Welcome to our latest Classical Choices! With the arrival of Advent, I’m opening this month’s selection with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s brightly lilting 1993 recording for Deutsche Grammophon of Respighi’s L’Adorazione dei Magi.
From there, it’s on to our new releases. First, the premiere recording of a new work, Flow, from Nokuthula Ngwenyama, commissioned by the Takács Quartet to mark the commencement of its 50th season, followed by a celebration of Fauré (who died 100 years ago this month) from French violinist Irène Duval. We round things off with a collection of multi-piano works including a newly rediscovered score by Mendelssohn and his teacher Ignaz Moscheles. Enjoy, and we’ll be back soon with a selection of highlights from 2024!
Ngwenyama: Flow
Takacs Quartet
Hyperion
Formed in 1975 at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, and now based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the world-renowned Takács Quartet has just entered its 50th season – an incredible milestone for a string quartet to achieve. Even more impressive, the Quartet has retained its founding cellist, András Fejér. Having released a Schubert album earlier in the year, the group is kicking off its anniversary season with a future-facing recording of Flow, a brand new piece which it commissioned from American composer and violist Nokuthula Ngwenyama (of Zimbabwean-Japanese parentage), and premiered in 2023.
Ngwenyama’s brief was to create a work inspired in some way by the natural world. The resultant work – which, perhaps surprisingly, follows the traditional four movement quartet template – opens with a Prelude evoking the beginning of the universe. It then proceeds to a slow movement providing a meditative space in which to contemplate the beauty of sound and silence. Next, a playful ‘Quark Scherzo’ third movement captures the subatomic realm, particles dancing in their own rhythm, before a joyfully vibrant, climactic Finale.
The music, its performance and its warmly high definition capturing, are all a joy. In compositional-stylistic terms, there’s all sorts here, with Ngwenyama drawing on both the past and the present to create her forwards-flowing, organically developing portrayal of a nature that’s simultaneously fragile and vital. There’s a panoply of special sound qualities and textures for the quartet to realise, such as bowed and pizzicato glissandi, sul ponticello (playing on the bridge) overtones and extreme high register pitches.
The harmonic and linear language is strikingly tonal and melodic one moment, atonal and fragmented the next, and represents a rhythmic smorgasbord. Stylistically, Ngwenyama draws on everything from American folk to spectral, to Viennese ballrooms, Mendelssohn and jazz. Under the Takács’s combined fingers, it makes for a fabulously energising listen, and feels tremendously lyrical and expressive, with some sublimely played solos in the Finale.
If you get an opportunity to hear this work live, then go. In the meantime, I’ve given the recorded version to you in its entirety.
Fauré and Friends
Irène Duval and Angus Webster
Capriccio
If you happened to be one of the lucky souls who made it to Steven Isserlis’s Fauré-themed Wigmore Hall residency at the start of this month, you would have had the pleasure of catching a young rising star among the constellation of celebrated players – violinist Irène Duval, whose poised, fearless energy, chamber intelligence and musical finesse has been attracting the attention of every critic who comes across her.
Fauré and Friends, in partnership with young British pianist-conductor Angus Webster, is Duval’s second recital album, and it delivers on its central promise with tremendous style. From Fauré himself, there’s the Second Violin Sonata (the First featured on Duval’s 2016 debut album, because her affinity for Fauré is no fleeting fascination), plus the Berceuse Op 16, Andante in B flat major and the rare Morceau de lecture.
There are also works from composers in Fauré’s circle, including the Romance in A major (1901) by Reynaldo Hahn, a younger admirer of Fauré’s best known for his mélodies (songs). Fauré’s pupil and friend Georges Enescu is represented with his Sonata No 2 (1899), dedicated to the great French violinist Jacques Thibaud, and you can find a nice counterpart to Fauré’s famous Berceuse in the form of the tender, much rarer one by his own teacher and dear friend Saint-Saëns, with its bewitching, touching harmonies.
Duval plays on a sweetly warm Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume violin on loan through the Beare’s International Violin Sonata, and brings all the fluid, smooth-lined confidence and focussed sweetness we’re now becoming used to appreciating on the concert stage. The piano tone is equally warmly attractive and defined. The conversation between the two of them feels smoothly familiar and effortless. I’ve selected the latter end of the album: the Saint-Saëns Berceuse, followed by Fauré’s Romance, Second Sonata and Morceau de lecture, for our playlist.
Unplayed Stories...in 40 Fingers
MultiPiano Ensemble
Hyperion
This joyous album from the MultiPiano Ensemble presents a selection of early Romantic concertante works for multiple pianos and orchestra by Mendelssohn, his teacher Ignaz Moscheles, Schubert and Liszt, performed by the assorted members of MultiPiano Ensemble: Alon Kariv, Tomer Lev, Berenika Glixman and Nimrod Meiry-Haftel. All are new to the catalogue in the versions recorded here, and one – the album-opening Fantaisie and Variations on a Theme by Weber, co-composed by Mendelssohn and Moscheles – was only rediscovered at the beginning of this century.
The newly rediscovered Weber arrangement was born of a charity event held at the British court in 1833, for which the two piano virtuosi were scheduled to perform. The Weber theme was his hit ‘Marche bohémienne’ (‘Gypsy March’) from his incidental music to Preciosa, and with both Mendelssohn and Moscheles pushed for time in advance, they simply prepared a joint skeletal plan and then improvised onstage in what was effectively a 19th century jamming session. They then used those improvisations to produce an actual score when asked to do it again a few months later. At some point after that second performance, the manuscript disappeared.
Confusion followed, when a new version created by Moscheles 16 years later was mistakenly described by the publisher as the original shared-authorship work. The true manuscript resurfaced in St Petersburg at the start of this century, in the personal archive of legendary pianist Anton Rubinstein, who it transpired had been gifted it in London by Felix Moscheles, Ignaz’s son.
As for the music, it begins with a free fantasy by Mendelssohn, followed by Moscheles’s presentation of the march theme, followed by two variations from each of them, rounded off with a sparkling finale largely authored by Mendelssohn. Part of the fun comes in listening out for the switches between composer, performed here with suitably celebratory ebullient nimbleness by pianists Alon Kariv and Tomer Lev, and to sprightly support from the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin under Ivor Bolton.
The album’s other works begin with Moscheles’s Les Contrasts ‘Grand Duo’ for two pianos in eight hands, newly realised with orchestra accompaniment by Tomer Lev and Aryeh Levanon. Next, Alexander Tamir’s recent two-pianos-and-orchestra reworking of Liszt’s piano-and-orchestra arrangement of Schubert’s solo piano ‘Wanderer Fantasy’. The pianos-only remainder of the album then offers up two of Schubert’s Grandes Marches for four-hands piano duet, rearranged by Ernst Pauer (1826-1905, who was principal piano teacher at London’s Royal College of Music in its earliest days) for two pianos in eight hands.
All in all, it’s a thoroughly merry album. Inevitably, it’s the Mendelssohn-Moscheles Weber march that I’ve chosen for the playlist.
