And so one of today’s most singular young harpsichordists comes to one of the most singular works ever written for the instrument, JS Bach’s Aria with 30 Variations, aka the Goldberg Variations. The legend, propagated by one of Bach’s great early biographers Forkel, is well-known. In 1741 an insomniac Count von Keyserlingk of Dresden commissions from Bach a work which the Count’s harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, subsequently performs for his master to while away the sleepless hours. Now considered an apocryphal story, it is no less attractive for that. But one thing is true: that in the last century and this one at least, both exponents and listeners of the piano or the harpsichord have spent many an hour in thrall to one of Bach’s most original and grandly conceived work for keyboards. Whether playing Rameau and CPE Bach or Steve Reich and Górecki, the Tehran-born Esfahani always seems to be asking not whether he has something new to say about the music but whether the music has something new to say to him. In other words, a merely novel interpretation isn’t the endgame – though it may be a byproduct. The aria, a stately sarabande that encloses the 30…

As Donald Francis Tovey writes in his eminently useful Essays in Musical Analysis, Mozart’s three last symphonies, written in 1788 over six weeks, “express the healthiest of reactions on each other” and, being “in Mozart’s ripest style makes the full range of that style appear more vividly than in any other circumstances. Consequently, they make an ideal programme when played in their chronological order.” Thus does one often hear them, as a kind of triptych or three-movement, Major-Minor-Major meta-symphony, both in concert and on record. And thus does one hear them in this instance, recorded live during the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s 2015 Mozart’s Last Symphonies national tour, which commemorated 25 years since the great Frans Brüggen conducted the orchestra in the same programme. It was also Tognetti’s first year as leader. Listening again to Brüggen’s last great pronouncement on these three symphonies (for the Glossa label in 2014), one marvels anew at the way he shapes the Orchestra of the 18th Century’s lithe, colourful responses to Mozart’s almost Shakespearean combination of low comedy and high seriousness. But it is to John Eliot Gardiner’s live 2006 recording of Symphonies Nos 39 and 41 that we must turn to find something like…

If Melbourne composer Samuel Smith’s Bleed-through for guitar and laptop is “about” anything, it’s the mutability of memory. It receives its world premiere recording as part of Australian guitarist Callum Henshaw’s debut disc which, taken as a whole, is about the same thing. Smith’s work was inspired by the phenomenon for which it is named.  As magnetic tape deteriorates, its signal infects different layers, resulting in, “a ghostly prediction and recollection of the original signal, itself now significantly diminished… In Bleed-through, the guitar acts as an original signal, becoming surrounded and consumed by the whale song of its own echo.” It’s a spacious, saudade-saturated work, and a perfect end to an echo chamber of a recital resounding with variations on themes, including Henshaw’s own “return” to playing after injury interrupted this recording project. Henshaw, who has numerous awards to his credit, begins his recital with Granados’ Valses Poéticos, delighting in the Spanish composer’s refined chiaroscuro, before moving confidently through Napoléon Coste’s programmatic Le Départ and Manuel Ponce’s unquestioned masterpiece for classical guitar, Variations sur Folia de España et Fugue to the endless vistas of Peter Sculthorpe’s From Kakadu. Henshaw has technique to burn, as evinced by his clear textures and…

The contemporary “easy listening” status of Eric Satie’s Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies belie his reputation in his own day as a musical iconoclast and innovator of the first order. And while they are among his earliest compositions, their outrageous simplicity and, in the Gnossiennes, lack of key signatures and bar lines, place them too in those dangerous regions of novelty and experimentation. Prolific pianist Noriko Ogawa, whose Debussy interpretations in particular have won her wide acclaim, begin and end this first volume of the complete piano music of Satie with the above works. What happens in between should prove to those who consider Satie’s music chillax fodder that it is anything but. Ogawa’s tone, tempi and phrasing are just right in the seven Gnossiennes and three Gymnopédies for the more transparent timbre and slightly faster decay of the 1890 Érard grand, she’s chosen to record on. The effect is a languid obsessiveness, a perfumed tension, between the (mainly) simple chordal accompaniments and spare, haunting, modal-inflected melodies. Following the Gnossiennes is what feels like a Dadaist phantasmagoria, beginning with the ragtime march Le Piccadilly and heralding the Gymnopédies with Satie’s own arrangement of his cabaret song, Je te veux, a waltz, which…

This latest volume in Ronald Brautigam’s consistently brilliant survey of Mozart’s works for piano and orchestra finds the Dutch fortepianist in fine fettle in some of the early concertos.  Joined by superb German period-instrument band Die Kölner Akademie under Juilliard-trained director Michael Alexander Willens, Brautigam raises the curtain with the main attraction, so to speak. Written in 1773, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 5 was his first original piano concerto, the previous being arrangements of other composers’ music. It’s a thrilling work, with a grand opening Allegro replete with trumpets and timpani, a delicate Cantabile slow movement and a punchy, exciting concluding Rondo.  All of which contrasts nicely with Mozart’s sweeter, more delicate Piano Concerto No 6 in B Flat (1776). Gone are the martial effects; instead the main attraction is a stately, delicious Andante where flutes replace oboes, upper strings play on the bridge and lower strings are for the most part plucked. More contrasting again are the Three Concertos for keyboard, two violins and basso arranged around 1772 by Mozart fils and père after JC Bach’s keyboard sonatas of 1766. With Brautigam joined only by violinists Peter Hanson and Marie-Luise Hartmann and cellist Albert Brüggen, these are more in…

We’re so used to hearing Handel recitals from sopranos or countertenors that one from a tenor is somewhat of a novelty, and we have to go back to Mark Padmore’s terrific 2007 release As Steals the Morn for something comparable. Basses fare even less well, and Bryn Terfel’s Handel Arias is now almost 20-years old. So English tenor Allan Clayton’s recital focusing on songs either written for or sung by the great Handelian tenor John Beard (c.1715-1791), who seems not only to have had a fine voice but acting skills to match, is most welcome. Beard created some of Handel’s most famous roles, including Samson, of which there are excerpts from not only that version but William Boyce’s; there are also arias from Ariodante, Alcina and Semele, as well as from Judas Maccabaeus, Samson, Jephtha, Alexander’s Feast and more. For As steals the morn from L’Allegro, Clayton is joined by soprano Mary Bevan; for Happy Pair from Alexander’s Feast, the Choir of Classical Opera; the recording opens with Sol nel mezzo risona del core from Il Pastor Fido, in which Bevan duets with James Eastaway’s sweetly plangent oboe. Of course the orchestral playing under the ever-musical direction of Ian Page…

Liszt has always struck me as a latter-day John Donne: passionate, creative and a ladies’ man in his youth; turning more inwards and closer to God later in life; yet ultimately leading a conflicted life, since both states coexisted in one form or another from the start. That’s what makes Hyperion’s non-chronological complete survey of Liszt’s songs such a fascinating listening experience – apart, of course, from the quality of the songs themselves and the superlative nature of the performances. One gets the whole man, rather than just a slice. Previous volumes from Julius Drake with tenor Matthew Polenzani, mezzo Angelika Kirchschlager and bass-baritone Gerald Finley have already set the bar high. But Grammy Award-winning American mezzo Sasha Cooke is right up there, with a voice as rich and responsive as her musicality. The majority of the songs here, drawn from across a 37-year period, tend towards the introspective and one has only to listen to the lush repose of the opening Des Tages laute Stimmen Schweigen Cooke evokes as the day draws to an end. Or the tastefully characterised romantic drama of Il m’aimait tant! Or the delicate rendering of Liszt’s marvelous setting of Blume und Duft, or the…

The fifth volume in Perth organist Joseph Nolan’s magisterial survey.

Sometimes strong performances aren’t enough to throw a work’s greatness into sharper relief. What’s needed are violent contrasts. Which is what we get with these electrifying new interpretations of two Russian string quintets that deserve to be better known. Not that Sergei Taneyev’s first of two String Quintets and Alexander Glazunov’s only String Quintet haven’t been recorded before. But to hear to the Gringolts Quartet and second cellist Christian Poltéra shift from the dense intellectual rigor of the Taneyev to the lightness and charm of the Glazunov with such conviction is something else again. Taneyev was a Renaissance man, as interested in science and philosophy as he was in music while Glazunov was part of the famed Mitrofan Belyayev circle, who benefited from the timber magnate’s fortune and love of chamber music. While his music too can sound academic at times, his compositional fluency from a young age ensured an effortlessness that perhaps eluded Taneyev. Although as Andrew Huth writes in his booklet note, “The heavy burden of theory and reflection that Taneyev brought to the process of composing fades away when actual performance brings the music to life.” That’s certainly the case here. A stormy Allegro con spirito gives…

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★★★★☆ Crass, colourful and immensely entertaining theatre. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Profound musicianship breathes life into familiar repertoire.