommended by the communist government for connecting to the ‘broad masses’ by creating what today might be called ‘people’s music’. In this work Lutosławski demonstrates his characteristic lightness of touch, excellent ear for orchestral timbre, and ability to transform his material into something highly individual.

The Second Symphony (1965 – 67) was Lutosławski’s first large-scale orchestral work since the Concerto for Orchestra (1950 – 54), and a lot had happened in Poland since the premiere of that work. The government had significantly eased its cultural restrictions for music, which meant that Polish composers were becoming increasingly exposed to new ideas from the West. Lutosławski, ever his own man, chartered a distinctive path through this thicket of new music, and by the mid-60s he had developed his own individual and expressive idiom. In the Second Symphony, he creates an atmosphere of tense anticipation in the opening stages, before drawing the listener into the ensuing, more purposefully developed music, which reaches a climactic explosion and resolution.

Paul Watkins is the soloist in the Cello Concerto, one of the most original works of recent times. While Lutosławski insisted that this highly dramatic work was a purely musical drama, Mstislav Rostropovich, its dedicatee, considered the music to be a mirror of his own battles with the authorities in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and ’70s.

In Grave, for solo cello and strings, for the first time in his life (not counting folk-inspired pieces), Lutosławski based a work on the music of another composer: the first four notes of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. He takes Debussy’s motif and transforms it from intense musings into a free-flowing succession of robust and vigorous shapes.

Knussen started composing at the age of 6. In 1968, aged 15 he stepped in to conduct his Symphony's premiere at the Royal Festival Hall after István Kertész fell ill. Upon hearing this, Daniel Barenboim asked him to conduct the work's first two movements in New York a week later.

Composer/conductor Oliver Knussen celebrates his 60th birthday this year.

This disc features the dynamically virtuosic violinist Leila Josefowicz, who has worked with many of today's leading composers – including John Adams and Oliver Knussen – and is a strong advocate of new music.

Oliver Knussen is a huge infl uence on the contemporary British music scene - not only as composer, but as conductor, teacher, programmer and artistic director. Despite having started composing as a teenager, his oeuvre is relatively small – partly due to his busy schedule as a conductor (he must surely hold the record for premiere performances!), but also because every bar he writes is measured against all the music that he knows and loves.

This new recording, to celebrate Olly's 60th birthday, is a chronological tour of his work, starting with the brooding orchestral Choral, and the poetic Autumnal for violin (both written in the 1970s), through to Ophelia's Last Dance from 2010. Requiem: Songs for Sue, was written following the death of his wife in 2003, and sets texts by poets who were important to them both – from Emily Dickinson's poem to her sister Sue, "Is it true, dear Sue?" to works by Antonio Machado, WH Auden and Rainer Maria Rilke – the latter translated by Olly's friend and musical collaborator Alexander Goehr.

Also on this disc is a live recording of Knussen's luminous Violin Concerto, performed at the BBC Proms by one of the world's exemplary soloists (and ex-Chanel model) Leila Josefowicz.

Shura Cherkassky (1909–1995) enjoyed a long career of over seventy years, rising to the forefront of internationally acclaimed concert pianists, first in America (where his family emigrated to escape the Russian Revolution), and after 1961 in London, where he lived until his death in 1995.

A pupil of the legendary Josef Hofmann at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, Cherkassky made his concert debut in Baltimore at the age of eleven, touring Australia and South Africa in 1925, and thereafter building up what was almost an obsession for foreign travel as he satisfied an incessant demand for festival appearances, solo and concerto recitals. He moved to California in the 1940s, appearing at the Hollywood Bowl with Sir John Barbirolli and Leopold Stokowski, and after the war, he developed his second, European career, scoring an outstanding success in Hamburg in 1946 and in London, following his acclaimed Wigmore Hall recital in March 1957.

Although he had an enormous repertoire stretching from Bach to Berio, the highpoints of Cherkassky’s career for many remain his interpretations of the concertos of fellow Russian composers like Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, and he is now classed alongside Horowitz and Rubinstein as a legendary and sensitive re-interpreter of the nineteenth-century Romantic repertory.

Cherkassky’s phenomenal virtuosity, colour range, imagination and spontaneity made him the ideal Chopin interpreter, though he never commercially recorded the two Chopin Concertos, so this is an important addition to his CD discography.

These live performances from the 1980s present Cherkassky at his most spontaneous and charismatic. As Robert Orledge has written in his booklet notes, “but if purists may now view some of his interpretations as idiosyncratic, there is still no denying that we are in the presence of a first-rate musician who understood better than many pianists what Chopin’s harmony and voice-leading were about, and who could make what are early works sound like monuments to his mature genius.” Superbly remastered in excellent stereo sound.