Christina Pluhar / L'Arpeggiata MEDITERRANEO

This release by the early music group L'Arpeggiata and its leader, lutenist Christina Pluhar, seems to encompass two separate goals, only partly laid out in the handsomely illustrated booklet notes. First is an illustration of the idea that, as the notes put it, "the sea does not separate cultures, it connects them." Jordi Savall and others have released albums that cut across a wide swath of Mediterranean lands from Turkey to Spain (and around to Portugal), finding in them a traditional music that responds well to improvisatory practice, shows the continuing influence of musical practices from the Arab and Ottoman worlds, and reflects a lyric impulse and a tendency toward accompanied vocal song. Pluhar adds different singers and musicians onto her core group according to the national origin of the music, a noteworthy and innovative practice that gets the listener to hear commonalities and differences in a fresh way. The second goal is more unusual: Pluhar and company explore the common roots of these practices in Greek music, demonstrated by the persistence of the Greek language and a large repertory of orally transmitted song in southern Italy, on the Salento peninsula on the east coast of southern Italy, and also in Calabria. These songs are sung in a language called Griko, essentially an Italian dialect of Greek. This music, and even the language itself, is sufficiently obscure to attract attention to the album by themselves, and "Greco-Salentino" songs, with everything transliterated and translated in the booklet, are lovely. The album's perhaps of a bit more interest to speculative world music fans than to serious devotees of old Mediterranean song: Pluhar's female vocalists don't have quite the power needed to take command of the material. But the instrumental group L'Arpeggiata is a remarkably flexible, breathing instrument, and the entire project gets major points for sheer originality. (James Manheim)

András Schiff FRANZ SCHUBERT

Schubert's music has an immediate impact. No one has expressed this more forcefully than Theodor Adorno in his early essay of 1928: 'Confronted with Schubert's music, tears fall from our eyes before the soul is even consulted. That is how solidly and unmetaphorically it affects us.' It would be wrong, however, to take this as a plea for sentimentality, allowing pianists to claim, as Ulrich Schreiber once put it, 'the right to lend the score a helping hand by improving it'. To avoid this dilemma, one thing above all is helpful, in addition to pianistic skill and aesthetic sensibilities: archival research. This involves the questions of which instruments Schubert played upon, which surroundings his works were performed in, what social groupings they were conceived for and what sound-ideals this imposed on him.

Hungarian pianist András Schiff has long been concerned with period performance practice. At first, however, the musical results of the research into authentic sound left him unconvinced. Since then his initial qualms, sparked by the dogmatism of the original practitioners and the poor state of many historical instruments, has given way to a gusto for period instruments. A change of heart was prompted above all by his experience with Mozart's hammerklavier, which he was allowed to play in the composer's birth-house in Salzburg – 'at once a privilege and an unforgettable experience'. Only on this instrument, where Mozart probed the limits of the keyboard and the piano’s potential, does the revolutionary character of his music come fully to the fore, nor did Schiff play his spectacular double-recording of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations on a modern Steinway.

Instead he chose two earlier instruments: a hammerflügel from Beethoven's day, which gives full play to the composer's rich sonic universe, and an original Bechstein grand of 1921, with a sound-ideal virtually nonexistent today.
For the present recording of works by Franz Schubert, the pianist has again chosen a Viennese hammerflügel built by Franz Brodmann in 1820. Anyone listening to his interpretations will be surprised at the instrument's ability to bring out the gentle, wistful songfulness of Schubert's music, a quality far removed from Biedermeier sentimentality. Above all, the instrument is capable of rendering the huge range and myriad gradations of Schubert's dynamics down to the softest pianissimo. This is due in particular to the moderator pedal (a feature no longer found on today's instruments), which places a piece of cloth between the hammers and the strings, muting the attack and the sound in an almost mystical manner.

Indeed, the recordings on this instrument lack all false brilliance and any neutralising equilibration of the registers. We feel we are listening to Schubert for the first time, perhaps as he heard his own playing, with silvery high registers, a warm timbre in the mid-range and a dry, almost laconic bass. Most of all, the works, especially the highly popular Moments musicaux and Impromptus, benefit from an instrumental character defined more by rounded consonance than by the isolated note. Even the light folk-like inflection found, for example, in many passages of the G-major Sonata seems perfectly natural, not as if Schiff had to curtail the instrument’s fulsome sonority in order to accommodate unadorned expression.

Arabella Steinbacher MENDELSSOHN Violin Concerto, Op. 64 - TCHAIKOVSKY Violin Concerto, Op. 35

This release arguably features the two greatest concertos ever written for the violin: performed by one of the most brilliant violinists of her generation, together with one of the finest orchestras, and under the baton of one of the world’s foremost conductors. This recording of Tchaikovsky/Mendelssohn violin concertos bears witness to the eminence of the collaboration between violinist Arabella Steinbacher, conductor Charles Dutoit and PENTATONE’s Orchestra of the Season January June 2015, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and the result thereof.
After waiting for a long time to record these concertos with the perfect collaboration, Arabella Steinbacher didn’t waste any chance to shine with heart-felt enthusiasm and bravura in this recording.

Her performance produced such a pure, yet fierce sound that it allowed the music to speak in an immediate, translucent way. Recorded in September 2014 in the magnificent Victoria Hall, Geneva, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande were totally at home with the repertoires and performed with great confidence; they were led by Dutoit, who was vivid, rhythmic and clear in his direction.

José Ramón Encinar / Orchestra and Chorus of the Comunidad de Madrid LEONARDO BALADA María Sabina - Dionisio: In Memoriam

The Barcelona-born composer Leonardo Balada is credited with pioneering a blending of ethnic music with avant-garde techniques. The symphonic tragedy María Sabina, one of Balada’s bestknown works, tells the extraordinary story of Sabina, a Mexican Indian mushroom-cult priestess who meets fierce resistance from her people when endeavouring to open the holy rituals to the outside world. Some of the text in Balada’s work is based on her incantations, of which the composer has written, “While composing the work, the power of the text was so extraordinary that I felt inspired by it. I recall composing the music even when I was travelling, in airports or hotels”. The cantata Dionisio: In Memoriam is a homage to Dionisio Ridruejo, a poet and politician from Soria, Spain, on whose ideological, philosophical and descriptive writings the work is based. (NAXOS)

Claudio Abbado / Orchestra Mozart SCHUBERT The "Great" C major Symphony

Throughout his career, Claudio Abbado evinced a keen desire to work with young and unspoilt musicians, and it was this desire that led him to gift to the world of music one new orchestra after another. He loved working with his players with the maximum degree of intimacy and in an atmosphere of mutual understanding that encouraged them to listen to each other. In the course of his life more than a dozen wonderful ensembles were created thanks to his powerful initiative. The two most recent ones were the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which dates back to 2003, and the Orchestra Mozart, which was established the following year as a project of the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna and financed by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna. It was with the latter that Abbado developed an especially close bond during the final years of his life, its outstanding qualities demonstrated, not least, by the many prestigious awards that it received. In one of his last interviews, Abbado himself stressed that he was never interested in “drawing a distinction between my youth orchestras on the one hand and my elite orchestra on the other. The truth of the matter is that there are few major differences between my orchestras. We are all members of one big family, performing music together and in that way helping each other out.”

The Orchestra Mozart was never simply a youth orchestra but was a highly qualified large chamber ensemble in which young musicians appeared alongside experienced figures such as the double-bass player Alois Posch, the violist Wolfram Christ and the trumpeter Reinhold Friedrich. Apart from the genius of Abbado himself, it was very much this combination of experience and youthful enthusiasm that lent the orchestra its unique and irresistible colour. It was founded in 2004 against the background of the crisis that beset the whole of Italy, where regional orchestras and opera houses were dying out in large numbers.
As such, it was a sign of the untiring optimism and thirst for action that Abbado brought to art and society right up to the end of his life, for unlike many of his colleagues of a similar age he retained his political beliefs from the 1960s and 1970s, when his work had been inspired by his left-wing sympathies. His conviction that music does not exist in a vacuum but has an emphatically ethical significance alongside its aesthetic importance bore fruit from start to finish. On Abbado’s initiative the Orchestra Mozart also played voluntarily in kindergartens, prisons and facilities for the disabled. (Julia Spinola)

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica GLASS - PÄRT - KANCHELI - UMEBAYASHI New Seasons

Gidon Kremer returns to the Yellow label after more than a decade with the brand new reference recording of Philip Glass’ Second Violin Concerto – “The American Seasons”, his first solo concerto album in many years.The first Glass Violin Concerto, performed by Kremer and released by DG in 1993, has achieved cult status and shipped close to 90k units (in Germany alone over 25k copies) – and has become a staple of DG’s contemporary music catalogue.

Now, this extraordinary follow-up Concerto is at the heart of the repertoire of the Kremerata Baltica. Performed for the first time in San José, Costa Rica with Gidon Kremer as soloist in August 2013, it will be toured later in the year - info to follow shortly.

The album is completed by works of Arvo Pärt and Giya Kancheli – two composers both closely associated with Gidon Kremer, and who are both set to celebrate milestone 80th birthdays this year. Gidon has also added the short piece by the well-known Japanese film composer Shigeru Umebayashi as a tribute to his Japanese friends.

Four highly regarded visual artists and film maker have created four different films for each of the American Seasons that are projected to screens during concert performances. (Presto Classical)

Mahan Esfahani TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST

If you buy only one record of harpsichord music in your life . . . buy this sensational album. The 30-year-old Iranian-American Mahan Esfahani has been making waves among connoisseurs for several years. Now he emerges as a superstar whose musicianship, imagination, virtuosity, cultural breadth and charisma far transcends the ivory tower in which the harpsichord has traditionally been placed . . . Where necessary, Esfahani is brilliantly accompanied by Concerto Köln. Even their final performance -- of JS Bach¿s Vivaldi-inspired harpsichord concerto in D Minor, with its plangently lyrical slow movement -- has a delicious twist. In the last movement Esfahani inserts a flamboyant cadenza by Brahms, of all people. A truly magical mash-up of times past, present and future.

(Record Review / Richard Morrison, The Times (London) / 08. May 2015)