Music is the key

 It's a recording that just a few years ago would have been mainstream: a "name" pianist (albeit one much less well known in the U.S. than elsehwere), who has been playing Mozart's piano concertos since childhood, joins forces with a name conductor with whom she has frequently collaborated, leading a modern-instrument orchestra of some 70 players, with the results released on a major international-conglomerate label. Now it's distinctly unusual. But lo, there's value in the old ways. Portuguese-Brazilian pianist Maria João Pires is a lifelong Mozart specialist, but she still has new things to say in two of Mozart's most popular piano concertos. You can chalk it up to her Buddhist outlook if you like: her readings of the Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major, K. 595, and Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466 , might be described as detached without being lifeless. Her approach is most startling in the Piano Concerto No. 20, where her no...

Even though violinist Janine Jansen appears alone in the cover photo of this 2012 Decca release, and her name is featured in large letters, no one should mistake this album as a solo effort. The recordings of Franz Schubert's String Quintet in C major and Arnold Schoenberg's sextet Verklärte Nacht are ensemble performances, and the musicians who play with Jansen form an artistic bond that seems utterly at odds with the star-oriented artwork. Jansen is certainly behind the choice of works, because they were programmed on her critically praised concert at Wigmore Hall. But beyond Decca's marketing decision emphasizing Jansen as the main performer, equal attention should be given to her colleagues, violinist Boris Brovtsyn, violists Amichai Grosz and Maxim Rysanov, and cellists Torleif Thedéen and Jens Peter Maintz, who are all comparable in technical skill and expressive abilities. The performance of Verklärte Nacht is impassioned and dark, and the richness of the lower s...

It would seem that Alison Balsom has become about as popular as a classical trumpet player can be. She has a half dozen well-received recordings . She plays the Haydn with warmth and grace, with a clear, penetrating tone. Her cadenza in the first movement is ideal in demonstrating her virtuosity without distracting us from the (eventual) flow of the movement. In this new disc, expertly accompanied by Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert, she plays mostly transcriptions and all on natural, valveless trumpets. She calls such instruments “an adventure.” One of her adventures, which does sound entirely natural, is taking the second countertenor part on Purcell’s Sound the Trumpet , playing alongside the countertenor Iestyn Davies. As the part was meant to have trumpet-like phrases as well as introduce a trumpet later, this transcription seems virtually to be taking Purcell at his word. Not so inevitable is Handel’s Oboe Concerto with the trumpet taking the solo part. ...