Ever since she won two major competitions as a 16-year-old nearly two decades ago, Natalie Clein has had a reputation in her native Britain not just as one of the finest cellists going around but also as one of the most intelligent, a fact borne out in her extraordinary previous recording of music by Kodály. But that acclaimed disc – one of only a handful of commercial recordings she’s made in her entire career – was only a warm-up for this magnificent new CD of masterpieces for cello and orchestra by Bloch and Bruch. In her succinct addition to the main liner notes, Clein describes Bloch’s “deep sense of longing and loneliness” – qualities which are more than demonstrated in a stunning reading of the immortal Schelomo. The very first notes on solo cello sear the soul, before burning their way deep down in a rich sound mix, and when Ilan Volkov fires up the BBC Scottish Symphony in the big tuttis it’s almost overwhelming. Clein has a way of making the cello wailand keen like a lamenting voice drifting in from some windswept hill, wild and untamed in its spirit but with never a note out of place. And…

As regular readers will know, I’ve often been unimpressed by Gergiev’s sadly variable LSO Mahler cycle, where he often had even less to say about the music than Ashkenazy. I’m happy to say I was entranced by this 2-CD set from beginning to end. For once, the cliché “unjustly neglected” is totally accurate in describing the shameful overlooking of these three genuine masterpieces. The First and Third have long been my favourite Tchaikovsky symphonies; until now my preferred version of No 1 was the youthful Michael Tilson Thomas with his Boston forces, and in the Third either Bernstein’s 1960s New York Philharmonic or Karajan’s 1980s Berlin Phil. Gergiev’s First, Winter Daydreams, is simply gorgeous. The combination of panache, finesse and imagination in the first movement is wonderful: you can almost feel the chill on the rosy cheeks of Romanov aristocrats with exquisite noses and perfect cheekbones, as they travel through the wondrous winter landscape, swathed in sable in a troika. The tender phrasing of the second subject is worth the price of the set alone. The second movement is a wistful reverie and the scherzo is jewel-like. I’ve often regarded the Second Symphony, the so-called Little Russian, aka Ukraine, as…

Behold the quintessential 21st-century classical musician, Valentina Lisitsa, an American-based Ukrainian whose homemade videos have garnered 50 million YouTube hits (and counting), and forged for the formerly unemployed pianist an international career that culminated in this recital in June at the Royal Albert Hall. Decca are the Johnny-Come-Latelys in all of this, but have given it the due sense of urgency, releasing the completed package online just a week after YouTube viewers had watched the whole thing unfolding live. Minor-league pianists making such a dramatic leap to major success usually have some marketable eccentricity, like a potty mouth or a tragic autobiography or a swimsuit model’s figure, but aside from a shock of blonde hair à la Claudia Schiffer, Lisitsa doesn’t. What she does have, though, is a sincerity about her playing and an ability to communicate with her audiences visually and emotionally, together with a refreshingly olde-worlde technique honed in the East European tradition of Josef Hofmann and Rachmaninov. Purists will still find plenty to hate about her playing, especially her stilted Chopin, but she has more than enough artistic credibility to take on the kind of repertoire featured here in this plebiscite concert programmed, naturally enough, by… Continue…

Nicola Benedetti makes for a poised, but overqualified, screen siren.

Thanks to the wholesale appropriation of popular song by court and church composers, there’s something at once vibrant and austere about the early Baroque music of Spain and Portugal. The program on this new recording by Australian period instrument ensemble La Compañia comprises mostly villancicos (rustic songs) in vocal and instrumental settings by 16th-century Spanish and Portuguese composers such as Pedro de Cristo, Manuel Machado, and Francisco Guerrero. Some travelled to take up positions in churches and cathedrals in the New World, where their music was inflected by indigenous and African rhythms. The anonymous pieces included here are all taken from the Cancioneiro de Paris manuscript of c1523. Under their director Danny Lucin, La Compañia perform these works on period wind instruments such as cornetti, sackbuts and dulcians, as well as the viola da gamba, vihuela, guitar, cavaquinho and percussion. Joining them is young Australian soprano and early music exponent Siobhan Stagg, winner of the 2012 Australian International Opera Award. Throughout, La Compañia’s relaxed and improvisatory yet passionate and precise playing is a delight, recalling the best of Hespèrion XXI, The Harp Consort and L’Arpeggiata in similar repertoire. Listen to the rich textures of De Cristo’s Ay mi Dios,… Continue…

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……

Across its eight movements, this secular mass is a focused refinement of what Westlake does best.

In one of the most singularly gorgeous recordings to have come across my desk in recent months, Zurich-born cellist Christian Poltéra and British pianist Kathryn Stott explore some of Dvořák’s greatest melodies in new transcriptions by Poltéra. Silent Woods was arranged by the composer himself from the original version for piano four hands; in fact, the only compositions originally written for cello here are the Rondo in G Minor and the Polonaise in A. It seems extraordinary now to think that Dvořák wasn’t immediately enamoured of the cello’s sound, finding it “nasal” in the upper register and “grumbling” in the lower, as the booklet notes recall. But how he would have adored the warm, emotionally expansive playing of Poltéra – and Stott for that matter: a superb soloist in her own right and an ever-sensitive accompanist.  The opening Sonatina in G, originally for violin and piano and dedicated to Dvořák’s children, is all brightness shot through with pentatonic flavours; Poltéra and Stott animate the music with the perfect balance of poise and exuberance. And if, in the following Rondo in G, the players seem for the most part simply to be letting… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4…

>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…

According to Schubert’s friends, the composition of Winterreise in 1827, a year before his death, left the composer agitated and disturbed. Wilhelm Müller’s poetic journey starts with Gute Nacht, as a traveller walks away from us into a moonlit, snowy landscape. At the end of the cycle, The Signpost, he takes the path to his death. All very close to the bone for a composer with a terminal illness, and the first performance duly shocked his contemporaries. It’s good to report, then, that this superb, bold and harrowing new interpretation by the Austrian baritone Florian Boesch and English pianist Malcolm Martineau may just shock a whole new generation. There are big choices here but crucially, every moment of this intimate collaboration has been thought through. Each emotional twist and turn is presented as another step on Schubert’s solitary winter journey, from the abandoned home of his loved one to a lonely grave. Boesch may not have an idiosyncratic voice like Fischer-Dieskau or Matthias Goerne, but he certainly has an individual style and a special way with poetry. His vocal mood-swings and unprecedented use of half-tones – at times more popular songster than classical lieder singer – sets him apart from…

Nobody does special projects quite like Cecilia Bartoli – each one with at least a few premiere recordings, and each seemingly more elaborate than the last. Mission is no exception, having been preceded by a whimsical YouTube video series and even inspiring a new book by American detective novelist Donna Leon. The centre of all this activity? Agostino Steffani: composer, priest, diplomat and possible spy, whose name has fallen into obscurity but who, according to Bartoli and company, might just be the “missing link” between Monteverdi and Vivaldi in the development of Italian opera. It’s hard to argue with their evidence. This double disc not only showcases Bartoli at her intense and virtuosic best; it’s an immersive musical experience, whose interest lies not merely in the novelty and rarity of the repertoire, but in its genuine brilliance. Gorgeous melodies, tireless musical invention, and a deft sense of theatre leap out at every turn (it’s hardly surprising to discover how heavily Handel was influenced by Steffani, even incorporating some of the latter’s compositions into his own works) and while the program is long, there’s little chance of fatigue. Bartoli’s expressive palette is as colourful as Steffani’s own, and this music –…

ARCAM (RDAC WIRELESS) PRICE: $775 ★★★★★ For a while, Arcam had the “affordable-DAC-by-a-venerable-hi-fi-brand” sector all to itself with its 2010 rDAC. As this test shows, it’s now under pressure, but it’s a measure of just how right Arcam got the original that this wireless variant is still up there. This sturdy little box features the most important connections: optical and coaxial digital and asynchronous USB inputs, plus stereo RCA output. Wireless connection requires an rWave or rWand streaming dongle. Build quality is impeccable. Hard-wired preference The wireless aspect will appeal, but there’s no denying the rDAC sounds its most effective when hard-wired to a source. We used a MacBook for the bulk of our listening and for every genre of music, at every file size, the Arcam proved an adaptable and likeable device. A 24/192 file of REM’s Country Feedback reveals everything that’s admirable about the rDAC. It’s a punchy, dynamic listen, with an emphasis on excitement. That’s not to suggest it’s short on detail, but its real strengths concern scale, soundstaging and separation. Listening to the other units, however, highlights the rDAC’s relative lack of low-frequency finesse. Extension is impressive, and there’s admirable tonal variation, but where the leading…