Part documentary, part concert film, the warmth and ease between composer and quartet is palpable.

★★★★☆ 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…

★★★☆☆ 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…

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…

An Australian vintage puts Bach and Co.’s new wine into old bottles.

★★★★☆ 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…

★★★★☆ 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…

  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…

“Stravinsky belongs to that group of composers whom we admire first and foremost for their intellect…  but it would be a mistake to believe that this intellectual admiration excludes emotion.” So writes pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet in the note to his terrific new recording featuring Stravinsky’s works for piano and orchestra and which appeals to the heart as much as the head. Bavouzet won awards last year for his recording of the Prokofiev Piano Concertos. Here, joined by a very much on-form São Paulo Symphony Orchestra under the suave, alert direction of Yan Pascal Tortelier, he again demonstrates his affinity for genuine orchestral collaboration while submitting to that lapidary yet rhythmically vital realisation of line and texture so important in Stravinsky’s music. The Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments has never sounded more like a multi-coloured riot of tessellation across which drift occasional shadows. The following Capriccio is also pure delight, Bavouzet’s playing shot through with a sparkling lyricism that he even manages to inject into the 12-tone Movements. And if the piano in Pétrouchka is merely a member of the orchestra, Bavouzet nevertheless relishes his role in contributing to one of the tightest yet most theatrically lavish performances of this…

Nigel Westlake ensures the film’s modest aims are not bashed about the head by the music.

World premiere recording Frederick Septimus Kelly’s Elegy anchors this ANZAC project.

★★★★☆ When you think of a composer doing it tough in Soviet Russia, your mind probably jumps to Shostakovich. Of course, he wasn’t the only one who struggled (and ‘struggled’ is putting it lightly). Mieczysław Weinberg, a Polish Jew, fled the Germans twice, and met further trouble in the Soviet capital when he was arrested on charges of “Jewish bourgeois nationalism”. Despite hardships, Weinberg managed a 50-year career, completing an impressive 22 symphonies as well as numerous concertos and chamber works.   The Warsaw Philharmonic under Jacek Kaspszyk has chosen this lesser-known composer for its most recent release, with a performance of Weinberg’s Fourth Symphony and his violin concerto. Violinist Ilya Gringolts is a fantastic force on the disc, delivering an impassioned performance that shows off not only his skill but also his emotional depth. The orchestra is similarly fine, with gutsy playing in the faster movements of both works.  In truth, the music pays a huge debt to Shostakovich. Telltale harmonic shifts, stark contrasts in orchestration in the faster movements (particularly wind writing), and a pervading sense of melancholy in the slow movements bear the unmistakeable influence of Weinberg’s friend and contemporary. And as Shostakovich’s music is stained with…