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The Lebrecht Weekly

 


CDs of the Week

By Norman Lebrecht

Read

June 25, 2009

Contemporary Music from Ireland vol. 8
(CMC)
****

The title is unlikely to send anyone rushing down to the stores and the opening track for four guitars by Kevin Volans is a soul-destroying plink that leaves little appetite for more. Volans, a South African who gained renown with an early pair of hit quartets for Kronos, sounds here as if he needs to see more sunshine.

The rest, though, is party time. Andrew Hamilton contributes a gorgeous German aria that gets broken up by Tourette-like interruptions. John Kinsella, former head of music for the Irish broadcaster RTE, puts up a 10-minute quartet inflected by Wagner’s Tristan chord but offering more of a tribute to Mahler, intelligent and moving.

Deidre McKay’s setting of Beckett’s poem Dieppe is a devotional ecology, Frank Lyons raids the rock archives for Rush, while Martin O’Leary’s Bluescape tilts more towards New Orleans. Gerald Barry, probably the best-known Irish composer, pipes up with a bleary piece called Lisbon, reeled off by Thomas Ades and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

I guess it was the Dublin bureaucracy that put out this album under a dull title and cover, but with so much new music worth shouting about, and so much fun, Ireland deserves to be getting more of a spin on the world’s turntables.

>Buy this CD at CMC


Three concertos to try

Mozart piano concertos
Leon Fleisher, Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra
(Sony)
***

Beware of Mr and Mrs records. Leon Fleisher, back with both hands after 40 years of disability, brings an authority bred of prolonged abstention. His touch in concertos 12 and 23 is a thing of wonderment, a throwback to golden-age keyboard masters. But paired with Mrs Fleisher in the two-piano version of the three-piano concerto, he turns deferential and utterly conventional, opening the doors to let the lady through. I bet Mrs F can give as good as she gets, but her husband is too nice to let her show it.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical



Yossif Ivanov
(Naïve)
****

The independent French label justifies its name once more with an unpretentious artist playing two tough concertos as if they were child’s play. Ivanov, a Belgian violinist of fine pedigree, finds bucolic innocence in the second Bartók concerto and mystery in the Shostakovich first. Both interpretations are personal to the point of idiosyncracy, a welcome relief from standardised star versions. Pinchas Steinberg conducts.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical





Mendelssohn: early concertos
Dinorah Varsi, Alexander Sitkovetsky
(Orfeo)
***

Two d-minor violin concertos and an a-minor for piano, so early that they sound more sub-Amadeus than boy-Felix. The vitality is infectious (and the playing superb), but civilisation is not advanced by such juvenilia.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical







June 17, 2009

Shostakovich: Symphonies 1 and 15
(Mariinsky)
*****

The first and last symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich are tragic worlds and a war apart. The first, a student score from 1926, captures the high excitement of the post-Lenin years when the revolution was won and all seemed possible. The 15th, dated 1972, exhales sighs of hopelessness amid mystifying quotations from unrelated works and sudden eruptions of impotent rage. Or so most conductors seem to think.

Valery Gergiev, in these July 2008 recordings from St Petersburg, tears up the script in two of the most terrifying performances you will ever hear. He casts the first symphony as an act of prophecy, teasing out early hints of themes from the future fifth symphony, when Shostakovich was crushed by Stalin, and the eighth, when he was caught between the clashing forces of fascism and communism.

The graduation work feels like an entry ticket to Dante’s Inferno. This corrective interpretation, at odds with every other reading from Mravinsky to Mariss Jansons, convinces from start to finish.

The 15th is made to sound less bleak than usual, its near-empty pages held together by taut rhythms and gallows humour. Soloists of the Mariinsky orchestra deliver serene lines of calm despair in a land of the damned. Gergiev, in this mood and on home turf, is in a class of his own. Such a shame he so rarely matches this intensity abroad.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical


Three more to try

Marc-André Dalbavie: Variations
Monte Carlo Symphony Orchestra, Dalbavie
(Ame-SON)
**

The busy French composer, born 1961, conducts his commissions from Cleveland, Montreal and Tokyo, all with a Janacek connection. The variations are on a theme from the Czech composer’s piano suite, In the Mists; there is also a Sinfonietta and something called Rocks Under Water. Unfailingly tonal and ‘‘atmospheric’’ in double-inverted commas, the disc sounds like a pitch for a movie soundtrack.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical



Europa
David Grimal, Georges Pludermacher
(Naïve)
**

Nice idea to group sonatas for violin and piano by Janacek, Szymanowski, Enesco and Bartok on one disc. Not so nice to put the mikes so close you can almost hear the players sweat. The playing is over-gestural, flicking abruptly from loud to mute.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical





Karin Lechner, Sergio Tiempo
(RCA)
***

Four-hand music by Milhaud, Ravel, Fauré and Debussy conjures up the edgy domesticity of fin-de-siècle Paris, rippled with moral equivocations and sideways glances. Two young Venezuelans play agreeably as one.







June 3, 2009

Nino Rota: Symphonies 1 and 2
Torino Theatre orchestra, Marzio Conti
(Chandos)
***

Composer to all of Italy’s great filmmakers, most effectively for Federico Fellini, Rota (1911-1979) won a Hollywood Oscar for Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather 2 and a rank close to Erich Wolfgang Korngold as a defining master of the movie soundtrack. Encouraged by the conservative conductor Arturo Toscanini, he also wrote four symphonies and a plenitude of instrumental music, some of which has been recorded by his Neapolitan pupil, Riccardo Muti.

The first two symphonies are naïve in the nice sense of the word, an innocent stroll in the footsteps of tradition. The opening of the G Major symphony (1939) is mistakable for Dvorak. Later themes recall Brahms, Mahler, Debussy and Vaughan Williams, all very pleasant and undemanding. The second symphony, finished in the same year and taking its title, Anni di Pelegrinaggio, from Liszt, is derivative from early Mahler without the bark or the ironic bite.

There is no intimation here of an original voice or a questing mind. These are tributary symphonies of no compelling interest except that in writing them Rota discovered the means to create indelible screen atmospheres for 81/2, Amarcord, Romeo and Juliet and so much more.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical


Three more to try

Brahms, Korngold: violin concertos
(RCA)
**

A sinuous, strange, seriously underpowered account of the Brahms concerto is paired with a reading that gives too much weight to Korngold’s tinselled textures. The Vienna Philharmonic who can play this stuff in their sleep, apparently do, and you wonder whether conductor Valery Gergiev ever opens his eyes, start to finish. Ther approach works better in concert than on record.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical



Thomas Adès: The Tempest
(EMI)
**

Overpraised on debut in 2007, Covent Garden’s latest Shakespeare opera is well sung by Simon Keenlyside, Ian Bostridge, Kate Royal and a large cast but the music feels tame and house-trained even when technically virtuosic.

>Buy this CD at Amazon





Shostakovich: Incidental music for Hamlet; 15th symphony
Russian National Orchestra, Mikhail Pletnev
(Naxos)

Instant evocation of the Danish prince, fresh from the composer’s radical youth, and a stark, moving performance of the final symphony – the best I’ve heard from this team.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical







May 27, 2009

Yuja Wang
(DG)
****

China’s new piano whiz was raised, like Lang Lang, at the Curtis Institute incubator in Philadelphia before launching this year at 22 with a debut album and a blaze of high-profile dates including her first London concerto at the Barbican next month. And boy, can she play.

It’s not just the speed of her fingers in Chopin’s B-flat minor sonata that catches the breath, it’s her dexterity on the turn. Leading from wild scherzo into the sombre funeral march is like taking your riving test on an ice-rink and being told to brake. Yuja does it with an expression that resists morbidity without loss of solemnity.

In Liszt’s B-minor sonata she is a little less assured getting over the opening, but only a little. Once she hits the allegro energicos, resistance melts. In between, she plays Scriabin’s second sonata and two sets of György Ligeti, neither of them likely to get heard on Classic FM but both announcing a free spirit with an eclectic intelligence. Bookmark that name: Yuja Wang is going to be around for quite a while.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical


Three more to try

Brahms: late piano works
Anna Gourari
(Berlin Classics)
****

Another piano stunner on debut, Anna Gourari, Russian born, has been working the German provinces without much luck. Her touch in Brahms separates her from the pack. Arrestingly delicate and thunderous by turn, hers is a totally individual voice. She has more to say on this record than I have space to describe. Someone, please, book her London debut.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical



Baldassare Galuppi: piano sonatas
Andrea Bacchetti
(RCA)
**

Best remembered as the title of a Robert Browning poem, Galuppi (1706-85) was a baroque bore who tried by repetition to mask his thematic weakness. Even played very fast, as Bacchetti does, he can wear the lining off your ears.

>Buy this CD at Amazon





Gustav Mahler: 4 Movements
(Virgin)
***

Mahler revised his first two symphonies and junked two chunks. Britten redid a movement from the third, and the adagio of the tenth fills the disc. The Frankfurt orchestra play well for Paavo Järvi, but to what purpose? Music, in disembodied bits, is meaningless.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical







May 14, 2009

Songs of Muriel Herbert
Ailish Tynan (sop), James Gilchrist (tenor) David Owen Norris (piano)
(Linn)
****

Hardly a week goes by without an obscure English composer presenting a debut CD. Most justify their obscurity in a couple of tracks, but every now and then an original voice leaps out.

Muriel Herbert flourished in the Vaughan Williams era and wrote songs to the same sort of poets – Housman, Hardy, Meredith – in the same pastoral mode. Her style, though, could not be more remote from VW’s bluff masculinity. Behind the cover of a conformist quietude, she uses unexpected intervals to invent a sudden fantasy.

A 17th century lover’s song segues in a change of pitch into the jittery morals of the 1920s. James Joyce, whom Herbert met in Paris, supplies a pair of good texts and there’s a beguiling meditation at a Montparnasse cemetery. Herbert never strays off the tramlines of tonality, though you suspect she would have loved to.

The booklet describes a shy pupil at the Royal College of Music who picked a mediocre mentor in Roger Quilter, made a bad marriage and wound up giving private lessons in Welwyn Garden City. The notes are by her daughter, the distinguished biographer Claire Tomalin. The music discovers an unexplored inner life of absorbing interest.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical


Three more to try

Schubert: The Miller’s Lovely Daughter
Matthias Goerne (baritone), Christoph Eschenbach (piano)
(Harmonia Mundi)
****

Matthias Goerne is less affecting in this cycle than on his last Schubert release, but he is still in a class of his own. No current baritone has such command of shade and light, so quick a shift from one song persona to another. Try ‘Trockne Blumen’ on download.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical



Shostakovich: The Nose
(Mariinsky)
****

Valery Gergiev’s St Petersburg theatre has gone into record production with the LSO Live team and the first release is a cracker. There is no good CD of Shostakovich’s 1928 student opera and, while the work is raw, the musical energy is overwhelming.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical





Mahler: 6th symphony
(RCA)
**

David Zinman’s Zurich cycle of Mahler’s symphonies reaches an over-civilised midpoint, the terror drained from the music by a Swiss need to show a clean orchestral sound. The ear cries out for a rough timbre, and answer comes there none.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical







May 6, 2009

Dvorak: violin concerto, sonatas
(Sony)
****

Jack Liebeck, 29, is one of a clutch of British violinists who have hovered since the millennium on the threshold of recognition. This CD debut is his breakthrough chance and he has chosen his repertoire well. Dvorak’s violin concerto has no obvious champion at the moment, and Liebeck’s astute amalgam of seriousness and sweetness is highly effective, making you think much of the time that this could be Brahms.

It isn’t, of course. Dvorak was turned down by Joseph Joachim, who premiered the Brahms, on grounds of immaturity. The concerto has a flawed finale but the adagio is irresistible and the work as a whole is worth more performances than it gets. Liebeck never blinks in his conviction. You’d have to go back two generations to Nathan Milstein to hear advocacy of this order. The Scottish national orchestra give stout support under the up-and-coming Garry Walker.

Liebeck is more laid back in a sonata and sonatina, partnered by Katya Apekisheva. But the pianist is aurally recessed and the booklet reveals that the concerto recording was made fully four years ago. What took Sony so long?

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical


Three more to try

Szymanowski: complete music for violin and piano
(Hyperion)
****

Alina Ibragimova is Russian, Cédric Tiberghien French. Meeting at the Polish midpoint, they cover the whole of Szymanowski in expressions that veer from muscular to dreamy. The early violin sonata is especially fine, as are the little-known Paganini caprices.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical



The piano music of Teresa Carreno
(Nimbus Alliance)
***

Carreno (1853-1917) was a Venezuelan pianist of world renown. The pieces she wrote are wayside scraps of occasional charm, eloquently recorded here for the first time by Clara Rodriguez, who teaches at the Royal College of Music. Nothing to set your ears on fire, but an intriguing glimpse into Victorian salon music.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical





The celtic viol
(Alia Vox)
**

The Irish and Scottish heritages are shrouded by Jordi Savall in mists of gloom. Even the jigs seem to be stomping on someone’s corpse and the lamentations are dreary beyond words. If this is what Prince Charlie droned on his Last View of Edinburg (sic), he can’t have been altogether sorry to move to a sunnier modality.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical







April 29, 2009

Bernstein’s Haydn: Paris and London symphonies and masses
(Sony, 12CDs)
****

Leonard Bernstein on record is a pale simulacrum of the man in action. Irresistibly charismatic, his presence touching the farthest reaches of the hall, his concerts were an exercise in shared experience: you felt what he felt at that moment.

He was never so effective in studio and, though Columbia let him work through the symphonic canon, few of his records are totally convincing. Even his icebreaking Mahler cycle fails, on grounds of gritty sound and some disputable phrasing, to stand among the best. What worked for Bernstein in concert could seem impetuous and over-personalised once engraved on record.

Except for Haydn. Bernstein had a winning way with the father of symphonic form. He let the music speak for itself, adding just a touch of effervescence or a shade of sorrow to underline the narrative. He had no big points to make, no overload of irony. What you hear are symphonies of structural clarity and naïve beauty, played with unerring finesse by the New York Philharmonic.

Haydn’s masses and his oratorio The Creation are marginally less impressive, marred by rather dull American soloists and inflexible choral dynamics. But a Theresia Mass that opens with Lucia Popp grips the ear with a loving vivaciousness that was Lenny’s hallmark. The world has yet to see another musical communicator of his vitality.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical


Three more to try

Haydn: The Seasons
(DHM)
***

In our age of academic correctness, you can get arrested for playing big-band Haydn as Lenny did. Among period practitioners, Nikolaus Harnoncourt has the edge of experience and affection and his Vienna ensemble plays with sweet charm in this live Graz festival performance. The soloists, Kühmeier, Güra and Gerhaher, lack much by way of lightness or wit.

>Buy this CD at HB Direct



Haydn: Six late masses
(Vivarte)
***

Bruno Weil’s Tafelmusik are on the organic edge of period practice and their tutti can sound rough until the ear attunes. The Tolz boys’ choir and soloists are impeccable and the performances agreeable, if a touch impersonal.

>Buy this CD at Amazon





Kate Royal: Midsummer Night
(EMI)
****

The soprano’s second recital album is intelligent and eclectic, opening with a Strindbergian aria from Alwyn’s unstaged Miss Julie and ambling through the byways of Barber’s Vanessa and Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah to a stunning, unexpected dream song by Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Hitchock’s screen composer. Much here to adore.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical







April 22, 2009

A New Heaven
The Sixteen
(UCJ)
***

There has never been a better time to run a chorus. With All The Small Things, a choral friction serial, on prime-time BBC1 and Messiah on every seasonal tongue, the appetite for all-together-now is well and truly whetted and Harry Christophers is not one to let the opportunity slip.

Christophers runs a tight little choir with close ties to Classic FM, Sky Arts and the Southbank Centre. He has his own record label, Coro, and a flush of pop-ups on other outlets that ensures no month goes by without a Sixteen release on the deck. Recent Coro discs of MacMillan, Purcell and Guerrero thrilled with shared discovery, as if the choir members were conquistadors of a new musical continent.

The present offering, on a major label, purports to narrow ‘the gap between our secular age’ and a time when the Anglican Church waxed supreme. It falls short on two counts. First, the composers Parry, Stanford, Gardiner, Bainton and lesser lights struggle to hold the ear for a whole hour, and something of the brio goes out of the choir when twittering through long stretches of fusty Victoriana.

Second, and no less wearing, is Universal’s sonic tinkering which gives the voices an unnatural brightness and makes the organ grumble like a Canterbury day-tripper with corns. The show-stoppers Jerusalem and I Was Glad lack grandeur and two modern takes on Psalm 23 by Howard Goodall (originally his Vicar of Dibley theme) and John Rutter are trivial beyond belief - literally so. Agnostics may well love it.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical


Two more to try

Handel: Messiah
(EMI)
***

Stephen Cleobury’s hot-cross Messiah, recorded a fortnight ago and already in the shops, has the benefits of live excitement and the Choir of Kings College, Cambridge. Its demerits are close miking and a mixed bag of soloists among whom soprano Ailish Tynan adapts best to testing conditions.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical



John Tavener: Requiem
(EMI)
****

Expecting another drone of meditative mysticism, I was taken aback by the melodic diversity and daring astringency of Tavener’s commission for Liverpool’s culture year. Conductor Vasily Petrenko sets a cavernous Musorgsky-like atmosphere and the soloists – especially the orchestra principals – are sensational. This is not a masterpiece by any measure; it’s the musicians who make it sound like one.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical







April 17, 2009

Prokofiev: piano concertos 2 and 3
(EMI)
*****

This has been a long time coming. It is 11 summers since Evgeny Kissin gave a BBC Prom of the rarely played second Prokofiev concerto that tore up all prior impressions of the piece. Dating from the composer’s abrasive youth, just before World War I, the concerto is infuriatingly nearly-atonal in the sense that it plants ‘wrong’ intervals on the ear but scurries back to tonal chastity before the petting gets serious. Prokofiev was not the commitment type of composer.

What Kissin did at the 1998 Proms, and does again in these 2008 Southbank concerts, was to reveal a complex work of provocative originality whose violence is rooted, like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, in the primordial recesses of the Russian soul. There are few angrier passages in the whole of music than the closing pages of the first and fourth movements, yet Kissin teases out therapeutic insights that place the concerto at the centre of 20th-century evolution, a formative masterpiece.

He has less analysis to do in the popular third concerto and his brittle tone sits at times uneasily with the ingratiating Prokofiev of the 1920s. Kissin’s way with beauty is to freeze it slowly to icecap silence. The Philharmonia, under Vladimir Ashkenazy, offer intuitive support. This is an absorbing record, absolutely indispensable.

>Buy this CD at Amazon


Three more to try

Rachmaninov Preludes
Bernarda Fink
(Hyperion)
****

The C#-minor prelude made Rachmaninov’s name in 1892 with a thunderous opening to a dour little melody that almost anyone can handle at the piano. Steven Osborne plays it as a warm-up to the composer’s two substantive sets of preludes, one closely connected to the second concerto, the other to the third. Somehow, he turns them into coherent narrative, rather than a string of encores.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical



Handel: Organ concertos, opus 4
(L’Oiseau Lyre)
***

If you’re not Handeled out in anniversary week, Ottavio Dantone’s laptop baroque-like organ makes a refreshing change from English cathedral rumblings. No prizes for spotting a Messiah theme in the opening adagio. Handel believed that if a tune was any good, it was worth using twice.

>Buy this CD at MDT





Piotr Anderszewski at Carnegie Hall
(Virgin)
**

The Polish-Hungarian pianist is worth hearing anywhere on earth, but I cannot see the point of issuing a two-disc, mixed-bag recital from last December, complete with applause and encore. Janacek’s In the Mists, sandwiched between Schumann and Beethoven, would have worked much better the morning after in a quiet studio.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical







April 8, 2009

Schumann: Heine songs
(Onyx)
*****

Manic depressive, romantically obsessed and impractical at most aspects of his profession, Robert Schumann is not much of a role model for young musicians, which may explain why so few of them pay him more than perfunctory attention. A mere fragment of his 250 songs are widely known and specialist performers are scarce.

The Austrian baritone Florian Boesch, a regular on the opera circuit, reveals himself here as a Schumann natural, flickering with finely controlled mood in and out of the shadows of 25 poems by Heinrich Heine. The shadows are alternately inviting and ominous. Boesch, partnered by Malcolm Martineau’s sensitive pianism, evokes them in vocal brush strokes that range in texture from velvet to hemp.

Some of the songs are fairytales, others – like Belshazzar’s Feast – dramatic scenes in which Boesch personifies mad kings, runaway coachmen and broken Napoleonic soldiers straggling home from Russia. This is mood music of the highest artistry, never comfortable and seldom cheerful, but penetrating the human condition like a surgical laser beam, healing as it sears.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical


Two more to try

Schumann: music for cello and piano
(Hyperion)
****

Given that he wrote the best cello concerto of his century, one might have expected Schumann to deliver more for the instrument. Steven Isserlis, to fill this recital, had to make his own transcription of the third violin sonata, adapting its exhibitionist character to something more introspective. Isserlis’s playing on two Strad cellos is peerless and Dénes Varjon is no shrinking violet at the piano in the Grimm-like world of the composer’s five late folk tales.

>Buy this CD at Amazon



Schumann and Bartók: The Berlin Recital
(EMI)
****

Gidon Kremer and Martha Argerich, ice and fire, reconfigure Schumann’s yearnings for childhood and countryside in the context of another forlorn soul, the Hungarian Béla Bartók. It’s a stunning match, placing a work of Bartók’s exile behind Schumann’s late struggle for sanity, the sunlit Childhood Scenes ahead of the Hungarian’s first essay for solo violin. Hearing is believing.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical







April 1, 2009

Haydn: 27 quartets
Amadeus Quartet
(DG)
*****

No string quartet has repeated the mid-20th century dominance of the Amadeus, and none will ever do so again now the record business has gone phut. Those, like me, who caught the Amadeus late in orbit may have been irked by their conservatism, their refusal – Britten excepted - to search much beyond Brahms into modern languages of dissonance and microtones. What we failed to appreciate, other than pure mastery, was the spirit of reinvention that these three Austro-German refugees and a London cellist brought to the heart of the repertoire.

Listening again to the 27 middle and late quartets, a mere third of Haydn’s output, it is impossible not to be amazed how four argumentative men worked out a character for each and every work, often at odds with its title. The quartet known as The Razor is sharp only in precision; it never draws blood. The Lark is more larkish than ornithological and The Emperor is splendidly unimposing, chubby toned and perhaps unclothed.

Although this reissue comes in a box of ten, this is the opposite of production-line music making. Every note is weighted with forethought and lightened with humour. If you buy only one set of Haydn quartets this bicentenary year, make this the one.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical


Three more to try

The Virgin’s Lament
Bernarda Fink
(L’Oiseau Lyre)
****

Baroque devotions by Vivaldi, Monteverdi and others are raptly played by the specialist Il Giardino Armonico and rather fruitily sung by the cult Argentine mezzo. The big find is a lament by Ferrandini (1710-91), sumptuously lyrical, if overlong.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical



The NMC Songbook
(NMC)
****

96 new songs by living British composers is a lot to take, but there are gems in this box – I am smitten by Brian Elias’s Meet Me in the Green Glen and Michael Berkeley’s Homage to Poulenc. These, and many more, can be heard in a Kings Place cycle, starting tonight (April 1). www.kingsplace.co.uk/

>Buy this CD at NMC





Chicago SO, Barenboim
(Warner)
*

This craziest of all disc compilations contains Gershwin’s Cuban overture, Bernstein’s Dances from West Side Story, Ravel’s suite from Daphnis and Chloe and, wait for it, Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. Some of the playing could melt an icecap, the Bernstein in particular, but what are these pieces doing here together?

>Buy this CD at Amazon







March 25, 2009

J S Bach: 6 solo sonatas and partitas
(Onyx)
****

The ultimate test of a violinist, Old Bach’s testament is more a test of musical personality than mere technique. It’s not how you play, but what you have to say over the course of two hours that separates the conservatory mice from the eternal masters and gives Bach a fresh voice at the contemporary table.

Viktoria Mullova has plenty to say. A product of the Moscow music factory, she fled west after winning the 1982 Tchaikovsky competition and has spent the rest of her life in London unlearning what she was taught for the test. Gone are the emphases on gymnastic speeds and pinpoint accuracy and in comes an awareness of alternative ways in Bach, and in music. Her sound is shaped by 18th century practice and her expression by close engagement with artists as diverse as the jazz-oriented Katia Labeque and the West African beat of Youssu Ndour.

Her eclecticism yields constant surprise in the Bach soliloquies. She takes the slow movements of the second sonata as bathroom-mirror meditations and the fugue of the third almost as a bus-stop conversation, its phrasing oddly reminiscent of London Bridge is Falling Down. There is a ceaseless flow of ideas, not all of them sensible, but the personality is strong and ever-so-slightly elusive. Her narrative does not replace, for me, the intellectual and emotional force of Nathan Milstein and the young Yehudi Menuhin, but it is very much a performance of our time.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical


Three more to try

Rodion Shchedrin: The Sealed Angel
(Delphian)
****

A personal restatement of faith during the collapse of the Soviet Union, Schchedrin’s a capella devotion uses the small, still voice of the oboe to counterpoint the massed voice of organised society. The choir of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, join Kings College, London, in a mighty roar, with Clare Wills on the plaintive reed.

>Buy this CD at Amazon



Mahler: 8th symphony
(LSO Live)
**

The best moments in this performance at St Paul’s Cathedral come in the orchestral interlude between the symphony’s two uneven halves. The worst come from some of the Russian soloists whose intonation and accents are altogether unacceptable.

>Buy this CD at LSO





Lutoslawski: Orchestral works
(Brilliant)
****

One of the subtlest painters in orchestral sound, the Polish composer has dropped off concert programmes in the 15 years since his death. This Polish radio set under his baton is illuminating, definitive and, at £9 for three CDs, irresistibly cheap.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical







March 18, 2009

Mendelssohn: Complete string quartets
(MDG, 5 CDs)
*****

Mendelssohn is full of surprises. Just when you thought you knew the scope of his chamber music – some cheeky teenaged foursomes and a more stately mature set – up pops the Leipzig String Quartet with unsuspected treasures of irresistible verve.

As a composer of string quartets, Mendelssohn does not match Haydn for fluency, Mozart for vivacity, Beethoven for intellect or Schubert for emotion. His skill lay in turning out pleasantries for the middle classes until, after his sister’s early death in the summer of 1847, he wrote an opus 81 quartet of such nervous agitation that it seems to foretell his own imminent collapse. Haunting and elusive, this unsparing piece was followed by an almost unplayed Capriccio for string quartet, five and a half minutes of pre-Mahlerian self-reflection.

Such dark snatched thoughts in the intervals between grand oratorios reveal much of Mendelssohn’s internal struggle. For reasons unknown, he made a chamber version of his first symphony, encouraging others to produce reductions of his Hebrides overture and the great Reformation Symphony. The masterpiece in this box is, unmissably, the unique octet and the playing here is as captivating as I have ever heard on record.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical


Three more to try

Richard Mudge: six concertos
(Tudor)
****

A Swiss label introduces the work of an 18th century Englishman, born in the Devon town of Bideford and serving as a parish priest in Warwickshire. Mudge’s bright and breezy concertos, in the manner of Avison or Arne, were written for a titled patron and are played with a Haydn touch by the Capriccio Basel. Perfect Springtime fare.

>Buy this CD at Tudor



Beethoven sonatas
(Warner)
**

Popular in Paris, the pianist Giovanni Bellucci will appeal to those who enjoy exaggerated difference in their Beethoven. He goes from roar to whisper for no obvious reason and while his singing tone is always attractive, those intolerant of amateur dramatics may prefer to listen elsewhere.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical





Wolf-Ferrari orchestral works
(Chandos)
***

My idea of hell is an eternity with Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948), a successful composer of such impeccable superficiality he would have made a perfect Big Brother contestant. Giannandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic give his fripperies their best shot. It might make good incidental music for a TV period drama.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical







March 11, 2009

Rollando Villazon sings Handel
(DG)
**

The downhill slalom that is Rolando Villazon’s career hits another obstacle in this off-piste adventure. The Mexican tenor, who last week cancelled a Werther in Paris after an underpowered opening, can’t get much right at the moment. Whatever the problems that forced him to take a long break in 2007, the freshness and fearlessness have not returned and the voice sounds brittle at the top.

Singing Handel relieves him of romantic stress and exploits a knack for the baroque that he showed in a Monteverdi project with Emmanuelle Haim and her gutsy strings. That, however, was before the break. Here, with Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Players in a cold church in Tooting, he delivers more spills than thrills. Set pieces from Tamerlano and Rodelinda lack much by way of expression while Ombra mai fu, the roof-raiser from Serse, is so subdued it hardly happens.

This, along with three other arias, is not written for tenor at all but for mezzo-soprano. Why bother to raid the girls’ dressing-room, you wonder, when Rolando has so little to bring to the party?

>Buy this CD at Amazon


Three more to try

Walton: cello concerto
(Onyx)
****

The Walton orphan has a new champion. Never as catchy as his violin concerto, the cello piece is delivered with pensive beauty by a daring Dutchman, Peter Wispelwey, and the excellent Sydney Symphony Orchestra under Jeffrey Tate. The companion works - by Bloch, Ligeti and Britten – provide an altogether novel context, one that will oblige you to rethink Walton’s known qualities.

>Buy this CD at Amazon



Lada Valesova: Intimate Studies
(Avie)
****

Mood music by four Czechs – Janacek, Suk, Martinu and, least known, Pavel Haas, a Janacek pupil who died in Auschwitz. Valesova, a professor at London's Guildhall, comes up with unpublished Janacek sheets from the archives, including a letter to his dead daughter. Extraordinary stuff, magically played.

>Buy this CD at System records



Richard Strauss: Red Roses
(Bis)
****

The choice in Strauss lieder is big voice or perfectly formed. Myself, I prefer the exquisite phrasing of Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling (recently Gretel to Alice Coote’s Hansel at Covent Garden) over many a big belter. Sample her Malven track on download from www.eclassical.com

>Buy this CD at Amazon







March 4, 2009

Handel: Alcina
(DG Archive)
***

The first flush of anniversary-year Handel has gone through my audio system without flooding the emotions. The releases are mostly live performances with a fixed star and not much by way of supporting constellation. It doesn’t help matters that Handel has fallen back into the hands of scholarly leaders at the keyboard when his dramas cry out for a conductor’s brio.

The Kansas mezzo Joyce Didonato is the unique selling point of this pack from a 2007 festival in Viterbo. Coming up as Rosina in Covent Garden’s Barber of Seville this summer, Didonato dazzles as the sorceress in a rackety plot that leaves her beached at the close, ignored by the silly mortals.

Alan Curtis directs Il Complesso Barocco, with Karina Gauvin and Sonia Prina in a solid lineup. But given a choice of stellar vehicles that include Renee Fleming, Susan Graham and Natalie Dessay on Erato, and the academically incorrect Joan Sutherland and Fritz Wunderlich on DG, would you really settle for a low-carbon new model?

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Three more to try

Handel: Faramondo
(Virgin)
***

Written in 1738 for the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, and pulled after eight nights, Faramondo is wrecked by a convoluted plot and remembered chiefly as the dry-run for magnificent Xerxes. The big noise here is the male soprano Philippe Jaroussky, who never gives less than tops; Diego Fasolis directs a radio production from Lugano.

>Buy this CD at Amazon



Handel: Acis and Galatea
(Carus)
***

Nicholas McGegan in Göttingen exhumes a little-known Mendelssohn arrangement of a lesser-spotted Handel opera. He draws fine singing from Julia Kleiter and Christoph Prégardien and communicates the excitement of discovery. If you can put up with Happy We being sung as Selig Glück, it’s well worth a try.

>Buy this CD at Amazon



Handel: Jephtha
(Carus)
*

Handel can be sung in Italian, German and English, but not in blends. Ze chairman exsents in the English text of this live recording from Dresden’s Frauenkirche might just pass an audition for Allo Allo. Matthias Grünert directs.

>Buy this CD at Amazon







February 25, 2009

Puccini: La Boheme
(Axiom Films DVD)
****

Opera loses more than one of its dimensions on film – not just depth, but the distance an audience requires to give the characters credibility. If Mimi has plump cheeks in Boheme, we cannot believe in her death of consumption. And since the camera never lies – not unintentionally, that is – it is very hard to accept that the voluptuous Anna Netrebko is going to leave us in the fourth act. As for Rolando Villazon’s Rodolfo, too many close-ups expose a stiffness in his acting that is not visible on stage.

Robert Dornhelm’s film was shot on low budget – five million euros - in a Vienna studio on a square that looks no more like Monmartre than Isabella Bywater’s present set at ENO. The February snow, though, is authentic, as is the appearance of Ioan Holender, outgoing director of the Vienna Opera, in a cameo role as Alcindoro.

These reservations aside, Netrebko and Villazon have chemistry. The voices are ripe and full and you can just about imagine them feeling the lust in a frozen garret. Apart from as-seen-on-TV spinoffs, there is not much competition for filmed Bohemes, other than Baz Luhrmann’s stylish Australian production, with low-voltage singing. This pair sound great and look good. Suspend disbelief. That’s what opera’s about.

>Buy this DVD at MDT


Three more to try

Leif Ove Andsnes: Shadows of Silence
(EMI)
****

The eclectic Norwegian pianist kicks off with a Nordic lullaby, chases shadows in Lutoslawski’s 1987 concerto, cracks the elusive theorems of Kurtag’s Games and blows out with a 2005 concerto by the Frenchman Marc-André Dalbavie. This is altogether too much new music to take at one sitting, but Dalbavie’s sonorities are never less than charming and there’s a second lullaby at the end. No other pianist makes braver or cleverer programmes.

>Buy this CD at Amazon.com



Magnus Lindberg: Sculpture
(Ondine)
**

An establishment favourite, with a mini-season on the South Bank and a new post as composer in residence to the New York Philharmonic, the middle-aged Finn is everyone's all-purpose modern composer. Nothing he writes would frighten the horses. His title piece opened the Disney Hall in Los Angeles. Its companion here, his 2002 Concerto for Orchestra, is a half-hour also-ran to Bartok and Lutoslawski, great instrumental skill going nowhere in particular.

>Buy this CD at Amazon.com



The Sixteen: works by Janequin and Guerrero
(Coro)
****

Harry Christopher’s vocal ensemble are about to set off on a UK Easter pilgrimage with a pairing of Purcell and James MacMillan. Here they retrieve 16th century French and Spanish works of intriguing polyphonic complexity. This is new music – to me, and to record – as gripping, in parts, as anything of the present.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical





February 18, 2009

Puccini Madam Butterfly
(EMI)
****

Five years ago this summer, EMI put together what it said was going to be the last-ever studio recording of an opera, a stunning Tristan und Isolde with Nina Stemme and Placido Domingo, conducted by Antonio Pappano. Never is the longest word in the language when it returns to haunt you, and here’s a new regime at EMI, back in studio in Rome, with a Butterfly conducted by the selfsame Pappano.

The orchestra of Santa Cecilia play like ice-creams in the Colosseum sun – meltingly, that is – and the cast is mostly local, with the exception of Angela Gheorghiu and Jonas Kaufmann on whom the project hinges. Gheorghiu is too forceful to make a weak-willed geisha, and Kaufmann matches her with a vocal virility that needs no chemical aids. This is Winslet-Di Caprio casting, a jousting of differences that engages heart and mind regardless of plot inanities. The limelight arias, nicely bedded into the relationship, may not dazzle quite as much on a highlights disc.

There is no obvious Butterfly to recommend on record. Freni-Pavarotti is three decades old and Karajan conducts like a Baedeker tourist guide; Callas, Tebaldi, Scotto and de los Angeles all have shortcomings. This could go down as an historic record – not least because the executive that okayed it has gone and it is now certain that there will never be another studio opera. Or nearly never.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Three more to try

Schoenberg, Berg, Webern: string quartets
(Brilliant)
*****

Music that comes in cheap boxes does not usually challenge the mind. These, though, are the best accounts ever recorded of the chamber works of the Second Vienna School, from the smeary late romanticism of Schoenberg in D minor to the geometric aridity of Webern’s 1937 quartet. The La Salle Quartet made these records for DG in 1968-70, with sound as warm as your fireside.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical



Boccherini: chamber works
(Virgin)
****

Luigi Boccherini, born in Lucca a century before Puccini, landed a job at the court of Spain where, off the beaten track, he wrote domestic music of exquisite delicacy. Cynics called him Mrs Haydn because he used the quartet form. But the infectious appeal of these pieces, exuberantly played by Fabio Biondi’s ensemble, display an ingenious near-genius at work.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical



James MacMillan: St John Passion
(LSO Live)
***

Fifty this summer, MacMillan is the first Scottish composer of world renown, an embattled Roman Catholic nationalist in a state of petty prejudices. His Passion, premiered last year by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with Christopher Maltman as Saviour, shares more of a languae with Britten than with minimalism. At 90 minutes it’s a long sing, but Easter is not far off and I’m happy to hear it again.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com





February 11, 2009

Philippe Jaroussky: Opium
(Virgin)
*****

This record requires a health warning, in addition to the declared drugs advisory. It is a collection of French melodies, irresistibly seductive and sung not by the usual sotto mezzo but by a counter-tenor of such gender-bending capabilities that he rewires parts of the brain and requires the listener to checks his or her sexual triggers from track to track. This is an almost indecently beautiful recital, too disturbing for one sitting. If ever there was an album made for selective download, this is it.

The title track, by Saint-Saens is smoky and alarming, while Massenet’s Elegie, with a cello line, is even more entrancing. Jaroussky is perfect for that elusive melodist Reynaldo Hahn, but he also manages the solemnity of Franck, Lekeu and Dukas without stuffiness. Another Saint-Saens, Violons dans le soir, is the sort of chanson you might have heard of an evening beneath Marcel Proust’s window. Jérome Ducros is the deft pianist, with the Capucon brothers joining in on violin and cello and Emmanuel Pahud playing the flute in a Caplet ode. Altogether ravissant. I can’t get it off my player.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Three more to try

Mahler: 2nd symphony
(LSO Live)
***

Valery Gergiev’s wilfulness often misreads Mahler’s mood, but the LSO play with conviction and the chorus is in good cry. This is Mahler seen through a retrospective Shostakovich prism. Less acceptable are the Russian mezzo and Rumanian soprano who wobble like double chins and miss notes by a fatal margin. Are there no singers in London that the LSO has to rely on imports?

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



Mahler: 2nd symphony
(Ondine)
*

I may have heard duller accounts of the Resurrection, but memory is merciful and they have been wiped. Christoph Eschenbach extends notes beyond their scripted value, overbalancing the opening movement into a meaningless abyss. The andante is better crafted and the Philadelphia Orchestra play like angels, but you can see why they dropped Eschenbach as music director.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



Leonard Bernstein: Mass
(Chandos)
****

Bernstein festivals at Carnegie Hall and Minneapolis are stirring a reassessment of this troubled 1970s happening, an interfaith tribute to slain Kennedys. Midway between Broadway and the Vatican Rag, its massive means never justify a serious end. Here, removed from the composer’s complications, Kristjan Järvi and his Austrian ensemble run it for fun, blowing false pieties to the wind. This is by far the best Lenny Mass I have ever heard.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com





February 4, 2009

Luigi Cherubini: Song on the death of Joseph Haydn
(Phoenix)
****

With Haydn’s symphonies being played two a week on the radio and some of his operas being brought out of the deep-freeze at summer festivals, it is fascinating to consider the contemporary effect of his death 200 years ago. Beethoven may have grunted ‘I never learned anything from him’, but in Napoleonic Paris the leading composer composed an elaborate tribute on first reports of Haydn’s passing in 1805 and had to withdraw it for another four years until the death was confirmed.

Cherubini (1760-1842) is mostly remembered as a butt of Berlioz jokes, but this rather jolly requiem reveals him as a composer of no false pomposity. His opening theme bizarrely pre-echoes Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz and there are further passages that resemble Beethoven’s unheard Pastoral symphony and Berlioz’s unwritten oeuvre. Visionary or not, Cherubini is master here of some interesting material, deftly directed by Gabriele Ferro with the Capella Coloniensis in a 1981 German broadcast. This happy-chappy dirge deserves to be heard live. If there’s a spare Proms slot going, the BBC should book it.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical


Three more to try

Beethoven: 9th symphony
(LPO)
*****

I was there when Klaus Tennstedt rehearsed this concert in October 1992 and the impact lingers. Tennstedt was prone to the kind of improvisation you never hear in studio recordings. I challenge anyone to resist the tremendous momentum of the opening allegro or the agonised tenderness of the adagio. The singing quartet – Pape, Popp, Murray and Rolfe-Johnson – are Elysian.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical



Bruno Walter: Symphony in D minor
(CPO)
**

Gustav Mahler’s assistant conductor was a bit of a composer in his early days. A very small bit, judging by this record, though a stronger case might be made by a less lurching conductor than Leon Botstein and a better orchestra than North German Radio. There is a lyrical opening to the adagio, which could have made a good song.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



Eugene Goossens: First symphony, Phantasy concerto
(Chandos)
**

The late Richard Hickox recorded reams of English music, not all of it top-drawer. Goossens, a fine conductor, has little on the evidence of these two wartime works to say as a composer. The piano concerto (soloist Howard Shelley) meanders around a milky theme and the symphony lacks a gripping statement. A curio, no more.

>Buy this CD at MDT





January 28, 2009

Josef Suk: Asrael
(Ondine)
****

One of the great symphonic requiems, Asrael mourns the sudden deaths of Dvorak in May 1904, and a year later of his favourite daughter Otylka, who was Suk’s young wife. Full of rage and rancour in the first two movements and followed by a macabre dancing vivace, the work achieves consolation in two great Adagio movements, reminiscent of Bruckner.

An international violinist with his own string quartet, Suk was a successful composer of episodic pieces and encores, nothing more. Asrael lifts him on angel’s wings high above his modest abilities into a realm that is literally beyond himself. ‘Misfortune either destroys a man,’ he explained, ‘or beings dormant powers to the surface.’

The signature recordings of Asrael are by Czech conductors, Talich, Ancerl, Kubelik and Pesek. Vladimir Ashkenazy, with the Helsinki Philharmonic, universalises the work, placing it dead centre in European tradition, he product of deep suffering, mightily overcome.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Three more to try

Suk: The Ripening
(CPO)
**

Springtime on the Czech plains and all the fruits are blooming is what it sounds like. If you follow the composer’s titles, it’s a man going through Youth, Love, Fate, Resolve and Self-Moderation. Whichever, the music is overblown and largely inconsequential, with a few memorable moments. Tale of a Winter’s Evening is the companion piece. Kirill Petrenko conducts the Berlin Komische Oper orchestra.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



James Ehnes: Homage
(Onyx)
**

The Canadian soloist plays show-off pieces on 18 different pedigree violins and 15 violas, mostly Strads and Guarneri. It’s a good test for a dealer’s ears and, with top fiddles fetching £4 million, it might even be investment research. I can’t see what other point there is to this CD/DVD, though the solo version of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy is worth having on download.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



Boulez plays Mozart
(Decca)
**

No kidding: the man who said he’d never touch sweeties is caught nibbling Mozart balls. The Serenade for 13 wind instruments needs no conductor and gets no obvious help from Boulez. He’s more at home in the Alban Berg chamber concerto, though I suspect the pianist Mitsuko Uchida could have led it just as well herself.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com





January 21, 2009

Dvorak, Herbert: cello concertos
(Virgin)
****

The lustrous Dvorak concerto is usually paired with the more tortured Schumann as twin peaks of the romantic cello. More thought than usual went into this record, where the coupling is a concerto that supposedly gave Dvorak some of his ideas. It is by the Irish-American Victor Herbert (1859-1924), a player in the cello section at the Metropolitan Opera who went on to write 42 Broadway shows (Naughty Marietta was his big hit).

The concerto rambles and rumbles away for stretches, but the Andante theme has a long, sweet aftertaste and the finale is quite fizzy. Dvorak liked the sound Herbert got from his brass but does not copy his themes or technique. There is only one great composer here. Taken together, you can hear how Dvorak is filled with yearnings for home, while the Irishman has clearly found heaven on earth in New York. Gautier Capucon gives both concertos a restrained reading of faded fin-de-siecle elegance; Paavo Järvi conducts the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Three more to try

Gorecki: Life Journey
(Landor)
****

The Polish composer scored the first million-selling symphonic disc. Here is some smaller stuff in the same vein, mutedly devout, often breath-catching in its beauty. The Requiem for a Polka is intriguingly ambivalent, mourning either the dance or the nation it is named after. Gorgeous playing by Chamber Domaine, recorded in a Suffolk church, grey as a January dawn.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



Arnold, McCabe: concertos for orchestra
(LPO.org.uk)
****

Remember when London orchestras used to commission new music? These pieces date from the 1970s. John McCabe wrote abstract stuff with enormous skill. Malcolm Arnold was never less than tuneful. Solti and Haitink conducted the premieres. High time for a second hearing, but don’t hold your breath.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



Give it one: the London Horn Sound
(Cala)
****

The big brass from London’s symphony and opera orchestras knock off early one night to run through a set of pop, jazz and movie arrangements. There’s Hamlisch’s The Way We Were as you’ve never heard it before, and Ellington’s everlasting Daydream. It’s virtuoso stuff, thrilling at times, but why only one woman in the band? Brass is no longer a boys’ game.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com





January 14, 2009

Gustav Holst: The Perfect Fool, &c
(Chandos)
****

This was supposed to be the start of a complete set of Holst’s orchestral music, but the conductor Richard Hickox died in November while recording the little-known Choral Symphony and this disc comes tinged with sorrow. Not in the music, which is quite unexpectedly full of little chuckles and witty asides. Who would have thought? Holst (1874-1934) always looks so sombre in his portraits. Hickox finds his lighter side.

The Perfect Fool is a balletic satire on Wagner’s Parsifal, which was never going to work. The music, though, is ingenious and entertaining, the extension of a larger conversation. Dustier by half is The Golden Goose, a ballet based on English folksongs. A third dance work, The Morning of the Year, is the first musical work ever commissioned by the BBC, complete a clunky text by a broadcasting mandarin. Ignore the idiot words, ‘a representation of the mating ordained by Nature to take place in the Spring of each year’. The orchestral passages here have an ethereal shimmer reminiscent of Vaughan Williams at his dreamiest and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales give it all they have got for a conductor they clearly adored.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Two more to try

Purcell: Dido and Aeneas
(Chaconne)
***

I wish I could raise more cheers for the first Purcell disc of the anniversary year but the tempi on this OAE performance are too languorous and the cover-listing of two music directors, Elizabeth Kenny and Steven Devine, suggest that tough decisions may have fallen between the two harpsichords. Sarah Connolly and Gerald Finley are a tad precious as the doomed lovers and, while Dido’s farewell is affecting as ever, this cast cannot stand muster beside Susan Graham and Ian Bostridge on Virgin, under the electrifying beat of Emmanuelle Haim. And then there’s the old Flagstad recording…

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



Purcell: Dido and Aeneas
(Alpha)
***

And here’s one just in from Siberia. Slightly hoarse period sound from the musicians and chorus of the Novosibirsk Academic Theatre but an appropriately glacial Dido in the German soprano Simone Kermes and a lovely English Belinda in Deborah York. The unbending Trojan Aenaes is Dimitris Tiliakos. It feels rather static, often too slow, but with moments of deep rapture. Worth catching a few tracks on download.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com





January 7, 2009

JS Bach: Goldberg Variations
Sylvain Blassel (harp)
(Warner)
*

At that peculiar moment in adolescence when annoying the parents becomes life’s chief objective, one of our daughters switched from piano to penny-whistle, sending me up the wall in a manner I never expected to re-experience until this French bloke began playing the Goldberg Variations on the plucking harp.

The Goldbergs, you may recall, were written by Bach to help a Russian diplomat through a pre-jetlag patch of insomnia. Played on the harpsichord, the clavichord or the modern piano they have just the right balance of structural elegance and startling invention to allow the listener to select a response, alert or soporific. No-one ever snoozed when Glenn Gould worked the keyboard.

The only conceivable reasons for transcribing them for harp – an instrument that did not exist in its modern form until half a century after Bach’s death – must be to advertise either the player’s virtuosity or a potential application in voluntary euthanasia.

I cannot fault M. Blassel’s playing: it is brilliant, in every infuriating sense of that adjective. It shines in the ear like an ENT probe, jangling the cortex of the brain until the victim willingly yields every official secret he has ever known. The harp travesties Bach’s caressing keyboard sound, reducing the variations to a New Year’s firework display, noisy, expensive and artistically superficial. I’m still recovering.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Three more to try

Jerusalem, city of peace
Jordi Savall, Montserrat Figueras
(Harmonia Mundi, 2CDs and book)
****

Spanish musicians, with all three monotheisms in their bloodstream, make a bold attempt to seek common ground. There are some lovely tracks and surprising affinities in this bi-millennial anthology but, like all Mideast peace efforts, noble aims run up a wall of self-interest and we are left with shards of glimpsed hope. The oud-playing, though, is among the best I have heard.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Boris Tchaikovsky (1925-96): 6 String Quartets
(Northern Flowers)
****

The Tchaikovsky who lived in Soviet Russia wrote music that was so far ahead of its time and outside official styles that you have to double-check the dates. The 1954 first quartet sounds like music Shostakovich wrote 20 years later. The second quartet (1961) delivers Glass-like minimalisms while the third (1967) anticipate the mystic Pole, Gorecki. Compelling stuff, and hard to find. Try www.boris-tchaikovsky.com


Alexander Knaifel: Lamento, Blazhenstva
(ECM)
***

An Uzbek composer much favoured by Slava Rostropovich, Knaifel opens this disc with the grimmest imaginable lament for solo cello before raising the soul to a lofty serenity with a choral evocation of the beatitutdes. Seldom sill you hear so extreme a mood swing on a single disc, from utter gloom to sweet spiritual calm. The perfomers belong to the State Hermitage orchestra and choir in St Petersburg.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical



December 17, 2008

Vaughan Williams: A capella choral works
(Delphian)
****

There can be no better way to end the Vaughan Williams year than with a sampling of his choir works, for church, stage and country village. The centrepiece here is the Mass in G minor, gripping the ear with a deceptively gentle Kyrie and not letting go until the lamb of God has been put out to happy pasture. There is a goodly selection of Tudor songs, not just the inevitable Greensleeves, but three Shakespeare poems and the ever-haunting Willow Song. A poem by his second wife, Ursula, titled Silence and Music, delivers a tangible shiver of late love.

VW wrote these songs chiefly for amateur performance and the temptation to sing along is extreme. But the choir Laudibus, directed by Mike Brewer, add a dimension of transcendence that few of us could hope to match in the post-match shower. At 64 minutes the disc is slightly short measure. You keep wishing it would run on forever.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Three more to try

Making Waves - Bob Chilcott
(Signum)
*****

Perhaps the most gifted choral writer at work today, Chilcott has a talent for spiritual melody that nods neither to the American midwest nor the English pasture. His title song, commemorating Marconi's first transmission, is infectiously singable, irresistibly memorable. Lovelier still is The Lily and the Rose. A century from now, womens' choirs will still be singing it.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


I love all beauteous things
Choral and organ music by Herbert Howells
(Signum)
****

For the second time this month I've been left dumbstruck by a Dublin choir, this one to be heard at Christ Church Cathedral, under the direction of Judy Martin. They somehow manage to rid Herbert Howell (1892-1983) of his faintly astringent English churchiness and find the love between the lines of his hymns. There are moments here that Messiaen would have envied.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Donald Francis Tovey: Piano trios
(Toccata)
***

If Brahms had lived in Scotland, he would have sounded something like this. Tovey (1875-1940) was the high priest of British musicology from 1914 to his death, professor at Edinburgh and published by Oxford University Press. Casals was proud to give the premiere of his cello concerto, such was his intellectual influence. As a composer, though, Tovey belonged to an age before his own and these chamber pieces, charming as they are, seem pointlessly anachronistic. One of the themes he uses in a minuet is ‘Lavender’s blue, dilly-dilly…’

>Buy this CD at Toccata Classics



December 10, 2008

Handel, English cantatas
The Brook Street Band
(Avie, 2CDs)
*****

The first question we put to candidates in the Lebrecht Psychometric Test is: Bach or Handel? With that information, our interviewers have a pretty good idea of a person's fitness for office, whether he or she is a desk jockey or high flier, a conscientious worker or a blue-sky thinker. I tend to favour the Handelian risk-taker over the Bachian slogger and I'm going to be in clover next year because we're in for lots of Handel at the 250th anniversary of his death.

What the Brookies have come up with here is a bunch of Handel's little known English songs, some never recorded before. Full of wit, sometimes laconic, there's an aria about 'the noisy joys of wine' in which you can practically hear the tavern hubbub. 'I like the amorous youth', another ditty, is not a homoerotic meditation but a rather sad thought about the loss of sexual powers with advancing age. Congreve's cruel description of love as 'but the frailty of mind' strikes a poignant chord from the lonely, bachelor composer.

Nicki Kennedy and Sally Bruce-Payne are superb vocalists, every English diphthong beautifully articulated, but the big hand belongs to the four-piece band - two baroque violins, cello and harpsichord - for the richness of their sound, a delight from start to close.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Three more to try

Handel: Saul
(Warner, 6CDs)
*****

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was famed in Germany for baroque roles but seldom heard in English. His late 1986 account of mad King Saul is a dramatic tour de force, credible in every quiver of rage against the presumptuous young David (Paul Esswood) and his own son Jonathan, stunningly sung by Anthony Rolfe Johnson. Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducts a boxed set that contains many other Handel goodies, including Julius Caesar extracts and Ode for St Cecilia's Day.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Daniel Taylor: The Voice of Bach
(Sony)
***

More difficult than walking while chewing gum, the Canadian countertenor Daniel Taylor manages to sing and conduct at the same time. This hyped-up showcase album from Montreal's Theatre of Early Music contains Bach's best hits, the arias interspersed with easy-listening Sinfonias. Taylor is a talent to watch but until he is tested by the dramatic demands of a full oratorio we cannot judge his true potential.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Double concertos by J S Bach and sons
(Teldec)
****

It's nice to discover that Bach's young brood repaid him for the father-son concerto for two violins by writing doubles of their own. Carl Philipp Emanuel's piece for harpsichord, fortepiano and orchestra is an obvious forerunner of Mozart's keyboard conversations while Johann Christian's Sinfonia contains lovely dialogues for oboe and cello. These revelations are played by Nikolaus Harnoncourt's Vienna ensemble and Gustav Leonhardt's Amsterdam consort. A good last-minute choice one for the stocking.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



December 3, 2008

John Rutter: A Christmas Festival
Cambridge Singers, RPO, Rutter (dir.)
(Collegium Records)
***

It’s that time of year again and tickets are on sale at the Royal Albert Hall for John Rutter’s carol singalong with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s a popular perennial, always a sell-out, but I was left underwhelmed by this discoid simulation, both by the atmosphere (it was recorded in the more modest Cadogan Hall) and by ever-steady speeds that leave no room for fantasy. The Welsh soprano Elin Manahan Thomas is a welcome star turn but almost all the 20 tracks are either written or arranged by the industrious Rutter and the homogeny is deadening. Of Rutter’s own compositions, Ave Maria has an off-Broadway melancholic turn and Rejoice and be Merry is quasi-Victorian in its forced festivity. The song that lingers longest in the mind is The Shepherd’s Carol by Bob Chilcott, unaccompanied and unadorned, a perfect Christmas invocation for a frugal year.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Three more Christmas CDs

Angelika Kirschlager sings Christmas Carols
(Sony)
**

Nothing from Kiri this year, praise be, or from any of the big tenors. That leaves the field clear for a lustrous Austrian mezzo to try out her church-school Latin and Berlitz English to unintended comic effect. A-why in a Meinger seems a pretty good doctrinal question and In De Blick Mittwinter gives a curious twist to Holstian diction. For want of a language coach, Angelika’s serene musicality gets lost in the linguistic mangle. A car-wreck of a record, almost a collector's piece.

>Buy this CD at Presto Classical


Christmas with the Palestrina Choir, Dublin
Blanaid Murphy (dir.)
(www.Pro-Cathedral.ie)
****

A lovely mix of boys’ voices arrives from Dublin with a repertoire that runs from the Vulgate to Benjamin Britten. If the Wexford Carol is one of your seasonal faves, you will never hear it more authentically sung and the young soloists here are unexpectedly characterful. The sound, in St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, is of spine-tingling veracity. Not easy to find in shops, so buy from the website above.

>Buy this CD at St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral


Mission Road
Chanticleer
(Warner)
****

Not strictly for Christmas, Mission Road is a devotional anthology from the Spanish missionary churches of 19th century California, sunnier than the regular religious persuasions and sprung with irresistible rhythms. Selections from the Mass in G are almost wickedly beautiful and the singing of Chanticleer’s male sopranos and altos is unfailingly convincing. If yours is a multi-cultural Christmas, this could be your midnight fare.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



November 26, 2008

Schumann, Elgar: piano quintets
(Cavi-music)
****

Why did no-one think of this before? The Schumann quintet is usually paired on record with Brahms, but it fits even better with Elgar who drank deep from the same source. Schumann’s work, dated 1842, is riddled with yearnings for Clara, his future wife. Elgar’s dated 1918, is downcast with war weariness and his wife’s failing health (Alice died in 1920). The syntactic thread is Brahms, who was Schumann’s protégé, Clara’s secret admirer and Elgar’s role model. Both pieces are written in his language.

Lars Vogt is the pianist in these two concert performances, Christian Tetzlaff and Antje Weithaas the lead violins. The Norwegian’s natural reticence and the recessed position of his piano create an ideal balance with the strings. The exuberance of young Schumann is offset by Elgar’s autumnal regrets and the interplay of the two works provides fresh context. The lofty Elgarian sonorities are smeared at times into salon music but irreverence lets the music breathe more easily than most English players allow and the artists’ commitment here is altogether convincing.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Three more to try

Shostakovich, Britten: cello works
(Signum)
****

The second Shostakovich cello concerto never matched the appeal of the first. Even Slava Rostropovich struggled to make it wince, let alone smile. Walton, a young British cellist, takes a less stressed approach to the work, listening out for melodic fragments and making the most of them. His approach to the Britten Cello Symphony, equally intractable, is almost the opposite. He goes for the sweeping gesture, reminiscent of Elgar, redeeming the piece of its intermittent stutters. His is more than just performance, it is an act of interpretation. The Philharmonia Orchestra under Alexander Briger give responsive support.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Bloch, Lees: violin concertos
(Artek)
****

The pastoral opening of Ernest Bloch’s violin concerto could easily be mistaken for Vaughan Williams, as could certain gruff elements in the music of Benjamin Lees. Both are American composers of Jewish extraction and, while Bloch is ethnically typecast and fairly well-known, Lees, still composing in his mid-80s, has fallen into undeserved neglect. Elmar Oliveira plays to maximum post-romantic effect, ably backed by the Ukraine national orchestra, conducted by John McLaughlin Williams. I find both concertos absorbing, the Lees absolutely compelling.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Tchaikovsky: violin concerto
(Decca)
**

What we really need, right now, is another sugary splat of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, this time from the expressive and elegant Janine Jansen. It is not a bad performance, distinguished by athletic bursts and sweet dolours, but it adds nothing worth having to the epic recordings of Milstein, Heifetz, Stern, Mullova, Kennedy and Vengerov. Employing the Mahler Chamber Orchestra instead of a symphonic band might have been a device to save money and procure tighter ensemble. The opening, though, is scrappy and conductor Daniel Harding does little more than follow the star.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



November 21, 2008

Tchaikovsky: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet
Russian National Orchestra, Vladimir Jurowski
(Pentatone)
****

An excess of Tchaikovsky on London's South Bank does not diminish the thrill of hearing his music performed idiomatically by native Russian speakers in his most theatrical mode. Shakespeare speaks directly to the darker elements of the Russian character and there is reason to suspect that the sexually tortured Tchaikovsky felt an empathy with the tragic Prince of Denmark.

Be that as it may, the incidental music to Hamlet is performed here as wordless drama with a panoramic range of emotional subtleties. If some of the themes sound familiar, it’s because they have been recycled from the third symphony.

Jurowski, music director at Glyndebourne and the London Philharmonic, is no less convincing with his compatriots who, while they can play this stuff drunk and in their sleep, pull out most of the stops in these performances, especially in the shimmering tensions of Romeo’s love music. Boy, can those Russians play harp.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Three more to try

Sanctum est verum lumen
National Youth Choir of Great Britain
(Delphian)
****

The NYC’s title track is multi-directional, which is a nice way of saying the singing is all over the place, but that’s how Gerald Jackson wrote it – as a contemporary riposte to Thomas Tallis’s 40-part Spem in Aulium. Following up with that masterpiece in St Alban-the-Martyr, Holborn, the NYC overcome perils of echo to fill the space with great glory. Of all the works on this heartening disc I was most taken with Tarik O’Regan’s I sleep but my heart waketh, a post-minimalist patter song with a Vaughan Williams-like part for soprano solo. Mike Brewer conducts a mellifluous bunch of teens and there’s not one voice out of tune or place.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Chantage at Christmas
(EMI)
***

Chantage are a class act, a professional chamber choir that does its stuff on demand, on TV, on-line. Their 2008 Christmas album is made up mostly of original works by the likes of Arvo Part, Howard Skempton, Andrew Gant and Kenneth Leighton. It’s a nice change from the usual stuffed turkey and well worth sampling for novelty value. I’m less happy with the modern arrangements of Silent Night and Jingle Bells and least of all with some of the solo lines. A little more passion and rhythm might have swung it.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


J S Bach: Cantatas Volume 5
Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner
(SDG)
***

Followers of John Eliot Gardiner’s survey of Bach cantatas will know by now what to expect – lusty singing, well-sprung playing and soloists who integrate with the enterprise rather than standing out in their own right. Bach wrote these cantatas to a town hall deadline and some of them run close to hackwork. No aria in this set leaps out as a work genius. If you believe in Bach as holy writ, you will want the whole cycle. If not, volume 5 is a safe miss.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



November 12, 2008

J S Bach: Keyboard concertos
David Fray (piano)
(Virgin)
****

The emergent French pianist, 27 years old in floppy locks, first caught the ear last year in a bizarre solo programme of Bach and Boulez, ill-matched but oddly effective. Self-assured and conversational in tone, Fray saunters through the Bach concertos as if narrating adventure stories to a hyperactive child who needs to be diverted from irresistible urges. His hypnotic therapy works pretty well with stressed-out adults.

Imagine a sound midway between Glenn Gould and Andras Schiff and you have something like David Fray’s self-immersion in the inexorable logic of a Bach score. The added quality is a brushed-velvet keyboard touch that sounds almost too hushed to be real. Fray directs from the keyboard without giving the impression that he looks up much at the orchestra – the alert but unremarkable German Kammerphilharmonie of Bremen. In faster passages, there is a Gouldian sense of a young man laughing at some inner joke of his own making. Not for one moment is Fray dull. I can’t wait to hear him in concert and I don’t think I will have to wait long. He recently married Chiara, daughter of the influential conductor Riccardo Muti.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Three more to try

Natalie Dessay sings Bach Cantatas
(Virgin)
***

Irresistible though she is, Dessay sings Bach with little of the joie de vivre that she brings to Handel, the vocal nudge and wink of ironic detachment that lets the music suggest more than one mood. Her German is a bit stiff and, striving for correctness, splutters too many consonants for comfort. Emmanuelle Haim directs the Concert d’Astree fluidly but without much byplay. When Natalie sings Ich habe genug, I’ve just about had it, too.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Susan Chilcott in Brussels
(Cypres)
****

The lamented Susan Chilcott, singing with her favourite conductor at his former job at La Monnaie, gives three Britten arias with a penetrative serenity that takes the breath away. The first variation from Turn of the Screw is fine enough, but Ellen Orford’s Embroidery aria and her duet with Peter Grimes are simply irreplaceable, relics of a massive talent that was destroyed in 2002 by breast cancer. Having experienced Chilcott live in Britten, I was unprepared for her high aplomb as Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello and Ariadne in Strauss’s opera. Hermione, in Philippe Boesmans opera of A Winter’s Tale, perhaps her least-known role, is just as captivating. Antonio Pappano controls proceedings with innate discretion.

>Buy this CD at Cypruss Records


Susan Graham: Un frisson francais, a century of French song
(Onyx)
****

The American mezzo Susan Graham, one of Chilcott’s best pals, covers the quai of French song from Bizet to Poulenc in five sets. The selection is clever, eclectic and often downright obscure. A rare nocturne by the severe Cesar Franck, a sentimental neurosis called Psyche by the unspellable Paladilhe, The Lost Fiancee by Messiaen and Manuel Rosenthal’s Smile of England are just a sampling of this potpourri. Malcolm Martineau is the impeccable accompanist in St Paul’s Church, New Southgate, which is engineered to sound like a Left Bank salon. Delicious.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



November 5, 2008

Olivier Messiaen: Inédits
(Jade)
***

More Messiaen? You got it. This is an album of unpublished works performed under the eye of his widow, Yvonne Loriod. A sexless 1929 love song, Le Mort du nombre, has a pleasing smash of Bartok in the piano part, while a 1986 Mozart parody for clarinet and piano is clever, whimsical and mildly comic, a commentary on another composer’s last words. Various organ solos add little to our Messiaen knowledge but a 1951 flute and piano piece, the Blackbird, is quite transfixing in the way it melds accurately imitated birdsong into a Boulez-style atonalism. Suddenly the chain of modernism becomes logical and organic.

The sour note on this disc is a Song of the Deportees for chorus and large orchestra that Messaien wrote, words and music, to a 1945 commission from French radio with a view to commemorate the tens of thousands, mostly Jews, who were rounded up by French police and sent to Nazi death camps. Messiaen refers neither to Jews nor to French complicity. ‘My pain takes the form of a cross,’ he chants devoutly, ‘…and peace returns at night.’ If ever there was a musical whitewash for Vichy France, this is it.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Colours of the celestial city, etc.
Radio France Orchestra, Myung-Whun Chung
(Naïve Classique)
**

The Korean conductor and sometime director of the Paris Opera was a Messiaen disciple, sensitive to his rhythmic quirks. Of the three works on his DG record, the Celestial City comes off best, though it sounds at time like a sermon that has lost its thread and allows the congregation to nod off. Three Small Liturgies and a Hymn for large orchestra, though rousingly performed, have little to say to the Messiaen agnostic.


Illuminations of the beyond
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Ingo Metzmacher
(Kairos)
****

Ingo Metzmacher, who conducted Messiaen’s St Francis opera at the BBC Proms this summer, is on much higher ground with Eclairs sur l’au-dela, if only because the Vienna Philharmonic play this late music as if it were located halfway between Schubert and Schoenberg. Talk of unsuspected beauties – I had to go rushing for a score to make sure this was what Messaien really wrote. Slow, sonorous and steeped with nasal intimations of a huge wind and brass section, it provokes a complete suspension of earthly concerns for the 67-minute duration and must be the least typical record ever to leave sybaritic Vienna.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Olivier Messiaen anniversary edition
(EMI)
***

The EMI factory outlet has issued a 14-CD Messiaen survey in which Simon Rattle conducts the Eclairs in Berlin with no intensity to match Metzmacher’s and Andre Previn busks the LSO through an endurance test of Turangalila. Much else, though, is worth having – the composer’s widow leading Quartet for the End of Time, Martha Argerich duetting with Alexandre Rabinovich in the Visions de l’Amen, Messiaen himself playing the organ. There are inexplicable omissions – Des Canyons aux étoiles, for instance – but this box will keep any would-be Messiaenist happy for the rest of the centenary year.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



October 29, 2008

Composers in Person
20-CDs
(EMI)
****

Composers are not the best judges of their music and seldom the best interpreters. Rachmaninov was one of few to admit that players such as Vladimir Horowitz found more things in his concertos than he thought he had put in. The rest, craving rewards and applause, hurled themselves into the fray with mixed results. This treasurable box brings together some of those 'author! author!' moments.

Setting aside the discs with Hindemith, Glazunov, Lehar and Roussel, who were truly terrible conductors, the chance of hearing Elgar conduct the Enigma, Holst the Planets and Richard Strauss a selection from Rosenkavalier is not to be missed - nor, at times, to be believed at the wayward speeds they take.

At the keyboard, Bartok beats all others for brio, quite the noisiest pianist you could ever wish to hear, yet delicate in between the banging. Prokofiev is winningly clattery in his third concerto. Messiaen is as solemn as you'd expect at the organ and the sound of Granados, who drowned in the First World War, comes almost from another world.

More familiar are the austere presences of Stravinsky, Britten and Shostakovich at the piano - but why no Rachmaninov or Ravel or Gershwin? You may have to find them on YouTube.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com

Three world premieres

Salvatore Sciarrino: Orchestral works
3Cds
(Kairos)
****

I fell in love with Sciarrino at Salzburg last summer. His music is made of aphorisms, like a volume of e e cummings, but the fragments cohere into a picture that is both attractive to the ear and mathematically absorbing. Listening to it is like piecing together shards of a broken Roman jug, much more satisfying than buying a new one. Try the Recitatvo oscuro piano concerto as an entry point. It's different from anything you've ever heard.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com

Harrison Birtwistle: The Minotaur
DVD
(Opus Arte)
****

Within half a year of its first staging, the most accomplished British opera of the century is now available for home viewing. Half man, half-beast, the Minotaur spends 175 minutes searching for his inner tenor. The music, especially the choral writing, is rich, warm and wonderful. John Tomlinson is magnificent as the beast and if you fail to find much sympathy for Ariadne (Christine Rice) it is because you wish sometimes she would just haul off and slap him one. Stephen Langridge's direction is classically static and the 'scenes of a sexual nature' blazoned on the DVD box don't get very far past first blouse. But the orchestra and chorus of Covent Garden under Antonio Pappano produce a sumptuous sound and there is a sense of moment in what you're watching. It is great art, made to last.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



Imogen Holst: Chamber Music
Sirba Octet, Isabelle Georges
(Court Lane Music)
***

Unsung daughter of The Planets composer, Imogen Holst (1907-84) spent much of her life as musical dogsbody to Benjamin Britten. Her 1928 Phantasy for string quartet owes much to Elgar, her 1982 quintet is imbued by Vaughan Williams. The Fall of the Leaf (1962) does exactly what is says on the label. None have ever been recorded before. A talent in a tea-cup is Imogen: warm, not too milky and utterly agreeable.

>Buy this CD at courtlanemusic.com




October 22, 2008

Los Desterrados: Miradores
(Crusoe)
****

The Ladino language and culture of Mediterranean Jews survived the 1492 expulsion from Spain and Hitler’s Holocaust to enjoy a minor contemporary revival in a narrow niche between classical and world music. Los Desterrados, led on violin and mandolin by the editor of the impeccably classical Strad magazine, Ariane Todes, is cheerfully eclectic and eco-tourist. Instead of the usual drone of Sarajevo lullabies, they play Tunisian devotions, Greek love songs and a Bulgarian ditty about a frog who fries chips. Never a dull moment, and done with infectious enthusiasm.


Du Shtetl a New York
Sirba Octet, Isabelle Georges
(Naïve Classique)
***

The Sirba Octet have a go at tracing early Broadway musicals to their East European ghetto melodic roots. The idea is such a good one you wonder why no-one has tried it before until the urban sophistication of a Hart-Rodgers torch song like My Funny Valentine leaves its bucolic origins so far behind that the singer is lost in a nightclub fug. Fun, though, especially in some of the Gershwin reinterpretations.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


Songs of Joy and Peace
Yo Yo Ma and Friends
(Sony Classical)
*

The slew of Christmas discs has yet to reach the shops but I doubt we’ll hear anything more excruciating than Yo Yo Ma’s attempt to play variations on Dona Nobis Pacem with chums James Taylor, Diana Krall, Sergio Assad and Renee Fleming. If there’s an honest, hard-worked note on this record, I missed it. Even Ma’s cello playing is scratchy and Fleming’s pitch for the Diana Ross vote in Touch the Hand of Love is so far off genre it will have to apply for a re-entry visa. Strictly for the masochists.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com



October 16, 2008

Vivaldi: Four Seasons
Joshua Bell (violin & cond.), Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields
(Sony)
****

There is an immutable law of critical life that whenever you rip open a pack of discs with anticipatory excitement, out falls another bloody Four Seasons and you wish you’d gone into a career in dentistry, where most of these recordings wind up.

Out of a sense of public duty, I sat through the latest asseveration of Vivaldi’s trinkets, recorded in Hampstead’s Air Studios by the immaculate producer Steve Epstein, and after a while my ears were pleasantly piqued.

Not by the outer movements, which are fast and flashy as last year’s Porsche, but by Summer and Autumn in which Joshua Bell evokes a wistfulness for the slipping sands of time.

Bell, pushing 40, is dressed on his record cover like a sixth-former on prize day, tie slipping and collar askew. There is a schoolboy mischief to his playing, a tendency to linger longer than is polite around the desserts table of upper harmonics, but the exaggerations are not gratuitous. When he extends a phrase, he does it to make an intelligent sound. His adagio in Summer suggests an almost Proustian regret; the adagio molto of Autumn, framed by John Constable’s harpsichord, is reflectively sad without being treacly and nostalgic. This is the most interesting Seasons for quite a while. There’s also a bonus track of Tartini’s Devil’s Sonata.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


October 8, 2008

Elgar, Rainier, Rubbra: cello works
Jacqueline du Pre
(Medici Arts)
*****

Jacqueline du Pre’s 1965 recording of the Elgar concerto is the best-selling cello recording of all time. Anyone seeking a different take on its elegiac Englishness has Rostropovich, Yo Yo Ma and Paul Tortelier to> choose from. So why bother releasing a live Du Pre concert in the inferior acoustic of the Royal Albert Hall? Precisely because it is live. Where du Pre made her recording with the avuncular Sir John Barbirolli, this Prom is conducted by the preening Sir Malcolm Sergeant with whom she'd had prior clashes. This time the soloist, still only 18 years old, grabs the initiative in the opening statement and drives the performance at speeds that fluctuate without warning from near-stasis to Silverstone Grand Prix. Orchestra and conductor are left hanging for dear life onto wisps of wilful impetuosity. The quarter-second of free space that du Pre steals at the opening of the finale amounts to a declaration of interpretative independence against the tyranny of maestro routines.

Since this is a BBC Prom in the William Glock era, she goes on to give the world premiere of a concerto by Glock’s friend Priaulx Rainier, a work of many clever effects and an overarching inventive mediocrity. du Pre never played it again. A bonus track from the 1962 Cheltenham Festival introduces the devout, lyrical and (to my ears) irresistible sonata by Edmund Rubbra, in which the accompanist is the cellist’s mother Iris, a less reticent pianist than I had previously imagined.

>Buy this CD at MDT


October 1, 2008

Haydn, Hummel: trumpet concertos
Alison Balsom, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, Bremen
(EMI)
***

Alison Balsom has made the move from musician to minor celebrity with little fuss. Backed by striking photographs that catch the eye in unexpected places, she has kept the gossips busy by ditching Maxim Vengerov – who gave up playing the violin while they were together – for a Winchester delaer in antique silver. She’s 29, blonde and rather nice when you get chatting to her.

As for music, she plays a mean trumpet. In the two best concertos for hunt and field instruments, and two more by Torelli and Neruda, she maintains a clean tone and snappy tempi. But how much trumpet can you bear at one go? By the time Alison is past the tenth track, I’m happy to pass the next equinox without hearing another trumpet solo.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


September 24, 2008

Schubert: An mein Herz
Matthias Goerne (baritone), Helmut Deutsch, Eric Schneider (piano)
(Harmonia Mundi)
****

Battered by Bryn Terfel dramatics, the ears cried out for a pure dose of lieder from a master of the craft. Matthias Goerne, who appears this weekend at the South Bank in modern rep, seems to own a different shade of baritonal colour for every syllable Schubert wrote. The voice is sweet and serene, even at fff, and the shifts that Goerne applies to the changing of seasons and the fickleness of love are done with enviable delicacy. More reticent than Fischer-Dieskau or Thomas Quasthoff to bend a line for expressive emphasis, when Goerne takes a liberty the effect is breath stopping. He delivers ‘Du bist die Ruh’ (you are peace), for instance, at fifty percent off the prescribed tempo, bringing a virginal wonderment to the old recital warhorse. The programme on the first of these two CDs is more felicitous than the second, as is the accompanist (Helmut Deutsch). This is not an album to gorge at one go. Take it two songs a night before bedtime, and it might see you through to the end of recession.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


September 17, 2008

Bryn Terfel: First Love, Songs from the British Isles
Cantorum Caracas, LSO, Adams
(Warner)
*

Bryn Terfel’s announcement that he plans to retire in his mid-forties, a couple of years’ hence, will not be widely regretted if he makes many more records like this. Gone is the brushed-velvet gradation of soft to loud; gone, too, the little winks of shared pleasure. What we have here is a stadium belter, hammering out numbers at two dynamic levels ff and pp, nothing in between. Few of these treasures receive much by way of interpretative forethought. Hamming it up, as he did to excess on Last Night of the Proms, Terfel treats the national heritage to a rough day at sea. Three Welsh songs apart, there is not much to beguile the ear. And when Terfel is joined in Danny Boy by Ronan Keating of Boyzone any hope of the sublime is blown away by Keating’s difficulty in hitting a note without sliding towards it. If this CD deserves any star rating, it is for the London Symphony Orchestra’s sweet playing, against severe provocation. The record label, by the way, is Deutsche Grammophon, which used to be the classical benchmark.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


September 10, 2008

Adams: The Flowering Tree
Cantorum Caracas, LSO, Adams
(Warner)
****

Big season coming up for John Adams. There’s a new opera being staged in London and New York, an autobiography next month and several recordings. Setting aside the DVD of Doctor Atomic which is being released in advance of the ENO production in February, I listened with renewed satisfaction to A Flowering Tree whose premiere in November 2006 marked, for me, a breakthrough in the Adams style.

From the opening phrases of this South Indian fable, performed by a South American ensemble, the composer surrenders unconditionally to the pleasure principle, allowing story and melodies to unfold without concern for the academic correctness that stiffened some of his earlier work. The rhythms are infections, the tunes hummable and the ecological and multicultural messages timely and credible. Stripped of its visuals on record, it stands up pretty well under the composer’s baton, though the soloists can be a bit declamatory and the LSO plays too cleanly for the rustic setting. Compared to most modern operas,, this is one that will run and run.

>Buy this CD at amazon.com


September 3, 2008

Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs &c.
Renee Fleming, Munich Philharmonic, Christian Thielemann
(Decca)
***

There are moments in this live concert recording from last April when you will hear the most lustrous Strauss singing of the present century, along with the most idiomatic accompaniment. Frustratingly, those moments are scarce in the Four Last Songs where Fleming is mannered, self-regarding and emotionally statuesque. She gave a more affecting account on disc with Christoph Eschenbach a decade ago in Houston and does herself no favours with such pristine preening.

I am about to junk the disc when three arias from Ariadne auf Naxos, the least dramatic of Strauss’s operas, bring out a kaleidoscopic range of expression and colour from the enigmatic American diva, tempered by supple conducting from Thielemann and transcendent playing from the composer’s hometown band. A selection of salon songs that Strauss wrote for his tough-love wife, indulgent as a double-cream cake, are almost wickedly beautiful, void of moral purpose but ravishing beyond words. Fleming here is sunning it, absoloutely in her element. For the Last Songs, look elsewhere: Flagstad, Della Casa, Norman, Nina Stemme, Mattila.

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August 27, 2008

Erwin Schrott
Valencia orchestra, Riccardo Frizza
(Decca)
*

The beefcake Uruguayan baritone has been making news of late as the prospective father of Anna Netrebko’s forthcoming baby, and as defendant in a no-show suit filed against him by the London recitals organiser, Ian Rosenblatt. As Leporello in this summer’s Salzburg Don Giovanni, Schrott was a fearsomely physical presence, a steamy figure shooting drugs in the woods. Here on record, without visual aids, he’s as raw as a salmonella breakfast egg. The voice is strong and not without character, but the singer has neither the gesture nor the suggestive charm to give life to an aria, whether it’s Mozart, Verdi or Gounod, three of the most singer-friendly composers. His crack at Figaro’s non piu andrai reminded me in its metronomic boxiness of Elvis Presley’s wooden heart. When he does try to inject expression, as Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust, he slithers round the notes like a newcomer at the local ice rink. Schrott, who settled his London case out of court with a donation to a children’s charity, is an opera star by proxy alone. He’ll make a great child minder in the Netrebko ménage.

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August 20, 2008

Beethoven: 3rd piano concerto; Sibelius: 5th symphony
Gould, Karajan, Berlin Philharmonic
(Sony)
*****

This is a record that never happened. When super-smooth Herbert von Karajan led super-crank Glenn Gould in his Berlin debut in May 1957, the conductor said their concert would be ‘equalled by very few in our lifetime’ while the pianist complained of Karajan’s ‘obsessive concern with legato phrasing’. Despite such differences, maestro and soloist agreed that making a record was more important than playing a live gig. Over the next 25 years they talked of booking a studio, but could not agree which of them would have the final edit.

Dredged from Berlin Philharmonic archives, this radio tape of their first concert is the more electrifying for the absence of after-care. This is not so much a musical collaboration as a heated conversation. Karajan, a big-sound romantic, bends his tempi to Gould’s classical intimations while the pianist stays preternaturally alert to holding his balance against the band. Every phrase they make has a singularity in time and space and Karajan’s second-half Sibelius is chilled by the prior experience. This is music making of epic quality – a legend, if not a record.

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August 13, 2008

Clement, Beethoven: violin concertos
Rachel Barton Pine
Cedilla, 2CDs
****/*

Franz Clement was the soloist for whom Beethoven wrote his violin concerto in 1806, having heard Clement play his own concerto the year before on the night the Eroica Symphony received its premiere. Clement’s lack of rehearsal made a hash of Beethoven’s masterpiece, prompting the composer to withdraw it for revision. Clement’s concerto vanished for rather longer - until a scholarly edition two centuries later prompted a Chicago soloist to make this, its first recording. How revealing is that? Immensely. Both concertos are in the same key, D major, and many of the phrases that we think of as typically Beethoven are presaged in his friend’s work, particularly in its rondo finale. Clement’s concerto is attractive, propulsive and well worth a live date. If I were bossing the Barbican or South Bank, I’d be on the phone to the enterprising Rachel Barton Pine before lights out tonight. The blight on her record, however, is a companion account of the Beethoven concerto taken at a tempo the wrong side of humdrum – a decision that cannot have belonged to the able conductor Jose Serebrier – and with cadenzas of leaden banality. Pine almost manages to bring Beethoven down to Clement’s level, which is what Clement tried to do in the first place.

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July 30, 2008

Nikolai Miaskovsky: Complete Symphonies
Russian Symphony Orchestra, Evgeny Svetlanov
(Warner)
****

Given that most people have not got one symphony of Miaskovsky’s in the house, why am I urging you to buy all 27? Simple, really. Because the Polish-born composer provides a valid parallel track to the Dmitri Shostakovich history of Stalin’s Russia.

Raised in a military family, Miaskovsky (1881-1950) was in cadet uniform when he heard an early concert of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique and discovered his true vocation. Wounded in the First War, he served in the Red Army after the Revolution and brought frontline experience to the symphonies he wrote, one every year like clockwork. Lyrical by reference, he used intermittent dissonance from the 6th symphony onwards to he was not part of the propaganda machine. Though he toed the party line with a 1936 Aviation Symphony and a 1941 potpourri of folk-tunes, his 23rd symphony, the voice was distinctive and the material concentrated. As professor in St Petersburg, he taught two generations of composers, leaving an unmarked footprint on his artform. There is hardly a dull phrase to be heard in this box of 16CDs , sold at a giveaway price.

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July 9, 2008

Birds on Fire: Jewish musicians at the Tudor Court
Fretwork
(Harmonia Mundi)
***

The history I learned in school was that the Jews were expelled from England by Edward I in 1290 and readmitted by Oliver Cromwell in 1655. History, though, is made of human exceptions. Modern research has uncovered Jewish musicians and doctors at the courts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Some of the music on this intermittently fascinating CD is ascribed to members of the Bassano and Lupo families, Venetian migrants who were imported for their musical skills. None of their inventions is overtly Jewish, though my ear picks up the maqam of one Hebrew hymn, None Like Our God, in the unlikely setting of the Lumley Part Books.

Not much else on the release lives up to its billing. The living composer Orlando Gough contributes three meditations on a pair of klezmer tunes, which are culturally alien to the Hispanic-Italian mode of Lupo and Bassano. Other pieces are by a 17th century Antwerp saloniste, Leonora Duarte, and by the celebrated Salomone Rossi of Mantua, the first Jew permitted to practise music freely in Christian Europe. The fillers are there for want of Tudor Jews. They may have played at court, but they did not leave enough music to fill an album.

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July 2, 2008

Mieczyslaw Weinberg: 4 concertos
Swedish National Orchestra, Gothenburg
(Chandos)
****

Players in Gustavo Dudamel’s second band in Gothenburg have been pushing out the sled to explore the endless expanses of a Polish-born, ex-Soviet composer. As well as 26 symphonies and seven operas, Weinberg (1919-96) wrote ten concertos that are almost indecently appealing.

A close companion of Shostakovich at the worst times of his life, Weinberg borrowed his friend’s best jokes but left out the bitterness. His second flute concerto quotes Bach and Gluck in flagrant imitation of the Shostakovich 15th symphony, more in whimsy than malice. The clarinet concerto has affinities with Copland’s little masterpiece and the first flute concerto opens with what sounds like a Jewish wedding dance. The emotional depths are plumbed, as you’d expect, in a cello fantasia that Slava Rostropovich used to play with deep affection, its main theme as rich and indelible as a red wine stain. Why these works are never heard in our concert halls I have no idea. Memo to Maestros Jurowski, Salonen and Gergiev: get an earful of this disc. Quite apart from audience appeal, the players will love you for letting them loose on these grace notes.

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June 22, 2008

Villa-Lobos/Ginastera
Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Goossens
*****

Once upon a time there was a label called Everest that produced classical records in dazzling covers, with spectacular sound to match. Like many of the best, it was set up by a man who learned his trade in military radar and ballistic missiles. Everest flourished from 1958 for four years, after which its catalogue fell into the hands iof liquidators and lawyers, never to appear on CD – until this week, when it pops up at an impulse £6 a disc. Neither of the Latin American composers on this release are played much in concert nowadays, more’s the pity. The second Bachaianas Brasileiras of Heitor Villa-Lobos takes us on a little train ride through the jungle, while the Argentine Alberto Ginastera delivers two Workers Educational-type ballets, titled Estancia and Panambi and almost impossible to listen to sitting down. Played by a New York pick-up band, and by the LSO at its most bristling – is that the young Jimmy Galway on flute solo? – these scintillating sessions could never have been made by a major label with three salaried suits watching the wall clock for musicians’ overtime. It’s fabulous playing, fun, fun, fun.

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June 18, 2008

Lorraine at Emmanuel
(Avie)
****

The contralto Lorraine Hunt Lieberson will soon have more posthumous records to her name than live ones, so vastly has she sold since her death two summers ago, aged 52. A viola player who found her voice while freelancing in Boston orchestras, Lorraine enjoyed brief fame at the summits of opera before falling victim to breast cancer. The Bach cantatas and Handel arias presented here are pre-fame performances in Boston’s Emmanuel Church with an orchestra of old friends and an ambience that is devout in Bach and declamatory in Handel, not an easy fit. Her Sunday-morning Bach style is reminiscent of Kathleen Ferrier at her most touching and orotund, every consonant an immaculate offering. In scenes from Handel’s Hercules, a concert rarity, she switches to brimstone and heartbreak, bringing a Purcell-like translucence to the lament, ‘When beauty sorrow’s’. The only shortcoming on this church-owned record of her emergent gifts is the over-friendliness of the accompaniment. Spurred on by fiercer conductors than the resident Craig Smith and John Harbison, Lorraine could – and did – melt mountains.

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June 11, 2008

Mahler: First Symphony
London Symphony Orchestra, Valery Gergiev (cond.)
(LSO Live)
**

Gergiev’s Mahler cycle is not going well. The Sixth Symphony, released in April, stumbled along in search of a coherent line. The First, in many ways Mahler’s most explicit symphony, has vital markings overridden and much of its atmosphere lost. The opening six-octave A on string harmonics is supposed to conjure up an image of woodland mystery. Here it is played, without fantasy, as a peremptory prelude to the next theme.

The plangent Frere Jacques motif in the third movement is written for solo double-bass. Gergiev, for reasons unexplained, employs all or part of the LSO’s bull-fiddle section in the passage, substituting collective effort for sombre contemplation. The tempo then goes completely off the metronome. This is not Mahler we are hearing but someone who thinks he knows better than Mahler.

I have much respect for Gergiev and have been excited by many of his opera performances. But, unless he devotes more time to studying Mahler’s scores and intentions, he won’t have anything worthwhile to say in the rest of this series.

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June 4, 2008

Craig Armstrong
BBC SO, Garry Walker (cond.)
(Virgin)
****

Among a fresh stream of film composers who write credible concert music, Craig Armstrong, 49, is a crafty ear-tickler. A Glaswegian who wrote Moulin Rouge for Baz Luhrmann and Love Actually, the acme of mush, Armstrong is unafraid of abstract expression and the occasional atonality in three diverse works on this disc. Immer is an 18-minute violin concerto for the undervalued Clio Gould who plays without pause, giving a deep Brahmsian gloss to contemporary meditational chords. One Minute is a set of 15 orchestral aphorisms, while Memory Takes My Hand is a cantata for soprano Lucy Crowe, chorus and orchestra in a Walton-meets-Philip Glass mode. Its central aria, As We Loved, has atmospheric affinities with Gorecki’s million-selling third symphony and could well be the next motorway tailback hit. Armstrong writes too short, failing to exploit the full potential of his invention. But he is his own man and, while the influences are overt, the creative voice is unmistakable.

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May 28, 2008

Glyndebourne on record
****

The festival’s venture into record sales is admirable in every way but one. The first two CD sets, out next week, consist of Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery from 2006, persuasively conducted by Vladimir Jurowsky with a Russian cast, and a 1962 Marriage of Figaro with Mirella Freni as Susanna, Edith Mathis as Cherubino and Leyla Gencer’s exotically warbled Countess. Recorded live, their reception is punctuated by audience laughter and applause.

Betrothal has no rival version on the market, and Figaro dates from an age when free-range singers articulated every consonant as accurately as they hit the adjoining note. Silvio Varviso, never a showman, conducts Mozart with exquisite discretion.

So what’s not to like? The packaging. Both sets come with librettos in four languages in a luxury hardbacked mini-book that takes up as much shelf as the complete Vaughan Williams. This may be no problem if you live in a country house, but for city dwellers space is at a premium and librettos can be found on-line. A slim pack would be preferable.

>Buy this CD at glyndebourne.com


May 23, 2008

Handel: Alcina, Orlando
Les Arts Florissants, William Christie
(Warner)
*****

Name me a hotter cast for any Handel opera in a century of recording than Renee Fleming, Susan Graham and Natalie Dessay – and that’s just the women. I must have missed this Alcina on first release in 1999; reboxed here with an attractive account of Orlando, it is quite irresistible, a bookend for your Handel shelf in the coming 2009 anniversary year. The voices come at you in Alcina like a burst of fireworks, one aria after another, high as you like. Fleming is more flexible that her present diva image permits, Graham is luxuriant and Dessay steals the show time after time with eruptive vivacity and breath-stopping risks; her real-life husband Laurent Naouri lurks sonorously in the bass register. Orlando has mezzo Patricia Bardon in the male title role, opposite love-interest Rosemary Joshua, nicely matched. Conductor Christie shapes both narratives with deft discretion and smiling tempi. Emmanuelle Haim plays the continuo. Who could ask for anything more?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 Biondi’s 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 Sammartini’s is a salon piece, but the Boccherini symphony is dangerously dramatic and Monza’s 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 summer’s 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 Beethoven’s 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 brother’s cantata, The First Walpurgis Night. Felix, guilt-stricken, followed her six months later. His bicentenary will be widely celebrated in 2009 while Fanny’s 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 Beethoven’s 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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