CD and Other Review

Review: Beethoven: Piano Sonatas (Jonathan Biss)

★★★★★ The first three volumes of his Beethoven cycle was released by Onyx, and now Jonathan Biss issues Volume Four via his own label. Beethoven would surely have approved of artists taking control of their destiny. Biss has organised his cycle by type and historical ties so Volume Four spools back to the beginning – to the Piano Sonata No 1 in F Minor – before advancing towards the great Appassionata in the same key, via Sonatas 6 and 19. Biss writes in his booklet notes about the unassuming nature of Sonata No 1 – “can this really be how it all begins,” he asks, ‘it’ being the journey that ultimately led to the late sonatas. In these hands, though, Beethoven’s debut sounds far from ordinary. The fervour and intensity of Biss’s hot-fingered touch is something else. Beethoven’s models were Mozart and Haydn – but Biss persuades us of the unheralded harmonic lawlessness that lay just below the surface. Contemporary with the Eroica, the Appassionata Sonata is full-throttle punk Beethoven, volatile and combustible, like anything from later in the great man’s career. I note, and dig, how Biss leapfrogs into that Alice-like descent towards the bowels of the instrument, smothering…

July 8, 2015
CD and Other Review

Review: Busoni: The Visionary, Volume 3 (Jeni Slotchiver)

★★★☆☆ Ferrucio Busoni (1866-1924) was the outstanding piano virtuoso of his time. Performance activity interfered with his composing, much to his annoyance, but he produced highly individual works.  He also made transcriptions of music by Bach, mainly of organ works. Two such pieces are played here: the Prelude and Triple Fugue in E Flat (St. Anne), and a Fantasia after Bach (1909). The original works, all from Busoni’s later years as he suppressed most of his earlier music, are the exquisite Ravelian Nuit de Noël, the Prélude et étude en arpèges, Variations on a Prelude of Chopin, and Toccata: Prelude, Fantasia and Chaconne. The Toccata was his final composition, a fine example of his unique harmonic sense, as well as the tremendous technical difficulty of his piano music. His Chopin Variations of 1922 give Brahms’s Paganini Variations a run for their money. American pianist Jeni Slotchiver is a Busoni specialist. This is the third disc in her series; earlier issues contain the slightly better known Elegies and Sonatinas. Some unevenness in descending arpeggios aside (in the Etude), she undoubtedly has the necessary technique, and her booklet note attests to her deep knowledge of this music. However, Marc-André Hamelin recorded a 3CD…

July 6, 2015
CD and Other Review

Review: CPE Bach: 6 Organ Sonatas (Ton Koopman)

★★★★☆ With the passing of Gustav Leonhardt, elder statesman of period keyboard performance, the mantle passes to Ton Koopman, a treasure of the early music scene for the last 30 years. His witty approach to a potentially sober repertoire has charmed and illuminated, with several tours of this country and a discography treasured by connoisseurs.  His complete set of the elder Bach’s organ works is one of my desert island discs. As one of many cast-offs from the major labels we can thank Challenge Classics for continuing to record him and this latest release is a delight. Koopman’s musical personality is tailor-made for CPE Bach’s free-wheeling invention and whacky sense of fantasy. His experiments in period keyboard techniques has always given his playing an extra degree of air and space so CPE’s rhetorical stop-starts and flourishes have extra point and lift.   The younger Bach didn’t write much organ music but the six sonatas are delightful works in his mature empfindsamkeit style. Koopman has recorded them on a magnificent restored organ once owned by Princess Amalia of Prussia. She owned a manuscript of these works, so it’s possible the composer played on the very instrument heard here. Recorded in state…

July 6, 2015
CD and Other Review

Review: Grainger: Piano Works (Howard, Stanhope, Parsons)

Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961) was an ambiguous presence in Australian music, both as a man and a composer. A sensational concert pianist in his youth (though not one to take other composers’ score markings too seriously), he befriended Grieg and Delius, and achieved considerable success in America (eventually he took US citizenship). Post-World War II he became the forgotten figure described by Barry Humphries in his memoirs: shuffling around Melbourne, struggling to maintain a Grainger museum that housed his manuscripts, home-made “music machines” and a large collection of whips and sex toys. Grainger saw himself as the future of Australian music. Certainly, he wrote a great number of musical arrangements, or ‘rambles’ as he called them (such an English word!). Most of the 61 tracks on these discs are arrangements of British folksongs, like Shepherd’s Hey, My Robin is to the Greenwood Gone, and famously English Country Gardens. They recall a world of Empire Day, folk dancing, and bland radio programmes for schools that was in its death throes when I was a kid. Imaginatively written for the piano though Grainger’s arrangements are, and as lovingly performed as they are here by Australian pianist Leslie Howard, those associations render them……

July 1, 2015
CD and Other Review

Review: Piffarissimo (Capella de la Torre/Bäuml)

★★★★☆ Capella de la Torre is dedicated to the performance of an older brand of music. Their instruments are similarly old, from shawms, slide trumpets and sackbut to lute, cow horn and percussion. With an eye to authentic historical readings, their playing evokes distant times and places, and frequently explores the music of the Middle Ages by focussing on people, locations and events. In their recent release, the group have reconstructed through music the 15th ecumenical council.  Imagine tens of thousands of dignitaries, clerics, noblemen and women of various nations gathered together at Constance for this important ecclesiastical meeting. Written accounts of the time describe great parades through the streets, accompanied by music of the various regions raining down from roof and castle-tops. The various tracks on the disc feature music for drums, pipes, strings and trumpets, in the music of noted medieval composers like Guillaume Dufay, Philippe de Vitry and Gilles Binchois.  Capella de la Torre’s musical reconstruction is a great success. With their keen eye for historical accuracy, the group have pieced together a programme of music that conjures the spirit of this momentous occasion. Admittedly, there’s not really enough on the disc to convince nonbelievers of the…

June 28, 2015
CD and Other Review

Review: Smörgåsbord! (The Marais Project)

★★★★☆ This is the best kind of crossover. Swedish traditional and popular music across centuries and styles – folk, jazz, ABBA(!) – rubbing shoulders with songs and chamber music by composers Johan Helmich Roman and Carl Michael Bellman. The dishes are plentiful, varied and tasty without being overly rich, with just a little French dressing courtesy of Marin Marais.  Australian-based period instrument band The Marais Project features a flexible line-up which this time comprises Tommie Andersson on theorbo and guitar and Jennifer Eriksson on gamba with tenor Pascal Herrington, flautist Melissa Farrow and violinist Fiona Ziegler. For starters they serve up a strikingly beautiful instrumental arrangement of an old pastoral hymn which the booklet describes as “one of the most haunting and melancholy tunes from the region of Dalarna.” For dessert there’s Andersson’s cheeky yet effective arrangement of ABBA’s Waterloo in the form of a baroque courante. In between there is much to choose from. Bellman’s delightful songs, in which a limpid-voiced Herrington is accompanied by classical guitar with varying involvement from the other instruments, exude Mozartian charm and irreverence. Roman’s staid trio sonata provides a suitable palate cleanser before Andersson’s arrangement of late jazzman Esbjörn Svensson’s Pavane: Thoughts of…

June 26, 2015
CD and Other Review

Review: Sonorous Sonatas (Peter Sheridan)

★★★☆☆ Peter Sheridan’s Sonorous Sonatas reveals the rarely heard sounds of the lower flutes. Commissioned by Sheridan himself, the works feature alto, subcontrabass, and pretty much every flute in between.    Gary Schocker’s bubbly Music for a Lost Planet opens the album with Sheridan’s alto flute vibrato rhythmic in Above. The piano is so strikingly similar in range that the instruments seem to blend into one, but the aggressive Burn reaches more familiar realms with flute playing at a higher register.  A flutter-tonguing bass flute opens Taran Carter’s Owls Sfutel. The Allegretto movement initially seems an expression of random madness – but stick with it, as it soon falls into a jazzy rhythm. Con Molto Energy is announced by a metronomic pounding of the piano – not a style the ears are accustomed to after half an hour of ‘sonorous’ flutes! Andrew Downes’ Sonata for contrabass flute is far warmer – though it’s a shame about the clicky keys. Carolyn Morris’s Forest Over Sea features gorgeous harmonies. The album finishes with Houston Dunleavy’s bizarre Clumsy Dances – an opportunity to hear the subcontrabass flute, yes, but a poor fit for the release.  Everyone should invest time into listening to rarer…

June 26, 2015
CD and Other Review

Review: Revolution (Emmanuel Pahud)

Editor’s Choice: Chamber – July 2015 ★★★★★ For some years Emmanuel Pahud has been the poster boy of the flute fraternity with prominent positions in the Berlin Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado’s hand-picked Lucerne Festival Orchestra. His superb two-disc set The Flute King explored the German school hovering around the court of Frederick the Great, while this new release is a tribute to the French school of the late 18th century.  For those of us who grew up with hoary old music histories declaring this a period bereft of interest apart from Mozart and Haydn, other fascinating developments from a time of social turmoil are gradually coming to light. Earlier recordings of these works in the old “Dresden china” manner of playing were mostly deadly dull and reinforced those old prejudices so it is a delight to hear them taken by the scruff of the neck and presented with the sort of flair and élan that a crack team would lavish on a mainstream masterpiece.  Pahud’s playing is stunning with perfectly focused tone at all dynamics, immaculate articulation and a technique so supreme that one can simply enjoy it for its physicality and grace. A single sustained note from Pahud can…

June 22, 2015
CD and Other Review

Review: Boulez: 20th Century Music Box Set

★★★★☆ Pierre Boulez turned 90 on March 26 this year, and several reissues have already appeared to commemorate the occasion. This set collects together his DG recordings of basic 20th-century repertoire: primarily Bartók, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, as well as his own music.  Boulez first recorded almost all this music for Sony (CBS) in the 1960s and 70s. In the ‘90s he signed with DG and began again. While his later recordings are polished, better recorded, and extremely well played, I mostly prefer the earlier set. In 1966, when Boulez made his first controversial disc of La Mer, he was still a rebel and regarded Debussy as revolutionary. An edgy, analytical performance resulted, but in this one with the Cleveland Orchestra from 1991 all discoveries have been made.  Sony issued a box of their Boulez recordings, reviewed here recently by Philip Clark, where the repertoire is quirkier and more diverse. In the new box, for example, we have no Pelléas et Mélisande or Berg Violin Concerto, no Berio, Elliott Carter, Manuel de Falla, nor Boulez’s orchestral masterwork Rituel. We get Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto but not Pulcinella. The Sony box reproduced the original LP covers, whereas Universal settles for…

June 16, 2015
CD and Other Review

Review: Grieg: Piano Concerto (Herbert Schuch, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln/Aadland)

★★★★☆ Grieg marked the score of his G Minor Symphony (composed when he was 20 in 1863), “Must never be performed”. This was honoured for 113 years (though individual movements were performed in the 1860s) but after much discussion, it was played in Bergen in 1981 and recorded by Decca under Karsten Andersen.  It’s hard to understand Grieg’s attitude, as, for an apprentice work, it’s rather good. Certainly, it has the generic Romantic rhetoric, the stuttering Schumannesque syncopations in the first movement for instance, but it’s also thematically interesting and full of ideas, proving that, even this young, Grieg could think effectively in symphonic paragraphs. The Adagio is especially winsome. Grieg regarded the work as “insufficiently Norwegian”, whatever that means, but the scherzo-like third movement sounded very ‘Norwegian’ to me.  I’ve raved about Eivind Aadland’s recordings with the excellent West Deutsche Rundfunk Orchestra in his Grieg cycle and this vivid performance and lovely recording maintain the standard. The soloist in the Piano Concerto is Rumanian-born Herbert Schuch, whose debut disc caused quite a stir a few years ago. Here, his reading is alive to every nuance of what is, for better or worse, a warhorse. One review exclaimed “his shadings…

June 15, 2015
CD and Other Review

Review: Beethoven: Emperor Concert (Nelson Freire, Leipzig Gewandhaus/Chailly)

  This is smashing programming: Beethoven’s last piano concerto and final piano sonata performed by two Decca war horses. Beethoven dedicated the concerto (as well as the Op. 111 Sonata) to Archduke Rudolf; the imperial epithet was coined by his English publisher (not the first or last time a publisher ‘re-interpreted’ a composer’s intentions!). In the context of a work in E Flat, the curious key relationship of the nocturnal second movement in B emphasises the movement’s reflective and subdued character. Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire first performed it in 1957 at the age of 12. Now 70, Freire changes gear effortlessly between rhythmic vitality and deliquescent lyricism in the prolonged opening movement. The Leipzig Gewandhaus occasionally seems more brawny in interpretation of this audacious music than Freire. The Piano Sonata No 32 arrived about ten years after the Emperor Concerto and falls into Beethoven’s late period. Not uniquely it is in two movements: a sonata-allegro followed by a set of variations including the famous proto-boogie-woogie third variation. The rhetorical vigour of the first movement comes off with genius. The herculean second movement is elegant, Freire poetic in tone and line. If really great playing by artists at the top of…

June 14, 2015