Music is the key

In the United States, Christophe Rousset's Decca recordings of Bach keyboard works have had a spotty history – here today, gone tomorrow. Fortunately, Decca has now repackaged these recordings into a four-disc set that sells for only $7.00 per disc. However, it's best not to assume that the set will indefinitely be on the U.S. market; in other words, snap it up before it's yanked. Rousset's Decca/Bach recordings are essential for the Bach serious record collector and anyone else who prizes idiomatic interpretations of some of Bach's most compelling and glorious keyboard works. Rousset's style is generally informed by sharp contours, buoyant rhythms, brilliant phrasing, excellent detail of musical lines, poignant slow movements and very speedy and even wild fast movements. Overall, his interpretations crackle with energy. Another trait I love is that Rousset is often youthful and exuberant while at the same time expressing a full l...

Sergey Khachatryan's unaccompanied Bach is decidedly "old school" in its tapered phrasings and dynamics, with an emphasis on nuance and tone color rather than linear shape. You immediately glean this from the subito pianos, tenutos, and oozing legatos of the C major sonata Fugue. Yet if this particular style of Bach playing holds appeal, then Khachatryan's attractive, sweetly singing timbre and generally spot-on choice of tempos will satisfy on their own terms, to say nothing of the violinist's brisk yet relaxed delivery in fast, virtuosic movements like the G minor sonata's Presto, the B minor partita's second Double, and the E major partita's opening Prelude. However, for an ideal fusion of tonal allure and contrapuntal cogency, James Ehnes remains first choice, notably in the fugues and the stronger architectural unity that distinguishes his pacing of the great D minor Chaconne . Excellent annotations and sound. (Jed Dis...

This wide-ranging programme in EMI's Debut series is like a musical calling-card for Sergey Khachatryan (born in Armenia in 1985), who submits himself to daunting tests of virtuosity (triumphantly surmounted in Ravel and Waxman) and musicianship. And it's his musical abilities that make the biggest impact, along with his fine, rich, malleable tone. In the Waxman it's the dark, fatalistic side of Carmen that predominates. The Brahms springs no interpretive surprises--the second and fourth movements are particularly successful, the Adagio splendidly expressive at a flowing tempo, the finale played with driving energy. In Brahms and Ravel, Khachatryan is partnered by his sister (she, too, looks very young in the photos, but her age isn't stated). Her contribution is very positive, especially in the Brahms finale and the later stages of Tzigane, when both violin and piano revel in the music's kaleidoscopic textures while having fun with idiom...

As so often with Bach, the plain-sounding title of the Well-Tempered Clavier gives little hint of the riches within. The composer may have intended it as an aid to students out to improve their playing, but the 48 preludes and fugues it contains range from the technically simple to eye-watering five-part fugues, from the insouciant to the dramatic, from the most introverted to the ebullient.  Pierre-Laurent Aimard has the kind of musical brain that can untangle the music of Ligeti and Elliott Carter, so it's no surprise that he brings to the fugues of Bach an unfailing sense of clarity and purpose. This is music whose overwhelming humanity can be brought vivaciously to life on the piano, as artists as varied as Edwin Fischer, Samuel Feinberg, Glenn Gould, Daniel-Ben Pienaar and Angela Hewitt have shown, offering as it does a wide variety of colour, timbre and dynamic shadings.  Aimard is on the cooler end of the spectrum, emotionally speaking; while this can work wel...

Carlos Prieto, Mexican-born and MIT-educated, is one of the most respected cellists in the world, regularly premiering works composed especially for him by Latin American, North American and European composers. Mr. Prieto began playing the cello at age four, studying with the Hungarian cellist Imre Hartman and later with Pierre Fournier in Geneva and Leonard Rose in New York. Mr. Prieto´s playing has inspired such rare critical acclaim as “impeccable” ( The New York Times ), “in true bravura fashion, unafraid, secure, zestful” ( The Boston Globe ), “distinguished music-making” ( San Francisco Chronicle ), “remarkable, razor-sharp” ( The Star-Ledger ), and “impeccable...absolutely gorgeous...breathtaking” ( The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ), “stunning performance” ( The Globe and Mail, Toronto). He has played with orchestras from all over the world: the Royal Philharmonic in London, the Chamber Orchestra of the European Union, the American Symphony Orchestra in New York, th...

The U.S. duo of soprano Ailyn Pérez and tenor Stephen Costello has garnered considerable publicity in its home country, and now with this new collaboration with the venerable BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, they seem poised to gain a round of admirers across the Atlantic as well. Opera cognoscenti may conclude that their success is due in large part to having the field to themselves right now: opera companies and symphonic programmers, like those in the folk field who roll over and put their hands in the air for the Swell Season and the Civil Wars, can't resist the spectacle of a husband-and-wife team who seem to be experiencing the emotions they sing about. Pérez's voice for many will have a rather plummy quality, while Costello's tenor at times plows ahead with little regard to pitch. But the duo is canny in picking their music, and it's easy to see the appeal in spite of such objections. The album is dedicated to the memory of Richard Tucker, and the duo exploits the ...

Here's a really terrific recital, both enterprising and intelligent, that winds up being much more than the sum of its very considerable parts. Isabelle Faust and Ewa Kupiec play Janácek's quirky Violin Sonata with uninhibited passion, making no attempt to smooth over the music's rough edges but at the same time (as in the gorgeous second-movement Ballada) offering playing of bewitching beauty and fantasy. Kupiec in this respect proves herself a more than worthy partner to her gifted colleague. For example, her approach to La Fontaine d'Aréthuse, the first of Szymanowski's Mythes, points the music's rhythms with unusual care. No impressionistic fog here! The result, when combined with Faust's exquisitely poised tracery in her upper register, must be the most characterful interpretation of this music since the celebrated Danczowska/Zimerman version on DG, and it couldn't be more different--sharply focused and precise where the D...

'A Winterreise of vision and searching intensity … Finley’s rich and beautifully modulated baritone voice is also one that nurtures words and can encapsulate the musical images with which Schubert clothes them … for instance in his veiled, hushed and then anguished interpretation of 'Auf dem Flusse’, again with Drake establishing an undercurrent of desolation. Finley can exercise his lyrical powers in such songs as ‘Der Lindenbaum’, ‘Die Krähe’, ‘Letzte Hoffnung’ or ‘Täuschung’ but it is not a lyrical talent alone: more to the point, it is the spectrum of tonal colouring, inflection and instinctive phrasing which lend this performance of Winterreise such an absorbing sense of inner communion with the soul. Nothing is exaggerated; but on an intimate scale Finley and Drake find the nub of the dramatic psychological substance of these songs' (Gramophone)   The affecting, chilling bleakness of ‘Gute Nacht’ immediately suggests that this is going to be a W...

 Following the huge success of over 2 million records sold with critically acclaimed albums such as Adiemus, The Armed Man, The Peacemakers and Requiem, Karl Jenkins presents his brand new album! Motets  is an intimate a capella album that features stunning new choral adaptions of Jenkins’ previous hit compositions and marks the year of his 70th birthday and fifty years of his career in music. As a composer and a brand – a brand that stands for an epic sound that connects with people from all different age groups on a spiritual level - Karl Jenkins remains one of the most performed living composers in the world today. The concept Motets goes back in time and celebrates his hits from the past in a newly arranged intimate sound – accessible, performable, emotional. Recent reviews declare Polyphony “one of the best small choirs now before the public” ( Telegraph ) and “...

Music emerges from a dark tunnel, a smooth and liquid train with a large chorus as passengers. The accelerated evolution of Harmonium is brought forth in what Adams calls a “preverbal creation scene,” an inescapable feeling of solitary light tinted with the weight of retrospection as the voices intercede. Harmonium seems to revel in self-awareness, building as it does through a series of dynamic swings from the threshold of audibility to ringing pronouncements of verse. It is a convoluted world where density and transparency coexist in equal measure. At times this piece sounds like Adams’s popular Shaker Loops with words, at others like a Philip Glass tribute with characteristic pulses of flute and strings, at still others like a ritual of its own kind. It is a pastiche of poetry (John Donne and Emily Dickinson provide the texts), a bridge of intentions, a house with only two windows. The recording quality here may polarize listeners somewhat. While on the one ha...

With this recording Argentine-Swiss cellist Sol Gabetta completes her pair of Shostakovich's cello concertos, recorded in reverse order. Perhaps she has simply been aware of Shostakovich's still growing popularity, or perhaps she felt it was a unique challenge to apply her somewhat impetuous style to Shostakovich, who could certainly be called sober and perhaps even dour. This is a strong reading of the Cello Concerto No. 1, Op. 107 , which was composed in 1959 and dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich. It's probably preferable to Gabetta's recording of the second concerto, which doesn't quite catch Shostakovich's expansive late manner. Here she is in her element, with plenty of facility in the spectacular cadenza that introduces the finale, and an interpretation that stands out in comparison with Russian ones. As is her way, Gabetta plays fast and loose with tempi, but what she finds here is one of the Shostakovich works that seem to be rather angry assertions...

Award-winning composer Kaija Saariaho frequently draws inspiration from extra-musical sources, be they the night sky, the natural environment or literature. Saariaho studied music and fine arts in parallel before taking up composition, the latter at the graphic arts department of the University of Art and Design Helsinki. She studied composition with Paavo Heininen at the Sibelius Academy from 1976 to 1981 and continued with Brian Ferneyhough at the Freiburg Music Academy, completing her diploma in 1983. This album is devoted to chamber music which exhibits the same rich sense of instrumental colors and feeling of dramatic contrast as her celebrated orchestral works. In 2008, Saariaho was named 'Composer of the Year' by Musical America. In addition, she has received several internationally distinguished awards, including the Grawemeyer Composition Award for her opera L'Amour de loin in 2003. In 1997, she was awarded one of France's highes...

It was with Bach that Anne Sofie von Otter made her very first solo appearances when she performed the alto arias in the St. John Passion in Stockholm. But by then, as she has explained, the experience gained as a chorister in the Stockholm Bach Choir had already had a fundamental and enduring influence on her approach to the composer. “The conductor of the Bach Choir at that time was very dynamic: he was on fire for this music, and I became on fire for it as well. Then Nikolaus Harnoncourt came up to conduct the Bach motets, and that was also a marvellous experience. Harnoncourt was revolutionizing the performance of Baroque and Viennese Classical works - spring-cleaning tempos and phrasing and using original instruments to shed the old woolly sounds of a Romantic orchestra and make the music vibrant again. It was an exciting time for young people like me who gathered around the gramophone and listened eagerly to his new recordings of Monteverdi, Bach and Mozart. Harn...