DG’s new series of Mozart operas helmed by the label’s latest “das Wunder” Yannick Nézet- Séguin, kicked off last year with a superb Don Giovanni. Rolando Villazon is making a low-key comeback after his various vocal crises and has given a different slant to the tenor roles so-far. His Don Ottavio was a refreshingly muscular and Italianate change from the usual polite Mozartian tenors but here his Ferrando is not quite so successful with the more lyrical writing exposing his slightly nasal delivery; the tone now more tight and dry. Miah Persson’s Fiordiligi, a known quantity from an excellent Glyndebourne DVD, is technically immaculate and Angela Brower’s Dorabella is superb with ideal colour and weight of voice. Platchetka’s is an ideal Gugliemo and Corbelli puts in another fine not-too-buffo Don Alfonso however I remain immune to the charms of Mojca Erdmann, DG’s house soubrette. Her Despina is irritatingly arch with all the old clichéd off-key vocal disguises – tediously unfunny! Nézet-Séguin’s direction is superb, more weighted towards period style than before. The recitatives are wonderfully fleet and conversational, tempi are ideal, the finales thrilling with precise articulation. It may seem churlish to complain that this set is not at the…

As well as being one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, Benjamin Britten was also a distinguished conductor, accompanist and chamber musician. Collected here for the first time, in this captivating 26 CD box, are the fruits of his most important labours in these fields. Britten’s singular talent was for getting inside the mind of his fellow composers, whether it be Mozart, Schubert or Elgar, and generating something entirely original. It’s not always what they might have wanted (he takes untold liberties with The Dream of Gerontius), but he seldom fails to excite, often with a heart-stopping moment of enormous originality.   Highlights include a revolutionary reading of Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust – a masterpiece scarcely touched until this 1972 recording, his landmark Schubert and Schumann recitals accompanying Peter Pears and that radical Elgar, pushing the envelope farther than even Barbirolli was prepared to go.   If his Bach is less well recorded and a million miles from the period instrument school of thought, his Brandenburgs are still one of the best pre-1970 versions. Other classics include Mozart piano concertos with Clifford Curzon as soloist, his visionary Mozart and Schubert for two pianos where he’s joined by Sviatoslav Richter and Schubert’s Arpeggione with Rostropovich. All in all, a must have.

Here are two exceptional reissues. The Brahms consists of 1980s recordings featuring András Schiff with the Takács Quartet in the F Minor Piano Quintet, and with Viennese colleagues in the Horn and Clarinet Trios. VPO principal clarinetist Peter Schmidl is heard in the Clarinet Quintet. If that weren’t enough, Schiff plays the four-hand Variations on a Theme of Schumann, joined by no less a partner than Georg Solti. This fine collection covers works from all periods of Brahms’s life, but is especially recommendable for the autumnal late works. An interesting comparison may be made with the heart-on-sleeve Clarinet Quintet played by a Viennese ensemble of an earlier era, in the massive but treasurable Westminster Chamber Music collection. Fascinating generational differences. The ASMF disc restores Argo recordings from 1968 when Neville Marriner still played violin with the ensemble. Boccherini’s late quintet (one of over a hundred of the composer’s works in this form) is typically gentle and mellifluous, while Mendelssohn’s Octet is a recognised masterpiece. Both are very well played, though I think the Academy’s English good manners suit Boccherini better.

Max Raabe and his Palast Orchestra have been cult artists for several years. Their work has appeared on German labels, along with a terrific Kurt Weill album conducted by HK Gruber for RCA in 2001. Now Raabe and his authentic 1930s band have signed with Universal. Their mission is to resurrect what Ian Wekwerth’s notes call the ‘shellac’ sound of crooners of the Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby vintage. Hence, band arrangements feature oily saxophones and jazzy brass fills, plus a more present drum sound than we used to get on old 78s. Raabe himself is unique. His voice is at the same time resonant, with a wide range, and nasal. His ever so slightly Germanic pronunciation lends an air of high camp to the proceedings. This is also born out in his choice of repertoire. While legitimate hits of the 1920s and 30s are included, such as Singin’ in the Rain and Brecht and Weill’s Alabama Song – both of which he performs with authentic charm – there are also point numbers like Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf and Cosi Cosa from the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera.   As a bonus we get Raabe’s hilariously po-faced 30s rendition of Britney Spears’ Oops, I Did It Again, but in a shorter form than the older version where he reproduced the dialogue. (Don’t ask how I know…) Some fun originals and vivid sound add to the…

Following on from last year’s 1960s box, here are Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic’s recordings for the yellow label from the 1970s, minus the operas. By this time Karajan was the dominating force behind the Salzburg Easter Festival and a towering figure in Austro-German musical circles. He was even more prolific as a recording artist than during the preceding decade. Like the 60s box this set boasts 82 discs, but Karajan also returned to EMI at this time to record with other orchestras as well as his Berliners.   He enjoyed the freedom to rerecord some of his core repertoire, namely the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The Beethovens, especially Nos 3, 6 and 7, are broader than their 1960s counterparts: stirring performances, but beginning to exhibit the glacial grandeur that the conductor was later accused of overdoing. The historically informed movement had not yet reached Beethoven, but it had reached Bach. Karajan continued to program Bach, Vivaldi and other Baroque masters, and his modern instrument readings sound leaner than might be expected (notably his 1978 set of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, though not his B Minor Mass or St Matthew Passion)….

The ABC’s decision to record the complete Beethoven piano sonatas with Australia’s foremost specialist Gerard Willems was launched in the late 1990s and hailed as a first for the country. The three-year project was given an added frisson by Willems’s decision to use pianos built by Aussie Wayne Stuart rather than the ubiquitous Steinway.   Wayne Stuart’s skills as a piano maker were first tested when as a young man he played dance music published by J. Albert and Son at village halls around the country. The upright pianos were in varying states of disrepair and he often had to fix and tune them before the gig. Years later when his piano company in Melbourne wasn’t going anywhere Robert Albert, head of the publishing company, asked Stuart if they could come in on a joint venture. “I was hoping for ages that you would ask me that,” Stuart replied.   A couple of ARIAs later and with burgeoning sales, the next logical step – the five piano concertos – was announced with Willems being joined by Antony Walker conducting Sinfonia Australis, drawn from the cream of our orchestras. In 2010 Willems was back in the Ultimo studio tackling the mighty…

The first thing you notice are the asterisks all over the liner notes. They’re on every track bar the opener to denote world premiere recordings of these sometimes outrageously virtuosic Neapolitan arias for the famous castrati. David Hansen’s voice, too, is something of a modern world first.   On his debut solo album he soars across three octaves, so that listeners are left to marvel at his stamina and dexterity in the 13-minute tour de force Son Qual Nave (by Farinelli’s brother Riccardo Broschi) as he flips between octaves – showing off the equally impressive lows – and embellishes impossibly long passages leading to a thrilling da capo high D. Hansen’s interpretation is as close to Farinelli’s as possible, in the version the castrato annotated with his own ornaments. That D is Hansen’s fullest and richest high on the album; at other moments it can get cold up there – occasionally drifting a little sharp despite his care and precision – but it’s a remarkable feat you certainly won’t hear anywhere else.   It was perhaps inevitable that the refined playing of the orchestra Academia Montias Regalis would be outshone by the soloist, but in Leo’s Freme Orgogliosa L’Onda (with…

Melbourne composer Stuart Greenbaum’s chamber works, like all the best art, is in the world but not of the world – qualities which are sympathetically brought out in these performances by one of New Zealand’s leading chamber ensembles, NZTrio.   Head of Composition at the Melbourne Conservatorium, Greenbaum has written opera, choral, orchestral, chamber and solo instrumental music. This new recording features eight works exploring the latter two genres from between 1999 and 2011. The title work, 800 Million Heartbeats, takes the nominal number of heartbeats in a human life as a metaphor for life’s journey. Falling by Degrees explores gravity and falling in seven miniatures. Equator Loops and Lunar Orbit are for solo piano and cello respectively, while The Lake and the Hinterland and Scarborough Variations combine both instruments. The Year Without A Summer takes the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora as its subject.   Greenbaum says his music “aims to evoke an atmosphere apart from the routine of modern life”. But by drawing on familiar styles such as blues, pop and jazz, his music celebrates modern life in all its forms. It simply jettisons the routine. Thus 800 Million Heartbeats tells the story of our lives through soaring string melodies singing over the steady pulse of piano figurations. In Falling by Degrees, ghostly harmonics, agitated pizzicatos…

Johann Jacob Froberger led an interesting life, not least when his ship was attacked by pirates on a voyage some time in the early 1650s! Arriving penniless in London, so the story goes, he accepted work as an organ blower – a job he then lost because he was consumed with ‘melancholia’.   Presumably the combination of pirates, poverty and English weather led him to compose the Plaincte…pour passer la mélancholie – the starting point for Andreas Staier’s engrossing journey into the melancholic utterances of 17th-century keyboard music. Using a beautifully restored harpsichord, Staier guides the listener through a well-paced program that illustrates the fantastic and colourful fruits of the melancholic temperament.   Bookended with works by the hapless Froberger, the recital also includes music from D’Anglebert, Louis Couperin, Fischer, Clérambault and Muffat. Forms such as the tombeau (a musical gravestone), the passacaglia or the chaconne allow the composer, player and listener to work through their melancholy in musical tension and release. Staier coaxes a wonderful range of tone from his instrument.   Only Fischer’s wild Toccata and Passacaglia threaten to push it beyond its musical limits. Closing the disc is an exquisite account of Froberger’s Lamento on the death of Ferdinand IV, the perfect antidote to melancholia.

This collection of legendary recordings provides an outlet for nostalgia among older music lovers and a rich opportunity for younger ones.

At a Prom concert in the Royal Albert Hall a few years ago, a few seconds after the famous bassoon passage at the beginning of the Rite of Spring, a mobile phone sounded. Sir Simon Rattle simply stopped the Berlin Philharmonic and started again. It makes you thankful they didn’t exist when Szell and Klemperer were around. This was the work that catapulted the then 21 year-old tyro conductor into the limelight when he conducted it with the Youth orchestra of Great Britain in 1976. I remember it vividly: I was there. Since then, he also recorded it during his tenure with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Whereas that was a respectable reading, this is in another league. In terms of tempos, colour and rhythm, it’s superb. The barbarism is beautifully tempered with finesse. It’s one of the great Rites. The only version I’d put above it is the stereo re-make by Igor Markevich and the aristocratic Philharmonia in 1960 where the orchestral shriek at the opening of the second part is… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Obscure baroque operas are common now, but this recording of Provenzale’s tragicomedy still wins points for novelty.