Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic’s recordings for the yellow label from the 1970s, minus the operas.

Ashkenazy masters massed forces of SSO and Philharmonia Choirs in eloquent prayer for peace. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

This collection of legendary recordings provides an outlet for nostalgia among older music lovers and a rich opportunity for younger ones.

Perahia makes his long-awaited Australian debut with grace, style and aplomb.

Certain conductors have become synonymous with particular composers. One thinks of Beethoven/Klemperer or Mahler/Bernstein. In the case of Elgar, the conductor who most often comes to mind is Sir Adrian Boult. He conducted and recorded Elgar’s music repeatedly over a period of 60 years, although when he first heard The Dream of Gerontius he predicted it wouldn’t last! This box contains all his Elgar recordings for EMI. There are others: Boult famously recorded the symphonies for the small company Lyrita in 1968. But this collection contains practically all Elgar’s orchestral works, many obscure or secondary, usually in multiple performances. The only substantial work missing is the song cycle Sea Pictures, probably because Barbirolli’s EMI recording with Janet Baker swept the board.  Timings vary – Boult’s Enigma Variations runs 26:21 in 1936, 31:03 in 1953. Occasionally he rethinks his approach. The Shakespearean tone-poem Falstaff is mellow and its climaxes more triumphal in a late performance from 1973. In 1950, the piece sounds mercurial, lively and even comic…. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

With this issue we get to No 59 in Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series. That’s an awful lot of concertos, and although the series has included Saint-Säens and Rachmaninov, the vast majority of works have been obscure, neglected or (in the current case) completely unknown. The two Polish composers represented here were musicians of local reputation: highly capable but not notably individual. Aleksander Zarzycki was the older (1843-1898). His Grande Polonaise was composed in 1859, and while it has quiet sections and even a passage that sounds like French operetta, its basic aim is to imitate Chopin – for political as much as musical reasons. Chopin remains inimitable, however, and the piece comes over as a Polish imitation of Liszt. Zarzycki’s later Piano Concerto is a compendium of mid-century Romantic gestures, expertly assembled, but it lacks a true memorability that would set it apart. Władysław Żeleński (1837-1921) is slightly better known (though I must confess not to me). His Piano Concerto of 1903, a sprawling work in three movements, shows a sophisticated harmonic and orchestral palette. While possibly overwritten, it contains several individual episodes, like the first movement’s coda in Straussian waltz time… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per…

Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 2 in G is played much less often than its popular predecessor.

The reclusive Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888) wrote almost exclusively for the piano. His fascinating music, which is finally becoming known and admired by a wider audience, is among the most individual and technically demanding of any in the Romantic era. His challenging Twelve Studies Op 35 and the titanic Symphony for Solo Piano (from Op 39) have previously been given outstanding recordings by the Australian pianist Stephanie McCallum. The series entitled Recueils de Chants (literally: Compilations of Songs) are rather different. In five books of six pieces each, composed between 1857 and 1872, these are pieces on a smaller scale, modeled to some extent on Mendelssohn’s Songs without words but displaying a broader expressive range. Some have evocative titles such as Chant de guerre and Esprit follets, while others are simply given tempo indications. Each book ends with a Barcarolle, where the quirky essence of the composer’s individuality is most evident. While these Chants do not require the sheer stamina of Alkan’s larger works, they do require a skillful and sympathetic pianist who can tease out the lyricism and bring point to the composer’s distinctive style. McCallum is across every aspect of this music, exploring the collection’s diversity with apparent ease –…

  Yundi (born in 1982), like Lang Lang, is a major musical sensation in China, where he is treated like a rock star by a generation of young devotees. China is a vast and expanding market in this area, as in many others, and if it takes celebrity promotion to get more people to fall in love with classical music, then I’m all for it! My problem concerns the narrowness of the repertoire, implying that a few recognised masterpieces exist and nothing else is worth bothering about. The farthest these young keyboard lions stray from the beaten track (apart from insipid transcriptions of traditional Chinese songs) are Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto (Lang) and Prokofiev’s Second (Yundi). Yundi approaches Beethoven in the same manner as the showmen concert pianists of old. His elongated opening phrases of the Pathétique indicate that these will be Romantic interpretations with no Classical or period flavour. He thunders the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata as if it were Chopin’s Revolutionary Étude. This places him at a considerable stylistic distance from young European pianists who have recorded Beethoven of late, like Ingrid Fliter, Alice Sara Ott or François Frédéric Guy, all of whom display an awareness of…

  Joachim Raff (1822-1882) was a celebrated composer in his time, equally as famous as his older contemporaries Schumann and Liszt (he was the latter’s assistant in Weimar in the 1850s.) Raff wrote prolifically, composing eleven symphonies, yet his work fell out of favour and is rarely played today. This excellent release from Järvi and his Swiss orchestra – appropriately, since Raff’s family was Swiss – gives us a possible clue as to why his popularity did not outlast the century. The Second Symphony surges forward in the manner of Schumann’s Rhenish, especially in Järvi’s vigorous performance. The lusty first movement is built on a fanfare figure, and the work is bracingly orchestrated with clarity and flair. Compared to his peers, however, Raff lacks a distinctive personality; his music is a public utterance, at odds with the Romantic zeitgeist. His harmony is less sophisticated than Schumann’s, and certain themes sound derivative of Mendelssohn, who had been dead 20 years. Raff embraced programmatic music, and this side of the composer can be heard in his four Shakespearean Preludes. They pre-echo the tone poems of Richard Strauss, but again Strauss did it with more imagination and individuality. If you don’t expect more,…

For ages Haydn’s piano concertos were overshadowed by those of Mozart. It is true that Mozart’s Concertos Nos 20-27 are
 so substantial as to make Haydn’s look like trifles. The three concertos on this disc, Nos 3, 4 and 11, are in fact the only ones of Haydn actually confirmed to have been written by him. They contain all the joie de vivre we associate with this composer at his sunniest, as well as (in the G Major) a sublime slow movement that clearly influenced several composers in years 
to come, not least Beethoven. Indeed, Beethoven’s two earliest piano concertos would not exist without Haydn’s in D Major: the best known of his three.
 The first thing one notices in this recording is the tight ensemble and single-minded attack of the Violons du Roy: 
a moderately-sized string orchestra based in Quebec. (The Concertos in F and G use only string accompaniment.) These musicians play modern instruments but are historically informed in matters of vibrato and bowing. Hamelin, also Canadian, is a super virtuoso; Haydn poses no technical challenge to him whatsoever. He brings strength and colour as well as insouciance to the music. At times this team may seem a……

  The son of a music critic, Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a child prodigy in the mould of Mozart and Mendelssohn. His 43-minute Sinfonietta was written at the age of 15. In its lush orchestration, Romantic melodies and richly chromatic harmonies, it sounds like a tone poem by Richard Strauss. (Both Strauss and Mahler admired the young Erich). Forced to leave Vienna in the early 1930s, Korngold made a fresh start in the USA where he virtually invented the sound of Hollywood films. He was brought over by the Austrian director Max Reinhardt to adapt Mendelssohn’s music for a movie of A Midsummer Night’s Dream possibly on the basis of his earlier score for a theatrical production of Much Ado About Nothing. This is the first recording of the full incidental music. Korngold’s approach to Shakespeare is appropriately characterful, and the power he gets out of his chamber forces is extraordinary. He was truly a master of the orchestra. Storgårds and the Helsinki Philharmonic have given us several first-rate recordings of neglected music – including Korngold’s Symphony – and this disc is similarly successful. I don’t care for the pinched tenor of Mati Turi in Balthazar’s song (Sigh no more,…