The Cuban piano virtuoso Jorge Bolet (1914-1990) enjoyed a special relationship...

Lauded for his taut and lean Mozart and pioneering recordings of Bartók and Kodály, Ferenc Fricsay is not a name one associates with Richard Strauss. Like his even rarer excursions into Mahler, Fricsay’s sporadic Straussian ventures follow no particular performing tradition like Fritz Reiner, Karl Böhm, or Herbert von Karajan and consequently feel very fresh and new for their vintage. Recorded between 1949 and 1955, most of these works are included in Deutsche Grammophon’s complete boxes devoted to Fricsay. Indeed, I assumed (wrongly) that Audite had simply packaged up the same performances. The soloists are identical confusingly but these live performances were made some time apart from DG’s accounts. Aside from these repertory duplications Audite’s well-filled album also includes Strauss’s Oboe Concerto, which does expand Fricsay’s recorded legacy.

Fricsay mentored the young Swiss pianist Margrit Weber, and their 1951 performance (on DG) of Strauss’s busy, thorny “piano concerto,” Burleske is endearingly warm-hearted if sober and unvirtuosic. Audite’s account from four years later with the same team is a very different animal. Brisker, brighter, and keener toned, Weber still lacks the fingerwork for Strauss’s climatic moments but she is otherwise splashy and reflective. Fricsay’s accompaniment is lean, gleaming, and transparent, and in those intervening years recording quality could finally do justice to the RIAS strings. DG’s Burleske is a dusty relic by comparison.

Leon Goossens, who gave the UK premiere of the oboe concerto, makes a rare appearance with this Berlin ensemble. Closely recorded, Goossens and Fricsay don’t overplay the chamber aspects of this overtly light and classical-sounding oboe concerto. Despite the interconnected movements and melodic echoes of Strauss’s operatic writing, Fricsay’s expertise in Mozart comes to the fore here.

Recorded on April 20, 1953, Strauss’s little known Duet concertino is the identical performance on both DG and Audite, although the latter’s remastering is brighter and more forward. Charmingly played by Heinrich Geuser and Willi Fugmann, Fricsay’s fights a good case for this slight, late period work. On grander, better-known territory, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche dates from roughly a month after his studio recording for DG, clearly benefiting from all that time spent in the studio. Timing and phrasing are virtually identical, so there are no revelations other than both performances being punchy, playful with shattering climaxes. Fricsay is never afraid to accentuate the theatricality of these tone poems, obtaining colorful, strongly contoured playing from all sections. It’s a terrific end to this collection.

The sound is mono, of course, and in-your-face-close and spotlit. I personally love that sort of “pop record” sound quality, but hi-fi fetishists won’t have read this far anyway. Expect some tape hiss and chalky decay on headphones; otherwise these performances leap out of the speaker. Generously filled as it is, Audite also point you to Fricsay’s spirited version of Don Juan online, which I think is identical to that in the DG box. We Fricsay fans are being spoilt with what is commercially a historical and niche product. Like so much of his work, this disc is so bracingly modern and fresh sounding that my plea is for younger record buyers to sample this and understand that modern performance practice didn’t begin with John Eliot Gardiner. There’s no affected Munich tradition or sentiment: This is Richard Strauss scrubbed clean and placed under the spotlight, with only the recording technology belying the age of these radio tapes. A thrilling album.

These two performers represent two different schools of baroque performance. Gottfried von der Goltz plays with a violin in baroque set-up and a baroque bow, and Christoph Schickendanz plays with a violin in modern set-up with a modern, post-Tourte bow. Actually, they don’t really represent distinct styles; there is some cross-pollination. Schickedanz has taken a cue from period performance practice and has added ornaments to repeated material in the slow movements. He does this to striking effect in the Sarabande of Partita 2. Goltz flashes his PPP credentials briefly in Minuet I by briefly playing notes inegales, which is when you play notes written with equal value with the first note slightly longer than the second. The effect is pleasant because he doesn’t overdo it, and it lends the music a kind of swagger otherwise unobtainable; but he only does it at the beginning of the movement for some reason.

Between the two, I prefer Schickedanz. He is a more analytical player, and he sounds more involved in the music. The ornaments he plays are more interesting than the ones I have heard before. Both sets are good, but neither makes it onto my short list.

Goltz plays a violin made by the 18th-Century Milanese maker Paolo Antonio Testore around 1720. Schickedanz plays a violin made by Giovanni Antonio Marchi in 1780 with a bow from the Peccatte school around 1860.

This is the second recording by these musicians to come my way. The first, four years ago (S/O 2014), was of a jazz Requiem. This one has a few moments of jazz style, but mostly it is a thoughtful and fascinating work that ruminates on seven little poems (no translations) by theologian Bastian Rutten. After each movement is a brief interlude, all based on the same melody but each in a different mood and style.

I wasn’t fond of trombonist Hansjorg Fink’s small-bore, slow-vibrato tone in the first recording, but those elements seem less prominent here. Most prominent is the fantastic, 149-stop Seifert organ of St Marien Basilica in Kevelaer, built in 1907, severely damaged in WW II, and restored by 1981. It makes an incredible array of sounds, from the minuscule to the huge. My favorite is a big, breathy pedal sound—probably a 32-foot pipe—where the gust of air doesn’t last long enough to produce an actual pitch.
Superb recorded sound.

Please keep on reading even though I’ll begin this review by telling you that this disc is the result of an academic research project. No, that doesn’t mean that it’s “dry” or “theoretical”. In this case the research project at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and the Fachhochschule Nordwesternschweiz brought together musicians, instrument makers, art historians, musicologists, and others to reconstruct three new viols to play old music.
Using new information about early 16th-Century instruments, especially about their inner construction, the new viols were built without a bass bar or sound post. The instruments’ “dolce suono profoundly alters the sound balance and blendability between the different instrumental groups” and their “fast response [facilitates] a clear and transparent execution of the diminutions”.

In this repertoire—often based on vocal music—instrumental players are expected to invent highly intricate melodic figurations called diminutions. Members of Ensemble Arcimboldo play with sensitivity, creative improvisation, deft touch, and mastery of the style. The composer and interpreter create new works together.

Soprano Ulrike Hofbauer sings 7 of the 23 pieces with varied color and tone to complement the shadowed, sweet, and slightly bitter edge characteristic of viols. Texts are also supplied for two of the instrumental versions (De Layolle’s ‘Lasciar’ Il Velo’ played here by viols and Willaert’s ‘Amor Mi Fa Morire’ where diminutions are played on recorder). Having texts for these helps the listener hear how players interpret words in their phrasing, gesture, and timbre.

The pieces are taken from several published collections from 1539–1562, and the booklet contains two essays about the research project with drawings and photos of the instruments. Texts in Italian.

Die Etüden op. 12, vier Polonaisen und das Fantaisie-Impromptu op. 66 von Frédéric Chopin stellt Bolet leuchtend transparent, durchaus auch mit machtvollem Zugriff, aber nie als bloße Pianistik dar. Robert Schumanns f-moll-Sonate op. 14 wird zum nachdenklichen Fest romantischer Erregungen, Claude Debussys "Images II" werden zu traumverlorenen Gebilden, gewonnen aus feinstem Klanggespür.

An immensely important issue, this is the first recording of the performing edition by British musicologist David Trippett of Sardanapalo, the only projected opera by the mature Liszt of which substantial material survives. Its genesis remains to some extent shrouded in mystery. Byron’s 1821 play Sardanapalus, about the sensualist Assyrian king who immolated himself and his mistress after failing to quell an insurrection, was among the subjects that Liszt was contemplating, as early as 1842, to mark his return to opera, his only previous work in the genre being the juvenile Don Sanche of 1825. Why he chose Sardanapalo over, among others, Byron’s Corsair and an opera about Spartacus, is seemingly unknown. We also have scant information about Sardanapalo’s librettist, an unnamed Italian poet suggested by the Princess Cristina Belgiojoso after attempts failed to procure a text from the French playwright Félicien Mallefille. Nor has the full libretto survived: the only extant portions are those to be found in the manuscript.

Liszt seemingly began composition early in 1850 and was still working on the score in the winter of 1851 52. At some point shortly afterwards, however, he abandoned the opera, probably because his librettist was either unable or unwilling to undertake revisions to the second and third acts. The manuscript itself, meanwhile, though familiar to Liszt scholars, was long deemed too fragmentary for reconstruction. Trippett’s painstaking research, however, revealed that in essence what we possess is a draft piano-vocal score of the complete first act, albeit with some key signatures omitted and a handful of gaps in the accompaniment; there are also a number of cues for orchestration, which Liszt apparently intended to entrust to his assistant Joachim Raff. Trippett consequently decided there was ‘just sufficient’ to undertake a performing version, and his edition caused something of a stir when it was first heard in Weimar last August, conducted by Kirill Karabits, with the cast we have here.

It is indeed extraordinary and in some respects unique. Commentators familiar with the manuscript have often dubbed it ‘Meyerbeerian’. The opera might better, however, be described as through-composed bel canto, at times echoing Bellini, at others pre-empting 1860s Verdi (Forza in particular comes to mind), though the melodic contours and chromatic harmony are unmistakably Liszt’s own. Dramatically straightforward and uncluttered, it falls into four distinct sections: an introductory chorus for Sardanapalo’s many concubines; a colossal scena for Mirra, the king’s slave-girl mistress; a love duet for the central couple; and a final trio in which Mirra and the Chaldean soothsayer Beleso attempt to persuade the unwilling king to go into battle after news of the insurrection breaks. Though the opening chorus repeats its material once too often, the rest of the act is beautifully shaped, while Liszt’s fluid treatment of bel canto structures – blurring boundaries between recitative, aria and arioso in a quest for psychological veracity – reveals an assured musical dramatist at work.

He makes no concessions to his singers, though, and his vocal writing is taxing in the extreme. Joyce El Khoury is pushed almost to her limits in Mirra’s scena, with its big declamatory recitatives, interrupted cavatina (it fragments as mounting desire for her captor obliterates memories of a life once lived in freedom) and vast closing cabaletta. Her dramatic commitment is never in doubt, though, and there’s a ravishing passage later on when she pleads with the king to put aside his aversion to military conflict, her voice soaring sensually and ecstatically over rippling harp arpeggios. Airam Hernández sounds noble and ardent in the title-role, wooing El Khoury with fierce insistence and responding to Oleksandr Pushniak’s stentorian Beleso with assertive dignity. The choral singing is consistently strong, the playing terrific, and Karabits conducts with extraordinary passion. Trippett has carefully modelled his orchestration on Liszt’s works of the early 1850s, and it sounds unquestionably authentic when placed beside the exhilarating performance of Mazeppa that forms its companion piece. Throughout there’s a real sense of excitement at the discovery and restoration of a fine work by one of the most inventive of composers. You end up wishing that Liszt had somehow incorporated operatic composition into his extraordinary career, and wondering what the course of musical history might have been if he had.

Es ist mutig, ein Album ausschließlich mit Sonaten für Violine solo vorzulegen, stehen diese Werke doch zumeist ein wenig im Schatten der klangvolleren Arbeiten für Violine und Klavier. Doch wenn diese Solosonaten so engagiert und ausdrucksstark vorgetragen werden wie hier von Franziska Pietsch, dann hat sich dieser Mut gelohnt. Pietsch, die noch in der DDR als Wunderkind Karriere machte und seitdem vorwiegend als Konzertmeisterin und Solistin arbeitet, konzentriert sich dabei auf Arbeiten der Spätromantik und der frühen Moderne.

Béla Bartóks Sonate für Violine solo gehört unbestritten zu den größten Meisterwerken der Literatur für dieses Instrument. Entstanden 1944 im New Yorker Exil für Yehudi Menuhin, verweist das Werk bereits in seiner Anlage mit einer großen Chaconne als Kopfsatz, gefolgt von einer Fuge, auf die Sonaten für Solo-Violine Johann Sebastian Bachs. Im ersten Satz wirkt die Interpretation Pietschs sehr expressiv, mitunter sogar aggressiv und mit großen dynamischen Kontrasten. Dabei gelingen ihr vor allem die polyfonen Passagen äußerst eindrucksvoll, während die lyrischen Abschnitte manchmal etwas unterkühlt wirken. Kraftvoll und emotional packend dagegen ihre Version der Fuge, zart und einfühlsam das zentrale liedhaft-melancholische Adagio.

Ohne diese Bedeutungstiefe kommt die Solosonate von Sergej Prokofjew daher. Das liegt vermutlich daran, dass sie ursprünglich als Übungsstück für Geigenstudenten gedacht war. Es ist ein heiteres, unkompliziertes Werk. Man hört Franziska Pietsch die Freude an, mit der sie sich dieser Musik annimmt. Da wird jede melodische Phrase ausgekostet, jeder kompositorische Einfall zelebriert. Sätze aus den Solo-Sonaten Eugène Ysaÿes sind heute meist nur noch als Zugaben zu hören. Dass sich eine intensivere Beschäftigung mit diesen Werken lohnt, stellt Pietsch hier eindrucksvoll unter Beweis.

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