Words and Music

Monday, 3 September 2012

'Ah!' says my companion of his programme at the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra's Messiaen and Mahler prom, 'lots of advertising!' While I am boring him about other Mahler symphonies, he carefully unbends the staples and takes out the central pages. 'Are you undoing you programme?' I ask. 'I am comparing the weight of the adverts and the actual notes,' he says, 'and I have discovered that the adverts are twice as heavy as the rest.'

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Signature Scream

**** James MacMillan • Magnificat • Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic and Choir • Edward Caswell • Challenge Classics • CC72554 • MacMillan’s Mag and Nunc is festal in length but not in mood. Composed for the millennium, it alternates between trepidation and violence. After steady descending instrumental steps, the choir enters with a hallowed hushed as if into a crypt. This is Mary not bold but querulous. Each verse is similarly sombre and homophonic like an Anglican psalm, but with a long indulgent melisma on each penultimate syllable. The Dutch singers’ enunciation lacks clarity, though the full orchestra is sometimes to blame. The vicious screaming chord which announces the Gloria is a powerful signature and refuses to diminish even when bracketing the choir’s cowering pianissimo amens. Basses begin the Nunc from the pits of a bottom E and end it there too, fulfilling the Gloria’s ‘as it was in the beginning’. Ten years earlier, the unknown 30-year-old made a stir with Tryst, a single-movement, thrillingly rhythmic, half-hour orchestral work inspired by a William Soutar poem. Glissandoing clarinets start uncomfortably, their chalky tone aching, but chomping, hungry strings give their angst cause. Relief comes in legato sections, the Netherland strings aglow, the halfway point orchestral crescendo awesome, though the darting syncopations remain the soul of the work, an expression of youthful hyperactivity by one detemined to be noticed.

Czech Honoured

Schuch Ullmann **** CD Review • Herbert Schuch • Ullmann • Beethoven • WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln • Olari Elts • OEHMS Classics • Schuch gives vivid life to Ullmann’s Piano Concerto, composed during the German occupation of Prag in 1939 but unperformed in the composer’s life which ended in Auschwitz in 1944. Fear is audible in the murky modal theme of the allegro, the piano adding an edge like a fixed bayonet. The contrasting second theme is surreal – a dreamy romance with a spiky piano – as extreme as war and peace. The pacific mood prevails in the tranquillo second movement with the gentle piano in faint dialogue with the harp over muted strings. Ullmann’s beloved Mahler provides the model for the forced laughter of the scherzo, Schuch pounding the bass notes with Laendler impudence. The finale is optimistic as the twinkling, exuberant piano dispels the subdued introduction, though events confounded hope. Schuch justifies Ullmann’s witness-like score, defying the evil which suppressed a man but not his spirit. That lives on here. Schuch honours the Czech by marrying his concerto with Beethoven’s Third, the ominous C minor opening and jaunty second subject a prototype for Ullmann’s concept. Elts conducts the German radio orchestra with breadth, weight, judicious speeds and deference to the soloist. The Largo is serene after Schuch’s magical opening although his rising scales later just fall short of the pins-and-needles staccato effect, which Beethoven calls for.

Latin Primer

**** CD Review • Ginastera • Dvorak • Shostakovich • Simon Bolivar String Quartet • Deutsch Grammophon • The Simon Bolivar project in Venezuela now casts a formidable string quartet upon the world. The string principals of the former Youth Orchestra chisel Shostakovich’s Quartet No8 from a dark, gritty ore, first in moaning restraint, then with sudden, barely containable speed as they punch out the composer’s initials written in notes as a signal to his admirers that he still had his own mind and was no mere stooge of the authorities. The Venezuelans play with the pride and awareness that they have no peers where fire, precision and excitement are the order and they lean leaning back, casual and confident on the cover in a ‘beat that!’ pose at the thrill of their Shostakovich. Only some of the maturity and sorrow of the slow movement’s dark pessimism goes missing. They are at home with the syncopated rhythms Ginastera’s passionate Quartet No1 and have a knowing way with the romantic nostalgof Dvorak’s ‘American’ Quartet. They seem determined to put themselves and their music on the map in every way.

Schubert Fountain

**** CD Review • Maria Joao Pires • Schubert Piano Sonatas No16 in A minor D845 and No21 in B flat D960 • Deutsche Grammophon • The slow movement of Schubert’s B flat piano sonata was one of the favourite pieces of the writer WG Sebald and therefore of value also to his many fans. Pires captures what Sebald calls the ‘incomparable solemnity’ of its deathly tread, touching the hollow chords with velvet hands and quickening only slightly those bars which close unexpectedly with three quavers rather than a high note pinged with bell-like tone by her crossing left hand. She gives the movement perfect shape, just as it came to the composer with no contrivance of any sort, but ‘the assurance of a somnambulist’ as Sebald puts it. The following Scherzo has firefly brilliance and crackle, the finale a weightless exuberance that makes more magnetic than usual its ear-worm tune. The mighty first movement, as long as the other three movements combined, is an absorbing journey in Pires’ reading, as long and tortuously gripping as a Sebald walk through space and history. In the slow movement, Schubert composed his own funeral dirge for he died not long after writing it, a fact which partly explains Sebald’s fascination with it.

Love Story

*** CD Review • Tell me the truth about love • Amanda Roocroft • Joseph Middleton • Champs Hill Records CHRCD040 • Roocroft and Middleton, soprano and piano, perform the story of an erotic weekend, lovers who glimpse each other on Saturday morning, make love on Saturday night, swap adoring looks the following morning, but part on Sunday evening. The 29 songs are carefully chosen: all are in the female first person and no names are given until the last, Britten’s gently eccentric setting of the folksong Early one moning. Britten also starts the CD with the WH Auden title track. Roocroft neatly handles the comic element with a stand-up’s rhetorical pause before ‘llamas’, but betrays a certain sense of desperation in the full-blown operatic fortissimo with which she delivers the final, pleading ‘tell me’. This same somewhat off-putting volume recurs throughout, not least at the midnight moment in Rachmaninov’s Midsummer Nights in which she rises to the sort of embarrassing clamour to make the neighbours cringe and bang on the walls. Best are the retsrained love songs like Mompou’s beautiful major / minor Damunt de tu nomes or Dunhill’s The Cloths of Heaven. The kiss in Quilter’s Love’s Philosophy provokes an explosion on ‘sweet emotion’ best left private, but that in Ireland’s The Trellis is magical, expressed by a single low, dark chord, and a silence that says both parties know where it will end. We’ve all been there. The disc contains much to remind of the excitement of such encounters, but just as much we’d rather not repeat.

Sacred Ben

CD Review • Britten Sacred Works • New College Oxford • Edward Higginbottom • Novum NCR1386 • The choir sound fresh as a new spring term, their diction enthusiastic, their tuning bright, their ensemble razor-edged. This is an emotive double-disc, richly nostalgic for choristers weaned on the twin Te Deums, poignant with a sense of loss for disappearing Anglicanism. Most of the church works are here with A Boy is Born the only significant omission. ‘Not intended for liturgical use,’ says Higginbottom, explaining the criteria. Rejoice in the Lamb was an anthem, albeit a terrifically long one. Treble Inigo Jones sings the cat with boyish wonder. Only the Silly Fellow section lacks conviction, the organ sneer a wimper. The unaccompanied choir opener - the setting of WH Auden’s Hymn to St Cecilia – entrances musically and grips verbally, the meaning of the poet’s barbed verse never clearer. The Missa Brevis is as hard-toned, concise and pleasing as a crisp sermon and an early finishing service, the carhorn chords of the Agnus Dei gentle reminders of the secular outside. The Ceremony of Carols rings with chorister impatience for Christmas, lullaby Balulow showing the tenderest tone, the racing echoes of This Little Babe like a puppy chasing its tail, the harp interlude ringing with the same resonance extinct civilisations knew, the plainsong bracket enclosing all like the beginning and end of time. This is as fitting a centenary tribute as may appear all year.

Mozart in Britten

CD Review • Mozart Piano Concertos No21 in C and No22 in E flat K482 • Christian Ihle Hadland • Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra • Arvid Engegard • A 30-year-old Norwegian titivates my lugs, sparking life into Mozart’s two piano concertos from 1685. He plays a serious modern instrument with the lightness nowadays associated with the tinkly fortepiano that the composer carted round Vienna in a barrow. In both No21 in C and No22 in E flat he contrasts the whippet speed and precision of the outer movements with a sensual depth in the slow movement arias which tells of tragic passions. His tone has icy clarity which the instruments of the Oslo Phil seem to long for when he is silent. The performances are remarkable for their cadenzas. In No21 in C K467 he plays his own where Mozart invites improvisation. His style is to maintain the rhythmic shape of the composer’s themes but to visit keys he would have found un-Classical. In No22 in E flat, he plays the ‘improvisations’ which Britten wrote for Sviatoslav Richter and turns the disc into a moody tribute in this centenary year. Britten often programmed Mozart at Aldeburgh and never played him without a sense of tragic loss cming through. Son it is here. The concerto darkens as if a curtain has been pulled and we hear the eighteenth century suddenly through a filter. What came upon civilised men to wear powdered wigs for a century and think it normal behaviour? What will our foible be?

Thoroughbred Fiddle

CD Review • Beethoven Violin Sonatas • Leonidas Kavakos • Enrico Pace • Decca 4783523 • Under Kavakos’ dark fingers, the outer movements of the Kreutzer Sonata writhe and heave like one in the throes of passion. After the simpering introduction, Kavakos roughs up the presto with vigorous bowing over the staccato theme, maintaining intense restraint through the repeat and only coming a little adrift from his pianist Enrico Pace two pages into the development. In his eagerness the violinist races sometimes, urgent for the climax. Both players lean gratefully into the adagio punctuation bars before continuing with renewed vigour. The presto finale responds like a thorughbred to a starting pistol, the galloping monotones from one answering the leaping triplets from the other with no kink in the flow, no lumpy strokes, no inelegant stresses. In the thrill of the chase their full-pelt tally-ho triplets have telepathic synchronicity. Meanwhile, the slow movement happens like a dream sequence, the statement glowing in soft-focus serenity, the four variations taking their turn in polite order, the players with after-you-sir deference to each other’s volume, each caressing with sudden unselfish warmth their partner’s phrases. The Kreutzer is merely the greatest of Beethoven’s ten Violin Sonatas, all of which are included on this Decca triple CD released this week. The recording captures in Kavakos a violinist of exceptional gifts at the height of his considerable powers.

Cartoon Orator

CD Review • Lutsolawski • Cello Concerto • Paul Watkins • BBC Symphony Orchestra • Edward Gardner • Chandos CHSA 5106 • Embraced by the virtuoso Paul Watkins the cello becomes a great orator celebrating the centenary of Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1996) in his Cello Concerto, dedicated to Rostropovich. The first movement is a monologue of pulsing open Ds played slightly quicker than the second- counter on the CD interspersed with glissando sighs, queries, affirmations, shivers and laughter, conjured from the strings by Watkins’ wand-like bow. Brass fanfarades like Ligeti’s car-horns interrupt and mark the second movement in which Watkins with some passion confronts the separate orchestral sections, the woodwind bearing faint echoes of a seascape by Britten, the other centenarian and Lutoslawski’s friend. The cello gasps for air in quick glissandi to be rescued by the arrival of the Cantilena slow movement where Watkins brakes by tugging on the strings in a restraining pizzicato before continuing con arco with sinuous lyricism against an eerie background of pianissimo strings rising and falling in quartertones. Soloist and orchestra meet in unison agreement before powerfully accelerating together with impressive unanimity under Ed Gardner’s tight-rein conducting into the brick wall of a screaming discord like a splattered cat in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. The contrast of extreme violence with the cello’s comic understatement characterises the finale, the soloist whimpering, the orchestra sledge-hammering, until Watkins sails above the maelstrom in ‘angelic triumph’ as the composer directs, transforming his plodding Ds into resonant As. The Concerto is counterweighted by the composer’s two-movement Symphony No2 and bookended by two shorter works of great charm.

Hosepipe Ban

***** Handel • Queen Anne Birthday Ode • Zadok the Priest • Dixit Dominus • Keira Duffy • Meg Bragle • Apollo’s Fire • Apollo Singers • Jeannette Sorrell • Avie AV2270 • Physical and intellectual beauty attaches to this thrilling CD. The opening is a drum solo of dark, bellicose resonance by the composer Philidor. These skins have not the bin-lid clatter of other period kettle-drums, but a visceral throbbing heat. They punch with a velvet fist from nowhere the chorus entry of Handel’s Zadok the Priest after the tension-and-release of the tantalisingly restrained string introduction. These lack the familiar gut whine heard elsewhere among authenticists while the trumpet at the start of the Birthday Ode to Queen Anne has not the tight hosepipe tone of other narrow-bore brasses, but blazes warm and golden as sunrise in answer to mezzo Meg Bragle’s low liquid tone. Are counter-tenors on the way out? The female alto has counter-tenor beef with glistening depth where the falsetto peters out and. Her accomplice Kiera Duffy has laser like long high notes but sometimes squeezes the vowels to a squeak over lower runs. The chorus is martially drilled, the unanimous T on prophet in Zadok adding a subtle percussion, the audible ensemble breath a part of the phrase, the distinction between loud and soft effectively nd vividly used and the precision over the semiquaver chains at speed in Dixit a delirious thrill. Founder conductor of the Apollo groups Jeannette Sorrell produces a stunning disc here which will send more than just early music nuts to the moon.

First Human Apologises

**** Adam’s Lament • Arvo Pärt •Latvian Radio Choir • Sinfonietta Riga • Vox Clamantis • Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir • Tallinn Chamber Orchestra • Tonu Kaljuste • ECM New Series 2225 • Within a few seconds the Latvian singers are pouring out Adam’s emotions as they apologise on his behalf for letting down mankind. Adam once had eternity to idle in, but Pärt wastes no time in coming to the first man’s ‘mighty moan’. The words are indistinct and distant in the echoey acoustic of Niguliste Church, Tallinn, the vernacular notwithstanding, and one hears only the misty outline of their diction. The poet is Staretz ‘Holy’ Sarouan a twentieth century mountain-dwelling saint, whose Adam represents all mankind. Sorrow gushes out before a line of forlorn unison lower voices relate the situation, telling of the deesert ringing with his lamentation. The voices betray no weaknesses, the sopranos with full tone wailing from the ledger lines, the basses adding depth to the despair with the dark volume of orthodox priests. The strings chill in cluster chords depicting the loss of Eden and beat themselves with their bows at the further crisis of the chilrden’s fratricide. Other Pärt works fill out the disc. Nothing beats the catchy simplicity of his Estonian Lullaby nor the hollow piety of the Alleluia Tropus. Kaljuste conducts with intense feeling for Pärt’s prophet-like voice.

Great Britten

**** Britten • On This Island Op11 • Holy Sonnets of John Donne Op35 • Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo Op35 * Canticle I My Beloved is mine Op40 • James Gilchrist • Anna Tilbrook • Linn Records * This early celebration of Britten’s centenary sets a high standard for the rest of the year. Gilchrist’s voice is light, sometimes boyish, and always careful of the words. It’s a cool instrument, to be found in its natural habitat on the stark height with chords far below of Britten’s treatment of the word ‘cold’ in Now the leaves from the WH Auden cycle On This Island. He has ice in his tone. Anna Tilbrook matches it with an incisive accompaniment using many shades, roaring in the Donne sonnets, beaming in the Michelangelo, sparkling like a sunlit brook in the love song My Beloved is Mine. Gilchrist’s Italian is rather English and this is the least successful of the cycles, but he caresses Quarles’ lines tenderly, scaling the recurrent arpeggio of the refrain with an easy touch and sensing through the prim formality of the simple masterpiece’s conventions, the love which the composer felt for his art and those around him.

Nowhere Man

**** Out of Nowhere • Salonen • Violin Concerto • Nyx • Leila Josefowicz • Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra • Esa-Pekka Salonen • Deutsche Grammophon • The album title is the instruction at the start of the concerto to the soloist who begins the work alone with a line of wispy semiquavers. A glowing dissonance settles underneath like a shimmering lake in the desert. The movement is called Mirage. The slow movement Pulse I dozes sonorously over a regular pair of dark tympani beats. Pulse II is violent edgy, powerfully rhythmic, very loud and grotesque in the way Schnittke can be or a nightmare is. The long finale Adieu floats serenely, the soloist tying lyrical contortions. The work is one of extremes in volume, colour and mood. The Finns respond to their countryman’s creativity and direction like faithful followers trusting that his outrages will find listeners and confident that in the soloist Josefowicz they have a champion of peerless authority. From her opening statement to her last swipe, she owns the piece. One removes the CD purged and exhilarated.

Top 48

***** CD Review • Bach • Das Wohltemperierte Clavier • Andras Schiff • ECM New Series • Release 10 September 2012 • No pedals are used in this recording; sustained tone is produced only by finger control yet the Hungarian master often both damps and undamps simultaneously, not least in the Prelude No1 in C, which a hundred years ago, Busoni edited with the pedal down in every bar. Schiff’s interpretation requires complete independence of each bony phalanx yielding daylight clarity round every note. His pictures have perspective depth as staccato shapes stand out against legato backgrounds like stars in a night sky. The piano here relates to the organ, Bach’s own instrument, which also sustains by held depression. But the pianist colours tone also by variable touch and Schiff grades from soft to loud like an orator. He spits with the exagerrated dots of Book I’s D major fugue which he plays very fast, but simpers in Book II’s F minor prelude with its chords like caressed sighs. Schiff’s sensitivity individualises each piano and he brings his own Steinway to the recording session in Lugano, Italy, just like the pianists old. The briefest gaps link prelude, fugue and prelude leading the listener on through many extreme landscapes. Excitement mounts with the keys. Schiff marks his age as Busoni did his.

Javelin Gold

**** Handel Saul • Chris Purves • Sarah Connolly • Robert Murray • Elizabeth Atherton • Joelle Harvey • The Sixteen Harry Christophers • CORO16103 • Christophers allows no slackening of dramatic pace through this three-disc account of Handel’s fourth oratorio, first performed at Lent 1739. Purves’ jealous Saul growls his dastardly scheme for David’s death like a pantomime villain, condemns his own son with knee-jerk violence, but evokes pity when alone he admits his faults and sings Wretch that I am at the start of Act III. The Sixteen as Chorus is the collective conscience, sympathetic to the characters’ fate, careful in the thoughtful fugues, brightly triumphant in celebrating the death of Goliath with a proto-type Hallelujah. Sarah Connolly’s smooth-cheeked David is a gentle warrior, at her/his most touching in the arias with harp, which with trombones and carillon, make Handel’s orchestra exceptional for its date. Atherton’s snobbish Merab is appropriately steel-edged, but Harvey’s fresh-voiced Michal sparkles with feminine warmth. Murray’s Jonathan has the pathetic plain tone of the tragic victim, condemned with his father, but deeply loyal to his friend. His death is devotion ended and promise cut short. The difficulty of depicting on stage the love between two young men was off-set then as now by the casting of David as a mezzo, but the lines speak for themselves as argued in Ruth Smith’s excellent essay. May the whole project slay ten thousand.

Red Cage

***** John Cage As It Is • Alexei Lubimov • Natalia Pschenitschnikova • ECM New Series 2268 • Fortunately, notoriety is fleeting. Cage’s fame presently rests on the silly indeterminate works of chance and silence post 1950. His compositions before that watershed are of lasting sculpted beauty and thus ultimately what he will be remembered for. Russian music students admired them and revered the composer, inviting him to Moscow with his porridge and salads in the late 1980s. Pictures of the visit illustrate the sleeve. Pianist Lubimov and mezzo Pschenitschnikova perform him here with awed brilliance (as they did then), he distorting the Steinway with hardware for the exquisite ‘prepared’ pieces, she likewise the vowels of Cummings, Joyce and Stein with her Russian inflection, enhancing those poets’ ability to arrest by strange meaning. Her voice is controlled in the staccato arpeggios of At East and ingredients and eerily mesmerising in Is it as it was, whence the album title. Lubimov plays the unprepared Two Pieces for Piano demonstrating that Cage was not just a composer of surprises and eccentricities but a creator of music of intense feeling and profound expression. The world was correct that Cage was a genius, but until now for the wrong reasons. This CD provides the right ones. Give it air time on all channels.

Film Star

Nicola Benedetti • The Silver Violin * Korngold • Shostakovich • Williams, • Shore • Mahler • Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra • Kirill Karabits • Decca • Films differ from plays in that music plays an integral part in the former. Benedetti evokes the moods and characters of 15 celluloid narratives through the silver tone of her eloquent wordless fiddle. She bitterly summons the shuffling death camp prisoners in the mourning theme of John Williams’ Schindler’s List. She powerfully evokes heroism and romance in three extracts from Shostakovich’s Verdi-like score for the 1955 Soviet film about revolutionary Italy, The Gadfly. She airily perfumes the air iwith Nigel Hess’ simple theme from Ladies in Lavender and burns at the psyche in Mahler’s Piano Quartet from the disturbing film Shutter Island. She struts alluringly in the bracing tango Por una Cabeza from the film Scent of a Woman but retreats into the darkness of a psychological shell in Dario Marianelli’s My Wdward and I from the 2011 remake of Jane Eyre. She swashbuckles the derring-do finale of Korngold’s Violin Concerto and wrestles with her conscience in three themes from Die Tote Stadt which is not a film at all but a 1923 opera about coming to terms with the loss of a lover. It hit a nerve in post-war Europe and Mariettas Lied, which Benedetti plays with a sad, steely line, became a hit.

Big Ben

‥ Benjamin Grosvenor• Royal Liverpool Philharmonic ∪ Orchestra• Ravel • Gershwin • Decca 4783526 • Young, gifted and bow-tied, the Essex boy picks an unfashionable romantic and two jazz-as-classical concertos for his first album with orchestra. He brings super-confident fire to Saint-Saens Piano Concerto No2, its heavy G minor tonality moody under his passionate teenage hands. He’s easily a match for the Liverpudlians who hardly hold back. Grosvenor squeezes the blue notes of Ravel’s Piano Concerto with slightly too strict an adhertence to the score, but he gets the euphoria and big city excitement in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue just right. James Judd conducts with a chaperon’s discretion.

The Dead Shall Live

The Dead shall Live ****CD Review • Howells • Rodgers • Rolfe Johnson • Opie • BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus • Hickox • Chandos 10727 • The conductor’s sudden death four years ago cut short a series of recordings which had reached 280. The label now, in tribute, re-issues a selection. Hickox shapes the grief in Howells’ Hymnus Paradisi with a heavy baton, loading the repeated opening motif with increasing sorrow. Chords familiar to church musicians identify the composer: it was here, mourning his eight-year-old son, that Howells found his voice. The chorus caresses but soprano Joan Rodgers wails her Latin line with piercing clarity. The text is macaronic – a mixture of English psalm translations and lines from the Requiem. Tenor Anthony Rolfe Johnson glides like a luxury yacht through the calm confidence of Psalm 23. Bright upper chorus voices enter heaven with a sturdy Sanctus while soprano and tenor soloists duet comfortingly from Psalm 121. The finale comes from the burial service: I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write. Howells took this as his injunction, too. The low harp tolls like a funeral knell while trumpets summon the light over and ominous pedal. The Kent Yeoman’s Wooing Song finds Howells experimenting with jazz elements and modal harmonies at the start of his career though he seems to have got cold feet about it and stuck it in a drawer for 30 years. Hickox took pride in championing less familiar works. On other re-issues he explores Elgar’s rarely performed The Light of Life and Holst’s bawdy The Wandering Scholar. A farmer’s wife cuckolds her husband with a fat priest but a student is suspicious. ‘I hope this isn’t going to be the content of your lessons here at Jags, Mr Holst…’

Virtual Virtuosity

****CD Review • Valentina Lisitsa • Decca 4784572 • The Ukrainian YouTube star fires off a programme of Romantic finger-twisters as she moves straight from the virtual world to fleshly reality in this ‘live at the Royal Albert Hall’ disc recorded in June this year. And it’s still only July! Every fourth number is by Rachmaninov, starting with the mighty Prelude in G minor, which Lisitsa plays like an unrefusable call-up mixing booming heroism with whispered conscience-pricking. She’s a pianist of light and shade, ainting pictures in sound: her Red Riding Hood Etude-Tableau alternates growling and jaw-snapping with light, febrile panic. Her two Beethoven classics: a restrained Für Elise and all three movements of the Moonlight Sonata including a thrillingly fast but controlled finale, avoid cliché and re-assert their masterpiece qualities. The Liszt lollipops Liebestraum and La Campanella glide over the keys like fresh morning mist over the Steppe and Un Sospiro cushions melody on delicate chord sprays. Her Chopin Nocturnes betray her homesickness while the Scriabin pieces – the Mosquito Etude has convincing leg-rubbing - reveal the serious artist and technician behind the web-savvy keyboard poet.

Apeman Discovered

****CD Review • Shostakovich • Orango • Symphony No4 • Los Angeles Philharmonic • Los Angeles Master Chorale • Esa-Pekka Salonen * DG 479 0249 • It is easy to hear from Salonen’s performance of the Prologue of Shostakovich’s abandoned satirical opera Orango, what the self-important Soviet censors objected to. The overture is tragic enough and the first number full of praise for Soviet workers, but the third number breaks the mood as Ryan McKinny’s Entertainer reveals with spivvy cynicism in comic waltz time to a parping klaxon that it’s only an act. Here’s what the crowd really wants: the apeman Orango! Scientists created the freak, which proceeds indecently to assault a woman in the crowd. Eugene Brancoveanu’s Zoologist boasts his skill in a plump, mock-heroic tenor to a fatuously comic march using the instruments of a tea-dance band. The Los Angeles musicians play their circus effects with almost superfluous skill. The piece roars raucously into life and regret is the only response to the lack of subsequent acts. The piece was discovered only as recently as 2004 but as a truncated, unknown opera might not have been enough for decent sales, the disc is a double with the jack-booting Fourth Symphony following. Here is an awesome performance, offering punch-drunk marches, sneering anti-authoritarian tuttis, an evocation of Mahler in the middle movement and, after a sinew-busting double-fortissimo climax to the finale, a draining down to the mysterious celesta and sustained strings leaving an enigmatic question-mark for the audience to retire on.

Got Guts

****CD Review • William Lawes • Phantasm • Linn CKD399 • A 1634 poem about tennis - ‘The world I sample to a Tennis-court / Where fate and fortune daily meet to play’ – might have inspired the Fantasy in C major here, thinks Laurence Dreyfus, Director of Phantasm, with little evidence. He just wants to quote it: ‘All manner chance, are Rackets, wherewithall / They bandie men like balls from wall to wall’. And why not? The parts ping against the barlines in bouncing syncopations or float mournfully out on serene long notes as if in slow-motion replay. The plaintive whine of the gut strung instruments is analagous to the toiling swing of the gut-strung rackets. Seven suites or ‘Sets’ are included, some for five viols, some for six, all including a discreet organ which mostly doubles, but occasionally pokes its pipes into play independently like a voluble line-judge. Frequent dissonances wince like a netted serve. The counterpoint flows with unhurried, stately confidence. The movements are Fantazias, Aires, Pavens or In Nomines, one of them, ‘On a Playnsong’, disappointingly shy of making the spurious cantus firmus tell. Elsewhere the balance is finely judged, the sound drily imperious. Lawes was a Royalist and friend of the King. His music, like tennis, was a court entertainment. Phantasm’s disc is an excellent shot.

Off to a Flier

****CD Review • Beethoven Piano Trios Vol1 • Gould Piano Trio • Somm Records 0114 • Although the cello sometimes disappears beneath the glistening tar of the Steinway bass, the recording still succeeds in capturing the tension, passion and intimacy of the live original in Bristol, October 2011. Dangerous excitement marks the presto of Op1 No2 in G which races at record speed, the occasional missed note adding to the sense of thrilling risk. The joyful exuberance of the first movement, the beaming lyricism of the largo second and the swing of the scherzo third show Beethoven was off to flier with his first publication. So too is the Gould as they set out to define everything Beethoven wrote for their genre on four discs. They nail the stern determination in the first movement of the Ghost Trio Op70 No1 in D with a biting attack, blemishless unisons and featherlight pianissimi. The largo, whence the nickname, is suitably edgy, the coarse, tentative strings contrasting with the oozing legato of the piano at the start. The pianist’s subsequent slow, gentle semiquavers falling like a leaf impart serene restfulness. The finale exudes a playful wit as the main theme rises, hangs in the air like a held breath, then returns more directly with a leap. The players sparkle as they pursue and realise the composer’s fecund imagination. The prompt storm of applause at the emphatic fortissimo end brooks no bystanders.

Dead Language

*** CD Review • Latino • Milos Karadaglic • Deutsche Grammophon 4790514 • Single instrument, restricted repertoire recordings usually struggle to maintain audience interest. Milos varies his touch much, but cannot prevent some longeurs. The dull moments belong to the cliché works, the jangling, cheap sostenuto tremolandos of Mangore or the fret-wise descents and sprayed arpeggios of Dyens. Rodriquez’s La Cumparsita is rescued from dumb regurgitation by a dissonant arrangement - the rose between the tango-ista’s teeth has thorns. But for intriguing variety, Milos softly skins the strings in Ponce’s Chanson and Villa-Lobos’ Mazurka-Choro, attacks them with hard, bright nails in Savio’s crisp, joyful Batucada,, or damps them in Mangore’s Un Sueno veiling the sound as it were in a dream. Most beautiful are the melodic pieces – Brouwer’s Un dia di noviembre and Cardoso’s Milonga where Milos bends the music to a sad, expressive rhetoric, the sections often punctuated by the gentle jewel of a single harmonic note. A ‘studio film orchestra’ appears in four tracks, their freelance cure-all sound doing nothing for the tired overall effect. They thump every beat in Gardel’s corny Por una cabeza like a comic, who tries to make every utterance a punch-line.

Committee Movement

Although Bruckner’s Ninth is an unfinished symphony, the composer did not pass away at 3pm on 11 October 1896, aged 73, without trying to complete it and was working on the finale that morning as both his secretary and cook aver. Rattle and the Berlin Phil perform the work with the finale as completed by four musicologists in 1992 and revised in 2010. It presents a quite different last statement to the pianissimo querulous whisper of the third movement Adagio, which in concert almost always ends this work. Here Bruckner’s Ninth concludes in blazing triumph which accords with his own recommendation that, should he not finish it, an appropriate conclusion would be his Te Deum. The Catholic Bruckner dedicated his last symphony to ‘my dear Lord’ and the work is infused with references to his faith. In the Adagio he quotes the Miserere from his own Mass in D alongside the Holy Grail motif from his hero Wagner’s last opera Parsifal. The new finale intones the chorale tune Christ ist Erstanden (Christ is risen) as its third theme while a mighty double fugue begins the drive towards the climax in golden D major. The symphony now ends as it begins, around the note D, which it fails to do when the Adagio is last. Resolution comes to the famously irresolute composer. Rattle achieves impressive spaciousness in the symphony’s opening. Throughout, Rattle maintains the surest balance between weight of sound and agility of movement, industrial power and gentle phrasing, violent intent and spontaneous whimsy. This is nowhere clearer than in the strings’ delicate pizzicato over the roaring timps or in the dancing giant of the Scherzo, moving with elfin, sunny lightness. The Adagio proceeds with solid grace under Rattle’s slow beat, always with a feeling of inexorable, urgent momentum like lava down a volcano. A radiant dissonance of the clearest components at the halfway mark gives way to the violas fiddling nervously in pairs amid the slow grind towards oblivion. Rattle ends the movement with less rallentando than he would have done, but the new finale has changed hope into certainty, albeit dotted with the anxieties of one knowing death were near. Yet the new last movement, marked ‘Misterioso – nicht schnell’ (mysteriously – not fast) lacks the clarity, tension and fluidity of those movements which came directly from Bruckner’s pen. One feels the absence of a single presiding genius: this is music ratified by committee. An angular first theme elbows its way forward before a more lyrical second subject meekly holds the floor. The insistent growl of the aforesaid chorale seems to suggest renewed confidence in the divine will. Summary recollections of the previous movements occur in the coda but, interesting as it is to hear the composer’s dying thoughts expressed, it is not enough to replace the work’s accustomed question mark conclusion. Death after all remains the great unknown.

Non-Universal Technique

CD Review • Eric Whitacre Water Night • Eric Whitacre Singers • London Symphony Orchestra • Decca • It is one thing to compose for a choir, but quite another to do the same for symphony orchestra. Whitacre’s extraordinary success in the choral repertoire has not translated to instrumental works as this CD demonstrates. Indeed, the title track started life as a choir piece, but the same notes played by strins sound merely prosaic. The piece for Julian Lloyd Webber’s cello, The River Cam, composed of fragments which came to Whitacre on walks through Cambridge, sounds appropriately pedestrian. Orchestra alternates with choir throughout. His Alleluia, with which he makes his Proms debut this summer, remains strong, but he has tinkered with the powerful When David Heard since it appeared on the Hyperion disc in 2006, and upset its balance by extending it by nearly five minutes. Concision gives way to indulgence. This is a shame. One would hate to think stardom has gone to the composer’s head.

Unrelated Theory

CD Review • Domenico Scarlatti • Sonatas • Irina Zahharenkova • Classical Records CR-150 • Scarlatti composed his 500 or so keyboard sonatas in pairs apparently, yet although Estonian pianist Zahharenkova mentions this in her note, she does not demonstrate it in her selection. She glides Astaire-like down scales the length of the keyboard in the G major sonata Kk454, but has no room for its thrilling repeat-note companion, Kk455. This is strange as it is a sunnier, happier work than the Sonata in F Kk438 which exhibits the same features, the scrunching, percussive dissonances centuries ahead of their time, and the hammering, repeat-note ostinati which put early fortepianos to the test. Zahharenkova plays it on a glowing modern instrument slower than other pianists, making the syncopated rest feel like a missing note rather than the funky lurch it is supposed to be. She shapes the works as measured breaths, repeating each half as indicated, gathering herself at each cadence. Only Kk85 in F courses through without a break, having the sole non-binary structure on the disc. Zahharenkova’s touch is clear, decisive and never timid, even in the improvisatory A minor sonata Kk217. She tends not to vary dynamics within individual sonatas but quietens for the softer slower pieces. She punches out the bitter discords of Kk12 in G as if discovering them for the first time. This may well be the case. The disc is full of fresh vigour from a young pianist on a voyage of exploration.

Strange Combination

****CD Review • Bach Flute Works • Daniel Pailthorpe • Julian Milford • London Conchord Ensemble Champs Hill CHRCD031 • The modern piano is a jolt, especially as the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Flute habitually plays a wooden instrument and does here. Wood veers towards authenticity, the piano away from it, an eccentric mixture. The wood tone is soft, warm, breathy and blunt compared to the thin, hard edge of the steel model. While Bach on piano is generally preferable to the jangling harpsichord in solo keyboard music, here in combination with the flute it sounds strangely old-fashioned. You get used to it. The match is perfect by the time the presto sprint finale of the B minor sonata BWV1030 arrives, the players as synchronised as Siamese twins. The disc contains the four works for flute which are indisputably by JS Bach. The close mike betrays the soft clatter of the keys and Pailthorpe’s snatched breaths in the Allemande of the solo Partita in A minor BWV1013 which is a pity: you want the semblance at least of perpetual motion. The London Conchord Ensemble arrives for the Orchestral Suite in B minor BWV1067, the strings rich, the bass line a little murky, but clear enough in the double of the Polonaise where it canoodles alone with the flute, low and high together, the one playing the themes the other has left for an ecstatic variation

Kitsch Forgiven

****CD Review • Illumina Music of Light • Choir of New College Oxford • Edward Higginbottom • Decca • Most will forgive the naffness of this new recording (released 2 April 2012) because of the sheer dazzling musicality of the performers. To fit the words of the Ave Maria to the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is the height of kitsch, but the skill with which it is carried out takes the breath away. When the boys, mostly taking the violin part, finish their complex wanderings through G flat, E and D major at height but with occasional difficult trampoline bounces off the bottom of the stave and meet again the long silent harp on a restful chord of F, the effect is as satisfying as a solved equation. Gounod is to blame; his Ave Maria to Bach has long been accepted though the Protestant might have winced and lurks here as the penultimate track in all its gooey sentimentality. Two settings of the same text might be thought insincere, although I grant religion likes its emphatic repetitions. I confess I warmed to Barrington Pheloung’s Inspector Morse theme (set to the Benedictus) only on discovering the rhythm was morse code for MORSE and I am surprised more composers have not used this as a rhythmic device. The treble tone is hard, bright and poignant; singing a family TV theme must surely invoke the boarding chorister’s homesickness. The choir shies not from scheduling the composers of the moment: Whitacre, Lauridsen and Rutter are all present, if not correct. The latter is represented by his unashamedly sugary The Lord Bless You with accompanying strings to boost the blubbability rating. The juicy dissonances of Lauridsen’s Ave Dulcissima are marked by the tinkling of a camp little bell which is like putting glitter on. The choir’s superlative legato is nowhere more in evidence than in the Bruckner motet Locus Iste and their skill in staple polyphony exemplified by the Palestrina Agnus dei, its imitations coursing through the work like identical waves. In a sense the disc has everything, just rather too much of it sometimes.

Northern Rock

***DVD Review • Big River Songs The Tyne • Various Artists • The pick of the 35 folk and pop songs presented here is, for me, Sir Thomas Allen and Graeme Danby singing The Hexhamshire Lass with the Northumbrian Concert Orchestra under David Haslam and the Brown Ale Brass Band. For all the song’s upbeat mood and springy step, a sadness underlies the innocence of the soldier’s blithe optimism. The tune is a gem with its unusual central section subbdominant modulation, given an extra kick by the film splicing from orchestra to brass band and back. The performance of Blow the Wind Southerly is a little over-sentimental but it provides the opportunity to refer to fishing traditions. The film is quite interesting as a travelogue as it follows the Tyne from source to mouth breaking for relevant songs along the way. Plenty of poignant black and white footage feeds the thirst for nostalgia, not least in accompaniment to Dance to Your Daddy which harks back to a childish TV era. Sting makes an audible appearance, Jimmy Nail, Mark Knopfler and Kevin Whateley a visual one alongside a dozen other Geordie performers. There’s a slightly cloying tribute to Sir Bobby Robson, the one-time England football manager, and it’s surprising there’s no Alan Price singing Simon Smith and his Dancing Bear or the Jarrow Marchers’ Song, which one would have thought was a gift for a film like this.

Core Revealed

*****CD Review Schumann, Britten, Shostakovich • Krzysztof Chorzelski, Katya Apejisheva • Champ’s Hill Records CHRCD029 • Polish violist Chorzelski, taking a solo break from the Belcher Quartet, digs deeply into the heart of each work. He unearths the childlike visions of Schumann’s Maerchenbilder fantasy like a psychiatrist, each picture scratching around in the past for new truths about the ailing composer’s growing mental disarray. He prises off the layers of Britten’s Lachrymae down to its weeping sixteenth century core, the tremolando episode before the final revelation as the trembling anticipation before the opening of a tomb. He scythes the searing lines of Shostakovich’s swansong, the Viola Sonata of 1975, achieving a passionate intensity unrivalled among current violists, the last movement in particular grasping at grief for the ebbing away of life with a hard grip before relaxing into its peaceful morendo conclusion a long way from home, beckoned by the recurrent Moonlight motif and the dark night of Katya Apekisheva’s imposing pianism. Both musicians are at the peak of the powers here and this is music of exhaustive power and expression.

Spin Off

***CD Review • Debussy Songs 2 • Lisa Milne • Lorna Anderson • Malcolm Martineau • Hyperion CDA6783 • Neither soprano quite has the fin-de-siecle sigh which the composer sought. Milne is the more successful especially where she abandons herself to the drunken whirl in Chevaux de Bois, a Paul Verlaine poem from the Ariettes Oubliees cycle, admitting a sense of disappointment as the spinning, and the music, slows. Martineau runs nicely out of steam here. Debussy chose his French poets well and the disc is a treasure from that respect. He even set himself in Proses Lyriques which Milne sings with breathy come-hither tone, Anderson gets the fifteenth century Duc d’Orleans and Stephane Mallarmé. She sings the latter’s Soupir (sigh) with more of a sob and a faint, rapid vibrato like a loose wire which doesn’t help her cause. There’s a want for the sort of weary ache which Renee Fleming brings to this gorgeous, but hard to nail, repertoire.

Trebles all Round

****CD Review • Palestrina • Westminster Cathedral Choir • James O’Donnell • Helios CDH55407 • This thirteen-year-old recording really captures the holy Sunday morning aura of Westminster Cathedral. The choir’s lofty echo at the end of the Missa Ecce Ego Johannes disappears into the dark vault as if into infinity. The brass bright trebles sing forte as a default but respond promptly to O’Donnell’s dampening gesture in the hushed Qui tollis of the Gloria. But they are soon opening their throats again competing with their neighbours and the Domine section of Tribulationes Civitatum is a tumble of urgent suspensions, like wave after wave of supplicants pawing at one’s feet. It’s not all Holy Weeek music. There’s a Tue s Petrus, a Cantantibus organis and the Magnificat quarti toni which I am sure you can be relied on not to listen to until Easter Day. Promise?

Great She Is

*****CD Review • Howells Requiem • Choir of Trinity College Cambridge • Stephen Layton • Few conductors do Howells as well as Mr Layton. He has given himself every opportunity, mind, to produce perfect results: beautiful acoustics in Lincoln and Ely Cathedrals; brilliant choir of male and female undergraduates from Trinity College Cambridge; choice repertoire – how light the divided girls at the beginning of the Gloucester Magnificat and how gloriously the tutti inflates the arching phrase of that item’s main theme. Perfect results he certainly does produce. The St Paul’s Service is as fresh as the Goloucester. The JF Kennedy funeral anthem Take Him Earth for Cherishing is deeply, democratically moving in its unisons which give way to the most finely calculated chords as only Howells writes. The Requiem veers powerfully between the simplicity of its psalm settings and the drama of the opening and closing movements. Speeds throughout the disc have weight and momentum; diction is so good that some aitches come out whistled, so the She hath put down the mighty and God is female for once. The one trun-off is final hymn which sounds too much like Songs of Praise although it does give the sleeve note writer the chance to rehearse the anecdote of Howells composing the tune before he had finished breakfast one morning.

Fiddle Stick

CD Review • Saltarello • Garth Knox viola • ECM New Series 4764501 • Une heure de colle – an hour of glue – is a French euphemism for detention, but applies equally well to this new ECM disc, as it is hard to extricate oneself from each new fascinating track. Knox brings three instruments to the studio – viola, viola d’amore and Mediaeval fiddle. The icy viola d’amore never appears without Agnes Vesterman on cello. Incredibly the pair deliver a whole Vivaldi concerto as a duet, nonetheless convincing us of solo and ensemble sections. The music is virile, lean and agile, the silver-edged viola d’amore running on straight unadorned paths with no wasted energy. The duo wallow in Purcell’s Music for a While, the cello striding firmly the circular bassline, the viola d’amore mourning the loss of Dryden’s lyric which makes it only half the song. Dowland’s Flow my Tears has a life away from its obscure text as Lachrimae, and viola and cello alternate the tune like romantic balladeers. Knox takes up the raw-toned fiddle, always acccompanied by Sylvain Lemetre’s hard-rimmed drum. Words matter little in Hildegarde of Bingen’s melismatic Ave generosa whose pure, ecstatic melody Knox’s fiddle solemnly delivers, waking to the dance when joined by Lemetre’s thrilling rhythm beckoning the Machaut song Tels rit au matin qui au soir pleure – they laugh in the morning, who weep at night. The anonymous title tracks, Saltarello I and II trip with simple three-time gaiety towards the concluding track in which Knox demonstrates how his ancient strings can imitate even wind instruments. Then, in the studio, the dark viola comes out and the others leave. Knox plays alone Kaija Saariaho’s Vent Nocturne, or nocturnal wind, which may or may not be a French euphemism but in any case exerts an extraordinary grip as the viola’s mean voice is transformed by electronics to meet the player’s amplified breath. Ghosts of giants sigh across unlit plains. The glue sets.

Get Drunk

CD Review • Renée Fleming • Ravel Shéhérazade • Messiaen Poemes pour Mi • Dutilleux Le Temps Horloge • Decca 4783500 • Golly it’s hot in here all of a sudden. A Fleming recital anyway is an exciting prospect, but all in French is blatant seduction. The thick perfume of her rich, yearning soprano wafts in on the ‘I wants’ of Ravel’s alluring Asian summons. Her power is easily a match for the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France under Alan Gilbert and her luscious tone strains at the bulbous phrases of the song as the wind fills the sails of the Persian galleon. She seems restless, longing for adventure in a colourful but dangerous world. There is longing too in Messiaen’s Poèmes Pour Mi, but here it’s spiritual, the aching phrases rising like ecstatic prayers. The juicy colours of Messiaen’s unmistakable chords are as sunlight on stained glass. Les Deux Guerriers explodes on to the ear, a rough embrace after the hypnotic smooch of L’Epouse. The laughter of Epouvante is damn-all hysteria, caution thrown wildly to the wind. The Dutilleux songs punch with rhythmic drive in the first of the Jean Cassou sonnets and with caustic irony in the Baudelaire prose-poem Enivrez-Vous. Get drunk, he says, or be a martyred slave to time. Get Fleming’s CD and forget time completely.

Composer Resurrected

CD Review • Gal Symphony No4 • Schumann Symphony No2 • Orchestra of the Swan • Kenneth Woods • Avie Records • When two record companies simultaneously show interest in the same unknown composer, a reviewer might almost talk of a trend. This is the case with composer Hans Gal who died in Edinburgh in 1987 three years short of his hundredth birthday. He’d lived in Vienna until 1938 when the German invasion sent him into exile. A defiant spirit courses through this Brahmsian fourth symphony, composed in 1975. The first movement’s theme has a raised ‘Lydian’ fourth, resembling the Simpsons’ signature. It’s a sinfonia concertante with solo parts for violin, cello, flute and clarinet. Played here by the excellent Orchestra of the Swan under Kenneth Woods (see left) it casts the twentieth century in a new light, one of obstinate cheerfulness and determined optimism, a refusal to be bowed by contemporary events, which may in the end be more useful to mankind than the pain of defeat. The finale, Buffoneria, plays up to this clownish refusal to be gloomy in an irrepressibly jaunty rondo. The work is not without sadness: the slow movement is a melancholy dialogue on loss between violin and cello, the flute and clarinet now silent, having been active as the tragicomic figures of Harlequin and Columbine in the wistfully capricious scherzo. Schumann’s C major symphony shares the Gal’s combative spirit, as it was written in the 1840s when the composer was battling depression. In his own words it represents the ‘power of resistance of spirit’. Woods conducts it with profound romantic feeling, the repeated statements never repetitive, the conscious striving never self-conscious. It may yet prove to be a landmark, pipping, as it does, the other Gal disc by a fortnight.

Gut Reaction

**** CD Review • Bach Cello Suites * Richard Tunnicliffe * Linn Records CKD396 • Baroque cellist Tunnicliffe takes a pair of instruments from the 1720s for a gentle swing through Bach’s six solo dance suites in numerical order, because the composer’s sequence, increasing in complexity, is good enough for him. He is a considerate partner, neither hurrying his elderly German and French embraces, nor tarrying too long on the parquet. Puritan modesty is his approach – he’s a bass viol player in another world. Caressing their gut produces voluminous bass resonance and a thick, treacley tenor. His replacement squeeze for the last dance has a bitter, wiry voice with excitable overtones in its extra string. With familiarity encouraged by the relaxed Baroque tuning, Tunnicliffe treats the dances as old friends rather than revered masterpieces, surrounding them with warmth, not sacrosanct haloes. The climactic semitone ascent in the opening prelude is restrained. The emotional highpoint is No5’s simple, confessional Sarabande which Tunnicliffe renders with pity in every carefully placed note. The cliff on the cover is surely a visual joke on his name, as well as an evocation of the natural, unadorned, almost sombre beauty he elicits in his Bach.

Hard Groove

**** CD Review • Debussy • Szymanowski • Rafal Blechacz • Deutsche Grammophon • The Polish pianist hears no wispy Debussy. For him the impressions have hard outlines like shadows on hot days, and he carves the etchings of Estampes with strong, deep grooves, laughs with unsuppressed guffaws in the shimmering L’Isle Joyeuse and exaggerates the effects - the typewriter crispness, the smooching homophones, the bear-hug chords, the whizz-plonk glissandi - of the love-song to a keyboard, Pour le Piano, with cheerful virtuosity. The two final movements, Toccata in Pour le Piano and Jardins sous la Pluie in Estampes, scintillate at dazzlingly vigorous speeds. Blechacz’s average volume is loud, his un peu cédé a mere mezzopiano which will be pleasing enough for Debussy’s many friends in his 150th year. His Szymanowski, on the other hand, is impressionistic in a squashy, amorphous sense. His three-time in the first movement of the Piano Sonata in C minor is no regular triangle, but elastic-sided with show-off emphasis on every stroke. The chromaticisms moan and writhe unrhythmically, but Blechacz clings to sturdy inner themes like a diver to an airpipe. The spongey chords and chromatic movement begin to suffocate at the queasy turn into the E flat second subject as they do in the following adagio and there is respite from the thick, choking perfume only in the gently stroked spread-chords of the minuet. The Prelude and Fugue in C sharp minor follows a similar pattern, the lush prelude only just keeping touch with its rhythmic definition, the fugue rather too proud of its grown-up volume like a newly-broken voice expressing itself gauchely at a rugby match. The disc lacks subtlety but has youthful simplicity and passion in spades.

First Lady

CD Review *** Bach Concertos • Xue Fei Yang • Elias String Quartet * EMI Classics • Chinese guitarist Yang transcribes Bach’s a keyboard (D minor BWV1052) and two violin (A minor BWV1041, E major BWV1042) concertos for herself and string quartet. Her resonant tone is clear against the surprisingly full sound of the quartet. She sets a gentle pace in the reworked keyboard concerto. She allows a little bass string buzzing in the recap to pass and her cadenza has the effect only of a soft tickling, bereft of drama. One misses the soloist’s burning, long-bowed notes in the violin concertos; tremolando is a poor substitute. Yang shows her sensitive musicianship in the expressive, elastic phrasing of the adagio of the solo violin sonata in G minor, her thrilling virtuosity in speed and articulation in the presto finale. The Prelude in C from the Well-Tempered Clavier rings rather toytownish on guitar and the Air on a G string twinkles cheesily. They detract from the serious single-mindedness with which Yang has forged a pioneering career. She was the first student in China to study guitar, to receive postgraduate honours in London, and to establish an international career. She is a one-woman cultural revolution.

Variations Right On

**** Fred Rzewski • The People United • Ursula Oppens • Piano Classics PCL0019 • The Chilean struggle of the 1970s yielded the protest song Un Pueblo unido jamas sera vencido, or A People united will never be defeated, which today is chanted, with new words appropriate to each purpose, at political rallies and demonstrations the world over. Rzewski’s exhaustive set of 36 variations on the theme was written in 1975 for the American pianist Ursula Oppens, whose recording for Vanguard Classics three years later now appears in re-issue on CD. Oppens’ touch is more varied than the number of variations since the twelve-bar song fits twice into each and she even shades each mood with renrewed vigour at every sixth variation with its recap in snatches of the previous five. She is as persuasive in the robust unison opening statement as she is in the modernistic first variation with its notes pilfered from random octaves, the smoochy jazz-chord thirteenth, the excited, filigree sixteenth, the joyful Fast-Wallerish twentieth, or the sombre, minimalist twenty-ninth. Although she ignores most of Rzewski’s optional effects such as lid-banging and shouting, she does agree to whistle in the eleventh and again in its recap during the twelfth. Although the rhythm sometimes becomes annoyingly diffuse, the whole is still a powerfully emphatic utterance of a fundamental political belief. One might also infer from this colourful rendition that variety keeps a message fresh much better than monotonous repetition on a march.

Pole Star

CD Review **** Gioia! • Aleksandra Kurzak • Francesco Demuro • Rossini, Mozart, Donizeti, Verdi, Belllini, Puccini, Moniuszko • Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana • Omer Meir Wellber • Decca 4782730 • Kurzak has a voice like freshly popped champagne. The Polish soprano is an exciting newcomer to the world’s opera stages. The light golden sparkle in her soprano perfectly suits Mozart’s Susanna as she shapes the wineglass contours of Deh vieni non tardar oh gioia bella with a slender line. She effervesces deliciously as Strauss’ flirtatious Adina in the Laughing Aria though just once the bubbles are a little heavy. She thrills with the easy accuracy of her intonation as Bellini’s Elvira, nodding in the top B on giglio like a goalscorer. The effort for Verdi makes her breathless and her Gilda intakes between the staccato syllables of Caro Nome. However, this opera singer’s daughter characterises convincingly and one clearly senses her Lucia’s dark, fragile psychosis in the fluttering trills and crazed leaps of Donizetti’s sinister world. Her sidekick tenor Francesco Demuro leaves his calling-card with dry tone and a heroic sob as Donizetti’s Nemorino and one can expect a solo album from him soon. Wellber handles the orchestra discreetly, knowing how to imply both Donizetti’s racing heartbeat panic and Strauss’s endless fizzing lubricant. Quite possibly a vintage.

Ding Dong!

**** CD Review • Bach Cantatas • Andreas Scholl • Kammerorchester Basel • Decca 4782733 • Scholl cheers the cold, grey, wet new year with an early rising disc of Protestant sentiment. There is a no trace of a Silvester hangover in his creamy tone, blemishless legato and effortless, open-throated top notes. His diction is as keen as a First-of-Jan resolution. He dives into baritone, breaking his otherwise consistent two-octave range, only for the sepulchral Baroque Gs (sounded F sharps) of the aria Ich freue mich auf meinem Tod – I’m looking forward to dying – of BWV169 Gott soll allein which in any case was written not for a pious alto but a slimey, sinful bass. Scholl lovingly caresses the phrases of the single-movement BWV53 Schlage doch verwuenschte Stunde – Chime, Oh hour I long for - while a campanella punctuates the lines with tinkling tonic and dominant bells. The effect is rather camp, yes. Scholl likes the New Year time theme and precedes this with a recit pilfered from BWV161 which includes the same words, schlage doch, and imitates a cuckoo clock in a pair of ticking flutes. Nothing is as welcoming, however, as the embracing swell of the oboe in the third bar of the opening track BWV82 Ich habe genug – I am fulfilled. It’s a warm beckoning, seductive gesture. Scholl imitates it in his turn but with him it has more purity like the saintly Simeon acknowledging his life’s ambition achieved. I’ve seen the Lord. Look out for Scholl later in the year as the greatest of modern counter-tenors salutes the first of them in the Alfred Deller centenary.

Sweet Sixteen

**** CD Review • Renaissance • The Sixteen • Harry Christophers • Decca 4767601 • This is re-birth in the sense of re-issue as most of the tracks are from a 2004 recording. Excellence persists, however, and no new group has yet risen to challenge their dominance. The group’s tuning is exemplary not least in the Allegri Miserere with the unflagging soprano bulls-eyeing the top C every time. Their diction makes Tomkins’ When David Heard a vivid account of the king’s inner turmoil, incidentally making nonsense of the CD’s subtitle Music for Inner Peace. That’s descriptive of Tavener’s The Lamb which is sung with a sense of wonder. Other eras are represented – Lotti the Baroque, Bruckner the Romantic, Gorecki and Barber the 20th century – but most are sixteenth century whence the group’s name. This is explained on the accompanying DVD which profiles the golden-touch conductor. Like Jesus he was born in a pub and works miracles.

Unfinished Finished

****CD Review • Moeran Symphony No2 sketches • Ireland Sarnia • Royal Scottish National Orchestra • Martin Yates • Dutton Epoch CDLX7281 • Yates dishes up a sumptuous disc on which he doesn’t just interpret the composers Moeran and Ireland, he convincingly impersonates them, completing the unfinished symphony of the former and orchestrating a piano work by the latter. Moeran’s untimely death intervened before he could turn the sketches of his second symphony into a score, but Yates finds in the pages a breezy, uplifting, salt-flecked first movement with a wistful second theme, a bubbly, nervous and compulsive second with outrageous hemiolas and unrelenting speed, a quiet folksong third and syncopated seasong fourth with echoes of the first, all four movements fused together into one satisfying whole. It is a remarkable realisation by one musician of another’s inchoate creation. In the Ireland, too, Yates boldly gifts pianistic melodies to orchestral soloists – a sorrowing oboe singing of loss over a tolling church bell and ominous timps in the first, a distant yearning horn through gusting strings in the second – as if he were colouring up a black-and-white romance about a life lost for ever. The work was composed on Guernsey in 1939 before the Germans arrived. As Yates says, the music throughout this CD deserves to be heard, the more so, surely, for the clothes he has dressed it in.

Monster Hit

****CD Review • Herrmann Moby Dick • Edgar-Wilson • Wilson-Johnson • Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Choir • Schonwandt • Chandos • Bernard Herrmann queasily depicts the rolling sea in his 1938 cantata for male chorus, soloists and orchestra based on Herman Melville’s novel. The music pre-echoes Britten who was in the audience. Wilson-Johnson’s Ahab is a gruff bully, competing for ferocity with the storm. Edgar-Wilson’s Ishmael is a sad, death-obsessed narrator in the high, antiheroic Pears mould. The dark, brooding ship’s-crew chorus sing a hymn which brightens through the verses and a heavy, threatening jig – Hist Boys! – which shows them complicit in Ahab’s lust for whale-blood. The powerful score suits the Danes who sense in their Viking DNA the fatal attraction of the sea. Complementing the disc is Herrmann’s Sinfonietta of 1936, which Herrmann filched for the score of Psycho. There are no slashing bow-strokes, but the essence of that scene is present in the icy strings and harsh brass. Schonwandt conducts with an incisive baton scores which strongly refute Herrmann’s reputation as a mere film composer in his centenary (2011).

Lone Star

****CD Review • Ruth Waterman • Bach Solo Sonatas and Partitas • Meridian Records • Waterman plays a modern instrument at concert pitch with bright, exciting tone and fluid phrasing. No low, dry whine of the Baroque authenticicsts’ gut for her. The Partita dances, especially the slow allemandes and sarabandes, seduce like mating rituals. In the Sonatas, she takes the three fugues quickly when more sedate speeds might have better clarified the lines. The prestos maintain impressive stamina. The Prelude in E is dazzling, its articulation never missing a single turn. The Ciaconna is gripping, the magical D major episode dreamlike and unreal. These are profound and thrilling interpretations, valuably complemented by Waterman’s thorough and explicit sleeve notes, the result of a lifetime’s devotion and practice.

Hot Handel

***** CD Review • Lisa Smirnova • Handel * Die Acht Grossen Suiten • ECM Series • Smirnova discovered Handel’s eight keyboard suites in 2000, studied, learnt, loved and made them hers as this hot hit of a double album shows. Her touch is so sensitive and varied, it’s as if her modern grand has stops. She plays at thrilling speeds which she maintains through singing, recit-like adagios, while other Bach-obsessed keyboardists impress with one presto then concede and revert to dull sight-readable rates. Smirnova absorbs the handelisms, lives the music and embellishes the embellishments, which, in the prelude of No2, have been kindly written out by the composer. This was due, perhaps, to the many Europe-wide, pirate versions of his originals, which were better known than Bach’s solo keyboard works in their day. His reason for publishing the suites in 1720 was, he insisted, to counter the ‘incorrect Copies of them [which] had got Abroad’. He composed them while working for the Duke of Chandos at Edgware, probably at the organ in St Lawrence’s Church which still exists. The crowning movements among the allegros and adagios, allemandes, courantes, sarabandes and gigues, are the two airs with variations, which Smirnova deivers as pinnacles of lyricism and virtuosity. No5’s is the Harmonious Blacksmith, named after the loud-voiced parish clerk at St Lawrence’s, while No3’s works backwards, so that Smirnova appears to be pealing off the layers like a striptease. The suites are placed out of sequence, No7 coming last to end the album with its Passacaille which Smirnova rounds off with a spectacular, improvisatory flourish. ECM has another winner on its hands.

No Lift-Off

CD Review • Mathias • Vaughan Williams • Mark Bebbington • Ulster Orchestra • George Vass • Bebbington hammers out the spiky rhythms of Mathias’ two piano concertos with emphatic delight. The alla danza which closes the second is compelling. The soloist’s hands are heavy in the grinding slow movements, however, and Vass’ handling of the Ulsterfolk, though flexible, is wont to weigh down the music. Such pounding also robs Vaughan Williams’ 1904 Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra of its dreaminess, though Bebbington’s frothy solo variation on the moody modal melody with which the orchestra announces itself is an adventurous flight.

Street Incredible

***** From the Street • Ivana Gavric • Janacek • Ravel • Prokofiev • Gavric’s current obsession with Janacek results in this CD of piano pieces composed around 100 years ago. Janacek’s 1.X.1905 commemorates the violent death of a Czech demonstrator on that date. Gavric captures the grey, brooding discontent, the seething anger and the aching premonitions so early in the century. One longs for what can never be known: the third movement which the composer destroyed. Exactly 100 years ago he published On an Overgrown Path, a sequence of scenic mood pieces which Gavric plays with autumnal wistfulness. She plays the autobiographical Frydek Madonna with solemn reverence in its heavy processional tread. She charms with play-it-again spriteliness in the busy insouciance of They Chattered like Swallows. The obsession does not preclude other composers. She swings through Ravel’s 1911 publication Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, like a now nobly strutting, now sentimentally simpering dancer and reveals 21-year-old Prokofiev’s 1912 Sonata No2 in D minor to be a work of youthful brilliance, rapacious in the fast movements, harmonically cunning in the slow, and fully precognitive of the mature master. The disc is thoughtful, cliché-free and shows the first was no fluke.

Repeat Performance

**** Bach Goldberg Varations • Daniel-Ben Pienaar • Playing a modern piano, Pienaar dazzles with the speed of his fingers and brilliance of his tone in the toccata-like variations such as Nos 5, 8, 14 and 28. The repeats are observed in none of these which suggests panting impatience and the concentration on speed sometimes causes the rhythm to lose its focused drive. Pienaar observes the repeats only in the canons (except the last) and the four-part variations Nos 4, 10 (the fughetta), 16 (the French Overture at the halfway mark), 22 (the alla breve) and 30 (the Quodlibet with its relaxed double fugue on folk tunes about home-coming and home-cooking). Sensing the long journey ahead perhaps as well as the desire not to detain the weary traveller, he plays the Aria at either end without indulgent repeats too. The canons now become the focus of Pienaar’s account, the repeated phrases playful under the spotlight of the repeated halves. Indeed, it is the repeats, whether in or out, which are the essential detail in the architecture of Pienaar’s interpretation. His climax is the slow chromatic variation No25, which has no repeats, so increasing the value of each restless, writhing half’s once-only appearance.

Sop at the top

**** Netrebko Live at the Met • Anna Netrebko • Metropolitan Opera Chorus and Orchestra • Bellini, Donizetti, Gounod, Mozart, Prokofiev, Puccini • DG 4779903 • This is a souvenir album of Netrebko performances over eight years (2002-2010) at the New York Met. She sounds like a teenage anorexic indulging an anxiety in the mad scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Her sadness is empty of reason against the glass harmonica’s icy tone. As Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni she is warmly in love and any threat of heartbreak is gone. Applause like rain sounds before the end. In debut opera for the Met, Prokofiev’s War and Peace, she is innocent, lithe and modern in her insomniac excitement at the beauty of the night. In Donizetti’s Don Pasquale she shows a coquettish talent for comedy with the sparkling aria La Moral di tutto questo, inducing snuffles of laughter among the bewitched Americans. She is an untiring soprano gifted in all areas of the repertoire, awesome in tragedy, enchanting in comedy, and yet in the springtime of her career.

Fiddler on Form

CD Review Rihm Lichtes Spiel, Dyade • Penderecki Duo Concertante • Currier Time Machines • Anne Sophie Mutter violin • Roman Patkolo double-bass • New York Philharmonic • Deutsche Grammophon 4779359 • Mutter is on top form on this pulsating CD of works commissioned by and dedicated to her. Rihm’s Lichtes Spiel – Ein Sommerstueck (Play of Light – a piece for summer) floats like, and quotes, Ravel. Flies swarm lazily in the heat. It’s long, not like summers we know, and lightly outstays its welcome though not before inducing longing in the listener. In seven short movements, Currier’s Time Machines addresses the truth that music is merely decorated time. The heart of the work is the fifth, Entropic Time, which is hard, aggressive and thrilling, its pent-up energy escaping finally in comic instrumental sighs. The New York Phil sounds as driven as the dedicatee. You feel the tension in the air for a world premiere in their home auditorium, Avery Fisher Hall. Mutter dominates like a figurehead, prow first, cutting into the waves of sound. The two central works are duos for violin and double-bass. The first, Penderecki’s Duo Concertante works as polite homophonic dialogue, the parts alternately deferring to each other. The second Rihm’s Dyade, gives contrapuntal independence to the high and low voices, which share episodic moods if not rhythms. It’s an excellent disc which marks Mutter out as the world’s leading commissioner, not to say performer, of new violin music. Fiddlers everywhere fall down and admire.

Sink Heart

Rise Heart ** Worcester Cathedral Chamber Choir / Stephen Shellard • Regent Records • Elgar Light out of Darkness, O Salutaris hostia, The spirit of the Lord is upon me; Vaughan Williams Five Mystical Songs • Parry My soul there is a country, Hear my words, Chorale preludes • Stanford The blue bird • The CD is a disappointment. Worcester’s Chamber Choir is a mixed ensemble which performs in the Three Choirs Festival annually and for ceathedral services once a term. The female sopranos and altos lack the freshness of boys and the bite of counter-tenors. The soloists step from the choir and sound like it. The dynamic range in the Vaughan Williams is narrow and the impact of Stanford’s beautiful Blue Bird negligible. Parry’s concluding Hear my Words is a forlorn plea.

Tourist Trap

** Anoushka Shankar • Traveller • The disc is a disappointment. There are no long-drawn ragas which begin slowly, improvisatorily and inveigingly; instead the producers have thought to cut straight to the fast exciting parts of the sitarist’s technique and repertoire. Western instruments have been added to the sitar-tabla combination so that we are no longer on the Hindu temple’s mat but in some no-man’s-land of casual influences, Spain, the Middle East and North America make fleeting touristic appearances. A mish-mash.

Beefy Bach

**** Ramin Bahrami • Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra • Riccardo Chailly • Bach Five Keyboard Concertos • Iranian pianist Bahrami plays Bach on a meaty modern Steinway. It’s a fine sound, quite different from the slightly precious, original instrument versions which tend to prevail these days. In No1 BWV1052 Bahrami’s technique includes crossed hands where a harpsichordist would switch to another manual. It’s a harking back to the days of magnifying Bach, not trying to confine him to his time. Bahrami’s Baroque is a rich, golden fanstasy. His tone has power and athleticism and his steady rhythmic motor courses inexorably through the movements, albeit sometimes at thrilling, dangerous speeds. In No3 BWV1054 he emphasises Bach’s juicy basslines. He works with an improviser’s sensibility and in No4, plays in the rests, along with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly who sound as fresh as he. His melodic instinct brings out Bach’s lyricism and the largo of No5 BWV1056 – sometimes called Bach’s Arioso for its stand-out beauty – is the serene climax of the disc.

Psychological Arnie

****CD Review • Berlin Philharmoniker • Sir Simon Rattle • Brahms Piano Quartet No1 in G minor Op25 arr Schoenberg • Schoenberg Chamber Symphony No1 Op9b • Schoenbger Belgleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene Op34 (Accompaniment to a Film Scene) • Rattle is at home with the contemporary. He made his name conducting what others made only incomprehensible. He makes such logic of the Chamber Symphony that it might have actually been Brahms. As for the Brahms, it sounds rather overblown expanded to fit the sections of a symphony orchestra. The percussion is camp, especially the toytown xylophone and the off-beat tambourine in the gypsy rondo finale. Rattle seems to recognise atonal Arnie’s jokes. The film accompaniment is a masterpiece of psychological tension, Rattle creating sweaty-palmed tension and a look-away climax as if we were on the edge of our seats in the local fleapit.

No Chocolate Box

*****CD Review • David Trio • Tchaikovsky Piano Trio in A minor Op50 • Shostakovich Piano Trio in E minor Op67 • Tchaikovsky? Bleagh. Chocolate box ballet music and over sentimental symphonies. Then three Italians called the David Trio turn up with this CD and Tchaikovsky will never be the same again. They play like blood-brothers, committed to themselves and the music. When the cello sings out the long, proud melody at the start and passes to the weeping violin who hands on to the octave-wide hands of the pianist, they set a level of passionate involvement that never declines throughout the work’s 50-minute duration. Argerich, Kremer and Maisky play this too on another label, but they are three individual soloists who combine for a fun get-together of argued dynamics and disjointed speeds, where the David are an ensemble who know from hours spent together the most intimate details of Peter Ilyich’s homage to Nik Rubinstein and what their response to them is. They achieve a riveting intensity. The immense fugal eighth variation of the second movement is thunderously perfect, you want to laugh out loud and listen again. The final bars peter to the deathliest hush as the slow steps of the funeral procession plod into the distance. Argerich and co, incidentally, play this loud and spoil the effect. Shostakovich’s slinky E minor trio is a dessert of piquant sauces and long aftertaste. The strings pizzicato like archers and the pianist leaps on the off-beats like a Cossack kicking the air. David slays his ten thousands.

The Accordion Gets Ideas

*** Ksenija Sidorova accordion • Bach Berio, Scarlatti, Mozart, Schnittke, Takahashi, Piazzolla • Champs Hill Records • CHRCD019 • I knew someone at school who played the accordion on the coach to rugby matches. His repertoire consisted of the rudest songs I’d ever heard, none of which are included on this CD. Sidorova’s stated aim is to improve the reputation of the folk keyboard, strapped to the performer’s chest. Her Bach Overture BWV831 In the French Style puffs up pompously the reedy dotted rhythms. The Domenico Scarlatti sonatas seem well suited to the vertical hand position and exude effortlessness. The instrument’s pretensions to seriousness are hardly helped by the inclusion of Mozart’s amusing Twinkle Twinkle variations or Schnittke’s playful Revis Fairy Tale, while the Berio and Nordheim works are almost too heavy. With the Takahashi, the squeeze-box finally loses its character and one hears birds and the squeaks and groans of the natural world. Then with the Piazzolla all the effort to distance itself from its reputation is undone as it becomes the common bandoneon in a sweaty bar in Buenos Aires. If nothing else, Sidorova proves the instrument has great range.

Via Crucis

CD Review: Via C rucis • L'Arpeggiata, Nuria Real, Philippe Jaroussky, Christina Pluhar • Barbara Fortuna • In Leipzig at the opening of the Bach Festival recently, the group L'Arpeggiata with singer Nuria Real are an absolute sensation. The crowd is on their feet at the end bellowing their approval. They give five encores and it is not enough. The Via Crucis contains their most potent hits. Merula's Hor ch'e tempo di dormire is a long moan of pleasure over a simplest two-note ostinato bass. The anonymous Ninna Nanna alla Napoletana swings with such a seductive beat that one has to conclude music went slightly backwards after the early music period.

Brian Gothic

*****CD Review • Havergal Brian Symphony No1 in D minor Gothic • Slovak Opera Chorus, Slovak Philhamonic Orchestra and Choir, Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra / Ondrej Lenard • Brian never really expected his fantasy colossus to be performed, but as with Everest, once it’s there, the challenge to scale its heights becomes irresistible. The Czechs achieved this recording in 1989, cramming the vast forces into the state radio station’s concert hall. The 800-voice choirs appear only in the second half. At the start of Part V Judex Crederis they are unaccompanied - giant triads rubbing against each other in awe-inspiring chord-clusters. They are singing the Te Deum, still the text of choice for society’s large-scale rituals, however outwardly secular. They are the whole of humanity acknowledging the infinite. The end though is a still small voice on the words ‘let me never be confounded’, a petering, bold speck in the black emptiness of the studio’s embracing silence. The opening, on the other hand, is a blaze of light, a Big Bang perhaps, with large numbers of Slovak brass fanfaring the structure into view. The conductor Ondrej Lenard has a sense of the scale of the assault, measuring out the mix of marches and meanderings circumspectly, conserving strength in constant, steady preparation for the unrushed arrival of the voices. The second movement follows distant timps with an ominous plainsong theme. The Gothic of the title is a cathedral, albeit the largest, most forbidding edifice ever imagined. The Royal Albert Hall is ready.

CD Review • Schubert ‘Great’ Symphony No9 in C • Budapest Festival Orchestra, Ivan Fischer • Fischer picks out the detail but loses sight of the overall picture. The natural horns give the opening statement crude appeal, like an announcement from an uncultured town crier. Their low notes buzz like paper-and-comb. The pizzicato in the first movement pierces the creamy legato like drawing pins under a silk tablecloth. The pulse quickens with the accelerandi but there’s no sense of what has caused the excitement. The shuffling semiquavers supply nervous tension. The second movement’s gruff storytelling is a little too quick and the third’s gaiety naively innocent. The curious breaks in the finale sound like a philosopher pausing for thought but the four-crotchet stamping chords sound petulant. Most tellingly, of course, the disc suffers by comparison with Giulini conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with the same work in the review below.

Giulini in America

CD Review Giulini in America • Robert Tear, Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Carlo Maria Giulini • Giulini conducted the Chicagoans as Principal Guest Conductor at the request of Principal Conductor Georg Solti and where the latter was an ogre, the former was a saint much loved by the musicians. All but two of the works in this five-CD box-set are symphonies recorded between 1976 and 1978: Schubert (4,8 and 9), Dvorak (8 and 9), Mahler (9), and Prokofiev (1). The warmth and humanity of the conductor radiate through the discs and nowhere do you feel any sense of studio routine or duty. Mahler’s Ninth has all the expansive power, space and moment of a mighty occasion. The parts speak as lines in a great drama, distinct and potent even when submerged in Mahler’s lucid harmony, the architecture solid as the plot of a Greek tragedy. Schubert’s Ninth has a buoyancy and momentum that seem to suggest Giulini knew he was creating something definitive even as he was doing so. The sedate, confident accelerandi do not panic but take their easeful time, sure of the listener’s patience and pleasure in the fact of the performance’s endurance. One of two non-symphonic works, Britten’s Serenade for Tenor Horn and Strings with tenor Robert Tear, concludes the collection. Tear is in his absolute pomp, his high-tensile tone pure and thrilling in the Dirge, threatening in the Elegy and as darkly comforting as eternal sleep in Keats’ Sonnet. Giulini matches him every step of the way, an inspiration and guide, master and servant. We may not see his like again, but at least we have his legacy.

Britten Songs

CD Review **** Britten Songs Vol1 • Andrew Tortise, James Geer, Ben Johnson, Caryl Hughes, Philip Smith, Nicky Spence, Katherine Broderick, Robin Tritschler, Malcolm Martineau • Onyx 4071 • Volume One includes Britten’s earliest published songs, settings of Burns and Longfellow composed for his mum to sing when he was a ten-year-old. Tenor Nicky Spence sings the Burns with a Scotch twang and ironic regret in the refrain, Oh that I’d never been married. He is one of five tenors, none of whom has either Pears’ intimacy or his wobble. Andrew Tortise sings Canticle I – As I my best beloved’s am, so he is mine (Francis Quarles) – with wistful, unforced clarity, weighting the words which are pregnant with meaning. Britten and Pears blest their listeners with their choice of lyrics. Tenor Ben Johnson sings the John Donne sonnets – Oh my black soul! – with dark power, the last, Death be not proud, winding smoothly towards its positive conclusion over a Purcellian ground bass. Tenor Geer sings the Hölderlin cycle with dust-dry tone, and tenor Tritschler Hardy’s Winter Words with sombre, glowing intensity. Soprano Broderick sings the Pushkin cycle The Poet’s Echo with with an ominous sob, the last song Stikhi (Lines written one sleepless night) sighing through the piano’s bell tones. Mezzo Hughes sings Auden’s Cabaret songs with a chanteuse’s phrasing though she’s a little hysterical in the last verse of Stop all the clocks. In fact, it is the poets here who are the winners and but for Britten drawing attention to these treasures through his spare, deferential accompaniments beautifully shaped by Martineau, their voices would be much less heard.

Other Love Songs

CD Review Other Love Songs Brahms Liebeslieder Walzer Op52, Neue Liebeslieder Op65; Hough Other Love Songs • The Prince Consort with pianists Alisdair Hogarth, Philip Fowke and Stephen Hough • Both sets of Brahms’ Liebeslieder, Op52 and Op65, are for four voices plus piano duet. He composed Op52 in 1869, aged 36, after settling permanently in Vienna and Op65 in 1874 on holiday beside Lake Zurich. The texts are translations of folk poetry from Russia and Poland by GF Daumer. Stephen Hough’s eight Other Love Songs were commissioned to complement the Brahms waltzes and are settings of poets as different as AE Housman and Mother Julian of Norwich. • No Victorian stuffiness deadens these light, frothy performances; they make the sung waltz sound the latest craze. Thank the pianists who thunder at speed and simper without losing tension. The singers’ young voices are lithe and tuned to the ensemble. They blend well despite their opera soloists’ egos. The separate lines are vivid as rock strata and diction clear as day. Naughty I know to pick one, but the tenor Staples is destined for a top career. The problem will be staying together. They birth Hough’s babies with character, especially the Langston Hughes lyric Madam which mezzo Jennifer Johnston does Scouse. It's not what Hughes intended, but it works.

Gods Heroes and Men

CD Review Gods Heroes and Men - Beethoven Eroica Symphony Op55, Creatures of Prometheus ballet Op43 Montreal Symphony Orchestra / Kent Nagano **** Beethoven composed the Symphony No3 Eroica in Vienna 1804. No previous symphony could compare in length, power or emotional range. It was inspired by a political ideal and the composer violently retracted its dedication when the dedicatee, Napoleon, proclaimed himself emperor. Back in 1801 he hadn’t minded composing for the Empress Maria Theresa the Creatures of Prometheus ballet, however. Five of the original 16 numbers are given, including the familiar overture, the harp adagio and the finale based on the same theme as that of the Eroica. Under Nagano’s baton the symphony is alert, forceful and quick. Youthfulness pervades an athletic first movement. The Funeral March is too quick and lacks a sense of grinding grief. Its middle section fails to soften. The horn section sounds unusually golden in the gods-a-hunting trio of the scherzo and a faint sense of euphoric comedy enters the finale at the simple leaping theme. The performance expresses revolutionary zeal at the expense of authoritative grandeur. The ballet has the brightness of the new. The harp, flute and cello soloists demonstrate what sensitive players Nagano has while the presto has the regal splendour of a fanfare announcement: this orchestra is back to its best.

Beauty and the Baroque

CD Review Beauty of the Baroque Danielle de Niese, The English Concert / Harry Bickett **** De Niese starts her programme with two songs by Dowland and ends with two by Bach. Two British composers Purcell and Handel and two Italians Monteverdi and Pergolesi share the middle tracks, It’s an eclectic disc of Baroque hits. De Niese’s soprano is a little heavy for the repertoire, especially the lute songs, and some of the runs a little hit-or-miss but she has the rare ability to sustain interest and maintain drama at very slow tantalising speeds. Despite a naughty phase-breaking breath and an inauthentic portamento, she generates extraordinary tension in Dido’s Lament; some of her vowels are Janet Baker’s. Andreas Scholl guest-duets in Pur ti miro from the Coronation of Poppea and the pair linger outrageously on the clashing pain-as-pleasure semitones. There’s a slight loss of dancing momentum over the sinuous rhythm of Quel Sguardo but she delivers Sich üuben im Lieben with infectious exuberance. She has such allure in her voice that she manages to make the politically sycophantic Schafe können sicher weiden (Sheep may safely graze) sound like a come-on or Monroe singing Happy Birthday Mr President.

Sixteen Pilgrims

CD Review. Palestrina Volume 1. The Sixteen / Harry Christophers. This is not the first recording of Palestrina’s works by Christophers and co but he has a new approach. No more clipped endings, he says. Cadences are drawn out with impressive rallentendi as if the breath at the end were a part of the whole, indeed as if the phrases themselves were long, sighing exhalations. Compare the present recording of the motet Assumpta est Maria with their 2006 version (Music from the Sistine Chapel COR16047). The new focus on the cadence gives a more elegant arching shape to the phrase. It also makes for slower performances but Palestraina’s ‘almost too perfect’ music can bear this indulgence. The revision is helped by the more generous acoustic of St Alban The Martyr Holborn where previously it was the drier St Silas The Martyr Kentish Town. The mikes are unfashionably distant, drawing less attention to individual voices. The emphasis is on silky tone and blemishless legato. Phrases from the motet feed the mass of the same name: this is to be the scheme for each subsequent volume. Each will also include settings from the Song of Songs (Palestrina wrote 29). Here the Sixteen sing three including Sicut lilium inter spinas. The voices caress the sensuous lines, colouring the consonants of spinas with a hiss, darkening the lower voice tone at sub umbra (shade) so that the sopranos’ imitation is shadow-like, and delivering the unanimous dotted rhythm on desideraveram (desired) with emphatic resolution. The immaculate tuning, clear diction and finely balanced ensemble are hardly worth mentioning.

Seeing is Believing

CD Review Nico Muhly – Seeing is Believing Thomas Gould, Aurora Orchestra / Nicholas Collon The main work on 29-year-old American composer Muhly’s third Decca CD is his Concerto for Electric Violin Seeing is Believing with soloist Thomas Gould. Its single movement occupies more than a third of the total playing time. A wailing violin cadenza inflected with slightly corny orientalisms kicks off the work, its butch, amplified tone full of aggressive mystique. Ordinary acoustic strings arrive like fawning bridesmaids, flattering the soloist’s power-sound. Glissando sighs turn from major to minor like falling shadows and a simple theme played pizzicato and repeated like a minimalist’s obsession cuts through the orchestra like a stabbing finger. A similar motif occurs at the end of the work, bowed, heavy and, structurally, a second pillar. Minimalist techniques (Muhly was a pupil, if not disciple, of Glass) govern much of the writing, the solo metamorphosing with infinitesimal changes through a scherzo-like third section. Jazz ornaments such as double-stopped violin trills, over a cool passage for tuned percussion lead to a slow movement for the lyrical, egotistical soloist who is unable to remain in the background. The work is full of interest and Muhly is fluent with the different styles – a true eclecticist – but the patchwork remains obvious. A coherent new style is not yet apparent. Earthing the electric concerto are arrangements for orchestra of three choral works by Byrd and Gibbons. They anchor us to tonality. In Gibbons’ This is the Record of John, the plaintive solo line is shared by viola and clarinet. The Aurora Orchestra proves sensitive although they make no attempt to vary the time or decorate the melody and leave it to the warm tone colours to variegate the polyphony. Other works by Muhly alternate with the choral arrangements. The piano in ‘Motion’ has a Stravinsky flavour, the chords at the start of ‘Step Team’ suggest Sondheim, and minimalism’s abrupt ostinati are a recurrent flavour throughout. Muhly is a prolific composer who is unafraid of experiment. In time, he will mesh wide-ranging influences into a masterpiece, but that has not yet arrived.

Matalon Trames

CD Review Les Siecles Live The music of Martin Matalon conducted by Francois-Xavier Roth // The orchesra Les Siècles consists of instruments from several centuries, from lutes to synthesisers, and is the ideal outfit for performances of the series of chamber concertos Trames by Argentine composer Martin Matalon. They date from 1997 and exploit extreme contrast of timbre and rhythm. Founder-conductor Francois-Xavier Roth, a Matalon admirer, picks three for the present album. Trame II pits solo harpsichord against clarinet, trombone, viola, double-bass, bandoneon and percussion including steel drums. The splashy harpsichord, played with energy by Maude Gratton, loses its eighteenth century echo and assumes a buzzing, metallic electrocuted fly tone. In the slow middle section it rolls drunkenly ; in the fast ending, it departs on a extended running and rhythmic cadenza. The bandoneon’s wheezey Argentinian breath makes fleeting appearances like suppressed memories while bass clarinet growls with the sexy tone of a heavy smoker. The steel drum forsakes rhythm and calypso gives way to the tone quality of tin. The ear rings with variegated colours. The closing tutti ascends like a flock of birds and concludes comically with the single ding of a shop’s counter bell. Trames IV and VIII are less distinct in terms of timbre, but still veer rhythmically between pulseless, recitativo driftings and syncopated, acoustic funk. Trame VIII features a groovy, cool-jazz passage of digging off-beats and angular melody for the solo marimba, played by Eriko Minami, with interjections from flute, clarinet, French horn, trumpet, piano, violin, viola and double-bass. Trame IV is the most traditional with the piano as soloist, Florence Cioccolani hitting the keys with the easy sophisticated touch of a nightclub pianist amid the tangle of other voices. There is much to enjoy in Matalon’s music as it meanders between muddle and meaning. Roth has the measure of it: composer and conductor aid each other’s cause. The band gells warmly and there is no feeling that the disparate instruments are mere freelancers called in as required but members of a union with a common goal and sense of brotherhood.

Spooky Bard

Rick Jones, Arthur Smith and Jane Jones celebrate Shakespeare's 446th birthday in Southwark Cathedral with a reading of the rude bits of the King James Bible and a few Shakespeare songs. The King James Bible was published in 1611. Lancelot Andrewes, who is buried in the cathedral, heads the list of translators. The 46-year-old playwright is supposed to have left his mark in Psalm 46. The 46th word from the start is 'shake' and the 46th word from the end is 'speare'. The coincidence does not occur in any other version. I want to believe it, but Arthur says it's crap.

Words and Music

Monday, 3 September 2012

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