It is hardly surprising that the Australian-born Leslie Howard has been typecast as a Liszt pianist: he recorded the Hungarian master’s complete piano works on 99 CDs. It is therefore interesting to hear him in other music, even if it is not far removed from his specialty. The two composers were both known as phenomenal lions of the keyboard, but what Rachmaninov also requires is depth of feeling. The last of the great Romantics, his piano music is imbued with a distinctively Russian angst. A full, deep tone is required to express the melancholy in his slow music and the barely concealed savagery in his turbulent climaxes. Howard meets these demands, and puts them to good use in the earlier D minor Sonata (1907). In this work there is a sense of the composer stretching his wings: his habitual use of sequential passages in place of development is rather transparent, especially as the melodic content is not all that memorable. Howard finds moments of pure tranquillity in the slow movement but strikes me as heavy-handed in the rhythmically charged finale. The B flat minor Sonata is more mature. An entrancing slow movement opens with Scriabin-like chromatic harmony… Continue reading Get…

The encore is an awkward ritual, but without it concertgoers feel cheated. The audience knows the artist is coming back; the artist knows it, but still we cheer and applaud, willing the performer to reappear. When our exhortations are rewarded, the artist pretends the little nugget they’ve kept up their sleeve is a spontaneous addition. But presenting a satisfying encore is an art in itself, and Spanish cellist Pablo Casals had an arsenal of compact crowd-pleasers for precisely this purpose. No doubt a disc of beloved encores once popularised by the most revered cellist of the 20th century – some in Casals’ own transcriptions – means big shoes to fill for Alban Gerhardt, whose faultless technique and singing tone make this an admirable tribute. The program’s balanced selection contrasts favourites with rarities, sparkling virtuosic display with the slow, expressive numbers that defined Casals’ encore style. Some of the most famous inclusions are weighed down by familiarity – Elgar’s Salut d’amore, Saint-Saëns’s The Swan and Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude languish most. As is often the case in concert, the most successful offerings are the most surprising. Boccherini’s Sonata in A major is the ideal showcase for Gerhardt’s… Continue reading Get unlimited digital…

Four players with a big vision of music feel like an entity in themselves.

Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs are traditionally regarded as the last gasp of Romantic music, despite being written decades after its “official” demise. I prefer to bestow that mantle on Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, albeit only the so-called “torso” of the first movement and the tiny intermezzo-like purgatorio are completely orchestrated by him. Recent years have seen a plethora of different versions but Mark Wigglesworth cleaves to the original performing edition by Deryck Cooke. The performance is a superb achievement – sonically, interpretively and in execution. The opening Adagio sets forth like a stately galleon sailing into dark waters which seem to lap at the boundary of where the Ninth Symphony stopped. The dissonant shards are well handled and intensify the anguish. Both the second and fourth movements are scherzi and both exude Mahlerian ambiguity: febrile Viennese gaiety and even exaltation, undermined by nervous fluctuating metrical changes, with nostalgic violas in the second, alternating with a dance of death, again, similar to the Rondo burleske in the Ninth. The pivot is the purgatorio movement, barely five minutes long, which starts innocently but soon becomes insidious. My only criticism relates to the start of the final Adagio, where the score… Continue reading…

You’d be surprised what just two violins can do. Natsuko Yoshimoto and James Cuddeford, formerly the upper half of both the Australian String Quartet and Grainger Quartet, have long commissioned more than their fair share of inventive, witty and often very beautiful Australian duets. This excellent disc presents the final fruits of their joint mission and the array is diverse. Echoes of folk music appear in Stuart Greenbaum’s Danny Boy Variations and Andrew Ford’s affecting pair of works, balanced by Cuddeford’s sober memorial to the victims of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. Roger Smalley and Elena Kats-Chernin both turn in sets of neat miniatures alongside a clever Compossible by David Harris. For me, however, the standouts are the opening and closing tracks. Matthew Hindson’s titular piece is hedonistic and energetic, maturely fusing his early attraction to pop music with new sonic complexities. By contrast Mary Finsterer’s Spherica No 1 is ethereal and otherworldly, the violins spinning a careful web of glistening harmonics. Cuddeford and Yoshimoto were married at the time of this recording and the disc is by default a powerful portrait of their lengthy musical and personal partnership. The pair sound highly attuned to each other, almost… Continue reading…

The Italian early music group Accordone was founded by members of L’Arpeggiata and trades in similar repertoire, reinventing Neapolitan folk music with a captivating blend of period-instrument Baroque precision and improvisatory abandon. The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra has toured with both ensembles in Australia, which begs the question: why is this style so popular? Well, there’s plenty of dancing. Accordone’s new album is bursting with ritual tarantellas and jaunty peasant songs. The sunny Mediterranean chitarro guitar adds to the zest of castanets and tambourines, but the incessant stamping rhythms can become exhausting. If percussive excess tires the ear, the voice of Marco Beasley soothes it. Soulful and supple, his is an instrument ideally attuned to the album’s serenades and lullabies. Nowhere is the tenor more beguiling than in the sensual chromatic descent of Volumbrella, caressed by the velvet sheen of a viol quartet. Pino de Vittorio’s more brazen, traditional folk style is an excellent foil to Beasley’s sweeter tone in theatrical duets. And those rolled Italian Rs add still more rustic bite! These vibrant songs are based around the life and times of the infamous Fra’ Diavolo (Brother Devil), an 18th-century freedom fighter against the French occupation of Naples. Judging by the… Continue reading…

Marc-André Hamelin is one of the greatest pianists alive today. His technique is superhuman, as is his memory for the reams of notes penned by Alkan and Godowsky. He has recorded many fine discs for Hyperion, which is fortunate as it gives the potential buyer plenty to choose instead of this one. Of all the German late-Romantics, Max Reger is the hardest to love. His textures are thick, his themes unmemorable and his dense counterpoint impenetrable. His best pieces are sets of variations on themes by other composers: Mozart, Hiller and Bach. Left to his own devices, as in this bloated Brahmsian concerto from 1910, his worst habits come to the fore, including haste: he composed and scored the 38-minute monster in a matter of weeks. Contemporary critics were scathing –… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The last recording I reviewed by Julia Fischer was her standout performance of the Paganini Caprices, where the performer was in splendid isolation, with nothing between her and her audience. Here she performs wrapped in the embrace of rich orchestration, in concert works by Ottorino Respighi (Poema autunnale), Josef Suk (Fantasy in D minor), Ernest Chausson (Poème, Op 25) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (The Lark Ascending).  The Suk work runs to 25 minutes. At that length, and in its dramatic scope, it amounts to a virtual one-movement violin concerto. The other pieces are much shorter, at around 15 minutes each. None except for the ethereal Lark is heard much on stage nowadays.  Yet they all deserve a wide audience. The drama of both the Suk and the Chausson and… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

In 1819 the publisher Anton Diabelli asked several composers each to write a single variation on a fairly nondescript waltz of his own. Beethoven set the task aside for four years – possibly the collegiate nature of the commission held little appeal – but eventually returned to Diabelli’s theme, proceeding to de- and re-construct every aspect of it in a monumental set of 33 variations. A major work, it postdates the piano sonatas and was composed at the same time as the Choral Symphony. This is late Beethoven, the deaf and obsessive composer who pushed the envelope and for whom an executant’s stamina was no longer a consideration. The variations display a double dose of virtuosity. For one thing, they stretch the pianist technically: the rapid Variations 17, 25 and 28 are as dazzling and difficult… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The little English early music choir with the wacky Italian name (I Fagiolini means “the beans”) has made it to the big-time with its Decca debut, which has outstripped albums by pop stars such as Eminem and Bon Jovi on the British charts. I also say “big-time” because the madrigal specialists have augmented their lineup for this premiere recording of a long-lost High Renaissance masterpiece in forty individual parts. Like Monteverdi a generation later, Alessandro Striggio was employed by the court of Gonzaga and patronised by the powerful Medicis. But his name is associated more often with Thomas Tallis, who famously heard one of Striggio’s 40-part offerings and indulged a little one-upmanship with the same polychoral forces in the famous Spem in alium.  Tallis may streak ahead of his… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

This release becomes a magnificent final testament to one of the greatest interpreters of Czech music. Asrael, named for the angel of death (for both Jews and Muslims) was the product of Josef Suk’s grief after losing his father-in-law Dvorák and his young wife in rapid succession. What fascinates me more than anything about this genuinely neglected masterpiece – a genre which in the age of Naxos is becoming rarer – is the dignity of Suk’s suffering: he rarely descends to the Manfred-like lugubriousness of Tchaikovsky or the self-dramatisation of Mahler. Only at the end of the first movement with screaming strings and manic drums does his suffering become uncontrollable, a moment perfectly calibrated by Mackerras and the Czech Philharmonic, who play like real angels throughout. From the opening bars, Mackerras captures the elegiac atmosphere with the soulful cor anglais over pizzicato strings. In the second movement Andante, these forces distill the exquisite numbness of grief. However, what makes this work so… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Best known for orchestral works and grand opera, the Russian group of composers known as “The Mighty Handful” (Balakïrev, Borodin, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky) are found here in the salon, with a bouquet of piano works. The centrepiece is Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, played in the original version. British pianist Philip Edward Fisher is most convincing in its lighter episodes, serving up an effervescent Ballet of the Chickens in their Eggs. For the hulking Polish cart Bydlo and the rousing Great Gate at Kiev finale, his playing is a touch too staid and introspective, never rising above forte or the constraints of “niceness”. Balakïrev’s Islamey, meanwhile, is dissected by Fisher with refreshing rigour. It’s a laudable attempt to make musical sense of a work often abused as a vehicle for virtuosity, especially by competition pianists…. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in