Music is the key

Themed recitals seem to be in fashion at the moment. Sales may support them, but it appears counter-intuitive in this computer age of digitised music where you can compile your own mix from different tracks in the twinkling of an eye. Then again, a ready-made recital of ‘related’ works that can be played now or uploaded to your favourite listening device may have its own attraction. The other issue with these recitals, as I inferred in a recent review, is whether they should be judged just in their own right, or whether each work’s performance should stand comparison with the best on the market. That particularly applies when mainstream pieces are programmed; in the case of Vitali’s Chaconne which opens this recital, I counted a good dozen alternatives on this site alone, including those by the likes of Milstein, Heifetz, Oistrakh and Francescatti. There is a middle path, though, and that is whether the chosen programme, and its delivery, works well enough to exceed the...

ECM’s ongoing series of recordings with the Munich Chamber Orchestra continues with an intriguing album of new and recent pieces by Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa. Amongst the featured compositions are “Sakura für Otto Tomek” and “Cloud and Light”, both written in 2008, and “Ceremonial Dance”, written in 2000. These 21st century pieces are brought together with “Landscape V” (originally from 1993 and for string quartet, and subsequently expanded into an orchestral version). Mayumi Miyata, perhaps contemporary music’s best-known shô player, is heard here with the MKO in a recording made at Munich’s Himmelfahrtskirche (Church of the Ascension) in October 2009. Paul Griffiths describes the internal processes of Hosokawa’s music in the liner notes: “The interplay of shô and strings, and in particular their mutual imitation, is the driving force – or perhaps one should say ‘drifting force’, given that the music carries itself so lightly.  The...

Renaud Capuçon exudes a youthful air, but, now firmly established as one of the world’s leading violinists, he celebrates his 40th birthday on January 27th 2016. This release of the best-known works of three composers – Edouard Lalo, Pablo de Sarasate and Max Bruch – marks this important personal occasion in a suitably festive fashion. Capuçon made the recordings with Paavo Järvi and the Orchestre de Paris at the orchestra’s new home, the French capital’s Philharmonie, which opened in early 2015 and was immediately hailed for its superb acoustics. The Bruch concerto became the first piece to be recorded there, in May 2015. As it happens, Capuçon shares a birthday with Edouard Lalo, born in 1823 – and with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart too! Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, first performed in Paris in 1874, inhabits the same Franco-Spanish musical world as Bizet’s Carmen, which received its premiere the following year. The piece also has a special connection with both Sarasate’s ...

The Danish String Quartet, one of the most widely-acclaimed chamber groups of the present moment, makes its first recording for ECM, with a programme of Danish and British music. The pieces featured here, all written when the respective composers were each barely into their 20s, have retained a freshness and intensity vividly conveyed in the Danish String Quartet’s energetic and assured interpretations. Per Nørgård’s Quartetto Breve (1952), Hans Abrahamsen’s 10 Preludes (1973), and Thomas Adès’s Arcadiana (1994), represent first forays, for each of the composers, into the world of the string quartet. The Nørgård quartet appears to reflect the influence of Bartók, as well as the lean tonality of Nørgård’s teacher, Vagn Holmboe. Nørgård would become an influential teacher in his own right, and Hans Abrahamsen, one of his most talented pupils, was inspired by the minimalism which the older composer had drawn into his music. In his 10 Preludes , Abrahamsen gives to his pul...

When talent is passed on from generation to generation, it often happens in an unpresuming way. Such is the case with Daniel Röhn – one of the most remarkable and talented violinists of the present day. What is so fascinating about him and his playing is his natural approach to great traditions and his clear perspective on them. Over a number of decades, both his grandfather and father were renowned concertmasters on the universally unique German orchestral scene; now the new generation has joined those ranks as a soloist and chamber musician, who will no doubt contribute significantly to the world of violin. His first two CD releases featuring Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and virtuoso 19th-century works for violin and piano earned him several international awards. When describing his playing, it is hardly sufficient to simply mention his seemingly effortless, brilliant virtuosity. Daniel Röhn’s heart-meltingly warm tone and his almost narrative gestures are what endea...

This young trio that takes its name from the legendary violinist Adolf Busch (1891-1952) has already made its name on the international scene as one of the most talented of the new generation, picking up on its travels enthusiastic reactions from public and press – as well as several prizes at the major competitions. ‘... what impressed most was the group’s effortless musicianship and unity of thought and attack. The threesome even seemed to be breathing in synch’, wrote The Times after one of their concerts at the Wigmore Hall. Under the auspices of Alpha Classics and the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel, the ensemble has set itself a challenge: to record the complete chamber music with piano of Antonín Dvořák. With the monumental T rios no.3 op.65 and no.4 op.90 , these London based musicians get the saga off to a flying start, in deeply felt interpretations that penetrate to the heart of the great Czech composer’s poetic universe.

The majority of these performances will be very familiar to Heifetz collectors and so will the transfers. Discs one and two were remastered in 2006 whilst the bulk of the remaining pieces date to work carried out in 1992-93. The selection certainly meets with my approval ranging across the repertoire as it does and I particularly commend the selection of the smaller pieces which occupies discs five and six and the 1935 Bach recordings enshrined in disc four. The sole item from the 1920s is also here; the Menuet I and II from the Partita in E which was recorded on an early electric in 1925 in Camden, New Jersey.   Heifetz had recorded the Sibelius with Stokowski at the end of 1934 but it remained unissued at the tim...

This is a superb, in fact I feel justified in calling it unequivocally a great, Elgar Two. It's difficult to know where to start in listing its excellences -- the playing of the Berlin Staatskapelle, without one ounce of unnecessary emotion yet performing as if they've had the music in their blood all their lives? The warmth and yet crystal clarity of the recording, in which every counterpoint, every subsidiary voice in Elgar's hugely complex score is perfectly audible and ideally balanced? But one must start and finish with Barenboim's interpretation, his first in this work for 40 years, with which he burnishes his already impressive and long-established credentials as an Elgarian . . . this is a marvellously full-blooded reading of the Symphony , full of drama and passion and rich-hued colour . . . [Barenboim] also understands perfectly Elgar's inwardness, the moment where the dynamic drops to "ppp" and he seems almost to lose himself in t...

“Pianist András Schiff has made a specialty of the music of Schumann for years, and his readings continue to get richer and more incisive. What's remarkable about Schiff's playing is his mastery of touch and texture, the way he carves out sculptures in sound that are at once delicate and sharply defined. Just as in his performances of Bach on the modern piano, Schiff gives Schumann's music a crystalline textural clarity that still allows for a range of highly expressive moods and tonal colours.” - Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle  András Schiff, one of the great pianists of our era, traces the development of Schumann’s piano music, from the youthful “Papillons”, to the C Major Fantasy op. 17 – in which the composer sought new routes for the sonata after Beethoven – , and onwards to the final (and seldom-performed) “Geistervariationen”, the “Ghost variations”. By this time, Schumann’s genius was in thrall to escalating illness, and he bel...

This recording is all about the Italian renaissance, how it understood itself, how we understand it today and how we would have understood it if we had been contemporary with it, because no other period in European music’s history was as contemporary with itself as was the renaissance. During the 16th century, humanistic inspiration had led to the most equilibristic levels in all arts and had stretched the human mind to the highest achievements and skills flourishing in a landscape of youth, spring and rebirth of all of mother earth’s beings. Diminutions , divisions , or glosas were one of the renaissance’s unique inventions. Technically it means embellishing a melody into a much more flavored and elaborated melody in faster movement and shorter rhythmical values, presuming that the simple melody still remains in the listener’s mind. This supreme discipline of ornamentation became a new work of art in itself. The original composition on th...

Per Norgard is a major force among Danish composers, and no wonder. His music has exuberance, brilliance, and the freedom from inhibition or routine that we expect of a true symphonist in this post-Mahlerian age. His Third Symphony, in two big movements, features in its finale a chorus that among other things sings the Latin hymn Ave maris stella as well as a poem by Rilke. The words are completely unintelligible, what with all the other stuff going on at the same time, but it hardly matters because the music is stunningly colorful, atmospheric (cosmic even), and often very beautiful. There are tunes here, triadic harmonies, as well as wild dissonance, but it's all controlled so as to create an impressively intense pattern of tension and release, and to keep the ear engaged. You won't take in all of it the first time through, but you will want to come back for more, which is the first indication that we're dealing with a serious contender for "classic" status. ...

‘As if God the Father had thrown down pieces of a mosaic from the floor of heaven and asked me to work out the pattern.’ Not Per Nørgård’s words, of course, but those of his 1950s confidant Jean Sibelius in relation to his own Fifth Symphony. Nørgård’s Fifth was premiered in 1990 in a concert that included Sibelius’s; both are post-crisis, breakthrough scores and both represent a maturing of that concept of symphonic ‘flow’ that is so important to the two composers - the idea that once you get the symphonic river moving, the material will emerge readily enough. Nørgård lets the listener decide how many movements the Fifth has but the material clearly springs from its opening gesture, as tectonic plates judder into a new position, allowing ideas to pour forth. The ensuing process is tight and controlled, even if the impression is of music that is entirely out of the composer’s control in its impulse and liquidity. Nørgård often uses ostinatos, chaconnes or even single-no...

I t is almost two years since the release of Daniel Barenboim’s exceptional recording of Elgar’s Second Symphony with the Berlin Staatskapelle. The finest version of the work to appear on disc in many years, it signalled Barenboim’s return to the music of a composer he had conducted and recorded extensively more than 30 years earlier, but which he was now revisiting with an orchestra possessing its own very distinct tradition and soundworld. Now, we have the First Symphony, recorded at concerts in the Berlin Philharmonie last September. If it’s not quite as overwhelmingly impressive as his account of the Second, it’s still a remarkable achievement. In its voicings and especially in its gradations of string tone, the performance seems to fix Elgar’s orchestral writing even more firmly into the context of post-Wagnerian romanticism than before; the veiled sound for the opening motto theme immediately evokes memories of Parsifal, while the slow movements sometimes acqui...

This album contains nearly 3 hours of music and includes all Pavarotti's opera hits - including Nessun Dorma, used as the 1990 World Cup theme tune and the track that made him a household name as well as all his famous popular songs: O sole mio, Caruso, Santa Lucia, Volare and many more. In a thrilling first, the album also contains the first official release of the first known recording of his voice, the aria Che gelida manina recorded on his Italian professional debut in 1961. Other highlights include great duet collaborations with superstar friends Frank Sinatra, Bono, Eric Clapton and Sting plus fellow tenors Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras in the live Three Tenors version of Nessun Dorma. For the first time all material is fully remastered at 24bit for the best sound ever. Pavarotti The 50 Greatest Tracks - truly the definitive collection of the music of a great man and true legend.

The Tetzlaff Quartet is unusual in consisting of four busy soloists who get together only intermittently. The upside is that what they do has the tension and imagination of four big personalities, and that certainly pays off here. Their combined sound is highly refined and honed, resulting in a tautness of approach that gives Mendelssohn’s A minor Quartet real potency and drive. Even in the most driven passages, textures always have a sparkling clarity. Just dip into the first movement (beginning at 2'30"), where viola player Hanna Weinmeister takes over the melody with eloquence. The Elias are more refulgent in tone, generally more open-hearted in the touching Adagio non lento , but the Tetzlaff’s greater austerity is also very moving. And their finale is particularly searing, bringing out the contrast between the melodramatic tremolos and the leader’s impassioned recitatives, the light-as-air passages of the upper three players and the pungent pizzicatos o...

The three works on this first CD by Disquiet Media, composer, film-maker and director Michel van der Aa’s own multimedia label, together constitute a stylistic cross-section of a genre that, with its refined musical expression of conceptual first principles, has quickly gained ground both nationally and internationally. They demonstrate the scope of a vision of ‘music about music’, in which as an object of study the human being, musician or not, is just as important as musical ideas. When Van der Aa says he is not a composer of notes, he means he is not only concerned with the creative dialogue with forms and musical languages but also with the theatrical aspects of music-making, perceived with the detachment of the principled outsider who constantly asks himself what and how he sees and hears. His attention is directed primarily to the physical and social facets of music-making: producing sound, the musician as a recreative individual, relationships between musician...

Vincent d’Indy is another late-19th/early-20th-century composer who is all but forgotten. A Franck and Wagner disciple, he reacted obstinately against “modern” contemporaries, even Ravel, although he admired the Debussy of L’après-midi and the Nocturnes. The widowed D’Indy fell ardently in love, which was reciprocated, with a student 36 years his junior and the straitlaced Roman Catholic musician suddenly acknowledged the underlying sensuality of his nature. He was already working on the Poème des rivages but the music’s pantheistic feeling blossomed when he and his young bride went to live at Agay on the Mediterranean. The rich orchestral colours of these four seascapes develop an expressive radiance in his luminous scoring. It is not another La mer , for the third-movment Scherzo wittily evokes a country train journey. But the final scene, “Le mystère de l’océan”, depicts the sea’s unpredictability and violence. The Diptyque méditerranéen followed, a mellow view o...

Testament to the versatility and musical command that Teodor Currentzis and his unique orchestra and choir possess, this new album brings together two diverse masterworks from two titans of Russian music. Although they have been acquainted for a long time prior, this recording represents the first musical collaboration between Teodor Currentzis and the exceptional violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. The instant artistic rapport (an “artistic wedding” of sorts) between these two maverick musicians can be heard in this dynamic new recording of Tchaikovsky’s Violin concerto – one of the most popular works in the violin repertory. Currentzis’ authentic approach to the folk influences in Stravinsky’s music (as revealed in Le Sacre du Printemps) is again very present in his interpretation of Les Noces. This work for percussion, pianists, chorus, and vocal soloists – originally composed as ballet music – is probably one of Stravinsky’s most rarely recorded works. The work is based on a Russi...