She can sing! She can dance! She can act! But can she do justice to Mozart? The Mozart Album is a curious mix. It offers opera arias (including Susanna’s ‘Giunse alfin il momento… Al desio di chi t’adora’ and Despina’s ‘Una donna a quindici anni’), concert arias (‘Bella mia fiamma, addio!… Resta, o cara’ and ‘Oh, temerario Arbace!… Per quel paterno amplesso’), sacred music (Exsultate, jubilate), with the Don Giovanni-Zerlina duet (‘Là ci darem la mano’), in which she is joined by Bryn Terfel, thrown in for good measure. Given de Niese’s expertise with Handel, it is surprising to hear her struggle with some of the florid passages in Exsultate, jubilate, the CD’s opening track. The two concert arias, on the other hand, are more successful and provide opportunities for thoughtful and nuanced characterisation. Also successful is ‘Quando avran fine omai… Padre, germani, addio!’, Ilia’s opening number from Idomeneo. Mindful of her soubrette Fach, de Niese has sensibly avoided some of the peaks of the Mozart soprano repertory (the arias for the Countess and Fiordiligi for example) and settled for the charming and pleasant foothills. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log…

Creating a good selection of arias is a bit of a Devil’s art. Making a selection work in relative terms, instead of simply being a grab-bag of favourites, has been very successful in this CD. Kaufmann has what all great tenors need, a darker tone in his lower register. Few tenors can cover the repertoire properly without this baritonal quality and Kaufmann has it in spades. There is also a fine intelligence at work. A real plus in our pop-opera world where top Cs and triple fortes get many lesser talents over the line. Kaufmann handles the texts with the same intelligence he brings to his musicianship. Kaufmann dives into the heart of the German repertoire and the CD opens and closes with two of the most ethereally beautiful arias in opera; ‘In fernem Land’, from Lohengrin and the final scene from Parsifal. Between these masterpieces lie scenes from Die Zauberflöte, rarer arias from Schubert’s operas Fierrabras and Alfonso und Estrella; a thrilling ‘Winterstürme’ from Die Walküre and Florestan’s agonised aria to his love, Leonora, from Fidelio. It is an intensely moving and heroic interpretation and the performance is gripping. It is worth noting that this man differentiates effectively between…

The sound was thrilling, but in reality, atrocious. And she fared not much better on CD.

Even the Adagio in Klemperer’s legendary account sounds resolutely dry-eyed and casual. Klaus Tennstedt had an Indian summer of justified adulation from both audiences and orchestras in Britain, Europe and the US after a life in former communist Germany, but his career was nobbled by inner demons and crippling self-doubt. This performance is partly a disappointment. The first movement is played straight with little light and shade and a distinct lack of involvement. The big cataclysmic moments simply aren’t big or cataclysmic enough. Similarly, the scherzo, shorn of every repeat, lacks the demonic quality with which Klemperer, superb here – with virtually every repeat – imbues it. However, in the adagio, Tennstedt is superb. At almost 19 minutes, he’s as slow as Furtwängler and just as profoundly moving, especially in the way he floats the sublime second subject. The finale is similarly fine at the other extreme, with one of the most energised readings I’ve heard despite not sounding at all rushed. The London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus are in good form and the soloists are all fine. The sound, despite being recorded in the Royal Festival Hall, is also bright. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per…

Sergei Prokofiev completed his Piano Concerto No. 2 while he was still a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatorium. By this time he had already established a reputation as a dazzling virtuoso and precocious composing talent. Similarly, both performers here, Evgeny Kissin and Vladimir Ashkenazy, are Russians who had their pianistic skills recognised at a young age.  The Concerto No. 2 is unapologetically romantic, much like Rachmaninov’s concertos, but without the all-pervasive melancholy. The first movement is broad and grand in its themes and extremely virtuosic. The second movement (a scherzo) is as technically challenging as any, while the third is one of Prokofiev’s first excursions into the macabre. Full blown romanticism returns in the dazzling fourth movementwith its ecstatic conclusion. The second concerto is much less indulgent and much more a product of the 20th century, occupying a similar, sometimes jazz-inspired, sound-world to Ravel’s Concerto in G. Kissin and Ashkenazy are terrific interpreters of these works. Kissin is undaunted by Prokofiev’s extremely demanding piano (his control in the first concerto’s Scherzo is phenomenal) and a more sympathetic partner in Ashkenazy is difficult to imagine. These are live recordings and the frisson this provides adds enormously to the result. This…

The sonatas were composed over several years from 1722 onwards, although they remained widely unheard until publication 100 years later. They have a constantly lively nature and a beauty of expression which belies early critical writing which claimed they had been composed merely as dry technical exercises in counterpoint and in independence of foot and hand. Although they lack the great rhetoric and drama of the preludes and fugues, they make up for that in their perpetual bright invention. There’s special interest in the instrument chosen for the recording – an organ known as the Garnisons Kirke in Copenhagen, which contemporary organ-maker Carsten Lund completed in 1995 as a reconstruction of the original baroque instrument which dated from 1724. The instrument lacks the grand sonority we associate with more modern instruments, but its agility and very clear piping sonority has great charm, especially when played with the facility heard here. The recording reveals every detail of the instrument and its special baroque-church ambience. It has been recorded in 5.1 Surround SACD, but for people not able to benefit from that, it can also be heard in stereo SACD or in conventional CD-format stereo. The result in all formats is outstanding….

Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s two string quartets were written under vastly different circumstances. The First Quartet was completed in 1917 at the end of his three-year confinement in Russia during the First World War. It is typical of his output during this period – heavily influenced by both Debussy and Scriabin but, as ever with this remarkable composer, recognisably his. The Second Quartet was written ten years later, in 1927, after the return to his native Poland and during his first year as director of the Warsaw Conservatorium. By this time, Szymanowski had been influenced by both Stravinsky and Polish nationalism and his mature style, while retaining his individuality, includes elements reflective of both. Biographical details of Ludomir Rózycki are not well known. As well as composing throughout his life, he was an important teacher and administrator in the Polish music scene. (He was the first chairman of the Polish Composers’ Society and Dean of Music at the National Higher School of Music.) His String Quartet, written in 1906, is a workman-like effort firmly rooted in a neo-romantic style. The Warsaw-based Royal String Quartet are superb advocates for this music and, especially in the two Szymanowski quartets, bring a subtlety…

It was interesting, that despite his considerable discography, none of his recordings was considered good enough for the recent ABC Classic FM Symphony Countdown, confirming my theory that Rattle’s never recorded anything that hasn’t been done better by at least several other conductors. This Brahms cycle, virtually a rite of passage for Chief Conductors of the Berlin Philharmonic, doesn’t have any startling revelations, but is unlikely to disappoint either and improves as it progresses. To describe the playing as wonderful is hardly revelatory either. Rattle certainly unleashes the incomparable firepower in the finale of the First and, somewhat inappropriately, in the first movement of the Second Symphony – no pastoral idyll here. The Third Symphony receives a glowing performance with steady tempos and the intermezzo-like third movement has a particularly autumnal radiance. The visionary Fourth is sublime from start to finish, with the tango-like rhythm of the opening especially seductive in Rattle’s hands and the passacaglia finale (Brahms’s greatest symphonic movement?) sublimely phrased. My two quibbles are that Rattle does not observe the first movement repeats in the First and Second Symphonies, yet does in the third. The other is the atrociously niggardly playing… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access…

Most people who want the much-recorded music by Elgar and Co will already have it, and mostly in better performances. Those who only want the contemporary works by Nicolas Maw et al will likely not want Holst’s Planets or the Walton works. Doubtless there is a droll side to packaging the Dream of Gerontius with Three Screaming Popes (surely a CD first!) but I don’t imagine that was the aim. So the collection has to be for the Rattle fan club. Setting aside my usual reservations about the conductor (had he been on the scene in the 1950s he would simply have been one of a large number of excellent conductors), these are all perfectly good performances. In the case of the more contemporary music, better than that. Rattle is excellent in this repertoire, making a case for even the most unrewarding scores. For me, the musical utterances of composers such as Turnage often leave a great deal to be desired. Whereas Thomas Adès’s marvellous Asyla, has altogether more colour and variety. The bag of Elgar is mixed. Falstaff is appropriately brisk. The Enigma is excellent. The Gerontius indulgent; with Janet Baker a shadow of her former self, and Nigel…

The music is quite unlike Weill’s “Berlin cabaret” idiom and seems to resonate with an emotional ambivalence between an unsentimental nobility in the extended central largo, combined with wit and grace in the outer ones. The Concerto for violin and wind orchestra is completely neo-classical and somewhat prickly but, as one commentator observed, contains “roses among the thorns”. The mood here is almost Hindemithian with occasional touches of Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Zimmermann plays with an appropriately pared down tone. The vocal works I find less satisfying and unlikely to reward repeated listening, despite fine singing. Elise Ross, conductor Simon Rattle’s first wife, doesn’t quite differentiate sufficiently between the various deadly sins (although is much better than Marianne Faithful). No one can capture the desperation of either Anja Silja or Gisela May in this music, not to mention the 40-unfiltered-cigarettes-a-day croak of the incomparable Lotte Lenya. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Apart from the recent Davis recording of the 1st Symphony with the Dresden Staatskapelle on the Profil label (an absolute blinder) this is the best recording of the work in my view. Barbirolli’s interpretation of the 2nd Symphony was also the best on disc for many years. Although over-shadowed by the remarkable 1st, it is nonetheless a great symphony, worthy of regular performances. Those of us who heard Vladimir Ashkenazy’s masterly performance with the Sydney Symphony last year can attest to this. Of course, the Philharmonia was the better English orchestra at the time. However the Halle orchestra players respond to Sir John Barbirolli in their own special way and play as if the devil were behind them. The interpretation is all. The lovely Serenade for Strings is always welcome. Norman Del Mar directs it well, with considerable sensitivity. Perhaps the recording is a little too reverberant, but that really is a minor problem. Of special interest in this recorded collection is the recording of In the South. Long regarded by Elgar buffs as the best performance ever recorded. If great Elgar playing is what you are after, you can’t go wrong with this excellent re-issue. Continue reading Get unlimited…

If Trevor Pinnock and Christopher Hogwood represent the cooler end of the period instrument music-making spectrum, then Giovanni Antonini and Il Giardino Armonico represent the other explosive extreme. If you add to that volatile mix the melodramatic gestures of mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink, who is more hyper-emotional than the most exaggerated daytime soap actress, then you are in for an ‘over the top’ listening experience, where the recitatives almost require sea sickness pills in order to deal with all the swells. The Italian tendency for outburst is given free reign in this collection of Marian works, and it is all utterly convincing, if not somewhat shocking. In certain dramatic figures, the strings play incredibly roughly, and yet at the beginning of the CD the playing is so quiet and delicate, the gut strings only just speak. This CD isn’t for everyone but I suspect it is closer to what Vivaldi and his colleagues had in mind when they wrote these works, and it certainly matches the historical descriptions of the weeping and wailing of famous Baroque divas. The works here are by a combination of minor Italian composers such as Ferrandini, Conti and Marini interspersed with works of Vivaldi and Monteverdi…