Andrew Manze Archives - NativeDSD Music

Mozart: Piano Concertos No. 25 & 26

Sjoerd Staal — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 09:59:37 +0000

On Mozart: Piano Concertos No. 25 & 26, a ‘stellar Mozartian’ Francesco Piemontesi finds a perfect partner in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra whose impeccable Mozartian credentials are widely acknowledged.

Piemontesi has performed Mozart extensively over the last year, including a critically acclaimed 2015 BBC Prom, a Mozart cycle at London’s Wigmore Hall which commenced in January and Mozart concertos with the SCO which The Herald awarded five stars.

The Swiss pianist enjoys particular insight into Mozart gaining a useful ‘love of detail’ from his teacher Alfred Brendel, who was himself renowned for his masterly interpretations of Mozart. This recording couples consecutive yet contrasting works from Mozart’s Vienna period: K. 503 represents the longest and most substantial of his concert masterpieces and K. 537 provides the soloist with an audience-pleasing cadenza.

Conductor Andrew Manze, well known as a hip pioneer, shares Piemontesi’s approach to creating an authentic performance, making this somewhat of a Mozart dream team. Francesco Piemontesi is a pianist of exceptional refinement of expression, which is allied to a consummate technical skill.

Piemontesi is widely renowned for his interpretation of Mozart and the early Romantic repertoire. Andrew Manze has rapidly emerged as one of the most stimulating and inspirational conductors of his generation.

Manze’s extensive and scholarly knowledge of the repertoire, together with his rare skill as a communicator and his boundless energy, mark him out. The SCO is a world-renowned orchestra with an outstanding reputation for Mozart; its extensive discography features Robin Ticciati, Charles Mackerras, Elizabeth Watts and Ingrid Fliter.

Francesco Piemontesi, Piano
Scottish Chamber Orchestra
Andrew Manze, Conductor

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Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 19 & 27, Rondo K. 386

Baha Striker — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 07:00:20 +0000

This is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Francesco Piemontesi’s summer 2017 release, Mozart Piano Concertos Nos. 25 & 26. This recording finds the ‘dream team’ of Piemontesi, Andrew Manze and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra back together for two further concertos: the graceful and sunny Piano Concerto No. 19 in F major and the mellow and magnificent Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major, which was Mozart’s last. When Piemontesi performed No. 27 at the 2018 BBC Proms, The Independent commented: ‘Piemontesi gave a definitive performance … his sound was gloriously transparent throughout’.

This well-established team garnered multiple accolades for their debut recording together (Benchmark Recording France Musique, Recording of the Year Presto Classical, Excepcional Scherzo, Editor’s Choice Gramophone, Album of the Week Classic FM) which increases the weight of expectation for this new recording. In addition the orchestra has recorded the Rondo in A major, K. 386, which only survived in the form of a piano arrangement by Cipriani Potter, whose father was a pupil of Mozart. Fittingly this piece was reconstructed by the SCO’s Conductor Laureate Sir Charles Mackerras in 1989 and it is this orchestral version which is performed here. Widely considered one of the world’s greatest Mozart orchestras, the SCO finds an ideal foil in the freshness and spontaneity of Piemontesi’s playing.

Francesco Piemontesi, piano
Andrew Manze, conductor
Scottish Chamber Orchestra

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Elgar Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 85 [DSD EP]

Sjoerd Staal — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 08:30:19 +0000

The profoundly moving, elegiac lyricism of Elgar is on full display in this irresistible 3-Track DSD EP from Pentatone played with consummate virtuosity by the German Canadian cellist Johannes Moser with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under Andrew Manze.

Composed at the end of the First World War, Elgar’s powerful Cello Concerto in E minor is one of his best-loved and most deeply felt works. Released now as a post-release EP, we hope to draw fresh attention from DSD music listeners to this particularly beautiful work and recording from Johannes Moser & Pentatone.

The full album where these tracks originated, Elgar & Tchaikovsky Cello Works, is also available from NativeDSD Music in Stereo and Multichannel DSD. It is linked below.

Johannes Moser – Cello
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande conducted by Andrew Manze

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Elgar & Tchaikovsky – Cello Works

Sjoerd Staal — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Disillusioned. Grieving. Lamenting. And sinking down into the underworld of the low E. This is how Edward Elgar begins his Cello Concerto, Op. 85. Without further ado, the first five recitative-like bars draw the listener mercilessly into a deeply emotional mood of leavetaking, from which there is no escaping. Twenty years after breaking through as a composer thanks to his Enigma Variations, Elgar achieved a subsequent and final creative climax with his Cello Concerto. The concerto is a swan-song to the world that preceded the “Great War”, as the English term World War I. A world that was lost for ever after four years of widespread slaughter in the trenches, of orgies of violence, of total contempt for all that was human.

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Mozart Night Music

Sjoerd Staal — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 22:00:00 +0000

Nachtmusik was a term Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sometimes used in preference to Serenade or Notturno. The connotations are the same, of music for evening time, performed out of doors, to loved ones, friends, or patrons, to woo, amuse or flatter. But the term can embrace a more shadowy side of life, the way Mahler or Bartók used it. Not so long ago, one British politician blighted the career of a colleague by saying that there was something of the night about him. This recording explores the night-music of Mozart’s soul.

On 10th August 1787, in the catalog he kept of his own works, Mozart wrote Eine kleine Nachtmusik beside a piece in G major for strings—not so much a title as a description: ‘a little piece of night music.’ It is not known why he wrote it, whether to fulfil a commission or for a private occasion, though it is safe to assume that it was performed. In those days, few pieces were written without a particular function in mind. The manuscript shows signs of extreme haste, even for Mozart. For example, doublings are written in shorthand, and large sections of the piece, where the music repeats itself, are simply left out with written instructions about where to find the missing measures. It is this which shows how quickly Mozart was working since he often took the opportunity to alter small details the second time around. Although his haste is visible, it is not audible, and the work is widely accepted as one of the great masterpieces of the genre. By looking at the other works on this recording, an insight into why this is so can be found.

The Serenata Notturna (k. 239) is the earliest piece here, written in Salzburg early in 1776. Serenades were often grand affairs, sometimes one hour long and involving as large an orchestra as could be mustered. A few months later in his ‘Haffner’ Serenade Mozart used flutes, oboes, bassoons, hhorns,and trumpets, as well as a prominent solo violin. So why this Serenata uses the unlikely (and unique) combination of strings and timpani is a mystery, one which praised a smile as well as a quizzical eyebrow from Mozart’s employer, Archbishop Colloredo. Despite the restricted orchestration and the fact that he was becoming increasingly frustrated as a middle-ranking musician in a provincial Austrian court, Mozart’s creativity runs riot. He draws a rich variety of colors from the small instrumentation, one moment a full-blooded forte, the next a playful pizzicato. At the start, all the parts combine to deliver a pompous, public fanfare. Then the tutti gives way while a string quartet of two violins, a viola, and a violone (here a small three-string double-bass) play a more private concert. This rocking between public and private, high, and low music runs through the whole piece, notably in the (public) Menuetto and (private) Trio. On paper, the tutti / solo division is reminiscent of a baroque concerto grosso, but the music sounds closer to an operatic scene, such as the party in Don Giovanni. In the final Rondeau Mozart interrupts the flow with a cheeky pastiche of Handel’s pseudo-tragic style, and then immediately brings the music back to the here-and-now by breaking into a low folk tune (as yet unidentified but not unlike the ‘Strasbourg’ tune in the finale of the G-major violin concerto, written just a few months earlier).

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Mozart: 3 Violin Concertos

Sjoerd Staal — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The present three violin concertos were completed during the last four months of 1775. After the success of his operas La finta giardiniera in Munich in January, 1775, and Il Ré pastor home in Salzburg in April, Mozart was now back in his seat, earning a modest salary as a violinist at the Episcopal court. His employer Count Hieronymus Colloredo was rarely helpful when it came to the Mozart family’s extra-mural activities but he was a keen amateur violinist, so performing entertaining violin concertos was perhaps one of the better ways to keep in his good books. In addition, Mozart was working alongside the Vice- Kapellmeister, his father Leopold, who had taught him the violin and whose letters are peppered with parental pressure on the subject. “Every time I come home I succumb to a feeling of melancholy, for as I draw near to our house I always half expect to hear the sound of your violin.” (6 October, 1777). “Have you been practising the violin at all while in Munich?” (9 October, 1777). “Your violin is hanging on its nail, of that I’m sure” (a reference to a common way of storing a violin in the 18th century, by tying a ribbon to its scroll and hanging it on the wall; 27 November, 1777). Writing and playing violin concertos must have been a good way to keep his father happy as well as Colloredo.

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Biber – Missa Christi resurgentis

Sjoerd Staal — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

During 2004, three hundred years after the death of Biber, The English Concert gave the first European performances in modern times of the Missa Christi resurgentis. Although the existence and whereabouts of this Mass have been known for a long time, it is only thanks to the work of Dr James Clements that it can be heard today. Before I met James, I had pictured an intrepid Indiana Jones look-alike, abseiling his way into the candlelit vaults of Kromeríz castle deep in the Czech Republic, sneezing his way along the dusty shelves and finally laying his hand on a pile of music undisturbed since it was placed there by one of Biber’s contemporaries.

More Bond than Jones, James described a reality far more prosaic, involving cups of tea with helpful librarians, ugly strip-lighting and many silent hours poring over scraps of paper. The result, however, is the same: we can now hear a lavish piece of music that Biber wrote for the Archbishop of Salzburg. This recording was made in London’s Temple Church which, while not as lofty a building as Salzburg’s cathedral, has as voluminous an acoustic. By placing the four main ‘choirs’ of musicians – two groups of singers, one each of strings and winds – approximately at the four corners of a square we were able to create the impression of Salzburg’s grandeur without losing clarity, which can easily happen in Biber’s polychoral works.

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C.P.E.Bach: Symphonies 1-4, Cello Concerto in A

Sjoerd Staal — Fri, 16 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The four symphonies recorded here display the eternal youth of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s musical spirit, although he was, by eighteenth- century reckoning, already an old man (sixty-one!) when he wrote them. Their subjective intensity, a style referred to then and now as Empfindsamkeit (ultra-sensitivity), was perhaps the com-poser’s own elixir of youth. Bach’s life falls neatly into three distinct periods.

He learned his trade literally at his father’s elbow, as a student not just of organ, harpsichord, clavichord and composition but of all the skills necessary to be a complete Kapellmeister. He sat at his father’s table copying out material for the Sunday cantata or the weekly Collegium Musicum concerts and met the many colourful characters who visited the Bachs’ Leipzig home. At the age of twenty-four, in 1738, he became harpsichordist to Crown Prince Frederick, later ‘the Great,’ King of Prussia.

It is hard to imagine how disorientating this change must have been to the young musician who had served his apprenticeship under Johann Sebastian. He found himself surrounded by colleagues, notably Johann Joachim Quantz, Carl Heinrich Graun and the Benda brothers, whose reputations and salaries far exceeded his own but whose talents were clearly inferior. In addition, Bach was now the subject of a royal employer whose tyranny extended to censoring his musicians’ works on matters of musical style. As Burney wrote, “with respect to the general and national style of composition and performance [in Berlin], it seems at present, to be formed so much upon one model [i.e. the King’s], that it precludes all invention and genius.” But perhaps the strangest change Bach had to cope with was the almost complete lack of interest Frederick showed in church music, to which generations of Bachs had devoted their lives.

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Concertos for the Emperor [Pure DSD]

Sjoerd Staal — Thu, 01 May 2014 22:00:00 +0000

Now Available in Stereo & 5 Channel Surround Sound Pure DSD 128 & DSD 256 plus Stereo DSD 512 only at NativeDSD

On Concertos for the Emperor, Andrew Manze, leads The English Concert in their second recording together on Harmonia Mundi. Manze demonstrates the electrifying, spontaneous style of playing which has made him one of the hottest properties on the classical music scene.

This program brings together for the first time a reconstruction of six violin concertos from the manuscript which Vivaldi had presented to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in 1728. The album was recorded, edited & mastered in DSD. Available in Stereo and 5 Channel Surround Sound Pure DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64 plus Stereo DSD 512 at NativeDSD.

The English Concert
Andrew Manze, Director

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Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 – Eroica

Sjoerd Staal — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 22:00:00 +0000

The music presented here charts two careers, of a simple musical idea, from acorn to oak, and of its creator, from obscurity to daylight. First heard as the modest seventh of twelve ‘contredances’ (WoO 14), Beethoven set this gem of a melody in more resplendent surroundings in the finale of his first large-scale success in Vienna, the ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, Op.43 (1800-1). The following year, he used the theme and its bass line as the subject of Fifteen Variations and a Fugue for fortepiano, Op.35, now known as the ‘Eroica Variations’, before immortalizing them in the finale of his Third Symphony, arguably the greatest and most important symphony ever written. This progress neatly reflects the development of Beethoven’s career. In the late 1790s, the Viennese public danced to his music without caring or probably even knowing who the composer was. With Prometheus Beethoven stood in the half-light of the theatre’s wings, his name overshadowed by the star billing of the ballet’s choreographer and principal dancer, Salvatore Viganò. In the audience at the Burgtheater was Beethoven’s former mentor, Haydn, who two years previously had enjoyed a triumph with his Creation at the same venue. Their conversation afterwards went something
like this:

H.: It’s good.
B.: But it’s no Creation.
H.: No, it’s not.

How Beethoven must have been tempted to knock the old man’s wig off! The following year was one of crisis for Beethoven, faced with inevitable deafness and plagued by the black dog. The so-called ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ of 6 October, 1802, shows him contemplating suicide. This letter, addressed to his brothers but never sent and discovered posthumously, describes the moment Beethoven choose heroism over cowardice – ‘The only thing that held me back was my art.’ Soon he was talking of a new way: ‘I am not happy with my works so far. Henceforth I shall take a new path.’ It was with Eroica, composed during 1803-4, first performed privately in 1804 and publicly on 7 April, 1805, at the Theater an der Wien, that he presented his fully-formed genius and its immortal creation to the public’s – and posterity’s – gaze.

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