In the ballet world, Adam’s Giselle is almost as often performed as Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. However on the concert stage, it hasn’t achieved the same popularity as its Russian cousins. Despite the efforts of this beautiful recording by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, expertly led by Nicolette Fraillon, it’s not hard to understand why. Adam’s buoyant melodies aren’t as charming as those in a Strauss waltz and there isn’t the same melodrama as you hear in Tchaikovsky’s famous ballets. The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra with Fraillon at the helm do play Adam’s score stylishly and without fault, once again proving they are one of Australia’s most versatile orchestras. Their balance in the romantic orchestration has wonderful depth and is consistently lush. The frequent woodwind details are delightfully delivered, notably the interchanging flute and clarinet solos. Giselle and Albrecht’s Pas de Deux reveals the strength of individual players, with all the soloists playing with poise, especially the opening cellist. This disc is marketed toward the dance student, with the inclusion of ten alternative dance solos at varying tempi designed to suit differences in choreography or a dancer’s individual technique. If you are a fan of Adam’s music, or you are a…

Far from hinting at the avant garde orchestral works to come, Charles Ives’ symphonic debut could almost have been penned by Dvorˇák with Brahms and Tchaikovsky looking over his shoulder. Ives had heard the New York premiere of the New World Symphony and he paid it more than a passing nod, almost channelling the famous Largo (including cor anglais). This engaging work, written when he was still at Yale, shows the insurance salesman-cum-composer was no mere hobbyist. It includes a highly competent fugue in the Scherzo, engaging melodies and skilful use of orchestral palette. The five-movement Second Symphony, championed by Bernstein, is more characteristic with snatches of Stephen Foster’s Camptown Races and American hymns vying with quotes from Beethoven, Brahms, Bach and Wagner. There’s a hint of what was to come in the final bars where it ends on an abrupt, comical key change – a musical thumbing of the nose? The work was applauded at its premiere although Ives is said to have spat at its reception. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra are clearly relishing their collaboration with Chief Conductor Sir Andrew Davis judging from the playing in both works. Phrasing and tempi are excellent and technically they are up there with overseas orchestras. Production from Chandos is exemplary….

Isserlis seems incapable of playing a dud note, let alone giving a dud performance.

Last month we reviewed the 1954 Rigoletto, not an opera one normally associates with the thrilling tenor, but this recording of Verdi’s Otello from the same year on Decca’s budget Eloquence label features Mario del Monaco in a role which fits him like a glove and which he made very much his own in the 1950s and ‘60s. And it pairs him with Tebaldi as Desdemona. You can tell straight away, despite the obvious drawbacks of a mono recording, exactly why this partnership set the opera world alight for two decades. Their musical chemistry is still potent 60 years on. Alberto Erede conducts the magnificent Accademia di Santa Cecilia with dramatic verve and gusto. Italian baritone Aldo Protti, so compelling as Rigoletto on the companion disc, is equally impressive as the wilily conniving Iago, while tenor Piero de Palma (Cassio) and mezzo Luisa Ribachi (Emilia) give great support. But this is all about Tebaldi and Del Monaco. They had recorded Aida two years earlier so their partnership was well established, but the Decca executives must have been rubbing their hands with glee to have found such a magnificent double act whose true worth would flower with the emergence of stereo…

Editor’s Choice, Vocal & Choral – November 2015 “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded survived” – the old schoolroom rhyme is still a good way of recalling the fate of the six colourful women who married Henry VIII. Anne Boleyn, the second wife and the first to get the chop (literally) had quite an interesting life before she came to Henry’s attention. As a maid of honour to Margaret of Austria, a great musical patron, then in the French court of Henry’s sister, Mary and later in that of her stepdaughter, Queen Claude, Anne would have been exposed to a wide variety of musical styles, as well as being given ample opportunity to develop her own musical talents. All the more intriguing then, is a music book kept in London’s Royal College of Music that bears her name. It contains 42 works, both sacred and secular, by a variety of composers. Some are smaller works destined for domestic or devotional settings, while others are grander, liturgical works. David Skinner and his vocal consort (named after the Tudor singer, composer, music copyist… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

This programme has been cleverly crafted around the world premiere recording of Sir James MacMillan’s Oboe Concerto performed by its dedicatee Nicholas Daniel with the composer at the helm. It is a bold virtuosic work that should prove popular with both players and audiences. The breezy first movement, a bustling affair with the soloist goaded on to challenging passage-work by startling effects in the orchestra, contrasts starkly with the following Largo based on material from a earlier composition In Angustiis (a post-9/11 lament for solo oboe). It juxtaposes periods of keening sorrow with outbursts of rage, while stretching the expressive possibilities of the instrument just about as far as it can go. The Finale is forthright and playful, opening with a demented parody of serialist pretensions before veering off in unexpected poly-stylistic directions – although some of its jokes are a little too wacky for its own good. The disc opens with Vaughan William’s pastoral idyll with the soloist directing a performance that should serve as a top recommendation for this under-recorded gem. The Britten Sinfonia’s limpid strings conjure moments… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

How extraordinary, when you think about it, is Guillaume Tell in the career of Gioacchino Rossini? At the age of 37, at the very height of his powers, he writes his longest, grandest, and probably his greatest French opera, only to then fall silent for decades except for a few naughty piano works and the odd bon mot. He must have known (or feared) that he could do no better and, listening to it all over again, his final opera is a very fine thing indeed. This outing comes from the admirable and ambitious annual Rossini Festival in Pesaro, and if there’s one thing they invariably do well it’s pick a cast. I really can’t imagine a better sung bit of bel canto than this. Add to that a magnificently detailed reading of the score, plus a thoughtful production, and this is nigh on four hours of operatic heaven. Graham Vick’s neatly politicised staging shifts the action from late medieval times to the Swiss ‘Downton Abbey’ era, focusing on the class oppression that was running its course round about then rather than on the stark nationalism of the original. Against a bleak, white set, the drama is played out effectively…

Anne Sofie von Otter has crossed more genre boundaries than most and with effortless ease, so when DG marked her 60th birthday by asking her to pick her best 10 albums it was no surprise that she would come up with this stunner. The set, branded “10 Classic Albums”, lives up to the name. We get lavish helpings of Brahms, French chansons, late-Romantic lieder and Scandinavian songs alongside von Otter’s brilliant collaboration with Elvis Costello, and we are given a bonus with her 1997 arias from Handel’s Ariodante, her first collaboration with Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre. They also collaborated on an all-Offenbach album, done with wit and elan and even if it’s not your aperitif of choice von Otter’s ability to inhabit the music will impress you. English conductor John Eliot Gardiner is another regular partner and their 1994 Kurt Weill tribute, Speak Low, represented another outstanding departure. Two further jewels in the set are her Baroque ventures with Reinhard Goebel and Musica Antiqua Köln, Lamenti and (my favourite) Handel’s Marian Cantatas. But it is her 30-year association with fellow Swede, pianist Bengt Forsberg, which is the beating heart here. Their broad musical landscape takes in Cécile Chaminade’s…

Van Dam’s effortless musicality, burnished velvety sound and ability to inhabit a character made him one of the outstanding singing actors of our time.

Editor’s Choice, Opera – August 2015 A few years ago I welcomed unreservedly the revelatory recording of Leonardo Vinci’s late opera Artaserse (Virgin 6028692) as an undiscovered masterpiece. Featuring a stellar line-up of no less than five countertenors (thanks to prudish Roman fashions, the women’s parts too were written for men), the opera, composed in the high-Neapolitan gallant style is a glorious succession of imaginatively scored virtuosic arias with no duds and plenty of hummable tunes. With the same cast bar one, this DVD is in some ways even better as the confusion between who is singing what, when so many roles are sung in falsetto, is no longer an issue. Artaserse was one of the hit libretti of the period, set by everyone who was anyone, but Vinci’s is rather special. The villainous vizier (Artabano) has killed his king letting suspicion fall upon his own son (Arbace), best friend to the new king (Artaserse). When Arbace won’t dob on dad, a tangled web of blame and deceit ensues before all comes good in a magnanimous finale involving a poisoned chalice. Silviu Purca˘rete’s production is the campest thing you’ll see this side of Eurovision, with costumes that would make Cinderella’s…

There is something special about the blend of voices among family members – witness the Everlys or the McGarrigals in the pop world  – but there are few instances that exist in the field of classical music. German father and son team Christoph and Julian Prégardien, however, are two exceptional tenors in their own right and have been performing duets over recent years. Now they have taken their popular recitals with pianist Michael Gees into the studio for the Dutch label Challenge Classics. The result, Father and Son, is an entertaining collection of curiosities and rearrangements of what some may consider to be sacred cows. The arrangements, mostly by Julian Prégardien and Gees, include 12 Schubert songs and were the product of rehearsals followed by in-the-moment improvisations, much like you would hear in a folk club. This, they argue, is in the spirit of contemporary accounts of the original Schubertiade evenings. The Goethe setting Der Erlkönig divides logically into the two roles of the night-riding father and the son who dies in his arms. Other songs sit less comfortably as duets, for this listener at least, although the Prégardiens and Gees perform them all impeccably. Two little-known German composers are…

A wonderful mixture of power, passion, beauty and expressive intensity, the distinguished Bulgarian-born bass, Nicolai Ghiaurov was a fine exponent of many aspects of opera and song, not least the Italian and French schools. He and his second wife, the great Mirella Freni, made a formidable operatic duo. Now dead for over a decade it is timely that Decca honour Ghiaurov with this generous and varied survey of his work in the field of Russian music. In the operatic realm, we have a selection of important arias sung with the London Symphony under Sir Edward Downes. Ghiaurov presents impressive characterisations in roles from Eugene Onegin, Prince Igor and most notably Boris Godunov, for which he became particularly famous. A selection of songs by Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Glinka, Rubinstein, and the now-forgotten Dargomyzhsky, shows the singer to be capable of great warmth and intimacy, especially in favourites such as None but the Lonely Heart and Rubinstein’s Melody. Ten folksongs performed with the Kavel Orchestra and Chorus under Atanas Margaritov are a welcome reminder of the other side of Russian music which Ghiaurov obviously enjoyed. The lusty singing of the male chorus… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe…