One feels that it’s very much the pianist’s hand on the throttle of Weber’s ghost train, plunging ahead one moment, the next, pulling back.

She’s playing the Elgar Cello Concerto with the husband of the woman who made the greatest-ever recording of it; she’s already won a “Genius” award from the MacArthur Foundation, and she’s got Decca hailing her as its first solo cellist signing in more than three decades. Lots of hype to live up to there, and Alisa Weilerstein seems on a hiding-to-nothing when the inevitable comparisons are made with Jacqueline duPré. What
the conspicuously intelligent American has going for her is a prodigious talent that’s been
recognised ever since she made
her concert debut with Cleveland
Orchestra nearly two decades ago.
That, and a commercial point-of-difference
in programming, with the immortal Elgar coupled implausibly with Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto, and then the bitter pill’s sugar- coating of Bruch’s Kol Nidrei. But Weilerstein is known for her interest
in contemporary music, and Carter’s Cello Concerto, filled with slap-pizzicato and spiky orchestral explosions, is one of the few works by the American composer’s-composer that has crossed over successfully into the popular concert hall. And strange as it may sound given the beloved warhorse company that it keeps, this boots-and-all recording of it is the highlight of an impressive CD which leaves the brain stimulated but the emotions strangely unengaged. In…

Academic and composer Stevie Wishart has edited and recorded the complete works of the recently beatified 12th-century mystic and composer Abbess Hildegard of Bingen over the last 20 years. She collaborates here with electronica producer Guy Sigsworth on a “creative re-imagining of a choral evensong”. Released with an eye on the crossover/new age audience, the disc may make purists recoil in horror but Wishart has never been afraid to allow some creative license in her interpretation of the melismatic neumes. Most of the content of this album features unadorned monodic chant performed by the six pure but characterful voices of Sinfonye, interspersed with Wishart’s tasteful reworkings “alio modo” (another way). One of Wishart’s original compositions, a particularly impressive polyphonic setting of the Magnificat, turns out to be the highlight of the disc, showing off the expressive range of the ensemble to better effect than the restrained chanting nun material surrounding it – indeed, I wished for more of this sort of polyphonic elaboration throughout. Some of the instrumental contributions come perilously close to 1970s folk/rock doodlings. And beware of two tracks where the producer has been allowed his head; Azeruz and ZuuenZ – generic ambient electronic soundscapes more appropriate for…

The image of heavyweight composer and patriarchal guardian of a decaying romantic tradition makes it easy to forget that Brahms started out as a virtuoso concert pianist. It is equally easy to forget that his third and final sonata, for his own instrument, was completed at the ridiculously precocious age of 20 (during a sojourn with his new friends Robert and Clara Schumann). From then on it was as if he had said all that he wanted to say in the genre, and his large scale piano compositions were henceforth confined to sets of variations – those on themes of Paganini and Handel being the most substantial. For his ambitious (and auspicious) debut on the BIS label, the British pianist Jonathan Plowright exhibits a prodigious musical appetite, tackling the meaty Third Sonata for his main course with the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel making for a rich and sumptuous dessert. The sonata again confounds any expectations you might have of Brahms as a structural conservative, being cast in no less than five contrasting movements, linked with a recognisably Beethovian thematic motto. It receives a carefully considered yet intensely dramatised reading, more tempestuous in approach than, say Radu…

Chamber music is the ideal medium for composers with a knack for polyphony. Here we have a fascinating disc of string trios by two exact contemporaries who were among the victims of Hitler’s Germany. Hans Gál fled to Scotland and lived a long (if obscure) life, while the Czech Hans Krása was interned at Terezin and killed in Auschwitz in 1944. While their music differs in intensity, both men were skilled at writing counterpoint so all these works are full of interest. Gál’s Serenade dates from 1932. Notable for its high spirits, it follows in the wake of similar trios by Beethoven and Dohnányi. The Trio of 1971 is understandably more autumnal in quality (apart from its Mendelssohnian Scherzo) and features a set of gentle, lyrical variations as its final movement. Krása’s music was heavily influenced by the Second Viennese School and is made of tougher stuff. Tanec (or Dance) is a short work evoking the sound of trains, with a tender chorale in the middle section. In the powerful Passacaglia and Fugue, the underlying emotional impetus stretches these highly structured forms almost to breaking point in Krása’s final composition. The performances by the Ensemble Epomeo are beyond praise: lively,…

At just 32 years of age, Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel is already the hottest property in classical music. Both on the mean streets of Caracas with his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, and closer to Hollywood Boulevard with the LA Philharmonic, who’ve just re-signed him as Chief Conductor until 2019, and even over in Gothenburg in Europe, he’s presiding over a musical revolution. And his Mahler recordings have already played a big part in it, whether it’s the Fifth Symphony with the South American kids, the live DVD of the Eighth, or various download-only recordings of other Mahler masterpieces, all given extraordinarily compelling readings. But none of those previous releases could truly prepare you for an encounter with this, Dudamel’s first full-scale Mahler CD with the LA Philharmonic in arguably the greatest symphony of them all, the Ninth. Recorded live last year before an audience with jaws on floor at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, it is incredibly well played (with Australia’s own Andrew Bain on first horn) and beautifully recorded by the Deutsche Grammophon engineers. But it’s Dudamel’s command of the overall architecture, and in particular his unerring… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

I made my debut at the Theatre du Chatelet last year conducting the Paris premiere of John Adams' first, and extremely complicated, opera Nixon in China. That, along with the Canadian Opera Company's production of Janacek's From the House of the Dead, was the most pleasurable new production I have conducted. It may have been a risk to programme this work but it paid off in spades as the French went literally wild for it and it received rave reviews in every paper and magazine worldwide. It led to the Director of the Chatelet, Jean-Luc Choplin, who is very daring in his programming, wanting to stretch the boundaries further by mounting Adams' third opera I Was Looking At The Ceiling And Then I Saw The Sky, in which he asked me to return and conduct and premieres here on June 11. "Ceiling" is not your average "opera". It was written by Adams in 1995 and centres around the LA earthquake of 1994. Adams wanted to make a departure from the true operatic world of his first two operas and try his hand at the musicals from Gershwin, Bernstein etc. that he had grown up with. The result is a mix…

As the last five crates were dumped unceremoniously into a ute and sped out of my life, I groped for some musical comfort, flimsy cheque quivering in my hand. What consolation could Bach’s cantatas hold for me? They were, after all, among the few essentials that escaped the dreaded CD cull. I’d been doing plenty of Weinen and Klagen (BWV12) about selling off my lovingly and painstakingly amassed library, but Ach wie flüchtig, ach wie nichtig (Ah how fleeting, ah how futile, BWV26) seemed to sum up both the transaction and the artifacts themselves.  Saying au revoir to 95 per cent of my CDs brings me closer to a long-held dream of one day moving to Paris: turns out you need money to live la vie bohème, and without all that beloved baggage it feels as if I have little left to stay for. Oh, that’s not true; I have plenty of friends. In fact, when word got out that everything must go, from Adams to Zelenka, musical acquaintances I hadn’t seen in years were popping round “for tea”.  A warning to hoarders contemplating a similar tabula rasa: you will not rake in a huge profit. Some conservatorium libraries won’t even accept bequests, lacking the manpower to manage…

When the renowned flautist Johann Joachim Quantz visited Alessandro Scarlatti in Naples in 1725, it seemed he inspired the ageing composer, hitherto ambivalent about wind instruments, to write some flute sonatas for him. Not only that; in the years that followed, the younger composers of the Neapolitan School also wrote specifically for the recorder – the flauto dolce, or transverse flute. This had not happened in Naples before, and only once again in the same period, during an amateur flautist’s reign as Viceroy between 1728 and 1733. So it is that a talented player often inspires composers. Likewise, recorder virtuoso Maurice Steger inspires his fellow instrumentalists here, with compelling performances of music from the mid-1720s by Alessandro Scarlatti and his “spiritual heirs”. Using a range of alto recorders and, in the Leo concerto, a soprano recorder, Steger leads a small band comprising strings, psalterium and continuo in a selection of concertos, sinfonias and sonatas by Scarlatti father and son, Sarro, Fiorenza, Barbella, Mancini and Leo. Throughout, Steger emulates the great singers of the day such as Farinelli, with beautiful cantabile lines tastefully ornamented to complement the sparkling allegro movements. The band is superb, with violinists Fiorenza de Donatis and Andrea…

Petrenko is transforming what has always been a good orchestra into an undeniably outstanding one, catapulting the RLPO into the very top of the second tier – no mean achievement and no faint praise. Their recent Rachmaninov Third Symphony was a harbinger about Petrenko’s calibre as a Rachmaninov interpreter, and this superb account of No 2 more than fulfills that promise. Few, if any other Romantic symphonies, need as convincing a pulse in the first movement. By the end of the Largo and Allegro Moderato, Petrenko has delivered slow-release incandescence with both conviction and that uniquely Slavic sense of yearning. He’s not afraid to employ quite striking rubatos without resorting to sentimental overstatement, and the formidable climaxes are beautifully integrated. The second-movement Scherzo with its initial Prokofiev-like spikiness is easier to bring off, but in the Adagio we’re back in the emotional heartland with a polished but tender clarinet solo. The finale erupts spectacularly, Petrenko’s lively but sensible pace reassuring me that this really was a vintage Rach 2, not one which fell at the last hurdle. It’s thrilling how he gradually gathers momentum in the Allegro Vivace. The other works, orchestral excerpts from the opera Aleko, are well chosen…

Scary time, the 1930s, when the Stalinist denunciation of Soviet artists made for serious anxiety among composers just waiting for the dreaded knock at the door from the secret police, and some of the justifiable paranoia is manifested in the music itself. Take the searing opening solo melody in Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto for instance, with which Dutch star Janine Jansen opens her outstanding new all- Prokofiev disc. It’s a restless, unsettled kind of thing, and that first movement as a whole is a musical cat on a hot tin roof, jumping at its own shadows, and made all the more disconcerting by the intellectual clarity of the performance and the equivalent audio definition in a masterly production job by Decca’s engineers. Not that it’s all Reds-under-the-bed hysteria. The concerto’s slow movement is a gloriously long-arching melody, even if the mechanical accompaniment provides a menacing, albeit subtle, reminder of the machinery of war parading by outside. Every note here is made to count, and while it never fully engages the emotions, Jansen again demonstrates why her first recording back in 2004 sold 300,000 copies. She is the violinist for the age, detached yet precise, cool but considered, and when she……

Last week was a theatrical rollercoaster. Sandwiched between two roles on stage, an over indulgent American mother and a medieval German nun, I observed and absorbed a diverse range of shows too; from a west end style musical to a family opera, an adapted European classic to a Canadian comedy, and a experimental development project too. And like any such ride, it brought some highs, as well as quite a few lows. I love the theatre, for many reasons. To quote one of my heroes, Cate Blanchett, it’s "life affirming, exhilarating". For those of us who know that feeling, who have experienced theatre's magic, whether watching it or being part of it, we know that there is nothing quite like it. We move on quickly from the lows, knowing that the highs will come. But sadly not everyone sees it that way and unfortunately, there are times when I can understand why. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was wonderful fun for children (mine, aged six, seven and eight, loved it) but it was an expensive and rather disappointing afternoon as an adult. I’d read up on the tour and so wasn’t expecting the marvels of a Matilda or a Mary Poppins…