Although Reger’s music has partly recovered from its deeply unfashionable reputation, much of this prolific composer’s work still remains underperformed. This disc offers a chance to redress the balance, both by bringing to light an aspect of Reger’s output that has been relatively neglected, and by demonstrating that the important influences on him were not just musical but literary. Like his near contemporaries, Mahler, Strauss, Wolf and Zemlinsky, Reger responded deeply and imaginatively to the German Romantic poetic tradition. The works recorded here set many of the same poets (and even some of the same poems) that were popular among his colleagues, with a sensitivity and intuitive understanding that belie Reger’s reputation for stodgy academicism. Richard Stokes’s comment, that ‘Reger does not always lose out in comparison’ (when he and Strauss set the same texts as Lieder), could apply equally well to his choral music.

Artykuł REGER <br >Choral Music <br />Consortinum <br />Andrew-John Smith pochodzi z serwisu Cleartone.

While the Reger concerto comes from the end of his career, the Strauss Burleske is a product of that composer’s prodigious youth. This ebullient work has long been a Hamelin ‘party-piece’, and he plays it with an unmatched brilliance which surely captures the essence of this humorous music and will have the listener on the edge of his seat.

Artykuł REGER, STRAUSS R., <br />Piano Concertos <br />Marc-Andre Hamelin <br />Berliner Rundfunk Sinfonie-Orchester <br />Ilan Volkov pochodzi z serwisu Cleartone.

2010

“The variety of Reger’s music could hardly be better suggested than by this pair of discs. Reger the wild modernist (by the standards of 1903) is vividly before us in the headlong, turbulent, disconcertingly chromatic outer movements of the Op 72 Sonata, with their huge variety of moods and frequent abrupt changes of direction. But the Little Sonata of only six years later is almost classical by comparison; it’s much more direct, economically worked and tightly argued. And in all the unaccompanied music in Luigi Alberto Bianchi’s recital we meet Reger paying sincere and often touching homage to Bach.
Bianchi’s disc is beautiful but poignant. The three Suites for viola were recorded in 1977 on a large and sumptuously rich-toned viola by the brothers Amati, the Medicea. It was stolen three years later; Bianchi began playing the violin instead and eventually acquired a fine Stradivari, the Colossus, upon which in 1992 he recorded the unaccompanied Violin Sonata. That too was stolen six years thereafter, and apart from the interest of the music and the eloquence of the playing this disc has the sad value of being perhaps the last that we shall hear of two exceptional instruments.
Reger’s love for the violin is as evident in the Op 91 Sonata as is his reverence for Bach. All the movements are like Bach in late-Romantic dress, and the finale is a magnificent chaconne.
Ulf Wallin plays with a slightly narrower tone than Bianchi, which works well in the tumultuous gestures of Op 72. But he and Roland Pöntinen are just as alive to Reger’s moments of withdrawn pensiveness and long lines, which need care if their chromatic shifts aren’t to make them seem diffuse; they never do here. The recordings are excellent.
Years ago the merest mention of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto brought just two key stylistic templates to mind: David Oistrakh and, a little later, Leonid Kogan. Oistrakh in particular had fashioned such a warm and intimate reading of the piece that it became almost impossible to imagine a credible alternative. And yet the passing years have brought many, not least Perlman, Mullova, Vengerov and Chang, to name some of the best.
Hilary Hahn is certainly in their league, though different again. She’s a lean, athletic player, utterly still at the muted centre of the Concerto’s first movement, and with elfin agility in the Scherzo. Hahn is to be preferred, primarily because her sweetness-and-steel tone, with its expressive but narrow vibrato, lends a fresh perspective to the work but also because of Marek Janowski’s fine conducting.
Some might find Hahn’s approach a trifle cool, especially in the cadenza. Hahn is a very clean player, colour-conscious but never dangerous in the manner of her most rival, Ilya Gringolts, though she does engage in some active dialogue with individual soloists. Only the finale seems a little short on what one might call ambiguous sparks – where sudden ignition could be taken either as celebration or protest – but as fiddle-playing per se, it really does cut the mustard. Among digital rivals Vengerov and Khachatryan are still tops, though as Hahn is nearer than they are to the honeyed tones of pre-war players some collectors might favour her on that count alone.
As to the coupling, Hahn gives a swift, resilient, bright-toned reading, tender-hearted in the Andante and very fast in the finale. Too fast perhaps for true composure. Still, it’s a fine display, and this is a thoroughly fine disc, confirming Hilary Hahn as among the most gifted and individual players on the concert circuit.”

Artykuł Reger, Luigi Alberto Bianchi<br/>Violin Sonata No. 7 Op.91 / The 3 Viola Suites pochodzi z serwisu Cleartone.

But Bianchi demonstrates that there is some fine music here. He has a rich, warm tone, but that doesn’t impede his agility around the top end of the instrument. In general, it is very secure playing, but very fluid too. He often shapes phrases with some quite extreme rubato at both ends, although his dynamics tend to be more stepped, distinguishing one phrase from the next.

…lyrical dimension

Reger isn’t known as a melodist, mainly because his themes tend to lack memorability, but there is a strong lyrical dimension to this music that Bianchi brings to the fore. I love the way that he deals with Reger’s often rambling phrase structuring. Rather than try to focus the end of the phrase on the – often ambiguous – cadence, he usually prefers to let it trail off, as if the composer has lost his train of thought and the performer has no intention of reminding him.

As is probably obvious from the above comments, this is not the sort of reading that emphasises the neo-Baroque dimension of the Suites. In fairness, it is not as pronounced here as in Reger’s Cello Suites, but even so, Bianchi seems intent on positioning this music squarely at the end of the Romantic period, with thoughts of Bach all but forgotten. There are a few exceptional movements, the allegretto third movement of the Second Suite for example, but even here the Baroque formality is only apparent in the dance rhythms and not in any particular metrical discipline in the performance.

Bianchi’s viola…

Bianchi’s viola has an interesting story behind it. It is a 1595 Amati, ‚modernised‘ – and Bianchi himself has surprisingly few reservations about that process – by the William Hill workshop in the late 19th century. The instrument was stolen from him in 1980 and only returned in 2005 when it was found in a barn. He is obviously more careful with it now, as it currently resides in Cremona, no doubt in some specialist repository. There are photographs of it in the liner and it is clearly a beauty.

The sound quality is fairly good, but there are a few glitches here and there that really stand out, especially when listening on headphones. They sound like tape edits, but given their positions – one is in the first note of the Second Suite – that can’t possibly be the case. A gremlin somewhere in the mastering process perhaps?

Bianchi’s one big mistake on this disc is to open it with Reger’s Seventh Violin Sonata, performing it himself on the violin. He is clearly a competent violinist – he started playing in the early 80s, presumably as a practical response to the theft of his viola – but his skills on that instrument don’t come close to his mastery of the viola. As a result, the Sonata sounds precarious throughout, with the intonation and the articulation always only just coming up to scratch. His timbre in the top register of the violin also leaves something to be desired, a great shame considering how elegantly he plays at the top of the viola fingerboard.

A disappointing filler, then, to an otherwise satisfying disc of Reger chamber music. The sheer Romanticism of the readings make this a somewhat idiosyncratic reading. But then, it is solo chamber music, so you can’t blame the player for doing things exactly the way he wants.

Gavin Dixon

Read more: http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2011/Apr11/Reger_DM8008.htm#ixzz1VnLubI9C

Artykuł Reger, Luigi Alberto Bianchi<br/>The 3 Viola Suites / Violin sonata Op.91 pochodzi z serwisu Cleartone.