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| CDs of the Week
 By Norman Lebrecht
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May 7, 2008
Rolando Villazon: Cielo e Mar
(DG)
**
There were some worrying moments in a private recital that the Mexican tenor gave last week in the Covent Garden crush bar, between rehearsals for Verdi’s Don Carlo. After five months of unscheduled sabbatical and all sorts of health rumours, Villazon sounded in richer voice at lunchtime with a house pianist than he does here in studio with a Milan orchestra and a tame conductor, Daniele Callegari, who indulges every tenor vanity. The record is a clutch of arias from mostly forgotten operas by Ponchielli, Cilea, Mercadante, Boito, Pietri and Gomes. Deservedly forgotten, on the whole, though Villazon calls it ‘buried treasure’ - and that’s another worry. Why is the world’s best young Verdi tenor wasting his voice on Andrea Bocelli-type bling? The title song, Heaven and Sea, has numinous moments but the rest of the set covers an emotional lexicon from roughly A to B. Only when Villazon stretches to Verdi’s Luisa Miller in two closing tracks does he stand tall above the trash and demonstrate what he might become, if nerve and body stay strong – the Don Carlo to die for, the heir to Domingo.
>Buy this CD at amazon.co.uk
April 30, 2008
Vaughan Williams on record
EMI are bringing out the complete works in a 30-CD Collectors Edition (selling on amazon.co.uk for a giveaway £34.99), while Warner offer the nine symphonies with some tempters – Tallis Fantasia, Lark Ascending, Job – in a 6-CD box (around £16.50). Like all compendia, these are mixed bags. Andrew Davis, Warner’s conductor, is too safe for my taste in the middle symphonies but good with the choral waves of the Sea and Antarctic. Vernon Handley on EMI is fervent and atmospheric in the fourth and fifth symphonies, but the Liverpool orchestra is not at its peak. Boult’s recording of Dona nobis pacem, on the other hand, is unsurpassed and the song cycles by Thomas Allen and Robert Tear, with Rattle conducting, are eternal treasures. EMI’s is certainly the box to live with.
If I were packing a VW hamper for a picnic on Box Hill, it would contain Barbirolli’s accounts of Greensleeves, Tallis Fantasia and 8th symphony; Boult in the 3rd and 9th; Haitink in the 7th (all on EMI); and a revelatory 4th and 6th from the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Dmitri Mitropolous and Leopold Stokowski (Sony).
The Nash Ensemble deliver a gorgeous double-disc of chamber music on Hyperion (£9.98) and the Halle have issued an outstanding Mark Elder performance of The Wasps (12.98). No VW set would pass muster without songs. I prefer the Housman group, On Wenlock Edge, in the piano and string quartet version, which allows the singer to remain conversational. Ian Patridge does Wenlock with rare conviction, along with the late Blake Songs for voice and oboe (in EMI Collector’s box), an essential for every bedside table.
>Buy this CD at amazon.co.uk
April 23, 2008
Haydn: Symphonies 22 and 49; Divertimenti
Sinfonia Classica, Gernot Süssmuth
(Landor Records)
***
There is going to be a glut of Haydn next year, the composer’s bicentennial, and this is a nice warm-up from a new band based in North Devon, a rural area starved of arts funding by metropolitan pen-pushers. Made up of ex-members of the European Union Chamber Orchestra and led by a violinist from a Berlin string quartet, the Sinfonia Classica play tight and light, just right for the Esterhazy country atmosphere where Haydn worked and wrote. Mixing two symphonies, The Philosopher and La Passione, with a pair of dancing divertimenti eliminates the risk of over-seriousness that attends symphonic form, and some of the solo work is filigree. Where this debut loses focus, though, is in La Passione, which ought to surge with ardour but succumbs to timid tempi, the kind of wooing you’d expect from a guy who hadn’t got lucky in a while. A tough producer would have ordered another take, but Landor is a start-up label for new artists and no producer is named. Memo to Landor: put an extra pair of ears behind the glass wall.
>Buy this CD at amazon.co.uk
April 16, 2008
Mozart: piano concertos 12 and 24
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Maurizio Pollini
(DG)
***
At the risk of being exposed as a lobbyist for the conductors’ union, I am struggling to live with a rush of star concertos that have been made without the benefit of baton. Last month there was Kennedy rolling his own Beethoven while slagging off maestros in the press, next was Piotr Anderszewski and now comes the venerable Pollini, who ought to know better. The Italian, 66, once played Mozart in Vienna under Karl Böhm and Claudio Abbado, discs that live in the ear long after they got lost on my shelves. Granted, the Vienna Phil does not need a conductor to play Mozart, awake or in its sleep, nor is it hard for a soloist to give the nod for tempo shifts. But what is missing in these performances is the snap and crackle that comes from a stand-up leader who challenges the band to take risks. Hear it for yourself. In the Larghetto of the C minor concerto Pollini, opening with a solo passage, imposes enough of himself to raise the movement off the metronome mark and make it flexible. The rest is mostly mush.
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April 9, 2008
Mahler: Sixth Symphony
London Symphony Orchestra, Valery Gergiev
(LSO Live)
***
Gergiev’s debut disc with the LSO is also his first Mahler recording. It’s a high-risk venture. Any conductor broaching the sixth symphony in London begs comparison with the incandescent Klaus Tennstedt in 1993 and with a more controlled, though profoundly moving Mariss Jansons on an LSO release in 2002. So how does Gergiev rate? He’s high energy, as you’d expect, and big on contrast – very satisfying in the shift from full industrial roar to the tinkling of cowbells. The supercharged orchestra make a stunning noise and the accuracy is pinpoint. Something, though, is missing. It could be that the hard-driven opening lacks enough of the ominous, or that too many solo effects are singled out for listener appreciation, but the performance as a whole lacks philosophy. At no point does Gergiev impart Mahler’s battle with the Sixth, his attempt to balance midlife success with dark forebodings – an inner war so fierce he could not decide on premiere night which order the movements should play. This is an impressive concert. An interpretation awaits.
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April 2, 2008
Tan Dun, Takemitsu, Hayashi
Moscow Soloists, Yuri Bashmet
(Onyx)
****
There are few pleasures greater than being swept away by music you didn’t expect to like. Tan Dun, a Chinese émigré, drifted from his early concert moorings to commercial Hollywood tracks, while the Messiaen-like whimsy of the late Toru Takemitsu never kept me awake for long. Here, though, both fire on fresh cylinders. Tan’s concerto for pipa and string orchestra is a fusion of plangent east and minimalist west with episodes that veer from marshmallow emotion to culture-clash bemusement. At one point, mid-section, the whole ensemble stops and retunes to the pipa’s earthy pitch. Listen, too, for the Tibetan bells. Takemitsu opens with a morose elegy for the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, followed by captivating settings of three arthouse movie scores. Yuri Bashmet leads the band with the fastidious curiosity of a Michelin musical gourmet; Wu Man plays a mean pipa. The filler on disc is a viola concerto from the Japanese film composer Hikaru Hayashi, outclassed in this company.
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March 26, 2008
Reich: Daniel Variations
(Nonesuch)
****
Contemplating a work in memory of Daniel Pearl who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan while researching links to al-Qaeda, Reich was struck by the young journalist’s video affirmation: ‘My name is Daniel Pearl.’ These words, crisscrossed with dark verses from the biblical Book of Daniel, set the frame for this disturbing and hypnotic creation, premiered at the Barbican in October 2006. It is not typical Reich by any means. The tiny shifts of process have given way to piano-pounded currents of rage and fear. The impression is a cry for pity and reason in a world turned cruel. Pearl, an amateur violinist and eclectic record collector, told a friend, ’I sure hope Gabriel likes my music, when the day is done.’ It would take a heartless angel indeed who resisted this plaintive yet uplifting tribute. The filler on disc is a more traditional dance piece of Reich’s, Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings.
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March 5, 2008
Hilary Hahn, Swedish Radio SO, Esa-Pekka Salonen
(DG)
*****
Arnold Schoenberg’s violin concerto is so resistant to easy listening that Jascha Heifetz turned it down after brisk perusal and the Israel Philharmonic was hit by a subscriber walkout when they put it on in 1971. It still grates the ear more than ingratiating it, even in a performance as rare and winning as Hilary Hahn’s, full of youthful mood swings and romantic delusions. The middle movement comes over sensual and sumptuous, almost neo-tonal, and if the outer themes are angry – well, this was the 1930s and Schoenberg was a penniless exile in Hollywood. The Sibelius concerto, popularised by Heifetz around that time, has been a winner ever since with women soloists – Ginette Neveu, Ida Haendel, Viktoria Mullova, Tasmin Little. It sounds facile by comparison with the Schoenberg, for all the heat of Hahn’s advocacy. Her tone has such enaging depth you wonder at times if she’s playing viola and her virtuosity is agreeably unflashy. I warmed to her eloquence more on second hearing, and more still on third. This is definitely a record to live with.
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February 27, 2008
London Bridge Ensemble
(Dutton Epoch)
***
The group’s name, irresistible at first sight, does not make clear whether it plays above the River Thames or underneath the arches. Close observation reveals a misnomer. The name belongs to Frank Bridge (1879-1941), teacher of Benjamin Britten and a force for good in British music, undeservedly neglected. If played at all these days, Bridge is known for his great orchestral suite The Sea and his late string quartets. The two Phantasies performed here, for piano trio (1907) and quartet (1910), have a touch of the palm court about them, perfect for teatime at a riverside hotel. But listen again and there is a hint of foreboding, a darkness amid the lyricism, a distinctly individual voice. The Phantasies are separated on this disc by drawing-room songs of lesser interest, though I cannot remember Heinrich Heine being set in English by another composer - and very badly, to boot. Daniel Tong, Benjamin Nabarro, Kate Gould and Tom Dunn are the ensemble’s members, and their sessions were recorded at St Paul’s School, where Gustav Holst taught. This is music of London, by London, for London.
February 20, 2008
Michael Rabin
Plays Wieniawski, Paganini, Saint-Saens
(Medici Arts)
****
Michael Rabin died in 1972 at the age of 35 after a run of dodgy performances and whispers of drug abuse. There is a scholarly biography in the works which may show that he was more abused than abuser ˆ a victim of vicious managers and famous rivals. Hearing these recaptured sessions shows how great a talent was lost with his mysterious death, officially from a fall in his New York apartment. Rabin plays the second Wieniewaski concerto with sweet lack of sentiment and the first Paganini with a nonchalant flamboyance. He does not try to make more of these showpieces than the little they are worth, yet beyond the razzle-dazzle one senses a fastidious intelligence and a dimension of the ridiculous. The beauty of his tone is what catches you at the base of the throat. He plays a Guarnerius del Jesu that once belonged to Jan Kubelik and he makes it sing like a Verdi tenor. There are clips of him to be seen on YouTube in egregious sound but this the real thing, mostly made at Abbey Road in 1960.
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February 13, 2008
J S Bach: six cello suites
Anne Gastinel/ Jean-Guichen Queyras
(naïve/harmonia mundi)
***/***
 
I sometimes think Bach must have been French. No-one who grew up with recordings of these suites by Fournier, Tortelier and Gendron can erase from mind the elegance of their phrasing and exquisite accentuation. To hear two fine French cellists of a new generation is an unexpected, almost unmitigated pleasure. Gastinel takes the more languorous approach, turning gigue into smoochy clinch and sarabande into something less than frenetic. There is no denying the voluptuousness of her tone; the only qualm concerns its persistence. Queyras, a former soloist with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, takes his cue from Pierre Boulez and treats Bach with clinical modernity, eschewing emotions for white clarity and clean lines. He is most severe and persuasive in the fourth suite, where each dance gets its distinctive character, though at the end the ear cries out for a cuddle. Truth in Bach lies halfway between these two. Ideally, you'd want to hear them live and together.
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February 6, 2008
Janacek: The Excursions of Mr Broucek
BBC SO, Jiri Belohlavek (cond.)
(DG)
***
Broucek is the least recorded of Janacek’s prime operas, omitted from Charles Mackerras’s Vienna cycle on Decca and available only on two Czech-made sets. Since operas are no longer cast in heaven and captured in studio, this is a coughless transfer of a live Barbican concert last year. Under its Czech chief conductor, the BBC Symphony Orchestra has Janacek’s rhythms and idioms nicely under its fingertips and the singing line-up is affecting and impressive, outstandingly so in Jan Vacik as the drunken Broucek and Maria Haan as his daughter. The story is a silly time-travel comedy, complicated by the involvement of about 12 librettists and unclarified by the supposedly ‘new’ edition performed here. On stage, Broucek is enlivened by comic gesture. Here, unless, your Czech is more fluent than mine, the jokes fall flat and it’s a long, long listen. Bagpipes can be heard in a 15th century battle scene; the soloist (a Scot?) is unnamed. DG’s booklet is less informative on the opera than Wikipedia.
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January 30, 2008
JS Bach: The Arts of the Fugue
Pierre Laurent Aimard
(DG)
**
The French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard will loom large in our lives in the coming year as director of the South Bank’s Messiaen festival and artistic director at Aldeburgh, in succession to Thomas Ades. I wish I could warm more to this, his launch project. Aimard is a resourceful and dedicated pioneer of new music who brings a contemporary dimension to the classics he performs. Not for him the anorexic harpsichords of the 18th century. He plays Bach on a full-blooded concert grand and delivers a rhythmic vitality that is often found wanting in nit-picking ‘authentic’ accounts. Working from a facsimile of Bach’s original manuscript he applies what he describes as ‘alchemical’ insights to the score. That’s a daring claim to make and its credibility runs out somewhere around the eighth Contrapunctus when Aimard starts to weary the ear with sameness of weight and lack of colour. Like Glenn Gould, he stops dead in mid-fugue at the last note Bach wrote. Unlike Gould, he adds little to the sum of musical experience.
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January 9, 2008
Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde
Ning Liang, Warren Mok, Singapore SO
(BIS)
****
This is a Mahler world premiere - The Song of the Earth, sung in the ‘original’ Chinese. Mahler lit upon Tang Dynasty poets during the summer of 1907 while suffering his daughter’s death and the collapse of his own health. The six poems he chose from Hans Bethge’s Chinese Flute were German translations made from an 1890s French edition by Marquis Saint-Denys and Judith Gauthier, Wagner’s last love. These are so far removed from the scrolls of Li Bai and Wang Wei that one source has proved impossible to trace. Daniel Ng, a Hong Kong businessman who used to own the McDonalds concession, has spent the past 20 years creating a performing edition in modern Chinese and the results are intriguing if not altogether convincing. Most of the lines appear to scan and if some Mandarin consonants jar the ear, they sound no worse than Mozart does in English. Singing and playing are first-rate, but the Ewig, ewig ending just won’t work in Chinese – so much so that this disc offers an alternative German finale.
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December 19, 2007
Bach Magnificat; Handel Dixit Dominus
Le concert d’Astree, Emanuelle Haim
(Virgin)
****
No Christmas release better illustrates the evolution of musical tastes in the 21st century than this deft French blend of masterly devotions. Gone are the belted declamations of opera divas and the tweeted supplications of early-music specialists. In their place comes a contemplative alliance of widely varied artists brought together by Emmanuelle Haim’s enlightened diversity. Check out Suscepit Israel in Bach’s Magnificat for a designer fusion of big-house soprano Natalie Dessay, baroque mezzo Karine Deshayes and castrato imitator Philippe Jarousky - an object lesson in classical multiculturalism with very few flaws except in one male’s intonation. Handel’s Dixit, in his early Italianate style, offers fewer stylistic contrasts, inviting the soloists to weave in and out of a fine-tuned, never too-loud chorus until all are united in Gloria Patri. The antidote to maestro-portrait superstore vanities, this is organic, free-range music making that feels natural, intimate and magnificently self-restrained.
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December 12, 2007
Philip Glass/Leonard Cohen: Book of Longing
(Orange Mountain Music)
*
Clocking the nostalgia raves for five old Buena Vistas from Havana, someone came up with the bright idea of twinning the professional miserablist Leonard Cohen with monotonous Philip Glass to plumb the depths of Seventies mediocrity. The collaboration, originating this summer in Toronto, drew middle-aged crowds in flares and tank-tops to London’s Barbican and New York’s Lincoln Center before being finally submitted for critical appraisal.
Cohen wrote the words for this album and supplied some drawings of appropriate naivety, with an emphasis on women’s bottoms. In the opening stanza, he rhymes ‘shot’ with ‘God’, betraying a cloth ear for consonantal character. An occasional Cummings-like aphorism lights up his stream of banalities without dispelling the pessimistic gloom. Glass’s repetitive, mechanical music affords no uplift or surprise. If ten thousand metronomes had been set to work on this project, one of them could surely have composed a Philip Glass score. Even the Seventies can’t have been this hopeless.
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December 5, 2007
Janacek/Haas: string quartets
Pavel Haas Quartet
(Supraphon)
****
Based in Prague and newly installed as BBC New Generation Artists, the Pavel Haas Quartet take their name from a star pupil of Leos Janacek’s who was sent to Terezin in 1941 and killed at Auschwitz. This pairing of the old master’s love-drenched first string quartet with two intense scores by his unfortunate protege is imaginative in more ways than the obvious. Janacek’s late quartet is filled with yearnings for his improbable muse, a plump Jewish housewife, Kamila Stoesslova. Haas’s one-movement first quartet is explicitly Judaic, melancholic at first before swelling into affectionate melodic reminiscences. His third quartet, dated 1938, is a technical marvel, full of confidence and clever intertwinings of Jewish and Czech themes, oblivious to the imminent Munich betrayal and the disaster that lies ahead. The young Prague ensemble address this music on merit, without a hint of sentimental retrospect. The sheer brio of their playing invests all three works with such vigour and narrative momentum that they sound like a first performance, fresh off the page.
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November 21, 2007
Bridges
Kuss Quartet
(Sony)
****
The connections on this disc are so far stretched that an intercity train would be upended by the third track and the innocent ear is left wondering what hit it. First comes a 16th century dirge by Orlando di Lasso then, without pause, a eulogy by the contemporary Hungarian aphorist Gyorgy Ligeti. The Kuss, based in Berlin, confine themselves to medieval and modern works half a millennium apart. After the always-fragmentary Kurtag it’s Lasso again, then Stravinsky, more Lasso, the epigrammatic Arcadiana by Thomas Ades and a wail of Dowland’s to finish. The oddest thing is, how well it works. Not just as music, though some of the playing is superb, but as an intellectual commentary on an affinity between epochs. Kurtag has never sounded so melodious as he does in proximity to Lasso; and Stravinsky, in his three microscopic pieces for string quartet, seems a lot closer to 21st century momentum than Ades does in his sepia-tinged nostalgia for faded Albion. As for the Dowland, it’s a two-handkerchief must-hear.
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November 14, 2007
Britannia
Atlanta SO, Donald Runnicles
(Telarc)
****
Scotland’s premier conductor, Runnicles is switching jobs from San Francisco Opera to the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, taking up the vacancy at the BBC Scottish orchestra along the way. His drop-by tribute to Gordon Brown-style nationhood combines a pair of hackneyed Elgar marches with Britten’s underplayed Sinfonia da Requiem and three recent works of varied aural challenge.
Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Three Screaming Popes (after Francis Bacon) is a 15-minute masterpiece of post-modern angst, richly textured and devilishly hard to balance. Peter Maxwell Davies’s An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise, is a one-way daytrip with rabbit traps for unwary hikers. James MacMillan’s Britannia is a tour d’horizons, taking in patriot tunes from all four nations, pompish and circumstantial in parts but not without hints of social disaster.
The interpretations are a mite short of revelation, especially in the mists of Britten’s sorrow, but the Atlanta playing is both powered and versatile and Runnicles’ programming is faultlessly conceived. This is as fine a portrait of modern Britain in music as you will come across in a month of Sunday roasts.
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October 31, 2007
Brahms: double concerto and clarinet quintet
Renaud and Gautier Capucon
(Virgin)
****
This is a disc of two halves. The first is a perfectly decent performance of the Brahms double concerto by the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra with the busy French brothers Capucon on violin and cello. The solo instruments are placed too far forward – not so much in your ear as in your face – and the tempi are metronomic, lacking any element of surprise. Conductor Myung Whun-Chung never extinguishes the seatbelt sign on this flight.
No such precautions, though, in the elegiac quintet where clarinettist Paul Meyer asserts an insouciance that takes both speed and dynamics to unexpected extremes and the texture of the music to the very brink of otherworldliness. The Capucons play with baroque intricacy and the extra violinist, Aki Sauliere, and viola Beatrice Muthelet sound as if they have been playing in this group all their lives. This is Brahms with an Yves Montand accent and a lightness that dispels Brahmsian gravitas.
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October 24, 2007
Mahler: 10th symphony adagio; Shostakovich 14th symphony
Kremerata Baltica, Gidon Kremer
(ECM)
****
Gustav Mahler used to write exposed solo passages in his symphonies for his brother-in-law Arnold Rose, who was concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic. That allows some historic justification for this modern arrangement for soloist and string ensemble of the one finished movement of his final symphony. Still, few would expect anyone to better Mahler at orchestration so it comes as a shock to hear just how well this version works. Kremer’s violin acts as a microscope staring into the scurrying microbes of the composer’s final thoughts, the ensemble adding reflection and analysis in a way that makes us rethink the movement almost from first principles.
Dmitri Shostakovich, the Soviet chronicler who drew so much of his technique from Mahler, meant the 14th symphony to be his last and scaled it down to chamber size, with vocal parts for soprano and bass. The darkness is deeper than Mahler’s, relieved by random chords of gallows humour and redeemed at the close by mortal defiance. An amazing human testament.
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October 17, 2007
Saint-Saens: piano concertos 2 and 5
Jean-Yves Thibaudet, OSR, Charles Dutoit
(Decca)
****
Too gifted for his own good in maths, philosophy and natural sciences, Saint-Saens (1835-1921) wrote orchestral music with such ease that most of it has been deservedly forgotten. Of five piano concertos, only the second gained concert posterity, thanks in the main to a lapel-gripping solo introduction which appealed to egotistical pianists because it allowed them, rather than the conductor, to dictate tempo and structure. The concerto is full of whimsical objects, like a rich bouillabaisse, and although top heavy in an overlong first movement, sustains the appetite until the bowl is bare. More piquant is the Mediterranean plat du jour, the so-called ‘Egyptian’ fifth concerto, a piece of 1896 cultural imperialism that steals souk tunes and transposes them amusingly to western modalities. Thibaudet plays with appropriately skittish superficiality, adding gravitas where required in the filler piece, Cesar Franck’s symphonic variations for piano and orchestra. The flaw in the meal is chef Dutoit and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, a former Michelin-starred band now reduced to scraggy sound.
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October 10, 2007
Chopin: complete preludes
Rafal Blechacz, piano
(DG)
****
Blechacz won the Chopin International Competition in Warsaw in 2005, the first Pole to do so in three decades (Krystian Zimerman was the last). He was 20 at the time and, such is the momentum of the antediluvian music industry, it has taken another two years to get him on record. Still, the wait has been worthwhile. Blechacz, raised and trained in provincial towns, picks his way ruminatively through the preludes without much bravura. Instead, he seeks the inner voice of the A minor and E minor preludes, drawing the listener beneath the glistening surface and towards a heart of unsuspected darkness. In the agitated 1st and 8th preludes, he is fast but never flash and in the cantabile 21st he is unaffectedly lyrical. There is something authentically Polish in his prudent, bucolic understatements. What I don’t yet sense is a fully-fledged individuality – at least until Blechacz plays two bonus Nocturnes of breathtakingly slow and soft audacity. This is a real artist in the making.
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October 3, 2007
Nicola Benedetti: Vaughan Williams, Tavener
LPO, Andrew Litton (cond.)
(DG)
*
Setting aside the hype of her million-pound record deal, the 19 year-old Nicola Benedetti plays the fiddle fetchingly enough to arouse the creative impulses of that ascetic spiritualist Sir John Tavener, a composer who once held an audience spellbound (it was said) through a seven-hour all-night work at St Paul’s Cathedral. His new work, premiered last week at the South Bank and instantly on sale, is a meditation on a 14th century Hindu saint Lalla Yogishwari who liked to shed her clothes and dance naked beneath the all-forgiving heavens. Nothing remotely so interesting occurs in this rambling 34-minute recording; in fact, for much of the time nothing musically revealing happens at all as Sir John and his muse wind their way around bits of ragas and a tediously reiterated snippet of the Bruch concerto. Benedetti plays with enough vibrato to crack a bank vault and an occasionally edgy tone. Maybe she lost patience before I did. In Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending she displays no discernible personality, taking a sealed-window coach tour of the English countryside.
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September 26, 2007
Shostakovich: works for piano and orchestra
Martha Argerich and friends
(EMI)
*****
It’s not so much the notes she plays as the spaces between that makes this the most compelling record of Shostakovich piano music by anyone outside the composer’s inner circle. What Martha Argerich performs in music is akin to alchemy. She recasts a work metaphysically in different matter. Where others lurch into Soviet-era texts with heavy irony and an excess of sentiment, she treats the composer as if he were a fictional character, a figment of her imagination. In these tapes from the 2006 Lugano festival, she recasts the first concerto as stand-up comedy in the face of Stalinist terror, trading punchlines, bang for blow, with star trumpeter Sergei Nakariakov. The little concertino for two pianos becomes a secret dialogue of dissidence with the tremulous Lilya Zilberstein, while the mid-war quintet for piano and strings evokes the struggle of one voice to be heard amid existential mayhem. This is less a matter of interpretation than creative reinvention – music making on an altogether different plane.
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September 19, 2007
The Elfin Knight
Joel Frederiksen
(Harmonia Mundi)
*****
English ballads of the 16th and 17th centurues are usually rendered by reedy Oxonians to a painful plucking of lutes. Frederiksen, an American bass-baritone with a Munich ensemble, overturns all such clichés with this radical reworking of ancient pops from archival sources. Frederiksen, Minnesota and Michigan trained, delivers Greensleeves raunchily and at speed, reinterpreting it as a failed roadside transcation between prostitute and client. Two contrasting versions are given of Scarborough Fair and a pair of John Dowland glooms are freshened up with deft changes of mood and insturmentation. Bawdy London street ballads mingle with courtly laments; once you’ve heard the one about the king stripping his daughter naked to all eyes to see if she has been sleeping around while he was away in Spain you will never again believe in the myth of courtly love. What Frederiksen does is not so much song recital as musical storytelling, a forgotten fireside art. How rare to find a record that is both historically authentic and truly original.
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September 12, 2007
Corigliano: The Red Violin concerto, violin sonata
Joshua Bell, Baltimore SO; Jeremy Denk (piano)
(Sony-BMG)
**
The sound of a dead horse being flogged has never yielded a hit record. This release of a concerto cobbled together from soundtrack of one of the wettest movies ever made about music is no exception.
The Red Violin (1998) followed a valuable fiddle through the hands of collectors across three centuries, down to a modern auction where the latest owner tries to trace its provenance.
It’s the stuff of daytime TV at its dreariest and the film made little impact, other than winning John Corigliano an Oscar for the soundtrack, which he proceed to convert into the present concerto for Joshua Bell with plenty of good tunes and some virtuoso moments but no sense of the piece being written for purpose.
Too episodic to command prolonged attention, the narrative becomes actively dysfunctional when conductor Marin Alsop fails to control the percussive crashes of the opening section, leaving it horribly imbalanced. A pity, really, since Corigliano writes so well for orchestra in his two symphonies and for violin in his unpretentious, early sonata that Bell plays here as if it were Brahms meeting Samuel Barber for tea – one melodic confection sweeter than the next, the saving grace of a misfired release.
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August 30, 2007
Strauss: Enoch Arden
Emanuel Ax (piano), Patrick Stewart (speaker)
(Sony-BMG)
***
Enoch Arden was a rare miscalculation by Richard Strauss. He had the idea of creating a melodrama suitable for his wife to perform in concert recital and for the bourgeoisie to put on of an amateur evening in their drawing rooms.
The piece consists of piano interludes worked around a recitation of Lord
Tennyson's dramatic poem about two lads and a girl in a Scottish fishing
village. Philip loves Annie, who marries orphan Enoch, who gets lost at sea.
Philip marries desolate Annie, Enoch returns, sees them happy, disappears.
Strauss gives each character a credible leitmotiv, but there is not enough
in the tale to sustain a musical drama. Ax makes the most of thin gruel and
Star-Trek actor Patrick Stewart recites with classical elegance; it's all
bravely done and rather beautiful but the piece palls fatally on second
listening. The filler is a nice set of early Strauss piano pieces.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
August 26, 2007
Bartok piano music (Brilliant Classics, 2-CD)
Zoltan Kocsis, Andras Schiff, Bela Bartok
(Brilliant Classics)
*****
No ifs, no buts: this is the best Bartok playing money can buy. Kocsis and Schiff, the foremost current Hungarian pianists, are keyboard antipodes, one dazzling and aggressive, the other cuddly and introspective. When he reads the notation Allegro Barbaro, Kocsis stops shaving; in the 1926 piano sonata his brutal note clusters will break windows in your nearest gated village. Schiff, all cufflinks and charm, is slyly seductive in the Dance Suite, wistfully lyrical in the Rumanian folk dances and Hungarian peasant songs. These recitals, taped in Japan, are new to Europe; they leave all others standing. The second CD is of Bartok himself playing selections from the six books of Mikrokosmos, from recordings he made on arrival in New York in 1940, after fleeing fascist repression in Hungary. The masters, gathering dust in a Columbia vault, have never been readily available and the freshness of this transfer defies belief. Bartok could be sitting in your own living room, smoking his way through divided arpeggios. The best that money can buy? This 2-CD pack costs a risible £6.
>Buy this CD at amazon.co.uk
August 15, 2007
Igor Raykhelson: Little symphony, jazz suite
Moscow Soloists, Igor Bashmet
(Toccata Classics)
****
Composers were the big losers in the collapse of Communism. Unwanted in
Putin’s Russia, they dispersed among the nations, seeking a meagre
livelihood. Raykhelson, 46, born in Leningrad, plies jazz clubs and chamber
halls in New York. His Little Symphony for Strings is a deceptively
classical piece with lashings of ironic commentary, rather like the young
Prokofiev visiting the Chernobyl disaster site. Even more captivating is a
five minute Adagio for viola and strings that Yuri Bashmet delivers tenderly
and without virtuosic showiness as an internal meditation on dashed idylls –
perfect for late-night listening. The second half of the disc is a jazz
suite for viola, saxophone and band, part scored, part improvised, a cross
between New Orleans nostalgia and Soviet-era samizdat gatherings where
musicians shook off the shackles of state and let it swing for a few hours
of free expression. Raykhelson is the latest discovery on Toccata Classics,
a British label devoted to neglected composers. He won’t be ignored much
longer.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
August 8, 2007
Swingle Singers - Beauty and the Beatbox
(Signum)
****
Emilio Aragon - Bach to Cuba
(DG)
*
The Swingles are back. Those laidback Parisians who redid Bach in barbershop
style and challenged the Beatles in the 1960s pop charts have a brand new
line-up and a mouthy beatboxer to boot. The singers are less cohesive than
Ward Swingle’s original octet of Edith Piaf backers and the vocalisations
are more verbal, but the mood is just about right. Beethoven's 5th at the
head of the album is one of the weaker attempts at giving classical street
cred. But cut to a riff on Chick Corea’s take on the Rodrigo Aranjuez theme
and we’re into clever improvisation with multiple variations. Expecting to
be repulsed, I was intrigued by a citrus twist on Dido’s Lament and found
myself listening to Albinoni's Adagio with something approaching tolerance –
which never happens in Giazzotto’s orchestral version. I’m not sure what
the Starky & Hutch TV theme is doing in a classical mix but beatboxer Shlomo
earns his rent in a Bach finale and whole sounds edgy and almost cool.
Deutsche Grammophon's Bach to Cuba, on the other hand, is just dire playing
and dustbin lids in a Tenerife arena, another executive conceit from
the yellowing label.
August 1, 2007
Evgeny Kissin: Schumann piano concerto, Mozart 24th concerto
LSO/Sir Colin Davis
(EMI)
****
Is Evgeny Kissin finally crawling out of his shell? The self-enclosed Russian pianist popped up at the Montpellier festival a couple of weeks back in a jolly evening of French and Yiddish readings with his new best friend, the actor Gerard Depardieu. He has also junked BMG’s crabby recorded sound in favour of warmer tones on EMI. The mood has decisively altered. Kissin sounds as if he enjoys live communication. He pursues a singing line and turns playful in his dialogue with the orchestra. In Mozart he idles meditatively in a cadenza of his own, but no longer with the same introspective, don’t-touch-me effect. In Schumann he banishes the composer’s depressive aspects to give a resolutely sunny performance, albeit one marked by unexpected pauses, hinting at darker regions. This is the most likeable Kissin I have heard in years. If it’s Depardieu who has sprung him from the torture cell, the actor deserves the Legion d’honneur.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
July 27, 2007
Osvaldo Golijov: Oceana
Dawn Upshaw, Atlanta SO and Chorus
(DG)
****
To call the US-based Golijov an eclectic would be a defamatory understatement of his recent work. Mostly written in the 21st century, this album consists of an Hispanic oratorio, a high-churchy string quartet and three soprano songs in Yiddish, Spanish and Emily Dickinson’s English. The title work juxtaposes J S Bach’s musical superstructures with the Cantos of Pablo Neruda, flirting with kitsch by adding an over-prominent harp and two guitars to massed choirs and orchestra. The terse string quartet, played by Kronos could be mistaken in some parts for Pachelbel and in others for Henryk Mikolai Gorecki. But the best of Golijov is a triptych of laments from Dawn Upshaw that stray onto Goreckian turf but transcend it with lashings of klezmer and gypsy music. Upshaw is irresistibly affecting and the Atlanta orchestra under Robert Spano play with deep, dark feeling. In simple confectionary terms, this is a luxury chocolate box with many unexpected centres.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
July 5, 2007
Myleene's Music For Romance
Myleene Klass
(EMI)
*
Myleene Klass, the reality TV star and former girl-band member has reinvented herself as a Classic FM weekend DJ, peddling easy-listening bits and bobs over the breakfast coffee. Myleene believes she can reach a young audience for classics. This compilation is her manifesto – two tracks of herself at the piano playing a banal movie theme and a simplified Satie arrangement, followed by a ragbag of rough cuts from the EMI archives. Can Myleene play? No better than grade 6, on my marking. She takes her scores very slow and the orchestra swirls vaguely around her like a jerry-built spa pool. To put this kind of footling around beside high performance from Stephen Hough and Leif Ove Andsnes seems to me mutually self-defeating – anybody who admires the one is unlikely to appreciate the exceptional qualities of the other. Curiously, the online video promoting this CD shows plenty of close-up, over-the-shoulder pouts from Myleene but no single synced-up shot of her playing the piano. Can our little star actually tinkle? Only a concert could prove it.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
June 27, 2007
Reverie
Jian Wang (cello), Göran Söllscher (guitar)
(DG)
*
In the post-Mao rush for Chinese talent, there is much grit among the occasional glint of gold. Jian Wang, a boy cellist spotted by Isaac Stern on his ice-breaking 1979 tour, signed in last year on Deutsche Grammophon with a Bach disc of impeccable neutrality. Here, in a follow-up recital of popular encores, he dispenses with piano accompaniment and any evidence of good taste, choosing a guitarist as his partner and some of the slushiest tunes ever written. Wang lurches through Schubert, turns Schumann’s Dream into scream, misses the beat in Piazzolla, murders a Scottish ballad and winds up with an Andrew Lloyd Webber Memory of such desperate sob-value that one wonders whether executives at a once-elite label offered dumb-down encouragement. Söllscher, the Swedish guitarist, provides the only musical relief on this dreary run of misfired squibs, any of which would sound better after three drinks on a Belfast penny-whistle. I am presenting a Radio 3 programme this Saturday on the worst classical records ever made; this CD could easily qualify as the year’s highest newcomer.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
June 20, 2007
Under the Sign of the Sun
Claude Delangle, Singapore SO
(BIS)
***
The saxophone, as its name suggests, reaches the low and dirty parts other instruments are too proper to play. Invented by a Belgian-born Frenchman in 1840, it was taken up more by jazz soloists than by symphony orchestras, though its most famous line is probably Maurice Ravel’s slinky setting of the Old Castle in Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Much of the saxophone’s concert repertoire was written by Frenchmen, and some of it is truly seductive. Debussy’s 1904 Rapsodie (absent from this disc) leads the pack, but there is a gorgeous Legende by Florent Schmitt, the sizzling Scaramouche by Darius Milhaud and mini-concertos from the mid-century middle-roaders Jacques Ibert and Henri Tomasi. Some of it is so delicious you wonder why it is so rarely served in live concerts. The soloist Delangle plays a little too lingeringly for my taste, making a meal out of no more than amuse-bouches and losing some of the suggestiveness in the music by hitting the notes too cleanly. Still, these are rare treats for the ear, well worth a stray off the symphonic track.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
June 13, 2007
J. S Bach: The Cello Suites
Steven Isserlis
(Hyperion)
****
Ever since Pau Casals began playing Bach’s solo suites in public a century ago, cellists have made the music more extravert and exhortative than it was meant to be. Casals played the suites expansively and with spiritual intensity; the Frenchmen Pierre Fournier, Paul Tortelier and Maurice Gendron applied an overgloss of stylistic elegance; Slava Rostropovich attached a different dramatic mood to each suite, while Yo Yo Ma coordinated his recording with the work of a landscape gardener. Here, in a radically organic approach, the London cellist Steven Isserlis takes the works back to first manuscripts and to their meditative core. Nothing of the music survives in Bach’s hand; the oldest texts are variant copies by his wife Anna Magdalena and a cantor Johann Peter Kellner, which leave many important decisions to the performer. Isserlis plays with daring introspection. There are moments, in the fifth suite for example, when the monologue becomes almost too private; but the inner voice is on the whole wondrously refreshing, laced with flashes of wit and dazzling insight. I am still finding surprises on third hearing.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
June 6, 2007
Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius &c.
CBSO, Sakari Oramo
(CBSO, 2CD)
****
One of the casualties of industrial shutdown, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra lost its record deal with Warner and decided to roll its own. This debut album on its label is an ear-opener, guaranteed to melt the hearts of Elgar-sceptics appalled by the Little-Englandism that has swamped the composer’s 150th birthday year. Starting with a world premiere – a choral setting of the Holly and the Ivy that was turned down by Elgar’s publishers and turned up decades later in a Worcester junk shop – it moves into the most appealing rendition of the Enigma Variations that I have experienced since Sir Adrian Boult was at the far end of an elongated baton. Rhythmically pert and stripped of chauvinistic gush, the suite is revealed in its formal dignity and its elevated regard for platonic friendship – the poignant musings of an essentially lonely man. The Dream of Gerontius is stickier, striving too hard as it often does for spiritual depths in imperial shallows. But Sakari Oramo shapes the piece without a whiff of churchiness, delivering a rational account that could pierce the armour of a Richard Dawkins. Birmingham’s chorus and orchestra have never sounded better; Jane Irwin, Justin Lavender and Peter Rose are immaculate soloists.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
May 30, 2007
Mahler: Symphonies 1 and 8 (DVD)
Chicago SO, London Philharmonic/Klaus Tennstedt
(EMI)
*****
No-one who squeezed into three sold-out Mahler Eighths in the Royal Festival Hall at the end of January 1991 will ever forget the experience. During rehearsals for the Symphony of a Thousand, I sensed a rare symbiosis between the conductor and his army of musicians, spilling down the flanks of the heaving stage. In performance, I saw tears trickling down men’s cheeks. Tennstedt was a maestro like no other and these nights were his apotheosis. Nicknamed the Demented Stork, for his jerky arms and febrile stare, Tennstedt conducted Mahler as if the universe hung on a filament of symphonic texture, emoting with the music and forcing musicians to play as if equally possessed. The opening cry of Veni Creator Spiritus was not so much prayer as triumphant affirmation: we were in the presence of divine inspiration and the boys of Eton College Choir who trilled the treble lines were practically seared out of their skins. See it all here on a careful DVD edit of the BBC’s videos (coupled with a slightly less fearsome Tennstedt Mahler First from Chicago). You will never see its like again.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
May 24, 2007
Strauss: Don Juan, Rosenkavalier suite etc.
New York Philharmonic/Lorin Maazel
(DG Concerts)
***
Having slimmed its studio activity down to size zero, the largest classical label has begun issuing concerts by the New York and Los Angeles orchestras with an eye to cultivating a download habit. The first releases, on both CD and MP3, have the buzz of live performance and the double nuisance of intrusive applause and short measure; concerts last two hours, these albums just 80 minutes. The playing is exemplary but in no way exceptional and the programming is simply routine. Under Maazel’s music directorship, the New York Phil are the best-sounding band in America with the dullest repertoire, powerful in every section and often gorgeous, but daring only in the length to which a viola or cor anglais will occasionally stretch a solo. Who needs its concerts on disc? Not many, I’d guess. In six months of US sale, ahead of this week’s UK release, Soundscan figures show that just 900 copies were bought – barely enough to pay the production team’s wages, let alone manufacturing costs.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
May 16, 2007
Beethoven Egmont overture; Brahms first symphony
Munich Philharmonic/Thielemann
(DG)
**
Christian Thielemann is regarded by many Germans as the next Herbert von Karajan - in both ambition and ability. A spate of reactionary utterances has made him less welcome abroad but on home turf, as conductor of the Munich Philharmonic and a fixture at Bayreuth, Thielemann receives what are described as ‘torrential ovations’ for his high voltage performances. The Beethoven overture on this live recording is unforgettably intense, the textures stretched to Nurofen point before the maestro administers lyrical resolution. More than any living conductor, Thielemann adjusts tempo relations to produce what can, with poor judgement, resemble demagoguery – and in Brahms does just that. Having encouraged a sleeve-note interviewer to imagine that he ‘comes very close to Brahms’ compositional aesthetic’, Thielemann bends vital elements of the symphony into a row of Versailles mirrors, polished to a high gleam but distorting any human image. Nowhere is his manipulation more obvious than in the finale when, instead of letting the big tune emerge mysteriously from mists, he slows and dims the orchestra to a standstill and then thumps out the rhetoric like a national revivalist. Not a performance for the nervous.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
May 9, 2007
Brahms violin concerto/Schumann 4th symphony
Northern Sinfonia/Thomas Zehetmair
(Avie)
***
The Northern Sinfonia, based at The Sage in Gateshead, are not heard much down south so this CD is a chance to check on their progress under the direction of the warm-toned Austrian violinist, Thomas Zehetmair. Far more communicative than some of the sleeveless icebergs on the London stage, Zehetmair is fairly prudent in the Brahms concerto, letting expressiveness run loose only in the slow middle movement, opened by a solo oboist who will soon have top orchestras searching for her email. The Schumann symphony is full of delightful touches and unexpected turns that expose pastoral beauties often obscured by larger ensembles. Not competitive with recent world-class recordings ˆ Vengerov in Brahms, Zinman in Schumann ˆ this CD has been paid for by the Sage (and the taxpayer) to display the rising calibre of music making in a north-eastern region which, a decade ago, was barely a dot on the concert map.
>Buy this CD at amazon.co.uk
May 2, 2007
Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs
Flagstad, Philharmonia, Furtwängler
(Testament)
*****
The world premiere of Strauss’s four last songs – there were five, actually, but the publisher was in a hurry – was heard at the Royal Albert Hall on May 22, 1950, eight months after the composer’s death and a fortnight after his wife’s. Illicit, grotesque-sounding tapes have long circulated: this is the first authorised, audible release of a concert that lives in legend. Kirsten Flagstad’s voice is almost surreally well suited to these gentle valedictions – rock-solid yet velvet-smooth and with a spontaneity that comes from singing with an unedited manuscript in hand. Manoug Parikian’s violin solo melts in air and Wilhelm Furtwängler’s conducting redefines the relativities of time. The rest of the performance consists of Wagner extracts, beautifully rendered. The remastered sound is somewhat scratchy, but the ear soon adjusts to the majesty of the moment, the ceremonial closure of a glorious musical epoch. If you never buy classical records, make this the exception.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
April 18, 2007
Improvisata: Sinfonie con titoli
Europa Galante/Biondi
(Virgin Classics)
****
The days when the early music revolution was run from London are long gone. The wildest tempi and edgiest sonorities are now being made by continental bands like Fabio Biondis Europa Galante who take all bends at high speed and never look down. This job lot of titled symphonies by baroque writers are played hell for leather, without regard to the relative reputation of the listed composers. A Sinfonia by Vivaldi is little more than a manuscript scrap and Sammartinis is a salon piece, but the Boccherini symphony is dangerously dramatic and Monzas Tempest Symphony stands up well to repeated hearing. Most dazzling of the lot is The Bells of Rome by Giuseppe Demachi, of whom little is known except that he may have led a band in London during the French Revolution and possibly died here in 1791. Totally diverting and not in the least bit profound, this is music for an early summers evening, when the flutes interplay happy with the birds in the garden.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
April 10, 2007
Handel: Music for the Chapel Royal
Choir of the Chapel Royal/Andrew Gant
(Naxos)
****
Handel wrote so copiously and in so many forms that some of his best works remain virtually unknown. It may be that devotions he delivered for the Royal Household did not get out much beyond the palace chapel but Handel here is heard at his most imperious. No composer before or since has better evoked the majesty of the English language when laid in humble offering before the world’s Creator. The sonorous rhythms of the King James Bible sparkle like sunlight on water in the vivacity of Handel’s tunes. When his chorus proclaims ‘Let God arise’, no listener stays long in his seat.
A suite of piano pieces, each named after the months of the year, is an indicator of her qualities. The idiom belongs somewhere between Chopin and Schumann, with a touch of Bellini for light relief. Three long months pass before the ear settles on an original theme and, pleasant though it is, there is little to develop. May is the sunniest of her months; August is a steal from Beethovens Choral Fantasy (and 9th symphony); the Epilogue is gently moving. Fanny, on this evidence, was not a first-rank inventor; but the young Latvian pianist here is a dazzling advocate.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
March 28, 2007
Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel: The Year
Lauma Skride, piano
(Sony-BMG)
***
The idea that women have been airbrushed out of music history is fashionable among feminists. One of the chief victims, according to theory, is Fanny, elder sister of Felix Mendelssohn, who was hailed as the most prolific child genius since Mozart. Fanny, as a child, captivated the poet Heinrich Heine with her piano playing. She married a painter and died of a stroke, aged 41, while playing piano at a rehearsal of her brothers cantata, The First Walpurgis Night. Felix, guilt-stricken, followed her six months later. His bicentenary will be widely celebrated in 2009 while Fannys music sits virtually unplayed.
A suite of piano pieces, each named after the months of the year, is an indicator of her qualities. The idiom belongs somewhere between Chopin and Schumann, with a touch of Bellini for light relief. Three long months pass before the ear settles on an original theme and, pleasant though it is, there is little to develop. May is the sunniest of her months; August is a steal from Beethovens Choral Fantasy (and 9th symphony); the Epilogue is gently moving. Fanny, on this evidence, was not a first-rank inventor; but the young Latvian pianist here is a dazzling advocate.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
March 21, 2007
Brahms: A German Requiem
Berlin Philharmonic and Chorus/ Simon Rattle
(EMI)
**
I’m worried about Sir Simon. Not to the point of losing sleep, you understand, but just enough to make me wonder whether he still has his superbly managed career quite so firmly in hand. Facing dissent in Berlin for failing to play late romantics, Rattle has set his eye on Bruckner and Brahms with much oohing and aahing from sworn fans. Hearing this apex of German art, however, I wonder what exactly he brought to the party. Nothing wrong with the performance, far from it. It’s nicely shaped, every note in place, all the loud bits impressively brash, the tender passages appropriately damp. Trouble is, there’s nothing memorable about this great arch of personal and national memorial, no imprint of conductorial input to raise Brahms’s lament above the level of grouch. Dorothea Röschmann and Thomas Quasthoff soloes affectingly, the Berlin Phil and Choir play and sing their hearts out, but when they come to the bit about "Blessed are the Dead," the drag is worse than a puncture on a funeral hearse and the listener starts envying the corpse.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
March 14, 2007
Mozart: piano concertos 22, 27
Sviatoslav Richter, ECO/Benjamin Britten
(BBC Legends)
*****
Every now and then, a voice from the past puts all else in shade. Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997) has only to put finger to keyboard and there is no mistaking him for any other pianist. Mozart is not where you naturally expect to find his clarity and authority - the magic flows more readily in Schubert, Brahms, Prokofiev and Scriabin – but that is all more reason to catch this first-release archived pair of Aldeburgh concertos. The performances feel like eavesdropped conversation between two world rulers, an impression underlined by Richter playing a cadenza composed by Britten for the E-flat concerto, and playing it almost out of shape. Britten’s phrasing is on the decorous side, Richter’s is not. Where minds meet, in the Larghetto of Mozart’s last concerto, the sun stops in its trajectory and critical judgement is suspended. This is playing of unrepeatable daring and intensity. There are some background coughs that might have been edited out, but the English Chamber Orchestra are immaculate and not even the crabbiest of Mozartphobes could deny the evidence of genius at work.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
February 21, 2007
George Enescu: piano sonatas etc.
Luiza Borac
(Avie, 2CD set)
****
The Rumanian composer Enescu (1881-1955) was a formidable violinist, pianist and conductor who, in exile, made an indelible impact on English musicians immediately after the second world war. He composed three piano sonatas but somehow never got round to writing the middle one down. The first sonata is elegant in the manner of Debussy's Preludes, alternately grave and quirky. The third veers from wistful escapism to faintly manic anguish, his princess wife having suffered a terrible mental breakdown from which she never fully recovered. Personal history aside, the music is compellingly communicative, full of wit and original melody, commanding total attention. The lesser pieces in this package consist of a Bach-like Prelude and Fugue in C major, a friendly meditation on Faure, and a nocturne that Chopin himself could hardly have bettered. Empathetically interpreted by Rumania's foremost young pianist, this music cries out to be universally heard.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
February 19, 2007
Rachmaninov 2nd symphony
Cincinnati SO/Paavo Jarvi
(Telarc)
***
Once a box-office cert, the E-minor symphony was written around the same time as the third (D minor) piano concerto and shares some affinities of mood. Which is not to say it is all gloom and doom. The big tune of the expansive adagio may be as cheerful as the last leaf in autumn, but the surrounding movements are dynamic, propulsive, romantic and occasionally playful. More than most composers, Rachmaninov knew the worth of a good tune and squeezed it to the last variation. The symphony is presently off menu but Paavo Jarvi pushes all the buttons and makes a persuasive case for restoration. The Cincinnati orchestra, with strong German traditions, plays with precision and power, adding dances from the early opera Aleko and Rachmaninov's very first orchestral piece by way of bonus.
February 7, 2007
Bruckner: 7th symphony Orchestre
Métropolitain du Grand Montréal/Yannick Nézet-Séguin
(ATMA Classique)
****
This is the finest Bruckner I have heard from a young conductor since Franz Welser-Möst started shaving. The Canadian in charge is 31 years old and has just been appointed to succeed Valery Gergiev in Rotterdam. He shapes the gigantic Adagio at the heart of this work, a tribute to the dying Wagner, with austere and respectful restraint. The performance as a whole is marked by a fastidious refusal to emote and a structural certainty that seems uncanny in a maestro of such little experience. Within the massive score, he teases out decorative details from the woodwinds and lower strings, cleaning up the old warhorse as if it were about to run at Ascot. The opening of the finale is positively frisky and the playing of Montreal's second orchestra is flawless, world-class. Nézet-Séguin is unquestionably the talent to watch. He makes his London debut at the South Bank on March 9; miss it if you dare.
>Buy this CD at S.R.I.
January 31, 2007
Chopin: 2nd piano sonata, 4 Scherzos
Simon Trpceski
(EMI)
**
Here's a tricky one: how do you review a formidable young pianist whose sound leaves you ice-cold? Simon Trpceski, 28, is a rising comet from Macedonia, busy on the international circuit, recently with the LSO. He has all the technique it takes to play Chopin while answering his emails and he can catch the breath in your throat with the speed and accuracy of his keyboard sweeps. But that, for me, is it. Lots of flash and not much feeling, let alone the respect a work of art requires. The funeral march of the second sonata sounds almost facile, too easy by half; the scherzos substitute bombast for passion. Some may find this approach clinically objective; to my ears, it's the wrong music for this prodigious but very raw artist. I want to hear him tackle Prokofiev, Busoni, De Falla, John Cage.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
January 24, 2007
Chopin and Rachmaninov: cello sonatas
Alexander Kniazev (cello), Nikolai Lugansky (piano)
Warner Classics
***
The two foremost piano composers each wrote one cello sonata. Both used the languorous key of G minor and both, once the formalities were over, reverted to type and gave the piano as big a role as the centre-stage soloist. Any cellist who tackles these works will struggle for primacy. Kniazev, professor at the Moscow Conservatory, has all the technique but not enough personality to overcome the incisive playing of the expansive Lugansky who always threatens to steal the show. The match is fairly even in the Chopin, but the pianist wins it hands down in Rachmaninov. None of this need affect your listening pleasure so long as you throw away the star-crossed cover photo which has Lugansky foreground at some social gathering, with his cellist a distant wallflower. And they tell us art is non-competitive.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
January 18, 2007
Boris Tchaikovsky: Symphony No 1
Volgograd PO/Edward Serov
(Naxos)
****
Before the BBC gets its wall-to-wall Tchaikovsky season on air this weekend, I’d recommend a listen to the more interesting and lesser known Tchaikovsky, the one called Boris. A product of Soviet stringencies, Boris (1926-1996) studied in Moscow with Shostakovich and Miaskovsky, learning to develop creative individuality behind conformist heroism. His first symphony, written in 1947 and promptly banned, waited 15 years for its premiere and 60 for this, its first recording. Declamatory at times, it is currant-cake rich in melody and invention. Like his decadent namesake, this Tchaikovsky grabs the ear from the opening chord but instead of indulging melancholy, fights off the miseries with argumentative vigour. I cannot name a stronger first symphony in recent memory, and the two radio suites that fill out the CD are balletically gorgeous. Give me Boris over Peter Ilyich, any day.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
January 10, 2007
Weinberg: On the threshold of hope
Arc Ensemble
(RCA Red Seal)
Mieczyslaw (Moishe) Weinberg (1919-1996) was the composer closest to Shostakovich, each playing the other his new works before committing them to print. When Weinberg was arrested in the last weeks of Stalin’s terror, Shostakovich wrote to the NKVD chief Beria protesting his innocence. Weinberg, a prolific symphonist, is at his most expressive in chamber works that he imbued with echoes of contemporary Jewish suffering. His 1945 clarinet sonata played here by Joaquin Valdepenas and Dianne Werner, is a miniature masterpiece, combining a klezmer-like improvisatory spirit within a strict formal structure. The 1944 piano quintet bears kinship to a prior work in the same form by Shostakovich. Both are melodic, ironic and disrupted by passages of panicky agitation; Weinberg, however, finds a soft ending. These revealing performances, by members of the Royal Conservatory of Music, are testimony to a Soviet composer’s courage, ingenuity and, in the clarinet sonata, near-genius.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
January 3, 2007
Viva L'Opera
Roberto Alagna
(DG)
*
A neat twist of fate has brought out a 2-CD retrospective of the French-Sicilian tenor a mere fortnight after he walked out of La Scala's Aida, jeopardising what remains of a rocky career. Recruited in a Paris pizza parlour, Alagna shot to celebrity as partner to the Rumanian diva Angela Gheorghiu. Their set-pieces here, from Trovatore and Boheme, sound less convincing than they are on stage and Alagna, singing solo, can be very tiresome. The voice is stressed on the opening track, the top notes in La Donna e mobile almost shouted. He is better in French than Italian, meltingly so in the heartbreak arias of Gounod's Romeo et Juliette and Halevy's La Juive. But his attack on the Berlioz arrangement of the French national anthem is both rough, cheap and ugly: a football crowd does it better.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
December 20, 2006
Noel
Anne-Sophie von Otter (mezzo-soprano), Bengt Forsberg (piano)
(DG)
****
The Swedish mezzo-soprano has taken a lot of stick this year for singing the hits of Abba and passing them off as art, but there is no faulting her taste in this choice album of seasonal songs, drawn as if from an antiquarian bookseller's junk box. Nordic fireside melodies jostle the high devotions of Bach and Cornelius, interspersed with carols from Sussex mummers and Parisian aesthetes and the meditations of solemn Bavarians: I was bowled over by a Joaquin Nin set of Spanish tunes and a lullaby of Max Reger's. In an exceptional gesture of singer goodwill, Otter allows five intermezzo solos to Forsberg, her long-suffering accompanist, culminating in the plangent wonder of Busoni's grave transcriptions of two great Bach chorales.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
December 13, 2006
John Dowland: Lute Music 2
Nigel North
***
Whether Sting's rasping breath has worn the lining off your eardrum or left you eager to hear more, this compilation is an amiable corrective to the X-factor version of 16th century laments. Dowland, heard plain and simple on his favoured instrument, is a certified stress-buster with a beguiling line in self-pity. Whether he's telling you about his rotten luck in a Lachrimae Pavan or strumming a dirge called I Saw My Lady Weep, he can't help but make you feel better about your own day at the office. Semper Dowland Semper Dolens (a Latin pun meaning Johnny D's such a misery), his signature piece on this album, is played straight-faced by an eminent instrumental professor and yields the kind of calm that is normally obtained only from a $100 aromatherapist. Spin it, and see.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
December 7, 2006
Shostakovich: violin concertos
Sergey Khachatryan
(Naïve) ***
It seems appropriate that the only classical record label still developing serious talent is called Naïve, but there is nothing artless or innocent about this Armenian violinist, 21, winner of two international contests. Khachatryan plays Shostakovich with grave elegance and casual flair, tossing off the high jinks without breaking sweat while maintaining a consistent line of beguiling beauty. His objective approach is a world apart from the older-generation air of pained introspection but no less convincing in the way he turns the stone-melting Passacaglia of the first concerto from torment to hope. In the less affecting second concerto he draws a veil of melody over a chasm of despair. Kurt Masur conducts the tenderly empathetic Orchestre National de France.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
November 27, 2006
Monteverdi: Combattimento
Le Concert d'Astrée/Haim
(Virgin)
****
Even with unclothed nymphs and acrobats, Monteverdi on stage requires suspension of disbelief and on record a good deal of patience. Recitatives stretch like the Gobi between arias of occasional beauty and bouts of courtly dance. Highlights are usually as much as I can take; this disc, though, had me nailed to the seat. Rolando Villazon, more familiar in Verdi roles, gives vivid narration to the armed bout between Tancredi (Topi Lehtipuu) and Clorinda (Patrizia Cofi), Christian boy and Muslim girl across a Crusade battlefield. Both lovers are neatly cast and Villazon is simply thrilling in his closing lament. The French harpsichordist and conductor Emannuelle Haim drives her ten-piece ensemble with an unerring feel for dramatic realism.
>Buy this CD at amazon.co.uk
November 22, 2006
Frank Peter Zimmermann/Heinrich Schiff
***
Music for violin and cello duo normally counts as cruel and unusual punishment, the scraping of hair on gut matching the drip-drip of a faulty tap for aural torture. Not here, though. The Austro-German pair have worked together between high-class solo gigs for 20 years and have chosen their pieces well. Honegger and Martinu, two of the most prolifically uneven modernists, are represented by closely-argued Socratic dialogues, the timing as sharp as club comedy. Matthias Pintscher, in his early 30s, provides a 21st century shimmer of shifting textures in Treatise on the Veil while the main item on the menu is a sinuous 1922 sonata by Ravel, deliciously suggestive after a stern canon by JS Bach. This is perfect music for a winter’s night, warming and reflective.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
November 17, 2006
Catherine Bott; Convivencia
(Fred Music)
*
A luminous soprano on the early music circuit and a presenter on Radio 3, Catherine Bott has taken a leap onto an art-dealer’s new label with an album evoking the 15th century reconquest of Spain for Christianity. The country was ethnically cleansed of Moslems and Jews, but its music could not be purged. Eastern austerities pervade courtly romances of the winning side and the accompanying instrument is none other than an Arabian ‘oud, forerunner of the lute. Much of the music has been unearthed and recorded before by scholarly groups. What Bott brings to the party is a splash of showmanship and an emotional immediacy that will catch the breath in your throat. A pavan for a dead king (track 12) and an Arab love song, Zaranil mahboub (14), go straight onto my playlist as top hits of 2006.
>Buy this CD at amazon.co.uk
November 8, 2006
Panufnik: Homage to Polish Music
Polish Chamber Orch./Mariusz Smolij
(Naxos)
***
Half a century ahead of the present influx, a lone Pole came to London in 1954 seeking relief from Communist oppression. Andrzej Panufnik was, at the time, Warsaw's most successful composer, so much so that the shock of his defection provoked a thaw in cultural policy. Settling in Twickenham, in a house whose garden ran unfenced into the river, Panufnik spent the rest of his life writing complex diagrammatic symphonies, the utterances of a curious and unfettered mind. The music performed here is his early stuff. To appease the Stalinists without compromising his principles, Panufnik recast old folk tunes in the laconic manner of neo-classical Stravinsky. The Old Polish Suite and Concerto in Modo Antico are bright, though never quite carefree, while Hommage a Chopin for flute and string ensemble avoids sentimentalising the national hero and reflects more on his introspection than his insurrectionist zeal. You don't have to be Polish to feel the beauty and the pain.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
November 1, 2006
Klezmer Karma
Roby Lakatos Ensemble/Franz Liszt Chamber Orch.
(Avanti)
*
The Hungarian gypsy fiddler Roby Lakatos crosses most musical forms, from smoky cafes to the BBC Proms. What he is pursuing here are affinities between his own caravan heritage and the klezmer music of little Jewish bands that used to crisscross central Europe. The symbiosis is striking, both traditions drawing copiously from the same melodic wells and both refined over centuries to squeeze a tear from hearts of stone. The Lakatos take on Hatikvah may never get played on Israeli state occasions but its tremulous yearnings are authentic beyond dispute. Best of all, Lakatos introduces the Yiddish singer Miriam Fuks who, in a pitch-perfect alto profundo, delivers irresistible sweet-sour wedding songs of a world that is no more.
>Buy this CD at amazon.com
October 25, 2006
Miaskovsky: Symphonies 6 and 10
Ural Philharmonic Orch/Dmitri Liss
(Warner)
Nikolai Miaskovsky (1881-1950), once named Father of the Soviet Symphony, is now a forgotten man. A 1917 Bolshevist, he drew hour-long applause in 1924 for a morbid and mildly dissonant sixth symphony which ends in a bright-and-beautiful choral finale ö utterly unconvincing but an important period piece. His tenth symphony of 1928 was written for the conductorless Persimfans band, a Marxist model for the orchestra of the future. There are 27 symphonies altogether.
None of them amounts to a row of Prokofiev, Shostakovich or Khatchaturyan; neither form nor expression is truly original. But Miaskovsky is a master of musical structure and these performances, by a remote Russian orchestra, are as good as it gets.
>Buy this CD at Rhino.com
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