There’s something so inviting about this second installment in Leif Ove Andsnes’ Beethoven Piano Concertos cycle, as if the pianist/director and ever-so-sympatico Mahler Chamber Orchestra are offering a sparklingly restored heritage hotel, blazing fireplace and all, to the cold and weary musical traveller. The engaging moods of Beethoven’s Concertos can claim some credit in themselves, but just as in the critically acclaimed previous recording of One and Three by the same players, it’s the lack of hang-ups and a maximum of good-vibes that makes you want to be best friends with these performances, right from the opening ritornello of No. Two that takes off with a smile on its face. Andsnes himself then brings all the enthusiasm and attention to detail of the perfect dinner-host. And it’s a well-balanced meal being served up, always lyrical, with the slow movements in particular achieving an extraordinary balance between lightness of touch, profundity of meaning, depth of emotion and sheer take-your-breath-away beauty. In the outer movements, the melodies extend the view toward the musical horizons, and yet every moment in its own right seems so filled with musical detail, the diversity of instrumental colours and the shifting points of focus constantly prompting the…

Ge Gan-Ru (b.1954) has been described by as China’s finest avant-garde composer. Like the young Takemitsu, he had to study Western classical music in secret but when the Shanghai conservatory was reopened in 1974, he found an affinity for the likes of Stockhausen, Ligeti and Debussy. These became influences in Ge Gan-Ru’s own compositions and merged successfully with traditional Chinese music in a way where the styles were truly synthesised into an individual and exciting compositional voice. This new BIS disc is a marvel where orchestral colours and big Messiaenic blocks of sound brilliantly coalesce to form a highly individual sound world where seemingly disparate musical styles seamlessly knit with the 2,000 year old Qin tales that provide the inspiration (the suite Lovers Besieged is based on the famous Farewell, My Concubine). Fairy Lady Meng Jiang was composed for the Israeli flute virtuoso Sharon Bezaly who has no problems whatsoever with the unfamiliar Asian influences within this highly impressive work. Both works find their inspiration in difficult periods of Chinese history but never do the Western and Chinese elements oppose or work against each other. For here is truly international music – a Chinese-American composer, an Israeli soloist and Spanish…

The most eye-catching part of the packaging for The Good Song was a small explicit content sticker in the top left hand corner. I didn’t give it much thought, writing it off as a packaging error, or a joke, a mild grab for attention. It wasn’t until I was looking through the English translations of Poulenc’s Chansons gaillardes provided with the disc that I realised this sticker might be more related to the content that first expected. Poulenc’s Chansons gaillardes derives its lyrical content from obscene 17th-century texts, resulting in lyrics such as:      To the god of love a virgin      Offered a candle      That she might obtain a lover      The god smiled at her request      And said to her: Pretty one while you wait,      You can always use the offering It is an example of obscenity realised as beautiful music. Of course these words sound far more eloquent in French. In 2013 Thomas Meglioranza devoted an entire album to Schubert’s Winterreise, a logical extension of 2007’s Schubert Songs. It is with interest that 2014’s The Good Song moves tangentially to Meglioranza’s recorded work this far. There is no Schubert to be heard here, but…

Full of the festive spirit, and wondering what kind of entertainment will keep the children off my back over Christmas, I thought I’d take a swipe at one area of music which has been bugging me for years – the music in musicals. When a musical gets it right and the music is passionate and the dancing and singing and staging all work together, they can be a magical, joyful experience, but of late musicals have been a series of pastiche experiences. Pastiche comes from the Italian word pasticcio which is apparently a pâté or pie-filling mixed from diverse ingredients, and the theatrical equivalent is music that has all the dynamic texture of pâté and sounds like every other musical you’ve ever heard. I watched the musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels recently in Sydney and while the acting and production were great, the music in the show was like some old 1950s generic score taken out of the freezer covered in frost and congealed fat, reheated in the microwave and served up as a new dish. As soon as a song begins you know exactly what is going to happen, every chord, every rhyme. You could even just start the song……

I first encountered Matthias Goerne’s artistry 17 years ago with his first contribution to Hyperion’s landmark Schubert Edition; he opened with Lob der Tränen and one was bowled over by the sheer beauty of the voice with its velvet sheen and rich, dark colour. He was granted the honour of providing the edition’s Winterreise which was predictably excellent then jumped ship to Decca and for me the shine went off ever so slightly. His singing took on some mannerisms that started to pall with repetition; fussy micro-managed phrasing and a tendency to croon. Thankfully that turned out to be just a stage in his artistic development and with him signing to Harmonia Mundi for an 11 disc survey of Schubert Lieder those artifices have disappeared. We live at a time when there is an extraordinary array of fine singers tackling this repertoire, but this series is something quite special; the overwhelmingly moving Die Schöne Mullerin from 2009 with Christoph Eschenbach’s magisterial accompaniment is one of my desert island discs and the very definition of the word Innigkeit. This final instalment with its predominantly nocturnal imagery is on a similar plane with limpidly beautiful and subtle contributions by Helmut Deutsch and…

Brilliant pianists tend to be either jaw-dropping virtuosos or they are intensely musical. James Brawn, at 42 years of age, while having the chops at his disposal to negotiate the thundering octaves of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No 1 or Mussorgsky’s Great Gate at Kiev belongs in the second category. He is a musician first: you hear it in the clarity of line maintained throughout the extensive variations of Busoni’s monumental arrangement of the Chaconne from Bach’s Violin Partita No 2, the gentle cantabile of Liszt’s Consolation No 3, and the unaffected fluidity of the C Major Prelude from Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. Brawn was born in England, but spent his early years in New Zealand and Australia, where he first studied piano. He has won many prizes. For a while he returned to Melbourne to teach at Scotch College but in 2010 moved back to the UK to resume his concert career – of which this and two discs of Beethoven sonatas are a product. The title “In Recital” reflects the judiciously chosen program; the disc does not seem to have been recorded live in concert. The centrepiece is the Mussorgsky, where Brawn takes a thoughtful approach. He is more…

Unsurprisingly, a nocturnal atmosphere pervades the works assembled here – lullabies old and new – but such is the variety of styles and timbres there is never any danger of monotony. Rather, these are like watercolours rendered in what artists call chromatic greys, with the occasional shower of prismatic hues shining out of the darkness. Earlier masters include Enescu, Stravinsky, Szymanowski, Sibelius and Ravel, whose exquisite Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré opens the program. Of the modern masters, I particularly enjoy Brett Dean’s Berceuse, the violin’s higher register lending it a mysterious, ethereal quality, as well as Kate Moore’s inventive Broken Rosary, which evokes the stringing of beads – the title refers to a rosary belonging to Moore’s late grandmother, which she broke one day as a child. Other highlights include Peter Adriaansz’s quirky Palindromes Part 3, Kats-Chernin’s cute Lullaby for Nick, which was the first piece she ever wrote, age 7, but which she never wrote down until recently, Cor Fuhler’s 18 Spoonfulls – the music’s units relate to the small mouthfuls one must feed a child (!) – and the lullaby in the form of a passacaglia by Andrew Ford, Cradle Song. Anna McMichael and Tamara…

Two spectacular instrumental showcases that, despite their differences, find common ground.

In 1918 Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes were doing their best to cheer up a shell-shocked public so, rather than continue his assault on bourgeois sensibilities that had brought forth Le Sacre du Printemps, he commissioned Respighi to orchestrate a selection of Rossini’s piano pieces. La Boutique Fantasque premiered in London in 1919 and was an instant hit. Rossini’s bouncy tunes in Respighi’s Technicolor orchestration made the suite a regular feature of Classical Pops concerts of previous generations. Neschling and his superb Belgian orchestra offer perform the complete ballet with gusto as an orchestral showpiece laying bare usually blurred details of orchestration aided by an upfront and brightly lit recording. While prudently less high voltage than the old rip-roaring account of the suite by Arthur Fiedler on RCA Living Stereo (a guilty pleasure) it is an exciting romp in demonstration sound but lacks a certain balletic grace and flexibility. Impressioni Brasiliane was the product of a visit to Rio and is very much in Respighi’s pictorial style with snatches of Brazilian tunes. Opening with an evocative night piece and closing with a hip-swaying danza, its bizarre middle movement portrays a visit to a biomedical institute that held 80,000 snakes –…

The opera star writes exclusively for Limelight about ending her stage career and the good times ahead.

While I’m no great fan of “chill” albums, I’m a great fan of good choral singing. Thankfully, Eventide not only features some of the finest choral singing you’ll here anywhere; as far as chill albums go, it’s one of the best I’ve heard (and having worked in a suburban CD store for some years, I’ve heard a lot). Young UK choral outfit Voces8 (for those of you whose school Latin is a bit rusty, voces is the plural of vox – “voice”; the “8” is for the group’s eight singers) has been around since 2003 but this is its debut for the prestigious Decca label, surely a coup for any young choir. The repertoire is unashamedly chillax and features straight classical works by Tallis, Bruckner, Britten, Lauridsen et al, albeit sometimes in arrangement, as well as vaguely crossover items such as Karl Jenkins’ Benedictus and film music such as Hymn to the Fallen by John Williams from Saving Private Ryan. There are also world premiere recordings such as Ola Gjeilo’s Second Eve, which was commissioned by Voces8. Many of the items feature solo instrumental accompaniment courtesy of Christian Forshaw’s saxophone, Matthew Sharpe’s cello and Lavinia Meijer’s harp; Tallis’ Te lucis ante……

You may think it repertoire raiding but there’s a surprisingly long tradition of playing these suites on viola; we don’t know if they were played thus in Bach’s day but there was a modern transcription published back in 1916. Authenticity is irrelevant here as Bach himself happily rehashed his own material to suit the circumstances and as a colleague once observed “more than any other composer Bach remains Bach even if you play him on a kazoo”. Maxim Rysanov follows up his superb 2010 recording of Suites 1, 4 & 5 and makes it abundantly clear why he is the current golden boy of the viola scene. Playing a magnificent Guadagnini instrument from 1780 his tone is in the clean bright modern manner rather than the dark and dusky. I have rarely heard these pieces played with such a nimble lightness of touch and it makes a startling contrast to my current cello benchmark, Pieter Wispelwey’s extraordinary recent recording in low baroque pitch with its dark umber shading and gravitas. Rysanov’s style is a balance of bold gestures tempered by period manners with the preludes tossed off with improvisatory dash and dance rhythms beautifully pointed. He daringly plays the sixth suite in its original key… Continue…