In the epic first movement, he’s not afraid to slow down daringly for the lyrical second subject and at various other points, nor is he at all prim about portamenti. No one will ever sound as craggy or implacable as Klemperer in this movement, but it’s a more than promising start. The minuet movement has just the right mixture of charm and momentum so as not to sound like a cross between the score to a televised Jane Austen adaptation and Little Bo Peep. The scherzo conveys the relentless tyranny of the mundane with the trio effectively contrasted as an oasis. Alice Coote is fine in Urlicht (“Primaeval Light”) as is the bizarrely cast Natalie Dessay, but it’s in the vast sprawling and kaleidoscopic final movement where Järvi and company excel. The tempos are excellently judged; textures are always kept lucid; and dynamics scrupulously observed, without any feeling of micromanagement. The cathartic moments are all brilliantly realised. One particularly memorable touch – hardly cathartic – is the exchange between the flute and piccolo at the Last Trump, which conveys a genuinely bleak almost creepy sensation. Järvi and his forces manage this vast and complex canvas breathtakingly. Continue reading Get unlimited…

Charles Kœchlin is a prolific French composer remembered, if at all, almost exclusively for his 1933 Seven Stars Symphony, which had movements dedicated to Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo; Belgian composer Joseph Jongen is known mainly for organ works. If nothing else, the release demonstrates material for solo viola is much richer than generally imagined. By far the longest work (at 30’) is Kœchlin’s Sonata Op 53 (1912-5), a rich addition to this repertoire. Benedict’s playing is mesmeric, conveying moods varying from languorous to ruminative, and is always darkly beautiful. The third movement andante seems to anticipate Messiaen, with the ethereal voice of the viola floating above pointillistic piano chords. The other pieces which engaged me were Kœchlin’s Quatre Petites Pieces, on which Benedict is joined by the French horn of Ben Jacks. Two complaints: why do the liner notes not follow the performance sequence, causing listeners to keep having to flip back and forth tediously to remind themselves which particular piece they’re listening to? And why does Ivan March state in them “it seems likely that Koechlin intended this [the finale of the sonata] as a threnody [i.e. lament] for Milhaud, the loss of his great friend…”…

Another milestone in Vassily Petrenko’s magisterial Shostakovich Symphony survey with this cracking Eighth, a work rapidly gaining stature as the equal of the Fifth and Tenth. Petrenko’s timing in the opening movement, 25’, is splendidly central (although this is by no means a middle of the road performance). Mark Wigglesworth, a fine Shostakovich interpreter, takes 29’ and the equally fine Oleg Caetani takes 20’, proving there’s more than one way. The latter three movements – allegretto (actually a scherzo), largo (essentially a ghostly passacaglia) and a second allegretto ­– fascinate me as superb examples of emotional ambiguity. These are equal, I think, to anything in Mahler. The playing throughout is magnificent and it’s obvious conductor and orchestra have developed a spectacularly effective synergy. All sections acquit themselves nobly (this is not a work which tolerates any orchestral “passengers”) but the woodwinds in particular (rapid flute trills) convey that sense of bleakness unique to Shostakovich. The ambiguity intensifies in the last movement as repeated “attempts” to lighten the mood come to nothing, unable to prevent a central traumatised paroxysm. The beautifully paced final bars, with flute and pizzicato strings sounding like the breath ebbing from a dying body, are especially haunting….

The Neptune movement is conspicuously faster than in his earlier EMI version, but without sounding in any way perfunctory. Mercury also whips along. Boult is not the only conductor to distinguish himself: André Previn and the LSO, during their halcyon days, turn in a wonderful performance of the ballet music from his failed opera The Perfect Fool, alternately boisterously rollicking and ethereally magical. But if I had to nominate one work to hear on this masterly anthology, it would be Egdon Heath, subtitled “Homage to Hardy”. In the almost continuous soft playing, Previn and co. evoke perfectly the sense of haunting loneliness in the place Hardy himself described as “singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony.” The other discoveries are three of the Sanskrit hymns the composer set from the Rig Veda, which make me wonder whether any other composer “does” the mystical and otherworldly as well as Holst. Sir Charles Groves, Sir Malcolm Sargent, Norman Del Mar and Imogen Holst also make valuable contributions to this invaluable collection. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The excerpts from Spactacus and Gayenah conducted by the composer himself with the London Symphony in its palmy days not long before his death, bring these two scores with their heady exoticism to life. The Concertos are a different story. Neither has ever become mainstream repertoire, despite the advocacy of the seriously underrated pianist Mindrew Katz and the peerless David Oistrakh in the Violin Concerto, in which he apparently had serious input. In the Piano Concerto, Katz invests this often racketty score (replete with phoney orientalisms) with genuine poetry, and the lyrical episodes are well handled by Boult in acceptable 1950s sound. Where the work momentarily comes unstuck is in the disastrous inclusion of the flexatone, a kind of musical saw, wisely omitted from Willaim Kapell’s recording. Unlike the theramin in Miklos Rosza’s score to Hitchcock’s Spellbound, where it adds to the sinister ambience, the flexatone sounds like a demented audience member whistling along. The Violin Concerto benefits similarly from Oistrakh’s virtuosity and imagination. For me, the most interesting work in the set is the Suite from the 1942 ballet Masquarade, based on Lermontov’s reworking of the Othello story, where Khachaturian’s sardonic portrait of Leningrad society could almost have been…

That said, there’s no denying much of his music is extremely avant-garde, and much of this two-CD set could hardly be described as Ligeti’s “greatest hits”. The first CD is dedicated to the String Quartets Nos 1 and 2. The first is a multi-faceted work in 12 movements, none longer than three minutes, with a prestissimo surely inspired by that in Beethoven’s Op 131 Quartet. I found it fascinating, although a cynic might conclude that none of the movements hangs around long enough to become either intimidating or deeply incomprehensible. Just think of the intense abstraction of Bartók’s quartets, taken one step further. The pizzicato of the Second Quartet is particularly ingratiating. The Artemis Quartet is brilliant, with diamond edge precision throughout. The Ramifications for twelve string instruments and the Six Bagatelles for wind instruments (with Barry Tuckwell’s French horn) are witty and accessible. The second CD comprises the Lux Aeterna, which gained momentary exposure in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but most of the vocal fare is obscure and often sounds overwrought, despite the superb attack, ensemble and intonation of the Groupe Vocal de France. One for Ligeti aficionados only, I imagine. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from…

Much like other British composers Edmund Rubbra and George Lloyd, Leighton published his first symphony (1963-4) in the face of the orthodoxy of the time, which considered the symphony a spent and irrelevant art form. Leighton wrote: “The idea of a symphony is still valid… it is often a work to which the composer attaches particular importance and is usually meant to be a particularly personal document”. Indeed! The First Symphony is very powerful in an engagingly edgy, Age of Anxiety way, with a dark first movement which begins with echoes of Sibelius’s Fifth and gradually intensifies the tension. While the scherzo is frantic and marginally outstays its welcome, the final movement starts very coolly, the piece ending quietly and equivocally. I found it absorbing. Despite my best efforts, I could find no references or influences from other composers, indicating that Leighton quickly found his own voice and I would have no hesitation in recommending it to even conservative palates. I can’t wax quite so enthusiastically about the Piano Concerto No 3 Concerto Estivo. At 37’ it’s rather long, and not even the advocacy of Martyn Brabbins, sans pareil in this repertoire, nor the artistry of Howard Shelley, who, I’ll……

But I feel they should shoulder the blame for the fetish with “completism” – in their inexorable march to record every note ever composed, irrespective of its merit. This CD is a case in point: the only reasonably well-known work is the Op 35 so-called Eroica variations on that theme used first in the Prometheus ballet music and then the finale of the eponymous symphony. Ian Yungwook Yoo is a fine pianist, who makes the crucial distinction of contrasting each variation and investing them with a particular quality. He misses nothing. The opening hauntingly anticipates Beethoven’s Op 111, his ultimate and for me greatest piano work, but Variation 5 has witty syncopations. There is playfulness in other sections and power in the concluding fugue, which prefigures the titanic conclusion of the Hammerklavier. I have to confess that, despite the advocacy of Ian Yungwook Yoo, I found the other works on this CD indescribably tedious. Anyone familiar with the aforementioned Prometheus ballet or the Triple Concerto knows that Beethoven wasn’t always storming the barricades or shaking his fist at fate, but I found 48 minutes of variations on extremely obscure music just too much, especially at one sitting. The four stars are……

To describe something you can’t quite categorise as sounding like television documentary music is a cop-out I’ve always sedulously avoided, but in this case I’ve had to succumb. And what do I see when I read the notes? This piece was composed to accompany an ITV series called The Seasons. I then noticed in very small print “as seen on ITV 1”. In the somewhat narcissistic sleeve note, Goodall mentions the dramatic seasonal differences taken for granted by the British. This may be true but these differences are not effectively conveyed by the music. At 60’ it soon becomes bland and undifferentiated, especially with the occasional repetitive figures, which make the piece sound like a John Adams or Philip Glass pastiche. It makes Vivaldi’s effort seem all the more impressive when you consider he had very little experience of “program” music to go on. Another mystery is that the harpist and second cellist are credited, but in the first two movements of the final Summer movement, there are clearly a clarinet and celeste involved, whose players are not credited at all. If you have a taste for seasonal music, my advice is to stick to Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky or Glazunov. Continue…

Wilhelm Taubert (1811-1891) was a friend of Mendelssohn and a fully paid up member of the Berlin musical establishment, despite Mendelssohn’s rather lukewarm opinion of his music. The First Concerto (1833) is, as Schumann noted, very similar to Mendelssohn’s own First Concerto – uncomfortably so, I think – even down to the facile charm and absence of breaks between movements. The Second Concerto appeared 40 years later and, while its structure is somewhat different, sounds much the same and must have seemed very old-fashioned. I found its most endearing moment the soaring cello theme in the unusual andante. Jacob Rosenhain (1813-1894) wrote his D minor Concerto in the 1840s and it’s made of altogether sterner stuff. It’s more Schumannesque, ironically, because Schumann seemed as lukewarm about Rosenhain’s later output as Mendelssohn was about Taubert’s. I found it equally charming but more dramatic, poetic and generally interesting, with an especially winsome central andante which seems more “developed” than Taubert’s – and more inspired orchestration generally. Naturally, Howard Shelley has long been in his element in this repertoire and the TSO acquit themselves well in what has virtually become their “niche”. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe…

The work’s primitive ostinati and pseudo-mediaevalism also appealed to the fascist mentality, making it the musical equivalent of Albert Speer’s monstrous architecture for Hitler’s proposed capital Germania, or Leni Riefenstahl’s Nuremburg rally documentaries. As a teenager, I always found it among the most exciting scores ever composed. We’re all young once… This performance is relatively low-powered, especially in comparison to Muti’s Philharmonia and Frühbeck de Burgos’s high-octane accounts, which feature the greatly lamented Lucia Popp and Arleen Augér respectively (both EMI). The orchestra sound here is quite recessed, which lessens its contribution to the essential velocity of this piece. That the orchestra concerned is the Bavarian Radio Symphony, who, of all ensembles, should be at home in this “Bavarian” music, is all the more regrettable. The results are much more satisfactory in the quieter, more poetic passages, of which there are many. The soloists are more than adequate, with Patricia Petibon (normally more associated with Chabrier and Poulenc!) coping well with the ethereal heights of Dulcissime; Hans Werner Bunz does his dying swan with all the requisite grotesquerie but it’s the uncanny resemblance of baritone Christian Gerhaher’s voice to that of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau that stopped me in my tracks…. Continue…

The Arcantos bring a special distinction to everything they play, and this recording is no different.