Gramophone Magazine Editor's Choice

Following a first solo recital (2008) and a successful Ravel-Prokofiev concerto recording (2010), this is the third recording of Russian pianist Anna Vinnitskaya for Naive.

The recording presents two of the heights of Ravel's piano repertoire, 'Gaspard de la Nuit' and 'Miroirs', performed many times in recital before this recording.

In both works, as well as in the mysterious 'Pavane pour une infant défunte', Anna Vinnitskaya displays the whole range of her skills: intense delicacy, amazing legato and control of dynamics, supple and a strong personal style.

Anna Vinnitskaya, aged 29, is developing an intense concert career in Germany, Belgium and the UK. She won First Prize at the Queen Elizabeth Competition in 2007 and an Echo Klassik award (Germany) in 2011 for her latest recording.

Soprano Sandrine Piau's new project is dedicated to French baroque repertoire, offering a wide range of very beautiful arias by Rameau, Lully, Campra etc in a 100-year journey that mixes very famous music with little-know pieces, such as arias by Grétry or Sacchini > Sandrine Piau and Jérôme Correas, a former singer, founder and music director of Les Paladins, have worked together on a regular basis since their early careers, especially with William Christie. This new release is the 10th recital of Sandrine Piau on Naïve and 2012 marks the 10th anniversary of our collaboration.

“The French music of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has changed my life both literally and metaphorically: having trained as a harpist, I never imagined I might one day embark on a singing career. Nevertheless, in an incredibly fertile profusion of music, a series of encounters led me into this Baroque adventure where imagination and rigour call the tune, and permanently influenced my approach to all kinds of music.”

-- Sandrine Piau

“A hundred years of music: we offer our listeners a journey through the elegant language of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the very special world of the tragédie lyrique and the opéra-comique, but also the evolution of two artists eager to pool their sensibilities and their taste for discovery.”

-- Jérôme Correas

This Requiem is known in five sources; two of them mention no composer, two attribute it to Antoine de Févin, one, the Occo Codex, to Antoine Divitis. It is recorded here in the version transmitted by an early sixteenth-century manuscript, the Occo Codex, a sumptuous, richly illuminated volume. The book was originally intended for use in worship at one of the oldest churches in Amsterdam, built in the fourteenth century on the site of a miracle which played a fundamental role in constituting the religious identity of Amsterdam. Occo was the name of the rich merchant who financed the production of the manuscript. It contains some fifteen masses by great composers of the fifteenth century.

Composed at the very end of the fifteenth century, shortly after Iohannes Ockeghem’s setting, this Requiem presents a perfect synthesis of the plainchant tradition and the supreme technical skills of the Franco-Flemish polyphonists who diffused their art throughout western Europe. It was discovered at the end of the twentieth century and has not yet received the full measure of attention it deserves. It is a luminous work. The plainchant melodies, constantly present, sculpted by the living flesh of the polyphonic texture, blaze, shine and reveal the inner energy that, cutting through the centuries, fashions the deployment of time.

With her winning combination of consummate technical brilliance, fine musicianship, and personal verve, the pianist Xiayin Wang captures the hearts of audiences wherever she appears. She is achiving high levels of recognision for her commanding performances as a recitalist, chamber musician, and orchestral soloist in such venues as New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. This is Wang’s second disc for Chandos Records. Her previous disc, of piano works by Earl Wild, was an ‘International Piano Choice’ in International Piano.

The six Moments musicaux constitute a set of solo piano pieces, each representing a different but complementary musical form, such as the nocturne, song without words, barcarolle, virtuoso étude, or variations. Although intended from the beginning as part of a set, each piece holds its own well, with individual themes and moods, ranging from the sombre funeral march of No. 3 to the majestic canon of No. 6. Revolutionary and grand in style, the Moments musicaux still retain the charm of Rachmaninoff’s early works: dense, rich in counterpoint, highly chromatic, poignantly nationalistic, deeply felt, and, of course, exceptionally challenging to the pianist.

The Études-tableaux were composed as ‘picture pieces’. Rachmaninoff never did disclose what inspired each piece, but stated: ‘I don’t believe in the artist that discloses too much of his images. Let [the public] paint for themselves what [the music] most suggests.’

The Variations on a Theme of Corelli was the last original solo piano work that Rachmaninoff wrote, and the only one he composed outside Russia. The theme of this cycle is actually not by Arcangelo Corelli (1653 – 1713), but an old Spanish-French folk dance. The Variations were written in 1931, the same year that the composer boldly denounced the Soviet Union, referring to its leaders as ‘Communist grave-diggers’. Stalin consequently banned Rachmaninoff’s music, but, recognising its more appealing and generally less radical nature, rehabilitated it three years later. The work is among several pieces that were later well received in Moscow.

The Aronowitz Ensemble’s second CD, recorded in the ideal acoustics of the Wigmore Hall, comprises three of our favourite works: Mendelssohn's ebullient second string quintet and Dvorák's incomparably radiant second piano quintet are perfectly complemented by Martin Suckling’s To See the Dark Between, which conjures brilliant, unique colours from our full septet line-up - a combination for which, to the best of our knowledge, no work existed prior to the Aronowitz Ensemble's formation. Jointly commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society and the Wigmore Hall in 2010, Martin’s work is here given its premiere recording.

In her third release for EMI Classics the energetic young Norwegian violinist continues the idea of Nordic and Russian concerto pairings established with Sibelius and Prokofiev Concertos on her first album. Here the famous romance of Tchaikovsky’s well-loved violin concerto and Scandinavian poise and unique colouring of Nielsen’s concerto are presented in a rare coupling together on disc.

Danish composer Carl Nielsen wrote his violin concerto during the summer of 1911, in a small Norwegian lakeside hut belonging to fellow composer Edvard Grieg. The concerto is very close to Vilde’s heart, being written in her homeland Norway and premiered in Scandinavia by Danish violinist Peder Møller and the Royal Danish Orchestra. It is a work she is very keen to record and champion. The concerto is unashamedly developed around enticing melodies, giving it a delicacy and simplicity and conjuring up that sense of spaciousness which is so much a part of Scandinavia’s musical and physical landscape.

Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto needs little introduction and is perhaps the most famous of all violin compositions. It is also regarded as one of the most technically difficult pieces in the repertoire and so is a brilliant showcase for Vilde’s hugely assured virtuosity.

Vilde recorded her debut album with EMI at the age of 22. The recording of Violin Concertos by Sibelius and Prokofiev released in January 2010 was enthusiastically reviewed “rarely has this music sounded so tender, so intimate or so lyrical” (Financial Times) and Independent Record Review called her “prodigiously gifted”. The disc won Best Classical Release at the Norwegian Grammy Awards.

She has been compared to a young Anne-Sophie Mutter, with whom she often performs.

A dazzling orchestral disc of music from the Jewish tradition of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Bruch’s Kol Nidrei is one of the most well-loved works in the cello repertoire. The descending opening phrase of the cello line is instantly recognizable: a universal, extraordinarily expressive utterance.

The main part of the disc comprises the works for cello and orchestra by Ernest Bloch, all part of his ‘Jewish cycle’. The most famous is Schelomo, a work inspired by passages from Ecclesiastes, where the cello, playing a deeply lyric and speaking line of prodigious technical difficulty, can be seen as ‘the incarnation of King Solomon’, as Bloch himself wrote. The other large-scale work for cello and orchestra, Voice in the Wilderness, is of a darker hue. Both works reveal a composer whose works should be firmly in the canon of twentieth-century symphonic writing.

The cellist here is Natalie Clein, a celebrated figure in British musical life since winning BBC Young Musician of the Year in 1995 and now a formidable artist, possessed of great musical, technical and intellectual gifts.

Emil Gilels played a sonata by Scarlatti at his first public concert in 1929 and included them in his tours to the West in the 1950s. These recordings present a splendid group of the composer’s widely contrasting moods. Gilels was a true virtuoso in the Lisztian tradition, combining musical integrity with rarely equalled technique. The Fantasia was one of the works with which he won the First Soviet All-Union Competition in 1933, while his recordings of the Hungarian Rhapsodies and three works by Chopin are full of character and personality. A recently discovered notebook in which Gilels logged some of his recording sessions has made the dating of these recordings more accurate in this edition.

Ward Marston, audio restoration engineer

Guitarist Mattias Jacobsson makes his recording debut on Avie with Invocación, a unique perspective on the works of Francisco Tárrega, his inspiration Chopin, and his students Llobet and Pujol.

The brilliant young guitarist Mattias Jacobsson invokes a guitar tradition originating with the influential Spanish composer Francisco Tárrega. The repertoire explores Tárrega’s influences and legacy, from the inspiration that Chopin had on his musical output through to his students Miguel Llobet and Emilio Pujol. Tárrega often turned to Chopin’s favoured forms - Preludes, Mazurkas and Nocturnes - and also transcribed works in those forms by Chopin. Mattias has created a unique concept in the guitar discography by juxtaposing Chopin transcriptions with Tárrega’s most Chopinesque works. The “invocación” continues through works of two of Tárrega’s most prominent pupils in Barcelona and even extends to Mattias himself, whose first teacher Erik Möllerström studied in Barcelona and secured an instrument from the great guitar maker Ignacio Fleta e hijos, that now has been passed on to Mattias and is played on this recording.

Juilliard-trained Mattias Jacobsson was born in Stockholm and has studied with Göran Söllscher and Sharon Isbin, among others. He has performed throughout Europe and the United States, and has appeared on Spanish television, New York’s WQXR and National Public Radio’s Performance Today. He has further extended his reach with several features in Classical Guitar Magazine and hundreds of thousands of views on his YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/guitarcactus

Garth Knox is one of the most versatile and audacious string players today, a member of the famous Arditti Quartet for eight years and a virtuoso viola soloist, he is now a leading exponent of the viola d’amore (the rare instrument from the Baroque era with seven playing and another seven resonating strings that allow for a particularly full and warm sound). On Saltarello he plays both instruments, as well as the fiddle, in an astonishing range of music spanning 1000 years.

From opposite ends of this timescale are Hildegard of Bingen’s Ave, generosa, a song of praise to the Virgin Mary, and Vent Nocturne, pieces for viola and electronics written for Knox by Kaija Saariaho. The adventurous programme also brings in Guillaume de Machaut, John Dowland and Purcell, a concerto for viola d’amore by Vivaldi, and a new work for solo viola by Garth himself, plus his captivating arrangements of 14th century dances and traditional Celtic tunes (he was born in Ireland and raised in Scotland). Sounds and feelings resonate across the centuries…

Knox comments: “Each of my instruments – medieval fiddle, viola d’amore and viola – brings its own perspective and sound world to the chosen pieces, and is complemented by its corresponding partner (fiddle/percussion, viola d’amore/cello and viola/electronics). The aim was to ‘bring back’ the pieces to the present day and to explore them here and now without destroying their inherent qualities.”

He is joined for different pieces by percussionist Sylvain Lemêtre or French cellist Agnès Vesterman. She also contributed to his previous “hypnotic” recital for ECM, D’Amore (4766369), named as Gramophone’s ‘Disc of the Month’ in September, 2008.