This is the debut release from the Rautio Piano Trio, and it’s an assured debut indeed. They perform three of Mozart’s Piano Trios (he only managed to write six, more’s the pity), the Trio in B Flat K502, the Trio in E, K542, and the Trio in G, K564. Mozart wrote these trios over the course of several years, during which time he also wrote The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. It might be me being tempted to hear things Mozart never intended, but I feel as though the breezily conversational writing of these trios is indebted to his operatic writing. There’s plenty of cheerful Mozartian melodic lines passing around the ensemble that can’t help but bring a smile to one’s face. These trios were composed specifically for Mozart himself to perform in Viennese concerts. Being well aware of the monetary potential in creating music that could sell, you can almost imagine Mozart composing with one eye on the audience as the movements unfold. The trios are filled with an almost palpable sense of delight in the way the music twists and turns. Pianist Jan Rautio performs here on a fortepiano that once belonged to Christopher Hogwood, and, like…

John Adams frequently references tradition in his music, using contemporary sonorities and forms to comment on the past. His most recent major orchestral work, Scheherazade.2, is only on the surface a nod to Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic poem, taking a more contemporary approach in telling the famous story. Remarking on the disturbing violence committed against women in stories from The Arabian Nights, Adams was inspired to reinvent the principal tale, imagining a strong and empowered ‘modern’ Scheherazade. The composer gives voice to this powerful retelling in a massive four-movement work that’s part symphony, part concerto, with a dramatic solo violin part embodying the Scheherazade character (another cursory nod to Rimsky-Korsakov’s original). The work receives here its premiere recording with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and David Robertson (also Chief Conductor of the SSO) with the soloist for whom it was written, Leila Josefowicz. Josefowicz’s performance is outstanding, negotiating the virtuosic solo part with passion, assurance and an ironclad tone. She slides, ducks and weaves around an often-aggressive orchestra that’s given an exotic flavour thanks to the addition of a Cimbalom – a Hungarian dulcimer. The St. Louis orchestra’s sound is simply magical and perfectly balanced in this recording under Robertson’s expert direction. 

This disc brings together an unlikely but convincing combination of instruments in a trio consisting of the organ, baroque oboe and baroque trumpet. The reasoning that Austral Harmony gives for this is rather interesting. A contemporary of Bach’s named Georg Friedrich Kauffmann apparently suggested in some of his chorale preludes that an oboe or “other agreeable instrument” (trumpet, in this case) could play alongside the organ so as to give the impression that an organ stop was being used. I rather like his amiably cheerful descriptions of his own pieces given in the liner notes: “the oboes have been used in such a way here, which should be announced as good news”. Good news indeed for fans of Baroque wind and brass! What you get is a recital focusing on the oboe and organ (with appearances from trumpeter Simon Desbruslais on a respectable six tracks) with music from JS Bach and his contemporaries. There’s actually significantly more by the “other” composers than there is by Bach, but they’re in a similar style, so if you like Bach, you’ll like the other composers here, too. I particularly enjoyed the Sonata o Oboe Solo col Basso by the magnificently named Gottfried August…

It is the earthy directness of violinist Franziska Pietsch’s sound, over Detlev Eisinger’s sepulchral piano, that captures the ear of the listener in this disc from Audite. Prokofiev likened a passage in the first movement of his First Violin Sonata to “wind sweeping across a cemetery” and Pietsch and Eisinger perfectly conjure this darkness, their spacious tempo giving the movement a sense of deep loneliness that periodically swells into pained longing. There is a gritty violence to the jagged Allegro brusco and the third movement is searingly plaintive. The intimate recording captures every detail of Pietsch’s resonant pizzicatos in the outer movements and the finale bristles with folk-energy, receding into quiet lyricism. The Second Violin Sonata – originally composed for flute but arranged for violin at David Oistrakh’s prompting – is almost pastoral. Composed during Prokofiev’s sojourn in the Ural Mountains during World War II, a jagged motif whose rhythm echoes the Morse Code “V for Victory” that accompanied the BBC’s broadcasts recalls the ongoing violence. The motif – three dots and a dash – sends aural sparks flying from Pietsch’s violin and there’s a quirky bounce to her Scherzo.  Pietsch and Eisinger interweave soulfully in the Andante and the finale…

Cellist Rachel Scott is spreading the gospel of classical music far and wide. She works with underserved communities as Education Director of the Australian Children’s Music Foundation and runs her own popular concert series, Bach in the Dark. Her second self-released album Dreaming with Daisy emerges from a close-knit collaboration with cellist David Pereira, who she has been performing with for six years. According to Scott, their work “is as much a celebration of their friendship as their artistry”. Click Here To Purchase Album Dreaming with Daisy has the feel of a celebration, of untempered, free and loose-limbed music-making, where lines are shaped with boldness, and questions of style seem beside the point. The recorded sound, with its in-your-face rawness, is apt for music-making of immediacy and intimacy, but does reveal frequent, jarring intonation issues, as well as some rough-and-ready sounds from both cellists. Depending on your perspective, the programme is a delightful potpourri or a mismatched patchwork. Full-throated Bach rubs up against Pereira’s own jazzy fantasy on Daisy, Daisy (with its bicycle fittingly “built for two”), and Dotzauer’s indulgent Mozart variations run into some gravelly heavy metal from Elena Kats-Chernin. A conscious decision appears to have been made to…

Jaakko Kuusisto is one of those ‘triple threat’ musicians. Accomplished as a violinist, conductor and composer, he has received numerous accolades in his native Finland and around the world. His recordings have mostly featured him as performer or conductor, however this most recent release focuses on the Finnish maestro’s chamber works, performed by a catalogue of exemplary Finnish musos, including Kuusisto himself. Much of the music adopts a language evocative of the early 20th century. Play III sounds like a lost Bartók string quartet, while Valo for piano and violin makes extensive (crossing into exhausted) use of the whole-tone scale in its harmonic and melodic progressions – a favourite device of the so-called musical ‘impressionists’. An ornamented transfiguration of the opening bassoon solo in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring becomes an effective source of material for much of Loisto, also for piano and violin. Play III is a bold opening to the disc. The rich, robust sound of quartet Meta4 sets a strong tone on an album featuring expert musicianship from all featured performers. Kuusisto’s own performances in the two works for violin with piano, and in the central work, Play II, are incredibly powerful, his robust and expressive tone matching…

As Donald Francis Tovey writes in his eminently useful Essays in Musical Analysis, Mozart’s three last symphonies, written in 1788 over six weeks, “express the healthiest of reactions on each other” and, being “in Mozart’s ripest style makes the full range of that style appear more vividly than in any other circumstances. Consequently, they make an ideal programme when played in their chronological order.” Thus does one often hear them, as a kind of triptych or three-movement, Major-Minor-Major meta-symphony, both in concert and on record. And thus does one hear them in this instance, recorded live during the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s 2015 Mozart’s Last Symphonies national tour, which commemorated 25 years since the great Frans Brüggen conducted the orchestra in the same programme. It was also Tognetti’s first year as leader. Listening again to Brüggen’s last great pronouncement on these three symphonies (for the Glossa label in 2014), one marvels anew at the way he shapes the Orchestra of the 18th Century’s lithe, colourful responses to Mozart’s almost Shakespearean combination of low comedy and high seriousness. But it is to John Eliot Gardiner’s live 2006 recording of Symphonies Nos 39 and 41 that we must turn to find something like…

The classical music recording industry must be in better shape than we think: this is the culmination of Osmo Vänskä’s second Sibelius cycle in little more than a decade. The first with Finland’s Lahti orchestra was widely regarded as “the one to have” but these BIS performances with the Minnesota orchestra (which seems to have at last survived its travails, fortunately) have run that cycle close. This CD lasts 82 minutes – with magnificent sound. As an aside, why, one wonders, can’t more CD’s offer such outstanding value?  The Third, Sixth and Seventh are, each, in its own way, emotionally ambiguous and unconventional and occupy their own unique sound world’s, just as do the symphonies of Beethoven and Vaughan Williams. The Third Symphony has always been one of my favourites, despite, or perhaps, because, of being, along with the Sixth, the least performed, but arguably, the most original, even by Sibelius’ standards. The coherent whole transcends the disparateness of the individual movements. I love the Haydnesque bustle of the opening movement and that sudden pause shortly after the start, which seems like a sort of gasp from someone suddenly realising they’re hovering on the edge of a precipice, or contemplating…

If you’ve seen soprano Emma Matthews in an opera you will know that her performance lives long in the memory. It’s not just her glorious, limber voice that captures you but her remarkable acting ability. In short she lights up the stage. Witness the Aussie diva’s extraordinary and moving portrayal of Lucia’s madness a few seasons back for Opera Australia, or her vulnerability in La Traviata and comedic flair in Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia, playing superbly off buffo baritone supremo Paolo Bordogna. This theatrical quality adds immensely to her latest collection of bel canto gems, with ABC Classics following on from her triumphant 2010 Monte Carlo outing on Deutsche Grammophon. Featuring the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under Andrea Molino, and produced by acclaimed tonmeister Virginia Read, this offering is as good if not better than the yellow label one. Whereas on the former recording Matthews laid out her entire stall and gave us 21 songs over a generous 76 minutes, the new album offers greater cohesion with interconnected moments from La Traviata, Il Turco and a brace each from Bellini’s La Sonnambula and I Puritani. It gets off to an effervescent start with Je veux vivre from Gounod’s Roméo et…

Hyperion deserves its reputation for uncovering hidden gems of the Romantic piano repertoire. This latest recording debuts an early concerto of Moszkowski that was only uncovered in 2008. The conductor, Vladimir Kiradjiev, deemed it too good to remain unpublished (as the composer himself wished) and it was issued by French publishers in 2013. The same conductor leads an impressive BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra through the work. It’s an instantly likeable piece, brimming with tuneful themes, but not without the rhapsodic fever expected of a pianistic showstopper. The soloist, Ludmil Angelov, is known as an interpreter of Chopin, and brings a sparkling dexterity to the faster passages. The second movement is particularly moving, the second theme emerging on the piano from the midst of the chorale previously played by the orchestra. The wonderful stillness is reminiscent of Rachmaninov, though it predates him by a quarter of a century. Angelov is charming throughout, and though the final movement is a little long-winded, it’s a fine recording that should help the piece enter the repertoire. The disc concludes with Schulz-Evler’s Russian Rhapsody, another work deserving of greater acclaim. Angelov again demonstrates his astonishing quick-silver technique in a work of incredible virtuosity, building in…

Brett Dean (b. 1961), born and raised in Brisbane, took up composing during his 14-year tenure as violist with the Berlin Phil. In 2000, he returned to Australia where his appointments have included Artistic Director of ANAM and curating the Sydney and Melbourne Festivals. Shadow Music brings together works for various permutations of chamber orchestra, in addition to an arrangement for flute, clarinet and string orchestra of the (third) Adagio molto e mesto movement of Beethoven’s first Razumovsky Quartet. Dean’s arrangement is approximately half the length of Beethoven’s, and beautifully expands the harmonic intensity of the already symphonic original. This segues into Testament, a reference to the famous Heiligenstadt Testament, written by Beethoven in 1802, in which he despaired of his increasing deafness. These two works form a complementary whole, the latter a meditation on Beethoven’s inner world of tinnitus and chaos. Etüdenfest (2000) is a gloriously hectic melange of string exercises with piano evoking the panic of practice rooms as exam time approaches. Shadow Music is elusive and at various turns dark, veiled, ghostly and diaphanous; Short Stories are a series of five interludes with literary allusions. This is nuanced, complex and fantastically assured music by a renowned Australian…

This is a stunner. Weilerstein manages to make this difficult music absolutely riveting. If I had to point to a collaboration between orchestra and soloist that was as close to ideal as humanly possible, then this would be it. The cellist herself is at the top of her profession. The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (described by one English critic as “super-elite”) is in red-hot form, as is Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado,  currently Principal Conductor of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, but who has also performed at the Met and with the Vienna Philharmonic.  These concertos are among the most important 20th-century repertoire for the instrument, and Weilerstein’s playing seems to convey that. The first concerto’s Moderato hovers between wonder and melancholy, sentiments not uncommon in Shostakovich’s music. Later we hear the composer’s own motif, DSCH, which he employed often, perhaps as a badge of defiance in the face of Stalin’s grotesque tyranny.  The second concerto reverses the traditional structure. It begins with a long (nearly 15 minutes) Largo, followed by an Allegretto which would test the chops of any cellist. Weilerstein makes it sound as if it was written for her, as indeed many more recent large-scale works have been….