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Mozart: Exsultate Jubilate!

Hyperion’s record of the month for February presents a Mozartian showcase for the extraordinary talents of Carolyn Sampson, and is also something of a rarity, the repertoire all dating the composer’s time in Salzburg. Two Regina coeli settings (for soprano, chorus and big orchestra), written whilst Mozart was still only in his mid-teens, are extremely fine—but not so often heard and even less often recorded. This is superb music: triumphant outer movements and heartfelt, more introspective inner sections which find Mozart at his most ardent.

Exsultate, jubilate has, of course, been performed and recorded widely, but usually in the ‘Milan’ version; here we record the rarely heard ‘Salzburg’ version, which has a different orchestration (delicate flutes instead of oboes giving a very different colour) and different words. It ends, of course, with the wildly famous, virtuosic ‘Alleluia’.

These three works make substantial pillars for the disc. But there is much more! A series of shorter jewels, including three of the greatest movements for solo soprano taken from larger sacred works: the hugely famous ‘Laudate Dominum’ from the Vesperae solennes de Confessore (which could be by Verdi, with its amazing soft chorus entry part of the way through), the utterly ravishing ‘Agnus Dei’ from the ‘Coronation’ Mass, and a cheerful and less often heard ‘Laudate Dominum’ from the Vesperae solennes de Domenica with a cheery organ solo duetting with the voice.

Finally we have a very rarely heard duet, Sub tuum praesidium, where, thanks to the wonders of technology, Carolyn duets with herself—surely no two sopranos have ever duetted more perfectly, and it is a glorious piece of writing.

Reviewing the concert prior to the recording sessions for this disc, Geoffrey Norris wrote in The Daily Telegraph that The King’s Consort and Robert King displayed ‘an unerring understanding of Mozart’s sublime thrills’ and that ‘Carolyn Sampson produced pure streams of coloratura’.

The Romantic Violin Concerto, Vol. 1 – Saint-Saëns

These sparkling performances of Saint-Saëns' violin concertos are a fitting start to Hyperion's new series of Romantic Violin Concertos; a follow on from the highly successful Romantic Piano Concerto series.

Saint-Saëns C Major concerto resembles Mendelssohn's great violin concerto. Both are declamatory, extravagant in character, highly lyrical and immediately establish the soloist as a romantic protagonist.

Though more conventional, the violin writing for the Concerto in A Major is ever-inventive, especially in the witty second episode where the hen from Le Carnaval des Animaux makes a premature entrance. This was the first of several works he composed for the great Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate; in 1859 just fifteen years old but already a famous virtuoso. Saint-Saëns' instantly memorable melodies are a feature of all his best-known works, and there are tunes in abundance in the well-known B Minor Concerto. The intense B minor mood probably offered inspiration for the violin concertos of Elgar and Bartók.

Mr Abel's Fine Airs: Sonatas for viola da gamba

Catalogue # CDA67628

Carl Friedrich Abel (1723–1787) was a contemporary of J C Bach, and a fashionable performer and promoter in London in the eighteenth century. By that time the viola da gamba was a rarity, but Abel’s performances sparked a revival of interest among performers and audiences. The works recorded on this disc (six of which have never been previously recorded) can be seen as musical expositions of sensibility, inhabiting the same tragic world as the gamba solos in J S Bach’s Passions. Abel’s contemporary Charles Burney commented on the musician’s ability to ‘breathe’ the notes as he played them, and this extraordinary sensitivity is present too in the beautiful playing of Susanne Heinrich.

Tippett: Piano Concerto

The musical and intellectual exuberance of Tippett’s music is fully demonstrated in his piano works, recorded here in their entirety on a double CD. The sonatas and concertante works recorded here offer a more compact survey of the various stages of his composing career than any other of the traditional genres he favoured: symphony, opera, and string quartet.

Every one of Tippett’s six piano works is substantial, if not in length then in compositional ambition. By temperament he conceived music on a large scale and was more attracted to the sonata than the short genre piece typical of the famous pianist-composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Being only a moderate pianist himself his piano writing speaks of an imagination directed not by virtuosity or routine movements of the fingers or the blandishments of the sustaining pedal but one set free to explore the contrapuntal style and fascination with rhythm it was heir to.

This is full-blooded, dramatic, joyful music. Steven Osborne is a celebrated interpreter of Tippett’s piano music, making the works his own and dealing with their considerable technical difficulties with ease and aplomb. In a recent interview with International Piano magazine, he wrote ‘I can’t think of any late 20th-century music that is more gripping to perform’. He is joined by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins.

Dvorák: Piano Quartets

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Poulenc: Gloria and Motets

Catalogue # CDA67623

Stephen Layton and Polyphony continue to blaze a trail as great interpreters and dazzling performers of a wide range of choral music. Their recent disc of Bruckner’s Mass in E minor and motets was acclaimed as a benchmark recording. For their latest Hyperion disc they turn to some of the most bewitching and unusual, yet well-loved, choral works of the twentieth century.

Poulenc’s choral music is a deep expression both of his faith and of his unique musical language. In the various motets, the music responds to the composer’s studies of Bach, Monteverdi, Palestrina and Gabrieli, but is always stylistically progressive. Prominently featured are Poulenc’s distinctive and often ingenious chord progressions. Each motet has its own delightfully etched personality.

Poulenc’s Gloria is one of his most enduringly appealing works. In some ways straightforwardly pious, it is also tinged with mischievous irreverence and a sense of rollocking enjoyment. ‘When I wrote this piece’, Poulenc famously recalled, ‘I had in mind those frescoes by Gozzoli where the angels stick out their tongues; and also some serious Benedictine monks I had once seen revelling in a game of football.’ This recording by the Britten Sinfonia, The Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, Polyphony and the soprano soloist Susan Gritton under Stephen Layton brings out all these aspects in a classic performance.

Walton and Rubbra Viola Concertos

‘Power is a latter-day Orpheus, an expression of music’s power to disarm, encourage, soothe and serenade’ (Financial Times)

This recent appraisal of Lawrence Power affirms his status as one of the foremost violists of today. His unremitting musical eloquence and brilliant technical ability have consistently drawn the highest praise for all his recordings and performances.

In our record of the month for June, Lawrence is joined by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov. The disc brings together three major pieces by two outstanding and highly individual English composers. Walton’s Viola Concerto is one of his greatest works—haunted throughout by the dreamy opening melody, yet suffused with action and vigour, exhibiting the dazzling, biting brilliance familiar from works such as Façade. The ‘eloquent epilogue’, wrote Walton’s biographer Michael Kennedy, ‘remains the single most beautiful passage in all his music, sensuous yet full of uncertainty’. It is presented here in the original 1928 version in its first modern recording.

Rubbra’s Viola Concerto is also one of its composer’s major works, demonstrating the new musical depths he had sounded with his Sixth Symphony and showing influences of the symphonic traditions of Tchaikovsky and Sibelius. Alongside it we have the first recording of Rubbra’s Meditations on a Byzantine Hymn for solo viola, an extended virtuoso work of religious and solemn aspect.

Lawrence Power’s instinctive understanding and feel for this music together with the great musicianship of his collaborators make this a disc as much to be treasured as their recent recordings of York Bowen and Cecil Forsyth concertos.

Gombert: Tribulatio et angustia

This is The Brabant Ensemble’s third disc for Hyperion. Under their director, eminent musicologist Dr Stephen Rice, they continue to excavate jewels of the sixteenth-century choral repertoire which have until now remained under-performed and under-represented in music history. Their natural and instinctive performing style, which foregrounds the essential vocal qualities of this music, unlike the instrumental tone of other early music choirs, brings these beautiful and complex works abundantly to life.

Gombert’s motets are the heart of his writing and this selection of them allows the range of his musical accomplishments to fully emerge. Often seen as written in penance for heinous crimes committed by the composer, many of them are settings of various texts of penitence, sorrow and yearning for deliverance from punishment. Images such as the ‘hellish lake’ in Tribulatio et angustia are dramatically explored. Also on this disc are motets for the adulation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which surprisingly demonstrate an especially intensified and dissonant musical style, showing the almost erotic level of devotion suggested in some of the greatest art of this period.

Monte: Missa Ultimi miei sospiri

In their third disc for Hyperion, the acclaimed vocal ensemble Cinquecento continue their exploration of the rich repertoire engendered in the Habsburg court. The prolific composer De Monte, Kapellmeister to the Emperor Maximilian II, wrote over a thousand madrigals as well as hundreds of sacred works, and the expressive aspects of the madrigal infuse his sacred music delightfully. His Missa Ultimi miei sospiri contains the constant interplay between groups of voices and dramatic word-setting which are features of the madrigal genre. The motets recorded here cover many Biblical and liturgical subjects and demonstrate the wide range of techniques and styles used by the composer.

Alkan: Concerto For Solo Piano

Alkan was one of the greatest composer-pianists in history, with a voice as original as Chopin or Liszt, and a technique that even Liszt admitted was the greatest he had ever known. His music is of surpassing difficulty, and fell into relative obscurity in an age where published music was frequently aimed at amateurs. Its greatness is undeniable—but it unquestionably requires performances of unceasing brilliance.

Alkan’s Concerto for solo piano is one of the great pianistic high-wire acts—an epic work which demands unprecedented levels of technical ability and physical stamina. It is conceived on a breathtakingly grand scale and is rich with both orchestral sonorities and lyrical pianistic passages. The Troisième recueil de chants is a delightful rarity, rescued here from oblivion by the wonderful Marc-André Hamelin, who with his transcendent technique is simply one of the greatest living performers of this intoxicating music.

Barber: Songs

The wonderful Gerald Finley, described recently as ‘the best living baritone currently at the peak of his powers’ (The Globe and Mail), brings his ‘glorious sound and great dramatic instinct’ to this fascinating selection of songs, sensitively accompanied by Julius Drake.

Barber’s songs are among his greatest musical achievements, demonstrating above all his sustained lyric impulse and graceful melodic writing. Another aspect was his well-developed literary taste. He unfailingly selected texts of high quality, including English ‘Georgian’ poets, Irish bards, the French Symbolists and poets writing in English who were affected by them, such as James Joyce, as well as some of his own American contemporaries. Throughout his song output, he found ways of embodying the poets’ thought in musical correlatives that were never merely decorative, and developed an instinctive knack for embodying words in a memorable vocal shape. Presented here are a range of early and later songs including Barber’s first success for voice, Dover Beach, which the composer sang on its first recording in 1935.

Romanzo di Central Park: Charlies Ives

In a second disc of Ives’s songs, the unbeatable partnership of Finley and Drake again enthral their listeners and bring them to the emotional core of each work.

The range of style and approach in Ives’s text-setting is startling—from simple, sentimental ballads to complex and strenuous philosophical discourses, sometimes encompassing the most dissonant and virtuosic piano parts, sometimes with the accompaniment pared down to an almost minimalist phrase-repetition. Even those composed in a superficially conventional or ‘polite’ tonal idiom usually contain harmonic, rhythmic or accentual surprises somewhere.

A particular beauty is Mists, composed in 1910. The poem is by Ives’s wife Harmony—an elegy after her mother’s sudden death that year. The manuscript, written while on vacation at Elk Lake in the Adirondacks, is dated ‘last mist at Pell’s Sep 20 1910’. This exquisite and deeply felt setting, with its brume of Impressionistic harmonies in contrary motion, is among Ives’s most atmospheric songs.

This thrilling collection also includes Ives’s War Songs and settings of Goethe.

JS Bach: Cello Suites, BWV 1007 - 1012, 2 CD Set

Hyperion’s record of the month for May is a major milestone for a performer at the zenith of his career—described recently in The Independent as ‘the stuff of legend’. Steven Isserlis’s award-winning discography spans his diverse interests in repertoire and his musicological enthusiasm, as well as demonstrating his supreme artistry and uniquely beautiful sound, and his first recording of the complete Bach cello suites is an indelibly important addition to the set.

Steven writes that ‘the Bach suites are works of such total perfection, such sublimity, that it is well-nigh impossible to feel ready for them’. He has proved more than adequate to the task and this release is a triumphant conclusion to an artistic pilgrimage.

Steven’s eloquent booklet notes reveal his personal thoughts about the suites, as well as extensive academic research. His is an interpretation that has come from his passionate involvement in the music rather than from following the various theories that abound in Bach scholarship, and he discusses it fully in an article which is a perfect complement to this wonderful release.

Boccherini: Cello Quintets, Vol. 1

Before Boccherini settled into the life of a composer he was a virtuoso cellist, and it was during his employment in the court of King Carlos III that he started writing cello quintets for himself to perform with the quartet already in residence. The combination of quintet with two cellos freed one of them from the obligation to provide the bass line, so Boccherini was able to exploit the instrument's full range and write for an ensemble of five soloists. He was able to further develop this sound when later employed by the cello-playing Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, where his quintets with two cellos were especially welcomed. And so were written a magnificent series of works combining lively, robust passages with elegant, suave melodic writing, and passionate driving rhythm with sweet seductive passages, all underpinned by rich five-part harmony.

It should be noted that track three of this disc is the Boccherini Minuet in its original guise. Now in its sixteenth year, the RTE Vanbrugh Quartet is firmly established as one of Europe's most successful string quartets, and on this disc they are joined by Richard Lester, one of Britain's most outstanding cellists, co-principal cellist of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and member of The Florestan Trio.

Boccherini Cello Quintets Vol 2

Being the sort of chap who doesn’t like a lot of frou-frou, a string quintet generally strikes the fear of God into me. There is never any excuse for two violas. Ever. Luigi Boccherini has no truck with such frippery either, and wrote his quintets with the cello doubled. Some might say circumstance impelled him - the family that employed him had two cellists - but I prefer to think that he did it so that 250 years hence the editor of the Readings newsletter, gazing forlornly at lots of gaps in his publication, would have this robust, melancholy music to soothe his furrowed brow. Thanks Luigi, you done good.

Peter Salmon is from Readings Carlton

Brahms: The Piano Quartets

Catalogue # CDA674712

Hyperion is proud to present as its Record of the Month for November electrifying new performances of the three Brahms Piano Quartets: the celebrated Leopold String Trio is joined by Marc-Andé Hamelin.

The G minor quartet (1861—actually Brahms’s second foray into the genre) offers a heady mix of unbridled gypsy vigour cast within a musical architecture of symphonic mastery, characteristics not lost on Arnold Schoenberg who later made an orchestral arrangement. The following year saw the premiere of the A major quartet, Brahms himself at the piano in offering to the world a work which would be hugely popular during his lifetime before falling inexplicably to the periphery of the repertoire in recent times.

It was over a decade later, in 1873/4, that Brahms returned to his aborted C minor quartet: ‘Imagine a man who is just going to shoot himself, for there is nothing else to do’, wrote composer to publisher of this profoundly moving score. Much of the 1850s material is recast, and the resulting quartet is a tense masterpiece terminated by a cadence of perfunctory abruptness. Unsatisfied fatalism triumphs.

This generously filled set is concluded with the Op 117 Intermezzos for solo piano. One of four late groups of piano pieces Brahms composed with his beloved Clara Schumann very much in mind, these exquisite miniatures find an eloquent interpreter in Marc-André Hamelin.

The recorded sound here is astonishing, both in its immediacy and raw energy: every passionate nuance of Brahms’s Romantic vision is perfectly captured. Awards can be expected.

Chopin: Nocturnes

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Duruflé/Fauré: Requiems

This CD brings together previously issued recordings from separate discs of two of the best-loved settings of the Requiem. The Requiem Mass is the solemn liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church sung to honour the departed and to ask for rest for their immortal souls (the Latin word 'requiem' is best translated as 'rest'). There have been many settings over the centuries. Fauré's is unquestionably one of the best loved and is indeed the composer's most popular work. Some of its melodies have even been used in TV commercials (for Volkswagen). Duruflé's Requiem was clearly written in homage to Fauré's serene masterpiece and exists in three versions. It is the composer's final revision of the work that is recorded here.

The Fauré recording is described as 'ethereally beautiful' in the Penguin Guide, and BBC Record Review said of the Duruflé that it has 'a heavenly, visionary effect which is amazingly satisfying'.

The two discs from which these recordings are taken remain available separately.

Haydn: Piano Sonatas, Vol. 1

Hyperion’s Record of the Month for March—a generous two-for-the-price-of-one set—pits enthusiastic composer and master pianist Marc-André Hamelin against enthusiastic pianist and master composer Franz Joseph Haydn.

Epitomizing the evolution of the Classical sonata, Haydn’s iconic contributions to the genre, some sixty in total, have in some respects become victims of their own perfection, ignored by all but a handful of today’s leading pianists and relegated to the classroom. But in the hands of Maestro Hamelin these crystalline marvels are released from such transient shackles—to wondrous effect.

The programme is varied: a tour through Haydn’s ‘experimental’ and ‘popularist’ styles culminates with two of the acknowledged ‘great’ sonatas, Nos 50 and 52. And how suited this all is to the performer: Hamelin’s devotion to virtuosic innovation—as reflected in his astonishing discography—is so firmly rooted in his passion for a sense of pianistic genealogy that these seminal works seem entirely in keeping with his more pyrotechnical reputation.

Hildegard: A Feather on the Breath of God

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Mendelssohn: Songs without Words

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Monteverdi: Vespers

Hyperion’s record of the month for May brings us the monumental Monteverdi Vespers—a perennial bastion of the choral repertory, and the fifth release in The King’s Consort’s acclaimed series: ‘The definitive representation of Monteverdi on disc’ (BBC Music Magazine).

In 1610, disgruntled with his lot as choirmaster to the Duke of Mantua, Monteverdi set about compiling what was to become one of the most significant choral publications in history. At its heart lies the Vespers—a blistering array of virtuosic solo movements and magisterial choruses to texts from which can be assembled music suitable for any Solemn Vespers, whatever the forces available. Many movements offer abridged versions and a complete alternative Magnificat is provided. This performance is of the full work in all its opulent glory, with the addition of the simplified Magnificat and the Missa In illo tempore—a setting of the Mass without which no liturgical publication of the time could have been complete.

And what a recording this turns out to be. As the cornerstone of The King’s Consort’s twenty-fifth anniversary concert series, the Vespers scored a knockout performance at The Sage Gateshead in February this year. Over the following weekend Robert King led the same jubilant forces in the creation of this recording, the fruit of some two-and-a-half decades of research and performance—the glorious result being a rendition cut free from transient artifice and embued with a degree of fully formed confidence that can only spring ‘from the heart’.

A dazzling array of soloists join King—his choir and orchestra on top form—in presenting this new recording of a true masterpiece to the world: a project made possible by the generosity of all the many hundreds of people who donated to Hyperion’s appeal for recording funds in 2005.

This new recording is available in multichannel DSD hybrid SACD and conventional CD formats.

Mozart: Clarinet Concerto & Quintet

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Pergolesi: Stabat Mater

Catalogue # CDA66294

Pergolesi:
Stabat Mater
Salve Regina in A minor
In Coelestibus Regnis

Gillian Fisher (soprano) & Michael Chance (countertenor)
The King's Consort, Robert King

Schubert: 'Trout' Quintet

Catalogue # CDA67527

Hyperion’s record of the month for March presents Schubert’s much-loved ‘Trout’ Quintet, one of the most popular chamber music pieces of all time. The young Schubert, inspired by the surroundings of a summer trip in the Austrian Alps, decided to use material from his earlier song ‘Die Forelle’ (’The Trout’, D550) as the basis for the beautiful fourth movement of his Quintet. Composed in five movements, the ‘Trout’ is unusual in being scored for a double bass in place of the expected second violin; the resulting transparency of texture and infectious melodies instantly bring to mind the calm serenity of summer mountain air and the ‘darting’ piano accompaniment in the fourth movement vividly conjures up that wriggling trout!

Also on this disc are Schubert’s two string trios. D471 (written in 1816) is just a single movement, which may suggest that he was having some difficulty mastering this demanding medium; however by 1817, at the age of just twenty, he was finding his own distinctive voice with his four-movement Trio, D581.

The Leopold String Trio, considered one of the world’s most outstanding string trios, here performs these works with remarkable poise and expression. For the ‘Trout’ they are joined by the pianist Paul Lewis (himself a fine Schubertian) and double bassist Graham Mitchell: these fine young musicians bring to these works the engaging freshness, calm authority and generosity of spirit the music deserves.

Shostakovich: Complete String Quartets

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Stravinsky: Mass & Symphony of Psalms

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Tallis: Spem in alium

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Vivaldi: Lute & Mandolin Concertos

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British Light Music Classics

77 tracks of golden nostalgia on 4 compact discs

including the music made famous as the signature tunes to Music While You Work, The Secret Garden, Dick Barton—Special Agent, Children’s Favourites, Jennings at School, the Paul Temple detective series, In Town Tonight, The Archers, Down Your Way, Dr Finlay’s Casebook, Television Newsreel, Housewives’ Choice, My Word, Top of the Form, BBC Morning Music, Desert Island Discs, BBC Farming, The Barlows of Beddington …

with music by 45 composers, including Charles Ancliffe, Ronald Binge, Ernest Bucalossi, Eric Coates, Frederic Curzon, Robert Farnon, Herman Finck, Albert W Ketèlbey, Lionel Monckton, Gilbert Vinter & Charles Williams