Jeremy Dibble, indefatigable scholar of all things English, Romantic and musical, has exhumed a sizeable body of madrigals written in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Some of the composer’s names will be familiar: Elgar, Stanford and Parry. Some choristers will be familiar with Stainer, whose oratorio, The Crucifixion makes an annual appearance on Good Friday at St. Paul’s, Melbourne. The names of Leslie, Goodhart and Pearsall will more often than not draw a blank. Pearsall is best known for his arrangement of In Dulci Jubilo in Willcocks’ Carols for Choirs 1. Encouraged by societies who ran competitions with generous prizes, these composers and many others turned their hand to the form of the madrigal, attempting on the one hand to evoke something “antique” and on the other to push the form’s harmonic and textural envelope in new directions. Victorian prudery is evident in the lack of any salacious Elizabethan texts. Hard by a Crystal Fountain and Come Again, Sweet Love are definitely out. Stanford and Pearsall, each in their own way, are the best of this bunch. Stanford unashamedly displays his ‘modernist’ credentials in daring but deftly handled harmonies in God and the Universe and On Time. Pearsall in ‘antiquarian’ mode…

A composer of Catholic liturgical music in a Lutheran society, Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745) was fighting an uphill battle for popularity even during his own lifetime. After his death, his music all but disappeared from the repertoire, and still remains firmly on the fringes of concert programming. One ensemble, however, is doing more than any to change this. For over 20 years, Czech conductor Václav Luks and his superb Collegium 1704 choir and orchestra have been turning out eloquent recordings that celebrate the  intricate counterpoint and bold harmonic gestures of the composer JS Bach so admired. Their latest is particularly interesting: a world premiere recording of the Missa Divi Zaveri, a major 1729 work thus far silenced by the poor condition (including lost parts) of its surviving manuscript. Now Luks himself has produced a complete edition, and the results are thrilling. The Mass features the largest forces Zelenka ever composed for, including four trumpets, timpani, doubled flutes and oboes as well as strings, chorus and SATB soloists. The result is truly festal in scale, possibly an informal audition for the job of kapellmeister at Dresden that would eventually go to Hasse.  With no Credo, the centre of musical gravity shifts…

If you want to hear a dazzling young female pianist with a promising career ahead of her, try this. Such creatures are common today, but this set is special. It collects unreleased recordings Argerich made in 1960 and 1967 for North and West German Radio. At the time of the earliest of these, she was studying with Friedrich Gulda, who famously said he had nothing to teach her as “she could already do everything”.  Argerich’s recognisable characteristics are here: lightning reflexes; pithy attack; astounding nuance at high speed. She has since abandoned the solo repertoire, so it is fascinating to hear her in Mozart (Sonata No 18, K576) and Beethoven (the Sonata in D, Op. 10 No 3). The latter particularly benefits from her vitality and velocity; it is a shame she never recorded more Beethoven sonatas. The second disc contains works she rerecorded shortly afterward for DG: Prokofiev’s Toccata, Ravel’s Sonatine and Gaspard de la Nuit. In Ravel’s Ondine she is arguably too volatile – tranquillity is not in her armoury – but Scarbo is a knockout. So is her 1967 performance of Prokofiev’s Sonata No 7: the sharpness of her rhythmic response takes your breath away.  Throughout her…

Antony Gray is a London-based pianist who has gained praise for his recordings of Poulenc, Bach, Brahms and Goossens and one can see his skill with these composers fertilising this new disc devoted to Schultz’s pianistic output. In the Adelaide-born composer’s music there is a sense of space, which is entirely appropriate to the vast Australian landscape; and unlike many earlier composers, Schultz is is content to write in a more neo-tonal manner without resorting to dissonance or mimicry of birdcry. Even in his recent Interludes (2015), there is a sense of late-Romantic intensity. And though Schultz does not regard himself as much of a pianist, there is much here – a sparseness of creative landscape, which defines modern notions of Australia. His music is more melodic than atonal, and yet almost naively deductive in its sense of logic, place and space. Here is music that is haunting and inward, searching for a sense of landscape if not comprehension. Schultz’s literary influences are disparate – from the 10th-century Japanese Pillow Book to Inventions from his own opera The Children’s Bach after Helen Garner’s touching novella. His counterpoint is all so appropriate, making even more sense of the Bach adopted by…

This disc is, rather remarkably, volume 31 in Miklós Spányi’s complete keyboard works of CPE Bach, so it’s safe to say he knows what he’s doing! This disc includes several sonatas from Bach’s 1778 collection Six Sonatas for Connoisseurs and Amateurs.  I have to admit a certain fondness for just how odd CPE Bach’s music is, with his sudden melodic shifts and startling key changes. Bach’s left-of-centre keyboard writing is best exemplified by the charmingly experimental Sonata No 5 in F, which begins by teasing the audience with two false starts (first in C Minor, then D Minor), before beginning properly in F Major. It begins with a noble phrase that sounds like a precursor to Haydn. Similarly, the sparse second movement and sprightly third bounce along with enthusiasm, walking the fine line of being appealing without being cloying. The clavichord is a surprisingly quiet instrument – I saw one played in a small hall once to no more than 20 people, and the instrument still required amplification. I think that the recording in this case is a little too detailed – although we get a wonderfully close-up sound of the instrument itself, most of the more expressive passages come…

If Melbourne composer Samuel Smith’s Bleed-through for guitar and laptop is “about” anything, it’s the mutability of memory. It receives its world premiere recording as part of Australian guitarist Callum Henshaw’s debut disc which, taken as a whole, is about the same thing. Smith’s work was inspired by the phenomenon for which it is named.  As magnetic tape deteriorates, its signal infects different layers, resulting in, “a ghostly prediction and recollection of the original signal, itself now significantly diminished… In Bleed-through, the guitar acts as an original signal, becoming surrounded and consumed by the whale song of its own echo.” It’s a spacious, saudade-saturated work, and a perfect end to an echo chamber of a recital resounding with variations on themes, including Henshaw’s own “return” to playing after injury interrupted this recording project. Henshaw, who has numerous awards to his credit, begins his recital with Granados’ Valses Poéticos, delighting in the Spanish composer’s refined chiaroscuro, before moving confidently through Napoléon Coste’s programmatic Le Départ and Manuel Ponce’s unquestioned masterpiece for classical guitar, Variations sur Folia de España et Fugue to the endless vistas of Peter Sculthorpe’s From Kakadu. Henshaw has technique to burn, as evinced by his clear textures and…

The contemporary “easy listening” status of Eric Satie’s Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies belie his reputation in his own day as a musical iconoclast and innovator of the first order. And while they are among his earliest compositions, their outrageous simplicity and, in the Gnossiennes, lack of key signatures and bar lines, place them too in those dangerous regions of novelty and experimentation. Prolific pianist Noriko Ogawa, whose Debussy interpretations in particular have won her wide acclaim, begin and end this first volume of the complete piano music of Satie with the above works. What happens in between should prove to those who consider Satie’s music chillax fodder that it is anything but. Ogawa’s tone, tempi and phrasing are just right in the seven Gnossiennes and three Gymnopédies for the more transparent timbre and slightly faster decay of the 1890 Érard grand, she’s chosen to record on. The effect is a languid obsessiveness, a perfumed tension, between the (mainly) simple chordal accompaniments and spare, haunting, modal-inflected melodies. Following the Gnossiennes is what feels like a Dadaist phantasmagoria, beginning with the ragtime march Le Piccadilly and heralding the Gymnopédies with Satie’s own arrangement of his cabaret song, Je te veux, a waltz, which…

Dutch label Channel Classics has released an attractive box set of the first complete series of Mozart violin sonatas to be performed on period instruments. The albums, featuring English duo violinist Rachel Podger and keyboardist Gary Cooper, were released individually from 2004 to 2009 when they picked up a swag of awards. Now they come in an eight-disc box, giving listeners the chance to appreciate the sweep of the 36 works that covered 25 years of the composer’s life. Cooper performs on a copy of a 1795 Viennese fortepiano by Anton Walter – the maker favoured by Mozart and Beethoven – while Podger plays her 1739 Pesarinius violin, made in Genoa by a student of Stradivari. For the final disc Cooper switches to a 1766 Kirckman harpsichord, exactly the sort of instrument the young Mozart would have used, while the bass line is augmented by cellist Alison McGillivray. As Podger says: “Approaching [Mozart’s] music instinctively comes most naturally to me. It seems so effortlessly composed, and communicates with us directly.” Beautifully recorded, the set would make an ideal companion to the Beethoven sonatas being recorded by US violinist Susanna Ogata and British fortepianist Ian Watson. The Mozart canon, however, is…

Queensland’s all-woman Muses Trio – violinist Christa Powell, pianist Therese Milanovic and cellist Louise King – has been promoting female composers in a series of chamber concerts for four years and now they have released their self-published debut album. Taking its title from Elena Kats-Chernin’s relatively well-known The Spirit and the Maiden, it includes three world premiere recordings: Melburnian Kate Neal’s piano solo Song For Comb Man; Queensland jazz lecturer Louise Denson’s engaging Two Boleros and, also from Queensland, Cecile Elton’s Insomnio de la Cuidad (Tango for a Sleepless City) which sits nicely alongside the Boleros, starting lazily until the restlessness begins. Three pieces for cello and piano by Nadia Boulanger take us to another time and place, as does the Czech Víteˇzslava Kaprálová’s Elegy for violin and piano from the 1930s. Kats-Chernin’s trio, based on a legend about a young woman who is captured by a ghost that lives in a well, is the most substantial work and makes a good opener with its exciting, driving rhythms. English composer and mezzo-soprano Judith Bingham’s Chapman’s Pool is a four-part work which starts and ends sombrely. Brooklyn-born Jennifer Higdon’s contrasting Pale Yellow/Fiery Red closes the disc strongly, although you can download Amy Beach’s Romance for…

Liverpool-born Mark Simpson has been attracting critical acclaim for his compositional prowess in addition to his virtuoso clarinet playing. In 2006, he became the first ever winner of both the BBC Young Musician of the Year and the BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year, an astonishing achievement at just 17 years of age.  Night Music is a collection of eight chamber works covering the last decade, and the works are largely performed by the musicians for whom they were written. The titular work for piano and cello is assured, introspective, intricate and captivating, its intensity heightened by impassioned performances from pianist Alexei Grynyuk and cellist Leonard Elschenbroich.  Not surprisingly, several works have substantial clarinet parts, performed by Simpson himself. Echoes and Embers is a nuanced exploration of the clarinet’s timbral possibilities; Lov(escpape) a tug-of-war between gestural dynamics featuring fluttering, swoops and other extended techniques. Un Regalo for solo cello (performed by Guy Johnston) is also a highlight. Simpson’s detailed notes are included, but, unusually, no information about the performers.  This is a minor quibble in another stellar release from NMC, a charitable company dedicated to British contemporary music. Night Music is an exemplary recording and it will be fascinating…

It took Franz Liszt 26 years to produce the final version of his Twelve Studies in Increasing Degree of Difficulty. The earliest version dates from 1826, but the pianist-phenomenon decided that these pieces were not difficult enough. Other pianists could still manage to play them! The most challenging version of the expanded and elaborated studies appeared in 1837, but the final version of 1852 – dedicated to Czerny – brought a reduction in technical obstacles. Stretches of over a tenth were eliminated, for example.  While these 12 Etudes and the others in this recital were designed to showcase Liszt’s superhuman technique, Liszt the poet is still in evidence. Additional to the pyrotechnics lie delicate textures, presaging those of Debussy in terms of color if not harmony. These textures require all the subtlety of nuance that the later composer would demand.  Recordings have tended to lean towards one or other extreme. Generally, young pianists use the Etudes to show off their pianistic skill: the young Bolet, Cziffra and Ovchinnikov come to mind. Older pianists stress the poetry and musicality, like Arrau and late Bolet, both in their 70s when they recorded these works. Arrau’s Transcendental Etudes have been described as magisterial,…

And then there were three cycles – the Silesian Quartet’s version of Polish composer Graz˙yna Bacewicz’s seven string quartets following on the heels of the Amar Corde Quartet (on Acte Préalable) and the Lutosławksi Quartet (on Naxos), and securing her reputation as one of the best-known unknown composers around. Bacewicz died in 1969 and her quartet cycle journeys from makings of tonality that are known towards a hard-fought for personal harmonic wizardry that embraces 12-tone thinking without being overly concerned with ‘correct’ 12-tone technique. Secreted kernels of melody appear discreetly from behind shadowy, shuffling textures to anticipate the soundworld of latter-day Bartók quartets – and even Luigi Nono. Bacewicz’s cycle is noticeably more consistent and chancey than Shostakovich’s, but how depressing to read elsewhere mantras about Bacewicz the “female composer”. Music as great as this ought to leave crude gender categorising far behind. “Music as great as this ought to leave crude gender categorising far behind“ The pivot is the Fifth Quartet. Written in 1955 as she was recovering from serious injury sustained during a car crash, Bacewicz has developed her language from the broadly Neo-Classical turn-of-phrase of the Fourth Quartet – for which please don’t read Stravinskian pastiche –…