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Monthly Archive: April 2025

Leif Ove Andsnes plays Liszt – Via Crucis & Solo Piano – Sony Classical

Leif Ove Andsnes plays Liszt – Via Crucis & Solo Piano – Sony Classical

by | Apr 30, 2025 | Classical CD Reviews

LISZT: Via Crucis, S. 53; 6 Consolations, S. 172; Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, S. 175: No. 9 Andante lagrimoso; No. 8 Miserere, d’après Palestrina. Largo – Leif Ove Andsnes, piano/ Oystein Stensheim, tenor/ Olie Holmgren, bass-baritone/ Ditte Marie Braein & Magnhild Korsvik, sopranos/ Mari Askvik, mezzo-soprano/ The Norwegian Soloists’ Choir/ Grete Pedersen, conductor – Sony 19802856672 (2/8/25) (58:43) *****: In 1861 Franz Liszt left Weimar, moving to Rome, where in 1865 he took minor orders as an Abbé in the Catholic Church. Perhaps the outward conversion to overt religious ideals confirmed his constant need for ecstasies of experience, sacred and profane. In 1869 Liszt began his vie trifurquée, his transits between Rome, Weimar, and Budapest. The visionary in Liszt set liturgical texts in the form of motets, oratorios, and masses, meaning to raise the level of sacred music to the artistic standards of lay compositions. The 1879 Via Crucis, for soloists, chorus, and orchestra (or organ), serves as an experiment for his idiosyncratic, radical chromaticism, often straining the boundaries of the tonal system Pianist and conductor Leif Ove Andsnes calls his 23-27 August 2024 recording of the Via Crucis “an encounter with Liszt’s soul,” a confrontation with the issues of faith, […]

Timothy Ridout, Viola – Bach, Britten, Shaw, Telemann – Harmonia Mundi

Timothy Ridout, Viola – Bach, Britten, Shaw, Telemann – Harmonia Mundi

by | Apr 29, 2025 | Classical CD Reviews

Timothy Ridout (viola) plays: BACH: partita no 2.  BRITTEN; Elegy. SHAW: in manus tuas,   TELEMANN: Fantasias – Harmonia Mundi HMM 902 750 (61.08) 2/2025 [Distr. PIAS] **** Timothy Ridout’s new issue has no title, unusual for Harmonia Mundi productions.  It is his first solo performance  on disc after a couple of award winning chamber recitals and a concerto recording of Bloch and Elgar. Four composers are featured on the cover along  with striking blurred photo of the performer.  We are invited to figure out without any thematic hints what  each has to do with the viola as a solo instrument and perhaps how they fit together as a whole.  Telemann and Bach both wrote a select number of works for solo string instruments, whether they are called partitas or Sonatas or fantasias doesn’t seem very important.  They are all based on dance suites and pared down to fit over no more than four strings. In Telemann’s case, he allows the violin (or viola) to stay pretty close to its graceful baroque idiom. Cantabile singing, modest additions of a second voice to steer the way through an implicit but not overly complex harmonic support. They are pieces of great charm.  […]

James Ehnes, Andrew Armstrong – Brahms Viola Sonatas, Schumann Märchenbilder – Onyx

James Ehnes, Andrew Armstrong – Brahms Viola Sonatas, Schumann Märchenbilder – Onyx

by | Apr 27, 2025 | Classical CD Reviews

BRAHMS: Viola Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 120/1; Viola Sonata No. 2 in E-flat Major, Op. 120/2; Wiegenlied, Op. 49/4; SCHUMANN: Märchenbilder, Op. 113 – James Ehnes, viola/ Andrew Armstrong, piano – ONYX 4256 (9/11/24) (61:31) [Distr. by PIAS] ****: Canadian-American violinist James Ehnes (b. 1976) addresses (9-12 October 2023) the two sonatas Johanns Brahms wrote late in his creative life, 1891, inspired by the clarinetist of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, Richard Mühlfeld (1856-1907, the two sonatas (1894) later arranged for the viola. Robert Schumann composed his sequence of four “Fairy Tale Pictures” in 1851 with violinist and conductor Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski in mind.  For these recordings of music by Brahms and Schumann, James Ehnes performs on the 1696 ‘Achinto’ Stradivari viola, courtesy of the Royal Academy of Music. Schumann’s patented melancholy informs the opening of his Op. 113, marked Nicht schnell, D minor, the three minutes of the piece haunted by the close, darkly hued intimacy of the two instruments. Schumann’s template for rondo form dominates the second piece, Lebhaft, F major, an athletic, dotted-rhythm excursion with two intervening episodes. The spirit of the hunt reigns here, the viola’s rich stops and the piano’s sweeping chords affecting […]

BRAHMS: Piano Quartets Nos. 2, 3 – Krystian Zimerman – Deutsche Grammophon

BRAHMS: Piano Quartets Nos. 2, 3 – Krystian Zimerman – Deutsche Grammophon

by | Apr 21, 2025 | Classical CD Reviews

BRAHMS: Piano Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 26; Piano Quartet No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 60 – Krystian Zimerman, piano/ Maria Nowak, violin/ Katarzyna Budnik, viola/ Yuya Okamoto, cello – DG 486 4650 (2/6/25) (79:10) [Distr. by Universal] ****: Recorded at LAC Lugano Arts e Cultur, Sala Teatro, 6/2021 and 4/2023 respectively, these collaborations between pianist Krystian Zimerman and selected chamber music colleagues testify to his enduring passion for making music on intimate terms, a residual effect of his musical childhood in Zabrze, Upper Silesia. The 1981 Lockenhaus Festival directed by Gidon Kremer solidified Zimerman’s notion of the quartet ensemble, which resulted in his collecting 500 pieces for diverse instruments. Of the three piano quartets by Johannes Brahms, Zimerman opted for the latter two, given the relative familiarity of the No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 25.   The A Major Piano Quartet of 1862 results from residences Brahms enjoyed between his native Hamburg and a visit to Vienna, where he absorbed the creative impulses he relished from the likes of Beethoven and Schubert. The first movement, an expansive Allegro non troppo, sets the keyboard part in triplets, answered by the cello’s flowing eighth notes, and the […]