This latest album of Philip Glass piano music is a desperately poor effort from a pianist who apparently thinks that pressing down notes in the right order constitutes an interpretation. Never mind the specifics of the cultural milieu that helped create this music. Don’t bother listening to other pianists – musicians who have worked with Glass or indeed the composer’s own recordings. People who know stuff? What have they got to say that might be remotely useful? As in her earlier album of music by the British composer Michael Nyman, Valentina Lisitsa has assembled a grab-bag of Glass film scores – from The Truman Show, The Hours, Mishima and The Olympian – and her strategy is to wrap these already candy-sweet scores inside a lasagne of tinsel. Which is not to say that she puts a technical finger wrong. Inner parts are balanced; harmonic ambiguities are allowed to speak. No, the problem lies in her decorative and ambient touch, which reduces the music to inert patterning. The brief spans of most of these picture-postcard vignettes means that your irritation is generally only momentary. But her hapless attempt to sustain the 30-minute generative structure of Glass’s 1968 How Now – one of his trail-blazing,…

On paper, this album by New York City-based chamber orchestra The Knights looks like a goer. Each piece – apart from Bach’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe, which is the genuine article – riffs off re-imagined ideas of the Concerto Grosso: a small body of soloists co-existing against the firepower of an orchestra. The Knights are musicians on a mission. Describing themselves as “an orchestral collective dedicated to transforming the concert experience”, the first thing to go is a conductor and I wonder if the pressure to count like crazy is why the Bach is taken at such a stampeding tempo? Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks fares better. But the group’s homogenised, pile-driver tone makes you wish for a hint of whimsy, vulnerability even. Steve Reich’s Duet for Two Violins and Strings transforms the concert experience into extreme tedium: this is one of Reich’s most casually note spun and generic scores, not helped by the glutinous recorded sound. A concerto for santur, violin and orchestra cobbled together by Colin Jacobsen (a santur being a Persian dulcimer) is episodic. The collectively composed …the ground beneath our feet, anchored around a ground bass borrowed from Baroque composer Tarquinio Merula is the final hurrah, but…

I can, it’s true, find a jazz analogy in most things, and this two-CD set of dance music from the 1630s proves to be no exception. Listening to William Lawes’ The Royal Consort, I’m reminded of why hipsters digging Miles Davis and John Coltrane too often find the early 1920s recordings of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong a problem. The sheer ancientism of the music apparently operates under completely different rules and feels so utterly alien to the modern world that its archaism flips over into something entirely new: an avant-garde relic that has to be grappled with. William Lawes inhabited a medieval London that was about to be irreplaceably altered by the Great Fire of 1666. He found gainful employment as a composer at the court of King Charles I and as Parliament flexed its republican instincts, he felt moved to add the prefix ‘Royal’ to his Consort pieces. The much good it did him though: Lawes was killed fighting for the Royalists during the Siege of Chester in 1645. As with all genuinely great dance music – from Rameau right up to Cage – Lawes’ pieces are as much about the idea of movement as they are specific invitations…

Angela Hewitt, as they used to say in old-school classical CD reviews, is currently at the peak of her pianistic powers, and having just released a well-upholstered and characteristically thoughtful recording of Bach’s The Art of Fugue now turns her attention to Franz Liszt – his sempiternal B Minor Sonata placed alongside the earlier Dante Sonata and Petrarca Sonnets. B Minor was a significant key for both Bach and Liszt, and Liszt’s mass of sound integrates fugal grandeur within a narrative framework that delights in extreme shifts of mood; harmonic non sequiturs and melodic flashbacks are glued together by rhythmic markers in the sand. With fingers expertly primed to unpick the inner workings of Liszt’s fugal writing, Hewitt is also on top of the overall trajectory of Liszt’s large-scale dramatics. Never ostentatious or showy, her mission, apparently, is to show that the B Minor Sonata adds up to more than a sequence of grandstanding set pieces. Hewitt fesses up in her booklet notes that when, in her teens, she first encountered the Sonata she came away thinking “what an awful piece,” but she enters its world with the zeal of a reformed smoker. Could some of the descending passagework near…

A few years ago, I interviewed the London-based Elias Quartet about plans to tour and record Beethoven’s complete string quartets. A few days later the publication that commissioned the interview folded and, as I write, our conversation remains untranscribed: lost words of wisdom. But one section, where we cracked into the true nature of spontaneity in music as familiar as Beethoven’s, rewound through my mind as I listened to these deftly articulate and noticeably personal performances of Op. 18 No 4, Op. 74 The Harp and Op. 130, complete with Grosse Fuge finale – all recorded live at the Wigmore Hall in 2014. The first thing you notice is the sound. Do I hear residual traces of the old-school charm of, say, the Busch or Borodin Quartets? Quite possibly, but then again this playing is perpetually and effortlessly contemporary. Unlike Riccardo Chailly’s extreme-sports take on the symphonies, the quartet’s tempi stick within a narrow bandwidth. But their performance of Op. 130 aspires to something quasi orchestral, their muscular, pile-driver tone motoring the Grosse Fuge forwards in time, the crystal-cut clarity of line against line never negating their meticulous plotting of the music’s kaleidoscope of inner harmonic tensions. You are reminded……

Australian World Orchestra's Guest Conductor helps shed light on the Eighth Symphony of the Austrian behemoth.

Fresh recordings of Olivier Messiaen’s Des Canyons aux Étoiles… come along only rarely. Scored for four soloists – piano, French horn, glockenspiel and xylorimba – really every player in Messiaen’s orchestra needs to be a virtuosic soloist too. He gently warns anyone fancying their chances that his woodwind writing is exceptionally tough, while few composers throw out as many hardcore challenges to orchestral percussionists as Messiaen. But given that Des Canyons aux Étoiles… (From the canyons to the stars…) is a philosophical and spiritual portrait in sound of the Bryce Canyon in Utah, with its shape-shifting rock structures and vistas of sheer science-fiction awe, it would have been odd had Messiaen not attempted to accentuate the primacy of sound over music by recalibrating the expected relationships between harmony, melody and rhythm. Because Messiaen’s hills are not so much alive with the sound of music – these canyons are brought alive with the sound of sound, this extraordinary score inviting your ears to footslog through a living, breathing, evolving aural environment. The first sound you hear is a faraway French horn call, here the excellent John Ryan, which opens the aperture like a wide-angled lens. Then Messiaen zooms in close: woodwind……

★★★★★ When I hear Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam play Beethoven on period fortepianos I think that, quite honestly, performing the great man’s music on a modern grand piano is an aesthetic crime of some magnitude – right up there with colourised Laurel & Hardy films and microwaving chicken.  Elsewhere in this issue, it’s true, I lavish praise on the fourth instalment of Jonathan Biss’s ongoing cycle of Beethoven Piano Sonatas, praise that is sincere and unquestionably deserved. But Brautigam’s attention to historical form is such that three separate fortepianos have been recalled from the subs’ benches in order to trace the evolution of the instrumental hardware with which Beethoven himself necessarily wrestled. Paul McNulty’s copy of an 1802 fortepiano serves Sonatas 1 through 18, its timbral delicacies and coarse-grained tuning temperament representing a complete game changer. Take, for example, the Moonlight, Beethoven’s most used and abused sonata, lacquered often with cod-Romantic rubato. In Brautigam’s hands we’re reconnected with its eerie oddities – when rhythmic values aren’t pulled around too much, the compulsive harmonic circling of the opening feels as suffocating and disorientating as a Hitchcock stairwell. And anyone worried that the ferocious Finale might not speak on a fortepiano can…

★★★★★ The first three volumes of his Beethoven cycle was released by Onyx, and now Jonathan Biss issues Volume Four via his own label. Beethoven would surely have approved of artists taking control of their destiny. Biss has organised his cycle by type and historical ties so Volume Four spools back to the beginning – to the Piano Sonata No 1 in F Minor – before advancing towards the great Appassionata in the same key, via Sonatas 6 and 19. Biss writes in his booklet notes about the unassuming nature of Sonata No 1 – “can this really be how it all begins,” he asks, ‘it’ being the journey that ultimately led to the late sonatas. In these hands, though, Beethoven’s debut sounds far from ordinary. The fervour and intensity of Biss’s hot-fingered touch is something else. Beethoven’s models were Mozart and Haydn – but Biss persuades us of the unheralded harmonic lawlessness that lay just below the surface. Contemporary with the Eroica, the Appassionata Sonata is full-throttle punk Beethoven, volatile and combustible, like anything from later in the great man’s career. I note, and dig, how Biss leapfrogs into that Alice-like descent towards the bowels of the instrument, smothering…

Editor’s Choice, Orchestral  – June 2015 And the question remains – why aren’t Johannes Brahms’ Serenades staples of the concert repertoire? Would conductors rather cut to the chase and perform his four symphonies? Or is the truth more that, conceived when Brahms was grappling with the structural minefield of his First Symphony, those two works remain peculiarly difficult to classify? Ought conductors plot a quasi-symphonic pathway through their structures? Or in reality is each movement a self-contained character piece that would likely buckle under the pressure of a consciously symphonic treatment? As Riccardo Chailly points out, Serenade No 1 clocks in at 40 minutes, longer than the symphonies, and no one should be lulled into any sense of false security. The Serenades might exhibit a lightness of surface, but underneath that whimsical charm Brahms’ orchestration, his rhythmic litheness and complex web of internal tempo relationships are difficult to achieve – darn difficult in fact. Chailly’s mettle as a Brahms interpreter crystallised around his 2013 cycle of the symphonies: tempos rethought, textures thinned, traces of Germanic stodge erased. An approach that sets him up well for the Serenades; expect an artful fusion of dramatic contrast operating hand-in-hand with a certainty that…

Onyx’s first installment from Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires shows how foolish Deutsche Grammophon were to let her go. Pires is unafraid to take risks. Her view of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto not only enters into a pianist-composer dialogue, but also probes our relationship as consumers of this (too) regularly recorded masterwork. With Daniel Harding and the SRSO resonating in empathy, Pires stretches the opening movement to just short of 20 minutes which, although not unprecedented, blows air through the structure, allowing us time to look around, to reacquaint ourselves with what we know from a slightly oblique angle. Some of my reviewer colleagues have suggested that at this tempo Pires and Harding let the momentum droop, but personally I hear liberation within their deliberation. Pires’ analytically detailed playing tunnels deep inside the poetic soul of Beethoven’s score; no glossing over his abrupt changes of mood, the confrontation between soloist and orchestra in the slow movement given Stravinskian objectivity – although you do wish the Finale could have been a little more peppery and genuinely vivace. The Third Concerto is as bold as brass too, the first movement peaking as Pires rips through the cadenza before tip-toeing around the graceful…

By refusing to ally himself to the received wisdom that Bach always sounds best on an ocean-going modern grand piano, John Butt gives us a Well-Tempered Clavier performed on harpsichord and instantly we’re teleported back to an ancient, shady world of tuning that feels as alien to our modern experience as water divining, those harmonic ripples causing the basics of familiar musical gesture to flow in ways which are utterly unexpected, but that also feel instinctively right as Bach swims in appropriate waters again. When performed on the sort of grand piano that does Brahms or Rachmaninov favours, the Well-Tempered Clavier becomes frozen in time, like an adjunct to Classicism or Romanticism, more a hook for our convenience as it turns out because that is the historical prism through which we’re most comfortable hearing anything vaguely ‘Classical’. Bach, though, had precisely nothing to do with that Classical milieu, and Butt, playing on a facsimile of a harpsichord built during the first decade of the 1700s, plugs us back into the archaic world into which this music was actually born. Which is a bracingly radical, forward-thinking stance for a Bach interpreter to take. Even something as glaringly familiar as the Prelude…