This CD hails from a 1983 live Royal Festival Hall concert at a time when this symphony was much less known than it is now. In the intervening years, many of the usual suspects have recorded it, often as part of an integral cycle. This recording, however, wears its age particularly well! Rozhdestvenksy had been at the apex of Shostakovich interpreters for years, even in 1983, and his experience shows in the flowing tempo and rhythmic variation in the huge adagio arc of the first movement (almost the length of the other movements combined) without losing either drama or intensity. The string playing is first rate. A relentless unremitting trudge often casts a shadow from which the remainder of the work never recovers. Even by the standards of Shostakovich’s highly original approach to symphonic structure, the Eighth is certainly problematic. Rozhdestvensky’s account of the two bizarrely juxtaposed scherzi brings out the usual ‘bi-polar’ elements of Shostakovich’s scores in this vein: manic almost febrile gaiety alternating with militaristic aggression and grotesque hecticness. The trumpet episode in the second demonstrates the fine quality of the soloists in the London Philharmonic at that time. The final two movements pose more interpretive challenges: perhaps…

  Couperin’s three surviving Leçons de Ténèbres (settings of texts from the Lamentations of Jeremiah to be sung at the office of Tenebrae in Holy Week) are surely some of the greatest glories of the French Baroque and a validation of the musical taste of Louis XIV. The first two lessons are scored for just one voice, and then to heighten the dramatic and spiritual intensity of the music, the third lesson is scored for two voices. English soprano Carolyn Sampson and Norwegian mezzo Marianne Beate Kielland deploy their different voices to great effect in the first two lessons, and when they come together we hear how complementary their instruments are, giving the music an admirable amount of light and shade, particularly in the urgent final refrain, “Jerusalem, return to the Lord, your God”. Robert King and his consort afford nuanced support for the singers, opting for traditional organ continuo. For an alternative view with harpsichord continuo, the account with William Christie, Les Arts Florissants and sopranos Sophie Daneman and Patricia Petibon remains a classic. Apart from strong performances in the main work, the added appeal of this newcomer lies in the generous selection of makeweights. These include Couperin’s famous motet…

The second half of the Belcea Quartet’s Beethoven cycle, again mixing-and-matching quartets from all three periods, is a culmination of the modern era’s tendency to turn Beethoven from the voice of God into a highly-strung mortal, whose music is as skittish as a like-whatever teenager texting. Forget the played-in- blood, unified drama of the Jurassic-Era American recordings by the Yale and Guarneri Quartets, or the modern European classic from the Takács. The London-based Belceas, now nearing their 20th anniversary, are all about character-playing, revealing a big-personality Beethoven whose moods and emotions discharge on a hair-trigger. These live performances from the Snape Maltings Hall in Aldeburgh are excellently-recorded and equally well-played, and it’s up to the listener to try to keep up with the caffeinated hyper-activity as each new musical impulse is animated with the energy of a game-show host. Some of it’s deeply felt, like the slow movement of the first Razoumovsky Quartet, for instance, but it never dwells there, as if settlement on a definitive point-of-view is impossible when there are still so many musical hyperlinks to click on. The DNA of any complete Beethoven string quartet cycle, though, is contained in the epic slow movement of Op 132….

The reclusive Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888) wrote almost exclusively for the piano. His fascinating music, which is finally becoming known and admired by a wider audience, is among the most individual and technically demanding of any in the Romantic era. His challenging Twelve Studies Op 35 and the titanic Symphony for Solo Piano (from Op 39) have previously been given outstanding recordings by the Australian pianist Stephanie McCallum. The series entitled Recueils de Chants (literally: Compilations of Songs) are rather different. In five books of six pieces each, composed between 1857 and 1872, these are pieces on a smaller scale, modeled to some extent on Mendelssohn’s Songs without words but displaying a broader expressive range. Some have evocative titles such as Chant de guerre and Esprit follets, while others are simply given tempo indications. Each book ends with a Barcarolle, where the quirky essence of the composer’s individuality is most evident. While these Chants do not require the sheer stamina of Alkan’s larger works, they do require a skillful and sympathetic pianist who can tease out the lyricism and bring point to the composer’s distinctive style. McCallum is across every aspect of this music, exploring the collection’s diversity with apparent ease –…

As one of Verdi’s early works, (it was staged in 1846 just prior to Macbeth) Attila has not always been received particularly well. However, what we see in this DVD is a full blooded Italian opera with some thrilling music and effective dramatic highlights. If some of the music is familiar it may be that it has come to you through Charles Mackerras’ resourceful ballet score for The Lady and the Fool, where he drafted music from Verdi’s lesser known operas to great effect. There are some seven versions on CD, four on DVD; the one to beat appears to be from La Scala under Riccardo Muti, with Cheryl Studer and Samuel Ramey. Even though this production from the Mariinsky is excellent, La Scala’s production and soloists are superior. Abdrazakov’s Attila is very good, until compared to Ramey’s splendid savage. Markarova fields a fiery Odabella, the woman who (in this opera) kills Attila in the final scene, but Studer simply wipes the floor with her at La Scala. In the part of the knight, Foretso, both Skorokhodov in this performance and Kaludi Kaludov at La Scala acquit themselves well. Mariinsky’s Pope Leo (Addikeyev) is piously wet. The character of Attila…

Performances of Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto range from the romantic/rhapsodic (Shaham/ Boulez/BPO) to the gritty, abrasive and uncompromising (Mullova), with Mutter somewhere in- between. Thomas Zehetmair, a native of Salzburg, has been around for a long time but I wouldn’t have had him down as an arch exponent of the mighty Bartók Second Violin Concerto, one of the greatest concertos for any instrument of the twentieth century. Well, he is! There’s something excitingly kaleidoscopic and mercurial about this 1995 performance. His rhythms are nimble, his tone slender but full of coruscating folkloric colours. One thing I initially found disconcerting are his tempi: he takes 35’ over the work which makes it sound quite different; Shaham takes over 40’ which, I think, is closer to the norm. The Budapest Festival Orchestra, generally regarded for some years as Hungary’s premier ensemble, especially under Ivan Fischer, enhance the soloist and conductor in what amounts to a symphonic accompaniment wonderfully captured. The companion piece is Bartók’s First Violin Concerto, an early work sometimes dismissed as an expression of love-sickness over his inamorata, Stefi Geyer. It wasn’t discovered until after both the composer and Geyer had died, in 1956. It’s OK but very much a…

Bach’s keyboard concertos, despite their obscure provenance (all are thought to be arrangements of earlier instrumental concerti), stand tall as the earliest masterpieces of the genre, brimful of contrapuntal invention. As such they offer endless possibilities for imaginative interpreters, yet performances and recordings played on harpsichord are not as common as you might suppose in the era of historically-informed performance practice, and are well outnumbered by those on modern piano. To overcome the problem of balancing the harpsichord against the standard Baroque string ensemble, the current fashion is to play them one-to-a-part, as recorded here by London’s critically acclaimed Retrospect Ensemble with their inspired young leader Matthew Halls. He plays a superb instrument with a robust yet refined tone and inflects the solo part with illuminating details, crisp rhythmic articulation and clever yet tasteful ornamentation. The ensemble perform with a clean transparent sound and fine intonation but are a times a little restrained and polite – this certainly allows the soloist to be heard to good advantage but doesn’t always reach the ideal of “a first among equals” – the players seem reluctant make the bold dramatic gestures one hears from their leader. Their short-breathed phrasing and avoidance of expressive…

The Bach family seems set on becoming as inescapable as the Kardashian fungibles. Once again, music by all sorts of profoundly obscure Bachs, as well as by JSB, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, Wilhelm Friedemann, and Johann Christian, has been covered. And yes, we behold here a piano in all its tonal glory, not a harpsichord, let alone a clavichord. The trumpet-piano combination has seldom generated original music (among front-ranking composers only Hindemith employed it, and even he struggled to make it interesting). Still, in these arrangements, carried out by pianist Daniel-Ben Pienaar from a bewildering variety of organ, chamber, and orchestral originals – even the theatre is acknowledged, an overture from JC Bach’s 1779 opera Amadis of Gaul having been included – it works like the proverbial charm. Jonathan Freeman-Attwood is a real find. His trumpet timbre resembles the late Maurice André: intrinsically straightforward but with judicious vibrato for emotive purposes, and with boundless panache. The pianism of his colleague avoids both undue pedalling and tiresomely excessive staccato. On occasion fast speeds impair chorale- preludes’ contrapuntal lucidity; yet overall, jaded sensibilities will consider this production a very agreeable tonic. Both performers benefit from remarkably vivid, well-balanced sound. May we have a…

When a jury comprising Martha Argerich, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Alexis Weissenberg, Nelson Freire and Joachim Kaiser announced Kazan- born, now Munich-based Anna Gourari the winner of the First International Clara Schumann Competition in 1994, apparently praising her “almost mystical playing”, she knew she had arrived. Nearly 20 years and nearly a dozen recordings later, it’s astonishing she isn’t better known internationally. Because she is that rare thing – not merely a pianist with a formidable technique; not merely a musician with a knack for clarifying the underlying musical structure as Michelangelo clarified the skeleton and musculature of the human body, but a true artist and poet. If there is one work on this recording capable of revealing the full range of Gourari’s technical, interpretative and yes, artistic gifts, it’s Busoni’s magisterial piano arrangement of Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor for solo violin. Quite simply, this is one of the finest interpretations of this work that I have ever heard – and my favourites include wonderful recordings by Arthur Rubinstein and Alicia de Laroccha. Despite Gourari’s having technique to burn, her playing is spacious, lyrical, profound, imbued with an almost Celibidache- like mysticism. Not that there is any lack of excitement in…

This set is a cornucopia of glorious conducting and orchestral playing. While it’s impossible to generalise about works as gargantuan as Wagnerian melodramas, I can’t help thinking, having soaked up this set over a period of weeks, that people who find the contemporary interpretations of Levine, Barenboim & Thielemann faceless, may be onto something. The recordings range from Hans Knappertsbusch with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1927 or 1928, to his Munich recordings of 1962. The sound ranges from the just acceptable to the relatively modern. Knappertsbusch was famously – or notoriously – slow, depending on your point of view, in Wagner. However, there was never any dissent about his unique ability to preserve a line or arc, gradually and convincingly accumulating tension. When it came to architectural grandeur, no one could top “Kna” in these excerpts from Rienzi, Die Fliegender Höllander, the Lohengrin Act 1 Prelude (aptly described by the liner note writer as Wagner’s first piece of truly transcendent music) Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Overture and Parsifal Prelude in Munich and another Meistersinger Overture coupled with extracts from Die Walküre, Parsifal & Tannhäuser in Berlin. Intriguingly, the Meistersinger Overture in 1928 took 8’34. By the 1962 Munich performance, it…

Globalisation, in terms of international orchestral performing standards, seems to be the high tide which has lifted many boats! Excellent Bruckner performances are no longer the exclusive domain of the illustrious ensembles of Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig, Dresden and Amsterdam. Last year I reviewed a persuasive Bruckner Five with Philippe Herreweghe and the Champs-Elysées forces – an orchestra of only 68! Donald Runnicles had critics diving for the thesaurus with his 2012 Proms Bruckner Eight (which he also conducted in Sydney a few weeks earlier) with the BBC Scottish Orchestra. His flair for maintaining lucid textures while blending different orchestral voices was singled out for particular praise, as they are here in Bruckner’s Seventh. That said, however, I take issue with the Guardian reviewer who spoke of this performance as expansive. At 60 minutes? You must be joking! Even Solti, who rarely stopped to smell the flowers, managed to take 70 minutes in his second recording. Runnicles provides an uneccentric account. The stopwatch can be an unreliable ally, especially here where, paradoxically, his tempi don’t actually sound as swift as the overall duration would indicate. They are also well integrated and the gradation of the climaxes. His ability to know how…

Andreas Ottensamer is one of these frustrating overachievers who are obscenely good at everything. Born into a family of clarinetists, the Viennese wunderkind walked away from Harvard to pursue a career in the Berlin Philharmonic where, at the tender age of 24, he now occupies the principal post in his section. It’s a mystery how the first solo clarinetist ever to be signed to the Yellow Label also manages to model part-time and keep up his game in the football club he founded: the Wiener Virtuosen. I don’t want to penalise Ottensamer for his abundant gifts, but his Deutsche Grammophon debut Portraits just seems a little too perfect, much like the chiselled features highlighted on the album cover. Amongst these diverse musical portraits were a few leaky watercolours but not enough to spoil the exhibition; Ottensamer’s articulation is so flawlessly legato that occasionally it’s difficult to shake the ear out of its reverie, especially in the arrangement of Debussy’s La fille aux cheveux de lin. Copland’s pointillistic, madcap concerto glides smoothly by in the slow opening movement, until the cadenza kicks in – dazzling, if a little cautious in comparison, for example, with Martin Fröst’s plucky, devil-may-care version, which accelerates…