‚This is Hyperion at its best: a pair of fine artists exploring a less-than-familiar corner of the repertoire. More please!‘ (International Record Review)

‚Joan Rodgers’s live recitals of Russian song, and her earlier Tchaikovsky album for Hyperion, set up hugh expectations for this disc of four song cycles which have become classics of the repertoire. And it does not disappoint‘ (BBC Music Magazine)

‚Roger Vignoles provides sensitive accompaniments, with Hyperion supplying a realistic sound environment that avoids over-reverberance. Decent liner notes are furnished by Jonathan Powell, and English texts alongside transliterated Russian ones for all songs. Highly recommended‘ (Fanfare, USA)
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This adventurous new song recital, from this country’s leading interpreters of this repertoire, brings together divergent cycles from four masters of the genre.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century any aspiring Russian composer would have been composing songs, and by the middle of the century such songs had taken on a distinctive ‘Russian’ flavour. Mussorgsky’s The Nursery became an instant hit, and has remained a core part of the repertory. Some fifty years later Prokofiev penned his Five Poems of Anna Akhmatova; hoping for some relief from his enfant terrible reputation, he can only have marvelled at their reception: ‘After these songs, many people believed for the first time that I write lyrical music.’ Inheriting from Prokofiev ‘leading Russian composer’ status – and with it the burdens of officialdom imposed by the new Soviet state –, Shostakovich still found time to write personal works such as the Satires; composed at a time of great personal tragedy, these songs combine an apparent light-hearted music tone with deeply unsettling cynicism. Shostakovich became one of the first to hear Britten’s cycle The Poet’s Echo; initially intended as an exercise to remedy his ‘obstinately bad Russian’, Britten’s cycle ended up perfectly encapsulating the gamut of human emotion found in the poetry of Pushkin he chose to set.

Artykuł MUSSORGSKY, PROKOFIEV, SHOSTAKOVICH, BRITTEN <br />Russian Songs <br />Joan Rodgers, Roger Vignoles pochodzi z serwisu Cleartone.

INTERNATIONAL RECORD REVIEW ‚OUTSTANDING‘ AWARD
SUNDAY TIMES CLASSICAL CD OF THE WEEK

‚[Violin Concerto] A lithe, spiky, rhythmical performance, bristling with satire in the Shostakovich style … Every phrase is highly charged … [Double Concerto] Marwood and his viola colleague Lawrence Power prove to be the most outgoing soloists on disc so far … There is an extra spontaneity here that helps give this youthful music a welcome lift. With the rich-toned Power returning to give an eloquent performance of Lachrymae, this disc offers a trio of highly characterful performances‘ (Gramophone)

‚This is a highly distinguished recording, very intelligently planned and exceptionally well executed … Performances which it would be difficult to imagine could be improved on … [Violin Concerto] Magnificently set out for us by Anthony Marwood and Ilan Volkov … [Double Concerto] The performance on this disc by Marwood and Lawrence Power revelas it to be an astonishing achievement as a work of art on several levels … [Lachrymae] The finest performance I have ever heard, live or on disc‘ (International Record Review)

‚[Violin Concerto] A bittersweet, sinuously virtuosic account of a work that repays repeated listening and vindicates Britten’s faith in it … A brilliantly planned, played and orchestrated release‘ (The Sunday Times)

[Violin Concerto] ‚Anthony Marwood makes the best possible case for it in this new recfording … Has the opening Moderato’s edgy lyricism ever sounded so tantalisingly seductive? Marwood goes on to capture the sinewy vitality of the middle movement and, no less brilliantly, the quixotic moods fo the closing Passacaglia, where Volkov’s tensile accompaniments are spot-on‘ (The Financial Times)

‚[Double Concerto] A rarity… Energetic and characterful, and emerges strongly from the performance of the soloists here. But it is quite overshadowed in originality and richness by the Violin Concerto of seven years later‘ (The Daily Telegraph)

‚Anthony Marwood, in one of the most gripping acounts of recent times … careful pacing, agile bow-work and careful tonal manipulation … [Double Concerto] Marwood and Lawrence Power are ideally matched … and they make a convincing case for the concerto … A well-recorded disc, in which Ilan Volkov and the BBC Symphony Orchestra provide bitingly visceral support throughout‘ (The Strad)

‚Marwood is a vivacious soloist in the Violin Concerto and particularly compelling in its magnificent Passacaglia, which is expertly paced … We are left in no doubt about the levels of searing commitment behind Marwood’s performance‘ (BBC Music Magazine)

‚Ilan Volkov’s BBC Scottish SO relish the first movement’s spiky, quirky invention and are a superb foil for Anthony Marwood in the central danse macabre. Britten’s masterstroke was to close the concerto with a haunting large scale Passacaglia, which resolves into a typically ambivalent manner. Marwood’s handling of the closing pages induces shivers, gently rocking between major and minor. It’s a compelling work, and this is a wonderful recording‘ (TheArtsDesk.com)

Artykuł BRITTEN <br />Violin Concerto and Double Concerto <br />Anthony Marwood, Lawrence Power <br />BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra <br />Ilan Volkov pochodzi z serwisu Cleartone.

Set in Venice, the English composer’s beloved city, Death in Venice is Britten’s last opera, written between 1971 and 1973.

There are clear autobiographical reflections: strict self-discipline, reserve, the artistic vocation as an all-encompassing passion, beauty and knowledge. Another fundamental theme is the corruption of innocence and guilt as a source of inner doubt, which the composer records with implacable sensitivity.

The opera is written for only three singers: a tenor (Von Aschenbach), a counter-tenor (the voice of Apollo) and a baritone who covers all the other roles, whilst the young Tadzio and his family are dancers. This economy of vocal and instrumental means accentuates the underlying dramatic idea and is translated into moving essentiality. The staging is pervaded by a mysterious, metaphysical serenity lacking in Mann’s work but found in the music. The rock walls are substituted by books that look like ancient ruins and highlight the ineluctable immobility which constitutes the fascination of the original. The sense of death and foreboding emanated by the cypresses remains till the end: the slender, dark trees like cast iron, point upwards, rising above the views of Venice, reminding us of the inevitability of destiny: ”No choice for the living, no choice for the dead.”

The initiation journey of Gustav von Aschenbach ”Death in Venice” from Mann to Britten according to Pier Luigi Pizzi (from a newspaper article) Pier Luigi Pizzi reveals his successful approach to Britten’s Death in Venice.

The sets for this ”Death in Venice” production are not new; I had designed them for a Genoa production in the year 2000 that was very successful, winning the Abbiati Prize. It is a pleasure to work once again at this opera, which is musically complex but, in my opinion, also very poignant and intense.

When I began to think about my approach to Death in Venice, the first decision I made was to forget Visconti. I thought it would be meaningless to offer the same images as the movie; it would be like ”putting the movie on stage”. In addition, the movie differs from the book in a few things, both general – interpretation – and particular – the character of Professor Aschenbach.

I imagined Aschenbach in a different way from Visconti, and my reading, I believe, is more faithful to the original.

Aschenbach is no artist: he will become one through a painful initiation journey. When we first meet him in Munich, he is going through a life crisis: he is a successful writer: famous, respected, admired and wealthy; but he is no artist, and he is aware of it. It is at this point that a somewhat devilish character suggests that he should travel to the South in search of new emotions. This journey will take him to his death, but also to his resurrection as an artist. Aschenbach needs to discover the meaning of beauty, the meaning of art, and the painful aspects that go with them.

Britten describes this parabola very well, from both a dramatic and musical point of view.
What I did was abandon myself to the narration, following not only the cues given by the word but also those given by the music. This made me take a precise direction; to begin with, I changed the temporal setting: we are no longer in 1910 but at the beginning of the 1940s.

Those years were both tense historical times, times preceding a calamity. In the ’40s there was Nazism, and Fascism, and they fell in line with the extreme nationalism of the 1910. War was the inevitable consequence. This heavy mood is perceivable in the opera, where all the symptoms of illness, the cholera plague itself, are a metaphor. The setting of this production is somewhat autobiographical: in the 1940 I was ten years old and I remember well that environment and those beaches; I have very clear memories, on which I built using my imagination. The personal involvement and emotions have helped me very much. Thus my reconstruction is not based on documents but on recollection. Images are not realistic – or rather, they are filtered through a lyrical, poetic realism. Venice itself is portrayed in different ways: sometimes places are faithfully reproduced (re: the Procuratie); other images are more dream-like: for example the San Marco basilica, smaller and surrounded by cypresses, trees that call to mind a cemetery like the one in Munich, at the beginning of the opera. It is a Venice made of images that are not true-to-life; they are the deformed images created by memory when it recalls things long past.

Marlin Miller (Gustav von Aschenbach),
R.-François Bitar (Voice of Apollo),
Scott Hendricks (Traveller and other roles),
Alessandro Riga (Tadzio), Danilo Palmieri (Jaschiu),
Sabrina Vianello (Strawberry seller and other roles)
Liesbeth Devos (Lace seller and other roles)

Orchestra and Chorus of Teatro La Fenice,
Bruno Bartoletti (conductor) & Pier Luigi Pizzi (director)

Artykuł BRITTEN<br/>Death Venice pochodzi z serwisu Cleartone.

• Mstislav Rostropovich & Benjamin Britten
• 01. Arpeggione Sonata – Allegro moderato (13:34)
• 02. Arpeggione Sonata – Adagio (4:36)
• 03. Arpeggione Sonata – Allegretto (10:36)
• 04. Sonata for cello and piano – Prologue (5:06)
• 05. Sonata for cello and piano – Serenade (3:29)
• 06. Sonata for cello and piano – Finale (3:52)

VERY RARE Ausgabe – Limited  – Audiophile Pressing aus Japan

Artykuł SCHUBERT, BRIDGE, <br />Mstislav Rostropovich, Benjamin Britten <br />Arpeggione Sonata Sonata for cello and piano pochodzi z serwisu Cleartone.