Classical CDs
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Symphony No 9 Park Avenue Chamber Symphony/David Bernard (Recursive Classics)My favourite recent Beethoven cycle is a largely unnoticed one from Copenhagen. This disc of No 9 is another outsider. It’s performed by a semi-professional New York chamber orchestra and has ghastly sleeve art. The recording is a little over-resonant, but I can live with that. As a performance, it’s a winner: dramatic, witty, eloquent and boasting some startling choral work in the last movement. Things start promisingly, the string tremolandi at the symphony’s outset clearly articulated, the brass and Read more ...
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Bach: Keyboard Concertos, Italian Concerto Sonya Bach (piano), English Chamber Orchestra/John Mills and Stephanie Gonley (leaders) (Rubicon)There's no shortage of decent recordings of Bach concertos played on piano. I’d probably rescue my Murray Perahia discs from a burning house and Glenn Gould’s vintage accounts still cast a spell. This new set from South Korean pianist Sonya Bach more than holds its own. These are such fantastic little pieces: three-movement concertos which don't exceed the 20-minute mark. This is probably why they’re programmed relatively rarely, though András Schiff Read more ...
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Guy Johnston: Tecchler’s Cello - From Cambridge to Rome (King’s College Cambridge)Acquiring a second-hand instrument always leads one to wonder what sort of a life it led before. Did said instrument enjoy a flourishing professional career, or was it abandoned in an attic for decades? Cherished by a master or mistreated by a bumbling amateur? Guy Johnston’s enjoyable anthology celebrates his recent acquisition of a 300-year-old cello made by one David Tecchler. He was a Bavarian-born craftsman who pitched up in Rome towards the end of the 17th century, one of his workshops being situated Read more ...
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Sibelius: Piano Music Leif Ove Andsnes (Sony)Yes, Sibelius did write piano music, though not a lot of it gets heard. A recent BIS collection featured original pieces and transcriptions played on the composer's own piano, and Glenn Gould recorded a small selection in the 1970s. So Leif Ove Andsnes’s glorious disc fills a useful gap, but it's not just for completists. Sibelius himself famously complained that the piano “doesn't sing”, and Andrew Mellor's perceptive booklet essay describes the piano output as a chronically neglected secret. Andsnes's collection spans Sibelius’s career, opening Read more ...
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Antheil: A Jazz Symphony, Piano Concerto No. 1, Capital of the Word, Archipelago “Rhumba” Frank Dupree (piano), Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz/Karl-Heinz Steffens (Capriccio)George Antheil’s worst move was probably calling his 1945 autobiography Bad Boy of Music. If he'd genuinely been that naughty, he'd have become a household name instead of fading into obscurity. A recent Chandos disc of Antheil symphonies underwhelmed me, but this raucous anthology makes a much more persuasive case for Antheil's talents. Try the invigorating Jazz Symphony from 1925. Performed here in its Read more ...
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John Cage: Two4 Aisha Orazbayeva (violin), Naomi Sato (shō) (SN Variations)The shō is a Japanese wind instrument long associated with traditional court music. Looking like a bundle of sticks, its 17 pipes each plays a distinct pitch. Its sound is something else, the shō’s clusters of notes emerging and fading into silence along with the player’s breath. John Cage’s 1991 piece Two4 can be played by solo violin with piano or shō, their short-lived chords set against the violin’s ability to sustain individual notes for over a minute. Shō and violin blend well together in terms of sound; Read more ...
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Henze: Neue Volkslieder und Hirtengesänge, Kammermusik 1958 Scharoun Ensemble Berlin/Daniel Harding, with Andrew Staples (tenor), Markus Weidmann (bassoon) and Jürgen Ruck (guitar) (Tudor)Hans Werner Henze worked regularly with the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin from 1983 onwards, and this enchanting collection includes works performed at a memorial concert given after Henze’s death in 2012. One of the best routes into Henze’s music must be through Oliver Knussen’s mesmerising DG set of Undine, surely one of the great 20th century ballet scores. Or via the two works collected here, which will floor Read more ...
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Mansurian: Requiem RIAS Kammerchor, Münchener Kammerorchester/Alexander Liebreich (ECM)Requiem mass settings commemorating historical events are effectively a musical sub-genre, and Tigran Mansurian’s absorbing 2011 Requiem is dedicated to the victims of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman government between 1915 and 1917. Mansurian’s own family was affected, and the work is a moving meeting point between opposing musical and spiritual points of view: a traditional European Catholic mass setting rubbing shoulders with the traditions and music of the Armenian church. The Read more ...
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Dvořák: Symphony No 9, Sibelius: Finlandia Chineke! Orchestra/Kevin John Edusei (Signum)These live performances mark the recording debut of the Chineke! Orchestra, an ensemble created by bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku to provide opportunities for BME orchestral musicians in the UK and Europe. The only reservations have to concern the programme; releasing a disc of music by dead white Europeans is surely a missed opportunity. Still, Dvořák’s Symphony No 9 does make a lot of sense in this context, a product of the composer's years spent in New York as director of the now defunct National Conservatory Read more ...
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Krenek: Complete Piano Concertos, Volume 2 Mikhail Korzhev, Eric Huebner (pianos), Nurit Pacht (violin), Adrian Partington (organ), English Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Woods (Toccata Classics)A cycle of piano concertos by Ernst Krenek won't be on many people's shopping lists, but Volume 1 in this series was unexpectedly absorbing. All hail its successor, which contains just one piano concerto in the conventional sense. That's the Concerto No 4, composed in 1950 and another example of Krenek’s gift for writing exuberant, approachable atonal music. The first movement's waltz rhythms are Read more ...
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Dreams & Fancies – English music for solo guitar Sean Shibe (guitar) (Delphian)This is the best solo guitar disc I've heard. That it comes from a soloist in his twenties makes it all the more astounding. There's a funny quote in Lucy Walker’s sleeve note from the influential Spanish guitarist Francisco Tárrega, who remarked that “the guitar in the hands of an Englishman is almost blasphemy.” Not any more; the British guitarist Julian Bream emerged from nowhere to become one of the 20th century's most important players, and one who inspired a huge range of contemporary composers to write Read more ...
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Mompou: Fêtes Lointaines Steffen Schleiermacher (piano) (MDG)“I am not a composer and don't want to be regarded as one… somehow, I always have the feeling that it comes to me from outside.” There is indeed something otherworldly about Federico Mompou’s spare, understated music, and it’s interesting that several pianists who excel in this repertoire also specialise in performing works by other fringe minimalists. Steffen Schleiermacher is one, having previously recorded discs of Feldman and Cage. Not that Mompou’s output is as outré as theirs: you’d place him close to Satie and Poulenc on the Read more ...