This is some of the most wonderful piano playing I’ve ever heard. Hamelin’s dazzling bravura and technical mastery can almost be taken for granted, but not the discreet nonchalance with which he dispatches even the most challenging passages. The Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude from the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses is spellbindingly beautiful. Hamelin makes this extended piece sound arrestingly modern and radiantly dramatises the bewildering duality of Liszt’s life between the spiritual and the sensual, providing a serene resolution. Or does he? In Venezia e Napoli, the contrast in the two gondoliers’ songs could not be greater. In the first, Hamelin produces exquisitely pellucid effects and in the second, based on a theme from Rossini’s Otello, a much darker sonority. The B-minor Sonata is magnificent, from the first menacing gesture to the pauses (or foreboding silences) in the descending scale, which seem like question marks. In terms of mood, Hamelin never puts a foot wrong. If ever there were a musical autobiography made in sound, this is it. In intellectual, emotional and technical terms, this is a CD to cherish.

Pietari Inkinen maintains the high standards he has achieved with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and their distinguished Sibelius cycle. However, the competition is much stronger here (Karajan, Järvi, etc) and I don’t think I’m able to give quite as unqualified an endorsement to the performance as the previous release (Symphonies 4 and 5). Nonetheless, the results are impressive. At just over 44 minutes, tempi are splendidly central (it’s hard to believe the great Sibelius conductor Kajanus got through it in 39’!) but what impresses me most about the reading is the articulation of the strings and both the alert playing of the woodwinds and the way the engineers have captured it. The work was said to have been partly inspired while Sibelius was visiting Italy and there’s certainly plenty of Mediterranean warmth once the first movement gets going, and in the trio of the quicksilver scherzo. Perhaps it helps to be Finnish but Inkinen seems to judge this music unerringly and maintains the odd arctic chill amid the pastoral charm. He doesn’t over-egg the pudding either in the final brass peroration, which can sound laboured if too drawn out, but maintains a convincing intensity. The Karelia suite was one…

I must confess at the outset that Belshazzar’s Feast had never taken my fancy but if ever a performance were to tip the scales, it would be this one. Sir Colin and his LSO forces are in sizzling form in this truly revolutionary take on the often turgid oratorio form. They capture perfectly the coiled spring tension and the jagged, snarling, jazz-inflected rhythms and whisk us through one scene after another. Walton’s orchestration is stunning: to cite just two of many moments, the way the sounds imitate the description of Babylon’s obscene riches and the creepy instrumental accompaniment to the singer’s (Peter Coleman-Wright in fine form) description of the “writing on the wall”. In what may perhaps be an unlikely coupling, Walton’s First Symphony finds the same forces less impressive. The first movement contains some of the most explosive, searing music ever composed. You can almost smell rubber on tarmac. Walton went from the languid, effete, bright young thing of Façade to an angry young man. The benchmark will always be André Previn’s 1966 RCA recording with the same orchestra. Davis and his LSO just don’t cut it, along with everyone else. There’s nothing specifically wrong with it, it’s that…

Tiberghien and Ibragimova maintain the wonderful synergy of their two previous albums in the final instalment of this riveting series. As with the others, it’s a challenge as to which of the countless felicities to mention first. The fluctuating dynamics are as good a point as any: Beethoven dubbed these works, in effect, piano sonatas with violin accompaniment (like Mozart’s) and the pair acknowledge this throughout, with long passages where the piano is rightly dominant. The three sonatas are well contrasted: the playful and witty Op 12 in E flat with its variable pulse in the first movement is perfectly captured by the pair, the rather banal theme (described as “dim-witted” in the liner notes) of the final movement completely transformed by the magic of their partnership. The Op 30 A-major Sonata is deliciously suave and Tiberghien is dominant in the slow movement, with Ibragimova reticent and the pianist dispatching the demanding variations of the last movement with panache. The series ends, appropriately, with the mighty Kreutzer sonata, perhaps the only work in this genre with the sense of drama and power we take for granted in Beethoven’s music. Here, Ibragimova is amazing: she may look gamine but her tone…

Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs are traditionally regarded as the last gasp of Romantic music, despite being written decades after its “official” demise. I prefer to bestow that mantle on Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, albeit only the so-called “torso” of the first movement and the tiny intermezzo-like purgatorio are completely orchestrated by him. Recent years have seen a plethora of different versions but Mark Wigglesworth cleaves to the original performing edition by Deryck Cooke. The performance is a superb achievement – sonically, interpretively and in execution. The opening Adagio sets forth like a stately galleon sailing into dark waters which seem to lap at the boundary of where the Ninth Symphony stopped. The dissonant shards are well handled and intensify the anguish. Both the second and fourth movements are scherzi and both exude Mahlerian ambiguity: febrile Viennese gaiety and even exaltation, undermined by nervous fluctuating metrical changes, with nostalgic violas in the second, alternating with a dance of death, again, similar to the Rondo burleske in the Ninth. The pivot is the purgatorio movement, barely five minutes long, which starts innocently but soon becomes insidious. My only criticism relates to the start of the final Adagio, where the score calls for…

This release becomes a magnificent final testament to one of the greatest interpreters of Czech music. Asrael, named for the angel of death (for both Jews and Muslims) was the product of Josef Suk’s grief after losing his father-in-law Dvorák and his young wife in rapid succession. What fascinates me more than anything about this genuinely neglected masterpiece – a genre which in the age of Naxos is becoming rarer – is the dignity of Suk’s suffering: he rarely descends to the Manfred-like lugubriousness of Tchaikovsky or the self-dramatisation of Mahler. Only at the end of the first movement with screaming strings and manic drums does his suffering become uncontrollable, a moment perfectly calibrated by Mackerras and the Czech Philharmonic, who play like real angels throughout.   From the opening bars, Mackerras captures the elegiac atmosphere with the soulful cor anglais over pizzicato strings. In the second movement Andante, these forces distill the exquisite numbness of grief. However, what makes this work so marvelous is the Scherzo, described by one critic as exuding the nocturnal creepiness of Mahler’s Seventh (exactly!), and bringing a real element of orchestral virtuosity to this miraculous music.  The fourth movement is, again, dreamlike and almost Debussyesque, which makes the violent…

Is this another example of repertoire creep? Recently I reviewed (favorably) a Bruckner symphony played by a chamber orchestra. Now Brahms’s Violin Concerto turns up. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra is the ideal partner here, as Isabelle Faust’s reading eschews the sprawling grandeur of some interpretations but it’s in no sense Brahms-Lite. Poetry and introspection abound in Faust’s playing, while her vibrato is restrained and her phrasing warm. At 37 minutes, it’s on the swift end of the tempo spectrum but is never remotely perfunctory or generalised. One interesting aspect is her use of Busoni’s 1913 cadenza with timpani accompaniment (inspired by its similar use in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto?) Brahms had a soft spot for Busoni, once declaring he would mentor the younger composer in the same way Schumann did Brahms. The Second Sextet, almost equally significant to the concerto, makes me marvel at how Brahms, even at a relatively young age, could suffuse his music with an autumnal melancholy and sense of yearning, seldom more than here in a work allegedly written “on the rebound”. Yet there remains an exquisite ambiguity of veiled emotions here. The performance of the Sextet begins with what seems like an extended trill on the…

This performance of Tchaikovsky’s music to Shakespeare’s The Tempest may well inspire the listener to exclaim “O brave new world that hath such people in it”, but I doubt whether the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture would provoke a similar reaction in this surprisingly staid excursion by firebrand conductor Gustavo Dudamel. To take one example, the canonic exchanges between the lower woodwinds and the strings in the first fight sequence lack the needed tension. The Tempest fares better. The exquisite evocation of the magic island and surrounding ocean is simply ravishing and well captured by Dudamel and co. Likewise the love music, initially “tender and restrained” (to quote the sleeve notes), gradually becomes almost incandescent – and certainly more dramatic than the equivalent scene in the play. Here the French horn sounds a little tentative but strings and woodwinds are alert and Dudamel certainly knows how to milk the climaxes.  Unfortunately,… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

It’s heartening to see major labels still signing largely unknown talent. In a well-planned and intelligent program to showcase his eclectic virtuosity, Chen raises the curtain with Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata, music which supposedly came to the composer in a dream in which it was played by the devil. The work begins with sweet simplicity and becomes more fearsomely difficult as it progresses. By the end, Chen’s virtuosity is like shards of light refracted through a brilliant prism. The first major work is the famous chaconne from JS Bach’s D minor Partita. For all its structural formality, this sublime movement harbours as wide an array of emotions as any Romantic violin piece, ranging from joy to solemnity and grief. Chen maintains the shape in one great arc but also remembers that a chaconne is still a dance, even in Bach’s hands. The other masterpiece is the César Franck sonata, perhaps the greatest Romantic violin sonata of all, composed by the 64-year-old Franck, an eminent organist who, it’s thought, would have been unable to play the violin. Here, Chen’s youthful ardour is to the fore. I’ve always found this work, especially the first movement, a wonderful amalgam of poetry and drama,…

Sibelius’s Fourth is, for me, the most enigmatic symphony ever written. Both the second movement scherzo and finale trail off elliptically. Inkinen and his New Zealanders capture the intense bleakness of the first movement (described by one commentator as “groping in utter darkness in order to avoid the abyss, aided only by the occasional shaft of weak sunlight”). In the slow movement, the temperature drops to absolute zero – the subatomic particles simply stop vibrating – and here, these forces are up with the best. In the finale, perhaps the strangest movement of all, Inkinen cleaves to the glockenspiel (instead of chimes), whose silvery sonority is, on the face of it, the most incongruous instrument Sibelius could have chosen: it can sometimes remind you of The Nutcracker, or even worse, Der Rosenkavalier. Not here, thank heavens! I’m not quite as taken with the Fifth, although it has many fine features. Inkinen handles the gear change between the two halves of the first movement convincingly, but I think he baulks slightly at the great climaxes. In the coda at the end of the first movement, the brass doesn’t ring with quite the stentorian force that it does in Berlin (Karajan) or Philadelphia (Ormandy)….

Just as I’d begun to wonder if Ashkenazy has anything interesting to say about Mahler, this perfomance completely restored my confidence. It’s long been almost a truism to opine that no one will ever dislodge the Klemperer/Ludwig/Wunderlich recording, but this one yields to no one in its beauty and honesty. Both soloists are excellent. Stuart Skelton negotiates the orchestral tuttis of the first song (The Drinking Song of the Earth’s Sorrow) like a true heldentenor, seething with bitterness and contempt while never being swamped by the huge climaxes nor resorting to bluster or rant. In the second song, The Lonely One in Autumn, Lilli Paasikivi is perfect, conveying the sense of unhappy solitude while the orchestral accompaniment conveys a real autumnal chill. In Of Beauty her articulation and breath control during the manic so-called ‘horseback’ interlude are miraculous. In the wrong hands this passage can resemble Ethel Merman belting out Everything’s Coming up Roses, as one critic wittily observed. In Der Abschied, her repetitions of the word ewig “forever” make her voice sound like an extension of the orchestra. The legendary producer Walter Legge, who supervised some of the Klemperer recording of this work, once said that in creating great recordings one…

Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili has joined the ranks of Znaider, Ehnes, Hahn, Benedetti et al with this magnificent rendition of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto – now virtually a calling card for every violin wizard. While any of David Oistrakh’s various versions of this work remain sans pareil (at least in interpretative terms) she’s still up against formidable competition. The kaleidoscopic combination of moods – ranging from the dark solemnity and emotional bleakness of the introduction to the exquisitely haunted lyricism of the passacaglia movement, to the manic, sardonic scherzo and final burlesque – clearly hold no terrors for her and her tempi, seemingly slower than usual, enhance the reading. Throughout, her playing radiates profound emotion. This is musicianship of a very high order. The other music on the CD is Giya Kancheli’s V and V for violin and taped voice with string orchestra, Shostakovich’s Lyrical Waltz from The Seven Dolls Suite arranged by her father, Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel (“Mirror in the Mirror”) and Rachmaninov’s Vocalise, all played with equally ravishing beauty (the pianist in the Pärt and Rachmaninov is Hélène Grimaud, no less). Alas, the liner notes don’t contain a word about the Pärt or Kancheli works, neither of which is exactly a well-ploughed furrow. The…