In 19th-century Poland, composers faced a real dilemma. The country had been partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria, super-powers with a vested interest in keeping nationalistic music firmly out of the public domain. That left
 you two options. The first was 
to become a composer-virtuoso (the path taken by Paderewski along the way to becoming Polish Prime Minister) so you might be able to export your music to an international audience. Juliusz Zarębski (1854-85), complete with flamboyant shock of hair, was one such showman, gaining a European reputation for his performances on a double keyboard piano. The other possibility was to stay at home and teach, the sedate choice of Władysław Żeleński (1837-1921). These two gentlemen of two roads diverg’d are the subjects of this fascinating disc from Hyperion. Zarębski’s Piano Quintet, a 40-minute work as rich in melody as it is strong on motivic development, was heard in Martha Argerich’s impassioned 2011 Lugano Festival release. The composer was clearly something of an innovator, employing bold tonal shifts and quirky rhythmic devices. The 
 Żeleński Piano Quartet is entirely new to CD but should make many friends on this showing: as tuneful as the Zarębski but with an added layer……

Strange as it may seem now, Prokofiev’s most famous ballet had a particularly painful birth. The Soviet director Adrian Piotrovsky suggested a ballet adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy to the composer in 1935, but the Bolshoi pronounced the finished work “undanceable”. The Kirov agreed to stage Romeo and Juliet (complete with happy ending!) but plans were rapidly shelved after the dramaturge
 was denounced in the Pravda article Balletic Falsehood. It was his libretto for Shostakovich’s ballet The Limpid Stream that 
had offended. Piotrovsky was arrested and shot the following year – a definite nadir for the arts in Stalin’s Russia. The revised version (now with acceptable tragic ending) didn’t see the light of day until 1940, when the Bolshoi turned out to be able to dance it after all. Since then it has conquered the world, danced by the likes of Fonteyn and Nureyev. The three suites are regular concert items. Sydney Symphony chief Vladimir Ashkenazy clearly identifies strongly with the work, having recorded it for Decca
 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra ten years ago. He rightly treats it as Prokofiev’s most elevated piece – sincere, emotional and unflagging in its inspiration. So how does the new CD stack up? On…

So apparently Benjamin Britten once died, and to prove it the BBC is making a docu-drama about his final decade. Well, it is the centenary, after all, and the English sure do love him. It’s taken most of the art out of guessing what Oxford ensembles might programme over the course of 2013. Actually, it turns out that some of Britten’s lesser-known choral music is pretty extraordinary. This livens things up no end if you happen to sing with Schola Cantorum of Oxford (as I do, having unaccountably passed the audition back in October). Schola has collaborated with the BBC several times recently on composer profile pieces, and we duly fronted up to the chapel at St Peter’s College – which is also our usual rehearsal space – on 11 February. Our task: to be filmed singing three Britten numbers while not stuffing up too badly or accidentally looking into a camera. Upon arrival, it was a bit like the first five minutes of a Doctor Who episode – all frosted blue light and dry ice, with unknown backlit entities lumbering through the murkiness from time to time. Sadly, we weren’t permitted to pretend to land a TARDIS, nor even…

Here begins our first tour back to Australia and New Zealand in 2013! We are so glad to be back! Sydney couldn’t be more perfect at this time of year. The first thing we noticed when leaving Sydney airport was the air – it is warm and smells sweet, like flowers and eucalypts. Trees and greenery are everywhere; we feel like we have landed in paradise after having just spent months surrounded by grey concrete and snow. One good thing about jetlag is that you wake early enough to watch the sun come up – on our first morning back home in the Blue Mountains, we woke at 4am to watch the sunrise. It’s absolutely magical – the kookaburras begin laughing at the moment that the sun appears. Even though I make this trip three times a year, I still find it so surreal how you can just cross seasons in the space of 24 hours. Before 24 hour flight: After 24 hour flight: This tour is going to be quite different from any other one we have done, because we're without our cellist this time. Martin injured in an accident with a taxi that ran a red light while…

Bernarda Fink has a vibrant mezzo-soprano voice and the sense of style to interpret this program to the manner born – which, despite her surname, she was. The daughter of Slovenian parents, she was brought up in Buenos Aires. Her repertoire includes Baroque music and mainstream German and French song, but this Spanish recital does not come out of the blue: it follows an earlier release of Argentinean songs from 2006. The diverse program,
which includes many rarities, concentrates on three of the
four masters of 20th-century Spanish song. (The missing one is Joaquín Turina.) It opens with Falla’s well-known Seven Popular Spanish Songs, and straight away Fink reveals her strengths: a strong chest voice for Andalusian declamation, the ability to float her warm tone at the top of her register and an understanding of the emotional terrain that allows her to hold nothing back in this spirited, heart-on-sleeve music. Rodrigo’s gentle Adela 
follows, the first of his Tres canciones españolas, and here Fink presents a beautifully poised cantilena against the simple accompaniment, rendered with style by American pianist Anthony Spiri. Rodrigo’s songs tend to
be spare in texture, Granados’s popular Tonadillas notable for their elegance, while Falla remains the most earthy. Throughout,…

It can’t be easy being Lang Lang, what with the hype surrounding him as the world’s favourite pianist and all. And yet as a commercial commodity the 30-year-old’s been delivering that showmanship and technical excellence ever since he wowed Beijing and the world more than half his lifetime ago. The hard bit comes in translating the unparalleled reputation into musical performances that truly take your breath away year after year. He remains a wonderful player, the recording quality of his discs is a given, and in the show- off works like those featured on his previous Liszt album, his extrovert style is hard to beat. But Chopin? Sure, it’s well- known that Lang Lang has built much of his career on this beloved composer’s work, and for the non- specialist music-lover buying on the performer’s well-deserved reputation alone, there will be more than enough musical ability here to leave a favourable impression. But for those comparing Lang Lang’s Chopin
 with recent efforts by the now- septuagenarian Maurizio Pollini
on DG, and Lang Lang’s labelmate, young tearaway Khatia Buniatishvili, things become more competitive. With all the poetry and sadness deriving from a lifetime of supreme musicianship, Pollini’s take on
the 24 Preludes Op…

Not many composers would be reasonably justified in releasing a retrospective collection of their works at the meager age of 33, let alone have the arsenal in their creative inventory to present it in five meaty volumes. But then, having already collaborated with the likes of Richard Tognetti, Jon Rose and Brett Dean, Melbourne-raised Anthony Pateras isn’t like many other young composers. Pateras’ Collected Works 2002–2012 affirms his position as one of the most respected and sought-after Australian composers of his generation. The 5-CD limited edition box set spans a decade of creative output across various instrumental media, from chamber, orchestral to solo piano. Reproduced in the notes are excerpts from a handful of Pateras’ highly personal and oftentimes clinically schematic scores, offering a fascinating insight into the composer’s unique way of assembling sounds. The list of Pateras’ recruited performing artists reads as an all-star line of Australian talent, comprising Dean conducting the ANAM Orchestra in the fragmented, free-wheeling Immediata electric violin concerto with Tognetti as soloist, Melbourne-based experimental outfit Golden Fur in chamber piece Broken then fixed then Broken, and Timothy Munro as bass flautist in the ethereal and monolithic Lost Compass. Pateras himself executes a mix of prepared…

An impertinent, altogether exhilarating performance filled with extreme tempo and dynamic shifts

“Too much beer and bread,” said Paul Dukas about the music of Johannes Brahms, and certainly there have been some who have found the contrapuntal density of the Viennese master an inhibition. It would be a churlish listener, however, who could apply this prejudice to the violin sonatas, packed as they are with gentle lyricism,
 memorable melody and plenty 
of fresh air between the notes.
These three works, written over 
a ten-year period, show Brahms
 at his sunniest and have attracted distinguished interpreters. This 
latest CD features British violinist
 Anthony Marwood and his Serbian
 partner, pianist Aleksandar Madžar, recorded live at London’s Wigmore Hall. The duo recently delighted Australian audiences on their national tour for Musica Viva and so this CD is doubly welcome. The G Major Sonata here receives one of
 the loveliest readings I can recall, Marwood’s silvery tone spinning a continuous line with numerous inspired touches. A violinist with 
a lighter touch yields riches and offers greater flexibility than those who opt for melody at the expense of a more engaging conversational tone. The outer movements capture Brahms’s magical Viennese lilt and the poignant Adagio is especially memorable, its mellow song wistfully tugging at the heart. Madžar here……

Despite the academic narrative that suggests opposing aesthetics, the pairing of the Brahms and Berg Violin Concertos makes perfect historical sense, Berg’s anguished tribute In Memory of an Angel 
to Alma Mahler’s daughter, who died aged just 18, representing a logical extension of the late Romantic sensibility from which the Second Viennese School took its lead. But French violinist Renaud Capuçon’s performance of the two works, conducted by fellow 30-something Daniel Harding with the Vienna Philharmonic, almost makes Brahms sound postmodern compared with the merely “modern” Berg, courtesy of the vastly different characters that he brings to each of its three movements. Technically excellent throughout, the first movement of the Brahms faffs about interpretively for nearly its entire 22-minute duration, not really engaging the emotions, until the Kreisler cadenza (so much spikier and self-conscious than the usual
 Joachim one) suddenly resolves into the most sublime conclusion imaginable. The slow movement then continues in the same
 vein, making it a candidate for a standalone Swoon compilation. Then the finale sounds like it’s had its structure rearranged by Picasso in his cubist phase, passages of clashing genres and rhythmic gear shifts being emphasised (à la Boulez with Mahler) rather than reconciled. And……

In an industry said to be in more or less dire straits by various sources, I’m amazed that a small boutique label like Oehms can afford to issue two recordings of Mahler’s Resurrection symphony with different conductors and orchestras. Simone Young’s Hamburg recording followed
 hot on the heels of Markus Stenz’s Cologne effort. Now, here is another Markus Stenz live performance with the Melbourne Symphony, of which he was chief conductor. Stenz proved his credentials as a Mahler conductor during his slow-release cycle a few years ago. This performance dates from December 2004. I don’t know why it’s taken almost a decade to reach us. That said, I enjoyed this traversal. It’s quite different from Simone Young’s: more volatile, with a much greater range of tempos and moods. Occasionally, I felt he skated over details in the first movement and the phrasing risked sounding perfunctory. (Perhaps ironically, this version is overall about four minutes longer than Young’s.) The Minuet movement is commendably unsentimental
 but the Scherzo is taken too 
fast for it to register its sardonic and demonic quality. Both Stenz’s soloists, mezzo-soprano Bernadette Cullen and soprano Elizabeth Whitehouse, seem more comfortable than their Hamburg counterparts. Also, in the Urlicht…

What a journey is traversed in Schubert’s nine symphonies, from the adolescent pomposity of the opening flourish of the First, through the genuine drama of the Fifth and onto the pure, unadulterated inspiration of the final two. And along the way are the under-appreciated gems, the Third in particular that, please forgive me, beats hands- down anything that Mozart or Mendelssohn had written in the symphonic form by the same age of barely 20. No wonder so many of the great conductors have had a crack at the complete set, and let’s just list von Karajan, Böhm, Barenboim, Muti, Abbado and Harnoncourt for starters, not to mention the Peter Maag LP-era and the Jos van Immerseel sets. So Marc Minkoswki and Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble are mixing it with the big boys in this new boxed set recorded live in March 2012 in Vienna’s Konzerthaus. Good thing they know what they’re doing. Using the same technique they applied to Haydn’s London Symphonies, the 30-year-old French group performed the entire series in a week and recorded the lot, the upshot of the spontaneity being some really exciting performances, and the downside being the occasional ouch-moment when the period instruments… Continue…