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Ulf Wallin, Roland Pöntinen – Schumann: The Violin Sonatas (2011)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:14:06 minutes | 1,16 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Music Web International March 2012: “With highly impressive playing, sound and presentation it is hard to find fault with this excellent release”.
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Roland Pöntinen – Bergman: Music from the Films (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:28 minutes | 1,16 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Ingmar Bergman (1918- 2007) made fifty films, directed more than 150 theatre productions and wrote several books, but the recurrent thread running through his life was music. He often said that if he hadn’t become a director he would have wished to become a conductor, and went so far as to claim that ‘film and music are almost the same thing. They are means of expression and communication that go beyond human wisdom and that touch a person’s emotional centre.’ Bergman’s interest in classical music became evident early on in his career. Music in Darkness (1948) is about a pianist who loses his sight in a shooting accident, To Joy (1950) features a violinist who dreams of a solo career and Summer Interlude (1951) takes place at the Royal Swedish Opera. He admired all who could perform music, reserving his greatest love for pianists, and concert pianists are portrayed in Hour of the Wolf, Face to Face and Autumn Sonata.
One of Bergman’s favourite Swedish pianists was Roland Pöntinen, who here performs a number of pieces featured in Bergman’s films, by composers including Mozart, Chopin and Schumann. Pöntinen is joined by the Stenhammar Quartet in the second movement of Schumann’s piano quintet, used by Bergman to great effect in the award-winning Fanny and Alexander. Another of the director’s favourite performers, the cellist Torleif Thedéen, also contributes to the project, with the sarabandes from three of Bach’s suites for solo cello.
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Sueye Park, Roland Pöntinen – Szymanowski: Music for Violin and Piano (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:59 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Lush, impressionistic, exotic, erotically charged even, Karol Szymanowski’s music appears as a world in its own right, a refuge from the harshest aspects of reality, but also a place in which, paradoxically, the dreamer can find the strength and solace needed to cope with the real world and is drawn into an alternative, heightened state of consciousness.
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Ulf Wallin & Roland Pöntinen – Brahms: Works for Violin & Piano, Vol. 2 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:12 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Ulf Wallin and Roland Pöntinen made their first duo-recording for BIS in 1991 and have released acclaimed recital discs ranging from Schumann and Liszt to Alfred Schnittke, by way of Schoenberg and Hindemith. With the present disc they bring their most recent project to a close: a recording of all the works by Johannes Brahms for violin and piano. These include not only the three well-known and -loved numbered violin sonatas, but also the Scherzo from the so-called F.A.E. Sonata and the composer’s own violin versions of the two sonatas for clarinet and piano. Wallin and Pöntinen open the present disc with Sonata No. 2 in E flat major, Op. 120, composed in 1894 for clarinet and transcribed for the violin a year later. As the clarinet part extends further down than the lowest note on the violin, Brahms made considerable revisions to the clarinet part, which entailed changes in the piano part, and consequently the printing of a new piano score. This is followed by the second and third violin sonatas, in A major and D minor respectively. Both works were composed during the summer of 1886 in Thun in Switzerland and are clearly related, even though they inhabit completely different expressive worlds.
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Ulf Wallin, Roland Pöntinen – Brahms: Works for Violin & Piano, Vol. 1 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:03 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Asked the question ‘How many sonatas for violin and piano did Johannes Brahms compose?’, many lovers of chamber music would probably answer three, and maybe also add their respective keys and opus numbers. When pressed, a number of them would also remember the so-called F.A.E. Sonata, a collaborative effort by the young Brahms, Albert Dietrich and their mentor Robert Schumann. But very few would probably think of the two Opus 120 sonatas, composed in 1894 for clarinet (or viola) and piano, but a year later published in the composer’s own version for the violin. As the range of the B flat clarinet goes a fourth lower than that of the violin, Brahms had been forced to make considerable revisions to the clarinet part – which in turned entailed changes in the piano part, and consequently the printing of a new piano score. The seasoned team of violinist Ulf Wallin and pianist Roland Pöntinen have now decided to record all the Brahms sonatas, and the results are being released on two albums, the first one including the first of the ‘official’ sonatas, No. 1 in G major, Op. 78, the F minor Sonata from Op. 120 and Brahms’s Scherzo from the F.A.E. Sonata. Wallin and Pöntinen round off the programme with transcriptions of two of Brahms’s more lyrical songs.
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Torleif Thedeen, Roland Pontinen – Schnittke – Epilogue, works for cello and piano (2007)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:16:12 minutes | 655 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BIS
Alfred Schnittke’s use of the elegiac voice of the cello evokes Russian musical tradition and history. His works for the cello were to a large extent inspired by his friendship and close collaboration with the exceptional musicians Mstislav Rostropovich, Alexander Ivashkin and Natalia Gutman, to all of whom he dedicated works. Rostropovich has said about the composer: ‘As far as I am concerned, the most remarkable thing about Schnittke is his all-embracing, all-encompassing genius… he uses everything invented before him. Uses it as his palette, his colours. And it is all so organic: for example, diatonic music goes side by side with complex atonal polyphony.’ These words perfectly illustrate the works on this CD, whose stylistic breadth reflects the many facets of Schnittke’s development, including his playful engagement with historical musical styles, the continuation of the Shostakovich tradition, and his later ascetic, introspective and often solemn style. Concluding the programme is Epilogue, an arrangement by the composer of the concluding scene of his full-length ballet Peer Gynt. Subtitled ‘Out of the World’ this scene is, to quote the composer, ‘an attempt to express the shadows of the fourth dimension given to us in our present lives… a kind of beginning of a new circuit of existence.’ Torleif Thedéen and Roland Pöntinen, who with this discs give us the larger part of Schnittke’s chamber music for the cello, are long-time partners whose first joint recording for BIS was made in 1986 – entitled ‘The Russian Cello’, it incidentally included a performance of the first of Schnittke’s cello sonatas. Since then the two have appeared on a number of discs together, performing works by Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Hindemith and Anton Webern among others. Their recording of the Chopin Sonata, coupled with works by Robert Schumann, was highly acclaimed in The Gramophone, whose critic found that the team gave ‘this wonderful music a sweep and grandeur that’s immensely satisfying’.
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