Italian conductor, harpsichordist and organist Rinaldo Alessandrini and his versatile period-instrument ensemble Concerto Italiano have for many years possessed a reputation for over-the-top yet technically precise performances of Renaissance and Baroque vocal and instrumental music. Their high-octane recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has to be heard to be believed, while their ability to communicate the eroticism, febrile intensity and innovatory chiaroscuro of the madrigals of Monteverdi and Gesualdo is treasured amongst connoisseurs of that repertoire. Here they apply their considerable interpretative skills to Italian chamber music written at a time of musical transition, when the polyphonic textures of the Renaissance were giving way to a more homophonic language enlivened by soloistic flights of fancy. Using the Italian string quartet format, which would eventually lead to the classical string quartet, aand filling out the harmonies with theorbo, harpsichord and/or organ, Alessandrini and his fellow musicians explore music written by travelling Italian composers including Frescobaldi, Torelli, Bononcini, Marini, Zanetti, Merula and Castello. Here are the dances, canzones and fantasias long favoured by Renaissance composers, streamlined and then re-embellished, the resulting sonatas and sinfonias electric with virtuosic passages and sometimes belligerent “conversations” among the instruments. A good example of the latter is Castello’s…

Looking back, an intimate pastoral was an unlikely follow-up to the splashy Rinaldo, Handel’s first London triumph, with its trumpets, crusaders and flying sorceress. First performed at the Queen’s Theatre in 1712, Il Pastor Fido managed only seven performances, one eyewitness complaining in his diary, “The Scene represented only ye Country of Arcadia. Ye Habits were old – ye Opera Short.” Listening to this fresh and tuneful work today, however, it’s a mystery why we’ve had to wait until now for a recording. This is the Harmonia Mundi debut of London-based La Nuova Musica, led by David Bates, and it’s an auspicious start. Handel’s delicate orchestration involves a mere 18 players: just strings and three woodwind, but the magical effects he achieves are impressively diverse. Bates lovingly shapes every phrase with imagination and exemplary attention to detail – just listen to the exquisite pizzicato violins and flute in the sleep sequence in Act Two. His line-up of young singers is equally impressive. Anna Dennis as the shepherd Mirtillo is a singer of great daring and considerable facility, characterising her arias with passionate flair and offering some bravura top notes. Lucy Crowe’s beautiful soprano is brought into play most affectingly as…

This double CD is a treat for operetta fans. The Silent Serenade was designed to pave the way for Erich Korngold’s return to Germany after the war. Having given up writing for films in Hollywood and getting back to what he considered his main business, he began work on the piece in 1944. The story revolves around mysterious lovers, bomb conspiracies and mistaken identities; the usual plot devices so beloved of the genre. However, Korngold fell into that old trap which bedevils much of central European operetta – that of a poor libretto. A shame, because the music is witty, bright and melodious. It also failed, both in the US and Germany, because it had missed its time, as the excellent notes tell us. Had the work been staged in the 1930s it might have been a hit. On Broadway, the famous producer, Jacob J Shubert, wanted to make too many changes for the composer’s taste and by the time it was sorted, Rodgers and Hammerstein had revolutionised the form of musicals. Meanwhile, “Viennese” operettas had become passé. My advice: simply ignore the book and listen to the delightful score. The small orchestral ensemble, based around two pianos, is most…

These two major works from Rachmaninov’s last decade form a substantial and varied program, given here in excellent performances and recorded in very vivid Super Audio format. Thirty-something Russian virtuoso Yevgeny Sudbin gives a dashing account of the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, investing the work with all the requisite drama, colour and wit. Lan Shui and his Singapore musicians are totally committed to the cause and support Sudbin with excellent ensemble. Rachmaninov’s orchestration is brilliantly highlighted by the engineering to the point that everything is very present, and this listener at least lost some sense of sonic perspective on standard audio equipment.Doubtless playback in surround sound would yield added dimensions. Don’t let this caveat, however, deter you from enjoying Sudbin’s considerable artistry. Mention “Rach Three” to music lovers and they will immediately think of the Third Piano Concerto rather than the Third Symphony. Rachmaninov’s symphonies have always lived in the shadow of his piano concertos. Completed a few years after the Paganini variations, the composer’s last symphony did not receive a rapturous welcome and at least one commentator has referred to it as “a sad failure”. Despite all of this, the work does have a voluptuous art deco…

Another young pianist makes a splash with a well-structured and scintillatingly played program. Only 21, Tashkent native Abduraimov won the 2009 London International Piano Competition, and toured Australia earlier this year. If Europe is trying to wrest the piano wunderkind crown back from China, then Abduraimov is definitely the real thing. He takes on the titans in the very first track: Horowitz’s elaboration on Liszt’s piano reduction of Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre. With old-school aplomb Abduraimov produces sparklingly even scale passages, quick clean staccato and over-the-top rubato. Here and there I feel a sense of control being carefully maintained – Horowitz and Earl Wild made pieces like this sound effortless – but what control this young pianist has! Prokofiev’s Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Piano Sonatas were composed in the wake of WWII, and are often called the composer’s war trilogy. They not only form the peak of Prokofiev’s keyboard output, but one of the peaks of 20th-century piano music. Abduraimov toughens his touch in the first movement of the Sixth to conjure up a steely militarism that is frighteningly appropriate. In the pungent slow movement he maps out the dramatic landscape with care and sensitivity, while the Scherzo is suitably light-fingered….

Britten’s Serenade presents a sort of history of English poetry, from 15th-century verse through to Blake and Tennyson, so clear diction is the key to bringing the words to life musically. Tenor Mark Padmore doesn’t disappoint.The Serenade was composed for the composer’s life partner Peter Pears and the great horn virtuoso Dennis Brain. Their 1953 recording with maestro Eugene Goossens (Decca/Eloquence) remains the definitive version, but Padmore and the Britten Sinfonia have plenty of fresh insights almost 60 years on. I’m also a fan of the late Anthony Rolfe-Johnson on Chandos. Padmore doesn’t quite match Rolfe-Johnson’s light, limpid gait in the florid Hymn, but his lean, muscular tone, sweetened with generous vibrato, has more immediate drama throughout. The shimmering Sinfonia strings show finesse in the music of their namesake, while the appropriately named Stephen Bell provides energetic, richly shaded phrasing and precise intonation on horn. Britten’s darker Nocturne for tenor, seven obbligato instruments and strings (1958) shows even more stunning invention from the master of orchestral colour. Most noteworthy are the sinister bassoon and crisp pizzicato of the second movement, delicate harp in the third and the arrestingly powerful timpani solo in the fifth. With so many Serenades in all-Britten…

The most surprising aspect of this CD is that it took until now to happen. Natalie Dessay’s light, nimble soprano has always seemed a natural fit for French art song, yet she has shied away from it on disc, focusing her recorded efforts instead on aria discs and Baroque repertoire. Enter pianist Philippe Cassard, who was so impressed by Dessay’s performance as Mélisande that he wrote to her to suggest this recital of early songs by Debussy. Delicate and dreamy heroines have long been Dessay’s forte onstage, and she conveys those qualities deftly in these lyrical miniatures too – with just a dash of gamine mischief to spice up the proceedings. Her voice has lost a little of its lustre: her upper register sounds threadbare in spots, and there is, as always, a brittle quality to her singing which can be an acquired taste. Yet she evokes the fin-de-siècle milieu of these songs – a heady cocktail of languor and quivering passion – with impeccable style: shimmering in Nuit d’étoiles and Les cloches, trilling her way perkily through Pierrot and turning in a melancholy tour de force in the cantata La damoiselle élue, which features a ravishing cameo by mezzo…

Among the more daring projects underway for the Wagner centenary is Dutch-based PentaTone’s plan to record Wagner’s ten later operas on SACD, all from concert performances and all conducted by seasoned Wagnerian Marek Janowski. Following a superb sonic rendition of The Flying Dutchman last year, here we have Die Meistersinger, to be followed rapidly by Parsifal next month. Wagner’s comic masterpiece can be a hard act to pull off, requiring dramatic singers with stamina who can act with a lightness of touch when required. Quite a feat, and one that nearly comes off here, if not quite. First, the pluses. The sonic engineering is superb – not quite as orchestrally revelatory as the Dutchman but you’ll be hard pressed to find a better sounding opera recording. Albert Dohmen as Hans Sachs is also mightily impressive, firm of tone and offering great textual insight into this multifaceted character. Edith Haller’s Eva is charming and Dietrich Henschel makes Beckmesser a formidable rival, if pushed at the very top of the voice. The sense of ensemble is also excellent with fine chorus work and a great sense of occasion, all moving forward swimmingly in Janowski’s pacey reading. It’s the two… Continue reading Get…

My introduction to Rachmaninov’ s Second Symphony was a welcome distraction from Camus, Jane Austen and Virgil studies for my HSC. I loved it from the start. My introduction to Tadaaki Otaka’s first splendid version, with the BBC Welsh National Orchestra, came many years later and I was equally impressed. He continues to acquit himself as a masterful and instinctive Rachmaninov interpreter in a rendition which wins hands down, in both performance and recording, against Ashkenazy’s tepid, enervated reading with the Sydney Symphony, itself a mere epigone of that conductor’s radiant Concertgebouw version. The secret in this potentially sprawling work is to gauge the pulse of the opening movement, making the ebb and flow convincing and grading the climaxes – in other words, keeping your powder dry. No other symphony I know radiates such a powerfully Russian sense of yearning amid the glamorous scoring, enriched by Otaka’s haunting, affectionate (without appearing to milk every bar of emotion) and ultimately stirring insights. Tempi are well judged – I particularly responded to the precision in the Prokofiev-like spikiness of the Scherzo and the tenuto used to great effect just before the final climax.  A colleague whom I… Continue reading Get unlimited digital…

I always found Christoph Eschenbach a much better pianist than conductor: his 1968 recording of Beethoven’s First Concerto with Karajan was unforgettable and his insights into the Op 111 Sonata many years later ranks among the best. By contrast, his conducting often seems stodgy. So this stunning performance and recording of the Missa Solemnis came as a revelation. The London Philharmonic Orchestra is in sizzling and quite virtuosic form. Running to just over 80 minutes, tempos are mainstream. I was hurtled backward in my chair – like, I imagine, most of the audience – with the velocity and ferocity of the choral fugue in the Gloria. The (appropriately) manic sound of the choir in Beethoven’s cruel tessitura of this paroxysm remind me that he may well have been mad when he composed it. The singing is largely undiffereniated and unnuanced and the diction is pretty unclear, but the result is impressive nonetheless. No one will ever eclipse Klemperer’s implacable juggernaut (EMI) here. The soloists are more than satisfactory, although the soprano Anne Schwanewilms and Nicolai Schukoff are the most distinguished of the four. Dietrich Henschel is no Martti Talvela. Pieter Schoeman’s solo violin in the Benedictus is balm… Continue reading…

If you want a disc of Liszt’s Greatest Hits you could do worse than have Lang Lang as your guide. The hype and the hysterical fan base of the megastar Chinese pianist have not entirely managed to obscure the fact that he continues to mature as an artist. Lang has said Liszt is a special composer for him, and his playing on this disc demonstrates that affinity very clearly. What a wide-ranging composer Liszt was. I recently reviewed Brendel’s Liszt recordings, which concentrate on the inward, philosophical late works. Lang opts for Liszt the showman: cascades of glistening scales and fancy finger work (La Campanella), surging double octaves (Hungarian Rhapsody No 6) and so on. But Liszt also set the ladies swooning with the beauty of his tone and the breathless quality of his rubato, and Lang understands this side of the composer as well. In Liebestraum and the transcription of Schubert’s Ave Maria he achieves a perfect balance: not over-romanticised but not foursquare either. The thundering virtuoso and the gentle poet come together in Liszt’s First Piano Concerto − one of the best piano concertos ever written, in my opinion. This performance, recorded live with Gergiev and… Continue reading Get…

For a singer so attuned to the undulating tones of the French language, Renée Fleming has recorded relatively little Gallic repertoire apart from the Massenet operas. This album redresses the balance in a tour de force of 20th-century orchestral songs. In Ravel’s Shéhérazade, the American soprano’s rich, finely matured instrument floats above the opulent orchestration and serpentine flute. Her operatic sense of storytelling embodies Scheherazade herself, who tantalises her king and captor with one tale after another in 1,001 Arabian Nights. In some declamatory passages, however, her voice loses the lustre and carefully placed diction heard elsewhere. Messiaen’s erotic yet deeply spiritual Poèmes for Mi, settings of his own text dedicated to his first wife, were written almost 40 years after Shéhérazade. Fleming exerts a siren-like thrall when she is left exposed in the orchestra’s pregnant pauses. She caresses the ear with impeccable intonation, luxuriating in the long, melismatic “Alleluia”. Later in the cycle, she unveils the satisfying warmth of her lower range, and exploits her keen dramatic instinct in the deranged laughter and visceral imagery of Terror. Alan Gilbert and the Orchestre Philharmonique give these challenging pieces their all in a kaleidoscope of colours, textures and nuances, shimmering strings……