The Grigoryan Brothers have impressed in recent years with their ability to genre-hop without ever seeming out of place; their collaboration with the Tawadros brothers a few years ago was excellent. The repertoire here is primarily performances of vocal favourites by Dvorˇák, Fauré, Elgar, and Tchaikovsky, among others, re-worked for guitar duo. There are a few issues with the repertoire selection in that some pieces are rather more effective than others. For example, Rachmaninov’s famous Vocalise comes off a distinct second-best for a simple reason – the guitar’s lack of sustain means that the notes disappear long before they should. In some of the pieces, the duo seems to have realised this dilemma. Tchaikovsky’s None but the Lonely Heart is taken at such a rapid clip that it’s done and dusted in about two minutes, whereas most recordings usually take at least a minute more. Since this is simply the nature of the instrument, pieces that don’t rely quite so much on a single sustained note work considerably better. Manuel de Falla’s set of Seven Spanish Folk Songs are played very effectively, though I wish there was more rhythmic bite in some of them – Jacqueline du Pré… Continue reading Get…

Believing in being Franck: A Polish detour adds spice to Little and Lane's French day out.

Hyperion’s admirable Romantic Piano Concerto series has been running for over 25 years. It would be easy to be exercised by the fact that it has taken until now, Volume 70, to arrive at a concerto by a female composer. Easy, but not entirely fair. Male dominance in the genre is almost total – even today – and perhaps more interesting than wrangling over quotas is the question of why. It’s a question this disc answers with vehement clarity. You only have to read the contemporary response to Amy Beach’s concerto – critics reading autobiographical significance into the lone voice of the piano crying out against the oppressive orchestra – to understand that a woman could never inhabit this most combative of musical forms on the same terms as a man. It’s interesting that both other concertos here eschew the traditional three-movement form – an attempt, perhaps, to reclaim and redefine their musical territory. Dorothy Howell’s 1923 Piano Concerto stretches the definition of “Romantic” to its limit. Filmic in scope, an abstract tone-poem drawing heavily on Debussy and Strauss, this single-movement work is the weakest of the three – an attractive showcase for soloist Danny Driver’s limpid touch, and the…

Recorded live in Sydney’s City Recital Hall last year, this disc takes the listener from the beautifully spare, intertwining lines of JS Bach’s The Art of Fugue to the lush complexity of Beethoven’s Opus 130 Quartet. Tognetti and the ACO merely dip their toes into Bach’s contrapuntal water, offering the first four movements of the collection as a kind of musical primer for the Beethoven. The first Contrapunctus presents Bach’s subject before it’s accompanied by lively dotted rhythms in the second and inverted in the third, the ACO’s weaving voices lilting conversationally. The fourth Contrapunctus is all pizzicato, a motif from the subject’s tail brought to soft, haunting life by the voices of the instrumentalists – a quirky touch that, while effective, might scare off traditionalists. From the clean lines of the Bach, the ACO blossoms into the warmer – if no less cerebral – textures of Beethoven’s String Quartet in B Flat, the orchestra off-leash in the first movement, singing in the lyrical moments. The Presto is taken at a gallop while the Alla Danza Tedesca: Allegro Assai has a sweet naivety. The Cavatina throbs with expression before the climax: the Große Fuge, which the ACO attacks with vigorous…

DG continues to releases live recordings of Grigory Sokolov. His mastery is unquestionable but he is famously enigmatic. He refuses all interviews, will not record in a studio, and as of 2005 stopped performing with orchestras. The Mozart concerto comes from January of that year. Was it the straw that broke the pianist’s back? The legend of the reclusive artist is rejected by many but not by DG, who enclose a documentary entitled Grigory Sokolov: A Conversation That Never Was. In it, friends and colleagues praise Sokolov extravagantly, although he himself is absent. One viewing suffices. Despite Pinnock at the helm, the Mozart is given an old-school reading. Poetry abounds in the first movement, while the Adagio builds to a climax of cinematic proportions. Sokolov expends more energy in the finale than other pianists do in Brahms. He is more suited to the Rachmaninov, where his innate mastery of the music’s ebb and flow is on the highest level. As in his solo recitals he is fond of extremes. He thunders through the cadenza of the first movement (a passage where I feel less is usually more), but the section immediately following is beautifully delicate. As a live recording (from…

When it comes to a toss-up between slow-release rumination and velocity, I’ll take the former any time. Khatia Buniatishvili’s last release – Pictures at an Exhibition,  La Valse and Three Movements from Petrouchka – was a brutal disaster to my ears, showing little regard or understanding for the music. She fares a great deal better here, although both these performances often lack what virtually all Rachmaninov’s music needs most: that uniquely Russian sense of yearning, with an overlay of stoic resignation. This is where the slow release rumination comes in! Both these concertos are played faster than usual. One of the great challenges for this music, especially the Second, is that of revealing a new insight beneath the ‘dazzling virtuosity’, which here, like that of virtually every other artist who records this repertoire now, is impressive. The recording also militates against the contribution of the Czech Philharmonic, which is recessively recorded and doesn’t provide the luxuriant backing that we hear from the Philadelphia orchestra in Daniil Trifonov’s recent triumphant CD. The Third Concerto likewise comes up slightly short with persistently low voltage until near the very end, when she lets the rhetoric rip. I found myself yearning for those langorous…

In 1761, at the age of 29, Haydn joined the household of the Esterházy family as Vice-Kapellmeister and set to work proving his worth by writing the three symphonies we know as Le Matin, Le Midi and Le Soir; his only true cycle and the most programmatic of his symphonies. The idea for illustrating the times of the day was suggested by Prince Paul Anton but the only truly explicit passages are the sunrise opening of Le Matin and the storm of the conclusion to Le Soir – the flute’s forked-lightning motif Haydn would re-use some 40 years later in The Seasons. The cycle harks back to the concerto grosso style with concertante intrumentation displaying the individual talents of his front-desk players to win over his new workmates – everybody gets a turn in the spotlight, even the double-bass during the trios; that of Le Matin hints at Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. Seven years later on the death of his superior, Haydn assumed the full position as Kapellmeister so took on responsibilities for writing church music while churning out reams of chamber music including numerous baryton trios for the voracious musical appetite of Prince Nikolaus. Despite the workload, Haydn produced the extraordinary…

The clue is in the title. Bellini’s ‘graduation opera’ Adelson e Salvini is more buffo bromance than tragic romance, and none the worse for it. Composed while he was still a student at Naples’ Royal College of Music, and premiered by an all-male cast of fellow students in 1825, the work is a precociously tuneful, intermittently dramatic affair (though the less said about the 17th-century Irish plot the better). Rossini and Mozart are plentifully represented here in the younger composer’s first opera, but there are also tantalising hints of the mature composer to come, and this premiere recording by Opera Rara does its youthful promise proud. Opera Rara know how to put together a cast, and this one’s no exception. Baritone Simone Alberghini (Lord Adelson) and tenor Enea Scala (his friend, the painter Salvini) battle for the affections of the magnificent Daniela Barcellona’s Nelly – richly resonant, painting her vocal lines with the thickest of brush-strokes – while Maurizio Muraro blusters and booms characterfully as the Leporello-ish manservant Bonifacio. Rising young conductor Daniele Rustioni shapes an affectionate and lightfooted account of the score, deploying some lovely solo woodwind textures (skittish flutes for Bonifacio, melancholic oboes for Nelly’s Romanza Dopo l’oscuro…

You have to admit, Handel knew how to craft a drama equal with the best at HBO. Theodora is a masterpiece, and with the drama focussed on the relationships between the central four characters, superbly sung, this is a story that resonates easily with modern audiences. With unity in direction, concept and lighting, this is a fantastic production. Although he’s top billing, Philippe Jaroussky (Didyme) is the weakest member of this ensemble of singing actors. Vocally, he is stunning, but a stronger presence on stage would have made more of the juxtaposition between the feminine quality of his vocal tone and the traditional heroism of his character. The soldier’s physicality is a little uncomfortable, and in stark contrast to his masculine costuming. However, Kresimir Spicer (Septime) is so astonishingly good that the comparison is a little unfair. He sails through the notorious Dread the Fruits of Christian Folly, with gravity defying coloratura while Descend, Kind Pity reveals his astonishing legato. The female cast is just as strong. Katherine Watson (Theodora) is youthful and sweet, balancing the steel and sweetness of the martyr. Her Irene is the captivating Stephanie d’Oustrac, whose extraordinary presence translates effortlessly to screen. William Christie paces superbly…

Carl Heinrich Graun (1704-1759) shared Hasse’s popular acclaim and fondness for effervescent coloratura. Unlike Hasse, however, his music has remained confined to the archives, and it has fallen to Russian soprano Julia Lezhneva to dust it off. The arias here – world premieres all, save one – make a startlingly strong case for Graun’s music in all its exhilarating virtuosity and emotional variety. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Lezhneva, whose advocacy is blighted by technical problems. Something has gone badly wrong with this voice. Back in 2010, aged just 21, Lezhneva had a winning combination of purity and agility, and a lovely ease to her production. But vocal quirks and an increasingly manufactured delivery have crystallised into a voice that has retained agility, but at the cost of power and tonal control. Lezhneva now sounds like a precocious boy-treble – light and nimble, but snatching at top notes, swooping through intervals, blurting through legato passages. A shame, as there’s some thrilling music, stylishly performed by the exemplary Concerto Köln. Graun’s two styles – poised and proto-galant in ballads, outdoing even Vinci for brilliance in the stormy numbers – make for a disc of contrasts. There’s simple beauty in…

Visceral Vivaldi brought vividly to life by Sydney’s very finest.

In Aristotle’s Poetics, catharsis was considered a desirable state brought about by arousing and magnifying the emotions in such a way that the spectator’s inner being would be purified. The best way to do this, Aristotle reckoned, was to evoke fear and pity by confronting an audience with a vision of souls in torment. The musical equivalent is what Catalan countertenor Xavier Sabata aims to induce on the enterprising Aparté label with a string of mostly unknown opera seria arias by the likes of Orlandini, Conti, Torri, Caldara, Ariosti and Sarro plus a handful of classics from Handel, Hasse and Vivaldi thrown in for good measure and a nod to marketing. Not that marketing needs much help. With the hirsute Sabata taking what I presume is a cathartic icy shower on the cover, this is a CD that is unlikely to go unnoticed on the shelves. With a good recital disc, the programme is half the battle, and in that respect Sabata has played an absolute blinder. He opens with a real find in the form of a classic ‘nemesis-aria’ from Orlandini’s Adelaide. Sabata has one of the richest, darkest countertenor voices on the circuit. Blessed with a splendid legato,…