New Releases Feb. 4: Crossovers, Obscurities, Early Music, and Ecology

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Francesco Corti (Photo: C. Doutre)

A well-rounded, eclectic crop of new releases sees focuses on the environment, early music, and lesser-performed works by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Reynaldo Hahn. Plus, an album that puts music by Franz Schubert and The Beatles in conversation.

Francesco Corti leads the prolific period-instrument orchestra from the harpsichord in a program centering composers belonging to the generation of the Empfindsamer Stil or “Sentimental Style.” Following the High Baroque style of JS Bach and Handel, the composers of the next generation explored contrast and extreme juxtapositions in their music. This avant-garde style remained in fashion for only a short period, but anticipated many of the features of early Romanticism. The three harpsichord concertos—two by Georg Benda and one by JS Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach— featured on The Age of Extremes exemplify the Empfindsamer style, oscillating between excitement and melancholy, furious frenzy, and serene calm.

Chicago-based violinist Martin Davids (Callipygian Players, Bella Voce Sinfonia, Haymarket Opera, Music of the Baroque) is joined by organist, musicologist, and author David Yearsley for a program paying tribute to an unlikely, yet celebrated duo. In 17th century Hamburg, organist Heinrich Scheidemann (1595-1663) and violinist Johann Schop (1590-1667) became one of the town’s leading cultural attractions playing from the organ gallery of the cavernous St. Catherine’s church to the delight of locals and tourists. The four manual organ of St. Catherine’s was equipped with a vibrant palette of registers imitating other instruments of the age: cornetti, viols, recorders. Scheidemann was renowned for his ability to express his lively humor while Schop’s violin playing was extolled for its unexpected creativity and sparkling flourishes. Recorded in the Anabel Taylor Chapel of Cornell University, Davids and Yearsley present music by Schop and Scheidemann as well as their own improvisation on a chorale tune by Schop. All works are new to the WFMT library.

The Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective was conceived in 2017 by husband-and-wife duo Tom Poster, piano, and Elena Urioste, violin. The Collective operates with a flexible roster featuring many of today’s most inspirational musicians, both instrumentalists and singers, and its creative programming is marked by an ardent commitment to celebrating diversity of all forms and a desire to unearth lesser-known gems of the repertoire.

Poster and Urioste write, “Kaleidoscope has championed many unjustly neglected composers, but in the case of Reynaldo Hahn the neglect seems particularly puzzling to us. His music is immediately approachable, soaringly beautiful, and speaks directly to the heart; audiences, on the rare occasions that they get to hear it, seem to adore it. His life story is fascinating, too: born in Caracas, to a Jewish-German father and a Catholic-Venezuelan mother of Spanish / Basque origin, the handsome and urbane Hahn charmed high-society Paris, enjoying great success as composer, conductor, singer, writer-lecturer, and music critic.”

Kaleidoscope presents Hahn’s Piano Quintet, Piano Quartet, and select songs arranged for chamber ensemble by Tom Poster featuring Grammy-winning tenor Karim Sulayman.

In February, Karim Sulayman, a Chicago native and alum of Chicago Children’s Choir (now Uniting Voices), gives a local recital with pianist Shannon McGinnis.

This two-CD album presents, for the first time ever, a recording of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp performed by the composer himself, an incredibly special historical recording from the Korngold Family Archives. The new release also presents a 1997 live performance by the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana conducted by John Mauceri, whose research into the symphony included his exclusive access to the aforementioned reference recording of Korngold playing the piece himself on the piano from the early 1950s.

New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) presents the debut solo album of the rising star American baritone Theo Hoffman, a student of the late Sanford Sylvan and an alumnus of the Ravinia Steans Music Institute, in an adventurous yet appealing program that pairs Schubert songs with Beatles songs (by Lennon-McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison) on similar themes.

Hoffman tells WFMT, “adventurous programming means the audience gets something they didn’t even know they wanted … We want the audience to shed their pre-conceived notions of both of these artists and just embrace that these are both some of the greatest musical storytellers of all time.”

The baritone’s collaborators include Grammy award-winning soprano Julia Bullock, tenor Andrew Owens, guitarist Rupert Boyd (for Schubert), guitarist Alex Levine (for the Beatles), pianist Kunal Lahiry, and NYFOS co-founder and pianist Steven Blier. The album is set to be released on January 31, the birthday of Franz Schubert.

The world music-leaning period instrument band L’Arpeggiata, led by theorbo player Christina Pluhar, celebrates nature in a mostly Baroque program (Monteverdi, Bononcini, Biber and Handel) coupled with traditional songs and ballads including eden ahbez’s “Nature Boy.” In Terra Mater (meaning Mother Nature), Pluhar writes, “You will hear the chirping of the nightingales, sweet birds, cuckoos, frogs and chicken, the whispers of the winds, heavy storms and the rumbling of the seas.”

The ensemble is joined by the charismatic Swedish mezzo-soprano Malena Ernman, a former Eurovision contestant comfortable in genres ranging from cabaret and jazz to opera. On the verge of international stardom, Ernman paused her career when her then-11-year-old daughter, Greta Thunberg, was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. Ernman has gone on to become an active supporter of climate policies, and with her husband, co-wrote the book Scenes from the Heart about her family, the environment, and sustainability.