Patricia Kopatchinskaja is the latest phenomenon in the galaxy of young violinists who seem to excel at everything they undertake. Following up her Gramophone Bartók/Ligeti/Eötvös Recording of the Year, here come the Stravinsky and Prokofiev Second Concertos. Both were composed within five years of each other but could hardly be more different. Indeed, the Prokofiev inhabits a different universe from its playful neo-classical precursor. Kopatchinskaja states that the work indicates an exquisitely creative “re-ajustment” to Prokofiev’s return to the Soviet Union, an acceptance that “this is the sort of music you have to compose.” She captures the emotional ambiguity of the work perfectly: the uneasy stirring of the G minor opening and the subsequent lyricism tinged with bleakness, her tone impressively kaleidoscopic, alert to every emotional nuance (as are Jurowski and the LPO). The spiritual core is the central movement with its ‘raindrop’ accompaniment – a radiant, rhapsodic oasis, shot through with shards of intensity. The finale seems to tap into Kopatchinskaja’s Moldovan roots: earthy and uncomplicated on one level yet maintaining headlong relentlessness to the last. The Stravinsky is, by contrast, a hard nut to crack, stylistically and psychologically. It took the composer down a path alien to the Russia he’d abandoned,…

At a Prom concert in the Royal Albert Hall a few years ago, a few seconds after the famous bassoon passage at the beginning of the Rite of Spring, a mobile phone sounded. Sir Simon Rattle simply stopped the Berlin Philharmonic and started again. It makes you thankful they didn’t exist when Szell and Klemperer were around. This was the work that catapulted the then 21 year-old tyro conductor into the limelight when he conducted it with the Youth orchestra of Great Britain in 1976. I remember it vividly: I was there. Since then, he also recorded it during his tenure with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Whereas that was a respectable reading, this is in another league. In terms of tempos, colour and rhythm, it’s superb. The barbarism is beautifully tempered with finesse. It’s one of the great Rites. The only version I’d put above it is the stereo re-make by Igor Markevich and the aristocratic Philharmonia in 1960 where the orchestral shriek at the opening of the second part is… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Alina Ibragimova and Cédric Tiberghien are one of the most formidable teams in the world today. Their Wigmore Hall Live Beethoven series was sensational, form first note to last. I must say I was surprised to receive this two CD set of the violin/piano music of Schubert. Curiously, this combination never inspired him to the same sublime heights as the two Piano Trios, the late quartets or the two quintets, as different as they are from each other. This music has never really been accepted into the mainstream repertoire (a bit like Dvorák’s Violin Concerto). Mono recordings on LP by the now forgotten Max Rostal and Colin Horsley and Johanna Martzy still change hands for astronomical sums, for reasons no one has ever quite explained.   Listening to these performances certainly inspired me to reevaluate them. Perhaps Diabelli is to blame, as it was his idea to publish them as Sonatinas, thereby emphasising their appeal to amateurs but trivialising it for everyone else. While the D Major Sonata D384 is Schubert in his gemütlich Biedermeier mood, the two minor key ones are quite substantial and as long as many of Beethoven’s works in this genre. The A Minor especially presents…

An excellent album of works by a composer whose musical trajectory was almost as varied as Stravinsky’s, but much less well-known.

The world continues to shrink! First we have Philippe Herreweghe and his Champs-Elysées forces in Bruckner’s mighty Fifth Symphony with an orchestra of just 68. Then Thomas Dausgaard and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra in a convincing reading of another Bruckner symphony, this time the Second. Robyn Ticciati’s outstanding Symphonie Fantastique a couple of years ago belled the cat about how Berlioz can sound with smaller forces: this emotional roller coaster, where passion so often becomes an extreme sport lacked nothing in drama and, well, passion in their account. This current super-audio disc represents Ticciati’s latest foray into Berlioz. I listened to this release with a Berlioz expert and asked him not to reveal his reaction until after I’d written this revue. When he read it, he concurred completely. We both loved both the performances and the interpretation. The early La Morte de Cleopâtre sees the up-and-coming mezzo-soprano Karin Cargill in quite superb voice. Their can be no greater praise heaped on her than to say that, not since Dame Janet Baker’s recording more than 40 years ago has the worked been so successfully and graphically sung. It has just the right degree of histrionic agony as well as plenty of…

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…

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…

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…

The only gripe I have with this otherwise splendid CD is the fact that the three works are not presented in chronological order, especially as they represent the three distinct musical periods in Szymanowski’s chameleon-like composing career and are quite different from each other in idiom. The otherwise excellent Chandos usually gets this sort of thing right. In its “spangled bumptiousness”, as one deathless description had it, the Concert Overture, composed in 1904, is an unashamed homage to Richard Strauss, especially reminiscent of Don Juan with the opening vaulting motif followed by the a tender, lyrical theme. I hope it won’t be the kiss of death when I reveal that the Second Symphony (1909-10) was influenced by Max Reger’s fin-de-siècle hothouse chromaticism, although, fortunately, it lacks his academic dryness. The idiom is more akin to the intense ambience of Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, though without its thicket-like orchestral textures. It begins curiously with a violin solo, and moments of intimacy are overshadowed by a hankering for expressive climaxes. The second movement opens with a lovely string melody followed by charming Rococo variations including a gavotte and a minuet before the various strands are woven into a highly convincing contrapuntal finale….

Valentina Lisitsa virtually invented herself through social media and is supposedly the most viewed pianist on YouTube. If this is supposed to imbue her with cachet, I’m afraid it’s lost on me. The liner notes in this set read more like a media release, giving us chapter and verse about her doubts and tribulations (as if these were somehow unique to her) and adopt an unduly reverential tone, hardly worthy of a label like Decca. Since she and her husband (with whom she initially attempted a duo pianist career before abandoning it for a solo career) sank their life savings into this project and allegedly paid for the LSO, conductor and venue themselves, one can only wish them luck. One review has described this undertaking as the latter-day equivalent of vanity publishing. Lisitsa mentions that there was no rehearsal and she hadn’t met the conductor before the recording sessions. It shows in the playing – competent, the least one would expect from the LSO, but hardly incandescent. The First and Fourth concertos have never really interested me very much. The Fourth seems to try (unsuccessfully) to incorporate jazz and the slow movement has the misfortune to bear a resemblance to…

One acerbic US critic dismissed Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony as “a woolly mammoth which emerged after the Stalinist freeze”. Once upon a time I would have said, “I wish I’d thought of that!” Now, I’m not so sure. Yes, it’s still a sacred monster and Gergiev’s reading lasts more than 82 minutes (two and a half minutes longer than his previous effort, which also featured the bizarre combination of both the Rotterdam and Kirov orchestras because, apparently, the composer wanted the work played by two ensembles – a fact new to me). However, I’d forgotten just how much of the score is actually quite dark and brooding. This reading has none of the agonized, self-dramatised protraction of Bernstein’s mid- 1980s version with the Chicago Symphony (his only recorded foray with that orchestral war machine) which clocks in at 85 minutes. In this version with the Mariinsky Orchestra (formerly Kirov) Gergiev demonstrates again what a superb orchestral builder he is. Unlike, say, Petrenko in Liverpool, whose orchestra has long had exposure through a large of body of recordings, the Kirov Orchestra was largely unknown in the West before Gergiev’s emergence as a major podium force. There’s little agit- prop bombast here, and…