(The Album’s Worldwide Official Release Date is November 1st)

Are you not a Plus Member but want to purchase this exclusive early release, as well as receive 15% Off every album purchase + all lower resolutions? Then you can Become a Plus Member now for only €110/year or €10/month.

This Boundary-Challenging new recording of Beethoven’s Complete Sonatas for Piano and Violin features the acclaimed duo: violinist Shunske Sato and pianist Shuann Chai. Beethoven’s pieces occupied a special place in their repertoire for a long time – in fact the Kreutzer Sonata was the very first piece they played together. Apart from playing Beethoven, both of them spent an inordinate amount of time deling into historical sources and old recordings.

We soak up what we can – reading anecdotes, newspapers articles, letters from people who heard Beethoven. And then… we let go and make it our own.
– Shunske Sato

‘Copying’ Beethoven is never the goal. Anyway, from what we know about his edgy and near-scandalous performances, I get the feeling that nothing we do now would be far enough! In a live performance we rarely plan what to do specifically; we agree on some general things. Our recording, then, is a version of what we might do, not the version. Beethoven had so much to say, and left us with so many possibilities. His scores are like treasure maps – there’s something wonderful everywhere you look, and it’s our responsibility to dig around and show what we’ve found! And everyone who searches will find something different, so I think it is important to own one’s interpretation.
– Shuann Chai

The motivation to make this recording arose when Shunske Sato and Shuann Chai played all Sonatas as a mini-marathon. It turned out to be a worthy endeavor: they got tremendously positive feedback. This recording allows them to share ‘their’ Beethoven with even more people.

Beethoven in a nutshell:
*10 sonatas
*235 minutes of music
*Creative, expressive and daring musicians *Gorgeous sounding historical instruments *Recent insights from the historical informed
performance practice

Shunske Sato, Violin
Shuann Chai, Piano

The post Beethoven: The Complete Violin Sonatas [Triple Album] [Exclusive Early Release for Plus Members] appeared first on NativeDSD Music.

The album includes songs that tell of exile and longing for the land that had to be abandoned due to war, expulsion and other dangers & threats. The songs also testify to a different kind of exile, the alienation that the unfamiliar new environment brings. Migration is off all times, and certainly not just a phenomenon of the present.

This album’s music addresses the mindset of people from another time, the 16th century. In 1492, Columbus arrived in America and Spain conquered the Nazaré dynasty of Granada, putting an end to the Muslim rule on the peninsula. In that same year, the Jews were driven out of Spain or forced to convert to Christianity. All this caused Muslims and Jews to flee to the north of Africa. Roman Catholics from Castile and Aragon left for America. Large numbers of seafarers and invaders were never to return to the peninsula.

Given all this, we can say that there were enough reasons for poetry, and consequently song, to introduce a new leitmotif, namely ‘in foreign territory’. Those who are exiled, lose everything familiar and loved in one fell swoop. The same thing happens to anyone who knocks on a closed heart in vain: a lonely journey from everything to nothing. These are just some of the subjects of the songs recorded in the famous Spanish and Portuguese songbooks of the period such as the Cancionero Musical de Palacio and Cancionero Musical de Lisboa.

On the album In terra aliena gems from these songbooks by composers as Juan del Encina, Francisco de Peñalosa, Pedro de Escobar as well as anonymous composers, all of whom excellently expressed in sound the theme of alienation and the fragility of life ‘In foreign territory’.

Música Temprana
Adrián Rodríguez Van der Spoel, Founder & Conductor

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NativeDSD Founders Jared and Jonas Sacks invited Meditation and Singing Bell Artist Leonie Schuurman (Body & Sound Sister) to our recording studio for the album Singing Bells Meditation.

With the streets quiet and the sky looming on an otherwise uneventful Sunday afternoon during an hours session Stereo, 5 Channel Surround Sound and Binaural Pure DSD 256 recordings were created.

We recommend to lie down if possible using headphones (best with the Binaural version) or speakers. Start with some deep and calm breathing. Make sure you are comfortable. It is nice to maybe remind fellow house-mates or family that you will be ‘offline’ for the next hour and ask them not to disturb you. If you are into scents or candles, this is the time to light them!

Begin by playing the meditation sounds and focus on understanding which frequencies resonate best with your body. As you immerse yourself, you’ll start to feel as if you’re floating on waves, gently carried by the resonating frequencies. In this state of pure bliss, you’ll find yourself eagerly awaiting the return of those harmonious tones.

Bells have a toning effect that offers therapeutic relief to the body such as muscle tension release, improved concentration and overall positivity as well as reducing stress, improving sleep quality, boosting immunity, or increasing creativity. The Tibetan Brass Meditation Bells used in this recording are free standing bells. Ringing a Bell helps you change your mind state if you feel that your thoughts are drifting away from the present moment. Once you ring the bell, your mind becomes re-focused on the “now”.

Enjoy!

Leonie Schuurman, Singing Bells Artist

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The album is Exclusively Available at NativeDSD in Stereo, Binaural and 5 Channel Surround Sound DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64 and DXD plus Stereo DSD 512.

For far too long Paul Wittgenstein’s library was inaccessible to the world. Not before 2001 a pile of chamber music surfaced, specially composed for the pianist who commissioned Maurice Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand. These chamber music works have hardly ever been played since Wittgenstein premièred them in the 1920s and 30s.

The Dutch pianist Folke Nauta had to continue his career as a one-handed pianist, after focal dystonia affected his right hand. Paul Wittgenstein was his model and this trove of chamber music was his salvation. There was just one complicating factor: Wittgenstein’s library had become dispersed throughout the world. Nauta tracked down the original manuscripts in Austrian and English archives, still containing Wittgenstein’s furiously scribbled annotations. The quintet formation of piano, clarinet and string trio is a consistent feature of Wittgenstein’s chamber music legacy. So Nauta approached the clarinetist Lars Wouters van den Oudenweijer and Prisma String Trio. Together these five top-of-the-bill chamber musicians from the Netherlands joined forces and launched the Wittgenstein Project, with the aim of bringing the music back to life and telling Wittgenstein’s extraordinary tale of misery, struggle and artistic triumph.

The album Left Hand Legacy Vol. 1, also available at NativeDSD, showcases the diverse vocabulary of Wittgenstein’s circle of composer friends Franz Schmidt, Josef Labor, Hans Gál and Ernest Walker. This album Left Hand Legacy Vol.2 plumbs the emotional depths, with Franz Schmidt’s brooding Quintet in B flat major and the sublime combination of clarinet, viola and piano left hand in Josef Labor’s Trio in G minor.

Tragically and unexpectedly, the second album is destined to be the last one to feature Folke Nauta, who passed away suddenly in de summer of 2023. This personal tragedy signifies a great loss for the music world. This album features the very last recordings Folke Nauta ever made.

Folke Nauta, Piano
Lars Wouters van den Oudenwijer, Clarinet
Prisma String Trio

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For a brief period in the early 19th century, the guitar enjoyed a veritable hype. Salons in Paris and Vienna hosted musical soirees where the latest compositions were performed for an intimate audience. And when a true virtuoso guitarist came to play, like the Italians Carulli, Molino or Gragnani and the Bohemian Matiegka, the enthusiasm reached the level that can only be described as ‘guitaromanie’ – guitar mania.

They offered a completely new sound, because the guitar was a young instrument at the time. Sometime around the year 1800, the double strings were replaced by single strings with higher tension. And a sixth string was added; the low E. These changes allowed the guitar virtuosos to sound like an orchestra, vocalist and accompaniment with a single instrument. The sounds were intimate, but also expressive and spectacular, and something the salon audiences had never heard before. The guitar virtuosos usually performed their own work, or they arranged a familiar aria or overture from an opera specifically for the occasion. This album focuses on original music composed by the guitarists themselves, showing their creative and inventive spirits. Moreover, four of these pieces are also world premiere recordings.

The album was recorded using original guitars with gut strings from the early 19th century built by renowned luthiers of that time. The compositions by Molino, Carulli and Gragnani were performed on an Italian guitar crafted in 1812 by Carlo Guadagnini. The compositions by Matiegka were performed on guitars of two of Vienna’s most famous guitar makers; a guitar made around 1820 by Johann Georg Stauffer and a guitar built sometime around 1834 by Bernhard Enzensperger.

Izhar Elias, Guitar

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Schubert’s Impromptus are not without their quirks and curiosities, and Shuann Chai used Extemporize  as an opportunity to delve deeper into them. In doing so she was also introduced to the two delightful Fugues (D 24a and D 24c ) that accompany the impromptus on this album.

Schubert’s Impromptus drew Shuann Chai in because they are full of contradictions. An ‘impromptu’ suggests a piece that’s light in character, not too dramatic, not very long the opposite of, say, a sonata in four movements. While these Impromptus are musically very approachable, they are also powerful, often quite dark, deep, and pianistically challenging. Also, the suggested element of improvisation is interwoven with a feeling of narrative. There are certainly moments of capriciousness or surprising modulations throughout, but the pieces themselves are very formally organized much more prescribed than what one would expect, say, in a ‘fantasy’. What intrigued her was this tension between spontaneity and structure, a paradox which Schubert exploits and expands to great dramatic effect.

This paradox can also be found in the Fugues on this album. Fugues and Impromptus are at first sight to very different forms of music: they are constructed in almost diametrically opposite ways, but artistically speaking, they are two sides of the same coin. Schubert’s fugues are searching for the freedom within their strict contrapuntal framework, and his Impromptus are works of imagination and great expression that are grounded by their formal architecture.

The album title, Extemporize, also has different sides. The dictionary defines ‘extemporize’ as “to speak or perform without prior planning; to act in an impromptu manner” (italics added), suggesting, again, improvisation and spontaneous expression. ‘Extemporize’ comes from the Latin ‘ex tempore’, which means ‘out of time’. Taken literally, that’s what happened to Schubert: he ran out of time dying at such a young age full of plans for the future.

Shuann Chai is a soloist and chamber musician who performs on a wide range of early to modern pianos, bringing the emotional content of music from the past to listeners in the present. Recognized by critics as “a graceful virtuoso”, she has been praised for performances that are “sensitive and communicative, …full of warmth an emotion.”

Shuann Chai, Fortepiano

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All three composers wrote the works brought on this album Duo in disturbing and turbulent times; during a world war. Bohuslav Martinů’s Cello Sonata No.1, premiered in 1940, is an exciting, dramatic work and the melodies with a Czech character convey his nostalgia for his homeland. Martinů was persecuted by the Nazi regime because of his ties to the Czech resistance movement and thus he fled to the United States with his family in 1940. He called the premiere of his first cello sonata the ‘last greeting from a better world’.

Francis Poulenc’s safety was endangered during the Nazi regime due to his homosexuality and his ties to the resistance movement ‘Front National des Musiciens’ which had close connections to persecuted musicians such as Milhaud and Hindemith. Poulenc composed his Sonata for cello and piano in 1940 shortly after being discharged from military service following France’s capitulation to Germany. It took another eight years for the composition to be completed so that it could be finally premiered in 1949. The sonata was received with little enthusiasm. Some critics rated it as ‘pleasant but nothing more.’

Paul Hindemith’s early works 3 pieces for cello and piano Op.8 were composed in 1917, the third year of World War I, shortly before being drafted into military service. Between 1913 and 1920, disturbing times and his circle of young conservatory friends inspired Hindemith to write a total of seven so-called ‘dramatic masterpieces’ – whimsical, almost surrealistic pieces whose subjects usually have an autobiographical background. Later he dismissed his works from this creative period as ‘unbearable’, but towards the end of his life he saw these works in a different perspective and attempted to publish them.

Nuala McKenna – Cello
Robert Kulet – Piano

Read a full Music Review from reviewer Adrian Quanjer of HRAudio.

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Composed in 2018 for the newly completed hyperorgan of the Orgelpark, Amsterdam, Trevor Grahl’s Of Ancient Days employs its unfamiliar resources to tell a familiar story. The piece ‘Of Ancient Days’ is a musical creation story, illustrating the birth of the world through sound in a unique composition for hyperorgan. For this creation Trevor had a special companion, the composer Johan Sebastian Bach, whose partita Sei Gegrüsset, Jesu Gütig runs through the piece like a silver thread, performed on the Utopa Baroque Organ by organist Francesca Ajossa.

Trevor Grahl is a tireless advocate of the hyperorgan and has introduced countless composers and makers to its myriad creative possibilities. Played on one of the few hyperorgans in the world this will be the first time a specially-composed piece for this instrument will be released. 

The term ‘hyperorgan’ describes a complex, flexible interlinking of instruments and playing mechanisms. Key to its functioning is a digital console which was first installed in the Orgelpark in 2011 as an enhancement to the venue’s 1922 Sauer organ. On the installation of the Utopa Baroque Organ in 2018 this console additionally became one of the two modes of access to this new instrument. The addition of a digital console enables both organs to be played from a single source forming a hyperorgan capable of blending both German Baroque and Romantic sound.

The hard and software offers both instruments a host of new possibilities; new ways of controlling both organ’s airflow and many other parameters are possible enabling the organs to sound very differently, producing as John Cage would have said, “glorious and shocking” sounds. And all this is acoustic, without loudspeakers! In ‘Of Ancient Days’, Trevor Grahl shows both sides of the organ – the new and the old, which are both important, beautiful and exiting. Each movement is based on a different day of the Genesis creation narrative where elements stack on top of one another until the climax, the arrival of humans on the sixth day. Bach’s partita Sei Gegrüsset Jesu Gütig serves as the nights, offering a steadfast moment of pensive meditation amongst the creative action of the days.

Blog Post – Meet Cobra Records’ New Producer & Engineer Ernst Coutinho

Trevor Grahl – Hyperorgan
Francesca Ajossa – Utopa Baroque Organ, Mechanical Console

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The album “Atomos” features works by three of the most important and historically influential composers in string quartet history: Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Béla Bartók. Additionally, it includes a world premiere recording of “Secreta,” a recent masterpiece by one of the absolute greatest living composers of our time, György Kurtág.

The aim of “Atomos” is to illustrate how these composers, in their pursuit of the nucleus of musical expression, sought to compress sound to a particle incapable of further division—an atom (ἄτομος)—giving birth to some of the most striking musical achievements in this exceptional repertoire. The ability to convey a lot in a short space of time while maintaining idiomatic subtlety and constructing a complete narrative structure is indeed a quality of extraordinary and transformative rarity. This concision enhances the strength of the message, making compression the most genuine gesture of revolutionary vision in linguistic, narrative, and poetic terms. Brevity, in this context, enhances the eloquence of the message.

Throughout this fascinating journey into the art of musical concentration, these four extraordinary composers reveal, through the works recorded here, what is most remarkable in music and life—the ability to pare oneself down to the minimal essence and allow the music to speak for itself with the most persuasive eloquence and the most moving kind of beauty.

Cuarteto Quiroga
Aitor Hevia – Violin
Cibrán Sierra – Violin
Josep Puchades – Viola
Helena Poggio – Violoncello

Recording Session Video by NativeDSD’s David Hopkins & Jonas Sacks

This album has been reviewed in our blog by music reviewer Rush Paul. Go To Article

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Left Hand Legacy Vol. 1 is the new album featuring the Prisma String Trio.  It is available from NativeDSD in Stereo, 5 Channel and Binaural DSD. The trio’s debut album on Cobra, Le Muse (The Muse) won the 2021 NativeDSD Album of the Year Award for Chamber Music.

Two pianists were faced with a terrible choice: end of career or persevere? The Viennese pianist Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm at the front in 1914. He persevered with incredible persistence. Pianist Folke Nauta recently lost the use of his right hand due to focal dystonia.

Folke followed Paul Wittgenstein’s trail. He traced a treasure trove of hidden chamber music for piano left hand from Wittgenstein’s library and took it to clarinetist Lars Wouters van den Oudenweijer and Prisma String Trio. These five musicians made a daring plan for two double albums, 21 concerts, four new compositions and a podcast documentary.

Treasure Trove

For far too long Paul Wittgenstein’s library was inaccessible to the world. The pianist who commissioned Maurice Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand had passed away in 1961, but his widow kept the monumental doors of their country manor firmly closed. Every musicologist knew that there must be a treasure trove hidden inside. It was not until her death in 2001 that te library was opened to the public; the first visitors must have felt like archeologists entering into a nineteenth-century world. Amidst Beethoven’s scores and a hair lock of Brahms, they discovered a pile of chamber music, specially composed for the one-handed pianist. Many works had been premièred by him in the 1920s and 30s and had since lain in quiet neglect; waiting.

Waiting

Waiting for whom? Pianists who had lost the use of their right hand in mid-career, as a result of an accident or injury. However, those seeking repertoire for the left hand came away disappointed. Among them was Siegfried Rapp, for instance, who received a letter on 5 June 1950 with the message: ‘You don’t build a house just so that someone else can live in it. I commissioned and paid for the works, the whole idea was mine […]. But those works to which I still have the exclusive performance rights are to remain mine as long as I still perform in public; that’s only right and fair. Once I am dead or no longer give concerts, then the works will be available to everyone because I have no wish for them to gather dust in libraries to the detriment of the composer.’ — Paul Wittgenstein

Original Manuscripts

Finally, the opportunity has arrived to restore Wittgenstein’s entire chamber music legacy to the place where it belongs: the concert stage. The Dutch pianist Folke Nauta had to continue his career as a one-handed pianist, after focal dystonia affected his right hand. Wittgenstein was his model and this trove of chamber music was his salvation. There was just one complicating factor: Wittgenstein’s library had become dispersed throughout the world.

Nauta tracked down the original manuscripts in Austrian and English archives, still containing Wittgenstein’s furiously scribbled annotations. The quintet formation of piano, clarinet and string trio is a consistent feature of Wittgenstein’s chamber music legacy.

So Nauta approached the clarinettist Lars Wouters van den Oudenweijer and Prisma String Trio. Together they launched the Wittgenstein Project, with the aim of bringing the music back to life and telling Wittgenstein’s extraordinary tale of misery, struggle and artistic triumph.

Featured in blog post Notes on Recent Finds, No. 9 – Endless Bounty from NativeDSD by music reviewer Rushton Paul.

Folke Nauta – Piano Left Hand
Lars Wouters van den Oudenweijer – Clarinet
Prisma String Trio

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