Avie Records — Youthful Exuberance
A snapshot of recent releases...
The beautiful thing about a spate of Avie releases is the listener scarcely knows what to expect. The label fearlessly promotes both young performance and compositional talent.
I was just kidding with the “youth” in the title. Here are Baroque pieces imagined by Apollo’s Fire Baroque Orchestra as led by long-time musical director Jeannette Sorrell. The pride of Cleveland, OH, Apollo’s Fire has been starting them stateside for the last 25 years. The band’s popularity and musicianship have appeared most recently on the award-winning Handel’s Israel In Egypt (Avie Records, 2023) and Biber’s Mystery Sonatas, featuring violinist Alan Choo (Avie Records, 2024).
These guys are not your stuffed-shirt variety of period instrument gunslingers, no. Sorrell and company have a vein of humor and playfulness about them. On Bach’s Coffeehouse, they reimagine what an evening may have sounded like when these composers and musicians let their collective hair down performing secular pieces at Leipzig’s Cafe Zimmerman while Bach toiled at his day (particularly Sunday) job as cantor at St. Thomas Church, where today the great man lays for eternity beneath the sanctuary floor.
Bach's Coffeehouse uses new and old Apollo's Fire recordings featuring music likely performed in local coffeehouses during the early and mid-18th century.uses Included here are new recordings of Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 with virtuoso soloists Alan Choo, violinist and Assistant Artistic Director of Apollo's Fire, and recorder player Daphna Mohr; the Double Concerto for Oboe and Violin with Debra Nagy and violinist Johanna Novom; and "Air on a G String" from Orchestral Suite No. 3. Rounding out the album. From the catalog the band resurrects Telemann's jaunty Don Quixote Suite, and Vivaldi's fiery "La folia", also featuring Alan Choo and the Spanish violinist Francisco Fullana. Bach was a great admirer of Telemann and Vivaldi, filling out what must have been a pleasurable evening with friends.
The young Robert Schumann, referred to in the album title, was the composer in his creative salad days, between 1830 and 1835. The works surveyed by British pianist Charles Owen include “Variations on the Name ‘Abegg’” (1830), “Papillons” (1831), Intermezzi” (1832), and “Carnival” (1835). These youthful works reflect Schumann’s bright, whimsical mind, both descriptors being captured and translated through Owen’s thoroughly studied lense. Owen’s performances are fresh, revealing the wonder the ultra-sensitive Schumann had to have composed these early pieces in his oeuvre. I bet Owen would kill with a new reading of Kinderszenen.
It is difficult to not celebrate this recording for its playfulness and humor. Canadian Composer Christopher Tyler Nickel has been hitting the prime points of classical composition with his previous releases, Symphony No. 2 (Avie, 2021), Gospel According to Mark (Avie, 2023), and Requiem (Avie, 2024). His composing is both youthful and reverent, possessing a keen sense of the out of the ordinary. His unique solo choices for this concertos album bear this out. The Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra under the baton of Clyde Mitchell (frequent collaborators with Nickel) welcome Sarah Jackson as soloist on Nickel’s three-movement Concerto For Piccolo. The piece and performance are thoroughly modern in orchestration, with Ms. Jackson’s playing both sensitive and assertive.
Nickel’s Concerto for Four Wagner Tubas1 is a wonderful kick in the head. Composers have woefully neglected the tuba, the butt of every musical joke, second only to the viola, as a solo instrument. Nickel rescues the maligned instrument, casting a quartet of them in a beautifully Romantic concert that smacks as much of Charles Ives as it does its namesake Wagner. The concerto sports a particularly beautiful adagio movement that splits the piece. The low brass will prove to be a specialty of Nickel.
Wagner Tubas are a thing. The instrument is a four-valve brass instrument that is the love child of the standard tuba and French horn. The instrument’s namesake, Richard Wagner, commissioned its development for performances of Der Ring des Nibelungen.