Topics

Apologies to any member who tried to access UC overnight, UK time. As you'll know, the site was down for a few hours. The hosting company has now resolved the issue, whatever it was, and the site is now fully working.

New from Dux: Jozef Poniatowski's Mass (details at Presto here). Members may remember his Meyerbeerian opera Pierre de Médicis, still available in our Downloads board here, a tuneful and intermittently impressive piece of work.

Duplicating the existing compilation which has been available from Toccata for the last five years, the Avie label will be releasing a new survey of Raff's compositions for cello and piano in February next year. Both discs actually miss out a couple of obscure, unimportant arrangements which Raff made early in his career, but that's of no import. This new offering features the very impressive young Swiss cellist Christophe Croisé, whose fine reading of the First Cello Concerto is already available on YouTube, and it will be interesting to see how his interpretations of these grateful works differ from those of Toccata's Joseph Mendoes. Full details of the new Avie release are here.

Many thanks to BritishComposer for making available in our Downloads Board here recordings of two Piano Trios by Emilie Mayer (those in A minor and D minor) recently broadcast by NDR in Germany. What a fine composer she was!

A couple of month ago I attended a short piano recital in a nearby town, given by the excellent pianist Clare Hammond. Amongst more familiar fare she played several etudes by the French revolutionary-era aristocrat turned composer, pianist and teacher Hélène de Montgeroult (1764-1836), who was a complete unknown to me. From her dates I was expecting something pleasantly late-classical, and that's just what some of the etudes were, but what surprised was that others of them displayed strong romantic-sensibilities and wouldn't have been out of place had they been written thirty years later than they were. They must have seemed very avant-garde to her contemporaries. Talking to Clare Hammond after the recital she confirmed that she will soon be recording a selection of de Montgeroult's piano works for BIS, and since then I've been exploring the several recordings already available, which have born out the impression that de Montgeroult really was a very early romantic, and her piano music is well worth getting to know.

On the face of it he's way outside our focus here at UC, but judging by audio extracts from his String Quartet No.4 and Piano Trio No.2 on a new Chandos CD, at least some of the works of Dmitri Klebanov might be worth exploring. Which I will do. I'm fairly sure that the fifth String Quartet won't be my cup of tea, though.

In something of a very welcome Röntgen-fest cpo have issued a twofer CD set with no less than seven symphonies by Julius Röntgen: Nos.7 Edinburgh, 11 Wirbel, 12 In Babylone, 14 Winterthur, 22, 23 and 24. All bar Nos.7 and 24 are one movement works and the conductor is the indefatigable David Porcelijn with, depending on the symphony, the Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt or the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra.

It's beginning to look like Raff's operatic magnum opus, the music drama Samson, may be recorded in 2023. It would be a very big project if the piece is recorded in full: it lasts around two and a half hours and needs a large cast of top flight soloists (and therein lies a major worry). Still, great news if it comes off and I'll keep my ear to the ground.... Details of the opera itself here, by the way.

The Musical Heritage Society have reissued a 1978 recording by Robert Murray and Daniel Graham of Anton Rubinstein's "four violin sonatas", but which is in fact the three sonatas plus an arrangement for violin and piano of the Cello Sonata No.1. However, as far as I know, this is the only recording of the Third Sonata Op.98, which is a welcome addition.

Some members may be aware of the Romantic Discoveries series of unsung piano music CD-Rs produced (and played) by John Kersey. These feature many major and minor works by mostly 19th century unsung composers, with a particularly extensive selection of piano sonatas. They are now all available on YouTube here, and Kersey explains the reasons for this move in his blog post here, in which he also confirms that he will continue to make new recordings but post them exclusive on his YouTube channel. His playing style is often rather four square, literal and dynamically unvaried, but there can be no doubt that over recent years Kersey has explored the byways of 19th century piano music like few others and on his channel one can find such interesting works as the eight piano sonatas of Eduard Franck, or the eleven of Rudolf Viole, and we should be really grateful to him for that.

FWIW, I've found that, if one has the audio software to do it, the flatter performances can be injected with a lot more life by speeding things up by 5-10% (being careful to maintain the original pitch), but in any event it's a great bonus that these works can be heard at all, all the more so when it's free to do so. 

I have been partially impressed by the new recording on Chandos of Florence Price's A minor Piano Quintet (there is another, supposedly "better known" one in E minor according to the booklet notes, but I can find no recording or anything much about it online). I say partially, because the weighty first movement is a strong piece of writing, very much in the full romantic mould, and the following slow movement is really lovely, with a subtle American tinge to its melody. Together they last over 21 minutes and both are quite anachronistic for the 1930s, of course, but that's a point in their favour in my book. The trouble is that Price then rather throws the work away with the final two brief movements which barely last six minutes between them. One of her characteristic, slightly jazzy Jubas is the third; it jars a little after the full-on romanticism of the previous movements, but that's OK as one expects Price to throw in a Juba. An attractive and very fast Scherzo, reminiscent of a jig, serves as the finale, and again the music itself is exciting and not out of keeping stylistically with the rest of the work, but way, way too brief, so the whole piece is left quite unbalanced. One does wonder if there's a substantial fifth movement waiting to be discovered. I do recommend the piece, there is some excellent, romantic music in it and it gets a really fine performance from the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, but be warned that at the end you might be left thinking "is that it?"

I can't comment on the Beach or Barber couplings as I didn't download them.

Buried deep on my hard disk I've found a recording of Raff's Octet arranged for 16 strings. There is nothing to jog my memory about where it came from, who the arranger or performers are, or when it was recorded. It probably came to me in 2018. Does anyone know anything else about it, and my apologies if it was one of you who gave it to me!

Due out from Sterling in around six weeks is a generous selection of 29 lieder by Raff:

They comprise single songs, complete sets and pieces from larger collections, spanning Raff's creative life. Some, like Ständchen (the only one to have been recorded before), were once very well known, another - the rather lovely Traumlied - has only just been discovered in manuscript, but all, as one might expect, demonstrate Raff's melodic generosity. The five singers are all young artists and this lends a special freshness to their interpretations, which I found especially appealing but I suppose might not be to everyone's taste. Hedayet Jonas Djeddikar is a consistently sensitive and lyrical accompanist.

Another thought provoking twenty-odd minutes....

To mark Raff's bicentenary next year, there are plans at various stages of certainty for performances of his early four act biblical epic Samson and the comedy Die Eifersüchtigen, Raff's final opera, which is set in 16th century Florence. Samson will have two unconnected performances, one fully staged and the other a concert performance for which a recording is planned. It's hoped that the concert performance of Die Eifersüchtigen will also be recorded. Finally, there are tentative plans for a recording of the comedy Dame Kobold, the performances of which in Regensburg last autumn were so well received, although not necessarily with the same forces. I stress than none of this is definite at this stage, and I definitely can't divulge any more details, but wouldn't it be wonderful if we ended up in a couple of years' time with recordings of three more of Raff's operas to add to that of Benedetto Marcello?

Not one for serious Bruckner enthusiasts, but for those of us who are more agnostic this should provoke a laugh

For some as yet unknown reason the thread begun by gprengel on his arrangement of Beethoven's last sketches has disappeared completely from the board. We have no idea how this happened and I apologise to all members who contributed, but particularly to Gerd.

Vaughan Williams is currently BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week. Of course many of his compositions (including several hymns) are part of the musical fabric of the UK, The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis being regularly voted amongst the nation's favourite compositions. I was prompted to wonder, though, just how well known is his music in the rest of the world? It used to be said that Elgar was "world famous in England"; I think his music is better known and highly regarded pretty generally now, but what of RVW? 

I'm not going to attempt explanation or comment, just give you the link to Hurwitz' latest offering - comparing, would you believe, Massenet and Bruckner! Very funny in places, on the face of it absurd, but maybe there's a ring of truth to some of it?

Has anyone else noticed the frequency with which BBC Radio 3 now broadcasts the music of Florence Price, usually accompanied by the host expressing amazement at how good her music is, or astonishment that it has lain unheard for so long? Now, I really don't have a problem with Price's music, it's pleasant if hardly exceptional, but it is galling that she is now getting such a disproportionate amount of attention when there are so many better unsung composers and compositions out there deserving at least a portion of the air time she's now receiving. Maybe I'm unduly cynical, but perhaps the fact that programming her music (as opposed to, say, that of William Grant Still or Samuel Coleridge Taylor) enables the BBC to tick not one but two "woke" boxes has something to do with it?