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…

Ravel is often described as an Impressionist. While this is an erroneous label overall, he is at his most impressionistic in the piano cycles Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit. There are two schools of Ravel pianists: those who create a dreamy, soft-centred sound picture (usually old-school, like Walter Gieseking) and those who seek
out the sharp edges and go for clarity like Alexandre Tharaud. The young Russian Anna Vinnitskaya amalgamates both worlds. In her reading of Une barque sur 
l’océan from Miroirs, the opening arpeggios have a chiseled quality – no blurry wash here – yet her subtle way of emphasising single notes in the right hand suggests sparkles 
of sunlight on the water. Similarly in Noctuelles, Ravel’s depiction of moths at night, Vinnitskaya vividly plots the haphazard flight of these nocturnal creatures. She is less successful at evoking humans. Her Alborada del grazioso is too brisk to capture the braggadocio character of the serenade. It is highly impressive as pianism, as is her Scarbo from Gaspard de la nuit, but the latter reading underplays the piece’s unique grotesquerie. On the basis of her nuanced performance of the Pavane, I rather wish she had ditched Gaspard and recorded Le Tombeau…

I was impressed with the whimsicality Alice Sara Ott displayed in early Beethoven on a disc I reviewed last year, so I was surprised by her ponderous approach to Pictures from an Exhibition. Several of Mussorgsky’s impressions of his artist friend Hartmann’s work have a scherzando quality: the children playing at the Tuileries garden, the bustling market place at Limoges, and of course the ballet of the unhatched chicks. Ott’s pianism is meticulous and well prepared however some careful tempos and overemphatic dynamics rob her performance of character. She stretches out The Great Gate at Kiev considerably and, generally speaking, she fails to treat these pictures with enough visual imagination. As this is a live performance from the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg it is quite possible that Ott needed to project and underline the music more than she would in a recording studio. Even so, it’s bad luck for her that a performance by Stephen Osbourne recently appeared on Hyperion that supplies some of the telling detail and subtlety that Ott misses, and I would recommend his in preference to this one. The unusual coupling of Schubert’s Piano Sonata Op 53 is more successful. Here Ott’s poise is an…

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Joaquin Turina took on the advice as well as the example of his older compatriots Albeníz and Falla, and wrote works influenced by the fiery gypsy music of Andalusia. His output consists mainly of piano music, songs, chamber music and a handful of dazzling orchestral works which show him to be second only to Ravel in orchestral wizardry. In all the music on this well-filled disc you will hear a style of Impressionism that is not cool and misty but ablaze with heat and light. The BBC Philharmonic relish Turina’s textures under Mena’s idiomatic direction, and typically rich Chandos sound is everything one could wish. This is well worth collecting alongside Mena’s previous discs of music by Falla and Montsalvatge. If I have a quibble, perhaps a degree of earthiness is missing in these lush performances. In the Danzas Fantásticas some of Mena’s predecessors point more clearly to the gypsy origins. Try the
old Ansermet/Suisse Romande recording on Eloquence to hear what I mean. Clara Mouritz’s vibrant mezzo- soprano voice is perfect for the heartfelt Saeta, but I feel the five Poema en forma de canciones lie too high for her. A true soprano is needed, the likes of Los Angeles,…

Chamber music is the ideal medium for composers with a knack for polyphony. Here we have a fascinating disc of string trios by two exact contemporaries who were among the victims of Hitler’s Germany. Hans Gál fled to Scotland and lived a long (if obscure) life, while the Czech Hans Krása was interned at Terezin and killed in Auschwitz in 1944. While their music differs in intensity, both men were skilled at writing counterpoint so all these works are full of interest. Gál’s Serenade dates from 1932. Notable for its high spirits, it follows in the wake of similar trios by Beethoven and Dohnányi. The Trio of 1971 is understandably more autumnal in quality (apart from its Mendelssohnian Scherzo) and features a set of gentle, lyrical variations as its final movement. Krása’s music was heavily influenced by the Second Viennese School and is made of tougher stuff. Tanec (or Dance) is a short work evoking the sound of trains, with a tender chorale in the middle section. In the powerful Passacaglia and Fugue, the underlying emotional impetus stretches these highly structured forms almost to breaking point in Krása’s final composition. The performances by the Ensemble Epomeo are beyond praise: lively,…

As a young virtuoso, Claudio Arrau was renowned for playing long programs and tackling technically challenging works like Albeniz’s Iberia. From mid-life onwards he concentrated on the German tradition and mainstream repertoire. He reached his full maturity in the mid-1950s, when most of the recordings in the EMI box were made. This set contains the five Beethoven concertos, a selection of sonatas, and concertos by Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Schumann, Chopin and Brahms. Arrau was never a mere technician. In a 1970s broadcast
 of Brahms’s Second Concerto, he swayed and grimaced like a
 soul in torment. That is both the upside and downside of these recordings: he approaches each forte as if it was Mount Everest, and handles lyrical themes as if officiating at High Mass. Take
 the limpid piano melody in the second movement of Grieg’s concerto: its innate simplicity eludes him as he inflects every note with emotional significance. In his desire to make the instrument resonate he overuses the sustaining pedal, which would have been effective in a vast auditorium but turns muddy in the studio. By contrast, Alceo Galliera and the Philharmonia, who accompany most of the concertos, are a model of clarity. Arrau’s Beethoven is fascinating. Often…

Bernarda Fink has a vibrant mezzo-soprano voice and the sense of style to interpret this program to the manner born – which, despite her surname, she was. The daughter of Slovenian parents, she was brought up in Buenos Aires. Her repertoire includes Baroque music and mainstream German and French song, but this Spanish recital does not come out of the blue: it follows an earlier release of Argentinean songs from 2006. The diverse program,
which includes many rarities, concentrates on three of the
four masters of 20th-century Spanish song. (The missing one is Joaquín Turina.) It opens with Falla’s well-known Seven Popular Spanish Songs, and straight away Fink reveals her strengths: a strong chest voice for Andalusian declamation, the ability to float her warm tone at the top of her register and an understanding of the emotional terrain that allows her to hold nothing back in this spirited, heart-on-sleeve music. Rodrigo’s gentle Adela 
follows, the first of his Tres canciones españolas, and here Fink presents a beautifully poised cantilena against the simple accompaniment, rendered with style by American pianist Anthony Spiri. Rodrigo’s songs tend to
be spare in texture, Granados’s popular Tonadillas notable for their elegance, while Falla remains the most earthy. Throughout,…

Meticulous. Polished. A perfectionist. These are terms frequently applied to Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). It is true that there is never a wasted note or an indistinct effect in his work. He is also linked inextricably to Debussy under the heading “Impressionist”, but Ravel’s music is less ethereal and his harmonic thinking conceived quite differently. (Debussy places unrelated chords in the ether; Ravel’s harmony is structured more like contemporary jazz. He employs chords of the 9th, 11th and 13th degrees of the scale but eliminates their roots.) Ravel’s personality was reserved and enigmatic – he was famously more relaxed with children than with adults – and this led to the perception that his music was merely polished surfaces. So it is, but I find tremendous heart in the melting opening of his String Quartet, or the tender closing chorus of the strangely affecting opera L’enfant et les Sortilèges. Nor does his polish make him a conservative composer. What could be more out there than Boléro? The climatic harmonic resolution is orgasmic! Scarbo from Gaspard de la nuit is extreme both in its technique and its inspiration. Virtuosity and spontaneity again combine in the rousing finale of the opera L’Heure espagnol in……

The Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire made his initial impression on collectors with a recording of music by his compatriot Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959). That Teldec disc included the Prole do Bebê Suites and the massive Rudepoema. After partnering Martha Argerich in two-piano works, Freire was absent from the catalogues for two decades, finally to reappear with a series of acclaimed recordings of Beethoven and Brahms. Now, after 40 years, he returns to the music of his homeland. The result is playing of such freshness, spontaneity and vigour that you would think no time had passed. This disc is clearly a labour of love. While Villa-Lobos gets the lion’s share of the generous program, it also contains pieces by older composers, which Freire tells us have been in his repertoire since he was a teenager (he was born in 1944). Among these are the Tango Brasileiro by the un-Hispanically named Alexandre Levy, the Valse Lent by Henrique Fernández and Camargo Guarnieri’s popular Dança Negro. While they don’t have the profile of Villa-Lobos, the other composers represented here are hardly unknown, as the sleeve note claims. Villa-Lobos selections include the bubbling Carnaval das Crianças, more familiar in its piano and orchestra version under…

It is the largest box I have ever been sent to review – physically speaking – even bigger than Karajan’s 82-CD collection, though it holds only 12 discs. It also contains a lavish 192-page booklet chock full of colour photographs and articles about the pianist’s inspiration and suchlike. The product’s dimensions reflect the phenomenon of Lang Lang, a young concert pianist whose discs have sold millions of copies in China alone. Lang recently decamped to Sony, announcing his arrival with an excellent Liszt program, so DG have sensibly decided to repackage the recordings he made for them between 2000 and 2009 in a new design splashed liberally with red. No one can say that Lang Lang does not deserve the acclaim. He is a remarkable musician: technically adroit and emotionally involved in the music at all times. In many ways a throwback, he adopts the approach and occasional mannerisms of older pianists like Horowitz and Arrau. He sometimes rolls chords, and has a penchant for emphasising lyrical moments with rubato and a hushed, pearl-like tone. I call this an “18th Variation” approach, because it particularly suits that famous movement from Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Lang is also……

>Following the success of his English and Spanish albums, Stephen Hough has come up with this thoughtfully planned, beautifully executed French album. Typically for Hough, the repertoire is anything but predictable. It opens with the familiar strains of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. The Gallic connection lies in the transcription by the pianist Alfred Cortot, who was actually Swiss. Hough himself is a transcriber of note (or notes) and so we have his keyboard arrangements of Pizzicati from Delibes’ ballet Sylvia and Massenet’s song Crépuscule. Among the rarely played works are the charming Automne by Cécile Chaminade and Alkan’s quirky La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer. Two popular encores are included: Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso and Debussy’s Clair de lune, the latter sounding not at all hackneyed due to the surrounding context. There are multiple selections by Fauré and Poulenc, and the recital ends with a longer work, Liszt’s Réminiscences of Halévy’s opera La Juive. Hough invariably hones in on the specific quality that defines each piece. In the Ravel, it is humour, an aspect that pianists often neglect in their desire to remind us how difficult this music is to… Continue reading Get…