This month's list of Australia's top 20 classical music albums.

  This is smashing programming: Beethoven’s last piano concerto and final piano sonata performed by two Decca war horses. Beethoven dedicated the concerto (as well as the Op. 111 Sonata) to Archduke Rudolf; the imperial epithet was coined by his English publisher (not the first or last time a publisher ‘re-interpreted’ a composer’s intentions!). In the context of a work in E Flat, the curious key relationship of the nocturnal second movement in B emphasises the movement’s reflective and subdued character. Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire first performed it in 1957 at the age of 12. Now 70, Freire changes gear effortlessly between rhythmic vitality and deliquescent lyricism in the prolonged opening movement. The Leipzig Gewandhaus occasionally seems more brawny in interpretation of this audacious music than Freire. The Piano Sonata No 32 arrived about ten years after the Emperor Concerto and falls into Beethoven’s late period. Not uniquely it is in two movements: a sonata-allegro followed by a set of variations including the famous proto-boogie-woogie third variation. The rhetorical vigour of the first movement comes off with genius. The herculean second movement is elegant, Freire poetic… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber?…

Editor’s Choice, Orchestral  – June 2015 And the question remains – why aren’t Johannes Brahms’ Serenades staples of the concert repertoire? Would conductors rather cut to the chase and perform his four symphonies? Or is the truth more that, conceived when Brahms was grappling with the structural minefield of his First Symphony, those two works remain peculiarly difficult to classify? Ought conductors plot a quasi-symphonic pathway through their structures? Or in reality is each movement a self-contained character piece that would likely buckle under the pressure of a consciously symphonic treatment? As Riccardo Chailly points out, Serenade No 1 clocks in at 40 minutes, longer than the symphonies, and no one should be lulled into any sense of false security. The Serenades might exhibit a lightness of surface, but underneath that whimsical charm Brahms’ orchestration, his rhythmic litheness and complex web of internal tempo relationships are difficult to achieve – darn difficult in fact. Chailly’s mettle as a Brahms interpreter crystallised around his 2013 cycle of the symphonies: tempos rethought, textures thinned, traces of Germanic stodge erased. An approach that sets him up well for the Serenades;… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a…

This month's list of Australia's top 20 classical music albums.

The singer will work with Sutherland’s Maestro, Richard Bonynge for debut recording.

This release is a sequel to the earlier Decca Sound box set. It covers the years of Decca’s analogue “Full Frequency Range Recording”, starting with the company’s earliest stereo recordings from 1954 –Ansermet conducting the Suisse Romande Orchestra in music by Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Balakirev and Liadov – and finishing in 1980 just prior to the advent of digital recording, with Dutoit conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra in tone poems by Saint-Saëns. The bonus CD gives us the Ansermet Russian program in its original mono, for comparative purposes. Unlike the earlier box, this is not presented as a best performance collection; rather, it is designed to showcase the peak of Decca’s sound quality over those analogue decades. And indeed it does: the sound of Fistoulari’s highlights from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake holds up stunningly (recorded with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1961), not to mention Solti’s visceral Mahler Resurrection Symphony with Heather Harper, Helen Watts and the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus from 1966. Sometimes the sound is of its time. When Decca producers recorded opera in the late 1950s and early 1960s they preferred a cavernous space with the voices set back  – an opera house acoustic – yet the clarity and presence…

On the 50th anniversary of his first recording for Decca, the Australian maestro reflects on the tenor and his legacy.

Concert planners seem to have turned away from the overture. Time-poor 21st-century audiences want to plunge straight into the main event, yet I for one would not complain if my evening began with the high-spirited Donna Diana Overture by Rezniçek or Nicolai’s overture to The Merry Wives of Windsor. For the overture-deprived, these five separate releases are invaluable. Taken from the Decca catalogue and recorded mostly in the late 1950s, they include almost every overture of note – or every note of overtures – between Gluck and Mascagni. (Missing are Berlioz, favourites like Mendelssohn’s Hebrides and Brahms’s Academic Festival and the best 19th-century light overture: Sullivan’s for Iolanthe.) The conductors are specialists and primarily men of the theatre, so performances are idiomatic. Vol 5 has Gianandrea Gavazzeni conducting the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Florentino in Italian overtures and intermezzi; Vol 3 explores the German repertoire (including four by Beethoven and two by Schubert) with the cool, clear-headed Karl Münchinger. Viennese overtures in Vol 4 are in the capable hands of Willi Boskovsky and the Vienna Philharmonic, setting a standard in Johann Strauss and Suppé. Vol 1 contains rare music: preludes from operas which are rarely performed, such as Schreker’s Die…

The current roster of Decca/Deutsche Grammophon glitters with star sopranos, most of them on the lyric side and many with at least some claim to coloratura. Yet Aleksandra Kurzak continues to set herself apart, her formidable technique matched by vocal charisma and a richness of colour more idiomatic form here under conductor Pier Giorgio Morandi, playing with sympathetic panache. Kurzak sings with poise, rounded tone and evocative colours, moving mercurially from the ecstatic assurance of Semiramide’s Bel raggio to Amenaide’s ardent prayer from Tancredi and even a kittenish not always found in a voice of such agility. Her solo recording debut, Gioia!, came as something of a revelation, and while, two years on, she’s no longer such a surprise, this generous collection of Rossini arias is further proof of the Polish soprano’s ability to dazzle and delight. The album focusses mostly on the composer’s serious operas: Semiramide, Guglielmo Tell, Matilde di Shabran and, in a nod to Kurzak’s homeland, Sigismondo, whose title character is a 16th-century Polish king. There’s a smattering of comedy too, though, with arias from Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Il Turco in Italia, the former featuring an avuncular cameo by fellow Pole Artur Rucinski as Figaro…….

It is hard to believe that the dynamic principal conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra has had a 50-year recording career (and ongoing). The bulk of Ashkenazy’s work in the studio has been for Decca, and this box dips into his extensive discography with the label. It begins with the Rachmaninov Second and Third Piano Concertos from the
early 1960s, when young Vladimir
 was still a Soviet Award-winner,
and concludes with his 2007 
recording of Beethoven’s Diabelli
 Variations. In between are many 
examples of his work as a pianist 
and conductor, although the
 selection is by no means complete. 
(What’s missing? Previn’s mellifluous Piano Concerto, and all the Stravinsky recordings.) As with most prolific recording artists, Ashkenazy has his detractors and is often taken for granted, but at the very least he is reliable. None of these performances strikes me as eccentric, wrong-headed or self- promoting; nor are they boring. At his best he has produced readings of works such as the Prokofiev and Rachmaninov concertos that have held their own in a competitive field for decades. The secret of his success is the music.
 He puts the composer first. You can hear that as early as the 1963 Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto…

Could listening to The Rite of Spring for 38 days drive a music critic to distraction? As Limelight’s sacrificial guinea pig, I found out. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Marie Bashir gives Peter Bassett’s Ring Cycle lectures on Decca Eloquence the Royal seal of approval.