"Climbing the Skies" CD
Fiona Maddocks
January 31, 2010
The Observer
There’s virtuosic playing from the young, seven-strong Aronowitz Ensemble on their first disc, which also marks the debut of Sonimage, a label dedicated to that elusive commodity, “quality”, and specifically to encouraging a new generation of artists. The premiere recording of Huw Williams’ Sad Steps (2008) - wistful yet lean and supple, written for pairs of violin, viola and cello with piano – complements the melancholy late-romanticism of Vaughan Williams’ Phantasy Quintet (1912) and Elgar’s Piano Quintet in A Minor (1919). The players’ exuberance keeps English nostalgia at bay and all stays in keen, bright focus.
Aldeburgh Festival
Andrew Clements
Monday June 25, 2007
The Guardian
The Aronowitz Ensemble, a string sextet and piano, owes its existence to the Aldeburgh festival. The players met at the festival three years ago and made their debut as a group a few months later. Now they are part of the BBC's New Generation Young Artists scheme, and they returned to Aldeburgh for a recital on the festival's final weekend.
Between Mahler's earliest surviving work, the A minor movement for piano quartet, and Mozart's E flat Piano Quartet K493, the Aronowitz's programme included the last of this year's premieres: the first European airing for Nicholas Maw's String Sextet, introduced at Lincoln Center, New York earlier this year. It's a substantial (30-minute), single-movement piece subtitled Melodies from Drama. Four of the most important themes are taken from Maw's Covent Garden opera Sophie's Choice, first seen in 2002, where they are associated with the principal characters - Sophie, Nathan, Stingo and the Narrator - while two of the opera's orchestral passages are transcribed and incorporated into the sextet as well.
The themes are warmly expressive and lyrical, another reminder of Maw's declared musical aim of picking up the threads of late European romanticism from the point before they morphed into modernism, and developing them. The musical world of the sextet is closer to the Richard Strauss of Metamorphosen, or the Schoenberg of Verklärte Nacht than anything else, though there is also something curiously English about the music too, with an echo of Vaughan Williams in the opening moments, as the first theme is unwound over archaic, Tallis Fantasia-like harmonies. The string writing is rich and sonorous; every theme is supported and carried on detailed textures that must be a delight to play. The Aronowitz clearly relished all of it - their playing was constantly expressive and raptly beautiful.
Rian Evans
Thursday July 19, 2007
The Guardian
The rain couldn't dampen the impact of this recital by Radio 3 New Generation artists. In the two song cycles of Ivor Gurney and Ralph Vaughan Williams, which set words from AE Housman's A Shropshire Lad, it is the scything down of young men in the Boer war that shatters the idyll of the English countryside; the sensibility of these performers to the anguish expressed in the music was acute.
Gurney's cycle Ludlow and Teme for tenor and piano quintet dates from 1919 and was modelled on Vaughan Williams' On Wenlock Edge, composed a decade earlier. While Gurney's own poetic instinct helped him capture the subtle balance of pastoral joy with the dark shadows of battle, the knowledge of his own suffering in the first world war and his subsequent consignment to a mental hospital adds to their force. Andrew Kennedy's perfect diction made him an ideal interpreter; while the almost impish quality of 'Tis Time, I Think, By Wenlock was a foil first for the intensity of his delivery of Ludlow Fair and then the tenderness of The Lent Lily.
The passion which the Aronowitz brought to Elgar's Piano Quintet in A minor equalled their finesse in the song cycles, and if one player should be singled out it is Jennifer Strumm, whose viola solos had a warmth of tone worthy of the late Cecil Aronowitz, for whom the ensemble is named.
Aldeburgh Easter Festival
Geoffrey Norris
April 2006
Daily Telegraph
“The playing by this group of young musicians in works by Strauss, Fauré and early Schoenberg showed an already hatched and well developed style. Named for the distinguished viola-player Cecil Aronowitz, the Ensemble made its debut 18 months ago, and more recently has come under the wing of the Aldeburgh Residencies programme, which fosters and provides facilities for consolidating UK talent such as this.
Here the Sextet from Strauss’s Capriccio and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht for the same string forces framed Fauré’s First Piano Quartet, at once illustrating the Aronowitz’s flexibility of numbers and its marked assimilation of differing musical idioms. The Gallic finesse of the Fauré was enhanced by the ensemble’s warmth of tone, an adept colouring and phrasing, and a temperament that struck an ideal balance between rapture and reason.
Above all – and this was something equally apparent in the Strauss and
Schoenberg – the Aronowitz works as a true ensemble, listening, responding, moving as one and creating mellifluous, fascinating textures. Its tour is well worth catching.”
Debut concert at St John's, Smith Square
Tully Potter
March 2005
The Strad
“I can recall few London debuts as exciting as this. The late violist Cecil Aronowitz, under whose name these seven young musicians appeared, would have been delighted to be so honoured - and gratified by the exceptional standard of performance.
With a leader as visionary as Magnus Johnston, the opening string sextet from Strauss’s Capriccio had the right combination of urgency, anticipation and warmth, setting the scene for what followed: not an opera, but two huge masterpieces by Brahms.
Johnston, his cellist brother Guy and the outstanding American violist Jennifer Stumm were joined by pianist Tom Poster in a heroic interpretation of the G minor Piano Quartet. With the piano lid wide open, all four rose to the climaxes with seemingly limitless power.
Yet there was also extraordinary delicacy, as Poster combined magically with the strings in the quieter passages of the first movement. There was further magic in the Intermezzo, broad phrasing at the ideal tempo in the slow movement and scintillating virtuosity in the Hungarian rondo.
After the interval second violinist Nadia Wijzenbeek, second violist Tom Hankey and cellist Marie Macleod returned for the B flat major Sextet. As in the Strauss, Macleod stood out too much on occasion. But otherwise it was a deeply and richly satisfying performance.
It is difficult to see how these fine players can greatly advance from this bridgehead. Let us hope we have many more chances to hear them attempt to do so.”