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New DSD Music from LAWO Classics, TRPTK & Fonè Records.

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This week we bring you 3 new DSD Releases, one new DSD Review written by Adrian Quanjer (more below) and a new Album of the Week!

Dodd’s DSD Discoveries “The Pentatone Edition” continues to give you a 20% discount through May 9th.

You can now use the NativeDSD Downloader app for Windows and Mac to download your purchases. No more un-zipping is needed. Available in your account.

Happy DSD Listening from all of us at NativeDSD.

Å her møter mangt (Many Meet Here) is a new album with songs composed by Johan Kvandal. This Lawo Classics release features soprano Isa Katharina Gericke accompanied by pianist Joachim Knoph.

“Kvandal heading for stardom” proclaimed local northern newspaper Helgeland Arbeiderblad when Johan Kvandal’s name first materialized in a radio program in August of 1940. The backdrop for this announcement was that several of Kvandal’s songs were performed on the radio program “Young and New”. Listeners expected a precocious talent in the following show, and the Haugtussa songs found on this recording confirm that this 20-year-old clearly knew his craft and the music has proven to withstand the test of time.

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Kvandal focused on composing chamber music, concerts and symphonic music. He continued to compose music for lyrics but taking on the position of organist at and Oslo church inspired him to embrace biblical and religious texts. However, his tonal constancy was the bedrock for everything he wrote. Not even during the mid-1960s avant-gardism was he led off-track. It can therefore be said that there is a common thread in his vocal music, from the very first songs of 1939 up until the Knut Hamsun opera Mysteries in 1993, by which time his many years of experience in writing melodies for voice had reached its peak.

Isa Katharina Gericke is known as a versatile and colorful artist in concert, chamber music and opera; her solo engagements have included collaborations with Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Akademie fur alte Musik Berlin, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra with conductors Sir Andrew Davies amongst others. She is accompanied by pianist Joachim Knoph, an active soloist and chamber musician who has performed in a number of countries.

Isa Katharina Gericke - Soprano
Joachim Knoph - Piano

Violinist Merel Vercammen returns to NativeDSD with her new album The Boulanger Legacy from TRPTK. The album follows her previous release The Zoo.

On The Boulanger Legacy, Vercammen not only plays the music with pianist Dina Ivanova, but she also wrote the album liner notes and ran a crowd funding campaign to fund the recording and its release! TRPTK tells NativeDSD “We’re so stoked about this one!”

That Merel Vercammen is constantly looking for new challenges is something she proves with her new TRPTK production, ‘The Boulanger Legacy,’ is a thematically curated album in which the music of Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) and her students are the common thread. “Her influence on the music of the twentieth century has been gigantic,” Vercammen says. The school, of which she would become director in Fontainebleau, attracted many American music students. Various names such as Aaron Copland, Jean Françaix, Philip Glass, Daniel Barenboim, Elliott Carter and Quincy Jones took lessons from her. Referring to her surname, there was talk of the “boulangerie,” as if she delivered composers like loaves of bread. The album includes works by her sister Lili Boulanger, Grażyna Bacewicz, Leonard Bernstein and Astor Piazzolla.

The three pieces by the young Lily Boulanger (1893-1918) that she wrote for violin and piano are featured, with the expressive ‘D’un matin de printemps’ (1917) standing out in particular. The Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-1969) enjoys great fame in her native country. Her music is highlighted here with the beautiful ‘Sonata No. 3 for Violin & Piano’ (1948). An early, modernist work by Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) ‘Sonata for Violin and Piano’ (1979) features a series of variations in which he plays with form.

Additional color comes from “Le Grand Tango” (1982) by Argentina’s Astor Piazzolla, a piece he originally dedicated to the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Composer Sofia Gubaidulina arranged it for violin and piano. Vercammen and pianist Ivanova seem to step outside themselves for a moment in this special performance. Like no other, the duo lets the energy of the tango speak for itself! “We really had to make those rhythms our own,” Vercammen remarks.

The carefully constructed album concludes with the first movement, ‘Modéré,’ from Nadia Boulanger’s ‘Trois pièces.’ Melancholic music originally written for piano and cello but suited with a violin part by Vercammen.

Merel Vercammen - Violin
Dina Ivanova - Piano

In Giardini e Rovine di Ninfa (Gardens and Ruins of Nymph) – Mozart Piano Music, pianist Charles Rosen brings us piano music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This is a Stereo DSD release from Fone.

One basic feature, which determines the difference between fonè and other record companies, is the recording of performances in their natural spaces, which is in the places where they were originally presented. This leads to a constant search for suitable locations, and the choice of churches, theatres, country mansions, drawing rooms and other locations.

The recordings are carried out with the utmost simplicity, the only way not to do violence to the music.

Charles Rosen - Piano

Reviewer Adrian Quanjer returns to the NativeDSD Blog with a DSD review of last week’s Eudora Records release!

Pianist Javier Laso’s new album: Schubert and Schumann: Sonata D. 960 – Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6 (Pure DSD)

Engineering Wizardry & Pianistic Honesty

“(…) Playing Schubert’s final sonatas are very demanding in terms of understanding the varying moods and handling of the score. It is not just a matter of notes and markings. It’s the subtleties, the shading, phrasing, and coloring, together with the choices of handling of the pedals that make things complicated. Interpreters and scholars do not agree on any of them.

Following Laso’s friend and first-rate Spanish pianist Josep Colom’s advice, it makes sense to approach each reading as though it is a first-time hearing. Based on Colom’s recommending notes, listeners new to this sonata will find much to admire in Laso’s reading.”

“(…) Javier Laso’s debut release with Eudora records is crowned with a most respectable reading of Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze at par with other available prime choices but recorded at the best possible resolution in decent surround, thanks to the engineering wizardry of Gonzalo Noqué.”

- Adrian Quanjer

Our Album of the Week features violinist David Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg performing Sonatas for Violin and Piano composed by Debussy, Bartok, and Brahms. This is another in the fine series of Stereo recordings from Wilson Audio.

The album features Brahms’s second violin and piano sonata (1879), the first written when he had just turned sixteen, having disappeared and then recovered; it was destroyed by the composer as not worthy. The work was named Regen-Sonate (Rain Sonata) because it uses material from two songs, Op. 59, written to the poetry of Claus Groth, evoking the sad past. The raindrop material is present in each movement, especially the third. The overwhelming impression of this tragic work affected Clara Schumann intensely, she writes, over a period of time.

This sonata shows the composer at his most original, still experimenting with form near the end of his life. Debussy writes that the first movement shows “curious evolving, giving the impression of an idea turning around on itself, like a snake biting its tail.” The work is remarkable, as the composer points out, in its joyousness and impetuousness, reflecting nothing of the depression and illness that Debussy was feeling at the time of its writing. Contrary to these, he says, “the spirit breathes when it wishes to.” And further, it shows “what a sick man can write in time of war.” Debussy himself gave the first public performance with the violinist Gaston Poulet at the Salle Gaveau in May 1917, his last public appearance in Paris.

Bartok’s Rumanian collection numbered more than 800 cylinders and over 4,000 songs at the time he wrote these dances. It is amazing to think of the perseverance it must have taken for him to manage collecting trips on the outer rim of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the midst of World War I. His letters chronicle the difficulties of communication and transportation. Exhaustion followed the last trip.

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