W. Lutoslawski - Symphony 4 / Partita for Violin & Orchestra - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

With well-received albums of his piano trios, piano music and music for chamber orchestra, Brilliant Classics has expanded the horizons of many listeners to Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948). Previously known principally for his operatic and dramatic works such as I Gioelli della Madonna, Wolf-Ferrari built up a body of instrumental music that was played across Europe during his lifetime. Association with Mussolini's Fascist regime cast a shadow over his postwar reputation and only in recent years have listeners been able to rediscover the music of an inveterate Romantic. The First Violin Sonata was written while the 19-year-old Wolf-Ferrari was still studying with Joseph Rheinberger in Munich. However, it's long-breathed melodies and grasp of large-scale form bely it's composer's relative inexperience. All the same, the Brahmsian contours of the First Sonata are succeeded in the Second by a more personal idiom, one that more successfully integrates Wolf-Ferrari's lifelong allegiances to both German and Italian schools of composition. Dating from 1901, it sings with a stern, almost austere passion rather in the manner of the composer's Belgian contemporary Cesar Franck; the second of the sonata's two movements has an especially sacred character and ends in a mood of serenity. The Third Sonata is a very late work, dating from 1943, while Wolf-Ferrari was giving concert tours through Axis countries. In parallel with the evolution of the trio of sonatas by Brahms, this E major work has a neoclassical character maintained throughout the suppressed passion of it's four compact movements there is even an excursion into strict counterpoint in the first movement's development section, and the finale returns to the work's opening theme, now touched by both irony and tenderness.

Auckland, New Zealand post-punk group Guardian Singles return to Trouble In Mind for their follow-up to 2021's debut with InchFeed Me To The DovesInch, a ten-track socio-political burner addressing our collective spiritual chaos that pulls influence from across the history of punk & permeates it into something decidedly Aotearoan & uniquely their own in ways that are both personal & universal. InchFeed Me To The DovesInch is the first album to feature the current, long-standing lineup of Thom Burton (guitar, vocals), Fiona Campbell (drums), Yolanda Fagan (bass), and Durham Fenwick (lead guitar). The band has been playing live together now for a few years & it shows. The songs herein vary from the deeply personal, to sketches or postcards, as Burton says Inch... scribbled while watching the dregs of a delirious culture war play out through broken smartphones and praline vape clouds.Inch Expertly recorded at Neil Finn's Roundhead Studios in Auckland by engineer Steven Marr, who Burton says had a Inchgreat sense of being able to keep the urgency of the songs while adding lushness and keeping things sounding like they're about to break at any secondInch. Marr helped turn the album's scrappy beginnings into something more cohesive and beautiful.

Nunkomm, der Heiden Heiland (Now come, Saviour of the Heathen) appears in three versions. The chorale on which it is based is Martin Luther's adaptation of the original Ambrosian hymn Veni Redemptor gentium. The first of these, for two manuals and pedals, opens with the first measures of the chorale theme in the tenor, imitated at once in the alto register, over a constantly moving pedal bass. The melody is then elaborated in the upper part to form an ornamented line. The second treatment of the chorale is in the form of a Trio, three melodic lines, one for each hand and one for the pedals. Here a contrapuntal imitative opening by the two lower parts is followed by the appearance of the ornamented chorale theme, to which the two lower parts provide a postlude in conclusion. The third version of Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland is described as in organo pleno, il canto fermo nel pedale (for full organ, with the chorale melody in the pedal part). An introductory contrapuntal passage derived from the chorale leads to the solemn appearance of the chorale itself in the lowest register, successive pedal entries preceded by similar prefatory passages. The canonic variations on Vom Himmel hoch (From Heaven on high) were apparently written in 1747 and offered by Bach when he was admitted to the polymath Lorenz Christoph Mizler von Kolof's Correspondierenden Societät der Musicalischen Wissenschaften (Corresponding Society of the Musical Sciences). Bach was the fourteenth of a membership limited to twenty scholars and musicians, including, among those now better remembered, Telemann and Handel. The Christmas chorale by Martin Luther first appears in the pedal part of a Canon at the Octave that involves the two upper parts in such canonic imitation. The cantus firmus is again heard in the pedals, in the second Canon at the Fifth, followed by the chorale melody itself in canon at the