Five of the world’s top wind players have formed chamber music’s equivalent of The Three Tenors to record an absolute pearler of a double album. Going under the name Les Vents Français, flautist Emmanuel Pahud, Paul Meyer, clarinet, Francois Leleux oboe, Gilbert Audin, bassoon, and Radovan Vlatkovic, french horn, are all star soloists in their own right. Together they are magic. The set kicks off with a light and air-filled soufflé in the form of Jacques Ibert’s Trois pièces brèves. This is highly accessible music composed during the inter-war years as an antidote to the heavier fare of modernism. Much of Ravel’s piano music transcribes beautifully for chamber ensembles and American horn player Mason Jones’ arrangement of Le Tombeau de Couperin shows off the group’s matchless balance and flawless intonation. Andre Jolivet (1905-1974) was greatly influenced by both Varèse and Bartók and his 1963 Sonatine for oboe and bassoon slides playfully between keys like a witty conversation between these two instruments. This leads seamlessly into Darius Milhaud’s nod to the 15th century troubadour era, La Cheminée du Roi René, seven exquisite sketches with acrobatic flute and oboe lines depicting jugglers and jousting knights and a serene madrigal/nocturne suggesting a chivalrous…

Having previously recorded Beethoven’s complete violin sonatas with Corey Cerovsek, as well as some fairly uncompromising 20th-century works, including pieces by Boulez, Bartók and Rautavaara, Paavali Jumpanen has released a two-disc set of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. He’s chosen some of the very earliest works in the Op 2 set, as well as the Sonata in A Major, Op 101, and he concludes with the monumental Hammerklavier. Jumpanen’s approach to these pieces is highly convincing; in the early sonatas, he reminds us that they were dedicated to Haydn through a thoroughly Classical reading of the works. However, there’s an intensity behind the elegance that’s refreshing. It’s clear that Jumppanen realises that Beethoven was already pushing the boundaries of the Classical style, showing a firm understanding of the works’ progressive nature. The Sonata in F Minor begins with an arpeggiated melody highly reminiscent of Haydn himself, but it’s only a short time before the storm clouds gather. Take for example, the passionate last movement, which is full of gestures that signify what was to come for Beethoven’s stylistic development – we hear crashing bass chords paired with rapid-fire scalic passages. The Sonata in A is a more restrained work, and it’s worthwhile…

The main strike against this CD is that it lasts barely 45 minutes. A pity, as the performances are very fine.

Daniel Barenboim first recorded the Elgar symphonies back in the 1970s and of course also made ‘the other’ Cello Concerto recording with his wife Jacqueline du Pré. Now he’s returning to them all, the latter with Alisa Weilerstein last year. He’s redoing the symphonies with the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Second this year with the First to follow in 2015. And this Symphony No 2 sounds like urgent business for Barenboim. Forget Sir John Barbirolli weeping in the slow movement, or Sir Adrian Boult with his stiff upper lip and two-metre baton revealing Elgarian profundity. Barenboim’s all bustle-and-busyness at the start, not so much nobilmente as ‘no time to stop, got errands to do’. This is a turbulent Elgar, changing his mind every ten seconds, and with his rhythms and phrases all sounding rather four-square at the outset (and perhaps a little too Elgar-as-Brahms). Then when Elgar says “presto”, Barenboim really puts the foot down, making the third movement a veritable showpiece of technical virtuosity on the orchestra’s part, perhaps at the expense of the unusual but altogether distinctive Elgarian characteristic of nostalgia infusing the quick bits. But eventually it all begins to make sense. He may be an old Elgarian…

For some time, enterprising groups have been recording the Sullivan operas which he didn’t write with Gilbert, a welcome development, especially when as well performed and recorded as is this splendid offering from Wales. Most contain a good measure of attractive music and are important additions to the catalogue. The Beauty Stone arrived at the Savoy in 1898, two years after the last G&S opera, The Grand Duke and ran for a mere 50 performances. The Savoy audience had tired of the genre and were being entertained by hits such as Floradora and The Geisha. On top of that, the librettist, Comyns Carr and the brilliant playwright Arthur Wing Pinero, overwrote the piece into the ground. Unlike Sullivan, who knew a thing or two about these things, they thought it was play with music, and it ran four hours at its premiere. Now, with a good recording and first-rate cast we can largely ignore the clumsier aspects of the drama and content ourselves with Sullivan’s fine score, and it is excellent. With his grand opera, Ivanhoe in 1891 Sullivan was endeavouring to find a way from Wagner to a newer romantic English school with strong medieval elements. He continued this…

I’ve long admired and respected the work of Neil McEwan and his accomplished choir at Christ Church St Laurence in Sydney. This disc is a fine celebration of McEwan’s scholarly expertise in the area of Gregorian chant with his dedicated ‘chant schola’. What makes this disc particularly interesting is the premiere recording of eight items from the Rimini Antiphonal, a 14th-century chant book housed in the State Library of New South Wales. McEwan transcribed these chants and prepared them for performance. Other chants from the regular plainsong repertory as well as three polyphonic motets and two chants by Hildegard of Bingen make for a pleasantly varied program. Performances are enhanced by the atmospheric but not overwhelmingly reverberant acoustic of the chapel at St Scholastica’s Convent, Glebe. McEwan elicits the necessary flexibility from his male singers in the chant. Their occasional bursts of vocal fervour are understandable. Robert White’s Christe qui lux es et dies, Taverner’s Dum transisset Sabbatum and Byrd’s Laetentur caeli provide an appropriate change of texture along the way. These motets are sung with clarity and precision. Hildegard’s chants, O tu suavissima virga and O eterne Deus add yet another dimension to the program. The addition of a…

Jean-Rudolf Kars’ parents were Viennese Jews but he grew up in France, part of the same generation as Jean-Philippe Collard and Pascal Rogé. He converted to Catholicism in 1976 (three years after touring Australia for the ABC) and became a priest in 1983. On the strength of these discs, the priesthood’s gain was music’s loss. One CD contains Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy and also the D.946 Klavierstücke. This is Schubert at his most profound, simultaneously radiating Biedermeier exquisiteness, under the shadow of imminent death. Kars’ readings are searching, charming and poignant. His second CD contains both books of Debussy’s Préludes, beautifully played, if a little slower than we’re accustomed to today (The Submerged Cathedral must be somewhere in the Mariana Trench). His Messiaen excerpts from Twenty Contemplations of the Christ Child and the Catalogue of Birds underscore the extent to which Messiaen was Debussy’s spiritual successor. Kars’ renditions are wonderfully extrovert and joyful, emphasising the ecstatic side of Messiaen. Dame Gillian Weir, perhaps the most ardent champion of Messiaen’s organ output, performs previously unissued works including the epic Les Corps glorieux – Sept Visions brèves de la Vie des Ressuccités “The Bodies in Glory – Seven Brief Visions of the life…

In the first volume we heard Wilhelm Stenhammar pay tribute to Beethoven, and creating in the fourth what some consider to be the finest Scandinavian string quartet. Now the excellent Stenhammar Quartet are back with volume two in which the listener discovers how the composer has progressed after some self-imposed rigorous counterpoint study, and gets to hear the premiere recording of the unnumbered F Minor Quartet composed in 1897. Stenhammar was pleased with the middle movements but worried about the finale and in the end abandoned it. Was he justified? You decide. After the fourth quartet the self-critical Stenhammar felt he needed further refinement, especially in counterpoint, and he spent nine years studying. The results can be heard in the fifth and sixth quartets. The melody and invention are as rich as before but there is a greater homogeneity in the part writing. Gone too are the tributes to Beethoven and Haydn and the flirtation with atonality – this is late Romantic music with strong folk influences and a light infusion of the ‘impressionism’ of Debussy or even Delius and the influence of his great friend Jean Sibelius. Although a celebrated pianist, Stenhammar worked closely with the Aulin Quartet and…

There’s something so inviting about this second installment in Leif Ove Andsnes’ Beethoven Piano Concertos cycle, as if the pianist/director and ever-so-sympatico Mahler Chamber Orchestra are offering a sparklingly restored heritage hotel, blazing fireplace and all, to the cold and weary musical traveller. The engaging moods of Beethoven’s Concertos can claim some credit in themselves, but just as in the critically acclaimed previous recording of One and Three by the same players, it’s the lack of hang-ups and a maximum of good-vibes that makes you want to be best friends with these performances, right from the opening ritornello of No. Two that takes off with a smile on its face. Andsnes himself then brings all the enthusiasm and attention to detail of the perfect dinner-host. And it’s a well-balanced meal being served up, always lyrical, with the slow movements in particular achieving an extraordinary balance between lightness of touch, profundity of meaning, depth of emotion and sheer take-your-breath-away beauty. In the outer movements, the melodies extend the view toward the musical horizons, and yet every moment in its own right seems so filled with musical detail, the diversity of instrumental colours and the shifting points of focus constantly prompting the…

Ge Gan-Ru (b.1954) has been described by as China’s finest avant-garde composer. Like the young Takemitsu, he had to study Western classical music in secret but when the Shanghai conservatory was reopened in 1974, he found an affinity for the likes of Stockhausen, Ligeti and Debussy. These became influences in Ge Gan-Ru’s own compositions and merged successfully with traditional Chinese music in a way where the styles were truly synthesised into an individual and exciting compositional voice. This new BIS disc is a marvel where orchestral colours and big Messiaenic blocks of sound brilliantly coalesce to form a highly individual sound world where seemingly disparate musical styles seamlessly knit with the 2,000 year old Qin tales that provide the inspiration (the suite Lovers Besieged is based on the famous Farewell, My Concubine). Fairy Lady Meng Jiang was composed for the Israeli flute virtuoso Sharon Bezaly who has no problems whatsoever with the unfamiliar Asian influences within this highly impressive work. Both works find their inspiration in difficult periods of Chinese history but never do the Western and Chinese elements oppose or work against each other. For here is truly international music – a Chinese-American composer, an Israeli soloist and Spanish…

The most eye-catching part of the packaging for The Good Song was a small explicit content sticker in the top left hand corner. I didn’t give it much thought, writing it off as a packaging error, or a joke, a mild grab for attention. It wasn’t until I was looking through the English translations of Poulenc’s Chansons gaillardes provided with the disc that I realised this sticker might be more related to the content that first expected. Poulenc’s Chansons gaillardes derives its lyrical content from obscene 17th-century texts, resulting in lyrics such as:      To the god of love a virgin      Offered a candle      That she might obtain a lover      The god smiled at her request      And said to her: Pretty one while you wait,      You can always use the offering It is an example of obscenity realised as beautiful music. Of course these words sound far more eloquent in French. In 2013 Thomas Meglioranza devoted an entire album to Schubert’s Winterreise, a logical extension of 2007’s Schubert Songs. It is with interest that 2014’s The Good Song moves tangentially to Meglioranza’s recorded work this far. There is no Schubert to be heard here, but…

Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Tragédie en musique Castor et Pollux received merely a lukewarm reception when it was first performed at the Paris Opéra in 1737. However, its 1754 revision turned out to be a complete triumph. That’s the version Australia’s Pinchgut Opera presented in Sydney, December 2012, from which live performances this recording was assembled. One of Rameau’s most popular operas, containing music of exceptional quality and beauty, it’s surprising this was the first time the work had been performed in Australia in its entirety. Better 258 years later than never, I suppose. It is also of great comfort that this is such a fine interpretation. The story is straightforward. The immortal Pollux offers to marry his deceased mortal brother’s widow, Télaïre. She’d rather have her husband back, which request Jupiter agrees to grant providing Pollux takes his slain brother’s place in Hades. Castor’s filial love is too strong, however, and he insists on spending one day only with the grieving Télaïre. Impressed, Jupiter makes Castor immortal as well and both brothers are placed among the constellations as the heavenly twins. Conductor Antony Walker and harpsichord continuo player Erin Helyard are fully conversant with the style of the French Baroque, and…