BERG: VIOLIN CONCERTO, THREE ORCHESTRAL PIECES et al, James Ehnes, BBCSO, Sir Andrew Davis Chandos SACD While music by uncompromising 12-tone composers such as Schoenberg have lost their once inalienable grip on the musical world (with composers such as Stravinsky feeling obliged to abandon their usual idiom for the sake of what became the new orthodoxy), it remains something of a truism that the serial composer who remains accessible to the intelligent and adventurous listener is Alban Berg, with his exquisite Violin Concerto utilising the then-modern idiom but keeping the plangent late-romantic heart of such composers as Mahler. This new recording in splendid surround sound by James Ehnes and the BBCSO under Sir Andrew Davis is one of the most involving that the piece has ever received, and the fill-ups – the three Orchestral Pieces and Andrew Davis’ orchestration of the piano Sonata complete a desirable disc.
GUERRA-PEIXE: SYMPHONIC SUITE NUMBERS ONE AND TWO, Goias Philharmonic Orchestra, Neil Thompson/Naxos How does Naxos continue to pull off this particular trick? Once again they have found immensely attractive music by a composer whose name will be completely new to most listeners. Guerra-Peixe was one of the most impressive Brazilian musicians of the 20th century, and these colourful exciting suites are here given the best possible advocacy.
BARTÓK, MITROPOULOS, SAYGUN, ENESCU: WITHOUT BORDERS, Can Çakmur/BIS SACD It’s well known to lovers of the composers Bartok and Kodaly that they were assiduous collectors of folk music, and the influence of that genre is often to be found in their idiomatic work. But the Hungarian composers were not alone in their interest, as this enterprising new issue proves. Towards the end of the 19th century, several composers were taking a new interest in folk music. Folk tunes, or imitations of them, had previously mainly been used in order to provide ‘local colour’ or as a way of catering to nationalist sentiments, but it was now seen as a means to revitalize art music itself, opening up for new possibilities in terms of rhythm and harmony as well as melody. At the forefront of this development was Béla Bartók, who also considered the use of folk elements as a tool to transcend boundaries – to achieve a ‘brotherhood of peoples’. For his new recital disc, Can Çakmur has devised a programme which juxtaposes four composers’ different responses to folk music.
MALIPIERO: VIOLIN CONCERTOS NOS. 1 & 2, Per una favola cavalleresca, Paolo Chiavacci, Violin,Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma, Francesco La Vecchia/Naxos
Typical of the Naxos label is its readiness to tackle many underexplored byways of classical music – with some very welcome discoveries, such as these the two colourful and energetic violin concertos by Gian Francesco Malipiero. This release couples the two violin concertos with the world premiere recording of his kaleidoscopic orchestral work Per una favola cavalleresca, with its tableaux of love, tournaments, battles, moonbeams and heroes. Malipiero’s Violin concertos are well worth investigating.
RAVEL: CANTATES POUR LE PRIX DE ROME, Véronique Gens, Vannina Santoni, Sophie Koch, Janina Baechle, Julien Behr, Michael Spyres, Jacques Imbrailo, Choeur et Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, Pascal Rophé/BIS 2 SACD Lovers of the exquisitely crafted music of Ravel have often wondered what the early cantatas he composed for the Prix de Rome sounded like – were they characteristic pieces with fingerprints of the composer’s mature style, or more anonymous tyro works before he found his feet as a composer? Now we have a chance to discover, thanks to this enterprising set. Between 1803 and 1968, the Grand Prix de Rome marked the zenith of composition studies at the Paris issue Conservatoire. In Maurice Ravel’s time the competition included an elimination round (a fugue and a choral piece) followed by a cantata in the form of an operatic scena. The entries were judged by a jury which generally favoured expertise and conformity more than originality and Ravel’s growing reputation as a member of the avant-garde was therefore hardly to his advantage, and may explain why he never won the coveted Premier Grand Prix, and the three-year stay at Rome’s Villa Medici that went with it. The present two-disc set brings together all the vocal works that Ravel composed for the Prix de Rome – five shorter settings for choir and orchestra and three cantatas.
BRAHMS: SYMPHONIES NOS 1–4, London Symphony Orchestra, Bernard Haitink/LSO Live SACD Those lucky enough to have heard live performances by the conductor Bernard Haitink over the years will have been well aware of his meticulous attention to the details of a score and his almost uncanny ability to penetrate to the heart of the music of many of the greats symphonists such as Mahler. This LSO Live set of Brahms symphonies can now be seen in its spruced-up iteration as one of the most significant of his contributions to the field. Haitink’s revelatory Brahms recordings with the LSO demonstrated why new takes on major works are so relevant. The London Symphony Orchestra’s cycle of Brahms symphonies was Bernard Haitink’s first set of recordings on the LSO Live label, originally released individually throughout 2004–05, and then as a boxed set in 2005. This collection of remastered recordings is now available on SACD, and digitally in spatial audio. Along with the symphonies, this release also includes Brahms’ Double Concerto, Tragic Overture and Serenade No. 2.
KOECHLIN: THE SEVEN STARS SYMPHONY OP. 132, Sinfonieorchester Basel, Ariane Matiakh/Capriccio An earlier recording of the Seven Stars Symphony by Koechlin demonstrated that this neglected piece more than deserved renewed interest, and this new disc is further proof that lovers of modern French music will find much to enjoy here. “Koechlin can daub with notes as Seurat daubed with bright pigments on canvas; [he] could, whenever he wished, bathe his music in the impressionist glories of Debussy and Ravel or give it the delicacy of Fauré and then toughen it up with some Roussel-like grinding rhythms,” opined Robert Reilly – a sound summing-up. A very cherishable disc.
DEBUSSY: WORKS FOR PIANO DUET, Helene Mercier & Louis Lortie, pianos/Chandos If you are an admirer of the most elegant and affecting classical piano music (and what true music lover isn’t?), this poetic disc will be absolute catnip. Few composers wrote as sensitively as Debussy, and there is no denying that Louis Lortie and Helene Mercier are among the most judicious interpreters of these French masterpieces, with every detail of the pianistic soundscape caught with great felicity by the Chandos engineers. An essential disc, not least for lovers of Debussy – even if you possess other recordings of these pieces.
LYATOSHINSKY: SYMPHONIES NO. 4 & 5, Cracow Philharmonic Orchestra, Roland Bader/CPO As Ukraine is very much in the news thanks to the brutal invasion of the country by its neighbour, it is perhaps a significant period to look at the composer who is perhaps the most important that the country has produced, but whose dramatic music has been somewhat under-regarded in recent years. He might be called – with justification — the father of Ukrainian music. The Soviet music encyclopaedia praises him as one of the most important founders of Ukrainian symphonic and chamber music, and also as the creator of the first Ukrainian symphony. The performances here of his 4th and 5th symphonies are strong and passionate.
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: PAN’S ANNIVERSARY, various artist/Albion There are music lovers who will be content with the more familiar pieces by the composer Vaughan Williams, but on the occasion of his 150th birthday, Albion Records has dipped into far less familiar territory (as is its wont) to focus on some less familiar pieces. The album is an essential purchase for lovers of RVW, but it’s a cause to regret that an unnecessary spoken text was included rather than simply the uninterrupted music. The disc contains no less than five world premieres: firstly, Ben Jonson’s masque Pan’s Anniversary, as adapted for the Shakespeare Birthday Celebration at Stratford-upon-Avon, with incidental music by Vaughan Williams. At the heart of the music are four great Hymns to Pan for three female soloists, chorus and orchestra. Time was short, so Vaughan Williams delegated some of the dance arrangements (based on traditional tunes) to his friend Gustav Holst. The work was performed just once, on Easter Monday 1905 and was reconstructed for this recording. Peace, Come Away and To Sleep! To Sleep! are two settings of poems by Tennyson that Vaughan Williams made when he was a student. They have been orchestrated and edited by the composer Christopher Gordon, who also orchestrated Margery Wentworth, a much later setting of poetry by John Skelton. Finally, Timothy Burke made an arrangement of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for voices and string octet as an innovative lockdown project. This is the first full recording with the choir (of 39) and octet under one roof. The words set in the Fantasia were taken from the English translation of Psalm 65 from Archbishop Parker’s Psalter, the source for Tallis’s original setting, which is also heard on the disc.
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS ON BRASS, The Tredegar Town Band with Ian Porthouse and Martyn Brabbins/Albion More RVW from Albion. Famously, Vaughan Williams made a point of writing for virtually every instrument that set him a challenge, and brass aggregations are particularly grateful for his contributions. Vaughan Williams wrote three pieces for brass band – Henry the Fifth Overture, Prelude on Three Welsh Hymn Tunes and Variations for Brass Band, the latter commissioned for the National Brass Band Championships in 1957. This album brings together these works with many new arrangements of some popular pieces by Paul Hindmarsh (who curated and produced the album) and Phillip Littlemore. The tracks include A Flourish for Band, the English Folk Songs Suite, Sea Songs and Henry the Fifth.
NOVÁK: ORCHESTRAL MUSIC, VOL. 1, Alice Rajnohová, Vilém Veverka, Lucie Schinzelová, Kristýna Znamenáčková, Ensemble Opera Diversa, Gabriela Tardonová/Toccata One of the glories of Moravian music was the composer Novak, and this impressive disc from Toccata is a showcase of some of his most characterful work The music of the Moravian composer Jan Novák (1921–84) – a natural successor to Bohuslav Martinů, with whom he briefly studied – is nothing less than life-enhancing: it has Martinů’s rhythmic charge and his unflagging energy. And although Novák had such difficulties with the authorities in Communist Czechoslovakia that he chose to emigrate, there is a real spirt of life in these wonderful scores.
VLADIGEROV: ORCHESTRAL WORKS, VOL. 3, Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra; Bulgarian Chamber Orchestra; Alexander Vladigerov/Capriccio A casual acquaintanceship with the colourful scores of the composer Vladigerov will suggest exciting bustle and energy, but that first impression does not tell the whole picture – repeated listenings show that he is undoubtedly composer of complexity and inventiveness. Amid Bulgaria’s diverse musical culture, Pancho Vladigerov clearly stands out as his country’s most important representative composer. As a mentor to generations of other 20th-century Bulgarian composers, he remains to this day one of the most prominent figures in the musical life of his country. Revered as a living legend, he was in a position to continue his work largely unaffected by the ideological demands of the Communist regime, although his musical style, which was tonal and grounded in the late-Romantic tradition, was hardly likely to provoke any reprisal. These remasters of recordings produced in Bulgaria in the 1970s are now being released on CD for the first time, enabling Capriccio‘s 18-disc Vladigerov Edition to preserve his colourful music for future generations.
FARNON: BRITISH LIGHT MUSIC, VOL. 9: THE WESTMINSTER WALTZ, COLDITZ MARCH, STATE OCCASION, A STAR IS BORN, Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, Adrian Leaper/Naxos When (in 1962) he recorded his album Great Songs From Great Britain, Frank Sinatra chose the conductor Robert Farnon, despite the fact that he was Canadian rather than British (that album was the first in a series that Sinatra planned to record in various countries – but this disc was the only fruit). Those arrangements are exquisite, but there is far more to Farnon, as his light music and vivid film scores demonstrate. This Naxos disc is the perfect introduction to Farnon, including the stirring Colditz March and the impressionistic beauty of À la Claire Fontaine.
BOYER: ORCHESTRAL WORKS, London Symphony Orchestra, Peter Boyer/Naxos The days when atonal music virtually obliterated all other composition are over, and accessible composers such as Peter Boyer are now getting the kind of attention they deserve This album presents eight of the most recent works by Boyer, one of the leading American orchestral composers of his generation. Balance of Power was commissioned for the 95th birthday of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, while Fanfare for Tomorrow was composed for the inauguration of President Joe Biden in 2021.
RESPIGHI: CREPUSCOLO, Timothy Fallon, Ammiel Bushakevitz /BIS SACD It goes without saying that Respighi’s exciting and dynamic orchestral works are the centrepiece of his creativity with the Roman trilogy standing central. But his exquisite songs are now gaining more and more interest even though they are a tougher nut to crack. Crepuscolo is the final song in Ottorino Respighi’s song cycle Deità silvane (‘woodland deities’), but as an album title it also stands for the twilight during the interwar years of everything that Respighi represented, as various trends such as atonality, spiky neoclassicism and futurism flourished. In reaction to these developments, Respighi in 1932 famously signed a manifesto calling for music with a ‘human content’ – something which his songs certainly live up to: as Elsa Respighi, the composer’s wife, once said it was to his songs that he ‘entrusts his heart’s hidden secrets, when he lets his soul sing freely.’
SCHOENBERG, MESSIAEN AND RAVEL: ORCHESTRAL WORKS, Francesco Piemontesi, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Jonathan Nott/Pentatone SACD The Pentatone label is more intermittent in its commitment to SACD these days, but when it returns to the medium of surround sound, the results can be spectacular indeed – as in this impressive disc of colourful orchestral works by Schoenberg, Messiaen and Ravel). The talented conductor Jonathan Nott does full justice to these scores in PCM surround, 192/24 PCM Stereo and 44.1k/16 PCM Stereo.
BACH: THE VIOLIN & HARPSICHORD SONATAS, Mercero & Sebastián/Eudora SACD It’s hard to imagine these imperishable pieces given more persuasive advocacy than by Mercero and Sebastian, who find every nuance in the music, greatly aided by the sympathetic surround sound recording granted them by the Eudora label. Even those resistant to the pieces may find themselves converted by this disc.
RUDERS: Clarinet Quintet etc., Rudersdal Chamber Players/OUR SACD This is not music that immediately gives up its secrets, but close attention on the part of the viewer will be greatly rewarded. The recording – nuanced SACD sound – does justice to the music.
HOLLYWOOD SOUNDSTAGE, Sinfonia of London, John Wilson/Chandos SACD The days when orchestral music from the great era of Hollywood was considered a poor relation to symphonic writing are, thankfully, fading away – not least thanks to the passionate advocacy of the conductor John Wilson, whose latest disc (in dramatic surround sound) perfectly serves the magnificent scores of such composers as Franz Waxman David Raksin and the doyen of the field, Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Even for those who possess the scores in other forms, this is an ear-tingling disc, full of delights — notably the suite from Franz Waxman’s score for Hitchcock’s Rebecca.