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.

Mahler’s First was one of them. I vividly recall the normally somnolent Thursday afternoon audience rising to its feet to cheer after his 2002 performance. Sadly, neither that, nor the 2008 reprise, has ever been issued. I think his reading had both more Innigkeit and sheer élan than this reading by Ashkenazy, who I doubt has anything particularly interesting to say in this work. The opening string shimmer lacks mystery and expectancy. Is this, perhaps, because he’s a pianist, not a violinist and can’t convey the importance of a sustained string tremolo? The Wayfarer theme goes well enough but, overall, there is little sense of verdant nature awakening to a new day. The Scherzo needs more of what Germans call Schwung (“oomph”), and the trio should resemble an inebriated swoon, which doesn’t quite happen here. In the klezmer-meets-Kurt Weill third movement, again, the music is played a little too straight. The final sprawling movement is always a challenge and Ashkenazy and co. don’t sweep the field here either. Even the famous molto expressivo string passage sounds slightly perfunctory in their hands. Leonard Bernstein is, as usual in Mahler, wonderful in both his recordings, but my favourite performance is Guilini’s in…

Much of his church music, admittedly, lacks any more than a hint of introspection, spirituality or light and shade. One always has the impression that in Haydn’s take on Catholicism a good time was had by all. Even the supposedly darker Missa in tempore belli, nicknamed the “Timpani Mass”, really becomes ominous only with the menacing timpani figures in the Agnus Dei depicting Napoleon’s army besieging south-east Austria. Otherwise, only the unsettled minor key mood of the Benedictus undermines the otherwise joyful mood. Interestingly, the man whom Beethoven a few years later considered (initially at least) to be a liberator was viewed by the more conventional Haydn as a threat to civilisation. That said, performances of this calibre deserve an unreserved welcome. These two works were composed 24 years apart, the Mariazellermesse in 1782 as a celebration of the ennoblement of a prominent Catholic, a retired army officer who organised Marian pilgrimages. Owen Burdick and his forces (the Trinity Choir refers to the Trinity Episcopal Church in Wall Street, Manhattan, not Trinity College, Cambridge) and REBEL Baroque orchestra are agile and idiomatic in this music while, among the soloists, the men are adequate but the real star in both masses…

Angela Hewitt has made a seamless and very successful transition from Bach to Schumann with her usual poise, precision, imagination and humanity. The Davidsbündlertänze are, even by Schumann’s standards, a poetic masterpiece. Hewitt is across every nuance, capturing the strangely off-centre melody of the first dance, the even stranger syncopation of the tarantella No 6 and the jolly polka of No 12 to perfection. In the penultimate number, Wie aus der Ferne (“As from afar”) the melody starts without a break from the previous section and then develops into a melancholy ländler. In Kinderszenen (“Scenes from Childhood”), sample the final section Der Dichter spricht (“The poet speaks”), savour the uniquely German quality of Innigkeit or “inner depths” Hewitt brings to this enchanting music. Time really does stand still here. The Second Sonata is more problematic. Although generally regarded as his best keyboard sonata, the form didn’t suit Schumann’s essentially dreamy nature and instinctively discursive expression. What some may see as excessive dramatic urgency I felt sounded more like relentless headlong impetuosity, although this is no reflection on Hewitt’s playing. The lovely song-like slow movement radiates a rapt tenderness. A lovely CD, beautifully recorded. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from…

Johan Halvorsen was always an essential mention on any “one hit wonders” list of classical composers, known exclusively for his Entry of the Boyars. I missed Volume 1 of this series but I’m just as enthusiastic about Volume 2 as everyone seemed to be about its predecessor. Grieg himself loved these scores. Much of the music (Three Norwegian Dances, Air Norvégian and Chant de Veslemöy) features violin solos, delightfully played here by Marianne Thorsen. The second longest piece is the Suite ancienne, formed from entr’acts for the incidental music for Holberg’s (as in Grieg’s Holberg suite) play The Lying-in Room. It’s a skilful pastiche of 18th-century dance forms. My assessment of Halvorsen as a Nordic Eric Coates or Leroy Anderson was completely confounded when I heard the Second Symphony: it reinforced my amazement at how many seriously first-rate symphonies were composed by seriously obscure composers. This one is a little gem, with a recurring “fate” motive in all four movements (à la Tchaikovsky), a delicious oboe melody in the slow movement, reminiscent of the one in the slow movement of Bizet’s Symphony and a lovely intermezzo. All in under 28 minutes. An absolute winner! Continue reading Get unlimited digital access…

Readings marked by a seemingly infinite variety of inflections, astutely calculated nuances and exquisitely judged tempi.

Powerful stuff! David Oistrakh would have been proud.