Kenneth Leighton came to prominence in the 1960s with a unique musical language that suited the times. His output had a ‘mod’ feel: edgy harmonies and propulsive rhythms seemed to proclaim a bold, new outlook that challenged both the musical and ecclesiastical status quo. Looking deeper we discover that Leighton’s music was anchored by a fair weight of musical history. Five years as a boy chorister at Wakefield Cathedral imbued him with a love of the Anglican tradition, whilst his later experience as a student of strict counterpoint, under the stern eye of his teacher Petrassi, ensured he knew what rules he was breaking. Stephen Layton and the Trinity choir have done a magnificent job in bringing out all the colour and drama of this selection of Leighton’s church music. Much of the disc has been recorded at Lincoln Cathedral where the weight of the organ adds to the intensity of the performances, even if it means some detail is blurred. Crucifixus Pro Nobis is splendidly realised with superb attention to the text by Patrick Carey and Phineas Fletcher. Tenor Andrew Kennedy wrings all the pathos from the score… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe…

Editor’s Choice, Vocal & Choral – August 2015 When one considers Franz Liszt’s rapacious appetite for poetic stimulation, the exalted literary circles in which he moved and his inexhaustible creative drive, it should come as no surprise that he composed over 70 songs, although only a handful will be familiar to most lieder-philes. That may change thanks to this third volume of Hyperion’s latest project in the label’s seeming aim to record the entire art-song repertoire and the bringing on board of Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley will broaden its appeal. The album spans some 50 years of Liszt’s career and demonstrates his wide ranging polyglot tastes and searching intellectual curiosity for source material. His harmonic and formal invention can veer from the exploratory to the mundane, but when taken on its own terms and delivered with this level of dramatic intensity it makes for a haunting 75 minutes. Finley takes these songs by the scruff of the neck and gives them all the dramatic gesture and flair he can muster. The Petrarch Sonnets are here, but heard in the substantially revised second edition for low voice, their austere… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

This latest album of Philip Glass piano music is a desperately poor effort from a pianist who apparently thinks that pressing down notes in the right order constitutes an interpretation. Never mind the specifics of the cultural milieu that helped create this music. Don’t bother listening to other pianists – musicians who have worked with Glass or indeed the composer’s own recordings. People who know stuff? What have they got to say that might be remotely useful? As in her earlier album of music by the British composer Michael Nyman, Valentina Lisitsa has assembled a grab-bag of Glass film scores – from The Truman Show, The Hours, Mishima and The Olympian – and her strategy is to wrap these already candy-sweet scores inside a lasagne of tinsel. Which is not to say that she puts a technical finger wrong. Inner parts are balanced; harmonic ambiguities are allowed to speak. No, the problem lies in her decorative and ambient touch, which reduces the music to inert patterning. The brief spans of most of these picture-postcard vignettes means that your irritation is generally only momentary. But her hapless attempt to sustain the 30-minute generative structure of Glass’s 1968 How Now – one of his trail-blazing,…

Javad Maroufi is credited as one of the first composers of piano music in Persia and is renowned for his significant contribution to Persian classical music. Inspired by their common heritage, Australian-Persian pianist Amir Farid has long been familiar with the composer’s work – indeed, Maroufi’s compositions were some of the first that Farid performed in public as a child. It’s fitting then that Maroufi’s body of work forms the basis of his wonderful second solo album. The pieces on this disc fuse the Western language of Chopin with the modal folk melodies of Persia, resulting in a journey through a collection of deceptively simple piano works. The Preludes in particular pay homage to Maroufi’s Polish counterpart. Farid is the perfect interpreter of these tiny gems. One technical trial is the use of a rapid right-hand tremolo, imitating the sound of the Santur, a Persian dulcimer. Farid sustains these rollicking repeated notes with an almost vocal quality. The melodic lines require rapid embellishments, which Maroufi allows the performer to add at their discretion. It’s through these subtle inferences that Farid demonstrates his intimate understanding while getting a chance to show his virtuosic chops in the demanding Charagh-e-Esfahan. If there is…

Paganimania is a collection of newly commissioned works for piano by seven contemporary composers. Their brief? Take Paganini’s 24th Caprice for solo violin and use it as the basis of a new composition. This project was the brainchild of Christopher Janwong McKiggan, an English-born pianist currently resident in the US and completing a doctorate at Rice University, Texas. It has produced some spectacular results, and McKiggan’s playing is uniformly commanding. Robert Beaser’s Pag Rag teases out American Rag-influences with lyrical and rhythmic panache, while James Mobberley’s Capricious Invariance gently unfolds into cascades of colour with hints of fugues. Scène V by Moon Young Ha is meditative and expansive, allowing the resonant qualities of each note/chord to radiate outward in space. On this topic, it’s a good point at which to note that Paganimania is particularly well-recorded with the rich, warm tones of McKiggan’s piano hanging reverberantly in the air. Other highlights include Zhou Jing’s Jade Clappers, a meditation on cross-cultural intersections between China and Europe through the Tai Ping Ge Ci music that, to her ears, is reminiscent of Paganini’s Caprice. Thai composer Narong Prangcharoen’s Pact Ink is fast, furious and captivating. As a pianist actively commissioning new works McKiggan…

Music inspired by the atrocities of the 20th century perhaps took a while to reach their peak with Britten’s magisterial War Requiem in the early 1960s, but with the centenary of the battle of Gallipoli this year, there has been a plethora of recordings of music inspired by the horrors of World War I. Some have been more successful than others but I’m glad to state that this new Melba release by the very fine Melbourne-raised and Juiliard-trained pianist Benjamin Martin, must immediately take its place at the top of the pile. There is something quite unique about this disc, which presents a well selected programme of solo piano music by a group of fine orchestral English composers whom we we do not initially associate with the solo keyboard (Bax, Vaughan Williams, Bridge and Delius), immaculately played and intimately performed by Martin. All of this music ranks amongst the earliest inspired by the Great War – all of it being written during the 1920s and all of it is as equally affecting as the best of the period’s song cycles. Perhaps the finest work lies with Vaughan Williams’ Prelude after a piece by Orlando Gibbons, dovetailing English music across the…

How can a miniaturist have delusions of grandeur? The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) showed the way. Overwhelmingly a writer for the piano, Scriabin modeled his early works on Chopin, and adopted the Polish master’s forms: etudes, preludes, nocturnes, scherzos, waltzes and mazurkas. He also wrote ten piano sonatas, along with three symphonies and a few other orchestral works, but no opera and very little vocal or chamber music. As he matured, Scriabin stretched the boundaries of chromatic harmony. His late miniatures such as the ‘poème’ Vers la Flamme of 1914 are practically atonal. In his final years he assumed a messianic self-regard, conceiving of a vast musical event complete with light shows and massed choirs. For a short time Scriabin was thought to represent the future of serious music. He certainly thought so, but did not live long enough to see the post-war abandonment of Romanticism. A hundred years after his death we are in a position to revisit his work without the mystical-philosophical baggage, and to appreciate its exquisite craftsmanship. These 18 discs cover everything: all the piano music from a Waltz Op. 1 to Five Preludes Op. 74, and many works without opus numbers. Vladimir Ashkenazy, who…

Astonishingly, the Belgian composer, organist and pianist Joseph Jongen (1873-1953) entered the Liège Conservatoire at the age of just eight. So one can imagine the gifts bestowed upon a musician who was at one time considered the greatest living Belgian composer and who is today chiefly remembered for his organ music. This is Volume 85 in Phaedra’s In Flanders’ Fields series, which aims to give listeners some idea of the richness and beauty of Flemish and Belgian classical music, past and present, performed by Flemish musicians. According to Phaedra’s website, the enterprising Flemish label wants to shine “a light on music by composers from the Low Countries, especially from Flanders and Wallonia… to save them from indifference and oblivion.” Here the spotlight is on Jongen’s chamber music for winds, with and without piano. The earliest work is the Lied for horn and piano; the most mature, the Concerto, Op. 124 for woodwind quintet (1942). 5 Beaufort (the Brussels Woodwind Quintet), which comprises players from the National Orchestra of Belgium, and Belgian pianist Hans Ryckelynck, choose however to open with the uncharacteristically modernist Rhapsodie, Op. 70 for woodwind quintet and piano (1922). The remaining works are an attractive blend of Saxon late-Romanticism…

On paper, this album by New York City-based chamber orchestra The Knights looks like a goer. Each piece – apart from Bach’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe, which is the genuine article – riffs off re-imagined ideas of the Concerto Grosso: a small body of soloists co-existing against the firepower of an orchestra. The Knights are musicians on a mission. Describing themselves as “an orchestral collective dedicated to transforming the concert experience”, the first thing to go is a conductor and I wonder if the pressure to count like crazy is why the Bach is taken at such a stampeding tempo? Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks fares better. But the group’s homogenised, pile-driver tone makes you wish for a hint of whimsy, vulnerability even. Steve Reich’s Duet for Two Violins and Strings transforms the concert experience into extreme tedium: this is one of Reich’s most casually note spun and generic scores, not helped by the glutinous recorded sound. A concerto for santur, violin and orchestra cobbled together by Colin Jacobsen (a santur being a Persian dulcimer) is episodic. The collectively composed …the ground beneath our feet, anchored around a ground bass borrowed from Baroque composer Tarquinio Merula is the final hurrah, but…

The rapport between the two musicians is highly effective, and probably the standout of the disc.

Prior to the recorded age, composers made piano transcriptions for a number of reasons. In the case of Gustav Mahler, transcriptions were presented to orchestral organisations and musicians who had expressed an interest in presenting one of his densely contrapuntal vistas to their audiences. To such a purpose, his popular Resurrection Symphony, which took the composer six years to write, has given birth to two such arrangements including one for piano duet by Mahler’s disciple and specialist, Bruno Walter in the latter years of the 19th century. A third, perhaps more satisfying approach was taken by Heinrich von Bocklet after the composer’s death and it is this which receives its discographic premiere in this excellent Melba release. It does take the ear a while to readjust to this more intimate and chamber-like impression, but here we have four pianists aiming towards a single and coherent performance, rather than having to bypass the often egocentric excesses involving a conductor and orchestral forces, thereby honing in on Mahler’s actual intents. The hushed, otherworldly quality of Urlicht seems appropriately lit from within, though the finale’s choral outburst may lack a little in power. However, all in all, here is an excellent guide towards understanding this great emotional work with even greater insight. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

It’s always a coup when two internationally renowned soloists come together to play chamber music.