Another dose of what I’ve come to regard as high altitude kitsch, with Strauss marking time until the next good idea. Ho hum! Richard Strauss’s most grandiose, final tone poem, An Alpine Symphony, celebrates its centenary this year. The Saito Kinen Orchestra, founded by Seiji Ozawa, is a Japanese  equivalent of Abbado’s Lucerne Festival Orchestra, or for that matter, the Australian World Orchestra, drawing Japanese players from the world’s most prestigious ensembles. Daniel Harding and his forces enter a crowded field, up against Previn, Welser-Möst, Thielemann and, naturally Karajan. Harding’s orchestra plays well, although the strings lack the last ounce of sheen. Woodwind and brass are distinguished (although the great burst of 12 horns representing the first rays of the sun always reminds me of Caro mio ben). Also, I found the very opening a little lacking in mystery and tension. The incidents, which take place during the hike are also well handled – these climbers are granite-jawed blue-eyed Aryans, not day-trippers in sensible shoes worrying about whether they’ve remembered to pack the thermos. The glacier episode exudes a real sense of danger. The ending is well handled, not drawn out too agonizingly (it’s not Mahler Nine). Mehta indulges more…

Shostakovich’s Symphony No 14 is a hard nut to crack, and I admit it’s a long way from my comfort zone. It’s like an ugly descendent of Mahler’s Song of the Earth – without the charm or poignant nostalgia. “When you’re dead, you’re dead” is the message. No regret, no sentiment. The 11 poems are by Rilke, Lorca and Apollinaire, who all died tragically young. No one does bleakness like Shostakovich, but this work is somber and death-suffused even by his standards. Parts of it make the Fourth Symphony sound like Offenbach! Even the poems are bizarre: one starts with the words, “Look, Madame, you’ve dropped something. It’s my heart”. It’s pretty off-the-wall stuff. Petrenko’s penultimate addition to his highly impressive Shostakovich cycle, which more than anything else, has cemented his reputation as ‘one to watch’, is certainly masterful. His Liverpool band is pared back to chamber-like proportions of strings and percussion (much fewer, I imagine, than Rattle’s luxuriant Berlin forces) and establish and maintain an admirable spareness of tone. The singers, Alexander Vinogradov, a genuine Russian bass, with all the vocal resources that implies, and Gal James (an Israeli with more than a hint of Slavic earthiness in her…

The first thing I noticed about this CD was what fine form the Suisse Romande is in nowadays. Marek Janowski and Neeme Järvi have created a better orchestra in a short time than Ansermet did in 40 years! A century ago, Raff’s output was regularly featured in concerts but gradually fell into neglect. The second striking thing here is Järvi’s duration for the symphony at 40’. Bernard Herrmann’s 1970 self-financed recording takes 56! Herrmann ranked it with the Symphonie fantastique and Lizst’s Faust Symphony, and he was right. Lenore is a young girl whose sweetheart dies in battle but whose spirit returns and carries her off on horseback. As usual, the whole thing ends, gothically, in tears. The wild ride doesn’t conjure up anything like the visceral terror of the ride to the abyss in Berlioz’ Damnation of Faust, but it’s still impressive. The March, however, miraculously anticipates Mahler’s militaristic songs in Des Knaben Wunderhorn: I say miraculous, because Raff was born in 1822, almost 40 years before Mahler. It has a tune I couldn’t get out of my head for days. The excellent liner notes describe the work in terms of a single tempo, ingeniously manipulated by altering note…

I’ve always thought Khachaturian’s ballet music superior to his concertos. Even James Ehnes’ customary fusion of virtuosity and insight cannot convince me otherwise. Despite the contribution David Oistrakh made to its composition, if I had to sum up the Violin Concerto in one word, I’m afraid it would be “racketty”. Even the “exotic” arabesques, which must have seemed original in the 1930s were much better when used by composers like Dmitri Tiomkin and Miklós Rózsa in 1950s “sword and sandal” epics. Ehnes ennobles virtually every piece of music he performs but I think his prodigious talent is wasted on this work. The rest of the disc contains string quartets performed by Ehnes’ eponymous quartet, a curious juxtaposition because, while the Khachaturian has never really entered the “canon” of great violin concertos, it certainly does have audience appeal. Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet is his only work in this genre to have gained permanent status in the repertoire, but it’s still a hard nut to crack for the uninitiated listener. It’s a work of emotional extremes, although the very opening is played here with a warmth I’ve never heard before. The second movement is demented (even by Shostakovich’s standards) but these wonderful……

Anyone expecting the chromatic, expressionist post-Mahlerian idiom of Zemlinsky’s mature works will be surprised. As Fiona Maddox wrote in The Guardian: “At the stage when these early works were composed, Zemlinsky occupied a crevice between Brahms and Mahler.” He never crossed the musical Rubicon into atonality like Schoenberg (his brother-in-law) or Berg and Webern, but here the “Brahmsian” influence is more apparent than any nod to modernity. Both works were composed in the 1890s but the conservatism of both is in striking contrast to the sheer genius of Mahler’s First Symphony, written years earlier. Both symphonies are essentially genial and life-affirming and seem to lack any sense of struggle between orthodoxy and radicalism, personal or creative. With the First, you’d think you were listening to Max Bruch or Stanford/Parry. The Second is the longer and more ambitious, with a sprawling first movement that, like the scherzo, slightly outstays its welcome. Its coda is reminiscent of middle period Dvorák. The slow movement is charming rather than dramatic and the finale is simply too discursive to have any real effect, with none of the drama of Brahms symphonic finales, especially the awesome passacaglia of the Fourth. These works are not tepid and…

The main strike against this CD is that it lasts barely 45 minutes. A pity, as the performances are very fine.

Jean-Rudolf Kars’ parents were Viennese Jews but he grew up in France, part of the same generation as Jean-Philippe Collard and Pascal Rogé. He converted to Catholicism in 1976 (three years after touring Australia for the ABC) and became a priest in 1983. On the strength of these discs, the priesthood’s gain was music’s loss. One CD contains Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy and also the D.946 Klavierstücke. This is Schubert at his most profound, simultaneously radiating Biedermeier exquisiteness, under the shadow of imminent death. Kars’ readings are searching, charming and poignant. His second CD contains both books of Debussy’s Préludes, beautifully played, if a little slower than we’re accustomed to today (The Submerged Cathedral must be somewhere in the Mariana Trench). His Messiaen excerpts from Twenty Contemplations of the Christ Child and the Catalogue of Birds underscore the extent to which Messiaen was Debussy’s spiritual successor. Kars’ renditions are wonderfully extrovert and joyful, emphasising the ecstatic side of Messiaen. Dame Gillian Weir, perhaps the most ardent champion of Messiaen’s organ output, performs previously unissued works including the epic Les Corps glorieux – Sept Visions brèves de la Vie des Ressuccités “The Bodies in Glory – Seven Brief Visions of the life…

What an inspired idea! To capture the Zeitgeist of a troubled decade through the medium of a musical genre: in this case, the violin concerto. Gil Shaham explores violin concertos of the 1930s in Volume 1 of a series which contains works by Barber, Stravinsky, Britten, Berg and Karl Amadeus Hartmann, by far the least known of the group. A confirmed socialist, Hartmann was one of the few genuinely anti-Nazi figures in German music throughout the Third Reich and refused to allow his music to be performed there. I’d always considered what little music I’d heard of Hartmann (1905-1963) very difficult, however, this is a real discovery and Gil Shaham makes his Concerto Funèbre into a highly moving threnody, meditation and evocation of the horrors of war, using sources as disparate as a Hussite (Czech protestant) hymn and a Russian revolutionary song bookending an adagio and a Bartókian scherzo which lashes out in anger. Shaham’s tone and intonation throughout this tour de force are impeccable. Stravinsky and Alban Berg reacted to what they considered the excessive emotions of late Romanticism in contrasting ways: Stravinsky adopted neo-Classicism with baroque forms and his Violin Concerto, with its concision, ironic wit and dancing quality is… Continue…

Despite a recent snippy comment in the Spectator, I still find Mark Wigglesworth one of the more interesting conductors on the international circuit and his Shostakovich cycle has been distinguished. This release is a popular combination of Shostakovich’s symphonic Alpha and Omega – his First and Fifteenth symphonies. Both were recorded in 2006 and the First appeared with the Second and Third Symphonies on a single CD. Why it has taken almost a decade for BIS to release the Fifteenth is anyone’s guess. The composer burst on the scene with his First Symphony, written at 18, with staggering assurance. It’s an engaging blend of youthful cheekiness and subversion with darker undercurrents. Wigglesworth and his Dutch orchestra handle the kaleidoscopic orchestration and signature moods – humour, wit, agitated energy – deftly, though tempi are measured. The Fifteenth, composed when Shostakovich was already ill, is one of music’s great enigmas by a composer who raised enigma to an art form. The opening, whose first notes we hear on a glockenspiel, was meant to portray a toyshop. Only Shostakovich could conjure up an atmosphere so sinister conveying innocence. The first climax doesn’t occur until the second movement. Here we are in familiar desperation territory and… Continue…

I am, as they say nowadays, conflicted about this release. The playing of the Camerata Nordica is highly impressive. What disturbs me is the concept. String orchestra transcriptions of Beethoven quartets, especially the late ones, are nothing new. Toscanini and Weingartner did them – the latter even subjecting the Hammerklavier Sonata, of all things, to the process. The point is, can a string ensemble really replicate the unique intimacy, intensity, complexity and sublime enigma of this music more effectively than the medium for which it was originally composed? The ‘happier’ or less complicated quartets (if any of this music could be described as uncomplicated) fare better. The Op 127 sounds robust and almost jolly in this ensemble’s hands. It’s when we reach the Finale of the B Flat, Op 130 that the problems set in. The original Finale, the Grosse Fuge, is the most ferocious and terrifying piece by Beethoven (or anyone else, for that matter). I’m not against string transcriptions of the “Great Fugue” per se. Klemperer recorded it early in his EMI career, almost 60 years ago, and the result is, to this day, grittily unforgettable, but the effect of the playing here tends to glamorise it. The…

Benjamin Britten’s personal life has been well documented – his relationship with Peter Pears in a period when homosexuality was still illegal, his pacifism and years in America and his friendships and fallings-out. But two documentaries by John Bridcut will rate as indispensable for the full picture of the man – both for the interviews and with the people who knew him best and for their impeccably performed musical excerpts. Britten’s Children is, in the filmmaker’s words, “an edgy subject, full of danger”, these days perhaps even more than ever before. Bridcut’s fascination with the composer started when he took part as a chorister in Britten historic recording of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. His interviews with the various boys with whom Britten became “besotted” – including the late English actor David Hemmings for whom the role of Miles in The Turn Of The Screw was created – show these relationships to be innocent, if unusual, and without a physical sexual element. In a moving highlight Bridcut tracks down Wulff Scherchen, the German teenager whom Britten dumped for Peter Pears. Scherchen, now a grandfather living in Australia who was willing to be seduced, has kept all of Britten’s love letters is filmed……

I found this CD puzzling, but a friend described it as a “marquee” issue – a showcase for the Australian Chamber Orchestra and director, Richard Tognetti. The main courses are the first movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and the first movement of Brahms’ First Symphony. The rest of the program is a Bach violin concerto and two other short excerpts. I’m at a loss to understand why anyone would want to hear just the first movement of the Beethoven or the Brahms. Surely it would have made more sense to issue a double CD featuring both in their entirety. Tognetti’s way with the concerto is admirable. Without sounding rushed, he keeps it moving while retaining the monumental grandeur. His is an unfailingly sweet-toned reading with plenty of animation. The Brahms is similarly flowing, eschewing the granitic approach of Klemperer and Furtwängler. I recently saw Tognetti’s Brahms Fourth. His conducting gestures were infrequent, but the results were stunning: the ACO’s ensemble was tight and the heft of just 48 players was amazing. This is not quite as impressive but I’d still like to hear the entire performance as the textures are admirably lucid with just the right quotient of bounce or schwung…