Oliver Knussen

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.

Recorded live in 2011 at the Aldeburgh Festival, which Benjamin Britten founded in 1948, this performance of his dark, intense chamber opera The Rape of Lucretia stars Angelika Kirchschlager, Peter Coleman-Wright and Ian Bostridge, with Oliver Knussen conducting. “Everything, without exception, was right on the money,” said The Guardian,” ... a dazzling success.”

Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera The Rape of Lucretia was given its premiere at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1946, with Kathleen Ferrier in the leading role. The composer founded his own festival two years later in Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, where he and Peter Pears had a home. This recording is drawn from a concert given in June 2011 at Aldeburgh’s acoustically superb Snape Maltings.

“As this brilliantly vivid, impassioned concert performance reminded us,” wrote The Telegraph, “Lucretia is a problematic and disturbing piece. It's hard to think of another opera where the opposite poles of male violence and tender female intimacy are made so vividly real in purely musical terms, and brought into such horrifying proximity.”

Representing those opposite poles are the Australian baritone Peter Coleman-Wright as the Roman prince Tarquinius and the Austrian mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager as Lucretia, the chaste wife of a Roman general. She commits suicide after Tarquinius has raped her, but, in an interview with The Independent Kirchschlager explained that: "There is absolutely a subtext. Lucretia is not happy where she is; both she and Tarquinius are longing for something more. People are not black and white: we long for things we don't allow ourselves. Perhaps these two should be a real couple, but circumstances have determined that they can't be together. You have to look carefully at the words and at every nuance Britten wrote, and it makes sense. They are both incredibly passionate people and Lucretia is a strong woman. I never see her as a victim."

Joining them in the cast are some of Britain’s finest singers, including Ian Bostridge as the Male Chorus, Susan Gritton as the Female Chorus and, as Collatinus, Christopher Purves; the Aldeburgh Festival Ensemble is conducted by Oliver Knussen.

The Guardian felt that the performance succeeded in “revealing the score as one of Britten's richest ... Everything, without exception, was right on the money. Bostridge and Gritton vied with each other for clarity of diction and gesture, while Kirchschlager's magnificent Lucretia was direct and powerfully sympathetic. Claire Booth and Hilary Summers, as maid and nurse respectively, sent the mellifluous flower duet wafting seductively around the Maltings' rafters. Best of all was the orchestra, revelling in its extraordinary palette of colours, and showing how the score so often hangs like gossamer off the vocal lines. Oliver Knussen conducted neatly, precisely and economically – in short, giving his players and singers everything they needed to make Britten's return to Aldeburgh a dazzling success.”

“Britten's amazingly inventive score was played with scalding intensity by the Aldeburgh Festival Ensemble under Oliver Knussen,” enthused The Telegraph, while The Independent, describing the opera as “a masterpiece of psychological and musical acuity”, observed that: “Ian Bostridge and Angelika Kirchschlager, as the Male Chorus and protagonist, gave it a searing, declamatory force. But its chief glory lies in the menacing beauty of its orchestral sound: the textures which Oliver Knussen extracted from the Aldeburgh Festival Ensemble repeatedly took the breath away.” Likewise, The Sunday Times praised “Oliver Knussen's incisive and compelling conducting. He clearly believes in every note of the often ravishingly beautiful and coruscatingly violent score.”

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.

Alexander Goehr was born in Berlin and is the son of the conductor Walter Goehr.

Goehr studied composition with Olivier Messiaen. The music scene of Paris made a great impression on him and he became good friends with Pierre Boulez and was heavily involved in the serialist avant-garde movement of the early 1960s.

Alexander Goehr is Emeritus Professor at Cambridge University.

“Unburdened by ideology and technical schemata, Goehr’s works fly free of their conceptualisation with the energy of pure artistic discovery. What he most values in his technical devices is an ability to throw up felicities of part-writing or reiterative rhythm which may be cultivated for their independent strangeness and beauty. Such trouvailles lend his music a very personal flavour even as they unlock the fragrance of the past.” Paul Driver

Goehr’s orchestral evocation of Goya’s terrifying painting, Colossos, is coupled with the premiere recording of his early cantata The Deluge, inspired by Eisenstein’s notes for a film based on a writing by Leonardo da Vinci (the film was never completed). The neo-classical Little Symphony uses the chordal structure of Mussorgsky’s ‘Catacombs’ from Pictures at an Exhibition as a harmonic backbone and is performed by the Dutch chamber orchestra, ASKO Ensemble.

'No figure in British contemporary music is more respected than Oliver Knussen' The Guardian

This release on the NMC mid-price re-issue label Ancora was previously issued on Unicorn-Kanchana Records.

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

Knussen's Ophelia Dances will be performed by BCMG at his 60th birthday concert held at the CBSO Centre (Birmingham, UK)

A new release on NMC of works by Knussen is released this autumn, featuring BCMG, Ryan Wigglesworth and soprano Claire Booth.

Knussen started composing at the age of 6 and aged 15 he stepped in to conduct his symphony's première at the Royal Festival Hall, London in 1968 after István Kertész fell ill. After that debut, Daniel Barenboim asked him to conduct the work's first two movements in New York a week later.

This is a substantial sampler of Oliver Knussen's output in the 1970s. The two major works are the luminous Second Symphony, which takes the form of a 17-minute song cycle to texts of Georg Trakl and Sylvia Plath and Symphony No. 3, a symphonic poem about Shakespeare's Ophelia.

The Prince of the Pagodas and The Miraculous Mandarin: both titles suggest Oriental fairy tales, but while Britten set a fantastic scenario for choreographer John Cranko, Bartók controversially evoked and expressionist urban nightmare. In his variation-based score, Britten salutes Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and the Javanese gamelan. Bartók, with atonality, complex textures and rhythms, and daring orchestration, illustrates vice and violence as a Chinese mandarin miraculously survives repeated murder attempts, only dying when his lust is assuaged.

On this disc three of Ruders’s pivotal chamber works are in the hands of one of Europe's leading new music ensembles Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

Four Dances in One Movement (1983) is an emotional sequence of four pure musical characters. Abysm (2000), which Ruders has written for BCMG, and Nightshade (1987) are two modern tone poems rooted in both dark and moving sound worlds.

BIRMINGHAM CONTEMPORARY MUSIC GROUP (BCMG) was formed in 1987 by musicians from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle, the Group’s Founding Patron. BCMG is one of Europe’s leading ensembles and has won many awards for its work in attracting new audiences for contemporary music.

OLIVER KNUSSEN is one of the most respected figures in British contemporary music. He is in international demand as an illuminating interpretation of twentieth century music, and he appears regularly with the major orchestras of the world. He was made a CBE in 1994 and is Conductor Laureate of the London Sinfonietta.

Born 11 December 1908, Elliott Carter will celebrate his centenary later this year. Carter is still an active composer and has recently written a piece for the Boston Symphony Orchestra that is to be performed when he reaches 100.It was as a teenager that Carter developed an interest in music, an interest that was encouraged by a friendship with Charles Ives. Like many other American composers at the time, Carter's early neoclassical style was inspired by study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and both Stravinsky and Hindemith became early influences. By the 1950s Carter had developed his mature style and he adopted a more rhythmically complex technique that he called 'temporal modulation'. Needless to say this music is not what might be termed 'easy on the ear', but it is wonderfully crafted, challenging to the listener and never less that rewarding.