Here, in all it’s lengthy glory, is my roundup of seven favourite CDs of 2011.
Click on the album cover images for all the album details.
A skeptic might accuse me of local boosterism. I admit I would rather applaud than jeer local artists, but my favourite album of 2011 is, I’m convinced, a standard of reference — and just happens to star a Toronto musician.
That would be period-instrument violinist Julia Wedman’s recording of the Mystery Sonatas by Heinrich von Biber, released on the Sono Luminus label.
The first listen was a revelation, and each subsequent visit with these interpretations has revealed new layers of craft from both performer and composer.
Here is what I wrote about it in my Toronto Star review, in August:
Toronto violinist Julia Wedman, a member of the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra for six seasons, has pulled off an astounding feat in this two-CD set of all 15 Mystery Sonatas (also known as the Rosary Sonatas) by Baroque composer Heinrich von Biber. This music is at once beautiful, provocative and profound, guaranteeing years of listening pleasure. It would take hundreds of words to describe the powerful yet transparent textures that Wedman and her cohorts have conjured out of Biber’s minimal musical instructions. It would take hundreds more to describe the intensely spiritual significance of each sonata, which corresponds to a section of the Rosary. And that doesn’t even touch on the weird and wonderful alternate violin tunings that most of the sonatas require. The world is a better place for Wedman’s interpretation of this remarkable music.
CHAMBER MUSIC
Another favourite chamber-music disc, which also features Wedman, moves from the Baroque to the Classical era, also featuring period instruments: The Eybler Quartet’s recording of music of Backofen and Mozart, with clarinettist Jane Booth, for the Analekta label.
In my review, which ran in my old Toronto Star blog, I wrote:
Clarinettist Jane Booth and Toronto’s Eybler Quartet, one of the few such ensembles in the world to work on period instruments (violinists Aisslinn Nosky and Julia Wedman, as well as violist Patrick Jordan belong to the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, and cellist Margaret Gay is a frequent guest), bring an affecting elegance to this album that features two quintets by Johann Georg Heinrich Backofen (1768-1839) — one for basset horn and strings, the other for clarinet and strings (where Max Mendel sits in as extra violist) — and Mozart’s A-Major Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, K. 581. Booth’s seamless, silken woodwind solos glide over the strings with uncommon grace. The combined effect on is an almost supernatural translucence. This is music of the ether, not the earth.
I also want to give a nod to the the U.K.’s Gould Trio, for a slice of fine Romantic pudding in their Naxos recording of Charles Stanford’s Piano Quartet No. 2. In the Star, I wrote:
From concert programs or classical CD offerings, you’d hardly know that Irish-born composer Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) was the toast of the British Empire in his day. But thanks to dedicated enthusiasts like England’s Gould Trio (pianist Benjamin Frith, violinist Lucy Gould and cellist Alice Neary), we can roll around in some of his most engaging music through gorgeous interpretations. The highlight on this CD is the Piano Quartet No. 2, first performed in 1914, then abandoned, unpublished. After listening to the Goulds (joined by violist David Adams) elegantly serve up the four-movement outpouring of late-Romantic musical pudding, I can’t understand why the Quartet isn’t part of chamber-music concerts everywhere. Other treats on the album are the sparkling, spacious Piano Trio No. 1 and some light stuff — a Legend and two of a set of six Irish Fantasies — that serves as the whipped cream, with cherry on top.
PIANO SOLO
Two albums stand out in a crowded field:
The finest tribute to the 200th anniversary of the birth of Franz Liszt came from Montreal-born pianist Janina Fialkowska, who mixed transcriptions with original compositions, well-known pieces with less-often-heard ones in interpretations at once elegantly understated and magnetically compelling. Her flawless technique is breathtaking, but no less impressive is her ability to gorgeously shape every musical phrase and thought on this ATMA Classique disc.
Korean-born pianist Minsoo Sohn, a laureate of the Honens International Music Competition in Calgary, released a seductive interpretation of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations on Honens’ own label that magically balances a clarity of structure with a storyteller’s knack for building and relieving tension amidst the composer’s studies in counterpoint, cloaked in Baroque structures and dance forms. This is another one of those recordings that reveals fresh insights into both the composer’s and the interpreter’s art with each listen. (Don’t take my word for it: Click through to the Honens site for free streaming audio of this wonderful performance.)
VOCAL/OPERA
A pantheon of prime-time talents assembled for the world-premiere recording of Antonio Vivaldi’s opera Ercole with conductor Fabio Biondi and the Europa Gallante ensemble, somehow managing to still produce a whole much greater than its glittering parts. In my Star review, I wrote:
Fabio Biondi and his period-instrument orchestra Europa Gallante are joined by a Mount Olympus of today’s opera gods and goddesses in this two-CD, world-premiere recording of Ercole (Hercules), a long-forgotten, 2 1/2-hour opera by Antonio Vivaldi 1678-1741). The composer presented this work during Carnival season in Rome, in 1723, as a supersized sampler of his compositional skills. As was the habit of Baroque composers, much of the music here is adapted — with great skill — from earlier works. The opera was such a hit that Vivaldi became the toast of the former imperial capital. This recording, created from a reconstruction from a variety of sources, features long stretches of recitative, but the all-star vocal cast (tenor Rolando Villazón in the title role, along with Joyce Di Donato, Diana Damrau, Philippe Jaroussky and Topi Lehtipuu) never ceases to dazzle. The booklet includes much background history, as well as the full libretto (with translations) by Antonio Salvi.
ORCHESTRAL/NEW MUSIC
I posted last week about the hip joys of England’s Aurora Orchestra and its conductor, Thomas Collon. Earlier this year, they charmed the earbuds out of my head with a Decca album that neatly blurs the boundaries of old and new, courtesy of hot young New York City-based composer Nico Muhly.
Here is a bit of what I posted on my Star blog:
Muhly has interwoven his own works (Elizabeth II) with instrumental arrangements (enriched with the young composer’s own embellishments) of works by William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons (Elizabeth I).
The aesthetics are, of course, vastly different, but they share the trait of pre-dating and post-dating J.S. Bach’s conventions of harmony and counterpoint. As “new” alternates with “old” on the disc, it quickly became apparent to me how much devotion and love Muhly has for the Renaissance masters. His composerly interventions (an extra shimmer of piano or celeste here, an embroidery of clarinet or oboe or English horn there) are elegant and respectful while making the music sound fresh and beguiling. The vast majority of listeners will have no idea that these pieces started off as motets — and, in the case of Muhly’s arrangements, it hardly matters.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
