Andreas Scholl has come a long way since singing Bach as a boy chorister with his local church. The experience instilled in him a deep affinity for this repertoire, as evidenced by several fine discs for Harmonia Mundi. For Decca, the German countertenor has released an album featuring two of the most famous solo cantatas, each showcasing the sonorous, sinewy strength of his tone, particularly when it is focused on long, sombre lines. With assured diction he brings out the meaning of the text, most persuasively the haunting catharsis that comes with a wish for death in BWV82.  Kammerorchester Basel’s tempo in Ich habe genug, intended to play to Scholl’s strengths, crawls along at the same pace as Janet Baker’s classic if somewhat old-fashioned reading on EMI. Scholl is all subtlety and poise, using minimal vibrato and eschewing the histrionics that have dogged the aria elsewhere, but his efforts to convey the words compromise the fluidity of the sublime melody. The final movement Ich Freue Mich auf Meinen Tod, which usually hastens towards the desired release of death, here drags with little tonal or dynamic variation. Scholl finds his way back to the freer approach of his previous Bach album in…

Composed and premiered in a concentration camp in the winter of 1941, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is one of the most terrifying and profound musical expressions of the Catholic faith to emerge out of the horrors of 20th-century warfare. And yet it also contains some of the most sensual music ever written. It is a rare group that can move between those extremes and master the score’s extreme virtuosity, but Ensemble Liaison passes with flying colours. The trio plus Wilma Smith on violin are impressive individually, particularly clarinetist David Griffiths in his Herculean solo with its feats of breath control. But they play as one when it counts the most: the extended unison movement Dance de la Fureur, a fierce evocation of the seven trumpets of the apocalypse. This section is impressively faster than my go-to recording on DG with Daniel Barenboim, maintaining almost telepathic focus between the four players, but what they gain in speed they lose in gravitas. Messiaen’s ethereal musical realm – beyond time as we know it – is not too daunting for these artists, who seem comfortable drawing out its rhythmic complexity and elasticity, playing with sinuous fluidity or taut precision as…

A surprising, if welcome, entry into the ABC’s Classic 100 20th Century was this huge choral monument. Gerontius is never an easy work to bring off. Some conductors and performers treat it like a church service, instead of the great music drama that it is. The work drips with Catholic piety and needs special care. Vladimir Ashkenazy has an unusual affinity for Elgar and he plays this oratorio with passion and conviction. The hushed choral invocation towards the end of Part 1 is exquisitely handled. At this point the overly reverberant recording, which takes the edge off the music elsewhere, is perfect. Lilli Paasikivi’s Angel is beautiful; more effective on the CD than I remember her in the concert hall. Mark Tucker’s impassioned Gerontius is marred by strain at the top of his range. More than 20 versions are currently available on disc. Although the SSO plays superbly, the remarkable 1964 recording with Barbirolli and the Philharmonia is the one to beat: soloists Richard Lewis and Janet Baker are beyond compare and the closer-miked recording is illuminating. Joining Gerontius on Sydney Symphony’s 2-CD set is the work that came in at number one on the ABC’s 100 list, also in a recording drawn…

Last year, on tour with the ACO’s surfing-themed program The Glide, Joseph Tawadros vowed he wouldn’t be caught dead on a board. Richard Tognetti may not have taught him to duck dive, but it’s clear the mystery of the sea exerts its thrall over Australia’s young oud virtuoso. On this his fifth album, Tawadros draws on Khalil Gibran’s description of the human spirit as “a boundless drop to a boundless ocean” for his Concerto of the Greater Sea. The six movements of the suite for oud, viola, piano and percussion are interspersed with shorter pieces recorded with the ACO’s full complement of strings back in 2006. These are as fresh as if they had been made yesterday, fitting comfortably with the concerto and documenting the ease of stylistic integration that has remained constant through years of collaboration. Tawadros’s compositions develop from simple chord progressions that give him space to showcase his impressive finger work and explore the tangy sonorities of his instrument in soulful musings, often doubled in taut unison by Tognetti or violist Christopher Moore. The effect is breathtaking, the timbres exquisitely blended, but where it gets interesting is when the soloists are more independent, as in the lyrical…

Longing, melancholy and visceral pain – but also a stark beauty – pervade this new recital from Simon Keenlyside, a collection of mostly English songs from the early decades of the 20th century, when the shadows of war loomed large. Rollicking tales of battle and militant flag-waving are conspicuous by their absence; Keenlyside focuses instead on the personal side of war, the physical and emotional toll taken on soldiers and on those left behind. At the centre of the recital are Butterworth’s settings of poems from A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, and it’s hard to imagine these songs in better hands. Keenlyside’s singing explodes with raw emotion. Happy moments are as ardently captured as the deepest sadness or sharpest blow, and his exceptional diction and dynamic control are utterly in tune with Housman’s touching poetry. Ned Rorem’s graphic An Incident and Kurt Weill’s harrowing Beat! Beat! Drums! and Dirge for Two Veterans (all settings of Walt Whitman poems) are a bracing and at times brutal contrast but just as masterful in their execution. At 52, keenlyside is blessed with a voice that combines youthful brightness with dark mahogany, allowing him to declaim and whisper with equal impact, and to…

Only in recent years has Charles Ives been acknowledged as a founding father of American classical music, but there can be no mistaking the true grit in his four violin sonatas, all composed before 1920.  Youthful brio, blistering technique and a fierce musical intellect make Hilary Hahn the ideal interpreter of her countryman’s work. She and Ukrainian pianist Valentina Lisitsa have been exploring the sonatas together for a few years and the synergy they have achieved is remarkable, considering the  two parts are often composed to sound entirely disjointed from one another. It’s clear from the duo’s mercurial rhythmic interplay just how much fun they’re having with this music. Hahn’s sweet-toned violin is closely-miked for a dry, honest sound that matches the directness of Ives’s borrowings from hymns, ragtime and spirituals. North Carolina-based Lisitsa calls these tuneful quotations “American as apple pie”, and that’s the spirit in which she attacks buoyant, punchy passages. But the players are just as expressive in gentle moments of reflection, easing into Debussyesque lyricism for the Autumn movement of Sonata No 2. Highlights: the wide-eyed adventure of the Sonata No 4 Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting, its final movement ending abruptly with the charm…

Here is a compendium of four British rhapsodies for lost worlds. Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending is a sublime expression of pure joy, as violin soars against orchestra to weave its line of melody against the sky. Michael Dauth and the SSO combine with lyrical delicacy in a work that demands surrender to its idyllic beauty. More attention is needed for the song cycle On Wenlock Edge, Vaughan Williams’s settings of A E Housman taken from A Shropshire Lad  – rural poems of love and grief as soldiers went to die on foreign soil. Tenor Steve Davislim with Benjamin Martin on piano and the Hamer Quartet find quiet beauty in the sadness of these poems, and the fine audio experience provided by the SACD format makes for a profoundly moving experience. Vaughan Williams’s work for viola, chorus and orchestra Flos Campi is performed perhaps better than it deserves to be. The work always sounds to me like the soundtrack to a portentous 1950s sci-fi movie.  Amid these pieces is a solitary symphonic work by Benjamin Britten, his Sinfonia da Requiem, a supposedly celebratory piece commissioned by the Japanese Government shortly before that country entered into the Second World War. It…

For Los párajos perdidos: the South American Project, lutenist, harpist and director of early music band L’Arpeggiata Pluhar takes as her starting point two ideas: that unlike their modern European equivalents, Latin American plucked instruments differ little from their common Baroque ancestors; and that South American dances and songs still exhibit rhythmic and harmonic structures that would have been recognisable to a Baroque musician.  Pluhar thus combines a period ensemble of lutes, harps, guitars, cornett, double bass and percussion with a smaller group comprising instruments still played in Latin America such as the cuatro, charango, arpa llanera and maracas. Her vocalists include classical singers Philippe Jaroussky, Luciana Mancini and Raquel Andueza, as well as Italian folk singer and researcher Lucilla Galeazzi and the extraordinary singer and ballet dancer Vincenzo Capezzuto.  Despite their different performing traditions, all show the same remarkable ability to really loosen up and go with the often sensual, sometimes totally wild rhythms in these traditional and contemporary zambas, golpes, polcas, joropos and boleros from Latin America.  Yes, there’s very little “early music” as such – though there is an arrangement of Soler’s famous Fandago that will really knock your socks off. What you do get is some…

The “sonic spectacular” is back, if Paul McCreesh has his way. The veteran of so many wonderful early music extravaganzas has now parted amicably with Deutsche Grammophon after a 15-year relationship. The next phase of his artistic endeavour will see him set his own artistic agenda, underpinned by his fascination with large-scale works and historically informed performance values. The first fruits of this new phase are truly mindblowing. In 2010 McCreesh assembled some 400 players and singers in Wrocław, Poland to record the Berlioz Requiem. Meticulously following the composer’s directions which call for, amongst other things, a chorus of at least 200, 16 timpani, 18 double basses and four additional brass groups, McCreesh has produced a recording of jaw-dropping power and sublime beauty. While the thunderous, apocalyptic vision of the Tuba mirum is absolutely awe-inspiring, much of the work is more intimate in scope, and it is in these sections that we see the composer’s mastery of musical colour. Robert Murray might not be the most distinguished tenor to have sung the solo in the Sanctus, but at least he respects its rapt, devotional character. Mary Magdalene Church, Wrocław provides an excellent venue for this work, imparting atmospheric resonance that…

Comprising both smaller-scale works as well as three sonatas, this generous collection shows the versatility and mastery of Paul Lewis in Schubert’s piano music. While the Impromptus D899 are among Schubert’s best-known instrumental works, Lewis allows us to hear them as if for the first time. Each is carefully shaped and interesting details are pointed out along the way, without ever losing sense of the melodic and dramatic arc of the whole. Full of references to Schubert’s song style, the late, lesser-known Klavierstücke D946 are ultimately valedictory in tone and Lewis gives them a marvelous rendition. Less easy for some to enjoy are the sonatas, with their emphasis on thematic development at the expense of structure. Lewis’s strong characterisation of successive ideas together with an uncanny sense of musical perspective allows him to guide the listener convincingly through Schubert’s musical arguments. In particular we can delight in the variety of moods Lewis creates in the scherzo of the D-Major Sonata D850 and the laconic humour he brings to its finale. By contrast, the opening of the G-Major Sonata D894 is invested with an admirable quiet devotion. The unfinished sonata Reliquie D840 seems a strange work on first acquaintance, but in…

Following his stellar live album of Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf tunes, French-born master accordionist Richard Galliano turns to his Italian roots in a tribute to Nino Rota, marking the great film composer’s centenary in 2011. Captivated by these sumptuous scores ever since he saw La Strada at his local cinema in Nice as a child, Galliano brings the timeless creations of Fellini and Francis Ford Coppola vividly to life in his own jazz-tinged arrangements for quintet.  With idiomatic playing from the band, especially Dave Douglas on trumpet, Rota’s melancholic themes lose none of their original romance and mystique, from The Godfather waltz (played on trombone, surprisingly, by Galliano) to the seductive opening of Amarcord. There are more upbeat and varied offerings: the soloist and his La Strada Quartet glide effortlessly from circus music to lounge, dirge to Latin dance – sometimes, dizzyingly, all in the one track – with a selection of themes and medleys cleverly interwoven to revisit motifs as a composer might do in a single film score.  Aside from the crisp ensemble work, Galliano’s instrument and its rich sound palette are most engaging when his stylish, virtuosic improvisations are allowed to soar (The Godfather love song…

The release of any new film score by John Williams is an event. Beginning with the grand Mahler-esque melodies of Indiana Jones and Superman, the American composer has created the most recognisable film music of all time. The Williams of Tintin, however, is less like Mahler and more like the dive bar on Tattoine from Star Wars – if it had been a French colony. The theme of Tintin the character is heavily swing-infused, with a walking double bass and a synthesised harpsichord (like something out of Mario Brothers) that may disappoint some listeners. The piano-driven Snowy’s theme is more fun, and sounds weirdly like one of Rachmaninov’s more chipper Paganini Variations.  There is a chromatic, circus-like quality to all the proceedings here, with a clarinet and accordion introducing bungling detectives Thomson and Thompson. A moment of grandeur is introduced by Renée Fleming (as Mme Castelfiore) singing Ah, jeux vivre, with the final high C autotuned up to an F (to the sound of breaking glass). Williams’s ensuing variations on the melody of the aria are a witty touch. The Adventures of Tintin is perhaps not a piece of the stature of, say, Saving Private Ryan – a soundtrack that…