English pianist Jonathan Plowright continues to stake his claim for recording the modern benchmark set of Brahms piano works with this fourth volume in BIS’s superlative series. This despite stiff competition from Irishman Barry Douglas, who has already completed his six-volume set for Chandos and the redoubtable Paul Lewis who coupled the Four Ballades with his recent five-star reading of the First Piano Concerto. The difference in approach between Plowright and Douglas is no better demonstrated than in the third Intermezzo from the Piano Pieces Op. 119. It’s marked grazioso e giocoso and Plowright dispatches it with infectious high spirits in 1’15’’ while Douglas chooses more grace than jocularity with a generous 1’51’’. Plowright bookends this latest programme with the first and second sets of the 30 Paganini Variations. Played straight through they are tedious for listener and performer alike, but Plowright’s solution is a fine one. He plays the other works – the Ballades, Rhapsodies and Piano Pieces Op. 119 – in their original groupings whereas the adventurous Douglas seasons a set of Cappricios with a single Ballade or Intermezzo. So, very different approaches from two very different performers. Ultimately the choice will be yours. If you can… Continue…

Barenboim’s new piano is a concert grand made by the Belgian instrument maker Chris Maene to the pianist’s specifications. It differs from the usual Steinway D in several crucial respects, one being the use of parallel rather than crossover strings. So far this Maene piano is the only one of its kind, and Barenboim has “fallen in love with it”. I hear less tonal homogeneity across the registers, less “blend” as the pianist puts it. The bass produces great warmth, shown off in Liszt’s arrangement of the March from Wagner’s Parsifal. The tone of the upper registers resembles a Classical period fortepiano (“hollow” is too strong a word), which makes it eminently suitable for Scarlatti. I’ve not heard Barenboim in Scarlatti before; he approaches these three sonatas in an unruffled but characterful way. Like the Fazioli piano, which it also resembles in the treble, the Maene seems incapable of producing a smooth, singing legato – rather a drawback in Chopin’s Ballade No 1 and Liszt’s Funérailles – and we are used to more upper-level brightness in Beethoven’s 32 Variations and Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz. The latter is neither diabolic nor exciting, although the tone colours are attractive. Big… Continue reading Get…

After a hand injury in 2005, Kyung Wha Chung stepped away from the concert platform and turned to teaching. More than a decade later, this is her triumphant return to recording. Although Chung had recorded Partita No 2 and Sonata No 3 back in 1975, this disc is the complete Bach Sonatas and Partitas. They’re the solo violin Everest, since the player is completely exposed, without the reassuring safety net of an accompanist. At the same time, Bach demands the player navigate a thicket of interlocking lines of music. Tricky! This is quite a different recording to most recent performances of these pieces. By now, there’s a fairly firmly ingrained tendency towards historically informed performances of Bach’s music, but here Chung neatly sidesteps the issue. It’s not that she ignores the HIP movement (on the contrary – tempos are fleet here, and vibrato is kept on the subtle side), but more that minor quibbles about stylistic approaches are exchanged for an intensely passionate performance. Chung describes this disc as a project that has been with her for 60 years, calling it “recording Unaccompanied Bach”, and it seems like those capital letters are important. This is… Continue reading Get unlimited digital…

If you’ve worn out your copy of Georges Cziffra playing Liszt’s Transcendental Studies – and why wouldn’t you, because he da man – and are in the market for a newer model, should you direct your hard-earned cash towards Daniil Trifonov on Deutsche Grammophon or Kirill Gerstein on Myrios? Both are newly released and attracting praise like superlatives are about to outlawed by presidential executive order. Like everything Trifonov touches, his Transcendental Studies are proudly personal statements and wilfully so on occasion – witness, for example, the roof-rocking intensity of the fourth study, Mazeppa, where the volatile harmony is allowed to churn up the structure, and the ‘recitativo’ section of the coda plays out as something approaching a mad-scene. Gerstein – who plays the definitive 1852 version of Liszt’s Twelve Etudes – sits more obviously in a tradition that stretches back to Cziffra. Much has been written about how Gerstein’s background in jazz lends his performance an improvisational, power-to-the-moment flow. But despite his studies on the jazz course at Berklee and mentoring by jazz vibraphone guru Gary Burton, I’m not sure I hear it like that. At every turn, Gerstein peels the minutiae’s minutiae out from Liszt’s notation. The spread…

This a strange compilation with a convoluted concept, can’t help but be amazed at the sound of the ASMF.

When they were 14, the Jerusalem Quartet were considered The Monkees of the classical world because they were “manufactured” by the Jerusalem Music Centre. Since then, with one change of personnel (violist Ori Kam replacing Amihai Grosz in 2010), they have established themselves in the top echelon of chamber groups. They continue their wide and impressive discography with this awe-inspiring reading of three of Béla Bartók’s six quartets. Led by the charismatic Alexander Pavlovsky, the Jerusalems are a tight, exciting unit, brilliant in attack but also uncannily sensitive. Sergei Bresler’s violin sparks off Pavlovksy’s and Kam is the equal of his predecessor in every respect. Kyril Zlotnikov, playing one of Jacqueline du Pré’s instruments loaned to him by Daniel Barenboim, is a formidable cellist, driving and astute. Together they bring out every nuance of these awe-inspiring works, from the Fourth’s scurrying insect-like ‘night music’ of the prestissimo second movement to the heart-rending mesto finale of the Sixth, composed at a time when Bartók was down on his uppers and mourning his mother’s death. The Jerusalems brought the house down when they played the Allegretto Pizzicato as an encore when they were here in 2016 on their… Continue reading Get unlimited…

Combining fine classical musicianship with pop hits from the 70s to 90s, is not your average mixtape.

Both works are robustly Germanic and finely written; the surprise is that they are not better known.

Three's a charm for Gidon: DG fields a dream team to bring this elegiac music to life.

Berlin Philharmonic principal clarinettist Andreas Ottensamer co-founded the Bürgenstock Festival, which takes place near Lucerne, in 2011, and his Berlin Phil colleagues Emmanuel Pahud and Albrecht Meyer are regular guests. This recording is the third released by Ottensamer and friends as part of the Bürgenstock Festival Edition. As Ottensamer writes in his booklet notes, “The spirit of the Mannheim School, being all about finding new ways of making music and trying to unify all aspects of musicianship, lives on in the mindset of our festival.” Thus New Era pays homage to, via orchestral music featuring solo clarinet, a selection of composers associated with or inspired by the extraordinary music coming out of the Mannheim court of the Elector of Pfalzbayern in the 18th century – music that indeed heralded a new era. Johann Stamitz (1717–1757) was one of the chief instigators of the spirit of relentless musical experimentation and innovation that prevailed at court during this time. His Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra in B Flat opens, with Ottensamer performing on a modern clarinet, as he does in the following work, Franz Danzi’s Concertino for Clarinet, Bassoon and Orchestra in B Flat, where he is joined by Meyer playing… Continue…

This lovely disc from Hyperion completes brilliant young British violinist Jack Liebeck’s survey of the three Bruch concertos with the excellent BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins. At its heart is the Second Violin Concerto which, despite being championed by Perlman and Heifitz, still remains shamefully neglected in the concert hall. Proudly romantic with big singing melodies and death-defying solo passages, it has all the hallmarks of the great 19th century barnstormers and shows that the ever-popular First Concerto was no fluke. Liebeck and his smooth-toned Guadagnini take it on with magnificent aplomb. Originally composed for the Spanish virtuoso Sarasate, the 36-year-old Londoner shows he has golden tone, character to spare and a dazzling technique. The disc’s other three works are equally enjoyable. Bruch considered the Adagio Appassionato one of his best works. Konzertstück started out as the ‘Fourth Concerto’ but Bruch refused to add a third movement. He probably felt that not much needed to be said after its glorious Adagio. Bruch described In Memoriam, a single movement which starts with an ominous tattoo from the timpani, as “a lamentation, a kind of instrumental elegy”. Liebeck, seen in Australia last year with Trio Dali for Musica Viva, gets…

Chimes and gentle winds open A Celestial Map of the Sky – the title track on this disc by British-American composer Tarik O’Regan – before the Hallé, led by Sir Mark Elder, is joined by the choir. The luminous opening soon gives way to powerful, driving intensity, O’Regan setting extracts of poetic texts (by Walt Whitman, Mahmood Jamal and more) that reflect his response to a pair of woodcuts – star charts – by Albrecht Dürer. Haunting vocal meditations are entwined with a glittering, astral score. Jamie Philips conducts the Hallé in the remaining works. O’Regan takes the Adagio of JS Bach’s third Violin Sonata (BWV 1005) as his jumping off point in Latent Manifest. Solo violin is joined by harp and percussion, O’Regan extrapolating Bach’s quadruple-stops into a whorl of vivid orchestral colour and sizzling rhythms. Both Raï and Chaâbi (which was commissioned for the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s 2012 tour) derive from O’Regan’s memories of childhood visits to relatives in Algeria and Morocco. Raï is full of fierce strings, rhythmic drumming and bright momentum from the Hallé, while shifting string textures in Chaâbi create a reflective mood. The finale is Fragments from Heart of Darkness, a dramatic… Continue reading…