S Bach composed his French Suites (or at least the first five) in 1722 for his second wife, Anna Magdalena, who used them for teaching. (They are in her “notebook”). These dance suites, showing all the composer’s contrapuntal skill, are less outgoing than the English Suites and Partitas, suggesting they were designed solely for domestic use and may in fact have been intended for the clavichord. Vladimir Ashkenazy, on this new recording, plays a concert grand. “I use few ornaments and don’t think of the sound of the harpsichord,” he writes. “What I try to do is play on what we have today, and make the combination of voices as clear as possible.” That he does, and produces some warm-toned pianism into the bargain. The Sarabandes, in particular those from Suites Nos 1 and 5, are sensitively caressed; the Gigue from Suite No 3 teeters excitingly on the edge. Ashkenazy turned 80 in July of this year, and has retired from public piano concertising due to arthritis, but this is barely hinted at in these 2016 recordings. The Courante from Suite No 5 would probably have been more fluent earlier in his career, but overall there is no doubting his…

If you’ve ever wondered why you’d never heard of Vaughan Williams’ keyboard music, you might find the answer in these well-performed examples by the excellent British pianist Mark Bebbington. It’s important to hear the full range of any great composer’s music, and Discoveries, recently reviewed in Limelight, brought us some of his unheard orchestral works. It’s wonderful music, hidden away for decades. But that is orchestral music, of which the composer was a master.The piano, being a percussion instrument simply cannot release the Vaughan Williams magic. It works a treat for Beethoven, but is relatively alien to the misty loveliness of Vaughan Williams. Two works for solo piano, A Little Piano Book and Suite of Six Short Pieces, are pleasant, but not much more. Of sterner stuff is the Introduction and Fugue for two pianos, a first recording; at 17 minutes it has some substance. The Lake in the Mountains is claimed to be a masterpiece, and is possibly the best piece on the disc. However, it descends into musical head-banging with a great deal of thumping, not a style I associate with the composer. The arrangements of his more famous pieces, such as the Tallis Fantasia and Greensleeves, and…

Schumann’s Humoreske and Davidsbündlertänze are hard nuts to crack. They both reveal Schumann at his most ruminative and discursive. The Humoreske is one of Schumann’s kaleidoscopic “mood” pieces – much more than the salonistic bagatelles of Grieg and Dvořák. Schumann lamented the absence of a French word for whimsy, which is what this piece is about, as much as anything. Buratto plays beautifully but at times a bit anonymously. Compare Horowitz’s recording (made when he was 76) where there’s more animation and imagination. The Davidsbündlertänze (David’s Club Dances) were another celebration of the inspiration of Schumann’s imaginary world and his bi-polar muses and the foundation members and twin pillars of the “club”: Florestan, active, adventurous, heroic, and Eusibius, contemplative and introverted. (David triumphed over the Philistines: i.e. the composer’s conservative critics.)The 18-section work, another love letter to Clara, presents challenges in terms of cohesion. There’s a subtle connective tissue but it would be missed by most listeners. Many of these “dances” are hardly terpsichoral but Buratto has, for the most part, their mutli-faceted measure, from the frenetic bursts of enery to the quintessential Schumann reverie. The centrepiece is the exquisite Blumenstück. Here, Buratto is equally exquisite, though not yet in…

Glass on the piano to the max rather than to the Minimalist.

Umberto Clerici uses Bach's Cello Suites as a kind of platform to explore the experience of a solo cello suite: its pacing, progression of tempi and mood, dance character, and dramatic flow.

German violin virtuosa Isabelle Faust and Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov have released an extensive list of recordings of chamber works by Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Shostakovich and Weber. This, their most recent release, sees them dabbling in French repertoire, with two works by French romantics César Franck and Ernest Chausson. Franck and Chausson really are a perfect complement to each other. Both composers inject the same kind of lyricism and harmonic drama into their music, Chausson lying somewhere between Franck and Debussy in terms of style. This recent recording sees the pairing of Franck’s classic Violin Sonata with Chausson’s Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, Op. 21. The Chausson is less well known than the Franck, but is nonetheless a wonderful example of chamber music at its most intimate and dynamic, and sees Faust and Melnikov joined by the Salagon Quartet. Faust’s signature silky, gauze-like tone colour is on fine display throughout the recording, though particularly in the Franck’s fragile third movement, and Melnikov’s light touch on the c.1885 Érard piano lends a sense of period authenticity to the performance. The reading of the Franck Sonata captures all of its dreaminess and nonchalance, balanced nicely by more rugged displays…

It’s hard to argue there could be a better way to demonstrate Fauré’s unparalleled ability to express melody than through the combination of piano and cello. This new recording collects all of Fauré’s compositions for the two instruments, tracing them from his early ‘salon’ period through to his sparse later compositions, which he wrote when he was almost completely deaf. While his two major cello sonatas (1917 and 1921) feature, the majority of this disc highlights Fauré’s ability to perfect the miniature. Cellist Andreas Brantelid and pianist Bengt Forsberg are perfect partners for these ‘songs without words’. Brantelid has a rich, claret tone. He perhaps takes a bit too much liberty in elongating phrases at times, but he has the consistency of sound to sustain the ear. Forsberg is an experienced chamber musician and plays with willing support, but sparkles through the texture at the appropriate moments. Nothing demonstrates this more than the famous Élégie. The two sonatas allow Forsberg to demonstrate more of his virtuosity, and he rises to the occasion admirably. This album is a worthwhile portrayal of this master of chamber music. Fauré shied away from large orchestral colours, to instead busy himself with works of a…

Benjamin Britten’s interest in the music of his great Baroque predecessor Henry Purcell extended far beyond basing his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra on the Rondeau from Purcell’s Abdelazer suite. Purcell’s songs were championed in Britten’s own idiosyncratic arrangements for piano and voice.Purcell’s music for string consort also exerted a fascination for Britten whose String Quartet No 2 contains a Chacony: a direct homage to Purcell’s  ‘chaconne’ for four-part string ensemble. Britten made a performing edition of Purcell’s Chacony in the late 1950s (revised in 1963), and this is the version used by the Emerson String Quartet – here celebrating their 40th anniversary with the first release on Decca’s new Decca Gold label – in a fascinating programme which also includes a selection of Purcell’s Fantazias for viol consort along with Britten’s Second and Third String Quartets. Despite some three centuries and enormous stylistic differences separating the two composers, their music complements each other’s rather well – which is unsurprising, given Britten’s updating of archaic forms and Purcell’s love of dissonance and complexity.Unsurprising too, in this instance, given the Emersons’ insightful and highly expressive readings, which find the modern in Purcell and the ancient in Britten while maintaining a…

This is the third volume of Mozart works that Alina Ibragimova and Cédric Tiberghien have recorded, and they’ve stuck to a rather neat little formula for each CD by juxtaposing Mozart’s later compositions for violin and piano with those of his younger self. In this case, the early works (K27 and K31) are those of a ten-year old Mozart, who was touring the courts of Europe. The tour was designed by Leopold Mozart to highlight his son’s extraordinary skills, so the flashy keyboard part takes the lion’s share of the musical material, leaving the violin with the accompaniment. Ibragimova and Tiberghien wisely give these pieces an unaffected performance. The star of the show on this disc is the Sonata in B Flat Major, K454, which Mozart famously composed so rapidly that he didn’t have time to write the piano part out for performance, playing from memory instead. This is sublime music-making, and particular note must be made of the duo’s beautiful playing in the slow movement. The Sonata in F Major, K547 was designed for beginners to play as a money-making exercise, something like a chamber music companion piece to the well-known Sonata in C Major that most piano students…

A gently swelling guitar figure is adorned with flecks of pizzicato cello in the atmospheric opening to guitarist-composer Jaime Zenamon’s Reflexões No 6. The track throws the listener immediately into the rich sound-world of Boyd Meets Girl – a duo formed by Australian guitarist Rupert Boyd and American cellist Laura Metcalf. Their debut, self-titled album features works by Fauré, Bach, Ross Edwards, Gnattali, Piazzolla, De Falla, Pärt and Steve Porcaro – an eclectic programme bound together by the distinctive instrumental combination, the musical possibilities of which the players explore in wide-ranging detail. The Doloroso second movement of Reflexões is sparse and haunting, Metcalf’s cello carving rich-hued melodic lines over a crisp, dissonant accompaniment from Boyd. The musical world shifts with Fauré’s tender Opus 50 Pavanne, arranged for the combination by Metcalf and Boyd. An arrangement of a handful of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions sees the pair strike out in another direction in a joyful romp of brisk counterpoint. The mood becomes more reflective with a stripped back arrangement of the expansive second movement of Ross Edwards’ Guitar Concerto Arafura Dances, arranged for the duo by the composer. The Café 1930 movement from Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango, borrowed from the flute and guitar…

On Migration, Slava Grigoryan and the Australian String Quartet have teamed up to record three recent works written for the unusual combination of guitar and string quartet. The album is named for the first of these, a single-movement work composed in 2003 by American guitarist Ralph Towner, a name that will be more familiar to fans of the German jazz and new music record label ECM than to classical music audiences. Migration languished unrecorded until now, and Towner credits Grigoryan’s enthusiasm and prodigious skill (indeed, in his hands its complex technical demands seem effortless) as central to the success of the work’s complex scalic runs and their integration with elegantly angular string parts. It sits easily alongside Flexible Sky by Austrian guitarist and composer Wolfgang Muthspiel, a dynamic but contemplative work comprising four contrasting movements. Dark and exciting, it features beautiful glissandi, and the notable interplay between violins and guitar reflects Muthspiel’s earlier training on that instrument. Nevertheless, for Flexible Sky, Muthspiel’s approach to instrumentation is democratic, noting that for him the work is “an interactive web of equal voices”. Towner, Muthspiel and Grigoryan regularly perform together as a guitar trio, indicating a degree of intimacy and mutual… Continue reading…

This Bruckner Three augurs well for what I hope will be a complete Bruckner symphonic cycle. The Third is, with the Second, probably the most tinkered with. The best performance of this work I’ve ever heard was with this very orchestra under Kurt Sanderling on an Electrola LP. This orchestra has just the right Teutonic heft but, in the hands of Nelsons, assumes a real finesse (influenced by his work with the Boston Symphony?) in the softer Gesangsperioden (lyrical passages). For Bruckner anoraks, this is the 1889 version, described somewhat fancifully by one critic as the “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am” one, a sentiment one doubts the resolutely chaste composer ever experienced. Bruckner was far, at this stage, from exploring, consciously or otherwise, the pyschological undercurrents apparent in the Eighth and Ninth symphonies. Nelsons’ take has neither the (impressive) tempo  idiosyncrasies of Jochum, nor the glamorised sheen and sleek legato of Karajan, nor yet the craggy implacability of Klemperer. The great recording producer Walter Legge, once said that Moghul architecture was monumental but finished with the lapidary detail of a jewel – something that all successful Bruckner conductors always achieve. Nelsons is aware of the need to construct an edifice,…