A trio of Bach family Magnificats sound marvellously magnificent.

A recital of Bach favourites and a Vivaldian surprise.

Cello works from the south turn out to be Neapolitan baroque treat.

Solemn Estonian cello works finessed on a wing and a prayer.

A roaming cellist’s debut heads off down a well-bowed path.

No Corelli, but plenty of violins in some rare Italian concerti.

This ensemble Schütz and scores with music of the next generation.

Domenico Scarlatti’s collection of 555 sonatas for the harpsichord represents a unique output. Far more showy than most of his Baroque brethren, the sonatas are a kaleidoscope of swirling melodic lines and rapid runs. There are even a few that take their influence from the music that he must have heard at the courts of Spain – strummed guitars are never far away. Canadian pianist Luke Welch presents an all-Scarlatti recital comprising favourites like the Sonata in E Major, L23/K380. One of the oddest things about the harpsichord is that it can’t change volume, though composers got around this problem in some ingenious ways. So, when a performer plays Scarlatti’s music on the modern piano, they must also choose whether to take advantage of the piano’s full range of dynamics or to imitate the harpsichord. Welch sensibly doesn’t thunder away, but instead keeps to a more restricted dynamic range that evokes the older instrument in mood if not in timbre. This is an assured performance, though awfully short, with the eight tracks on the disc coming in at a smidgen over 35 minutes. I’d have definitely liked a few more to build the recording to a more… Continue reading Get…

From Falla to Michael Jackson, the cello and guitar duo talk about their tour plans and the pleasures of Australian coffee.

This is the third volume of Mozart works that Alina Ibragimova and Cédric Tiberghien have recorded, and they’ve stuck to a rather neat little formula for each CD by juxtaposing Mozart’s later compositions for violin and piano with those of his younger self. In this case, the early works (K27 and K31) are those of a ten-year old Mozart, who was touring the courts of Europe. The tour was designed by Leopold Mozart to highlight his son’s extraordinary skills, so the flashy keyboard part takes the lion’s share of the musical material, leaving the violin with the accompaniment. Ibragimova and Tiberghien wisely give these pieces an unaffected performance. The star of the show on this disc is the Sonata in B Flat Major, K454, which Mozart famously composed so rapidly that he didn’t have time to write the piano part out for performance, playing from memory instead. This is sublime music-making, and particular note must be made of the duo’s beautiful playing in the slow movement. The Sonata in F Major, K547 was designed for beginners to play as a money-making exercise, something like a chamber music companion piece to the well-known Sonata in C Major that most piano students…

The Grigoryan Brothers have impressed in recent years with their ability to genre-hop without ever seeming out of place; their collaboration with the Tawadros brothers a few years ago was excellent. The repertoire here is primarily performances of vocal favourites by Dvorˇák, Fauré, Elgar, and Tchaikovsky, among others, re-worked for guitar duo. There are a few issues with the repertoire selection in that some pieces are rather more effective than others. For example, Rachmaninov’s famous Vocalise comes off a distinct second-best for a simple reason – the guitar’s lack of sustain means that the notes disappear long before they should. In some of the pieces, the duo seems to have realised this dilemma. Tchaikovsky’s None but the Lonely Heart is taken at such a rapid clip that it’s done and dusted in about two minutes, whereas most recordings usually take at least a minute more. Since this is simply the nature of the instrument, pieces that don’t rely quite so much on a single sustained note work considerably better. Manuel de Falla’s set of Seven Spanish Folk Songs are played very effectively, though I wish there was more rhythmic bite in some of them – Jacqueline du Pré… Continue reading Get…

If you’ve seen any Australian period-instrument orchestras you’ve probably seen Tommie Andersson playing the theorbo as part of the continuo. He’s quite an institution by now, having co-founded the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra as well as co-directing Ludovico’s Band. This CD, however, is a recording from the mid-1980s of Andersson performing as part of a guitar/lute duo with Hållbus Totte. What’s particularly unusual, however, is that the disc is of traditional Swedish folk fiddle music. It was planned to come out on a specialist folk-music label, but for one reason or another was never released. Now, more than 30 years later, the album is finally available. Apparently Swedish folk music doesn’t usually use much in the way of plucked instruments, so the duo were something of a rarity when they first arrived on the scene. If that’s the case, you’d never know it. Switching freely between classical guitars and lutes, the polskas here sound completely natural in their new duo format. On several tracks the duo is joined by fiddlers – and the owners of the record label the album was intended to be released on – Magnus Bäckström and Per Gudmundson, a quartet collectively known as the Nordic Strings. These…