Alexander Scriabin - Mazurkas

"Alexander Scriabin was born in Moscow on Christmas Day of 1871, according to the Julian calender (also called Old Style), which was used in Russia until early 1918, when the country joined the rest of the world in adopting the Gregorian calendar.

"Scriabin's musical talent was discovered early; he studied piano with the famous teacher and menot Nikolay Zverev, also a teacher of Rachmaninoff, and was destined to become one of the Moscow Conservatoire's most famous graduates. Only three years after his graduation, he was already a hot topic: the prominent music critic, writer, and editor Nikolay Findeizen wrote that Scriabin's name was on everyone's lips, from Rimsky-Korsakov to Stasov, and much was expected of him. Mitrofan Belayev, a wealthy industrialist, music publisher, and philanthropist who supported many promising Russian musicians, committed to publishing Scriabin's works, no matter what they were. Although Scriabin looked like a young boy at the time, aged 24, Findeizen remembered that he already was speaking like a true and mature artist, pronouncing that to sell his works would mean to 'sell off his own inspiration.' However, the lifeline provided by Belayev (and later other publishers) was not something the young composer could do without.

"As an artist, Scriabin developed in the musical environment in Moscow where Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Tchaikovsky were revered and diligently studied, where Wagner's music influenced even the staunchest defenders of traditional harmony and melody (like Sergey Taneyev), and where the virtuoso genius of Anton Rubinstein reigned supreme. Scriabin's composition teacher at the Moscow Conservatoire, Sergey Taneyev, was himself a student of Tchaikovsky, but he struggled to find common language with his talented student. Having never really understood Scriabin's creative genius, he could only offer comments on the rules of composition, and shake his head in disbelief at Scriabin's adventurous departure from them. Taneyev sarcastically noted that for the first time in his life he met a composer who, instead of giving his compositions tempi indications, gave them praises instead: 'divine', 'grandiose', 'sublime', etc.

"When in 1902 Scriabin visited Taneyev and spoke about his philosophical views, the astonished Taneyev noted Scriabin's pronouncements in his diary: 'I am I', 'the world is my creation', and 'I am above God'. The music of Scriabin's Third Symphony, however, which was performed in Moscow at the same time, left Taneyev feeling 'as if beaten up by sticks'. Later, Scriabin would develop his aesthetic philosophy and devotion to mysticism into a kind of Messianic vision, and an actual belief that he was destined to bring about the dissolution of the world itself through his mutli-media creation, 'Mysterium'. This he did not finish, having died rather prosaically at the age of 43 from sepsis caused by a sore on his lip.

"Scriabin composed prolifically and predominantly for the piano. Only a handful of works were written for orchestra, although these remain as popular as his piano compositions.

"As a performer, he was described by one of his contemporaries, Leonid Sabaneyev, as a 'magician of sounds'. Although Scriabin insisted on playing in large hall, his pianism was most suited to smaller venues, and ideally to an intimate circle of a salon. He simply did not have enough physical power, a result of his small stature and frailty and also due to a recurring strain in his right hand caused by the over practice of Liszt's 'Don Juan Fantasy' for his graduation recital in 1892, but he more than compensated for it with the mesmerising brilliance and imagination of his tonal nuances. It was as if this alchemist of sounds possessed a secret with which he was able to transform the sounds of the piano into a variety of orchestral timbres.

"Scriabin was close to the family of Boris Pasternak, whose younger brother remembered the impression left by his playing: it was as if, against all physical laws and the mechanics of the instrument, he did not press the keys down, but rather appear to be extricating himself from the keyboard. This appearance of fluttering of the fingers above the keyboard created the unique sound for which Scriabin was remembered by so many of those who heard him play.

"As for performing his own works, Sabaneyev believed that no one could compare with him in being able to transmit 'his own delicately sensuous, erotic moments in his compositions'. Scriabin never performed the same piece in the same way, as if the work was an independent entity, plastic and living and breathing on its own accord, allowing Scriabin to interpret varied nuances of its existence on the piano.

"In the beginning of his professional career as a pianist and composer Scriabin was drawn to, and influenced by, the music of Chopin - the undisputed poet of the piano. And Chopin, in turn, was inspired and drawn to the mazurka - the only form in which he composed regularly throughout his short life, and which he elevated into an intensely personal and nostalgic art form.

"The mazurka, orginally a Polish country dance, developed from the ancient 'Polska' and its descendants, 'kujawiak', 'oberek' and 'mazurek', a folk dance in triple time with strong accents on the second or third beat. The mazurka was popular in Mazovia, the area around Warsaw, and from there conquered European ballrooms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even reaching America in the nineteenth century. Throughout the vastness of nineteenth-century Russia, the mazurka was a very popular dance, not least in glittering ballrooms in the estates and palaces of the nobility. Although today the mazurka in classical music is first and foremost associated with Chopin, it was explored by various composers from Glinka to Balakirev, through Debussy and Scriabin, and is still cherished in Poland, in the works of Szymanowski, Maciejewski, Gradstein and other.

"Scriabin composed his 'Ten Mazurkas, Op. 3' between 1888 and 1890, publishing them in 1893. Although often compared in style or at least in inspiration to the musical language of Chopin and Schumann, Scriabin's voice is unmistakable here. It is not surprising to hear these influences - virtually every Russian composer (especially if he was also a pianist) of that period grew up on a diet that included a large of these composers' music. But there is also Wagner, whose music Scriabin may have first encountered at the home of Taneyev, and who influenced many Russian composers of the period. These pieces show that, despite his youth, Scriabin already possessed the very special talent of being able to distil a mood or a sentiment in just a few pages. Many of his mazurkas found their way into his concert programmes throughout his performances career. For example, Op. 3 No. 4 already charmed Anton Rubinstein who had come specially to hear the young Scriabin perform at his final exam at the Moscow Conservatory in 1892.

"The 'Nine Mazurkas, Op. 25' were composed between 1898 and 1899. Bursting with harmonic and melodic invention, these pieces show Scriabin's imagination taking flight with chords already often built on fourths and not thirds. Here, the composer is starting to push harmonic and melodic invention to their extremes, delaying harmonic resolution, blurring the lines between the distinct lilt of the mazurka and often entering the realm of a dream waltz, or a tone poem. Scriabin further enhances the form with the use of unsual and innovative pedalling and also his very distinctive polyrhythmic and polyphonic writing, often in a single hand. In the mazurkas Op. 25 Scriabin goes further than before in his aim to be able to capture a fleeting dream, a mood, a scent, into sounds that take flight and are burning with an inner flame - something that Scriabin wanted his music to encapsulate. In his last ever public performance in St. Petersburg on 2 April, 1915 Scriabin included his mazurka Op. 25 No. 4 into the programme.

"The 'Two Mazurkas, Op. 40', published in 1903, are more economic and concise in their means of expression, and show the spiritual, intimate, distilled light of Scriabin's sound world. Written around the same time as the prophetic Fourth Sonata these mazurkas are already pointing to completely new harmonic and philosophical directions that were to dominate Scriabin's mind from then on.

"The 'Mazurkas in B minor and F major, although published in 1893, with the date of composition given as 1889, were most likely composed between 1884 and 1886, when Scriabin had barely entered his teenage years. These two pieces had to wait half a century before they were included into Scriabin's collected works, edited by Konstantin Igumnov (a pianist well known as one of the important Scriabin interpreters). These are two contrasting pieces, with the dreamy and lyrical B minor, to the jubilant and full of youthful exuberance in F major. However, the F major mazurka could also be interpreted in a subtler, more melancholy and introverted way, despite its brightness and openness.

"'Op. 2 No. 3 (Impromptu à la mazur)' was published in 1889, and strictly speaking, this is not a mazurka but rather an improvisation on and contemplation of the form. This charming work shows just how personal a form the mazurka had already become to the young composer, about to take flight into the far reaches of his very own musical universe." (Anastasia Belina. From the liner notes.)

Performer: Peter Jablonski

1. 10 Mazurkas, Op. 3: No. 1 In B Minor

2. 10 Mazurkas, Op. 3: No. 2 In F-Sharp Minor

3. 10 Mazurkas, Op. 3: No. 3 In G Minor

4. 10 Mazurkas, Op. 3: No. 4 In E Major

5. 10 Mazurkas, Op. 3: No. 5 In D-Sharp Minor

6. 10 Mazurkas, Op. 3: No. 6 In C-Sharp Minor

7. 10 Mazurkas, Op. 3: No. 7 In E Minor

8. 10 Mazurkas, Op. 3: No. 8 In B-Flat Minor

9. 10 Mazurkas, Op. 3: No. 9 In G-Sharp Minor

10. 10 Mazurkas, Op. 3: No. 10 In E-Flat Minor

11. 9 Mazurkas, Op. 25: No. 1 In F Minor

12. 9 Mazurkas, Op. 25: No. 2 In C Major

13. 9 Mazurkas, Op. 25: No. 3 In E Minor

14. 9 Mazurkas, Op. 25: No. 4 In E Major

15. 9 Mazurkas, Op. 25: No. 5 In C-Sharp Minor

16. 9 Mazurkas, Op. 25: No. 6 In F-Sharp Major

17. 9 Mazurkas, Op. 25: No. 7 In F-Sharp Minor

18. 9 Mazurkas, Op. 25: No. 8 In B Major

19. 9 Mazurkas, Op. 25: No. 9 In E-Flat Minor

20. 2 Mazurkas, Op. 40: No. 1 In D-Flat Major

21. 2 Mazurkas, Op. 40: No. 2 In F-Sharp Major

22. Mazurka In F Major

23. Mazurka In B Minor

24. Impromptu À La Mazur In C Major, Op. 2 No. 3

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Alexander Scriabin - Symphony No. 1; Prometheus: The Poem of Fire

"Come, all peoples of the world,

Let us sing the praise of Art!

Glory to Art,

Glory forever!"

(Excerpt of the words in the final movement of Alexander Scriabin's 'Symphony No. 1'.)

"There was no doubting the young Russian composer Alexander Scriabin's (1872-1915) high ambitions when he presened his first symphony to the public. With its six-movement, hour-length duration, incorporating a grandiose choral final, complex chromatic harmonic language and self-composed text paying tribute to the universal greatness of art, Scriabin made a grand entrance on the international symphonic stage. Beethoven's ninth might well have served as a mode, but the symphony's harmonic language owes more to Tchaikovsky, Strauss, and above all, Wagner. For Scriabin, this grand symphonic project was the start of an even greater artistic plan. His ambitions reached far beyond the traditional boundaries of music and into the realm of philosophy and existentialism.

"Russian composer, philosopher and mystic Alexander Scriabin was one of the most eccentric and mystic figures of the age of modernism. His innovative sounds and utopian ideas challenged not only performers and audiences of the time, but also the boundaries of our thinking, the categories of history, and the limitations of art. His apparently egocentric view of the world, his megalomania and delusions have been psycho-analyzed, ridiculed and dismissed. He genuinely believed that art in general, and his own music in particular, could change the world and raise humankind to a higher level of awareness. His plan was that his musical oeuvre would culminate with 'Mysterium', a workd in which all art forms came together, time and space dissolved and all present participated in a spectacular transendence.

"One of the first steps towards this utopean moment was the 'Symphony No. 1' which Scriabin began drafting in 1899 and completed in 1900. By that time, he had discovered two of his most important conceptual bases. The first of these was Russian symbolism, especially the symbolism associated with the ideas of Alexander Soloviov in which art plays a defining role as a builder of bridges between extreme contrasts in life and the world, taking on almost religious functions. In many ways, 'Symphony No. 1' gives voice to Soloviov's 'theurgical' understanding of art - implicitly in the first five movements and explicitly in the final movement's verbal tribute to the unfathomable greatness of art. Although the words are not Soloviov's own, Scriabin has captured a similar spirit and world of ideas.

"Scriabin's second conceptual basis was the music and ideas of Richard Wagner. In Wagner's concept of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' Scriabin found a cautious variant of what he himself so strongly believed in. Of perhaps greater relevance in this context was the fact that Wagner's harmonic language provided a decisive point of departure for Scriabin around 1900. He was one of the few Russian composers who took Wagner seriously, incorporating chromaticism and extended traditional harmony within his own musical style, eventually taking both to their very extremes. Scriabin was so deeply engrossed in Wagner's ideas that between 1902 and 1903 he planned a grandiose, philosophical opera based on the myth of Eros and Psyche, the inspiration for which undoubtedly lies in Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde'. Scriabin eventually abandoned the project but carried Wagnerian compositional techniques and stylistic elements forward into his first two symphonies.

"It is particularly in the two Allegro movement, and in parts of the final choral movement, that certain harmonic and melodic elements point towards 'Tristan' and other Wagner operas as possible influences. Scriabin operates within a similar late romantic, expressive idiom with extensive use of chromaticism and chord progressions on the very brink of conventional tonality. The symphony also offers lyrical passages in the spirit of Tchaikovsky, such as in the introductory Lento movement which more or less serves as a prelude. The concluding choral movement is perhaps the most special and gripping moment for many, particularly at the point where art is extolled in words and music in a complex fugal section preceding the mighty finale. In this final movement the orchestra is extended wiht soloists and a choir; the reference to Beethoven's ninth is as obvious as it is bold. By ending his first symphony in this way, Scriabin indicated his intention to take up competition with the musical giants of the past, and that his approach to art was both profound and ambitious to the extreme.

"Contrary to Scriabin's wish, the final movement was ommitted at the symphony's first performance in 1900, the publishers claiming that the choral part was 'impossible to sing'. In 1901, however, the workd was performed complete under the leadership of Vasily Safonov in Moscow. It never became part of the standard repertoire, but has gained renewed interest in recent years, parallel to Scriabin's growing international popularity. For Scriabin, the work was without a doubt a major step along the road to the Himalayas and the great mystery he envisioned for the future. He never made it that far, however, and when he died of blood poisoning at the age of 43, he left the world and humanity more or less unchanged. His output is nonetheless regarded one of the most fascinating in the history of western music; in the absence of the 'Mysterium', it is 'Prometheus - The Poem of Fire', his last symphonic work, and often referred to as his fifth symphony, that remains Scriabin's greatest musical legacy.

"It is quite incredible to contemplate the stylistic development that Scriabin's music underwent between the first symphony and 'The Poem of Fire'. One a decade separates the two works, yet they appear to inhabit two entirely different musical worlds. Not only have all traces of Wagner and Soloviov vanished from the harmonic language in 'Prometheus'; Scriabin has set aside the entire tonal fundament and diatonic key system. Instead, he uses octatonic and whole-tone scales and avoids the sensation of major and minor. From the very first chord, it is clear that we are in new and unfamiliar terrain. The distinctive, dissonant chord is Scriabin's musical signature and consists of the notes A, D-sharp, G, C-sharp, and F-sharp, known as the 'mystic chord'. A large portion of the work is built around the chord and its constituent notes in various forms and constellations.

"The mystic chord and all that came with it was not, however, the only innovation that Scriabin introduced in 'Prometheus'. Scriabin was blessed - or perhaps cursed - with a condition called synesthesia in which stimulation of one sense is experienced by a different sensory area of the brain - such as, in Scriabin's case, seeing colour when hearing music. In 'Prometheus' Scriabin took his multi-modality out of the orchestra to create and independent part for 'Luce' - a 'colour organ' or 'chromola'. Despite the title, Scriabin's work is only loosely based on the myth in which Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to humans. Scriabin envisaged a colour organ in which two 'colour parts' were to be performed with the orchestra. One of the parts follows the chords, illustrating Scriabin's synesthetic linking of specific chords with specific colours; the other colour part has a slower rhythm. Even though the colour organ can only be experienced in the listener's imagination on this recording, it is testimony to Scriabin's innovative and original ideas.

"There can be little doubt that the audience found the music modern and unfamiliar when Serge Koussevitzky conducted it for the first time in Moscow in 1911. Scriabin's mystic harmonic universe is so distinctive that it still jogs listeners out of their comfort zone into uncharted waters. And even if a state of transcendence is not achieved, Scriabin never came closer to sublimity than he did at the conclusion of 'Prometheus - The Poem of Fire'. Choir and orchestra, sound, light, and colour all come together as the mystic chord finally resolves in a powerful and consonant major triad - a hint of the grand transformation that Scriabin had planned for us all, from the primeval dark of mysticism to the ecstatic enlightenment of a greater awareness. (Thomas Erma Møller. From the liner notes.)

Performers: Oslo-Filharmonien, Vasily Petrenko, Kirill Gerstein

1. Symphony No. 1, Op. 26: I. Lento

2. Symphony No. 1, Op. 26: II. Allegro Dramatico

3. Symphony No. 1, Op. 26: III. Lento

4. Symphony No. 1, Op. 26: IV. Vivace

5. Symphony No. 1, Op. 26: V. Allegro

6. Symphony No. 1, Op. 26: VI. Andante

7. Symphony No. 5, Op. 60 'Prometheus: The Poem Of Fire'

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Nicola Porpora - Passio: Music on the Passion of the Christ

"At the beginning of the 50s of the Eighteenth century, the artistic route of Nicola Antonio Porpora (1686-1768) seems to have come to its natural end: after being - with Leonardo Leo and Leonardo Vinci - one of the major proponents and promoters of the universalisation of the Neapolitan 'new style', after a career played in the most prestigious theaters of the time (in his hometown and in Venice, London, Milane, Rome, etc.), after creating as a singing teacher stars such as Farinelli, Caffarelli and Porporino, after receiving assignments of primary importance in the Venetian 'Ospedali Grandi' and in the Neapolitan 'Conservatori', Porpora was hired hired at the Dresden court in 1747, being appointed Kapellmeister the following year (with Hasse's great scorn). In 1752/3 he retired to private life, leaving the court of Saxony-Poland with the guarantee of an unusual rich annual pension of 400 tallers.

"The composer then elected Vienna as his city of residence: here he appears to seek no more continuous assignments of absolute important, but only to teach singing and composition (among his students, Franz Joseph Haydn), writing sometimes a few pages of church music. However, in the 1756 the Prussian invasion of Saxony disrupted the life of the old musician, leading to the immediate termination of his pension and bringing Porpora to a state of great economical need: in a poignant letter to Farinelli, Metastasio portrays the composer as 'ridotto alla positiva mancanza del pane quotidiano' ('reduced to a substantial lack of daily bread'). Given the situation and the absence of main patrons in Austria, Porpora went back to Italy - old and tired - to find some job to earn money to support himself. As it is known, the musician died in total destitution, after twelve difficult years.

"In the midst of his stay in Vienna, however, the unlucky composer gave birth to two of his highest masterpieces: two collections that can be read as a kind of musical guidance of his abilities, his taste and his inventiveness. In 1754 the 'Sonate XII di violino e basso' were printed with a dedication to Princess 'Maria Antonia Walpurga di Braviera' (his patroness in Dresden); dated the same year are also the six duets 'da cantarsi nelli venerdì di Quaresima nella Cappella di Sua Altezza Serenissima l'Elettore di Sassonia' ('to be sung on Lent Fridays in the Chapel of His Most Serene Highness, the Electoral Prince of Saxony').

"These six vocal pieces on Latin text form an autonomous cycle, very different in shape and use from the 'Passions' from the Protestant and German-speaking areas, and also from the Italian Oratorios on the Passion of Christ: we have to think of these duets as an organized set of compositions designed to accompany step by step (presumably one for each Friday) the personal reflections of the members of the Saxon royal family in the most crucial period of the liturgical calendar. The collection, known under various titles, had considerable success among some of the greatest admirers of the 'stile antico' music in the late Eighteenth century and at the beginning of the Nineteenth, even leading to a full printed edition by Gaetano Nava (1802-1875) for Breitkopf & Härtel. Mistakenly believed to be the offspring of a commission for the singers of Charles VI of Hapsburg (who died fourteen years before their composition), these duets charmed key personalities in the movement for the rediscovery of early music, such as Fortunato Santini (1768-1861) and Raphael Georg Kiesewetter (1773-1850), both promoters of their performance in private concerts.

"Kiesewetter especially showed great enthusiasm, writing on a manuscript copy of the music the Virgil quotation 'Sic itur ad astra!' ('So you climb to heaven!'). The composer Giuseppe Gazzaniga (1743-1818), among the last Porpora students, described the duets as being made 'di musica divina' ('of divine music'). In Germany during the Nineteenth century, printed editions of the individual pieces of the collection, with piano accompaniment, tailored to the needs and tastes of the time, were in circulation. The first major encyclopedias of music mentioned as some of the main points of Porpora's output the so-called 'Duetti latini sulla Passione di Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo' ('Latin duets on the Passion of Jesus Christ, Our Lord') or 'Duetti per la Quaresima' ('Duets for Lent'). To fully understand the choices made by the composer in creating these musical treasures one must first pay attention to two key points: the historical moment in which the 'Duetti' were conceived, and the musical genre they belong to.

"As already mentioned, they are contemporary to the printing of the 'Sonate XII', organized according to a precise plan, clearly stated in the dedication by Porpora: in it the Neopolitan musician proclaims that he wanted to give a demonstation of its technical background and his ability to write in different styles (ancient and Italian, modern and French), mixing them and dedicating two different attitudes (conservative and free) to the two sections into which the volume is divided. Thus the first six sonatas show a more severe attitude compared to the remaining ones, and have complex fugues as second movements, including that well known example of shameless virtuosity: a Diatonic Enharmonic Chromatic fugue, in the 'Sonata VI'. These pieces impressed very much the contemporary counterpoint connoisseurs, as we can see thanks to some Neapolitan manuscript copies of the fugues made by composition pupils and the to the most famous keyboard adaption by Muzio Clementi (1752-1832), who published them within the first volume of his 'Selection of Practical Harmony' (1801).

"Porpora, by signing the 'Sonate XII' volume and bearing the most prestigious title of Kapellmeister of the Elector of Saxony, was consciously not only giving life to a monumental and elegant collection of violin sonatas, but also publishing a monument to the various styles and technical aspects he elaborated during his entire life. The duets can also be seen in the same light. These six songs fit perfectly into the definition of the genre of the Italian Chamber Duet (Italianische Kammerduette), with the only peculiarity of presenting a Latin text. Written as 'da capo' arias for two voices and continuo, at this time the Italian Chamber Duets are usually intended as the refined genre par excellence, difficult to perform, requiring listeners able to grasp the subtleties that were expected to characterize it (poignant counterpoint, audacious harmony, and melodies very tied to the lyrics, sometimes almost 'madrigalistic'). The Chamber Duets, for Porpora and his contemporaries were the perfect theater of technical ability of a composer, of the intelligence and skill of the performers in showing the details of his writing, and of the competence of the selected audience that attends to the performance: an aesthetic game of the highest intellectual and performative kind.

"The materical and formal shape of the Latin lyrics of the 'Duetti' by Porpora shows that they probably were not born for this kind of musical treatment. It is likely that his choice should be attributed to an autonomous idea by the composer: to adopt a 'high' musical genre for texts related to the highest topic of Christianity, in order to please his very musically competent patrons. The six duets show between them very different stylistic aims, and thus appear to be designed, as well as the violin sonatas, to show the absolute versatility of the composer: the first one is a magnificent example of sever and strict counterpoint; the second one shows an ivdence initial reference to the model of the 'French' duet, as carefully defined by Johann Mattheson (1681-1764) in his 'Der vollkommene Capellmeister', with two voices involved in parallel running of the test and vocalizations. The third duet makes a strong use of chromaticism, devoting harmony delays to expressive purposes. The fourth seems to makr the abandonment of 'severe' writing, proclaiming the glory of the holy cross with long passages of coloratura in triplets, imitation of writing for trumpet, references to the ancient use of the so-called 'nomina sacra', and a remarkable simplification of the harmonic texture. The fifth duet even becomes a little dramatic scene, completely disrupting the assumption of the imitative writing of the genre: partially different texts (in the first verse of the lyrics) are assigned to the bass and to the soprano, which then are used to describe two different emotional attitudes with contrasting vocal styles (pathetic for the soprano, 'di segno' - 'of anger' - for the bass). The sixth duet, finally, provides a partial concertante role for the organ, for which Porpora also defined the precise registration (octave): here the voices sing music stylistically very far from that exemplified by the first duet, music open to some of the main stylistic features of the so-called Viennese Classicism.

"At the end of this CD you will find an unpublished anonymous 'Miserere' for two voices and basso continuo, in many ways conceptually opposed to the 'Duetti'. Porpora's devotional duets are 'musica reservata' par excellence, written by a famous Neopolitan composer for private devotional use of a strongly competent German court: on the other hand, this 'Miserere' represents a perfect example of 'everday' music; written for the same liturgical season, but for a public performance during vespers in a town church of the remote prince of the Kingdom of Naples (presumably Campobasso or, maybe, the tiny Civitacampomarano). Copied for Lent of 1772, the music combines charming modern stylistic features to deliberately stereotyped archaic ones, resolving itself in a fair and strictly functional satisfaction of the small splendor required by those country holy services, with a vocal cast forcibly restricted for economic reasons and not necessarily technically founded as the one needed to the performance of chamber duets.

"Thanks to the Eighteenth-century devotional expectations of the people, the work of professional but less known composers also inclucded this: to bring the good taste and style encoded by revered masters of the rank of Porpora, Vinci, Leo, Hasse, even in the small villages which constituted the majority of the urban centers of the kingdom of Naples.

"In performing the 'Duetti', we followed the evidences emerging from the score and the context for which it was born: it wasn't difficult to establish that the instrument used at the time for the basso continuo playing was an organ, to which we added as small bow bass instrument the cello. Given the esthetical nature of chamber duets, we choose to flourish very few of the vocal lines, changing in the 'da capo' more emphases, attitudes to pronunciation, expressive colors given to individual words, dynamics, than pitches, making only brief cadenzas where required.

"In the 'Miserere', following the usual practice, the composer scored only the odd lines, leaving the other ones to be sung in chant. For the performance practice of the latter, it was considered appropriate to refer at closely as possible to the nearer geographically and chronologically relevant composition that has been given to analyze: the autograph of the 'Miserere concertante a due cori' (1739) by Leonaro Leo, held at the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella in Naples. The composer wrote here also the 'Gregorian' chant verses of the text, providing them with basso continuo and with the exact duration of individual values. So, observing the criteria used in a very standardized way by Leo, we performed all the ommitted verses of the Psalm to give a complete picture of the score and its function." (Stefano Aresi. From the liner notes.)

Performers: Stile Galante, Stefano Aresi

1. Sei Duetti Latini Sulla Passione Di Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo: Duetto I. Crimen Adae Quantum Constat!

2. Sei Duetti Latini Sulla Passione Di Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo: Duetto II. Rigate Lacrimis Facies Populi

3. Sei Duetti Latini Sulla Passione Di Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo: Duetto III. Mortis Causa Tu Fuisti

4. Sei Duetti Latini Sulla Passione Di Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo: Fuga V

5. Sei Duetti Latini Sulla Passione Di Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo: Duetto IV. In Hoc Vexillo Crucis

6. Sei Duetti Latini Sulla Passione Di Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo: Duetto V. Tamquam Agnus Immolatur

7. Sei Duetti Latini Sulla Passione Di Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo: Duetto VI. Ab Imo Pectore Ede Suspiria

8. Sei Duetti Latini Sulla Passione Di Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo: Fuga VI. Diatonico Enarmonico Cromatico

9. Anonymous - Miserere

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Carl Nielsen - String Quartets Vol. 2

"Although most of a decade separates the two string quartets by Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) recorded here, like the other two quartets in his official worklist they belong to the more youthful end of his oeuvre. As a mature composer he did at one point in the 1920s consider plans for yet another quartet. But he abandoned them in the middle of bar 31 of what was presumably to have been a first movement, and threw himself into other projects.

"The F minor quartet is from 1890, when the young, still unmarried composer was able to enjoy a regular salary again, now as a violinist in the Royal Danish Orchestra, something he had not done since stopping as a regimental musician in Odense to go to the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. There had also been another stroke of luck: applying for the second time, he had been awarded the biggest grant in Danish cultural life, 'Det Ancherske Legat', worth DKr 1800 – by comparison his annual salary as an orchestra musician was DKr 1200.

"With leave of absence from the Royal Theatre, Nielsen was able to set his course for Germany on 3rd September 1890. In his trunk he had a letter of recommendation from the composer Niels W. Gade, whose name was at least as famous in Germany as in Denmark, as well as the manuscript of the F minor quartet. He had begun work on it that spring, and had in fact meant to finish it before his departure. He had even worked on it in his summer holidays with his parents in the Funen village of Nørre Lyndelse. Nevertheless only the first movement was really finished.

"The remainder of the work was written amidst a tumult of new impressions, for on this first journey outside the borders of his native country the 25-year old composer was hungry for all kind of artistic impulses, and received them in Dresden, Leipzig and Berlin in turn. In Dresden, for example, he was at the 'Gemäldegalerie' on 5th September, where according to his diary he was greatly taken with Rembrandt's 'The Gold Weigher' and Juspe de Ribera's 'Diogenes with His Lantern'. And in the rough draft of the fourth movement of the quartet we find a handwritten remark that clearly documents that he himself felt there was a connection between the two arts: 'The 2nd time the secondary subject does not come; a snatch of the coda in the first part appears as such, but with many odd harmonies. Remember 'odd', little Carl. Think of Ribèra!!' The inspiration could also be of a more outward kind; after an elevated soirée on 26th September at the 'Böhmischer Bahnhof' Nielsen went home and composed an expansion of the first subject of the last movement, which had occured to him on the way.

"More or less finished with the quartet, and armed with Gade's introduction, Nielsen now looked up one of the leading musical personalities of the day in Berlin, the conducter and composer Joseph Joachim (1831-1907). He had known Gade since their youth and promised to listen to and comment on the new work. So after five rehearsals, an ad-hoc ensemble (Nielsen himself, Fini Henriques, Frederik Schnedler-Petersen and the American cellist Paul Henry Morgan) gave the work its informal christening on 18th December at the 'Hochschule für Ausübende Tonkunst', where Joachim was a highly esteemed teacher.

"'It is extremely difficult to play well, since there are so many modulations and often enharmonic affairs that have to be played so purely that the half of it would have been enough. If you add to this the fear of playing for Joachim, you can imagine that it did not go all that well,' Nielsen wrote back afterwards to his old theory teacher from the academy years, Orla Rosenhoff. In other words Nielsen knew very well what made - and still makes - his quartets difficult to play.

"The old master responded with both praise and criticism; he recognized both imagination and talent in the music, but on the whole it was too radical for him, and he wanted to suggest some changes. Nielsen replied that he was afraid the work would lose its character, and the good-natured Joachim seems to have retreated: 'Well, my dear Mr. Nielsen, perhaps I am after all an old philistine. Write as you will, just as long as that is how you feel it.'

"The young Nielsen stood his ground. The Danish newspaper reviewers, who otherwise often scolded him, were nevertheless surprisingly positive when the quartet was given its first public performance in Copenhagen on 8th April 1892. Most unreserved was 'Politiken's Charles Kjerulf: 'Carl Nielsen is clearly a considerable talent; none of his works has shown him as assured as this quartet, which besides the most youthful dauntlessness exhibits a will and skill matched by very few of the works of our other very young composers.

"The F mionor quartet was printed by the publisher Wilhelm Hansen in 1892 and could now be performed by ensembles who did not first have to borrow the manuscipt music from the composer. In October 1894 when Nielsen, in the company of the music publisher Alfred Wilhelm Hansen, ran into the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931) in the railway station in Leipzig after hearing him play earlier that evening in the Gewandhaus, the latter immediately declared that Nielsen was not wholly unknown to him - he had recently heard the F minor quartet performed at Nice, had liked it and had procured the music. As proof he hummed the beginning of the first movement! Ysaÿe may have later done more than simply hum: the four string players in one of the top ensembles of the day, the 'Quatuor de Bruxelles', had a shared point of departure in master classes with Ysaÿe, and a few years later they put the F minor quartet on their repertoire. They first played it at a concert in Copenhagen on 13th February 1909, then later the same year they presented it in Mexico City and Buenos Aires. Thus it also became the only one of the four string quartets ever to cross the Atlantic during the composer's lifetime.

"The E-flat major quartet (composed in 1897-98) is associated with a tragicomic episode that meant that the birth of the work was drawn out longer than anticipated. The composer himself was given an account of it, but only far later, in a retrospective article marking his sixtieth birthday in 1925:

"'I had composed a string quartet. The first two movements had already been copied by the music copyist; I had tried them out with my comrades, and we agreed that it was a work with which I had made a great effort. Now I also had the last two movements finished, so I packed it all into a large roll, took my bike and set off along Gothersgade towards Nørrevold, where the music copyist lived. When I got to Rosenborg Brøndanstalt [a mineral water factory], I saw a vehicle with two horses, one of which had fallen over and lay floundering with its legs over the pavement. The driver looked very helpless, as the horse had ended up lying in a strange lopsided position. Since as a young man I had worked with horses and had often myself been a driver, I jumped off my bike, put it up against the Brøndanstalt, shoved my music roll into the hands of a boy who was standing in the crowd, and asked him to hold it for a moment. It was only the work of a couple of minutes to cut one of the traces to the cart over, get a horse blanket under the forelegs of the horse and get it up on its legs; but when I got back the boy had vanished, probably into the Vognmagergade area, with my great work. I rode home in despair and told my wife about my loss. The she got the idea that we should go up into the neighbourhood and arouse some attention about the matter among the young people of the streets, and in time we succeeded in gathering a very large crowd to whom we announced that whoever could find the boy with the roll of music would get a large reward [...] However, I never got my work back, but had to reconstruct it laboriously from various notes and sketches and from memory.

"The episode must have taken place in the autumn of 1898, but cannot be directly documented by contemporary sources. They only mention the preceeding work: 'Finished the work on the first movement of a quartet in E-flat major in December '97. Am work on the andante at present,' the composer had noted in his diary on 6th January 1898. Nevertheless a good part of the year evidently passed before he was ready to saddle up his bicycle with the finished score. He had met his wife Anne Marie, who was a sculptress, in 1891 in Paris, during the above-mentioned study trip. Now in this very year, in the summer of 1898, they had one of their periods of friction, for reasons that are not hard to understand. He spent his holiday from the Royal Theatre on her family's farm in Jutland, where he tried at one and the same time to keep the farm going and to write a string quartet, while she stated at home in Copenhagen to take care of her sculptural work - she was modelling a red stallion - and their three small children. 'Can't you see and get you final movement done and I'll be busy with my horse and we'll never again spend a summer like this year's, will we, my own dearest?' she had written to him on 2nd August in a clear attempt at reconciliation.

"We do not know exactly how long it took Nielsen to reconstruct the last two movements of the quartet, for it is unlikely to have been true when he described the work as in the process of publication in an application for a ministerial composer subsidy dated 7th November 1898. He did not hand in the score to Wilhelm Hansen until the early summer of 1899, and the printed edition was not available until December 1900. On the title page the work was then dedicated to his older colleague Edvard Grieg, who was among the family's circle of friends.

"By then the quartet had already seen a semi-private first performance on 1st May 1899 in the relatively newly-founded 'Vor Forening'. The public one was given by the newly-formed Høeberg Quartet on 4th October 1901, also in Copenhagen. The latter elicited a very clear-sighted review in 'Illustreret Tidende', written by the almost ten-years-older Hother Ploug, who alongside a career in the central administration also worked as a music write and composer:

"'A strange work, like everything that has come from his hand, but more a work for connoisseurs than for the general public. In particular, the energetic first allegro with its enclosed structure and the highly convoluted contrapuntal work proved caviare to the general... Here we meet a young Danish composer with a sense of form and the sculptural not strongly evident in many others at present than perhaps Johan Svendsen and people are repelled by it. In a way this is explicable enough: when one is bottle-fed day in and day out with 'romances' and romance-like music, in the end one forfeits the feeling for stronger fare.'

"Caviare to the general or not - during the composer's lifetime the E-flat major quartet remained the most critically acclaimed, but also the least performed of the works!" (Knud Ketting, 2008. From the liner notes.)

Performers: The Young Danish String Quartet

1. String Quartet In F Minor, Op. 5: I. Allegro Non Troppo Ma Energico

2. String Quartet In F Minor, Op. 5: II. Un Poco Adagio

3. String Quartet In F Minor, Op. 5: III. Allegretto Scherzando

4. String Quartet In F Minor, Op. 5: IV. Allegro Appassionato

5. String Quartet In E-Flat Major, Op. 14: I. Allegro Con Brio

6. String Quartet In E-Flat Major, Op. 14: II Andante Sostenuto

7. String Quartet In E-Flat Major, Op. 14: III Allegretto Pastorale - Presto - Allegretto Pastorale

8. String Quartet In E-Flat Major, Op. 14: IV Allegro Coraggioso

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Carl Nielsen - String Quartets Vol. 1

"Would we have wished it otherwise? Well, yes, it would have been exciting if Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) had composed another string quartet at the mature age when he created masterpieces like the 'Wind Quintet' (1922). But we are not poorly served either with the four string quartets that are in his official worklist, complete with opus number etc., three of which were composed as far back as pre-1900.

"While today it is hard to draw any great distinctions among these four Nielsen quartets in terms of popularity, it was a different matter in his own, time, when the earliest, the G minor quartet, was by far the least frequently performed, while the next one, in F minor, and the last, in F major, vied for a definitive first place, probably because they both belonged to the regular repertoire of well established ensembled like the Breuning-Bache Quartet and the Thorvald Nielsen Quartet. Both these ensembles also took them with them abroad.

"The G minor quartet was not published until 1900, and therefore bears the opus number 13, although it was written before opus 1 'Suite for Strings'. It was one of the two great private Copenhagen chamber music societies of the day, Privat Kammermusikforening, that gave the work its musical christening. This was on 26th March 1889, and the quartet was to see at least a further four performances in the second of these societies, Kammermusikforeningen of 1868 and in the newly founded Vor Forening, before it was played for the first time in public at Nielsen's composition evening on 3rd February 1898 in the smaller hall of what was then known as Koncertpalæet, because it had not yet been taken over by the Order of Odd Fellows.

"The work was the oldest in the all-Nielsen programme, and before this it had been subjected to a critical revision, perhaps prompted by an agreement with the music publisher Wilhelm Hansen to print it. The revision involved abridgements in the transitions between the various formal sections, not so much in the fundamentals of the structure, which remained the quite conventional one for the epoch, with a single exception: in the last movement, between the recapitulations of the first and second subject, Nielsen feature a section entitled 'Resumé', where he contrapuntally combines thematic material from the first, third and fourth movements and thus underscores the unity of the work.

"The reviews were mainly positive, perhaps especially in their comparisons with more recent works in the programme: 'Undoubtedly the most important, most beautiful and in all respects most appealing piece of music one heard at the concert, and finally, first and foremost, the most direct and wholesome. Unfortunately its genesis lies about a decade in the past' ('Dannebrog)'. 'The ten-year-old quartet provided a breath of youth and freshness that did the heart good. There was a pace and power in this beginner's work that delighted the audience' ('Vort Land').

"On publication the quartet was furnished with a dedicated to the composer Johan Svendsen (1840-1911), whome Nielsen admired greatly, and who in his capacity as principal conductor at the Royal Danish Theatre also did his bit to procure the best opportunities for the young orchestral musician Nielsen to see to his composing work alongside his duties as a musician at the Theatre.

"Carl Nielsen's only string quintet was written in 1888, on the heels of the G minor string quartet. It was given its first performance at a concert on 13th February the next year in the society Kammermusikforeningen of 1868. The composer himself played second violin, and did the same in the next performance on 28th April in the newly founded society Symphonia, which held its concerts in the Hornung & Møller concert hall.

"On this particular early spring Sunday the 23-year-old violin-playing composer had in fact stretched himself almost to breaking-point. For at 4 p.m. he appeared in one of the so-called 'Folkekoncerter' ('Popular Concerts'), where, along with his old academy classmate Julius Borup, he was the soloist in a concerto grosso by Händel, as well as conducting his own 'Suite for Strings', which had been performed for the first time late in the previous summer in the Tivoli Concert Hall. And then at 8 p.m. he had to take the stage in Symphonia, where the programme consisted exclusively of newly composed Danish music and - fortunately for him - was for mixed ensembles, such that at least he only had to appear in his own quintet.

"Not only would it have pleased Nielsen that the two great names of Danish musical life then, Niels W. Gade and J.P.E. Hartmann, where both present; he also had reason to be satisfied when he read the Monday papers: 'As a whole, judging from a first performance, this work makes a beautiful impression with its appealing melodiousness, its rounded form and no ordinary inventiveness in harmonic respects' ('Berlingske Tidende'). 'An extraordinarily fresh and pleasing string quintet in G by the very young composer, Mr. Carl Nielsen, testified to a healthy, fertile talent for instrumental composition' ('Politiken').

"One might think that the new quintet would then gradually become established in the standard repertoire. But that simply did not happen - perhaps because it was overtaken and sidelined by new string quartets: the above-mentioned G minor quartet, already composed before the quintet, but given its first performance later than it, and an F minor quartet, written in 1890. In addition it was always a little more difficult to get a quintet performance together, even though Danish musical life before 1900 was typified more by ad-hoc ensembles than by firmly established string quartet ensembles.

"At all events the G major quintet was afterwards only played privately in Berlin during Nielsen's study trip in 1890 (where he himself called it 'overloaded') and in Copenhagen in a couple of times more in 1892 and once in 1911. Prior to the extensive festivities in connection with Nielsen's 60th birthday in 1925, the violinist Thorvals Nielsen asked about the possibility of a new quartet and was instead furnished with the more than 35-year-old quintet, which still only existed in manuscript form. There were a further couple of performances, after which Nielsen showed his gratitude by giving the work a dedication to the young man with the same surname as himself (to whom he was not related).

"In 1905 Nielsen took his leave as a violinist at the Royal Danish Theatre. His violin-playing would never have reached the soloist standard, but friends described him as an amusing and characterful quartet first violinist, and he still occasionally engaged in quartet playing, especially in the company of the Dutch musicians of the Röntgen family, whom he met regularly at the estate Fuglsang in beautiful natural surroundings on the island of Lolland.

"Nielsen's F major quartet was composed in Copenhagen in 1906, at a time when he was busy with the opera 'Maskarade'. It has the same gaiety and grace as the opera, and - although written in a quite different musical idiom - it is clear evidence of Nielsen's profound admiration of Mozart. It was performed for the first time privately at a chamber music evening at Fuglsang on 10th August. To his good friend the pianist Henrik Knudsen, Nielsen wrote the day before the rehearsal work:

"'Today we have played my new quartet and it sounds as I had expected. After all I am now close to complete familiarity with the true nature of the bowed instruments. Incidentally it is strange how many years one must coax and caress such a delicate creature as a string quartet before she gives in. Only now do I think I have got more or less to grips with its coy, chaste character.'

"The first public performance took place on 30th November 1907 at a Nielsen composition evening in Copenhagen. At this time the quartet bore the opus number 19 and the by-name 'Piacevolezza' ('Delight'), which he was later to scrap. And perhaps this is just as well, for there is no eagerness to please in this highly modulated music. We are not meant to feel sure of very much: the first subject of the first movement is only nine bars long, but begins firmly in F major only to end just as firmly a semitone higher in G-flat major. If that can happen, anything can happen!

"And indeed the composer was rewarded with a lecture from 'Politiken's Charles Kjerulf: 'If what the four gentlemen on strings sat up there and played is seriously to be understood as good, beautiful music, then Messrs. Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and associated, including Wagner and Tchaikovsky - the whole gang, on our own too, with Hartmann and Gade at their head - have all been pulling the wool over our eyes, indeed indulging in false advertising. And in that case sciatica is also a musical pleasure. For that is very unpleasant too.'

"The slow movement of the work, 'Adagio con sentimento religioso', in fact clearly points forward, with its hymn-like introduction, to Nielsen's above-mentioned last great chamber music work, the 'Wind Quintet'. In the quartet, though, there is no question of varying the hymn theme, rather of something that can be described as a gradual metamorphosis.

"In a partly new shape, the F major quartet was played a few times in 1919 and the presumably further revised before Carl Nielsen finally succeeded in having his string quartet swan song published in 1923 by Edition Peters in Leipzig, now without a by-name and with opus number 44. (Knud Ketting, 2006. From the liner notes.)

Performers: The Young Danish String Quartet, Tim Frederiksen

1. String Quartet In G Minor, Op. 13: I. Allegro Energico

2. String Quartet In G Minor, Op. 13: II. Andante Amoroso

3. String Quartet In G Minor, Op. 13: III. Scherzo: Allegro Molto

4. String Quartet In G Minor, Op. 13: IV. Finale: Allegro (Inquieto)

5. String Quartet In F Major, Op. 44: I. Allegro Non Tanto E Comodo

6. String Quartet In F Major, Op. 44: II. Adagio Con Sentimento Religioso

7. String Quartet In F Major, Op. 44: III. Allegretto Moderato Ed Innocente

8. String Quartet In F Major, Op. 44: IV. Finale: Molto A    dagio - Allegro Non Tanto, Ma Molto Scherzoso

9. String Quintet In G Major: I. Allegro Pastorale

10. String Quintet In G Major: II. Adagio

11. String Quintet In G Major: III. Allegretto Scherzando

12. String Quintet In G Major: IV. Finale: Allegro Molto

mp3/v0

Nicola Porpora - Sonata XII di Violino e Basso

"Nicolò (or Nicola) Antonio Porpora remains today one of the least explored and recognised of the great 18th-century Italian composers. The son of a bookseller, born inNaples in 1686, he studied with Gaetano Greco at the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo. In 1708 he made his Neapolitan debut as an opera composer with 'Agrippina'. Employed from 1711 to 1725 by Philip, Prince of Hessen-Darmstadt, head of the Imperial army in the kingdom of Naples, in 1713 he also entered the service of the Portuguese ambassador in Naples, and with the Lusitanian court he kept excellent relations throughout his career. Between 1715 and 1722 he taught at the Naples Conservatory of Sant'Onofrio, where he trained some of the most renowned singers of those days, such as the famous Farinelli, Caffarelli and Regina Mingotti. In 1725 he moved to Venice, where he took up the position of chapel master at the Ospedale degli Incurabili, which he kept up to 1733. He then moved to London where he competed with Haendel until 1736. It was in the English capital that some of his most important operas were staged, like the outstanding 'Arianna a Nasso' (1733), and his first instrumental compositions were published. Having returned to Italy, he spent some time in Naples and then moved again to Venice. In 1742 he followed the Venetian ambassador to Vienna; from there he moved to Dresden where he worked from 1747 to 1751; back in Vienna, he remained in the Austrian capital for seven years, and had among his pupils Franz Joseph Haydn. In 1760 he made his final return to Naples, where he lived in considerable poverty until his death (1768).

"Porpora was not endowed with an easy character, but had a literary culture uncommon for a composer of his days, and became famous not only as an opera composer but also as a singing teacher. He wrote some sixty operas, very few of which have enjoyed philologically credible revivals in modern times. While Porpora's style has the imprint of his Neapolitan training, it also shows the influence of the composer's cosmopolitan experiences and of his being personally acquainted with the works of composers of the Venetian and German schools. His instrumental output is numerically scanty but qualitatively excellent and it includes, besides a Concerto for flute and one for cello, the authenticity of which has recently been under debate, the 'Sonatas for two cellos and two violins with b.c.' (1745), the '12 Sonatas for violin and b.c.', and few other minor compositions.

"The 'Sonate XII di Violino, e Basso / Dedicate / A S.A.R. La Principessa Elettorale di Sassonia / Maria Antonia Walburga / di Baviera / da / Niccolò Porpora / Maestro di Cappella di S.M. il Re di Polonia' ('12 Sonatas for violin and bass, dedicated to H.R.H. Maria Antonia of Bavaria, Electoral Princess of Saxony, by Niccolò Porpora, chapel master of H.M. the King of Poland'), as the original title reads, were published in Vienna in 1754. The beautiful edition, superbly printed and engraved, includes a short dedication to the Princess of Saxony, commissioned by Porpora to his friend Pietro Metastasio, in which he expresses the criteria behind his composing the 12 sonatas. Writes Porpora/Metastasio: 'I have endeavoured to bring peace among the most educated nations of Europe, in constant debate as far as their musical preferences of old over modern, Italian over French music. You will note that in the first six (particularly in those where I made special use of the three genera: diatonic, enharmonic and chromatic), written in polyphonic fashion and in strict observance of the rules, there is however reason for the most eager followers of the ornate modern style to be delighted: and that, on the other hand, the severe custodians of the most rigid traditional style will find nothing to complain about in the lively and capricious blend of old and modern, Italian and French, characterising the other six.'

"The 12 sonatas therefore were meant as a sort of 'Goûts Réunis', as a sum of international significance - not by chance published in Vienna, imperial capital -, of all aesthetics and styles of instrumental music developed in Europe in that period.

"With their noble grandeur and retrospective quality, the Neapolitan composer's 12 Sonatas constitute one of the last and most significant expressions of Baroque music, which the galant style would soon push into oblivion in the name of a spontaneity and ease of composition that a great exponent of the old school such as Porpora would probably have regarded with ill-concealed contempt. In the same years another great musician, Johann Sebastian Bach, was turning his back to contemporary trends, taking refuge in the abstractedness of his last speculative compositions, such as 'The Art of Fugue' and 'The Musical Offering'. A liaison to the style of the day is, in any case, present in the 12 Sonatas; however it is filtered by a professional conscience that was illdisposed to come to too obvious terms with the allurement of 'ease' and 'pleasantness', traits of a style that, in the space of a few years, would have made his violin Sonatas appear completely out of fashion.

"The first six works, written in a severe and archaic fashion, are all structured in four sections, after the Church sonata, featuring ample and elaborate fugues as second movements. These fugues - which would be transcribed for piano by Muzio Clementi several years later - reveal the mature Porpora's profound knowledge of counterpoint and of violin technique (in 1754 the composer was sixty-eight), and require extraordinary skill of the performer. The first Sonata of this group, in A Major, is the only one that features an opening 'Prelude (Grave)'; its final 'Allegro' in 12/8 time is written in the form of a 'Gigue'. The second Sonata opens with a 'Sostenuto' and a very complex 'Fugue', followed by an 'Aria Cantabile' that witnesses to Porpora's experience as an operatic composer. Sonata No. 6, in C Major, contains the most complex fugue of the entire collection of 12, the one in which Porpora made use of the three genera - diatonic, enharmonic and chromatic - mentioned above. In all six works the soloist's technical skills are put to the test by the repeated use of double stops and by instrumental writing that is often awkward, privileging musical content to mere bravura display.

"The subsequent six sonatas, lighter and relatively more modern in character, are technically easier and modelled after the 'Chamber sonata'. Only one out of the six (Sonata No. 9 in E Major) features the more modern structure in three movements instead of four. Here the tone is less severe and the technical passages less exacting; there are even a few occasional openings to the galant style (final 'Allegri' of Sonatas Nos. 7 and 8, and 'Andantino' of Sonata No. 9), though they remain set into a composed formal context. All of this corresponds to music writing that is less spontaneous than that of the previous group of six, as was rightly remarked by Francesco Degrada in his essay on Porpora's instrumental output. There is no lack, however, of fine and original pages, as for example: the first 'Allegro' of Sonata No. 7 in F Major; the 'Lento' of Sonata No. 9; the melancholic and pensive 'Lento assai' of Sonata No. 10; the very lively 'Presto' of Sonata No. 11; or the intense and vibrant 'Sostenuto' of Sonata No. 12. Significant, finally, is Porpora's habit of linking the various movements thematically to each another, which is particularly evident in Sonatas Nos. 7, 8, 9 and 11." (Danilo Prefumo, tr. Daniela Pilarz. From the liner notes.)

Performers: Giovanni Guglielmo, Pietro Bosna, Andrea Coen

1.1. Sonata I In A Major: I. Preludo (Grave)

1.2. Sonata I In A Major: II. Fuga

1.3. Sonata I In A Major: III. Adagio

1.4. Sonata I In A Major: IV. Allegro

1.5. Sonata II In G Major: I. Sostenuto - Fuga

1.6. Sonata II In G Major: II. Aria Cantabile

1.7. Sonata II In G Major: III. Allegro

1.8. Sonata III In D Major: I. Largo - Fuga

1.9. Sonata III In D Major: II. Andantino

1.10. Sonata III In D Major: III. Vivace

1.11. Sonata IV In B-Flat Major: I. Adagio

1.12. Sonata IV In B-Flat Major: II. Fuga

1.13. Sonata IV In B-Flat Major: III. Adagio

1.14. Sonata IV In B-Flat Major: IV. Allegretto

1.15. Sonata V In G Minor: I. Adagio

1.16. Sonata V In G Minor: II. Fuga

1.17. Sonata V In G Minor: III. Adagio

1.18. Sonata V In G Minor: IV. Allegro

1.19. Sonata VI In C Major: I. Adagio

1.20. Sonata VI In C Major: II. Fuga

1.21. Sonata VI In C Major: III. Aria

1.22. Sonata VI In C Major: IV. Allegro

2.1. Sonata VII In F Major: I. Cantabile

2.2. Sonata VII In F Major: II. Vivace

2.3. Sonata VII In F Major: III. Lento

2.4. Sonata VII In F Major: IV. Allegro

2.5. Sonata VIII In C Major: I. Adagio

2.6. Sonata VIII In C Major: II. Allegretto

2.7. Sonata VIII In C Major: III. Adagio

2.8. Sonata VIII In C Major: IV. Allegro

2.9. Sonata IX In E Major: I. Andantino

2.10. Sonata IX In E Major: II. Lento

2.11. Sonata IX In E Major: III. Allegro

2.12. Sonata X In A Major: I. Cantabile

2.13. Sonata X In A Major: II. Allegro

2.14. Sonata X In A Major: III. Lento

2.15. Sonata X In A Major: IV. Allegro

2.16. Sonata XI In D Major: I. Moderato

2.17. Sonata XI In D Major: II. Presto

2.18. Sonata XI In D Major: III. Lento

2.19. Sonata XI In D Major: IV. Allegro

2.20. Sonata XII In D Minor: I. Sostenuto

2.21. Sonata XII In D Minor: II. Vivace

2.22. Sonata XII In D Minor: III. Lento

2.23. Sonata XII In D Minor: IV. Allegro

flac/16-bit

Igor Stravinsky - Petrushka; The Fairy's Kiss

"Provocative and probably previously unreleased reunion of two scores which has been essential for the ballet music in the Paris of before and after World War I. The Russian conductor Evgeni Mravinsky, who stayed in his homeland but remained always impervious to any ukaz, either political or aesthetical, dared to present in a single evening these two scores, both with the same accuracy of interpretation: the exuberance of a street theatre in Saint Petersburg, his native city, and the stylishness of an 'in Tchaikovsky manner' piece, where the Sleeping Beauty's awakening becomes an 'Icy Kiss'... Impressive and without competition!" (From the liner notes.)

Performers: Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, Yevgeny Mravinsky

1. Petrushka, Ballet Suite: I. First Tableau

2. Petrushka, Ballet Suite: II. Second Tableau

3. Petrushka, Ballet Suite: III. Third Tableau

4. Petrushka, Ballet Suite: IV. Fourth Tableau

5. The Fairy's Kiss: I. First Scene

6. The Fairy's Kiss: II. Second Scene

7. The Fairy's Kiss: III. Third Scene - By The Mill

8. The Fairy's Kiss: III. Third Scene - Pas De Deux. Entrée

9. The Fairy's Kiss: III. Third Scene - Pas De Deux. Adagio

10. The Fairy's Kiss: III. Third Scene - Pas De Deux. Variation

11. The Fairy's Kiss: III. Third Scene - Pas De Deux. Coda

12. The Fairy's Kiss: III. Third Scene - Scene

13. The Fairy's Kiss: IV. Fourth Scene - Epilogue

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Rheinhold Gliere - The Red Poppy

"Rheinhold Glière (Reyngol'd Moritsevich Glier), a Soviet composer of Belgian descent, was born in Kiev in 1875, the son of a maker of wind instruments. He played the violin and wrote music at home and studied for three years at the Kiev Conservatory before entering the Moscow Conservatory in 1894. There he studied the violin with Hřimaly and composition with Taneyev, taking lessons in harmony from Arensky and his pupil Konyus and in orchestration from Ippolitov Ivanov. He completed his studies in 1900 with a one-act opera-oratorio after Byron, 'Zemlya i nebo' (Earth and Heaven).

"Glière's first employment was as a teacher at the Gnesin Music School, and he was to spend the summer holidays of 1902 and 1903 as tutor to the eleven-year-old Prokofiev. For two years from 1905 he studied conducting with Oscar Fried in Berlin, makin his first appearance as a conductor in Russia in 1908, while his compositions continued to make a favourable impression. In 1913 he returned to Kiev to teach the composition class at the Conservatory, of which he became director in the following year. In 1916 his former pupil Prokofiev appeared as soloist in Kiev in his own first piano concerto under the direction of Glière.

"From 1920 until his retirement in 1941 Glière taught composition at the Conservatory in Moscow. He showed particular interest in the music of the various ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union, making a detailed study of the music of Azerbaijan that bore fruit in his opera Shakh-Senem, written in 1924 and performed in Russian in Baku three years later, followed by staging in Azerbaijan in 1934. His musicological investigations extended to Uzbekistan and other Soviet republics, while the more familiar music of the Ukraine provided him with another native source of inspiration.

"During his career Glière occupied a number of official positions. In the early years of the Revolution he headed the music section of the Moscow Department of Popular Education and was Chairman of the organizing committee of the Union of Soviet Composers from 1938 until 1948. His work was officially recognised by various state awards, including the title of People's Artist, bestowed in 1938. He died in Moscow in 1956.

"As a composer Glière followed the Russian romantic tradition, something that brought him official praie in 1948 when the music of Prokofiev and Shostakovich was condemned. In particular his ballet music proved popular. 'The Red Poppy', later known, to avoid the connotation of opium, as 'The Red Flower', satisfied political choreographic demans and became a well known part of ballet repertoire from 1926 onwards, while the later ballet 'The Bronze Horseman', completed in 1949, also retained its place in Soviet repertoire.

"'The Red Poppy' ('Krasni mak'), with libretto and original décor by M. Kurilko and choreography by Lev Lashchilin and Vasily Tikhomikov, was first staged at the Bolshoy Theatre on 14th June 1927, when Ekaterina Geltser danced Tao-Hoa and Aleksey Bulgatov the heroic Captain. Set in a Chinese port, the story of the ballet is simply told. The dancer Tao-Hoa falls in love with the captain of a Soviet cargo ship, to whom she gives a red poppy. Li-Shan-Fu, her manager, plots to kill the captain by having her give him poisoned tea, but she refuses. Later, in a coolie uprising, she saves the life of the captain and is later killed in a coolie uprising by a bullet from Li-Shan-Fu. She hands a red poppy to a little Chinese girl, as she dies, as sign of love and freedom. Scope is given for divertissements in the second act, a dream-sequence, set in an opium den. Here Tao-Hoa sees a Golden BUddha, ancient goddesses, butterflies, birds and flowers.

"The ballet starts with an appropriate introduction, suggesting a Chinese setting with its pentatonic melodic material. A more ominous mood appears, suggesting the oppression to which the coolies, dock-workers are subjected, tyranny and suffering that will lead to their revolt. The dancing-girl Tao-Hoa enters, in a more lyrical atmosphere. The restaurant itself has a cosmopolitan clientèle, represented in the various dances that follow, including a 'Boston Waltz' and finally leading to the entrance of the Russian captain and the dance of his sailors. The love of the couple is established in Tao-Hoa's scene and variation, followed by a coolies' victory dance and a celabratory dance by the Russian sailors.

"The second act is set in an opium den. Here there is a dance of Chinese womne and an 'Adagio' for the four goddesses of ancient times. Tao-Hoa dreams of the Buddha, of the fabulous phoenix of legend and of the ship of her beloved.

"Reality returns with a Charleston and a dance in the restaurant, with preparations for the Chinese theatre, followed by an 'Umbrella Dance', a 'Puppet Dance', with xylophone, and a 'Chinese Acrobat Dance'. The coolie uprising is plotted and in this the captain is only saved by the intervention of Tao-Hao, allowing him to sail away with his men. In the aftermath Tao-Hoa is shot, to hand a red poppy to a little girl, as she dies. The flower, by its colour, symbolizes communism, which will bring freedom to the oppressed, a sign of hope of a better world, expressed in the well known Internationale, the Communist anthem.

"'The Red Poppy', its name changed to 'The Red Flower' in 1957, was greeted with some acclaim at its first staging. It seemed innovative, with a clear and acceptable political message, fulfilling the aims of the Soviet cultural establishment. Musically the libretto presented the composer with a number of problems. While the oriental setting provided an exotic background, enabling Glière to make use of characteristic pentatonic melodies, there were inevitable juxtapositions of other musical material, associated with colonial oppression or with the gallant Russian sailors and their captain. It might, therefore, be suggested that the work as a whole lacks something of the unity that might have been found in a more traditional ballet. Whatever reservations might be held about the score, Glière certainly won lasting success with 'The Red Poppy', of which excerpts, such as the 'Russian Sailors' Dance', have become very familiar." (Keith Anderson. From the liner notes.)

Performers: St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra, André Anichanov

1.1. Act I: Introduction

1.2. Act I: Coolies' Dance

1.3. Act I: Tao-Hoa's Entrance

1.4. Act I: Restaurant

1.5. Act I: Malik's Dance

1.6. Act I: Boston Waltz

1.7. Act I: Scene Of European Dance. Captain's Entrance And Sailors' Dance

1.8. Act I: Tao-Hoa's Scene

1.9. Act I: Variation With Gold Fingers

1.10. Act I: Coolies' Victory Dance

1.11. Act I: Dance Of The Soviet Sailors. Apple

1.12. Act II: Introduction. Scene In The Smoking Room

1.13. Act II: Scene

1.14. Act II: Dance Of The Chinese Woman

1.15. Act II: Adagio Of Four Goddesses

1.16. Act II: Adagio

2.1. Act II: Prelude

2.2. Act II: Tao-Hoa's Vision

2.3. Act II: Scene: Procession

2.4. Act II: Sword Dance

2.5. Act II: Phoenix

2.6. Act II: Adagio

2.7. Act II: The Rose Ship

2.8. Act III: Charleston

2.9. Act III: Dance In Restaurant

2.10. Act III: Preparation Of The Chinese Theatre

2.11. Act III: Umbrella Dance

2.12. Act III: Puppet Dance

2.13. Act III: Chinese Acrobats' Dance

2.14. Act III: Scene: The Conspiracy

2.15. Act III: Scene Of Confusion

2.16. Act III: Captain's Scene

2.17. Act III: Tao-Hoa's Scene; The Departing Ship

2.18. Act III: Rebellion Scene

2.19. Act III: Tao-Hoa's Death

2.20. Act III: Apotheosis

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Igor Stravinsky - Complete Music for Piano & Orchestra

"Igor Stravinsky enjoyed a lifelong association with the piano. From his earliest childhood works to a few preliminary sketches for a piano sonata left incomplete at the time of his death in 1971, the composer was seldom far from the keyboard. His piano works often serve as harbingers for larger, more familiar compositions. One often sees new contrapuntal patterns, new textural outlays, and new harmonic combinations emerging in a piano work just before appearing in the larger symphonic and choral works. Stravinsky himself referred to the piano as the 'fulcrum' of his compositional devices. The simple truth is that, in comparison to some of the composer's landmark compositions such as 'The Rite of Spring', 'Symphony of Psalms', and the 'Symphony in Three Movements', his piano literature (including the works on this recording) is too often unjustly neglected. Yet each piano work, while significant in itself, also opens new doors to understanding Stravinsky's sustained compositional evolution.

"Stravinsky's setting of the 'Song of the Volga Boatmen', scored for winds and percussion, captures the ancient spirit of a nation that remained unbendingly resilient. Over the years this iconic Russian folksong drew the attention of many composers, Mili Balakirev's arrangement being perhaps the best known. Stravinsky's Swiss exile during the First World War had stirred nostalgic feelings for his lost homeland as evinced in several settings of folks tales he knew as a child. With the 1917 February Revolution fresh in his mind, his memories grew particularly vivid. The composer supposedly prepared the arrangement for the Volga melody as a favour to Sergei Diaghilev. The Ballets Russes impresario needed a new work to replace the traditional playing of the Russian National Anthem 'God Save the Tsar' before performances. But the request for a new anthem actually came directly from the recently instated Russian parliament. Stravinsky's manuscript reveals that he initially entitled the arrangement 'Hymne à la nouvelle Russie'. The composers literally scored the famous song overnight, dictating the music to his friend Ernest Ansermet who dutifully took down every note. Stravinsky added a piano reduction of the work just below the orchestration. The manuscript also includes a coloursful red banner on the cover, sketched by Stravinsky's friend Picasso as an acknowledgement of the Russian Revolution.

"In addition to composing and conducting, Stravinsky assumed the roles of touring concert pianist for the better part of three decades. Written for his own unusually large hands, his piano music is idiosyncratic, and consequently often prodigiously difficult. The composer undertook concertizing with typical fervour. He devoted hours to honing his pianistic skills while also studying with the well-known pedagogue Isidore Philipp. Given his concerns about the excessive 'emotive exploitation' of his works by other interpreters, Stravinsky often retained the exclusive rights to public performance for years before permitting other to play his piano works.

"The Apollonian virtues of neoclassicism's clarity and leannes, to which the composer had been steadily drawn, were made unmistakably evident in his landmark Octet for wind instruments of 1923. Immediately following the Octet came the 'Concerto for piano and wind instruments', wherein the piano takes on a virtuoso concertante roles, partnering an equally important wind ensemble (with no strings other than double basses). The Concerto was written in Biarritz in 1923-4 and dedicated to Natalie Koussevitzky, whose husband, Sergei Koussevitzky, conducted the May 1924 premier in Paris with Stravinsky as the soloist. This three-movement work opens with a 'Largo' written in the style of a French Overture. The stylized dotted rhythms quickly give way to a mechanistic 'Allegro' reminiscent of many of the hard driving movements found among Bach's keyboard Partitas and English Suites. The form of the first movement is somewhat akin to a classical concerto, complete with a developmental middle section that brings to mind the Czerny and Hanon keyboard studies familiar to all budding pianists. The recapitulation leads to a rhythmically complex, jazzy piano cadenza in the style of Gershwin, disclosing just how taken by American jazz, especially ragtime, Stravinsky had become. The movement ends with a return to the opening stately French Overture material.

"The middle movement, originally written as a 'Larghissimo' but changed to 'Largo' in the revised 1950 score, incorporates a wondrously serene 'cantabile' style of piano writing not often found in Stravinsky's music of the 1920s. The movement's two melismatic cadenzas carry a very rare rubato marking, while the pianistic writing is clearly rooted in the highly ornate filigree so often encountered in the slow movements of Beethoven's early piano sonatas.

"The closing 'Allegro', with its percussive opening material built around open fourths and fifths, exhibits a satirical pastiche blending café tunes, jazz rhythms and even a Baroque-styled fughetta that appears out of nowhere. Taken as a whole, the movement bears a clear relationship to the keyboard toccatas of the eighteenth century, with rapid changes of constrasting and often seemingly unrelated material. Stravinsky performed the work nearly fifty times over the next few years, and its success spawned the composition of several subsequent works for solo piano, two pianos, piano and orchestra, and piano and violin.

"Composed in 1928-9 mostly in Nice, the 'Capriccio' for piano and orchestra is, in effect, Stravinsky's second piano concerto. So eager were audiences to see the composer perform his own works that he was regularly urged to write a sequal to his 'Concerto for piano and wind instruments'. Indeed Stravinsky was in such demand as a pianist that could only composer intermittently, as his touring would allow. The 'Capriccio' was the only new work written in 1929. It is of comparable length to the earlier Concerto; but the similarities stop there. Here the composer employs a full orchestra rather than a wind ensemble and takes full advantage of the addition of strings. Moreover, the piano writing stands in stark contrast to the earlier Concerto. While the outer movements of the Concerto were firmly rooted in the piano's natural percussiveness, the 'Capriccio' is far more lyrical. There are still passages that hark back to the assertive writing of such wind works as the Octet and 'Concerto for piano and wind instruments', but for the most part the 'Capriccio's melodious writing reflects Stravinsky's more recent compositions, especially the two important ballets 'Apollo' and 'The Fairy's Kiss'. As for the title, the composer wrote in his 'Chronicle' that he had in mind a fantasia, meaning a freely structure form that would give voice to a more impromptu-like, capricious style of writing.

"The first movement begins with an introduction marked 'Presto' that quickly gives way to the movement's main material - displaying piano writing that explores the entire keyboard in an undending, continuously expansive manner. From start to finish, with little opportunity for the soloist to grab a breath, the pianist must shape the long, mellifluous lines as part of an unbroken fabric. The movement ends with a restatement of the opening material.

"The heading of the middle movement, 'Andante rapsodico', indicates that the composer was once again writing in an almost improvisatory style, replete with rapid rhythmic figurations of nine-, elevent- and thirteen-note groupings. The resulting flight of fancy are reminiscent of the highly ornamental embroidery evident in the music of Carl Maria von Weber, who, as Stravinsky recalled in his 'Chronicle', exercised a 'spell' over him at the time.

"The second movement leads without pause into the final 'Allegro capriccioso ma tempo giusto' from whence the title of the work springs, since this third movement was in fact composed first. The form is stricter here, adhering to the principles of a classical rondo. The perpetual-motion writing that propels the movement is brilliantly spun throughout both the piano and orchestra.

"The 'Capriccio' was premiered at a Paris Symphony concert in December 1929 with Stravinsky at the piano and his friend Ernest Ansermet on the podium; the composer later revised the score in 1949, but only with minor alterations. Nearly forty years after its premier, the 'Capriccio' found a new home on stage with George Balanchine's 1968 ballet 'Jewels' in which Stravinsky's music was employed in the 'Rubies' section of this perennially popular New York City Ballet production.

"Completed in late July 1959, 'Movements' marked by the composer's most intricate serial work to date - his 'most advanced music' as he declared in 'Memories and Commentaries'. Scored for piano and an orchestra that included a harp and celesta, this astringent, compactly structured work assigns the most important roles to the solo piano. Initially, in fact, Stravinsky entitled the work 'Concerto for piano and groups of instruments'. But he soon did away with the description since the piano does not serve the same role it occupied in his earlier two works for piano and orchestra. Here the keyboard's use is more compressed, more of a contributor to the chamber music environment in which it finds itself.

"The piano seems to have assumed the roles of a solo instrument as a consequence of a commission by Swiss magnate Karl Weber, who wish to have a Stravinsky piano piece for his wife Margrit to perform. 'Movements' was premiered at the Town Hall in New York in January 1960 with Weber at the piano and the seventy-eight year old Stravinsky conducting. Originally there were five short movements (without individual titles and carrying only metronomic indications), including four even briefer intervening sections, marked as 'interludes', of only a few bars without piano (although by the time the work was published those headings were dropped). The work outlines a lexicon of serial techniques: rotations, retrograde segmentations - all within an unmistakably pointillistic orchestral structure. Stravinsky's close examination of the music of Krenek and the piano pieces of Stockhausen at that time evidently left an imprint. The score of 'Movements' reveals a pianism unlike anything Stravinsky had written before. The piano itself establishes a timbral constancy right in the centre of kaleidoscopically changing patterns of constrasting instrumental colours. Occassionally the piano is head alone, but even then only briefly. Most often it is found in combinations with one of the orchestral 'choirs'. Spatially, the pianism is also notably Webernesque in its exploration of the entire register of the keyboard. Compositionally, the work is a testament to Stravinsky's ongoing vitality at the age of seventy-seven, and his remarkable embrace of the most advanced, contemporary serial techniques.

"Also known as the Basle Concerto, the 'Concerto in D' was commissioned for the Basel Chamber Orchestra (Basler Kammerorchester) in 1946 by Paul Sacher, the conductor of the ensemble. Sacher was not only an advocate of Stravinsky during the composer's lifetime, but in the 1980s he established the Sacher Stiftung in Basel, where the vast majority of the composer's archives are now held. This elegant string concerto was written at a time when Stravinsky was acclimatizing to Los Angeles and the dizzyingly popular musical styles to which he was constantly exposed. As a result, the composer dabbled in film music, wrote ballet music for a Broadway revue, and completed a work in the jazz idiom, the 'Ebony Concerto' for Woody Herman, written just before the Basle Concerto.

"Scored for the full complement of strings, the 'Concerto in D' fully explores the richness of a full-blooded string ensemble in much the same way as his earlier Concerto 'Dumbarton Oaks' (1937-8) exploited the opportunities afforded by a chamber orchestra for both strings and winds. The Basle Concerto's string writing runs the gamut of special techniques including cleverly employed spiccato and pizzicato writing often juxtaposed with beautifully lyrical writing assigned to various parts of the orchestra. The Concerto is cast in three movements and displays neoclassical writing at its cleanest - unadorned and alternately gritty and graceful without artifice. The jutting silences and syncopations obvious throughout the first movement, for example, are characteristically Stravinskian in the way they energize the music's flow. The second and third movements reveal a composer still committed to the 'tension and release' formula of tonality but increasingly allowing prolonged dissonances to stand on their own without immediate resolutions. The work was composed entirely in Hollywood shortly before Stravinsky undertook his landmark ballet 'Orpheus', also notable for its luminous string writing.

"Written for full orchestra, including piano and harp, the 'Canon (on a Russian Popular Tune)' is one of Stravinsky's least-known works. The composer originally entitled the piece 'Canon for Concert Introductions or Encore' in the manuscript copy. Written quickly in 1965, and constituting an interruption in the middle of composing the monumental 'Requiem Canticles', it is merely a minute in duration; but its brevity belies a fascinating web in the canonically intricate treatment of the famous 'Coronation' theme from the finale of the composer's 1910 ballet 'The Firebird'. Thematic inversions and augmentations of on of Stravinsky's most memorable folk tunes abound as they snake their way through the separate strands of the orchestra. The switching back and forth between duple and triple time signatures provides a throwback to the alternating asymmetrical metres of the original ballet score. Stravinsky, who sometimes wrote little canons as gifts to his friends, composed the work as a memorial tribute to his old friend Pierre Monteux, who had died a year earlier." (Charles M. Joseph. From the liner notes.)

Performers: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ilan Volkov, Steven Osborne

1. Song Of The Volga Boatmen

2. Piano & Wind Concerto: I. Largo - Allegro - Maestoso

3. Piano & Wind Concerto: II. Larghissimo

4. Piano & Wind Concerto: III. Allegro - Agitato - Lento - Stringendo

5. Capriccio: I. Presto

6. Capriccio: II. Andante Rapsodico

7. Capriccio: III. Allegro Capriccioso Ma Tempo Giusto

8. Movements: ♪ = 110

9. Movements: ♩ = 52

10. Movements: ♪ = 72

11. Movements: ♪ = 80

12. Movements: ♪ = 114

13. Concerto In D Major: I. Vivace

14. Concerto In D Major: II. Arioso: Andantino

15. Concerto In D Major: III. Rondo: Allegro

16. Canon On A Russian Popular Tune

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