Glamorous German violinist Julia Fischer looks like a thoroughly modern classical celebrity, but in recital her repertoire is in the grand tradition of the mid-20th century when programs never seemed complete without Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata, Ravel’s Tzigane and works by the subject of Fischer’s fifth Decca CD, the 19th-century Spanish showman Sarasate. These dazzling works, composed at a time when Sarasate rivalled Joachim as Europe’s finest violinist, make great showstoppers and encores, but what’s surprising is how satisfying they turn out to be in their own right. Beginning with a couple of Spanish dances, it’s apparent from the get-go how effortlessly the 30-year-old masters the technical challenges of works designed to leave jaws on floor. She sounds like she’s having fun, and why wouldn’t she, especially in Zigeunerweisen, whose czárdás rhythm allows Fischer and accompanist Milana Chernyavska to demonstrate how convincingly a German and a Ukrainian can perform Spanish music inspired by Hungarian gypsies. The highlight, though, is the Serenata Andaluza, whose opening raises expectations of Bizet’s Carmen wandering in, but then transforms into one of those million-miles- an-hour extravaganzas of the kind that prompted George Bernard Shaw to say Sarasate’s music “left criticism gasping miles behind him”. Amen…

  There aren’t many pianists with the Beethoven pedigree of Rudolf Buchbinder. Now in his mid-60s, the former wunderkind who entered the Vienna Hochschule at age 5 has recorded two cycles of both sonatas and concertos, this most recent live set of concertos appearing on DVD two years ago to enthusiastic reviews. If Buchbinder in the studio can be a little studied, these live performances are sparked with more life. Anything but a ‘personality’ player, you sense Buchbinder’s much happier poring over Beethoven’s original markings rather than laying on the showmanship and emotion for excitable fans. And instead of the luscious warm string sounds that Barenboim unleashes in the same repertoire, Buchbinder goes instead for the intimacy and almost chamber-music textures of a smaller band. This is both a strength and a weakness. It’s a very ‘musicianly’ approach and one that will be appreciated by all who like their Beethoven affectation-free, interpreted with intelligence and good taste. But the live recorded sound to some ears will be less than scintillating, adding a dourness that the performances themselves, suitably animated in the First, lyrical in the Third and Fourth, and imposing in the Emperor, don’t actually possess. This is late-night Beethoven, to be……

Now here’s a CD that can’t be judged by its cover. No, it’s not a Janine Jansen solo album, although that’s the obvious, and presumably deliberate, first impression, but in fact a chamber music recording involving the Dutch violinist and five colleagues from her festival in Utrecht. And if anyone deserves to be featured in a hero-shot on the cover, it should in fact be audio engineer Julian Schwenkner who’s captured this interesting coupling of Schoenberg and Schubert in magnificent, warm, truly-contoured sound. As for the performances, every moment of Transfigured Night is drama-charged and driven home with commitment, making it easy to understand how the Second Viennese School arose not out of some abstract theory, but from late-Romantic hyperemotionalism. Jansen’s sweettoned fiddle balanced against the rich dual-cello sound makes Schoenberg’s haunting picture of Maeterlinck’s lovers in a moonlit forest into a compelling listen. The Schubert’s pretty good too, but as sometimes happens when friends get together, it perhaps misses some of the profundity, especially in the glorious Trio of the Scherzo, which suggests players anxiously glancing at one another, rather than the played-inblood, rip-your-heart-out shredfest that permanent ensembles like the Guarneris bring to it on disc. State of the…

You’ll read reviews of this CD where itinerant and half-hearted Brahmsians will tell you that the tempi taken by conductor Andris Nelsons and soloist Helene Grimaud in this utterly remarkable, inspired and inspiring recording of the two Brahms piano concertos are too slow and leaden. You must not believe them. Just as true Brahmsians appreciate the glacial tempi of the symphonies in Celibidache’s legendary complete set, so here Nelson’s slower pace is all about unfolding the Brahms universe with its profound richness of detail and astonishing warmth of tone. There are so many recordings of Brahms First Piano Concerto, but few could be classified as Desert Island Discs and in fact many are downright disappointing. Well this performance of it recorded live in Munich changes all of that, and if by the end your legs are still able to support the weight of your body, assume that Brahms just isn’t really your thing. From that first opening orchestral chord, surely the most arresting ever captured on disc, Nelsons announces the epic scope of the enterprise ahead. Just three seconds in and your breath’s been taken away, and from there, he and remarkable Frenchwoman Grimaud are like two Alices in the…

Wow, those New York opera critics are a right bunch of grumble-bums, at least if this superb production of Rigoletto is anything togo by. Sure, the Met’s staging earlier this year wasn’t universally panned, but a viewing o the DVD suggests a world-class theatrical spectacle that didn’t deserve its mealy mouthed treatment from some who seem to have taken umbrage that director Michael Mayer came from Broadway and set the whole thing in 1960s Las Vegas. It’s a brilliant concept that actually has you laughing out loud early on, as the Duke (the ever so charming Piotr Beczała) sings Questo a quella in a Rat-Pack style white jacket, crooner’s microphone in hand, and surrounded by showgirls waving their, um, feathers. But then when the tragedy strikes, designer Christine Jones’ casino set with its brilliant elevator exit never imposes, making this a production that compels you to become emotionally engaged in one of the most pathos-ridden final acts that Verdi ever composed, even when the corpse is revealed inside the boot of a Cadillac. The casting’s the key. Želko Lucˇic´ as the eponymous tragic jester who loses his daughter through a terrible twist of fate was criticised for being wooden in…

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….

When they burst onto the chamber music scene in the 1970s, the Emerson String Quartet were iconoclasts. New York-based, they swapped first and second violin roles, and along with the Brodskys and Kronos they swept away the grand but stuffy tradition embodied by the Amadeus and the Guarneris. And now, nine Grammys later, they’re continuing to push the boundaries with an intriguing CD featuring the bookends of arguably the most momentous decade ever in classical music. Joined by long-time collaborators, American violist Paul Neubauer and British cellist Colin Carr, the Emerson’s readings of the great sextets by Tchaikovsky and Schoenberg are like a lesson in musical history. Tchaikovsky, at the beginning of the 1890s, used his Souvenir de Florence (the slow movement was written in the city) to continue the classical traditions that he inherited from his models Mozart and Mendelssohn. Then, at the end of that decade – indeed century – the young Schoenberg in his Transfigured Night sent music into the future, his twisted harmonies depicting haunted forests and psycho-babbling sensualists. And in this wonderfully-played CD, which is being hailed as a farewell for cellist David Finckel who’s leaving after 34 years, the Emersons and friends do everything…

After 500 commercial recordings, mainly together, Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields have been one of the most dependable names in the business for half a century. So with the great man turning 90 next year, there’s more than a bit of interest in how American violinist Joshua Bell goes in his very first recording as the new music director of the venerable institution founded in Sir Neville’s living room back in 1958. Short answer: really well. Nothing to scare the warhorses in his choice of Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh of course, which he and the Academy worked up during a favourably reviewed American concert tour. But succeeding a legend? Well, Bell’s never been one to shy away from potential humiliation, as he famously demonstrated by busking in a Washington DC metro (net result: $32 in 45 minutes and only seven people stopping to listen). Here, he doesn’t try to impose his personality on music most of us could whistle in our concert-hall sleep. And in this day of new editions of everything, and bold personal statements, and authentic blah-blah-blah, it’s refreshing to hear a guy on a high-profile mission simply standing with his…

Dvorák’s Violin Concerto is a neglected masterpiece, but it’s never likely to have a better advocate than German violinist Julia Fischer.

Is there anything that 19-year-old American musical prodigy Conrad Tao can’t do? Here’s a kid whose concert party-piece is to appear as soloist in both the Mendelssohn Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto in the one concert; he’s already won eight ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards; this month he’s curating his own festival, made possible through various career grants, and now, with an exclusive contract, EMI have anointed him as the beacon of hope amid their recent slough- of-despond merger machinations. So his debut full-length piano album had better be good, right? Well it is good, refreshing even, right from the outset where he begins with the seemingly implausible choice of avant-garde polymath Meredith Monk’s Railroad (Travel Song), straight out of the contemporary American minimalist library and ultimately proving an inspired choice, both for its crossover appeal and its sense of a journey lying ahead. Here is a teenaged artist who grew up in a world where the old distinctions between high and low art, classical and pop have broken down, and where iTunes lists the great symphonies and sonatas as “Songs”. And it’s as “Songs” that he plays the selection of Rachmaninov solo piano Preludes, forming the first part…

There’s something a little creepy about this recording of Vivaldi’s late oboe concertos, not just because they were written as the Inquisition demonised the impoverished Red Priest, but also because an elephant had to die to provide the ivory from which the soloist’s instrument (his ‘Ivory Angel’) was made. Simone Toni and Silete Venti! use a reconstructed version of the 1730 original instrument currently held in a Milanese museum. Rather than a disclaimer that no elephants were harmed in the making of this recording, Toni’s liner notes only mention his own “ineffable sorrow” when the ivory located after an initial search proved unsuitable for his purposes. Five concertos are interspersed with instrumental excerpts from L’Olimpiade and Griselda, forming an intriguing snapshot of an ageing Vivaldi reaching the end of an era where his trademark ebullience seems tinged with something more sinister. Don’t expect The Four Seasons. The overall tone tends toward the lugubrious, the ivory oboe sounding like the soundtrack to a movie set in a haunted house, its eeriness ideally offset by the Baroque chamber organ burbling away in the mad professor’s attic, while the seriousness of musical intent does its best to stay on the right side of…

She’s playing the Elgar Cello Concerto with the husband of the woman who made the greatest-ever recording of it; she’s already won a “Genius” award from the MacArthur Foundation, and she’s got Decca hailing her as its first solo cellist signing in more than three decades. Lots of hype to live up to there, and Alisa Weilerstein seems on a hiding-to-nothing when the inevitable comparisons are made with Jacqueline duPré. What
the conspicuously intelligent American has going for her is a prodigious talent that’s been
recognised ever since she made
her concert debut with Cleveland
Orchestra nearly two decades ago.
That, and a commercial point-of-difference
in programming, with the immortal Elgar coupled implausibly with Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto, and then the bitter pill’s sugar- coating of Bruch’s Kol Nidrei. But Weilerstein is known for her interest
in contemporary music, and Carter’s Cello Concerto, filled with slap-pizzicato and spiky orchestral explosions, is one of the few works by the American composer’s-composer that has crossed over successfully into the popular concert hall. And strange as it may sound given the beloved warhorse company that it keeps, this boots-and-all recording of it is the highlight of an impressive CD which leaves the brain stimulated but the emotions strangely unengaged. In…