For many composers the 20th century was an era of paranoia. For some, particularly in Europe, the paranoia was about survival. Mostly, however, the paranoia was aesthetic; after the fall of tonality all doors were open. Which notes to use? How many notes to use? Whose notes to use? When to use them? Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski developed his own very individual response to this problem with a technique he called “limited aleatorism”. Instrumentalists would play their own carefully notated parts in their own time and at their own pace, cued by a conductor, creating a spaciousness and depth that is refreshed by every performance. You can hear this in the two masterful later works on this disc, both from the 1980s. Chain 3 and the Symphony No 3 are inventive and free, their constantly shifting branches teeming with life. The much earlier Concerto For Orchestra… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The first disc is the closest to the classic art song in style, allowing Anne Sofie von Otter to give full expression to these songs. Five are settings by Mehldau of poems by the early American poet Sara Teasdale, with one poem each from e.e. cummings and Philip Larkin. Von Otter invests these with plenty of rubato and emotion; this is her disc. The second disc shows more freedom in a light pop-jazz way. Although von Otter confesses she dares not try improvisation, she is able to cope easily with Mehldau’s mildly swinging approach to standards by composers including Richard Rodgers, Joni Mitchell, Lennon-McCartney, Bernstein and a group of French masters of the genre, including Michel Legrand and Jacques Brel. She does this by mainly observing rhythm and melody and lightening up the intense interpretative expression we heard earlier. Lightness is the key. It is a pleasant… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Lovers of musicals usually fall into either the Broadway camp or the Lloyd Webber camp. The skirmishes between the two are frequent, bloody and pointless. It’s simply a case of incompatible sensibilities: Webber writes modern light opera (i.e. all dialogue is sung) with an operatic, often overblown sense of drama and pathos; Broadway shows traditionally interleave spoken dialogue with musical numbers, highlight the pizzazz of the performer and wield a sense of irony absent in Webber’s work. But even fans of Webber may be a touch disappointed by this double CD, in which many beloved songs are rendered as instrumentals. Starlight Express, The First Man You Remember and I Don’t Know How to Love Him are performed by the likes of cellist Julian Lloyd Webber and André Rieu.These instrumentals sound dangerously like elevator music. Fortunately, for the tracks that are sung, Decca has deployed some of the finest voices you could desire. Sarah Brightman tackles Whistle Down the Wind; Anna Netrebko sings the… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The energy emanating from this exciting disc and accompanying DVD of Indian traditional music is almost palpable. In concert, the Dhoad Gypsies of Rajasthan dance, contort and breathe fire, as well as singing traditional folk songs from the deserts and light classical songs from North India. Led by tabla player Rahis Bharti, the group is formed around a pulsating percussion base, with morsing (jew’s harp), dholak (drum), kartal (wooden clappers) and several tablas. Over this weaves the bowed, cello-like sarangi and the harmonium, introduced to India by French missionaries in the mid 19th-century. With several vocalists, their music is part of the lineage which includes the Sufi qawwali devotional singers such as the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The wedding song Banno excites with its pounding drumbeat; the tongue-in-cheek Rajasthani Reggae is an invitation to love sung over a loping tabla rhythm. Vocalist Sanjay Khan hauntingly sings of the Wind of Love over bowed sarangi strings before the short frenzied dancing… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Written in 1940, the Symphonic Dances was Rachmaninov’s final orchestral work. Regarded as hopelessly retrospective at the time, it has since been re-evaluated as a masterpiece. The first movement begins with a stamping, syncopated rhythm, alternating with a wistful lament from the alto saxophone. The second movement is a restless waltz that is never content to settle into a single key. The kaleidoscopic third movement closes explosively with the Dies Irae chant, a musical theme that haunted the melancholic composer all his life. Its central episode, a yearning chromatic passage for strings, is as far from the world of dance as could be. The work has been recorded often by more famous orchestras, but Sokhiev gives an impressive and thoughtful performance. His feeling for rubato is spot on. He is not afraid to slow down for lyrical moments, yet the underlying momentum is… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Midori was only 13 or 14 when she recorded this account of Paganini’s First Violin Concerto and two morsels by Tchaikovsky, the Sérénade Mélancolique Op 26 and the Valse Scherzo Op 34. Yet the virtuosic demands of the first and last of these pieces do not daunt her; nor does she ever sound as if sheer virtuosity is an end in itself. These are satisfying performances with no allowance needed for her youthfulness. There is a technical drawback – but it is not hers. Rather, the primitive digital recording technology of the time (this recording dates from 1987) denies her the sonic richness which earlier analogue record producers brought to a fine art, and which today’s digital engineers have rediscovered. There’s a rather dry, clinical feel in the recording. It’s for this reason that Midori’s account of the Paganini, although a satisfying performance, can’t really supplant such… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The 2nd and 11th are among Shostakovich’s least known symphonies. Chronologically they bookend Stalin’s reign in Soviet Russia, a period of great personal anxiety for the composer, which paradoxically produced his symphonic masterpieces (the 5th, 6th, 8th and 10th symphonies). Shostakovich was only 21 when he composed the 2nd, a relatively short work for chorus and orchestra. In its harmony, structure and technique it is pure 1920s avant-garde, but strip away the wailing sirens and shouting chorus effects and you’ll find a Soviet pot-boiler. There is a visceral immediacy to the work’s depiction of the uprising of 1917, but those qualities of ironic jokiness and despair that characterise his best music are entirely absent. By contrast, the 11th, which deals with the aborted revolution of 1905, is a vast orchestral canvas. Quoting revolutionary songs of the period, the work is drawn out in… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

This performance of Rodrigo’s famous Concierto de Aranjuez is probably very different from what the composer ever envisaged or heard.

Australian pianist Stephanie McCallum is renowned for tackling the 19th-century virtuoso repertoire. Schumann presents an entirely different degree of difficulty. Though by no means easy to play, his music also demands a high level of empathy. His three-movement Fantasie exemplifies the composer’s stormy marriage of form and content. In my opinion, the emotional aspect is already written into the notes: Schumann, like Chopin, does not benefit from extra rubato or exaggerated dynamics. Judging from this recording, McCallum feels the same way. Her gradations of tone colour are subtly judged, and discreet pauses in the music’s progress are never underlined. Nothing is over-pointed. This is true throughout the whole recital. No thundering out the Novelette’s opening deluge of notes for her! In the Scenes from Childhood suite’s best known movement, Traumerei, she plays the famous theme gently but still with youthful energy. The suite ends with a piece… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Giuseppe Verdi was not the most devout composer of his time, but in Italy he was the most popular. When Rossini died, Verdi set about organising a requiem in the older master’s honour. That project foundered, and Verdi’s Libera me found its way into his full Requiem, written in 1873 in memory of Alessandro Manzoni. From the start, Verdi’s Requiem was more about public than private grief. It is operatic in style and scope – indeed, three of the original soloists sang the leads in the European premiere of Aida. Some conductors try to emphasise the spiritual side of the work, but Verdi’s Requiem is a matter of blood and guts as much as life and death. The chorus’s doomed Requiem aeternam is suffused with the portent of high tragedy. The opening of the Dies irae, with its drum whacks and shattering minor… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

This release focuses on Russian composers from the early 20th-century – including some émigré composers – who were linked through the famous pre-Revolutionary Moscow Synodal School of church singing. The comprehensive notes give an excellent background to the composers, who included Chesnokov, Gretchaninov and Viktor Kalinnikov. Though their styles diverge, the extraordinary sonority of the lusciously-voiced choral writing is a common point, as is the deep bass singing – as resonant as cathedral bells. To give a taste of the musical lineage of these composers, some earlier works are represented by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. An extract from Rachmaninov’s famous Liturgy shows how deeply that late-Romantic composer was affected by this tradition. Past and present are inextricably linked in this tradition, which draws from Gregorian chant, and which can be heard reflected too in the 20th-century revolutionary writings of Prokofiev, especially for his soundtracks… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

All-in-one music systems have come a long way from the table-top-sized music centre.