Neeme Järvi / Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra TCHAIKOVSKY The Nutcracker

This is the concluding recording in Neeme Järvi’s series with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra devoted to Tchaikovsky’s three great ballets. This complete, uncut version of The Nutcracker follows The Sleeping Beauty (CHSA 5113(2)) and Swan Lake (CHSA 5124 (2)), both of which have been much awarded.

The Nutcracker draws its influences from both Hoffmann’s and Dumas’s tales of the same name, and makes delightful use of ‘le joli’, i.e. ‘the pretty’, in music – vivacious themes decked out in ingenious orchestration – already mastered by Léo Delibes in Coppélia.

The Nutcracker relates the dreams of Clara Silberhaus on Christmas Eve, aroused by the nutcracker which her mysterious godfather has given her. Then the guests’ lulling and languishing waltzes take her on a fantastic journey from a mystical snowy forest to the princely kingdom of Confiturembourg. Tchaikovsky illustrates this journey with various musical themes, such as confectionary, flowers, and Mirlitons, as well as Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian dances.

Commissioned by the director of the Imperial Theatres, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, and originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, The Nutcracker was premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1892. It came in a double-bill with the opera Iolanta, also commissioned by Vsevolozhsky. For this recording, Neeme Järvi and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra have re-explored Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece together, in order to offer a completely new experience of one of the most-performed ballets in musical history. (CHANDOS)

Andris Nelsons / Boston Symphony Orchestra SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 10

For the first instalment of a Shostakovich series titled  Under Stalin’s Shadow, Andris Nelsons has chosen the composer’s monumental Tenth Symphony, prefaced with the startling “Passacaglia” from  Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. 

 It’s a programme that effectively bookends Shostakovich’s relationship with Stalin: at the dictator’s behest, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was denounced in 1936  as a “deliberately dissonant, confused stream of sound”  – yet there’s no confusion discernible here, as lowering horns, brooding strings and dramatic percussion combine to drive home the air of looming menace. 

 But Shostakovich struggled to rehabilitate his reputation through his wartime symphonies, culminating in  1953 with Symphony No 10, which shares the mood of  menace in “Passacaglia”. (Andy Gill)

Kronos Quartet plays TERRY RILEY Salome Dances for Peace

There is no string quartet that has ever been written that can compare length and diversity with Terry Riley's Salome Dances for Peace. Morton Feldman has written a longer one, but it is confined to his brilliant field of notational relationships and open tonal spaces. Riley's magnum opus, which dwarfs Beethoven's longest quartet by three, is a collection of so many different kinds of music, many of which had never been in string quartet form before and even more of which would -- or should -- never be rubbing up against one another in the same construct. Riley is a musical polymath, interested in music from all periods and cultures: there are trace elements of jazz and blues up against Indian classical music, North African Berber folk melodies, Native American ceremonial music, South American shamanistic power melodies -- and many more. The reason they are brought together in this way is for the telling of an allegorical story. In Riley's re-examining Salome's place in history, he finds a way to redeem both her and the world through her talent. Two thousand years after her original infamous dance she is summoned by the Great Spirit who sees her as the epitome of the feminine force and needs her talent to win back peace for the world, which has been stolen by dark forces. The quartet that Kronos takes on here has five movements, but within each movement are sections where the music changes to illustrate certain themes in Salome's journey to dance for peace. In the first two movements alone there are a total of 15 such sections. Some of them move through Middle Eastern desert themes and others through the Old West as portrayed by Aaron Copland. The genius in such a work is not so much in having so many ideas and putting them into one pot, but in writing transitions for a group of musicians to make them believable and seamless. In Riley's quartet, the journeying from summoning to the recessional at the end, movement is constant: action, contemplation, and meditation all take place on the move. Kronos' sense of drama and pace is inherent in everything they do and so the theater involved here (this was originally conceived of as a ballet) is not a stretch for them. But the emotional changes involved in the solemnity of the cause -- which Riley's mythical undertaking takes absolutely seriously -- that move from great seriousness to righteous anger to being in awe of the Divine and the urge to give in to various temptations are all illustrated by rhythmic, tonal, and timbral changes within the score. Modes shift from interval to interval without seam, hesitation, or mindless transition. Riley takes all of the musical ideas he holds dear, places them in the context of all the world's musical styles he holds sacred, and then creates for them an allegory that has lasting implications for how people view not only history and their role in the present, but how they conduct their view of the world around them forever more. That this is done without a lyric or being autodidactic is a small miracle. That he and the Kronos Quartet have produced a string quartet at the end of the twentieth century that stands as one of the most sophisticated and musically challenging in the history of Western music is an enigma. (Thom Jurek)

Anne Gastinel / Yuri Bashmet JOSEPH HAYDN Concertos pour Violoncelle 1 & 2

With the CD catalogue now awash with recordings of these concertos featuring every conceivable interpretative standpoint, any new version has to make a pretty strong case for its existence. Anne Gastinel is a technically adroit soloist, with an attractive, resinous tone, and certainly gives pleasure in her eloquently shaped accounts of the slow movements. Elsewhere, though, her playing can be a shade routine and undifferentiated, short on spontaneity and rhythmic imagination: listen to both the rival versions in, say, the finale of the C major work, and you’ll hear a wit, fantasy and lightness of touch that elude the efficient but slightly stolid Gastinel. And both Steven Isserlis and, especially, Truls Mork, find altogether more grace and allure in the outer movements of the D major Concerto, where Gastinel sounds dutiful rather than delighted in the bravura passagework. In fairness, she is done few favours by the prosaic, overemphatic orchestral accompaniments or by an ultra-close recorded balance which picks up every tiny sniff and hiss. And it is miserly of Auvidis to offer just 49 minutes of music at full price.' (Richard Wigmore/Gramophone)

Elina Vähälä / Virtuosi di Kuhmo JOSEPH HAYDN Violin Concertos

Haydn's three surviving violin concertos (a fourth is lost but might still resurface) were probably composed between 1765 and 1770. The music from this portion of Haydn's career has lately been subjected to a major re-evalution that's all to the good, rescuing many works from the limbo of halfhearted performances. It's especially helpful in the case of these concertos, which were composed for Haydn's lead virtuoso at Esterháza, Luigi Tomasini (one of the manuscripts even bears the note "fatto per il Luigi," "done for Luigi"). Haydn was not a skilled violinist himself, and the works are not virtuosically conceived. But he likely had input from Tomasini, and the sizable Violin Concerto in A major, Hob. 7a/3, especially benefits from the gutsy approach adopted here by Finland's Virtuosi di Kuhmo and violinist Elina Vähälä, whose playful flair makes an attractive contrast with the rather hard-edged orchestral playing (made even harder-edged by church sound whose lack of naturalness can't be disguised by the high-tech super audio multichannel recording). Vähälä, who is nothing if not photogenic, is a fine Haydn interpreter with a strong sense of the composer's humor. Sample her confident playing in the finale of the Violin Concerto in G major, Hob. 7a/4, where the violin extracts a jolly line from the orchestra's mock-weighty quasi-fugal texture at the beginning. The booklet notes, in English and Finnish, are informative despite a few gaffes -- "empfindsam" is a misleading word for these works, which are sunny and bear no traces of the gloomy, dramatic music of C.P.E. Bach. On balance a strong outing that makes one eager to hear more of what will emerge as Finland's cadre of vigorous young performers take up more music of the Classical era. (James Manheim)

Vanessa Benelli Mosell [R] EVOLUTION Stockhausen / Beffa / Stravinsky

Between 1952 and 1961, Stockhausen composed a series of 11 piano pieces, mostly quite brief, which he later referred to as his “drawings”. In them he tested out the techniques that he used to such spectacular effect in his large-scale works of that period, and which took him stylistically on a rapid development from the pointillism of total serialism, through the concepts of musical groups and moments to his exploration of mobile forms that left many organisational decisions to the performer.

Much later in his career he would produce another eight piano pieces, all either conceived as part of his week-long opera cycle Licht or derived from music in it. But it’s the ground-breaking Klavierstücke from the 1950s that Vanessa Benelli Mosell, who studied with Stockhausen in the final years of his life, concentrates on here. She plays eight of them – omitting the two longest, the sixth and the monumental 10th, as well as the 11th, with its maze of alternative musical paths for the pianist to take – and ends with what’s perhaps the most notorious of all of them, Klavierstück IX, in which the opening chord is repeated obsessively 139 times, which seems like an early exercise in minimalism, though the music’s subsequent journey through a forest of trills is anything but minimalist.

Mosell confronts this music fearlessly, shaping the smaller-scale pieces (the shortest, Klavierstück III, lasts just 38 seconds) as elegantly as she can, taking their technical challenges in her stride and above all conveying the sense of cutting-edge invention and innovation that is so characteristic of Stockhausen’s early music.

The rest of her debut disc for Decca, though, is disappointing. It carries the title [R]evolution, though in piano terms there’s nothing particularly iconoclastic about the two works that follow the Stockhausen. The three-movement Suite by the French composer Karol Beffa (born 1973) is anodyne and utterly unremarkable, even though Mosell doesn’t seem to make as much of the music’s colouristic potential as she might, while her account of Stravinsky’s Petrushka Movements sometimes seems less of a performance than an assault, and a rough-edged and rhythmically slapdash one at that. The energy and enthusiasm that make her Stockhausen playing so arresting seem to be applied much less precisely elsewhere. (The Guardian)

Alina Ibragimova / Cédric Tiberghien BEETHOVEN Violin Sonatas - 3

Ibragimova and Tiberghien have already received universally positive praise for the first two instalments of their Beethoven sonata cycle, so expectations run high for this third and final disc. Although I haven't heard the previous two, listening to this one I can well understand what the fuss was all about, for this is seriously accomplished Beethoven interpretation. The players have an extraordinary rapport, yet both put their individual stamp on the work, essential for any great Beethoven performance. 

The three discs each record a single Wigmore Hall recital, hence the jumping around the chronology of the sonatas. The absence of any late period works in the cycle makes this a practical arrangement. It is not like the string quartets, where serious thought has to be given to which early works to pair with the late quartets. Instead, the slightly less Titanic Opp. 47 and 96 can each close a concert with appropriate gravitas and without completely stealing the show. 

Ibragimova and Tiberghien are at their best in the earlier sonatas anyway. The young(ish) Beethoven was working at a time when the duo sonata was in a state of transition, with the balance gradually shifting in favour of the melody instrument over the keyboard. The genius of these performances is in the way that the players are able to keep that question of balance open. They are often equal partners, but just as often, one or other will take the lead, initiating elaborate semiquaver runs or suddenly dominating the texture with some florid decorative figure. But everything here is fluid, and none of these power imbalances lasts for long. 

I'm particularly struck by the way that both players are able to change their volume and timbre instantaneously mid-phrase, and to change the course of that phrase as a result, a quiet conclusion, for example, retrospectively taking all the bravura out of an imposing opening statement. 

Ibragimova has a fairly light tone. It is certainly attractive, and there is plenty of variety too, but if there is anything to say against this recording it is that the narrowness of that violin sound may not be to everybody's taste. She has a surprising ability to create airy, floating textures despite this reedy sound. In the second movement of Op.30 No.1, for example, the violin breezes across the piano textures with wonderful delicacy, but still with that slight edge to the sound. 

It works well there, but for me the Kreutzer needs something else. It needs a sense of weight from the violin that only comes from a big, round sound. The playfulness that brings the violin parts of the earlier sonatas to life seems almost to trivialise the Kreutzer's sterner textures. And Tiberghien holds back a little too much in some of the louder passages. That complex power balance between the keyboard and the violin becomes an outright paradox in the Kreutzer, with the piano line often looking like a solo part, but forced into the role of an accompaniment by the equally arresting violin part. There are a number of places where the violin and piano right hand ought to be working as equal partners, but what we always hear is the violin with the piano's figurations subsumed. No matter, Beethoven asks for the impossible, and this is one legitimate way to square the circle. 

 Wigmore Hall Live manage their usual high standard of audio recording here. I love the way that they are always able to capture the ambience of the hall's warm acoustic, making it almost the third player in the mix. All round an impressive recording, then, not the last word in Beethoven sonatas, but then how could it be? If anything that is a virtue; the subjectivity of these readings brings the players themselves, and their own attitudes to the music, clearly into focus. The interpretations are coherent and mature, and the teamwork between the players is what makes the recording something special. (Gavin Dixon, MusicWeb International)