Haydn entered the lucrative market for British national song arrangements during his last years in London, churning out 400 or so to satisfy the craze of the day, but as a man of integrity he refused to skimp on craftsmanship and care – these are natural beauties and though dressed for an outing in society they do give an inkling of their humble origins.  The modest selection offered here is culled from his more elaborate piano trio arrangements. The program is arranged as if for a domestic evening’s entertainment with the movements of Haydn’s Piano Trio No 43 interspersed to show off the talents of the fine instrumentalists; the artistry here is no doubt way beyond the capabilities of the intended performers of the day.  The German tenor Werner Güra is one the finest lieder singers of our time (his Die Schöne Mullerin is an overlooked gem, and a bargain) and brings his elegant musicianship and customary diction and care for word painting to bear (however the dialect requires one to keep the texts handy for reference). His period accompanists are first class with lovely sounding instruments including a superbly restored Collard & Collard fortepiano. A scholarly essay graces an…

This fascinating program replicates the second half of a charity concert given by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in Hamburg on Palm Sunday 1786 (the first half comprised the Sanctus from his father’s B Minor Mass and excerpts from Handel’s Messiah) and this recording was made to celebrated the 300th anniversary of the composer’s birth and serve as a sampler of the various styles of “the New Bach”.  His Magnificat from 1749 typifies his Janus-like profile in 18th-century music looking back to the High Baroque style and closely following the formal plan of his father’s 1723 example with a similar sequence of choruses, solo arias and duets, yet throwing open the shutters of dusty old tradition and letting the musical light of ‘Reason’ flood in.  The bustling Italianate style is overlaid with a cleaner vocal line that looks ahead to the later Classical manner yet still incorporates those exuberant curlicues of ornament that were once condemned by some as mere Rococo fluff.  One catches the occasional glimpse of the Empfindsamkeit sensibility for which he is famed in the Magnificat, but those sudden flickers of changing mood are at their most distilled strength in the D Major Symphony with its quirky harmonic…

I first encountered Matthias Goerne’s artistry 17 years ago with his first contribution to Hyperion’s landmark Schubert Edition; he opened with Lob der Tränen and one was bowled over by the sheer beauty of the voice with its velvet sheen and rich, dark colour. He was granted the honour of providing the edition’s Winterreise which was predictably excellent then jumped ship to Decca and for me the shine went off ever so slightly. His singing took on some mannerisms that started to pall with repetition; fussy micro-managed phrasing and a tendency to croon. Thankfully that turned out to be just a stage in his artistic development and with him signing to Harmonia Mundi for an 11 disc survey of Schubert Lieder those artifices have disappeared.  We live at a time when there is an extraordinary array of fine singers tackling this repertoire, but this series is something quite special; the overwhelmingly moving Die Schöne Mullerin from 2009 with Christoph Eschenbach’s magisterial accompaniment is one of my desert island discs and the very definition of the word Innigkeit.  This final instalment with its predominantly nocturnal imagery is on a similar plane with limpidly beautiful and subtle contributions by Helmut Deutsch and…

In 1918 Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes were doing their best to cheer up a shell-shocked public so, rather than continue his assault on bourgeois sensibilities that had brought forth Le Sacre du Printemps, he commissioned Respighi to orchestrate a selection of Rossini’s piano pieces. La Boutique Fantasque premiered in London in 1919 and was an instant hit. Rossini’s bouncy tunes in Respighi’s Technicolor orchestration made the suite a regular feature of Classical Pops concerts of previous generations.  Neschling and his superb Belgian orchestra offer perform the complete ballet with gusto as an orchestral showpiece laying bare usually blurred details of orchestration aided by an upfront and brightly lit recording. While prudently less high voltage than the old rip-roaring account of the suite by Arthur Fiedler on RCA Living Stereo (a guilty pleasure) it is an exciting romp in demonstration sound but lacks a certain balletic grace and flexibility.  Impressioni Brasiliane was the product of a visit to Rio and is very much in Respighi’s pictorial style with snatches of Brazilian tunes. Opening with an evocative night piece and closing with a hip-swaying danza, its bizarre middle movement portrays a visit to a biomedical institute that held 80,000 snakes –…

You may think it repertoire raiding but there’s a surprisingly long tradition of playing these suites on viola; we don’t know if they were played thus in Bach’s day but there was a modern transcription published back in 1916. Authenticity is irrelevant here as Bach himself happily rehashed his own material to suit the circumstances and as a colleague once observed “more than any other composer Bach remains Bach even if you play him on a kazoo”. Maxim Rysanov follows up his superb 2010 recording of Suites 1, 4 & 5 and makes it abundantly clear why he is the current golden boy of the viola scene. Playing a magnificent Guadagnini instrument from 1780 his tone is in the clean bright modern manner rather than the dark and dusky. I have rarely heard these pieces played with such a nimble lightness of touch and it makes a startling contrast to my current cello benchmark, Pieter Wispelwey’s extraordinary recent recording in low baroque pitch with its dark umber shading and gravitas. Rysanov’s style is a balance of bold gestures tempered by period manners with the preludes tossed off with improvisatory dash and dance rhythms beautifully pointed. He daringly plays the sixth suite in its original key of…

Following up his last collaboration with René Jacobs, a fine Handel recital, Bejun Mehta here presents an intelligent survey of early classical arias. While the great reformer Gluck inevitably opens the programme with the delicious Che purio ciel! from Orfeo ed Euridice, his neglected rival Traetta at last gets his moment in the sun; a scene from his Ifigenia in Tauride in which a slumbering Oreste is tormented by a chorus of Furies is the high point of the recital. Another delight is Se il fulmine sospendi from Gluck’s Ezio and the album fittingly concludes with an aria from that early glimpse of Mozart’s operatic genius Mitridate. Mehta’s voice might not have the beauty of Scholl (in his prime), nor the brilliance of Jaroussky, nor the flash of Hansen but he trumps them in his intensity of dramatic projection, incisive attack and vivid colouring of text. Mention is made in the booklet of the realistic acting innovations of David Garrick as taken up by the castrato Guadagni; the spirit of whom Bejun Mehta seems to be channelling here. Maybe it’s a consequence of the artificiality of the falsetto technique but with so many counter-tenors currently on the scene there is…

For the last twenty years soprano Emma Matthews has been an invaluable asset to Opera Australia, her miraculously reliable vocal abilities elevating many potentially mundane evenings into memorable occasions. With a captivating, vivacious stage presence whether playing sweet ingénue, saucy minx, ditzy maid or femme fatale (her Lulu was an unexpected tour-de-force) one felt secure knowing the musical values would always get their full due. Her virtues of beautiful silvery tone with tight but attractive vibrato and her impeccable technique allied with rock solid intonation are showcased here with this collection of Mozart arias. Opening with Lieve sono al par del vento one hears the artist’s virtues in a nutshell; beauty and virtuosity in abundance but never for the sake of empty display. Ruhe sanft, mein holdes leben is radiantly sung with the ends of phrases hanging in the air like silk on a breeze and Ach, ich fühls is sung with chaste purity and refreshing simplicity. She certainly has the pipes to deal with the concert arias; four of which are offered here and are the highlights of the recital. These are notoriously tricky works with many stratospheric passages; the coloratura demands are ramped up due to their function as insertion…

Adam Fischer gave us a superb set of Haydn symphonies back in the 1990s and more recently some fine early Mozart operas recorded in Denmark where he has recorded these symphonies over the last seven years – now economically released as box set. His approach applies “historically informed performance practice” and he does his best to make his modern orchestra sound like a period band.  I must admit that 20 years ago I would have happily embraced this approach but nowadays I miss the singing phrase and emotional gravitas of the much maligned old-school manner – George Szell proved that the 19th-century orchestra could play this music with clarity, bite AND romantic expression so it can be done! Here vibrato is eschewed and textures are lean and mean; I appreciate the delicate wisps of string sound and well projected wind playing but the period hard-stick timpani and braying horns grate on repetition.  The brisk tempi and crisp accents generate a breathless excitement with details blurred instead of clearly enunciated. While the approach works in the early symphonies, rooted in their 18th century context, the later symphonies that look forward to the early romantic sound world are seriously short-changed.  But then,…

Handel’s Serse of 1738 with its buffo elements and fast moving structure baffled the critics of the day who singularly failed to recognise Handel’s dramaturgical innovations; it was dismissed by some as a mere “ballad”opera and Charles Burney took him to task for reinstating the tragicomedic that had been banished from opera seria. Relying less on the static three-part da capo aria in favour of short snappy one-movement numbers it suits the light, nimble touch of Christian Curnyn and the Early Opera Company whose excellence in this field is a known quantity and the cast is ideal. Anna Stéphany is superb in the title pants-role, caressing the ear in moments of contemplation yet with sufficient metal in the voice to suggest the warrior king without going over the top and turning the character into a basket-case – her Se Bramante d’amar is a lesson in dramatic projection. Rosemary Joshua’s Romilda is her father’s child with nobility in the voice yet also a vulnerable femininity while her beau David Daniels is as strapping and heroic as a counter-tenor can manage. Thankfully the more comic characters are played relatively straight; Brindley Sherratt avoids conventional bluster as the soldier prince Ariodate, Hilary Summers…

It seems a miracle that Thomas Tallis was able to survive to the ripe old age of 80 or so during the most turbulent period of English history when the monarchy veered back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism, successfully piloting his career through those treacherous waters without foundering on the rocks of religious dogma. His ability to trim his sails to the prevailing winds is evident from Andrew Carwood’s clever programme of Antiphons, Mass, Anthems and Psalms.  Opening with the lovely Anthem O Lord, give thy Holy Spirit, followed by the parody Mass Salve intemerata, complemented by more anthems and the austere Psalm Domine, quis habitabit, the disc closes with his early Votive Anthiphon, themes of which Tallis re-used for his mass.  The Cardinall’s Musick sounds glorious with gleaming sopranos (no breathy boy treble impersonations here), firm and individually characterised voices and a stronger than usual projection. Their warm rich tones are a refreshing change from the cool restraint usually heard here; the slight edge to the choir’s timbre clarifies the counterpoint and avoids the over-refinement that can often turn this repertoire into a bland ill-defined soup. This is part of a series so one hopes we don’t have…

Strauss and Hoffmansthal’s fantastic fairytale has a reputation as a brute to stage and while expensive, requiring a heavy-duty cast of singers to do it justice its heavy symbolism and Jungian archetypes, it’s a gift to directors who can give free rein to their imagination. Sadly, most try too hard to spell out the bafflingly symbolic as seems to be the case in Jonathan Kent’s literal production which serves the human aspects well but is rather ho-hum when it comes to the other-worldly; Barak and his wife live in a squalid Laundromat while the inhabitants of the Spirit-World gad about in a colourful Russo-Oriental pastiche.  The Mariinsky singers have the necessary heft but also a great deal of Slavic wobble. Best of the bunch were the Olgas Sergeeva and Savova as the Dyer’s wife and Nurse; both threw themselves into the maelstrom and their dramatic intensity made up for the occasional ugly sound.  Gergiev’s conducting, while wildly exciting, lacks the sweeping Echt-Straussian line and while the strings make some glorious sounds the orchestra comes across as relentlessly loud and crude. An essential purchase for Gergiev fans, perhaps, but I would veer towards the Sawallisch/Munich production with its clever Kabuki-style and musical…

It’s 28 years since René Jacobs sung the alto arias on Phillipe Herreweghe’s first recording of the St. Matthew Passion, which despite many superb recordings over the years has remained my favourite until now. Since taking up the baton Jacobs has given us some extraordinarily bold and personal visions of the sacred and profane. Having finally tackled this greatest masterpiece of all he is bound to cause a great deal of critical tutt-tutting with this defiantly “post-historical” interpretation using the superb RIAS Kammerchor, who have a fuller sound than the usual specialist early music ensembles and a lineup of operatic soloists; this is a redbloodedly sensual performance that may make purists foam at the mouth. In typical Jacobs’ fashion the recitatives are enhanced with a more varied continuo than usual; it is quite a shock to hear harpsichord and lute alongside the usual organ. Sunhae Im delivers soprano arias with a sinfully feminine allure (no pallid impersonations of boy sopranos here) and Bernarda Fink’s alto arias are passionately heartfelt although her tone is finally starting to show some wear; her Erbarme dich is a devastating expression of guilt. Werner Güra’s stunningly well sung Evangelist drives the narrative forward with marvelously…