Ibert: Concerto for Cello & Wind Instruments

Sono Luminus, together with the Baton Rouge Symphony Chamber Players, brings together the works of three contemporary composers in this latest release, Weill - Ibert - Berg.

The son of a cantor, Kurt Weill was born in Dessau into a family that took in operatic performances as a main form of entertainment. When Weill was in his teens the director of the Dessau Hoftheater, Albert Bing, encouraged him in the study of music. Weill briefly studied composition with Engelbert Humperdinck and was already working professionally as a conductor when he attended composer Ferruccio Busoni’s master classes in Berlin. Delighted to see the positive responses of an audience to his first collaboration with playwright Georg Kaiser, Der Protagonist (1926), he thereafter resolved to work toward accessibility in his music. French composer Jacques Ibert was born in Paris August 15, 1890. His father was a financier, his mother an accomplished pianist. She began his musical training when he was four years old, and despite his father’s objection, continued to encourage his ambition to become a musician. Upon returning from his wartime duties in the French Navy during World War I, he resumed his conservatory training, and in 1919 won the Prix de Rome for his cantata Le Poete et la Fee. His navy service in the Mediterranean gave rise to his arguably most famous composition, the 1924 symphonic suite Ports of Call (Escales). He continued to compose for virtually every genre, including seven operas, six symphonic works and five ballets, three choral works, plus scores of incidental pieces, songs, concertos, and scores for films.

Alban Maria Johannes Berg is one of the central figures of twentieth century musical composition. As one of the triumvirate of the Second Viennese School, Berg produced a rather small body of work that is nonetheless distinguished by a strongly Romantic aesthetic and a distinctive dramatic sense.

The Baton Rouge Symphony Chamber Players is a collection of talented artists taken from the larger parent group, the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra. Celebrating its 63rd year, the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra has become an ambassador for the arts in the greater Baton Rouge region and neighboring communities. The BRSO currently offers over 40 concerts a year, bringing in internationally-known guest artists and offering a broad range of programs to the people of the area.

A Czech conductor who excelled worldwide. Martin Turnovsky recordings for the first time on CD.

Paradoxically, a greater opportunity to witness the artistry of the remarkable Czech conductor Martin Turnovsky, whose teachers included Karel Ančerl and George Szell, has been afforded to audiences abroad.

After winning the international conducting competition in Besancon (1958), he had to wait almost a decade for the real launch of his international career, since the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia prevented him from travelling around the world.

He was chief conductor of the Dresdner Staatskapelle and Staatsoper, and, after emigrating to the West at the end of the 1960s, led the Operas in Oslo and Bonn, guest-conducted the New York Philharmonic, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and other major orchestras. Only after the regime change in Czechoslovakia in 1989 could he renew his work with orchestras on home soil. In the 1960s he made numerous recordings for Supraphon. The majority of those presented on these discs are now available on CD for the first time. They bear witness to Turnovsky’s distinct talent, which several years later would dazzle to the full in front of the world’s most renowned orchestras.

This new CD from cellist Ernst Simon Glaser, the Norwegian Navy Band, and musical director Peter Szilvay presents a collection of four fascinating and varied works for cello and wind orchestra. The music includes concertos by pianist Friedrich Gulda, Jacques Ibert, and Olav Anton Thommessen, and the disc’s title piece ‘Zvezdochka in Orbit’ by contemporary Norwegian composer Jon Øivind Ness.

Friedrich Gulda was known as a virtuoso pianist and a remarkable performer, famous of course for his collaborations with Chick Corea. His Cello Concerto was written in 1980 and its style, as with many of his compositions, is highly eclectic. Consequently the ouverture is a rock song, and the finale resembles a virtuosic Sousa march (with a little touch of jazz in the middle) - a superb ending to a virtuosic and highly enjoyable work.

Jon Øivind Ness’s ‘Zvezdochka in Orbit’ refers to the last dog that the Soviet Union sent into orbit only a few weeks before Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. It was commissioned by the soloist here, Ernst Simon Glaser. Olav Anton Thommessen's ‘The Phantom of Light’, a miniature concerto for cello and two woodwind quintets, is a musical representation of a search for light that can never quite be captured. Jacques Ibert’s Concerto, composed in 1925, reminds listeners of his skill at producing musical pictures, most likely as a result of his experience as an accompanist of the silent films.

The Norwegian Navy band is a full-time wind orchestra consisting of 28 musicians and the conductor on this CD is the ensemble’s artistic director Peter Szilvay. With deliberate focus on contemporary music in recent years, both in concert and on recordings, the NNB has established a profile as a key member of the Norwegian contemporary music scene. Ernst Simon Glaser, born in 1975, is the current principal cellist of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and was formerly the principal cellist of the Norwegian National Opera Orchestra and of the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra.