Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.

This week’s pick from the Orfeo label (C621061A) is the second movement of English composer William Walton’s Cello Concerto, a work that provided a rich, atmospheric display vehicle for both soloist Daniel Müller-Schott and conductor André Previn, who was a personal friend of Walton. The second movement is a test of the soloist’s virtuosity, with flickering tone colours and flute-like harmonics combining with brilliant scales and demanding multiple-stopping. After two brief cadenzas, Walton recalls the cello’s lyrical qualities, and in a duet with the orchestral winds, he creates a kaleidoscope of virtuosic rhythmic effects that exploit the instrument’s range of sonorities.

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Cello Concerto – Allegro appassionato (C621061A)

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Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.

This week’s pick from the Dynamic label (CDS517) is Mantovana, a short piece by Italian guitarist/composer Francesco Corbetta. Born around 1615, Corbetta served at a number of European courts, including in England from 1660 to 1670, where Charles II conferred upon him the title of "Gentleman of the Chamber to the Queen". He died in Paris in 1681, when an epitaph in the Mercure galant, signed by a pupil, cited as his most precious virtue the fact that he had made the guitar speak the true language of love, and that during his marvellous performances, pervaded by an almost divine spirit, he had charmed all his listeners – and would have enchanted Death itself if it had had ears.

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Mantovana (CDS517)

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Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.

This week’s pick from the Capriccio label (C71128) is by Ernst Wilhelm Wolf (1735–1792), a leading musical personality in Weimar for nearly 30 years, initially as organist and eventually as kapellmeister at the court chapel. He composed almost 40 symphonies between 1770 and 1790, and the large scale of his later ones, with their characteristic use of certain forms, varied treatment of the winds, and elements of motivic and thematic work, clearly reflect the influence of the Viennese School. Here’s the first movement of Wolf’s E minor Symphony, probably written between 1785 and 1790, in which the key and Sturm-und-Drang dramatics of the opening movement reflect the influence of Haydn’s minor-key symphonies.

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Symphony in E Minor – Allegro (C71128)

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Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.

This week’s pick from the Ondine label (ODE1089-2) is from the Bassoon Concerto by Finnish composer, journalist and writer Jouni Kaipainen (b. 1956). The second movement’s concept derives from a musical play for children titled Hämärän maa (Land of twilight), where a rag doll becomes animated and dances with a piccolo; in the concerto, the piccolo dances with the solo bassoon, about which Kaipainen noted: “I feel that the bassoon is a far more versatile instrument than we are led to believe from school concerts onwards. To regard it only as the ‘clown of the orchestra’ is to disregard a large portion of its potential – or, at the very least, we should then understand the term ‘clown’ as a mixture of comedy and tragedy in the manner of Don Quixote, Chaplin, Pierrot or the characters of the commedia dell’arte in general.”

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Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.

This week’s pick from the Musiques Suisses catalogue (MGB-6238) is from the Second String Quartet by Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (1886–1957). He was the son of the painter Alfred Schoeck and briefly a pupil of Max Reger, going on to become one of the leading composers of his generation in Switzerland. The selected string quartet was completed in 1923, shortly after Schoeck had been first confronted with musical Modernism at the chamber music festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Salzburg. We hear the work’s Presto finale.

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Presto (MGB-6238)

 

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Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.

This week’s pick from the Oehms Classics label (OC588) spotlights a piano concerto by Leopold Koželuch, born in Velvary, north-west of Prague in 1747, an esteemed contemporary of Mozart, and in some circles considered the finer composer. By 1781 he was regarded so highly that the Archbishop of Salzburg offered him Mozart’s former post as court organist. He declined, later stating to a friend that “the Archbishop’s conduct toward Mozart deterred me more than anything; for if he could let such a man as that leave him, what treatment should I have been likely to meet with?” Food for thought as we listen to the rondo finale of Koželuch’s Fifth Piano Concerto.

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OC588 – III. Rondeau: Poco presto

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Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.

This week’s pick from the Naxos label (8.557577) is an orchestral miniature by Elgar, music that represents a less familiar side to his work but nonetheless imparts engaging, wistful charm and immediate melodic appeal. Elgar’s Suite in D was first performed in Birmingham in 1882, but Elgar revised the work in 1899, when it was published by Novello as Three Characteristic Pieces, Op. 10. We hear the second movement, Sérénade mauresque, opening as a Moorish intermezzo, then wandering from Moorish Spain to pastoral England before returning to close the movement with a recall of the characteristic turns implied by the title.

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No. 2. Serenade mauresque (8.557577)

 

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Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.

This week’s pick from the Orfeo label (C687061A) is from a recording of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, a work completed in 1948 but premiered only in 1955, a victim of the political-artistic scrutiny imposed by the apparatchiks of the then Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. Even with so unpolitical a work Shostakovich could not be careful enough; a violin concerto’s virtuoso form alone would have been difficult to justify to their ears, not least in this finale, in which soloist Arabella Steinbacher plays the ‘Muntz’ Stradivarius made in Cremona in 1736.

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IV. Burlesca: Allegro con brio (C687061A)

 

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Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.

This week’s pick from the Dynamic label (CDS484) presents the finale from Beethoven’s String Quintet, Op. 4, published in 1796. It’s actually an arrangement for strings of an earlier work by Beethoven, the Octet in E flat major for two oboes, two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons, composed in 1792. To refer to it as an arrangement, however, is somewhat diminishing, since Beethoven’s changes to the original score were radical enough to consider the Quintet Op. 4 in many ways as a work in its own right.

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String Quintet in E-Flat Major, Op. 4 – Finale: Presto (CDS484)

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Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.

This week’s pick from the Ondine label (ODE1071-2) is Tangonator, a piece for violin and piano composed by Finnish jazz pianist Iiro Rantala (b. 1970). The work was written for Rantala’s ensemble Tango Kings, which enjoyed the peak of its popularity in New York in the 1990s. On this recording, the violinist is Jaakko Kuusisto (1974–2022), accompanied by the composer.

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Tangonator (ODE1071-2)

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