Acquired

The Gramophone Choice

Rachmaninov, Piano Concertos No. 1-4

Vladimir Ashkenazy pf, London Symphony Orchestra / André Previn

Double Decca 444 839-2DF2 (135' · ADD) Recorded 1970-72.

Despite the recording dates, the sound and balance are superb, and there’s nothing to cloud your sense of Ashkenazy’s greatness in all these works. From him every page declares Rachmaninov’s nationality, his indelibly Russian nature. What nobility of feeling and what dark regions of the imagination he relishes and explores in page after page of the Third Concerto. Significantly his opening is a very moderate Allegro ma non tanto, later allowing him an expansiveness and imaginative scope hard to find in other more ‘driven’ or hectic performances. His rubato is as natural as it’s distinctive, and his way of easing from one idea to another shows him at his most intimately and romantically responsive. There are no cuts, and his choice of the bigger of the two cadenzas is entirely apt, given the breadth of his conception. Even the skittering figurations and volleys of repeated notes just before the close of the central Intermezzo can’t tempt Ashkenazy into display and he’s quicker than any other pianist to find a touch of wistfulness beneath Rachmaninov’s occasional outer playfulness (the scherzando episode in the finale).

Such imaginative fervour and delicacy are just as central to Ashkenazy’s other performances. His steep unmarked decrescendo at the close of the First Concerto’s opening rhetorical gesture is symptomatic of his Romantic bias, his love of the music’s interior glow. And despite his prodigious command in, say, the final pages of both the First and Fourth Concertos, there’s never a hint of bombast or a more superficial brand of fire-and-brimstone virtuosity. Previn works hand in glove with his soloist. Clearly, this is no one-night partnership but the product of the greatest musical sympathy. The opening of the Third Concerto’s Intermezzo could hardly be given with a more idiomatic, brooding melancholy, a perfect introduction for all that’s to follow. If you want playing which captures Rachmaninov’s always elusive, opalescent centre then Ashkenazy is hard to beat.

From: https://www.allmusic.com/album/johann-sebastian-bach-mw0003195372

Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson emerged from considerable popularity in his native country, signing with Deutsche Grammophon and releasing an attractive album of music by Philip Glass. With his second album for the label, Johann Sebastian Bach, he ups the stakes; the title itself announces a grand ambition to reimagine the compositions of the first master of keyboard music. Ólafsson rightly points out that the Bach canon is constantly changing, and indeed many of the pieces on his program are not very familiar. Sample the Aria variata, BWV 989, both to hear a marvelous Bach piece that's not one of the common ones, and to experience Ólafsson's piano style, detailed and pianistic without, for the most part, being Romantic. He's a compelling pianist who can take an audience through a wide range of sounds, and his Bach demands attention. He also tries to climb the Bach mountain and plant a new flag at the top, and here he may overreach. Ólafsson ignores Bach's tendency to think in sets, and he picks individual pieces and stacks them up for cumulative effect. There's nothing wrong with this per se, but the program builds in sheer volume toward the end, with the pedal, sparsely applied at the start, playing a greater and greater role. Reactions to this will differ: Ólafsson has the technical equipment to pull off this grand gesture, but whether it fits Bach is something for the listener to decide. A Bach recording that demands attention.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN8-8YAHtws

HiRes album: https://www.prostudiomasters.com/album/page/12717

Booklet: http://vivatmusic.com/booklets/VIVAT107-Bach-The-Six-Cello-Suites-booklet.pdf

Renowned Dutch cellist Viola de Hoog presents an outstanding recording of the greatest of all solo cello masterworks, Johann Sebastian Bach’s extraordinary Six Suites for Solo Cello. Unique in the solo repertoire, Bach’s six suites represent the musical summit for all cellists.

For three decades, period instrument cellist Viola de Hoog has straddled at the highest international level the worlds of both period instrument performance – playing as soloist, principal cellist and guest principal with many of the world’s greatest historic instrument orchestras including Concerto Köln, Netherlands Bach Society, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Tafelmusik Toronto, Anima Aeterna and currently The King’s Consort – and also the ‘modern’ world, playing cello for twenty years in the world-famous Schönberg Quartet.

For this recording, Viola de Hoog plays a remarkable baroque cello from 1750 by the great Italian maker, Giovanni Battista Guadagnini – an instrument perfect for Bach’s music. For the sixth suite, which demands a five-string cello, she plays an equally rare Bohemian instrument dating from the late 18th century, whose unusually large size results in a rich sonority rarely heard in this unusual variant of the cello family.

Recorded by distinguished engineer Adriaan Verstijnen in the perfect acoustic of the Oude Dorpskerk, Bunnik – a historic Dutch church near Utrecht dating back to the twelfth century which has hosted many fine period instrument recordings – this recording is deeply musical yet historically faithful, thoughtful yet inspired. Extensive presentation includes 48 page booklet with authoritative liner note in four languages (English, Dutch, French & German) by renowned Bach expert Prof. Greta Haenen, together with session photographs, and reproductions from Anna Magdalena Bach’s manuscript.

“A formidable player … fine sound … elegance and finesse … entirely convincing”

(Gramophone)

“de Hoog is outstanding … first class recording … among the very best versions ***** ”

(BBC Music Magazine)

“must surely place cellist Viola de Hoog amongst the great performers of Bach’s Cello Suites”

(The Classical Reviewer)

“thoughtful, imaginative, powerful”

(Music and Vision)

From The Gramophone's Duncan Druce:

Viola de Hoog was the cellist of the Schoenberg Quartet. However, alongside her affinity with the music of the Second Viennese School, she has developed all the requirements of technique and stylistic sensitivity to be a formidable player of the Baroque form of her instrument.

This issue is noteworthy for its fine sound and for the elegance and finesse of the playing. De Hoog has a light touch when playing chords: in the Allemande of the Sixth Suite she sketches in the harmony while allowing the listener to concentrate on the beautiful, ornamented melodic line. Another recurring attribute is her poised vigour in the quicker dances, for instance the lively Courantes of the first three Suites. In the corresponding movement of the Fifth Suite, however, her search for liveliness leads to a hurried tempo; I feel that this Courante, closer to the French manner of Couperin, demands a more relaxed approach. And I’m not entirely convinced by the different tempi adopted for the pairs of minuets in the first two Suites. But elsewhere de Hoog, even at her most individual, is entirely convincing. This is certainly the case with her account of the Prelude to the First Suite – spacious and meditative, with a pervasive expressive rubato.

The other preludes similarly have a distinct character. I especially enjoyed the start of the Fourth Suite which, with its awkward leaps, can sound uncomfortable but here sounds entirely suave and natural. The Sixth Suite’s Prelude, too, is pervaded by a joyful, bouncy sense of rhythm.

Viola de Hoog’s interpretations place her midway between two other distinguished Baroque cello accounts. Jaap ter Linden is a very fluent player but his smoother style results in performances that appear less lively and imaginative than de Hoog’s, and his heavier playing of chords tends to interrupt the music’s flow. Roel Dieltiens’s performances adopt a more forceful, often virtuoso manner, with more detached and staccato playing, and sharper characterisation. That is a most striking issue but I imagine many listeners will prefer Viola de Hoog’s gentler approach, as well as the more spacious recording and emollient tone.

At the age of just fifteen, the budding composer Richard Strauss (1864-1949) lost his way during a summer hike on the Heimgarten in the Bavarian Alps, and ended up in a thunderstorm. The next day, he fantasized about the experience on the piano. Twenty years later, that memory had matured into a concept describing a one-day hike in the form of a symphonic poem, and in 1915 – a further fifteen years later – Strauss finally completed his masterpiece. The hike begins in the darkness before dawn, and after sunrise the ascent goes through a forest, past a stream and a waterfall, through meadows and pastures, and up to a glacier. The hiker then loses his way, and after several risky moments arrives at the summit, where he also experiences a vision. The weather then suddenly worsens, and the descent is accompanied by heavy rain and fierce thunderstorms. The eventful day - summarized in just sixty minutes of music - ends with a sunset, and darkness returns.

"An Alpine Symphony" is probably Strauss' most famous symphonic poem. Its content is easily understandable, and the work became especially well-known for its gigantic orchestra. The music is far from heavy-handed, however, with many of the passages orchestrated like chamber music. Like a kind of greeting from the Bavarian Alps, as it were, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and its chief conductor Mariss Jansons have placed this masterpiece, and the music of Richard Strauss in general, on the programme of their tour of Asia in late 2016. The live recording of “Alpine Symphony” concerts in October 2016 in Munich’s Philharmonie im Gasteig is enhanced on this latest CD from BR-KLASSIK by the addition of Strauss’ symphonic poem "Death and Transfiguration", first performed in 1890; the recording here is of concerts performed in Munich in February 2014. We thus have interpretations of two of this great German composer’s most important tone poems on one CD.

Live recordings…with character and excitement. The Alpine Symphony storm is impressively gutsy.

-BBC Music Magazine

April 2017

The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra brings a burnished, polished sound to every strand of Strauss's kaleidoscopic score, and BR-Klassik's engineering is a marvel of presence, clarity and detail.

18th January 2017

A highly desirable album performed by an orchestra who knows this music so well.

classicalsource.com April 2017

Jansons holds the tension throughout as part of a sensitive, deeply-thought reading to leave the listener in a reflective mood…the music provides a moving experience.

Classical Ear 11th April 2017

Beauties, thrills (heroic trumpets) and – appropriately – highs abound in Jansons’s unerringly symphonic approach that journeys and paints pictures and does so compellingly

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