Emánuel Moór: Music for Viola

The works of Emánuel Moór (1863–1931) ought to be celebrated as among the major achievements of Romantic music, but because of Moór’s peripatetic life – he was born in Hungary, studied in Vienna (with Bruckner), performed in the US and across Europe, became a UK citizen and settled and died in Switzerland – no country has claimed and promoted him to the degree he deserves. Moór’s musical language offers a deeply satisfying blend of contrapuntal mastery and ardent lyricism, as the works on this album – written for or involving the viola – demonstrate. In time he will be recognised as one of the masters of his age.

Dirk Hegemann, viola
Dávid Báll, piano (Tracks 3, 8, 9)
Rosenstein String Quartet (Tracks 1–2, 4–7):
Michael Hsu and SooEun Lee, violins
Dirk Hegemann, viola
Markus Tillier, cello
Anima Musicae Chamber Orchestra (Track 10)
Mátyás Antal, conductor (Track 10)

Richard Flury: Der schlimm-heilige Vitalis, Opera in Five Acts

Der schlimm-heilige Vitalis (which can be translated roughly as ‘Lustful Brother Vitalis‘) was the last of the four operas by the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967). It was premiered in 1963, the year after its completion, and then remained unheard until this recording. The plot, based on a novella by Flury’s fellow Swiss, Gottfried Keller, sets jolly village life against religious intolerance and sexual politics in an unsettling blend of the sentimental and the cynical – although love, of course, triumphs in the end. Flury’s late-Romantic music redeems the libretto with a steady flow of memorable melodies, engaging solo and choral numbers, and colourful orchestration – and with a sense of fun never far from the surface.

Rebecca Nelsen, soprano
Marlene Gassner, contralto
Matthias Stier, tenor
Markus Eiche, baritone
Madrigal Choir of the Nuremberg University of Music
Alfons Brandl, chorus-master
Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra
Paul Mann, conductor

Heinrich Sutermeister: Orchestral Works, Volume Two

Heinrich Sutermeister (1910–95) belongs to the generation of Swiss composers after Bloch, Honegger, Martin and Schoeck. His operatic version of Romeo and Juliet soon spread his reputation far afield, and conductors as prominent as Böhm, Karajan and Sawallisch championed his works, although since his death his music has not had the attention it deserves. These four big-boned works – a powerful setting of Boethius, an extract from Romeo und Julia and two sets of moving love-letters from genuine historical figures in Renaissance, Baroque and Enlightenment Germany and Switzerland – attest to the acuity of his ear in balancing voice and large orchestra and confirm his instinct for drama.

Juliane Banse, soprano (1–9, 17–22)
Benjamin Bruns, tenor (10–16)
Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz
Rainer Held, conductor

Richard STÖHR: Chamber Music, Volume Four

Like Korngold, Toch, Schoenberg, Zeisl and Zemlinsky, Richard Stöhr (1874–1967) was another Austrian composer driven into American exile by the Nazis. His generous output of music, being rediscovered at last in these Toccata Classics recordings, includes seven symphonies, much chamber music, songs, and choral and piano pieces. These chamber works, from his first years in the United States, show him in surprisingly relaxed mood, the Viennese lyricism of his native city maintained in his US refuge.

Stefan Koch, cello
Conor Nelson, (Tracks flute 1 – 4)
Velda Kelly, (Tracks violin 1 – 4)
Priscilla Johnson, (Tracks violin 5 – 9)
Judith Teasdle, (Tracks violin 5 – 9)
Susan Schreiber, (Tracks viola 5 – 9)
Mary Siciliano (Tracks 1 – 4)

Fritz HART: Complete Music for Violin and Piano, Volume One

The composer and conductor Fritz Hart (1874–1949) led a peripatetic life: London-born, he moved to Australia to tour travelling productions of musicals there and in New Zealand. He soon became a formative figure in Australian musical life as teacher and conductor, but in 1936 left to become the first professor of music at the University of Hawai‘i and permanent conductor of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra. Hart‘s three violin sonatas – poised but passionate – reveal a musical language influenced by Debussyan Impressionism but also coloured by his own Celtic roots.

Stephanie McCallum, piano
Susan Collins, violin

Stephen Dodgson: Chamber Music, Volume Two: Three Quintets

These three quintets by the London-born Stephen Dodgson (1924–2013) continue the exploration of his chamber music on Toccata Classics. Dodgson’s musical language inherited something of Shostakovich’s irony, Janáček’s spiky energy and Britten’s polished clarity, occasionally reaching further into the past in passages of Purcellian dignity, all animated with a gentle harmonic warmth of Dodgson’s own. The result, in a typically English paradox, manages to be both elusive and direct.

Tippett Quartet
Emma Abbate, piano (Tracks 1-4, 8-10)
Susan Monks, cello (Tracks 5-7)

Ferenc Farkas: Complete Wind Quintets

Ferenc Farkas (1905–2000) was one of the longest-lived members of the wave of Hungarian nationalist composers which began with the rise of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. A student of Ottorino Respighi in Rome, Farkas blended Respighi’s Latin melodiousness with the Magyar folk-heritage that Bartók and Kodály had made the central element of Hungarian music. His Old Hungarian Dances of the 17th Century have become a staple of the wind-quintet repertoire; the other five works on this disk display the same irrepressible joie de vivre.

Ulrike Schneider, mezzo soprano
Daniel Dodds, violin
Dieter Lange, double-bass
Phoebus Quintet, wind quintet
Christoph Bösch, flute
Barbara Zumthurn-Nünlist, oboe
Dimitri Ashkenazy, clarinet
Martinů Roos, horn
Susan Landert, bassoon

Axel Ruoff: Complete Works for Organ, Volume Five

This final instalment of the organ compositions of Axel Ruoff (born in Stuttgart in 1957) presents two starkly contrasted sides of his musical personality: three of them, for voice and organ, are concerned with the spiritual – two even addressing head-on the issue of death itself – and are thus solemn and hieratic, whereas the concluding work is a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek set of variations on ‘Happy Birthday’, written as a present for Ruoff’s publisher on his 80th birthday.

Mari-Anni Hilander, soprano
Henri Tikkanen, baritone
Jan Lehtola, organ of the St. Paul’s Church, Helsinki

Émile Jaques-Dalcroze: Complete Lieder

The Swiss composer Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950) is best remembered for his development of Eurhythmics, which teaches the appreciation of music through movement. This first-ever complete recording of all his German-language Lieder – setting folksongs as well as more recent Romantic poetry – shows him bridging both French and German traditions with a style somewhere between Fauré and Brahms. Written early in Jaques- Dalcroze’s career, these songs span a wide range of emotions, from innocent rural idylls to the contemplation of existential pain
and heartache.

Clémence Tilquin, soprano
Adalberto Maria Riva, piano

Richard Flury: Four Song-Cycles

The output of Richard Flury (1896-1967), one of Switzerland’s most prolific composers, ranges from operas and ballets to symphonies, instrumental concertos, sacred and secular vocal works, chamber music and no fewer than 181 songs with piano accompaniment. These four song-cycles, written between 1920 and 1946, contain 45 of them, their concision nonetheless embracing an expansive, Romantic style of which Schumann himself might have approved. The prevailing mood is one of an open-hearted sincerity, occasionally enlivened by a dash of humour.

Stephanie Bühlmann, soprano
Margaret Singer, piano

Bernhard Sekles: Lieder – Aus dem Schi-King and other Songs

Bernhard Sekles (1872–1934) was one of the leading figures in German music in the first decades of the twentieth century, prominent as composer, educator and administrator. In 1928, as director of the Hoch Conservatorium in Frankfurt, he established the first academic programme in jazz studies, an act of courage and conviction that unleashed furious attacks from the Nazi press. His own late-Romantic music, banned during the Third Reich, has been virtually forgotten, although he composed in all major genres, including opera, orchestral works and chamber music. This first-ever album of his Lieder includes a major song-cycle, the freewheeling Aus dem Schi-King, based on ancient Chinese poetry in adaptations by Friedrich Rückert, its moods ranging from the heroic to the comic.

Malte Müller, tenor
Werner Heinrich Schmitt, piano

Mit Deutschem Kommentar

Wilhelm Kienzl: Four Song-Cycles

The Austrian composer Wilhelm Kienzl (1857–1941) – also a pianist, conductor, musicologist and writer on music – enjoyed the esteem of his contemporaries particularly for his vocal music. But his star has waned over the past century, and only a handful of his 238 songs have had recent recordings. In style they range from the simple and folk-like to the dramatic and quasi-operatic; their harmonic world likewise embraces both the diatonic and chromatic, with hints of the influence of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner and a foretaste of later composers. The four song-cycles recorded here treat the grand themes of life: love, loss, death and man’s interaction with nature.

Malte Müller, tenor
Werner Heinrich Schmitt, piano

Samuel Adler: A Celebration of Sam @ 95: Piano Music and Songs

The youthful agility of Samuel Adler – born in Mannheim in 1928 but long since regarded as the dean of American music – would appear to contradict the fact that he reached his 95th birthday in March 2023. This celebration of his productive life – as composer, teacher, writer and conductor – testifies to his ongoing vigour with a programme of songs and piano works composed, for the large part, after his 90th birthday, many of them tributes to musician friends. His music has its roots in the Neo-Classical clarity of composers like Copland and Hindemith, who were among his teachers, but has a raunchy energy entirely
Adler’s own – and which would be remarkable in a composer half his age.

Sabine Goetz, soprano (Tracks 4, 11, 12, 17-20)
Noah Bendix-Balgley, violin (Tracks 17-20)
Laura Melton, piano (Tracks 1-3, 5-10)
Yevgeny Yontov, piano (Tracks 1-3, 13-16, 21-30)
Axel Bauni, piano (Tracks 4, 11, 12, 17–20)

Wagner: Transcriptions for solo piano by August Stradal, Volume One

The Czech-born pianist and writer August Stradal (1860-1930) — a student of Bruckner and disciple of Liszt — was one of the more prolific transcribers of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, producing a vast quantity of piano music, including Liszt's orchestral works, most of the Bruckner symphonies, a good deal of the Baroque (not least a huge amount of Bach) and much more, most of it phenomenally difficult to play. This series of recordings presents his Wagner transcriptions, cast in the best barnstorming virtuoso tradition.

Juan Guillermo Vizcarra, piano

Cloches et Carillons

The piano is perhaps better suited than any other instrument to evoke the sound of bells – evening bells, bells of farewell and of joy, funereal bells, bells with spiritual overtones – and late-Romantic and twentieth-century French and Russian composers in particular have responded to the challenge of capturing those sonorities at the keyboard. This recital explores three centuries of pianistic tintinnabulation, and its ability to capture atmosphere and emotion.

Irmela Roelcke, piano

Wagner by Arrangement: Volume Three, Operatic Highlights

Necessity being the mother of invention, the English conductor Ben Woodward has arranged the full-symphonic textures of some of Wagner’s operas for eighteen-part chamber orchestra to bring them within range of the forces available to Regents Opera in London – arrangements which should, indeed, put them with the reach of smaller companies everywhere. This new ‘room-sized Wagner’ enhances the sense of scale of the originals with a striking degree of clarity.

Catharine Woodward, soprano: Brünnhilde (Tracks 1,3,4), Isolde (Track 5)
Keel Watson, bass-baritone: Wotan (Track 1)
Philip Modinos, tenor: Siegfried (Tracks 2,3)
Holden Madagame, tenor: Mime (Track 2)
Edwin Kaye, bass: Hagen (Track 4)
Regents Opera Ensemble
Ben Woodward, conductor