LogoGreatMaestros

KALLE RANDALU − piano, ELINA NECHAYEVA − coloratura soprano, conductor NEEME JÄRVI
ESTONIAN NATIONAL SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Vol X
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Piano Concerto No 22 in E-flat, KV 482
1 Allegro 14:07
2 Andante 9:20
3 Allegro 13:47
Richard Strauss Le burgeois gentilhomme, Op 60
4 Ouverture 4:16
5 Minuet 1:38
6 The Fencing Master 1:54
7 Entry and Dance of the Tailors 5:34
8 Lully’s Minuet 2:18
9 Courante 2:37
10 Entry of Cléonte 3:51
11 Intermezzo 3:05
12 The Dinner 11:13

 

Mozart. Piano Concerto No 22, Movement III, Allegro, fragment, 2 min 51 sec, mp3, 320 Kbps

R. Strauss. Le burgeois gentilhomme, The Fencing Master, fragment, 1 min 43 sec, mp3, 320 Kbps

Vol XI
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Piano Concerto No 23 in A major, KV 488
1 Allegro 11:32
2 Adagio 6:19
3 Allegro assai 9:38
Johannes Brahms Piano Quartet No 1 in G minor
4 Allegro 12:52
5 Intermezzo: Allegro ma non troppo − Trio: Animato 8:18
6 Andante con moto 9:10
7 Rondo alla Zingarese: Presto 10:06
8 Peeter Vähi Encore: To the Mother 4:38

 

Mozart. Piano Concerto No 23, Movement I, Allegro, fragment, 3 min 25 sec, mp3, 320 Kbps

Vähi. To the Mother, fragment, 3 min 8 sec, mp3, 320 Kbps

 GreatMaestrosVolX300 GreatMaestrosVolXI300

Vol XII
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Piano Concerto No 20 in D minor, KV 466
1 Allegro 14:58
2 Romance 8:50
3 Rondo. Allegro assai 9:06
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Piano Concerto No 24 in C minor, KV 491
4 Allegro 14:15
5 Larghetto 7:05
6 Allegretto 10:07
7 Johannes Hiob Symphonic fantasy Fathers’ Land* 11:39

* World premiere, score published by e49

Hiob. Fathers’ Land, fragment, 2 min 59 sec, mp3, 320 Kbps

 GreatMaestrosXII GreatMaestrosXIII

Vol XIII
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Piano Concerto No 19 in F major, KV 459
1 Allegro 12:20
2 Allegretto 6:55
3 Allegro assai 8:55
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Piano Concerto No 17 in G major, KV 453
4 Allegro 12:01
5 Andante 9:18
6 Allegretto − Presto 8:52
7 Peeter Vähi To the Mother 4:34
8 Peeter Vähi Forty-two 4:17
9 Rudolf Tobias / Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald Ballade Of the Beautiful Air Maiden 12:18

Performed by:
Kalle Randalu, piano (Vol X #1−3, Vol XI #1−3, Vol XII #1−6, Vol XIII #1−6)
Elina Nechayeva, coloratura soprano (Vol XIII #7−9)
Orchestral solos by Mihkel Peäske, flute; Indrek Vau, trumpet; Age Juurikas, piano; Triin Ruubel, violin; Pärt Tarvas, cello (Vol X #4–12); Guido Gualandi, oboe (Vol XI #8)
Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, concertmasters Arvo Leibur and Triin Ruubel
Neeme Järvi, conductor

Recorded 2015−2019 in Estonia Concert Hall, Tallinn
Engineered and mastered by Tanel Klesment
Liner notes by Kaisa Luik, Maia Lilje
Booklet translated and edited by Tiina Jokinen
Booklet co-edited by Maarja Kasema
Cover artworks by Heinz Valk
Design by Mart Kivisild
Produced by Peeter Vähi

ERP 10619, 10719, 11120, 11220
© 2019 ERSO, ERP (Tallinn)


The Piano Concerto No 22 in E-flat major marks the busiest and most fruitful period in Mozart’s life. He was at the height of his success as a composer and pianist in Vienna and there was no lack of work nor ideas. The piano concerto as a genre became the ideal synthesis of his two main sources of income − composing and performing. After all, he wrote music mainly for himself and knew therefore exactly how to best highlight his skills as a pianist.
The Piano Concerto No 22 was completed on Dec 16th, 1785, as Mozart marked in his catalogue of works Verzeichnüß aller meiner Werke. Presumably the first performance of the piece was given between the acts of Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf’s oratorio Esther at the annual charity concert of Vienna’s Tonkünstler-Societät on Dec 22nd and 23rd, 1785. The premiere was a success − in the report of the two concerts in the newspaper Wiener Zeitung the favourable reception the concerto received is not mentioned “since praise is superfluous in view of the deserved fame of this master”. This is further confirmed by Leopold Mozart in his letter from Jan 1786 to Nannerl, where he expresses surprise that a call was made for the slow movement to be repeated. /…/ (More detailed info in the printed booklet.)

Based on Molière’s play of the same name, Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Op 60 by Richard Strauss (widely known in German as Der Bürger als Edelmann) is an orchestral suite composed on the incidental music for the play by Hugo von Hofmannstahl. The latter had an idea to simplify and shorten the plot of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme and serving it as a prologue to then a one-act chamber opera Ariadne auf Naxos. The first performance of this new stage project took place at the Court Theatre in Stuttgart on Oct 25th, 1912. However, it became apparent already during the premiere that the ambitious idea had some weak spots. First, fitting a play and an opera into one night was quite expensive and rather time consuming, but the evening was further prolonged by the nearly hour-long reception held by the King of Württemberg between the play and the opera. Secondly, as Strauss himself remarked: “a public that goes to the theatre does not want to hear an opera, and vice versa”. Following the unsuccessful premiere of the night, Strauss and Hofmannsthal revised the work and separated the play and the opera from each other. On Dec 25th, 1917, Strauss completed the orchestral suite based on most of the music from the play. The suite was premiered in Berlin on Apr 9th, 1918 under the direction of the composer himself. /…/

Mozart spent the last decade of his life as a freelance composer and pianist. The first years following his move from Salzburg also mark the busiest and most fruitful period of his life. Out of his 27 piano concertos, he composed 15 of them during those first four years (1782−1786), while also maintaining his regular schedule of performing and teaching. The Piano Concerto in A major is a true example of Mozart’s hectic life at the time. It was completed on Mar 2nd, 1786, according to Mozart’s own catalogue Verzeichnüß aller meiner Werke. This was only a month after the one-act comic opera, Der Schauspieldirektor, just three weeks before the Piano Concerto No 24 in C minor and two months prior to the premiere of his opera, Le nozze di Figaro. Although the exact date and place of the first performance is not documented, Mozart probably performed the A major concerto at one of the Vienna Lenten concerts a few days after finishing it. /…/

Johannes Brahms composed his Piano Quartet No 1, Op 25 in 1861 as a 28-year old young man. Having just moved from his hometown into the nearby peaceful Hamm, his life was bright, spending his days sketching new compositions and making music in the evenings with young disciples. Almost for decades later and less than a month before his death, Brahms met the 22-year old Arnold Schönberg, who had just completed his first string quartet. This meeting made a lasting impression on Schönberg, who thought of Brahms as his musical ancestor. /…/

Piano Concerto No 20 in D minor was completed by February 10th, 1785 and premiered the next day by the composer as soloist in Vienna’s popular Casino Zur Mehlgrube. On February 12th, Mozart and his guests, among them also Joseph Haydn, were making music in his posh rental apartment by St Stephen’s Cathedral. The performed works were Mozart’s recent quartets. Leopold Mozart, present on both occasions, later wrote in the letter to his daughter Maria Anna that the premiere of piano concerto in D minor had been ostentatious. Yet more important for him was the appraisal by Haydn: “As an honest man before God I am telling you – your son is the greatest composer that I know personally or by name: he has taste and in addition to that he also masters the ultimate
knowledge of composition.” /…/

Piano Concerto No 24 in C minor (KV 491) was composed in 1786 parallel to the opera Le nozze di Figaro. The concerto was completed on March 24th and was premiered with Mozart as soloist in Vienna Burgtheater on April 7th. This remained the composer’s last big performance as pianist in Vienna. Three weeks later, on May 1st, Le nozze di Figaro was premiered on the same stage. /…/

Hiob’s pathetic, dramatically tense and full of contrasts mode of expression has its source in the classic-romantic trend of the beginning of the 20th century and his idol Rudolf Tobias from the same period whose work had special place in Hiob’s repertoire as organist and choirmaster. Similarities between Johannes Hiob’s music and Artur Kapp’s heavier style can also be observed and particularly in the symphonic fantasy Fathers’ Land from 1940 which was premiered nearly eight decades later and is presented on the current recording. The gloomy atmosphere and threateningly agressive figures in the opening bars are contrasted by choral-like meditative or elegiacally plaintive patterns. The composer has used motifs from Reminiscence of Fatherland, a famous song by Karl August Hermann, the lyics of which seem to add programmatic meaning to the music. The work beginning so tragically in C minor ends with apotheosis in C major. Johannes Hiob was not an innovator, but rather a keeper of traditions. We can assume that with his life cut prematurely short, his individual style had really no possibility to develop into full bloom. /…/

Rudolf Tobias wrote the ballade Of the Beautiful Air Maiden for soprano and symphony orchestra in the summer of 1911 in Berlin. It premiered on 23rd August of the same year in the Vanemuine Concert Hall, at the celebratory concert dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the epic Kalevipoeg. Paula Brehm was the soprano and Juhan Aavik conducted the orchestra. The ballade is based on the ending of the tenth canto of Kalevipoeg, a story about the ring of the Maid of the Sky. Tobias was fascinated by the dramatic tension and peculiarity of the epic and found that “the one peculiarity of Kalevipoeg is its pure symphonic impact”. The composer was inspired to wrote an opera based on the Estonian national epic and its première was planned for the opening of the new Estonia Theatre house in 1913. He ended up not completing the opera for various reasons, but at the first symphony concert in the Estonia Concert Hall on 24th August 1913, which Rudolf Tobias also attended, his Sanctus of the oratorio Jonah’s Mission, ballade Of the Beautiful Air Maiden, and melodrama Kalevipoeg’s Epilogue were performed. /…/

Peeter Vähi’s To the Mother was composed – or rather, written down – only within a couple of hours on September 18th, 2017. The composer has described the process as follows: “One night I woke up just after 3 am having dreamed of a complete detailed score of a piece for oboe and chamber orchestra. Fearing that the dream would disappear by morning, I got up, switched on my laptop and started taking down what had been sent to me by the Almighty. By noon the same day the score was complete with only the title missing. And then I remembered that the next day would be my mother’s 100th anniversary.” /…/


The grand man of Estonian music, Maestro Neeme Järvi − a conductor “from God” − is probably the best known Estonian musician in the world beside Arvo Pärt. It is almost impossible to fully sum up the long and prolific career of one of the most sought after conductors of our time. /…/
Having served as chief conductor of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra from 1963 to 1979, he took a difficult decision in 1980 and emigrated from the artistically oppressive USSR to the West where he made it his mission to introduce Estonian music to the world. He has conducted works by Rudolf Tobias, Artur Kapp, Arvo Pärt, Eino Tamberg, Veljo Tormis, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Peeter Vähi and other Estonian composers − but first and foremost by Eduard Tubin with whom he closely collaborated artistically.

KalleRandaluByHeinzValk400

Kalle Randalu is an internationally sought-after pianist from Estonia. He has studied under Prof Bruno Lukk in the Tallinn Conservatoire and in the Moscow Conservatoire under Prof Lev Vlassenko. He is a laureate of several international piano contests, among others prizes from the International Robert Schumann Contest in Zwickau (1981), the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow (1982) and First Prize from the ARD International Music Competition in Munich (1985). /…/ Kalle Randalu has released numerous CDs. A sensational success were the seven volumes of the complete Hindemith sonatas with Ensemble Villa Musica, which have repeatedly received prizes, including the Classical Award in France and the Klassik-Echo Prize in Germany. Latest recordings feature Marginalia by Jaan Rääts (2014, ERP), various piano works by Brahms on a double-CD and three volumes of chamber music by Schumann.

ElinaNechayevaElina Nechayeva has graduated from the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre as MA in classical singing and gathered accolades at the TV competition Klassikatähed (Stars in Classics), at the competition of young opera singers Neue Stimmen and Eurovision song contest where her performance of La Forza in Lisbon won Estonia the eighth place. She has been soloist with ENSO under the baton of Neeme Järvi in Estonia, Georgia and the Shanghai Grand Theatre and performed with Tallinn Chamber Orchestra at the Pärnu Music Festival. Elina has been part of various exciting projects with Kristjan Järvi. At the beginning of 2019, she sang duet with Plácido Domingo at Saku Suurhall, Tallinn and performed as soloist Orff’s Carmina Burana with ENSO at the opening concert of
MustonenFest. /…/
The history of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (known in Estonian as Eesti Riiklik Sümfooniaorkester or ERSO) dates back to 1926 and is connected to the birth of the national broadcasting. Today, it is the longest continually operating professional orchestra of its kind in the country. There are more than 100 musicians playing in the orchestra.
Chief conductor and artistic director Neeme Järvi has led ERSO since 2010, while Paavo Järvi has been its artistic advisor since 2002, and Olari Elts its principal guest conductor since 2007. The orchestra’s previous principal conductors have been Olav Roots (1939−1944), Paul Karp (1944−1950), Roman Matsov (1950−1963), Neeme Järvi (1963−1979), Peeter Lilje (1980−1990), Leo Krämer (1991−1993), Arvo Volmer (1993−2001) and Nikolai Alexeev (2001−2010). /…/

ERSO 920

More detailed info in Estonian and English in CD-booklets.


Distribution in by Muusikapood (Music Shop), ERSO (phone +372 6 147787, erso@erso.ee), ERP (www.erpmusic.com, info@erpmusic.com), Easy-Living Music (reispuk@neti.ee), Note 1 Music, Naxos America, amazon.com
Available for downloads: Spotify

See also other orchestral records produced by ERP: Paavo Järvi, Ad patrem meum, Resurrection of Mozart, Joy and Sorrow Unmasked, Pure Handel, A Chant of Bamboo, Artist Chagall, Bassoon Concertos, Musica Triste, Nordic Legends, Somnium boreale, The Hand of God, Tubin, Strings on the Move, Wagner. Strauss. Seeger

See also other recordings of the Great Maestros series

See other releases by ERP with Estonian National Symphony Orchesta, Kalle Randalu and / or Neeme Järvi