This month I’ve been unusually digital, engrossed in editing audio, staring at my laptop screen moving music and speech around, before checking my emails, reading the day’s news and then relaxing with a movie online. I realised I had become fixated on my screen, completely off with the pixels. Then I took more notice of those around me, everywhere on trains and planes and street corners and restaurants, people are off with their own pixels, head down staring at a screen like battery hens waiting for the next pellet, obsessively checking messages and Facebook and Twitter, desperate for contact from anyone else who is trapped in their own bubble of digitised information. There is something empty about digital data. There is no weight to it, nothing tangible, it is all empty calories like eating potato chips all day. After a day of digital activity, I feel faintly queasy, unsatisfied, as if I haven’t actually achieved anything at all. The music I have been editing has been made by humans, but it has no energy, no sense of being real. It is so easy now to find any music or entertainment online, it begs the question why go to all the…

Karl Goldmark creeps into the more expansive music reference works for two reasons: his brief teaching – in Vienna – of Sibelius; and his 1877 Rustic Wedding Symphony, a five-section, 45-minute divertissement which Sir Thomas Beecham enjoyed reviving. Other than that, he seems almost entirely forgotten (though a handful of violinists, including Joshua Bell and the late Nathan Milstein, have recorded his concerto). Most people will have been totally unaware that Goldmark even attempted a Second (i.e. non-Rustic-Wedding) Symphony, but he did, and this is actually its second CD version. The first – a Marco Polo release two decades old – was unavailable for comparative purposes, which is perhaps as well, since the golden-toned new disc surely surpasses it. Singapore can now boast a really effective local orchestra, better than some Australian bands and worthy to rank with all save the topmost American ensembles. Touches of string portamento give a pleasantly old-fashioned atmosphere to various passages. Latter-day Beckmessers might dock points for some slightly crude trombone sounds and for the cornet-like first trumpet that dominates the symphony’s third movement; the rest of… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Dvořák would have been swept away by the gamut of human expression in Steven Isserlis's playing.

A revelatory set from one of the most formidable teams in the world.

With this issue we get to No 59 in Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series. That’s an awful lot of concertos, and although the series has included Saint-Säens and Rachmaninov, the vast majority of works have been obscure, neglected or (in the current case) completely unknown. The two Polish composers represented here were musicians of local reputation: highly capable but not notably individual. Aleksander Zarzycki was the older (1843-1898). His Grande Polonaise was composed in 1859, and while it has quiet sections and even a passage that sounds like French operetta, its basic aim is to imitate Chopin – for political as much as musical reasons. Chopin remains inimitable, however, and the piece comes over as a Polish imitation of Liszt. Zarzycki’s later Piano Concerto is a compendium of mid-century Romantic gestures, expertly assembled, but it lacks a true memorability that would set it apart. Władysław Żeleński (1837-1921) is slightly better known (though I must confess not to me). His Piano Concerto of 1903, a sprawling work in three movements, shows a sophisticated harmonic and orchestral palette. While possibly overwritten, it contains several individual episodes, like the first movement’s coda in Straussian waltz time… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per…

Australian Eloquence continues to mine the archives for precious things buried over the years and here is a veritable treasure trove for opera lovers, and Wagner fans in particular, including four albums that should be in any serious vocal collection. Canadian bass-baritone George London’s vocal paralysis at the age of 46 was a tragic loss to opera. He is represented here by excerpts from Rheingold and Parsifal as well as a recital with Knappertsbusch and the Vienna Phil from 1958 when he was at the height of his powers. The voice is dark and glorious, coping with expansive tempi that would have floored a lesser mortal. Astrid Varnay was the Brünnhilde of choice for many in the 1950s but she also did a mean Isolde. A generous double CD comes from DG studio sessions and includes golden swathes of Die Walküre, Siegfried (the entire final scene) and Götterdämmerung as well as nearly an hour of Tristan, all with Windgassen in his prime. The singing is effortless yet impassioned and there’s a fine Wesendonck Lieder as bonus. Two tenors, an oldie and a newie, make the set. Jess Thomas’s Siegfried for Karajan has had a rough ride in the past. The…

Israeli conductor Asher Fisch is no stranger to our shores, being particularly associated with the West Australia and Adelaide symphony orchestras. A generous helping of his landmark 2004 recording of Richard Wagner’s Ring in Adelaide was recently re-released by Melba Recordings, and Daniel Barenboim’s former conducting protégé features in a new release from that prestige label, albeit as a pianist, performing some of Franz Liszt’s paraphrases from five of Wagner’s operas. As a bonus on this excellent and fascinating disc, Fisch performs three rare, short piano pieces Wagner wrote as thankyous to friends and patrons. Liszt started championing his future son-in-law in Weimar in the 1840s where he conducted Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. He wrote 14 paraphrases of Wagner excerpts, with varying degrees of fidelity, over the years before the pair famously fell out over Wagner’s affair and subsequent marriage to Liszt’s already-married daughter Cosima. One can only guess what Wagner must have thought of the liberties “my holy Franz” took with his music in these concert pieces – though the seven featured here are relatively reverential compared with what Liszt did to Verdi on occasions! However, we do know that the younger composer was grateful for the support. When Liszt…

Since 1998, renowned Spanish conductor and gamba player Jordi Savall’s Alia Vox label has been synonymous with stylish packaging of equally stylish performances of early music. In 2007 Savall launched the Alia Vox Heritage collection in order to “offer a fresh vision” of the recordings he and his then wife, the soprano Montserrat Figueras, made with their instrumental and vocal ensembles on the Astrée label between 1977 and 1996. The remastered recordings on the four CDs contained in this handsomely packaged boxed set were originally made on that label between 1987 and 1995. Together they offer a snapshot of the kinds of vocal genres that flourished in Spain between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, including the secular villancico and ensalada (“salad” – a variety of madrigal) and the sacred mass and motet. El Cançoner del Duc de Calàbria features music associated with the court of the Duke of Calabria in Valencia by composers such as Aldomar, Flecha, Morales and Guerrero; another CD is devoted to the sacred music of Joan Cererols, a monk who contributed much to the musical life of the monastery at Montserrat. The remaining two discs are given over to the villancicos and ensaladas of Mateo…

These new performances are utterly compelling and deserve the widest possible audience.

An excellent album of works by a composer whose musical trajectory was almost as varied as Stravinsky’s, but much less well-known.

Given that Haydn left few instructions concerning the interpretation of his sonatas, Bavouzet notes that the performer “must, even more than usual, create his own world, his own logic, left only to hope that … he will not distance himself too far from the composer’s intentions”. Bavouzet relishes this challenge of bringing Haydn’s sonatas to life. In the latest instalment of his cycle he takes two early and four later sonatas and works his own musical magic with them. Of particular concern are the issues of ornamentation and repeats. Repeats are ornamented with imagination and elegance and in certain cases codas are ‘saved’ for the final repeat. These performances are admirable in their attention to detail and are delivered with a technical fluency that is always at the service of the music. The insightful annotations reveal Bavouzet’s fascination with these delightful works and his sense of artistic freedom. In the A major sonata (Hob XVI: 12) he was intrigued by the chromatic, minor mode Trio of the Menuet. As a thoughtful epilogue, he plays it at a much slower speed than would be possible ‘in situ’. Bavouzet’s use of a Yamaha piano with its clear, bright treble is one point……

The world continues to shrink! First we have Philippe Herreweghe and his Champs-Elysées forces in Bruckner’s mighty Fifth Symphony with an orchestra of just 68. Then Thomas Dausgaard and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra in a convincing reading of another Bruckner symphony, this time the Second. Robyn Ticciati’s outstanding Symphonie Fantastique a couple of years ago belled the cat about how Berlioz can sound with smaller forces: this emotional roller coaster, where passion so often becomes an extreme sport lacked nothing in drama and, well, passion in their account. This current super-audio disc represents Ticciati’s latest foray into Berlioz. I listened to this release with a Berlioz expert and asked him not to reveal his reaction until after I’d written this revue. When he read it, he concurred completely. We both loved both the performances and the interpretation. The early La Morte de Cleopâtre sees the up-and-coming mezzo-soprano Karin Cargill in quite superb voice. Their can be no greater praise heaped on her than to say that, not since Dame Janet Baker’s recording more than 40 years ago has the worked been so successfully and graphically sung. It has just the right degree of histrionic agony as well as plenty of…