Project Harmonia Mundi - Part 13

'Brahms was capable – as were all his great predecessors – of writing a melody that was his own property, right down to the smallest inflection, and yet sounded like a folksong. Or, to put it another way, a melody that was a real, genuine folksong – and yet was by Brahms.' (Wilhelm Furtwängler, 1931)

Transcendental virtuosity. The names of those two illustrious nineteenth-century pianists, Charles-Valentin Alkan and Franz Liszt, are generally associated with a style founded on transcendental virtuosity. Yet both the late works of Liszt, with their funereal and elegiac character, and the splendid Cello Sonata op.47 that Alkan wrote in the middle years of the century, reflect a shared ideal of purified expression and a poetic vision of instrumental music. Chamber music came to be the favoured vehicle for the manifestation of meditative, spiritual and experimental tendencies in the two artists, both of whom possessed a high degree of literary, musical and religious culture.

Beethoven composed more than eighty songs in all - the first one as early as 1783, in Bonn, the last forty years later in Vienna. In the course of his experience with the genre he outgrew the aesthetic and stylistic conventions of the Classical era and developed a form of his own that foreshadowed the Romantic songs of Schubert and Schumann. This recording provides impressive testimony to his achievement.

The world-renowned Tokyo String Quartet, playing with fresh vigor in its new formation, begins a series of recordings for harmonia mundi usa. With his revolutionary quartets of Opus 59, Beethoven left behind the classical confines of the genre and gave it a truly symphonic dimension.

A heritage of impeccable taste. This new recording by Alexandre Tharaud follows in the tradition of his earlier CDs devoted to Rameau, Ravel and Bach. Once again the young French pianist revisits in his own way a repertoire which we thought had already been explored right down to the tiniest details. Is any repertoire more famous than Chopin’s Waltzes? And yet . . .

Two supreme masterpieces!
Composed in a single burst of inspiration at the end of the summer of 1887, Dvorák’s Piano Quintet op.81, like most of his late chamber pieces, reflects ‘the lucid mind of the artist and his profundity of soul, with all his emotions and moods’ (Otakar Sourek). Seven years later, it was Boston that heard the first performance of the ‘American’ Quartet, one of the composer’s most appealing works. It was written in just sixteen days!

To the pleasures of the senses
The German Arias were the last pieces written to German words by G.F. Handel. Exquisitely wrought with all the art of the consummate rhetorician, and endowed with all the melodic charm that is Handel’s hallmark, these veritable jewels of Baroque musical literature lie midway between divertissements for a semi-public circle of music lovers and music destined for spiritual edification and private meditation.

Kodály, Kurtág and Veress are three of the five great names of modern Hungarian music, alongside Bartók and Ligeti. And this recording provides a representative survey of their output, from the ''spiritual father'' Zoltán Kodály whose famous Sonata for solo cello reaches the highest level of liberty and inspiration, without ever repudiating its origins) to his more recent successors.

Korngold left around forty songs, composed between 1911 and 1952. This recording contains many first recordings, including songs transcribed from the manuscripts and performed here for the very first time. Although it belongs to the great German Romantic song tradition, Korngold’s style is nonetheless distinguished by its freedom of form and of poetic interpretation.

This CD presents the two faces of Franz Liszt: the Sonata in B minor shows us a forty-year-old virtuoso, overflowing with enthusiasm – an exuberance much more evident in the work’s form than in its character. Thirty years later, it is an entirely different man who opens his heart in La lugubre gondola, Unstern and Schlaflos: in the meantime, the old man has lost his lovers and friends, and confesses to an inextinguishable ‘bitterness of heart’.

“One knows the fertility and beauty of this musician’s genius by the quantity of works he composed. One finds amongst all his works good taste and a surprising variety: his great knowledge shows in many of his works, and especially in [a piece] about which Masters of the Art make a great to-do: … Le labyrinthe, where after having passed through several keys, touched diverse dissonances, and having marked with serious notes, and then followed by quick and animated notes the uncertainty of a man lost in a labyrinth, he finally ends happily and finishes with a gracious and natural chaconne.” (Titon du Tillet)