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June 25, 2009 Contemporary Music from Ireland vol. 8
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.
Three concertos to try Mozart piano concertos 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
Shostakovich: Incidental music for Hamlet; 15th symphony 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 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 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 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.
Gustav Mahler: 4 Movements 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
Haydn: Six late masses 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.
Kate Royal: Midsummer Night 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 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 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 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 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.
Three more to try Rachmaninov Preludes 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 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.
Piotr Anderszewski at Carnegie Hall 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 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 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.
Schumann and Bartók: The Berlin Recital 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 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 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 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/
Chicago SO, Barenboim 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?
March 25, 2009 J S Bach: 6 solo sonatas and partitas 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 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.
Mahler: 8th symphony 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.
Lutoslawski: Orchestral works 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 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 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.
Beethoven sonatas 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 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 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?
Three more to try Walton: cello concerto 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.
Lada Valesova: Intimate Studies 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 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
March 4, 2009 Handel: Alcina 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?
Three more to try Handel: Faramondo 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.
Handel: Acis and Galatea 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.
Handel: Jephtha 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.
February 25, 2009 Puccini: La Boheme 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.
Three more to try Leif Ove Andsnes: Shadows of Silence 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.
Magnus Lindberg: Sculpture 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.
The Sixteen: works by Janequin and Guerrero 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 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.
Three more to try Schoenberg, Berg, Webern: string quartets 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 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 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.
February 11, 2009 Philippe Jaroussky: Opium 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.
Three more to try Mahler: 2nd symphony 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?
Mahler: 2nd symphony 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.
Leonard Bernstein: Mass 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.
February 4, 2009 Luigi Cherubini: Song on the death of Joseph Haydn 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 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 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.
Eugene Goossens: First symphony, Phantasy concerto 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.
January 28, 2009 Josef Suk: Asrael 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.
Three more to try Suk: The Ripening 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.
James Ehnes: Homage 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.
Boulez plays Mozart 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.
January 21, 2009 Dvorak, Herbert: cello concertos 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.
Three more to try Gorecki: Life Journey 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.
Arnold, McCabe: concertos for orchestra 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.
Give it one: the London Horn Sound 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.
January 14, 2009 Gustav Holst: The Perfect Fool, &c 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.
Two more to try Purcell: Dido and Aeneas 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…
Purcell: Dido and Aeneas 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.
January 7, 2009 JS Bach: Goldberg Variations 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.
Three more to try Jerusalem, city of peace 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.
Boris Tchaikovsky (1925-96): 6 String Quartets 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 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 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.
Three more to try Making Waves - Bob Chilcott 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.
I love all beauteous things 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.
Donald Francis Tovey: Piano trios 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 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.
Three more to try Handel: Saul 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.
Daniel Taylor: The Voice of Bach 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.
Double concertos by J S Bach and sons 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.
December 3, 2008 John Rutter: A Christmas Festival 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.
Three more Christmas CDs Angelika Kirschlager sings Christmas Carols 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 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 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.
November 26, 2008 Schumann, Elgar: piano quintets 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.
Three more to try Shostakovich, Britten: cello works 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.
Bloch, Lees: violin concertos 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.
Tchaikovsky: violin concerto 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.
November 21, 2008 Tchaikovsky: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet 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.
Three more to try Sanctum est verum lumen 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.
Chantage at Christmas 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.
J S Bach: Cantatas Volume 5 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.
November 12, 2008 J S Bach: Keyboard concertos 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.
Three more to try Natalie Dessay sings Bach Cantatas 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.
Susan Chilcott in Brussels 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 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.
November 5, 2008 Olivier Messiaen: Inédits 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.
Colours of the celestial city, etc. 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 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.
Olivier Messiaen anniversary edition 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.
October 29, 2008 Composers in Person 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.
Three world premieres Salvatore Sciarrino: Orchestral works 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.
Harrison Birtwistle: The Minotaur 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.
Imogen Holst: Chamber 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 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 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.
Songs of Joy and Peace 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.
October 16, 2008 Vivaldi: Four Seasons 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.
October 8, 2008 Elgar, Rainier, Rubbra: cello works 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.
October 1, 2008 Haydn, Hummel: trumpet concertos 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.
September 24, 2008 Schubert: An mein Herz |
By Norman Lebrecht
