Forthcoming and recent events featuring music, composers and artists associated with Altarus Records, and sometimes other events that we think are interesting.
NEW RELEASE!
AIR-CD-9034 
Samuil Feinberg
WORLD PREMIERE RECORDING of the long lost FIRST PIANO CONCERTO!
Concerto No.1 op.20 in C Major for piano & orchestra [1931]*
Christophe Sirodeau, piano / Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra / Leif Segerstam, conductor
Solo piano works:
Fantasia No.2, op.9 in E minor [1919]* / Etude op.11 No.1 in Eb major [1919] / Prelude op.8 No.2 in A minor [1917] / Prelude op.8 No.4 in Eb major [1917] / Etude op.11 No.4 in F minor [1919] / 3 Preludes op.15 [1923] / Berceuse op.19a [1927] / The Dream (from op.28) op.posth [1955]* / Album for Children op.posth [1961-62]*
Christophe Sirodeau, piano
* World première recording
Feinberg's 1st Piano Concerto, long thought lost, turns out to be one of the great forgotten masterpieces of early Soviet times, and one of the finest works by one of the most significant composers of the era, to boot. Feinberg performed the piece twice in the 1930s and it was then misplaced, to be rediscovered by the present soloist in the 1990s. This recording is from the work's only other performance to date, in 1998. Beginning unassumingly, diffidently, with a statement of the principal theme that pervades the entire piece, the concerto rapidly darkens in mood and embarks on a tragic, epic journey of over a half-hour's duration, alternating moods of uneasy tranquility, devastating despair and apocalyptic vehemence. After trying out elements of all three, the music abruptly plummets to the depths in one of Feinberg's most memorable inspirations; a vast, inexorable, nightmarish cortège in which the piano - reduced to a concertante, yet fiendishly difficult role - spasms like a sparking dynamo trapped within a huge, decaying yet implacable machine; a truly terrifying episode, comparable to the first movement of Mahler 6 or the cumulative climaxes of Pettersson 8. This subsides into a funeral march of the utmost bleakness, which Feinberg adapted and extended from his formally odd, highly inventive 3rd Sonata, the gloom alleviated by reconciliatory passages for the orchestra. Dynamic, driven music follows, leading via a brittle, angry fugato to the work's explosive cadenzas, before dying away into a semblance of calm before the final climax, suggesting victory, though hard-won. Perhaps surprisingly, as Feinberg is usually thought of as a successor to Scriabin, the influence of Busoni is very strong; there is more than a little of Doktor Faust in both the atmosphere and musical phrase-shaping of the piece, and of Busoni's own concerto in the conflict between concertante writing and extreme virtuosity of the solo part. The solo works - several also receiving their world première recordings - fascinatingly chart Feinberg's compositional evolution. Pre-eminent is the extraordinary 2nd Fantasia, a haunted and violent work from 1919. With the passage of time the Scriabin influence grows and recedes, and the later pieces - a beautiful, tragic song transcription from the 1950s and the enigmatic, aphoristic 'Children's Album' - the composer's penultimate work, unpublished in his lifetime - betray an understated, scholarly melancholy, far removed from the rumors of impending Armageddon present in the earlier works, yet no less telling on a personal level. A revealing and important release for our ongoing reappraisal of this major figure.
[Courtesy Records International]
For more information on Feinberg, and the performers on this CD, please visit the website of the International Feinberg-Skalkottas Society
NEW RELEASE!
AIR-CD-9082 
Sorabji Un nido di scatole / Djâmî / St Bertrand de Comminges
Jonathan Powell, piano
Paradoxically, the more we discover about Sorabji's output, the more complex his creative personality appears to be. As a case in point, consider 'A Nest of Boxes', a half-hour suite of 'nested' variations, in which each piece epitomises in miniature a characteristic Sorabjian genre, written for one of the very few performers who played Sorabji's music during his lifetime, Harold Rutland. So we have a chorale prelude of cumulative intensity; a tropical nocturne; two toccatas of contrasting texture and the customary blistering virtuosity; a gorgeous chorale like a glimpse into the incense-laden atmosphere of a Mass in some great cathedral, a Richard Strauss parody that seems to have wandered in from the Hoffnung concerts, and so on. Add to this the almost unique feature of verbal in-jokes in the guise of performance directions, and we have a sketch of Sorabji's working methods that conceals more than it reveals, which is also a tremendously exciting piece of kaleidoscopic contrasts and quicksilver variation of mood. St Bertrand sticks to one idea; the kind of highly virtuosic, compact free fantasia that embodies the kind of pianism that Sorabji was investigating in the 1940s, of which the summit, as we now know thanks to Mr Powell, was the Concerto per suonare da me solo. Based on a ghost story by M.R. James, St Bertrand is an essay in narrative drama and richly textured atmosphere. By way of the most extreme contrast, Djâmî is one of the finest example of the composer's elaborate, ornamented hothouse 'tropical nocturne' genre. Named for the Persian poet Jami and prefaced by a quotation from his masterpiece 'Yusuf and Zulaikha', the work mirrors the complex argument and obsessively detailed description of Islamic poetry and art in Sorabji's most harmonically rich and intoxicating style. Unusually in Sorabji's output, and probably a result of its connection to his Persian heritage, the piece contains gestures which seem explicitly to evoke Eastern musical idioms.
Available from Records International and other fine retailers.
NEW RELEASE!
AIR-CD-9035
Christophe Sirodeau
Musique vespérale pour Elsa (violoncelle solo et orchestre) [Pia Segerstam, 'cello, Orchestre National de Montpellier, Leif Segerstam, conductor.] / Obscur chemin des étoiles - Nocturnal-Fantasy pour piano solo [Jonathan Powell, piano.]/ Artificial Horizon pour violon solo [Hannele Segerstam, violin] / Cénotaphe pour piano solo en hommage à J.S. Bach et Samuil Feinberg [Jonathan Powell, piano.] / Jeux d'ombres pour violon et piano [Hannele Segerstam, violin, Christophe Sirodeau, piano.] / Arlequins en rouge et blanc - Hommage à Raoul Dufy pour violoncelle et piano [Pia Segerstam, 'cello, Christophe Sirodeau, piano.] / Esquisse pour Adramandoni op.12 : poème musical électro-acoustique
Christophe Sirodeau's name will be familiar to collectors for his pioneering recordings as pianist of Feinberg and Skalkottas, so it comes as no great surprise to discover that as composer he has much in common with the great virtuoso pianist-composers of the 20th century. In his taste for sumptuous harmony and rich instrumental colour one is reminded en passant of his French forebears - Debussy, Ravel, and more recently, Dutilleux, in his exquisitely judged combination of harmonic richness and economy of gesture. Lutoslawski will also likely come to mind, but perhaps the most telling comparisons are late Mahler, early Schönberg, and Berg. Every piece contains multiple levels of musical detail and psychological drama, ensuring that even after repeated hearings the music never seems to have given up all its secrets. 'Evening music for Elsa' is dedicated to the composer's daughter, but the reference is only to the circumstances of its composition and the work is nothing like the lullaby that the title might suggest; almost half an hour of highly concentrated argument, and a symphonic tour de force for the 'cello soloist, who sustains enough, and enough variety of musical narrative for a solo work, quite apart from the constant interchange of ideas with the large and inventively employed orchestra. The work progresses through a wide range of episodes, now exultant, now violent, now eerily nocturnal, always with a sense of underlying structure and inevitable progression. It shares many of these characteristics with the brilliantly virtuosic large-scale piano work 'Veiled path of the stars', a nocturne not in the sense of a celebration of comforting, enfolding darkness, but rather, in the manner of Mahlerian night music or a late Skryabin sonata, a surreal dreamscape, a kind of narrative stream of consciousness with the disjointed yet implacable logic of dreams. This kind of nocturnal imagery is a recurring trait of Sirodeau's music; the chamber works are limned in shadow, and even 'Harlequins' suggests the mask-like impersonality and clown illogic of the commedia dell'arte figures as much as the luminosity of the Dufy painting that inspired the work (reproduced in the extensively annotated, dual-language booklet). 'Artificial Horizon' is a set of ingenious - and thrillingly bravura - variations for solo violin, giving the impression of free atonality - but when the theme is revealed, at the end in one of those wonderful 'oh, now I get it!' moments, it turns out not to be. And the intriguing final item, a brief electronic 'collage', using musical fragments and 'found' sounds more in the manner of musique concrète than the current vogue for computer-manipulated timbre, sounds like the aural component to a fragment of a larger multimedia work, and points to the composer's range of expressive capability.
[Review courtesy Records International]
See also Christophe Sirodeau's website for more information and links
NEW RELEASE!
AIR-CD-9081
Sorabji Concerto per suonare da me solo
Jonathan Powell, piano
'If I wanted to give anyone an idea of my music, I'd play the Concerto per suonare . . .' and if we wanted to suggest one CD that really proves what all the fuss is about, and why it's justified, this would be it. In this three-movement work, obviously in the mould of the Alkan Concerto for solo piano, Sorabji simply pulls out all the stops, bombarding the listener - and the pianist! - with non-stop tumultuous and extravagant virtuosity that appears to have flowed even more effortlessly from his pen here than usual. Avoiding the large-scale variation and fugal forms common in many of his multi-movement works, this piece instead places the textures and interchange of argument of a virtuoso piano concerto under the fingers of one player, in possibly the most ferociously bravura work of his entire output. This is Sorabji as Mephistopheles, gleefully conjuring a pan-dæmonium of pianistic phantasmagoria, and very obviously revelling in his compositorial craft. Composers dear to Sorabji may be glimpsed in fleeting cameos - Chopin studies, Liszt Années de pélèrinage, Rakhmaninov, Alkan, Busoni - hinting both at a sophisticated yet broad sense of humour (incessantly present in Sorabji's writings, less frequently obvious in his music) and a serious intention to place himself in the company of these masters. In case this sounds like a pyrotechnical high-wire act of questionable substance, it should be noted that even amidst the most terrifying exhibition of transcendental piano writing in the outer movements, the level of musical inventiveness and effortless ingenuity with which Sorabji metamorphoses and constantly re-invents his material runs at a consistently high level throughout, and the rigorous control of structure binds the work into a miracle of concise expression which seems compressed, even at over an hour's duration. The central slow movement is a gorgeous combination of the composer's characteristic elaborate tropical-nocturne style (chronologically adjacent to Gulistan, the movement has much in common with Sorabji's finest essay in the genre) and the adamantine architecture of his quasi-orchestral (written 'orchestrally for the piano in terms of the piano') symphonic slow movements, as encountered in the symphonies for solo piano, and to which the Adagio from Opus Clavicembalisticum is a close relative. An exhilarating experience; on the evidence of this piece alone, Sorabji clearly stands among the most original and exciting composers of the 20th century.
[Review courtesy Records International]
NEW RELEASE!
AIR-CD-9061
Joseph Marx Lieder (Italienisches Liederbuch - first complete recording / selected Lieder)
Sarah Leonard, soprano / Jonathan Powell, piano
Joseph Marx is a composer whose time has seemingly come, or rather returned, after he inexplicably fell out of the public's attention having been widely regarded as one of the leading lights of Austrian music in the early part of the 20th Century. His marvellous lieder have long been the most renowned part of his output, and for good reason; they represent outstanding examples of the tradition as practiced by his illustrious forebears (Brahms, Schumann, Wolf, Mahler . . .) while extending it in a wholly individual fashion. While his fundamental æsthetic is the richest, fullest romanticism, hints of the modernism in the air in the turbulent first decade of the 20th century keep surfacing - for example in the unstable, glittering pyrotechnics of the surreal 'Pierrot Dandy', or the extraordinary range of expression in the Whitman setting 'Youth and Age' - a most unusual choice for a Lieder composer, with Whitman's characteristic extrapolation from personal to universal concerns (the textures achieved here are quasi-orchestral; the brief piano coda is pure Bruckner). Even in the songs that more closely conform to the conventions of the Romantic Lied, the abandoned and infatuated lovers, nature symbolism and intimations of mortality are handled with an unusually acute sense of dramatic contour and precisely etched characterisation. Also noteworthy is the (sometimes extreme) virtuosity and sophistication of the piano parts - coupled to an exquisite sense of balance with the voice, which is never overpowered even by the densest piano textures. First complete recording of Italienisches Liederbuch and of various of the individual songs. German texts and English translations included.
AIR-CD-9075 (5)
Sorabji - Opus Clavicembalisticum 
John Ogdon, piano
With the greatest pleasure we can now announce the return to the catalogue of our most famous - or notorious! - recording: John Ogdon's extraordinary account of Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum, recorded during the tragically brief late renaissance of the pianist's career between his 'return to the concert platform' (after years of illness) in the early 1980s and the swift decline in his health at the end of that decade which led to his untimely death at the age of only 52 in 1989. Since this recording was made - almost 20 years ago now - Sorabji scholarship and performance practice have grown out of all recognition. Yet there is still very much an important place in the catalogue for this, the most heaven-storming, quirky, sometimes infuriating, often breathtakingly brilliant, account of Sorabji's most famous work. Ogdon was quite simply a pianist sui generis, and there is very little point in even comparing him with anybody else. The risks he takes in this colossal work - tempi on the verge of total immobility, alternating with exhilarating, demonic, breakneck speed; dynamic contrasts between the edge of inaudibility and volcanic explosiveness - are tremendous, but such was the scale on which his imagination worked - similar, one might suspect, to the composer's own - that, controversial as they may be they far more often succeed, and succeed magnificently, than misfire. For a true and complete picture of the composer, now rapidly emerging as one of the very greatest and most original figures in 20th-century music (thanks largely to the more recent achievements of tireless advocates like Jonathan Powell and Donna Amato), one cannot avoid taking account of this truly unique recording. Spread over 5 CDs (the previous edition was on 4, but the price is unchanged) with the principal benefit that the great Theme and 49 Variations is no longer split over 2 discs, the recording has been completely remastered from the original master tapes using state of the art 24-bit digital technology and our engineers' customary meticulous attention to detail, allowing the massed sonorities and filigree delicacy of Ogdon's playing to be presented with a degree of clarity and precision surpassing even that of the previous editions, in which it was widely hailed as exemplary. The new edition is packaged in the now-familiar 'opera set' format (which did not exist when the set was first issued) with the CDs in a 5-CD case alongside the booklet, now 100 pages, in an outer slipcase which fits on normal CD shelves. The booklet has been extensively updated and incorporates numerous small but important revisions and corrections to the text. All the essays and photographs from the previous edition are included: Ronald Stevenson's masterly analysis (with 35 music examples), the composer's own note on the piece, a comprehensive list of Sorabji's works (the most up to date and accurate currently in print), John Ogdon's provocative and illuminating essay on Sorabji and Herman Melville, and much other material besides. [5 CDs for the price of 4]
Many radio stations now stream their programming over the Internet. This provides an opportunity for just about anyone, anywhere to hear a broadcast, wherever it originates. When we hear about a broadcast that might be of interest to people reading this site we will provide whatever information we can on our Broadcasts page. Please note that we are not responsible for the content or availability of external sites, nor for any incompatibility problems which may arise with the streaming media, players and web browsers. Most radio stations have a help section on their websites, with links to recommended players (RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, usually). Good luck!
Jonathan Powell
now has his own website at http://jonathanpowell.wordpress.com It has some useful links and several downloadable recordings of recent live performances, and other interesting material, so keep checking back!
Forthcoming appearances by Jonathan Powell:
[Please note - some of these are provisional and dates/times and venues may be subject to change. Please contact the venues for up to date details and ticket information.]
15 July
Bauer & Hieber (ex Schott-UE), 48 Gt Marlborough St, London W1F 7BB
6.30pm
Scriabin: 10th Sonata
Medtner: Prologue, op.1 no.1, Skazka op.9 no.2, Canzona serenata op.38
no.5, Skazka op.35 no.4
Tournemire: Cloches de Châteauneuf-du-Faou, op.62
Faure: Nocturne no.13
Alkan: Symphonie pour piano seul
17 July
Festival Radio France Montpellier, Corum, Salle Pasteur, Montpellier, France
18.00h
Scriabin: 10th Sonata
Medtner: Prologue, op.1 no.1, Skazka op.9 no.2, Canzona serenata op.38
no.5, Skazka op.35 no.4
Tournemire: Cloches de Châteauneuf-du-Faou, op.62
Faure: Nocturne no.13
Alkan: Symphonie pour piano seul
23 November 2008:
Muziekcentrum De Toonzaal, Prins Bernardstraat 4-6
's Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands
Ives: Sonata no. 2 "Concord"
Sorabji: Villa Tasca
Information: email: info@detoonzaal.nl
Ronald Stevenson at 80
Composer-Pianist Ronald Stevenson, with whom the Altarus label has enjoyed a long and fruitful association, celebrates his 80th birthday in 2008. A number of significant events are taking place during the year.
Please visit the Ronald Stevenson Society website for full details of these events and news and reviews of the ones that have already taken place.
The première of 'In Praise of Ben Dorain' can be heard via the BBC Scotland 'Celtic Connections' website - scroll down the page to the relevant link, choose your connection speed and player preferences, and enjoy!
The Ben Dorain symphony was reviewed very positively in The Times
Sorabji concerts in New York, June 2004.
An article by Paul Griffiths that appeared in The New York Times on June 13th, 2004 can be found HERE.
The review by Allan Kozinn of Jonathan Powell's performance of Opus Clavicembalisticum, published in The New York Times on June 22nd, 2004 is HERE.