Phoenix Edition is dedicated to the rediscovery of works by almost-forgotten composers as well as high-quality recordings of pieces written by well-known composers. Below you will find the Phoenix Edition titles that are available on July 29.
This set of 2 CDs contains recordings of music conducted by Gary Bertini when he was chief conductor of the Radio Symphony Orchestra Cologne of the West-German Radio Corporation Cologne (WDR). He cast first class soloists for the music he chose, namely Mozart’s two most important spiritual vocal works. In the Mass in c Minor, the first soprano part is full of virtuoso technical difficulties-especially in the famous “Et incarnatus est” passage-legendary soprano Arleen Augér interprets it in a fabulously exemplary manner. The bass voice in the Requiem is no other than young Thomas Quasthoff, whose voice already possessed the sonorous, unique timbre that so quickly secured him a place among the world’s best singers. Other famous singers perform the other solo parts, among them Doris Soffel, Thomas Moser, Robert Swensen and Krisztina Laki; and thus we encounter some truly exemplary recordings conducted by the experienced Gary Bertini.
An archive of inestimable value: Generally, the year 1498, during the reign of Maximilian I, is considered to be the founding year of the Wiener Hofkapelle, even though we know today that its roots stretch back deep into the 13th century, as “Hofkapelle der Habsburger.” A multitude of composers left their musical imprints behind in the form of commissioned works for ecclesiastical celebrations, coronation ceremonies, lyrical dramas, operas or simple and courtly light music. In the epoch of Viennese Classical music it was no less than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri who assisted the Wiener Hofkapelle to their eminence.
For this, the first redressment has been made: then, in addition to famous names such as Franz Schubert or Michael Haydn, it is the today unfairly forgotten “minor masters” like Joseph Leopold von Eybler, Johann von Herbeck or Benedict Randhartinger who, with their impressive and richly orchestrated sacral works, provide for surprises. An impressive programme in the capable hands of Helmuth Froschauer, himself conductor of the Wiener Hofkapelle and thus an expert for this repertoire.
Franz Vinzenz Krommer, born in Trebice in 1759, three years after Mozart, and deceased in Vienna in 1831, three years after Beethoven, he is something like the prototype of the classical composer. With unborrowed ideas, wit and fire he is, in his early works, closest to Haydn and Mozart, jokingly winking like Joseph Haydn, as lazily elegant as was composed only in Vienna. In his later years he approached the musical language of Beethoven and, on occasion, his stylistic devices extend into the world of expression associated with romanticism. The string trio also belongs to the later profound works, with which he invoked in part the dramatics of Beethoven, in part the yearning of Schubert.
Phoenix can offer yet another first class ensemble from the realm of Baroque and Early Music: the L’Orfeo Baroque Orchestra under Michi Gaigg. The orchestra is one of the leading ensembles for historically informed performance practice and has been awarded international prizes for its recordings such as Diapason, Pizzicato (Supersonic Award), Choc du Monde de la Musique and Radio Österreich 1 (Pasticcio-Prize).
Jean-Féry Rebel’s dance symphony Les élémens from 1737/38 is about chaos. All the notes in the opening key are in a “cluster” of dissonance. The bass represents the earth; the run of flutes, the course of water; the air is painted with restrained notes, followed by cadences of small flutes, and fire with the help of the dexterous runs of the violins. The suite describes the state of nature before man’s arrival as seen very much through the eyes of the French late Baroque.
Joseph Haydn named him as “one of the greatest geniuses that I have known.” The Mozart contemporary Joseph Martin Kraus (1756-1792) has for a long time now no longer been regarded as a “lesser master.” This is above all to be ascribed to the unremitting commitment of Werner Ehrhardt, who for many years has assertively promoted the music. On this new SACD a “summit meeting” takes place with Simone Kermes, the young and exceptional soprano.
Together with the ensemble L’arte Del Mondo the pair have dug out the four cantatas La Scusa (1777) VB 43, La Pesca (1779) VB 44, LaGelosia (1780) VB 46 and La Primavera (1790) VB 47.
Naxos releases Volume One of Arthaus Musik’s History of the Organ series in celebration of one of the oldest, most complex and most glorious musical instruments known to man. The four-part series tells the history of this magnificent instrument, displaying the beauty of the sound it produces, the wealth of music written for it, the craftsmanship involved in building such a complicated and often ornate structure and the wonderful settings in which it has come to reside.Volume One:Latin Origins begins in the Verona workshop of Bartolomeo Formentelli where he talks about the many craftsman skills that organ makers must possess and how these skills, in cooperation with traditional materials and processes, go into making each organ sound it’s best. The episode travels through Italy, Spain and France to trace the origins, history and development of the organ. It encompasses the classical sobriety of the Italian style, the Golden Age of the organ in sixteenth-century Spain, and the French style of the eighteenth century.
Volumes coming soon: Volume Two:From Sweelinck to Bach - A look at Central and Northern Europe and Germany provinces when the organ was popular from end of the middle ages. Because of Lutheran reform in the church, the organ became a widespread and important part of religious worship. This volume examines the development of organ music from Sweelinck to Bach.
Volume Three:The Golden Age - The third volume of the series explores the organ’s true renaissance in the first half of 18th Century. Mechanical and technical perfection in the structure and design of the organ coincided with the greatest musical expression it was now capable of. There were two important schools of organ music at this time: German and French. In this episode the viewer will visit the very sites in Germany associated with the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Volume Four:The Modern Age - Volume four introduces Romantic era organ composers, some of which continued to compose in the style of their great predecessor J.S. Bach. Many 19th Century composers tried to bring the language of the orchestra to organ composition, while many primarily composed for and played the organ for liturgical purposes. This volume examines the music of composers not necessarily known for their organ compositions, such as Liszt, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Saint-Saens, Franck, and Messiaen.
Hailed by the Times (London) as the “world’s leading festival of early music”, the Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF), directed by Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, has received two Grammy® nominations for its recordings of Baroque operas on the CPO label: Conradi’s Ariadne (777073-2) and Lully’s Thésée
(777240-2).The ensemble’s much-awaited third recording, Jean- Baptiste Lully’s Psyché (777367-2), was recorded at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall following BEMF’s North American premiere performances at its 14th biennial festival. This world premiere recording features soprano Carolyn Sampson in the title role and Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin as Venus. Other cast members include Aaron Sheehan, Colin Balzer, Amanda Forsythe, Mireille Lebel, Yulia Van Doren, Olivier Laquerre, Jason McStoots, Matthew Shaw, Aaron Engebreth, Ricard Bordas, Teresa Wakim, and José Lemos.
It was 330 years ago that Lully’s tragédie lyrique Psyché was performed at the court of Louis XIV. The plot concerns the fate of the most beautiful girl in the world and the jealousy of the goddess Venus; hell, death, and the devil; frightful journeys to the underworld; and the happy marriage of the god of love Amor and Psyche - that is, once her divine mother-in-law no longer has anything against this union, since Jupiter has endowed her soul with immortality. This magnificent and richly varied, entertaining as well as horrifying, musically and scenically uncommonly lavish opera from the France of the Sun King was presented last year at the Boston Early Music Festival.
Jørgen Plaetner is best known as one of the pioneers of electronic music in Scandinavia. This new recording from Danish label Dacapo (8226520) features Plaetner’s acoustic works and includes Episoder og Kollisoner, Op. 82 (1996) for clarinet, cello and piano; Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 93 (2000-2001); Three Songs to Texts by Stig Dagerman (1988); and Four Danish Songs.
Born in Copenhagen in 1930, Plaetner played piano as a child and entered the Royal Danish Academy of music at the age of 19, where he studied with Vagn Holmboe, Niels Viggo Bentzon, and Bjørn Hjelmborg. Early on, he became aware of the experimentation going on abroad in the field of electronic music, and at 20 he became one of the first Danes to participate in courses for contemporary music at Darmstadt. He attended the first performances of Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge and Kontakte, which inspired him to set up his own electronic music studio. In addition, Plaetner was a music teacher and taught at the State School for the Blind for almost a decade before taking a position in the town of Holstebro as the country’s first “town composer.” While serving in Holstebro, he set up a council music school for children and wrote music for local ensembles. Unfortunately, a rift with the city council in 1977 precipitated his move to Sweden, where he lived for the rest of his life.
When Plaetner died in 2002, his computer music was almost entirely forgotten in Denmark until Dacapo released a CD with a selection of his electronic works from the 1960s and 1970s (8226511), giving these works a new lease on life. That said, his electronic works have largely overshadowed his acoustic music, which includes music for chamber ensembles, vocal and theater music, and eight piano sonatas.
Representing one of the larger chamber works from Plaetner’s later period is the trio Episodes and Collisions, which was written in 1996 for the LINensemble. Partly influenced by Eastern European folk music (filtered through Bartók and Holmboe), the piece consists of various episodes that collide, in the manner of a rhapsody.
Plaetner’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano was one of his last works, and this performance marks its world premiere. In this three-movement work, the clarinet is torn between three different moods: frantic, touching, and wounded.
Plaetner’s settings of Swedish texts by Stig Dagerman show his interest in politics. Dagerman, from 1943 until his suicide in 1954, noted his daily observations in the form of “diary leaves,” which were printed in a left-wing Swedish newspaper. Plaetner came across the texts when they appeared in book form in 1983. They became “shrewd, ironic aphorisms on the meaninglessness of war.” The Four Danish Songs feature settings of poems by poets Halfdan Rasmussen, one of Denmark’s best-loved poets, symbolist poet Sophus Claussen, Arne Herløv Petersen and Pia Tafdrup.
The latest release from composer Michael Nyman, the 8 Lust Songs are based on texts by the Arezzo-born Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), who was known as the ‘Scourge of Princes’ for his outspokenness against the authorities of church and state. The sonnets belong to the first period of Aretino’s life in Papal Rome. In 1525 Aretino obtained the release from prison of Marcantonio Raimondi, an engraver who was responsible for I modi, a series of 16 engravings which depicted explicit sexual positions, based on works by the mannerist painter and Raphael pupil Giulio Romano (unfortunately, the original drawings have been lost). A second edition of I modi was published in 1527, this time with pictures and text-the first time an erotic text and pictures were combined.
Mr. Nyman has written:
“The origins of my settings of Pietro Aretino’s I Sonetti Lussuriosi, now known as 8 Lust Songs, lie in an exhibition of erotic art, that Marina Wallace and Martin Kemp were planning for the Hayward Gallery in 2005, and which eventually re-surfaced at the Barbican Centre as Seduced, in October 2007. The curators asked me to provide what would have become a tape compilation of erotic music of the past, but I preferred to explore my own approach to musical eroticism through the medium of 8 of the 16 of Licentious Sonnets, that Aretino wrote to ‘illuminate’ Giulio Romano’s I modi. The initial decision to ask Marie Angel to sing both the male and female roles was crucial to my attempt to dramatize and create as much variety as possible out of these repetitive dialogues of the sex act.
The 8 Lust Songs are the most recent in a long series of sex-related works that seem to have engaged me since the mid 60s when, as a student musicologist, I was asked by Professor Thurston Dart to make a new edition of Purcell’s Catches, which restored the dirty words that the Victorians had removed. From there, via the vast number of films that have required me to write music to accompany sex scenes - from The Draughtsman’s Contract to The Piano, from Carrington to The Libertine - to Acts of Beauty (2004), Love Counts (2005) and to the Sonetti, is a logical but haphazard progression. The Kiss (1985) and Facing Goya (2000) may, on the other hand, deal with non-sexual body art, but they, like the 8 Lust Songs and Acts of Beauty, are also concerned with adding a musical interpretation to verbal texts that are simultaneously coupled with the visual.”
Hungarian Music for Cello and Piano featuring cellist Mark Kosower and pianist Jee-Won Oh is now available from Naxos. The recording begins with Bartók’s First Rhapsody, an arrangement of Transylvanian folk music aimed at popularizing his music in a lighter, more popular, genre. The cello often carries the folk melodies, while the piano offers a playful accompaniment. Liszt’s Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth is sparsely scored and evokes a religious atmosphere of haunting solitude. The dramatic song is filled with images, fantasy, and memories but always maintains an underlying feeling of nostalgia. Mazurka in G minor, Op. 11, No. 3 and Serenade, Op. 54, No. 2 are salon songs composed by cellist and teacher David Popper. While the Mazurka is an artful expression of the Polish dance, the Serenade shows the influence of Spanish gypsies. Adagio by Zoltán Kodály is decidedly individual in tone despite the influence that Brahms had on the then young composer. Ruralia Hungarica by Kodály was originally written as a set of seven pieces for solo piano in 1923. Dohnányi then proceeded to set five of these pieces for orchestra, three for violin and piano, and one for cello and piano (as recorded here). Both works are expressions of the pious life of the Hungarian peasant. The four-movement Sonata in B flat minor, Op. 8 by Ernő Dohnányi is written in the tradition of the great Romantic sonata. The piano-writing is well-conceived and is very difficult which undoubtedly reflects Dohnányi’s abilities as a pianist. The cello generally plays a melodic role throughout the Sonata as melody is very aptly suited for the resonance of the cello. Last, but certainly not least, comes a work for virtuoso cellists, Toccata carpricciosa for solo cello, Op. 36 composed by Miklós Rósza. Toccata carpricciosa has three distinct sections, each portraying a different range of emotions, only to finish in a searing and resolute passage performed by the solo cello.One of the outstanding cellists of his generation, Mark Kosower is hailed by musicians and critics alike for his instrumental mastery and deep musical integrity. Mark has performed with the Toledo and Florida symphony orchestras, at the Aspen Music Festival, has held recitals at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and at New York City’s Merkin Hall and appears on another Naxos recording released in June 2008, Ginastera’s complete works for cello and piano (8570569). Mr. Kosower has collaborated with many prominent conductors such as James DePreist, Christoph Eschenbach, JoAnn Falletta, Erich Kunzel, Nicholas McGegan, Anton Nanut, Stefan Sanderling, Gunther Schuller, Gerard Schwarz, Joseph Silverstein and Hugh Wolff.
Born in Seoul, the Korean pianist Jee-Won Oh has performed internationally as soloist and chamber musician in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. She has made appearances in some of the world’s great musical centers, including the cities of Belgrade, Paris, Salzburg, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington DC. She has performed on the Great Performers Series at Lincoln Center in New York as well as at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C., the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Salle Gaveau in Paris, Kumho Art Hall in Seoul, and at the Sala Cecilia Meireles in Rio de Janeiro. She has also participated in such prestigious music festivals as the Schleswig-Holstein Festival and the Ernen Musikdorf, and she appears regularly at the Mammoth Lakes Music Festival and the Sitka Music Festival.
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This set of 2 CDs contains recordings of music conducted by Gary Bertini when he was chief conductor of the Radio Symphony Orchestra Cologne of the West-German Radio Corporation Cologne (WDR). He cast first class soloists for the music he chose, namely Mozart’s two most important spiritual vocal works. In the Mass in c Minor, the first soprano part is full of virtuoso technical difficulties-especially in the famous “Et incarnatus est” passage-legendary soprano Arleen Augér interprets it in a fabulously exemplary manner. The bass voice in the Requiem is no other than young Thomas Quasthoff, whose voice already possessed the sonorous, unique timbre that so quickly secured him a place among the world’s best singers. Other famous singers perform the other solo parts, among them Doris Soffel, Thomas Moser, Robert Swensen and Krisztina Laki; and thus we encounter some truly exemplary recordings conducted by the experienced Gary Bertini.
osers left their musical imprints behind in the form of commissioned works for ecclesiastical celebrations, coronation ceremonies, lyrical dramas, operas or simple and courtly light music. In the epoch of Viennese Classical music it was no less than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri who assisted the Wiener Hofkapelle to their eminence.
Franz Vinzenz Krommer, born in Trebice in 1759, three years after Mozart, and deceased in Vienna in 1831, three years after Beethoven, he is something like the prototype of the classical composer. With unborrowed ideas, wit and fire he is, in his early works, closest to Haydn and Mozart, jokingly winking like Joseph Haydn, as lazily elegant as was composed only in Vienna. In his later years he approached the musical language of Beethoven and, on occasion, his stylistic devices extend into the world of expression associated with romanticism. The string trio also belongs to the later profound works, with which he invoked in part the dramatics of Beethoven, in part the yearning of Schubert.
formed performance practice and has been awarded international prizes for its recordings such as Diapason, Pizzicato (Supersonic Award), Choc du Monde de la Musique and Radio Österreich 1 (Pasticcio-Prize).
Joseph Haydn named him as “one of the greatest geniuses that I have known.” The Mozart contemporary Joseph Martin Kraus (1756-1792) has for a long time now no longer been regarded as a “lesser master.” This is above all to be ascribed to the unremitting commitment of Werner Ehrhardt, who for many years has assertively promoted the music. On this new SACD a “summit meeting” takes place with Simone Kermes, the young and exceptional soprano.
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