Ever since his Leipzig debut in 1896, Franz Lehár longed to be produced at the Vienna State Opera. The barriers – beginning with Mahler who thought his music amateurish – went up from the start. It was only  a financial crisis that led Clemens Krauss, desperate for a box office hit, to open the hallowed portals to the now famous composer in 1934. The result was Giuditta, and it tolled a knell not just for Lehár – it was his final stage work – but for Viennese operetta itself, an art form destined not to survive the Anschluss. That sense of resignation hangs over this bittersweet romance. Giuditta, an innkeeper’s wife, elopes with Octavio, a soldier, to Africa. When he slips off to battle, she believes herself abandoned, becomes a dancer and finally agrees to a liaison with a wealthy English Lord. Octavio returns too late – he still cares, but the song of love “faded away long ago”.  Lehár really pushes the boat out, creating his richest, most beautifully orchestrated score, packed with melodic arias including Giuditta’s Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiß. Ulf Schirmer’s new Munich recording is orchestrally stunning, perfectly paced with full, rich sound. Christiane Libor…

Taking their name from Rameau’s opéra-ballet Les Surprises de l’Amour, this talented, young French ensemble now turns their attention away from the subjects of their debut recording, Rebel de père en fils and François Francœur, to tackle Michel-Richard Delalande and André Cardinal Destouches’ opéra-ballet for Louis XV, Les Éléments.First performed at the Tuileries in 1721 but enjoying considerable popularity beyond the court in the following decades, Les Éléments comprises a prologue, four sung entrées with danced divertissements and a concluding chaconne. Jean-Féry Rebel composed his own extraordinarily original 1737 creation ballet Les Éléments (not recorded on Les Surprises’ previous release). But the present opéra-ballet is full of vivid instances of word-painting too, from the subtle melismatic treatment of passages involving undulating waves or the flying of arrows to the more startling howling and crashing of wind and thunder. Les Surprises’ harpsichordist and Director, Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas, has again chosen to use chamber-sized forces throughout, focusing on instrumental colour – recorders, transverse flutes and oboe are particularly effective here – and the rapid, highly dramatic execution of dance rhythms and rhetorical gestures more potently to illustrate the brilliance of this work.

These extracts from the German-born Jewish cosmopolite Meyerbeer’s four grand opéras and two opéras-comiques, recorded in Sofia, show his ability to combine German orchestration with Italian bel canto and French drama in a heady mixture that excites, moves and charms. The husband-and-wife team of soprano Hjördis Thébault and baritone Pierre-Yves Pruvot pass with flying colours challenging arias demanding both agility and dramatic heft; like Handel and Rossini before him, Meyerbeer wrote for the best singers in Europe. Thébault’s dark voice and early career as a mezzo give her the range to sing both the lovely Italianate Robert, toi que j’aime, with its harp triplets and haunting cor anglais accompaniment, and Sélika’s death under the poisonous manchineel tree, a scene for a dramatic soprano.   Although a baritone, Pruvot is as comfortable singing a bass part as he is the optional high notes in the Adamastor ballad or the wild O puissante magie.Conductor Didier Talpain has the sense of rhythm, texture and colour necessary for Meyerbeer, apparent in the brilliant chorus from Robert le Diable, the luminous entr’acte for strings from Dinorah, and the eerie conversation between two clarinets at the start of Le Prophète or the same opera’s famous Valse…

The curtain rises on a large severed head sitting on a sea of crumbly black ash. As the camera pans in tightly, we see blood encrusted in the corner of the eyes and mouth, while one eye socket is smashed. It is the head of Goliath after his defeat by the triumphant young warrior David, now hero of the Israelites. Behind, an enormous table is heaped with floral arrangements, fruit, animal carcasses and an elegant swan. Clustered around the rather macabre banquet, the cast gleam in brightly coloured 18th-century costumes with extravagant wigs and make-up lending them a slightly crazed air. Bathed in Joachim Klein’s sickly lighting, the extravagant tableau looks like a warped Flemish still-life where everything is so lusciously overripe it will soon turn fetid.  So begins Barrie Kosky’s wildly imaginative production of Handel’s oratorio Saul, which received rave reviews when it premiered at Glyndebourne in 2015. Programmed as the centrepiece of the 2017 Adelaide Festival, here is a chance to see the original Glyndebourne cast, while the camera allows you an up-close look at the performers and vivid visual imagery. Working with designer Katrin Lea Tag, Kosky presents Handel’s original three acts in two parts: the first…

Trust Harry Christophers and The Sixteen to get to the heart of the matter. This selection of 22 carols is an engaging mix of old and new, sung unaccompanied and without the cloying sentimentality that often mars the Christmas season and threatens to make a mockery of a story that could have particular resonance in our own age of mass human displacement. Here we have singing that conveys wonderment and joy, but also empathetically touches on the less glamorous aspects of the human condition. The older carols are not necessarily well known. As Christophers notes, some are out fashion, but none the worse for that. Traditional compositions such as This endris night with its catchy tune together with the Somerset Carol and the Gallery Carol both of which evoke innocent merriment, are all worth reviving, while better known 20th-century favourites such as Peter Warlock’s Bethlehem Down, John Ireland’s The Holy Boy and Henry Walford Davies’ O little town of Bethlehem have an appealing intimacy. A welcome stylistic variety informs the choice of newer carols. Whether it is the close harmony of Morten Lauridsen’s O magnum mysterium, the subtle but effective motoric minimalism of Howard Skempton’s Adam lay ybounden or the…

Super-sized Messiah: no fries, but plenty of spicy extras.

Renowned conductor Antonio Pappano is best known as music director of the Royal Opera House, but he is also a very fine pianist. Songs on texts by William Shakespeare finds Pappano accompanying the equally renowned English historian and tenor Ian Bostridge on an expansive collection featuring composers across five centuries who have set Shakespeare’s texts and musical dramatic devices, very few of which are stand-alone songs, to music. Not surprisingly, English composers are a strong presence: these include Morley, Byrd and their contemporary John Wilson, whose Take, o take those lips away is a highlight. Quilter’s Come away, death is mysterious and affecting, greatly impressing and influencing  Warlock, who is also featured here, along with Britten and Tippett. Bostridge is commanding throughout, and justly famous for his attention to detail and extraordinarily nuanced delivery. The recording is glorious: rich, spacious and resonant. The final track on this collection, When that I was and a little tiny boy (Anon.), sung a cappella by Bostridge, is nothing short of extraordinary, from both performance and recording perspectives. The sumptuous packaging contains meticulously researched and detailed liner notes by Christopher Wilson, and includes all song texts. This is an excellent and beautifully… Continue reading…

Edmund Rubbra is a composer who has faded from English musical history, written out of a narrative that jumps straight from Vaughan Williams and Holst to Britten and Walton. But this release from The Sixteen is a defiant and overdue attempt to rewrite that history, to establish Rubbra where he belongs, as one of the most distinctive harmonic voices of his generation – not the conservative throwback he has been painted, but a composer for whom the possibilities of tonality were far from exhausted. That voice might emerge most emphatically in Rubbra’s 11 symphonies, but his choral works distil their harmonic language into something cleaner, more concise. The sonic imagination here roams widely, from the craggy, sharp-edged beauty of the Tenebrae Motets to the gauzy clouds of modal richness established by the two choirs of the Missa Cantuariensis and the lightly-worn contrapuntal skill of Vain Wits and Except the Lord. This music gives little away on the page – its impact is all in the pacing and careful textural balance of performance. Harry Christophers deploys his singers with care, ensuring absolute vertical clarity and balance, but also a horizontal flow that propels music whose organic, evolving structures can easily become…

Ernst Krenek’s resumé reads like a pro forma template of Austro-Germany’s forgotten composers sent into exile by the political climate of the 1930s. Studying with Franz Schreker and a short-lived marriage to Mahler’s daughter Anna ensured a thorough grounding in heady Late Romantic expressionism, dabbling with atonality before embracing Hindemithian democratic craft and making a big splash in 1927 with Jonny Spielt Auf; a key example of Zeitoper. Staged in over 100 European theatres, the pseudo-jazz inflected score and Jonny’s ethnicity would bring fame and notoriety but aroused the ire of the racial purifiers waiting to seize power. Krenek’s adoption of Schoenberg’s serial technique in the 1930s would seal his fate; his opera Karl V would be banned by the Nazis and he would be denounced as a “degenerate” so he decamped to Palm Springs, sheltering in academia for the rest of his life where he produced a steady stream of fine compositions that, apart from occasional performances in rebuilt Germany, were ignored.  His Reisebuch aus den Österreichischen Alpen song cycle of 1929 was a response to the previous year’s 100th anniversary of the death of Schubert. Spurred by a visit to the Alps, it is a revisionist take on…

Angela Hewitt wouldn’t be the first Canadian pianist to record Bach’s Goldberg Variations twice and, like Glenn Gould’s second performance, Hewitt takes longer over her remake. Her first, recorded in 1999, had critics throwing superlatives around like confetti: “If you only buy one Bach album in this anniversary year, let it be this one. A desert-island disc!” said the man in London’s Sunday Times. But my tropical island might not seem the perfect paradise if Hewitt’s was the only set of Goldbergs on offer. In a world where John Butt exists and Mahan Esfahani has just recorded an exceptionally nuanced performance on harpsichord, complete with an appropriately juicy tuning temperament, it feels like Hewitt is trying to catch an argument that has long since moved on. Of course, it’s that very dependability that will endear this disc to many and, on its own terms, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Hewitt’s performance. Eyebrows might be raised when she ignores some repeats during the opening Aria – her first version was branded with the strapline “Includes all repeats!” – but otherwise her immaculate voice-leading, rapid-fire articulation and slipstream rhythmic momentum keep the flame burning. Hewitt’s Fazioli is lighter-on-its-feet than the Steinway…

Following on from her superb 2008 recording of Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin, harpsichordist Winsome Evans also follows in the footsteps of Bach and his contemporaries by devising “keyboard transcriptions of all these solo works emulating Bach’s stylistic textural idioms, compositional procedures and performance practices.” Evans’ copious liner notes demonstrate an extraordinary erudition, an absolute fidelity to Bach’s musical language and an uncompromising attitude towards surmounting every difficulty. She has availed herself of as many 18th-century compositional and performing techniques as she thought necessary to produce a convincing, historically informed realisation of these masterworks, including frequent sharing of melodies “across and between the hands”, composing new bass lines and countermelodies, filling out harmonies and, of course, extensive ornamentation, more often written-out rather than extemporised. And the performances? They are sublime: intimate and urgently expressive, with tasteful use of rubato and colour changes, in the slower movements such as the allemandes and sarabandes; joyful and exuberant in the faster dances such as the courantes and gigues. Together with the performing scores, both sets of recordings comprise a major contribution not just to contemporary Bach scholarship and performance, but to the enjoyment of lovers of Bach’s music everywhere.

Maria Razumovskaya is a London-based pianist who thinks deeply about the music she performs. As well as pursuing a performing career, she has a PhD in the life and work of Heinrich Neuhaus. Her veneration of such Russian giants influences her performance style and programming. This disc gives us two Bach transcriptions by Busoni: Chaconne in D Minor and Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ; Busoni’s own Fantasia in the style of Bach; Liszt’s Vallée d’Obermann and Funérailles; an Elegy by Rachmaninov, and a Fantasia by CPE Bach. They are all predominantly slow, minor-key pieces, either monumental or melancholy and often both. Razumovskaya’s polished technique is big enough to encompass the bell-suffused climax of Vallée d’Obermann, but she tends to approach every piece in the same ultra-Romantic way. CPE calls for spontaneity and unpredictability, qualities her carefully considered reading negates. Her most satisfying interpretation is of Busoni’s arrangement of the Chaconne from Bach’s Violin Partita No 2. Busoni completely reconceived it in pianistic terms, and the result is as solid as a set of variations by Brahms. Razumovskaya has the work’s measure and it encourages greater light and shade in her playing, but as a whole this recital is… Continue reading Get…