Simax label - SACDs

Wire and String is a musical portrait of the internationally renowned contemporary Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin. The disc presents three works: “Imella”, a newly-written fiddle concerto, the album’s title piece for sinfonietta, and Drei Gedichte von Rainer Maria Rilke for soprano and chamber orchestra.

The Bodø Sinfonietta is conducted by Christian Eggen, and the soloists are Susanne Lundeng (fiddle) and soprano Siri Torjesen. As is often the case with the compositions of Rolf Wallin, on this new album we hear folk music interacting with contemporary idioms. The concerto "Imella" ('in-between') was commissioned by the Bodø Sinfonietta. It borrows its title, and also the titles of its individual movements, from the debut novel by the American author Ben Marcus. This wonderful and highly unusual book describes a world that defies earthly laws of nature, but that still seems to have its own set of laws and logic, consistent, yet ungraspable. The Rilke poems used in the Drei Gedichte are very different in terms of form, subject and atmosphere. Liebes-Lied is about deep and strong but painful love, Buddha in der Glorie is an account of religious ecstasy, and Slußstück is about death, existing right in the midst of us, in the middle of life.

Johannes Weisser is among the foremost young baritones on the European stage today, and particularly celebrated for his recent recording Of Mozart’s Don Giovanni with conductor René Jacobs. On this his debut solo recording entitled “Visiting Grieg” he performs the songs of his fellow Norwegian, including “Melodies of the Heart”, op. 5, “Romances and Songs”, op. 18, and “12 Melodies”, op. 33.

Edvard Grieg believed strongly that the most important element in setting music to the words of great writers was to convey the spirit behind the text, and he achieved this aim at the outset of his career with his first set of songs entitled “Melodies of the Heart” which incorporates the poetry of Hans Christian Andersen. Also featured on this hybrid SACD are songs to lyrics by O.A. Vinje, a writer who was a major inspiration to Grieg, and many of the composer’s best songs including “The Last Spring” and “The Wounded Heart” are from the collection called “12 Melodies”.

Born in 1980, Johannes Weisser made his debut at the Norwegian Opera at the age of 23. These days he performs at the Théâtre de La Monnaie in Brussels, Royal Danish Opera, Komische Oper Berlin, and the Salzburg Festival. He has collaborated with many of the leading conductors of our time, including René Jacobs, Fabio Biondi, Rinaldo Alessandrini, and Philippe Herreweghe.

Celebrating their 25th year together, the Vertavo String Quartet now releases its very first Beethoven recording. The works on this new hybrid SACD, the String Quartet Opus 130 and the Grosse Fugue, have been part of the Vertavo repertoire as long as the group has been in existence, and the insight that this brings is clearly evident in these memorable performances.

Formed in 1984, the Vertavo String Quartet is now established as one of the leading European string quartets, and since then they have collaborated with artists like Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Paul Lewis, and Leif Ove Andsnes. Among the many contemporary composers they have worked with are Ligeti, Adès, Widmann, Nørgård, Edlund and Asheim. The group have received a number of international awards for their recordings which so far have featured amongst others the music by Bartók (the complete quartets), Schumann, Brahms, Nielsen, Debussy, and Grieg.

The six-movement String Quartet Op. 130 was written between August and November 1825 during a rare period of relatively good health in the composer’s later years. Beethoven’s original idea was to have the Grosse Fugue as the finale of the Op. 130. Only after the Quartet was completed and premiered did he listen to the urgings of friends and issue the fugue as a separate composition. He then wrote a new and more light-hearted finale for the Op. 130 Quartet, a movement which turned out to be his very last composition.

The first time that any of the organ music of one of the 20th centuries most important composers, Olivier Messiaen, has been available on an SACD hybrid.

Although Olivier Messiaen holds the position as the most performed organ composer of the twentieth century, there are still several early works like “Prélude”, and “Offrande au Saint Sacrement” included here on this debut by Norwegian Inger-Lise Ulsrud that are seldom recorded. Some of these pieces were not published until after the composer’s death at the beginning of the 21st century. For this reason, apart from his early masterpiece “Lascension” and “Le Banquet Celeste”, works like the “Diptyque” and “Apparition de l’Église éternelle” are relatively unknown. This is the first disc of Messiaen’s organ music to be released as an SACD hybrid. The featured organ is that of the church of St. Nikolai in Halmstad, Sweden. Inger-Lise Ulsrud graduated from the Norwegian Academy of Music and continued her improvisation studies under Professor Anders Bondeman in Stockholm. Since 1993 Inger-Lise Ulsrud has been teaching improvisation and organ literature at the Norwegian Academy of Music, and is now Associate Professor for organ.

The Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra commissioned and premiered the work ‘Low Jive’ by Jon Øivind Ness in 2008, and now they release a portrait of this fascinating composer, whose music is powerful and symphonic with references to popular culture, post punk and Zappa. Allowing the intensity and rhythmical drive of popular music to fuse with the structures and multi-layer thinking of art music, Ness creates music which is pulsating and refined. The result is a rare, unpredictable beauty.

Mad Cap Tootling is a violin concerto written for Peter Herresthal, a violinist among the leading interpreters of contemporary music in Europe today. The political title of the piece depicts FORMER president George W. Bush and his behaviour prior to the Iraq invasion. Another prominent performer is Øystein Birkeland, to whom Ness wrote Wet Blubber Soup – the title is a play on words from a Godley and Creme remix. In this piece, Ness himself remixes the contrasting elements of the concerto.

Low Jive for full orchestra and the duo Gust both share a mesmerizing dark atmosphere. In the latter piece for viola and double bass, Ness creates a disturbing gloom where flashes of icy light only occasionally brake through. The whole orchestra is on stage again for the Low Jive in grand, unhurried and vigorous movements – like a monumental dance in the depths. The title is derived from Slowdive, a song by 80s band Siouxie and the Banshees.

Since their recording debut in 1991 the Grieg Trio has established itself as one of the leading ensembles in the world, with a number of highly acclaimed releases. Over the years It has performed at all of the world’s great concert venues, including the Concertgebouw, the Schauspielhaus and the Carnegie Hall. It is a regular visitor to London’s Wigmore Hall and has played there many times to great acclaim, most recently on the 23rd of February this year in a programme featuring works by Beethoven, Shostakovich and Brahms. The group’s new release, which includes trios by Tchaikovsky and Smetana, as well as a rarely recorded piece by Grieg, the Andante Con Moto, is being made available as a double SACD hybrid package for the price of one.

Edvard Grieg’s only essay in the genre was completed, according to the date on the manuscript, on 17 June 1878. The Andante Con Moto in C minor is a substantial piece apparently intended as the slow movement of a piano trio, though in fact its contrasts of character and alternation of slow with faster tempi make it an effective single-movement work. It is certainly no sketch or draft but a fully-realized piece in every way, and of a quality comparable to Grieg’s other, better known, chamber compositions.

Bedrich Smetana is one of the most prominent Czech national composers. His piano trio of 1855 was written in memory of his daughter ‘Frizi’, who died of scarlet fever the same year. The work is spontaneous, rhapsodic and deeply personal in its musical character.

Tchaikovsky’s trio Op. 50 holds a special position. The catalyst for this work was the death of the pianist and pedagogue Nicolai Rubinstein. Tchaikovsky stated that it was “a new form of music that I never have written before”. Op. 50 is a highlight in the romantic literature, both in the pure musical sense and because of the fact that the whole piece lasts for more than 46 minutes. The Grieg Trio received the Critics’ Award in 1993 for their performance of this epic piano trio.

Béla Bartók’s music for the violin occupies an important position in his creative output. The instrument attracted him at intervals throughout his career, from the Andante of 1902 to the magnificently disciplined Sonata for Violin Solo, written in 1944. Norwegian Elise Båtnes, newly appointed concertmaster of the Oslo Philharmonics, makes her international debut release as a soloist with a selection of these phenomenal works, revealing a mature interpreter and an outstanding violinist.

The earliest surviving work by Bartók for violin and piano is the Andante in A major composed in 1902 while he was a student at the Budapest Academy of Music. It seems to have been written for a fellow-student destined for fame as a violinist, namely Adila d’Aranyi, niece of Joseph Joachim. The work was written as a kind of friendly message on a series of six postcards. The Sonata in E minor was written only one year later, but it reveals a more ambitious composer audibly inspired by both the virtuosity of Liszt, Hungarian folk music, the chromatic harmony of Richard Strauss and the violin sonatas of Brahms.

Bartók and Kodály, as professional ethnomusicologists, uncovered the old, authentic Hungarian folk music by going into the countryside with a phonograph and recording the actual melodies people sang and danced to. They published their first joint collection of folksongs in 1906, and Bartók published his piano pieces entitled “For Children” in 1909. In 1931 Bartók transcribed several numbers under the title Hungarian Folk Songs for violin and piano. Bartók’s Sonata for unaccompanied violin was one of his last compositions. It was written early in 1944 for Yehudi Menuhin, who had begun to emerge as a notable interpreter of Bartók’s violin music. The composer worked on the piece in close collaboration with Menuhin, who gave the world premiere in New York on 26 November 1944 and subsequently edited the score for publication.

One of the most well known composers of his generation, George Crumb has developed his very own piano style over the years – a sonic universe of limitless variety. One does not ‘just play’ Crumb, the performer is also required to whistle, sing, shout and whisper in numerous clearly defined ways. Ellen Ugelvik has studied the Makrokosmos in detail with Crumb himself, enabling her to investigate further the ideas and ideals behind various parameters in the score. The liner notes for the release are written by David Burge, who gave the world premiere of the Makrokosmos I.

“While composing Makrokosmos, I was aware of certain recurrent haunting images. At times quite vivid, at times vague and almost subliminal, these images seemed to coalesce around the following several ideas (given in no logical sequence, since there is none): the ‘magical properties’ of music; the problem of the origin of evil’ the ‘timelessness’ of time; a sense of the profound ironies of life so beautifully expressed in the music of Mozart and Mahler.” – George Crumb

Ellen Ugelvik makes her debut recording with the world’s first 5.1 surround sound recording of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos I & II. She was born in Bergen, and has studied with Einar Røttingen at the Grieg Academy in Bergen, Håkon Austbø at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and Steffen Schleiermacher at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Leipzig. She collaborates regularly with composers like George Crumb, Louis Andriessen, Rolf Wallin, Magne Hegdal, Knut Vaage, and Dai Fujikura, some of which have dedicated works to her.

The young trumpet virtuoso Tine Thing Helseth came to the attention of audiences and critics when she was awarded 2nd prize in the 2006 Eurovision Young Musicians finale in Vienna. With her debut CD, which includes a stunningly fresh new recording of the ever-popular Haydn concerto as well as terrific performances of works by Albinoni, Hummel and Neruda, she seems destined to take the world of classical music by storm.