WORLD PREMIERE COMMERCIAL RECORDING

Margaret Brouwer is a composer renowned for her music’s lyricism, imagery and emotional power. The five premiere recordings on this album span 24 years. Brouwer grew up in a Dutch/American community and her Symphony No. 1 ‘Lake Voices’ encodes both a recurring Dutch hymn-like melody and the rhapsodic, sparkling sonorities of a lake vista. Rhapsody, Concerto for Orchestra provides dazzling sounds and virtuosic challenges, while Pluto, written during a period of loss, offers destructive but also restorative moments. Elsewhere, Brouwer evokes the beauties of nature and sailing at dawn.

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Toshio Hosokawa is Japan’s leading living composer. This fourth volume in the series of his orchestral works, during which he was present for all recording sessions, contains two concertos and two works for orchestra. The Trumpet Concerto ‘Im Nebel’, which draws its inspiration from Herman Hesse’s poem, conjures up a vision of man and nature, in which the trumpet slowly and magically melts into the orchestral mist. Inspired by a birth, Violin Concerto ‘Genesis’ again places the soloist as the human protagonist in a universal drama of finding harmony through conflict. Sakura is one of Japan’s best-loved songs, arranged by Hosokawa for orchestra, and Uzu displays unique orchestral sonorities.

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Restless and dynamic by nature, Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez was a key figure in the cultural life of Rio de Janeiro, founding numerous influential musical institutions both journalistic and educational. He gained international fame for the primordial power of Batuque, the final dance movement of his Afro-Brazilian influenced Reisado do Pastoreio suite. Without ever abandoning his Brazilian roots, in his later career Lorenzo Fernandez moved away from explicit nationalism towards a more universalist idiom as can be heard in the vigorously themed and atmospheric First Symphony of 1945 and the programmatic Second Symphony, inspired by the life and death of the heroic 17th-century explorer Fernão Dias Paes Leme.

The Royal Danish Orchestra’s performing history stretches back to 1448, making it the oldest orchestra in the world, with Carl Nielsen counted amongst its distinguished former members. His 16 years of experience as one of the orchestra’s second violinists helped shape him as a composer, and it was this ensemble that introduced his symphonies to the world. From the ‘imminent storm of genius’ of the First Symphony to the disarming outlandishness of the Sixth, Nielsen’s symphonies are recognised as among the greatest in their genre, heard here in recordings made with a league of conductors whose bond with Denmark and Nielsen’s music is second to none.

Although Bruce Broughton is best known for his many film and television scores, over the past five decades he has composed scores for a diverse array of projects from film and TV to concert music and even theme parks. His work has been recognized with an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score for the film Silverado (1985) and a record ten Emmy Awards for his musical compositions in television. This album presents a small selection of his concert works including String Theory for string orchestra, his oboe concerto And on the Sixth Day performed by Olivier Stankiewicz, principal oboe of the London Symphony Orchestra, and his brilliant Horn Concerto, written for William VerMeulen, principal horn of the Houston Symphony, who is the soloist on this recording.

Drawing on historical texts, Fabrice Bollon’s opera The Folly focuses on Erasmus of Rotterdam, the influential Renaissance reformer, cosmopolitan humanist and intellectual, who, in old age, reflects on the events of his life. Past and present converge as fictional figures from his books or real-life antagonists appear in much the same way as Bollon merges periods through his creative use of several 16th-century compositions. Set in an age of polarised extremism that reflects our own times, Erasmus’s humanism requires vigilance, defence and reinvention.

Numerous myths surround the supposed failure of Ermione, and while Rossini himself feared the subject might be ‘overly tragic’, he was clearly fond of the work, keeping its manuscript until his death. Ermione is set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, with the Greek princess Ermione consumed with jealousy because Pirro has forsaken her and fallen in love with Andromaca, the widow of Hector. This complex web of emotional turmoil explores the calamitous consequences of passion between larger-than-life characters, with Rossini’s captivating lyrical expressiveness and spectacular vocal acrobatics superbly performed in this acclaimed Rossini in Wildbad production.

The essence of Ferruccio Busoni’s music lies in its synthesis of emotion and intellect, rooted in his Italian and German ancestry. His Sonatinas typify the stylistic range of his maturity, with the First Sonatina unfolding with the spontaneity of an improvisation. Veering between darting angularity and ominous expectancy, the Second Sonatina is one of his most radical musical statements, while the poise of the Fourth Sonatina marks Busoni’s closest approach to Impressionism. The Drei Albumblätter represent Busoni at his most austere and profound, reflecting the mystical character of his late music.

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Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco began to focus on chamber music composition during the late 1920s. From this period comes the String Quartet No. 1 in G major, which offers a countryside panorama with rustic serenades and processional themes reminiscent of a village festival. Returning to a much-changed Italy after the Second World War inevitably generated mixed feelings in the composer – the String Quartet No. 2 in F minor reflects these through dissonance and restlessness, though dancing rhythms sound notes of optimism. His final quartet, No. 3 in F major ‘Casa al Dono’, is an effortless fantasia, animated and in part ecclesiastical, which was inspired by memories of his homeland and the friendships he had enjoyed.

WORLD PREMIERE RECORDINGS

Franz Clement was the first soloist to perform Beethoven’s Violin Concerto – ‘nature and art vie with each other in making [Clement] a great artist’, wrote Beethoven. Clement was a Viennese-born virtuoso who composed his own influential violin concerto and a sequence of challenging works for solo violin. The Twelve Caprices were composed on the cusp of the Classical and Romantic eras and offer a lexicon of technical demands but also suave lyricism and imaginative writing. Clement brings his own wit and flair to the themes and variations on popular stage works of the time, which are interspersed throughout the programme.

This recital by Marko Topchii, winner of the 2023 Guitar Foundation of America Competition, ranges widely across the repertoire, from a Renaissance lute masterpiece by John Dowland, through early 20th-century neo-Romanticism, to the technical challenges of the present day. The programme includes the only works for guitar composed by Roussel and Poulenc – both of which are endlessly evocative. Barrios Mangoré’s sublime Un sueño en la floresta, three Studies by Angelo Gilardino, the competition’s set piece by Frederic Hand, and Konstantin Bliokh’s contemporary Sonata No. 6 ‘Kharkiv’ complete Topchii’s diverse programme.

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Ausiàs Parejo is the winner of the 2022 ‘Alhambra’ International Guitar Competition. In this programme he includes three cornerstones of the Spanish and Latin American repertoire. Combining idiomatic colour and rhythmic vivacity, Guastavino’s First Guitar Sonata, Ponce’s great tribute to Segovia, and Brouwer’s ingenious sequence of variations offer formidably ambitious technical and interpretative challenges to the performer. Inspired by his youthful brilliance Juan Erena’s Luz del Alba, full of radiant grandeur, is dedicated to Parejo.

The third volume of Mozart’s Masses focuses on works written in Salzburg when the composer was in his late teens and early twenties. The Missa in honorem Sanctissimae Trinitatis, a bright celebratory work, is the only Mass setting without soloists that Mozart composed. The Missa Brevis in D major is a compact, economic setting conforming to the Archbishop’s dictates for shorter works. Its companion, the Missa Brevis in B flat major, though keenly responsive and beautiful, upset church musicians because it utilised a Parisian gavotte in the ‘Dona nobis pacem’ and ended Mozart’s employment on a provocative note. Volume 1 in the series is on 8.574270, Volume 2 is on 8.574417.

WORLD PREMIERE RECORDINGS

Richard Danielpour has collaborated frequently with soprano Hila Plitmann, and this album features three recent works, two of which were written specifically for her. The song cycles heard here are sung in three languages central to the composer’s life. Songs of Love and Loss is in Farsi and sets the poetry of Rumi; Canti Della Natura, in Italian, takes sonnets attributed to Vivaldi in The Four Seasons; while Songs of My Father is set to the English poems of Danielpour’s father. Each cycle features differing instrumentation and reflects Danielpour’s long-admired compositional subtlety and refinement.

WORLD PREMIERE RECORDINGS

Petros Petridis was one of the leading composers of the Greek National School. In Saint Paul he sought to combine the polyphonic approach of Byzantine music with the form of the oratorio. The libretto follows the Acts of the Apostles with fourteen chorales forming a connecting arc in the divine drama. Expressive originality – both elegiac and joyful – is a feature of Symphony No. 1 ‘Hellenic’, and the Kleft Dances, part of a discarded symphony, show Petridis’s personal stamp. Conductor Byron Fidetzis, whose recording of Petridis’s Requiem (Naxos 8.574354–55) was hailed as ‘a triumph all round’ by Gramophone, has prepared definitive editions of these works based on the original manuscripts.

Fernando Lopes-Graça’s importance to 20th-century Portuguese music cannot be overestimated. His study of native songs and traditions has been compared to that of Bartók, and the soulful melodies of the Três canções corais are an early example of his highly effective integration of folk style into rigorous historically established forms. From the reverence and purity of the Christmas Cantata songs to the harmonic density of the Três líricas castelhanas de Camões, the powerful and often deeply moving combination of Lopes-Graça’s use of classical structure alongside his country’s musical heritage finds its zenith in his writing for voices.

German composer Carl Teike came into contact with military music at an early age, but with his modest temperament he never achieved a high rank during his time in the army. He resigned from his post after his bandmaster told him to burn Alte Kameraden, a piece that would become one of the most popular marches in the world. Teike’s marches are entirely original and significantly enrich the German concert repertoire with their inventiveness, musical charisma and colourful instrumentation. This programme includes his first march, the Prinz-Albrecht-Marsch, which he dedicated to the Prussian monarch who ‘graciously accepted the dedication’. This is the first of three volumes.

The New & Now playlist features all that is new and exciting in the world of classical music, whether it’s new music, new presentations or new performers. With more than 200 new releases each year, and artists from around the world, there is always something new to discover with Naxos.