Janine Jansen / Mischa Maisky / Lucas Debargue SHOSTAKOVICH Piano Trio No. 1

 

PIANO TRIO NO. 1

Mischa Maisky / Martha Argerich BEETHOVEN Die Cellosonaten

DIE CELLOSONATEN

Mischa Maisky / Lily Maisky 20TH CENTURY CLASSICS

                                                         20TH CENTURY CLASSICS

Mischa Maisky / Lily Maisky ADAGIETTO

This very personal album, dedicated to Mischa Maisky’s young daughter Mila, features all-new recordings with his daughter Lily Maisky (piano). It features relaxing and inspiring popular melodies from the Bach/Marcello Adagio to Grieg’s “Solveig’s Song”, from Massenet’s “Méditation” to Tchaikovsky’s “Valse sentimentale”.

It also includes a multi-track arrangement of Mahler’s Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony with Mischa playing all parts (except the part for harp) – a truly captivating all-cello version of this classic.

Three bonus live recordings with Martha Argerich, Janine Jansen, Julian Rachlin, and Sascha Maisky.

Mischa Maisky / Daria Hovora SCHUBERT Songs without Words

The paradox here is that the main item – or, rather, the longest work on the disc and the only one that isn’t a transcription of a song – is also among the least significant, musically speaking. Much as I adore the Arpeggione Sonata, even I couldn’t place it on the same exalted level of such Lieder masterpieces as Du bist die Ruh or Schwanengesang’s “Am Meer”. Great songs, yes – and yet by divorcing Schubert’s melodies from their texts, you lose the verbal imagery, the story-line (such as it is) and the prompting inspiration behind the tune. In fact, what you’re left with is elevated background music.
Maisky’s Arpeggione is warm, effortless and, for the most part, judiciously phrased. Daria Hovora remains discreetly in the background (as a musical personality, that is, not as a physical presence) and although I found some of the Allegretto’s rubato just a mite contrived, the performance is a good one. As to the songs, DG’s annotator Reinhard Beuth tells us that, in each case, “Maisky has simply dispensed with the poet’s strident and often disruptive voice and, not having to worry about the poem’s superficial, verbal contents, is able to group these songs together on purely musical lines”. ‘Strident’? ‘Disruptive’? Listen to Husch, Fischer-Dieskau, Erb, Schiotz, Hotter, Berger, Schumann or Lehmann – see what they can do with those ‘superficial, verbal contents’, Mr Beuth!
Most of the transcriptions are ruinously anodyne, although Maisky makes a lovely sound, especially in, say, An die Musik, where the cello’s upper registers project with great warmth of tone. Songs like Die Forelle and Heidenroslein sound cumbersome and uncomfortable; and as for “Der Leiermann”, “Am Meer”, “Standchen” and Du bist die Ruh, the absence of words is a crucial inadequacy. Had Maisky commanded the ‘speaking’ tone of a Casals, a Feuermann, a Fournier or a Marechal, perhaps the true meaning of each song would have registered, if only by dint of interpretative implication. The more overtly romantic Lieder of Brahms and Schumann might have responded better to such treatment (their melodies suit the cello rather more than those of Schubert), but most Schubert songs sound far better sung than played.' (Gramophone)

Mischa Maisky / Berliner Philharmoniker / Zubin Mehta DVORÁK Cello Concerto RICHARD STRAUSS Don Quixote

These performances were recorded in front of an audience in Berlin's Philharmonie during December 2002. Maisky has dedicated this disc to his old mentor, Gregor Piatigorsky, who died thirty years earlier. Piatigorsky, of course, was a master in this repertoire, and his recordings of it endure even today. Maisky is a fine cellist, but it is less likely that these readings will stand the test of time the way that Piatigorsky's have.

It's not because Maisky lacks his mentor's technical ability. The problem is with the interpretations. Maisky is willful, much as Leonard Bernstein was when he conducted the Dvořák with Maisky back in the 1980s, but without Bernstein's electric personality. In spite of it all, there's a reticence to Maisky's playing that is out of character with this music. This reticence is emphasized by Mehta's conducting, which is correct, but thick and not very interesting. It's as if Mehta is trying to remove the last possibility that some listeners might find these works vulgarly exciting. (If only Mehta would reclaim the passion he had access to in the 1960s and 70s!) The coda to the Dvořák's opening movement, for example, doesn't get anyone's adrenaline flowing, and the opening minutes of the finale, usually so compelling, are even more stolid. (For what its worth, Maisky comments that he has removed some of the "distortions" that have become part of this work's tradition since the very first performance.)

Don Quixote is even more problematic. Mehta dusts off every single orchestral detail with care, but in terms of emotion, he and Maisky draw an almost complete blank. The cellist doesn't succeed in painting a multifaceted portrait of the knight. Shorn of its humanism, as it is here, Don Quixote is not much more than a series of noisy but cleverly orchestrated episodes. (Raymond Tuttle)

Martha Argerich CHAMBER MUSIC

This 8 CD boxed set is another in a series to commemorate the art of Martha Argerich in her 70^th birthday year. How lucky we all are as music-lovers to have the chance - where we don’t already own them - of obtaining these fantastic performances by a true artist. The title of one of the articles in the accompanying booklet is “The spirit of collaboration”. That sums up this set, for Argerich has, for many years, eschewed solo performances in favour of the collaborative process where she shares the platform with a whole range of world class colleagues, some very well known and some less so. You can be sure that if she wants to play with them they are at the very top of their musical game. I recently reviewed her solo and duos set which I described as “an embarrassment of riches”; this is an even greater one: 8 CDs of performances of the works of 9 composers in which she is accompanied by a total of 23 different musicians! The choice of repertoire cannot be faulted, involves plenty of variety and shows Argerich as a perfect fellow musician whether in duos, trios, quartets, quintets or septet. (Steve Arloff)  

 

Mischa Maisky / Martha Argerich J.S. BACH Sonates pour Violoncelle BWV 1027-1029

Bach wrote these sonatas, some of whose music presents a reworking of earlier trio compositions, for a partnership of viola da gamba and harpsichord. The G major and D major works adopt the four-movement sonata da chiesa scheme, whilst the G minor, organized more along the lines of a concerto, is in three movements. The harpsichord is treated as a concertante instrument almost throughout, whilst the viola da gamba writing reflects the virtuoso position which the instrument had reached in late-baroque German music. These are absorbingly interesting and emotionally satisfying works which reach their high-water mark in the expansive and very beautiful Sonata in G minor, BWV1029.
Most of the recordings on the market are performances on the instruments which Bach specifically asked for, but intelligent and expressive readings recently came from Yo-Yo Ma and Kenneth Cooper on CBS. Here is another which takes us a step, but a big step further from Bach's own sound-picture. Let me say at once that the playing of both artists is highly accomplished and is a true partnership throughout. The DG engineers have been careful not to give either instrument undue prominence over the other and that ensures both textural clarity and musical sense. Mischa Maisky is a fine a technician with an unerring ear for intonation and a good sense of phrase. Martha Argerich's Bach playing probably needs little in the way of introduction from me—her recording of the C minor Partita, BWV826, is one of the finest by a pianist that I am acquainted with (DG 2531 088, 3/80—nla). In this new release there is a comparable stylistic assurance, clarity in articulation and liveliness of temperament though I find the result less satisfying and less convincing. The fault is not entirely hers for my chief reservation rests with the character of the piano itself. It's too plummy for my ear and that quality is emphasized by a somewhat hollow acoustic too far removed from a chamber ambience; but I found, also, that chords are apt to sound heavy in the slow movements and that the way they are broken up at cadences is stylistically unconvincing. My feeling is that, in the end, these sonatas do not work well on a piano but there will be many, perhaps, who disagree and they will not be disappointed by the Maisky/Argerich partnership.
As I said earlier, there is some splendid music-making here, but I hope prospective investors hitherto unacquainted with these pieces will not be deterred from hearing them played on the instruments for which Bach wrote them. There is a world of difference between the end results of two such disparate sonorities.' (Nicholas Anderson)

Martha Argerich CARTE BLANCHE

The first release in Deutsche Grammophon’s new partnership with the Verbier Festival that will see the release of exceptional concerts with great artists (2 sets per year from 2016) recorded by Verbier over the years.

Something special was bound to happen when Martha Argerich was given carte blanche to invite whoever she wanted, to play whatever she and they chose at her Verbier Festival concert on 27 July 2007. She was the life and soul of the party, playing in seven works and making a rare solo appearance in Schumann’s Kinderszenen. Argerich’s artistic partners are Yuri Bashmet, Renaud Capuçon, Lang Lang, Mischa Maisky, Gabriela Montero, Julian Rachlin in a killer programme.

An uproarious encore was given by Gabriela Montero improvising a tango version of “Happy Birthday” (for Mischa Maisky’s daughter Lily Maisky).

This release offers over two hours of exceptional music-making with an enviable line-up of colleagues is now re-created on these two CDs. (McAlister Matheson Music)