Gramophone Magazine Editor's Choice

The Ebène Quartet’s fourth Virgin Classics release brings works that lie close to the origins of string-quartet writing – Mozart’s so-called ‘Haydn Quartets’. “It’s such amazing music, so rich and filled with such subtlety; completely unpretentious, yet of such genius,” says the Ebène’s first violin, Pierre Colombet.

After their multi-award-winning Virgin Classics debut with a CD of Debussy, Ravel and Fauré, a programme of Brahms, and the pop-jazz collection ‘Fictions’, the members of the Ebène Quartet turn to works that lie close to the very origins of string-quartet writing – Mozart’s so-called ‘Haydn Quartets’.

Composed in 1785, the set of six quartets was dedicated by Mozart to his friend and mentor Haydn, the acknowledged ‘father’ of the string quartet. The most famous of the set is the quartet in C major, KV 465, the ‘Dissonance’. It opens with a mysterious introduction, with layered harmonies creating the dissonance that gives the quartet its distinctive nickname. It is coupled with the quartet in D minor, KV 421 (another of the ‘Haydn Quartets) and the Divertimento in F major KV 138, written when Mozart was a teenager.

Pierre Colombet, first violin of the Quatuor Ebène explains the ensemble’s approach to Mozart: “We felt that, after Fictions, it would be a good idea to choose something really very classical, essential quartet music which went back to the roots of the quartet. We made a Haydn disc for another label some time ago, and we felt we just had to do some Mozart now. Yes, we’ve been playing Mozart for a very long time, but over the past year or two, we’ve felt more and more of a need to do it – it’s such amazing music, so rich and filled with such subtlety; completely unpretentious, yet of such genius.

And as Mathieu Herzog, the quartet’ viola vividly confesses: “It’s hardly news that classical musicians consider Mozart one of the most difficult composers to interpret, to play, to realise … you have to invest yourself constantly in his music and it’s very powerful, very tough on your emotions. And you have a weight on you – more like a layer of concrete on your head – because you want to succeed in delivering a new vision of the composer … We’re following in the footsteps of people who have played his music so very, very well and we want to respect Mozart for what he is. The whole thing is as hard as dancing Swan Lake in Caterpillar boots, but it’s worth the effort.

Pierre Colombet explains the title of their new release : “It might seem a bit of a paradox to call a Mozart disc ‘Dissonances’, even though he did write a quartet which is known as the ‘Dissonance’, but beyond that it’s true that Mozart’s music has loads and loads of very complex harmonies, sounds which create friction with each other.

Ebène’s cello Raphaël Merlin on the quartet’s interaction “When we’re playing Beethoven, Bartók or our jazz or pop repertoire, we use our instruments in a way that’s more percussive, that is more about the pressure we apply. But with Mozart it’s a matter of finding a natural resonance in our instruments, of letting them express themselves … almost of letting them communicate with each other in order to find the right resonance for this music. There is a phenomenon of sympathy – when the wood of an instrument’s soundbox vibrates and causes a vibration in the wood of an instrument close by. It’s that harmony that must link our instruments and that we ourselves must feel. It’s a very, very sensitive matter.”

The BBC Symphony Orchestra under Edward Gardner, music director of English National Opera and an exclusive Chandos artist, presents Volume 2 of their Polish Music series; a disc dedicated to vocal works by Witold Lutosławski. They are joined by the soloists Lucy Crowe, Toby Spence, and Christopher Purves in looking at some of the composer’s earlier works for voice and orchestra as well as three major works written after 1960: Paroles tissées, Les Espaces du sommeil and Chantefleurs et Chantefables.

Among the earlier pieces, Lacrimosa is the only surviving fragment of an intended Requiem and the only sacred work in Lutosławski’s output. In complete contrast, the Silesian Triptych was written at the height of the post-war Soviet doctrine that called for music that connected with the broad masses. In this folk-based work, Lutosławski takes three Silesian songs about the trials of love, giving them sparkle as well as depth to lift them above the mundanity of everyday life. Both works here feature the soprano soloist Lucy Crowe.

When Poland finally emerged from the cultural oppression of the post-war decade, its music scene flourished.

For Lutosławski, it was a time for personal development. In the first half of the 1960s his music had a raw energy, but by 1965 it had developed a much more subtle tone. Paroles tissées, in which the tenor soloist here is Toby Spence, simply accompanied by strings, harp, and piano, was the first work really to show this new subtlety in his works. Les Espaces du sommeil, with the baritone soloist Christopher Purves, is another prime example of the new lyrical quality that came to colour many of Lutosławski’s later orchestral works.

Chantefleurs et Chantefables is made up of nine charming and humourous songs which, inspired by the collection of childrens’ poems by the surrealist Robert Desnos, explores the vivid imagery and bright colours of the natural world through the innocent eyes of a child.

The first in a new series of releases from the world-renowned conductor Paul McCreesh and his Gabrieli Consort. Called Winged Lion (the symbol of Venice and of St Mark, as well as the Gabrieli Consort), the label will release recordings of Renaissance and Baroque repertoire, as well as large-scale 19th-and 20th-century oratorio, including on the near horizon, Howells’ Requiem Recorded in Poland as part of the Wratislava Cantans Festival (of which McCreesh is artistic director) this staggering performance of Berlioz’s ‘Grand Mass for the Dead’ is produced by a force of over 400 performers – drawn from the Gabrieli Consort and Players, the Wroclaw Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir and students from Chetham’s School of Music.

Future releases with McCreesh will include Mendelssohn’s Elijah [with Simon Keenlyside] , Haydn’s The Seasons, Britten’s War Requiem and a re-recording of their famed disc ‘A Venetian Coronation’, about which Gramophone had said: “Without doubt, this is one of the finest records of Italian Renaissance polyphony to appear for a long time”. The year also marks the ensemble’s 30th anniversary, and the 400th anniversary of the death of Giovanni Gabrieli whose music, along with that of Andrea Gabrieli, features on the recording.

Founded in 1982 by artistic director Paul McCreesh, the Gabrieli Consort & Players are world-renowned interpreters of great choral and instrumental repertoire, spanning from the Renaissance to the present day. Their performances encompass virtuosic a cappella programmes, mould-breaking reconstructions of music for historical events and major works from the oratorio tradition. With Paul McCreesh, the Gabrielis are regular visitors to the world’s most prestigious concert halls and festivals and have built a large and distinguished discography.

In conjunction with the Orchestra’s 30th Anniversary Season, Music Director Nicholas McGegan and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra announce the launch of the ensemble’s own recording label, Philharmonia Baroque Productions. The label’s début release showcases the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in a live 1995 recording of Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été and a live 1991 recording of arias from Handel’s Giulio Cesare, Ottone, Arianna, Radamisto and Agrippina. Hunt Lieberson had a long and fruitful relationship with McGegan and Philharmonia Baroque. The Berlioz is the last of seven acclaimed recordings she made with the orchestra and the first time she ever sang the full Berlioz song cycle in performance. Lorraine was in her element and the result was splendid. These incredibly moving performances are now available to a wide audience for the first time.

In more than two decades as its music director, Nicholas McGegan has established the San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Philharmonia Chorale as the leading period-performance ensemble in America – and at the forefront of the 'historical' movement worldwide, thanks to notable appearances at such venues as Carnegie Hall, London Proms, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and the International Handel Festival in Göttingen, Germany, where McGegan has been artistic director since 1991. Born in England, he was educated at Oxford, Cambridge and the Royal College of Music. In 2010, he was awarded an OBE for “services to music overseas". Other awards include an official 'Nicholas McGegan Day' declared by the Mayor of San Francisco to mark his 20th anniversary with Philharmonia Baroque.The next release from Philharmonia Baroque will be of Haydn's Symphonies.

Gramophone award-winning ensemble The Cardinall’s Musick return to another master of the Renaissance, Robert Parsons. Very few records remain of the composer’s short life, and his musical output is often overlooked, perhaps in the shadow of the prolific William Byrd, his successor as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. However, his vocal writing is some of the most opulent of the period.

The Cardinall’s Musick give sublime performances of some of the composer’s most sumptuous choral works, from the remarkably sophisticated Magnificat to the dramatic O bone Jesu. As demonstrated in their previous recordings, their resonant, pure-toned singing is the perfect advocate for such exquisite polyphony. The ensemble’s seemingly effortless and magical performance of the glorious Ave Maria is the perfect conclusion to an enlightening recording.

Sono Luminus presents nothing less than a revelation of the Scandinavian musical soul: chorale settings by Northern Europe’s greatest composers performed by some of America’s finest period performers. In The Vanishing Nordic Chorale, Musik Ekklesia brilliantly refracts the nordic chorale tradition through the prism of history, yielding a kaleidoscope of nuanced color and florid display.

Four hundred years ago, individuals traveled — if they traveled at all — only by the strained effort of foot and beast, wind and sail. Communication beyond the sound of their voices required hand-writing and hand-delivering. Even so, across Northern Europe, something unlikely was occurring. The musical memory of the Nordic people was becoming embodied with an identical opus of melodies. Average people, from Trondheim to Leipzig, participated weekly in the performance of the same tunes, each sung in their own language. These were ‘chorales’ (or hymn tunes) which formed the basis of congregational worship in the state-run churches beginning during the Nordic Golden Age of the Reformation.

The Vanishing Nordic Chorale presents 14 of these melodies sung in Nordic languages: the lilt of Swedish, the angled turn of Norwegian, and the gentle kneeding of Danish offer listeners a music all their own. In this collection, simple eight-bar chorale tunes have not been doggedly repeated merely to span their many verses. Instead, Musik Ekklesia director Philip Spray has exploited a variety of techniques to feature these tunes in situ as it were, either by selecting whole works of composers that incorporated the tunes — as in Bach’s alto aria from Cantata 137, Mendelssohn’s Forlen os freden, and Nielsen’s Denne er daget — or by taking one composer’s work on a short chorale verse, such as Pachelbel’s organ arrangement of Du er, opstandne sejerhelt, here arranged for various groups of baroque instruments, and setting it against a ritornello (i.e., Bach’s orchestral prelude to Cantata 99), or du Caurroy’s verses, similarly set alongside a well-known Noël by Charpentier as their ritornello. Spray has also borrowed chorale tunes from the Danish, Swedish or Norwegian Chorale Books and arranged them for voices and various consorts of instruments.

Musik Ekklesia is a baroque period-instrument ensemble based in Indianapolis that draws leading players from around the United States and abroad. In this recording, old instruments are used not solely for historical recreation, but for their unique, timeless timbre and appropriateness to the folk-like character of some of the musical material. This album is sure to delight classical and early music lovers, as well as light the fire and spirit of the far north in the listeners.

After the premiere of Artaserse, the Real Compañía Opera de Cámara addresses another unpublished work by Terradellas, Sesostri, a great find for all fans of opera, with the most wonderful cast.

Sesostri is the last opera composed by Barcelona-born Doménec Terradellas, who lived between 1713 and 1751, dying just after the premiere of this opera in Rome. His career developed mainly in Italy, and in Spain today he is mostly unknown. Sesostri had its Barcelona premiere in 1754 but did not return there until December 2010, when it was offered in concert and without its recitatives at the Auditori.

Sesostri seems to have been a Pharaoh in the 12th century BC, briefly mentioned by Herodotus and citing a bitter struggle between two brothers in ancient Egypt. This serves as the basis for the libretto of this opera, which is both remarkably complicated and highly implausible! The protagonist Sesostri, Korean soprano Sunhae Im, not only gives the title to the opera but also has a lot to sing, no less than 5 arias, a trio and the short final ensemble, in short, a remarkable performance.

The Anthology of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is a transcription in sound of the concert-giving history of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, based upon radio recordings from the archives of Dutch Radio and Radio Netherlands World Service. Six decades of the 20th century are put under the spotlight in six boxes, each containing 14 CDs. The RCO have chosen not only legendary performances by chief conductors of the Orchestra but also concerts led by countless guest conductors of both greater and lesser renown. Famous soloists make their debuts alongside world premieres of works that have since become classics of the repertoire.

This sixth volume of the Anthology features the radio recordings made by the orchestra in the 1990s, presenting an overview on 14 CDs of the orchestra’s artistic development under various conductors during that period.

The RCO will celebrate their 125th anniversary in 2013, when Volume 7 will be issued and limited print runs of the early volumes.

After the successful release by the highly regarded Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra of recordings of two of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies, No. 1 in D major (EXCL00026) and No. 4 in G major (EXCL00048), this two channel double SACD set features a live performance of the composer’s massive Third Symphony in D minor.

Considered to be one of the best modern day interpreters of Gustav Mahler’s music, the Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck began his career as conductor of Vienna's Jeunesse Orchestra, which he co-founded, and as assistant to Claudio Abbado with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in Vienna. After several highly successful guest appearances as conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, he was appointed its Music Director in 2008.

Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in D minor was written between 1893 and 1896 and is the longest symphony in the standard repertoire. It has five movements and features a large orchestra, chorus, children’s choir, and female soloist.