 |
 |
|
|
March 17, 2010 Brahms: choral works
Brahms, we are often told, is not for the young or the English. Well, here's the counter-argument. Robin Ticciati, 27, is the brightest of the new crop of Young British Batons. Alice Coote is a superb contralto who sails through the Alto Rhapsody with the aplomb of Dame Janet Baker, her sometime teacher, and a sweetness all her own. This is rapturous stuff. Entering like a distant churchbell, Coote controls the dynamic of the piece, never singing louder than luscious. Ticciati bends the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and Bavarian Radio men's chorus to her mood, achieving an organic unity that sounds, as it should, almost effortless. It lasts less than 12 minutes and you want it to go on forever. What I find so impressive about Ticciati's conducting is its discretion. Three of these pieces - especially Schicksalied, the Song of Destiny – can all too easily lapse into bluffness and bombast. Ticciati makes sure that the music overwhelms any unpleasant historical connotations. His chorus strains at the leash but it is the woodwinds that set the tone as a voice of conscience. You’d have to go back 20 years, to Claudio Abbado in Berlin, to hear Germans sing and play Brahms with such grace and refinment. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three more from Brahms & Co. Brahms: violin-piano sonatas Just when you think Anne-Sophie Mutter has nothing more to offer beyond the ice-queen brand, she comes up with a performance of the Brahms sonatas that is humbling in its quietude. Sample the Adagio of the G-major sonata for a lesson in mature self-exploration. Mutter is almost inside herself with concentration and Lambert Orkis plays porcelain accompaniment in a reading of fragile transparency, irresistible throughout.
Herzogenberg: string quintet, quartet One of Brahms’s best buddies, Heinrich |von Herzogenberg (1843-1900) excelled himself in the quintet, written after his wife’s death in 1892 and based on a Friedrich Rückert poem that Mahler also contemplated. The quartet is a callow, pre-Brahmsian work. The players are Cologne's fine Minguet Quartet.
Röntgen: Symphonies 8 and 15 Of all Brahms's acolytes, none was more slavish than the Dutchman Julius Engelbert Röntgen (1855-1932), concertmaster of the Gewandhaus orchestra. Long phrases in the andante of his C# minor 15th symphony are lifted straight from Brahms’s second; the wordless soprano in the F# minor eighth symphony evokes the Alto Rhapsody. Strictly for curiosity value, David Porcelijn conducts the NDR radio orchestra, with Carmen Fuggiss.
March 10, 2010 Mahler: 2nd symphony Longer than any performance on record except Otto Klemperer’s last gasp, this live Royal Festival Hall recording from February 1989 is a legend to the 3,000 of us who were there and even more so to many who weren’t. Klaus Tennstedt, the most sensitive and impulsive of conductors, opened the Resurrection at a tempo of such stubborn deliberation that it seemed the second coming would never come. But instead of causing impatience, the interpretation exerts an irresistible tension for 94 eventful minutes. There is nothing vain or wilful in Tennstedt’s approach. By stretching textures, he allows us to hear inner voices, to hold our breaths as a double-bass plucks a solo pizzicato, to marvel at the interwoven conversations of the vast symphonic mass. The opening movement ends in dark dread, the second in mute helplessness. Then Mahler hits the big drums and the works rises out of the known world into realms where the devil has the best tunes. Mezzo-soprano Jard van Nes offers tranquility in the Urlicht song, but Judgement Day follows with chorus and soprano Yvonne Kenny and the outcome remains uncertain until the conductor drops his arms and, in the frozen hush, we discover, half-amazed, that we are still alive. The experience on record, engineered with maximum discretion by Tony Faulkner, is hardly less shattering than in the hall that night in February 1989. This is one of the elite Mahler recordings that, indispensable and unforgettable, yield a new understanding of a mighty work. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three concerto discs for the weekend Jean-Yves Thibaudet plays Gershwin Bless the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for its jazz moves and its lead clarinet, Steven Barta, for his waterfront soul. Reverting to the original band versions of Gershwin’s works, the orchestra (under conductor Marin Alsop) bends the opening of Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F to slinky cool. Best moment is Barta at the opening of I Got Rhythm. This is seriously moody classics.
Beethoven: piano concertos 4 & 5 Till Fellner’s deft touch gets the G-major concerto going, but the orchestral response is not of equal calibre. Either the Montreal Symphony Orchestra had a bad-hair day with Kent Nagano or it is no longer the crack unit that Charles Dutoit took to Decca. In both concertos the orchestral intervention is rigid where the soloist is liquid and abrasive where he strokes silk. Something’s awry in Montreal. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Bernstein, Bloch, Barber: violin concertos Clever to put the three American works for violin and orchestra on the same disc, and with an Israeli soloist who reaches for their exilic roots. Vadim Gluzman is an expressive player with a clean tone, presenting the arguments in Bernstein’s Serenade as if they were Russian dialectics. In Bloch’s Baal Shem he avoids the pitfalls of mawkishness and in Barber’s concerto the clichés of prairie life. His cerebral tone inspires fine playing from the Sao Paolo orchestra under John Neschling. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
March 3, 2010 Via Crucis The counter-tenor Philippe Jaroussky is not just a good-looking young man with a very high voice. He is an Alpine mountaineer of uninsurable risk, doing stuff that gives record labels the shakes. His last album consisted of opera arias by a son of J S Bach, esoteric material but still within the classical mould. Here, he breaks right out of the baroque and gets low down and dirty with Italian country music of the early renaissance – earthy and authentic. His partners in grime are the Corsican chorus Barbara Furtuna, the soprano Nuria Rial and the Paris-based L’Arpeggiata ensemble under Christina Pluhar’s lead. Here’s how it works. Philippe or Nuria sings a repertory piece by Biber or Allegri, Legrenzi or Monteverdi, all high-church and incense. Then the Barbara Furtuna boys come right back at them with a Stabat mater from an island church or a virgin’s lullaby. The harmony is so close it could be barber-shop, but this is a barber’s where the patrons get their throats cut. Violence is innate to the gravelly melody and it spills over into the church pieces, reminding us both of their peasant roots and of their murderous proximity to the Balkans. The interweaving of rough and smooth, rustic and serene, is irresistible and the sound has an immediacy as forceful as a rock concert. If there were an Oscar for originality in classical recording, this disc would be a cert.
Three more for the weekend Liszt Suisse Liszt is red meat for the big beasts of the piano. What makes this recital so arresting is the low-key approach that Libor Novacek takes to the Swiss episodes of Liszt's travel diaries, as well the later, lesser known Consolations. The meditative, priestly aspect of Liszt is often eclipsed by virtuosic display. Not here, though. Softly, reflectively, Novacek portrays a deeper, introspective Liszt, seldom rising above double-forte. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Schubert: Arpeggione sonata and lieder Written for a bowed guitar, the Arpeggione sonata is usually played in a cello and piano transcription. Antoine Tamestit takes it upscale on viola, adding a more voice-like timbre at the expense of mellow meditation. Markus Hadulla is a compliant pianist and Sandrine Piau sings two lieder in a mix’n’match programme. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Shostakovich and Barber violin concertos Dylana Jenson, once an American favourite, has fallen off the radar – unfairly on the evidence of this self-published recording with the LSO, conducted by her husband, David Lockington. In the first Shostakovich concerto she sounds less tortured than most; in the Barber she is the sweet-toned prairie wife, all motherhood and apple-pie. Some of her phrases are slightly stilted. I suspect she needs to be heard live.
February 24, 2010 L’univers de Marin Marais Played by Gerard Depardieu in the movie Tous les matins du monde, Marin Marais (1656-1728) acquired the kind of celebrity that distorts not just the substance of his works but the drama of his life. Marais was a master of the bass viol, also known as the viola da gamba, ancestor of the modern cello. But he was never more than first among equals in the Sun King’s court ensemble at Versailles. What this record does is strip away the false celebrity by presenting pieces of Marais together with works by less-known fellow-members of the band. A shoemaker’s son, Marais studied composing with the chef d’orchestre, Jean-Baptiste Lully, and was paid up to play whenever Louis XIV felt like dancing. The ensemble was not a happy one. Two Forquerays, father and son, so hated one another that the jealous elder player had his boy thrown in jail to end the competition. The group also had a Couperin and his nephew, and Marais brought two nephews of his own onto the payroll. Nepotism, as they say, begins at home. Played with his colleagues, it is impossible to tell the genius Marais from supposedly lesser composers, since all wrote functional pieces for the king’s pleasure. Only when Marais writes a dirge for his own tombeau does his originality stand out, stark and strong. Jakob David Rattinger, the Austrian viol player, is accompanied by Rosario Conte and Ralf Waldner in a performance of grace, intimacy and tactful modesty. If you’ve had it up to here with celebrity, this disc is a welcome corrective.
Three cellos for the weekend Dutilleux, Lutoslawski: cello works Two concertos and two solos written for the grand sweep of Mstislav Rostropovich are tough nuts for anyone to crack without sounding imitative. Christian Poltera pulls it off by being entirely his own man, introspective and precise, untroubled by precedent. What seems tentative in the opening Enigme of Dutilleux’s Toute un Monde Lointain is serenely vindicated in the closing Hymne. He applies the same authoritative coherence to the elusive pointillisms of Lutoslawski’s concerto. Jac van Steen conducts the Austrian radio orchestra.
Haydn: cello concertos 1-3 Only two of these are definitely by Haydn, the middle one in D major is probably by his brother, Michael. Jan Vogler has a lovely chatty way with Ludwig Güttler’s Virtuosi Saxonae ensemble, essing the solo line out of the mix rather than lording above it. There is a domesticity to the sound that feels absolutely authentic. Vogler clinches a fourth star by playing cadenzas by Maurice Gendron, quite the most elegant soloist even seen on a cello, immaculate from head to bow.
Adolphe, Auerbach, Jalbert, Tsontakis: cello sonatas Husband and wife David Finckel and Wu Han play four works they have premiered, none of them hard on the ear. George Tsontakis, a Grawemeyer winner, is the most eager to please, but Pierre Jalbert shares his romantic ilk and Bruce Adolphe is soft as marshmallow. Lera Auerbach’s 2002 sonata offers a polite disagreement between cello and piano. Taken together, however, these four works pretend the second half of the 20th century never really happened.
February 17, 2010 Thomas Adès: Tevot The British composer, nudging 40, is at a turning point. For half his life he has been a fixture with top orchestras – Berlin, New York, Cleveland and Amsterdam – without ever stamping his footprint on the epoch. His music is well-made and easy on the ear, avoiding offensive extremes. Tevot, written for Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic in 2007, takes 22 minutes to get back exactly where it started. No musicians are harmed in the making of the piece and the sound is superb. The title is Hebrew with mystic intimations, but nowhere is there ethereality or transcendence. Rattle has called Adès ‘the most extravagantly talented’ of younger composers, but his sources are so catholic, ranging from Bach to Kurtag, as to be conservative. There is something retro in all that Adès writes - retro to the point of decadence. The overture, waltz and finale from his first opera, Powder Her Face – famous for irs fellatio scene – brim with effervescent mischief while leaving very little residue of an musical originality. One would be hard pressed on this evidence to tell Adès apart from five or six of his contemporaries. In Three Studies from Couperin he plays pretty games with baroque amusements. The 2005 violin concerto, titled Concentric Paths, goes likewise round and round in movements titled Rings, Paths and Rounds. Anthony Marwood and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe take the route in their capable stride. As an early admirer who gave Adès his first television appearance, I am still waiting for a work that proclaims his individuality. He needs to get off the middle of the road and dig a trench that is triumphantly his own.
Three vocals for the weekend Rolando Villazon, Tenor This is almost too painful to play twice, a remembrance of what might have been. Villazon, who is overcoming a vocal crisis by playing judge in a television game show, has a sandpaper moment at the opening of O Sole Mio, a wobble in West Side Story and a judder of genre confusion in Phantom of the Opera. These tracks, recorded in Prague two months ago, are spliced together with his former resplendence in Ombra ma fui with Paul McCreesh, his Salzburg Rodolfo. A tacky, misguided disc.
Gerald Finley The two pearls on this album of arias in English are from operas that Finley created – Batter my Heart from John Adams’s Doctor Atomic and a poignant hiatus from Mark-Anthony Turnage’s The Silver Tassie, ‘Oh bring me a pint of wine’. The tune is a folk ballad but Turnage’s orchestration and Finley’s delivery give it skin-crawling terror. The rest of the programme is a display of fine dramatic singing from Bizet to Wagner, in English.
Mike Brewer’s World Tour The National Youth Choir of Great Britain go all Soweto in an African wedding dance, Latino in Pueblo Sunrise Song, Qing Dynasty in Molihua and deep Maghreb in Yelli bo’dek. Quite apart from vocal versatility, the kids seem completely comfortable with multicultural crossover. There are ragged patches in the Arabic but on the whole Mike Brewer upholds his street cred as top choral trainer. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
February 10, 2010 Bernard Herrmann: Music from Hangover Square and Citizen Kane Hermann’s score for the 1945 homicidal movie Hangover Square so captivated the teenaged Stephen Sondheim that he sat through the film twice in order to memorise a two-second shot of a page of piano concerto. He has repeatedly told the story – how his eye was drawn to the page and how one chord - B#, C#, E, G# - lodged in his mind as the musical DNA of Sweeney Todd. Based on a Patrick Hamiton novel, the film follows a schizophrenic composer who is compelled to kill a girl every time he hears a particular high-pitched sound. Hermann’s score, London-foggy and sorrowful, is almost a character in its own right and the piano concerto is starker by far than Brief Encounter and other wartime scores. Reconstructed here from manuscript and played by the BBC Philharmonic under Ramon Gumba, with Martin Roscoe as soloist, its pathos wears thin after a while, but Herrmann’s ideas are always gripping – as Alfred Hitchcock would soon discover. The film Hangover Square is hard to find; you can watch six minutes of it here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x37kmy_hangover-square_shortfilms. Citizen Kane, so famous we know its lines heart, sounds quite different as pure music without all those Rosebud actors getting in the way. Once again, Herrmann’s knack for dictating atmosphere is evident from the opening growl. Less well remembered, by me at least, is the score’s diversity – its polka and allegrettos and the soaring aria from the projected Salammbo opara, sung here by the delicious Orla Boylan. Seeing Citizen Kane again on DVD, you can imagine Bernard Hermann behind the screen, pulling as many strings as Orson Welles.
Three Russians for the weekend Rachmaninov: Symphonic Dances Is any conductor making more records these days than Liverpool’s Vasily Petrenko? With a Shostakovich cycle for Naxos and Rachmaninov for Avie, Petrenko is covering the Russian rep in big strides. His rhythms in the Dances, sprung like a new mattress, are irresistible, his gloomy Isle of the Dead less gripping. The playing is faultless; it has been decades since Royal Liverpool Phil sounded this rich.
Rachmaninov: 2nd symphony Leonard Slatkin has a naïve passion for Rachmaninov, tempered by analytical restrain. Recorded live in Detroit, his structure in the second symphony is as solid as a T-model chassis and the adagio is never allowed to sink into mush. The soloists - concertmaster Emanuelle Boisvert and clarinet Theodore Oien - are world class.
Rodion Shchedrin: Naughty Limericks As mischievous as any People’s Artist of the Soviet Union managed to be, Shchedrin razzle-dazzled the workers and peasants with his 1963 concerto for orchestra, still crazy after all these years. More daring still in the second piano concerto, he tweaked the commissars’ ears with 12-note rows and dissonances. Detached from grey Soviet conditions, the music can still light up a long winter.
February 3, 2010 Roman Maciejewski: Requiem Started in a Swedish hospital bed in January 1945, this Mass for the Dead amounts to one Pole’s attempt to make sense of the century’s savageries. Both text and music are rooted in strict Roman Catholic usage. The tonality is traditional and free of the usual agendas, modernist and nationalist. Fourteen years in the making, the work is closer in spirit to Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem than to any East European counterpart. Its dedication is ‘to the victims of human ignorance’, a universal community, politically non-aligned. Premiered at the 1960 Warsaw Autumn Festival, Maciejewski’s masterpiece was wildly acclaimed but there have been few performances since – the CD booklet lists only six. An exile for most of his life, Maciejewski (1910-1998) married a Swedish dancer at Dartington on a 1938 English tour and spent the war years in her country. He worked with Ingmar Bergman before an invitation from the pianist Arthur Rubinstein took him to Hollywood, where he refused to oblige his sponsor with a new concerto and turned down a job as head of music at MGM. For the next 26 years, Maciejewski played organ in two California churches. He was not the kind of composer who pushes himself to the forefront. This debut recording of his Requiem is taken from an epic Warsaw performance at the end of communism in April 1989, Tadeusz Strugala conducting a tightly structured account with outstanding soloists – Zdzislawa Donat, Jadwiga Rappé, Jerzy Knetig and Januszk Niziolek. The work receives its UK premiere this week at Westminster Abbey, followed by a BBC relay. Once the ear adjusts to its Catholic and aesthetic conservatism, a compelling humanity surges through.
Three for the weekend Wedding Cake The finest Debussy player of today duets with his new bride in Wedding Cake by Saint-Saens, before working through Fauré’s Dolly suite and Ravel’s La Valse to an exquisite rendition of Debussy’s Petite Suite. Wedding pictures of Pascal and Ami Rogé decorate the booklet and the recital includes a newly composed tribute to the bride by the California composer Paul Chihara. It’s all rather touching, a perfect Valentine’s gift.
From the Heart If what your life is missing is an a capella version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, this Kings Singers release might give cause for excitement. Trouble is, the arrangement cannot find its tonal centre and there is an excess of overdubbing. More effective are John Brunning’s Pie Jeus and the bluegrass adaptation, Out of the Woods.
Mozart: flute concertos Reverting to an ego-free, pre-James Galway style, Bernhard Krabastch plays the two concertos on a simple wooden flute with the Salzburg Mozarteum, sympathetically conducted by Ivor Bolton. The difference is just so refreshing. This Mozart feels organic, fairtrade and eco-friendly; it is rounded off by a pretty C-major concerto by Johann Baptist Wendling (1723-1797). Mr Krabatsch has flair without swagger, a nice touch.
January 28, 2010 Not Just Dowland London’s Wigmore Hall is an intimate place where 540 ticket holders can feel like a family around a fireside. The hall has been releasing selected soirees for the past couple of years – this is its 34th CD – and while many album have been fine souvenirs of shared or missed experience, Carolyn Sampson’s set of 400-year old courtly songs is in a rapturous league of its own. A soprano of serene versatility, I have seen Sampson hold her own against a full orchestra and modern piano but here, with just solo lute for company, she finds a commanding quietude. Forget the husky sorrows of breathless Sting or the nervous hypertension of Alfred Deller, this is narrative singing of the highest quality, flawless in technique, every note on pitch, every phrase effortlessly fitted to its place. Dowland apart, she sings The songs are by Monteverdi, Grandi, Caccini and more. The pleasure of her perfection is enhanced by the diversity of her selection, ranging from prickly Venetian heat to the prim cruelties of the English Tudor court. Ballads by the lesser-known Robert Johnson (1583-1633) bookend the recital and so intense is the concentration that the audience is almost inaudible. Lutenist Matthew Wadsworth, who is blind, is a powerful presence in his own right and the sound engineering by Tony Faulkner is as natural as it comes. Short of actually being there, this is live music at its best. Some enchanted evening...
And three for the weekend Schubert: Die Schöne Müllerin So riveting is the heroic Jonas Kaufmann in his first descent from opera to lieder, so effortless in transition from mood to mood, that the first hint of brittleness, in the ninth of the songs, strikes the ear as a character flaw. It isn’t, of course. There is nothing in the music that Kaufmann cannot handle. The fault is with a record industry that no longer spends time in studio, even for patch-ups. This is a live Minich recital from July 2009, repackaged without editorial refinement. Terrific as Kaufmann is, he could have been historic. The accompanist is Helmut Deutsch. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Schubert: Die Schöne Müllerin The incomparable Fritz Wunderlich is miked too close in this 1964 radio recital and his partner Hubert Giessen is too recessed. Schubert comes so easily to Wunderlich that he can lull the brain to complacency. One longs for more Herculean struggle. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Mahler: Selected songs If you’re passing a branch of the Austrian National Tourist Office and ask nicely, they will give you a free set by the splendid Angelika Kirschlager, accompanied by the hard-working Helmut Deutsch. The songs are intended for male voice, but Ms K’s mezzo gets deep into the angst, especially in the younger works. The package also contains Pierre Boulez’s clinical and contentious account of the sixth symphony. >Buy this CD at Austrian National Tourist Office
January 22, 2010 Franz Liszt: Etudes The new piano prodigy on the once-exclusive Deutsche Grammophon is the Munich child of a German father and a Japanese mother, winner of a first award at seven years old and of many more in her teens. Now 21, Alice Sara Ott is being launched by DG in all major markets with a booklet interview of impeccable blandness in which she appears to have nothing interesting to say on any musical subject. At the keyboard, however, she has plenty to say. The most striking thing about her recital of Liszt’s etudes of ascendant difficulty is the colour differentiation that she manages between one piece and the next while maintaining an underlying character that is, throughout, entirely her own. Alice Sara Ott cannot be mistaken for any other pianist, alive or in legend. Hear her attack the Mazeppa and the approach is far from any Polish steppes, closer to the sound world of Schoenberg’s little piano pieces. In the Eroica, she is skittish, irreverent and altogether unimpressed by Beethovenian antecedents. And in Evening Harmonies she is more like someone who is going out for the night than tucked up at a warm fireside. Engaging and enterprising, Alice Sara Ott is a new-century pianist, looking resolutely ahead and rarely at antecedents. No teacher or mentor is named in her official biography. That suggests supreme confidence, originality and, perhaps, a streak of ingratitude.
Three more piano newbies Chopin: complete waltzes The style that works so well for Alice Sara Ott in Liszt falls a little flat in the overworked Chopin dances for which she professes ‘a deep attachment’. Ott adds an edgy micro-beat to opening phrases and adopts a contrived hesitancy in the 1831 A-minor – devices that are never substantiated by a coherent vision. Her playing is never less than impressive, but the interpretation is a league and a day behind Ingrid Fliter’s unaffected recent contemplations on EMI.
Handel: Suites Racha Arodaky is a French pianist of Syrian origin who commits the political offence of playing Handel on a modern piano. Avoiding the mien of reverence that English artists adopt for Mighty Handel, she runs through the pieces with conversational flair, breathless at times but always entertaining. Racha lists Murray Perahia as her teacher but I hear nothing of his restraint in her uninhibited Mediterranean inflections. I’d like to hear her live and might seek out the festival she runs in the south of France.
Mozart: piano concertos 22, 24 David Greilsammer, Jerusalem born, plays conducts and writes his own cadenzas for these even-numbered concertos, less profound than the oddities on either side of them. In the booklet, he then analyses the performance with two players in his New York-based Suedama Ensemble. The openness is refreshing, as is the pinpoint clarity of intonation. Tempi are brisk and the freshness appealing. Greilsammer and friends sound, even to a Mozart sceptic like me, like they are having fun. And so did I. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
January 13, 2010 Bruckner: 8th symphony Everything in Bruckner’s 90-minute eighth symphony is determined by the opening phrase – structure, mood, substance and relevance. Too much pomp at the outset strips the work of surprise. Too restrained an approach negates its religious passion. I have heard many conductors stumble in the Eighth, searching for a happy medium. The French-Canadian Yannick Nézet-Séguin seems to know where he is going. The opening sounds as inevitable as daybreak, a statement of common certainties. What follows is impressionistic rather than descriptive, a world that opens before our ears in a myriad of details that may, or may not, be connected in a divine order. The vast adagio and the ceremonial finale, each half an hour long, offer musical resolution but few literal absolutes. Bruckner’s Eighth is a gigantic mystery, greeted by early reviewers as an overblown monstrosity. In this interpretation, it is a representation of the mystery and wonderment of nature. There are more exhilarating recordings (Tennstedt, Barenboim) and more accomplished ones (Karajan, Harnoncourt), but I have never come across a more imposing Bruckner Eighth from a conductor in his 30s and an orchestra, the Métropolitain of Montreal, of low international profile. What I find so appealing about this combination is that it delivers Bruckner free of ego frills and excessive commentary. Yannick told me recently he expects to do it better when he’s 70, but this will do nicely for a few decades.
Three war hero CDs Karl Amadeus Hartmann: Chamber music Hartmann was a rare musical resistant to Nazism. Suppressing his own works during the Third Reich, he physically guided fugitives over the mountain passes to Italy. After 1945, he founded a landmark Musica Viva series in Munich to educate Germans in modern music. This collection of performances by the Doelen Quartet and other Dutch musicians, is augmented by interviews (in German) with Hartmann, his wife and son. Although best known for big symphonies, Hartmann’s two string quartets, written either side of the war, are intensely expressive and his chamber concerto for clarinet, string quartet and string orchestra is quite unexpectedly exuberant, given that it was written in 1935 in the heart of darkness descended.
Luigi Dallapiccola: Orchestral works 2 Forced into hiding under Mussolini, Dallapiccola developed a lyrical twelve-tone style in his one-act opera, The Prisoner. On this disc, a half-hour Partita occupies a modernist middle ground with some rambunctious orchestral effects. The 1960 Dialoghi for cello and orchestra suffers from an excess of Webernian fragmentation. More attractive are Quattro Liriche di Antonio Machado, delicately sung by Gillian Keith, backed by Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic.
Miecyslaw Weinberg: violin sonatas 4 & 5 Weinberg fled the Nazis in Warsaw, only to be jailed by Stalin. Strongly influenced by his close friend Shostakovich, his chamber style is close and confidential, a rustle of dangerous secrets. This live premiere recording, by Stefan and Andreas Karpal, is disrupted by heavy breathing on a misplaced microphone – a pity, since the music is urgent and compelling. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
January 5, 2010 James MacMillan: The Sacrifice The second opera by Scotland’s most successful composer draws on a misty Welsh myth in which a general, eager to end a civil war, marries his daughter, Sian, to the other side’s leader. This does not go down well with his deputy, Evan, who wants her for himself. Seven years later, as Sian’s son becomes heir apparent, Evan begs her to elope with him. Sian resists, and the climax is a political bloodbath in the tradition of Macbeth and King Lear. Cue for one of MacMillan’s trademark requiems. Staged by Welsh National Opera in 2007, The Sacrifice has two outstanding characters – the unyielding Sian and the orchestra, which gets many of the best lines. MacMillan, leaving his minimalist origins far behind, relieves an often prosaic text with lavish instrumental interludes, the last of which is a wrenching lament as Sian confronts the morbid consequences of her forced decisions. Sian is sung by the effulgent Scottish soprano Lisa Milne with such conviction that one could hardly imagine anyone else in the role. Christopher Purves is her father, Peter Hoare her husband and Leigh Melrose her rejected lover. Anthony Negus conducts. The Sacrifice needs to be seen rather than heard but, until your local opera house gets reckless, this Chandos recording is vivid and strong.
Two French Chopin CDs Alain Planès: Chopin chez Pleyel A Paris recital given by Frederic Chopin on 26 April 1841 and reviewed by no less than authority than Franz Liszt is repeated here on a period piano by one of the most thoughtful French interpreters. Opening with the Andante spianato, Planès takes us through a finely-balanced programme of heart tweakers and brain teasers – not a Polonaise in sight. The Pleyel piano inhibits lushness but the Nocturnes are no less tender for being hit by thinner hammers. Chopin comes alive in your room.
Alexandre Tharaud: Chopin, journal intime Tharaud offers a tour of the Chopin pieces that have meant most in his life. Why this should matter to anyone outside his family is unexplained, but the playing, on a modern Steinway, is arresting. Two mazurkas are stripped of nationalist subtext and the posthumous nocturne is given a performance of stunning and seductive introspection. Even the little Ecossasies acquire profundity under Tharaud’s probing hands. The benchmark for Chopin performance this year has been set high.
December 23, 2009 Ligeti: string quartets György Ligeti used to call his first quartet ‘Bartók’s 7th’ and for many years withheld it from performance. Written under Communism in 1954, it feigns conformity to the anti-modernist line while subtly mocking the constraints with hinted astringencies. Its morbid waltz movement is a cross between Ravel’s macabre dance and Schoenberg’s laconic settings of Johann Strauss, a blend of wit and aspiration. More playful than Bartók ever was, the young Ligeti’s self-deprecation hints at the wicked games he would play once he was free to do so. The second quartet, dated 1968, opens with nocturnal Bartók rustlings but its language is aphoristic, precise, fragmented and, in its particular way, beautiful as a Beckett play. A modern masterpiece, its unexpected conjunctions startle and intrigue the ear even on third hearing. The filler in this disc is a rarity – a 1950 Andante and Allegretto drawn from the Janacek sound world. There are more polished Ligeti recordings on prime labels from the LaSalle and Hagen quartets, but the energetic, Boston-originated Parker Quartet play with deep sympathy for Ligeti’s different styles, missing only the savage grin of his caustic humour. I really want to hear this group live.
Three seasonal CDs to try Into this world this day did come The 2009 Christmas stocking has been thin on winners, but I cannot let the season pass without a nod to a stunning conflation of carols new and medieval from the Choir of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. The top three tracks by Diana Burrell, Judith Bingham and Stuart Macrae, vigorous and inventive, refute the clichéd Dawkins doctrine that religion is beyond self-renewal. Theirs is an unflinching modern sound with an irresistible spiritual dimension.
Robert White: Hymns, psalms and lamentations A 1574 victim of the plague in Westminster, White is a bit-player in the liturgical shifts of his turbulent century. A high church Anglican, his translucent coolness makes the most of cathedral acoustics. Gabriel Crouch directs the London group, Gallicantus.
Ave Maris Stella Antwerp trained, the Dublin organist Gerard Gillen gives a nimble, idiomatic reading of two Flemish masters, Flor Peeters and Cesar Franck. St Mary’s Pro Cathedral has a late-romantic organ that eschews snorts and grunts and delivers a lovely singing line. A one-shot cure for committed organ phobics. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
December 16, 2009 Chopin recital: Janina Fialkowska Before Chopin Year floods us with tinklers in micro-skirts and Lang Lang duetting with Richard Clayderman, wrap your ears around the real thing. Janina Fialkowska, a Candadian, ran off with the first Artur Rubinstein competition in 1974 and won a devoted following for her warm and intimate tone, so unlike the bangers and crashers of the competition circuit. A tumour in her left arm forced a career break early in the present decade, but she’s back now and more characterful than ever. Her technique is fearless. Fialkowska takes the Grande valse brillante in F major as if it were the Moonlight sonata opening and she flickers through the waltzes, mazurkas and polonaises with the dazzle of a disco dancer. I particularly like her colour differentiations within the hackneyed old Minute Waltz, which I never expected to listen to again with pleasure. Best of all is the B major nocturne, which she plays conversationally without extremes of quietude and pointless rubato pauses. This is high-class Chopin playing, deeply felt and demonstrably authentic. Fialkowska writes the booklet notes herself, with much the same directness, explaining her choices and contrasts in a language accessible to all. The sound, from a studio in Quebec, is as good as it gets.
Three debuts to try Nemanja Radulovic: Devil’s trills The 23 year-old Parisian Serb is aiming for the Nigel Kennedy slot, projecting a rebellious hairstyle and an immediate stage presence. His sound on debut is too in-your-face for comfort, but there is no ignoring the individuality of tone or the edge of ambition. Accompanied by string quartet in Kreisler-like encores, he exudes Balkanic sulphur and disturbs all the horses in the high street. As well as Tartini, he plays Paganini, Wieniawski, Vitali, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Sarasate and Kreisler.
Andreas Brantelid: Chopin cello music The Danish cellist got his break at 14 in the Elgar concerto and is now launched, at 22, on the world circuit. His tone is reticent and meditative; I hope he’s showier on stage. His partners in the Chopin cello sonata and piano trio are Marianna Shirinyan (piano) and Vilde Frang (violin), who is going to be very big, indeed.
Vilde Frang: Sibelius, Prokofiev concertos A Norwegian protégée of Anne-Sophie Mutter, 22 years old, Frang opens Sibelius with the iciest wisp of evanescent sound, announcing a major new force on the strings front. Muscular and confident, she has something of the Mutter bravura but with a sympathetic wink. In the first Prokofiev concerto she substitutes flash virtuosity for an in- your-ear whisper. In Sibelius, she is fire on ice. Frang is my hot tip for 2010. Thomas Sondergard conducts the WDR Cologne orchestra, a crack band.
December 8, 2009 Shostakovich and Comrades, volume 1 The Scottish pianist Murray McLachlan has been on the road these past three years with a fascinating recital of Soviet-era keyboard music. The centre point is Dmitri Shostakovich, who emits more chord-cluster violence in his 1926 first sonata than he will ever dare again. The 1942 second sonata is sombre and subdued, written just after the Leningrad siege in memory of his piano teacher, Leonid Nikolaev. McLachlan captures the contrast to idiomatic perfection, conveying suppressed, inverted suffering in the moderato finale of the later sonata. The poignancy is deepened by the contemporary works of other composers. A 1945 third sonata by Dmitri Kabalevsky wears a forced smile and sounds painfully trivial beside the master’s hand-wrung truths. Nikolai Miaskovsky’s Song and Rhapsody of 1942 is steeped in pre-Revolutionary nostalgia, lost in salon reveries. A solo transcription of part of the 1963 first piano concerto by Rodion Schchedrin eases its way out the post-Stalin thaw with some of the abrasive chords of early Shostakovich, turned vulgar in the ceaseless deprivations of Soviet life. Schchedrin’s is a rich, comic piece, Gogolian in its self-mockery. An unexpected insertion is a tribute to DSCH – the Shostakovich musical mnemonic – by the Russophile Scot, Ronald Stevenson. This short extract from Stevenson’s 80-minute Passacaglia on DSCH is no more than a taster, grey as a winter’s day, and perhaps long enough. McLachlan is wonderfully atmospheric throughout. I am eager to hear his next compilation.
Three more Russian piano releases Rachmaninov 4th concerto, Medtner 2nd The two composers were good friends. Medtner’s second concerto of 1926 sounds like sub-prime Rachmaninov, as does Rachmaninov’s fourth of the same year. Both were written in exile and neither has a convincing centre. Yevgeny Sudbin makes an even-handed case for each work, alternately wistful and forceful. The North Carolina Symphony under conductor Grant Llewellyn are far less subtle.
Rachmaninov, Medtner, Prokofiev, Gubaidulina sonatas An intelligent set of contrasts by the Russian pianist Anna Vinnitskaya. Slightly under-powered in Rachmaninov’s second and indeterminate in Prokofiev’s seventh, she gives a heart-tugging account of Medtner’s 1918 Sonata Reminiscenza ad has revelations to share in Gubaidulina’s 1962 Chaconne. The Medtner has gone straight to my i-Pod.
Rachmaninov, Grieg, cello sonatas From the same period as his 2nd piano concerto, Rachmaninov’s sonata for cello and piano dips with startling suddenness from playful to darkness. Jamie Walton and Daniel Grimwood find more lightness here than most Russians; they are just as summery and enjoyable in the Grieg.
December 2, 2009 Richard Strauss: German Motet Totally out of a blue sleeve, sung by the Latvian radio choir with the French conductor Laurence Equilbey, comes a luminous collection of Strauss vocal works, unfamiliar to my ears and unrelated to anything he was writing at the time. The German motet, premiered December 1913 in Berlin and scored in 20 parts – 16 choirs and four soloists – is second in complexity only to Tallis’s Spem in Aulium. There are passing soprano affinities to the recent Rosenkavalier but nothing by way of baroque affectation or patriotic bombast, just an unleashing of choral virtuosity for the sheer delight of it. Strauss makes much play on the word Licht (light) in a text taken from Friedrich Rückert, whose poems yielded Gustav Mahler’s two great cycles. He is less concerned than Mahler with consonantal clarity, preferring a wash of sound through which the solo voices rise and fall like dolphins in an evening sea. Gorgeous. Strauss returns to Rückert in 1935 when, sidelined by the Nazis, he writes Dream Light for male choruses in a manner morosely reminiscent of Schubert and Brahms, reaching back for roots he once shared with the now-banned Mahler. Two other songs on this revelatory disc date from 1897 when both composers were poised at the edge of their prime. As for the record sleeve, Naïve make the most beautiful covers to be found anywhere in these straitened times. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Two more Strauss records and an Elliott Carter Alpine Symphony The best thing about listening to this monster on record is that you can leave the room when – you will – get bored. Semyon Bychkov conducts the WDR radio orchestra of Cologne in a well-constructed live performance. All the old mountain clichés come out on cue; the only shortcoming is the band, which is never quite Berlin quality in brass and lower strings. Karajan still rules the roost in this rep. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Symphonia Domestica, Metamorphosen The Weimar Staatskapelle is not nimble enough for Strauss’s quick turns and the conductor, Antoni Wit, eschews risk. The strings, exposed in Metamorphosen, lack the morose and scary rumblings of Vienna, Munich or Berlin.
Elliott Carter: Choral works Will Carter last the test of time? These songs, dating from the 1930s and 1940s, were written for the Harvard Glee Club in an idiom less advanced than Ives. The Stuttgart Vocal Ensemble make light work of them. Let’s Be Gay for female chorus and two pianos might get an occasional laconic airing in epochs to come.
November 26, 2009 Bryn Terfel: Bad Boys The latest Terfel product – to call it a recital of music insults both commerce and art – casts the Welsh baritone as all the best-known nasties on stage. He excels in the obvious roles – Mephistopheles in both the Gounod and Boito operas, jailer Pizarro in Beethoven’s Fidelio and, best of all, Commendatore Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. These acts are one-dimensional. Terfel does one-dimensional with brio. He is appropriately cynical as Sportin Life from Porgy and Bess and rather charming in a rotter kind of way as Ruddigore in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera. Where the product turns sticky is with those characters that require subtlety and shading to bring out the menace. Mack the Knife is not a credible mugger in Terfel’s bluff interpretation and Iago in Verdi’s Otello demands more foresight. Least effective is Sweeney Todd, a character who is meant to arouse more sympathy than terror in Somndheim’s master-musical. Terfel sings him as a stock villain, straight off the police line-up, with Anne-Sofie von Otter wittering as Mrs Lovett in the background. Paul Daniel conducts the Swedish radio orchestra and choir. This is superstore product, artless as it comes.
Three more CDs to try Martinu: chamber works Nearing the end of the Martinu anniversary year, he continues to be discussed as the Czech who wrote too much music for his own good. These four works are a good taster of how much energy and invention he could pack into a piece. The 1942 piano quartet has an ominous undercurrent, never overstated, with exiled yearnings. The 1947 quartet for oboe, violin, cello and piano is an original form: who else could write for that odd combo and make it work? A late duo for violin and cello, written months before his death, is the acme of intimacy. The Schubert Ensemble with George Caird (oboe) capture Martinu’s idiom to perfection.
Gare du Nord Two teenaged sisters from upstate New York, Madalyn and Cicely Parnas, give a fine, tense reading of two duos for violin and cello by Martinu, together with Paris-oriented works by Glière, Honegger and Milhaud and a new work by Brian Fennelly. Sensitive to one another, as sisters must be, they do not always differentiate the characters of these diverse composers. But those refinements should come with time. A pair to watch.
Alexander Tansman: chamber symphonies A Polish exile in Paris, Tansman adopted Stravinskian sonorities and jazz rhythms to sustain an agreeable and voluminous output, albeit one without strong personal traits. Oleg Catenai conducts the Swiss-Italian radio orchestra.
November 18, 2009 J C Bach: Philippe Jaroussky Bach’s eleventh and youngest son, Johann Christian, came to London in 1762 and lived there for the next 20 years until his death, aged 46. He cut a figure of fashion, was painted by Gainsborough and frequented all the best coffee houses. His music, too, was well received, but these were revolutionary times and his Italian-style baroque perfectionism became outmoded. Despite Mozart’s admiration, the London Bach fell between posterity’s cracks and seldom gets performed in modert times, let alone seen on stage. This selection of arias by the French counter-tenor is, therefore, an act of excavation and advocacy, both conducted with immaculate serenity. The songs he chooses were written for castrati to perform in operas drawn from Greek and Latin literature, stuffed with artificial pathos and pastiche. Jaroussky’s trick is to sing them with an early-romantic flourish that redeems the music from the risk of stultification. The longest aria, 13 minutes from Adrianno in Siria (1765), displays Bach’s ability to command full attention on a static stage setting. There is a marvellous song from Orpheus and Euridice - who knew there was a Bach Orfeo? - and four ravishing concert arias. Jérémie Rhorer conducts Le Cercle de l’Harmonie with twinkling assurance in one of the year’s late hits.
Three vocal discs to try To Saint Cecilia Great idea to combine Purcell’s Ode, Handel’s Song and Haydn’s Mass on a double-album, but Mark Minkowski’s tempi are sepulchral and the singing seldom evinces much enthusiasm. Where the two English works demand a certain lustiness from singers, what we get is precious attention for small details in the score. Lucy Crowe and Nathalie Stutzmann are the picks of the singing pack.
Diana Damrau: COLORaturaS The German soprano is right up there with the high Cs, and a good actress to boot. She gives good aria in the heavy 19th century works, less so in Stravinsky, least of all in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, where she glitters without much gaiety. This album needed more producer guidance.
Patrick Hawes: Visions of England Prince Charles’s favourite composer and a resident at Classic FM, Hawes writes music that is old before it is heard. His sonorities are pastoral and Edwardian, a pastiche of past times driven straight down the middle of the road. The Welsh soprano Elin Manahan Thomas sings without adornment or affectation and Julian Lloyd Webber plays two cello solos that sound as if he’s auditioning for film.
November 12, 2009 Gavin Bryars: The Church Closest to the Sea If I challenged you to name ten living composers whose music will be played 50 years from now, Gavin Bryars would be among my certainties. Never heard of him? Born in Yorkshire in 1943 and best known for two stage shows with Robert Wilson, he works at the nexus of polyphony and post-minimalism, seducing the ear with deceptively simple sounds whose complexity is revealed in the aftertaste. Epilogue from Wonderlawn (2004) opens with the kind of sound you would associate with a palm court hotel or a BBC World War Two romance, only for the interplay of strings and piano (or electric guitar) to take us into a very contemporary landscape of family dialogue and alienation. Bryars dedicated the piece to his two cellist daughters and the tension of their sorority is riveting throughout. Eight Irish Madrigals (2004) are the very antithesis of Celtic sentimentalism and The Church Closest to the Sea (2007), evoking a 750 year-old chapel on the Firth of Forth, works jazz riffs on the double-bass against a distinctly Caledonian drone, hypnotic and insistent. Whenever I hear Bryars’ music, I want to hear more. Among today’s ten most durable composers, he’s a dead cert. I might even make this a Twitter contest.
Three vocal discs to try Schumann Lieder The Argentine mezzo Bernarda Fink takes a pellucid trawl through some of the less-known cycles – notably the Mary Stuart songs and some poems of Friedrich Rückert who later, more famously, caught Mahler’s attention. Never forcing the tone, Fink is a superb scene-setter, achingly so in the moonlit Eichendorff set, infinitely relistenable.
Schubert Helipolis Something goes wrong from the off. Matthias Goerne, marvellous in his Schubert sets with Helmut Deutsch, Eric Schneider and Christoph Eschenbach at the piano, switches here to Ingo Metzmacher, a prosaic player. From the opening bars, piano and voice have little to say to each other. Not one stanza is illuminated. Ingo should stick to conducting.
Simon Keenlyside sings Schubert, Wolf, Fauré and Ravel What a difference Malcolm Martineau makes to this live recital, anticipating the singer’s intentions without ever dominating or overwhelming him. Keenlyside is at his most caressing in Fauré’s colourful ecologies.
November 3, 2009 Alfie Boe sings Love Was a Dream The Lancashire tenor was, until last month, being groomed by EMI as the next crossover phenomenon and generational heartthrob. So what’s he doing here on a small Scots label owned by a hi-end hi-fi manufacturer? Changing track, apparently. Boe says he wants to record the music where he feels most at home. The middle-road melodies of Franz Lehar, once popularised by Richard Tauber, have long fallen out of fashion even in those parts of the world where three courses of sweets are essential to any good meal. Boe has the right voice for Lehar, skinnier than the rotund Tauber and more agile on leaps and swoops. The hits he culls from the long-running Paganini, Frederica, Land of Smiles, Giuditta and, inevitably, Merry Widow are well chosen and the English texts he sings are acceptable, if dated. They are written with an exceptional ear for singer comfort and they show the voice to best effect. A little Lehar goes a very long way with me, and little is all you get here - just 44 minutes – with stolid backing from the orchestra of Scottish Opera. Boe may be at a career crossroads after a rather underpowered Rodolfo in ENO’s Boheme. But the voice is in excellent condition and I shall be intrigued to hear where it leads him next.
Three more vocal CDs Joyce DiDonato: Colbran the Muse First Cecilia Bartoli impersonates the early 19th century Spanish diva Malibran, now Joyce DiDonato takes on her rival Isabella Colbran, who wound up married to Rossini after a long stint as his impresario’s squeeze. In both relationships, she launched a stream of Rossini roles, from Armida to Zelmira. The American mezzo packs more power than Bartoli and – dare I say it? – more personality. D’Amor al dolce impero from Armida has wit and twinkle at both ends of the range and her trill runs in Tanti affetti from La Donna del Lago are a joy. Her tone is unfailingly clean and the accompaniment from Rome’s Santa Cecilia orchestra and chorus, conducted by Eduardo Müller, is often stunning. There is a major talent here on the make, and no mistake.
Renée Fleming: Verismo The world divides between those who regard Ms Fleming as America’s greatest living diva and those who find her singing mannered and expressionless. I belong to the second camp and nothing on this fin-de-siècle compilation touches my stubborn heart. Next, please.
Vivica Genaux: Vivaldi pyrotechnics I shall never willingly sit through an opera by Antonio Vivaldi, so I am grateful to the fizzy French mezzo for selecting a jolly highlights disc. My faves are a pair of arias from La fida ninfa but there is much else on this cull that warrants a second hearing. Genaux’s virtuosity is always tasteful and Fabio Biondi’s accompaniment with Europa Galante is appropriately lithe.
October 21, 2009 Ravel: suites Yannick Nézet-Séguin has taken over Valery Gergiev’s rostrum in Rotterdam and is working as number two conductor with the London Philharmonic. Friends in the US keep asking whether he’s as good as I have made out. Here, on his first major-label release, I feel no need to eat any past paeans of praise. A French-Canadian, Nézet-Séguin cut his record teeth on Bruckner with a seductive lyricism reminiscent of his Italian mentor, Carlo Maria-Giulini. In Ravel, he is more obviously on home turf. The first effect to catch the ear is the shimmer he gets out of the Rotterdam Philharmonic in the second suite of Daphnis et Chloé. The love saga sounds, for once, utterly credible and incredibly beautiful. Mother Goose is visualised before our closed eyes. In Valses nobles et sentimentales, the conductor lets his players off the leash for some window-rattling sonorities. La Valse is appropriately ghostly, restrained in the opening phrases but slowly building an image of a Vienna that is dancing towards self-destruction. At the risk of stamping Nézet-Séguin with false role models, I haven’t heard such sleek and controlled Ravel since Abbado in the 1970s. This is a conductor of very high promise indeed.
Three Schubert CDs to try String quintet, Death & the Maiden &c How dangerous for the young Belcea Quartet to attempt, with Valentin Erben, the great posthumous five-hander that has been every festival’s top seller since Pau Casals established Prades. And how close they come to ranking with the ever-greats. The opening is a mite prosaic and the adagio too muscular, but the scherzo is right on the edge of the cliff and the allegretto finale can hardly be better sprung. Young, maybe, but ready to drink. The D887 late quartet has magnificent tension, while Death and the Maiden conveys furious protest against cruel fate.
Works for cello and piano Peter Wispelwey, playing gut strings and partnered on fortepiano by Paolo Giacometti, does his best to convince us that the Arpeggione sonata sounds better on instruments that were already being superseded in Schubert’s time. It doesn’t. Nor do the duo and fantasy for these two instruments. Still, the playing is virile and you have to admire the enterprise.
Moments musicaux, Impromptus David Fray, French son-in-law of Riccardo Muti, is an impressive pianist in Bach and Boulez. Schubert he doesn’t quite get. The singing tone is missing and his rendition comes over fussy and declamatory. The second impromptu in E-flat glitters cleverly, but not enough to convince us of its coherence. What’s missing from his makeup is an understanding of romantic gesture. Muti could teach him a thing or two.
October 13, 2009 Mahler: 5th symphony None of Mahler’s symphonies was premiered in Vienna, where the composer was director of the opera house. Instead, he touted them all over Germany: to Berlin, Krefeld, Munich and, in 1904, to Cologne, where the Gürzenich orchestra gave the first performance of his fifth symphony, to an uncomprehending audience. That same orchestra plays the symphony here under Markus Stenz in an interpretation full of character and tradition. The sound is less sleek than the international norm and there is a lack of threat in the opening march. But the rustic tread of the first movement richly compensates for the absence of sheen, and the interpretation is never less than intriguing. Stenz is full of surprises. He speeds up the stormy second movement, catches breath in the scherzo and delivers one of the sprightliest modern readings of the ambivalent Adagietto – more love letter than funeral ode. The finale reverts to opening principles and the effect overall feels as satisfying as fairtrade coffee. You're not just waking up here, you're saving the planet. This is Mahler from source.
Mahler: 8th symphony Michael Tilson Thomas has achieved Mahler wonders in San Francisco over the past eight years, but this is not one of them. The Eighth is almost unworkable on record, involving around 1,000 musicians. The test of any performance is its quietude. In the orchestral interlude, between its two unequal parts, MTT is so driven by previous excess that emotion and contemplation go missing and the listener just feels stressed.
Mahler: 9th symphony Jonathan Nott and the Bamberg Symphony near the end of their cycle with a convincing Ninth, lacking only the extremes of mortal clarity. Nott approaches Mahler with a modernist detachment in a traditional sonority, a cross between Boulez and Bruon Walter. The blend does not quite jell but there are plenty of interesting passages, and much beauty in the second movement.
Mahler: 9th symphony This is a farewell concert in Stockholm by Alan Gilbert, new chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic. The tempi are stolid, the playing uncompetitive and the enlightenment absent. The opening movement bogs down in confusion before two minutes are up and the finale is numbingly banal. What has the conductor brought to this party other than a nice suit? What does he do that a metronome cannot match? New York be warned: this is your future.
October 7, 2009 Paganini: 24 Caprices The diabolical difficulty of these pieces is well known. The composer was accused of being in league with the devil, so unearthly was his dexterity and so menacing his aura. Although the Caprices are used on the whole privately as practice pieces by would-be virtuosi, when played in performance they require an other-worldliness, something of the night, to convince us of their musical validity. James Ehnes, a Juilliard-trained Canadian soloist, has technique to spare for these works, which he recorded once before at the defunct Telarc. Nothing in Paganini’s music seems to stretch him and he contributes little by way of personality or wit. Competent to a fault and thoughtful in his written notes, he achieves complete mastery of the Caprices without conveying any strong reason for hearing them. > Listen: No. 1 in E major: Andante (Naxos Music Library, available to La SCENA Card members) >Buy this CD at Presto Classical Two Korngolds and a piun-up violinist Korngold violin concerto Like London buses, you can wait years for a Korngold concerto and then four turn up in a row. Nikolai Znaider (RCA) was sulky and Philippe Quint (Naxos) I haven’t heard, but both Renaud Capucon on Virgin and Matthew Trusler on Orchid bring fresh qualities to the work and good reason to reconsider its virtues. Capucon pitches the opening sweetness to perfection and underplays the finale’s recycled movie themes. Trusler takes a more nostalgic route, finding exquisite love and pain in Korngold’s yearnings for a vanished Vienna. Both are thoughtful, distinctive and engagingly personal. Capucon is disadvantaged by his paring – a solid account of the Beethoven concerto, conducted in Rotterdam by Yannick Nezet-Seguin – while Trusler in Dusseldorf (cond. Yasuo Shinozaki) offers the stunning and apt concerto by another film composer, Miklos Rozsa, as well two prime Heifetz encores. In Korngold, though, I cannot choose one over the other: I’m keeping them both. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical > Listen: Trusler (Naxos Music Library, available to La SCENA Card members)
Nicola Benedetti: Fantasie The sultry Scottish violinist has a million-pound contract with Deutsche Grammophon, which used to be a distinctive classical label. The absurdity of this arrangement is demonstrated in showpieces by Sarasate, Vaughan Williams, Saint-Saens and others, which she plays very slowly and without a trace of character. The record is heavily advertised and a seasonal best-seller. It leaves a sour aftersound. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
September 29, 2009 Kim Kashkashian: Neharot Expectations of harmony are never high in contemporary music from the Middle East but this confection by the Boston-based violist is an ear-gripper. Kashkashian, an American of Armenian extraction, plays works by two Israelis, Betty Olivero and Eitan Steinberg, and by the Beirut-born Armenian, Tigran Mansurian (who contributes a piano solo). Olivero’s title piece plays mournful games on the Hebrew word for rivers, an allusion to the floods of tears shed by women in the region’s conflicts. Scored for viola, accordion, percussion, two string ensembles and two voices on tape, it is meditative and consolatory, embracing the sorrows of all sides as a precondition to a tentative harmony. Mansurian’s music starts slow and gets slower, seeking tranquillity in a furnace of unresolved emotions against the kaleidoscopic colours of a Mediterranean sunset. Steinberg’s Rava Deravin for viola and string quartet – a most unusual configuration – contemplates a chasidic melody on a Sabbath hymn by the Safed kabbalist Ari Zal. (Madonna will never get it.) Kashkashian’s playing is introspective to the point of transcendence. The notes rise like letters off a burning page and the heart turns upwards to heaven. Inspiration, that much-abused critical term, is the driving force. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three chamber music CDs to try Brahms: String quartet #1, piano quartet Aimez-vous Brahms? The Quator Ebène, based in Paris, give a contemporary twist to Francoise Sagan’s title. Light as soufflé chefs, they take openings at a daring clip, blowing off dust in pursuit of a natural pace. Brahms would have hated their vivacity (not to mention their Frenchness); Akiko Yamamoto is the quintet's pianist. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
The Bohemian Album The Amsterdam Sinfonietta (dir. Candida Thompson) play taut transcriptions of 1920s string quartets by Pavel Haas and Erwin Schulhoff, both furrowing between Janacek’s sound world and Alois Haba’s. Tough to play but a tonic for the ears. Dvorak’s serenade for strings comes off slushy by comparison. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Ephyra Trio plays Piazzolla A London restaurant-based classical label launches with a lovely set of tangos, transcribed for soprano saxophone, cello and piano, the last played by owner Adam Caird. The producer is Claudio Abbado’s studio partner, Chris Alder, and the style is far removed from dinnertime ambience. This is classical cool, audio chic, a musical menu to improve the autumnal mood.
September 23, 2009 Mendelssohn Discoveries The main attraction on this Leipzig programme is a third piano concerto in E minor that Mendelssohn left unfinished in 1844, the year he presented the matchless violin concerto. Why he never bothered to polish off the other piece is unknown. Either he reckoned he was capable of greater things, or he simply got fed up after two relative failures with prior piano concertos. The manuscript, lodged at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, has been fleshed out by Marcello Bufalini and the soloist is Roberto Proseda. The opening theme is bombastic and the whole of the first movement feels as if it is ticking boxes of audience expectation. The andante is introspective, almost in the manner of Schumann and with some minor wisps that anticipate Mahler; the banality of the finale defies belief. The rest of the disc comprises a preliminary London version of the Scottish Symphony and an early sketch of the Hebrides overture. Both are played with possessive warmth by the Gewandhaus orchestra, Mendelssohn’s own, deftly conducted by Riccardo Chailly. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three vocals to try Marcelo Alvarez: The Verdi Tenor Yes, he's big enough for Verdi, with what old-fashioned critics like to call 'a ringing tone' (as distinct from a ring tone, which is something else altogether). The test is not so much the decibels as the depth of interpretation. The fast-rising Argentine shows a good deal of character in tracks from Aida, Forza, Macbeth and elsewhere, but he lacks subtlety at the summit of Otello's Act 4 aria. Marcelo has some way to go before he's a contender for the title of this album. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Inva Mula Fresh up from Albania, Inva Mula has a fresh, clean tone in French arias, cloudier and somewhat forced in Verdi and Puccini. A protegee of Nicolas Joel, new director of the Paris Opera, she should get a fair hearing at the Bastille in the next couple of years. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Ildebrando Arcangelo sings Handel The record industry's basso of choice is heard here to best advantage in Ombre mai fu from Xerxes and Tu sei from Julius Caesar. The rest of the album lacks differentiating colour. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
September 18, 2009 Mischa Spoliansky: film music There were two halves to Spoliansky’s working life. The first, from 1914 to 1933, involved playing piano in Berlin cafes (from age 16), writing incidental music for Max Reinhardt and producing sheaves of laconic cabaret songs, some of which became popular hits. When Hitler seized power Spoliansky took his family to London, where he became one of the most versatile composers in British film, writing upwards of 50 scores over three decades. Like many other refugees, he started out with the Korda brothers. His first venture was writing songs for a Paul Robeson showcase, Sanders of the Rive, and he went on to compose thrillers, romances, comedies and adventure stories, creating a derring-do backdrop for King Solomon’s Mines (1937) and a seat-gripping soundscape for Lauren Bacall in North West Frontier (1959). Most of the music on this breakthrough album is arranged by Philip Lane and conducted by Rumon Gamba. By way of cinematic interlude, there is also an organ toccatina from Otto Preminger’s 1957 version of G B Shaw’s Saint Joan, with a script by Graham Greene, a piece of music which sounds, in places, defiantly Jewish. There is more to Spoliansky than meets the ear; someone needs to have a crack at those cabaret songs. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three more stage and screen Shostakovich: film music Writing movie scores kept Dmitri Shostakovich sane and solvent during two periods of Stalinist perecution when his symphonies were suppressed and he was persecuted for the crime of ‘formalism’. But film was more than just an emergency resource in his output. From 1929 until his death, Shostakovich turned out almost 40 movies, many of them overtly propagandist, but none without some touch of ironic originality. The eight works in this collection are headed by his two Shakespearian masterscores, Hamlet and King Lear, where music does as much as the avtors to evoke character and atmosphere. In The Gadfly (1955), Shostakovich finds a near-Mediterranean jollity, while in The Golden Mountains (1931) the industrial drama turns Chekhovian through discreet twists of late-romantic themes. The Fall of Berlin (1950), filmed as a 70th-birthday gift to Stalin, falls back on the Tchaikovsky lexicon to keep the tyrant in a benign mood. The sheer ingenuity of the stressed-out composer is a source of wonderment and José Serebrier conducts these scores with true verve, drawing fine playing from the Belgian radio orchestra. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Prokofiev: Eugene Onegin Written for a 1936 staging, the music went unheard for four decades after the theatre was shut down on Stalin’s orders. The combination of (English) speech and orchestral music sounds quirky and artificial, notwithstanding fine readings from Samuel West and Niamh Cusack. But the conducting of Sir Edward Downes, ever passionate about Prokofiev, is well worth the admission ticket. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen on DVD This off-stage set from Weimar, which I am slowly perusing, is intensely enjoyable. The acting of Mario Hoff (Wotan), Kirsten Blanck (Sieglinde) and Catherine Foster (Brünnhilde) underlines the text too often with hand gestures, but Michael Schulz's staging is unfussy and organic, an engaging piece of storytelling which conductor Carl St Clair supports with admirable tempi. The lack of pretension in this production puts bigger houses to shame. This must have been what the Ring felt like before it could blow a national budget. The filming is so unobtrusive, it feels like live theatre. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
September 9, 2009 Daniel Hope: Air. A Baroque Journey If you want to hear the future of classical marketing, go no further than Daniel Hope’s new venture. Air is a respectable selection of 17th and 18th century tunes played with brio by the British violinist and a small bunch of chums. Some of the composers are intriguingly obscure – Johann Paul von Westhoff and Andrea Falconieri are two paths I have never crossed before – and the ensemble is taut and alert. This is an efficient and intelligent compilation – but of what? Hope claims he is about to demonstrate ‘just how diverse the music of the Baroque era was.’ But track succeeds track with seamless homogeneity as inoffensive backdrop, which is how much of the music was originally received. The few genuine inspirations of Bach and Telemann are consumed in a tide of obsequious mildness. This is, needless to say, ideal dinner-party music and it will doubtless be sold in department stores on young couples’ wedding lists. It is the perfect product for people who don’t want to be bothered about music – like the anxious men who run the sales and marketing operations at once-distinguished classical labels. There is no point in my commenting about the quality of the playing, since no-one is supposed to listen this album, just to let it wash over them. This is one of the most dispiriting releases to come my way in a very long time, a triumph of paperwork over artistic pride.
Three more baroque-ies to try Alarm will sound There are 14 tracks of real diversity here from a/rhythmia, an eclectic new music group that starts from Conlon Nancarrow’s player-piano and works its way outward through Ligeti, Birtwistle back to medieval fragments of Josquin des Prez. Every item is an ear-cleanser. I leaped out of my seat at Michael Gordon’s Yo Shakespeare and collapsed in giggles at Benedict Mason’s Disgraceful Bossanova with Lemurs. Total fun, and totally unpackaged. Nobody here is trying to sell you a mood.
John Ward: Consort music for five or six viols An English predecessor of Purcell’s, Ward (1589-1638) wrote lively airs for lots of strings. Overshadowed by Orlando Gibbons, his music has pretty much fallen off the map until the present performance by a multinational group of Oxford musicians, called Phantasm. Much of the work is written to period formula, but the fantasy within is considerable and one senses that the composer, constrained by the conventions of his time, is dying to break loose. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Handel: La Resurrezione As different from Mahler’s as horse from locomotive, Handel’s 1708 Easter oratorio is a string of devotional arias sung in operatic style. The stars are Camilla Trilling and Kate Royal but what keeps the attention on tenterhooks for two hours is Emmanuelle Haim’s adroit keyboard control of rhythm and mood. Recorded live at Lille, it fizzes with an irreverent theatricality. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
September 2, 2009 Pergolesi: Stabat Mater I can’t remember when I last heard Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, or when I enjoyed it as much. Written in 1736, by a dying young composer, it is constructed for soprano, contralto, strings and continuo and evolves through subtle shifts of mood to a kind of slow acquiescence. There are no show-stopping arias or look-at-me interludes of virtuosity. Everything appears to come straight from the poor man’s heart. Rachel Harnisch and Sara Mingardo are the affecting soloists in this live concert, with Claudio Abbado conducting the Orchestra Mozart of Bologna, a group of soloists and young instrumentalists whom he directs with minimal intervention. The result is a period-style collaboration that sits very aptly with the intimacy of this work, although with only 16 in the band you wonder why a conductor was needed at all. The fillers on disc are a violin concerto in B-flat major, with Giuliano Carmignola as soloist, and a Salve Regina, one of many attributed to Pergolesi, though in this case genuine and fairly well-known. Charming more than uplifting, this may be Abbado’s least Abbadoist recording. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three more vocal discs to try Verdi: Requiem With considerable advance hype, this Requiem has much going for it – a Roman orchestra and chorus, a strong quartet of soloists and the fingertip control of Covent Garden’s music director, Antonio Pappano. The big bang of Dies Irae will jump you out of your skin and the two women, Anja Harteros and Sonia Ganassi, are very well cast, if a little florid. Rene Pape is the capable bass. The weakness arrives in the Ingemisco when the troubled tenor Rolando Villazon fails to impose himself. Whether he is saving the voice for some future comeback is not for me to judge. Villazon does nothing wrong – he’s just not there in the way that big tenors from Bjorling on announce their presence at this point. One listens on with trepidation and diminished satisfaction to the performance. Everything is fine, but doubt prevails. Hear Fricsay’s set on DG and you’ll recognise the difference a flawless team can make. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Jonas Kaufmann Acclaimed as the biggest German lyric tenor since Fritz Wunderlich, the Zurich-based Kaufmann sings Wagner, Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven with impeccable diction and no stress at either end of the range. He is almost too intimate with My Beloved Swan from Lohengrin and a bit dark as Fidelio, but when it comes to the agonies of Parsifal he is epic and overwhelming. The jollity in Magic Flute sounds forced – Richard Tauber did it better – but in a world short of tenors Kaufmann is the one to have, and he’s growing all the time. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Hugo Wolf: Mörike songs The Wolf cycles have fallen off the radar lately, so there much to be welcomed in this Wolfgang Holzmair recital, accompanied by Imogen Cooper. The dialogue is credible and the vocal timbre very fine. Wolf is an acquired taste. This is a very good place to acquire it. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
August 26, 2009 Chopin: Complete Waltzes The upcoming bicentennial of Chopin’s birth in 2010 will expose us to plenty of trite and indifferent playing. Pianists who delve beyond the clatter and glitter are rarer than bisons in a vodka bottle. Ingrid Fliter is the most interesting Chopinist of the new generation. An Argentine protégée of Martha Argerich, she plays without concession to romanticism. Forget Chopin swooning over George Sand, losing out to Liszt in love, dreaming of a free Poland and dying of consumption. Fliter plays the waltzes for what they are – the dances of a difficult man, riddled with ideas and prejudices he barely understands and contained by social courtesies that he probably despises. What one hears in her playing are the contradictions, and that’s what makes her Chopin worth plenty of attention. In the A-minor waltz, milked by others for teary emotion, she discovers a sound that is altogether unsentimental, the song of a lonely man who is in danger of becoming a musical wallflower, outshone by glamorous rivals. The F major waltz proves he can outplay anyone on earth, but frustration rings through these fierce performances. Beside Fliter, most modern Chopin sounds superficial. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
More keyboards to try Vladimir and Vovka Ashkenazy Father and son play four-hand Debussy and Ravel, often very beautifully if without ever sounding as one. The trouble with two pianos is that they do not communicate as well as two violins. The Rapsodie espagnole, though, is cherishable. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Rare Rachmaninov The intriguing scraps that Vladimir Ashkenazy shares from the piano with soloists of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra include a three-hankie Romance in A minor and a pair of Morceaux de Salon that would not sound amiss in a Romanov boudoir. Two solemn songs from Joan Rogers serve a reminder that this party was going to end in bloodshed.
Luiza Borac Together with the Chopin Etudes, which she delivers almost balletically, the Rumanian pianist offers a scarce set of six Polish songs by Chopin, transcribed by Liszt. Flashy and fascinating as they are, they are no match for the brute athleticism of the piano studies. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
August 19, 2009 Bruckner: Symphonies 3 and 4 Bruckner’s third symphony is of greater importance than commonly realised. Sabotaged by the Vienna Philharmonic on first performance in 1877, the audience fled and there were just two students left clapping at the end, one of whom was Gustav Mahler. The piano score that Mahler made found Bruckner his first publisher and put him, at 49, on the map. For the 17 year-old Mahler, this tributary Wagner Symphony taught him, among other things, how to write a big Adagio. Bruckner’s third, insufficiently heard, is a gateway to the musical future – an Eroica, of sorts. Mariss Jansons’ live performance in Amsterdam is captivating from the start, the tempi arresting and the sound magniloquent, with silences so daring that only an orchestra on the top of its confidence would attempt them. The fervency is proselytic, as if determined to convert ten thousand Bruckner sceptics in five minutes short of an hour, but Jansons’ phrasing is so congenial you never feel he is trying to sell you anything. This is great music played with total conviction. I cannot recall any performance on record – Böhm, Barenboim, Tintner – that comes close. The fourth symphony, more familiar, is delivered with an absence of nostalgia and an irresistible optimism. Far from the bucolic geniality of Bruno Walter and the historic sweep of Wilhelm Furtwängler, this is an interpretation retooled for a techie age, note-perfect and disco-loud but gloriously affirming the life-force that Bruckner celebrated. To treasure forever. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three more symphonies Shostakovich 11th symphony, ‘The Year 1905’ Kirill Karabits, the young Ukranian conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra weighs in with a reading that could hardly stand further from the old Russian norm. Studiously underplaying the party anthems, he brings out its Mahlerian antecedents, especially the Resurrection themes, to denote the composer’s dismay at the brutal crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Bold and original, this performance takes the symphony into new territory and the orchestra into strong new hands – I have not heard Bournemouth (last prop. Marin Alsop) play so powerfully in years. The disc is available as a cover-mount with BBC Music magazine. >Get this CD free with your copy of the September 2009 BBC Music magazine
John Adams: Doctor atomic symphony John Adams cannot be serious. Doctor Atomic is, in my view, the first durable opera of the 21st century. This distillation for orchestra works neither as a thinking person’s guide nor as a highlights disc. It’s not even a karaoke version. David Robertson and the St Louis Orchestra are wasting their skills. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Dvorak 9th symphony Why am I listening to a 43 year-old live performance of a symphony I’ve heard more often than Happy Birthday? Because the Brno Philharmonic in 1966 are a real Czech orchestra, unlike the modern soundalikes, and the conductor Jiri Waldhans is unafraid to let his brass let rip in organic style. This may not be everyone’s glass of Pilsner, but I found it marvellously refreshing. >Buy this CD at Orchestral Concert Cds
August 5, 2009 Scotland at Night This eclectic compilation of old poetry and (fairly) new music is the brainchild of best-selling Edinburgh author Alexander McCall Smith (of the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series) and composer Tom Cunningham. In the Rabbie Burns anniversary year, the idea could hardly be more timely but the selection avoids narrow nationalism and sentimental folksiness by employing a range of composers, not all of them Scots. James MacMillan stands out in two songs as the country’s most distinctive musician, and Cunningham’s contributions are cleverly evocative of past and present. But there are also compositions by Arvo Pärt, the Englishman Howard Skempton and the chorus leader Mike Brewer, whose Laudibus ensemble are in fine voice. It is no easy thing to imagine a nation in music. This disc suggests not only a sound of Scottishness, but also a fading awareness of night, dispelled by an excess of electric light and heat, a rampage of ecological damage. Songs cannot repair the loss but they can provide a reminder of values that are greater than specific nationhood. Something of that very high aim is achieved on this recording. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three Bruckner symphonies 4th symphony (1874 version) The original score, performed here, is structurally diffuse and texturally confusing. Kent Nagano opens with an absence of mystery and gets drearier. The Bavarian Radio orchestra sounds far from its supple best. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
7th symphony Paavo Järvi, with an innate feel for Brucknerian atmosphere, takes us into the dark sanctuary without fuss or piety. It’s a good straightforward reading, played by the workaday Frankfurt Radio orchestra. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
9th symphony Conductor Fabio Luisi makes the point that this symphony used to be done with too much sanctimony His directness is more refreshing than his interpretation, which strives far too hard for an altogether inappropriate objectivity. The Dresden Staatskapelle override the conductor’s torments with playing of serene rapture. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
July 26, 2009 Beethoven: lost concertos Like Mozart, Beethoven started writing piano concertos while still in short pants. The earliest sketch, written at age 13, is reconstructed here by the Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam from extant sketches in E-flat major. It could easily be mistaken for pre-pubescent Mozart, ingratiating to a fault and startling more for precocity than for any originality. A weak finale undermines much of the preceding statement. If the boy went no further, he would have been forgotten. A rondo in B flat major is all that remains of another immature Beethoven concerto, but its eight short minutes are full of hints of future greatness. There is a phrase that seems familiar from Fidelio and another that could come from the middle piano sonatas. Beethoven was growing up fast in the Napoleonic 1790s and this commands serious interest. The B-flat piano concerto, catalogued as his second but actually his first, rounds off this intelligent and entirely non-routine recording project, a meticulous exploration of a composer's evolution. All three pieces are nicely played by Brautigam, with the Norrköping orchestra, conducted by Andrew Parrott. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three Mendelssohns to try E-minor violin concerto, piano trios Lined up against a century of great violinists on record, from Fritz Kreisler to Nigel Kennedy, the Greek soloist Leonidas Kavakos brings little to the Mendelssohn party beyond a clean technique and sparky speeds. The piano trios are likewise pallid. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Octet and 1st symphony for 4 hands The supreme inspiration of Mendelssohn’s teens, the octet is best heard as prescribed, with eight stringed instruments rather than two pianists, though the skeletal version clariefies the conversation. The composer’s reduction of his first symphony adds a violin and cello to the piano pair, giving an e-ray view of an important work. Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen are the excellent piano duo. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
2nd symphony: Hymn of Praise Full of pomp and repetition, this grandiose symphony-cantata needs careful navigation to avoid running aground on a mighty rock. Andrew Litton steers a course of moderation with the Bergen Philharmonic orchestra and chorus. There are moments of rapt beauty in the adagio religioso, but the big shouts are a bit wearing. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
July 14, 2009 Kaija Saariaho: L’amour de loin – love from afar This is one of those rare operas that is better heard than seen. Nothing much happens in Amin Maalouf’s two-hour saga of courtly love in the crusader era. Lover and loved on croon at one other from either end of the Mediterranean. After an eternity or two, they finally meet and someone dies. There is no characterisation, hardly any incident, nothing to keep you awake beyond a generalised post-modern alienation. At English National Opera this month, many around me snoozed and many more left at the interval. Commissioned by Gerard Mortier at Salzburg, this is pure festival opera – to while away a summer’s night and be washed away with a crisp Chablis over dinner. On record, the diet range of sonorities sounds like elevator music in a superior class of hotel. The Finnish composer, based in Paris, has exquisite taste and an impeccable neutrality. The ENO cast of Joan Rodgers, Faith Sherman Roderick Williams gave better account of the lovers and their Pilgrim than Ekaterina Lekhina, Marie-Ange Todorovitch and Daniel Belcher on record. Ed Gardiner’s conducting, too, was more seductive than Kent Nagano’s. I detected greater enthusiasm in the opera house among under-30s but I cannot imagine that this elegant vacancy will ever become an operatic fixture. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Three more to try Grazyna Bacewicz: three violin concertos Almost unheard outside Poland, Bacewicz (1909-69) is the missing link between Szymanowski’s inter-war expressionism and the post-war austerities of Lutoslawski and Panufnik. Her language takes a while to beguile but, once entrenched, speaks with unerring agreeable directness. Joanna Kurkowicz expounds some extraordinary solo monologues, opening up the composer’s inner world like an August sunflower. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Szymanowski, Britten: violin concertos Frank Peter Zimmermann’s sinewy musicianship is perfect for this meditative repertoire. He has more to say in the second Szymanowski concerto than in the first, and he is quite compelling in the Britten, a work of near-maturity. Neither of the orchestras on this disc, Warsaw and Stockholm, matches the soloist’s intensity. >Buy this CD at Presto Classical
Tchaikovsky: 5th symphony, Hamlet |
By Norman Lebrecht
.jpg)
Thomas Zehetmair, the German violinist-conductor, adds a distinctive interpretation, treating the set as a fluctuant mood cycle – almost an exercise in psycho-dynamics. Without attempting to analyse the elusive Paganini, he manages to suggest both the magic of his stage presence and the sulphurous aspects of his character. Produced by the veteran Manfred Eicher on ECM, Zehetmair manages to give even the hackneyed 24th Caprice - variegated by everyone from Brahms and Rachmaninov to Joe Stump and Andrew Lloyd Webber – a flush of original feeling. Along with Michael Rabin (EMI) and Heifetz himself (RCA), this is diabolically as good as it gets.
x.jpg)
