Liszt has always struck me as a latter-day John Donne: passionate, creative and a ladies’ man in his youth; turning more inwards and closer to God later in life; yet ultimately leading a conflicted life, since both states coexisted in one form or another from the start. That’s what makes Hyperion’s non-chronological complete survey of Liszt’s songs such a fascinating listening experience – apart, of course, from the quality of the songs themselves and the superlative nature of the performances. One gets the whole man, rather than just a slice. Previous volumes from Julius Drake with tenor Matthew Polenzani, mezzo Angelika Kirchschlager and bass-baritone Gerald Finley have already set the bar high. But Grammy Award-winning American mezzo Sasha Cooke is right up there, with a voice as rich and responsive as her musicality. The majority of the songs here, drawn from across a 37-year period, tend towards the introspective and one has only to listen to the lush repose of the opening Des Tages laute Stimmen Schweigen Cooke evokes as the day draws to an end. Or the tastefully characterised romantic drama of Il m’aimait tant! Or the delicate rendering of Liszt’s marvelous setting of Blume und Duft, or the…

At first glance, you may wonder whether we need yet another disc of some of the Counter-Reformation’s greatest hits. Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, Tu Es Petrus and Sicut Cervus as well as Victoria’s Missa O Quam Gloriosum have been recorded countless times and surely there are many interesting and lesser-known pieces to explore? After all, Palestrina did write at least 104 masses and how many of those do we get to hear? These are quite legitimate questions, but New York Polyphony makes a plausible case for saying there’s always room for one more account of core repertory. The group’s main point of difference from previous recordings is that they perform the music one voice to a part and at a pitch to accommodate their four male voices (countertenor, tenor, baritone and bass). The fine quartet of main singers (Geoffrey Williams, Steven Caldicott Wilson, Christopher Dylan Herbert and Craig Phillips) are joined by countertenor Tim Keeler; tenor Andrew Fuchs and bass-baritone Jonathan Woody for the Palestrina mass and motet, and for some chant propers for Easter that are interwoven with the mass. Singing the Missa Papae Marcelli a fourth below its regular pitch creates quite a different sound world, particularly requiring…

Morton Feldman and George Crumb. Both white, male American contemporaries. Both composers of predominantly quiet, slow music that exploits the transfixing power of silence, that seems full of mysterious, dramatic and enigmatic rites. By putting the two men side-by-side, as Steven Osborne has on his fascinating new album, their profound differences are hugely amplified. And, sad to say, Crumb comes off a bit the worse for wear. Slammed up against Feldman’s epic, craggy, abstract, uncompromising majesty, Crumb’s slighter music sounds entranced by surface effect, seduced by momentary felicities, unable to see the forest for the trees. But Crumb does grow trees of great beauty, from the Debussy-lite opening of Processional to the rapt contemplations and awkward ‘Orientalisms’ of A Little Suite, a sort of Crumb-ian picture-book ode to Messiaen’s Vingt Regards. Osborne brings Crumb’s works to life without bells and whistles, treating his music with a seriousness of purpose that is rare for a composer who is often interpreted with tremulous mysticism or sweaty drama. Feldman’s works, drawn from very early and very late in the composer’s creative life, are stark and captivating, helped enormously by Osborne’s sure hand on the tiller. Osborne has long been the master of dynamic…

Any release by American pianist Garrick Ohlsson is guaranteed to delight and this new one of Smetana’s Czech Dances Books Nos 1 and 2 does not disappoint. Ohlsson is at home with these charming works, meeting their virtuosic challenges with aplomb.Smetana wanted to do for the Czech polka what Chopin did for the Polish mazurka and the four works which open the album show that his aim to “idealise” the form and push the boundaries succeeded admirably. As one of today’s leading Chopin interpreters Ohlsson is on top form here. Smetana lived his final years in a gamekeeper’s lodge where he befriended an amateur fiddler who showed him Bohemian and Moravian folk tunes and dances.The resulting 10 pieces may not have had the success of Dvorˇák’s dances but they were greatly admired. Slepicka (The Little Hen), is probably the best known of them. Oves (Oats) is a gentle piece while Medved (The Bear) has all the lumbering quality of Mussorgsky’s oxen in Pictures from an Exhibition.The Little Onion, an unpromising title perhaps, is full of lyrical appeal and Dupák, a stamping dance, is terrific fun. Hulán (The lancer) is full of longing and Obkrocak, a stepping dance, recalls the tune…

I suspect for many guitarists it’s tempting to stay within well-known repertoire. What a good thing we have performers like Rupert Boyd to perform the less commonly heard works! Although Boyd’s liner notes suggest the album is built around several Fantasias, it feels to me more like an album of whatever he wanted to record. I think this is a good thing – it’s all clearly repertoire that he’s passionate about. There’s plenty to delight listeners. An early highlight is Australian composer Phillip Houghton’s titanic God of the Northern Forest and evocative (but oddly titled) Kinkachoo, I Love You, where Boyd proves a fine match for the meticulously detailed colourings and shadings of Houghton’s dreamlike music. Other unusual pieces include Byron Yasui’s charming Fantasy on a Hawaiian Lullabye, as well as rare sightings like Luigi Legnani, represented by the flashy Fantasia, Op. 19. It’s terrific to see such a varied recital, though it’s sometimes a little jarring switching from one piece to the next. Moving from a John Dowland Renaissance Fantasia of 1610 to Leo Brouwer’s Bartók-esque Tres Apuntes (Three Sketches) was a head-scratcher, though both were performed with verve. A fine, well-recorded disc overall, with music to delight guitar newcomers…

This double-CD set is a collection of favourite encores, comprised of well-loved piano pieces that are recorded infrequently today, and hardly ever performed all together. The programme includes two of Scarlatti’s most popular sonatas, K380 in E Major and K159 in C Major, La Cacchia, five Bach Preludes (including the popular No 1 of “the 48” in C Major), Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca, Beethoven’s Für Elise, Schubert’s Moment Musicale No 3 in F Minor, several Chopin Etudes and two Preludes (including No 15, the Raindrop), and music by Liszt, Brahms, Grieg, Scriabin, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev, finishing with Gershwin’s own arrangement of I Got Rhythm. The performances? They are impressive in their precision and polish. The clarity and evenness of James Brawn’s playing is a major asset in the early works – such as the Bach D Major Prelude with its moto perpetuo semiquavers – and a piece like Chopin’s Black Keys Etude holds no terrors for him.  His approach is less suited to the C Sharp Minor Prelude of Rachmaninov, where a minimum of Romantic ebb and flow makes it either refreshingly straightforward or lacking in personality, depending on your point of view. Similarly, Brawn goes for clarity over sheer fire…

The fifth volume in Perth organist Joseph Nolan’s magisterial survey.

Alison Balsom is a skilled, experienced, technically accomplished trumpeter. Her tuning throughout this programme, recorded live, is immaculate. Her flexibility and control is admirable. She shapes phrases with taste. The chosen programme is as varied as the ‘standard trumpet-piano repertoire’ allows. This album is sure to be a hit with Balsom’s large, predominantly English, fan base. And yet, something is missing. Despite allowing her pianist a moment in the spotlight, for a shapeless performance of a movement from Ravel’s Sonatine, this album is a star vehicle. Tom Poster’s piano is relegated to the background, leaving the trumpet hanging, exposed, more obviously revealing the lack of expressive or emotional range in Balsom’s one-note playing. Her programme has stylistic range, from Hindemith’s square-jawed songfulness to Françaix’s quick-witted playfulness, Enescu’s long-breathed lyricism to Maxwell-Davies’ glorious sentimentality. But Balsom gives each piece strikingly similar treatment. Again and again the same note-attack, tone colour and phrase shapes, the same late-breaking, shuddery vibrato. When she takes tiny, welcome expressive risks in her final encore, Jerome Kern’s The way you look tonight, it’s clear what has been missing: any sense of the specialness, spontaneity or danger of live performance. When, why and how should artists communicate to…

Violinist Alina Ibragimova and her accompanist Cédric Tiberghien are a class act – witness their 2013 album of Schubert’s complete works for violin and piano, also on Hyperion – but this set of seven very early Mozart violin sonatas, written in between nappy changes presumably, rarely rise beyond the level of a composer expertly, and rather dogmatically, applying the rules who has yet to grasp that the whole point of composing is to put those same rules under the microscope with a view to learning how to make them bend. Still, Ibragimova and Tiberghien couldn’t turn in a lacklustre performance if they tried, and after experiencing this fine duo tackling Schubert, hearing them weave a degree of wonder through such low key material fills me with even greater respect for their interpretive clout. They tread a finely judged line between keeping alert to young whippersnapper Wolfgang’s harmonic language, while avoiding their knowledge of his later harmonic wizardry lest it (mis)inform the naïveté of this music. Ibragimova plays with childlike wonder – but there’s never a trace of sentimentalised whimsy. Sprawling over two discs, here is a lot of Mozart, much of it interchangeable. For my money Sonata No 27 in…

The 14th year of the Lugano Progetto (which sadly is about to be abandoned) sees Martha Argerich making music with the likes of cellist Gautier Capuçon and violinist Ilya Gringolts. How does one create a balanced snapshot of almost four hours of first-rate music making? Every performance is impressive and the sheer rarity and originality of much of the repertoire is admirable: a charming B Minor Piano Quintet by Ferdinand Ries (Beethoven’s friend), with the same instrumental combination as Schubert’s Trout Quintet, Brahms’ late, autumnal Clarinet Trio, Op. 114 and Horn Trio (with viola replacing horn – it works), Turina’s Second Piano Trio, all infectious Andalucian rhythms and shimmering effects. The sole orchestral offering is the Bacalov Porteña for two pianos and orchestra (Porteña being the word for native inhabitants of Buenos Aires) with Argerich herself and Eduardo Hubert as soloists. She also partners her former partner, Stephen Kovacevich, in Debussy’s En Blanc et Noir. Even the excerpts from Philip Glass’s dance opera Les Enfants Terribles arranged for three pianos scrubs up well. The last work featured is a selection of four dances from Ginastera’s ballet Estancia, including the famous Malambo. For me, the highlight was the gorgeous, silky Poulenc Sonata for two…

Whilst Debussy’s and Ravel’s quartets have been constant disc-mates since the LP epoch, there is greater artistic justification for hearing Debussy coupled with Franck’s wild, alarming (yet classically built) quartet-plus-piano masterpiece, given that Debussy took ages to expunge Franck’s influence from his system. The Franck Quintet might or might not have been a coded love-letter to the composer’s pupil Augusta Holmès, but it transcends all attempts at biographical reductionism. By comparison, the Debussy, however beguiling, can seem slightly incoherent.That Marc-André Hamelin meets Franck’s punitive technical demands was to be expected. Less predictable (since few will have heard Hamelin in chamber music before) is his collaborative panache. This admirably vivid performance never conveys the feeling of pianist and colleagues going their separate ways. Rather, they catch fire from each other’s interactions. As for the Debussy, the Takács instrumentalists give – thank goodness – the sense that they have never heard of wishy-washy terms like “Impressionism.” They often dare to be downright harsh, above all in the pizzicato-dominated second movement. This is a good account to reassure those who think themselves over-familiar with the composition. The recorded sound, somewhat dry (and markedly kinder to the piano than to the strings), nowhere detracts…

The big hitters of 19th-century song are well known, but how did they earn their reputations, who were their respected contemporaries, and how did the art form progress over time? It’s always been easy for a competent, or even an inspired composer, to get buried by the sheer overwhelming enthusiasm for a Beethoven or a Brahms, so a chance to examine the development of song from 1810 to 1910, decade by decade, might be expected to throw up a few surprises. And so it proves in the first of an excellently curated series from accompanist Malcolm Martineau and a stellar quintet of leading singers. Taking Schubert’s miracle years – 1815 and 1816 – as its starting point, Martineau chooses 16 of his finest as a peg on which to hang a thoroughgoing and eclectic selection of the greatest Lieder and song that were around at the time. Ranging across Europe, we visit Spain, Italy, Czechoslovakia, German  and France in a song lover’s magical mystery tour. The under-recorded Canadian tenor Michael Schade gets the lion’s share of the disc and the majority of the Schubert. Like Peter Schreier, to whom he bears a striking vocal resemblance, he’s a dab hand with…