A new disc by Pieter Wispelwey is always a cause for great rejoicing and this one is no exception. I doubt that Mendelssohn’s Cello Sonata No 2 (in D, Op 58) has ever sounded as joyous and carefree as it does here. In the opening movement the players have an unbridled enthusiasm that at first surprises but then wins the listener over. The delicate wit of the ensuing Allegretto scherzando with its pizzicato passages is perfectly realised and is admirably balanced by the plangent Adagio. Mendelssohn’s Song without Words for cello and piano is offered as another example of Wispelwey’s superb expressiveness, while arrangements of three of Chopin’s waltzes by the Russian virtuoso Karl Davydov, including the famous Minute Waltz, show off the cellist’s quicksilver dexterity and amazing lightness of touch. That Chopin’s Cello Sonata caused the composer so much creative grief is scarcely apparent in this ardent performance. Here, as in the Mendelssohn, the total abandonment to the music’s high romanticism results in utterly magnetic music-making. In particular, the Scherzo stands out as a compelling blend of drama and lyricism. Giacometti’s use of an 1837 Érard piano in conjunction with Wispelwey’s 1760 Guadagnini cello adds further authenticity to these…

No one is ever going to accuse British-born, Perth-educated soprano Lisa Harper-Brown of chasing commercial success. Consisting of Australian art songs for soprano and piano, her The Poet Sings recital disc will no doubt send cash-registers into rigor mortis. Harper-Brown is a terrific singer – a touch stentorian and single-gestured perhaps – but in there Viking horns and all, giving these neglected, indeed virtually unknown, remnants of Australia’s British Empire history every opportunity to stake a belated claim to greatness. Have we been too neglectful of these treasures? Probably not on this evidence, but the disc’s seven Roy Agnew songs are moving. Geoffrey Allen’s Two Chinese Songs, Op 1 are worthy of historical study, as they were composed 20 years before it became fashionable for any Australian besides Grainger to look to the north for musical inspiration, while Raymond Hanson’s five songs – led by a lovely setting of Tagore – demonstrate not just his giftsas a composer, but their free-flowing piano parts also show his experience as an accompanist. Using Shakespearean texts, Paul Paviour wrote the seven songs that give the CD its title, doing valiant (if not always successful) battle against better-known musical settings of them. This defiantly…

Jean Mouton (1459–1522) was a beneficed priest whose composing career developed slowly in provincial France until 1501, when he took a position in Grenoble. Spotted by Anne of Brittany, Mouton jumped ship to work in her chapel and subsequently that of her son-in-law Francis I. He was probably therefore in charge of the musical festivities when the latter monarch hosted Henry VIII on the famous Field of the Cloth of Gold. From these lofty heights he attracted the attention of the Medici Pope, Leo X and died a revered master and wealthy man at a respectable age. His most frequently recorded piece is the sublime Christmas antiphon, Nesciens Mater. The work has an instantly memorable main theme and an ingenious canonic structure, combining constraint with variety, to create one of the choral masterpieces of the 16th century. This disc, however, contains all of Mouton’s eight-part choral works in a veritable feast of polyphonic discoveries. The centrepiece is his Missa Tu es Petrus which demonstrates that while Mouton may be rhythmically uniform, “his melody flows in a supple thread,” as 16th-century music theorist Heinrich Glarean put it. Indeed, it is this tuneful quality that makes the program so beguiling – it’s not…

I found these performances of Schubert’s two Piano Trios sublime. I’ve long admired Schiff’s Schubert Sonatas, especially his intimate affectionate phrasing – which is, admittedly, sometimes a little too affectionate. The performances are wonderfully persuasive, with steady tempos which never drag and impressive chemistry (he and the violinist are married). I’d never sampled Miklós Perényi’s playing before, but on the strength of these performances, I thinks he’s been seriously underestimated. The trio play off each other and don’t “break out” jarringly with their solos and remain, in character, as it were, to preserve the existing mood and the architecture of the whole. What I also loved was the balance between exuberance and reflection. I sometimes think this calibration is even more important in Schubert than in Mozart. The B-major trio is obviously the sunnier of the two but it’s the later, E flat D 929, one of Schubert’s last chamber works, composed under the shadow of death, which moved me indescribably. Despite the key signature, which in Beethoven heralds heroic deeds etc, here is Schubert at his most declamatory, but also at his most ruminative. Some commentators discern a decline in quality of the last two movements but you’d never…

The opening titles of this DVD show pianist and conductor in rehearsal: two old men who first played in concert together 50 years earlier. Boulez is no longer the zealous young maverick who wanted to burn down concert halls (figuratively and, possibly, literally speaking); Barenboim has, of course, long been a conductor himself. In a printed interview the pianist relates that he didn’t come to appreciate Liszt until after he had accompanied Claudio Arrau in the Second Concerto. The concert opens with Wagner’s early Faust Overture, filled with hints of the master to come but still in the thrall of Weber. The burnished tone of the Staatskapelle Orchestra and clarity of Boulez’s conducting sit well together. This could well be one of the conductor’s favourite pieces, although his impassive face never gives the game away. Barenboim’s weighty touch is, in my view, not entirely suited to Liszt. While he produces a lovely full tone in the quiet passages (especially impressive in the Second Concerto), thundering fortes and double-octave passages sound and look effortful. In fact, despite excellent aural results, there is not a lot of the joy of music-making on show here. The Second Concerto precedes the better-known First, where…

At just 29 years old, conductor Robin Ticciati has already been named as the next music director of Glyndebourne, a position he will take up in 2014. If this charming Hänsel und Gretel, recorded in 2010, is anything to go by, the venerable festival is in very safe hands indeed. Ticciati’s account of Humperdinck’s opera is both expansive and electric, tripping through Humperdinck’s numerous folksong quotations while still maintaining the grand sweep of his score, and best of all evoking a true sense of fairytale magic. He’s aided and abetted by two first-rate siblings in the form of Alice Coote and Lydia Teuscher. Coote’s robust and earthy mezzo is tailor-made for breeches roles, and she’s a delightful Hänsel, conveying perfectly the boy’s ongoing battle between bravado and complete terror. Teuscher is a sweet and sparkling Gretel, her light soprano convincingly girlish but thankfully never too cutesy or twee. Together they’re a perfectly matched pair, and even without the benefit of visuals, their playful dynamic is palpable. Indeed, vocal acting is a strength throughout the cast: Irmgard Vilsmaier is a mother to be reckoned with, her bluster underpinned by the full force of a dramatic soprano, while William Dazeley’s Father… Continue…

Released to coincide with this year’s Sydney International Piano Competition, this disc of Russian music showcases a previous winner. In 2008, Konstantine Shamray won not only the First Prize but also the People’s Choice award. Listen to the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Sonata and you will understand the excitement caused by this young pianist. The piano was not Tchaikovsky’s natural medium, and parts of his sonata of 1878 sound like the keyboard reduction of a symphony. Understanding this, Shamray revels in the quasi-orchestral gestures of the first movement (Chopin’s heroics a clear influence), and savours the dark lyricism of the slow movement. In the fleet scherzo and dazzling finale his light touch impresses. A crucial section of the scherzo involves the repetition of a simple melodic figure with a descending scale in the bass. This passage could easily sound trivial, but so spry is the pianist’s response that instead it sparkles. He creates a mood of half-lights and shadows most effectively in four late pieces by Scriabin, especially the Feuillet d’album. Scriabin’s fragrant, introverted music is as impressionistic as anything by Debussy. By contrast, Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No 8 occupies a more robust emotional terrain. The third of Prokofiev’s so-called…

Jean Mouton (1459–1522) was a beneficed priest whose composing career developed slowly in provincial France until 1501, when he took a position in Grenoble. Spotted by Anne of Brittany, Mouton jumped ship to work in her chapel and subsequently that of her son-in-law Francis I. He was probably therefore in charge of the musical festivities when the latter monarch hosted Henry VIII on the famous Field of the Cloth of Gold. From these lofty heights he attracted the attention of the Medici Pope, Leo X and died a revered master and wealthy man at a respectable age. His most frequently recorded piece is the sublime Christmas antiphon, Nesciens Mater. The work has an instantly memorable main theme and an ingenious canonic structure, combining constraint with variety, to create one of the choral masterpieces of the 16th century. This disc, however, contains all of Mouton’s eight- part choral works in a veritable feast of polyphonic discoveries. The centrepiece is his Missa Tu es Petrus which demonstrates that while Mouton may be rhythmically uniform, “his melody flows in a supple thread,” as 16th-century music theorist Heinrich Glarean put it. Indeed, it is this tuneful quality that makes the program so beguiling – it’s…

If there’s anyone in the modern era who can channel the spirit of Robert Schumann’s wife, muse and principal performer Clara Wieck, then it’s Angela Hewitt. The Canadian pianist is no “personality-player” loading idiosyncrasies into music that in the wrong hands can sometimes seem obscure, self-indulgent or even a tad disturbing. As she demonstrated in her previous recordings of Schumann’s solo piano music, Hewitt identifies deeply with the great German Romantic’s lyricism, and loses herself, and the listener, in its beauty, getting inside the music as if she were Clara herself (for whom it was written), and expanding it outwards. But the difference in this new Schumann release is that in Hannu Lintu and the Deutsche Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, she’s now found collaborators who are willing to be similarly open to the music’s subtleties. Everyone will comment on the singularity of their reading of the famous A-Minor Concerto’s finale, played at a gentler tempo than usual and with a real lilt, in the spirit of the dance. But it’s in the Intermezzo middle movement that the supreme artistry is most evident, as Hewitt weaves a filigree around the orchestra, a kind of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t interaction between piano line and the ensemble texture. You’d…

Australian guitar duo Slava and Leonard Grigoryan have always strained against the boundaries of the classical guitar world.

In 1910, the Band of the Grenadier Guards serenaded Her Majesty with a selection from Elektra. (George V promptly sent down a message saying he didn’t know what it was that they had just played, but it was never to be played again!) Despite the royal vote of no confidence, the opera has become a modern classic and a classic of modernism, in which Strauss went further harmonically than he would ever again.  In this live 2010 recording, the LSO’s principal conductor shows not only that he appreciates Strauss’s daring orchestrations, but also that he’s a master of the dramatic pacing in Hofmannsthal’s gripping Sophocles adaptation. The members of the orchestra play their hearts out in a finely engineered recording that, thanks to Gergiev, is frequently revelatory. Sadly, this recording has a massive drawback in the Elektra of Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet. A pronnounced vibrato across the entire range is the first problem to beset the ear. Coupled with a tendency to fall flat at the top or miss certain key notes altogether, her performance is a bit of a roadcrash. The rest of the cast ranges from superb (Dame Felicity Palmer’s baleful Clytemnestra steals the show)… Continue reading Get unlimited digital…

While her colleagues scramble to devise a novel concept for every disc they release, French soprano Véronique Gens has been steadily developing a project she began six years ago with a disc exploring the French Baroque tragédie lyrique from Lully to Rameau. This release, the third in her series focusing on the tragic heroines of 18th- and 19th-century French opera, skips ahead a century. And judging by the musical riches she’s still unearthing, she may well stretch it to a fourth. Some of the repertoire here will be familiar to aficionados of grand opera: Gluck’s Iphigénie (1779), Berlioz’s Dido (1858) and Verdi’s Elisabeth (in her French incarnation) jostle with the heroines of the forgotten Auguste Mermet’s Roland à Ronceveaux and Kreutzer’s Astyanax. Most of these women sing in the face of massive personal and/or political crises, and Gens’s distinctive ability to sound both utterly refined and completely unhinged at the same time ensure that each character, however obscure, comes to life with equal vigour. Many of the arias here were originally written for singers who would today be classified as mezzo-sopranos but their low, meaty tessitura holds no perils for Gens, whose lissome soprano has always been… Continue reading Get…