Some of the hottest young properties in classical music perform Rachmaninov and Prokofiev.

Sir Arnold Bax was one of Britain’s most individual composers. Hearing a few bars of one of his mature, Celtic infused scores is often enough for you to say, “ah, Bax”. But in 1907, as a well-heeled emigré wannabe composer “battening on the fleshpots of Dresden”, as we are told in Lewis Foreman’s excellent sleeve notes, his influences and musical flavour were distinctly Russian – indeed, his landlady was convinced he was one! In Germany he also got to hear two movements of Mahler’s Sixth and something of the ambition of that work infuses this, his first attempt at a symphony. It was Bax’s practice to orchestrate only when he had a performance in view, and in the absence of such, the piano score languished – until now, thanks to the conductor Martin Yates. It’s a big, sprawling work, in places in need of a trim, but it’s brimming with memorable material such as the leaping opening theme of the first movement or the Ravelian waltz that forms the basis of the scherzo. The whole work is most convincingly realised for the orchestra. Bax was a master colourist and that this comes over here is a credit to Yates. It……

I am, as they say nowadays, conflicted about this release. The playing of the Camerata Nordica is highly impressive. What disturbs me is the concept. String orchestra transcriptions of Beethoven quartets, especially the late ones, are nothing new. Toscanini and Weingartner did them – the latter even subjecting the Hammerklavier Sonata, of all things, to the process. The point is, can a string ensemble really replicate the unique intimacy, intensity, complexity and sublime enigma of this music more effectively than the medium for which it was originally composed? The ‘happier’ or less complicated quartets (if any of this music could be described as uncomplicated) fare better. The Op 127 sounds robust and almost jolly in this ensemble’s hands. It’s when we reach the Finale of the B Flat, Op 130 that the problems set in. The original Finale, the Grosse Fuge, is the most ferocious and terrifying piece by Beethoven (or anyone else, for that matter). I’m not against string transcriptions of the “Great Fugue” per se. Klemperer recorded it early in his EMI career, almost 60 years ago, and the result is, to this day, grittily unforgettable, but the effect of the playing here tends to glamorise it. The…

It’s not for nothing that the young Bach walked 250 miles to Lübeck to hear Buxtehude perform. Johann Sebastian knew a good thing when he heard it and so, clearly, does Ton Koopman, whose scholarly edition of Buxtehude’s oeuvre is making available to us a substantial hoard of buried treasure from the early German Baroque. This is volume 17 of Koopman’s complete survey and, like its predecessors, it reveals the breadth and variety of the composer’s output. The double CD contains chorale settings, sacred arias and cantatas but if that sounds stock in trade you’d be surprised at the musical novelties herein. Buxtehude wrote for church but also for familial occasions, his famous evening concerts and town celebratory events. The performances are thoroughly idiomatic, Koopman encouraging a natural approach and embracing a quasi-improvisatory feel where appropriate. Original keys are restored (generally higher than the norm) and if these pose challenges to soloists, they are by and large met with aplomb. His sopranos blend perfectly despite some fearsome agility tests – listen to Gerlinde Sämann and Amarylis Dieltiens in the rapturous Laudate, pueri Dominum. Countertenor Maarten Engeltjes is ravishing in the poignant Klag-Lied, written to commemorate the death of Buxtehude’s father….

Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt initially became known for her Bach but lately she has ranged farther afield with composers such as Chabrier and Fauré. The last eight years have seen her gradually recording the complete Beethoven piano sonatas. This is the first disc in that series I have heard, and it is just terrific. In this program, Hewitt brings together the sunniest of the late sonatas (No 28, Op 101), the wittiest of the middle period sonatas (No 18: Op 31, No 3) and the rarely played Sonata No 11, Op 27. Without going to inappropriate extremes, she relishes dynamic contrasts and pays attention to detail with unfailing subtlety –yet, far from sounding studied, her playing retains a sense of spontaneity. Take the Allegro finale of the A Major sonata: Switching unexpectedly from exuberance to tenderness, intimate one moment and forthright the next, Hewitt makes it sound like a brilliant improvisation. Hewitt’s thoughtful, responsive performance of Sonata No 11 makes one wonder why the piece is not more popular (competition is fierce among the Beethoven sonatas, admittedly!) The first and third movements show us the composer in a playful mood, handling musical motifs like a juggler, while the second movement……

This remarkable ballet could be seen as the beginning of contemporary dance, so unusual and challenging was the work not only in its music, but in choreography and design.Stravinsky was arguably the most influential composer of the 20th Century. He burst upon the world around the same time as the serialists were preaching their new religion in Vienna. At this distance, we can see that Stravinsky and his descendants have won that culture war handsomely and Firebird has been performed and recorded countless time since. This new recording was made from live performances in the Sydney Opera House and the SSO has its work cut out to find a place among the dozens of other excellent recordings currently available. The shadow of the remarkable recording made 50 years ago by Antal Doráti and the LSO, and Bernstein’s brilliant reading from 1985, hangs over all later recordings. The SSO’s recorded sound is good, although there is some background noise in the quieter passages. Leader, Michael Dauth’s solos are beautiful and fit the ravishing music well. I was generally happy with the performance until we got to the demanding Infernal Dance of Kaschei, one of the show pieces in the work. Here the…

Concerto Armonico is a period instrument ensemble, which like its director the harpsichordist Miklós Spányi, came out of Budapest’s Franz Liszt Academy, where it was formed in 1983. Joined here by co-founder Péter Szu˝ts and keyboardists Tamás Szekendy and Cristiano Holtz, it performs Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s three innovative works for two keyboards and orchestra. This is the 20th and final volume in a highly acclaimed survey of the complete keyboard concertos of CPE Bach (1714-88), and provides a fitting end to such an endeavor in this 300th birthday year of the composer. Throughout, the performances are first-rate, exhibiting the same energy and razor-sharp precision which characterizes those of previous volumes. The program, in which Márta Ábrahám leads an orchestra variously comprising strings, flutes, oboes, horns, trumpets and timpani, opens with one of the last works Bach wrote, the Concerto in E Flat for harpsichord and fortepiano (1788). Here Spányi uses a swell device to muffle his harpsichord so as not to overpower Szekendy’s silvery-toned 1798 Broadwood, and the results are magical. Though this is less a witty, sparkling interplay between two equals than a conversation that rises above the pleasant din of the orchestra and is occasionally interrupted by……

The first wave of beauty washes over you 44 seconds in. Those dreamy, breathy flutes! The second wave hits at 3 minutes as two siren-like sopranos (of the sailor-luring rather than the whining ambulance variety) echo each other beguilingly. I don’t like to be a quick-draw with words like ‘ravishing’ and ‘beguilingly’, but I see no way around it for Cappella Mediterranea, the Spanish ensemble that has now brought back two works by Michelangelo Favletti (1642-1692) to see the light of day. The Calabrian composer and priest was Maestro di cappella in Palermo before relocating to Messina in Sicily while the city was under Spanish rule, which accounts for the exotic touches of kaval, galoubet pipes, haunting duduk, and bass chalumeau that enrich this premiere recording. This six-voice dialoghi oratorio was composed in 1683. Falvetti draws on the Book of Daniel to relate the story of the three youths condemned by King Nebuchadnezzar to be thrown into a fiery furnace for refusing to worship an idol. There are so many splendid moments one wonders why most of Falvetti’s output was itself consigned to the proverbial flames. From the orchestral prologue’s evocation of the flow of the river Euphrates, to the…

Although critics tend to single out his marathon Piano Concerto in five movements and his magnum opus, the opera Doktor Faust, like Franz Liszt, the vast majority of the Florence-born Feruccio Busoni’s compositional output is devoted to work for the solo piano. It is indeed appropriate that the Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin who specialises in obscure and difficult scores has now turned his gaze on this virtuoso and teacher. Perhaps more than any other composer this side of Henze, Busoni has brought an ingenious balance to bear between Teutonic counterpoint and sunshine and passion from the Mediterranean. Whilst Busoni’s philosophical ideas in the New Aesthetic pair him with the likes of Nietzsche, his musical composition is perhaps not so forward thinking – like Mahler, he still teeters on the edge of tonality whilst suggesting the ideas of Paul Hindemith’s sonatas of the 1930s. Even now pianists, if they approach Busoni, tend to focus on his Bach transcriptions rather than upon original works – though even here we find witty appropriations of English folksong (Greensleeves) and Bizet’s Carmen. Very little of this work has been favoured by modern pianists. The major exception is the Adelaide-born and Dutch-based contrapuntal specialist Geoffrey Douglas Madge…

Pascal Rogé and his wife Ami are no strangers to these shores, having performed at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville and in 2011 premiered the Concerto for Two Pianos of Sydney-based composer, Matthew Hindson, commissioned in honour of their wedding. However, the repertoire on this disc is decidedly Gallic and apart from Saint-Saëns’ rarely heard Scherzo, the pieces are two-piano transcriptions of well-known works for orchestra. Herein lies some of the difficulty with this recital. The vivid impressionistic orchestral palette of Debussy and Ravel is so well known to listeners that piano transcriptions can seem somewhat penny plain in comparison to their lavishly orchestrated counterparts. Despite those apparent disadvantages, the performers here give readings of great sensitivity and tonal nuance. Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) is particularly atmospheric and Debussy’s famous Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun is also well handled. For me, the performers’ own arrangement of La Mer is less successful, again perhaps because it is so well-known as a work for large orchestra. Ravel’s atmospheric Rapsodie Espagnole is familiar in its two-piano incarnation and certainly charms here, while his lesser-known arrangement of Debussy’s sparkling Fêtes is definitely worth getting to know. The thoroughly…

Benjamin Britten’s personal life has been well documented – his relationship with Peter Pears in a period when homosexuality was still illegal, his pacifism and years in America and his friendships and fallings-out. But two documentaries by John Bridcut will rate as indispensable for the full picture of the man – both for the interviews and with the people who knew him best and for their impeccably performed musical excerpts. Britten’s Children is, in the filmmaker’s words, “an edgy subject, full of danger”, these days perhaps even more than ever before. Bridcut’s fascination with the composer started when he took part as a chorister in Britten historic recording of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. His interviews with the various boys with whom Britten became “besotted” – including the late English actor David Hemmings for whom the role of Miles in The Turn Of The Screw was created – show these relationships to be innocent, if unusual, and without a physical sexual element. In a moving highlight Bridcut tracks down Wulff Scherchen, the German teenager whom Britten dumped for Peter Pears. Scherchen, now a grandfather living in Australia who was willing to be seduced, has kept all of Britten’s love letters is filmed……

No one disputes Martha Argerich’s pre-eminence as a concert pianist but her mercurial style has never really settled into a sustained relationship with the recording studio, so live recordings are prominent in her career – with all the blessings and curses implied by the form. Back in 1978 as a 30-something tearaway, she recorded Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 25 in C, K503, with a Netherlands Chamber Orchestra that never quite matched her virtuosity, making the subsequent release on EMI a little underwhelming. But now, as a cancer survivor in her 70s, she returned to this C Major work at last year’s Lucerne Festival with Claudio Abbado and his Orchestra Mozart in another live recording, but one which has an autumnal feel about it. Tempi, dynamics, and of course the grand maestoso opening all seem about right, but as a whole the first two movements speak of mature masters returning to a loved work in a spirit of authority rather than with the sense of vivacity, inspiration and play that might normally be associated with Mozart in this key. Beautifully balanced in the recording, there’s just something missing, just that spark of inspiration or vigour for which no amount of technical excellence can……