This 2-CD set of dance numbers from Rameau operas captures Jordi Savall’s period-instrument band Le Concert des Nations playing with all the lusty, effervescent joie de vivre the music demands. The “suites” put together by Savall trace a similar but more unified trajectory to Marc Minkowski’s Imaginary Symphony Rameau album (Les Musiciens du Louvre on Archiv). The present collection is a reminder that the composer’s instrumental music was just as thrilling and inventive as what he wrote for the voice: earthy and robust like a good Provençal stew, without sacrificing the majestic air of refinement that captivated the court of Versailles. One can only marvel at the punchy phrasing in the overture to Zoroastre and be seduced by the exotic percussion in Air des Incas from Les Indes Galantes. An authentic musette, that rare and peculiar Gallic bagpipe, makes an appearance in Naïs to spice up the French Baroque palette. Natural horns in Les Boréades, Rameau’s final tragédie en musique, are less graceful than Les Arts Florissants’ under William Christie (Opus Arts DVD) but richer for their pungency. Surging strings, turbulent transverse flute and a wind machine summon elemental forces, while delicate gavottes have more charm and snappy detail than…

The greatest music — say, a late Beethoven piano sonata — exists in its own realm. It does not automatically conjure up images of the period in which it was written. Chopin’s waltzes do, and that is why they are sometimes thought of as glorified salon music. It takes a pianist with the sensibility of Stephen Hough to reveal the art behind their mixture of effervescence and sentimentality. Chopin himself regarded his waltzes as comparative trifles; he only published half of them and often gave the manuscripts to young ladies as gifts.  Hough’s facility with lighter music is well documented in his mixed recitals. He has an instinctive knowledge of when to relax and when to press forward, which is used to charming effect in this beautifully recorded collection. In both the Minute and the C-sharp minor waltzes (from the Op 64 set) Hough subtly caresses the melodic lines, and breezes through the scale passages with an evenness of touch, never making too great a point of virtuosity. Mirroring the composer’s achievement, this is the art that conceals art. The delicacy of Hough’s approach also benefits the unpublished waltzes, many of which are less complex and less polished than the popular favourites….

I hate to sound like an old fogy here but I guess it’s unavoidable. James Rhodes is a British pianist whose rocketing career is fuelled by media-savvy management, celebrity endorsements and an individual presentational style combining the downmarket look of Nigel Kennedy with a troubled rock star rep: a history of mental issues, a failed marriage, and the inevitable refusal to toe the line. While many classical musicians have had broken marriages and some have suffered breakdowns, few have used that information to market a persona. (Rhodes is a better pianist than David Helfgott, incidentally.)  Rhodes’ notes on the music are subtly ingratiating: the Toccata from Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin is “me wrestling with London Transport as I head off on the tube to see my shrink”. What it is not, in Rhodes’ splashy rendition, is a meticulous salute to the Baroque clavecinist.The Scherzo from Beethoven’s Sonata Op 31 No 3 suits Rhodes with its snappy sforzandi, but other fast pieces are messy (single movements from sonatas by Alkan and Chopin), while Debussy’s La plus que Lente and Ravel’s Pavane lack poetry. This release is aimed at people who don’t know the music. That’s to be encouraged, no doubt, but…

Zubin Mehta has had a distinguished, if occasionally uneven career. His tenure with the New York Philharmonic was not one of the orchestra’s more successful appointments. Elsewhere he has done some outstanding work: his conducting of Turandot on Decca with Sutherland is probably the finest on disc, Richard Bonynge observing that Mehta’s scrupulous attention to detail at the recording sessions was remarkable. More recently he led the less famous forces in Valencia in a remarkable Ring Cycle. Now we have this new release from a concert he gave with the IPO in Tel-Aviv in 2007. From the outset, Dvorák’s Ninth is flabby and untidy, with the IPO’s strings sounding very indifferent. This is surprising, for the one of the IPO’s greatest strengths has always been its famous string section. There is some fine solo woodwind playing in the slow movement and the scherzo clips along nicely. Nonetheless, you don’t have to look far to find superior performances on CD. The New World Symphony is teamed with Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, and as couplings go it doesn’t get much stranger than this. What some orchestras can present together in a concert hall may seem incongruous on a recording…. Continue reading Get…

It’s good to see the Scandinavian company BIS persevering with the high-end SACD format at a time when the majority of music buyers no longer seem to care about quality audio reproduction at all. This disc has three audio layers to choose from: SACD Stereo, SACD Surround and standard-CD. When played through a good system boasting SACD reproduction, it shows just what the format is capable of. The sound here is simply superb. The violin has its natural warmth with plenty of bite, and the detail in the orchestral sound is exemplary, revealing layer on layer. Of course, that would be worthless if we were listening to a mundane performance. This is anything but. Soloist Vadim Gluzman and the Bergen Philharmonic under Andrew Litton give a committed interpretation of Bruch’s First Violin Concerto, and we can understand from this fine account why the success of this work overshadowed the rest of the composer’s career.  The Romance for Violin and Orchestra is a pleasant enough piece, much like a stocking-filler at Christmas. But the rarely heard String Quartet in A minor is a revelation. Written in 1918 when the composer was 80 and near the end of his life, this is a vigourous, even…

Anyone familiar with Schubert’s murderous Die Nonne (The Nun) or Mendelssohn’s frenzied Hexenlied will know the extremes to which a 19th-century composer might go in order to send shivers up the collective spines of his audience with a ghoulish musical yarn. But if an hour of such fare fills you with trepidation, fear not, for with Canadian baritone Gerald Finley and pianist Julius Drake you will be in very safe hands.   This is a brilliantly constructed program of tales told through poetry and music, ranging from blockbusters like Erlkönig, a most deeply felt Lost Chord and ending with a razor-sharp Cole Porter ballad about a social-climbing oyster who goes down the wrong way with inevitable results. Finley is clearly a singer at the very top of his game – the voice always used with intelligence; full, resonant and flexible. I would be hard pressed to think of a rival today who could finesse these songs with such grace, nuance and sheer vocal acting. Drake is in his element as well, breathing fire or exuding pathos in turn.  Standouts include a hypnotic rendition of Edward, Loewe’s tale of patricide revealed, as well as a chilling Der Feuerreiter – Wolf’s ballad of the legendary, mad…

Florent Schmitt (1870-1958) was a contemporary of Ravel, Roussel and Dukas, and like them he wrote music for the ballet, including Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In the early decades of the 20th century his name was well known but his reputation suffered after the 1930s. The reasons were partly personal – Schmitt was a cantankerous personality and Nazi sympathiser – but also his richly orchestrated, fulsomely chromatic style fell out of fashion. The three works on this stunningly recorded disc are among Schmitt’s better-known. His ballet The Tragedy of Salome was written at exactly the same time as Richard Strauss’s opera, although the opera was performed first and its notoriety overshadowed the Frenchman’s score. The ballet is packed with “orientalisms”, cymbal-topped climaxes and disembodied melismatic sopranos. Big on atmosphere and beautifully played, the performance is subdued compared to the ancient Paray version (Mercury) and the white-hot performance from the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic (Onyx).  Psalm 47 is a setting of biblical verses for soprano, large choir and orchestra. It employs the same exotic palette, but here the prolonged choral fortes and relentless climaxes invoke the law of diminishing returns. A few calm moments, usually involving the excellent Susan Bullock, provide welcome respite….

The difficulty of producing a documentary about Glenn Gould’s life and his eccentricities must have been daunting.

In his day Charles Gounod was seen as a leading composer of religious music, turning out a large number of works in his productive lifetime (20 masses and four requiems, for a start). We remember him as the composer of Faust, once the world’s most famous and popular opera. He is less well-known for a rather weak-kneed version of Roméo et Juliette, complete with happy ending. If, as an opera composer, Gounod has faded, on the evidence contained in this excellent CD his religious music warrants reappraisal, even though, with its faint perfumes of a bygone age, it might seem more elusive to ears attuned to Poulenc and Fauré. This is especially true of the Requiem, though the Messe Chorale is made of sterner stuff and is a fine work. In an 1892 letter to a colleague, Gounod writes: “It is time for the banner of liturgical Art to replace in our churches that of profane cantilena, and for musical practices to proscribe all the mush of the Romance and all the sweets of piety which have for too long sickened our stomachs”. It is possible that César Frank’s 1872 setting of Panis angelicus was just the sort of soupy church music he was…

Wigmore Hall continues to share its bounties with this release, recorded late last year, of Christopher Maltman in Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin. Live recordings can be uneven affairs, but Maltman’s performance captures all the excitement of the concert hall and few of its drawbacks – his interpretation is cohesive, his voice vividly caught and unwaveringly fine, and the only audience noise of note is the deservedly vociferous ovation at the end. If anything, the live setting has caught a depth of spontaneous emotion which a studio might have dulled. Maltman’s light, silken baritone is arresting from the outset, in a Das Wandern of breathless, barely contained emotion. He maintains the first half of the cycle at a slow burn, singing so gently, and with such delicate top notes, that the eventual outburst of Mein! comes as a genuine and jarring shock. The sweet tone of those early songs is barely detectable in the acerbic anger of Der Jäger, and when it returns in Eifersucht und Stolz, seems to mock its own timidity. The young man Maltman portrays is a sensitive soul in turmoil, prone to explosive rage and tears, but whose delusions (and depressions) are more naïve than pathological. From its softest to…

Rachmaninov’s four piano concertos are a classic example of the excellent being the enemy of the merely very good. When, in 1917, he came to revise his first youthful concerto (from 1891), the Second and Third Concertos had firmly ensconced themselves in the repertoire and in the affections of the public. The Fourth Concerto, composed in 1926, never had a chance: it had none of the fizz of Gershwin in its jazz-influenced passages and the main theme of its slow movement has a bizarre and unfortunate resemblance to Three blind mice! There are traces of the dreamy, sentimental, later Rachmaninov in both these works – and Simon Trpceski is excellent throughout – but they are either embryonic or truncated. In the last movement of the First, just as you think they’re about to burst into the BIG tune, the pianist scuttles off in a helter-skelter passage of presto fingerwork. There is real chemistry between Trpceski and Petrenko here, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic are on fire. I loved the brass attack in the opening chords of the First Concerto. Both orchestra and soloist are highly affecting in its slow movement.  I’ve left little room for… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from…

For many, Daniel Barenboim is thought of primarily as a conductor today. But this album, recorded in Warsaw only last year, sees him back at the piano in triumphant form. This live recital spans a huge range of Chopin’s works, from his Fantasia in F minor to the Nocturne in B-flat major; the Sonata in B-flat minor, through Barcarolles, Waltzes, the Berceuse in D-flat major, and the resounding Polonaise in A flat major. It’s an all-encompassing tribute marking the 2010 bicentenary of Chopin’s birth. There are many idiosyncrasies in Barenboim’s reading – sometimes a playfulness with tempi and weight that make the listener hear a piece in a completely new way, or a thoughtful new interpretation of a phrase or interval. Only once, in what seems a wilful account of the martial Polonaise in A-flat major, does the interpretation seem at odds with the work – or at least, with the interpretations we are most familiar with. The recording reaffirms his position as one of the great pianists of the latter part of the 20th century and it is great to see his keyboard career extended into the new century in such a manner. This is a live recording, and…