This week’s crop of releases includes a new setting of a beloved Bach work, a fresh take on Paganini’s timeless 24 Caprices, and a violin-forward exploration of Richard Strauss’s scintillating catalog.
Plus, delve into explorations of lieder, Romantic piano rep, and contemporary compositions by Richard Rodney Bennett and Stewart Goodyear.
Canadian pianist, composer, and recording artist Stewart Goodyear forges new territory with his new album, combining works by Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn with two of his own compositions, joined by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Andrew Constantine.
Goodyear’s original works are heard in their world premiere recordings and explore two very distinct thematic threads. Goodyear describes his 2021 Rhapsody on themes of love and loss “the most intimate piece I have ever written.” The Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (2022) is written in the spirit of Mendelssohn but inspired by the rhythmic and metric vigor of sub-Saharan Africa. Schumann’s Op. 54 Concerto in A minor and Mendelssohn’s Op. 25 Concerto in G minor round out the album.
Violinist Renaud Capuçon pays homage to Richard Strauss with a 3 CD compilation of chamber and orchestral works. The album is bookended by a new recording of the youthful Violin Concerto with the Wiener Symphoniker led by Petr Popelka, and an archival reading of Ein Heldenleben. Recorded in 2000, “A Hero’s Life” comes from Capuçon’s days as leader of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester conducted by the late Seiji Ozawa. The repertoire also includes the Daphne-Etude for solo violin, the Violin Sonata (with pianist Guillaume Bellom), and Piano Quartet (adding violist Paul Zientara and cellist Julia Hagen). The Sextet from Capriccio and string septet arrangement of Metamorphosen in a live performance from the 2022 Salzburg Festival complete this deluxe compendium from Strauss’s late-Romantic sound world.
The third solo album from Egyptian soprano Fatma Said focuses on Romantic era lieder by Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. In the conventional course of things, a lieder recital involves one singer and one pianist, but Said takes a characteristically imaginative approach with this album. “I’ve always wanted to make music with friends,” she continues, “When you share similar artistic values, the performances are on a very special level.”
The album’s program of 24 songs calls on the talents of no fewer than three pianists – Malcolm Martineau, Joseph Middleton and Yonatan Cohen, and of harpist Anneleen Lenaerts, clarinetist Sabine Meyer (in Schubert’s expansive The Shepherd on the Rock), Quatuor Arod (accompanying Brahms’s Ophelia-Lieder), male chorus Walhalla zum Seidlwirt (whose members were students with Fatma in Berlin), and another singer on the ascent, baritone Huw Montague Rendall.
María Dueñas, Opus Klassik‘s 2024 Young Talent of the Year, presents Paganini’s iconic Caprices. These 24 dazzling gems have accompanied the Spanish rising star since she began playing. Noting that Paganini lived in the age of Italian bel canto, María seeks “to bring out the vocal quality in the Caprices – to reveal the music behind the technique.”
The 2-CD album includes additional works by Hector Berlioz, Jordi Cervelló, Fritz Kreisler, Camille Saint-Saëns, Pablo de Sarasate, Henryk Wieniawski, and the world premiere recording of Gabriela Ortiz’s De Cuerda y Madera. Joining Dueñas are guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre, pianists Itamar Golan and Alexander Malofeev, violinist Boris Kuschnir, and the German Symphony Orchestra, Berlin, conducted by Mihhail Gerts.
A genuine masterpiece inspires musicians to adopt, adapt, or transcribe it without losing any of its greatness. Period-instrument ensemble Nevermind (Anna Besson, flute; Louis Creac’h, violin; Robin Pharo, viola da gamba; and Jean Rondeau, harpsichord and organ) has taken a creative look at Bach’s famous Goldberg Variations and made their own stylishly insightful “variations” on the work.
As they themselves explain: “We needed only an informal rehearsal to grasp the incredible potential of a transcription for our ensemble. There have been other arrangements, but nobody has ever attempted this one before now, even though our instruments are among those most typically used in J.S. Bach’s chamber music, in his many solo sonatas for flute, violin or gamba with bass continuo and obbligato harpsichord – and they also frequently feature in the arias of his cantatas and Passions.”
The fifth volume of John Wilson’s series of orchestral works by his mentor and friend Sir Richard Rodney Bennett features three works composed between 1973 and 1989. The Concerto for Orchestra is an homage to Benjamin Britten, taking a twelve-note series used by Britten in his Cantata Academica as an abstract musical starting point. Bennett’s rarely performed cello concerto Sonnets to Orpheus is performed here by Norwegian cellist Jonathan Aasgaard, principal cello of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Sinfonia of London. It was written at a crisis point in the composer’s life, as Bennett split with his partner and left the UK for New York, where he would spend the rest of his life.
Diversions was commissioned to celebrate the tercentenary of the Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys Schools in North London. It was first played by the combined orchestras of all seven schools at a celebratory concert in the Royal Festival Hall. The work is a colorful set of symphonic variations on the Scottish folksong “Whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad.”
