Anyone who saw Swedish clarinettist Martin Fröst twist, twirl, strut and shimmy his way through his national tour with the ACO last year will know what a physically engaging showman he is. So it’s natural that he would record a dance-themed album during the tour, and no surprise it’s the most eclectic and inspired program the ACO has committed to disc. Hillborg’s Peacock Tales creates a spellbinding atmosphere even without its visual component, Fröst running the expressive and technical gauntlet against an eerie backdrop of clustered strings. Copland’s Clarinet Concerto is equally virtuosic. Both soloist and orchestra (with added piano and harp) are bright and punchy right up to the final clarinet glissando. Fröst is spirited and idiomatic in klezmer tunes scored by his brother Göran and attacked with gusto by the ACO. Göran’s arrangements of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances are well served by the soloist’s lightness of touch and flawless intonation, but it’s the band’s sweeping romanticism that carries these pieces. The most fun on the disc, however, is Högberg’s highly charged Dancing with Silent Purpose with its manic electronic beat. The Expressive Rage movement gives the ACO an opportunity to rock out… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from…

In his notes to this anthology, Russian pianist Yevgeny Sudbin opines that, in a way, the very young are sometimes best fitted to play Chopin, as they can be free from the accretions of conceptions and misconceptions about that composer. As an example, he cites the young Evgeny Kissin – anyone who has heard that prodigy’s sublime recording of the Second Piano Concerto recorded when he was only 12 years old would have to agree. At 31, Sudbin is somewhat older, but he approaches Chopin in what seems a wonderfully youthful and transparent way, removed from “accepted” practice or conceptions. This is a far cry from the delicate Chopin of drawing rooms or Hollywood’s image of the neurotic consumptive genius. Here instead are highly-charged, powerful accounts of some of Chopin’s strongest works, including a spectacular reading of the Ballade No 4 – Chopin with muscle. Sudbin’s pianism is assured and constantly exciting. So is his inventiveness, as shown when he closes this recital with his own paraphrase À la Minute, a witty reinvention of the Minute Waltz as Rachmaninov might have imagined it. The program opens with another major piece, the Fantaisie in F Minor, and the recital, which also comprises…

I’ve always found Richard Strauss’s character a real mystery: a smug, rather banal bourgeois with a narcissistic streak, he wrote sublime music which itself often teeters on the edge of banality. I enjoyed this Heldenleben but, at 47 minutes, the hero, while not exactly an arthritic Colonel Blimp, isn’t a young buck full of rising sap, either. This is surprising, considering Yannick Nézet-Séguin is one of the most athletic conductors around today. The opening lacks the self-confident swagger that Beecham brought to it for EMI (at the age of 80). In the second movement, the “battle” rages effectively enough, although I can never escape the feeling that Mahler depicts his critics far more bitingly in the Rondo burlesque of his Ninth Symphony. Strauss’s wife Pauline, a granite-jawed termagant in real life, comes across relatively sympathetically in the extended (and ravishingly played) violin solo of the third movement. The ending, depicting the hero’s retrospective contemplation, is simply too slow, although the Rotterdam Philharmonic’s horns are glorious. The orchestra, which plays well throughout, also sounds very distant and was recorded at a curiously low level. I’d prefer any of Karajan’s readings, or Fritz Reiner’s legendary RCA one. The… Continue reading Get unlimited…

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…

Austrian composer H K Gruber visited Australia in 2001 for the Melbourne Metropolis Festival of new music, and as a conductor has championed the music of Brett Dean. This disc of three concertos spans more than 30 years of his composing career, with Busking commissioned by trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger in 2007. In this concertante piece – banjo and accordion serve as continuo instruments but with plenty of soloistic flourishes – Gruber captures the colourful cacophony of street musicians outdoing one another for the attention of passers-by. The Presto opens with a rustic, almost throwaway melody sounded casually in the trumpet’s detached mouthpiece; accordion and banjo chime in and before long the strings have picked up the theme. Like any good tune, once heard fleetingly it will be hummed incessantly. What sets this one apart is Hardenberger’s fierce virtuosity, and the meticulously constructed textures brought vividly to life by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. By the second movement it’s grown dark but the musos play on, with seedy urban noir on the breath of languorous jazz trumpet; the third movement has a quasi-improvisational quality. If only Hardenberger and company would take a leaf out of Joshua Bell’s book and let loose on the…

The very first Mozart violin concerto I ever heard was the composer’s first, dating from 1773, when Mozart was just 17. The performance was by David Oistrakh, and I found it simply wondrous, especially the Adagio movement, with the violin arching with aching beauty over the orchestra. That was many years ago, when I was a very young teenager. It was the natural springboard to the other four violin concertos, which each mirror Mozart’s increasing maturity. I love that concerto still, and Richard Tognetti and the ACO capture perfectly its youthful brilliance and zest. In fact, all three concertos heard here, plus the Rondo and Adagio, are presented in a way which confirms that our ACO is one of the very finest chamber orchestra ensembles performing anywhere in the world today. Particularly delightful in this recording are Richard Tognetti’s cadenzas, which seem to have grown organically from the source-material. There is… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra offer up an exclusive track from their new Mozart album.