Thanks to its in-house recording system, the King’s College Choir is able to offer us a snapshot of its musical activities during the past academic year. As you would expect, the range of music in any season would be rather diverse, and so it is here. There is a central core of English fare: Tallis, Parsons, Parry and Vaughan Williams, but continental influences include Poulenc and Mendelssohn, whilst more recent music by Giles Swayne and Henryk Górecki is also included. Having listened to many recordings of this choir over the years, I was struck by the freshness and clarity of the sound that the current microphone placement delivers. This clarity, combined with the live nature of these performances, shows the choir (and its chapel’s famous acoustic) in a different light. Take, for example, Swayne’s Magnificat. A certain exuberance and spontaneity add to the choir’s customary technical precision. The result is a livelier and slightly less homogenous sound than some of the choir’s ‘studio’ recordings – this is no bad thing. Whether it be the intimacy of Poulenc’s Christmas motets, the intensity of Górecki’s Totus Tuus, the grandeur of Parry or the romanticism of Mendelssohn, there is a welcome vibrancy to…

If a three-and-a-half star rating feels miserly for a record that promises much, you should know that the last time I reviewed music by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, I feared for the continued well-being of my computer as I punched my displeasure into my keyboard. Saariaho’s early music – especially gems like Verblendungen and Lichtbogen – were packed with raw-boned harmonic and timbral intrigue; but then, during the 1990s, her music drifts towards generic notions of lyricism and line, leaving those of us who admired the early work to wonder what happened to her incisive, bold spirit. The great British comedian Les Dawson once claimed that “beauty fades, while ugliness endures” and although Saariaho’s music from the 1980s was never exactly ugly – the beauty was elemental, bracing and absolutely revitalising – the ambient, soft-focus leanings of more recent pieces can sit too comfortably inside emotional inverted commas. But then I play this disc and Quatre Instants, her 2002 song cycle for soprano and orchestra, and Terra Memoria, a realisation of her 2007 Second String Quartet for full strings, win me over in a way I wasn’t expecting. The… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

Name an instance of unaccompanied violin music not by Bach or Paganini and most of us will struggle. Unless, that is, we have a special affinity with Belgium, in which case, the half-dozen works which Eugène Ysaÿe produced (1923-24) may have come to our attention. While both Franck and Chausson dedicated their best-known violin compositions to Ysaÿe, even violinists themselves rarely show much interest in his original output. A new recording emerges every few years but swiftly fades from view. Each movement of these pieces could appropriately bear Liszt’s title: “studies in transcendental execution.” But Liszt seldom discernibly influences the actual music, and anyone who dreads being subjected to a kind of hour-long Flight of the Bumble-Bee has a congenial surprise in store. Most obvious of the music’s features is its severity, suggesting Busoni above all. The printed score’s pages are black with expression marks and bowing indications as well as notes, but the writing never sounds over-ornate. Rather, it remains profound, however energetic. No real portraiture of the dedicatees, all great violinists themselves, appears to have been intended. The Fourth Sonata, inscribed to Kreisler, sounds scarcely less austere than the First, inscribed to Szigeti, though suggestions of Romanian fire…

While the Bachs make a definite argument for musical talent running in families, CPE Bach’s music is very different from that of his father. In contrast to JS’s concentrated style, CPE’s music is full of sudden and unexpected harmonies, rapid shifts of register, and bursts of virtuosity. His writing is similar to that of the Romantics in its bar-by-bar freedom to allow a piece to develop in any direction. While you can theoretically categorise his manner as that of the style galant (essentially tuneful and straightforward), there’s a biting intelligence behind all of his music that’s absolutely irresistible.  CPE Bach’s writings about music also give clues as to how they were performed, suggesting in his Essay on the True Manner of Playing Keyboard Instruments that it is vital that a musician “play with all one’s soul, and not like a well-trained bird”. Clearly having taken note of the composer’s advice, Bruno Procopio performs the six Württemberg Sonatas with verve. There’s a lot to enjoy in this set, with Procopio’s fleet-fingered touch doing much to highlight Bach’s unique compositional style. Particularly enjoyable are the exquisitely phrased slow movements of each piece – listening on headphones is a real treat. The only…

Nicholas Young is a graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium and since 2009 has been a Young Steinway Artist. Now based in Salzburg, Capricornia is his first recording on which he performs Roy Agnew, Ferruccio Busoni and Elliott Carter. “The internationalism of all three,” says Young, “particularly appealed to my own colourful identity as an Australian with Chinese ancestry, based in Austria.”  Like Young, Agnew was born in Sydney. His untimely death from septicaemia in 1944 at the age of 53 halted an international career. The two one-movement piano sonatas here are lyrical cascades of colour, firmly modern but still with a toe in the late 19th century. It is to be hoped that Young’s commanding performance will lead to more Agnew in concert programmes. Three works by Busoni anchor us in an earlier era, characterised by a commitment to creating music “that venerated the past but also embraced the language of his day.” The restrained serenity of the Berceuse, is followed by a virtuosic Toccata, followed in turn by Ten Variations on a Prelude of Chopin. Capricornia concludes with a Piano Sonata by Elliott Carter that takes inspiration from Beethoven’s Op. 111. It’s a thoughtful programme, handled with consummate skill, virtuosity…

Following his critically acclaimed Rameau and CPE Bach on Hyperion, Mahan Esfahani steps out in style on DG Archiv with this concept album mixing Baroque with Minimalism. I was a little alarmed at his relentless drive through Scarlatti’s La Folia Variations, but the mania is held in check by rigour and discipline. Gorecki’s Harpsichord Concerto is a strangely disturbing piece with its first movement infuriatingly like a broken-record while the second, a baroque mash-up, evokes Jerry Lee Lewis in a powdered wig. Esfahani is in his element in CPE Bach’s La Folia romp and his double tracked version of Steve Reich’s Piano Phase is a tour de force; stunningly accurate with the harpsichord’s pin-point precision helping to delineate the pattern as it shifts in and out of phase. The programme concludes with a magnificent account of Bach’s BWV1052 Concerto performed with intensity and gravitas, as befits a work of abstract intellect allied to sensuous pleasure. Esfahani’s articulation and subtle timing is a wonder, uncovering details that often fly by in the rush.  Concerto Köln fully supports his aesthetic with austere beauty of tone and focused rhythmic point. Their employment of a lute in the continuo makes especial sense in the…

Antony Gray’s set of the complete piano music of Francis Poulenc is, to paraphrase Orwell, more complete than others. Besides the many pieces written expressly for solo piano it contains Poulenc’s music accompanying the story of Barbar the Elephant (sans narration) and several transcriptions of other works including the Sonata for Two Clarinets, the Sonata for Horn, Trumpet and Trombone, and the ballet Les Animeaux Modèles. The latter was arranged by the composer, so it is more than a mere piano reduction for rehearsal purposes. There is also an arrangement of Mozart’s Musical Joke. Hence, five CDs as opposed to Pascal Rogé’s three. Gray has previously given us welcome surveys of piano music by Eugene Goossens and Malcolm Williamson, but here he enters a highly competitive field. Beginning with the composer himself (who recorded the Mouvements Perpétuels, the Two Novelettes and a selection of Nocturnes and Improvisations in the 1920s and 30s), many extensive selections of Poulenc’s piano music have appeared. Among French pianists are the composer’s friend and duo-piano partner Jacques Février, Gabriel Tacchino, Rogé, and more recently Éric Le Sage. Poulenc’s light touch is compelling; he plays his music as though he were improvising it. English pianist Paul…

Violinist Susanna Ogata is a tenured member of the Handel and Haydn Society. Keyboard player Ian Watson has had a long and distinguished career as an organist, conductor and as a director of early music, recently working with Harry Christophers and The Sixteen on a new edition of Bach’s St Mark Passion. In that same year, Watson and Ogata embarked on a project to record all ten of Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas on period instruments, and this release on The Sixteen’s Coro label is the first recording.  First up: Sonata No 4 in A Minor, Op. 23 (1801), and Sonata No 9 in A, Op. 47, the famous ‘Kreutzer’ from 1803. Watson plays a replica of an Anton Walter (1752-1826) Viennese fortepiano (both Mozart and Beethoven played Walters) while Ogata performs on a Joseph Klotz violin from 1772. It’s a remarkable sound world into which the listener is plunged and, given Watson and Ogata’s rigorous research, it is one we can assume to be similar to that inhabited by the composer himself. The sinewy violin lines are transformed by the deeper but slightly coarser and more nasal tone of the period instrument, making them noticeably more penetrating; this is particularly so…

This CD marks the recording debut for Australian performer/composer collective, Sideband. The brainchild of composers Tristan Coelho, Brad Gill and Peter McNamara, it features visceral performances by high calibre musicians. The Sideband composers are joined by emerging composer Chris Williams, and guest Slovenian-Australian Bozidar Kos. In Kos’s Modulations, solo flute is set twisting and writhing in a turbulent sea of percussion, at the same time being warped and transposed by live electronics. Brad Gill conjures a haunting atmosphere in Crickets for baritone and small ensemble, while his complex piano solo, Light, Snow, Suicide, presents a restless tapestry of melodic and chordal fragments. Chris Williams’ work for soprano and percussion, of silence into silence has a strong dramatic presence.  Tristan Coelho commands attention: his 2011 As the Dust Settles for bass recorder and vibraphone presents one of the most engaging soundworlds in the programme. Alicia Crossley’s playing is wildly virtuosic, engaging in erratic dialogue with Gill’s vibraphone. In The Writer’s Hand, Coelho fragments three female voices, creating a maddening counterpoint that pits spitting consonants against a strange lyricism. Peter McNamara’s Cadenza II for cello is another highlight, Julia Ryder deftly managing the complex demands, while his percussion solo, Voltage, features Claire…

French pianistic powerhouses Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and François-Frédéric Guy have teamed up to deliver a mega programme of works originally intended for orchestra. First premiered in 1913, all three are heard in piano form, with the shift in perspective providing new insights into the music while testing pianistic skills.  The first of Bartók’s Two Pictures sees washes of lush, whole-tone harmony and strangely winding melodies, conjuring a gorgeous, almost Debussian dream world.  The reverie is over in the second picture, Village Dance. Here, Bartók indulges in heavy harmonic dissonance and exuberant folk-like melody, delivered with full force.  The tone colour of Debussy’s Jeux comes as a soothing and gentle contrast. Bavouzet and Guy manage to make their instruments sound as colourful as Debussy’s orchestra. The opening is so delicately rendered you’re left questioning if it is indeed a piano you’re hearing. Bavouzet’s transcription is an intelligent and elegant reimagining of the original.  Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is the best-known work on the disc, and hence its transcription is perhaps the hardest sell. Piano four hands necessarily restrains the score’s savagery and contrapuntal melodic webs. While it might not best the original, the composer’s own transcription is the perfect vehicle for this…

Since graduating from the Tasmanian Conservatorium in 1987, reed-playing multi-instrumentalist Paul Cutlan has worked in a wide variety of styles from contemporary classical to jazz and world music. The central work on this disc, the Across the Top suite, is inspired by his work with world music ensemble MARA! on their Musica Viva tour for schools and Indiginous groups across the North of Australia in 2007. All four works on this Tall Poppies disc are influenced by folk music, filtered through composers like Bartók, Britten, Stravinsky and Sculthorpe, and melded with the ideas and practices of jazz improvisation. This never meanders, however, but is all tightly structured and highly approachable, and is, when all’s said and done, best described as chamber music of deep purpose and clarity. Improvisation and world music, when they do occur, are used to enhance Cutlan’s compositional ideas, and his sense of tonal colour and instrumental textures are indeed highly alluring. Those who are familiar with the NOISE string quartet’s recent set of improvised works on two CDs will have some idea of what to expect from their contributions. With Balkan specialists Llew and Mara Kiek, as well as one of Australia’s finest bassists, Brett Hirst,…

If there is one nationality who really wrote with hearts on sleeves, it was the Russians. If there is an instrument that can really explore torment, it’s the cello. Russian Cello, is a wonderfully colourful project for Zoe Knighton and Amir Farid who deliver a selection from known masters (Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev) and less-known contemporaries (Glière, Gretchaninov and Sokolov).  The duo start with an exquisite rendition of Rachmaninov’s Vocalise that allows Knighton to warm up her thrilling tenor-sound, sensitively accompanied by Farid. The programming continues with other ‘songs without words’, including an enchanting Album Leaf from Glière followed by Stravinsky’s eccentric, folk-inspired Chanson Russe. The playing goes up a gear with a pair of Glazunov items, beginning with Chant du Ménéstrel. Knighton’s portamento is suitably full of woe and in the substantial Elégie she really gets to show much more range, muscling into her lowest register with grit. Farid is an attentive partner in crime. Both are attuned to each other’s subtle musical choices.  Gretchaninov’s Sonata is the first long-form piece on the album. With charming interjections from the piano and a pretty melody for the cello it’s a lovely warm up for Prokofiev’s Sonata, which gives Knighton and Farid…