Angela Hewitt wouldn’t be the first Canadian pianist to record Bach’s Goldberg Variations twice and, like Glenn Gould’s second performance, Hewitt takes longer over her remake. Her first, recorded in 1999, had critics throwing superlatives around like confetti: “If you only buy one Bach album in this anniversary year, let it be this one. A desert-island disc!” said the man in London’s Sunday Times. But my tropical island might not seem the perfect paradise if Hewitt’s was the only set of Goldbergs on offer. In a world where John Butt exists and Mahan Esfahani has just recorded an exceptionally nuanced performance on harpsichord, complete with an appropriately juicy tuning temperament, it feels like Hewitt is trying to catch an argument that has long since moved on. Of course, it’s that very dependability that will endear this disc to many and, on its own terms, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Hewitt’s performance. Eyebrows might be raised when she ignores some repeats during the opening Aria – her first version was branded with the strapline “Includes all repeats!” – but otherwise her immaculate voice-leading, rapid-fire articulation and slipstream rhythmic momentum keep the flame burning. Hewitt’s Fazioli is lighter-on-its-feet than the Steinway…

Following on from her superb 2008 recording of Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin, harpsichordist Winsome Evans also follows in the footsteps of Bach and his contemporaries by devising “keyboard transcriptions of all these solo works emulating Bach’s stylistic textural idioms, compositional procedures and performance practices.” Evans’ copious liner notes demonstrate an extraordinary erudition, an absolute fidelity to Bach’s musical language and an uncompromising attitude towards surmounting every difficulty. She has availed herself of as many 18th-century compositional and performing techniques as she thought necessary to produce a convincing, historically informed realisation of these masterworks, including frequent sharing of melodies “across and between the hands”, composing new bass lines and countermelodies, filling out harmonies and, of course, extensive ornamentation, more often written-out rather than extemporised. And the performances? They are sublime: intimate and urgently expressive, with tasteful use of rubato and colour changes, in the slower movements such as the allemandes and sarabandes; joyful and exuberant in the faster dances such as the courantes and gigues. Together with the performing scores, both sets of recordings comprise a major contribution not just to contemporary Bach scholarship and performance, but to the enjoyment of lovers of Bach’s music everywhere.

Maria Razumovskaya is a London-based pianist who thinks deeply about the music she performs. As well as pursuing a performing career, she has a PhD in the life and work of Heinrich Neuhaus. Her veneration of such Russian giants influences her performance style and programming. This disc gives us two Bach transcriptions by Busoni: Chaconne in D Minor and Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ; Busoni’s own Fantasia in the style of Bach; Liszt’s Vallée d’Obermann and Funérailles; an Elegy by Rachmaninov, and a Fantasia by CPE Bach. They are all predominantly slow, minor-key pieces, either monumental or melancholy and often both. Razumovskaya’s polished technique is big enough to encompass the bell-suffused climax of Vallée d’Obermann, but she tends to approach every piece in the same ultra-Romantic way. CPE calls for spontaneity and unpredictability, qualities her carefully considered reading negates. Her most satisfying interpretation is of Busoni’s arrangement of the Chaconne from Bach’s Violin Partita No 2. Busoni completely reconceived it in pianistic terms, and the result is as solid as a set of variations by Brahms. Razumovskaya has the work’s measure and it encourages greater light and shade in her playing, but as a whole this recital is… Continue reading Get…

For many people, Bach’s solo violin works are the most remarkable works he ever composed. Personally, I suspect the title could be narrowed down further to the Chaconne from the Partita No 2 in D Minor! In any case, the fact that a solitary string instrument must showcase Bach’s profound musical thinking while playing several lines of music simultaneously means that these pieces are an extraordinary challenge to perform, let alone perform well. Rachel Barton Pine has been playing the music of Bach for most of her life, first encountering his music in St. Paul’s Church in Chicago. She gave her first performance, aged four, of Bach in this church, and played Bach in orchestral format there as well. She writes that she keeps the acoustics of the church in mind wherever she plays Bach, so it’s appropriate that it’s in that very same location that this disc was recorded. Players tend to emphasise Bach’s music in one of two ways. They either accentuate the rigorous intellectual side, or the dance-like nature of many of these pieces. Pine splits the difference neatly and leans more to one side or the other depending on the piece. For example, she gives the…

Jayson Gillham is a 30-year-old pianist, originally from Queensland, who is now based in London. He has won several prizes, and his career is progressing nicely as he performs solo recitals, concertos and works with various chamber groups including the Jerusalem Quartet. He won the 2014 Montreal International Music Competition with a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4, a work he recently played in Sydney as part of a national tour. Two previous solo discs are available on his website. At the 2016 Perth International Festival, a reviewer remarked on Gillham’s “bell-like tone and… sense of expressive lyricism”. The former is certainly in evidence in this recital from ABC Classics. It informs the final Allegro movement of Schubert’s A Major Sonata, D664, giving the music a fresh and unbridled pastoral feeling. Gillham captures the improvisatory style of Bach’s Toccata, BWV911, and once the work is fully underway his playing has real sinew and finely controlled momentum. Young pianists today (unless they are geniuses like Trifonov) fall into one of two broad approaches: either they attack music in a deconstructive way to make it sound newly minted, or they see themselves as part of a long concertising tradition and convey…

You never know what you’ll get when a label releases music by unknown composers. Here the Szymanowski’s and Plowright bring us piano quintets by two Poles plucked from the relative obscurity of the early 20th century. At a time when trailblazers like Stravinsky and Schoenberg were making their modernist mark, many others were remaining faithful to the good old ways of 19th-century Romanticism. Ludomir Różycki and Ignaz Friedman are two such late, Late-Romantics. First up on the disc, Różycki’s Quintet is a wonderful find. Its opening movement has a brooding, romantic character, marked by dramatic swells with gentle hints at the French impressionist sound that had also inspired his more famous compatriot and the quartet’s namesake. The second movement is more solemn, with a greater sense of darkness and melancholy. Plowright and the Quartet are in perfect synchronicity here, elegantly capturing the Adagio’s various moods, particularly cellist Marcin Sieniawski in his impassioned solos. The third movement is perhaps the freshest sounding, having some of the effervescent character of Ravel’s String Quartet second movement. Ignaz Friedman was a pianist-composer with an Australian connection. As a Jew during Nazi-occupied Poland, he was granted a lucky escape when he received the opportunity in…

The Heath Quartet’s lush, integrated sound in the opening chords of Tchaikovsky’s optimistic String Quartet No 1 in D, Op. 11, sets the tone for this disc – the English ensemble’s debut on Harmonia Mundi.Written for an all-Tchaikovsky concert intended to bolster the young composer’s reputation, the First Quartet is bright. The players trace sensitive arcs with muted strings in the delicate, folk-inspired second movement while the Scherzo hums with energy, the quartet producing a full, vibrant sound before the joyous romp of the quartet’s finale. From Tchaikovsky’s first (full-length) quartet, The Heath Quartet takes us to his last, composed only five years later. The Quartet No 3 in E Flat Minor, Op. 30, is darker and more nuanced than the First, composed in response to the death of violinist Ferdinand Laub. It opens with a melancholy Allegro Sostenuto that the Heath Quartet swells with passion, infusing the weighty 15-minute movement with moments of fragility and power. The funereal third movement maintains a pulsing intensity, the quartet driving forward rather than letting the music bog down in tragedy. The players bring out the ambiguities of the finale’s determined brightness, quiet pizzicatos before the final coda, a… Continue reading Get unlimited…

Isabelle Faust is an exemplar of the new generation of Modern String Players who have assimilated the techniques of Historically Informed Performance with cross-pollination, inspiring a pragmatic hybrid style. The sickly constant vibrato and bland homogenised phrasing of yesteryear is replaced with a clean-cut sound of impeccable intonation and rhythmically alert rhetorical gestures, effortlessly articulated by her phenomenal bowing technique, (as heard in her breathtakingly beautiful performances of the Mendelssohn Concerto on tour in Australia this year). Faust’s self-effacing persona and collaborative spirit is evident from her various partnerships in chamber music, while the breadth of her repertoire choices and her interest in contemporary works reveals a sharp musical intellect. Yet the end results are music-making of a stimulating spontaneity with a complete freedom from stylistic dogma. This latest release is a perhaps surprising collaboration with Il Giardino Armonico, one of the first Italian groups to embrace HIP. Their early recordings of Vivaldi were a shock to the system with their abrasive rustic accents, but in later years, changes of personnel have refined their sound and they are truly magnificent here under long-term director and co-founder Giovanni Antonini. Accents are as crisp as ever but not so grating as to…

Bologna’s musical history is a particularly rich and cosmopolitan one, and this recording by Roman period instrument ensemble Musica Antiqua Latina brings together the music of some of the Baroque composers associated with the city. There is a trio sonata by Giovanni Battista Bassani, long thought to have been Corelli’s teacher (though this is unlikely). A fine ciaccona by Maurizio Cazzati, who as maestro di cappella of St. Petronio had such an effect on the development of music in Bologna. Two trio sonatas from the famous Opus 3 and a ciaccona by Corelli himself, who studied in Bologna as a young man before moving to Rome. A trio sonata by Giovanni Maria Bononcini, whose son was a member of St. Petronio’s orchestra. A sonata by Giuseppe Torelli, whose Bolognese music for trumpet in particular is well known. A balletto by the Bolognese cello virtuoso Domenico Gabrielli. Another balletto by Giovanni Battista Vitali, also a Bolognese cellist of some repute who strongly influenced the development of the trio sonata. Finally, there is a delightful trio sonata by that most prolific of composers, ‘anon’. Founded by Giordano Antonelli in 2000, Musica Antiqua Latina also comprises four baroque violinists – one of whom…

Andreas Staier established himself in the 1990s as a perceptive Schubertian with revelatory recordings on period pianos of the late sonatas and Lieder performances with Christoph Prégardien. His hyper-sensitive touch coaxes a myriad of colour and sonority out of the fortepiano so my expectations were high for this set of Piano Trios. Using a lovely copy of a 1827 Conrad Graf, Staier’s colouristic playing gives us plummy bass notes and pinging treble, creating fascinating tints, his companions adding delicate brushwork. Moments such as the second statement of the main theme of D898 with pizzicato strings supporting Staier’s impeccable articulation are breathtakingly beautiful and many such moments abound; the funeral march of D929 is gaunt and sepulchral. However his companions seem to be channelling an earlier era; both are superbly expressive exponents of Baroque string playing but their approach here seems at odds with Staier. Their lithe dynamic thrust in fast movements make for an exciting ride but they refuse to indulge us with any hint of Romantic expression, their blank phrasing with barely any vibrato and minimal tonal variation works against Schubert’s long, singing lines and large-scale structures so that periods of reflection drag despite flowing tempi. A frustrating release…

I thought the Takács Quartet set the bar pretty high with last year’s Hyperion recording of the two Janáček string quartets, but that was before Swiss outfit Quartetto Energie Nove released this gem on the Dynamic label. Made up of the principal string players of the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, the foursome has a slim discography – just the two Prokofiev quartets – but the sheer quality of their playing and the marvellous production standard of both these albums argue strongly that we should be hearing a lot more of them in the future. Energie Nove – violinists Hans Liviabella and Barbara Ciannamea, violist Ivan Vukčević (an Aussie!) and cellist Felix Vogelsang – bill this release as a world premiere of a “critically edited and ‘Urtext’ version” of the two quartets. The main changes are in the second, Intimate Letters, written in the last year of the composer’s life and which was being rehearsed for its premiere by the Moravian Quartet just before Janácˇek died. Some changes had been made at these rehearsals attended by the composer, the chief among them being his decision to abandon the use of the viola d’amore in favour of its more conventional four-stringed cousin….

Here are two releases, each charting a sea change in the vision of a most singular artist. In three decades, four symphonies and two hours of music, we hear the Danish composer Per Nørgård shift from Apollonian order to Dionysian excess. Nørgård’s Second Symphony, written in 1970, breathes the calm air of Jean Sibelius. A lilting, seemingly infinite melodic thread is spun out unendingly, as if by the Fates themselves. The line flows throughout the orchestra, changing colour and character, from pastoral to threatening to mysterious, a calm forest stream that ripples and eddies, twists and turns. In the late 1970s Nørgård came upon the obsessive, hallucinatory visions of outsider artist Adolf Wölfli, whose paintings, writings and musical thoughts were a decisive influence on the composer. Wölfli’s work doused Nørgård’s music with fuel, lending it danger, terror, heat and violence. The composer recently approvingly quoted a listener’s comment, that hearing his music is like taking “a walk with a fire-breathing dragon”. The Fourth Symphony accordingly shimmers with a strange beauty, lingering on horrifying and grotesque apparitions, flying into a heavy-footed dance of death. The Fifth is positively unhinged: overstuffed, overlong, full to the brim with climactic moments. There is a…