Bru Zane’s latest from the vault of neglected French opera suggests why Ferdinand Hérold was once regarded as the country’s greatest musician. Le Pré aux Clercs is a light counterpart to Les Huguenots. Despite duels and a death it ends happily. Certainly happier than for Hérold himself, who died of consumption a month after the premiere in 1832. Only his ballet La Fille Mal Gardée and the brilliant overture to Zampa survive today. A pity, because Pré is delightful: an elegant, refined score, mixing pathos and melancholy with wit and dancing rhythms. Listeners may know the once-famous overture and Isabelle’s virtuoso aria Jours de mon enfance (on which Strauss modelled Zerbinetta’s aria in Ariadne). Lesser-known highlights include a catchy syllabic trio (a definite earworm) and the romance Souvenirs du jeune âge. The largely Francophone cast is excellent, headed by Marie-Ève Munger, Marie Lenormand and the American Michael Spyres, a versatile and stylish tenor like his idol, the late Nicolai Gedda. The singers in the 1959 Benedetti recording may be more idiomatic, trained in the old Opéra-Comique theatre tradition. Since 2004, the relaunched Opéra-Comique’s mission has been to explore its heritage. This production, enthusiastically received in Paris and Wexford in 2015,…

Johann Christoph Pepusch, aka John Christopher Pepusch or just plain Dr Pepusch, was born in Berlin in 1677, but moved to England around 1700 where he became a leading light of London’s musical life. In 1726, he was one of the founders of the Academy of Ancient Music and two years later scored his greatest success arranging the music for John Gay’s runaway hit, The Beggar’s Opera. The peak of his career coincided with the rise of the Italian opera in London, and, as his involvement with Gay’s famous lampoon would suggest, Pepusch was strong on the side of those seeking an English alternative to continental excess. Written in 1715, his masque Venus and Adonis looked like it might be just the thing to ‘reconcile Musick to the English Tongue.’ For all its Englishness – and it’s a clear precursor of Handel’s Acis and Galatea – the work is packed with the stock in trade of Italian opera including da capo arias, virtuoso instrumental effects and plenty of accompagnato recitative. So, what’s it like? The immediate observation listening to what is a world-premiere recording on the enterprising Ramée label is how can this melodious and memorable music have languished until…

We know Sullivan primarily for the brilliant music he wrote for the equally brilliant comic plays of WS Gilbert. Many will also know some of his excellent concert music. The songs are a different matter, although many are attractive and well written,  they fall outside the popular Lieder repertoire inhabited by Schubert and his lot, not always reaching the heights attained by those German composers with which they have a cultural affinity. Nonetheless they are certainly worthy of our attention and so Chandos has come to the rescue with 46 of them. For his texts Sullivan drew widely. He drew from Shakespeare, O Mistress Mine and The Willow Song. The song cycle The Window by Tennyson and from Robert Burns the delicately felt Mary Morrison. In the main the music is often what you would expect, lightly inspired Victoriana. For example, the Arabian Love Song, with its mysterious piano ripples between verses is intriguing and the ballad Once Again undoubtedly had female hearts fluttering in many a drawing room. Sweethearts is a melodramatic duet from the composer’s old collaborator, Gilbert. It is set as a waltz and goes with an engaging swing. Familiar to Savoyards will be the reworking of…

Way back last century (in 1986 to be precise) the choir of King’s College, Cambridge under Stephen Cleobury produced a recording of choral pieces by Bax and Finzi. At a time when fascination with ‘early music’ was at its height, this rather unfashionable choice of repertory was a revelation; its expansive text-setting and lush harmonies were a reminder of a then rather neglected corner of choral music, full of guilty but well-wrought pleasures. Some 30 years on, choirs are thankfully less narrow in their choices. James O’Donnell and his Westminster Abbey forces have delivered a more than worthy successor to that disc. O’Donnell lavishes much care on Finzi’s masterly anthem, Lo the Full, Final Sacrifice; its long, contrasting paragraphs full of beautiful singing, whether the exultant “Lo, the bread of life” or the meditative “soft, self-wounding Pelican” or the beguiling Amen. Careful attention to text mirrors Finzi’s own care in this regard. God is Gone Up is dispatched with appropriate élan and the Magnificat radiates unalloyed joy. Three smaller Finzi anthems confirm his appeal. Bax is represented by contrasting carols, I Sing of a Maiden and This Worldes Joie – the first carefree and the second careworn. Given the considerable…

Agnew and Les Arts top off their fine Monteverdi series.

The US tenor Timothy Fallon seems poised on the cusp of fame, judging from the debut release with his regular recital partner the Israeli-South African pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz. The duo appear regularly at London’s Wigmore Hall, winning the 2013 Wigmore Hall/Kohn Foundation International Song Competition. Fallon is also making a name in Europe where he appears regularly with Oper Leipzig and he is heard on a couple of Pentatone’s Wagner series under Marek Janowski. Fine diction and a lovely clear higher register even across all the dynamics, from a lovely sotto voce to full-blooded fortissimos, are qualities he brings to this BIS recording of 15 songs by Franz Liszt. His expressive voice is nimble and nuanced and he pays great attention to the text, teasing out the subtle colours and shades while Bushakevitz’s sensitive piano keeps momentum going. They work seamlessly together and there is plenty of scope for dramatic stretch, with the standout Drei Lieder aus Schillers Wilhelm Tell and the three Petrarch sonnet settings both offering plenty of emotional shifts and experimental harmonies. The disc covers 40 years of Liszt’s output and takes in four languages, with settings of Victor Hugo and Tennyson also on the programme. This…

Unlike the lifelong artistic journey of some other pianists, that of Maurizio Pollini has remained remarkably consistent. Winning the 1960 International Chopin Competition, the young virtuoso’s approach right from the start was one of clarity, served by a technique of formidable strength and accuracy. Pollini made two recordings of Chopin for EMI, then took an extended break. In 1971 he signed with DG where he has remained to this day. Every one of his early LPs was an event, due to his phenomenal concentration and technical assurance: His Prokofiev Seventh Sonata and Stravinsky’s Three Pieces from Petrouchka, and his Chopin Études, remain gramophone classics. From then until the ultimate release in this box from 2014, he has not so much mellowed as matured. He continues to seek out a work’s structure and clarify its textures; he is revelatory in Schoenberg. The more important the music, the better. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier (Book 1), Beethoven’s and Schubert’s late Piano Sonatas all receive this treatment. The slow movement of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto (especially in the earlier performance under Karl Böhm) is neither personal introspection nor a lyrical serenade; it is a hymn. With Pollini you get none of the wry humour…

Ravel called his glittering score to Daphnis et Chloé a ‘Symphonie choreographique’: essentially a ‘symphony with dance’, the perfect description for a work of such majesty, where the music really is centre-stage. The score is usually segmented into three suites for concert performance, making a hearing of the full version all too rare a treat. Thankfully François-Xavier Roth with period instrument orchestra Les Siècles and Ensemble Aedes deliver the full ballet on this recent release with Harmonia Mundi, with the most stunning results. The exact date of inception of Daphnis et Chloé is somewhat disputed, but the original commission came from Diaghilev, for the prestigious Ballets Russes. The composition was fraught with challenges, mainly due to creative differences between Ravel and the choreographer, Michel Fokine. After numerous revisions and a delayed premiere, the ballet finally opened in June 1912, almost a year before Parisian audiences would be scandalised by the riot over Stravinsky’s vicious Rite. Underscoring the ancient Greek tale of a pastoral romance between a shepherd and shepherdess, Ravel’s music is languorous and enchanting, shimmering with lush orchestral colour, and worlds away from Stravinsky’s pulsating nightmare. The beginning and third part are mostly relaxed, dreamy episodes, framing the dramatic…

I’ve been listening to a lot of Schumann lately, so it was with some pleasure I discovered that young Australian guitarist/composer Paul Ballam-Cross also finds Schumann “deeply inspiring” as he admits in the note on his self-titled debut recital. Ballam-Cross’s Two Portraits of One Subject is dedicated to Schumann. But those same qualities of melancholy, intimacy and nostalgia permeate the entire programme, which comprises works by Schumann (of course), Bach (a favourite of Schumann’s), Tárrega (who adored Schumann’s music), Chopin (born the same year as, and championed by, Schumann) and Sor (whose three studies evoke a kind of Schumannesque saudade). Tárrega’s preludes owe a debt to Chopin, and it is with Tárrega’s transcription of Chopin’s Mazurka No 4 that Ballam-Cross prefaces his sensitively rendered performances of those nine miniature masterpieces. He opens his recital, however, with Bach’s oft-performed-on-guitar Suite No 1 in G. He makes of it a spacious, searching prelude to the rest of the programme, which then moves through Sor to Ballam-Cross’s own lyrical, musical commentaries on Schumann’s work and personality, Chopin and Tárrega, before coming to rest, appropriately, on the latter’s transcription of Schumann’s Bunte Blätter No 1. This is a beautiful and thoughtful debut, which as…

In addition to masterful technique and sensitive lyricism, the English pianist Imogen Cooper is renowned for her impeccably considered and well-researched programmes, which eschew obvious choices. Her fifth recording for Chandos explores Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, exact contemporaries with personalities, egos and intertwined personal lives more generally associated with dissolute rockers of a century later; despite often strained relations, they were friends and great mutual admirers. This album’s initial impetus was Cooper’s rediscovery of Zoltán Kocsis’ piano transcription of the Prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and the notion of playing it alongside Liszt’s transcription of the Liebestod, effectively, the beginning and end of the (five hour) opera. Particularly inspired is Cooper’s decision to include, as a bridge between these two abysses, Liszt’s La Lugubre Gondola, written after a premonition that Wagner would die in Venice and his body would be borne along the Grand Canal, which did in fact happen. Also included are four of Liszt’s Italian Années de Pèlerinage, and his extraordinary transcription of Gretchen from his Faust Symphony, which glistens in Cooper’s hands. The liner notes by Dr Conor Farrington are erudite, learned and fascinating, as are the additional notes from Cooper herself. Zoltán Kocsis died…

There’s plenty to like about young German pianist Joseph Moog’s approach to Chopin’s three sonatas. The works span 27 years – almost the length of Chopin’s career. The seldom-recorded No 1 sees the teenage student experimenting with form and time signatures (witness the unusual 5/4 for the Allegretto) and is a rarity. Moog makes an eloquent case for having it heard more often, especially in the superbly restless finale. Just about every pianist worth their salt has recorded the other two works. The B Minor Second was famously described by Schumann as four of Chopin’s “maddest children harnessed together” to form a sonata. Moog takes the famous funeral march extremely slowly – it clocks in at over 10’ (compare Martha Argerich’s 8’34’’ or Ivo Pogorelich’s brisk 6’34’’) – but while other approaches are more weighty the beautiful nocturne-like middle section is played with affecting simplicity. The famous brief flurry of triplet quavers that follows, the “wind blowing over my grave” as the 19th-century virtuoso Tausig described it, is dispatched with breathtaking panache. Moog is equally astute in the Third Sonata, which many consider contains some of the finest Romantic music written for the instrument. Still only 30, he is being…

Brautigam's final furlong: The Diabellis are a satisfying conclusion to a superb survey.