It seems apt to be listening to jazz singer-songwriter Nicola Milan at this time of year. As the mercury drops, her second studio album Forbidden Moments begs to be enjoyed on a lazy Sunday afternoon, glass of red in hand. Produced with a $9,765 grant awarded by Arts WA and the Department of Culture, these ten original pieces move between bluesy swing, Latin, and folk to convey the emotional versatility and complexities of a talented and promising songstress. A WAAPA graduate and award winning songwriter, Milan’s vocals are warm, effortless and chocolaty, and occasionally spiked with a hint of something stronger. The Scent of Her Perfume is pure drama. Sensual and passionate, Milan’s voice flirts with violinist Ashley Arbuckle’s sexy melodic passages in this bold tango. Arbuckle, former co-leader of the London Symphony Orchestra is joined by a series of distinguished jazz musicians including double bassist Pete Jeavons, guitarist Rick Webster and drummer Michael Perkins. Together they form a tight ensemble and Milan provides ample opportunities for each performer to shine. Their experience shows. The final track on the album, Latin inspired The Lonely Flute, brilliantly showcases flautist and saxophonist Michael Collinson, and pianist and accordionist Ben Clarke – a……

Anyone passionate about Wagner’s Ring Cycle knows that every generation has its own prospective dream team.

Joaquin Turina took on the advice as well as the example of his older compatriots Albeníz and Falla, and wrote works influenced by the fiery gypsy music of Andalusia. His output consists mainly of piano music, songs, chamber music and a handful of dazzling orchestral works which show him to be second only to Ravel in orchestral wizardry. In all the music on this well-filled disc you will hear a style of Impressionism that is not cool and misty but ablaze with heat and light. The BBC Philharmonic relish Turina’s textures under Mena’s idiomatic direction, and typically rich Chandos sound is everything one could wish. This is well worth collecting alongside Mena’s previous discs of music by Falla and Montsalvatge. If I have a quibble, perhaps a degree of earthiness is missing in these lush performances. In the Danzas Fantásticas some of Mena’s predecessors point more clearly to the gypsy origins. Try the
old Ansermet/Suisse Romande recording on Eloquence to hear what I mean. Clara Mouritz’s vibrant mezzo- soprano voice is perfect for the heartfelt Saeta, but I feel the five Poema en forma de canciones lie too high for her. A true soprano is needed, the likes of Los Angeles,…

Just as flamenco guitarists Paco Peña and Paco di Lucía have stretched the boundaries of what constitutes flamenco, so too does Barcelona-born José Luis Montón draw on “new characters in the alphabet of flamenco” in his inspired, impassioned creations, while introducing a few of his own. As Montón writes in his brief booklet note: “In this music I have tried to translate all the sincerity and love of art that I appreciate so much when I encounter it.” Thus most of the pieces start
from a traditional base – bulería, tango, soleá, seguirilla and so forth – before pushing off from the shore in search of new horizons. Works such as the opening Rota (farruca) and the percussive Al oído (cantiñas) combine sweetly ornamented melodies with flurries of punteado and machine-gun bursts of rasgueado, while rhythms and harmonies take unexpected twists and turns. One of the biggest, and most enjoyable, of those twists is Montón’s beautiful, flamenco- inflected arrangement of JS Bach’s Air from the Orchestral Suite No 3 in D. Here, as in many other pieces on this recording, the main melody sneaks up on you amid a fresh, lyrical introduction. Other highlights include the intense Altolaguirre (tango), the exciting……

One feels that it’s very much the pianist’s hand on the throttle of Weber’s ghost train, plunging ahead one moment, the next, pulling back.

She’s playing the Elgar Cello Concerto with the husband of the woman who made the greatest-ever recording of it; she’s already won a “Genius” award from the MacArthur Foundation, and she’s got Decca hailing her as its first solo cellist signing in more than three decades. Lots of hype to live up to there, and Alisa Weilerstein seems on a hiding-to-nothing when the inevitable comparisons are made with Jacqueline duPré. What
the conspicuously intelligent American has going for her is a prodigious talent that’s been
recognised ever since she made
her concert debut with Cleveland
Orchestra nearly two decades ago.
That, and a commercial point-of-difference
in programming, with the immortal Elgar coupled implausibly with Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto, and then the bitter pill’s sugar- coating of Bruch’s Kol Nidrei. But Weilerstein is known for her interest
in contemporary music, and Carter’s Cello Concerto, filled with slap-pizzicato and spiky orchestral explosions, is one of the few works by the American composer’s-composer that has crossed over successfully into the popular concert hall. And strange as it may sound given the beloved warhorse company that it keeps, this boots-and-all recording of it is the highlight of an impressive CD which leaves the brain stimulated but the emotions strangely unengaged. In…

Forget the Complete Wagner with its paltry 43 CDs – this monolith, weighing in at a gargantuan 75 discs, beats all comers this year – that is if you can manage to struggle home with it from the shop! From 1840 to 1860, Giuseppe Verdi produced a new opera nearly every year. A slowpoke compared with some of his contemporaries (the likes of Donizetti and Pacini could
whack out three or four operas
a year) but considering that
Verdi’s output included works
like Nabucco, Macbeth, Rigoletto,
La Traviata, Il Trovatore and Un
Ballo In Maschera, that’s pretty good
going by anyone’s standards. He slowed down over the following 30 years, with only five more works seeing the light of day – but what masterworks they were! Decca and Deutsche Grammophon have made so many recordings over the years that it comes as no surprise that Universal Music are able to curate a “complete works” of the depth of quality that we have here. The classic sets include Kleiber’s La Traviata with Cotrubas and Domingo, Abbado’s Macbeth, Giulini’s Rigoletto and Il Trovatore, Domingo’s finest Otello and Karajan’s earlier Aida. We also get both versions of La Forza del Destino (St Petersburg and Milan) and both French and Italian…

Academic and composer Stevie Wishart has edited and recorded the complete works of the recently beatified 12th-century mystic and composer Abbess Hildegard of Bingen over the last 20 years. She collaborates here with electronica producer Guy Sigsworth on a “creative re-imagining of a choral evensong”. Released with an eye on the crossover/new age audience, the disc may make purists recoil in horror but Wishart has never been afraid to allow some creative license in her interpretation of the melismatic neumes. Most of the content of this album features unadorned monodic chant performed by the six pure but characterful voices of Sinfonye, interspersed with Wishart’s tasteful reworkings “alio modo” (another way). One of Wishart’s original compositions, a particularly impressive polyphonic setting of the Magnificat, turns out to be the highlight of the disc, showing off the expressive range of the ensemble to better effect than the restrained chanting nun material surrounding it – indeed, I wished for more of this sort of polyphonic elaboration throughout. Some of the instrumental contributions come perilously close to 1970s folk/rock doodlings. And beware of two tracks where the producer has been allowed his head; Azeruz and ZuuenZ – generic ambient electronic soundscapes more appropriate for…

The image of heavyweight composer and patriarchal guardian of a decaying romantic tradition makes it easy to forget that Brahms started out as a virtuoso concert pianist. It is equally easy to forget that his third and final sonata, for his own instrument, was completed at the ridiculously precocious age of 20 (during a sojourn with his new friends Robert and Clara Schumann). From then on it was as if he had said all that he wanted to say in the genre, and his large scale piano compositions were henceforth confined to sets of variations – those on themes of Paganini and Handel being the most substantial. For his ambitious (and auspicious) debut on the BIS label, the British pianist Jonathan Plowright exhibits a prodigious musical appetite, tackling the meaty Third Sonata for his main course with the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel making for a rich and sumptuous dessert. The sonata again confounds any expectations you might have of Brahms as a structural conservative, being cast in no less than five contrasting movements, linked with a recognisably Beethovian thematic motto. It receives a carefully considered yet intensely dramatised reading, more tempestuous in approach than, say Radu…

Chamber music is the ideal medium for composers with a knack for polyphony. Here we have a fascinating disc of string trios by two exact contemporaries who were among the victims of Hitler’s Germany. Hans Gál fled to Scotland and lived a long (if obscure) life, while the Czech Hans Krása was interned at Terezin and killed in Auschwitz in 1944. While their music differs in intensity, both men were skilled at writing counterpoint so all these works are full of interest. Gál’s Serenade dates from 1932. Notable for its high spirits, it follows in the wake of similar trios by Beethoven and Dohnányi. The Trio of 1971 is understandably more autumnal in quality (apart from its Mendelssohnian Scherzo) and features a set of gentle, lyrical variations as its final movement. Krása’s music was heavily influenced by the Second Viennese School and is made of tougher stuff. Tanec (or Dance) is a short work evoking the sound of trains, with a tender chorale in the middle section. In the powerful Passacaglia and Fugue, the underlying emotional impetus stretches these highly structured forms almost to breaking point in Krása’s final composition. The performances by the Ensemble Epomeo are beyond praise: lively,…

At just 32 years of age, Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel is already the hottest property in classical music. Both on the mean streets of Caracas with his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, and closer to Hollywood Boulevard with the LA Philharmonic, who’ve just re-signed him as Chief Conductor until 2019, and even over in Gothenburg in Europe, he’s presiding over a musical revolution. And his Mahler recordings have already played a big part in it, whether it’s the Fifth Symphony with the South American kids, the live DVD of the Eighth, or various download-only recordings of other Mahler masterpieces, all given extraordinarily compelling readings. But none of those previous releases could truly prepare you for an encounter with this, Dudamel’s first full-scale Mahler CD with the LA Philharmonic in arguably the greatest symphony of them all, the Ninth. Recorded live last year before an audience with jaws on floor at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, it is incredibly well played (with Australia’s own Andrew Bain on first horn) and beautifully recorded by the Deutsche Grammophon engineers. But it’s Dudamel’s command of the overall architecture, and in particular his unerring… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

This CD is a treat for lovers of English music and English folk song in particular. A Cotswold Romance is a concert version by Maurice Jacobson of Vaughan Williams’ robust ballad-opera, Hugh the Drover, written in the era before World War One and later refashioned as a cantata in 1951 using the opera as its prime source. The open-hearted, full fresh air composer is in fine form here; the music is very attractive and performed in great style by the assembled forces. It is led by the late Richard Hickox, whose work in rescuing forgotten English music is his legacy. This sweet rural fantasy is about a time when a young man could risk all to get the girl he loves and finally, after various tribulations, the happy couple sets off on the road to a new life, under the open sky. In today’s more cynical times, we can only look upon such idealistic foolishness with wry amusement and affection. As operas go (and the composer’s very fine Sir John in Love is similar) it inhabits a very different world to the more heady European styles, opting not for gripping drama but for more serene stories of village life with……