It’s fitting that this exciting new release from classical guitarist Karin Schaupp and the Flinders Quartet should end with Australian composer Phillip Houghton’s In Amber. As Houghton writes in his booklet note, “I drew parallels between a fossil ‘frozen/suspended’ in amberstone and the sound frozen/suspended inside the stringed instruments waiting to be brought to life.” One can just as easily talk about music being frozen/suspended inside a score, waiting to be brought to life, as well as living, breathing performances being frozen/suspended inside a shiny CD. Moreover, Houghton’s In Amber – its first movement filled with characterful miniature dances; its second with drones and melodies like “perfumes in a jungle” and its third with a compelling motoric intensity – summarises the whole program’s moods and ideas, bound by the sounds of plucked and bowed strings. Take Máximo Diego Pujol’s Tangata de Agosto (“August Tangata” – the latter word a conflation of “tango” and “sonata”), which recalls Piazzolla in its earthy sophistication; or Boccherini’s Guitar Quintet No 4 Fandango, which fills the Viennese salon with the raucous sounds of guitar and castanets; or the anonymous arrangement of Haydn’s String Quartet No 8 in E for lute (in this case, guitar), violin, viola and cello, which…

What is the opera singer Nathalie Stutzmann doing on the cover of her new album with a baton in her hand? She may be a Prima Donna, but she’s certainly wearing the pants for this recording, in which she sings with and conducts her own period ensemble, Orfeo 55, even wielding a tambourine on the final track. The French contralto is undoubtedly a musicians’ singer, and her insights into this repertoire, as a frequent star of Naïve’s Vivaldi opera edition, are invaluable. Prima Donna emphatically reclaims these arias from the castrati, acknowledging Vivaldi’s own preference for the warmth of the female contralto voice. He would have loved Stutzmann’s – smooth and velvety across all registers and precise in coloratura despite a rich vibrato. Her focus, however, seems to be sculpting a fine melodic line rather than building the kind of dramatic intensity needed in Juditha’s Agitata infido flatu. She is at her most persuasive, then, luxuriating in the slower tempi of Cor mio che prigion sei and Transit aetas. But some high-energy moments impress: lively recitative in Gemo in un punto e fremo, a peppy L’innocenza sfortunata (this version is the most fun I’ve heard on disc) and Con la face…

Luka Sulic and Stjepan Hauser are two Croatian lads who have gone global after posting their two-cello version of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal on YouTube. They also happen, both, to have improbably chiselled jaws and cool hair. Now signed to Sony, they have released a debut album of covers, including Sting’s Fragile, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Coldplay’s Viva la Vida. Both are classically trained virtuosos of their instrument, who put plenty of verve into these rather neat arrangements. If you like your pop music played by hunky Croatian cellists, this is as good as it gets.

What happens when three very different contemporary composers set the same texts from two of the Catholic Church’s most controversial saints? A striking musical chiaroscuro born in part out of the agony and the ecstasy of profound spiritual experience.  Following on from their disc Padre Pio: Prayer, which contains works by James MacMillan, Roxanna Panufnik and Will Todd (commissioned by The Genesis Foundation), The Sixteen perform settings of texts by St Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) and St John of the Cross (1542-1591) by contemporary British composers Tarik O’Regan, Roderick Williams and Ruth Byrchmore.  Each composer has set the same two texts: St Teresa’s prayer Nada te turbe (“Let Nothing Trouble You”) and St John’s poem En una noche oscura (“In a Dark Night”). All six works were again commissioned by The Genesis Foundation, a UK-based charity dedicated to helping emerging artists. The other works on the disc were the result of commissions from other organisations.  It’s no surprise that St John’s more sensual poem should elicit more passionate, if not fraught, responses from O’Regan, Byrchmore and Williams – a gifted baritone, who has recorded extensively for Naxos. But St Teresa was and is (in) famous for having experienced episodes of religious ecstasy…

Schubert’s final collection of songs, compiled posthumously under the title Schwanengesang, may not trace a narrative journey as unified as those mapped out in Winterreise or Die schöne Müllerin, but the most perceptive interpreters create a dramatic arc all of their own. The final disc in Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis’s triptych of the great Schubert song cycles finds them as emotionally attuned to the music and to one another as in previous volumes. Few tenors can give such potent voice to the bitterness Schubert poured into the lieder of his final year, but Padmore’s engagement with the text (well-rounded diction with plenty of “ch” in the “ach”!) and variety of tone place him among the best. His is a light instrument, but never lightweight – just listen to him bemoan carrying a world of sorrow on his shoulders in Atlas. Although he has developed a wide, almost braying vibrato in recent years, this actually works in his favour here, adding searing stabs of melodic intensity. And he can still rein it in for a warm, pure line, as he does when gently enfolding us in the Serenade.  He could not have asked for a more steadfast, sensitive companion than…

If this release was intended as a snapshot or showcase for the current state of the Sydney Symphony, it would zoom into the five-star category. The playing is some of the best I’ve ever heard from them. The felicities are too numerous to mention here, but I’ll cite the quadruple flute passage in the first movement development; the horns cover themselves with glory in the slow movement and Emma Matthews is fine in the finale, sounding innocent and then appropriately dreamy. Alas, a clear recommendation is not that simple – the playing and engineering are outstanding, but I’m still not convinced that Ashkenazy has anything especially interesting to say about Mahler. The first movement hums along well enough but lacks any lyrical intensity. I’m not suggesting Mengelbergian rubato pulling the music out of shape, but a slightly more varied pulse and more inflection would be welcome. The second movement effectively blends rustic awkwardness with a dark undercurrent (as with the equivalent movement in the Sixth Symphony, where it’s hard to tell whether the music depicts children at play or a sinister troupe of marionettes). The “Heaven’s Gate” climax in the adagio (relatively swift, like Klemperer’s) is well handled and not over-wrought….

Angela Gheorghiu pays tribute to Maria Callas in this collection of verismo arias closely associated with La Divina. Gheorghiu is no more the “Next Callas” than any other soprano, but in terms of repertoire and prima donna glamour, she’s arguably the best qualified for a venture such as this. Gheorghiu is in strong form, if not quite as versatile as her illustrious predecessor. She’s a resplendently flighty Nedda, revels in the lachrymose possibilities of Le Cid and Medea, and is of course marvellous as Violetta, a role which is as much hers as Callas’s these days. The breathy girlishness of Marguerite’s Jewel Song and Mimì’s Donde lieta is less appealing, however, while Delilah needs a smokier, more seductive timbre than she can muster. Comparisons aside, though, this stands alone as a solid representation of Gheorghiu’s artistry – sometimes mannered, sometimes compelling and very pretty – with Armiliato mostly following her lead. There’s just one oddity on this album: a digitally manipulated “duet” between Gheorghiu and, yes, Callas, singing Carmen’s Habanera. It’s a strange idea and frankly unnecessary, but it’s not quite as kitschy as it could have been, and shouldn’t deter those keen to hear Gheorghiu in the rest of the…

The Four Last Songs are by far his most famous, but before those late masterpieces, Richard Strauss wrote dozens of other orchestral songs – some conceived as such, others orchestrations of his songs for piano and voice.  Strauss’s lifelong love affair with the female voice is as apparent here as in his operas, and in this new collection Diana Damrau repays his affection in full with a ravishing set of performances. The silvery tone and effervescent charisma which have brought Damrau such acclaim as Strauss’s Sophie and Zerbinetta carry well into his songs, and her natural exuberance – so well suited to comic heroines – is tempered with sincere expression. The coloratura-filled Brentano-Lieder are a natural choice, of course, and Damrau doesn’t disappoint (her Säusle, liebe Myrte is especially enchanting) but she’s equally impressive in darker, less showy songs, including a moving account of the stormy, seven-minute-long Lied der Frauen.  Perhaps loveliest of all are Damrau’s accounts of songs from mother to child: Wiegenlied, Meinem Kinde and the irresistible Muttertändelei are delivered with touching warmth and tenderness. The oft-recorded favourites are here too, and while Morgen! and Allerseelen might demand a maturer sound, Damrau’s delivery lends a note of youthful…

With highly regarded complete editions of Schubert’s and Schumann’s songs to their name, Hyperion has embarked on another such venture, this time recording all the lieder of Brahms. Angelika Kirchschlager and Graham Johnson inaugurated the series last year, and now soprano Christine Schäfer, also accompanied by Johnson, has made her contribution. More appealing, if hardly less cheerful, than its miserable cover photo, this recital shows Schäfer on top form, combining artistry with a crystal-clear voice. Her rather delicate soprano is at its loveliest in the ethereal Ophelia-Lieder and in the six folksongs which end the recital, but when expansiveness is required – as in the Mädchenfluch – she’s quite compelling. Schäfer’s bright, compact soprano is not one in which to luxuriate: her word painting is excellent, but her palette is inherently limited, and there’s a certain whiteness to the voice which occasionally grows wearying, particularly in such a stylistically similar program. But her sweetness of timbre and her textual acuity usually win out in the end, and she has a gift for capturing the emotional vicissitudes of this often turbulent poetry – the intense, sometimes erotic Mädchenlieder (not written as a cycle, but evidently envisaged by the composer as a group)…

No one can yearn like a Russian. Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony has yearning aplenty. Beneath the suave, almost louche, art deco glamour – clearly influenced by his years in the United States – there lies an undercurrent of nostalgia for Mother Russia. I believe it was Jascha Heifetz who once described Rachmaninov’s Piano Trio as “silk underwear music”. It was probably one of those you-had-to-be-there moments but in listening to this gorgeous score, I think I know what he meant.  My favourite moment is the first movement’s second subject, which sidles in with cellos wafting above woodwind melismas. Gianandrea Noseda’s finesse in letting the music unfold naturally and seductively enhances its beauty. It’s hard not to fall back on that overworked adjective “elusive” to describe the kaleidoscopic, mercurial moods of this symphony. The central movement, with its plangent horn calls and swooning harp and then its strange sudden lurch into a scherzo is just as haunting. The finale is a 20th-century take on a Russian dance. The BBC Philharmonic is in top form in all departments and Noseda allows every strand of melody to shine through in what can only be described as a luminous recording.  The two other works are the early…

Palestrina’s name was synonymous with musical perfection even before his death in 1594, and his reputation as one of the great masters of late-Renaissance, post-Tridentine church polyphony is still as great as it ever was. The Sixteen’s name could equally be said to be synonymous with musical perfection, and the UK choir’s recordings of English, Spanish and Italian Renaissance masterpieces are prized for their combination of passion and precision. This first volume in a projected series dedicated to a selection of Palestrina’s 104 masses and great motet cycle of the biblical Song of Songs takes as its theme the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven. The centrepiece is the Missa Assumpta Est Maria; also included are a selection of shorter works such as the motet on which the mass is based and three of the Song of Songs most closely associated with Marian devotion. The performances are, as one would expect, first-rate, and an antidote to the sometimes bloodless approach to this music by The Tallis Scholars. Palestrina’s music moves swiftly and seamlessly between densely woven yet sharply delineated polyphony and rich homophony; furthermore, each part hovers or trembles, drops in or out, plunges or soars according to the…

An outstanding debut for spirited young guitarist, Zane Banks.