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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 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.
September 17, 2008 Bryn Terfel: First Love, Songs from the British Isles 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.
September 10, 2008 Adams: The Flowering Tree 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.
September 3, 2008 Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs &c. 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.
August 27, 2008 Erwin Schrott 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.
August 20, 2008 Beethoven: 3rd piano concerto; Sibelius: 5th symphony 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.
August 13, 2008 Clement, Beethoven: violin concertos 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.
July 30, 2008 Nikolai Miaskovsky: Complete Symphonies 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.
July 9, 2008 Birds on Fire: Jewish musicians at the Tudor Court 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.
July 2, 2008 Mieczyslaw Weinberg: 4 concertos 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.
June 22, 2008 Villa-Lobos/Ginastera 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.
June 18, 2008 Lorraine at Emmanuel 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.
June 11, 2008 Mahler: First Symphony 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.
June 4, 2008 Craig Armstrong 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.
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 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?
May 7, 2008 Rolando Villazon: Cielo e Mar 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.
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.
April 23, 2008 Haydn: Symphonies 22 and 49; Divertimenti 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.
April 16, 2008 Mozart: piano concertos 12 and 24 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.
April 9, 2008 Mahler: Sixth Symphony 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.
April 2, 2008 Tan Dun, Takemitsu, Hayashi 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.
March 26, 2008 Reich: Daniel Variations 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.
March 5, 2008 Hilary Hahn, Swedish Radio SO, Esa-Pekka Salonen 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.
February 27, 2008 London Bridge Ensemble 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 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.
February 13, 2008 J S Bach: six cello suites 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.
February 6, 2008 Janacek: The Excursions of Mr Broucek 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.
January 30, 2008 JS Bach: The Arts of the Fugue 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.
January 9, 2008 Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde 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.
December 19, 2007 Bach Magnificat; Handel Dixit Dominus 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.
December 12, 2007 Philip Glass/Leonard Cohen: Book of Longing 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.
December 5, 2007 Janacek/Haas: string quartets 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.
November 21, 2007 Bridges 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.
November 14, 2007 Britannia 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.
October 31, 2007 Brahms: double concerto and clarinet quintet 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.
October 24, 2007 Mahler: 10th symphony adagio; Shostakovich 14th symphony 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.
October 17, 2007 Saint-Saens: piano concertos 2 and 5 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.
October 10, 2007 Chopin: complete preludes 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.
October 3, 2007 Nicola Benedetti: Vaughan Williams, Tavener 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.
September 26, 2007 Shostakovich: works for piano and orchestra 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.
September 19, 2007 The Elfin Knight 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.
September 12, 2007 Corigliano: The Red Violin concerto, violin sonata 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.
August 30, 2007 Strauss: Enoch Arden 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
August 26, 2007 Bartok piano music (Brilliant Classics, 2-CD) 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.
August 15, 2007 Igor Raykhelson: Little symphony, jazz suite Composers were the big losers in the collapse of Communism. Unwanted in |
By Norman Lebrecht
