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February 5, 2012 John Cage: Complete piano music
Among John Cage’s multiple legacies, the piano looms largest. Bursting into music in California without the benefit or inhibition of a European tradition, Cage stuck nails and bits of wood between the strings of a concert grand to create a ‘prepared piano’, emitting quasi-oriental sounds of hypnotic fascination. That invention dates from 1940s Los Angeles, where the ungainly Cage was taking music lessons from the uncomprehending old-revolutionary, Arnold Schoenberg. At the end of that decade, again at the piano, Cage introduced the young Europeans Boulez, Stockhausen and Berio at the Darmstadt summer school to new freedoms. In Music of Changes, he gave the performer a range of score options and left him or her to decide on the moment which should be played. In 4’33”, Cage sat a pianist at the keyboard with instructions to do nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds, encouraging the audience to appreciate the ambience. The climax of his work for piano was Winter Music, written for ten pianos in 1957 and dedicated to the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, followed by a 1958 piano concerto – after which he gave up the instrument for three decades. Cage, whose birth centenary falls this year, remains one of the most diverse and perplexing influences on western music in modern times, and not on music alone. His impact on dance, pop and the visual arts was equally impressive, and continues to grow two decades after his death. DJs who manipulate turntables in dark discos are unware that they do so courtesy of a 1938 Cage inspiration. Steffen Schleiermacher, a German pianist and composer who poses for the camera between Californian cactuses on his album booklet, worked assiduously over five years to play all of Cage’s published work for piano, along with some that was considered unsuitable for publication. In tune with Cage’s outlook, he specifies that each recording ‘represents only one possible interpretation’ and the seriousness with which he approaches the work is tempered with a healthy measure of wit. Too much, on 18CDs, to absorb in a month of Sundays, this box is an ideal dipper in which anyone can find curiosity, surprise and entertainment galore - from an early Music for Marcel Duchamp to a positively exhilarating 1989 meditation on the Beatles. Never have the musical depths of I Wanna Hold Your Hand been so brilliantly illuminated. Such a shame that John Lennon never lived to hear it.
January 29, 2012 Bernard Herrmann: Film score for Jane Eyre, 1943 Very few soundtracks grip the ear from the opening statement the way a symphony does, but this – Hermann’s fourth movie score and his longest – is utterly adhesive. Written between his first symphony and his opera Wuthering Heights, the late-romantic score borrows arias from the opera and applies them to instruments of the orchestra. The composer seems to possess complete mastery of his means. The nerve-tingling bleakness of Herrmann’s Hitchcock movies lie far ahead. This is an unashamedly sentimental accompaniment to a 19th century love story. Mendelssohn and Wagner are much in evidence, with hints of Schumann and wisps of Mahler. There is even a marimba passage in the 7th track that could pass as a ringtone... The Swiss conductor Adriano reconstructed Hermann’s original intentions miraculously from a third-generation of a photocopy and the results are fully worth the effort. The Slovak radio orchestra play with multi-layered responsivity. The performance was first issued in 1994 but has only now been made available on a mass label.
Three Mahler CDs First Symphony The Seoul Philharmonic play with filigree precision for Myung-Whun Chung and the opening shimmer is as beautiful as any. Too beautiful, in fact. Chung bypasses Mahler’s ironic intentions and goes for seductive literalism. It works as a reading, but fails to pique much curiosity.
Second Symphony Simone Young has delivered robust Brahms and Bruckner with her Hamburg orchestra. This Mahler performance cowers too much in their shadow. It is brisk, unfussy and cleanly played, but the edginess that is so vital to Mahler gets lost along the way. Michaela Kaune and Dagmar Peckova are the vocal soloists.
Sixth Symphony This is a transcription for church organ and it’s by no means as bad as I feared. The thunderbox of St Katharinen Oppenheim would put the fear of God into all but the most Dawkins of unbelievers and its sonorous warning from history makes the opening passage almost unbearably terrifying. What’s more, there’s subtlety in David Briggs’s playing of the mighty beats. Much to my surprise, I loved it. >Buy this CD at David-briggs.org
January 15, 2012 Witold Lutoslawski: Symphonic Variations &c In the 18 years since his death, Lutoslawski’s music has fallen off the concert ad recording schedule. But 2013 sees the centenary of his birth and this Chandos series of the orchestral works just gets better and better. On this, the third volume, you will find minor masterpieces from either end of the composer’s life. The Symphonic Variations date from his student years in 1936 and are both formally correct and fizzingly attractive, terrific little themes for solo instruments that the rest of the band can dance around. The Variations on a Theme of Paganini were written under Nazi occupation, for four-hand performance with his friend Andrzej Panufnik in private homes and secret places. The orchestration was made in 1978 and the soloist, in this and the ensuing 1988 piano concerto, is the effervescent Louis Lortie. The disc closes with Lutoslawski’s fourth and last symphony, premiered in Los Angeles a year before his death. It has one of the softest openings since Maher’s Ninth but there is no room for rancour or regret in Luto’s ultra-civilised language. The music politely opens a door and invites you into warm salon. Such is the intensity of Edward Gardner’s interpretation and the virtuosity of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s playing that previous recordings, including the composer’s own, are banished from memory while you listen – truly, a performance for our time.
3 powerful Bach releases Keyboard concertos Not many pianists can make your listen to all five concertos as if for the first time. Well, Nick van Bloss can. Whatever alchemy he brings to the piano, and his life has been turbulent, Van Bloss finds a quiet certainty in Bach that few others match. David Parry conducts the English Chamber Orchestra.
Suite #6 Miklos Perenyi sandwiches a robust reading of the sixth solo suite in between a warmly affecting performance of the third Benjamin Britten suite – more sweet-toned than its dedicatee, Rostropovich – and a growly organic account of the weird and haunting Gyorg Ligeti sonata, written in Hungary in 1948 and 1953 when the composer could but hint at his true intentions. An original, unmissable recital.
Cantatas When Andreas Scholl sings ‘ich hab genug’, you beg him to continue. The countertenor has never sounded so much in his element as in this selection of cantatas and arias with the Basle Chamber Orchestra. The soloist is projected a tad too far forward but otherwise the sound is Decca’s finest.
January 8, 2012 Roberto Alagna: Pasión The tenor has reached a point in his life where he can do what he likes without apology. He no longer has to explain turbulent walkouts from La Scala or the Bastille, or the on-off switch in his marriage to Angela Gheorghiu. The world has to accept that this is what you get from Alagna, take it or leave it. At 48, the voice is rich and rounded, doing its job without hint of stress whether in opera or in the more popular songs that he learned as a troubador in Paris clubs. This collection of South American songs was recorded in five different studios with a pick-up ensemble conducted by Yvan Cassar (who alternates as piano accompanist). Episodic and populist, the album has its smoky moments, none smokier than 'Besame mucho'. More remarkably, it avoids the dumb-down tackiness of crossover with an inarguable artistic integrity. It is clear that Alagna has loved this material all his life and now sings it with greater comfort and flexibility than the Latino pop merchants. There’s nothing quite like hearing a great voice doing what it does best in down-to-earth everyday songs. Alagna, in Pasión, is on top of his game.
More singers Alexksandra Kurzak A big new signing, the Polish soprano hits all the high spots in her debut disc of Italian opera hits from Mozart to Puccini. The voice is rich, warm and stress-free. Expression may come later, along with articulation (Kurzak has fewer consonants than Joan Sutherland). Conductor Omer Meir Wellber, another record debutant, gets a convincing sounds from the Valencia orchestra. If Kurzak takes off, as I think she will, this CD will be a collectors’ piece.
Anu Komsi: Being Beauteous In peak form, the Finnish soprano has a bell-like top and unerring pitch accuracy. Both are of demonstration standard in this eclectic trawl of 20th century works by Britten (Les Illuminations – the best I’ve heard), Schoenberg, Castiglioni, Szymanowski and Henze, whose 1963 Being Beauteous gives the album its title. The conductors in these live performances are Sakari Oramo - Anu’s husband - and Juha Kangas, but the voice is central here – and often sensational. I’m falling in love with the Henze.
Hila Plitmann: The Ancient Question The Israeli soprano sings her own arrangement of five Yiddish songs, Lori Laitmann’s setting of some Terezin fragments, a slightly insipid set of Psalms by Aharon Harlap and, most effective of all, five Hebrew love songs by her husband, Eric Whitacre. Julian Bliss threatens to steal the show on clarinet, but there’s beauty in the voice and enough variety in the works to keep the ears attentive.
Christiane Stotijn: Stimme der Sehnsucht The Dutch mezzo is a formidable Mahler singer and her Kindertotenlieder here are chillingly exquisite. More surprising, and no less satisfying, are the preceding sets of songs by Pfitzner and Richard Strauss. A marvellously intelligent recital. To be heard often, with an amber glass in hand.
December 31, 2011 From Here On Out If this is where orchestral music is heading, I am intrigued enough to want to hear more – but not yet fully convinced. Nico Muhly opens with a title piece that deconstructs classical snippets in approved minimalist style, ending with a Mahlerian Das Lied fadeout. Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead contributes the second piece, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, a BBC commission in microtones that simulates the sound language of Penderecki, though washes of Messiaen are never far from mind. Muhly bounces back with Wish You Were Here, a jittery evocation of cartoon artists and the esoteric gamelan composer Colin McPhee. The final piece, For heart, breath and orchestra, is by Richard Reed Parry who creates sound ambiences for Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre. An excess of pizzicato prevents the ear from settling on his ideas, which is a pity since there is a strong pulse to the work. The program is the brainchild of Edwin Outwater, music director of the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony in Canada and I applaud his sense of adventure. But no amount of good intention can compensate for meagre substance. I shall expect more depth of content from Muhly, Greenwood and Parry next time round.
A flush of young pianists Beatrice Berret Schumann, like most wines, should not be tasted young. But the Swiss pianist avoids the usual pitfalls and gives serious attention to the three sonatas, with lovely tone and subtle wit. She’s 26 and a Menahem Pressler pupil. Definitely going places.
Vladimir Sverdlov-Ashkenazy Nephew and half-namesake of a living legend, Sverdlov, 35, lays heavy, Soviet-trained hands on Musorgsky’s Pictures. Balakirev’s Islamey comes off lighter and four of his own compositions are nicely turned.
Vittorio Forte More Schumann – the dangerous Fantasiestücke, played with nice restraint by a 34 year-old Italian. The poetry comes through, but there may be more compelling readings around.
Vanessa Benelli Mosell She’s 24 and she’s not afraid of Prkofiev’s 7th sonata or Scriabin’s 1st. What’s more, the technique seems to match the ambition. These are very convincing readings, with some Liszt and Haydn in between. But why does the booklet announce her as ‘internationally recognised as one of the great virtuoso pianists’? Not yet, I fear.
Jonas Vitaud 31 years old, the Parisian prizewinner takes an agreeable debut stroll through the Brahms rhapsodies, intermezzi and fantasies. Late as most of these pieces are, Vitaud sees them all the better through a young man’s eyes – as Barenboim and Ashkenazy did almost half a century ago. Bookmark Vitaud: he is a pianist who is ripe and ready for the big time.
December 18, 2011 Mare Nostrum How fitting that the first posthumous release for Montserrat Figueras should be a sumptuous album and multi-lingual text that celebrates the cradle of civilisation – ‘our sea’, the Mediterranean basin. From the beginning of her life with Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI 40 years ago, Figueras showed a prescient interest in all the cultures that formed her native Spain – Christian, Jewish and Moslem, indigenous and invader. Each was treated with seriousness and respect. Dialects were carefully studied, accents and emphases observed. Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Turkish and Ladino tripped of her discs in illuminating co-existence. The process continues on this captivating release, which opens with a Sephardic rhapsody from Rhodes and ends with a Bulgarian dance and a contemporary improvisation, as if to say the cross-fertilisation has not ended. What the Figueras voice lost in bloom down the years, it gained in depth and consolation. Most of the Arabic and Jewish microtones are sung with hypnotic devotion by Lior Elmaleh. Musicians from Israel and Palestine play side by side. Every single track challenges cultural preconceptions. This is the sort of album that you pray will never end.
Four Late-rush Russian CDs Rachmaninov: 1st piano sonata Rising Dutchman Hannes Minnaar delivers Rachmaninov's with less than the usual morbidity, a hint of greater things to come. He refrains from adding a populist Prelude by way of sweetener, following up with restrained morceaux of Ravel. A talent to watch.
Rachmaninov: 3rd symphony British orchestras have never sounded so good in Russian as they do today. The LSO has Gergiev in charge, the LPO with Jurowsky, Birmingham with Nelson, Bournemouth with Katabits and, most penetrating of all, Liverpool with Vasily Petrenko. Astutely, Petrenko leaves the sombre third symphony to last on this disc, opening with an atmospheric Caprice bohemien and following with the ubiquitous Vocalise. The symphony itself unfolds as coherent narrative rather than episodic anecdotes, a thoroughly convincing account in splendid sound.
Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Britten: cello sonatas Jamie Walton is a conviction cellist, playing the music he feels is most timely rather than what the industry demands. These hree works make sense together but are hardly a commercial proposition. The 1934 D minor Shostakovich sonata is among the most affecting performances I have heard since Rostropovich died. The C major sonatas by Britten and Prokofiev have lower emotive traction, but the playing compensates with delicious little insights and evocations. Daniel Grimwood is the intuitive accompanist. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Music of Vladimir Martynov The Russian pastiche composer, born 1946, yields a couple of essays for Kronos on Schubert’s C-major quartet and the Abschied from Mahler’s Song of the Earth. Opinions may vary, but I found no fresh insights into Mahler’s work, and therefore no reason to condense it.
December 11, 2011 C P E Bach: piano concertos Carl Philipp Emanuel, once considered the most gifted of Bach’s sons, has been eclipsed by Johann Christian, ‘the London Bach’ with his florid arias and Mozart influences, and even by the perplexing Wilhelm Friedemann, briefly a poster boy for the Nazis. So it’s good to settle down with three of Emanuel’s piano concertos, any of which is an excellent advertisement for his brilliance and wit, not to mention his acute professional judgement of audience tolerance. All they lack is inventive genius. Think of the Haydn piano concertos and you will not be far off: music making of the highest proficiency and agreeability without the arresting mark of originality. Scholars detect faint anticipations of Beethoven’s G major piano concerto in Emanuel’s C major but they are too faint to be picked up by the naked ear. Michael Rische is the soloist with the excellent Leipzig Chamber Orchestra. And I'm delighted to add them to the list of worth-hearing-once piano concertos.
Three seasonal CDs John Rutter: The Colours of Christmas Nobody does better out of Christmas than the English composer and arranger, John Rutter. His popular carol settings call to mind 1950s singing styles, round-the-fireplace, nothing to frighten the horses; the Bach Choir, RPO take the nostalgia trek on Decca, with Rutter conducting.
The King’s Singers: Joy to the World Classy barber-shop from different arrangers, including the inescapable Rutter's take on Silent Night. The Little Drummer Boy’s a lot better, but it’s no patch on Mahler's song.
Songs of the Baltic Sea Frost and reindeers come to mind in the opening chords of this thrilling disc from the National Youth Choir of Great Britain (conductor Mike Brewer). The composers are Vaclovas Augustinas, Mindaugas Urbaitis, Peteris Palkidis, Galina Grigorjeva and Gabriel Jackson, and the singing – virile and angelic - will freeze your breath in mid-air. Perfect for the time of year.
December 4, 2011 Caine: The Drummer Boy: Mahler It’s nearly 20 years since a Mahlerian friend played me an Uri Caine interpretation down the phone and I had to be scraped off the walls in stupefaction. Uri, a jazz pianist and composer, takes Mahler’s music and bends it every which way with a varied ensemble in search of hidden messages. His most successful track, absent from highlights album, segues the farewell song of Das Lied von der Erde into the Ashkenazi-Jewish memorial prayer for the dead. But there’s plenty here to stimulate and provoke. The extension of Caine’s Jewish thesis is found in the title track, where a cantor, DJ and small ensemble dance Chassidic and North African rings around an ostensibly German army song. Two songs from the Kindertotenlieder are given wildly unpredicted treatment. Polemics aside, there are moments of ethereal beauty and nagging might-have-been. If Mahler were living in 21st century New York, might he be going down this track? One way or another, I can’t get this disc off my playlist.
Three starry Mozart CDs Helene Grimaud The label makes a big fuss about this being Ms Grimaud’s first Mozart release. Given her growing interest in other genres, this may also be her last – which would be a pity, since she sets cracking tempi in two concertos, nos 19 and 23, and directs two arias by Mojica Erdmann in between. Ms Grimaud, who fell out with Claudio Abbado mid-summer, dispenses with a conductor, leading the chamber orchestra of Bavarian Radio from the keyboard. I especially liked her use of the Busoni cadenza in the second concerto.
Claudio Abbado The grand old man leads symphonies 39 and 40 with a dedicated Orchestra Mozart in a live recording from Bologna. Lively enough, but nothing like the hair-raising studio recordings he made of these symphonies as a young man with the LSO.
Emerson Quartet The Emersons have gone conservative on their new label, reverting to very classical rep with high panache and easy gestures. The three Prussian Quartets (K575, 689, 590) are exquisitely done, with frequent thematic nods to parallel works. All that’s missing is an edge of discovery. And the January sound at LeFrak Hall, Queens College, NY, is a bit on the brittle side. Da-Hong Seeto was producer and engineer.
November 27, 2011 Kaija Saariaho: D’om le vrai sens The Finns say of Saariaho that she is the only French composer who writes Finnish. That is both cruel, and deadly accurate. Living in France for much of her adult life, the serene Saariaho has acquired an elegance that is alien to her origins, casting her into a stylistic no-man’s-land from which there is no visible exit. Not that she seems keen to leave. Much of Saariaho’s music, especially her operas, has a static quality that can, in the wrong hands, numb the listener to distraction. I have never been a fan. But the present triptych of new works, written between 2006 and 2010, has melted my resistance. The title work is a clarinet concerto that performs enough Gershwin riffs and virtuosic tricks to command full attention for half an hour – and if you haven’t heard Kari Kriiku do his stuff, you must. Laterna Magica is an impressionistic tribute to Ingmar Bergman – a kind of sound movie without pictures. Best of all is a short, fluttery set of four Leino Songs for very high voice, performed by Anu Komsi, whose husband Sakari Oramo, conducts. The sense of aptness – that this music could not be written any other way or for any different combination – is compelling. The sound, too, is impressive. That’s no small triumph for producer Laura Heikinheimo who had to record each work in a different hall.
Three Bruckner symphonies #1 Forsaking my iron rule of never listening to a Bruckner symphony numbered lower than 3 (there are four of them), I was gripped by the energy and conviction of Simone Young’s First Symphony with the Hamburg Philharmonic. Any concentration lapses you might detect are the composer’s. The musicians give it all they’ve got, a little thin at the top of the strings but deeply satisfying in the adagio.
#4 The first Bruckner I ever heard in concert was the ninth with the Concertgebouw orchestra, conducted by Bernard Haitink. In some sense, all others are judged by that sumptuous experience. Haitink goes for broader tempi nowadays, an avuncular interpretation closely in keeping with what we know of Bruckner’s character. The LSO brass are ablaze here but a recessed Barbican sound does the strings few favours and the recording loses the immediacy of a live concert.
#6 Salzburg’s Mozarteum Orchestra gets overshadowed at festival time by the world’s best. Founded by Mozart’s widow in 1841, its sound is well suited to Bruckner’s bucolic reflections: large, warm and with a hint of wildness. Ivor Bolton conducts a persuasive.
November 20, 2011 Brahms: Piano concerto #1 in D minor Julius Katchen, an American in Paris, was the one to watch in the 1960s – a talent admired alike by Sviatoslav Richter and pop stars. He died in 1969, aged 42, before he could establish a foothold in the pantheon. Those who remember him do so mostly for Brahms. This London studio performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Rudolf Kempe is a good reminder of his exceptional gift. Never gratuitously assertive, Katchen glides into the music like a seal into arctic water, leaving no doubt in the listener's mind that he is in his natural element. The lack of bombast in the opening movement is succeeded by an unintrusive tenderness in the adagio – thus far and no further – while the finale has all the fireworks it needs without ever sounding showy. The closest comparison that comes to mind on record is the British pianist Clifford Curzon, though Katchen is more athletic and slightly heavier in his touch. There’s an interview at the end of his disc in which he explains his approach. Before that, he plays a quirky Chopin ballade and other solo encores.
More piano concertos Busoni The biggest and toughest challenge for any pianist, with a man-sized orchestra and full men’s chorus. Roberto Cappello, a Busoni prize winner, makes a brave fist of it. He lacks John Ogdon’s reckless bravura, but he gets the mood right and the symphony orchestra of Rome give it all they’ve got.
Maderna The human face of the Boulez-Stockhausen brigade, Bruno Maderna did not know the meaning of forte. His two concertos, dated 1942 and 1948, are pre-avantgarde and utterly charming. The 1969 Quadrivium gently flutters and meanders. Aldo Orvieto is the pianist in these world premiere recordings.
D’Indy: Symphonie sur un chant montagnard francais A great avalanche of notes from pianist Martin Helmchen barely dents the surface of a monstrous piece of hokum by the least original of French composers. In my list of upland pastoral symphonies, this scrapes the barrel. The filler is Saint-Saens’s early second symphony, sweetly played by the Suisse Romande, under Marek Janowski.
November 13, 2011 Berlioz: Harold in Italy &c. Berlioz is, for me, the point where period instruments lose their charm and descend into scratch and screech. The opening of this lavish disc from Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens de Louvre-Grenoble proclaims otherwise. The ensemble is agreeably smooth and the entry of Antoine Tamestit’s viola is delicately managed. There are collisions along the way when the sound loses its sheen but travel in Italy was never easy going and it’s good to be reminded of the rigours of Berlioz’s day. The fat booklet is decorated with art photographs of the southwards drag. Anne-Sofie von Otter takes the lead in Les nuits d’été. No longer the ice-clear bell of technical precision, she relaxes enough to let passion swell and ebb before setting free the two laments in the set with an air of one who has seen it all and is still appalled by the dread finality of life. There’s a bonus track from Damnation of Faust – a pertinent finale. No other record label could ever be mistaken for naïve, in its matching of content and image.
Four Anglo-American mixes Music for a Time of War Carlos Kalmar has a good eye for a story. The Oregon conductor leads a performance of Ives’s The Unanswered Question, The Wound-Dresser by John Adams, Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem and the fourth symphony by Vaughan Williams – a truly apt and thoughtful selection (most would pick VW3 or VW5 as his war work), convincingly played a more-than-decent orchestra. These guys are going places.
American Music/quatuor diotima Less than the sum of its parts and with the most horrific classical cover of the year, the French-based quartet grapple with Reich’s Different Trains and Crumb’s Black Angels, with Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio’ quartet as a smoothie filling. The miking is too close, the playing aggressive. Kronos still claim these works as their own.
Simon Keenlyside – Songs of War A fine contrast of rural peace and distant war, ranging from Butterworth to Kurt Weill, warily accompanied by Malcolm Martineau. Apart from a gruesome Ned Rorem stretcher-case (‘An Incident’), the selection is tasteful and often surprising. Keenlyside has the admirable knack of never making more of a song than it needs.
Phoenix When was the last time I sat down to an oboe concerto? Emily Pailthorpe plays the well-known Vaughan Williams and the quite-new Paul Patterson, titled Phoenix. Her tone is seductive and the orchestral sound serene. There’s a new instrumentation of the Herbert.
November 7, 2011 Beethoven: Complete Symphonies A symphonic cycle is as different from a single concert as training for a 100-metre dash is from running a marathon. The eye must maintain a constant dual focus: on the next milestone and simultaneously on the overarching structure of the race. There can be no short cuts, no shoulder slumps. The tension has to be high from start to finish. Riccardo Chailly’s approach to Beethoven is faultless on both fronts. Using early editions and adhering to a Leipzig tradition that dates from Felix Mendelssohn’s 1840s spell as Gewandhaus conductor, Chailly sets a cracking pace that has both tactical and strategic validity. Compelling details emerge from the progress of each symphony and, at the same time, the overall span is cohesive and thrilling. Contrary to contemporary fashion, Chailly does not regard Beethoven of the first two symphonies as an extension of Haydn and Mozart but as a breakaway, a radical new voice who sets out to shock at every turn. The Eroica, revolutionary by intent, sounds abrasive at first impact, a calculated device that intensifies the pathos of its ensuing funeral march. Placing the Coriolan overture on the third disc ahead of the fifth symphony deprives that terse opening of its shock value and the Pastoral, later on, is a little under-coloured. But the seventh symphony is majestic, the eight exciting and the ninth overwhelming. Unusually for these cheapskate times, the performances are not live. They were recorded in an empty Gewandhaus hall and the absence of audience only adds to the listener’s private concentration. This is, pace Rattle and Abbado, the first major Beethoven cycle of the 21st century. Chailly allies a Solti-like hard drive to an Abbado sleekness and a fearless Klemperer independence in his midlife mastery of these works. Among recent sets, only Zinman in Zurich is so assured, but at key junctures – opening the Eroica finale – Chailly gets an explosive attack from players of the highest calibre to hit the finishing line with a massive flourish. Record of the Year? Certainly a front-runner.
Four Russian CDs Tchaikovsky: 2nd symphony Evidence of Kirill Karabits’s success with the Bournemouth SO can be heard in his slow solos, trusting individual players to deliver clean, impressive openings. The ‘Little Russian’ Symphony is thoroughly enjoyable. The rest of the disc is taken up with Musorgsky showpieces – Pictures and Night in the Bare Mountain – that do no more than confirm the partnership’s quality.
Shostakovich: 9th and 12th symphonies The fifth instalment in Vasily Petrenko’s cycle with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic lacks the traction and pathos of its predecessors. The playing is high class and the sound adequate, but both symphonies feel constricted – as if the conductor and musicians have not fully decided how late-Mahlerian the 6th should sound and how propagandist the 12th, titled ‘The Year 1917’. Neeme Järvi on DG and Mariss Jansons get this symphony bang to rights.
Shostakovich: New Babylon The first complete recording, on two CDs, on the 1929 film score has more than curiosity value. It affords a rare glimpse of the composer as a youthful mischief, before Stalin and the system contrived to crush his spirit. Too much rom-pom for concentrated listening, but a necessary addition to my shelf.
Shostakovich: string quartets 5-8 The Pacifica Quartet, recorded in a Midwest winter, bring an authentic bleakness to the middle quartets, written at a time when the composer lived in fear of arrest and death. The miking, though, is intrusive. If you want a US quartet in these works it’s a choice between too-smooth Emerson or too-close Pacifica. There’s a lovely end-bonus of Miaskovsky’s 13th quartet in A minor.
October 31, 2011 Charles Ives: Four sonata The essence of Ives is the achievement of surprise. Knowing that the millionaire insurance magnate is prone to throw in corny bits of folkore, players need to numb their anticipation and the audience’s to ensure that each piece of hokum hits the ears completely unexpected. Like Mahler, Ives interjected ambient sounds for ambiguous, unexplained purposes. Penetrating his quirky mind is never easy and there is a temptation to dismiss his devices as simple-minded. The triumph of this performance lies in its acknowledgement of Ives as a giant of American culture. Hilary Hahn, the violinist, might be expected take this view, but she has to convince Valentina Lisitsa, her ex-Ukrainian pianist, and their argument through the recital is as open-minded as an old-fashioned town meeting. The four sonatas, virtually unplayed, date from 1903-16, the age of innocence before the US entered the First World War. Yet there nothing innocent about the music. A simple country tune can take a cynical business twist. An amiable conversation turns a sinister. Even the patriotism contains hints of melancholic irony. Ives tried in vain to get Mahler to perform his music; he might well have found personal affinities in the last of these sonatas, ‘Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting’. Hahn is at her most confident and thrilling in this recital, while Lisitsa, already the most popular pianist on Youtube, is a soloist waiting to soar. Music as interesting as this should never have lain neglected. DG’s release, mysteriously delayed in Europe until the New Year, has all the hallmarks of a legendary record.
Stephen Hough: Liszt and Grieg concertos For his 50th birthday, the busy English pianist and composer has recorded the Grieg
concerto in its native Bergen, along with both of the Liszts. Daunted, perhaps, by the location, Hough sounds more relaxed in the expat Liszt – but that’s a minor cavil. All three performances are exquisitely sololoquised and beautifully accompanied by Andrew Litton’s Bergen Philharmonic.
Stephen Hough: Broken Branches The pianist-as-composer shows an excessive fondness for bassoon and contrabassoon. Pick of a mixed pack of chamber music is a quasi-concerto for the cellist, Stephen Isserlis, more a private meditation than a public showpiece. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Jorge Luis Prats: Live in Zaragoza Hailed as the next Jorge Bolet, Prats is a Cuban in his 50s who wowed Spain on tour with suggestively rhythmic performances of Granados, Villa-Lobos and Lecuona. This is his major-label debut and the sound clarity is quite angelic. He sounds like a deep-freeze master from a former time, a classical version of the Buena Vista Social Club.
October 23, 2011 The Liszt Project Here, for once, is a concept album that works. Pierre-Lairent Aimard opens with an exquisitely shaped account of Liszt’s La lugubre gondola, every morose wavelet lapping against the ear. Aimard then moves into Wagner’s almost unknown A-major sonata for Mathilde Wesendonck, followed by another flutter of Liszt. Next up is the nail-breaking opus one sonata by Alban Berg, Scriabin’s Black Mass ninth sonata and, finally, a truly virile performance of Liszt’s great B minor sonata, making a perfect circumference – a journey with and around Liszt and those he touched and formed. The second disc exercises the same refined discrimination. You might expect to find Bartók in the mix but not, perhaps, the early piece Nénie that takes off on a Lisztian rhythm from the Années de Pélerinage. Ravel is there, and Messiaen, obligatory for a Frech pianist, but in the middle of the recital there’s a skittish mantra by Marco Stroppa, a gritty modernism rooted in dark antiquity. Every single piece here has its place and each and every one of them makes you think again about the adjacent works. It’s a brilliant act of programming – and of sympathetic record production. Take a bow, DG Executive Producer Dr Alexander Buhr. Liszt himself would have grasped this concept.
Two more Liszt CDs Piano concertos 2 & 1 Played in reverse order by Daniel Barenboim, with Pierre Boulez conducting the Berlin Staatskapelle, this is a high-profile event for the Liszt bicentennial. It is a commanding performance, at time over-vigorous, full of verve and excitement, lacking only a space for private contemplation. For a more reflective approach, go to Sviatoslav Richter’s intense self-immersion, or to the young Martha Argerich.
Lieder Helmut Deutsch’s piano introductions provide soprano Diana Damrau with a secure yet flexible foundation for these deceptively simple songs. At times, as she substitutes emotion for intellectual exploration, you wonder if they are even deceptive. But Damrau gives each song its due and each a different hue, before she lets rip with a climactic O Lieb. Lovely. Best Liszt singsong of the bicentennial.
October 16, 2011 Shuffle, Play, Listen It’s a terrible title for some terrific music. Cellist Matt Haimovitz and pianist Christopher O’Riley have eclectic tastes that they’d like to share. Take a suite from Bernard Herrmann’s music for Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo and intersperse its episodes with vaguely related pieces by Stravinsky, Martinu, Janacek and Piazzolla. That’s the first disc, and it’s a blinder. The second is even better – a set of O’Riley arrangements of recent rock numbers and some jazz, going from Arcade Fire’s Empty Room (2011) back to Radiohead’s magical Pyramid Song and fast-forward to the same group’s Weird Fishes (2007). Known to me or unknown, it’s compelling stuff, sitting perfectly on the two instruments. The oldest it gets is a 1971 Dance of Maya by John McLaughlin. I can’t wait to play this CD to people a third of my age and set them guessing where it’s from. The categories are irrelevant. This is good music, fabulously played. I can see where they are coming from with the title, but it gives no sense of the content. This could well be the coolest classical disc of the year.
Three Mahler CDs 3rd symphony The concluding segment of Jonathan Nott’s cycle will impress those who think Mahler should sound like Bruckner, an irony-free zone. The Bamberg playing is clean and the contralto soloist, Mihoko Fujimara, beautiful. But the approach is, to my mind, completely wrong-headed, designed for a Bavarian bourgeoisie.
6th symphony Antonio Pappano so rarely puts a foot wrong that it’s upsetting to find that his live account of the bleak monster fails to grip. The savagery is missing in the opening allegro energico and somehow muted in the finale. It may be that the Santa Cecilia orchestra cannot play other than lovely. There’s no date on my advance copy but it must have been recorded in the Roman winter: there are constant coughs in the hall.
Lieder Katarina Karneus is perfectly cast for the Gesellen, Rückert and Kindertoten Lieder, holding the line with just the right gloss of vibrato. More unexpected, the post-modern conductor Susanna Mälkki turns out to have the right pulse for Mahler and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra show why they are still the best in the Baltic. Ich bin der Welt gets an exemplary performance. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
October 10, 2011 Brahms: Piano concerto #1 in D minor Both the soloist and conductor are new to me – and so is the concept. Hardy Rittner plays an Erard piano dated 1854 and Werner Ehrhardt conducts l’arte del mondo on instruments of Brahms’s period. Their abrasiveness when the going gets tough gives an immediate, inimitable idea of how revolutionary the young Brahms must have sounded to audiences of his time. The D minor concerto began life as a sonata for two pianos and developed into a near- symphony. Brahms himself played the 1859 premiere in Hannover, Joseph Joachim conducting, and the second performance in Leipzig the following year was decidedly unpopular with a public raised on Bach and Mendelssohn. The clattery response of the Erard keys under the weight of Brahms’s demands must have sent many Leipzigers home with a not-tonight headache and a quick sniff at the laudanum salts. Ehrhardt has a fine feel for the structure of and Rittner rattles away with great vim and vigour. This is not a performance you would want to hear often, but you should certainly hear it once. A bonus op 119 intermezzo restores the Erard to something like its intended working order. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three more concerto CDs Stanford: cello concerto &c Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was the very model of a late-Victorian composer, with just enough of an Irish twinkle to mitigate the pomp and circumstance. You have to wait for the adagio of his concerto before the twinkle kicks in. Gemma Rosefield, in her debut commercial recording, plays the piece beautifully and for rather more than it’s worth. She does not reap full reward until the final track – an Irish Rhapsody. The BBC Scottish accompany under Andrew Manze.
Nicola Benedetti: Italia Demoted from DG to Decca, the hot Scot fiddler in a sun-faded cover photo plays Vivaldi, Tartini and Veracini without a smidgeon of passion and in truly blodgy sound. Andrew Walton was the engineer. Dolce & Gabbana got her dressed. What else do you need to know?
Tchaikovsky: violin concerto; Bartok, 2nd concerto Valeriy Sokolov is a talent to watch, though perhaps more in 20th century rep than 19th. He plays the Tchaik perfectly well and without touching the sides. In Bartok he adds a laser of analytical clarity to an often misjudged piece. David Zinman conducts the Zurich Tonhalle.
October 2, 2011 Mozart: piano concertos 6, 8, 9 The Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt, vastly popular in Bach, opens a cycle of the 27 Mozart concertos in an unlikely location, at the wrong time of year and with an offbeat orchestra. The venue is Toblach in the Italian Dolomites, where Mahler spent his last three summers, it’s knee-deep in skis and the ensemble is a chamber group from Mantua, little known beyond national borders. Hewitt plays a Fazioli and the orchestra, led by Carlo Fabiano from the concertmaster’s chair, strikes a crisp balance between period practice and modern instruments – altogether a very pleasing sound. The three concertos, from Mozart’s early twenties, are the foundation of the cycle – a statement of intent. The 9th, known as the Jeunehomme, is the only one to get regular play, but the other two are hardly inferior in ideas or spirit. Hewitt brings a gravitas to the concertos that recalls something of the approach of Arthur Schnabel, who was the first to revive them in modern times. It offers an invigorating contrast to the wanton athleticism and occasional flippancy of younger interpreters and suggests that Hewitt may be on the threshold of an adventure of real importance. I wonder which concerto’s next.
Three solo Beethoven CDs Alice Sara Ott DG’s rising star is over-impetuous in opus 2/3, utterly compelling in the Waldstein sonata and thrillingly reckless in the Rage over a Lost Penny. High-class playing with a contemporary touch.
Frédéric D’Oria Nicolas Moscow-trained Nicolas, new to me, traces a line on this album from Beethoven’s midlife Waldstein Sonata, through one of Liszt’s peregrinations to a transcription of Wagner’s Tannhäuser and a Busono Adagio from Bach. His thoughtful concept is matched by flawless playing, full of character and changing colour.
Sarah Beth Briggs A child finalist in the BBC Young Musician of the Year, Briggs has grown into a thoughtful, determinedly old-fashioned interpreters of the core classics. Her account of the op 110 sonata is rooted unfashionably in the world of Mozart and Haydn. The 32 Variations in C minor are even more conservatively conceived. Yet, unflashy as her playing might seem, there is no mistaking the passion.
September 25, 2011 Schubert: C and D major sonatas, D840, D850 For most of my adult life, Alfred Brendel was considered the last word in Schubert, dominating the landscape with his outstanding series on Philips Records. Others – Uchida, Andsnes, Lupu – have occupied the vacuum since his retirement in different ways. But Brendel had an unmissable authority in this deceptively simple music, an assertion that it could be played his way and no other. Shai Wosner, an Israel-born New Yorker, is the first since Brendel to announce a similar, monolithic assurance. Listening to him in the two big sonatas of 1825, both in a major key and both capable of being played by a competent amateur, I am struck on several hearings by Wosner’s absolute conviction in the literal expression of the notes and the structural soundness of the works. The literalism can lack suggestive subtlety, as it often did in Brendel, but it is a rock on which any listener can build a lifelong understanding of Schubert. Between the two sonatas, Wosner gives a skittish account of six German dances and a Hungarian melody, none taken too seriously. The recording, made at Wyastone Leys, yields exemplary Steinway sound. Simon Kiln produced. One of the revelations of 2011.
Four CDs of Anglo-American song Sing Freedom! Craig Hella Johnson and Conspirare work through the songbook of Afro-American spirituals with sumptuous renditions of such indelibles as Motherless Child and A City Called Heaven. Too sumptuous, at times. The harmony is over-contrived, pitch-perfect. An occasional raggedness would have made the recital more exciting.
Sarah Connolly: My True Love Hath My Heart A lovely big mezzo reading of modern settings by Britten, Howells, Gurney and more, with unassertive accompaniment by Malcolm Martineau. A sarcastic Richard Rodney Bennett set rounds off the show. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Bejun Mehta: Down by the Salley Gardens Some of the same songs as Connolly, but in a luscious counter-tenor. The reservation, for me, is an excess of vibrato, making the delivery a trifle too precious.
Richard Lewis: The Great Welsh Tenor A Handel and Mahler pioneer of the 1950s, Lewis has an almost Victorian manner of singing but is stunningly effective in All Through the Night and O Waly Waly. Malcolm Sargent and Charles Mackerras conduct.
September 18, 2011 Mahler: 9th symphony Valery Gergiev’s live performance of the ninth brings to an end one of the more daring cycles of recent years. Taken from two live concerts with a conductor who never performs the same way twice, the project left little room for edits or correction. Producer James Mallinson excised any trace of an audience, miking closely to the strings and achieving something close to a studio ambience – no small feat in the ungracious Barbican acoustic. The London Symphony Orchestra sound a little over-bright, but that’s how they often play. Following Gergiev’s interpretation is never easy, since he is prone to change line like a London Underground commuter. The opening movement lacks the air of resignation that gives the subsequent resistance its force of surprise. Gergiev goes for something more ominous, then turns it wilder in the middle movements, letting brass and winds off leash to roar and shriek at fate. The finale finds a measure of consolation, though never the quietude of acceptance. There is a disturbing quality to the performance, as there is to much of what Gergiev does, but I’d rather be unsettled than lulled by the synthetic resolution of Haitink or Nott. The LSO Live Mahler cycle leaves more questions than it answers, which is just as the composer intended.
Three rising soloists Charlie Siem A male model who does gigs in Apples stores is what you may have read about the Anglo-Norwegian Charlie Siem. Ignore it. The boy can play. He takes the Bruch concerto at a scary lick and the the Wieniawski as a piece of cake. A cantabile doloroso by the Nordic virtuoso Ole Bull is the surprise bonus. The LSO accompany efficiently, under Andrew Gourlay.
Alexandre Tharaud Having recently heard a recording of Richter in the Bach keyboard concertos, I decided to give them a rest for a year – but the French temptation proved irresistible. Fast, frank and totally introspective, Tharaud is a runaway train with Les Violons du Roy in hot pursuit. When he slows, the world goes backwards. Irresistible? Pretty much.
Javier Periane The Spanish pianist brings out the Moorish tinge of Manuel De Falla in a beautifully planned recital of solo pieces with Nights in the Garden of Spain as its centrepiece (BBC Symphony Orch, conducted by Josep Pons). Hearing the Nights in this context, rather than sandwiched between overture and symphony, feels acutely authentic and Perianes finds a tone that is precisely fit for purpose. A near-perfect project.
September 11, 2011 Mieczyslaw Weinberg: symphonies, vols 1 & 2 No composer was closer to Shostakovich in terms of physical proximity, outlook and spirit than his next-door neighbour Moisei Vainberg (the name has several spellings). A musician who fled Warsaw when the Nazis arrived, Weinberg became a victim of Stalin’s persecutions after his father-in-law, Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered on the dictators orders. Shostakovich offered him moral and practical support during his jail time and unquestioning friendship thereafter. There are 27 Weinberg symphonies and 17 string quartets. His Holocaust opera, The Passenger, will be staged this month at English National Opera. Where to begin? The 1948 Sinfonietta on the opening disc of Neos’s new Weinberg Edition is a classic piece of deception – happy-happy on the surface, deeply troubled underneath. Its companion piece, the choral 6th symphony of 1963, ripples with Jewish motifs – including a reckless khasneh-tanz Allegro molto. Finding a path through the composer’s contradictions is a process that is only just beginning. The 17th symphony of 1984 opens a triptych of war memories, restless and unresolved. It is dedicated to Vladimir Fedoseyev, who conducts the Vienna Symphony Orchestra with crisp determination. Weinberg is beyond question an historic composer; how important he may be cannot yet be determined. The fillers on the record are the gripping Mallet Quartet and Dance Patterns. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three new-music concerto CDs Rihm, Penderecki, Currier Wolfgang Rihm’s Light Games is a glorious seduction of the ear, low pitched and languorous. Anne-Sophie Mutter never overplays it and the New York Philharmonic are tautly subdued by Michael Francis’s baton. Pieces by Penderecki and Rihm for violin and double-bass sound larger than life with Roman Patkolo as partner virtuoso. Less compelling is Sebastian Currier’s hurry-scurry Time Machines, conducted by Alan Gilbert and premiered three months ago. Its movements are short enough not to pall, but little of it lingers in the ear.
Grazyna Bacewicz: violin concertos 2, 4 and 5 Barely known outside Poland, these three Stalin-era works are among the composer’s more emollient works. Soft-edged Bacewicz is not quite the real deal, but Joanna Kurkowicz plays with zest and the Polish radio orchestra are terrific. Lukasz Borowicz conducts. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Armenian Rhapsody Name an Armenian composer other than Khachaturian. Well, there’s Suren Zakarian and Vache Sharafyan, both of whom wrote for cello and chamber orchestra in recent years. The mood is not cheerful and sometimes downright lachrymose, but Alexander Chaushian takes to it like mother’s milk, as do the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
September 4, 2011 Steve Reich 9/11 There are risks in repeating a masterpiece. From the rough-string opening rhythms and the speech fragments of this ambitious new work, Reich refuses to disguise its origins in Different Trains, his twin-track account of Holocaust memoir and childhood alienation. The bits of speech are taken from 9/11 air traffic control logs on 9/11 and from survivor recollections. The effect is too close for comfort. It feels intrusive. Reich himself suffered grave anxiety on 9/11, fearing that his family had been trapped in an apartment opposite the falling towers. He had a powerful personal reason for writing this piece. But where, in Distant Trains, his documentary detachment deepened the emotional impact, here the layering of recent memory becomes part history lesson, part bio-doc. It may be that Different Trains was so original that it put the methodology out of use for a generation. Or it may be that Reich, revisiting his masterpiece, could do no better than repeat himself. The piece, I am told, is being warmly received on a Kronos tour. Perhaps it needs to be sampled live. The fillers on the record are the gripping Mallet Quartet and Dance Patterns.
Four Mozart CDs Requiem A fierce performance from Harry Christophers and the Handel and Haydn Society and elite soloists is marred by in-your-face recording. Eric Owens is the mighty bass.
Horn concertos Alessio Allegrini, ex-#1 horn at La Scala and Berlin Philharmonic, is the suave, purposeful soloist, Claudio Abbado conducts the Mozart Orchestra. Both seek hidden depths in the music where there are none. Dennis Brain and Karajan, it ain’t.
Clarinet concerto, quintet Benny Goodman made this coupling famous on record – and he didn’t play the basset, as Sharon Kam does. The Haydn Philharmonie sound a bit period-abrasive, but the clarinet tone is deliciously liquid in the concerti and tenderly intimate in the quintet. As pleasing as any account I have heard in years.
String quartets KV 421, 138, 465 The Ebène Quartet are so tight-knit that Mozart flows off their bridges almost too easily. In these three works, the Dissonance Quartet gets the most out of them. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
August 28, 2011 Martinu: Piano Recital and Drawings Bohuslav Martinu has dropped so far below the radar that he has lost parity with such compatriots as Janacek, Suk and Smetana. A victim of fluctuating fashions, he is a composer of great elegance, constant invention and, sometimes, excessive serenity. Too many opus numbers – more than 400 – make it hard for musicians to present him with any expectation of public familiarity, even in his own country. Much of his work is left to gather dust. This project by the Czech pianist Michal Masek - is a double discovery, a retrieval of largely unplayed piano music along with some of Martinu’s humourous sketches and concert-stage drawings. There is wit and warmth in both art forms. A piano turns in one sketch into a roaring bear, threate ning to crush the red-faced performer. One set of piano pieces is called Butterflies and Birds of Paradise. The sounds are enchanting, realistic, yet never banal. Another is a victory march for his local sports club, utilitarian yet attention compelling. Masek plays with quiet intensity, sanitised of the sentiment that Rudolf Firkusny, the foremost Martinu interpreter, was prone to indulge. The longer you listen, the more you want to hear. The record, produced by EMI’s Czech division, may be hard to find in some countries; a website - http://www.masek-martinu.com/ illuminates its content. You won’t be disappointed.
Three more Czechs and balances Martinu: the six symphonies Jiri Belohlavek’s second recording of the Martinu symphonies is lower in voltage than the first, done for Chandos with the Czech Philharmonic. The BBC Symphony Orchestra struggle with irregular accents and miss the drama of the three post-war symphonies. On the other hand, some of the happier moments have a lighter, more infectious feel to them.
Czech string quartets Josef Suk’s Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn is the treasure here; Smetana’s first and Dvorak’s 12th are finely played by the Sacconi quartet, though not always fiercely enough. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Czech music for strings The Janacek chamber orchestra play a somewhat superfluous arrangement of the composer’s second string quartet. An expansion of Martinu’s sextet is scarcely more convincing. But an early Janacek suite and a study for string orchestra by Pavel Haas are gripping.
August 21, 2011 Brahms: viola sonatas, op. 120 Among the last works to leave Brahms’s desk, these duo sonatas were written for the principal clarinet of Hans von Bülow’s orchestra and then adapted by the composer for just-as-smooth viola and piano. Summery and elegiac, composed in the imperial spa of Bad Ischl, the music is replete with ease. One note leads inexorably into the next without ever seeming either predictable or uninspired. The gently sighing second movement of the first sonata – allegro, with a touch of adagio – suggests a man amply in harmony with with his world. Recordings of these masterpieces are surprisingly infrequent. A benchmark release by Pinchas Zukerman with Daniel Barenboim at the piano has been a first choice for nigh on four decades, outlasting challenges from Yuri Bashmet, Maxim Rysanov, Lawrence Power and more. On record, the star viola tends to overpower the piano. Here. However, Rachel Roberts, former principal viola of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, balances her sound serenely against Lars Vogt’s ripple effects on the piano. She plays plays a modern instrument by Peter Greiner and there is so little ostentation about their performance that it feels like an eavesdropped conversation, intriguing and at times oblique. Rather than play the two sonatas back to back, they are separated here – irrelevantly– by Schumann’s Märchenbilder, but that’s a small quibble for such an engaging act of music making. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
3 piano CDs Prokofiev: 5 piano sonatas Alexandra Silocea, a Rumanian, is one to watch. She surmounts Prokofiev’s fiendish tricks at high speed without shredding the piano to matchsticks, often finding a tenderness that eludes flashier interpreters. I like her style, especially in the early works. The C major Op 135 is a little too jaunty for my taste.
Chopin, Xiaogang Ye, Qigang Chen The Chinese award winner Xiaotang Tan makes an unusual coupling of competition pleasers with two living compatriots. His Chopin is limpid and athletic in appropriate measure and his local delicacies are steeped in Messiaen-isms. We should hear more of him, and them.
British piano music When a German pianist offers contemporary stuff from my own backyard that I’ve never heard before, I sit up and say thankyou. Steffen Schleiermacher plays some striking post-minimalisms by Howard Skempton and Michael Finnissy, but the ear-prickers are tributary works of contemplative depth by Richard Emsley and Laurence Crane, endlessly fascinating. >Buy this CD at ArkivMusic.com
August 14, 2011 Debussy: La Mer; Ravel: Ma Mère l’Oye The first Asian orchestra ever to win a major-label contract does itself proud in this debut disc, released as it arrives to play at the Edinburgh Festival. The Seoul Philharmonic is, so far as one can tell on first hearing, an orchestra without weak spots. The strings are lithe and full-bodied, the winds full of character and the brass rich and warm. I trust Michael Fine as producer and editor as my guarantee that no digital fakery went into this production. Under his guidance, the SPO have signed a massive 10-disc deal with DG. Myung-Whun Chung, the music director, knows French repertoire inside out from his stormy spell at the Paris Opéra in the early 1990s. He interprets the art without added sugar. Debussy’s brute egotism is clearly glimpsed behind clouds of beauty and his armchair orientalism is given real bite and pungency by Korean woodwinds. Ravel’s Mother Goose is recounted less as bedtime story than as psycho-magic realism: there’s a beast hiding in your fairy garden, go deal with it. The showcase album is capped by an account of La Valse that seems to emerge from nebulous dawn, swirling ever faster to mutual self-destruction. The performances are so distinctive, so explicitly articulated, that comparison with past legends is redundant. Whether your tastes in these obsessively over-wrought scores lie with Monteux, Beecham, Karajan or Boulez, you do need to hear Chung and his champion ensemble to find, perhaps, a different perspective.
3 chamber music CDs Emanuel Ensemble Ever heard Nikolai Kapustin’s jazzy trio for flute, cello and piano? Me neither, and it’s a cracker. There’s more here by Gaubert, Schumann, Borne, Farrenc and Piazzola from three young English players, edgy, offbeat and fun-loving. The Schumann Adagio and Allegro is a quiet corner at this party, raptly played.
French string trios The Streichtrio Berlin are accomplished players but too high in the brow for the fripperies of Jolivet, Milhaud and Francaix. A deathbed Roussel trio is the pick of an unsmiling compilation.
Brahms: complete works for violin and piano Arabella Steinbacher is faultless in German romantics; she is flawlessly recorded with pianist Robert Kulek on this Dutch label. They sound, at allegro pace, a little risk averse but those who turn to Brahms for comfort and consolation will relish this immaculate set of the three sonatas and FAE scherzo.
July 31, 2011 Klaus Tennstedt: The complete Mahler symphonies ***** Tennstedt was the most inspirational Mahler conductor of my time, a musician who interpreted by instinct and whose responses were never conventional. A nightmare for record producers, he fiercely resisted interference in studio. In concert, he took risks that few others would countenance – a 5th symphony Adagietto three minutes slower than any other, followed by the most breathless finale you could possibly imagine. This first box brings together, at long last, his studio set of Mahler symphonies with three live concert performances of 5, 6 and 7 from 1988-93, breathtaking accounts that crack open the heavens. Even when stitched together from adjacent nights’ concerts to get rid of fudged notes, these performances are beyond compare. I have written in greater detail about them in Why Mahler? The second box, containing some of Tennstedt’s best work for EMI on 14CDs, is of parallel voltage – disturbingly explosive in the opening of Beethoven’s Leonore #3 overture, irresistibly tender in Dvorak’s New World Symphony. There is abundant good cheer in Kodaly’s Hary Janos suite and something numinous in Schubert’s Great C major symphony. Strauss and Wagner are lavishly expressive and Bruckner 4 and 8 are magisterial. Tennstedt’s account of Bethoven’s Pastoral Symphony has an innocence unequalled in modern times. Most of the performances are by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, whose strings are not quite as silky as I remember; others are by the Berlin Philharmonic, who had a low opinion of the conductor but responded professionally to his instructions. There is also a serene Mahler 1 with the Chicago Symphony. This is not a record set, it’s an inexhaustible treasure trove. >Buy Klaus Tennstedt: The complete Mahler symphonies at Amazon.com >Buy Klaus Tennstedt: The great EMI recording at Amazon.com
July 24, 2011 Bach: 5 piano concertos We’re spoilt for choice this week with a breakthrough performance that reclaims Bach for the modern symphony orchestra and a Lucia performance that rivals the greatest on record. Where to start? Riccardo Chailly, for all his many achievements, may well go down in music history as the conductor who reclaimed Bach for Leipzig and modern instruments. Dismissing the academic correctness of scratchy horns and gut strings, Chailly argues that the Bach tradition is unbroken in Leipzig and more fiercely maintained than anywhere else, more valid than arid musicological theory. Working a virtuoso orchestra at high speed – his sole concession to period practice – he strips the concertos of encrusted reverence and plays them as Bach intended, as a coffeehouse family entertainment. Breathless at times but never incoherent, he cuts as much as nine minutes off the regular playing tome for one concerto without anyone feeling the loss, or imagining it could be played differently. The soloist, Ramin Bahrami, has room for other insights. Remembering that Leipzig was always a trading post, a meeting point of east and west, he hears something of his own Iranian childhood in the F minor concerto, a hint of Persian folksong and traces of Jewish klezmer. This is Bach as I have always wanted to hear him - alive, engaged, alert to the living world.
Three opera sets Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor The attraction here is Natalie Dessay driving herself mad in the thick of a Russian cast - but there is more to this package than a lonesome star in an alien constellation. Dessay has few equals in this tragedy since Joan Sutherland, her spiralling descent leaving no emotion unravaged. There is an added darkness, though, to the Mariinsky orchestra sound that makes the drama more harrowing as Valery Gergiev contrives to give the music an unheralded edge of menace. Piotr Beczala’s Edgardo is top-drawer. Must be heard. Make that a five-star.
Beethoven: Fidelio Jonas Kaufmann, Nina Stemme, with Claudio Abbado conducting – it reads like a throwback to the glory days of opera recording, and in many ways it is, taken from live Lucerne Festival performances with thrilling sound. The drawback is the German recitative, which sounds more tedious and stagy the longer it goes on. You’ll keep skipping tracks to get back to the music. Kaufmann, though, means buy it now.
Robert Saxton: The Wandering Jew The English composer has constructed an original panorama of Jewish history in 90 minutes, from Jesus to Holocaust, via Faust and Spain. The music leads from darkness to light and back again, but the stretches of narrative pall quite quickly, making this more passion play than opera and quite draggy on record. Roderick Williams, a splendid baritone, drives the title role.
July 17, 2011 Beethoven: septet, sextet There are favourite works that you can go years without hearing and then return to as if you’d heard them only the day before yesterday. This performance by the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin is almost as good as it gets. The players, members of the Berlin Philharmonic, play Beethoven without needing to look at a page or each other. So cohesive is their flow that it can sound just a little too comfortable, too domesticated. But then neither of these works has Beethoven raging at the heavens. The septet is contemporary with his first symphony, no great advance on Mozart, while the sextet – for two clarinets, two bassoons and two horns – is one of the odder combinations in his output, probably written just ahead of Fidelio and sharing some of its cadences. But the liquid beauty of these creations s unparalleled. This is Beethoven at his most convivial and relaxed, played as part of a balanced daily diet. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
3 more chamber CDs Enescu: String quartets 1, 2 The first quartet was written before the composer was 20, the second (dated 1944) is an attempt to extend the language of Fauré. Neither conforms to any current fashion except the Rumanian’s exceptional fine taste. Simon Blendis’s Schubert Ensemble play with admirable introspection.
Howard Blake: A Month in the Country Best known for his children’s cartoon score, The Snowman, Howard Blake is a serious, prolific composer with more than 600 opus numbers to his credit. The title piece is an adaptation of a Colin Firth war film for the Edinburgh String Quartet. Interlacing lyricism with sporadic rage, it exerts a fierce grip on the ear. The CD contains three other Blake pieces, ending with a discreet Snowman bonus.
Nada Ananda The Edinburgh Quartet join classical guitarist Simon Thacker, a tabla player and Indian violin for first recordings of Nigel Osborne’s Birth of Naciketa, and Shirish Korde’s title piece. Nothing too heavy – too close, in fact, to background music: the composers sell us slightly short on invention. But the playing's terrific.
July 10, 2011 Revenge of the Folksingers Folksong is a subversive art, the caustic wit of the deprived. This album subverts the varied British genres, though not by subjecting them to radical politics or wilful distortion. This is a much more subtle process on traditional instruments, altering existing arrangements to take the ear by surprise with unexpected conjunctions. The opening number, Foggy, foggy dew, exemplifies the acuity of this improvisatory approach. A song that is usually droned in smoky dens opens with a pluck of what I think is a nyckelharpa, stating the singing widower’s solitude before other instruments add dimensions, dark and light, to his lament. The Salley Gardens takes sarcastic liberties with Benjamin Britten’s famous arrangement, listing bray harp and dulcitone in its instrumentarium. The third track, Bonnie Susie Cleland, is unbearably tragic yet delivered deadpan, as if tragedy is innate to Scottish life. The performers are members of Concerto Caledonia and the voices are pitched to perfection, midway between rough trade and concert flourish. Track by track, the album exerts an ever more insistent traction. The recording was made in Aldeburgh, the morning after a concert residency. Any background noise you might hear must be the ghost of Peter Pears. Best record of the summer, so far. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three orchestral CDs The Pulitzer Project A good idea, in principle, to present three 1940s Pulitzer winners. Copland’s Appalachian Spring (1945) is in a class of its own; the other two – by William Schuman and Leo Sowerby – could be mistaken for exhortative Stalinism, were it not for the pro-America lyrics. Both are premiere recordings. Carlos Kalmar conducts Grant Park Orchestra and chorus with evident enthusiasm.
Remembering JFK A Bernstein fanfare opened the Kennedy Center in Washington in 1961; a Peter Lieberson elegy commemorates its jubilee; neither is a top-drawer attraction. Christoph Escehenbach conducts, together with the West Side Story suite and Gershwin concerto in F, soloists Tzimon Barto. A bonus CD features the Center’s 1961 inaugural concert. Strictly for souvenir buffs.
Respighi: Pines of Rome Pure listening pleasure – the dazzle of the three Roman suites, played by the Royal Philharmonic orchestra under Josep Caballé-Domenech – not a dull moment.
July 3, 2011 Benjamin Grosvenor He is not the first British man to win Wimbledon in 75 years, but it’s been almost that long since a British pianist was last signed to the limelight label, Decca. Grosvenor has been in the public eye ever since he won the piano section of BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2004, aged 11. Much matured and soon to graduate from the Royal Academy of Music, he has found a voice of his own and sounds it here for the first time on record. Most of the recital is made up of Chopin - a pity since he has least chance to shine against legends of past and present. I much enjoyed his quietude in three nocturnes and was impressed by his nonchalant virtuosity in three scherzos. Two Liszt transcriptions of Chopin folk songs add little to the sum of human wisdom; Liszt’s Reve is suggestively nebulous. The big piece on the disc is Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, which Grosvenor delivers with delicious, meditative panache and appropriately nocturnal ambiguities. But it’s all a bit low-key and the recording level is comparably discreet (complain, if you can’t hear, to producer Simon Kiln). One would have wanted a new pianist to be announced with more of a blast. I’m sure Grosvenor make much more noise later this month at the BBc Proms.
Three more piano CDs Ingolf Wunder Wunder was the Austrian pianist and audience favourite who came second – was robbed, some say – at the 2010 Chopin competition in Warsaw. He benefits from a rich, warm, rounded Deutsche Grammophon sound (producer Sid McLauchlan) and a meticulous Polish teacher, Adam Harasciewicz. The third piano sonata could hardly be more idiomatically played.
Nino Gvetadze The young Georgian contender finds an edge of fire in the Liszt B-minor sonata and a deft caress in his B-minor ballade. Definitely one to hear live, though the record is a fine introduction to her pungent style.
Maurizio Baglini The major Italian prize-winner, aged 24, plays the irresistible Busoni transcriptions of Bach organ and choral works, a wonderful interpretation of one great mind by another. Someone must have thought it was a good idea to play them in an Italian church, in December. It wasn’t. The acoustic is brittle, barely acceptable, and the brilliance of Baglini’s attack is made to sound merely aggressive. He needs to have a conversation with some superior sound engineers. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
June 27, 2011 Rossini: William Tell Four acts of uncut William Tell is an awfully long night at the opera with no prospect of the sensual and moral apotheosis that comes with Tristan or Les Troyens. So it makes sense to get to know the work first on record, and then to return to the bits you like. This concert performance from Rome, sung in French and played by the orchestra and chorus of Santa Cecilia, under the direction of Antonio Pappano is absolutely as good as it currently gets. The solo passages in the overture exemplify Pappano’s approach, less a matter of mass drama and the fate of nations as the tiny acts of individuals caught up in historic events. The Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley is commanding in role and range, with sweet support from Malin Byström and Marie-Nicole-Lemieux, and the American tenor John Osborn. You can hear some of the cast, sans Finley and Lemieux, on July 16 at the BBC Proms. There is only one drawback: Riccardo Chailly’s studio dream team of Ghiaurov, Freni, Milnes and Pavarotti on Decca are eternally unbeatable.
Three Rachmaninov CDs Concertos 1, 4, Paganini Rhpasody Simon Trcepski completes his set with the Royal Liverpool Phil and Vasily Petrenko with some razzle-dazzle playing and sombre touches, best in the Largo of the 4th concerto, but without the intellectual coherence of Stephen Hough’s recent set for Hyperion or the breath-taking freshness of Yuja Wang on DG. With Trcepski, I’m never quite sure which side of the fence he is going to finish on.
Corelli Variations &c A young Russian of the old school, Vassily Primakov has a touch that is steeped in the Rachmaninov tradition, sombre and introspective without embracing morbidity. He achieves a limpid beauty in the Corelli set and much entertainment in the preludes, though his reading of the iconic C# sharp minor feels a tad immature. No matter, this pianist will go far.
Preludes and melodies The pedigree in Alessio Bax’s recording is in the small print. His producer is Anna Barry, a regular Gergiev partner with Grammy nominations, the sound engineer is Mike Hatch and the location is a castle in mid-Wales. The recital is strong on atmosphere and contrast. The Italian-born pianist seems to have time on his hands even in prestissimi and the selection is pleasing, culminating in his own sweet arrangement of the irresistible Vocalise.
June 20, 2011 Lutoslawski, Szymanowski, A. Tchaikovsky Mariss Jansons knows most 20th century repertoire and conducts very little of it. So to hear him in a programme of two Poles and a contemporary Russian is rare and revelatory. You will never experience a more hair-raising account of Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra than this. Jansons reads it through a Shostakovich prism as an individual’s response to Stalin’s terror. Written in Warsaw in the early 1950s, the Concerto is a defining document of the mid-century and this performance, bristling with barely suppressed rage, achieves its apotheosis. The Munich audience response at the close is mutedly confused. Jansons takes less vehement possession of Szymanowski’s Song of the Night, his third symphony, over-Russianasing its choral backdrop and making its troubled intimacies a little too declamatory. Rafal Bartminski is the tenor soloist, Andreas Röhn the sensitive solo violinist. The fourth symphony by Andrei Tchaikovsky (no relation) was commissioned by Yuri Bashmet with a prominent viola part for the 60th anniversary of the end of World War Two. It is an inoffensive orchestral showpiece that draws on the Mahler-Shostakovich lexicon to make some rather obvious points. Nimrod Guez is the soloist here and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra play with fire in their fingers.
Three offbeat contemporary CDs Només les flors Hypnotic from first note to last, I have listened to this disc more than any other in the past month. A sheaf of Portuguese scores for viola and piano, written between 1925 and 1999, its opening Scherzino by Ricard Lamote de Grignon finds the compelling, meditative sadness of Fado song. The succeeding sonatas are no less gripping. The only well-known composer here is Frederic Mompou, represented by four early melodies. Ashan Pilla and Albert Gimenez are the artists. I can’t get this disc off my deck.
Winging it John Corigliano displays his knowledge of Bartók, Sondheim, John Cage and other influences in this eclectic set for solo piano, played by Ursula Oppens (with Jerome Lowenthal). I was much taken by a sonata for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart, an ethereal venture into micro-tone cultures that never quite leaves the US mainstream.
Philippe Manoury: Inharmonies The French composer, nearing 60, combines church chorales with intellectual conundra. The title piece, hauntingly sung by Laurence Equilbey’s choir Accentus, messes around with non-tempered intervals, outside the tonal scale. Clever and unexpectedly appealing.
June 13, 2011 Liszt Wild and Crazy What can we do to make Liszt cool? A roomful of label flaks nibble at their pencils and scribble down what they know about the sainted bicentenarian. Hmmm… lemme think. Franz Liszt, right? Women fainted before he played a note. He had scandalous affairs with married women and produced three children out of wedlock while earning the Pope’s blessing and entering holy orders. He was Hungarian, French and German, multi-market. Lisztomania… that’s what Heine called it. 'I gottit!' yells an intern. Liszt, Wild and Crazy. Oh, dear. A ghastly red cover with a silhouetted pianist signals that this is a marketing wheeze not a serious album. The booklet credits a Project Manager; no producer is loisted. The tracks are drawn from deep archives but the array is random, without thematic connection or reason. The heart quickens intermittently at the dazzle of a Hungarian rhapsody or fantasia from a Martha Argerich, Vladimir Horowitz or Shura Cherkassy, but the flicker from one sweetmeat to the next gives no sense of who Liszt was or where he was heading. The young Alice Sara Ott and the Lang Lang sit well among artists of pedigree but the most interesting two tracks are froma pianist the world has forgotten. Jean-Rodolphe Kars was born in India to Austrian-Jewish refugees and was building quite a career, in the 1970s when, under the influence of Olivier Messiaen, he retired from playing in 1981 and, like Liszt, entered holy orders. Kars went one further than Liszt: he joined a monastery and was never heard from again. Kars apart, the album is an embarrassment – an act of condescension by a record label that has lost its dignity.
Three contemporary British CDs Harrison Birtwistle: Night’s Black Bird The further he gets into his 70s, the closer Birtwistle draws to the language of late Stravinsky, doing so without losing a scrap of his own identity. The title work is the most recent here, and I prefer it to two earlier scores, avidly as all three are played by the Halle orchestra under Ryan Wigglesworth. That said, the rustic 1994 Cry of Anubis, with its macabre tuba solo has a gritty originality that could not be mistaken for any other composer's.
The Shadow Side: contemporary song from Scotland The soprano Irene Drummond has the perfect keening tone for these Scots laments by James MacMillan, Edward MacGuire and others, with Ian Burnside giving her close support at the piano. I especially liked John McLeod’s wildly expressive 3 Poems of Irina Ratushinskaya. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Stephen Hough: Other Love Songs The pianist, author and blogger is also a capable composer. On this disc he interpolates Other Love Songs on gay themes between two sets of Brahms’s Liebeslieder, all performed by the Prince Consort. Hough avoids Brahms's florid touch and strips his songs down mostly to sotto voce and solo. There are a few little touches of Sondheim in the night and one maiservant’s song of defiance, but the idiom is elegiac, unfailingly tender, rather wonderful. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
June 6, 2011 Gustav Allan Pettersson: Chamber Music Pettersson, the Swedish outcast, is known if at all for his Barefoot Songs an his 16 symphonies, of which the seventh gets an occasional hearing abroad. A viola player in the Stockholm Philharmonic, he managed to offend the entire music establishment and was disparaged as a ‘screechy’ and ‘lumpy’ composer. Thirty years after his death, somebody ought to apologise. His chamber music, new to me, is constantly surprising. Two of the elegies, dating from the 1930s, are early and elegiac. But once Pettersson finds his voice he leads the ear into what feels like safe pastures, and then turns them into a total nightmare. Three sonatas for two violins sound as if they are becoming progressively untuned. A 1949 concerto for violin and string quartet goes from early to late Bartók in the space of ten opening second, fast forward into Webern and into the peculiarly tortured world of a unique voice, universally misunderstood. The more one listens to these pieces, the more coherence emerges. Members of the Leipzig string quartet play with tremendous energy and a blithe disregard for conventional beauty, although when the concerto enters its Lento movemement the contrast with the preceding violence could melt a stone to sobs. A genuine original. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three Rite of Spring CDs Bergen Philharmonic/Andrew Litton The 1947 revision of Stravinsky’s masterpiece can sound over-civilised, too many notes and all in the right place. Andrew Litton overcomes a sedate opening and the Norwegian orchestra has some virtuosic players, but this does not grab me by the lapels. The companion piece is Petrushka.
BBC National Orchestra of Wales/ Thierry Fischer Original 1913 version, opposite approach. High tension in the introduction and explosive energy in the dances. Some roughness in the strings and woodwinds, but who cares? Another Diaghilev ballet, Poulenc’s Les Biches, fills the disc. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo/Yakov Kreizberg A thing of beauty and a joy forever. Kreizberg, recorded a year ago, takes the 1947 revision and achieves a striking balance of refinement and ferocity. Sensitive to a fault – and that’s hardly an adjective you’d expect to apply to the Rite of Spring – he brings out the religious reverence of ritual alongside the pagan violations. An inspired performance, the more to be regretted as one of his last. It appears in the three-CD set with Petrushka, Firebird and Pulcinella. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
May 30, 2011 Korngold, Goldschmidt, Bloch: cello concertos Why did no-one make this link before? Three cello concertos reflecting the Jewish experience in the 20th century are brought together by the rising soloist Julian Steckel, a member of Claudio Abbado’s Lucerne Festival Orchestra. The first, by E. W. Korngold, was written in Hollywood despair in 1946 by an exiled composer who was trying vainly to retrieve success in the concert hall. Written directly after his violin concerto – famously scorned by one critic as ‘more corn than gold’ - the single-movement cello concerto is evocative of one of his recent movies, Deception, though far more daring in its harmonic relations. Seldom performed, with fascinating percussion colours, it is a gentle relevation. As his centrepiece, Steckel plays Ernest Bloch’s Shelomo, dating from the First World War and rooted in Hebrew hymnody. Once heard as much as Elgar’s concerto, it has fallen out of fashion; this is an eloquent, modern reading. The prime rediscovery of this album is the 1953 concerto by Berthold Goldschmidt, premiered by William Pleeth and recorded by Yo Yo Ma but hardly ever performed in concert. Witty, lyrical and contemporary, the concerto takes its forms from Bach and its mood from the composer’s refusal to bemoan his often miserable English exile. Steckel understands the work better than any soloist I have heard. Daniel Raiskin conducts the state orchestra of the Rheinische Philharmonie. Not to be missed. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three operas you may never see Pergolesi: Olympiade It’s the Italian martyr’s tercentenary year and they’re cleaning out his attic. His last opera sounds like early Handel left out to form bubbles in the sun, . It is revived in Innsbruck with great gusto by Alessandro de Marchi and a cast topped by Rafaella Milanesi, Ann-Beth Solvang, Jeffrey Francis and the outstanding Olga Pasichnyk.
Reimann: Medea This was German Premiere of the Year in 2010 by a prolific composer who rarely gets staged abroad. It’s beautifully made, couched in post-tonal sonorities and probably very dramatic on stage. But do we need another Medea after Cherubini’s, with memories of Callas aluve on record? I’m not convinced, though Claudia Barainsky is chilling.
Andre Previn: Brief Encounter Previn’s second opera reprises a World War Two movie with stretches of music that pay homage to Copland, Bernstein, Korngold, Rosza and Britten. Elizabeth Futral and Nathan Gunn are the almost-lovers. Brief? Ten minutes feels like an eternity.
May 22, 2011 Shura Cherkassky Here’s a first: classical artists agency launches its own record label. First releases from ICA have been pick’n’mix for sound quality, but this Cologne radio retrieval is a total stunner. Listen to Cherkassky (1909-1995) in the opening of Rachmaninov’s Paganini Variations and you’ll think he’s written himself. Tempo, expression, humour, sobriety – all bear the hallmarks of an original interpreter. Each variation comes up with a fresh surprise and the Cologne orchestra, conducted by Zdenek Macal in excellent 1970 sound, hangs on for dear life. This is a different Cherki from the one we know on major labels, much more public entertainer than custodian of tradition. I kick myself that I never heard him live. Even richer than the Rachmaninov are the solo pieces – Prokofiev’s seventh sonata, recorded in 1951, friskier and markedly less morose than the prime interpreters Gilels and Richter – and Stravinsky’s three pieces from Petrushka, riotous, clangourous and much the better for the occasional fluffed note. The reckless style is closer to rock than classical, never sounding respectable. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three more ICA CDs Adrian Boult Sir Adrian’s account of Elgar’s Enigma Variations is the benchmark by which all others are measured. The speeds are organic, the mood arcadian. Heard in a 1971 Royal Albert Hall concert with the BBC, you wonder how anyone can ever do it differently again. There is also a 1976 Brahms first symphony of otherworldly authority, rounded off by an obsequious interview with the master.
Arthur Rubinstein The old man and the Brahms – 2nd piano concerto, Christoph von Dohnanyi conducting in Zurich, 1966. Because this is a live concert, the piano is less centred and distorted, the balance restored. Much to revere, especially the Andante. There are some solo add-ons of Brahms, Chopin and De Falla. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Evgeny Svetlanov Widely underrated, written off as a Soviet-era functionary, there is more subtlety to Svetlanov than to many of his successors. Here he leads a shimmering Tchaikovsky Winter Dreams with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1996 and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite with the Philharmonia in April 2002, weeks before his death, both taken from London concerts. Cracking pace, super playing (who’s that sensational BBC clarinet?). >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
May 15, 2011 Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue Commercial crossover has some well-intentioned antecedents, none nobler than the two concertos George Gershwin composed for symphony halls. The trouble with good intentions is, of course, that they usually end up falling between the cracks. Sometimes, the jazz elements in a crossover piece go all black-tie, other times the classical musicians try to play too cool. In this release, however, both sides get it just right. The pianist is an Italian ex-drummer, Stefano Bollani, the orchestra one of Germany’s oldest – the Gewandhaus of Leipzig – and the conductor another Italian, Riccardo Chailly. None of them makes any compromise and the result is sheer joy. Knowing the orchestra is playing it absolutely straight, the pianist is free to improvise in the Rhapsody. Feeling its way in a strange, transatlantic idiom, the orchestra strives for clean sound. The brass gives a Wagner blare, 7,000 miles from New Orleans, but with an exuberance that is close to the spirit of the thing. And the string solos in the suite from Porgy and Bess might almost be lifted from the Mendelssohn concerto. The rendition of Rhapsody in Blue may not be to everyone’s taste, but the Concerto in F – which Chailly finds close to Stravinsky – is the most convincing performance I have heard on record. Neither soloist nor orchestra concedes an inch of idiom and the tension keeps tightening like a Danish cop series. Inspirational casting, and fun to boot.
Three transcription CDs Kuniko plays Reich Stunning versions of three seminal works – Electric Counterpoint, Vermont Couterpoint and Six Marimbas – knocked off by a Japanese performer who sounds immune to fear. The shimmer of her textures is beyond verbal description, a kind of painting in sound. Health warning: too much marimba can get monotonous but, taken in limited doses, this is a disc to remember.
Christian Rivet: 24 ways upon the bells Works by Dowland, Britten, the Beatles and some English anonymities, played on guitars, lute and archlute by a compelling French virtuoso who has put together his programme with the sensitivity of a great chef. Here Comes the Sun sounds as if it were written for archlute by one of the makers of the King James Bible.
Barb Jungr sings Bob Dylan Jungr is an interpreter of the highest class: she takes Dylan’s words and music and makes them her own. There are some of the best classical and jazz arrangements on record since George Martin produced the Beatles, with ear-catching snatches of Pie Jesu, bell-ringing and sundry post-minimalisms.
May 8, 2011 Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde Never previously released, this 1964 Vienna Festival performance under Josef Krips features the fantasy pairing of Fritz Wunderlich and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the alternative, baritone-for-mezzo version of the score. My preference (and Mahler’s) is for mezzo, especially in the autumnal Abschied and I have never left an all-male rendition feeling fully satisfied. Fischer-Dieskau’s famous Decca recording with Bernstein and James King worked overtime to over-egg the case for the boys. This concert is altogether more organic. Wunderlich is less full-on than in his EMI studio recording with Klemperer and Christa Ludwig, a little bumptious at times though never less than beautiful. Krips maintains an unobtrusive efficiency and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra – is that Nikolaus Harnoncourt on principal cello? – are idiomatic and ultra-flexible, in decidedly less-than-ideal sound. The USP of this record, however, is the immaculate Fischer-Dieskau delivering a masterclass in singing Mahler, every syllable in perfect articulation, matching colour to the musical notes, the transitional moment in the finale handled with such ease that you rub your ears and listen twice before believing it. No fancy tricks, no audio upgrade, this is live music at high risk in a city where Mahler was not yet rehabilitated. A historic recording, in all senses of the term, indispensable as a lesson in the art of singing Mahler. Mezzos, beware.
More Mahler CDs from the archives Mahler 8th symphony I have never heard an 8th more overwhelming than Klaus Tennstedt’s January 1991 concerts at London’s South Bank, a suspension of mortal limitations from start to finish. Released here for the first time from a BBC recording, the sound of that unrepeatable concert is marginally less vivid than EMI’s 1986 Walthamstow sessions and the organ is distinctly wheezy, but the singing and playing are celestial and the tension sensational. Ignore those qualifications: this is probably the greatest Mahler 8 on record. Once you've listened, you will probably delete the word probably.
Mahler 3rd Three days after this October 1960 concert in Cologne, Dmitri Mitropoulos collapsed and died during a rehearsal of the third in Milan. For this reason, if no other, the performance compels attention. It is wondrously shaped, ethereal in the finale and signed off with the conductor’s farewell speech to the radio orchestra with which he had worked for some years. The second disc is filled out with Debussy La Mer. An indispensable retrieval. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Mahler 2nd William Steinberg was a much underrated, under-recorded Mahlerian. His tempi here in the Resurrection are textbook and the Cologne radio orchestra play well. The chorus and soloists are somewhat under-par and the sound imperfect, but the scarcity of performances in 1965 gives the occasion a seat-clenching tension. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
May 1, 2011 Beethoven: piano sonatas Anyone who opens the Pathétique sonata at such a deliberate plod is smitten with either terror or genius. Maybe both in Ingrid Fliter’s case. She has been known to abort a recital after a few bars, walk off stage and return to start again, unhappy with her opening attack. Once she gets going, she grips. The three sonatas here are among the most familiar – Pathétique, Tempest and Appassionata – but Fliter manages to give them depth of field, a fresh dimension. Where most pianist melt the adagio cantabile of the Pathétique like ice-cream in sunlight, she keeps a tight chill on sentiment and encourages the mind to explore one level down below the obvious. The furies of the other two sonatas are tempered by fragility – think bone-china tea-set in an earthquake zone. But nothing Fliter touches is predictable. She is a major artist who needs a bigger stage. Maestros should be begging her for concerto dates.
Three more solo piano CDs Liszt: B minor sonata &c Khatia Buntiashvili, a BBC New Generation Artist, takes a roundabout route to Liszt. She precedes the titanic B-minor sonata with a bon-bon of a Liebstraum and succeeds it with the diabolical Mephisto waltz and The Lugubrious Gondola. She certainly plays the hells out of the sonata, at a force that would make Horowitz blanch, and every bar that she plays makes me all the keener to hear her live. Drama, for Khatia, is all. She ends with two limpid Bach transcriptions: the perfect curtain.
Haydn: sonatas vol.2 Jean-Efflam Bavouzet brings a devil-may care attitude to Haydn, speeding at the dangerous bends and slowing to walking pace on the motorway. If Brendel or Schiff is your ideal, read no further. If not, do try the C-major sonata, no. 48. It’s happy-hour Haydn.
Wilde plays Beethoven David Wilde, 76, returns to Beethoven with a composer’s perspective. The playing of sonatas 17, 21 and 31 is slightly old-school, rich in logical progression, rewarding for those who like to think as they listen.
April 24, 2011 Brahms: A German Requiem The old thunderbox is not heard much these days, its growling summonses to duty sounding peremptorily out of step with our gentler, consensual times. Brahms goes dangerously unreconstructed in his choice of Lutheran texts - no hope here for the unbeliever – and the Requiem music is heavy even on a German scale. Paavo Järvi does his damnedest to give it liftoff and, for the most part, succeeds. The Frankfurt radio orchestra responds well to his featherlight tempi and the Swedish Radio Choir are back to sounding the best in Europe. Ludovic Tézier manages to be sonorous without sounding stentorian and, if Natalie Dessay is a little shrill, she compensates with a shimmering, unBaltic lilt. Just how well this performance is shaped and how fine it sounds will be demonstrated by a straight comparison with a newly-issued 1956 Otto Klemperer radio relay from Cologne. The soloists Elisabeth Grummer and Hermann Prey are in good voice but the orchestra drags and the chorus are ragged. Klemperer’s speeds are metronomic, lacking fluidity, in boxy studio sound. Järvi, by comparison, has devoted much thought to his interpretation, striving for contemporary relevance.
Three vocal CDs An Irish Songbook High soprano Ailish Tynan has drawn far and wide for Irish texts set to music, including Samuel Barber’s and John Cage’s James Joyce meditations and several by stiff-lipped Englishmen. The whole, however is delightful, culminating in Britten’s stunning arrangements of Thomas Moore and W. B. Yeats. Iain Burnside is a dream of an accompanist.
Hugo Wolf: Italian Songbook Mojca Erdmann and Christian Gerhaher are the singers, crisp in pitch and articulation, sometimes a little over-dramatic and, in Gerhaher’s case, overloud. Gerold Huber’s piano takes a back-seat. He should have done more of the driving.
Mojca Erdmann: Mostly Mozart The Hamburg soprano opens her yellow-label account with a non-obvious range of Mozart and chums – Salieri, Paisiello, Holzbauer and J C Bach. The voice is high, pure and powerful and there is often a twinkle of amusement. Andrea Marcon conducts La Cetra baroque orchestra of Basle.
April 17, 2011 Ida Haendel plays Khachaturian and Bartók The great violinist, now in her mid-80s, made the Sibelius and Walton concertos her trademark pieces. Khachaturian seems somehow beneath her dignity and Bartok’s second concerto too abrasive for her late-romantic temperament. Well, think again. These 1960s radio performances from Stuttgart with a house orchestra under the capable Hans Müller-Kray demonstrate how a great artist takes ownership of a piece of music and reconceives it in her own image. The overlong, overly realistic first movement of the Khachturian passes in a flash of virtuosic fireworks, yielding to a sentimental andante that stops just short of schmaltz and a finale that she carries off like a tightrope walker who refuses to recognise that the rope beneath her is made of very thin material. In Bartók, Haendel finds constant beauty. She makes the opening melody singable and the whole of this 1939 creation coherent with anxiety and regret. At the edge of tonality, her intonation offers promise of resolution. Less anguished than Menuhin, less gymnastic than present-day performers, she cuts right to the heart of the work. This is demonstration-quality playing, unmissable for any lover of the violin.
Three offbeat orchestral CDs Josef Suk: Fairy Tale Suk wrote a mighty Asrael symphony while mourning his wife, Otilie, and her father, Anton Dvorak. The rest of his music is seldom played by non-Czechs so to hear a US orchestra give a fresh and unaffected account of three tone poems is like seeing a field of rain-soaked daffodils in sunlight. Buffalo Philharmonic concertmaster Michael Ludwig takes the solos in a gorgeous account of the G-minor Fantasy. The Fairy Tale is a bit folksy for my taste but the concluding Fantasy Schero finds Suk back at his best. Jo-Ann Falletta conducts with terrific sweep and drama.
Hans Gal: 1st symphony The Viennese composer, exiled to Scotland in 1938, wrote in a pre-modern style that looked anachronistic while still wet on the page. Paired here with Schubert’s 6th, his first symphony add little to the sum of human progress. The Northern Sinfonia play both symphonies with great vim under Thomas Zehetmair’s baton, though Gal's has yet to be tested before a live audience.
Alberto Ginastera: Popol Vuh It takes a good composer to conjure up as furious a storm as the opening of this Argentine suite and a great orchestra, the LSO, to bring it off. Gisèle Ben Dir delivers a cracking tempo and Michael Fine at Abbey Road produces rounded, refined sound. The other folk-national pieces here are played at lower voltage by the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Popol Vuh, though, is the one I want to hear live.
April 3, 2011 Jennifer Pike Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to see young talent overcome early setbacks and plant its feet firmly on the classical stage. Jennifer Pike was named BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2002 at the age of 12 with a geeky account of the Mendelssohn violin concerto. After the flashbulbs faded, she was caught between the twin pincers of music industry exploitation and adolescent normality. Five years ago, she lost the use of her on-loan Gofriller when the owner needed to sell. She found another to borrow and is trying to raise funds to buy it. Good things, though, come to those who wait. After several missteps she found the right agent and record label, relaunching on family-owned Chandos. The first results are confident and impressive. In the three great French sonatas, accompanied by the experienced Martin Roscoe, she sounds like an artist who knows exactly who she is and where she’s heading. Saving the virtuoso Franck to last, she opens with the ambiguous Debussy – fiddle was never his favourite – and teases tortured mysteries out of the late wartime meditation. Ravel she treats with sultry style and, reaching César Franck, resists temptations of cheap showmanship to deliver an interpretation of quiet substance. This is a mature artist making her statement, nothing flash but warmly satisfying. She sounds set for the long haul.
Two mature piano CDs Daniel Barenboim Barenboim’s new record deal takes him slightly off his track. Never a Chopin specialist, his two performances here avoid idiomatic reverence. In the concertos, partnered by his own Berlin orchestra and conducted by the ascendant Andris Nelsons, Barenboim looks around like a first-time tourist in Poland and takes in the atmosphere without emotional investment. Given that neither concerto is a blinding masterpiece, the approach pays dividends in revealed detail and dialogue. The solo pieces at a Warsaw recital are less comfortable. Astonishing with his reflective tricks of rubato in the B-minor sonata, Barenboim lapses in the waltzes a little too much into Arthur Rubinstein old school, an affectionate anachronism, not quite the full-on explorer.
Nelson Freire Brazil’s most beloved classical musician has devoted much of his life to Chopin and Liszt. In the latter’s bicentennial year, he records a selection of travel snaps that might work better in the recital hall. On record, Liszt’s peregrinations make you want the whole tour; flicker shots are not enough. Freire is at his most commanding when he plays the full set of Consolations to close the album with a compassion that could melt stone.
April 3, 2011 Rossini arias I think I have found a cure for my generalised Rossini aversion, my tendency to dismiss him as a master trill-maker with little to offer the intellect or the emotions. The cure is called Julia Lezhneva and the seven arias she dispenses on this modest disc have hardly been off my playing deck all week. Lezhnova, new to me, comes from a Russian family of geophysicists and has been finishing her studies in Cardiff with tenor Dennis O’Neill. She won the first Paris international Opera Competition six months ago, does not yet have a working website and , on her debut disc at 21, seems to be heading for the stratosphere. The first thing that strikes me about her fireworks is the complete lack of fuss. ‘Tanti affetti’ from La Donna del lago is delivered with a rare integrity that makes the glitter part of the general texture rather than an applause magnet. The voice sounds mature and fully formed. Often as not in the Cenerentola arias one is reminded more of Mozart style than Italian excess. Marc Minkowski directs the Sinfonia Varsovia with a very light touch and the choir of Warsaw Chamber Opera do the necessary. But it’s Lezhneva that keeps the ear glued to the speakers, demanding more. She’ll go far.
Three song CDs Wilhelm Kienzl, vol 1. A contemporary of Mahler and Strauss though, by his own admission, a small talent, Kienzel had a transient hit with an opera Der Evangelimann, but for the most part just enjoys writing songs for his friends. The idiom seldom advances beyond early Brahms but the manner is unfailingly agreeable and the singing here by Christiane Libor, Carsten Süss and Jochen Kupfer, with producer Stacey Bartsch at the piano, is fine and often fun. Expect no ironies or depth, but the song’s the thing and the sound’s exemplary. I particularly liked An die Nacht (track 21).
Loewe and Schumann Hand on heart, how many songs can you name by Carl Loewe? Not a big hitter in his own right of posterity but paired with Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis he provides context and depth of field to the more substantial work. One can hear the German Lied taking its first big strides after Schubert in this intelligent selection. Henk Nevin (baritone) is accompanied by Hans Eijsackers.
Schubert: Die schöne Müullerin The baritone Christopher Maltman, last seen in the buff in Kasper Holten’s new film, Juan gives a delicate account of the miller’s girl attractions, sensitively shaped by Graham Johnson at the piano and without a cough in the live audience (thanks to producer Jeremy Hayes). Not sure about the brown check suit in the cover shot. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
March 27, 2011 Beethoven: piano concertos 4, 5 |
By Norman Lebrecht
