 |
 |
|
|
May 7, 2013 Joseph Nebra: From Silence
Little known outside Spain, Nebra (1702-1768) composed around 50 operas and stage works, as well as a large volume of church music in his capacity as Deputy Master of the Royal Chapel in Madrid. What we hear on this album for the first time is his keyboard music, which has gathered dust in church and private archives, its originality unrecognised. The sonatas and toccatas reveal an intelligent musician who is searching for a language that is as far away as possible from Domenico Scarlatti, dominant in Spain at the time. Secure in his classical structures Nebra writes in a manner reminiscent of early Haydn or Mozart – frisky, entertaining and easy to absorb, or ignore. One imagines these pieces were intended for ruling-class dinner parties; if so, they could serve the same purpose today. Where Nebra arrests the attention is in his slow pieces, marked Grave, some of which are so slow they stop the clock and ask big questions about life on earth. The music feels at once familiar and entirely fresh. Moises Fernandez Via plays the set with great daring on a modern instrument in a Massachusetts banqueting hall, finishing off one of the incomplete Graves with his own improvisation. Try it for dessert.
Four Mozart concertos Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli The touch is like no other. After a pedestrian introduction from the Stuttgart Radio orchestra (conductor Antoine de Bavier), the pianist enters with the sound of a raindrop in a water barrel. Uncanny, inimitable, you must hear Michaelgeli in the K466 and K415 concertos, recorded in 1956 mono. No second thoughts.
Angela Hewitt The Canadian pianist is recording the set in an Italian mountain resort, far from the studio pressures of the big city. There’s a congenial feel to these performances, ideally suited to the vivacious K453 concerto. The climactic K595 feels a tad too laid back for my taste. Hannu Lintu conducts the Mantua chamber orchestra.
Alessandro Carbonare Claudio Abbado’s principal clarinet in the Mozart Orchestra can play the concerto with one hand tied behind his back, or so it seems. He has a fabulous tone, but he makes the music sound like child’s play. The companions works are the bassoon and second flute concertos.
Romain Guyot The Chamber Orchestra of Europe and its principal clarinet play the concerto without benefit of conductor. The added freedom is audible in Guyot’s playing – his playfulness – which lifts the performance above the common run. Five orchestra members then add an admirably well-sprung account of the clarinet quintet.
April 29, 2013 Shostakovich: 7th symphony Liverpool’s cycle of Shostakovich symphonies stands apart from all previous recordings for its edginess and its youth. Vasily Petrenko, the conductor, is 36 years old. He grew up in the dying embers of Communism and addresses the symphonies with no ideological agenda. He performs the Leningrad Symphony not as a relic of an historic event but as a work of music that demands objective interpretation in a different century. The ear is struck immediately by his refusal to overplay textural excesses. The atmosphere is quieter, less ominous than we’re used to. Flutes and clarinets are reduced to a whisper and strings to a hushed susurrus. When the climaxes explode, they do so with total shock and desperation. Between extremes, the conductor maintains an even emotional keel, avoiding the risk of melodrama that Bartok so wickedly caricatured in his Concerto for Orchestra. Petrenko puts his mind to saving the symphony from itself. Playing in another port-city at the western edge of a civilisation, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra deliver delicacy, empathy and, when required, astonishing power. The recorded sound is a shade below pristine (my only reservation) but the performance is treasurable, a terrific affirmation of a towering masterpiece.
Three Latino releases Ernesto Lecuona: The piano music Six CDs of music by a fascinating Cuban composer and pianist, who played the halls of Europe and won the envy of Ravel. Lecuona (1895-1963) has a rhythm all his own and an inexhaustible reservoir of dance tunes. How Thomas Tirino manages to stay seated at his piano is a mystery. The Polish Radio orchestra accompanies.
Brazilian sentiments Cristiane Roncaglio sings the socks off a set by Jobim, Villa-Lobos and others less known. Accompanied alternately on piano and guitar, she gives a semi-latte vocal flavour to these dark, romantic and insistently evocative ballads. Try one, you won’t resist the rest.
La Pasionara Irresistible Argentine melancholy from Valentina Montoya Martinez and Galsgow’s Mr McFall’s Chamber. The songs are by Astor Piazzolla and Valentina herself. They speak of the force of love, and its futility. The voice is sultry, bruised, undefeated. Lovely.
April 29, 2013 Valentin Silvestrov: Piano works When the Soviet Union collapsed, a generation of fine composers vanished into the vortex. Bereft of a parent state that fed and restrained them, some embraced exile, others bewailed the loss. Valentin Silvestrov, a Ukrainian rebel in Soviet times, adopted a baby-faced musical innocence that is at once appealing and disturbing. His set ‘Naïve Music’ sounds as if it could have been written by Tchaikovsky, a pair of waltzes defer to Chopin. Silvestrov refers obliquely to his ‘metaphorical style’ but what one hears is close to imitiation. Beyond that beats a heart that aches for the certainties of melody and a head that knows exactly how to steer a tune clear of sentimentality. If you love Chopin, you will wonder why Chopin didn’t write these waltzes first. Elisaveta Blumina, an accomplshed Leningrad pianist exiled in Dublin, delivers marbled enigmatic serenity, much as Tatiana Nikolayeva did when she played the Bach-like preludes and fugues written by Dmitri Shostakovich in darker times. There may be secrets in this neo-classical revival for John Le Carre to decode. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three Rachmaniov recordings Cello sonata The German cellist Julian Steckel, 30, is more sentimental than most Russians in this ultra-romantic sonata. Paul Rivinius is the pianist. Prokofiev’s late sonata is the companion piece.
Cello sonata The British-based cellist Leonard Elschenbroich pairs an attractively muscular account of the Rachmaninov with a thoughtful reading of the little-known cello version of Shostakovich’s deathbed viola sonata. Alexei Grynyuk is the pianist and the sound is outstanding.
3rd symphony The Detroit SO with Leonard Slatkin give one of the most compelling accounts of the symphony’s hypnotic hushed opening. The Adagio slackens off a bit, but the orch’s in fine fettle and go on to raise the roof in Symphonic Dances. Fabulous sound.
April 22, 2013 The Edge of Light Sometimes composers are best understood by what they do least. Neither Olivier Messiaen nor Kaija Saariaho wrote much for piano. Both use large orchestras and unconventional instruments to describe the world they inhabit. Messiaen (1908-1992) evokes wonderment at the idea of love and the glories of nature. Saariaho (born 1952) explores human intimacies. For both composers, the piano was a working tool rather than a means of expression. Or so one is led to believe. But this remarkable cache of little-known piano music connects the two composers in unexpected ways, tracing their common heritage in the impressionistic pianism of Claude Debussy. Messiaen’s Eight Préludes are an early set, written after his mother’s death in 1929. Rather than mourning his loss, he seeks meaning in a kaleidoscope of colours. His piano quintet is a three-minute valediction from the year before his death. Together, the two pieces bookend his life with the intensity of confession. Saariaho’s piano works, solo and quintet, are sandwiched between two of heroperas. With titles such as ‘I unveil my skin’ and ‘Open up to me, fast’, the intent is transparent and the emotion clinical. Gloria Cheng drives the keyboard, the Calder Quartet provide energetic strings. No sworn fan of either composer, I warmed to this album on first hearing, and keep returning to it.
April 15, 2013 Lionel Bringuier & Nelson Freire Bringuier, 26, is the youngest conductor since Gustavo Dudamel to take command of a world-class orchestra. He has been announced, almost unknown, as David Zinman’s successor at the Zurich Tonhalle and there’s much curiosity as to what he can do. This DVD of a 2010 BBC Proms concert is the first evidence of his abilities on record. Looking even younger than he really is, Bringuier opens with a Toscanini favourite – Berlioz’s Le Corsaire overture – and makes it entirely his own. Barely a minute in, he freezes the tempo to release the most delicate of clarinet lines. It’s a daring gesture, a declaration of intent: this conductor knows exactly what’s needed to bring the music to life. In the concerto, Chopin’s second, the august Brazilian soloist Nelson Freire turns deeply inward, with little for the conductor to do except keep the orchestra in harness. The symphony is Albert Roussel’s Third, a relative rarity outside of France. Bringuier teases out the emotion that lies beneath its brocaded bourgeois formality, no small feat for an interpreter. DVD may not be everyone’s favourite format for listening to music but, if this young man goes half as far as the Zurich musicians predict, this debut release will be a collector’s item many years from now.
Three cello concerto CDs Moeran Ernest Moeran’s post-war oncerto of 1945 is reminiscent all too frequently of Elgar’s, replacing its emotional wrench with gentle nostalgia. Guy Johnston gives a lovely, lyrical account. The Ulster Orchestra append Moeran’s Merrie England Serenade in G.
Strauss: Don Quixote There hasn’t been a fresher performance in years of the ‘fantastic variations’ that this. Alban Gerhardt is the dominant Don, Lawrence Power’s viola his Sancho Panza. Markus Stenz conducts the excellent Gurzenich Orchestra of Cologne. Till Eulenspiegel is the filler. Lovely.
Bloch, Bridge, Hough Steven Isserlis’s attack on Bloch’s Schelomo is fiercer by half than Natalie Clein’s recent stunner, and maybe more authentic; the Kings of Israel were not softies. His account of Frank Bridge’s Oration is vigorous and eloquent. The slight let-down is the rambling third piece, Stephen Hough’s The Loneliest Wilderness. Hugh Wolf conducts the DSO Berlin >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
April 8, 2013 Bela Bartok: Kossuth The only great composer ever to launch his orchestral career in Manchester, Bartok made his debut in February 1904, aged 22, with a 20-minute suite of such untypicality that it was sidelined in his worklist and left to languish unheard. Kossuth is a symphonic poem of the kind that Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler popularised 20 years earlier. Named after a hero of the 1848 Hungarian revolt against the Austrian Empire, it cloaks Lajos Kossuth in romantic tonality and relates his life in ten episodes of progressive futility. As the Austrians near victory (track 8), Bartok plays in Haydn’s Kaiser anthem. Hans Richter, Wagner’s house conductor, gave the work its Manchester premiere and one English newspaper healdined it ‘Strauss Out-Straussed’. Bartok never returned to mainstream romanticism. In the next decade he explored indigenous Balkan and North African musics, finding his voice at the edge of the tonal spectrum. But it makes no sense to cut Kossuth out of his biography. This excellent performance by Cornelius Meister and the Vienna radio orchestra reveals a host of might-have-beens, the false paths young Bela might have taken if Manchester had acclaimed his first venture. These intriguing hints reinforce the innocent idealism of the piece, beckoning you to hear it again. Bartok’s Rumanian Dances are given an equally vivid restoration, but the Concerto for Orchestra at the centre of this album lacks the caustic savagery of 1940s loss and exile.
Three male singers Lawrence Brownlee The US lyric tenor is so persuasive in his own language that idiomatic flaws are all too easily suspected in French, German, Italian and Spanish art songs. His account of Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child is, of itself, worth the album price. Ian Burnside accompanies.
Arnold Bezuyen The Wagnerian tenor sounds overly dramatic in Schumann’s Dichterliebe; the surprise is how deftly he delivers seven early songs by Alban Berg, drifting to the edge of tonality. Jura Margulis is the pianist.
Ian Bostridge The voice closest in colour to Peter Pears’s sings four sets of Britten songs for piano (Antonio Pappano) and one for guitar (Xuefei Yang). Brittenites will adore this album. It left me cold as a winter pond.
March 24, 2013 Salomone Rossi, Jewish polyphony at the Gonzaga Court In the 1820s, when Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn rose to prominence in Paris and Berlin, it was widely assumed that they were the first Jewish composers to write in the western, classical tradition. That was a partial truth. Jewish musicians had played since the Renaissance in many courts of Europe, where they were obliged to conceal their ethnic identity or convert to Christianity. Salmone Rossi (c.1570-1630) was an outstanding exception. A colleague of Monteverdi’s in Mantua, he flourished as concertmaster and composer in a ducal haven of relative religious tolerance. He wrote madrigals for court dances, trio sonatas for pracice, swoony little love songs and a large volume of new tunes for the sabbath and festival Jewish liturgy. The gulf between Italian baroque curlicues and guttural Hebrew texts would seem too large for any composer to bridge, no matter how well versed he was in both cultures. Rossi solves the difference by choosing prayers that are traditionally susceptible to vocal decoration – such as the cantor’s Kaddish – and treating each word of the prayer on rhythmic merit. The result is always agreeable and often uplifting, the charm of the music dispelling doubts of its aptness. Belgium’s Ensemble Daedalus perform a mix of Rossi’s religious and secular works with sweet voices and infallible enunciation. It sounds almost like the dawn of multiculturalism.
Four vocal albums Hubert Parry: From a city window The Edwardian drawing-room re-enacted by the rich voices of Ailish Tynan, Susan Bickley and William Dazeley, evocatively directed from the piano of Parry’s boyhood home in Gloucestershire by the exceptional Iain Burnside. Parry was not a powerful mind but his songs are several rungs above Elgar’s.
Tell Me the Truth about Love Despite the pretentious title song and the concept packaging, big-voiced Amanda Roocroft finds charm and flashes of humour in four sets of German, French and Brittenish songs. Joseph Middleton accompanies.
Wagner – Klaus Florian Vogt You will not hear a sweeter, truer tenor all Wagner year. Not another word. Jonathan Nott conducts the Bamberg symphony; Camilla Lund joins for duets from Tristan and Walküre. It doesn’t get much better than this.
March 13, 2013 Rachmaninov: piano concertos, Paganini Rhapsody A Ukrainian pianist, sidelined in North Carolina,, began filming herself at practice and uploading the videos online. Within four years, Valentina Lisitsa was the most-watched pianist in history with more than 40 million Youtube views. To the world at its screens, she is more famous than Horowitz and Van Cliburn combined. This, belatedly, is her first orchestral recording. She paid for it herself, hiring the London Symphony Orchestra, Abbey Road and veteran producer Michael Fine, flying over for three sets of meticulously planned sessions. Unable to afford a big-brand conductor, she made a virtue of necessity and shared her interpretative ideas by video with LSO player-turned-conductor Michael Francis to avoid wasting a minute of expensive studio time. The first thing that strikes you about this set is the pianist’s authority, her absolute conviction that each phrase can only be articulated in a certain way, her way. The assertiveness is most pronounced in the less performed concertos, the first and fourth, where she teases out subtle shifts that are commonly blown away in a blizzard of notes. The first concerto is played with a delicately calibrated rise of dynamic tension and the fourth with an empathetic and profoundly moving sense of irredeemable exile. In the C-minor concerto, she sidesteps melancholy and Brief Encounter romance to suggest a more innocent, hopeful kind of love, while in the D-minor she avoids tripwires at sensationally high speed, negotiating the tender Intermezzo without excess morbidity. The Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini turns into a bit of a romp, with the LSO in cracking form and Michael Fine delivering pellucid sound and perfect balance. Any pianist addressing these concertos has to overcome the composer’s 1920s recordings as well as those of his most-cherished interpreter, Vladimir Horowitz, and four more generations of brilliant performances. Bearing these monuments in mind, I find this the most compelling full set of Rachmaninov concertos since Vladimir Ashkenazy’s with Andre Previn 40 years ago, a recording that perfectly captures its moment. Both the orchestra and the label are the same. Sometimes, these things are no coincidence. A tradition is renewed.
Three piano originals Galina Ustvolskaya: 6 sonatas, 12 preludes A loner from mid-life on, Ustvolskaya turned down an offer of marriage from Dmitri Shostakovich and applied herself to writing hard-edged piano pieces of deceptive simplicity. She was present for these 1995 Moscow recordings by Ivan Sokolov and gave them her approval, but newcomers to her music might seek out more emollient performances.
Hilding Rosenberg: Piano pieces The first musical modernist in Sweden, Rosenberg (1892-1985) immersed himself in the 1920s in the Second Vienna School and shocked his countrymen with unsuspected atonalities. Played here by Ana Christensson, the music lacks Schoenberg’s passion or Webern’s rage. It is very Swedish in its moderation, and rather lovely.
Billy Mayerl: Piano music The premier piano syncopator of London’s 1920s palm courts, Mayerl (1903-59) was a finger wizard whose fun pieces were tinged with melancholy – a quality perfectly captured here by the Irish pianist Philip Martin. A little morsel titled ‘Wistaria’ sums him up to a tee. Listen to more than three short pieces and you won’t want it to end. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
February 25, 2013 Satie & Compagnie Nobody does chillout like the French, and no Frenchman does it better than Erik Satie. A crackpot in many ways, dressed in green velvet in all seasons and never without an umbrella, Satie invented the idea of background music, which he called ‘musique d’ameublement’ (furniture music). At recitals, he urged audiences to walk around and chat while the musicians played. Muzak took that idea and ran with it. You can play a baby to sleep with one of Satie's Gnossiennes, or wind a weary executive down with it faster than two fingers of scotch. Along with its soporific qualities, the music of Satie possesses an intensity that shuts out the busy world and envelops you in its shimmers. What the marvellous Anne Quéffélec contrives on this unmedicated compilation is a panoply of sounds by Satie and his contemporaries, of whom the best known are Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc and Reynaldo Hahn. The flaw with albums of this kind is that the best is ever the enemy of the merely good. A Reverie of Debussy is worth ten little pieces by Déodat de Séverac. A fanfare of Ravel’s stands out a Mont Blanc higher than any morceau of Gabriel Dupont. Twin peaks above them all stands Satie, who is the veritable master of the piano miniature, his genius confirmed by repeated comparison. You will play this album urgently and often but you may find yourself hitting the skip button now and then. The Steinway sound at Poitiers, by the by, is celestial and Mme Quéffélec plays like an angel in a film noir.
Three concerto CDs Elgar Before the 5* wonders of Alisa Weilerstein could fade from my ear, along comes an equally robust American attack on the English masterpiece. The cellist Zuill Bailey has the muscular ease of an Olympic athlete and an irresistible confidence. He knows where he’s going, and you’re happy to ride side-saddle. His large gestures leave little space for tenderness, but the momentum is upbeat and the outlook brighter than expected. Bailey is let down by patches of unrefined Indianapolis sound (conductor Krzystof Urbanski) and an inappropriate coupling – a selection from Smetana’s Ma Vlast.
Brahms Lisa Batiashvili makes the violin concerto sound so sunny and relaxed you can hardly remembered that Brahms was once feared for his Sturm und Drang. There are no profoundities to this interpretation beyond the enjoyment of beauty and nature in the flawless company of the Dresden Staatskapelle, conductor Christian Thielemann. The filler is a set of romances for violin and piano (Alice Sara Ott) by Brahms’s adored and unattainable Clara Schumann.
Liszt Nareh Arghamanyan, an Armenian pianist new to me, is deceptively more reflective than most in the two concertos, though she can compete with anyone for speed in the great crashing descents that Liszt uses to end a line of thought. The orchestra is Berlin Radio (conductor Alain Altinoglu) and the two fillers are absolute crackers – the hair-raising Totentanz and the Fantasy on Hungarian Folktunes. Fresh and effervescent, this is a soloist to watch out for. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
February 18, 2013 The Coral Sea Every now and then a record announces from the opening spin that you’re in for a really good time. Six works by five living British composers for soprano saxophone hardly sounds like an invitation to the dance, but the moment Sue McKenzie blows up the weird Caledonian wail of Gabriel Jackson’s title piece you just want to sit back and sip the smoky malt. Sue plays the sweetest, most serene soprano sax you will ever hear outside a jazz den. She is piloted through uncharted waters by Ingrid Sawers, piano. The Coral Sea sounds like it ought to: limitless, enchanting and implacable. Jackson, chiefly a choral composer, finds an almost-human timbre in the soprano sax and makes it sing and keen for all it’s worth. Graham Fitkin’s two pieces have a Mersey-like murk, somehow gloomy and yet a bit giggly at the same time. Nikki Iles, a composer I had never heard before, makes the sax sing nightclub languid and low in a piece called Alma Venus. Two Memorials by Mark-Anthony Turnage are too short by half, gone before they’ve broken the surface. But the concluding Allegrasco by Gavin Bryars is a world entire, a story that invents its own time and makes the second malt absolutely mandatory. The soprano sax is, unlike the operatic category, two sizes smaller than a tenor. It doesn’t sound that way. If you only buy one saxophone record this year, make this the one.
Three remarkable pianists: Cezara-Lucia Vladescu A classical pianist who has played at Carnegie Hall, Cezara last year won the public prize at the Montreux Jazz Competition. Her debut album, privately produced but available through all online outlets, takes teasing fragments of classical works and turns them into jazz meditations. The ear is taken in a single phrase from Bach to Chopin to Schumann to Cezara and the journey is altogether enchanting. This pianist demands to be heard live.
Caroline Sageman The youngest-ever finalist in the Warsaw Chopin competition, Sageman plays the Polonaises in mid-life as if they are her life’s purpose. Gone is the competitor’s showiness. What we hear is a mind and a set of fingers plunging ever deeper into Chopin’s textures in search of an elusive truth. Set beside recent showboaters, this is Chopin from the source.
Maria Joao Pires No grandmother pianist has sounded so curious and clear-sighted as Pires does in this ear-opening pair of two Schubert sonatas (D845 and D960). Just when you think you know all that can be done with these mine-shafts of introspection, Pires inserts a dimension of surprise and wisdom that will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about the music.
February 4, 2013 Scarlatti Illuminated Domenico Scarlatti was born in 1685 and overshadowed by two giants who shared his birthday year, Johann Sebatian Bach and George Frederic Handel. Worse luck, instead of staying home in Naples and writing operas for rich traders as hus father did, Domenico veered off to the relative obscurity of Portugal and Spain where, working for the royal families, he turned out exactly 555 solo sonatas for the harpsichord. This was not a good career move. Excess, in music, is a natural deterrent. The public will never tolerate 555 of anything, so it is little short of a miracle that some music by Scarlatti junior was taken up by 19th and 20th century virtuosi, adapted for the heavier sonorities of the grand piano and often used as a first encore to help the audience settle down after the big showpiece. Two famous soloists, Carl Tausig and Ignaz Friedman, made modern transcriptions of Scarlatti pieces; and Vladimir Horowitz was prone to slip Scarlatti into the gap between Scriabin and Prokofiev. What this album does, as none before, is give us the chance to hear both baroque and romantic-style Scarlatti, played side-by-side on a concert grand. It’s quite a ride. At 24 years old, Joseph Moog knows no fear. He takes the virtuosic slaloms eyes wide open and then reins back without brakes for the onset of baroque curlicues. I have a feeling we’re going to hear much more of Moog. German born, he has an original turn of mind and an impressive technique. The music is never less than unexpected, with an occasional wistful quirk that hints at might-have-beens. Contrary to the usual rules, this album could be a career-making release. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three fine cellists Quirine Versen An obscure sonata by a 19 year-old Kurt Weill, remarkably mature, leads into the equally unplayed opus 1 by Hans Pfitzner and the well-known romantic sonata of Samuel Barber. The dialogue between Versen and her pianist Silke Avenhaus is quiet, almost gossipy, making you want to listen all the more closely for nuance.
Christian Poltera Pairing the Barber cello concerto with his sonata may have seemed a brilliant programming idea, but it’s too much of a good thing. The Swiss cellist plays a notably rich-sounding Guarnerius, too rich for this austere rep. Katherine Stott accompanies the sonata, Andrew Litton conducts the concerto. Even with an added Adagio for strings, the album offers less than an hour of music.
Jakob Kullberg Danish and brave, Kullberg plays three concertos by living Nordic composers – Per Norgard, Arne Nordheim and Kaija Saariaho. Nordheim’s in a single movement, is easiest to grasp; the other two require deep concentration. Kullberg plays with blithe satisfaction, as if they were Haydn. The New Music Orchestra are conducted by Szymon Bywalec.
January 27, 2013 Andrzej Panufnik: Symphonies 7 & 8 Poland’s most successful composer fled to the West in 1954, settled in a London suburb and, with the Thames lapping at his cabin doorstep, wrote for the first time without fear or political pressure. Under Nazi occupation, Panufnik had played four-hand piano recitals in underground cafés with his friend Witold Lutoslawski. Under Stalinist rule, he was forced by the commissars to write big tunes and wear a broad smile. His early symphonies can sound a tad simplistic. In London, he became his own man, creatively and intellectually. His works became complex in the best sense of the term, expressing an idea that has been clarified to the nth degree by an independent, questing mind. The music may not always sound easy on the ear, but it is never less than fascinating and readily comprehensible. The 7th symphony, titled Metasinfonia, is an organ concerto with lots of work for the timpani and a sense of struggle that leads to redemption. The 8th, Sinfonia Votiva, was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and premiered with Seiji Ozawa in 1982. Dedicated to the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, it anticipates the religious revolt that toppled communism and reunited Panufnik, near the end of his life (he died in 1991), with Poland. A third work here is the Concerto Festivo for the London Symphony Orchestra, advertising its solo v irtuosities in much the same way that Bartok does in his Concerto for Orchestra. There is not a dull moment on this album, the fifth in a series that Lukasz Borowicz is conducting for the 2014 composer’s centenary. The Konzerthaus orchestra of East Berlin play with unthrottled passion, in stunning sound.
Three radio retrievals Klaus Tennstedt Bruckner and Mahler were Tennstedt’s prime specialities; who’d have imagined he would be so profound and evocative in the fourth symphony of Bohuslav Martinu? Tennstedt liked to say that he had a touch of Czech in him, but this is an interpretation to rank with the great Ancerl, penetrating a luminous sound world. It is paired with a glorious, ruminative performance of Brahms’s first, both played by the SWR Stuttgart Radio.
Geza Anda In an age of great pianists, the unassuming Hungarian gets unfairly overlooked. His account of the 2nd Brahms concerto (Otto Klemperer conducting) packs a massive punch – the kind of power you’d expect from Russians. The Tchaikovsky concerto, by contrast, he plays with an almost airy nonchalance and breath-taking subtlety (Georg Solti conducting). Absorbing interpretations with the orchestra of Cologne Radio. The soloist smokes a cigarette on the cover.
Hans Rosbaud One of the post-war pioneers of Mahler and modernism, a role model for Pierre Boulez, Rosbaud (1895-1962) remains near-unknown beyond German borders. His 1951 broadcast of Mahler’s fifth symphony from Cologne was a national ear-opener. On record for the first time, it is a persuasive performance if a little old-fashioned and too brisk in the Adagietto. The mono sound is too constricted for general pleasure.
January 20, 2013 Dinu Lipatti: Piano music The Rumanian pianist, who died tragically young of Hodgkin’s Disease in 1950, left some of the most intuitive and penetrating Chopin interpretations that exist on record. Like Chopin’s, Lipatti’s death at 33 overlaid his image with a false frailty, his name mentioned in hospital whispers. Yehudi Menuhin said he was ‘the manifestation of a spiritual realm, resistant to all pain and suffering.’ Yet there was nothing ethereal about Lipatti who remained, to the end, a virile, robust player with a decidedly modern outlook. Between ne recital and the next, he composed in a vivacious style, more for pleasure than posterity. This exploratory double-album contains a good deal of music that has never been recorded – or enjoyed - before. A Concertino, dated 1936, was clearly written to impress his Paris teacher Nadia Boulanger, the world’s foremost champion of Stravinsky’s neo-classical style. In it, Lipatti mimics and faintly mocks Stravinsky’s 1929 Capriccio, one of the most entertaining works of the epoch. Like an overly erudite classical DJ, Lipatti tosses in bits of Bach, Haydn, Enescu and Bartok, playing spot-the-composer with gleeful abandon. The 18-minute confection is fizzingly well played by pianist Luiza Borac and the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, conductor Jaime Martin, a fun piece for social occasions. Borac, a convinced Lipatti revivalist, takes us on through a sonata, a sonatine, a nocturne and a large fantasie, each of them original and derivative in equal measure. She follows up with Lipatti’s sparkling encore transcriptions of works by Albeniz and Bach. Evangelist though she is, Borac makes no excessive claims for this music beyond its simple attractions and wilful optimism. You will feel much the happier for hearing it.
Three Mozart CDs David Greilsamer The Israeli pianist-director takes crisp, bright tempi in the 23rd symphony and Jeunehomme concerto with the Geneva Chamber Orchestra, following up with something called In-between. This is a world premiere of a 10-minute work for string quartet and orch by Denis Schuler, a wispy, whispery thing that tickles the ears like a night breeze before a Mozart overture as finale. Nice idea, doesn’t quite set the house alight.
The Mozart Sessions The Austrian pianist Markus Schirmer joins Boston ensemble A Far Cry in two concertos (K414-5) and a beefed-up sonata, all adorned with his own lead-ins and cadenzas. The playing is a bit breathless and there’s an edginess to the ensemble, but ears reared on rock music might well be captivated.
Geza Anda The Hungarian pianist, who died young in 1976, recorded these two concertos (K453, 488) with the radio orchestra in Baden-Baden. The sound is a tad boxy and recessed but the Mozart style needs no commentary. Organic, gimmick-free, it lets the music speak for itself. He also gives a scintillating performance of the Ravel G-major concerto.
January 15, 2013 Elgar, Carter: cello concertos Ever since a long-haired blonde with a raging migraine entered a dungeon studio 48 years ago to play the Elgar cello concerto, the beat-that recording has been Jacqueline du Pré’s on EMI. Musicians sensed it on that hot August day in 1965, converging from all over town on a whisper that something extraordinary was going on at Kingsway Hall. And the primacy of that performance was confirmed when Mstislav Rostropovich, the cellist’s cellist, refused to record the Elgar on the grounds that Jackie had made it her own. Many have since had a shot, and fallen short. Not on thoughtfulness or skill – Natalie Clein and Paul Watkins are two fine recent interpreters – but in shaking off the shadow of a 20 year-old girl who found an intuitive understanding of an old man’s lament for a life destroyed by the first world war. Alisa Weilerstein is the first cellist I have heard who plays the concerto as if Jackie never lived. Her entry is marked by a distinctive restraint, a refusal to make the big statement until the narrative is in full sway. Phrase by phrase, she takes us away from the terror and the pity and deep into a golden beauty. She does not so much detach the concerto from Elgar’s time as give it a greater relevance to present fragilities, of society teetering on the edge of change. I find her reinterpretation utterly convincing. It is all the more daring for having, as conductor, none other than Daniel Barenboim, who was first married to du Pré, and an orchestra, the Berlin Staaskapelle, that has no roots in Elgar and his sound world. Against all odds, it works. The pairings are even bolder. Weilerstein takes on and breathes life into a phlegmatic concerto by the centenarian American modernist Elliott Carter, a work of wisps and flutters and dark rustlings in the night. And she winds up with an irresistible reading of Bloch’s supplicatory Kol Nidrei, a fusion of ancient fears into eternal hope. For sheer courage, strong convictions and fabulous playing, nothing less than five stars will do.
Three young pianists David Fray Two Bach partitas, separated by a toccata, played on a modern piano with a dreamy air and no regard for political or academic correctness. Ten years ago, no serious label would have dared deny the dogmas of historically informed performance (HIP), but Fray is one of a new breed who play Bach as they feel it should sound, not as some professor has decreed it must. This is Bach rich in fantasy and spontaneity. Don’t ask permission. Just listen. You’ll want more.
Javier Negrin The little-known travel preludes of Alexander Scrabin, dating from the 1890s, sound more Mediterranean than Russian and the performer seems to need more than the average number of fingers and feet. Negrin, a Spanish pianist, tells a beguiling adventure story, rich in thrills and spills, and in a slightly swoony sound that is just right for these pieces.
Denis Kozhukhin Winner of the 2010 Queen Elisabeth Competition, Kozhukhin plays three sonatas by Serge Prokofiev (nos 6-8) with intense power and concentration but none of the ominousness that these wartime works require. Some may warm to Kozhukhin’s an-historic neutrality; I couldn’t.
January 2, 2013 Mauricio Kagel/Alexandre Tharaud Contemporary Classical is the biggest turnoff in the music rack. Most people seem to think it is either going to hurt their brains with complex theorems or numb their ears with repetitive simplicity. Often, they are right. Sometimes, they are missing out. Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008) was an Argentine-German double-exile who could not resist poking sticks at the sacred cows of classical music. In Ludwig van, a 20-minute piece for small ensemble, he takes fragments of Beethoven’s most famous works and juxtaposes them with intrusive noises, bad singing, running water, false solemnity and all the tricks that post-modern art uses to smash the glass cases of museum culture. As a piece of satire, Ludwig van is an important statement, all the more timely on the eve of the Verdi-Wagner year. As a piece of music, it is good fun. As a work of art, you just want to own it. Composers like Kagel, who live outside safe categories, live in the hope that a major star will play their esoteric stuff. Kagel got lucky. He ran into the French pianist Alexandre Tharaud, a Chopin specialist who is not afraid of novelty or things go bump on the floor. Among other delights on this thrillingly wacky album is a work for metronome and piano and another, perversely, for three hands. I would have given the album five stars for the pleasure it has give me, but for a sudden anxiety that men in white coats might come to drag me away for liking such forbidden stuff.
3 underplayed symphonies Allan Pettersson’s 6th A Swedish outcast, living on the poverty line, Pettersson is the most original Nordic symphonist after Sibelius and Nielsen. Here, as is his wont, he starts in darkness and feels his way, an unbroken hour later, to light. Few modern symphonists create or sustain so gripping an atmosphere, and Christian Lindberg’s performance with the Norrköping Symphony is by far the best on record. I have listened to it, end to end, five times.
Witold Lutoslawski’s 2nd Trapped between Communist expectation and his own modernist inclinations, Lutoslawski walked a high wire in the nervous Sixties. His two-movement 2nd symphony is so jittery at times that he called the first section ‘hésitant’. It isn’t: Edward Garder conducts a commanding performance with the BBC Philharmonic. Luto’s cello cocerto, written for Rostropovich is, if anything, bleaker. Paul Watkins is the austere soloist.
Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s 19th By 1985, the prolific Russian had reached his 142nd work and was repeating himself. There are some glorious passages in the 19th, many reminiscent of his friend Shotaskovich, and blazingly performed by the St Petersburg State Symphony, conductor Vladimir Lande. But the intensity does not equal that of Weinberg’s Mahlerian 14th.
December 16, 2012 Frans Bak: The Killing For all the newspaper blether about an actress in a sweater and the irresistible charm of grey Danish dawn, vital elements in the compelling TV thriller have passed almost unnoticed – as if they were clues missed by detective Sarah Lund as she waves her torch down another dark tunnel. We’re talking music here. The soundtrack of The Killing was composed by Frans Bak, a conservatory-trained musician who used to be a bandleader on Danish television and later wrote lots of product commercials before settling for the long-form movie score. Bak works alone at an electronic desk, mixing sounds of his own invention. The only other musician credited on this soundtrack album is a hypnotic, low-voiced Swedish singer, Josefine Cronholm. For the opening titles, Bak creates a Ligeti-like Atmosphères underpinned by a percussive throb that might have come from the young Steve Reich and a brooding orchestral surge with roots in mid-Sibelius. The resultant fusion, however, finds a distinctive signature which, in turn, becomes indistinguishable from the gripping, questing ambience of the unfolding story. A complex rhythm, unremitting throughout, is a key structural element in the series. The soundtrack called to my mind Bernard Herrmann’s music for Alfred Hitchcock, two seconds of which suffice to evoke a screen situation. I was pleased to read online (the album has no sleeve notes) that Bak regards Herrmann as a role model. That’s encouraging at a time when film is losing its musical literacy and it augurs well for the future of Danish drama. Listen to any track on this chilling disc and you’ll be lost in the murk of a plot, as indelible as the graveyard scene in Hamlet.
Three past legends Ataulfo Argenta The Spanish conductor was soaring high on 1950s Decca when a domestic accident caused his death at 44. This account of Beethoven’s Eroica and Smetana’s Bartered Bride overture exemplify his electrifying effect on familiar music, even with second and third rank orchestras.
Clara Haskil Far from the heart of her repertoire, the Rumanian pianist skips and shimmies through Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain, in a Paris performance conducted by Igor Markevitch.
Sviatoslav Richter He cancelled more often than he played, and every date he kept lives on forever. This is a June 1975 Beethoven night at the Royal Festival Hall, two sonatas separated by a pack of Bagatelles. Richter, once he grips the attention with the opening bars, never lets go. But for an idiot yelling ‘bravo’ before the last chord fades, this record would be perfection itself.
December 10, 2012 Lebrecht’s Album of the Year Debussy: Clair De Lune 2012 was a bumper year – a bumper-to-bumper year – for vocal recitals. Most were fashioned along 1950s lines: pick six show-stoppers and pad them out with six more you hope the average listener (whoever that is) has never heard before. By September, I was having to pay the dustmen to cart them away. Apparently, unwanted CDs are used to pave new motorways. Next time you take a drive, count the singers beneath your wheels. And bumpers. On happier days, I was grateful to receive the complete piano music of John Cage on 18CDs, played by Stefan Schleiermacher on MDG, followed by the complete Arnold Schoenberg piano works on just one CD. Why did no-one think of that before? The set is on a new designer label, Odradek. The pianist is Pina Napolitano: you will hear more of her. I had more fun that was decent with Sony’s exhumations of the Glenn Gould sessions with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, a record made in hell. And I was hugely beguiled by Hyperion’s 18th century Portuguese love songs. On that same label, Natalie Clein played the best Bloch Shelomo on record – yes, it was a bumper year, after all. And then along came Nicola Benedetti’s Silver Violin on Decca, an altogether original confection of movie-linked music and the ultimate antidote to formula releases. But when all’s done and dusted and the frost is thick underfoot, one album of 2012 stood out half a mile from the pile. Not much was heard this year from Natalie Dessay. The French soprano-actress had a run of opera cancellations and suffered the death of her manager, Herbert Breslin. In the early spring, she issued on Virgin Classics a recital of Debussy songs that I do not expect ever to hear bettered. Everything about this album is five-star: the pianist, Philippe Collard; the sound quality; the order of songs; and the tinted cover that takes us straight to the heart of Debussy’s world, where Ms Dessay weaves a spell of unremitting fascination. Some find Debussy intimidating and cold. In Ms Dessay’s interpretation, at once clinical and passionate, his immaculate little songs have the grip of a couturier’s window on the Champs Elysées. You are rooted to the spot.
December 3, 2012 Voyages-Reisen: music for viola da gamba My friends who produce and present breakfast programmes on classical radio in different countrties share a common dilemma. Play anything too fast or loud, like the march of the Toreadors from Carmen, and the sleep-fuddled audience will switch to talk radio. Play slow and too soft – Barber’s Adagio – and they’ll fall back asleep. So breakfast radio ends up with reams of unnamed Haydn symphonies interspersed with middle-of-road classics by also-ran French composers of the 19th century, a murky start to a dull day. Well, here’s a remedy for breakfast. The viola da gamba is an ancestor of the modern cello, only with six strings instead of four. Its resonance stirs remote connections. Played by the Austrian virtuoso Jakob David Rattinger, it offers both gentle awakening and enough of a brain charge to make you explore both sides of the French-German border in the age just before enlightenment. Rattinger, who broke onto record with a stunning survey of the 17th Frenchman Marin Marais (featured in the film Tous les Matins du Monde), takes pieces of Telemann, J. S Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel from the German side and matches them with the lesser-known Forqueray, d’Hervelois and and Demachy. The accents are varied, but the compelling voice is that of the instrument, evoking a civilisation we can barely imagine in sounds that make us want to get up and grab the day. Rattinger’s narrative playing could hardly be bettered, and the ever compelling Marais closes the album with a riveting Badinage.
Three Schubert CDs Complete symphonies Mark Minkowski’s early-instrument box with Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble feels organic in brown-rice ways that some may find deterrent. The tempi are very bright, but there’s always a faint asperity to the string tone that feels more hair-shirty than necessary. The numbering is also odd, adhering to an academic correctness that makes the Great C major symphony 8th rather than 9th in the sequence.
4th and 5th symphonies Faster than Minkowski but on the modern instruments of the SWR Stuttgart orchestra, Roger Norrington puts Schubert back where he belongs – on the dance floor. Quick or slow, every rhythm is strictly on the spot and irresistibly infectious. You may not be able to sit through this without taking a twirl.
C-major quintet The quartet with an extra cello has a star-strewn recorded history, but it has been a while since a performance as gutsy as this has come along, The Takacs Quartet, augmented by Ralph Kirschbaum, tackle the ambiguities of the late masterpiece with rare clarity and profound sympathy.
November 26, 2012 Fazil Say: Istanbul Symphony Turkey’s most charismatic classical musician is in trouble back home. An atheist, uncomfortable with rising Islamist tides, Say retweeted a derisory comment last year and found himself prosecuted for ‘insulting the values of Moslems’ – accused, in effect, of the medieval crime of heresy. His case will be tried in February. Say has gone into exile. A prolific pianist, widely recorded, Say is also an ambitious composer, rooted in the sounds and sights of his homeland. His symphony opens with a rush of waves, followed by a run of Mediterranean melismas. The movements are titled ‘nostalgia’, religious order’, ‘blue mosque, ‘merrily clad young ladies aboard the ferry to Princes Islands’, and so on. To the post-modern listener, this may appears to be a leisurely travelogue in the manner of Saint-Saens and Elgar, east meets west in a four-star hotel. The energy is powerful and the noise made by the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra very loud, but the music arrives about 120 years too late, a cultural anachronism. Others, less aware of musical trends, may be charmed. Less contentious is Herzafen, a concerto for ney (a kind of flute) and symphony orchestra. The throaty instrument adds a whispering authenticity and Burcu Karadag, the soloist, exerts a hypnotic attention. A German audience at the world premiere sound hugely enthusiastic. I wanted to hear it again, at once.
3 underplayed symphonies Allan Pettersson’s 6th A Swedish outcast, living on the poverty line, Pettersson is the most original Nordic symphonist after Sibelius and Nielsen. Here, he starts in darkness and feels his way, an unbroken hour later, to light. Few modern symphonists create or sustain so gripping an atmosphere, and Christian Lindberg’s performance with the Norrköping Symphony is by far the best on record. I have listened to it, end to end, five times.
Witold Lutoslawski’s 2nd Trapped between Communist expectation and his own modernist inclinations, Lutoslawski walked a high wire in the nervous Sixties. His two-movement 2nd symphony is so jittery that he called the first section ‘hésitant’. It isn’t: Edward Garder conducts a commanding performance with the BBC Philharmonic. Luto’s cello concerto, written for Mstislav Rostropovich is, if anything, bleaker. Paul Watkins is the austere soloist.
Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s 19th By 1985, when he wrote this symphony, the prolific Russian had reached his 142nd work and was repeating himself. There are some glorious passages in the 19th, many reminiscent of his friend Shotaskovich, and blazingly performed by the St Petersburg State Symphony, conductor Vladimir Lande. But the intensity does not match Weinberg’s Mahlerian 14th.
November 18, 2012 The Irish Piano Not many Dubliners know, and very few Muscovites will admit, that it was an itinerant Irishman who first put Russia on the world’s musical map. John Field landed in St Petersburg in the winter of 1902 and, over the next 35 years, served as a role model to rising musicians and as a roving ambassador of Russian culture. Mikhail Glinka, the cornerstone Russian composer, was briefly his pupil. Frederic Chopin, it is said, stole one of Field's devices - the nocturne. ‘The Irish Piano’ is a scintillating and sometimes whimsical recital that takes John Field as its starting point and spreads out across the whole of the island’s music, from bar songs, through a Samuel Barber tribute to the breezy post-tonalities of the present generation. Michael McHale, in St Peter’s Church of Ireland, Drogheda, strikes just the right tone of contemplative wonderment and mischievous mythology. Starting with a traditional air of his own transcription, McHale introduces John Field both through a pair of his own nocturnes and through two-little-known homages by the American Samuel Barber and the expatriate Irishman Arnold Bax, who went on to serve the English Crown as Master of the Queen’s Musick. In amidst the classical verities, there are short new pieces by the captivating Donnacha Dennehy, the challenging Ian Wilson and other young Irish composers who have lately been taking the world stage in disproportionate numbers. Ireland has mysteriously become a crucible of contemporary music. Fascinating from start to stop, this album has lovely stuff that you won’t hear anywhere else.
Three mezzo CDs Susan Graham: Virgins, Vixens and Viragos An unusually thoughtful star recital, running the gamut from Purcell to Sondheim and taking in such unfamiliar gems as Joseph Horovitz’s Lady Macbeth and Vernon Duke’s Ages Ago (if you can’t place Duke, he was Prokofiev’s best friend). Malcolm Martineau accompanies and the big vibrato is kept well in check. The virago, on the other hand, runs riot.
Joyce DiDonato: Drama Queens The queens are from baroque and early-classical operas, many of them obscure (Berenice, Queen of Palestine, anyone?), which allows Joyce to let rip with more decorations than an oligarch’s bathroom and more freedom than the US Constitution. Alan Curtis conducts Il Complesso Barocco with commendable discretion. If it feels a bit overwhelming, skip to track six for Handel’s chilling Cleopatra. The singing is in a class – a world – of its own.
Marie-Nicole Lemieux: Opera arias Ms Lemieux, a Canadian, is a contralto - a deeper, richer, more swoony type of voice than the general run of mezzos. She is good in Haydn and Mozart, gorgeous as Gluck’s Orfeo. Bernard Labadie conducts les violins du roy.
November 4, 2012 18th century Portuguese love songs Sharp-eyed readers will have noted that the last Lebrecht CD of the Week shot straight to the top of the UK charts. This week’s is designed for a more intimate purpose. Described by an 18th century English traveller as ‘the most seducing, the most voluptuous imaginable,’ the music of the Portuguese ruling classes appeared to cross all mortal barriers. It is, wrote William Beckford, ‘the best calculated to throw saints off their guard and inspire profane deliriums’. Do not say you have not been warned. It offers two points of musical reference. The first is courtly Europe in the last years before the French Revolution. Some of the melodies could be passed off for very young Haydn or Rossini. Italian influence is pervasive and a sonata by Domenico Scarlatti, who lived in Lisbon for ten years, does not feel at all out of place. But beneath the delicate bobs and bows surge the powerful motives of love and betrayal that one hears in modern Portuguese fado – the eternal yearning for love, allied to a weary recognition that it must fail. This expression of love’s futility is not cynical, as it might be in other cultures. On the contrary, love emerges all the stronger for its black-eyed realism. The diversity of the music holds your attention from start to finish, whether it is a soprano serenade with guitar-led ensemble or a lonely harpsichord plucking away in the noonday sun. Impatient listeners should skip to the second track, where they will be assaulted by duet virtuosity of a feline, Rossinian felicity. Sandra Medeiros and Joana Seara are the stunning sopranos; Zak Ozmo directs L’Avventura London. This, wrote Beckford, is ‘an original sort of music, different from any I ever heard’. Two centuries later, that estimate still holds true.
Three opera CD sets Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier The American soprano Renee Fleming and the German conductor Christian Thielemann are unassailable in this sweetmeat opera. Franz Hawlata is the bullish Ochs, Diana Damrau the silky Sophie. My only cavil is the playing of the Munich Philharmonic at the Baden-Baden Festival, fifty calories less sweet than the Viennese.
Mozart: Don Giovanni Ildebrando D’Arcangelo is the rampaging Don, Rolando Villazon the Ottavio, Diana Damrau and Joyce DiDonato the two Donnas in another Baden-Baden production. Much of the singing is thrilling (DiDonati with added chill). The Mahler Chamber Orchestra offer slightly sterile accompaniment under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. It may have worked better on stage than on record.
Smetana: The Bartered Bride One of Mahler’s favourite operas has lost its foothold in the regular repertoire, perhaps due to its bucolic naivety. Jiri Behlolavek conducts an all-Czech cast – Dana Buresova outstanding as Marenka – in a London concert performance at the Barbican with the BBC orchestra and chorus. The sound is rather dry, but the enthusiasm is infectious. You’ll be whistling it for weeks.
October 14, 2012 Anu Komsi, Coloratura Vanity apart, there are only two credible reasons for releasing or reviewing a solo vocal recital. Either the music must be unfamiliar and powerful, or the singer must be possessed of a voice so extraordinary that there is no better way of appreciating it than in this concentrated form. Anu Komsi’s recital fits both bills. Komsi is a Finnish artist who plays roles no other soprano can reach, manily because they are way out of their league – too high, too complex, too dangerous. She’s had roles written for her in operas by George Benjamin, James Dillon and Peter Eotvos and she has a summer festival on the west coast of Finland that regularly cuts the edge. She is conducted here (with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra) by her husband, Sakari Oramo, chief conductor of the Stockholm Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony. The opening track, a wordless concerto for coloratura and orchestra by the half-forgotten Russian Reinhold Glière (1875-1956), s a guaranteed window-breaker – high, loud and a perfectly lovely assault on the senses. It is followed by the mad scene from Ambroise Thomas’s opera Hamlet and the outworn Bell Song from Delibes’s Lakmé, once dragged through an airport in a British Airways ad yet here sounding rejuvenated. I could have done without the Queen of the Night aria from Magic Flute, written for Mozart’s sister-in-law; nobody ever saves their best work for the in-laws. It does nothing to prepare your ears for the exhilarating wackiness of John Zorn’s 11-minute monodrama, La Machine de l’etre, a track that puts Komsi in the Cathy Berberian bracket of versatility. She closes, serenely on home turf, with Sibelius’s Luonnotar. The disc is more than the sum of its parts. It presents a unique artist, uniquely in her element. Of how many records can you say that?
3 violin concerto CDs Berg, Brahms Renaud Capucon’s account of the sombre Berg concerto, written in memory of a dead teenager, goes straight to the top of the pile. Making no concession for atonal asperities, it treats the work for what it is – a romantic concept in a modern form. The Brahms is sweetly done, if less decisive. Daniel Harding conducts the Vienna Philharmonic.
Schumann Schumann wrote a violin concerto his friend Joseph Joachim that went missing for 80 years. It lacks the warmth and conviction of his cello concerto and Anthony Marwood’s austere interpretation adds little to its charms. Nor is the violin adaptation of the cello concerto, played here by Marwood with equal severity, a match for the lush original.
Mendelssohn Alina Ibragimova is fast, lean and edgy in the famous E minor concerto, pitched against the organic timbre of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. A refreshing change from over-sweet accounts, it will not be to everyone’s taste. In the earlier, less-played D minor concerto, the orchestra sounds idiomatically more comfortable and the soloist is scarcely challenged.
October 7, 2012 Miklos Rozsa: violin concerto, &c. A Hungarian, penniless in 1930s Paris, Rozsa took a tip from the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger to try his hand at film. He called his compatriot Alexander Korda, who had a studio outside London and got started composing a routine epic, Knight Without Armour. When war broke out in 1939 Korda moved The Thief of Baghdad to Hollywood and took Rozsa along to finish the score. It was the composer’s gateway to heaven. Over the next four decades, Rosza scored 90 movies, including Spellbound, Ben Hur and Julius Caesar. With Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Franz Waxman, he defined the orchestral language of film. Like Korngold, however, he craved respectability and continued to write concert works, often reusing themes from his movies. Like Korngold, he composed a concerto for Jascha Heifetz that the great violinist adored and the critics uniformly deplored. Both are fine works, expertly wrought and easy on the ear. But while the Korngold concerto has soared with half a dozen recordings over the past couple of years, Rozsa’s has remained obscure. It is an original work, untouched by Hollywood (though Billy Wilder later asked Rozsa to work it into the soundtrack of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes). This new interpretation by the young British violinist Jennifer Pike is the most apeealing I have heard since Heifetz. Pike is terrific with the opening movement fireworks and tender in the gorgeous Lento movement. The furious Hungarian rhythms of the finale belong to Bartok, whom Rozsa knew well. At times, the concerto feels like the work of an equal master Rumon Gamba conducts the BBC Philharmonic in exemplary Chandos sound. The filler pieces are Rozsa’s neo-classical Concerto for string orchestra and an earthier Theme, Variations and Finale. Enjoyable stuff, can’t think why it doesn’t get played more. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Symphonic CDs Scriabin: Symphonic works The Russian composer has fallen so far out of fashion that to hear his music is like revisiting the old Soviet Union. These 1960s recordings, conducted by Evgeny Svetlanov, are vividly atmospheric, expertly played, in pellucid sound – an almost-guilty pleasure.
Tchaikovsky: symphonies 1-3 Once you suspend scepticism at the naivety, there is much pleasure to be had in Tchaik’s Winter Daydreams and the Little Russian and Polish symphonies. The LSO are on cracking form, with shimmering woodwind solos shaped by Valery Gergiev’s flutter fingers and some sumptuous ppps. This may be the most tempting interpretation since Karajan’s blue-box set of the 1970s… now, there’s a vanished world.
Rachmaninov 2nd The big romantic surges at the start of the first and third movements need taut baton control. Evgeny Svetlanov is exemplary with the Philharmonia in a live 1993 recording. Vasily Petrenko is a little more relaxed with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic but the outcome, far from indulgent, is more likeable. The big clarinet solo on both CDs is sensational. Try both.ebay
October 1, 2012 Glenn Gould: The Schwarzkopf Tapes This is the kind of worst-ever record that producers dream up drunk and forget by morning. Except, in this case, they decided to make it. Putting the perfectionist German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in a studio with the outwardly chaotic Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was a mismatch of Olympian dimensions. All they had in common was a passion for the songs of Richard Strauss, regarded in the mid-1960s as a romantic dinosaur. Gould considered him a genius; Schwarzkopf had known the composer quite well. Beyond that, the pair were chalk and cheese. Schwarzkopf, recalls producer Paul Myers in a booklet note, thought she was getting an expert accompanist to her exquisite voice. Gould thought he was the centre of attention. The soprano turned up in a New York studio in January 1966 with her control-freak husband, Walter Legge. Gould like his studio stifling hot. Schwarzkopf said heat killed her voice. The pianist refused to discuss tempi and interpretation before they got to work. At breaks, he showed no interest in shared listening of the recorded takes. While Schwarzkopf and Legge frowned over replays behind the glass wall, Gould carried on playing the piano. Schwarzkopf stuck to the printed score. Gould went off on riffs. The third day of sessions was cancelled by mutual consent. Fourteen years later, three songs were released in a Gould jubilee album. Three more were considered unpublishable. They are issued here for the first time. Worth hearing? Indispensably so. The strain on Schwarzkopf’s glittering instrument is audible at both top and bottom, but the faint patina harshness endows her voice with endearing warmth. Gould’s opening passages – especially in the torch-song Morgen – are straight out of dreamland, a set of fantasies on a near-imaginary Strauss that smash the glass windows of literalist protectionism. In the closing lines Schwarzkopf can barely be recognised as herself, extended as never before by a creative competitot. In between the two triptychs of songs, Sony have packed Gould’s Toronto performance of Strauss’s concerto-like Burleske, together with a 15-minute Gould rehearsal in which he growls along to his playing, finishing up with the comment: ‘OK, not bad. But not good.’ Utterly inimitable.
September 24, 2012 Mendelssohn: Elijah From its first performance in Birmingham Town Hall in August 1846 and for many decades after, Mendelssohn’s Elijah was considered the equal of Handel’s Messiah - certainly the most significant and spiritual work of music composed in England since time immemorial. Its grip on the public ear faded as world wars turned Sunday churchgoers into disillusioned sceptics. Over time, it has receded to an occasional performance. The flaw in Elijah is that is lacks the innate optimism and the massive singalong appeal of Handel’s masterpiece. The atmosphere is dark, and sometimes heavy. Mendelssohn in his set pieces for four voices, chorus and orchestra can sound as if he is straining to hard to please God, man and good Queen Victora all at the same time. So sensitive was the composer to the sensibilities of his prudish audience that he completely excised the massacre of the priests of Baal, which was the apotheosis of the prophet Elijah’s revelation and redemption. This oratorio needs more blood and guts. In a far-from-crowded field, Paul McCreesh’s recording, made at the Watford Colosseum and Birmingham Town Hall, does the crowd scenes extremely well. The soloists are a power-pack – Rosemary Joshua, Sarah Connolly, Robert Murray and Simon Keenlyside – the Gabrieli Consort play with vim and vigour. The sundry choirs deserve full credit: the Wroclaw Philharmonic Choir, Chetham’s Chamber Choir, North East Youth Chorale, Taplow Youth Choir and Ulster Youth Chamber Choir. The only drawback is the shelf-consuming thickness of the accompanying book, which is studded with pointless photos from the recording sessions (who needs to see a horn player with his eyes popping out?). Nicholas Parker’s sound production is exemplary.
3 concerto CDs Benjamin Grosvenor The 2nd Saint-Saens concerto, the Ravel G-major and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, performed by the young English pianist in descending order of effectiveness. The Saint-Saens is the most eloquent I’ve heard in years, the Ravel is very good and the Gershwin would benefit from a richer cultural perspective. Short solos between the pieces are nonchalantly tossed off by a young artists who has technique to spare. James Judd conducts the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, who sound in great form.
Mitsuko Uchida Conducting the Cleveland Orchestra from the keyboard in two Mozart concertos (K271, K467), the great pianist does not sound wholly comfortable. Orchestral tutti are a little heavy and the pianism lack the flinty certainty of Uchida at her finest. Try Geza Anda and the Mozarteum orchestra in the 'Elvira Madigan' concerto on DG and you'll glimpse what can be achieved when a pianist and ensemble speak with one voice.
Leif Ove Andsnes The Norwegian manages the double role of pianist and director persuasively with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. The first release in this cycle pairs Beethoven’s 1st and 3rd concertos. The less challenging C major concerto receives an affectionate reading, while the C minor achieves high tension and revolutionary fervour of a very rare order, before going off on a dancing riff. Andsnes seldom does what you expect and the sound, in Prague’s Rudolfinum, is exemplary (the producer is the EMI veteran John Fraser).
September 17, 2012 Jon Lord : Concerto for group and orchestra So many fading pop stars have sought to revive faltering careers in the classical sector that the term ‘crossover’ has become synonymous with sell-out. Jon Lord was never that. The Deep Purple founder was classically trained and passionate about keyboard instruments. He blended a Hammond organ into the band’s trademark sound and, unusually for his time, focussed more on live concerts than on recording. The first performance of his classic-rock fusion concerto was conducted by Malcolm Arnold, one of England’s most successful symphonists, and the influence of Arnold’s effortless tune-making is audible intermittently through the three movements of this remarkable work. Lord played the concerto more than 30 times with different orchestras and conductors before deciding to make a studio recording with Paul Mann, who had directed the work on tour. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic was engaged for the sessions along with some hardcore rock band members. In the last weeks of his life (he died of pancreatic cancer in July), the composer was able to supervise and approve the final takes. So what kind of work is the concerto? It’s a classically structured work with flashes of very loud rock playing and two stretches of ballad singing that, while agreeable, disrupt the cogent flow of instrumental conversation. The Hammond organ adds a unique nasal undertow and the propulsion of rhythm and ideas never flags. This is probably a work best heard where it was first played – in the Royal Albert Hall, London – but the recording is a precious relic of a time when music knew no barriers and the future held an infinity of hope.
3 Mahler CDs 1st symphony The pulse in this performance by Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony is inconsistent from one movement to the next. Irony is crucially missing from the third movement. The live sound (Tim Handley) is rich and transparent and the orchestra is on great form, but the interpretation is unconvincing.
1st symphony Cologne’s Gurzenich orchestra learned to play Mahler with the composer himself. Its sound has an unassuming authenticity and the narrative is confidently driven by Markus Stenz, a little too fast at times and without a trace of the underlying ironic contradictions. The brass playing, though, is supersonic.
2nd symphony Myung-Whun Chung’s tempi are exemplary and the Seoul Philharmonic playing is ferocious, yet note-perfect. Doubts nag in the low strings of the andante and the Röschen soloist, Myung Joo Lee, wallows in her own vibrato. But the interpretative line remains tight throughout and four Korean choruses deliver a mighty resurrection. >Buy this CD at Deutsche Grammophon
September 10, 2012 Stephen Hough: French Album The English pianist is so much a law unto himself that if he decides a piece is French we must take his word for it. Only Hough would dare to kick off a so-called French Album with two pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach and end it with one by Franz Liszt. How French is that? The justifications, if such things are needed, are that the Bach solos he plays are arrangements by the austerely Gallic Alfred Cortot and the Liszt is a compilation of themes from Halévy’s La Juive, arguably the cornerstone of romantic French opera. In between, Hough strings a sterling-silver chain of jewelled morsels by Fauré, Ravel, Massenet, Chabrier, Poulenc, Debussy, Delibes and Cécile Chaminade. Mostly, such pieces send me back to sleep when played as fillers on BBC Radio 3’s Breakfast programme. The Faurés, I’m sure, Hough can play in his sleep. Here, however, he presents each amuse-bouche as a banquet in itself – integral, entire and altogether satisfying until the ear remembers that it is empty and demands more. There is never a risk of torpor on this CD. In the thick of exquisite tidbits sits a four-minute masterpiece of commanding solemnity – a prelude by Charles-Valentin Alkan that stops time in its tracks and makes you wonder how anyone, anywhere, could compose music in any other form. Alkan was a recluse, found dead in his Paris apartment beneath a collapsed bookcase, his parrot still chirping. His works demand formidable hands and his advocates have been few: Busoni, Edwin Fischer, Ronald Smith, Olli Mustonen, Marc-Andre Hamelin. Hough, in La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer announces a new contender in the Alkan championships, a striking intelligence applied to the most intellectually challenging of 19th century keyboard masters.
Three contemporary CDs Michael Shapiro: Variation The New York composer has written two sets on Jewish Sabbath hymns, one for solo cello (Sato Knudsen), the other violin (Tim Fain). Both marry lyricism to the mathematical logic of the variation form – and do so with charm, boldness and a winsome wit.
Lowell Liebermann: Little Heaven Another New Yorker, Liebermann pulls off the considerable feat of setting the Holocaust poet Nelly Sachs without maudlin modes, his notes as sparing as her words. Brenda Rae is the soprano. Rae is joined by baritone John Hancock, with William Hobbs at the piano, in two further cycles. Tough, original writing – just as I like it.
A Different World - Contemporary Music for Solo Violin & Piano Baltic composers (Barkauskas, Salonen, Bacewicz) and some others are plinked and played on violin and piano by Diana Galvydyte and Christopher Guild. Some may find it a tad wintry, but Balsys’s evocative Lament and James MacMillan’s two pieces are well worth the admission price.
September 3, 2012 Bononcini: Messa, Stabat Mater The cover of this CD had me quivering with righteous outrage. Bononcini is one of the bad boys of music history. He came to London around 1720, stole Handel’s aristocratic patrons and half his audience and left him at the very edge of bankruptcy. Like Salieri with Mozart, Bononcini did enough to drive a great composer to drink and distraction without leaving works of his own that might justify his intrigues. Like Salieri, Boncini earned prolonged and richly deserved oblivion. I have never knowingly listened to a note of his music, the rotter. That, however, was Giovanni Battista Bononcini.(1670-1747). This present disc contains two liturgical works by his kid brother, Antonio (1677-1726), a Modena cellist who became Kapellmeister in Vienna in 1726. The music is very much of its time and type, soothing and reassuring rather than strikingly original, but many of the eight soloists’ vocal lines are beautifully turned and the cohesion that director Rinaldo Alessandrini achieve with the Concerto Italiano choir and orchestra is altogether impeccable. Recorded live at Vienna’s adventurous Konzerthaus, the music is seductive beyond all reasonable expectations. Silvia Frigato and Sara Mingardo are the standout soloists and the acoustic is near-perfect. When someone mentions Bononcini in future you’re going to have to ask, which one? >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three John Cage centenary CDs As It is Just when you think you know Cage, he springs a new surprise. The pianist Alexei Lubimov and singer Natalia Pschetnikova, veterans of a 1988 Moscow Cage-in, perform pieces for prepared piano and poems by e. e. cumming, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Stunning, simply stunning.
Jack Quartet The quartet of 1950 is not Cage’s finest half-hour and can, indeed, often seem a good deal longer. Written in quiet repetitions that anticipate the minimalism of the 1980s, the piece is chiefly of historic interest. That said, the Jack Quartet give it a taut, alert reading, between works of Ligeti, Pintscher and Xenakis.
Sonatas and Interludes ‘A ping qualified by a thud’ is how the conservative composer Virgil Thomson described these 20 pieces, but what did he know? Played here by James Tenney, who said they changed his life at age 16, they might well change your perceptions of the sounds it is possible to extract from a piano, prepared or otherwise. Almost definitive. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
August 27, 2012 The art of instrumentation: homage to Glenn Gould Glenn Gould, who died in October 1982, would have been 80 next month. Alive, Gould was known as the quirky Canadian pianist who soaked his hands in boiling water before he touched the keys, and who played Bach as no-one else before or since. Since his death, frozen in time, he has acquired an aura of philosopher and saint, extolled for his gentleness and intellectual rigour, raised to cult status on record. ‘They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old…’ To perpetuate an artist’s legacy in a double-anniversary year requires more than repetitive homage, as record labels have learned to their cost. Gidon Kremer, the Latvian violinist and conductor, once spent a night in Gould’s studio with the Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff. He has commissioned a set of variations on Bach themes by contemporary composers whom Gould might, or might not, have liked. I am fairly sure Gould would have grinned at Alexander Raskatov’s string orchestra riff on the Prelude and Fugue in D minor, and there’s a pair of arrangements for solo violin and vibraphone that cut right to the heart of the Gould sound world. A piece called Bridges to Bach by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli is the standout track. Its shimmering lines for violin, flute, oboe, piano and vibraphone against a string orchestra backdrop afford a meditative tour around the possibilities that Bach presents for the creative mind, a boundless resource for invention. The safer tracks on this CD are less successful. The most daring is a cross between five of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and two intermezzos from the works of Arnold Schoenberg, set by Steven Kovacs Tickmayer and giving the listener a constant expectation of challenge – just as Gould used to do. Rarely does a recording extend musical curiosity as much as this one does.
Three Tchaikovsky CDs Piano concerto #1 The Tchaikovsky Competition winner Daniil Trifonov makes light work of the great concerto, accompanied by Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra. Massive power gives way to the most delicate pianissimi and a constant sense of discovery. This performance is close to epic, diminished only by the solo encores – mostly Liszt settings of Schubert songs that somehow disempower the concerto’s impact.
Symphonies 4&5 The London Philharmonic is not, on present form, London’s pride. The woodwinds lack colour, the strings are mushy and the brass less forceful than it used to be. These are live recordings from the Royal Festival Hall, a smudgy venue, but the band should know the hall well enough to overcome its blight. Vladimir Jurowski conducts.
6th symphony The Seoul Philharmonic has risen under Myung-Whun Chung’s direction to world status and sounds ever better each year. Produced by Michael Fine, a former head of DG, this recording has bloom to die for and real depth of field in the aural illusion. Chung’s interpretation is classy and unfussy, carefully restraining pathos in the finale. The filler, Rachmaninov’s Vocalise, detracts more than it adds. >Buy this CD at Deutsche Grammophon
August 19, 2012 Nicola Benedetti: The Silver Violin The violin world is short of big beasts and big ideas at its summit. A handful of well-known soloists play the same old programmes ad infinitum and the new bloods are pressured by their agents to do much the same. So when one of the up-and-coming brood does something different, there is cause for applause. Nicola Benedetti won BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2004 at the age of 16 and was awarded a £1 million Universal contract for six recordings. It has taken a while for her playing to catch up with the hype, but recent concerts have been impressive and her new album is a considerable cut above anything she has done before. The Silver Violin presents music from and much it is shameless shmaltz, as you would expect. The surprise is that the selection is so intelligent and the running order so astute that the album acquires a personality far greater than its content. The central piece is the Korngold concerto in a finely judged performance, not perhaps as passionate as Capucon, Trusler and some other recent releases, but framed between two Korngold arias from Die tote Stadt, it gains a context in the composer’s pre-Hollywood life and an interpretation that is aptly rounded. The inescapable Schindler’s List theme by John Williams is deftly balanced by two laconic movie episodes from Dmitri Shostakovich. A student piano quartet by Gustav Mahler is included as the soundtrack to Shutter Island, while Howard Shore’s Concertino from Eastern Promises sounds even more exotic than it does on screen. Orchestral accompaniment is by the Bournemouth SO with Kirill Karabits and the sound (by K&A Productions) falls some way short of Decca’s best standards. What stands out here is the style and the sophistication of the soloist, along with the promise of more intriguing projects to come.
August 5, 2012 Clifford Curzon: the complete recordings Out of the London Blitz emerged two pianists of unusual sensitivity. Solomon, known by his first name alone, was possessed of powerful qualities of introspection. His playing was ended by a stroke in 1956, when he was 54 years old, and he is remembered by usurpassed recordings of the Grieg and Schumann concertos. Clifford Curzon, five years younger, wore a bespectacled, clerkish look that belied astonishing keyboard passion. Like Solomon, he is remembered for cornerstone recordings of the Grieg, but also of much else. Curzon was Decca’s number-one go-to pianist. A favourite of the irascible George Szell, he worked with maestros great and small, though his finest hours may well have been spent in chamber music. Among 24 discs in this bumper compilation, concertos abound. There are two releases each of the Grieg and the Beethoven Emperor and three of the Brahms D minor – each different in its magisterial way. The deeper you dig, the bigger the surprises. There’s a stunning account of the second concerto by Alan Raswthorne, paired with Falla, Litolff and Franck, as well as a totally unexpected piano obbligato on the third symphony of the Dutch composer Willem Pijper, conducted by Eduard van Beinum. Among the chamber music, a studio session with Vienna Philharmonic players on the Franck and Dvorak quintets is a delight from start to close, as are the two Mozart piano quartets that Curzon played with members of the Amadeus. His solo Schubert is in an ethereal space of its own. The box, a perfect browser, is a testament to an eternal artist and a test of the listener’s aptitude for the filigree distinctions of fine pianism.
Three French CD sets Jean Francaix: musique de chamber It’s the birth centenary of an archetype French composer, but the reassessment yields no fresh results. In these performances by Francaix and friends, what emerges is a beautiful civility and some delicious wind sounds, but nothing to frighten the horses. Octets, nonets, any combination of woodwinds and strings, lovely and ephemeral.
Debussy: chamber music with wind instruments The players are all French and the paying vivacious but too respectful for my taste. The piano version of the Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune is typically anaemic.
Messiaen: Turangalila symphony The most explosive account in years of Messiaen’s essay in sexual continence is performed by a Norwegian orchestra (Bergen) with a Spanish conductor (Juanjo Mena) and a British pianist and ondeist (Steven Osborne, Cynthia Millar). The pent-up energy is almost palpable, the playing superb and the sound quality (Andrew Keener/Simon Eadon) outstanding. Even a non-Messiaenist will be persuaded of this second coming.
July 29, 2012 Arnold Schoenberg: complete songs Song by song by Schoenberg is an album no-one has attempted before, and the more one spins through four CDs the more revealing it becomes. Who knew that the great revolutionary wrote so many little ditties, and of such trifling banality? Song, for Schoenberg, seemed to be the only musical education he ever got, a means of self-teaching. The earliest number in this set date from 1893, when he was a glum teen being sent to work in a bank. But rather than pitching for the pop charts or trying his luck with a sweet young girl, the composer is working from the outset to push the language of Brahms to its limits and be a serious contender. The result is often rather lovely – ‘You Turn Your Back on Me – as well as character revealing. Undeterred by lack of performance or romantic success, Schoenberg got married and carried on writing, extending his own boundaries with the Book of Hanging Gardens and the Cabaret Songs. He stopped writing songs at a seminal moment – the moment he inserts a song in his second string quartet in the summer of 1908, abandoning tonality and changing the course of music forever. He returned to the form only once more, in a 1929 commission to set four German folksongs, which came at a time that Schoenberg was starting to define his place in the history and tradition of German music. Song is peripheral to his reputation but, gathered together, the songs show how he became the composer he is. The singing here is accurate, beautiful and exemplary. Claudia Barainsky and Melanie Diener are the sopranos, Anke Vondung the mezzo, Christa Mayer the contralto, Markus Schäffer the tenor and Konrad Jarnot the head-and-shoulders standout baritone. Urs Liska accompanies, and the sound could not be better. Throw out your old recordings of Schoenberg songs: this is the set to have.
3 piano concerto CDs Adolf Wiklund Never heard of him? Wiklund (1879-1950) is number 57 in Hyperion’s series on the Romantic piano concerto. His first effort opens so assertively that you’re tempted to imagine a masterpiece might follow. It doesn’t, but the listening’s easy. Martin Sturfält plays, Andrew Manze conducts the Helsingborg SO.
Schumann Angela Hewitt’s mastery in Bach and Mozart does not transfer readily to heavy-handed romantics. Her phrasing is lovely but she seldom subdues a big orchestra (the DSO, conductor Hannu Lintu) or suggests that she is driving the tank.
Liszt &c Playing Liszt on an Erard of his own time and a period-instrument orchestra (Le Cercle de l’Harmonie) is like inviting an elephant to walk on plywood. A nasty accident could happen at any moment. Bertrand Chamayou averts one, narrowly. The other two pieces on disc are a Berlioz reverie for violin and orch and a forgotten symphony by Napoleon-Henri Reber. You have to hear it once, if just for the name. Live performance, pellucid sound.
July 22, 2012 Beethoven’s viola Viola players are always complaining they get overlooked. Not by young Beethoven, it seems. There’s a 1799 sonatina in C for viola and cello lying around in manuscript at the state library in Berlin, and a 1796/7 duo for the same instruments in E flat. Both are full of the joys of spring, rippling with dance rhythms and an invitation to waltz the night away. There is a suspicion Beethoven played the viola part himself in at least one of the works, writes Professor Barry Cooper in a lucid sleeve note to this interesting release. The duos, however, are the sum of Beeethoven’s viola parts. The rest of this album consists of arrangements – a viola-piano setting of the string trio opus 8 by William Primrose; a reworking of the fifth cello sonata; and, best of all, a conversion by Maxim Rysanov of the opus 11 clarinet trio for viola, cello and piano. The switch works for the late Brahms clarinet sonatas and positively soars in Beethoven. Rysanov, a BBC New Generation Artist, plays a gorgeous 1780 Guadagnini with the flair and hunger of a formula-one driver. He takes the bends at speed and challenges the rest of the field to keep up. The highly spirited musicianship is shared, bend for bend, by Kristina Blaumane’s cello and Jacob Katsnelson’s piano.
3 Mahler CDs Stenz: 3 Markus Stenz and the Gurzenich orchestra of Cologne delivered one of the most invigorating Mahler 5ths of recent years. The 3rd is less coherent, with too many stop-starts and too little irony in the opening movement; insufficient tension, too, in the marvellous concluding adagio.
Kreizberg: 5 Yakov Kreizberg, who died last year, was immersed in the language of Mahler and Shostakovich. This live recording of a September 2010 concert of the 5th symphony with the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic is not without flaws, but you will seldom hear a more dancing, mocking, life-affirming realisation of the difficult Scherzo, ahead of the evanescent, eternally ambiguous Adagio. The performance demands to be heard.
Haitink: 9 Haitink has long sought to de-emotionalise Mahler. It’s an interesting exercise in some symphonies, but never in the 9th where Mahler pushes himself to the edge. Of Haitink’s several recordings, this is the least convincing – though tautly played by the Bavarian Radio SO with a stunning concertmaster solo in the finale.
July 15, 2012 Bloch: Shelomo, &c. Ernest Bloch’s ‘Hebrew rhapsody’ for cello and orchestra, written in Geneva in 1916, has been performed with passion and conviction by many great cellists, none of whom has persuaded me that I ever wanted to hear the piece again. This new recording by Natalie Clein is the first to do so. The BBC’s 1995 Young Musician of the Year, Clein is a thoughtful artist with a gift for lyrical understatement. Bloch was a cosmopolitan chameleon who made his mark, aged 30, with a 1910 Macbeth opera in Paris. During the First World War he immersed himself in Jewish self-discovery in neutral Switzerland. The next decade he spent in Italy before reinventing himself in a new world with the huge 1928 oratorio America. The real Ernest Bloch is ever elusive. Clein’s approach is commendably uncluttered. In Shelomo’s many liturgical quotations, most notably in the melody that Bloch supposedly heard his father sing in Hebrew, she adopts a stiff upper lip of British reserve that allows the music to speak for itself and shields it from the hazards of kitsch. Her restraint, ably supported by conductor Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, pays off. Shelomo becomes a meditative cello concerto in Elgarian vein and less of an essay in exotic anthropology. No-one since Gregor Piatigorsky in 1957 has made such sense and beauty of the score. In Bloch’s suites From Jewish Life and Voice in the Wilderness lyricism runs on a looser rein, stopping short of sentimentality. Max Bruch’s version of the Kol Nidrei recitation for cello and orchestra might have benefited from a bigger change of gear; but that is a tiny grip. You cannot wish to hear a clearer, lovelier investigation of Bloch’s Jewish decade.
Recent piano CDs Alexandara Dariescu The prodigious young Rumanian playes Schumann’s Abegg variations, Liszt B-minor ballade and three Chopins in a career-launch demonstration disc. We can expect to hear her soon in more substantial stuff.
Valentina Lisitsa The night an unrecorded pianist nearly filled the Royal Albert Hall is preserved here: some fabulous Rachmaninov playing amidst a basket of popular pieces chosen inline by Valentina’s Youtube audience. Great fun, but just wait now for the Decca release of those Rachmaninov concertos…
Bezhod Abduraimov Decca’s newest signing is a 21 year-old from Tashkent with technique to spare and much yet to learn. His stunning USP is Vladimir Horowitz’s version of the Saint-Saens Danse macabre. Less convincing is Prokofiev’s sixth sonata, played with furious bravura that masks the horrific anger of the piece.
Mendelssohn’s Songs Without words I haven’t heard a complete set in years. Michel Korstick plays all eight books with serious, almost self-effacing dedication that makes this the perfect reference set.
July 8, 2012 Night Music: Voice in the Leaves
Handel: Alceste Handel operas do not come short, so to find one at an hour’s length is a good start. Most contain arias you’ve heard before, and this is no exception: familiarity breeds contentment. ‘Still caressing and caress’d’ is a very old friend. The score amounts to incidental music to a play by Tobias Smollett. Lucy Crowe is the splendid soprano, Benjamin Hullett the tenor, Andrew Foster-Williams the bass-baritone. Christian Curnyn conducts the Early Opera Company with summery breeziness. Lovely stuff.
Erkki-Sven Tüür: Awakening The Estonian composer is never uninteresting. His title track for mixed choir and chamber ensemble develops organically out of an orchestra’s tuning-up noises into a delicate and absorbing lifecycle meditation. Do try. I do, often.
Brooklyn Rider: seven steps The New York crowd-funded quartet approach the Beethoven opus 131 by way of a pair of contemporary meditative scores. Whether the whole package works is a matter of personal taste, but the energy and conviction are irresistible and the playing is pretty damn fine.
Miah Persson The Sussex-based Swedish soprano pairs Schubert songs in her recital with Grieg and Sibelius. It’s an unexpected conjunction, revealing more colours than one normally finds in the bleak Sibelius landscape and more austerity than Schubert often yields. Roger Vignoles accompanies, in pristine sound.
Witold Lutoslawski: musique funèbre Nothing can be taken for granted in a Luto score. He may call it funereal but vitality and vivacity seep through the cracks and the music becomes as life affirming as the Rumanian dances by Bartok which fill out the disc. The Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra play with reall bite and the Hungarian Radio children’s chorus close the album on a spiritual high.
July 2, 2012 Marianna Martines: Il primo amore The search for ‘lost’ women composers has kept armies of academics busily occupied for decades without adding a single personality to the established canon. Why women composers failed to make a name in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when women writers found a fertile market is too large a subject for this space, but given the amount of research expended it is unlikely that any will ever emerge at this late stage to challenge the classical giants. That said, Marianna Martines (1744-1812) is more than mere curio. Spotted by Charles Burney in 1772 as ‘the most perfect lady singer I have ever heard’ and ‘very nimble’ on the harpsichord, she liked to interpolate her own pieces in recital at the great courts of Europe, and they seem to have been well received. The Overture in C major that opens this intriguing album would not have disgraced the young Mozart and the cembalo concerto in E major has more going for it than many by Clementi. Both are recent discoveries and world premiere recordings by La Floridiana and its director Nicoletta Paraschivescu. Less successful are the concert arias in which, you would have imagined, Marianna wanted to display the cream of her skills. The emotion here is tepid and the invention small, for all the delicate advocacy of soprano Nuria Rial. Could it be that women composers were inhibited from releasing the range of expression that was available to men? We will never know. Marianna, who was trained as a child by the playwright and librettist Metastasio, became his carer in old age. She taught at the Accademia in Bologna and never married.
Three Italian triumphs 1612 Italian Vespers I Fagiolini’s selection of devotions by Monteverdi, Palestrina, two Gabrielis and several lesser souls is consistently uplifting and virtuosically sung. The tension that director Robert Hollingworth obtains in performance is in a class of its own among current baroque explorers.
Caro Sposo Eric Headley has retrieved an oratorio by Marco Marazzoli (1602-1662) from Vatican archives and given it the kind of performance its composer might have wished but could not have dreamed of, since women’s voices were banned in church. There are four attractive arias; the rest is well made and well sung but hardly memorable.
Vivaldi: New Discoveries II A scintillating flute concerto gets the full treatment from Alexis Kossenko and Modo Antiquo; the remainder is good background music for a high-class jewellery store.
June 24, 2012 Sounds of the 30s, Stefano Bollani/Riccardo Chailly So riveting was the Rhapsody in Blue played by this pair in Leipzig last year that my fingers couldn’t rip the cellophane fast enough off this new release and I had to resort to teeth. Bollani, an Italian jazz drummer and pianist, has a rare feel for the inter-War idiom and an even rarer capacity to adapt his improvisational flair to the stringencies of a great orchestra and conductor. What would they come up with next? The first 45 minutes are unalloyed bliss. The Ravel G major concerto feels less French and more febrile than I have heard it before, dancing (in George Steiner’s famous phrase) on the edge of a volcano. Stravinsky’s Tango, in both piano and orchestra forms, cannot shed its European corsets but a pair of Weill songs on raw piano amplify the smoky anxieties of the era. Bollano plays Weill as Milva sang him – with an Italian F.U. to literal niceties and an unforgettable penetration. That, however, was the end of my rapture. The last half-hour comprises a 1931 ballet suite, Mille u una notte (1001 Nights) by Victor de Sabata, one of the most influential conductors of La Scala, Milan. A musician of intellectual force and personal austerity, he was (like many maestros) a persistent, frustrated composer. In this score de Sabata meanders all over the place. His themes are unoriginal, hovering on the verge of pastiche. The suite may be an ironic commentary on the era; much of the time it sounds more like a man harnessing the power of a great orchestra to no worthwhile purpose. I wish they had left this one in the drawer.
Two war-torn recitals Rudi Stephan: Songs Shot by a wounded comrade on the Russian front in 1915, aged 28, Rudi Stephan wrote around 50 songs, of which 20 survived a warehouse fire in the Second World War. Some ranked him with Pfitzner and Strauss as the future of the German Lied. Tonally conservative and rather morose, he had an ear for quirky sonorities and was evidently fond of the reed organ, the kunstharmonium. The mezzo Sophie Harmsen and bass Alexander Vassiliev give it their best shot, with Miri Yampolsky on piano, but what grabs the ear is Ryoko Morooka’s harmonium.
Martin Shaw: The Airmen A contemporary of Vaughan Williams, Shaw lived through two world wars. His songs reflect classic RVW themes of wasted lives and landscapes. Sophie Bevan, Andrew Kennedy and Roderick Williams sing heart and soul in this boldly curated, subtly affecting retrieval by the pianist Iain Burnside.
June 17, 2012 Arias for Guadagni Aria recitals discs are, by definition, non-recommendable. They exist to advertise the singer more than the song and any intellectual coherence in the programming is generally incidental. Most go straight into the bin without a second spin. This release, however, could be the exception that proves the rule. Iestyn Davies, an ascendant counter-tenor, has sampled the life of Gaetano Guadagni (1728-1792), a castrato who flourished in mid-18th century London and Vienna. The disc is an eclectic selection of the music he performed. Top of the line is, inevitably, late-period Handel – the great arias from his Biblical oratorios. But there’s also a pair of songs from the master’s long-forgotten assistant, John Christopher Smith, and from his aggressive local competitor, Thomas Arne – a vengeance aria from Alfred. In Vienna, Guadagni got to know Gluck, who wrote Orfeo with his voice in mind. But he also sang music by Johann Adolf Hasse who was more than just a Mozart also-ran. And between one composers and the next Guadagni slipped in in a few arias of his own. Popular and generous, Guadagni lived to see demanded for his tyoe of singer wane as more women mounted the opera stage. Iestyn Davies recreates his world without apology or nostalgia. This is a documentary snatch of singing style, vividly accompanied by the baroque group Arcangelo, with conductor Jonathan Cohen. Added to the unsuspected variety of musical invention, the listener has forbidden sense of peeking behind the curtain of history to observe opera at a critical moment in its formation. I was gripped by Iestyn Davies’s concept and by the controlled beauty of his boyish voice.
3 more vocal CDs Véronique Gens This performance may be the nuits d’été de nos jours, a sumptuous exploration of Berlioz’s great set by a soprano who has emerged from Baroque tweeting into the romantic big time. The accompaniment by the Orchestre National des Pays de Loire under John Axelrod is exemplary.
Christian Gerhaher: Ferne Geliebte The Austrian baritone sandwiches Schoenberg (Hanging Gardens) and Berg (Altenburg Postcards) between slices of Beethoven and Haydn. Against all odds, the blend feels organic, with the atonal Schoenberg songs sounding specially effective; Gerold Huber accompanies.
Erwin Schrott: Arias This is a big, bad aria album of the vanity era – a set of bleeding opera chunks that display the beefcake baritone in his showcase roles. The voice is in good shape, the orchestra near-inaudible.
June 10, 2012 Vivaldi: chamber sonatas, opus 1 Just when you think you’ve heard enough Vivaldi in elevators and waiting rooms to last three lifetimes, along comes an independent French label with a release to blow cobwebs from fixed minds and knitted socks off a Venetian nun. These sonatas are the first published work of the red-haired priestly teacher of orphan girls, composed for two violins, cello and harpsichord (known as clavicembalo). Intended for girls of average ability, they are simple in texture and execution, turning tricky and exciting only if the prescribed tempi are observed. They must have sounded horrible in a hot classroom but, played with the skill and precision of L’Estravagante, a dazzling Baroque quartet, and with immaculate studio engineering by Fabio Framba, here they sound nothing less than exhilarating. The melodies are neither durable nor convincingly original. Vivaldi, like everyone else in his time, took his themes from street ballads and his more famous colleagues. There are notable similarities with Corelli in the way he shapes an adagio, for instance. Still, for a debut work, the set is richly varied and sufficiently intriguiing to make you want to hear more – which is not something I have felt about Vivaldi since my first Four Seasons LP wore out the bottom of its groove.
3 concerto CDs Elgar, Gal: cello concertos The first Brazilian soloist to attempt the Elgar, Antonio Meneses takes a languid stroll through unaffected nostalgia. There is more beauty here than pain and the playing of the Northern Sinfonia under Claudio Cruz evokes many an image of lost landscapes. One misses, perhaps, the edge of all those First World War losses. It companion piece, the little-known Hans Gal concerto, has a bright opening but not much to follow.
Nielsen, Tchaikovsky: violin concertos The prodigious Norwegian Vilde Frang lights up the underplayed Nielsen like a burst of Aurora borealis. The Danish national orchestra with Elvind Gullberg Jensen add all the right colours to the backdrop; it is hard to recall hearing the work more aptly performed. In the Tchaikovsky concerto, unfortunately, they have little to add.
Strauss, Skalkottas, Aho: oboe concertos Written for a US Occupation soldier in 1945, the Strauss oboe concerto is sickly-sweet and overly ingratiating, a kind of dessert to his morbid Metamorphosen. The Skalkottas work, written six years earlier by an orchestral violinist on a subsistence wage in Athens, is uncompromising and modern, yet gently seductive. Kalevi Aho’s piece is a duet for oboe and cello. The soloist is Yeon-Hee Kwak, former principal of Bavarian Radio, and the sound she yields is total serenity. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
June 3, 2012 Nikolai Medtner: piano concertos and solo pieces Medtner (1880-1951) was the Rachmaninov who stayed behind in Russia when the big names went west after the 1917 revolutions. Similar in style and lugubrious temperament to his friend and mentor, he stuck around until 1921 before slipping away to Berlin and Paris, where he nearly starved. Rachmaninov fixed him a North American tour in 1924, but Medtner’s insistence on playing his own music fell flat with audiences. He wound up from 1935 in England, where he won eccentric support from the Maharajah of Mysore, who paid for his works to be recorded by EMI. Despite his self-exile and lack of popular success, Medtner was remembered in Russia for his initial loyalty and continued to be performed there in the years the Rachmaninov was banned – to the point where a Medtner tradition evolved. These rare recordings, retrieved from Soviet archives, feature Tatiana Nikolayeva in the first concerto and Abram Schatzkes in the second, both conducted by Evgeny Svetlanov. The playing is of an order that cries out to be heard; the music itself may leave you in two minds. Nikolayeva, the famed champion of Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues, cannot prevent the opening and other sections of Medtner’s C-minor concerto from sounding as if they were hacked from the same forest as Rachmaninov’s C-minor. In a single movement lasting 37 minutes, written between 1914 and 1918, the concerto lacks enough originality for its length, let alone a heart-bender theme that might imprint it forever on the listener’s memory. Nikolayeva, heedless of such shortcomings, plays it like a deathless masterpiece with a contemplative oasis at its centre. She is even more compelling in the solo pieces that follow, a master-pianist who hears no voice but her inner self. Schatzkes, a professor at the Moscow Conservatoire, was one of many fine Jewish artists who were kept out of the limelight by the Soviet regime. His playing of the second concerto, also in C minor, is more playful than Nikolayeva’s. The central Romanza movement owes something to Rachmaninov’s preludes but the finale proclaims an altogether individual and unexpected exuberance. I have never heard Medtner sound so sunny and spirited. The ensuing sonata, op 38/1, is another of those rapt oases. Those who stayed in Russia understood this music best. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three more Russian discoveries Nikolai Rakov: works for violin and piano Rakov (1908-90) steered a deft course between Soviet expectations – he won the 1946 Stalin Prize – and his romantic inclinations, notably toward the Franck sonata. Both tendencies are evenly displayed here by David Frühwirth and Milana Chernyavska.
Alfred Schnittke: 12 Penitential Psalms; Voices of Nature Schnittke’s vocal writing, rarely heard, sounds like no other composer’s. Atonal at times, organic at others, it has both wit and spirituality, the unlikeliest of blends. If your ears need a rest from middle-of-the-road Eric Whitacre, start here. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Verdi Requiem An all-Russian Requiem with Galina Vishnevskaya at the centre might send you scuttling for the nearest nuclear bunker with a bottle of iced vodka. Hold on. This 1960 Moscow concert, conducted by Igor Markevitch, is among the most thrilling Requiems I have heard since Giulini’s – knife-edge tempi, thunderous choirs and Nina Isakova, Vladmimir Ivanovsky and Ivan Petrov with Galina on the frontline in all-out assault. It was Markevitch’s first return to his native land since 1935 and the energy is sensational. Must be heard to be believed. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
May 28, 2012 Schubert: String quartets 13, 14, 15 The difference between a good string quartet and a great one is no more than a fraction of a heartbeat. The Artemis Quartet – two Russians, two Germans, based in Berlin – have made the imperceptible upward transition in the past two years. It’s not so much how they play as how they play together – the fractional anticipations that foster an illusion of four minds thinking as one, eight arms in total cohesion. Together since 1989, their Beethoven cycle on Virgin is both the most coherent and the most integrally conceived set in decades. And that’s without saying a word about the sheer serenity of the playing. It is no easy matter to go from the high mindedness of Beethoven to the melodic allure of Schubert. The Artemis make no perceptible alteration to their approach. The tone is taut and bright, the tempi brisk and the breathing organic. In Death and the Maiden, there is none of the pathos that some quartets pump in for the third hankie effect. In the Rosamunde quartet, the symphonic sonorities point ahead to Mendelssohn and Schumann. And in the ultimate G major quartet, 50 minutes long and staring death in the eye, the Artemis present an interpretation of psychological neutrality, never second-guessing the composer’s sentiments and intentions. The cumulative effect is utterly convincing. You’d need to go back two decades to the Alban Berg Quartet for an account of comparable beauty and authority. This is a great performance by a very great quartet.
Three Shostakovich CDs Symphonies 2, 15 Vasily Petrenko is midway through an illuminating Liverpool cycle. The short second symphony is a hair-raising piece of political exuberance; the 15th is a dying man’s exhalation. The former performance here is brilliant. In the 15th, the tempo slackens and the sound turns oddly opaque.
Symphonies 9, 15 In this captivating account of the 15th, Andrey Boreyko navigates its mysterious emptiness with a Mahlerian lexicon and a failsafe compass. His performance with SWR-Stuttgart is four minutes shorter than Petrenko’s in Liverpool. The problematic post-War 9th falls between two stools of exhilaration and fear; the solution here is not always crystal-clear. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
String quartets 1-4 The US-based Pacifica Quartet takes a careful, depoliticised approach to the most intimate personal utterances of the besieged composer, who did not start writing quartets until Stalin threatened his life in 1935. Sheer beauty justifies the neutral tactic, though one misses the suppressed rage that imbues Russian interpretations. That said, the interpretation is fully thought-through than the Emersons and the sound is outstanding. There is a bonus quartet – Prokofiev’s second.
May 21, 2012 Arnold Schoenberg - Complete Works for Piano The rush of talent is as limitless as the infinity of labels that now flourish where once the majors commanded attention. Winnowing wheat from chaff becomes ever more difficult and the risk of missing a remarkable artist is a constant anxiety. Odradek is a start-up label based in Italy and committed to new artists and modern work. A one-CD album of Arnold Schoenberg’s solo piano works has not come my way for years, perhaps since Pollini three decades ago. Pina Napolitano plays the tricky pieces with light fingers and innate wit, bringing out a welter of contemporary parallels – Mahler in op 11/2, Busoni in op 23 – amid a panoply of delicate beauty.
New names at the piano Musical Toys The world premiere of Unsuk Chin’s piano etudes is the ear-catcher on Mei Yi Foo’s debut album, its Cage-like plinks intermingling with robust grand tones. Two sets of sound adventures by Gubaidulina and Ligeti take the ear where it has never thought to go before, and with a pianist it can really trust.
Viktor Ullmann: Piano Sonatas Nos. 5-7 Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944) is known for the music he composed in Terezin camp, before he was murdered in Auschwitz. It includes three piano sonatas, nos 5-7, that are kept deliberately simple and expressive for his camp audience yet still convey the ideas of his mentor, Schoenberg and Haba. Lala Isakova interprets with high skill and deep sympathy. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Schulhoff: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 & 3 & Jazz Improvisations for 2 pianos Erwin Schulhof (1894-1942), murdered by the Nazis, was an eclectic who veered from Dadism to atonality. His first sonata is reminiscent of Bartok while his jazz improvisations are more a tribute to the artform than an instinctual part of it. Margarete Babinsky is the committed interpreter.
>Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Chopin: The Complete Preludes Vanessa Perez, a Venezuelan, attacks Chopin's Preludes with gusto and finesse, almost to the point of recklessness (Telarc **). Fiachra Garvey, from Ireland, gives a rather blustery account of Samuel Barber’s sonata, albeit underpinned by a gripping narrative line (RTELyric **). Katia Apekisheva should have been advised against making another superfluous recording of Mussorgsky’s Pictures; but her Shostakovich Preludes are tender and captivating.
Stephen Osborne When a Russian arrives on a French label playing Ravel, expectancy is high. Anna Vinnitskaya adds a wintry Baltic greyness to the Pavane and a brilliant sparkle to the Mirroirs. Her account of Gaspard de la Nuit is a riveting piece of storytelling. This is a pianist who commands full attention.
May 13, 2012 A rush of Weinbergs Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) would have been mightily surprised at the attention that is turning his way these days. In the 1980s, as the Soviet Union fell apart, he let slip a regret that his work ‘belongs in the attic’ because it ‘cannot correspond to current fashion.’ A Hitler refugee and close friend of Dmitri Shostakovich, Weinberg wrote music that was tonal, rhythmic and melodically rich. He wrote too much – 27 symphonies, 17 string quartets, countless concertos. Finding a path into Weinberg is not easy. His opera The Passenger, now on the world circuit, divides critics and audiences alike. Where to begin? is the big question with Weinberg. Recent releases provide some strong tips.
3rd symphony The emerging Weinberg cycle from Sweden’s national orchestra in Gothenburg is beautifully played under Thord Svedlund’s impressive direction. The woodwind solos are often stunning and the heavy, pounding passages, reminiscent of Shostakovich at his angriest, could put an invading army to flight. The third symphony, rejected by Stalin’s censors in 1949 for being insufficiently ‘of the people, for the people’, received its first performance 11 years later after multiple revisions. It is Weinberg’s first mature symphony and it commands undivided attention for its full half-hour, equal in every way to early Shpostakovich. The disc filler is the Golden Key suite, less compelling.
6th symphony With a full boys’ choir singing idealistic texts, this 1963 work comes close to off-the-shelf Soviet propaganda. Redemption arrives in the 4th movement, a resetting of Jewish melodies. The filler is a Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes that sounds irresistibly like Jewish wedding music and makes you want to get up and dance the night away. Vladmir Lande conducts the lively, sometimes slightly ragged, St Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra.
20th symphony By his 20th symphony (opus 150) in 1988, Weinberg was running low in spirit and ideas. ‘With God’s help I may yet finish this one, but I doubt it,’ he writes on the title page. There is a strong Mahlerian impetus in the five-movement work, a lot of fatalism and not much hope. It would be too depressing without the must-buy on this release - a cello concerto, written for Slava Rostropovich and meltingly delivered by Claes Gunnerson and the Gothenburg orchestra, conductor Third Svedlund. Absolutely compelling. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Chamber music for woodwinds If ever you need a 20-minute sonata for solo bassoon, it’s here. The rest, nicely curated by the Irish-based pianist Elisaveta Blumina, consists of a clarinet-piano sonata, 12 miniatures for flute and piano and a trio for flute, viola and harp whose textures never fail to astonish. Weinberg had a wonderful ear and a fertile imagination. The playing it top-class. Just listen. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
May 5, 2012 Glass: 9th symphony The ninth symphony by Philip Glass, premiered three months ago in Linz, is out on record. That is all most readers will wish to know. The composer’s fans will rush out and buy it and the rest will mutter something about repetitive rhythms and shrug their shoulders. Both will be the poorer for that snap decision. Glass, as conductor Dennis Russell Davies remarks in a program note, was not cut out to write a symphony. When they premiered his Low Symphony in 1992, neither composer no conductor thought of calling it his first since there was never likely to be a second. Glass, however, defies easy categorisation. Over the next two decades he worked his way up to achieve a Beethoven, Schubert or Dvorak total. The 1st and 4th Glass symphonies are based on tunes by David Bowie and Brian Eno. The 5th and 7th use soloists and large chorus, the 6th sets a poem by Allen Ginzburg while the 3rd, modelled on Strauss’s Metamorphosen, is for strings alone. The 9th, in line with the 2nd and 8th, is abstract music, rhythmically driven and unmistakable for the work of any other composer. Its second movement opens with a heart-melter of a Rachmaninov-lite theme, just waiting to be made into a movie (unless it has already been taken from one). There are more surprises here that you might expect from a minimalist. The Linz orchestra play well Try before you buy.
3 Beethoven variations CDs Jeremy Denk The ever-thoughtful pianist plays two books of Ligeti Etudes either side of Beethoven’s final sonata, the opus 111. It works – just. Ligeti’s skittish riffs pave a polite path for the massive C-minor cragface and, quite wittily, take us back down. Denk’s fingers know no fear.
Andreas Steier It must have seemed a good idea on paper to play a dozen other people’s variations on Diabelli’s theme before arriving at Beethoven’s, but it’s a long wait before you reach the main course. Staier is deftly lyrical on a mock-period fortepiano.
Stephen Osborne Osborne’s solo Beethoven cycle has reached the three sets of Bagatelles and smaller variations. His touch is so sure that never for a moment does one hear these trivia as casual amusements, rather as flasher of insight into the composer’s lighter side. Für Elise alone is worth the price of purchase.
April 29, 2012 Rachmaninov’s ‘5th’ piano concerto So unflagging is the appeal of Sergei Rachmaninov that his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, will suffer a serious dip when his music goes out of copyright in 2013, 70 years after his death. One way of extending it is to create new copyrights, which is what composer Alexander Warenberg has done. At the request of Rachmaninov’s grandson, Warenberg added a piano part to the second symphony, compressed two movements into one and called it a fifth piano concerto. Several players have launched the work on video, including Denis Matsuev and Valentina Lisitsa. This, I believe, is its first major-label audio recording. I visited the Abbey Road sessions in February and was impressed by the cohesion of the piece. More remarkable still is the speed of release – two months from studio session to shops must be some kind of a record even for a night-owl producer like Michael Fine. The sound is immaculate and the London Symphony Orchestra, under Michael Francis, are on good weekday form, the woodwinds especially so. The Korean soloist Julius-Jeongwon Kim is a tad hesitant and heavy in some entries, overwhelmed perhaps by the responsibility of introducing a piano where no piano was meant to go. But he has technique to spare and finds his high moments in roller-coaster riffs and dashes. The middle movement opens with one of Rachmaninov’s mst famous tunes and is, as ever, irresistible. The LSO clarinet (I can’t remember who it was) deserves an OBE in the next Queen’s Honours List. The companion work is Shostakovich’s second concerto, easy on the fingers, competently done.
3 song CDs Walter Arlen: Es geht wohl anders Exiled from Vienna in 1939, aged 18, Arlen spent much of his career as a music critic on the Los Angeles Times. His songs, beautifully rendered by Rebecca Nelsen and Christian Immler (Danny Driver, piano), feel as if time stopped just before his flight. Tonal to a fault and meticulous in their attention to word colour, they set a range of texts from the Bible to Czeslaw Milosz in a gentle, regretful way. At times, you wish Arlen might have permitted himself a little rage.
Serious Cabaret Mary Carewe crosses songs from Weimar Germany (Weill, Spoliansky, Hollaeder) with post-War America (Barber, Bowles, Bliztstein, Bolcom). The hybrid would probably work better in concert than it does on record and the two bookend arias – James Bond and Lionel Bart – undermine the concept. The singing, though, is terrific; Philip Mayers accompanies.
Mercy and Grand: the music of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan The composer Gavin Bryars has arranged and produced an album of American oddities by a songwriting couple who are a category to themselves. Three or four songs are unforgettable; others sound like Weill, Lehrer and Irish balladry all mixed in a stew. Jess Walker is the intrepid vocalist.
April 22, 2012 Elgar conducts Elgar The music of Edward Elgar is a fixture in England and a passing fancy elsewhere. Local familiarity breeds complacency and confusion. Every British conductor thinks he conducts Elgar within ‘the tradition’, yet few agree on the essentials. Was Elgar a social climber or critical outsider, quintessentially English or aspirationally European, progressive or reactionary? And where do performances of Elgar by great interpreters from Mahler and Toscanini to Monteux and Abbado fit within that tradition? Elgar was himself a capable conductor and the obvious place to start is with his own recordings. Made mostly in the scratchy acoustic era, they have been issued in many unsatisfactory transfers. The present set is copied from Elgar’s personal record collection and the sound, while distracting at first, gives an intense proximity to the source. After a few minutes, you do feel as if the composer is in the room. That impression proves invaluable first in such rarities as the 1916 recording of the violin concerto with a slightly uncertain Marie Hall, favoured over the famous 1932 sessions with Yehudi Menuhin, and the 1925 version of the 2nd symphony, crisper than a lugubrious electrical version. The Sea Pictures with Leila Megane (whatever became of her?) are painted with a Debussian sensitivity for light and shade. Elgar’s tendency as a conductor is to dwell on the beauties he makes, never wasting a good tune but at the same time, not allowing the pulse to drag into sentimentality. I doubt I have heard a more seductive performance of In the South, or a more rousing one of Cockaigne. In the 1914 take of the first Pomp and Circumstance march, the tempo has a slow, troubling solemnity which builds, bar by bar, into a hymn that could never be recognised as celebrating empire or war. Elgar, in his own hands, is a far more complex creator than generally perceived and this set in an indispensable reference volume for anyone who thinks they know how his music should go. Test yourself against the master: you may well be sent back to the drawing board.
Three captivating eccentricities Joel Frederiksen: Requiem for a Pink Moon A baroque bass singer pays tribute, Tudor style to the short-lived pop balladeer Nick Drake, who killed himself in 1974. Captivating and sincere, Frederiksen never strays near to pastiche or kitsch: this is an exhilarating re-imagination in a period adaptation of uncanny aptness. Not to be missed.
William Young, An Englishman Abroad A 17th-century strolling player, Young played viola da gamba at various European courts. Rousseau rated him among the best and Simone Eckert’s Hamburg ensemble retrieves his lost work with sparkling vitality.
Accordion concertos If you thought the best way to kill a dinner party is to play modern Nordic concertos on the accordion, think again. Bjarke Morgensen’s set by Schmidt, Koppel, Lohse and Norgard, neither lugubrious nor autistic, fizz like an aural set of Northern Lights. Weird and scintillating stuff.
April 15, 2012 Mahler The centennial glut of Mahler recordings has dwindled to an interesting trickle. I had high hopes of the 7th symphony in Jonathan Nott’s Bamberg cycle (Tudor***). Nott, in previous release sought to recast Mahler as a hybrid of Bruckner and Boulez, tradition allied to modernity without the angular individuality of Mahlerian expression. The 7th is the most enigmatic of Mahler symphonies, grasped at first hearing only by one of Mahler's circle - and that was Arnold Schoenberg, who makes frequent references to it in his works. Nott, as a 20th century specialist, ought to get more our of the 7th than the rest. And indeed he does. The separation of textures in the opening movement brings clinical analysis to a narrative that is all too often treated with an excess of bucolic sentiment. The interior Night Music movements are nicely done and the symphony seems to be heading for ultimate coherence when, without good cause, conductor and orchestra slip into showtime mode and deliver a finale rich in swagger and void of crucial meaning. The decisions undermines what might have been a prime contender. Why would Nott do that? It strikes me that his shortcomings in Mahler are similar to Bernard Haitink’s. Both have a tendency to perform Mahler as abstract, emotion-lite music, ignoring the composer’s undercurrents and biographical intentions. Both men may take that comparison as a compliment. They do Mahler their own way. And there are many ways to Mahler. Francois-Xavier Roth’s debut recording of Mahler 1 with the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg (Hänssler **) may be his first and last, since the orchestra has been singled out contentiously by the radio authorities for abolition. Resistance is gathering and a petition has gathered 10,000 signatures. This is a fine ensemble with a proud history and this Mahler performances has many fine points. It is marred, however, by a misjudged languor at the opening of the first and third movements where the tempi should be at their most taut. The playing is refined and rather Straussian in texture; Mahler’s crucial ironies are missed. Roth, 40, has a knack for original programming. Here, he pairs Mahler with Webern’s early and naïve Im Sommerwind, a shrewd call. Not expecting much of a 9th symphony from the Badische Staatskapelle of Karlsruhe and its British conductor Justin Brown (PanClassics ****), I was gripped from first to last by structural certainty and lyrical playing. The orchestra is 400 years old and Brown has been there since 2008, long enough to obtain pinpoint response and one-wheel turns at tricky corners. The first and last movements are transcendent, done with an instinctual grasp of the composer’s unique sound. This is as moving a 9th as any I have heard in the past two centennial years. A radio retrieval of Fritz Reiner’s Chicago performance of Das Lied von der Erde shares the same tenor, Richard Lewis, as his famous RCA recording but substitutes Christa Ludwig for Maureen Forrester, a luxury upgrade. The problem is the boxy, 1958 concerthall sound (Archipel***), no match for RCA’s studio performance, but still worth hearing for the soloists. Lewis was coached for the performance by that astute Mahlerian Berthold Goldschmidt, the refugee composer who helped Deryck Cooke complete the tenth symphony. Klaus Tennstedt’s 1986 BBC Proms performance of the 3rd symphony is sensational, brash sound notwithstanding (ICA Classics *****). Its fluidity of motion, Tennstedt’s ability to turn an emotion into its opposite and back again within the same phrase, is a marvel of intuitive interpretation, an inimitable lesson in conducting Mahler. Tennstedt's concerts were always several degrees more heightened than anything he achieved in studio and this one is breathtaking, devastating, iridescent and unforgettable.
April 8, 2012 Henryk Mikolai Gorecki: Totus Tuus It would be a pity and a travesty if Gorecki were remembered only for writing the first modern symphony to sell a million discs. A pity, because the third symphony is not worth hearing more than twice and a travesty because Gorecki was tonally more adventurous than the symphony’s simple devotions might suggest. He delighted in greeting the homecoming Pope John Paul II with daring harmonies, couched with love in Church tradition but using the four corners of his choir to give a 20th century edge to his Marian hymn. Of the four choruses on this disc, the earliest is the most frugal, based on a three-note motif but full of surprising turns of harmony, a palette that he exploits to an exquisite perfection in a separate, seven-minute Amen. Compared to Penderecki’s grander, more reverent devotions, Gorecki’s always seem to push at the boundaries of familiarity. I cannot fathom why his piano concerto and string quartets are not performed more often. He could not have wished for a more effective chorus than the National Youth Choir of Great Britain under Mike Brewer’s leadership. The NYCGB regularly puts grownups to shame and is heading (I’m told) for a big Olympic night this summer. Must be heard. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
3 weird piano CDs Bach Crossings A set of 4-hand Bach transcriptions by the Hungarian ascetic Gyorgy Kurtag sounds at times like Glenn Gould on a no-carb diet. Duo Stephanie and Saar divvy up the keyboard, but why no sleeve notes? It would have been useful to know how and why Kurtag worked over these familiar pieces.
Godowsky: 22 Chopin Studies for left hand alone Leopold Godowsky decided that Chopin’s Etudes were not difficult enough, so he played them one-handed. Technique aside, this is a revealing work of commentary by one great virtuoso on another and Ivan Ilic plays with agreeable panache.
Hauer: Etudes, op 22 Josef Matthias Hauer was the Viennese geek who invented the 12-note method ahead of Schoenberg, or so he claimed. The surprise here is the flowing musicality of these etudes, flexibly performed by Steffen Schleiermacher.
April 1, 2012 Anton Rubinstein: Persian Love Songs Solo vocal recital discs flood my desk. Few grip the ear so fast and tight as this delightful discovery from a composer deservedly forgotten. Anton Rubinstein was bigger in his day than Tchaikovsky and far more powerful in Moscow, where he cofounded the conservatory with his brother Nikolai, who vetoed Tchaik’s first concerto. Anton looked like Beethoven and had a big recital following on both sides of the Atlantic. His compositions faded to dust after his death in 1894; a recent release of the fourth concerto beside Rachmaninov’s third confirms the ruthless verdict of history: he was never a composer of arresting originality. So when a set of Rubi songs arrived from something called Theartsongproject.com, I did not expect it to detain me for long. Three hearings later, I am still delighted. Soprano Hélène Lindqvist and her partner Philipp Vogler strike a fine balance with these sets of imperialist swagger, never taking it altogether at face value. Rubinstein’s idea of Persian music was a few chazzanic melismas from his Jewish childhood running up and down the scales amid sentimental avowals of eternal devotion in high middle German. Some of the songs are by Goethe and Heine, who should have known better, but the formula is attractive enough to sustain an hour’s listening and the mind is drawn inexorably to the late-romanticism of Byron and the tricks it performed on the political imagination of the 19th century. Musically, Rubi does nothing ground-breaking. He is a template of his times and the songs have the sultry adhesiveness of 1970s California rock. Try some. You won’t regret it.
More Russian discoveries Joseph Achron: Complete suites for violin and piano There is more to Achron (1886-1943) than a Hebrew Melody made popular by Jascha Heifetz. Hagai Shaham and Arnon Erez spin out two and half hours’ worth, too much for one listening but plenty of surprises in the Suite Bizarre, and in another children’s suite that Heifetz adapted from a clarinet/string quartet original. Hagai Shaham has terrific kitsch control, essential in this syrupy music.
Kuss Quartet: Thème Russe 11 variations on a Russian folksong by various composers is eight too many for my liking, but Stravinsky’s Concertino and Schnittke’s little-known elegy for Stravinsky are standouts in this very mixed bag.
Chisato Kusunoki A Japanese pianist of high promise, Kusunoki gives a vivacious account of the Medtner G-minor sonata, tempering its morbidity with youthful verve. Her approach, less effective in Scriabin’s B-minor fantasy, is fully vindicated in Rachmaninov’s Moments musicaux and snippets of Liapunov. This is the sound of an artist who knows her own mind.
March 25, 2012 Elgar: cello concerto It is striking how few cellists have left a mark on the Elgar concerto since Jacqueline du Pré’s first recording with John Barbirolli in 1965 (her second, with Daniel Barenboim, was blighted by illness). Among contenders of little residue are such big personalities as Yo Yo Ma, Truls Mork, Heinrich Schiff and Slava Rostropovich. Several British cellists have had their quirky way with the piece but only two, Steven Isserlis and Natalie Clein, added contemporary edge. The road is wide open for a new cellist to claim ownership of the Elgar and for a long stretch of Paul Watkins’s fresh performance on Chandos I was prepared to be persuaded that he might be the one. Watkins, the Emerson Quartet’s new cellist, understates the opening attack, avoiding Du Pré’s raw aggression and, no less awkward, the forced serenity of Pau Casals. His measured tread opens out onto the familiar rolling landscape of Elgar’s England, only now it is a land stripped by war of youth and pride. The sorrows are strong and near, here and in the slow middle movements. The playing is lyrical and the image heart-rending. In the finale, however, understatement comes unstuck and the listener is left craving resolution, clarity and a promise of continuity. At the end, one is not quite sure where Watkins stands on the central issue: will there always be an England? Andrew Davis and the BBC Philharmonic provide close support to the soloist but no real challenge. The concerto battle of one against all modifies into a very English consensus. This fine and memorable performance might have been finer still with a conductor who was prepared to fight his corner. The companion pieces on disc – Introduction and Allegro, Elegy for strings and the Pomp and Circumstance Marches – are irreproachably done, though the bombast of the marches drums the introspection of the cello concerto sadly out of mind. Blame lies again with the conductor; the cellist deserves all available stars.
Some other Schubert CDs Symphonies 1&2 David Zinman made a name for the Tonhalle Orchestra with finely-wrought cycles of the Beethoven symphonies. Schubert, though, is another matter. The early works are little known and, by Schubert’s standards, of limited invention. The Tonhalle run rings around its pretty tunes.
Songs Camilla Nylund is one of the sprightlier sopranos on the opera stage, with a voice that is full-on in Strauss and a little rich for Schubert. The compensating virtue is a high trill that lights up the slighter numbers and gives pesky Gretchen a good run on her wheel. Paul Rivinius accompanies and Marion Schwebel’s sound is exemplary.
March 18, 2012 Behind the Notes: Brahms performed by friends and colleagues My upstairs neighbour Eleanor Rosé, who died in 1992, was taken as a child to meet Johannes Brahms. Greeted by a large man with a long beard, she assumed he was God. In 1890s Vienna, she was not alone in that supposition. The aura attached to Brahms is still greater than to any other symphonist, Beethoven excepted. A recent youtube recording of the pianist Ilona Eibenschütz talking about the great man does more than just compel the viewer’s attention: it commands it. Eibenschütz (1872-1967) appears on Arbiter’s retrieval of archival rarities, playing three Brahms Intermezzi and a Ballade with a seriousness almost too great for these slight pieces to bear. Yet, while she plays, the listener imagines that she is playing them for Brahms himself and the reverence becomes both appropriate and approval-seeking. This may not have been how Brahms wanted his music to be played, but it was undoubtedly how up-and-coming pianists played them to him. Two other Brahms pianists, Etelka Freund and Carl Friedburg, offer similar solemnity, although Friedburg grows robust with noisy confidence the further he gets into the early E-flat minor Scherzo. The main course on this album is a 1936 Berlin radio recording of the D-minor concerto by the long-forgotten Alfred Hoehn, conducted by the aged Max Fiedler, whose friendship with Brahms was long and close. The tempi in the opening movement can lag to an extreme, but there is beauty and profundity in this account, especially in Hoehn’s Adagio soliloquies. Get over the scratchy, recessed orchestral sound and you will find this lost performance indispensable. The closing piece on the disc is history in motion: Joseph Joachim, Brahms’s lifelong champion, playing the first Hungarian Dance in 1903. Joachim’s violin tone is forthright and he displays no false humility. When Joachim played for Brahms, it would seem he pulled no punches.
Some Chopin competition winners and losers Michel Block: The Spanish Album Block was a Mexican whom Arthur Rubinstein backed for second prize in the 1960 Warsaw competition, only to be vetoed by the bloc of Soviet judges. Block plays De Falla, Granados and Albeniz in a manner unheard since Rubinstein himself – full of fun and sun, fascinating from first touch.
Garrick Ohlson plays Granados The conjunction is unexpected and Ohlsson sounds a little heavy in the Goyescas, as if he’s unable to decide how imposing these pieces ought to sound. Ohlsson won the 1970 Chopin contest and is an outstanding interpreter of mainstream romanticism. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical/
Rafal Blechacz: Debussy, Szymanowski The 2005 Chopin champion, the first Pole to win in 30 years, is delicate with Debussy and down-to-earth in Szymanowski. The playing is pinpoint, lacking only the last degree of warmth and character. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical/
Yundi Li: The Red Piano The 2000 Chopin laureate plays some of the splashier works of Chinese Communism, starting with the exhortatory Yellow River Concerto. The effect is rather like watching a brain surgeon cutting stale bread. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
March 11, 2012 Erik Chisholm: piano concertos 1&2 This little-known Scots composer was either a wacko wanderer or some kind of secret genius: you’ll have to decide for yourselves. All I can judge with certainty from these two illuminating retrievals is that Chisholm had a rare ability to make an arresting opening statement and a quirky knack of taking your ears to places they had never expected to visit. A Glaswegian, taught by Russians, Chisholm (1904-65) gave the Scottish premiere of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition before heading east and south. He served in Asia during the Second World War, founded an orchestra in Singapore and spent the rest of his life as Dean of Music at Capetown University. His first concerto, titled Piobaireachd’, takes its title from Highland bagpipes and its opening theme from a popular lament for a dead cow. Oboe and bassoon do the pipey noises. Sniggers aside, it’s a haunting sound and Chisholm develops the material over four movements with constant invention and no slippage of concentration. You might wonder why he didn’t introduce real live bagpipes to the orchestra; probably, because it would have killed off the two front rows and blown out all the windows. The second concerto, ‘Hindustani’, is founded on an Indian raga and struggles rather to adjust its meditative properties to western orchestral colours. At best, it’s sub-sub-Bartók. Danny Driver is the adventurous pianist and the BBC Scottish are conducted by Rory Macdonald, with Peter Thomas doing some melismatic concertmaster solos. Not an essential addition to the sum of human experience, perhaps but well worth a second listen. Chisholm warrants at least one hearing at the BBC Proms.
Some more side-tracks 1600 What on earth was going on in music at the dawn of the 17th century? Rinaldo Alessandrini’s Concerto Italiano provides a set of pieces by Gabrieli, Frescobaldi, Bononcini and others more obscure, fizzing with mischief and dance. The sheer playfulness of the music blows a welcome hole in the ensuing classical solemnity.
Pisendel Johann Georg Pisendel (1687-1755) - you knew those dates, right? – led the Dresden orchestra in Handel’s time and wrote a cheeky G-major concerto for himself. Paired with pieces by Fasch, Heinichen, Telemann and Handel, it holds up well. Johannes Pramsohler leads the buzzy little group of International Baroque Players. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Maurice Ohana: Etudes d’interpretation Ohana’s career was blighted by the political dominance of French modernism by Pierre Boulez. A Gibraltarian Jew, sceptical and progressive, he wrote on the edge of atonality without subscribing to dogma. These piano pieces, played with a rapturous tingle by Maria Paz Santibanez, fall midway between De Falla and Webern. Original thoughout and thought-provoking. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical/
Frederic Rzewski: The People United will never be Defeated An American in Rome, Rzewski wrote these 36 piano variations in 1975 as a tribute to the Allende socialist government in Chile, toppled in a US-backed military coup. He dedicated the piece to Ursula Oppens, who compels attention in this authoritative performance. At the sixth variation, the tension is so high you may need to walk around the block before taking in the seventh.
March 4, 2012 Renee Fleming: Poèmes How do I hate this record? Let me count the ways. 1 Ms Fleming appears on the cover in silken black curtain material, borrowed to all appearances from a reputable funeral parlour. Or a Second World War surplus store. Or Abu Ghraib. Either way, she’s telling you she’s not having fun, and nor will you. 2 She has completely the wrong voice for Ravel’s Shéhérezade, none of the required shimmer of mystery. Beside the enchanted flute, she is a Chevvy in a carwash, an American in a Chateau-Lafite winery ordering bottled Coke. 3 She’s not helped by Alan Gilbert’s scrappy valet service with the Radio France orchestra, all hustle, no shades of suggestion. 4 Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi are intimate odes to his first wife, whispered in her ear. Ms Fleming declaims. The orchestra blares. The listener begs for relief. 5 A new set of songs by Henri Dutileux fares better, thanks to the superior Orchestre National de France and Seiji Ozawa’s sense of shading. But Dutilleux is no writer for voice, dull and dutiful at best. Curiosity is not aroused. 6 Six different sound engineers are credited for the general acoustic murk. They were working from live performances in bad halls. They are not generally to blame. Decca should have dismissed the tapes as substandard. The executive producer was Ben Pateman. I guess he takes the rap. 7 Articulation. There is none. Just a blur of occasional syllables. Lucky they printed the words in the booklet. 8 The booklet article, in praise of Ms Fleming, announces that ‘all singing is story-telling’. There’s no story here. 9 The booklet comes in a fiddly folder and does not fit back. 10 It all gets worse on second hearing. Enjoy.
Something more esoteric? Modern Times Christian Immler sings Weimar-era ironies by Schreker, Korngold, Zemlinsky, Eisler and others, including my old friend Berthold Goldschmidt. A thoughtful compilation, every syllable clear as water, accompanied with delicate touch by Helmut Deutsch.
Martin Shaw: The Airmen Almost forgotten outside the Anglican church for which he wrote much liturgy, Martin Shaw (1875-1958) was a songwriter in the Vaughan Williams mode. This cycle, a bucolic reflection on two world wars, is put together by the pianist Iain Burnside and eloquently sung by Sophie Bevan, Andrew Kennedy and Roderick Williams. A real find.
Eighth Blackbird: Lonely Motel The composer Steve Mackey is on the way to inventing a new American cabaret. These songs are the inner meditations of a lovesick shrink with pastiche references to Dowland, Stravinsky and the Beatles. Much fun to be had (except by the shrink) and eight versatile musicians makes the most of it.
February 26, 2012 Shostakovich: piano concertos 1 & 2 The concertos date from either end of the composer’s span and are equal in neither temperament nor intent. The first was written for himself to play, the second for his son, Maxim. They are personal, intimate, riddled with coded references. The first, in C minor, was written in 1933, just after he had finished his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk and before Stalin’s terror attack on it. Like the 24 preludes, its preceding work, it owes much to Bach and Stravinsky but also (as Leonid Gakkel points out in an exemplary programme note) to the long, brave adagio of Mahler’s third symphony. The second, in F major, written 24 years later, appears on paper to be a textbook celebration of Soviet success, produced for the revolution’s 40th anniversary. Once again, however, the subtext points to Stravinsky and Mahlerian irony. What the commissars heard as glory is readily mistaken for scorn. Neither is a virtuoso vehicle and, the composer apart, there is no pianist who has stamped these works decisively as his or her own. Denis Matsuev, a Siberian who made his name in Rachmaninov is perhaps the first to come close. He has recorded them before with Maris Jansons, Yuri Temirkanov and a degree of restraint. Here, Valery Gergiev lets him off the leash and Masuev, with dazzling lightness and rude flashes of wit, finds the layered contrasts in Shostakovich that add a puzzle-solving dimension to the pleasure of his performance. He follows with the sardonic fifth concerto by Rodion Shchedrin, dating from the post Soviet chaos of 1999. Gergiev’s Mariinsky Orchestra has trumpeter Timur Martynov in the opening work. Simply, the best yet.
More Russian rep Shostakovich: piano concertos 1&2 Unfair to compare, Alexander Melnikov plays the 2nd ahead of the 1st and interposes between them the late Shostakovich violin sonata, op 134, played with Isabelle Faust. Sprightly, but scarcely as penetrative as Matsuev. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra is conducted by Teodor Currentzis.
Schnittke: 2nd piano concerto Epigrammatic and frankly weird, the concerto yields few rewards. The pianist (Maria Lettberg) plinks and bangs bravely away; the Berlin radio orchestra accompanies. More pleasing and mysterious are the piano quintet, quartet and trio, led by Ewa Kupiec.
Shostakovich: viola sonata, op 147 |
By Norman Lebrecht
