Mirella Freni - Great Singers Live - Mirella Freni - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Margaret Price - Great Singers Live Margaret Price [COMPACT DISCS] date 06/28/2011

It lives on! Thanks to the tireless efforts of the Gdansk composer, organist, and ensemble director Andrzej Szadejko, the lavishly reconstructed organ in Gdanks's Trinity Church experienced it's rededication last year. This opulent instrument by the Wegschneider Company in Dresden has forty-one stops on three manuals and a double pedal unit and represents the state of development that it had reached around the middle of the eighteenth century. In addition, the meticulous registration of works by Theophil Andreas Volckmar and Daniel Magnus Gronau lends special authenticity to the revival of the Late Baroque Baltic-Hanseatic tonal splendor. Volckmar himself worked for many years at Trinity Church in Gdansk. His efforts to obtain the much more prestigious organist's post at St. Mary's Church remained without success; this virtuoso in quest of recognition was too innovative for the Protestant city council members. His spectacular sonatas dauntlessly entrusting the pedal with breathtaking solos quickly convey the message that here we have somebody who could only with difficulty be integrated into the pious devotion of Lutheran religious services. The fact that the self-aware Volckmar dedicated the sonatas directly to the Polish king, bypassing the required participation of the city council, shows that he was an uncompromising artistic personality who was far ahead of his times - in more ways that just musical ones. Daniel Magnus Gronau's organ works are in several respects a discovery. The detailed instructions for registration are particularly unique for the eighteenth century and form the most extensive source of this kind in Europe. On the new/old Gdansk organ the result is a colorful organ sound questioning traditional ideas in Northern German Baroque church music. This Super Audio album is a top-quality three-dimensional production offering listeners the opportunity t

This recording is the culmination of a process spanning several years, in which the performers delved into the works of composers found right in their own backyard. The facts are that all but one of the composers on this recording were born in the 1940s (the exception here is Mark Adderley, who was born in 1960). All of the composers are Norwegian, except for Anders Eliasson from Sweden and Adderley, who is half English, half Swedish, and has lived in Norway since 1981. Three of the composers have worked as professors at the Norwegian Academy of Music, an institution that has been at the forefront of the education of Norwegian composers since it's establishment in 1973. These facts have not in themselves been instrumental in the choice of repertoire; rather it was more important that the works were composed for saxophone and piano, and that we as performers believed that they were works that deserved to be realized into sound and given attention beyond their catalog listings in various music libraries. The works become audible and alive through such a recording, rather than existing only as visual notations in the composers' manuscripts. There is so much fantastic music created in Norway and the Nordic countries that we wanted to bring some of it to light in order to make musicians and audiences, potentially all over the globe, more aware of the high quality of works from these countries. The recording also documents some of the different artistic directions and variations to be found among Norwegian and Nordic composers around the turn of the millennium.- Lars Lien