Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra

A popular programme of works including the orchestral suite for the film score of Lieutenant Kijé. The original film score contains two songs which are often performed by solo saxophone and orchestra but are recorded here in their original (but seldom heard) version for baritone voice.

With acclaimed previous recordings of music by Prokofiev, as well as Stravinsky, Mendelssohn and most recently Rachmaninov, Andrew Litton and his Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra are a tried-and-tested team in this repertoire. They make the most of the enormous palette of colours and moods provided by these three scores.

The orchestra has toured extensively in the UK at the beginning of the year, and Litton has appeared on several radio programmes including a Radio 3 documentary and in-Tune.

Neeme Järvi brings us Vol. 3 in his survey of orchestral works by the Norwegian composer Johan Svendsen. This series has received great reviews for its idiomatic performances by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and the violinist Marianne Thorsen. Gramophone wrote of Vol. 2: ‘Järvi and his Norwegian forces are on scintillating form… to be treasured.’

This volume takes us to the second half of the 1860s, when Svendsen was in his twenties and had just graduated from the Leipzig Conservatory. At this time the composer found himself captivated by new trends in European music, and in the orchestration of Symphony No. 1 he went in the French direction with a sound full of contrasts. Especially the woodwinds, often placed in their high registers, make a sparkling character in this work. The symphony is dedicated to Carl F. Leche, the Swedish-Norwegian consul in Lübeck ‘in deepest gratitude and reverence’. Back in 1863 Svendsen had been stranded in that city without the funds necessary for getting to Leipzig to enter the conservatory. He went to Leche to ask for economic support to go home to Norway, but the consul saw his potential and instead succeeded in getting him an all-important scholarship from the Swedish-Norwegian King.

Also on this disc are Two Icelandic Melodies, on tunes that were likely taken down by Svendsen on a journey to Iceland and the Faroe Islands in the summer of 1867, and the Violin Concerto (1870), which Svendsen himself saw as being new and original, several critics at the time agreeing with him. In this piece, the composer’s focus is on the contrast in timbre between soloist and orchestra, rather than the soloist’s virtuosic battle against it. His model for the work may well have been Berlioz’s Harold en Italie for orchestra and viola.

In 1874 Svendsen had settled down with his family in Christiania. Norwegian Artists’ Carnival was composed for the yearly carnival in Christiania’s Artists’ Association, the intention being to reconcile the cold North and the warm-blooded South. To that end, the work consists of three main themes: a Norwegian folk tune, an Italian folk tune, and a popular Norwegian Wedding Dance. It is one of Svendsen’s most acclaimed works, and one that remains a part of the standard orchestral repertoire in Scandinavia.

The Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Andrew Davis here perform seven dazzling orchestral overtures by Hector Berlioz, a composer who excelled in blending literary and musical elements into highly energetic and personal creations.

The overtures are widely varied in mood, as are the operas from which they were drawn. Berlioz wrote his first large-scale instrumental composition, the Overture to Les Francs-juges, in 1826, the year in which he enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire. Even though the opera itself was never performed, Berlioz remained proudly affectionate of the overture, which was played all over Germany and Holland in its early days. His second opera, Benvenuto Cellini, followed in 1838; its music gave rise both to the opera’s overture and to the concert overture Le Carnaval romain which depicts its subject in brilliant colour through breathtakingly vibrant orchestration.

The comic opera Béatrice et Bénédict took its inspiration from Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing. The overture draws on an intense solo scene for Béatrice and adds elements of the cheerful banter that make up the story of the title characters’ playful courtship.

When Berlioz visited the Hungarian capital Pest in 1846, it was suggested to him that one way of winning the hearts of the audiences there would be to make an arrangement of the beloved Rákóczy March, which up until that point had been known only as a piano piece. Berlioz agreed, and on the very night before he left for Pest, he put together his own orchestral version of the piece. It was a resounding success when performed at his first concert, to the extent that Berlioz promptly included it in the large work on which he was working at the time: La Damnation de Faust.

Le Roi Lear, Le Corsaire, and Waverley have one thing in common: all are independent concert pieces that have been given the title overture as in many respects they do resemble opera overtures – but none is in actual fact connected to an opera. The composer here took his inspiration from literary works. Le Roi Lear, for instance, is a remarkable tone portrait of Shakespeare’s deranged king, full of energy and anger, while Le Corsaire may be loosely based on Byron’s The Corsair. Berlioz based Waverley on a novel of the same name by Sir Walter Scott, and the score bears a quotation in English: ‘Dreams of love and Lady’s charms, give place to honour and to arms.’ The contrast expressed so well in this simple quotation is equally evident in the music itself. Here the ‘dreams of love’ unfold in a long cello melody, which is repeated with richer orchestrations, before leading into the vigorous musical depiction of ‘honour and arms’.

Andrew Litton and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra follow their acclaimed recordings of ballets by Stravinsky with a disc that features the first and last published orchestral works by Sergei Rachmaninov.

The disc opens with The Isle of the Dead, which was inspired by the painting by Arnold Böcklin and based on the first notes of the plainchant setting of the Dies iræ.

The Rock was inspired by an image from a short story by Chekhov, and shows the youthfulness of a composer just turned twenty.

The Symphonic Dances, by contrast, sum up a lifetime’s musical and emotional experience. The composer noted that its three movements depicted the sequence of Midday – Twilight – Midnight.

Cellist Christian Poltéra turns to the music of Samuel Barber. He is joined by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Andrew Litton and pianist Kathryn Stott.

Poltéra opens his programme with the Cello Concerto – one of only three concertos by Barber – which balances the natural lyric expressiveness of his earlier music with a more urgent, rhythmic and intense style.

Poltéra and regular chamber-music partner Stott then perform the Sonata for Cello and Piano, composed while Barber was still a student.

The disc closes with the enormously popular Adagio for strings.

On previous discs, Christian Poltéra has combined concertos with chamber works by composers such as Frank Martin (BISCD1637) and Arthur Honegger (BISCD1617).

This two-disc set marks the beginning of a new project devoted to Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores. We start the survey with the complete score of The Sleeping Beauty, recorded on SACD. Swan Lake and The Nutcracker will follow in 2013 and 2014, respectively.

Tchaikovsky was approached by the Director of the Imperial Theatres in St Petersburg, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, in 1888 about a possible ballet adaptation of Charles Perrault’s La Belle au bois dormant (The Sleeping Beauty). The vision was to stage the production in the style of Louis XIV, allowing the musical fantasy to run high and melodies to be written in the spirit of Lully, Bach, and Rameau. This proposal for a fairy-tale ballet rooted firmly in both the rococo and baroque periods appealed to Tchaikovsky, and The Sleeping Beauty was premiered in 1890, with choreography by Petipa, the principal choreographer of his day.

Elaborately constructed, the ballet places its focus undeniably on the two main conflicting forces of good (the Lilac Fairy) and evil (Carabosse). Each has a representative leitmotif, which runs through the entire ballet, serving as an important thread to the underlying plot. Tchaikovsky’s use of what, at the time, were considered new and unorthodox instrumental combinations went on to inspire a new generation of composers, among them Stravinsky, who declared The Sleeping Beauty to be Tchaikovsky’s chef d’œuvre.

The Sleeping Beauty is here performed by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Neeme Järvi, who is celebrating two major milestones this year: a thirty-year recording career with Chandos Records, and his own seventy-fifth birthday. Orchestra and conductor are joined by the pre-eminent violinist James Ehnes, one of the most dynamic and exciting performers in classical music today.

Having recently concluded his Halvorsen series, Neeme Järvi continues his Nordic project with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. This is Volume 2 in the survey of orchestral works by the Norwegian composer Johan Svendsen, a contemporary of Grieg.

In the Cello Concerto, the orchestration is perhaps more introvert than what we usually hear in Svendsen’s music.

His Violin Concerto is in the conventional three movements, but here he experimented with the form and designed the concerto in just one movement, enclosing a slow section within a large-scale sonata-allegro structure. The work speaks to the poetic capabilities of the solo instrument, rather than relying on virtuoso passages, and in this respect it demands a cellist capable of bringing out the work’s subtle lyrical qualities. Charged with this task is the Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk, described by The Daily Telegraph as ‘a player of angelic grace and purity of tone’, whose discography spans from a Grammy-award-winning recording of Shostakovich’s Cello Concertos to a critically acclaimed recording of Bach's Suites for Solo Cello.

Svendsen was the first really successful Norwegian symphonist. In fact, Grieg is said to have been so overwhelmed by Svendsen’s first symphony that he was persuaded to dismiss his own, and focus on more intimate genres. Svendsen’s second symphony is as optimistic and youthful as the first, yet perhaps more organically developed and less edgy. The second movement is one of Svendsen’s most captivating and deeply felt pieces, moving through several beautiful melodies to arrive at an intensified climax.

Svendsen also wrote four Norwegian Rhapsodies, of which Nos 3 and 4 are recorded here. The set as a whole draws on seventeen Norwegian folk songs and fiddle tunes. The composer picked most of them from Ludvig Mathias Lindeman’s collection Ældre og nyere norske Fjeldmelodier (Older and Newer Norwegian Mountain Melodies).

‘The Messiaen Monster’, ridiculed by critics at its premiere—in the best tradition of works of genius—is now ‘established as one of the most astonishing classics of the twentieth century’, as Nigel Simeone writes in the booklet of this brilliant new release. The joyful generosity of the orchestral writing and kaleidoscopic nature of the musical invention make Turangalîla one of Messiaen’s most characteristic and appealing works, considered by many to be his masterpiece. As well as the distinctive sound of the ondes martenot, the other striking feature is the virtuoso piano part—it is in some ways a concerto, although the sheer scale of the orchestral contribution belies that specific title. Rarely has it been more explosively performed than here, with an acknowledged living master of Messiaen’s piano music, Steven Osborne, at the keyboard.

Freddy Kempf and Andrew Litton with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra here join forces to present a disc of works by George Gershwin.

Rhapsody in Blue was originally arranged by Ferde Grofé for jazz band before being orchestrated for symphony orchestra. Here Kempf and the Bergen Philharmonic play this original version.

Concerto in F was a commission for Gershwin to write a ‘proper’ piano concerto, but still takes the rhythms, melodic structures and bluesy harmonies of popular music.

The disc is completed by Gershwin’s two remaining works for piano and orchestra, the Second Rhapsody and Variations on ‘I Got Rhythm’.