Pianist Javier Negrin and conductor Thomas Rosner return to Odradek in the company of the Beethoven Philharmonie, soprano Chen Reiss, tenor Jan Petryka and baritone Paul Armin Edelmann, to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th anniversary year with a sumptuous album of rarely heard works. The collection opens with Beethoven’s “terzetto”, ‘Tremate, empi, tremate’, and ends with the Piano Concerto arrangement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. These frame Mozart’s concert aria for soprano, piano and orchestra, ‘Ch’io mi scordi di te?’ K. 505. The album title, ‘Voices’, alludes not only to the vocal works featured on the album, but to the singing quality of Beethoven’s melodic lines in the Concerto.
Chen Reiss, who is at the heart of Mozart’s ‘Ch’io mi scordi di te?’ as well as Beethoven’s terzetto, is a rising star of the opera world, praised by Opera News, USA for her “immaculately produced and enticing tone matched by superb musicianship”. Mozart wrote this concert aria for himself and the soprano Nancy Storace, who had played Susanna in his opera, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’. For this recording, Chen Reiss is paired with pianist Javier Negrín, who has enjoyed considerable acclaim for his solo Odradek releases, such as his Granados and Mompou album, ‘Traces’, “played with elegance, beauty and affection” (BBC Music Magazine). The release was also praised in Gramophone: “
pointed and sensitively shaped reading
Negrin assiduously weaves the numerous tempo shifts, dynamic outbursts and reiterations of earlier themes into a fluid, fulfilling whole”, and by The Arts Desk: “Negrin understands the need for understatement, for restraint. The eighth variation may induce tears, so beautifully does Negrín handle it.” Javier Negrin brings these qualities to this interpretation of Beethoven’s piano transcription of the Violin Concerto, a version he describes in the album booklet as “totally idiomatic”, adding: “To me, this music speaks about reconciliation and acceptance; it has a very serene beauty and purity of sentiment.”
Beethoven’s operatic output has been neglected compared with his instrumental and choral works, so it is a treat to hear the rare gem, ‘Tremate, empi, tremate’, written when he was being taught by Antonio Salieri. As Thomas Rösner explains in the album booklet: “To me, this terzetto seems like an anticipation of the trio between Leonore, Florestan and Pizarro in ‘Fidelio’… Beethoven was clearly aware of the high quality of this trio, since it is the only one of these study works that he has completely orchestrated and had performed in concerts at least twice during his lifetime. It seems all the more important to me to raise awareness of this wonderful work.” This recording features tenor Jan Petryka and baritone Paul Armin Edelmann alongside Chen Reiss and the Beethoven Philharmonie, an Austrian ensemble created for and specialising in performances of this repertoire.
