Richard Egarr sets out to push boundaries while staying within the confines of historically informed music-making. Here he’s got our limited concept of the symphony in his sights, and has put together a program that demonstrates the enormous diversity and rapid development of the genre from Handel to Haydn. It’s an instructive journey: already you can hear the germ of the symphony in the Sinfonia from Handel’s oratorio Saul (1738), while the Grande Simphonie No 7 by Franz Xavier Richter (c.1740) and Stamitz’s Sinfonia in D (c.1750) demonstrate the stylistic and technical revolutions that were taking place at the famed Mannheim Court at the time. Mozart’s Symphony No 1, composed when he was just eight-years-old, reflects not only the influence of Mannheim but that of JC Bach; finally, one of Haydn’s masterpieces, the Symphony No 49 (La Passione) epitomises the Sturm und Drang style of sharply contrasting extremes of emotion, thus prefiguring Beethoven. The AAM are perfect advocates, their playing crisp and light yet virtuosic and given to extravagant gestures where the musical rhetoric demands it. This is most evident in the Mannheim works, where the loudest fortissimo and the quietest pianissimo are rendered with painterly skill amid a hail…

Rock meets classical as Perth explores music by Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, James Ledger and Andy Akiho. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Given its modest yet beguiling tone, it’s easy to forget the classical guitar is capable of painting a universe far beyond its actual sound-making capabilities. To fall under its spell is to enter a realm of ambiguity and suggestion; in other words, the classical guitar is the most poetic of instruments. So when 19th-century masters of the instrument Augustín Barrios, Francisco Tárrega, Caspar Joseph Mertz and the 20th-century composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco choose to pay homage to, respectively, Montevideo’s cathedral, Verdi’s opera La Traviata and the Alhambra, Schubert’s lieder and the music of Boccherini, there is no real paradox. Even if you aren’t familiar with the source material, you have your imagination to fill in the gaps. This is music that succeeds on its own terms but also points to a richer domain that, thanks to evocative writing, is immediately accessible. Of course, the quality of the interpretations must bear some of the responsibility for such a mysterious transference, and that’s where talented Austrian guitarist Armin Egger comes in. Whether it’s in Barrios’ melancholy, nostalgic waltzes and organ-evoking La catedral, Tárrega’s rippling Recuerdos de la Alhambra, Mertz’s virtuosic fantasy on The Flying Dutchman or Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s quirky evocation of a bygone era,…

Few recent piano recordings have given me as much pleasure as this one. Imagine that sense of relaxation, fun or reflection that one feels listening to an encore after a lengthy and often more serious piano recital. Then multiply it by 20, and you have Piers Lane Goes to Town. Of course it both is and it isn’t as simple as that. As the Queensland-born, London-based Lane writes in his engagingly-written booklet note, “Considering the scope of these short pieces (a selection of Lane’s most-often-played 20th- century encores), Australian composers feature more prominently than one might expect, partly because several works were written for me by down-under compatriots”. So this is a musical autobiography in more ways than one. Alan Lane may not have written his Toccata for Piers, but the fact he was the latter’s father counts for much, as does the fact that the music of Billy Mayerl “was a great favourite in the Lane household”. Anthony Doheny’s Toccata for Piers Lane was by contrast, and as the name suggests, expressly written for Lane, as was Robert Keane’s delightful yet slightly dangerous-sounding The Tiger Tango. Lane also suggests that he would be surprised “if even the most avid pianophile knew every piece on this disc”. However some…

Tedeschi’s new CD follows on from the success of his first recording, Gershwin and Me, and features the Rhapsody in Blue, the wonderful Preludes, arrangements from the Songbooks and Tedeschi’s own inspired take on Porgy and Bess. Elsewherere he’s joined by Australian jazz trumpeter James Morrison and vocalist Sarah McKenzie. With more arangements of Gershwin songs and pieces such as Promenade, Three-Quarter Blues and Impromptu in Two Keys, it’s a varied and attractive program. Gershwin’s music is able to effortlessly inhabit multiple worlds – blues, jazz, classical and so forth – while maintaining the highest standards of craftsmanship. Tedeschi by contrast is firmly of the classical world, while perfectly able to accommodate the rhythmic and harmonic nuances of Gershwin. This is evident right from the opening work, Promenade, which Tedeschi imbues with a jaunty insouciance; I also loved the sheer exuberance of Jazzbo Brown Blues and the expansiveness of I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise. If Morrison and McKenzie tend to steal the limelight when they appear, that’s more down to Tedeschi’s generosity as a collaborator. But it’s in the solo works that Tedeschi’s art is best savoured, and nowhere more so than in the solo version of Rhapsody in Blue. Here, Tedeschi, unencumbered by the orchestral accompaniment, really soars, An enjoyable…

Intimidated by the example of Beethoven’s late quartets, Brahms struggled for years before finally publishing his first two string quartets in 1873. By contrast, so inspired was he by the playing of the Meiningen Hofkapelle’s principal clarinettist Richard Mülfeld, whom he met in early 1891, that he wrote the Clarinet Quartet and Clarinet Trio in just a few weeks. Mülfeld and the Joachim Quartet premiered the Clarinet Quartet on December 12, 1891. It was an immediate hit. This beautiful new recording brings together the Clarinet Quintet and the A Minor String Quartet Op 51 No 2. It also brings together the Jerusalem Quartet, formed in 1993 and thanks to Musica Viva no stranger to Australian concert-goers, and that equally enthusiastic advocate for chamber music, Israeli clarinettist Sharon Kam. Excellent performances of the Clarinet Quintet abound. My personal favourites include Thea King with the Gabrieli Quartet on Hyperion and the Nash Ensemble on Wigmore Hall Live: both, true to the nature of the work, eschew any attempt to isolate the clarinet; it is instead effortlessly integrated into the string texture. Which is exactly what Kam does here, trusting individuality to timbre and tone while perfectly weighting volume and phrasing against the…

Iconic works from over 90 major artists on loan from New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Melbourne composer Stuart Greenbaum’s chamber works, like all the best art, is in the world but not of the world – qualities which are sympathetically brought out in these performances by one of New Zealand’s leading chamber ensembles, NZTrio. Head of Composition at the Melbourne Conservatorium, Greenbaum has written opera, choral, orchestral, chamber and solo instrumental music. This new recording features eight works exploring the latter two genres from between 1999 and 2011. The title work, 800 Million Heartbeats, takes the nominal number of heartbeats in a human life as a metaphor for life’s journey. Falling by Degrees explores gravity and falling in seven miniatures. Equator Loops and Lunar Orbit are for solo piano and cello respectively, while The Lake and the Hinterland and Scarborough Variations combine both instruments. The Year Without A Summer takes the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora as its subject. Greenbaum says his music “aims to evoke an atmosphere apart from the routine of modern life”. But by drawing on familiar styles such as blues, pop and jazz, his music celebrates modern life in all its forms. It simply jettisons the routine. Thus… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

One of music’s most widely travelled explorers and an indefatigable advocate for intercultural understanding and world peace, Jordi Savall here returns with another extraordinarily rich multicultural musical offering: the music of the Balkans. As Savall writes in an introductory booklet note, he and his fellow musicians from different cultures “have delved into this extraordinary historical, traditional and even modern musical heritage to study, select and perform it, thereby creating a genuine intercultural dialogue between the different cultures that have so often been torn apart by dramatic, age-old conflicts.” The result is a vivid collection of traditional (instrumental) folk songs and dances – some joyful, some melancholy – largely drawn from Ottoman and Sephardic repertories. Five different ensembles have been configured for the different yet interrelated styles and traditions: Bulgarian and Macedonian, Gypsy and Hungarian, Serbian and Romanian, Turkish and Greek and Bosnian and Sephardic. The instrumentation is equally rich and includes accordions, violins, viols, lyres, guitars, ouds, a psaltery, percussion, ney and kaval flutes and a qanun (zither). A lively ‘Balkan Prelude’ from Serbia but with Turkish elements opens the disc, with some dazzling accordion and percussion work especially. What follows is a veritable crosscultural smorgasbord, including a soulful Romanian…

Since 1998, renowned Spanish conductor and gamba player Jordi Savall’s Alia Vox label has been synonymous with stylish packaging of equally stylish performances of early music. In 2007 Savall launched the Alia Vox Heritage collection in order to “offer a fresh vision” of the recordings he and his then wife, the soprano Montserrat Figueras, made with their instrumental and vocal ensembles on the Astrée label between 1977 and 1996. The remastered recordings on the four CDs contained in this handsomely packaged boxed set were originally made on that label between 1987 and 1995. Together they offer a snapshot of the kinds of vocal genres that flourished in Spain between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, including the secular villancico and ensalada (“salad” – a variety of madrigal) and the sacred mass and motet. El Cançoner del Duc de Calàbria features music associated with the court of the Duke of Calabria in Valencia by composers such as Aldomar, Flecha, Morales and Guerrero; another CD is devoted to the sacred music of Joan Cererols, a monk who contributed much to the musical life of the monastery at Montserrat. The remaining two discs are given over to the villancicos and ensaladas of Mateo…

When a jury comprising Martha Argerich, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Alexis Weissenberg, Nelson Freire and Joachim Kaiser announced Kazan- born, now Munich-based Anna Gourari the winner of the First International Clara Schumann Competition in 1994, apparently praising her “almost mystical playing”, she knew she had arrived. Nearly 20 years and nearly a dozen recordings later, it’s astonishing she isn’t better known internationally. Because she is that rare thing – not merely a pianist with a formidable technique; not merely a musician with a knack for clarifying the underlying musical structure as Michelangelo clarified the skeleton and musculature of the human body, but a true artist and poet. If there is one work on this recording capable of revealing the full range of Gourari’s technical, interpretative and yes, artistic gifts, it’s Busoni’s magisterial piano arrangement of Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor for solo violin. Quite simply, this is one of the finest interpretations of this work that I have ever heard – and my favourites include wonderful recordings by Arthur Rubinstein and Alicia de Laroccha. Despite Gourari’s having technique to burn, her playing is spacious, lyrical, profound, imbued with an almost Celibidache- like mysticism. Not that there is any lack of excitement in……

Czech composer Jan Zelenka (1679-1745) was held in high regard by masters such as JS Bach and Telemann. Today his majestic church music is finally receiving the attention it deserves. But his six sonatas ZWV181 have been popular with modern wind players since the mid-1950s. Unsurprising, given the virtuosic treatment. These sonatas are superb examples of the quadro sonata, a genre in which all four voices were given fully independent parts. In Janice B Stockigt’s excellent booklet to this equally excellent recording, she quotes one of Zelenka’s students, JJ Quantz referring to the quadro sonata as “the true touchstone of a genuine contrapuntist”. Ensemble Marsyas, named after the satyr of Greek mythology who challenged Apollo in a reed-playing competition (he was skinned alive for his trouble), here perform sonatas III, V and VI; they are joined in Sonata III by that doyenne of the Baroque violin, Monica Huggett. Performances are dazzling throughout, with Josep Domenech Lafont and Molly Marsh (oboes) and Peter Whelan (bassoon) negotiating Zelenka’s dazzling, inventive and sometimes dense but never unclear writing with style and élan. Violone player Christine Sticher likewise relishes her part while keyboardist Philippe Grisvard and theorbo player Thomas Dunford add harmonic richness to…