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MICHAEL TIPPETT

LISON BALSOM

The unsung genius of English music?

he trumpeter on her musical loves

Full Radio 3 February listings inside see p110

The world’s best-selling classical music magazine EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Singers We salute the 50-year reign of the world’s greatest choral group

Alpesh Chauhan We meet the young conductor

Mail composers Musicians on stamps

Richard Morrison Harassment must not be tolerated

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Choose the winners of the BBC Music Magazine Awards

The art of memory How do musicians learn so many notes off by heart?

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue Violinist Lisa Batiashvili Tallis’s Lamentations Plus! 110 reviews by the world’s finest critics CDs, DVDs &books – see p74

20–29 May 2019 Helsinki

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THE MIRJAM HELIN INTERNATIONAL SINGING COMPETITION P.O.Box 203, FI-00121 Helsinki ∙ Phone: +358 9 6128 1248 ∙ info@mirjamhelin.fi www.mirjamhelin.fi

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Welcome For those not used to it, learning music by heart is a daunting and long process involving hours of hard slog (see our feature on p42). But is it worth it? The choir I sing in here in Bristol was recently asked to perform Howells’s Take Him, Earth, for Cherishing by memory – the subsequent hours (days) spent listening, repeating and cursing drove almost all of us to drink. And yet that slog did, indeed, pay off, Howells’s music gaining an immediacy and new-found energy.

For musicians that face their audiences, playing without music is surely a must – how many times, for instance, have you sat near the front of a concert hall, only to have the soloist’s entire body obscured by a music stand? That said, no one should negatively judge a solo performer who uses a score judiciously – as a prompt rather than a crutch. And in choral circles, especially in the UK, the bad habit of relying on sight-reading to get through performances means that singers have their heads buried in their scores far too much.

No sooner has 2018 heaved into sight, than the BBC Music Magazine Awards nominations have been announced. Turn to p38 and read about our 21 wonderful shortlisted recordings, and then head to our website at www.classical-music.com/awards. There you can listen to extended excerpts of each one and vote for your favourites. Have fun!

Oliver Condy Oli C d Editor Edi

THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS

Brian Kay

Terry Blain

Amanda Holloway

Broadcaster and writer

Writer and critic

Music journalist

‘A Christmas spent listening to Tallis’s Lamentations could have been depressing. Instead it was a reminder of deeper, spiritual values at a time of year that can seem brainlessly frivolous and materialistic.’ Page 70

‘In a particularly busy period, Alison Balsom happily made time to talk to me about music that ignited her passion for the trumpet, and how she wants to kindle that excitement in new audiences.’ Page 118

‘As a founder member of the King’s Singers back in the 1960s, it was a huge pleasure to talk to the current generation about their continuing success, still delighting global audiences 50 years on.’ Page 24

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Contents FEBRUARY 2018

FEATURES 24 Cover story: The King’s Singers

As the world’s top vocal sextet celebrates 50 years, founder member Brian Kay meets the current group

32 The BBC Music Magazine interview Violinist Lisa Batiashvili talks to Clemency Burton-Hill

38 BBC Music Magazine Awards Vote now on the biggest awards in classical music!

42 Memory games How do musicians learn so many long and complex scores off by heart? John Evans asks this very question

46 Stamps of approval We open the album of composers featured on stamps

48 Alpesh Chauhan Richard Bratby meets the brilliant Brummie maestro wowing audiences in the Italian city of Parma

52 Education We look at the inspiring orchestra for disabled players

EVERY MONTH 6 Letters 10 The Full Score

32 Lisa Batiashvili

Charles Dutoit suspended by RPO; Alison Balsom heads for Cheltenham; Tippett symphony revived

23 Richard Morrison Why indecent conduct in classical music must stop

62 Musical Destinations Geoffrey John Davies visits Vail in the US Rockies

MAGAZINE

Malcolm Hayes on the multi-voiced Michael Tippett

70 Building a Library Tallis’s Lamentations, as recommended by Terry Blain

108 Live events The best opera and concerts across the country

110 Radio & TV listings Full Radio 3 listings plus television highlights

116 Crossword and quiz 118 Music that Changed Me Alison Balsom 4

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COVER IMAGE: JOHN MILLAR THIS PAGE: GETTY, JOHN MILLAR

64 Composer of the Month

Subscriptions rates £64.87 (UK); £65 (Eire, Europe); £74 (Rest of World) ABC Reg No. 3122 EDITORIAL Plus the composers we would like to see celebrated on a British stamp Editor Oliver Condy (Thea Musgrave) Deputy editor Jeremy Pound (EJ Moeran) Reviews editor Rebecca Franks (Samuel Coleridge-Taylor) Production editor Neil McKim (Richard Rodney Bennett) Cover CD editor Alice Pearson (Hubert Parry)

Editorial assistant Freya Parr (Arthur Bliss) Listings editor Paul Riley (William Lawes) Art editor Dav Ludford (Brian Eno) Designer Liam McAuley (James MacMillan) Picture editor Sarah Kennett (Kate Bush) Thanks to Daniel Jaffé MARKETING Subscriptions director Jacky Perales-Morris Direct marketing executive Craig Ramsay ADVERTISING Group advertisement manager Laura Jones +44 (0)117 314 8760

Full F Radio ebruary 3 and te listings levisio n highli ghts See

February reviews Your guide to the best new recordings, DVDs and books

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24 The King’s Singers with Brian Kay

74 Teodor Currentzis VOTE NOW!

64 Michael Tippett Advertisement manager Louise Dunn +44 (0)117 314 8384 Sales and partnership manager Rebecca O’Connell +44 (0)117 933 8007 Senior account manager Rebecca Yirrell +44 (0)117 314 8364 Senior brand sales executive Katie Gibbons +44 (0)117 933 8072 Brand sales executive Dan Baker +44 (0)117 314 8841 Classified sales executive Stephanie Hall +44 (0)117 300 8535 Inserts Laurence Robertson +353 876 902208 SYNDICATION & LICENSING Tim Hudson +44 (0)20 7150 5170 Richard Bentley +44 (0)20 7150 5168 PRODUCTION Production director Sarah Powell

For the finest recordings of 2017 and you could win a copy of each of this year’s nominations

Production coordinator Lizzie Ayre Ad coordinator Beth Phillips Ad designer Parvin Sepehr Reprographics Tony Hunt, Chris Sutch PUBLISHING Publisher Andrew Davies CEO Tom Bureau Managing director Andy Marshall BBC WORLDWIDE Director of editorial governance Nicholas Brett Publishing director Chris Kerwin UK Publishing coordinator Eva Abramik EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD James Stirling, Edward Blakeman, Chi-chi Nwanoku, Charles Peebles This magazine is published by Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited under licence from BBC Worldwide

74 Recording of the Month Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 Teodor Currentzis ‘Currentzis’s interpretation grabs you by the scruff of the neck and compels you to follow its relentlessly tortured path’

76 Orchestral 81 Concerto 84 Opera 88 Choral & Song 92 Chamber 96 Instrumental 100 Brief Notes 102 Jazz 105 Books 107 Audio

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Letters

Have your say…

Write to: The editor, BBC Music Magazine, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol, BS1 3BN Email: music@classical-music.com L ET TE R of the

MONTH

Composer cut short: Beethoven was reduced to three movements in London

GETTY

Military woes As a former head of woodwind studies at two royal conservatoires, it was with dismay that I read the news concerning the potential diminishing of military bands in the UK (Comment, January).

We cannot, of course, defend nor justify their existence just on tradition and an employment opportunity for young musicians. Both these maybe true, but the musical standard achieved in all of the 6

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

Beethoven’s Hammer-lite Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata (Building a Library, January), has an interesting side story to it. The sonata was published in London in December 1819, within three months of its publication in Vienna, but saw the light of day in a rather truncated form in England. Here, the Grand Sonata for the Pianoforte consisted of the first three movements only, with the fast movements surrounding the Adagio. It didn’t bear an opus number, nor a dedication. The finale was published at the same time as Introduction and Fugue for the Pianoforte, without WORTH £170! any reference to the other publication whatsoever. Did Beethoven protest? No. It was the composer himself who thought the work might be too difficult for the English public.

He authorised the publisher to cut the work – in the composer’s view, even a sonata WIN A DIGITAL RADIO! consisting only of the three Every month the editor will movements was acceptable. award a Geneva Lab Touring S Was it a success? Hardly. Apart radio (retail value £170 – see www.genevalab.com) to the from the truncation of the writer of the best letter received. work, the London edition was The editor reserves the right to riddled with mistakes. shorten letters for publication.

Jacob Buis, Betws-y-Coed

bands is also extremely high, the services they provide are many, and all set a real example for musicians worldwide. What the bands display in terms of discipline, culture and moraleboosting support for other parts of our military services is widely recognised. Many of them go abroad as medical auxiliaries to provide a vital cog in our activities overseas, and at home play at many non-military functions, major sporting events, on TV, and to

support charities. Our military bands represent something uniquely British, and for the moment remain something that is envied and admired everywhere worldwide. The bands employ about 1,000 musicians overall and cost £35m per year to run that is 50p for each person in UK. John Reynolds, via email

Quality carols I have enjoyed the carol competition on Radio 3’s

Breakfast programme and considered Bernard Trafford’s setting a worthy winner.

The carol has been played frequently over the Christmas period, but I fear that, like previous winners, it will then disappear. I wonder if consideration could be made as to whether the recording could be made available on the following year’s BBC Music Magazine’s Christmas cover CD as a bonus track?

Reg Tomblin, Peterborough

Festive Finns

Late streamer

In your Christmas issue reviews, Terry Blain (on Riemuitkaamme! A Finnish Christmas) asks whether ‘Finns temperamentally avoid ribaldry and tinsel-draping at Christmas’. Yes we do.

Christmas is a solemn occasion for the solemn Finns. This solemnity goes on throughout the year, which in a way means that we have Christmas every day.

Ville Hildén, Helsinki

For many years I’ve relied on your magazine for news and reviews about CDs and vinyl records (especially once most record shops disappeared) and also for information about turntables, CD players and receivers. So I’m very pleased to have your informative piece about streaming (Dec issue).

Being 80 years old, I don’t think I’ll make it into that new age, but I appreciate learning more about it. Some time ago a young friend suggested I should ‘download’ some ‘tunes’ and, being an opera fan, I asked him how this would work with something like Wagner’s Ring.

I now know, but even so I think I’ll stick with the CDs I have.

Sheila K Johnson, Cardiff, CA, US

Spoken Schubert Michael Tanner (Reviews, January) writes as though baritone Christian Gerhaher and pianist Gerold Huber’s recording of Die schöne Müllerin were the first to include, in spoken form, the poems of Müller’s cycle not set by Schubert. In fact, this has been done at least twice before, both involving baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

In the Hyperion Schubert Edition, tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Graham Johnson’s 1994 performance of the cycle includes Müller’s Prologue and Epilogue as well as four interspersed poems spoken

by Fischer-Dieskau. This does not work very well the poems within the cycle are meant to be in the voice of the same young man as the songs, and the singer and speaker here do not sound at all like the same person. The Prologue and Epilogue, by contrast, are spoken by the poet, so FischerDieskau’s voice is fine there.

It is a little ironic, then, that on one of Fischer-Dieskau’s own recordings of the cycle (with pianist Gerald Moore in 1962), he includes the spoken Prologue and Epilogue, but not the other poems.

Donald Mackinnon, Suzhou City, China

Not Goodman As Bernstein’s biographer I was of course delighted to see the excellent coverage you dedicated to his life and work in your January issue, over and above my feature. There is just one statement which needs to be corrected. The clarinet soloist in the first performance of his exhilarating jazz piece Prelude, Fugue and Riffs was Al Gallodoro, a member of the ABC Studio Band and a former soloist with Paul Whiteman.

The world-renowned jazz clarinettist Benny Goodman played the solo in the CBS recording of PF&R which was made soon after the world premiere telecast. The complete 1955 performance can be viewed on YouTube.

Humphrey Burton, Aldeburgh The editor replies: Readers may be intrigued to know that Gallodoro carried on playing well into old age – in 2007, he made a recording of Grofé’s Gallodoro’s Serenade, aged a sprightly 93!

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Thefullscore

Our pick of the month’s news, views and interviews

Charles Dutoit: the Swiss conductor has been accused of sexual assault

Orchestras cut ties with conductor Charles Dutoit

GETTY

Maestro suspended by RPO following misconduct allegations The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has suspended performances by its artistic director and principal conductor Charles Dutoit in the light of allegations of inappropriate behaviour. In a statement, the London ensemble said it had released Dutoit ‘from his forthcoming concert obligations for the immediate future.’

The Swiss conductor has been accused of sexual assault by three opera singers and another musician, who gave separate interviews with The Associated Press providing details of the incidents they say occurred between 1985 and 2010.

The women include mezzo Paula Rasmussen and soprano Sylvia McNair.

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BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

Another, who preferred to remain anonymous, said Dutoit had attacked her on four occasions while she was a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

In a statement, the Philadelphia Orchestra Association has confirmed that it ‘has discontinued its affiliation with Charles Dutoit and removed his honorary title of conductor laureate. The Association does not tolerate harassment … and is committed to providing a safe, supportive and respectful work environment.’

In its own statement, the RPO says that it ‘takes very seriously its responsibility to maintain a safe working environment for all its artists, musicians and staff. These

accusations are taken very seriously by the Orchestra and the RPO believes that the truth of the matter should be determined by the legal process … Charles Dutoit needs to be given a fair opportunity to seek legal advice and contest these accusations.’

Dutoit was appointed by the RPO in 2009, and his contract runs to 2019, at which point he is due to receive the title of honorary conductor for life. He also holds the positions of conductor emeritus of the NHK Symphony Orchestra of Tokyo and music director of the Verbier Music Festival Orchestra. The conductor has 40 major accolades to his name, including two Grammys. See Comment, p23

Thefullscore RisingStars

Kanye hear us, Ludwig?

Beethoven and Kanye West are not two names you’d expect on the same concert bill, let alone spliced together. But conductor Yuga Cohler and his Young Musicians Foundation Debut Chamber Orchestra have had other ideas. Yeethoven II, a concert presenting the similarities and contrasts between the 21st-century rapper and 19th-century composer, has taken place in LA. It follows the success of 2016’s Yeethoven concert in the same city, designed, says its website, to show ‘how these two artists … broke all the rules to make room for their grand artistic ambitions’.

Three to look out for…

Ella van Poucke cellist Born: Amsterdam, the Netherlands Career highlight: It’s difficult to say. I have enjoyed so many projects in different ways, one of them being my debut with the HR-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt and maestro Christoph Eschenbach conducting.

Musical hero: One of them is pianist András Schiff. I’ve been lucky to work and play with him and hear him in concert on many occasions. His knowledge and presence when teaching and performing have inspired me a lot. The way he plays Bach is exceptional.

Dream concert: Playing Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 131 with a quartet formed of amazing players in one of Europe’s great halls.

Ben Goldscheider horn player

Deaf jam: Yuga Cohler couples Romance and rap

THE MONTH IN NUMBERS

400

GETTY, SVJATOSLAV PRESNYAKOV

…years of musical history destroyed.

Alitalia has managed to write off a 17th-century viola da gamba belonging to Ensemble Phoenix’s Myrna Herzog.

12

…LSO flutes in one movie. If the orchestral bill for The Shape of Water was notably large, it certainly proved worth it, as the score won composer Alexandre Desplat (pictured above) a Golden Globe. An Oscar next?

100

…amateur musicians will win the chance to play Brahms 4 with the Berlin Phil and Simon Rattle on 21 May.

300,000 …dollars for Igor Levit. The RussianGerman pianist is the happy winner of the Gilmore Artist Award, presented every four years.

Born: London, UK Career highlight: Being part of BBC Young Musician was remarkable; to get to the final and experience that atmosphere was astounding. And my debut in the Philharmonie Berlin was an experience I’ll never forget: to play to a sold-out hall as iconic as that was a dream come true.

Musical hero: What Daniel Barenboim has achieved and experienced in his life of music is remarkable – he sets the benchmark for what’s possible artistically and culturally in the context of being a musician.

Dream concert: To commission a concerto at the Proms. My passion for promoting the horn as a solo instrument and for new music means it would be the pinnacle of all I want to do.

Jiyoon Lee violinist Born: Seoul, South Korea Career highlight: I have two. One was making my debut with the Philharmonia and conductor Jac van Steen in 2015, and the other was winning joint first prize at the Nielsen International Violin Competition in Odense the following year.

Musical hero: Daniel Barenboim is one of the most influential people in my musical life. No matter how many times he performs the same piece, every time is like a first. It has been a privilege to to work with him as one of the first concertmasters with the Staatskappelle Berlin, a city I consider home.

Dream concert: That’s easy to answer: to make my debut at the BBC Proms!

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Thefullscore TIMEPIECE This month in history

SoundBites

Jazz starter: Gershwin in 1924 with the score of Rhapsody in Blue; (below) bandleader Paul Whiteman

Symphonic rescue: Martyn Brabbins conducts Tippett

Tippett revived Tippett’s abandoned Symphony in B flat is to be heard for the first time in over 80 years when the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Martyn Brabbins perform it at Glasgow’s City Halls on 1 February.

Though the work enjoyed a few outings soon after it was composed in 1933, it was never published and Tippett lost interest in it. The BBC SSO’s performance will be broadcast on Radio 3. See Composer of the Month, p64.

Truly honoured Awards to classical musicians were in short supply in the 2018 New Year’s Honours list.

Our hearty congratulations, however, to Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, principal of the Royal Academy of Music, who is awarded a CBE; Sarah Alexander, chief executive of National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, who has received an OBE; and violinist Anthony Marwood, who now proudly bears the letters MBE after his name.

FEBRUARY 1924

Cabin fever

Gershwin gives the world premiere of Rhapsody in Blue

Trumpeter Alison Balsom and violinist Nicola Benedetti have successfully led a campaign to convince British Airways to rethink its policy on the transport of instruments. ‘Our airport staff will make every effort to find space in the cabin for musical instruments that are within the dimensions of 80 x 30 x 25cm,’ says the airline, ‘as we know extreme temperatures can damage these instruments in the hold.’

L

Talking of high-flying trumpeters, Balsom has been appointed artistic director of the Cheltenham Music Festival, taking over from Meurig Bowen whose tenure spanned ten years. ‘I relish the opportunity,’ says Balsom, ‘to invite the world’s greatest artists and ensembles to the Festival and to lead it joyfully into this next exciting chapter.’

12

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

GETTY, BEN EALOVEGA

Top brass

awrence Gilman, a music critic from the New York Tribune, was clearly unimpressed. ‘How trite, feeble and conventional the tunes are,’ read his pointed review that appeared on the morning of 13 February; ‘how sentimental and vapid the harmonic treatment, under its disguise of fussy and futile counterpoint. Weep over the lifelessness of the melody and harmony, so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive.’

The work, he concluded, suffered from

‘melodic and harmonic anemia of the most pernicious kind.’

Ouch. But while Gilman may not have overly enjoyed hearing the 25-year-old composer and pianist George Gershwin give the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue with Paul Whiteman’s Palais Royal Orchestra, the audience most certainly did. ‘There was tumultuous applause for Mr Gershwin’s composition,’ reported the altogether more evenhanded Olin Downes in the New York

Thefull score

Blue period: New York’s Aeolian Hall

Times. ‘There was realisation of the irresistible vitality and genuineness of much of the music heard on this occasion, as opposed to the pitiful sterility of the average production of the “serious” American composer.’

That ‘occasion’ was ‘An Experiment in Modern Music’, an ambitious concert devised by Whiteman that would showcase the development of jazz and assess its standing as a serious artform – and, of course, show off his own band – over a lengthy programme that would culminate in Gershwin’s specially commissioned new work. The 1,300-seat Aeolian Hall was chosen to host the big event and, ever the publicist, Whiteman even promised in a newspaper article that a committee including violinist Jascha Heifetz, soprano Alma Gluck and Rachmaninov, no less, would be there to help give an answer er to the question ‘What is American music?’. m That such a seemingly randomly chosen committee was probably not thee best qualified to talk abou ut jazz appears not to have unduly u worried Whiteman nor, n more controversially, that he was conducting an all-white band to demonstrate musiic whose roots lay in the very heart of black America. Bu ut as a

publicity stunt, the concert seemed to work a treat.

It so nearly didn’t, however. Bored by a programme that was proving too long and lacking in variety, many of the audience were starting to make their way out of the hall and into the New York snow when Gershwin ‘sheepishly’, as Downes put it made his way onto the piano stool; it was only on hearing the clarinet’s famous opening glissando that, intrigued, they decided to turn back and stay a little longer. The rest, as they say, is history, as Rhapsody in Blue has gone on to enjoy a place as one of the most popular works in the repertoire.

Chances are, however, that the piece modern audiences know and love is significantly different to that enjoyed by the Aeolian Hall audience that February afternoon. For a start, while

Gershwin invited the clarinettist to add as much of a ‘wail’ to his solo as he could he had written out most of the piano score, Gershwin still left himself a little room for improvisation on the occasion itself given that no recording was made, we will never know how the exact performance sounded. And then, in the years to follow, it took the handiwork of Gershwin’s fellow composer Ferde Grofé to convert the Rhapsody from its big-band original to the orchestral guise that it is usually presented in today.

Interestingly, too, even that clarinet glissando itself was not as Gershwin originally planned it. Though a 17-note chromatic run was written in the score, w clarinettist Ross Gorman had other ideas in rehearsal and started to play around witth it his japes met with general approval, and the upwarrd swoop stayed. win even invited Gershw him to add as much of wail’ to it as he a ‘w could. On such hance moments ch is the history of music shaped. m

Name that tomb: Howard Carter and mummy

Also in February 1924 3rd: Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, dies at the age of 67 of a stroke and heart-related problems at his house in Washington, DC. His two terms in office, from 1913-21, saw him lead the US through the First World War and take a major role at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference.

12th: In the Valley of the Kings, the British Egyptologist Howard Carter and his team lift the granite lid on the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun to reveal the gold mummy case lying within. The discovery marks a high point of recent explorations that begun in 1922 and is eagerly awaited, but Carter strictly regulates press coverage.

14th: Founded in 1911, the ComputingTabulating-Recording Company, which specialises in selling or leasing industrial machinery and office appliances, decides to change its name to International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM for short.

22nd: Having already become the first US president to have had an address to Congress broadcast on the radio, Calvin Coolidge goes one further by delivering a political speech from the White House on air. Carried on five stations, ‘Silent Cal’s’ words are heard by an estimated five million listeners.

26th: Adolf Hitler (left) goes on trial, charged with high treason for leading the Nazi Party’s failed coup attempt, the ‘Beer Hall Putsch’, in Munich in October 1923. He is found guilty and sentenced to five years in jail, but the trial gives him and his cause significant publicity.

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Watch the rising stars of classical music Each week, exceptionally talented young musicians compete to win their place in the Grand Final of the 66th ROSL Annual Music Competition and the Gold Medal prize of £10,000.

Join us at the weekly section finals held at the London clubhouse and find out who will be taking the stage at the Grand Final on 4 June at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre.

SECTION FINALS Each Tuesday, 7pm Royal Over-Seas League, Over-Seas House Park Place, St James’s Street, London SW1A 1LR 13 February – Wind & brass 20 February – Voice 27 February – Strings 6 March – Keyboard 13 March – Ensembles A (strings and keyboard) 20 March – Ensembles B (wind and mixed) On Thursday 22 March, all Overseas participants compete for the Overseas Award.

Tickets are on sale now at www.rosl.org.uk/events or ring 020 7408 0214 ext 219 £12 Friends of ROSL ARTS; £15 General Admission; £5 Students Season ticket: £60 Friends of ROSL ARTS; £75 General Admission

Thefullscore MEET THE COMPOSER

Graham Fitkin In the habit: ‘I don’t like going long without composing’

A brush with disaster Few operas have been as ill-fated as the New York Met’s Tosca. In the lead up to first night on New Year’s Eve, Tosca herself (Kristīne Opolais), Cavaradossi (Jonas Kaufmann) and conductor Andris Nelsons all fell by the wayside, and then, with time now running short,

Baron Scarpia (Bryn Terfel) pulled out too. What was general manager Peter Gelb to do? Abandon ship?

Or maybe ask the cleaning staff if they fancied a go? Thankfully, replacements were found in Sonya Yoncheva, Vittorio Grigolo and Zeljko Lučić in the lead roles, and all passed smoothly. Phew.

DÉJÀ VU History just keeps on repeating itself…

KATIE VANDYCK, GETTY ILLUSTRATION: JONTY CLARK

Who says Carmen has to die? Not director Leo Muscato (left), who in his recent Florence production of Bizet’s opera reworked the plot to have the heroine instead shooting her would-be killer Don José. His reasoning for this unlikely twist? To make a statement against increasing violence against women. Traditionalists may sniff, but it is not the first time an opera plot has found itself significantly altered…

Censors, religious or political, have proved a regular thorn in the side of composers. One to suffer horribly badly was Verdi, several of whose operas came under scrutiny, not least The Sicilian Vespers. Though it successfully premiered in Paris in 1855, so tense was the political situation at home that, when it came to creating a version in Italian, Verdi decided his tale of Sicilian nationalists would be a provocation too far – changing the title to Giovanna de Guzman, he transferred the action to 17th-century Portugal. On a religious front, Verdi also had to amend Nabucco to get round Victorian England’s disapproval of portraying biblical characters on stage, a fate that also befell Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto. Other political victims, meanwhile, included those that found themselves reworked to suit Soviet propaganda in the 1920s. Puccini’s Tosca, for instance, was retitled as The Battle for the Commune and its heroine presented as a revolutionary icon, while Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar had to undergo major revision before Stalin would allow it anywhere near the stage – the title itself should explain why.

A minimalist and postminimalist, Graham Fitkin has written music for concert, dance, film and digital media.

He studied with Louis Andriessen and, as a pianist and conductor, also runs his own ensemble. The Sacconi Quartet’s album of his string quartets is out now on Signum Classics.

The first quartet I wrote, Servant, was for the Smith Quartet in 1992. I was very interested in mono-timbre at that time. I had written for two pianos, six pianos and clarinet quartets, so I approached the string quartet in a similar way. Fundamentally, the colour of different string instruments is not too dissimilar.

They all have the same ability to sustain, to pizzicato.

When I was younger I liked straight lines. I liked the clarity of American and Dutch minimalism. I liked Stravinsky, Pärt and JS Bach. I was less comfortable with Brahms and Wagner. Servant is all about straight lines. Over the years those lines blurred and in 2007, when I wrote String for the Sacconi Quartet, the piece was about texture rather than definite musical gestures.

Louis Andriessen got me to think. He would make me justify why I had done certain things: ‘Why are you writing this piece of music?’ I would have to answer, ‘Because, blah, blah, blah’ or, ‘No,

you’re right, it’s rubbish’ and I would stop doing it. Or he would say a bass line was very flabby, and ask why I was using those notes. I still think like this now.

It’s possible to get out of the habit of composing. I love working with other musicians. I run my own ensemble and one year we recorded two albums, and did a book and education work, so I didn’t really compose for four months at all. I don’t like having that long without composing. I get a bit rootless. I need to practise, to do my scales, in a sense. It took me a number of months to get back and feel happy with it.

Titles don’t mean very much to me. For instance, I wrote a short piano piece because I like running – especially on the cliffs in Cornwall, where I live.

Running is a very symmetrical thing, very repetitive. I can’t forget as a musician that there are all these patterns with the steps and breathing. I came up with a piece out of the cadence of my breathing.

But could I title it? It’s just called Running and breathing.

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Thefullscore StudioSecrets

Time out: guitarists Sharon Isbin (right) and Nancy Wilson collaborate on Guitar Passions in 2011

Grand entrance: Anita Rachvelishvili as Carmen in 2014

GETTY, MARCO BORGGREVE, J.HENRY FAIR

We reveal who’s recording what, and where…

Anita Rachvelishvili jumped to fame when, for her international debut, Daniel Barenboim chose her to open the La Scala season in the title role of Bizet’s Carmen, cast opposite tenor Jonas Kaufmann. ‘It was a huge risk for me,’ says the Georgian mezzo. It paid off. Her performance was acclaimed and she has been signed to Sony Classical. And, yes, her debut disc will include two arias from Carmen.

One of Handel’s star sopranos was Giulia Frasi, who is at the heart of a new CD from Ruby Hughes. The Chandos Records disc explores pieces by Handel and other composers that Frasi inspired. ‘I was struck by the empathetic temperament and lyrical ease of the vocal writing embodied in so much of the music written for her,’ says Hughes.

Amanda Maier was a violinist and composer in 19th-century Sweden whose music is now being revived by dB Productions. Two volumes of a complete works series are out now – see p95 for the review of Vol. 2 – and we hear that pianist Bengt Forsberg will be pairing Maier’s music with her husband Julius Röntgen’s on a new release from the Swedish label this March.

Two iconic pianists are marking the centenary of Debussy’s death with new solo piano discs (on DG). Maurizio Pollini turns to Book 2 of the Préludes, 18 years after recording Book 1. He’s also joined by his son Daniele for En blanc et noir. Daniel Barenboim has recorded Book 1, and has paired it with a selection of other works.

Steve Reich’s Pulse (2015) and Quartet (2013) have been recorded for the first time.

The Colin Currie Group plays Quartet, for two vibraphones and two pianos, a piece that Reich describes as ‘one of the most complex’ he has ever composed. On the same Nonesuch disc, the International Contemporary Ensemble performs Pulse, for winds, strings, piano and electric bass.

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BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

REWIND

Great artists talk about their past recordings This month: SHARON ISBIN Guitarist MY FINEST MOMENT Dreams of a World Sharon Isbin (guitar) Teldec (no longer available) (1999)

This 1999 album won the 2001 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance. It broke the glass ceiling, both for guitar and for women, because it was the first time in 28 years that a classical guitarist had won a Grammy I’m still the only female guitarist who’s ever been awarded one.

When I put the repertoire together, the concept evolved into folk-inspired music from eight different countries the British Isles, the US, Brazil, Greece, Israel, Cuba, Venezuela and Spain. The centre-piece was the premiere recording

of Appalachian Dreams, a five-movement suite composed for me by the late John Duarte. I researched a lot of folk material when I was giving concerts in the Appalachian region of the US, and he did his own research, too; he then selected material for his suite. It’s so beautiful, like a creative arrangement of folk songs.

However, just before I recorded the album, one of my former Venezuelan students arrived, excited about some new music he was learning. I asked him to play it for me, so he sat in the hallway at the Juilliard and played works by Brazilian composer Antonio Lauro that had never been published or recorded before. They were so gorgeous I knew I had to put them in the album. I delayed the recording for another two months so I could get the scores and learn them.

Thefull score Spanish flavour: Sharon Isbin (left) records Alma Española with soprano Isabel Leonard

BuriedTreasure Pianist Kirill Gerstein on three musical rarities from his record collection Weill Quodlibet Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie/ Antony Beaumont Chandos CHSA5046

MY FONDEST MEMORY Alma Española Isabel Leonard (soprano), Sharon Isbin (guitar) Bridge BRIDGE9491 (2017)

Alma Española was soprano Isabel Leonard’s idea. As an ArgentinianAmerican, she grew up speaking Spanish as a first language alongside English. She’s performed Spanish music all her life, as have I, so gravitating towards this music was natural for us both. We spent two and a half years on the road playing this music before going into the studio, which was a luxury. It gave the music a chance to evolve and be shaped and refined. The process of making the arrangements was collaborative – Isabel and I went through the lyrics and verses to explore their meanings. I have cultivated a way of playing that is like a human voice – having worked with singers for years, the voice is something I want to emulate.

This disc also speaks to our vulnerable political times. More than half the composers on it were murdered by or fled from fascist governments. It also communicates that Spanish yearning, nostalgia, sadness and celebration. It

was special to be able to do the setting of ‘Aranjuez, ma pensée’ by Rodrigo. When he was writing his Concierto de Aranjuez back in 1939, there was so much turbulence in his life: he and his wife lost what would have been their first child.

He would console himself, playing the Concierto’s Adagio theme, which in 1988 became, with his wife’s lyrics, this song.

They tracked me down after I played the Concierto live on the radio and we enjoyed a 20-year friendship.

I’D LIKE ANOTHER GO AT… Sharon Isbin & Friends: Guitar Passions Sharon Isbin (guitar) et al Sony 88697842192

This is one of my more unusual and exciting projects it celebrates my guitar heroes, with some pretty amazing guitarists and other musicians. I was able to honour those that weren’t alive as well, including Segovia, by playing his most famous transcription of Asturias.

I had a few lessons with him, aged 14, when he visited the US for concerts. To sit inches from him and hear him play that tone will always stay in my ear.

My only regret with this album is that it would be another four years before I could perform with Sting and Josh Groban at Carnegie Hall. The songs we did were so magical – it would have been wonderful to include them on the disc.

Sharon Isbin’s disc Alma Española was reviewed in the January issue.

I am fond of a piece by the young Kurt Weill, Quodlibet. He wrote it while studying with Ferruccio Busoni, himself an important figure. In 1922, Weill wrote music for a children’s pantomime on the subject of the ‘magic night’ (Die Zaubernacht) and recomposed it into an orchestral fantasy piece – the Quodlibet.

You can hear traits of future Weill in the marching music and its sarcasm, as well as Busoni’s idea of ‘Young Classicism’ and Mahler’s influence.

R Strauss Enoch Arden Claude Rains (actor), Glenn Gould (piano) Sony G010003287466F Strauss’s Enoch Arden for piano and speaker, is very 19th century and melodramatic. In his day it was one of his most popular works, but now it’s not known. The first recording was by Glenn Gould and Claude Rains in 1962. Its story – of a castaway who returns home to find that life has moved on without him – really resonates. The music is what one would expect from early Strauss and is flamboyant and Romantic in gesture.

Hummel Piano Concerto in A minor Stephen Hough (piano); English Chamber Orchestra/Bryden Thomson Chandos CHAN8507 Hummel’s A minor Concerto deserves attention because it is well written, but also because it’s interesting to see its influence on Chopin. When you hear this pianistic language, you see that Chopin had his models and inspirations and Hummel was one.

Hummel was in the repertoire of major pianists at the end of the 19th century, and it’s time his music came back.

Kirill Gerstein’s new Gershwin disc is released in February on Myrios Classics

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Thefull score THE LISTENING SERVICE

Music for mourning BBC Radio 3 presenter Tom Service looks at why we look to music, from solemn Purcell to stately Elgar, to help us bid farewell to our departed loved ones ILLUSTRATION: MARIA CORTE MAIDAGAN

M

usic’s power to console and transport is nowhere so starkly or movingly revealed as when it’s used in our rituals of public and private mourning. Whether it’s choices of music for funerals (the most popular song in the UK is currently Frank Sinatra’s My Way), works composed to commemorate the dead, or grand masses and requiems that transmute the raw material of loss and pain into cathartic expressions of hope and melancholy, music has been used across cultures and time to take us through the veil that separates existence from non-existence. Why do we have this existential longing for music at these moments? Perhaps it’s because music itself seems to belong to another plane of reality as well as our own: it is an apparition in the air, it begins and breathes in time, it ends and dies away.

In 1997, Tavener’s Song for Athene, music originally composed for a private tragedy, was used at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. This music was, for many, the defining moment of the service, a work whose breath-taken stillness voiced the feelings of shock and grief on the most public yet most intimate scale. Three centuries earlier, Purcell’s Funeral Sentences for Queen Mary in 1695 sounded out a stentorian but no less powerful lament. The Tavener and Purcell reveal some of the traits of music that Western cultures deem appropriate for mourning: solemnity through slowness and seriousness, often in a minor key; music that is meditative rather than energetic.

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BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

That’s true for music composed about mourning as well as music we use for mourning: think of the funeral marches

by Beethoven and Chopin in the Eroica Symphony and Piano Sonata No. 2, or the way that the agonised yearning of Samuel Barber’s Adagio, originally part

Tavener’s Song for Athene was used at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales of his Op. 11 String Quartet, has become synonymous with grieving, especially in the US, thanks to its use to accompany the announcement of the death of John F Kennedy. Hollywood has used the Adagio as a symbol of loss ever since; in the UK, Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ from Enigma Variations has become our sonic touchstone of grief: its falling sevenths drench the film soundtrack of Dunkirk.

Yet there are exceptions to the idea that music for mourning must be slow and elegiac: there are the carnivals of cathartic joy of New Orleans funerals, and the ecstasy of Mexico’s Day of the Dead proof that music takes us across the threshold by dancing too.

And there’s a sense that music, and sound, are literal bridges to the next world. The real title of the Tibetan Book of the Dead is ‘Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State’.

Composer Pauline Oliveros suggested that our hearing is the last sense to fade when we die. That means that we will leave our lives in an echo of our own listening. Wherever we’re going, somewhere, nowhere, or in between, it’s sound and music that will take us.

Tom Service explores how music works in The Listening Service on Sundays at 5pm

FAREWELL TO…

Leading light: Robert Mann with the Juilliard Orchestra in 1999

Robert Mann Born 1920 Founder of the Juilliard String Quartet Following an invitation from The Juilliard School’s president William Schuman, Portland-born violinist Robert Mann founded the Juilliard String Quartet in 1946. He remained in the position of first violin for over 50 years, and during this time the quartet received three Grammy Awards and performed over 100 premieres worldwide.

An independent recording career accompanied his success with the ensemble, with performances of Bartók’s Solo Violin Sonata, Mozart violin sonatas with pianist Yefim Bronfman and Beethoven’s violin sonatas with pianist Stephen Hough to his name. Mann also pursued composition and conducting, making his conducting debut with the Seattle Symphony during the 1988-89 season. Later in his career, he focused his attention on education, teaching violin and chamber music at the Manhattan School of Music. He also mentored ensembles, working closely with the Emerson, Alexander, New World, Concord and St Lawrence String Quartets.

Simonetta Puccini Born 1928 Granddaughter of Giacomo Puccini Puccini’s only known remaining descendant was only acknowledged as the granddaughter of the composer in 1974 following a lengthy legal battle, at which point she took the Puccini name. Known previously as Simonetta Giurumello, she was the illegitimate child of Puccini’s only son Antonio. Born of an affair between Antonio and Giuseppina Giurumello, Simonetta was not recognised officially as his daughter.

However, he did fund her education. He also occasionally visited her, and would tell her stories about her grandfather, who had died five years before she was born. Following Antonio’s death in 1946, his wife Rita left the composer’s estate to her brother. Simonetta received a share of the Puccini estate as a result of the court case, founding the Institute for Puccini Studies to support research and maintain the composer’s archive. She also raised money to restore the Tuscan villa where he composed some of his major operas and is now buried.

Also remembered…

Cambridge scholar and musicologist Rohan Stewart MacDonald (born 1975) was an expert on Clementi, and spent much of his time in Italy, researching and writing for academic journals across the globe.

He wrote more than 60 publications on 18th- and 19th-century music.

GETTY

As one of Bernstein’s assistant conductors at the New York Philharmonic, Maurice Peress (born 1930) conducted the premiere of Bernstein’s Mass in 1971 at the Kennedy Center. He went on to become the music director of the Kansas City Philharmonic.

American soprano Marilyn Tyler (born 1926) performed major roles with Rome Opera and the Dutch National Opera. In the 1970s she was invited to direct the Iran Opera, but was trapped by the revolution and only escaped months later. She taught at the University of New Mexico.

Thefullscore for the meaning in a phrase. I particularly enjoy his recording of Mozart’s Symphony No. 38 with his Concentus Musicus Wien orchestra.

The Essential Charlie Parker is an album I listen to about once a week, or even more frequently than that. I listen to it with very different ears to how I listen to any classical repertoire the way that the brain has to be able to modulate and turn on a dime in improvised jazz is a completely different skill. That said, in essence Charlie Parker just makes me feel very joyful and full of energy. I particularly like listening to it when I am cooking.

Karina Canellakis conducts the Hallé on 21, 22 and 25 February

Ian Skelly Radio 3 presenter

Supreme songstress: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf is intensely moving in Strauss

Music to my ears What the classical world has been listening to this month Karina Canellakis Conductor I recently conducted Rachmaninov’s The Bells, and so have been listening to Kirill Kondrashin’s recording. I was particularly impressed by the chorus I love hearing a Russian chorus singing the Russian text and also by the tightness and density in the sound. I understand that Kondrashin had a very disciplined rehearsal technique and was very tough about detail, and you can hear that in his recordings. It’s very inspirational.

I grew up with a recording of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs.

She’s incredible, and has such a unique voice! The piece itself has a very heavy subject matter, in that it sets poems that are effectively about resigning oneself to death, 20

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

READER CHOICE Huw Evans Rhyl On the school run with my granddaughters we listen to Bizet’s Carmen Overture, Vaughan Williams’s English Folk Song Suite, The Can can, Chapentier’s Te Deum, Sibelius’s Karelia Suite and several others to which we sing silly words. It’s great fun.

I’m also revisiting my many recordings of Sibelius’s Second Symphony Okko Kamu is my favourite as well as trying to find a CD transfer of the very first recording I got from my parents: the Malcolm Sargent BBC Symphony Orchestra recording on Music for Pleasure. I’ve had no success. Can anyone help?

and there’s something about the suppleness in Schwarzkopf’s voice that moves me to tears every time I hear it, particularly in the last song, ‘Im Abendrot’.

Of all the musicians who’ve ever lived, conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt was undoubtedly

Something about the suppleness in Schwarzkopf’s voice moves me to tears one of the most groundbreaking.

He basically revolutionised the way all European orchestras approached Mozart, Haydn, Monteverdi, Bach and Beethoven.

There’s a kind of freedom in his interpretations, almost as if he had removed pulse and the bar lines, and he is always searching

I’ve been enjoying a series of discs in a Mozart violin sonata cycle that Alina Ibragimova has released with the French pianist Cédric Tiberghien. They met when they were BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists and have been working together ever since. These two artists really are amazing and complement each other beautifully. They tour a lot and know each other’s playing styles, so what you get, particularly from Alina, is this kind of heartfelt playing that is wise for her years.

To mark two anniversaries, the 50th of Collegium Vocale Gent and 25th of the Orchestre des Champs-Elysées, the two ensembles released a series of recordings of Brahms symphonies, pairing them with major choral pieces including the Alto Rhapsody. Brahms delights in the voice and I’m interested in his choice of words, as he didn’t always select the greatest poets to set. He chose texts according to the music they suggested to him.

I’ve always liked chamber music, and in particular piano music.

Someone I listen to a lot is pianist Stephen Hough, and I recently

Thefull score came across a disc of him playing sonatas with cellist Steven Isserlis, with works by Mendelssohn, Grieg and Hough himself. Isserlis delights in playing chamber music with everybody he describes even working with an orchestra as a form of chamber music.

My final choice is from my first day as presenter on Radio 3’s Essential Classics, on Christmas morning. In the middle of the programme we have a section for a more reflective work and I chose White Scenery, a depiction of a winter landscape by Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks. The response from listeners was extraordinary. For those that want to hear it again, it’s from an album of meditative piano works called Midwinter Spring, performed by Alessandro Stella.

Mari Samuelsen Violinist I need my dose of JS Bach all the time, and I really like Janine Jansen’s interpretations of his concertos and inventions. The inventions were arranged for viola and violin and recorded with Maxim Rysanov.

She’s got this modern, playful way

Soaring Bird: The incomparable Charlie Parker

of playing. It’s clean and honest and convinces the listener that it seems so easy. I think, as a performer, that’s the most difficult thing to get across.

When I’m driving, there’s nothing better than Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy. He breaks down the orchestra and presents sections of it in such amazing ways. And the piano part seems to contain an orchestra in itself. Although I try other recordings I always come back to Daniel Barenboim’s 1995 live album. I was at that concert, and it’s not often that you have a live concert where the recording is just as good – Barenboim leads

READER CHOICE Kevin Don Levellie Paris, IL, US I recently heard the Heare Ensemble play George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae, a work that has to be seen live to be really experienced properly. The musicians played in the semi-dark with masks on, as Crumb had directed. I never realised that such a soundworld that could come out of only three instruments. I almost thought I was hearing actual whale sounds at times.

the orchestra so well. It’s such a simultaneously simple and complex piece, and can speak to regular concert-goers as well as beginners.

I’m bingeing on a lot of chamber music at the moment. I’m trying to stay away from the Romantics too much – I prefer things to be clean and simple – but I still get my Brahms and Schumann fixes. I could listen to Brahms’s String Quintets again and again, particularly the Hagen Quartet’s recording. I’m doing so many strange things as a violinist – I work with new composers and new pieces and I’m digging into everything from Bach to Glass – and yet these quartets always bring me happy memories of people I’ve worked with. They bring you into a world of pictures.

I’ve been wondering what would happen to me if I listened to Mozart’s Requiem every day this year, and whether it would make me a different person. I’m going to try this experiment, but at this stage of the year, it’s too early to judge whether it’s working! My 2018 resolution is definitely to try a lot of different recordings, though.

Mari Samuelsen’s Nordic Noir album is out on Decca Classics

Our Choices The BBC Music Magazine team’s current favourites Oliver Condy Editor

Rebecca Franks Reviews editor

Neil McKim Production editor

I’m rather thrilled by a new recording of Kodály’s orchestral masterpiece, Dances of Galánta, by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under its conductor JoAnn Falletta. Inspired by folk songs from his native Hungary, the Dances have plenty of swagger alongside more intimate, seductive moments. The mournful clarinet solo near the start is so beautifully played by Patti DiLutis, the orchestra’s principal clarinettist.

Have you heard of the composer Rita Strohl? I hadn’t either until the latest CD from the cellist Edgar Moreau and pianist David Kadouch arrived in the post. This enterprising duo open their new album of French cello sonatas with her ‘Grande sonate dramatique’, Titus et Bérénice (1892).

Inspired by Racine’s play, the sonata portrays a tragic love story. It’s a compelling listen.

I like works that lift double bass parts from out of the depths, such as Kozeluch’s Sinfonia concertante in E flat. On my disc of it, Iona Brown directs the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. The middle movement is a gleeful high point, with Kozeluch giving the bass its chance to shine, alongside trumpet, piano and mandolin.

Freya Parr Editorial assistant Alice Pearson Cover CD editor

GETTY

Jeremy Pound Deputy editor After a trip to the cinema to see Paddington 2, I decided to dig out my DVD of another Peruvian triumphing in London: tenor Juan Diego Flórez (right) in the Royal Opera House’s 2007 production of Donizetti’s La fille du régiment.

Flórez grabbed the headlines at the time for his rendition of the ‘Aria of the High Cs’, but he is also charm itself throughout the opera, as is soprano Natalie Dessay in the title role.

I admit to only pulling Adventures in a Perambulator off the shelf because of the intriguing title, but my curiosity paid off. American composer John Alden Carpenter’s score sounds like Ravel meets Tom and Jerry (trust me), and his rattling musical episodes are lit up by glorious technicolour orchestration.

Hunting for something joyful and carefree to get me through the anticlimactic postChristmas period, I turned to Arutiunian’s Armenian Rhapsody for two pianos, written with fellow Armenian composer Arno Babadjanian. Its transition from a lullaby into the frenetic second movement gets the toes tapping, and its changes of colour and tone contribute superbly to the development of the initially very simple rhythmic pattern.

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S TAY I N T H E K N O W

Opinion

Richard Morrison Sexual harassment was once tolerated, but we must all strive to stamp it out

T

hat strange clucking, shuffling noise you can hear isn’t a new piece of avant-garde electronica.

It’s the sound of chickens coming home to roost. For decades centuries, probably sexual harassment and outright abuse has been an unpleasant feature of musical life. Think of the historic cases of music teachers abusing pupils that recently came to light in Manchester. Think of the numerous directors of church and youth choirs convicted of child-sex offences. Think of the ‘casting couch’ stories constantly circulating in the opera world, involving young singers of both sexes who feel pressurised into responding to inappropriate suggestions or pressures from senior figures with the power to hire or fire them.

And think of the swirl of salacious anecdotes surrounding famous 20th-century conductors Leonard Bernstein regularly taking advantage of his starry-eyed entourage of pretty young acolytes; Otto Klemperer chasing female violinists and singers up and down the sleeper train to the Edinburgh Festival; Solti offering white fur coats as inducements to female chorus members at Covent Garden; István Kertész whisked out of America with the disgraceful collusion of the British Embassy after seducing a teenage girl on an LSO tour. I could go on and on.

The difference then was that it was all hushed up. As a choirboy in the 1960s I knew (as did all my friends) that one should avoid being trapped alone in the vestry with one predatory deputy organist. But it didn’t cross our minds to report him, probably because nobody would take us seriously if we did.

Similarly, but at a much more exalted

level, record-company executives, agents, opera-house administrators and orchestral managers often covered up (or, worse, laughed off) the outrageous sexual liberties taken by their star conductors.

Well, that era is gone forever thank goodness. Emboldened by the Harvey Weinstein scandal in Hollywood and the subsequent #metoo campaign, men and women are coming forward in all artforms with allegations about very senior people. Classical music is no exception. I make no comment about the multiple accusations concerning the

If some famous conductors are publicly named, shamed, sacked and prosecuted, so be it conductors Charles Dutoit and James Levine, except to say that they surprised nobody in the business. There are surely more conductors quaking in their boots.

But this stuff isn’t perpetrated only by famous men. The Incorporated Society of Musicians recently published the results of its inquiry into inappropriate behaviour in British musical life.

Astoundingly, 60 per cent of the musicians surveyed said they had been victims of abuse during their training or careers, and in most cases it was sexual harassment. Fewer than a quarter reported their experiences at the time.

‘Fear of losing work’, or a perception that harassment was ‘part of the culture’ were cited as main reasons for keeping quiet.

It’s clear that we have now entered a period of belated recrimination and

reckoning. That’s clearly necessary to give the victims some justice and to clear the air. But after that, what? If the future is going to be different from the past, there must be a moral sea-change in every musical organisation. Boards must exercise a zero-tolerance attitude to harassment of any kind. The climate of fear that stops victims from speaking out must be dispelled. And although much music-making requires a hierarchy, the power that such hierarchies invest in those at the top must never again legitimise the abuse of those lower down.

We are living in an era when the relationship between men and women, and between human beings and their own sexuality, is in flux. After 50,000 years of male dominance, the pendulum is swinging not fast enough for some, too fast for others, but surely and irresistibly. In the music world, women are increasingly demanding and getting the right to be taken seriously as conductors, composers, soloists and top administrators. At the same time, they are growing intolerant of the thousand ways in which they have been demeaned by generations of males-in-charge.

Pent-up resentment about all that is one reason why the campaign to stamp out sexual harassment has gathered steam but that campaign certainly shouldn’t be portrayed as a battle between the sexes. Men should be as indignant as women about abuse, and as determined to stamp it out. And if some famous conductors are publicly named, shamed, sacked and prosecuted, so be it. Making music should liberate people from the stress and distress of everyday life not add to it.

Richard Morrison is chief music critic and a columnist of The Times BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

The King’s Singers

All the

King’ s men The world’s best-known choral group, The King’s Singers will be spending 2018 celebrating 50 years since their first ever concert. In the company of the current group, founder member Brian Kay looks back at five glorious decades at the top PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN MILLAR

‘I

Regal sextet: The King’s Singers – (left to right) Chris G, Julian, Patrick, Tim, Chris B and Johnny – welcome the BBC Music Magazine camera

t’s a great idea, but it will never last’. That was the response from Sir David Willcocks when half-a-dozen choral scholars from his choir at King’s College, Cambridge asked his advice as to the viability of starting a six-voice all-male vocal ensemble way back in the swinging ’60s. I was one of those six, and it was good advice from Sir David. Fortunately, however, we chose to ignore it and started on a musical journey which has lasted until this day.

It shows no sign of coming to an end.

The facts are remarkable. Over halfa-century since the group’s first official concert on 1 May 1968 at London’s Queen

Elizabeth Hall, The King’s Singers have performed over 6,500 concerts, recorded 150 albums, appeared on countless radio and television programmes, commissioned or had commissioned for them major works from over 100 composers, and appeared in almost every corner of the globe. The six singers on that first performance were countertenors Martin Lane and Alastair Hume, tenor Alastair Thompson, baritones Richard Salter and Simon Carrington, and myself as bass. In the 50 years since, 26 King’s Singers have sung with the group, each one bringing something special to the ensemble, while fitting in to the unique sound and style that has developed much but changed little.

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I MEET UP WITH THE CURRENT line-up – countertenors Patrick Dunachie and Tim Wayne-Wright, tenor Julian Gregory, baritones Chris Bruerton and Chris Gabbitas and bass Johnny Howard – at The Grosvenor Chapel in Mayfair. Already, today has begun for them with a lengthy photo-shoot and, after we’ve chatted, they will be heading to City Airport and flying to the Faroe Islands for a concert engagement – it soon becomes clear that this is just a typical day’s work for what must surely be the busiest and only truly full-time vocal ensemble in the world. With an average of 120 concerts and a minimum of two recordings every year, the rest of their time is filled with educational work: workshops, masterclasses, lecture-demos and summer schools. And all of this is achieved without ever having signed an official contract, everything being carried out between them – as it was from the start – by gentleman’s agreement.

So how does it all work? In many ways, not much has changed since the rather rudimentary days when the six of us just wanted to go on singing after leaving university. Having said that, the world has moved on and The King’s Singers with it. Where, for instance, we had to lug vast quantities of printed music round the world, the nearly-4,000 items in the group’s repertoire have now been digitised and all the singers carry with them on their travels is an iPad (and their heads!) full of music. ‘It’s revolutionised our chiropractors’ bills!’ laughs Tim. As of old, each member has his own field of organisational responsibility, ranging from travel arrangements (Johnny), educational events (Chris B), financial concerns (Julian) and legal matters (Chris G) to scheduling, archive update (Tim), social media (Patrick), merchandise and even what they refer to as a ‘chief whip’ (Tim again), whose job it is to coordinate everything that needs to be done from day to day in order to keep the show on the road. On top of all that, they have to spend time putting together concert programmes from that extensive repertoire list, learning and rehearsing new music, keeping the tried and tested items up to scratch and still have the strength to perform at the top of their game 6026BBCBBC 26 MUSIC MUSIC MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

Dome, sweet dome: On tour in Venice, 2017; (above) recording the new GOLD album in Oxford

A big hand for Belgium: With fellow singers at a masterclass in Venglo and (above) in concert in Mechelen, 2017

‘We have to be increasingly streamlined in the way that we present ourselves’ while going through the physical, mental and emotional strain of constant planes, hotels, personal appearances and long absences from home.

For this 50th anniversary year, marked by a celebratory ‘GOLD’ three-CD set and book detailing the group’s history, they have assembled 12 programmes and simply choose between them wherever they happen to be singing. This gives them a sense of continuity as well as avoiding having to spend too much precious time making decisions. The only area of their programming which varies is in the

final section of every concert – what we used to call ‘arrangements in close harmony’ but they now refer to as the ‘party bag’. And it is those hundreds of magnificent arrangements that have always made The King’s Singers so special, performed in any concert alongside so many different kinds of music from so many contrasting centuries.

I wonder, however, if now being a truly global ‘brand’ adds a huge amount of pressure to their daily existence. As always, they have a good answer. ‘It’s crucial for us to stick to what matters most,’

The King’s Singers

Those Cambridge days: The original King’s Singers, (left to right) Martin Lane, Alastair Hume, Alastair Thompson, Richard Salter, Simon Carrington and Brian Kay

Kings of King’s The five longest-serving King’s Singers

PETER HARMER, ALIDOOR DELLAFAILLE

David Hurley (countertenor)

says Johnny. ‘That means having a good sing and enjoying travelling the world, but also realising that there are so many other groups around these days that we have to be increasingly streamlined in the way we present ourselves. We have to decide which areas of our global branding we have to showcase more often.’ One thing they absolutely agree on is that what matters more than anything is the unique sound of the group which, in spite of having had occasional changes of personnel over the years, has simply never changed.

What makes that sound so different and instantly recognisable is the unique line-up of voices. When we started out all those decades ago, countertenors were as rare as hens’ teeth, and there we were with two of them along with one tenor (the ensemble’s crucial centre-voice), two

Length of reign: 26 yrs 5 mths 21 days A former choral scholar at New College, Oxford, Hurley took over the top countertenor line from Jeremy Jackman in 1990, and then remained there until last year. Blessed with an effortlessly agile voice, he is spoken about with great reverence by the various younger King’s Singers he mentored over his time with the group.

Simon Carrington (baritone) Length of reign: 25 yrs 7 mths 10 days One of the group’s founder members, the double-bass-playing Carrington sang the lower baritone part until the group’s silver anniversary celebrations in December 1993. Throughout his 25 years with the group, he maintained a meticulous log of all King’s Singers concerts, recordings, tours and television appearances.

Alastair Hume (countertenor) Length of reign: 25 yrs 7 mths 10 days Another double-bass-playing member of the King’s Singers, the proudly Scottish Hume was also a member of the group for its first 25 years. Though he has

self-deprecatingly described his voice as ‘hooty’, he was the perfect second countertenor foil to first countertenors Nigel Perrin, Jeremy Jackman and, finally, David Hurley.

Stephen Connollyy (bass) Length of reign: 23 yrs 0 mths 18 days Something of a King’s Singers legend, thanks not just to a rich, resonant bass voice that could have earned him a career on the opera stage, but also to his peerless stage presence. Fondly referred to as ‘Mr Bean’, Connolly could have an audience in stitches with just the raising of an eyebrow or slightest inflection of the voice.

Philip Lawson (baritone) Length of reign: 18 yrs 0 mths 13 days Lawson has a unique position within King’s Singers for having sung two different voices: second baritone from 1994-6, then moving up to first baritone until 2012. Nor did his talents stop there – an accomplished composer, he is one of a number of King’s Singers whose own arrangements have been regularly sung by the group.

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The King’s Singers The write approach: putting brush to paper in Beijing, 2017

The Joy of Six Essential King’s Singers recordings from across the decades Original Debut Recording (1971) The first ever King’s Singers album consists mainly of popular songs, a number of which are heard in deft arrangements by Gordon Langford, whose Trio accompanies the group here. Originally released under the title ‘By Appointment’, the disc is rounded off by Ron Goodwin’s sublimely daft ‘What Kind of Things (Do the King’s Singers Sing)?’ party piece. Chandos CHAN6562

Madrigal History Tour (1984) A wide-ranging tour of Renaissance madrigals that followed the King’s Singers’ groundbreaking TV series of the same name. Accompanied by The Consort of Musicke and lutenist Anthony Rooley, the tour takes us on a musical journey of Italy, England, France, Spain and Germany, including composers such as Byrd, Lassus, Willaert and Flecha. Warner Classics 585 7142 The Beatles Connection (1986) The composer György Ligeti, no less, was a major fan of ‘Honey Pie’ and ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ on this disc of a cappella arrangements of Fab Four favourites. Arrangers include Daryl Runswick, a regular collaborator with the group, plus Bob Chilcott, who had recently began as tenor with the King’s Singers at the time of the recording, and Bill Ives, the singer he had replaced. EMI 749 5561

baritones and one bass. Having put those voices together, what we had to do in the early days was to search diligently in the hope of finding a source for new material so that we could exploit that combination to fullest advantage. As chance would have it, along came the amazing composer Gordon Langford who, in a single folk song arrangement (Blow away the morning dew) instantly created the sound and the style we had been looking for.

And it is that sound and style that have intrigued composers and arrangers ever since, resulting in a mouth-watering repertoire of musical allsorts which have kept the audiences and, most crucially, the singers entertained. During the 1970s we had the advantage of massive television exposure thanks to the then-fashionable world of ‘light entertainment’. Those opportunities no longer exist on British TV, which helps to explain why well over 90 per cent of the group’s appearances nowadays are overseas.

Glamorous, yes, but it can take its toll too. ‘We are just back from America,’ Chris B tells me, ‘and we’ve lost weight this week simply by not eating American food! It’s great when we tour in Europe as we have access to real vegetables.’ This constant touring can also put a strain on relationships back at home and, as they happily admit, there is no way they could do it if they didn’t have the full support of their families who both love and are proud of what they do.

It must be a daunting prospect for a new member whenever a change occurs.

Landscape and Time (2006) John McCabe, Peter Maxwell Davies and Richard Rodney Bennett are among the composers featured on this impeccably sung disc of modern masterpieces, recorded in the calm of a church in deepest rural Gloucestershire. The singers’ language skills are to the fore as the disc takes us through texts in Finnish, Hungarian and Japanese among others. Signum SIGCD090 GOLD (2017) The current King’s Singers celebrate the group’s 50 years over three discs that range from the Renaissance, through composers such as Saint-Saëns and Schubert, to songs specially commissioned for the occasion. Die-hard fans, meanwhile, will also want to invest in the GOLD book, charting five decades of King’s Singers history and including interviews with all 24 surviving past-andpresent members of the group. Signum SIGCD500 (discs); KSB50 (book)

‘To learn the music, I sat in a café with headphones on for six months!’

For Patrick, who succeeded countertenor David Hurley after David had top-voiced the ensemble for a record 26 years (see p27), this can’t have been easy. He had not long left the choir at King’s College, Cambridge and, although he had dreamt of being a King’s Singer, he never imagined it could really happen. After two auditions one short, the other much longer he was appointed, he says, well before he sang his first concert: ‘It was a good length of time to learn the music, and I sat in a café with headphones on for six months!’

I raise the subject of memorising so much music. All those who have joined the group over the years have been trained as professional sight-readers, and if you can always depend on yourself to be note- and word-perfect at sight, then one thing you never have to worry about is your memory… so long as you have the score in front of you. Take the score away, however, and it’s a very different matter.

At the very beginning, this proved a major uphill task, not least when we had to learn new arrangements by heart for television appearances, often with a day or two’s notice. But for the current group, it is an entirely natural part of the job, seasoned members or recent replacements alike.

Not that ‘replacements’ is the right word, I learn. ‘We very deliberately talk about successors rather than replacements,’ says Chris G, the longest-standing of the current members, having been a King’s Singer since 2004. ‘Every one of the BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Past and present: Today’s King’s Singers share their thoughts with forebear Brian Kay

voices over the years has been unique and brought something slightly different to the mix. It is essential for the voices in the middle of the group to fit in with the voices around it. The top and bottom voices are crucial as they define the overall sound: the top voice needs that sort of clarity of tone and at the bottom there has to be a strong foundation on which the rest of us can sit. In the end what counts is being a good fit vocally and in terms of personality.’ In spending so much time together far more than they do with their loved ones it is obviously essential that they get on well. ‘People often say to us that we are clearly having a great time on stage, but presumably after the show we never talk to each other,’ says Tim. ‘This couldn’t be more wrong as we get on extremely well together.’

And where does their energy come from? The current six are relatively young, but they also look after themselves very carefully. ‘If there’s a pool, we’ll swim it’s more fun than a treadmill!’ explains Chris B who, as a New Zealander, holds the distinction of being the very first King’s Singer to be recruited from outside the UK. ‘And then there are games of squash too. Constant touring takes its toll on the body and so we have to find a way to keep fit and cope with the endless exposure to air-conditioning on planes.’ ‘And five of 30

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us even took part recently in high-energy soulcycle spin classes in LA,’ adds Patrick.

The missing sixth, it should be pointed out, was due to a diary clash rather than lack of willing.

Life on tour has, of course, also been made much easier by the internet a world of difference from the early days, when even making a phone call from one side

‘If there’s a pool, we’ll swim in it – it’s more fun than a treadmill!’ of the world to another was a tortuous experience. ‘One of the great things today,’ says Julian, ‘is to have FaceTime, which is this video communication thing that means when we are away for, say, three weeks in America, we can still somehow see our loved ones.’ And Skype, meanwhile, also means the six of them can ‘meet up’ while back at home and living miles away from each other.

I ask how they see themselves. ‘We have fun, we travel and we sing,’ replies Chris G. ‘The difficulty is maintaining a sense of

place. The King’s Singers is a magical thing it’s a unique entity and we are hugely privileged to be part of the history and the tradition of the group. The essence of what we do is our sound, created by our forebears and by our wonderful arrangers.

We replicate that and try to add a little fairy-dust to it, trying to keep it all relevant and modern.’ They do experiment with their programming to avoid any sense of predictability in the old formula of ancient to modern and they aim to educate and entertain in equal measure by broadening people’s minds, approaching the different kinds of music in the same way.

The King’s Singers’ ‘mission’ is something they talk about at length.

‘Nowadays, not only do we have to make music brilliantly, there has to be a reason for doing it,’ says Johnny. ‘And so, when we choose new composers, new works have to contribute to the overall mission, to prove that there are no barriers and that the music has to appeal globally.’

‘Because The King’s Singers were the first to do what they do, other groups imitate that ideal,’ adds Chris G. ‘We will always have that pre-eminence through sheer longevity. The group will always be relevant as the godfathers of the genre, but other groups are snapping at our heels, so we have to work hard to stay where we are.

As long as there are six men who want to keep the message alive and to preserve that unique sound there is no reason why the King’s Singers should ever cease to exist.’

Following that debut concert way back in May 1968, we founder-members decided simply to give it our best shot for a year or two, carry on singing, enjoy some hoped-for world travel, have a lot of fun while doing it and then pack it all in and get ourselves a proper job! That The King’s Singers are now celebrating 50 years of uninterrupted, glorious music-making suggests that it was worth not taking too seriously the initial advice given by our great friend and mentor. And in the hands of Patrick, Tim, Julian, Chris B, Chris G and Johnny, the future is clearly in very safe hands.

The King’s Singers are celebrating their 50th-anniversary year with a special GOLD 3-CD set plus a new GOLD book chronicling their five decades at the top (see ‘The Joy of Six’, p29)

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Music can help people understand what makes humanity so valuable, so special THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW

Lisa Batiashvili The Georgian violinist talks to Radio 3 and TV presenter Clemency Burton-Hill about life under under Soviet rule, and her love of championing the music of her homeland PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN MILLAR

W

hen Lisa Batiashvili was a young girl in 1980s Georgia, she would eagerly await her father’s return from his travels. As a member of the ‘official’ state string quartet, violinist Tamas Batiashvili was one of the few Georgian musicians – few Georgian anythings – who were allowed, by the authorities, to leave the country.

When he came home, he would bring not just the occasional Western chocolate bar or bag of sweets, but treasures altogether more delicious: LPs and cassettes bearing a certain golden label.

‘Deutsche Grammophon recordings with Karajan, Anne-Sophie Mutter, the Berlin Philharmonic,’ Batiashvili recalls when we meet, three decades later, at a brasserie in central London, ‘all these things that 32

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seemed so distant but which had such a strong impact on me.’ She smiles. ‘Even as a child, my dreams were not really about the candies but about the music.’

Friends and neighbours would flock to the Batiashvili home to hear the records.

Those that struck Batiashvili most immediately were by Mozart – ‘I listened over and over again to the symphonies and violin concertos’ – but the phonographic haul extended beyond the classical canon. ‘I remember we had Porgy and Bess with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong: I think we were the only ones in all of Tbilisi with that recording!’ she laughs. ‘Jazz was even worse for the communists than classical: it was music that was very liberated, so when you had a jazz record you really felt you were doing something illegal.’

These days, it is the award-winning Batiashvili herself who records for DG, and her latest album to bear that iconic yellow label is an intensely soulful and insightful reading of Prokofiev’s two violin concertos, with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Prokofiev’s music has resonated since she started learning his First Concerto, aged

Lisa Batiashvili

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From East to West: ‘We become who we are based on our experiences’

13. ‘Here is a person who is so attached to his country and culture,’ she points out, ‘but who is also dreaming of a life in Europe.

That conflict in his heart and mind, that question of “where do I belong?” has always been personal for me.’ Batiashvili moved with her family to Germany in 1991 and although, she says, ‘everything that has happened in my musical and personal life was only made possible by the support I had in Europe’, she retains strong emotional ties to her homeland. ‘Prokofiev proves you can be both of the East and of the West; that we can complete each other; that it doesn’t need to be the conflict it is often made out to be.’

Was it a huge upheaval, leaving Georgia aged 12? ‘My parents had always wanted us to live in Europe, but at the end of 1980s to leave the Soviet Union was almost criminal: if you left you had to plan it carefully. But Europe was always the plan, because of the music.

Because of the life itself. My parents were anti-Soviet: they resisted the idea of the imprisonment of a soul, of not letting people speak out.’ Batiashvili, celebrated for the intelligence of her playing and her profound musicality, turns out to be as thoughtful off-stage as she is on. ‘This question of what we are,’ she ponders, ‘the genetic information we have when we are born; what is given to us by our parents; what happens later this fascinates me.

We are already our own personalities, but we become who we are based on our experiences and encounters. I am sure that if my parents hadn’t risked that move, I

would not have been the same the person and therefore not the same violinist.’ Nor has she ever been afraid to speak out, taking, for example, a principled stand against the largely unquestioning embrace

by Western musical communities of Valery Gergiev, a pal of Vladimir Putin. ‘Everyone has a decision to make about their priorities,’ she considers, with her signature blend of grace and integrity. ‘It’s not that

‘If my parents hadn’t risked the move, I would not have been the same person’ I’m political exactly, but it’s important to me that I have a conscience.’

No wonder the music of Prokofiev, who fought his own lifelong battles with oppression, speaks to her so profoundly.

Conductors and orchestras fall over themselves to work with Batiashvili (who has been a resident artist with many major ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic, Concertgebouw and, this season, the Accademia di Santa Cecilia) but the collaboration on this disc with Nézet-Séguin and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe was a particular goal. ‘The very unique sound this orchestra can make is how I imagined the ideal version of these works would sound,’ she explains.

‘Yannick gives a lot of freedom to

Caucasus counterpoint: The Georgian state polyphonic folk singers Ensemble Basiani

Sweet Georgia sound A quick guide to the exotic music of the Eurasian country Georgian musical culture possesses one of the world’s oldest traditions of polyphonic music. The use of polyphony in Georgian folk music is thought to predate the introduction of Christianity in the country in early fourth century AD. The music is made up of at least 15 regional styles (dialects), split between eastern and western groups.

Georgian sacred music is primarily made up of settings of hymns for the Orthodox Church. During the Soviet era, Georgia’s chant tradition was suppressed due to the closure of many churches and monasteries.

When the country declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 it made significant efforts to rediscover its musical heritage.

Singing is an integral part of social life in Georgia, and a cappella singing has long been a key feature of Georgian feasts. These ceremonial dinners can last for hours and include several toasts, each accompanied by a song.

In terms of pop music, Georgia’s position at the midpoint between Europe and Asia means that it mixes urban styles from both continents with its own native polyphony.

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Lisa Batiashvili

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No barriers: Batiashvili performs a free concert in Berlin in 2014

those musicians to express their own individuality, proving it is possible to be an orchestra with a chamber music attitude. There is great generosity in their playing: they have an incredible, timeless style which means it doesn’t belong to any fashion or school. That is something I long dreamed of having for this recording.’

As well as Prokofiev and other core repertoire, such as the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concertos she recorded in 2016 to great acclaim with Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin, or the 2014 Bach album on which she collaborated with her husband, French oboist François Leleux, Batiashvili is alive to the complex pleasures of contemporary music. She has recorded and performed works by the likes of Magnus Lindberg and Thierry Escaich; we meet on the eve of her UK premiere of a new violin concerto by Anders Hillborg, which the Swedish composer wrote for her.

‘I play the contemporary music that speaks to me,’ she says. ‘I find when I work with great composers there is no intellectual fight only trust.’ She remains, too, an advocate for the music of her homeland, promoting works by composers such as Giya Kancheli and Sulkhan Tsintsadze.

‘Georgians have an intuitive attitude to music,’ she says. ‘Our folk tradition [see box, p35] is rich and diverse and we have our own ancient harmony which influences us even as children. I think it’s something that has to do with nature, with the climate, with the variety of that country that brings its people closer to the arts and music.’

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Georgia’s outstanding music education is something she supports and celebrates to this day. ‘The only thing I miss from the Soviet time is their school system for gifted young musicians,’ she jokes. ‘The idea is that music becomes part of your life, like learning to read and write: you start solfège and musical history at the age of six; you go to regular academic lessons

‘When I work with great composers, there is no intellectual fight – only trust’ in the morning but then in the afternoon you go to the music school. It is amazing for kids who want to take on music seriously, without having to compromise on other subjects. Such a school does not exist in Germany and I often think: how is it possible that the most musical country in the world does not have a system for young kids to learn music unless you get a private teacher? I think it’s a real problem.’ Why? ‘I wish classical music could be part of every family,’ she responds, thoughtfully.

‘I wish it could be one of the languages that we all learn, because it is the only language that everyone can understand on the same level, everywhere. It’s why being a musician is such a privilege: music can help people understand what makes

humanity so valuable, so special; what makes us different from other creatures.’

For the time being, Munich-based Batiashvili is persevering with teaching music to her own children a flautist daughter, 13, and pianist son, nine but confesses: ‘I don’t think they will be musicians. When both parents are quite successful artists and the kids grow up with their parents being away because of the music, well, they probably won’t want to do that. My parents were both musicians too, but my mother was never away from home. That makes a huge difference.’

It’s rare to find an artist at Batiashvili’s level talk with such frankness about reconciling a solo career with motherhood, but on this subject, as so many others, she is refreshingly candid. ‘I have had a lot of conflict within myself about this, especially when the kids were really small,’ she admits. ‘I was split into two pieces. I couldn’t understand how to give 100 per cent to music and 100 per cent to family.’ Is her husband similarly divided? ‘François is a fantastic father and husband, but he’s a man and I’m a woman and that’s the difference,’ she shrugs. ‘He doesn’t have to feel bad every moment when he’s not there.

Somehow nature has made the decision, right from the beginning, that the mother does. One of the problems is that musicians often have to set up their schedule years in advance, so to fight for the right balance with family is a constant challenge.’

Still, as the children get older and Batiashvili, who turns 40 next year, cements her rightful reputation as one of the world’s greatest violinists, the strain is beginning to ease. ‘At this point in my career, I feel lucky that I no longer have to do certain things. I like to plan less in advance because I want to be flexible and able to change my mind; to be able to influence my schedule more.’ As well as the new album and Santa Cecilia residency, the season ahead includes Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 at Sydney Opera House and conductorless with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. But Batiashvili is also leaving gaps to fill with a few surprises. ‘It’s nice to keep your options open,’ she smiles, ‘so you can come up with new creative ideas and have time to achieve them.’

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Orchestral nominations Mahler Symphony No. 3

VOTE NOW! And be in with a chance of winning a copy of each of our 21 nominated recordings

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/ Bernard Haitink BR Klassik 900149 Reviewed May 2017

Haitink’s first recording of Mahler 3 was half a century ago in Amsterdam.

The view hasn’t changed too much a measured survey of the immense opening movement through to a mesmerising account of the great final Adagio but the playing of the Bavarian Radio Symphony is outstanding, and beautifully captured in concert.

Schmidt Symphony No. 2 R Strauss Dreaming by the Fireside

OVER THE PAST FEW MONTHS, our awards jury has been listening anew to each of the recordings awarded five stars by our critics throughout last year. After many hours of lively discussions, they whittled over 200 recordings down to a shortlist for you to vote on. Here, over the next three pages, are all 21 nominations, all superb recordings that will give you a lifetime of enjoyable and fulfilling listening. Now it’s time to read about them before you head to our voting website at classical-music.com/awards, where you can listen to the clips and choose your favourites. Get clicking!

THE AWARDS JURY: NICHOLAS ANDERSON, ERICA JEAL, DAVID NICE, KATE WAKELING, OLIVER CONDY, REBECCA FRANKS, ANDREW MCGREGOR

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Vienna Philharmonic/Semyon Bychkov Sony Classical 88985355522 Reviewed July 2017

Semyon Bychkov pleads masterpiece status for a rarity. Schmidt’s late Romantic style needs the sheen of the Vienna Philharmonic, here captured in outstandingly natural and spacious sound this is a winner on the engineering front, too. The jury was unanimous in welcoming this splendid risk from a major label.

Vaughan Williams Symphony No. 9; Job Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/ Sir Andrew Davis Chandos CHSA5180 Reviewed April 2017

VW’s final symphony has the sinister bite of Shostakovich at his bleakest a quality not lost on Davis and his Bergen ensemble who have a tight grip on the work’s waspish qualities with playing of eeriness and beauty.

The Elizabethaninspired Job is cloaked in luscious sound.

Awards 2018 nominees

Concerto nominations

Opera nominations

Choral nominations

Fagerlund and Aho

Carnevale 1729 Baroque arias

Pärt The Deer’s Cry

Bassoon Concertos

Ann Hallenberg (mezzo); Il Pomo d’Oro/ Stefano Montanari Pentatone PTC5186678 Reviewed September 2017

Vox Clamantis/Jaan-Eik Tulve ECM 4812449 Reviewed February 2017

Bram van Sambeek (bassoon); Lahti Symphony Orchestra/Dima Slobodeniouk and Okko Kamu BIS BIS2206 Reviewed February 2017

This collection of contemporary works for the oft-neglected bassoon is a revelation.

Vital new pieces

by Fagerlund and Aho highlight the fire and heart of the instrument, Bram van Sambeek delivers flawless performances, the Lahti Symphony are on fire, and the sound quality is top-notch.

Mozart Violin Concertos Isabelle Faust (violin); Il Giardino Armonico/Giovanni Antonini Harmonia Mundi HMC902230/31 Reviewed February 2017

A programme loosely based on the 18th-century Venetian carnival offers Ann Hallenberg a colourful window to dazzle us with her astounding virtuosity.

Here is a glorious voice which never falters and whose intuitive ornamentation is a constant delight. Il Pomo d’Oro under Stefano Montanari’s direction provides vital support.

Berlioz Les Troyens Soloists; Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra/John Nelson Erato 9029576220 Reviewed Christmas 2017

Everything feels right about this recording.

Faust brings purity and playfulness to Mozart’s five concertos, youthful works with a freshness of spirit that comes across here with fluent ease. Andreas Staier’s cadenzas are an inspired choice.

Erato’s muchanticipated recording of this four-hour epic, made live in Strasbourg at concerts conducted by Berlioz specialist John Nelson, did not disappoint. It captures thrilling performances from Joyce DiDonato as Didon and from Michael Spyres, at the peak of his powers, as Énée, and from a supporting cast of impressive strength.

Dynastie

Andriessen Theatre of the World

Concertos by JS, WF, CPE and JC Bach

Soloists; Los Angeles Philharmonic/ Reinbert de Leeuw Nonesuch 7559793618 Reviewed Christmas 2017

Jean Rondeau (harpsichord) plus ensemble Erato 9029588846 Reviewed March 2017

Rondeau is a firecracker harpsichordist – phrasing, rhythms, ornamentation delivered with panache and intelligence. JS Bach’s D minor Concerto has rarely sounded so urgent, while Rondeau delights in the impishness of JS’s son CPE’s own D minor Concerto. The orchestral playing is vibrant.

Louis Andriessen calls it a grotesque in nine scenes, turning the life of 17th-century German polymath, Jesuit and scientist Athanasius Kircher into a Faustian journey of self-discovery. Using a mixture of languages, children’s songs, Baroque music, jazz and modernism, it’s a dizzying kaleidoscopic creation from a master of stagecraft.

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From the incantatory style of The Deer’s Cry to the gently layered Veni Creator with its simple, quasimedieval organ accompaniment, Pärt’s choral music requires precision and sensitivity, qualities that are in abundance in this stunningly recorded album. Hard to imagine this music better performed.

Martinů Cantatas Prague Philharmonic Choir/Lukáš Vasilek Supraphon SU41982 Reviewed March 2017

Every new Martinů release from Supraphon over the past few years has been treasurable, but this compendium offers the composer’s miraculous poetic cantatas inspired by folk wisdom and timely ecological parables. Unorthodox instrumental combinations and superb singing heighten the pleasures of this recording.

Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott Luther and the Music of the Reformation Vox Luminis/Lionel Meunier; Bart Jacobs (organ) Ricercar RIC153 Reviewed July 2017

Music played an important part in Lutheran worship. Marking the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, Vox Luminis and director Lionel Meunier offer an illuminating exploration of Luther’s hymns and Gospel translations in settings by many of JS Bach’s predecessors. All is warmly performed, and wonderfully presented in a generously illustrated book format.

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Awards 2018 nominees

Vocal nominations

Chamber nominations

Instrumental nominations

Ligeti Six Bagatelles; Kammerkonzert;

Bach2 the Future

Songs by Mahler, Sibelius and Dvor˘ ák

Dix pièces pour quintette à vent

Works for solo violin

Jamie Barton (mezzo), Brian Zeger (piano) Delos DE3494 Reviewed May 2017

Les Siècles/François-Xavier Roth Actes Sud ASM26 Reviewed March 2017

The long wait for Jamie Barton’s debut recital disc was worth every minute.

Barton, double winner of 2013’s BBC Cardiff Singer of the World, is wonderfully idiomatic in Dvořák and Sibelius, and she and her pianist give a performance of Mahler’s Rückert Lieder that is up there with the greatest.

Ligeti’s brilliance, wit and quirky originality are at their most obvious in the wind quintet pieces, while the Chamber Concerto is a major work with a frenetic finale. Les Siècles play it all with exhilarating virtuosity, and utterly seductive wind timbres.

Fenella Humphreys (violin) Champs Hill Records CHRCD118 Reviewed January 2017

All Who Wander

Blow An Ode on the Death of Mr Henry Purcell & other works Samuel Boden (tenor), Thomas Walker (tenor); Arcangelo/Jonathan Cohen Hyperion CDA 68149 Reviewed Dec 2017

Blow’s music deserves to be better known as these stylish performances demonstrate. High tenors rather than the usually heard countertenors sing the Ode on the Death of Henry Purcell while the remaining programme uncovers music which is seldom heard but is of sterling merit.

Haas Fata Morgana Anita Watson (soprano), Anna Starushkevych (mezzo), Nicky Spence (tenor), James Platt (bass), Navarra Quartet; Lada Valešová (piano) Resonus RES10183 Reviewed May 2017

This captivating collection is everything a recording should be. The brain-child of pianist-musicologist Lada Valešová, the disc celebrates the delicately enthralling songs of 20th-century Czech composer Pavel Haas (including a premiere recording, of Fata Morgana), performed with beauty and care.

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A Noble and Melancholy Instrument Music for horns and pianos of the 19th century Alec Frank-Gemmill (horns), Alasdair Beatson (pianos) BIS BIS2228 Reviewed July 2017

This gutsy and exhilarating disc completes violinist Fenella Humphreys’s laudable project to commission and record six companion pieces to Bach’s Partitas. Featuring splendid new compositions by Sally Beamish, Peter Maxwell Davies and Adrian Sutton alongside works by Bach, Ysaÿe, Stravinsky and Sibelius, the disc is performed with great precision and verve.

Dreams & Fancies English Music for Solo Guitar Sean Shibe (guitar) Delphian DCD34193 Reviewed October 2017

This beautifully thought-through disc has horn player Alec Frank-Gemmill and pianist Beatson playing four different pianos and four different horns, all historically appropriate, in a programme ranging through Rossini, Glazunov, Dukas and more. Their warm, easy musicianship makes this edifying and effortlessly enjoyable.

Not just great guitar playing, but for two members of this year’s jury the best they had ever heard. At 25, Sean Shibe is that rare thing, a mature philosopher among musicians. He draws a rainbow of colours from his instrument, and Arnold’s Fantasy is a highlight in a balanced programme of English music.

Debussy Sonatas and Trio

Schubert Sonatas D959 and D960

Renaud Capuçon (violin), Edgar Moreau (cello), Bertrand Chamayou (piano) et al Erato 9029577396 Reviewed Christmas 2017

Krystian Zimerman (piano) DG 479 7588 Reviewed Christmas 2017

This is luxury casting for Debussy, with a clutch of the finest Francophone musicians from across the generations coming together for the occasion. Their readings of the late sonatas are packed with glorious detail, while Capuçon, Chamayou and Moreau make a great case for the early Piano Trio.

The soundworld of this disc is immediately striking: Zimerman has added his own keyboard into a Steinway to create an instrument more akin to what Schubert might have known.

But it’s not just the singing tone that sets these performances apart: Zimerman’s take on these two late sonatas is carefully thought through and deeply felt.

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The art of memory How do leading musicians go about learning huge amounts of music off by heart? And do they really need to? John Evans asks them ILLUSTRATION: PAUL BLOW

SIM CANETTY-CLARK

O

n 2 April 2007, David Farrow memorised a random sequence of 3,068 playing cards and recalled it perfectly to clinch the Guinness world record, which he still holds. ‘Give me just four hours and I’ll give you a mind like a mental magnet!’ he tells visitors to his website today.

If only Farrow had been around to coach me 20 years earlier in April 1987 when, as a young piano teacher, I performed Chopin’s G minor Ballade from memory to an audience of 300 parents at a school concert. The piece had featured in my music college graduation recital five years earlier. I’d played it a few times in public since, so as I settled myself at the piano, I was confident I could recall it perfectly.

The piece opens with a simple, rising melody but inexplicably, my mind went blank and I substituted a C minor arpeggio. It sounded terrible. Fortunately, I arrived at the top on the right note and the rest of the performance passed without incident.

This simple memory slip shook me to the core.

Could a memory man like David Farrow have given me a mind like a mental magnet capable of securely memorising the work’s thousands of notes? Possibly, but ever since it became fashionable to play without music, a number of well-proven memory techniques have evolved that have served musicians, as distinct from card players, pretty well. Soloist and chamber music pianist Susan Tomes sums them up as intellectual, aural, muscular and photographic.

‘When I was learning and pieces were shorter, I could picture the music in my mind,’ she says. ‘As I got older and began playing more complex music by Schubert, for example, 42

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All in the mind: Stephen Hough maps out patterns in the music

‘Some musicians, such as András Schiff, are born with a gift for memorising

I found intellectual memory techniques understanding the music’s shape and structure, location of bridge passages and so on helpful, especially when photographic and muscle memory, an instinctive memory that is acquired over hours of practice, failed me.’

Pianist Alexandra Dariescu, in turn, relies on what she calls ‘visual memory’. ‘It’s what I use the most,’ she says. ‘I can “see” where I am on the page but it only comes with huge amounts of concentration and after hours of “mental practice” away from the score. I can’t overstate how useful mental practice is. When I go for a walk or watch TV, my mind drifts and if I can shut out any noise and concentrate on that particular passage, I know I’ve got it.’

Like Tomes, Dariescu also employs intellectual memory to lock down the notes.

She’ll look for clues to the music’s shape and how it unfolds. She’ll reduce a passage to its harmonic essence, playing it as a sequence of chords. ‘The pianist Dinu Lipatti always analysed the score for a long time before even starting to sight read it, and I have adopted his technique,’ she says. ‘Of course, some musicians are born with a gift for memorising. I once asked pianist András Schiff about his skill at memorising. His answer was simple: “It’s a blessing”. But his kind of extraordinary memory can be achieved through lots of hard work and super-strong will power.’

Pianist Stephen Hough doesn’t claim to be ‘blessed’ with a great memory although accepts that by the time he knows a piece inside out, ‘I have memorised it’. He admits, though, that when faced with particularly challenging sections, he’ll fall back on intellectual

The art of memory

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The art of memory

Learning from pasta experiences: Puccini’s La Ciesca, played here by Krystian Marie McLaughlin, is a devil to commit to memory

Nightmares to remember Three leading musicians share their horribly hard-to-learn pieces Llyˆr Williams Pianist When I play Beethoven’s Sonata No. 31, Op. 110, I have part of the score hidden inside the piano. The first fugue in the last movement is particularly hard to remember. Whereas the fugue in, say, the Hammerklavier Sonata is more athletic and muscular and goes into the muscular memory fairly easily, in Op. 110, the writing is more melifluous. If you take a wrong turn it’s almost impossible to know where you are. It might also be psychological, as shortly before I was once due to play it, Mitsuko Uchida told me how she had gone all to pot in the fugue in a concert – I then found myself doing likewise.

Jennifer Johnston Mezzo-soprano All Wagner roles can be difficult to learn, partly because the German isn’t completely modern and so the syntax is different to how you would speak German today, but also because you never repeat anything. However, even harder is the role of La Ciesca in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. It’s an ensemble piece with constant interjections, the rapidity of the text can be bewildering at times and, because there are so many people on stage, you might not always be standing next to the person you think you’re going to hear before you sing.

When I sang it recently, the first few rehearsals of it were just terrifying.

Chloë Hanslip Violinist It’s quite hard to pinpoint one work, but I remember that when I first learnt Glass’s Violin Concerto, it took a great amount of practice to get it into my muscle memory. With his Minimalist style, it is very intricate and there are very subtle changes, particularly in the last movement. Aside from repeated practice, the way to learn a piece such as this is to study the score so that as well as your own notes, you also know what’s going on in the orchestra that might be able to guide you. Also, it’s good to continually go through it in your head and play it on your arm when you don’t have the violin with you.

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techniques: ‘I will map out patterns, black and white notes, repetitive shapes and so on.’

Much of this applies to other instrumentalists, with breathing and bowing providing additional aide-mémoires. Singers, though, face a different set of challenges, as soprano Lynne Dawson explains: ‘The verse nature of recital song can make it hard to memorise. You just have to find what works for you: mnemonics or straightforward repetition until it’s ingrained.

Abstract subjects can be hard to memorise.

Association helps singing one verse in the hall, another on the stairs, and so on. Or creating a picture for each verse. It needn’t be literal; just something to prompt recall. In an opera, it helps that you are told where to stand and can associate a position with a word or phrase.’

For Daniella Sicari, a multi-prize-winning soprano and postgraduate student at the Royal Northern College of Music who is busily launching her career, the challenges of memorising new repertoire are all too real.

She relies on an approach she calls ‘multilayering’. ‘Memorising a work begins with the text,’ she says. ‘That’s harder when it’s a foreign language so if it’s not one I’m familiar with, I’ll first do a poetic translation of it, which will help colour my interpretation, before a wordfor-word, literal one. Next, I go to the piano to learn the music before combining it with the libretto. I’ll exaggerate the music’s colours and sense to embed it in my mind, at the same time conducting myself. I create an inner monologue, too, that helps me navigate the music and the text. If it’s opera, I take the same approach to a lesser degree with the other characters I appear with, so I understand how to react when not singing and to be aware of my cues.’ Her approach applies equally well to a recital such as lieder, she says, the role of other characters being taken by the accompaniment.

Hard work, in short, is the key. But, as my experience proves, when push comes to shove, you can’t entirely trust your memory. The great composers certainly thought so. Until the late 19th century, playing from memory was frowned upon, composers believing it trivialised their work, led to bad practice and turned performing into a circus act. Susan Tomes recalls the story of Beethoven chastising his pupil Carl Czerny for playing from memory, saying it would make him casual about his markings on the score.

Ironically, one of the first artists to overturn centuries of performance practice by performing from memory at the piano was Liszt, who was often shown gazing skywards, as if seeking

ARENA PAL, ALAMY, ADRIAN STOICOVICIU, BEN EALOVEGA

divine inspiration. In truth, he performed only a fraction of his repertoire from memory and all of his own pieces from music, in case audiences thought he was making it all up as he went along.

Stephen Hough performs his own compositions from the music, too. ‘It’s partly because it helps me to separate “me” the composer from “me” the performer,’ he explains.

‘I don’t want any sense (in my mind or the audience’s) that I’m improvising.’

In fact, Hough’s adherence to the score isn’t confined to his own music: ‘If, or when, I begin to play Bach in public, I would definitely use the score.’ As for other composers, he says, ‘there is an argument (not entirely watertight but important) that a concert is theatre and, however well an actor might read a role or a poem from a book or even an autocue, it’s not quite the same as doing it from memory.’

Hough admits it’s getting harder to memorise as he grows older (he’s only 57), which may lie behind his willingness to consider playing from the score. He wouldn’t be the first to wave the white flag. As they grew older and lost confidence in their memory, Clifford Curzon and Sviatoslav Richter performed fewer concerts from memory. John Gilhooly, director of Wigmore Hall, accepts older artists may feel more comfortable performing this way: ‘An older performer, perhaps a cellist playing the Bach cello suites, might ask if they can use the music, and that’s fine. And an older pianist performs here with his wife turning the music, but I’ve never seen him refer to it; it’s there as a crutch.’

Otherwise, Gilhooly is less tolerant of younger artists choosing to use the score: ‘The music stand can be a barrier between the audience and the performer, and the performer and the music. I get cross when I see a singer buried in the score. I don’t think performing from the music should become the norm and I don’t see any signs that is happening. People are paying a lot of money to hear an artist and they have certain expectations. But I also accept that an artist may be experiencing pressures that are making them feel vulnerable. You have to be understanding.’

Alexandra Dariescu agrees that audiences expect artists to perform from memory but is unsure where exactly that expectation comes from: ‘I think everyone should perform in whatever way they feel most comfortable and concentrate on what they want to communicate.

Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to memorise pieces so I could spend more time learning repertoire, but it’s about prioritising, and attitudes differ between performers.’

Score draws: Alexandra Dariescu and (below) Susan Tomes believe a little leeway should be given to performers

‘Performers know that people come to hear the music, not see what your memory’s like

They certainly do. Pianist Kathryn Stott can memorise easily and securely but says she prefers to play from the music: ‘You have to know the music sufficiently well not to be glued to the score. When it doesn’t work is when it’s being used because the performer isn’t prepared.’ In any case, she reckons the public doesn’t care whether music is used or not. ‘I played Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 the other night to 2,000 people and no one gave a monkey’s that I played it from the music. Times are changing and more performers are doing it because they know people come to hear the music, not see what your memory’s like.’

Although Susan Tomes performs recitals from memory she can understand why some of her fellow performers do not. ‘So many students and colleagues have told me about the worry and distress that memorising and public lapses of memory have caused them that I have come to feel that, although it is liberating for some, it is burdensome for others and probably causes more unhappiness than it’s worth.’

In any case, like Kathryn Stott, she fears the audience may not even notice when a performer plays from memory. ‘I gave a recital last year and my friend who came along was surprised when I told her I played it from memory. She hadn’t noticed so why do we do it?’

I wish I’d asked myself the same question all those years ago.

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Stamps of approval They may have written symphonies and sonatas, but composers have also helped send parcels and letters…

E

ver since the very first adhesive postage stamps rolled off the presses in 1840, countries around the world have used their canvasses to showcase people or things of national importance. Sportsmen, artists, pop singers, literary icons, buildings, animals have all made the cut… and, yes, composers from time to time. And it’s good to see that our musical heroes are symbols of cross-border culture, too, from Mongolia’s celebration of Mozart to Greece’s marking of Beethoven’s bicentenary in 1970.

Here we present 12 of the best international stamps to feature composers.

Great licks: (this page) Sibelius, Finland’s source of pride; Greece remembers Beethoven; the US celebrates Gershwin with a scene from Porgy and Bess; in 1955 Hungary marked the tenth anniversary of Bartók’s death

Composers on stamps

ALAMY, GETTY

Parcel forces: (this page, clockwise from below) Monaco marks 300 years of Bach and Handel; Mongolia loves Mozart; Royal Mail keeps Delius out of the picture; Austria’s Schoenberg stamp – surely part of a serial?; Tailleferre, a member of Les Six, gets the French nod; Chopin on a stamp of the African nation of Guinea-Bissau; Janacˇek and Prokofiev get their homelands’ approval

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Alpesh Chauhan

The Prince of Parma Alpesh Chauhan has risen from Birmingham apprentice to international maestro in a dazzlingly short time, and is currently stealing the hearts of the Parmensi. Richard Bratby meets him

M

y red wine is fizzy. The conductor of tonight’s concert, Alpesh Chauhan, has invited a group of us for dinner at his favourite pizzeria in the Italian city of Piacenza, and no, I’m not imagining bubbles in my wine glass. Chauhan spots my double-take. ‘It’s Lambrusco; it’s supposed to be like that. They only produce it around here – after a concert, you’ve got to have it, really’. The waiter circles, then presents a basket full of little pillows of hot dough. Everyone looks expectantly to Chauhan – after music, the cuisine of the Parma region is currently his favourite topic. But that’s not entirely why the whole table waits for him to take the lead. He’s only 27, but this is his first season as principal conductor of Parma’s Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini, and when an Italian orchestra calls you ‘Maestro’, they mean it.

Is that so surprising? Young conductors find their feet quickly these days. Sorry, pause that. Conductors have always started young: Toscanini was conducting Verdi at the age of 19.

So let’s ignore Chauhan’s age. This is serious: the critic of the local paper, Libertà, declares the next morning that Chauhan ‘seems born to conduct’.

I’ve known him since he was a 16-year-old cellist in the CBSO Youth Orchestra, and I can’t quite wrap my head around this love affair between an Italian orchestra and a quiet Brummie from a state school in Handsworth. It’s not just me. The editor has asked me to find out ‘how someone 48

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You’ve got the study the score to the point where you can sort things out if something goes wrong

like him can make it to his position these days’.

So a few days later, back in Birmingham, I ask.

‘I saw my first cello teacher playing in assembly at primary school, and that same day I went home with a cello,’ he says. ‘I just fell in love with it. Every night, as well as working on the exercises I’d been set I’d push on through two or three more pages. It was a whirlwind romance’.

So there’s your starting point: an opportunity, offered to all students through the Birmingham Schools Music Service – ‘you had a free instrument, and subsidised lessons’ – and seized on with passion by the pre-teen Chauhan. The next step? A feet-first plunge – though again, with a network of support. ‘Well, two steps – they happened close together. I was playing in a string orchestra in Bournville, and I just said “I really want to have a go at conducting”, so they offered me Barber’s Adagio. The CBSO Youth Orchestra then started to hold conducting masterclasses’.

I remember that bit, because I was managing the CBSO Youth Orchestra at the time. The idea came from the CBSO’s associate conductor

GIANNI CRAVEDI, PATRICK ALLEN, GETTY

La dolce vita: Chauhan with the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini

Michael Seal, and I can’t remember precisely why we started doing them then, in the summer of 2007. But I’m glad we did, because that afternoon Chauhan shared the podium with two other teenagers, Jamie Phillips (later associate conductor of the Hallé) and Ben Gernon (now principal guest conductor of the BBC Philharmonic). At the time, he didn’t seem the most confident of the three.

‘It was really scary, because I was conducting friends,’ he tells me. ‘But before I conducted the Barber, Peter Bridle one of the first conductors I played under in a youth orchestra came backstage and I told him how nervous I was. He said, “You can’t be nervous, because if you’re nervous, what the hell is the orchestra going to do?” I think about that even now. You’ve got to study the score to the point where you can sort things out if something goes wrong. Then when you’re on the box, you just can’t be nervous.’

Step three, then: confidence and its necessary precondition, hard work. Chauhan went to the Royal Northern College of Music as

About Parma Named after a type of Roman round shield, Parma sits in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, pretty much equidistant from east and west coasts.

Tourist highlights include Parma Cathedral with its imposing Gambara frescoes depicting the life of Christ, and the octagonal 13th-century pink marble Baptistery.

a cellist, and emerged a conductor. Even before he’d finished the course, he was offered the post of assistant conductor at the CBSO. Major artist agencies flocked to his graduation concert in Manchester, and he signed with Hazard Chase after their managing director James Brown took him out for a pint. ‘We had a normal conversation. There was no BS, no “we’re going to make you rich”. It was honest: we’ll do this, but slowly; we’ll build your career up brick by brick.’

Though from there on in, it seems to have happened very quickly. You might have seen Chauhan conducting the BBC’s Ten Pieces films, or working with the CBSO, LSO or BBC Scottish Symphony. No one, though, guessed he’d be such a hit with Italian orchestras. ‘It almost became a joke in the office,’ says James Brown. ‘Wherever we sent him in Italy, they were on the phone the next day saying they loved him.’ It was Rosetta Cucchi, director of the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini who put a ring on it, so to speak.

‘In March 2015 we had a conductor cancel for Beethoven’s Eroica, and it was only by BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Alpesh Chauhan

Parma harmonies

ALAMY, GETTY

The Italian city’s rich musical offerings Casanova spent his happiest days in Parma, and every foodie knows that the city of Parma ham and Parmesan is a good place to enjoy yourself. But its musical pleasures are appetising, too. Toscanini was born here; Paganini was buried in the city; and Verdi – born 20 miles away at Busseto – is a local hero. It says something about Parma’s priorities that a town smaller than Northampton should have two opera houses.

The Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini, meanwhile, plays in the Auditorium Paganini, a new hall converted from a sugar factory in 2001 by Renzo Piano, the architect of London’s Shard – its new rehearsal facilities are in the same wooded park. As the orchestra for the entire Emilia-Romagna region, it’s never short of work: it doubles as the orchestra for the Teatro Regio in Parma, as well as opera houses in neighbouring Piacenza, Modena and Reggio Emilia.

Chauhan is mindful of local tradition. The music he conducts – Sibelius, Stravinsky, Brahms – isn’t everyday fare here. ‘I’m here to bring something different’ he says, and for now he’s steering clear of Verdi. ‘We did the Forza del Destino overture, and afterwards the leader said “That was very interesting. But please don’t ever do it that way in the opera house, because the audience here really knows its Verdi. If it sounds different, they’ll shout!”’

Sweet for orchestra: the former sugar factory, Auditorium Paganini; (below) Arturo Toscanini

‘Wherever we sent Alpesh in Italy, they would be on the phone saying they loved him’ chance that I saw a video of Alpesh,’ she says.

‘I thought: he’s young, but he’s something, he’s really something. I didn’t know if he’d conducted the piece I found out later that he hadn’t. But he studied for 48 hours, and the concert was amazing. We have experienced musicians in the orchestra; what we needed was Alpesh’s energy.

His talent spreads out to everybody.’

So there’s an answer. That’s how a young British conductor gets to host post-gig suppers in Piacenza, and perhaps the steps aren’t so unexpected: talent, hard work, a growing confidence and a readiness to take the opportunities on offer all made possible by fellow-musicians who were prepared to share their skills, whether in primary school classrooms or international orchestras. A simple equation, really: no subsidised school cello lessons in Birmingham no blazing performances of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem and Brahms’s German Requiem in Parma and Piacenza 20 years later.

And no chance for us to hear an artist with an increasingly distinctive voice. Wasn’t that Britten-Brahms double bill a bit sombre for an opening concert? ‘But that’s what I do,’ says Chauhan. ‘It’s “old man’s music”, apparently, but it’s what I feel closest to’. His deepest passion and one that surely has a long way to run is actually for Bruckner. ‘I heard

Andris Nelsons conducting Bruckner Seven – the pacing, the way the music breathed – and something happened. I’m not religious at all, but Bruckner made me realise what belief can mean.’

He’s conducted the Ninth Symphony in Parma and the Third in Birmingham.

Atypical? Maybe. But then, there are some who’d see his whole career as atypical. I won’t forget an official from a funding body (I’ll spare their blushes) in 2006 who, after witnessing Chauhan lead the cellos in a performance of The Firebird, sidled over: ‘I see you have an Indian cellist. Don’t you think he should be playing music that’s relevant to him?’ Chauhan’s family heritage – his father is from Tanzania and his mother is from Kenya; they met in the UK – is as important to him as it would be to anyone: ‘My parents supported me from day one’. But the idea that it could be a factor in his music-making leaves him nonplussed.

‘People say that western classical music’s so white. But I didn’t see that. Only three or four people in my class at school were white. For me, this music was diversity – something that took me out of a closed environment, meeting different people. Maybe it was growing up in Birmingham, where multiculturalism is so strong; for me it just felt easy’.

None of which alters the fact that the early stages of any conductor’s careers can be the hardest of all. Critics and audiences rarely see the half of it. But now Chauhan has an orchestra of his own, and ambitions to match. ‘It still feels strange, saying “my orchestra”,’ he says. ‘They’re so exciting when you push them. We’re getting to know each other; we’ve developed a sound together. For the first time, I can go to work knowing what to expect. This season will be a big push, but things are getting stronger, technically and musically. We’re learning from each other.

Plus, they throw amazing parties; you can’t beat a big wheel of parmesan. And I love the wine’.

Yes, the wine. I’d always thought of Bruckner as more Riesling than Lambrusco: but it’ll come. No serious artist is formed overnight, and the story so far barely lays the foundations.

Chauhan’s career to date has been defined by his own determination to express himself musically, and the support of colleagues willing to give him those chances. Now he has the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini on his side, and it’s up to him to return its commitment. Conducting is a lifetime’s journey, but it can’t be accomplished alone. The most encouraging thing about a conductor as thoughtful and as hard-working as Alpesh Chauhan is that he knows that.

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Leading the way: the South-West Open Youth Orchestra’s work won a Royal Philharmonic Society Award in 2017

Music without bars The new National Open Youth Orchestra is providing incredible opportunities for disabled musicians, as Andrew Stewart reports

V

iewed from one familiar perspective, the symphony orchestra appears as a model of creative co-operation and artistic freedom. But what does it look like to a wheelchair user or someone with complex physical and cognitive disabilities? Barry Farrimond, co-founder and chief executive of Bristol-based charity OpenUp Music, gives a striking answer.

Classical orchestras, he says, are disabling.

Their instruments are often impossible for disabled people to play; their repertoire, conceived for non-disabled performers, often excludes countless musicians whose impairments prevent them from taking 52

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

part; their stages, with steps and risers, are like fortresses built to repel the disabled.

The idea that orchestral music and concert hall culture could and should be different lies behind the creation of the National Open Youth Orchestra, the world’s first disabled-led band for young musicians.

Open to players aged 11 to 25, the National Open Youth Orchestra began recruiting in January for its September launch. It continues on from the success of the South-West Open Youth Orchestra (SWOYO), a pilot project built by OpenUp Music in partnership with Bristol Music Trust, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Bristol Plays Music. The

SWOYO, which bows out with a final concert at Bristol’s Colston Hall on 9 April, received last year’s Royal Philharmonic Society Learning and Participation Award.

Its achievements have been aided by new technology, including OpenUp Music’s clarion, a groundbreaking instrument for disabled people, accessible to musicians with complex disabilities, genuinely enabling for its players and a joy to hear.

The National Open Youth Orchestra has forged links with Colston Hall, Sage Gateshead, the Barbican and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and is set to work with Music Education Hubs, arts organisations, schools, charities and others

Education

SIMON JAY PRICE

Getting involved: OpenUP Music’s pioneering youth orchestra, SWOYO, performs in Bristol Cathedral; (right) a youngster uses a digital instrument

to reach the greatest number of young musicians around the UK. It also has backing from Arts Council England. ‘This is about providing opportunities for as many people as possible,’ says Farrimond.

‘Excluding people from the musical landscape can’t be allowed to continue.

Music is often described as the universal language, but disabled people are often left out.’ OpenUp Music’s Open Orchestras has already developed conversationstarting first access programmes with 24 special educational needs schools and other partners, with 21 more to follow.

Musical inclusivity involves imagination. Liz Lane, OpenUp Music’s composer-in-association, and Liam TaylorWest have written works for disabled-led youth orchestras that recognise and test the strengths of their performers. The growing stream of Open Orchestra repertoire contains new compositions with parts for clarion, electronic and conventional instruments, accessible pieces by Beethoven, Monteverdi, Pachelbel and others, and scores arranged to suit a wide range of young disabled people.

OpenUp Music’s musical director, Doug Bott, says that the National Open Youth Orchestra is much more than a boxticking exercise in access and diversity. It offers disabled youngsters the chance to play music live in real time, and develop skills with non-disabled peers. ‘There’s something particular about the idea of the orchestra,’ he says. ‘It’s exciting, it’s about bringing people together. But it’s also provocative and potentially explosive.

Young disabled people are central to what we do and they won’t necessarily create

something that looks or sounds like a conventional orchestra. This is all about reimagining what an orchestra can be from the perspective of young disabled people, people who have their own life experiences and views on the world. It allows them to express themselves and their musical identities. That can radically redefine and reinvigorate what a 21st-century orchestra can be.’ This orchestra’s model works on

‘Excluding people from the musical landscape can’t be allowed to continue’ the principle of ‘reverse inclusion’, offering places to the non-disabled in an ensemble built around young disabled people.

The campaign to make music more accessible to disabled people has gathered momentum with a push from Arts Council England’s Creative Case for Diversity initiative. ‘There’s been a sea-change in how diversity is perceived,’ says Farrimond.

‘There is a creative case for it, not just a moral one. It’s morally right that the arts should be diverse, but the Arts Council has seen that we’re missing a trick, that there’s huge creativity among disabled people.’

The National Open Youth Orchestra, adds Bott, is set to harness that creativity.

‘The range of people with disability and special educational needs is hugely diverse,’ he says. ‘Many disabled young people can play conventional instruments; others

face barriers to playing them. Various organisations have done wonderful things but there hasn’t been an attempt to pull everything together, to focus on one area of music-making and do it really well.’

Bott believes that disabled-led youth orchestras can transform attitudes to music and the disabled, much as the Paralympic movement has done with disability sports.

He points to performances by Paralympic athletes and the growth of sports such as wheelchair rugby as examples of innovation. ‘We have a group within society disabled people and especially young disabled people who have been almost completely disenfranchised from the world of music. Yes, there are opportunities for music therapy. But imagine what would happen if you asked high-achieving Paralympians how they’re enjoying their sport therapy! People in the music world are always asking how we’re going to involve more young people and achieve more diversity in orchestras and audiences. Here is the answer.’

It’s only a matter of time, concludes Bott, before audiences will be queuing to hear virtuoso clarion soloists perform with world-class open orchestras. The foundations for change are set. ‘I began working in disabled music in 2000 and it felt like pushing water uphill but that has changed. Awareness of disability and the aspirations of disabled people have been raised in sport, and that is having a positive effect in music. The Arts Council is behind the creative diversity agenda and this feels like a great time to launch the National Open Youth Orchestra.’

For further information see: noyo.org.uk BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

53

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Vail United States Geoffrey John Davies climbs to the high altitudes to enjoy the diverse range of music on offer at Colorado’s Bravo! Vail Music Festival

Outdoor pursuits: the Gerald R Ford Amphitheater at the base of Vail Mountain; (below) Bravo! Vail artistic director Anne-Marie McDermott

E

ach summer, a small town nestled in the Colorado Rockies familiar to most Americans as a ski resort plays host to a major international music festival. Over the past 30 years, the Bravo!

Vail Music Festival has grown from a small three-concert chamber series into a huge event which now features no fewer than four resident orchestras each year, a growing education programme run for the benefit of tourists and residents alike – and plenty of chamber music.

Colorado attracts active people who want to take full advantage of the state’s gorgeous natural landscape that the drive from Denver International Airport to 62

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

Vail takes the breath away is not just due to change in altitude. The town itself was founded in the 1960s and, during President Ford’s administration in the 1970s, the area was referred to as the ‘Western White House’; Ford used the town as an escape from the frenetic pace of Washington and many local landmarks still bear his name.

Since Vail’s economy relies on tourism, a host of organisations draw visitors to the town during the summer months, when the snow has melted but the mountains

still beguile. Bravo! Vail, which runs from late June to early August, was one of the first, founded in 1987

by John Giovando with violinist Ida Kavafian.

The locally based National Repertory and Colorado Springs Philharmonic were the festival’s first orchestras-in-residence, but Bravo! soon began to attract ensembles from further afield. The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra brought national attention to the festival when it began the first of 19 successive residencies in 1989, while the

MUSICAL DESTINATIONS

Under the mountain: the picturesque high street of Vail

Plucky charm: Jake Schepps

Classical and beyond

ALAMY, ZACH MAHONE

Colorado crossover

roster of today’s residential orchestras include the Dallas Symphony, the Philadelphia, the New York Philharmonic and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the first to come from overseas.

The monumental natural beauty of the Rockies provides a stunning backdrop for orchestral concerts, held outdoors at the Gerald R Ford Amphitheater. The venue, which seats 1,260 in covered seating, and an additional 1,300 on the grassy hillside, opened in 1987 and was built at the base of Vail Mountain, with a view of the Gore Range to the east. When the Amphitheater first opened there were doubts as to whether people would make the trip to a remote venue on the edge of town to see performances, but it is now home to a wide range of events: as well as the Bravo!

Vail Festival it hosts the Vail International Dance Festival, summer pop concerts and local choral and theatre productions.

The festival’s orchestral programming, meanwhile, spans ever-popular works from the European classical canon and all-American legends through to film screenings with live orchestral accompaniment (past offerings include ET and Fantasia). ‘Bravo! Vail is a musical hotbed because of the variety of performers over 400 every summer and the works we programme,’ enthuses pianist Anne-Marie McDermott, who has been the festival’s artistic director since 2011. ‘Striking a balance between the core classical canon and cutting-edge new works, as well as popular music, is my primary challenge and joy.’

Under McDermott’s guidance, the festival today places its emphasis on where it all began chamber music.

Bravo! runs several different chamber series each summer all around town, from free midday concerts to intimate performances in private homes, plus informal performances in bars and breweries that unite Vail’s musical legacy with Colorado’s craft beer scene.

The festival has consolidated its commitment to contemporary music,

‘My aim is to strike a balance between the core classical canon and new works’ meanwhile, with a new flagship venture, the New Works Fund. To celebrate the launch of this initiative, the 2017 edition of Bravo! featured five new commissions one for each resident orchestra plus one chamber work, with pieces by Roberto Sierra, Guillaume de Connesson, Julia Adolphe, David Ludwig and Edgar Meyer.

McDermott has a theory on why Bravo!

Vail’s festival format is perennially popular: ‘To be in dialogue with worldclass artists about realising their musical dreams is a privilege beyond words.

The layers of music-making whether orchestral, chamber music, commissioned works, or solo repertoire – among a

Colorado has been a launchpad for classical crossover musicians, including banjo-players Jake Schepps and Jayme Stone and fiddler Enion Pelta-Tiller. Schepps worked to find common ground between Bartók and forms of American acoustic music on his disc An Evening in the Village, which then inspired him to commission four US composers – Marc Mellits, Matt McBane, Gyan Riley and Matt Flinner – to write for his quintet. Banjo-player Jayme Stone has also championed contemporary composers, recording Andrew Downing’s This County is My Home, while classically trained violinist Enion Pelta-Tiller performs in the string band Taarka, merging Western and Eastern traditions.

diverse array of artists at every stage of their life has the power to reach people in the most meaningful ways.’

In addition to the concerts, one really has to try some open-air activities, such as hiking up Lionshead Mountain or biking the 12-mile paved trail from Vail Pass through Cooper Mountain Resort, or perhaps a brief foray into the local fitness trend du jour: goat yoga. Several days at Bravo! Vail leaves one feeling refreshed and relaxed, plus reassured about classical music’s ability to draw large crowds and bring people together. The festival provides another compelling reason to head to the Rockies besides the impressive skiing. Just remember to keep yourself hydrated in that thin mountain air.

Further information: Bravo! Vail Festival www.bravovail.org BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

63

Composer of the month

Michael Tippett

Composer of the Week is broadcast on Radio 3 at 12pm, Monday to Friday. Programmes in February are: 29 January – 2 February Handel 5-9 February Takemitsu 12-16 February Sibelius 19-23 February Dowland 26 February – 2 March Richard Strauss

Tippett’s fascination with the many cultural influences around him made for music of staggering variety, says Malcolm Hayes ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING

‘T

he prime need in the Western World is to break the ice of rationalism and release the imaginative life once more.’ Michael Tippett’s statement, made in wartime Britain in 1940, was at a distant remove from the spirit of the age. It could be argued that it still is today.

At once deeply rooted in English tradition and a spectacular nonconformist to it, Tippett by his early thirties had composed a fair amount of music. He withdrew these early statements after a choice handful of works the First String Quartet, First Piano Sonata and the Concerto for Double String Orchestra

On a grand scale: Gamelan players on the island of Java

Tippett’s style

64

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

Tippett’s determination to be a composer was backed up by only a patchy musical education

GETTY

Madrigal rhythm: As a student, Tippett decided that classical music in England was too much in thrall to the remnants of Romanticism. He found a way forward in the rhythmic invention of vocal part-writing in Tudor and Elizabethan madrigals.

Landscapes: Tippett would surely have shunned the idea that his music connected with English ‘pastoralism’, but he loved the countryside, and aspects of its idealised musical tradition, including modes and drones, feature in his works.

Melody and harmony: Discussion of Tippett’s music generally focuses on its rhythmic counterpoint derived partly from the madrigal tradition, partly from Beethoven. But in the works up to the mid-1950s, there is an underrated gift for melody and an expressive harmonic sense.

Wider musical worlds: Tippett looked to draw on idioms from foreign cultures, particularly American blues. The Javanese gamelan sounds in his Piano Sonata No. 1, and the spirituals in A Child of Our Time are two further examples.

place at London’s Royal College of Music in 1923. There he set about widening his awareness of music on every front: going to a complete season of Proms; hearing Palestrina in Westminster Cathedral; immersing himself in Beethoven, whose combination of creative energy and aspirational humanity became a personal benchmark; and standing next to the conductor’s podium while Adrian Boult rehearsed the RCM first orchestra. Before long, the future creator of The Midsummer Marriage and King Priam found himself conducting the college’s second orchestra in Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.

had announced the arrival of his true voice. More traditionally tonal or modal than modernist, with an appealing lyrical element, Tippett’s ‘breakthrough’ idiom to that extent connected with the musical world around him. Much less typical of this were a rhythmic drive and energy (derived from Tudor and Elizabethan madrigal music), and a particular sense of aspiring imagination and humanity qualities that were enduringly his.

Tippett’s early life veered between upbringing in an English country house, education at Fettes College (whose publicschool values and practices he loathed), and holidays in whichever part of England or Europe coincided with the erratic commercial ventures of his hotelier father.

Tippett’s determination to be a composer, backed up by only a patchy musical education, was enough to land him a

Life as a professional musician began in Oxted in Surrey, where Tippett conducted the local choir, composed and taught French (a by-product of his continental family holidays) in a nearby school. The leafy south was largely protected from the Great Depression in a way that the industrial north was not. A seminal experience for Tippett was a position as musical director of a philanthropic ‘workcamp’ in Yorkshire, designed to give focus and purpose to the lives of unemployed workers and their families who otherwise would literally have starved. For this project, Tippett wrote a ‘folk-song opera’, Robin Hood (the score is now lost).

His awareness of what was happening to the world around him reinforced Tippett’s instinctive fellow-feeling with wider humanity. It also tilted his deepening political sense sharply to the Marxist

COMPOSER OF THE MONTH

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

65

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COMPOSER OF THE MONTH

left. A growing acknowledgement of his homosexuality led to a love-affair whose disintegration brought about a personal crisis. How could one indulge oneself by composing music while the political and economic world order desperately needed radical, even revolutionary change?

Resolution came from a different source. A friend suggested that a course of Jungian psychotherapy might resolve the inner dichotomies that were threatening to tear Tippett’s inner life apart. Out of this experience came a perspective on the human condition summed up in the words central to his oratorio A Child of Our Time, composed to his own text, and completed in 1941: ‘I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole.’

The catalyst for this first major statement of Tippett’s creative personality was the story of Herschel Grynszpan, a young Polish-Jewish boy who, tormented by his family’s persecution, had assassinated a Nazi diplomat in Paris in 1938. Central to the music’s sense of embattled, yet resilient, faith in humanity was Tippett’s deployment of five spirituals, punctuating the music’s progress like the chorales of a Bach Passion.

The first performance of A Child of Our Time in 1944 confirmed to Tippett that from now on, his life was to be centred around composing. Always resistant to the potential for violence in Marxist politics, he had become, and was to remain, a pacifist a commitment which led to two months in Wormwood Scrubs prison as a conscientious objector. A position as director of music at London’s Morley College was meanwhile proving congenial.

By the late 1940s, however, the creation of the opera The Midsummer Marriage had become an unstoppable priority, and Tippett eventually resigned from his college duties to be a freelance composer.

The opera’s premiere at the Royal Opera House in 1955 brought its composer both recognition and notoriety. While the music’s rhythmic energy and soaring lyrical radiance won him new friends, Tippett’s libretto was lampooned, both by the sophisticated music press and by its populist counterpart. Despite occasional gauchenesses (less often than legend would have it), the libretto in fact does a decent job of putting across the opera’s world of

Second sensation: Tippett rehearses his Symphony No. 2 in 1958 with conductor Adrian Boult

ideas those of a modern counterpart to The Magic Flute, in which two young couples journey towards spiritual and romantic fulfilment, one with nonchalant ease, the other through deeper mutual psychological misunderstandings, before each partner can integrate their own inner ‘shadow’ and ‘light’.

The Midsummer Marriage brought Tippett recognition and notoriety Always unperturbed by criticism, facetious or otherwise, Tippett drew strength from the opera’s achievement.

Its burgeoning lyricism flowered further in a superb Piano Concerto, and in the Fantasia concertante on a Theme of Corelli for strings. Then came a surprise. The second of Tippett’s four symphonies cross-hatched this lyrical aspect with what appeared to be a new manner terse, abrupt, more harshly scored, more dissonant, with much more prominent

use of percussion, and generating largescale musical paragraphs less through traditional development processes, more by intercutting different musical ideas in a kind of dynamic mosaic. When a new opera, King Priam, based on the legend of the Trojan war, was premiered at Covent Garden in 1962, Tippett’s style seemed to have changed almost completely into a personal brand of clangorous modernism, which here unleashed a masterwork as openly dramatic in manner as its predecessor was not.

Comparing the sound-world of King Priam to The Midsummer Marriage, these shifts in terms of harmonic language, structural method and developmental momentum were in themselves slight; but they had happened at the same time, which was what made the transformation of style seem so startling. For Tippett, the release of these new possibilities was exhilarating King Priam generated two similarly trenchant ‘satellite’ works: the Piano Sonata No. 2 (which re-deploys some of the opera’s material) and the Concerto for Orchestra. Next came a wonderfully impenetrable, mystical cantata, The Vision of St Augustine difficult both to perform, and to take in while listening.

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COMPOSER OF THE MONTH

TIPPETT Life&Times A third opera, The Knot Garden (1970), filtered the concerns of modern psychology and urban angst through some of the characters of Shakespeare’s The Tempest; it too produced a crop of substantial ‘spin-off’ works, among them the Third Symphony with its bluesy finale for soprano and orchestra. The Ice Break (1977) proved controversial in its depiction on the operatic stage of race riots, psychedelic trendiness and the bitter generation divide of its 1960s setting. It also contains some superb music whose idiom spilled into a Fourth Symphony.

Then came another change, as Tippett embarked on a Janáček-like surge of oldage creativity: a Triple Concerto for violin, viola and orchestra (1979) found a way of bringing together the long-breathed lyricism of his earlier music and the sharp-

1905

LIFE: Michael Tippett is born on 2 January. His father is a liberal-minded entrepreneur, his mother a suffragette.

TIMES: On ‘Bloody Sunday’, demonstrators are fired on by the imperial guard as they march towards St Petersburg’s Winter Palace to deliver a petition.

1923

LIFE: He enters the Royal College of Music in London, where he studies composition with Charles Wood and conducting with Adrian Boult and Malcolm Sargent.

TIMES: The BBC publishes the first ever issue of Radio Times, founded by managing director John Reith to print radio listings because the UK’s daily newspapers refuse to do so.

1943

LIFE: Unwilling to compromise his pacifist ideology, he refuses even non-combatant war service and is sentenced to three months imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs.

TIMES: Soon after Benito Mussolini has been deposed as prime minister, the Italian government announces that it is now in fact siding with the Allied forces in opposition to Nazi Germany.

In the late 1970s, Tippett embarked on a Janáček-like surge of old-age creativity

1984

LIFE: Tippett joins with conductor Colin Davis to help the Bath h International Music Festiva al out of a financial hole. He becomes its director for five years.

TIMES: A crowd of over 400,000 assembles at the Woodstock Festival in New York, where performers include Grateful Dead, Joe Cocker, The Who and Janis Joplin.

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8

LIFE: H Having moved to Isleworth, Middlesex, to be close er to friends, he dies of a sttroke at the age of 93.

TIM MES: Footballer David B Beckham finds himself vvictim of a campaign o of hate when, following his s sending off, England are e knocked out of the Wo orld Cup by Argentina.

GETTY, ALAMY

1969

LIFE: Commissioned by the Boston Symphony to mark its centenary, his large-scale choral work The Mask of Time is premiered, one of several of his works to enjoy success in the US. TIMES: John Betjeman, the much-loved UK poet laureate whose works include In Westminster Abbey, A Subaltern’s Love Song and, mo ore controversially, Slough, dies aged 77.

focus, collage-like manner of his more recent works. The new method – with uneven results, wonderful at their best engendered another big-scale choral work, The Mask of Time; then a fifth opera, New Year, which introduced a sciencefiction element into another Tippettian urban landscape; Byzantium, a setting of WB Yeats’s poem for soprano and orchestra; and perhaps the finest of the composer’s late creations, the Fifth String Quartet, whose long and rapturous closing movement was inspired by the singing of that quintessential feature of the English countryside, the nightingale.

And there was to be a final surprise.

The Rose Lake (1993) is an orchestral evocation – almost Delius-like in manner and sonority – of a visit to Le lac rose (Lake Retba) in Senegal, which glows with different shades of pink in the sunlight due to the algae in the brackish water. In his last major statement, Tippett was continuing to explore new regions of imagination and to create, as he said an artist must, ‘images of abounding, generous, exuberant beauty’.

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Building a library

Lamentations of Jeremiah Thomas Tallis Terry Blain explores a composer’s grievous response to the religious upheavals of Tudor England – and names the finest recordings The work

Quality quill: English composer Thomas Tallis

The composer ‘Tallis is dead, and Music dies’, mourned composer William Byrd in his elegy Ye Sacred Muses of 1585, summing up in one line the immense impact of his friend, colleague and fellow Catholic. Born in the first decade of the 16th century, Tallis cannily navigated the reigns of both Catholic and Protestant monarchs, not just managing to survive but even enjoying regal favour. Though much of his music from the time of Elizabeth expresses the pain of a Catholic living in staunchly Protestant England, his own career was actively aided by the queen, who gave him and Byrd an exclusive licence to publish music.

Building a Library is broadcast on Radio 3 at 9.30am each Saturday as part of Record Review. A highlights podcast is available at bbc.co.uk/radio3

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Few composers have lived in such traumatic times as Thomas Tallis. The 16th century was an age of religious upheaval in England, where differences of outlook could prove fatal. When the Catholic Sir Thomas More clashed with Henry VIII over the king’s renunciation of papal authority, he was decapitated. Two decades later, under Mary I, the Protestant cleric Thomas Cranmer was burnt alive for the opposite crime of anti-Catholic views.

Many other citizens were executed for their beliefs in a bloody, retributive

the Lamentations are also instructive.

They come from the first chapter of the Old Testament Book of Lamentations, in which the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar is mourned. ‘All her friends have betrayed her, they have become her enemies,’ the text reads. ‘She finds no resting place’.

Although these verses date from two millennia before the age of Tallis, they closely mirror the situation of English Roman Catholics around the time the Lamentations was written. The Catholic religion, under the reigns of Henry VIII,

Tallis’s Lamentations prompt listeners to engage with their own spiritual situation era whose theological and political convulsions undoubtedly played a major part in shaping the dark-hued, introspective atmosphere of Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah, a work that ranks among his very finest.

When did Tallis write it, and why?

Because we know so littlee about his life life, it is difficult to answer th hese questions definitively. One clue is that t the text which Tallis used for the Lamentations is in Latin. That probablyy places the date of composition in th he second half of his long career, duringg the reigns of either Mary I (a Catholic who espoused the Latin liturggy), or her successor Elizabeth I (a Protestant who permitteed either English or Latin).

The words which Tallis chose to set in

Edward VI and Elizabeth I, had become progressively embattled, as Protestantism gradually became the established creed of the country. Socially marginalised and threatened with persecution, Catholics were often forced to meet in private, to avoid the public eye and escape censure. himself a lifelong Tallis was hims Catholic, and scholarly speculation suggests he may n the Lamentations have written to be sung at cclandestine religious his nature, where the gatherings of th tale of Jerusaalem’s abandonment and the ssense of stricken introspeection in Tallis’s would have struck a music w deep cchord in the Catholic worshippers present.

The original Hebrew T nguage text of lan

BUILDING A LIBRARY

BRIDGEMAN, GETTY

Centuries of sadness: Dutch painter Rembrandt’s Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem; (opposite) Queen Mary I

Lamentations Chapter 1 is an acrostic, where each biblical verse commences with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

In each of the two pieces which together form the Lamentations, Tallis imitates this trick, preceding his music for the biblical verse (in Latin) with an ornate setting of the Hebrew letter Aleph and Beth in Lamentation 1, Ghimel, Daleth and Heth in Lamentation 2.

The effect is remarkably peaceful, creating a kind of spiritual ante-room in which listeners can cleanse their consciousness from external distractions before the Latin text is sung. For each of the two Lamentations settings Tallis also provides an introductory section announcing which book in the Bible the text comes from, and a coda bearing

the invocation ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, turn to the Lord your God’.

This careful framing of the music provides both a clear musical structure for the listener to follow, and an emotional pathway through both pieces, with opportunities for mental preparation, reflection on the textual and musical messages and consideration of the need for penitence. Scored for five unaccompanied parts (usually alto, tenor, tenor, bass, bass), Tallis’s Lamentations are, in modern parlance, an emotional journey, intended by Tallis to prompt listeners to action, and engage with their own spiritual situation.

Performances of the Lamentations should above all communicate this sense that the music is not intended merely as a

pleasant decoration to a religious service, but as an invitation to a deeper, more personal reaction. Many recordings of the work are meditative and reverential, but little else: their serenity has a cumulatively stultifying effect.

The trick is somehow to draw the listener in to the world of sorrow, betrayal and abandonment depicted in Tallis’s wonderfully expressive settings, and to make the music utterly personal. That’s something of a tall order, but all four of the recordings recommended here manage to fulfil it.

Turn the page to discover the best recordings of Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Private devotion: the church of St John at Hackney

Three other great recordings Taverner Choir With one singer to a part, and a dry acoustic, this 1986 recording is the most intimate available version of the Lamentations. Although there are beautiful moments, the atmosphere is generally ascetic and inward-looking, a soul-searching rather than crowd-pleasing interpretation.

As such it has unique insights to offer: the five singers differ markedly in timbre, and you can follow their contributions with absorbing clarity. It is part of a two-disc Tallis anthology that is itself hugely recommendable.

(Erato 562 2302)

Perfectly balanced, intimate Tallis

The best recording

sensitivity. Plangently launched by countertenor Charles Brett, it unfolds with sensual fluidity, each voice distinctive yet discreet as it enters, and with a smooth, subtle dynamic swell as the different strands of melody combine together.

A marginal thinning of tone produces a touching vulnerability at ‘Plorans ploravit

Clerks of the Choir of New College, Oxford In his 38 years as the director of New College Choir, Oxford, Edward Higginbottom made many excellent recordings and this, from 1995, is one of the finest.

With two voices to a part, the choir produces an exceptionally mellifluous sound, assisted by the glowing acoustic of the Abbaye de Valloires in France. Higginbottom’s spacious tempos facilitate an interpretation rich in expressivity. If you find the one-singer-to-a-part approach of rival versions a touch austere, this is the ideal alternative. (CRD CRD3499)

Pro Cantione Antiqua Alto ALC1082

There are so many outstandingly proficient choirs performing early music nowadays that it is easy to forget what an enormous contribution the English group Pro Cantione Antiqua made in its heyday to the development of performance standards in Renaissance repertoire. This 1984 recording acts as a sharp reminder.

With one voice to each vocal part, the five singers strike a virtually perfect balance between individual expressivity and the need to blend together as a coherent unit.

The ‘Aleph’ section in Lamentation 1 is a good example of their corporate 72

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The five singers strike a perfect balance between expressivity and blend in nocte’ (‘She weepeth sore in the night’), and the ‘Jerusalem’ coda is appropriately penitential, while maintaining a firm, inclusive balance between the voice parts.

Lamentation 2 opens more anxiously, Tallis’s questioning harmonies etched out clearly by the singers’ pin-point pitching, and a sharpening of consonants at ‘Migravit Iuda propter afflictionem’ (‘Judah is gone into captivity because of affliction’).

This edginess persists throughout the second movement, which has a darker, more anguished feeling to it than in rival recordings. The coda is implacable in its plea for a return to godliness, with telling contributions from basses Michael George and Brian Etheridge.

The recorded sound neatly abets Pro Cantione Antiqua’s searching view of the music. The acoustic of the Church of St John at Hackney, London is neatly harnessed by engineer Anthony Howell to create the kind of intimate impression a private or domestic performance might have made in Tallis’s own period, and yet

BUILDING A LIBRARY

Theatre of Voices It can easily seem as though the Lamentations are the sole preserve of small, all-male, English groups of singers. Here, again from 1995, is a recording which challenges that assumption.

Made in California with a mixed-voice choir of 16 singers, it shows that women’s voices fit perfectly well in Tallis’s masterpiece, although he would not have expected to hear them. Conductor Paul Hillier directs an interpretation where tenderness and compassion are the watchwords. His all-Tallis programme includes a clutch of pieces for violin consort, providing added interest. (Harmonia Mundi HMU907154; download only)

And one to avoid…

CLIVE BARDA/ARENA PAL

Choir of King’s College, Cambridge Of the three Choir of King’s College, Cambridge recordings of the Lamentations available, the one conducted by David Willcocks in 1966 is the earliest and least satisfactory. The main drawback is the large amount of vibrato used by the singers, which both blurs Tallis’s part-writing and sounds eccentrically old-fashioned. The engineering doesn’t help much either: microphones are placed very close, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere.

retain enough resonance to warm the tones and textures of the singing.

With Andrew Parrott’s similarly conceived interpretation providing strong competition, this highly involving CD scores strongly for both its budget price and for its couplings a selection of Tallis’s vocal works in Latin and English and an evocative, revealingly layered account of the mighty 40-part motet Spem in Alium.

This year sees the 50th anniversary of Pro Cantione Antiqua’s founding this masterful recording perfectly sums up the exceptional standards reached by the pioneering group over that time.

Renaissance man: James MacMillan pays tribute to his predecessors

Continue the journey…

We suggest choral works to try after Tallis’s Lamentations

T

allis’s music combines a not quite as accomplished as Tallis’s or rigorous counterpoint with a White’s, Parsley’s eight-minute setting heavenly wash of sound that shows a keen ear for part-writing and a envelopes the ears in waves. For fine sense for musical narrative. another taste of Tallis’s masterly yet The Ash Wednesday motet mournful writing, look no further than Emendemus in melius by that other the staggering Miserere nostri from genius of Tudor choral music, William the Cantiones sacrae of 1575 (Tallis Byrd, is also in five parts and, like Scholars, Gimell CDGIM203). Its gentle, Tallis’s Miserere Nostri, was published hypnotic movement belies part-writing in 1575 in the Cantiones sacrae that includes canon, stretto (stretchedcollection of choral works. This fourout cantus firmus) minute prayer for and theme inversion. forgiveness begins Robert White’s vocal Tallis contemporary introspectively writing is every bit as Robert White’s before building astonishing as Tallis’s own five-part to a climax at the Lamentations spans words ‘Et propter a cathedral-esque 22 minutes (Tallis honorem nominis tui’ (‘And, for the Scholars, Gimell CDGIM210). White wrote glory of thy name’) – a nod both to God two settings, but it’s this one that and to the sponsor of the Cantiones stands apart, its vocal writing and sacrae, Elizabeth I (Cardinall’s Musick, subtle changes in harmonic direction Gaudeamus CDGAU197). every bit as astonishing as Tallis’s.

Finally, we enter the 21st century White probably intended his version to with James MacMillan’s affecting be sung during domestic devotions – a Miserere, written in 2009 for The household would have had to field an Sixteen (Coro COR16096). Following advanced choir to pull this one off… a brief but beguiling tenor opening, Prize for best name in Renaissance MacMillan introduces intricate, freemusic, meanwhile, goes to Norwich flowing chant in the upper voices, Cathedral ‘singing man’ Osbert Parsley, before a defiant central section and a whose own Lamentations, like Tallis’s, nod to his Renaissance forebears in sets the Hebrew letter that precedes the form of richly-harmonised psalm each section (Lay Clerks of St George’s chanting. MacMillan ends his Miserere Chapel, Delphian DCD34068). Although on a spine-tingling E-major chord.

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Reviews 110 CDs, Books & DVDs rated by expert critics Welcome What makes a great recording? It’s a question I have been pondering recently, not least after talking to the conductor Teodor Currentzis (see right), who holds passionate views about how, when and why particular pieces of music should be recorded. It’s also a subject I have been pondering at greater length with this year’s BBC Music Magazine Awards jury.

Our bunch of brilliant and indefatigable critics has been sifting through all the recordings given five stars in the magazine last year, choosing the very best for the 2018 shortlists. You can read all about these wonderful nominations on p38 – we think it’s a fascinating selection.

Then head to our voting website www. classical-music.com/awards where you can hear clips from all the nominated recordings, and, crucially, cast your votes.

Rebecca Franks reviews editor

RECORDING OF THE MONTH

A traumatic and tender Pathétique

Teodor Currentzis and MusicAeterna are on devastating form in Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, says Erik Levi

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6

This month’s critics John Allison, Nicholas Anderson, Terry Blain, Kate Bolton-Porciatti, Garry Booth, Geoff Brown, Anthony Burton, Michael Church, Christopher Cook, Martin Cotton, Christopher Dingle, Misha Donat, Jessica Duchen, Rebecca Franks, Hannah French, George Hall, Malcolm Hayes, Julian Haylock, Claire Jackson, Daniel Jaffé, Stephen Johnson, Berta Joncus, Erik Levi, Natasha Loges, Max Loppert, Andrew McGregor, David Nice, Roger Nichols, Bayan Northcott, Anna Picard, Steph Power, Anthony Pryer, Paul Riley, Michael Scott Rohan, Jan Smaczny, Geoffrey Smith, Michael Tanner, Kate Wakeling, Helen Wallace KEY TO STAR RATINGS

★★★★★ ★★★★ ★★★ ★★ ★ 74

Outstanding Excellent Good Disappointing Poor

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

MusicAeterna/ Teodor Currentzis Sony 88985404352 45.38 mins

Few performances of Tchaikovsky’s angst-ridden symphonic masterpiece have encapsulated the overwhelming passion of its musical argument to the same degree as this brilliantly recorded account.

Teodor Currentzis has a clear and unified vision of the music’s trajectory, his interpretation grabbing you by the scruff of the neck and compelling you to follow its relentlessly tortured path from first bar to last.

Much is revealed in the claustrophobic way Currentzis

projects the brief slow introduction. The few silences are hesitant and halting, but packed with expectancy, whereas the first sforzando marking in the fifth bar has a terrifying almost painful physical impact. The ensuing Allegro non troppo emerges tentatively from the gloom, and seems initially to be understated. But this is all part of a carefully constructed process that notches up the tension by several degrees once we get to the development section, which is projected here with brutal aggression. We then reach a veritable boiling point at the movement’s climax – a passage delivered with shattering intensity.

There’s a similar strategy to the way the third movement unfolds. For all the quiet scurrying musical activity of the opening, it is already evident that more sinister forces lurk beneath the surface. But these only fully reveal themselves near the end of the movement as we plunge headlong into the full-scale assault of the March theme, here sounding even

Recording of the month Reviews CHOICE B6<6O

>C:

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Russian greats: Teodor Currentzis rehearses Tchaikovsky

more desperate and hysterical than often is the case. After this, the descent into the abyss in the Finale is noble and dignified rather than self-pitying, though the final sforzando accents in the strings have such visceral impact that you can envisage them as veritable stabs to the heart. Here we return in effect full circle to the darkly scored music that opens the work.

From the sonorous lower strings at the opening to the lacerating stopped horns near the close, the playing of Currentzis’s MusicAeterna is simply breathtaking.

Even in the most ferociously challenging passages, such as in the middle of the first movement and the third movement March, ensemble is well-nigh perfect with not a

string spiccato out of joint, and the woodwind articulation in some of Tchaikovsky’s characteristically elaborate writing is tremendously vibrant.

Most remarkable of all is the clarity of sound achieved here

Every single layer in Tchaikovsky’s inventive orchestration can be heard which ensures every single layer in Tchaikovsky’s miraculously inventive orchestration can be heard. You have to admire the sheer daring of Currentzis’s interpretation which follows Tchaikovsky’s extremely wide range of dynamic markings to the letter, even though I must admit that there are also times

when this performance seems to cross beyond the threshold of audibility, a good example being the almost imperceptibly rumbling cellos and basses just before the return of the second idea in the first movement.

Prospective purchasers of this recording might feel shortchanged that Currentzis offers no coupling to the Symphony.

But they should not worry. This performance is so devastatingly powerful that it would be difficult to imagine hearing anything else alongside it.

PERFORMANCE RECORDING

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Hear excerpts and a discussion of this recording on the BBC Music Magazine podcast available free on iTunes or at www.classical-music.com

An interview with Teodor Currentzis

Tchaikovsky described this symphony as his best and most sincere work. Do you agree?

I’m absolutely convinced it is the most sincere. It’s not music that should be played regularly. It’s music to consider and talk about.

It’s not a symphony to play in concert halls, with the musicians waiting to go home. It’s suicidal music. It’s a protest. It’s a piece to play when bad forces take over your city, when your home town becomes a prison. That’s its purpose. That’s why I play this symphony rarely. For this recording, we gathered friends in Berlin, with a glass of wine and candles, and we played the symphony for 35 people. It was a kind of ceremony in darkness.

Why is the piece so emotionally and physically powerful?

It’s a bit of a traumatic experience to listen to this recording. It’s what Tchaikovsky wanted. He wanted this terrifying feeling of the physical sound. It’s as if you were climbing Mount Everest or the Grand Canyon and looking back: you feel so small compared to these huge dimensions. Also, I think the physicality of this performance makes sense as it is contrasts with the spirituality of the piece’s tender, lyrical lines.

How did you and your musicians achieve these extremes?

You know, I didn’t demand an extreme. The musicians were ready to go to the end. Every one of them knows this symphony like a family story. We started meditating on and analysing the piece, putting it under a microscope, and then after a point the energy became so big that everyone was connected.

The most important thing was to connect musicians’ hearts.

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Orchestral ORCHESTRAL CHOICE

Rattle and the LSO offer the Rite stuff Christopher Dingle applauds a programme that combines fun with virtuosity for the Rite, Rattle may have halfa-dozen recordings under his belt, but there is nothing pedestrian or Stravinsky run-of-the-mill here. Every nuance is crafted, each detail considered, Berg: Fragments from Wozzeck; yet there is still a sense of danger Ligeti: Mysteries of the Macabre; and visceral power. If only the set Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring; included surround sound in addition Webern: Six Pieces for Orchestra, to both Blu-ray and DVD discs.

Op. 6 (DVD & Blu-ray) Barbara Hannigan (soprano); London Rattle and the LSO are joined, Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle usurped even, by the extraordinary LSO Live LSO 3028 85 mins (DVD + Blu-ray) Barbara Hannigan for extracts from two contrasting The Rite of Spring operatic landmarks. does not dominate Every nuance is intensity of here, not because crafted, yet there is a Her expression in Berg’s the performance is sense of danger Three Fragments lame. Rather, it is from Wozzeck, part of something mirrored by the LSO’s depth of truly exceptional, joined here by sonority, is disturbing and moving. masterpieces from Webern, Berg Transformed into a stroppy, anarchic and Ligeti in performances of schoolgirl alongside a schoolmasterly outstanding beauty, passion and Rattle, she then brings the house power. This film captures a concert down in Ligeti’s Mysteries of the at the Barbican from January 2015, Macabre. Make no mistake, the when the public courtship between laugh-out-loud high spirits are the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle was still ongoing underpinned by virtuosic, serious music-making of the highest order and their artistic marriage not yet from Hannigan, the LSO and Rattle. certain. Their mutual suitability is confirmed by the remarkable control And that’s before the Rite even begins.

PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ and ravishing timbres produced in PICTURE & SOUND ★★★★ Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces. As

Brahms Symphony No. 2; Tragic Overture; Academic Festival Overture Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen/Paavo Järvi

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Sony 88985459462 67:26 mins

The instant we hear the luminously pure wind chorale opening Brahms’s Second Symphony, we know we are in safe hands. All the hallmarks that distinguished Paavo Järvi’s Schumann cycle with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie are here: airy, vibrato-free strings, subtlyhued winds and natural horns. It’s

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worth noting that he uses the latest Henle urtext edition. The playing is crisp and alert, though not always fluent: the first movement waltzes have an idiomatic lilt, but the gears grind clumsily at the transition to the next episode. The crunch of dissonance between cadences near the Allegro’s end are spectacularly heightened here by natural brass.

Brahms’s gorgeous cello melody in the Adagio non troppo is relatively swift and austere, warming up only when repeated on solo horn. But there is impressive detail in the contrapuntal string playing in this movement, and some superb quiet playing, beautifully balanced. Järvi achieves the required flexibility in a tenderly inward Allegretto grazioso,

An electric partnership: Rattle and the LSO bring the music to life

Hear extracts from this recording and the rest of this month’s choices on the BBC Music Magazine website at www.classical-music.com

whose presto has Mendelssohnian lightness. A frost-fresh Allegro con spirito is full of bright contrast, with off-beat rhythms driven hard. A resplendent finish is marked by drily penetrating timpani. Yet, for all its explosive energy and confidence, there’s something rather literal about this reading. We miss a certain perfume and warmth. Chailly’s Leipzig reading (Decca) manages to be both swifter and more sensuous.

Järvi’s Tragic Overture is a rollicking drama, with delectably keen horns, though it sags a little in the middle. He injects a welcome sense of fun into the Academic Festival Overture. Helen Wallace PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★

Brahms • Schumann Rossini: Semiramide – Overture; Schumann: Symphony No. 4; Brahms: Symphony No. 1 Philharmonia Orchestra/ Guido Cantelli ICA Classics ICAC 5143 79:45 mins

Any recording from Guido Cantelli is precious: killed in an air crash aged 36, just a week after he had been appointed artistic director at La Scala, he was the one young Italian who excited Toscanini. We have Richard Itter to thank for this bootleg of an entire Philharmonia concert, broadcast by the BBC from the Royal Albert Hall

Orchestral Reviews in 1953. The sound quality improves as it progresses: Cantelli’s party piece, Rossini’s Semiramide Overture, sizzles with nonchalant panache, but it’s filtered through a loud hiss and intermittent interference.

In his fiery Schumann Fourth, the first movement hurtles forward, the ensemble straining at the leash.

It’s a thrilling ride, despite sound distortion in the forte passages. Wind and horn solos are characterful, if not always pristine: at the opening of the Romanze, for example, the tuning curdles. Predictably, the Scherzo grabs attention, cutting through the cavernous Albert Hall acoustic, while the finale Lebhaft has a boisterous energy, its presto finale leaping into a blaze of applause.

In contrast with lithe, clean recordings by modern maestros, this Brahms First Symphony comes with dirt under the fingernails and an undeniable halo of majesty. From the apocalyptic opening timpani, there’s a real sense of occasion and mystery that no amount of interference can mask. The Philharmonia strings generate a fug of warm resonance, steaming in with real ballast and bassy depth. Cantelli also gives us something all too often missing from today’s urbane, athletic readings: passion. Helen Wallace PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★

Debussy Printemps

Rachmaninov Spring Cantata

Stravinsky The Rite of Spring Rodion Pogassov (baritone); Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Chorus & Orchestra/Vasily Petrenko Onyx ONYX 4182 66:53 mins

Spring is the theme of three relatively youthful works.

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring provides the substantive, cathartic climax, but Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra (RLPO) preface it with two lesser known pieces

by Rachmaninov and Debussy.

Petrenko is a convincing advocate for the latter’s Printemps, an attractive work that, despite several moments that are prophetic of the composer’s mature style, struggles to establish its distinctiveness.

Rachmaninov’s Vasna (Spring) is a mini drama written for Fyodor Chaliapin with choral interventions.

Rodion Pogassov is affecting here as the soloist musing about murdering his unfaithful wife only for the joys of Spring to change his mind. It is a pity the hushed conclusion is given no time to sink in, the opening bassoon solo of Stravinsky’s ballet arriving after just a few seconds.

This is soon forgiven, though, for this is a searing account of the Rite.

Petrenko judges the speeds acutely, always insistent, without simply trying to set landspeed records, and there’s a visceral energy to the RLPO’s playing, the orchestra cultivating a rawness of sound.

While this permeates the wind, it is most apparent in the upper strings, whose notes are often treated more as striking effects, a sense exaggerated by their periodically being thrust forward in the recorded sound. If the opening of Part II lacks a little poetry, that is a small caveat in a thrilling Rite. Christopher Dingle PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Mahler Symphony No. 5 Gürzenich Orchester Köln/ François Xavier Roth Harmonia Mundi HMM 905285 70:42 mins

Harmonia Mundi is determined to make capital from the fact that this is the same Cologne institution which gave the premiere of Mahler’s Fifth under the composer 113 years ago. It’s only fair to note that the Gürzenich Orchestra has already produced one of the great Mahler cycles of late under its previous principal conductor Markus Stenz, including a Fifth that sounded a good deal more radical than this one. Still, François-Xavier Roth’s is handsome work, resulting in trenchant strings with a superb bass line, perfectly focused in the storms of the first two movements and the fugues of the finale. There’s a good sense of forward but unforced propulsion which makes the Funeral March’s successor – often a sticky point in this symphony – a blazing success.

Unfortunately when the work needs to leave the ground, in what Mahler described as the Scherzo’s ‘world without gravity’, it lacks wings – and unlike the trumpet in

the first movement, the horns, both collective and solo, lack distinction.

The Adagietto seems to unfurl at a good pace – albeit without the acoustic warmth it ideally needs – until the recap, when Roth underlines one of two very hushed pianissimos with a slowing to the point where the heart almost ceases to beat – an eccentric moment in an otherwise straightforward reading.

There’s a lack of tonal glamour, too, which means this latest newcomer doesn’t catch the imagination like the launch of Osmo Vänskä’s Mahler cycle on BIS. David Nice PERFORMANCE ★★★ RECORDING ★★★

Mozart Adagio and Fugue in C minor; Serenade in G; Serenade in D; Divertimentos in D, B flat & F Camerata Nordica/Terje Tønnesen BIS BIS-2326 (hybrid CD/SACD) 65:02 mins

Camerata Nordica is a Swedish 15-20-player string orchestra directed by lead violinist Terje Tønnesen. Its attention to exact intonation, unanimous ensemble and resonance of timbre is outstanding. Although playing modern instruments, the musicians take full account of 18th century performance practice, shaping and colouring phrases by bow pressure rather than sustaining them with vibrato. Attack and articulation are crisply defined and differentiated: elegantly where required, but in more vigorous allegros tending to the aggressive – which may not suit those who like their Mozart smooth and sweet.

The disc opens with Mozart’s last and weightiest work for strings: the visionary Adagio and turbulent Fugue in C minor K546 – his tribute to the Baroque, composed in 1788 – and then works backward.

The remaining pieces are all ‘light’ in genre, though in distilling his serenading manner to its essence in his Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Mozart raised lightness to a higher level.

The much earlier Serenata Notturna, K239, is more interesting for its solo quartet, string orchestra and timpani scoring than for its musical substance, though the three little Salzburg Divertimentos K157-9, composed at 16, have many charms.

Camerata Nordica liven things up with a few additional touches, including a timpani cadenza in the Serenata Notturna and a few bars of ghostly ‘on the bridge’ playing in a repeat section of the F major Divertimento. Bayan Northcott PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Prokofiev Symphony No. 7; The Love for Three Oranges Suite – ‘March’ & ‘Scherzo’; Lieutenant Kijé Suite São Paulo Symphony Orchestra/ Marin Alsop Naxos 8.573620 55:42 mins

Unless Marin Alsop plans to complete her Prokofiev symphony cycle with the original version of Symphony No. 4, this is the final instalment of a generally fine series. Alas, these performances of much-recorded works stumble badly on this home straight.

Not that anything goes s f the

BACKGROUND TO…

Guido Cantelli (1920-56) Musically gifted, Cantelli (see p78) appeared as organist at the local church aged ten, and made his debut as a pianist aged 14. After studyying at the Milan Conservatory, he conducted Novara’s Teatro Coccia in 1941. He had to leave this post in 1943 to join the Italian army. When he refused to support the Fascists he was sent to a Nazi-run labour camp. He escaped to Milan butt was recaptured; he was only saved froom execution by the liberation of Italy in 1944.

A perfectionist, he often conducted froom memory.

Orchestral Reviews Reissues Reviewed by Michael Tanner Beethoven Symphonies Nos 6, 7 & 8 Pentatone PTC5186 250 (hybrid CD/SACD) (1973-75) 111.13 mins (2 discs) Warm, lyrical accounts from three orchestras and Rafael Kubelik. Quadraphonic sound sank these recordings originally; they are now in SACD. ★★★ Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 Brahms Haydn Variations; Symphony No. 3 Orfeo C916172A (1962-63) 112:40 mins (2 discs) Wonderfully characteristic late Hans Knappertsbusch performances: broad, flexible, the fruits of a lifetime’s devotion to the Viennese classics. The Beethoven concerto with Géza Anda is especially fine. ★★★★★ Beethoven Symphonies Nos 3 & 8 Alto ALC 1353 (1988) 78:28 mins Wyn Morris’s reputation is of being impossibly temperamental. Yet on the strength of these two performances of demanding works, the Welsh conductor was capable of inspiring great orchestras to great heights. This recording with the London Symphony Orchestra is a real bargain. ★★★★ Beethoven Symphony No. 9 Orfeo C935171B (1963) 77:17 mins The soloists and chorus of this performance from Bayreuth are marvellous, but they are not enough to redeem conductor Karl Böhm’s flaccid approach, which reduces the first three movements to directionless rambles. ★★

album. If the first two movements of the Symphony appear lacklustre, this arguably reflects Prokofiev’s state of mind after the brutal savaging his poignant Sixth suffered from Stalinist officials. Still, the third movement’s emotional warmth and natural flow appears a balm after so much stilted playing; yet Alsop misses its heart-rending quality by ignoring Prokofiev’s forte marking for the plangent woodwind interjections, having them match the strings’ bland mezzo-piano instead.

Tart details of orchestration are often blunted or virtually lost, such as the horn cries in the Three Oranges’ ‘Scherzo’ (why just two movements from that suite?); Alsop also extends that movement by about a minute with an unauthorised repeat of a whole section, making that soufflé collapse with so much exposure. Least forgiveable is the bassoon solo in Kijé’s opening movement, played as if it were written entirely in the bass clef whereas the first six notes are clearly prefaced with a treble clef.

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For alternatives on disc alone, Litton offers both suites on one CD/ SACD hybrid (on BIS); meanwhile, Gergiev (on Decca) or Tennstedt (on Profil Hänssler) more surely capture the Seventh’s spirit. Daniel Jaffé PERFORMANCE ★★ RECORDING ★★★

Schumann Symphonies Nos 1-4 San Francisco Symphony Orchestra/ Michael Tilson Thomas SFS Media 821936-0071-2 (hybrid CD/ SACD) 144:13 mins (2 discs)

In his introduction to this handsomelyproduced album, Michael Tilson Thomas explains that his solution to the sometimes problematical nature of Schumann’s orchestral palette is to reduce the number of string players at critical moments, to produce a more transparent, chamber-like sound. His approach is particularly appropriate in Symphony No. 4,

where, in revising – and in many respects improving – the piece a decade or so after he’d composed it, Schumann thickened its orchestration. Tilson Thomas also claims to have wanted these ‘live’ performances to communicate the kind of freedom a pianist could bring to the music.

There’s some predictably fine playing from the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra: the tautlysprung rhythm of the Spring Symphony’s first movement finds the orchestra on its toes, and the first violins dazzle in the tricky Scherzo of No. 2. But all too often there's a lack of symphonic tension, not to mention Romantic ardour, a fault compounded by some curiously lethargic tempos: the Scherzo of the Spring Symphony, for instance, is anything but ‘Molto vivace’, and the middle movement of the Rhenish, which is merely marked ‘Nicht schnell’ (not fast), drags mercilessly – particularly since it’s immediately followed by the solemn ‘Cologne Cathedral’ movement. Nor is there any genuine pianissimo playing – a lack that’s particularly noticeable in such moments as the mysterious fugal passage from the slow movement of the Symphony No. 2.

Add to all this a rather unfocused recording, and you have a distinctly disappointing project. Misha Donat PERFORMANCE ★★ RECORDING ★★★

Otto Klemperer Beethoven: Symphony No. 2; Brahms: Tragic Overture; Symphony No. 2; Bruckner: Symphony No. 7; Debussy: Nocturnes – ‘Fêtes’; Mozart: Symphonies Nos 29 & 40; Violin Concerto No. 5; Serenade No. 13 (Eine kleine Nachtmusik); Schumann: Symphony No. 4 Bronislav Gimpel (violin); BBC Symphony Orchestra; Philharmonia Orchestra/Otto Klemperer ICA Classics ICAC 5145 270:51 mins (4 discs)

Few conductors enjoyed such a resurgence in fortune as Otto Klemperer.

Largely ignored

by British audiences earlier in his career, he returned to London in 1954 and, aged 70, won the British public’s hearts and minds with his revelatory concerts and commercial recordings of the Austro-German symphonic repertory.

These performances, recorded live in the Royal Festival Hall and the BBC Studios between 1955 and 1956, vividly convey the huge energy and dynamism that characterised Klemperer’s concerts at the time, as well as the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response of the audience. In many respects, they demonstrate greater urgency in approach than some of Klemperer’s later commercial recordings of the same repertory. The downsides are the rather variable mono recording which includes one unfortunate drop in pitch near the end of the Finale of Mozart Symphony No. 40, the significantly murky sound in the Bruckner Seventh Symphony, and the painfully dry acoustic of the Royal Festival Hall. Also there is a considerable difference in the standard of orchestral playing between the Philharmonia which delivers some mightily impressive Mozart and Brahms, and the more speculative BBC Symphony Orchestra whose strings can’t really cope with some of the trickier figuration in the Bruckner and the headlong rush of quavers in the closing passage of Schumann’s Fourth.

Yet for all these caveats, there is still much to savour. Klemperer’s Mozart may sound a bit heavyhanded and brusque, particularly in a rather charmless account of Eine kleine Nachtmusik and the first movement of Symphony No. 29. On the other hand, the performances are refreshingly direct, projecting exemplary clarity of texture with the wind instruments really cutting through the orchestral tuttis to impressive effect. Likewise, the performance of Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 is really compelling, a good sense of structural cohesion working in tandem with great expressivity and rhythmic precision. Last but not least, despite the existence of better recorded later performances of several works here, Klemperer aficionados will undoubtedly want to hear this set for the inclusion of a feisty account of Debussy’s ‘Fêtes’ and Mozart’s A major Violin Concerto with Bronislav Gimpel as a warm-hearted soloist, particularly since neither work otherwise features in his post-war discography. Erik Levi PERFORMANCE BRUCKNER/SCHUMANN ★★★ THE REST ★★★★ RECORDING ★

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5009

Concerto CONCERTO CHOICE

Plowright adds shine to Polish centenary John Allison welcomes a fine new recording of Paderewski and Stojowski to Paderewski’s music with an invigorating performance, showing stamina for the long first movement Paderewski • Stojowski and poetic sense in the central Paderewski: Piano Concerto; ‘Romanza’. If he lacks the full Nocturne in B flat; cultivation and insouciance that Stojowski: Symphonic Rhapsody makes Kenner (on Dux) perhaps the Jonathan Plowright (piano); finest exponent of all, the orchestral Sinfonia luventus/Łukasz Borowicz performance under Łukas Borowicz Warner Classics 9029578756 54:45 mins is as good as any and the recorded sound is vivid. Paderewski’s popular With the centenary of Polish Nocturne in B flat major rounds the independence this year, we are likely disc off as a quietly consoling encore. to hear more of Jan Paderewski Both Plowright (1860-1941), the virtuoso pianistJonathan Plowright and Borowicz previously composer who was shows the expressive have recorded Zygmunt a signatory to the power of virtuosity Stojowski (1870Treaty of Versailles 1946) for Hyperion; and served as here they collaborate on the world Poland’s first prime minister. premiere recording of his Symphonic His magnificent Piano Concerto Rhapsody. Completed in 1900, five (1888) has never quite disappeared years before Stojowski emigrated to and virtuosos have recorded it; outstanding versions include those by America, the music inhabits a world Earl Wild, Barbara Hesse-Bukowska, not far from that of Rachmaninov, without matching all that composer’s Kevin Kenner and Nelson Goerner, sweep. These performers make and perhaps significantly the work exciting work of its episodic nature, appeared (played by Piers Lane) with Plowright again showing the on Vol. 1 of Hyperion’s now epic expressive power of virtuosity.

Romantic Piano Concerto series.

PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ Here Jonathan Plowright cements RECORDING ★★★★★ his already proven connection

JS Bach Bach in Black: Violin Concerto in D minor (arr. of BWV 1052); Violin Concerto in G minor (arr. of BWV 1056 ); Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, BWV 1041; St Matthew Passion – Erbarme dich; St John Passion – Es ist vollbracht; Mass in B minor – Agnus Dei La Voce Strumentale/Dmitry Sinkovsky (violin, countertenor) Naïve OP 30567 61:23 mins

Three minor-key violin concertos interspersed with three exquisite arias; it’s an alluring crowd-pleaser. Director, violinist, countertenor – multi-talented

showman Dmitry Sinkovsky reminds us of the flexibility of 18th-century musicians – but a recording which at first glance seems all about Bach is actually more about Sinkovsky.

It’s no mere stunt; certainly these are intensely personal interpretations, and Sinkovsky wears his heart on his sleeve.

Virtuosic abandon on his 1675 Ruggieri violin is countered by an ability to make the instrument sing – with techniques not restricted to the period. Prominent, bold percussive basslines in the D minor Concerto, BWV 1052 (which appear to gain significant postproduction resonance) add to the full-blooded energy, evident in

Invigorating performer: Jonathan Plowright brings excitement to Stojowski

Hear extracts from this recording and the rest of this month’s choices on the BBC Music Magazine website at www.classical-music.com

all three theatrical concertos; but for all the rhetorical placement of chords, pauses and agogic accents, the direction of lines regularly suffers. In the G minor Concerto, BWV 1056 (transcribed from the F minor key of the original work for harpsichord, strings and continuo) Sinkovsky finds increased whimsy in both soloistic phrasing and ensemble pizzicato – and throughout the disc his ornamentation impresses.

If, by the time you reach the A minor Concerto, BWV 1041 (the one work on this album Bach originally intended for a violin soloist), you are a convert to the film-style bass-heavy soundworld, there’s much to enjoy. The

Moscow-based ensemble La Voce Strumentale offers a texturally rich reading, with increased dynamics – and the most robust lute stop I’ve heard in a while.

Vocally, Sinkovsky has an attractive, if at times onedimensional instrument – especially in ‘Erbame dich’, where sadly, rather than achieving synergy of artistic obbligato lines, spontaneity is stymied by multitracking his voice and violin.

The emotive text is captured in a dramatic performance of ‘Es ist Vollbracht’, but his Agnus Dei is an abrupt end to the programme.

Hannah French PERFORMANCE ★★★ RECORDING ★★ BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Concerto Reviews Bliss • Walton Violin Concertos Lorraine McAslan (violin); BBC Concert Orchestra/Martin Yates Dutton CDLX 7342 (hybrid CD/SACD) 72:11 mins

The Walton Violin Concerto almost always heard today is not the original 1939 score, but its later revision. Marooned in England by the Second World War, Walton had to miss the work’s first performance by Jascha Heifetz in America. After himself conducting the British premiere, he re-worked the orchestration, in places substantially, while leaving the solo part unchanged. While Heifetz recorded the first version in 1941, Dutton’s release has the advantage of modern sound. Is this original version ‘better’? It depends on your preference. The general sound is a touch more astringent and penetrating, with a less dominant, though still evident Italianate ‘glow’ reflecting the sunlit surroundings of the work’s creation. One may regret Walton’s near-total omission of the original percussion writing: the clicking castanets in the whirling alla napolitano scherzo movement, for instance, here seem a real asset.

Lorraine McAslan’s response to the solo part’s Heifetz-satisfying technical demands is as fine as her bombproof tuning and warm, not over-sumptuous tone and expression. But the orchestra’s accompaniment under Martin Yates, while stylish and colourful, needs a tighter level of ensemble.

No such reservation applies to their handling of Bliss’s Violin Concerto (written in 1955 for

Alfredo Campoli), and McAslan’s contribution is state-of-the-art.

Not even this level of performance can compensate for the work’s prolix idiom and, at nearly 45 minutes, excessive length – the product of a wonderfully fluent and gifted composer with, seemingly, a blind spot in this department.

Malcolm Hayes PERFORMANCE ★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Paganini • Wolf-Ferrari Paganini: Violin Concerto No. 1; Wolf-Ferrari: Violin Concerto Francesca Dego (violin); City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/ Daniele Rustioni DG 481 6381 72:09 mins

Paganini’s First Concerto used to be played by only a handful of devotees – even now, despite taking all the once-traditional cuts, Yehudi Menuhin’s early 1960s stereo account with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Alberto Erede (EMI/Warner) comes closest to making all those Rossini-in-overdrive pyrotechnics sound musically compelling. Since then, a number of distinguished accounts have emerged, ranging from those by Midori and Itzhak Perlman to those by Maxim Vengerov and Hilary Hahn. Yet even in such august company, Francesca Dego’s fine-spun tonal purity and spotless intonational poise are exceptionally beguiling. Her calm poise and equanimity might feel just a shade ‘safe’ if you enjoy a keen sense of surging excitedly ahead, of technical chicanery being negotiated at phenomenal speed; yet

Re-emerging cellist: Corinne Morris celebrates her return with Haydn

to hear Paganini’s finger-crippling stratospherics despatched with such pristine grace and precision brings its own sense of exhilaration.

The star turn here, however, is Wolf-Ferrari’s rarely-heard Violin Concerto in a performance that puts this near-masterpiece back on the musical map. Dating from the mid1940s and cast unconventionally in four movements, there is little here that would not sound out of place in a Bruch concerto (the Second, especially). Wolf-Ferrari’s melodic invention is not especially memorable, yet Dego’s seductive phrasing and infectious sense of enchantment is such that one barely notices. The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Daniele Rustioni provide expertly honed, sympathetic accompaniments and the recording creates a convincingly natural concert-hall perspective.

Julian Haylock PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

BACKGROUND TO…

Prokofiev

Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948)

Violin Concertos Nos 1 & 2

GETTY, BEN EALOVEGA

The son of a German father and an Italian mother, Wolf-Ferrari was born in Venice. Originally named Wolf, he added his mother’s maiden name to his surname in his late teens. He initially showed a talent for art, and studied for a year at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. After studying counterpoint under Rheinberger at the Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich (1892-95), he returned to Venice where he established himself as an opera composer. Il segreto di Susanna, premiered in Munich 1909, is his most famous work.

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Franziska Pietsch (violin); Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin/ Cristian Macelaru Audite 97.733 50:07 mins

After the surprise of one apparent outsider shooting to the top of the Prokofiev list – Rosanne Philippens with the excellent St Gallen Symphony Orchestra and Otto Tausk (see the January

issue) – it’s back to business and programming as usual. Franziska Pietsch has been described as the ‘Anne-Sophie Mutter of East Germany’, and here she gives performances of the two concertos – and nothing else. You would be happy enough to hear this in the concert hall but it doesn’t justify a place in a crowded CD market.

The performances verge on what Shostakovich dismissively called ‘mezzo-fortist’ playing. Pietsch is almost too much the conscious soloist at the start of both works – straining to keep the dynamics down in what should be the allethereal opening of No. 1, nudging the phrases too much for the necessary air of wintry numbness at the start of the Second.

Pitch and articulation are never in doubt, but there’s too much acid in the tone even for Prokofiev and sometimes a lighter or spikier tread is needed, especially at the Stravinskyesque heart of the Second’s first movement, from Pietsch’s partnership with the perfectly decent Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Cristian Macelaru. Best, perhaps, are the two exciting builds in the finale of No. 1, but then the interpretation shoots itself in the foot by failing to dematerialise properly in the quiet coda. You’ll also need to have the volume at a low level – the sound is too much in-your-face, though decently balanced. David Nice PERFORMANCE ★★★ RECORDING ★★★

Concerto Reviews Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1; Symphony No. 9 Martha Argerich (piano), Jakub Waszczeniuk (trumpet); Sinfonia Varsovia/Alexandre Rabinovitch Barakovsky Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina NIFCCD 053 54:10 mins

This is Martha Argerich’s third recording of Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto – and I can confidently say the best. Recorded live in Warsaw in 2006, just two months after her acclaimed performance in Lugano (on Warner), Argerich, her fellow soloist, trumpeter Jakub Waszezeniuk, and the Sinfonia Varsovia under Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, present an even more polished, spontaneous and characterful account, yet avoiding those moments of over selfconscious point making to be found in the Lugano version.

If Argerich does not quite capture the wry humour of the first and

final movements’ free-wheeling and often incongruous juxtaposition of concerto clichés, her scintillating and stunningly reliable virtuosity (with none of the untidiness that marred her first account on DG) offer their own particular pleasure. And Argerich uses her interpretative alchemy to transform Shostakovich’s generic gestures into expressive gold – not only in the slow second movement, but also the opening of the third movement by an artful use of rubato. One can well understand the enthusiasm of the Warsaw audience, who are granted the finale as their encore.

Given Argerich’s strong association with Prokofiev’s Third Concerto, it is not surprising that his spirit hovers over her interpretation.

Likewise in the Ninth Symphony, Rabinovitch-Barakovsky highlights several echoes from Prokofiev as well as other canonic works – I’m not sure I have heard the scherzo’s allusion to Berlioz’s Queen Mab (a model for so many Russian symphonists) so clearly brought out as here. The performance is by turns perky, alert, brooding, and

ultimately – for all its breezy neoclassicism – disquieting. Daniel Jaffé PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Chrysalis F Couperin: Pièces en concert; Monn: Cello Concerto in G minor; Haydn: Cello Concerto No. 1 Corinne Morris (cellist); Scottish Chamber Orchestra Linn CKD 562 58:23 mins

Corinne Morris has called her album ‘Chrysalis’ – in reference not only to her own enforced absence from the concert platform for several years owing to injury, but also to the fact that the two main pieces she’s chosen lay dormant for so long. These two concertos were, in fact, both 20th-century rediscoveries. The now familiar Haydn C major Concerto came to light as late as 1961, while the music of the once-forgotten early 18th-century Viennese composer Georg Matthias Monn was revived

by Schoenberg, who arranged one of

his harpsichord concertos for cello in the vain hope that Pablo Casals would play it, and also edited his G minor Cello Concerto for its first publication in modern times. The latter is an attractive piece, with some surprisingly quirky chromatic passages in the tutti sections of its opening movement.

Morris gives sensitive and stylish performances of both, and she’s ably supported by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and its leader, Stephanie Gonley. Perhaps Morris has an occasional tendency to be overexpressive: in the slow movement of the Haydn, for instance, her first solo entry is even slower than the orchestral opening bars, and the music thereafter is in danger of dragging. It’s a pity, too, that the recording places the cello just a little too close, so that you can hear every movement of the bow across the strings. But this is an enjoyable disc, and the Couperin pieces arranged by the French cellist and teacher Paul Bazelaire make a refreshingly inauthentic bonus. Misha Donat PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Opera Debussy

OPERA CHOICE

Pelléas et Mélisande (DVD)

Cecilia Bartoli in friendly rivalry with Sol Gabetta

Jenny Daviet, Laurent Alvaro, Julie Mathevet, Marc Mauillon, Stephen Bronk, Emma Lyrén, Stefano Olcese; Malmö Opera Chorus & Orchestra/ Maxime Pascal; dir. Benjamin Lazar (Malmö, 2016)

Kate Bolton-Porciatti enjoys the spirited sparring and partnership of these two great musicians

BelAir Classiques DVD: BAC144; Blu-ray: BAC544 178 mins

Sweet duelling: Gabetta matches Bartoli’s artistry

Dolce Duello

lyrical lines with her Baroque bow and cello (a 1759 gut-string Guadagnini). Led by her violinist brother Andrés Gabetta, the ensemble Cappella Gabetta offers lithe and stylish support.

The disc includes three world premiere recordings: Cecilia Bartoli (mezzo soprano), Sol Gabetta (cello); Porpora’s mellifluous entreaty to the god of love, Cappella Gabetta/Andrés Gabetta (violin) Decca 483 2473 76:48 mins ‘Giusto Amor’, from a chamber serenata, and two settings of Apostolo Zeno by Antonio Caldara: Despite its sugary title and frothy cover, this disc ‘Fortuna e speranza’ (an achingly features music-making of the highest order and a rigorously Cecilia Bartoli and Sol lovely ‘duel’ of conflicting emotions) and the virtuoso quickresearched programme of Baroque Gabetta are valiant fire aria ‘Tanto, e con si gran arias with obbligato cello – a sweet duelling partners piena’, where solo violin joins in duel (or ‘dolce duello’) between the the sparring. human voice and the then young Other highlights include Handel’s liquid setting of instrument, oft praised for its vocal qualities. LongDryden’s ‘What passion cannot music raise and quell’ term friends and colleagues, mezzo-soprano Cecilia from a piece that perhaps has a personal resonance Bartoli and cellist Sol Gabetta make for valiant for ‘La Bartoli’: the Ode for St Cecilia’s Day. Here, voice duelling partners who converse, parry and riposte in and cello are reconciled in a harmony of opposites. spirited combat.

PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ Bartoli is velvet-toned, vivacious and voluptuous RECORDING ★★★★★ as ever. Her diction is sharp as a sabre; attack and intonation are spot on target. Add to that a gamut of Hear extracts from this recording and the rest of vocal timbres, colours and an expressive quiver and this month’s choices on the BBC Music Magazine you have an intoxicating mix. Argentinian cellist Sol website at www.classical-music.com Gabetta has an equally flawless technique, drawing

ESTHER HASSE, DELVAL PHILIPPE

Arias by Caldara, Albinoni, Gabrielli, Vivaldi, Handel and Porpora; plus Boccherini: Cello Concerto In D, Op. 34

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The curtain rises on a forest – yes, a real forest made up of things that look like trees. So the opera is not set on a desert island or in a mental hospital or in any other of the bizarre locales thought up by producers keen to make names for themselves. Accordingly the critic’s spirits rise. And they remain aloft for most of the opera. The production is not only respectful of both music and words, but intelligent. As Golaud, thrown from his horse, lies on his bed of pain, a particularly anguished chord in the orchestra draws from him a corresponding twitch; and one thinks ‘Aha, a stage director who understands the music!’ Plaudits then to Benjamin Lazar.

As often, Golaud lies at the centre of events. Mélisande is a flaky young thing to whom Jenny Daviet contributes a convincing wealth of confused gestures; Marc Mauillon gives us Pelléas as a mummy’s boy, arrayed in a selection of nerdy 1950s sweaters; but Laurent Alvaro’s Golaud is strong and impressive, sung with wonderfully dark, incisive tone and acted with at times horrific realism, making the end of Acts III and IV truly terrifying.

Julie Mathevet as Yniold sings exquisitely and more than holds her own in the confrontation with Golaud, but sadly she is not matched by the Geneviève, sung by an in-house Swedish mezzo. Though surrounded by Francophone colleagues, it seems she has not, for some reason, been accorded the benefit of a language coach, and her reading of Golaud’s letter is painful to the ear. But this is soon over and my only other complaint is that the orchestra occasionally threatens to drown the singers. Whether this was so in the stage production itself I cannot say, but it affects both the Blu-ray and DVD presentations,

Opera Reviews which otherwise are exemplary.

Roger Nichols PERFORMANCE ★★★★ PICTURE & SOUND ★★★★

Handel Parnasso in festa David Hansen, Robin Johannsen, Kangmin Justin Kim, Jenny Högström, Silke Gäng, Francesca Ascioti, Luca Tittoto; La Cetra, Barockorchester & Vokalensemble Basel/Andrea Marcon Pentatone PTC 5186 643 (hybrid CD/ SACD) 72:23 mins (2 discs)

Not an opera, but rather a festa teatrale or serenata, Parnasso in festa, per gli sponsali di Teti e Peleo (Festivities on Parnassus in Honour of the Nuptials of Thetis and Peleus) was written to celebrate the wedding of George II’s daughter Princess Anne to the Dutch Prince William IV. It was initially performed at the Haymarket Theatre the night before their wedding on March 13 1734.

Ever the pragmatist, Handel would have considered it an occasional piece and therefore adapted for it a good deal of music composed for earlier works – notably the oratorio Athalia (1733), which had not yet been heard in London.

In the event, the score – which was presented with a top-flight cast, as well as a single set and costumes – was heard three more times and even revived in later seasons.

This partially live recording was made in a generous church acoustic that verges on the swimmy and thus prevents the otherwise focused choir and characterful orchestra from registering with ideal clarity under conductor Andrea Marcon, whose light-textured, dance-like approach is nevertheless welcome.

The soloists are mixed. David Hansen’s Apollo is uneven, at best light, graceful and even virtuosic, at worst insubstantial, but his fellow countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim is steady and smooth as Orfeo, his aria with solo flute ‘Spira al sen celeste ardore’ a delicate highlight.

Good with text, Robin Johannsen’s Clio provides neat and attractive vocalism, while grander-scale soprano Jenny Högström’s vivid Calliope matches nicely bass Luca Tittoto’s vigorous Marte. George Hall PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★

Joy and desolation: Cyril Auvity as Monteverdi’s Orfeo

Humperdinck Hansel und Gretel Katrin Wundsam, Alexandra Steiner, Ricarda Merbeth, Albert Dohmen, Christian Elsner, Annika Gerhards, Alexandra Hutton; Kinderchor der Staatsoper Unter den Linden; Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra/ Marek Janowski Pentatone PTC 5186 605 (hybrid CD/ SACD) 94:72 mins (2 discs)

This box set is a trip down memory lane, with flexible and attractive packaging, and above all a full text in German and English, and a long and stimulating introductory essay. Marek Janowski presents Humperdinck’s masterpiece with a light touch, very much as he did his complete Wagner series, but much more appropriately.

Tempos are on the rapid side, a welcome change from the heavyhanded efforts of some recent stagings and recordings of the opera.

The cast is one of light voices. The children, sung by adults (I assume – no notes on the artists) sounding virtually indistinguishable, Hansel not in the least more boyish than Gretel. The parents are taken by two distinguished and veteran Wagnerians, Ricarda Merbeth a Mother too depressed to sound very angry, and Albert Dohmen a warm Father – when the role is sung as well as this, one wishes it weren’t so short.

The Sandman and the Dew Fairy are appropriately silver-voiced, and the only really questionable casting is Christian Elsner as the Witch. A tenor in this role is not uncommon,

but Elsner sings the part so straight that he evokes neither amusement nor alarm. Fortunately Janowski’s tempos are so brisk in Act III that what can drag seems just the right length, but more characterisation would have been better.

For anyone who takes a grim view of this opera, as some recent productions have done, with the oven prepared by the Witch to cook Gretel seen as a hideous premonition of Nazi atrocities, this set will seem merely escapist. My own view is that Hansel und Gretel is escapist, though it has something – but not much – of the darkness of Grimm’s fairy tales. All told, this recording is a welcome addition to a distinguished roster of performances.

Michael Tanner PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★

Monteverdi L’Orfeo (DVD & Blu-ray) Cyril Auvity, Hannah Morrison, Paul Agnew, Miriam Allan, Lea Desandre, Carlo Vistoli, Sean Clayton, Zachary Wilder; Les Arts Florissants/Paul Agnew; dir. Paul Agnew (Caen, 2017) Harmonia Mundi DVD/Blu-ray HMD 9809062-63 208 mins

British tenor Paul Agnew tackles an operatic triathlon here, as soloist (in the roles of Eco and Apollo), and as both musical and stage director of this new production of L’Orfeo filmed at the Théâtre de Caen. His mise en scène paints a series of pastoral tableaux

with apt simplicity – a welcome change from the anachronisms directors often impose on early opera (though the singers’ actions would have benefitted from a little more direction). Alain Blanchot’s billowing, draping costumes recall Nicolas Poussin’s paintings of Orpheus and Eurydice, and of fanciful Arcadian shepherds swathed in pastel robes. Christophe Naillet’s lighting, too, has the lustrous quality of an oil painting; indeed, much of the success of this production lies in its artistic use of oppositions of light and dark to enhance the opera’s themes.

Echoing performances from Monteverdi’s day, instrumentalists are integrated into the action, playing and moving midst the spare, elemental set against which they are sometimes backlit as if in an ancient shadow play. Their direct interaction with the singers produces an intimate, chamber-like performance, more madrigalian than operatic. Notable among the soloists is Cyril Auvity (Orfeo), whose agile, fervent, tremulous tenor spans the gamut of emotion, from joy to desolation, without ever sounding overblown or histrionic.

Hannah Morrison is sweet-toned as Euridice and La Musica, while Lea Desandre (Messaggiera/Speranza) really captures the narrational essence of Monteverdi’s stile recitativo with just the right balance of grace and power. Finally, in his brief but memorable appearance as the deus ex machina Apollo, Agnew pours a soothing balm of honeyed tones over Orpheus’s grief. The recorded sound is transparent and detailed. Kate Bolton-Porciatti PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ PICTURE & SOUND ★★★★★

Mozart Extracts from Idomeneo, Die Zauberflöte, Il re pastore, Don Giovanni, La clemenza di Tito, Così fan Tutte, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Don Giovanni; Misero! Misero! O sogno…

Juan Diego Flórez (tenor); Orchestra La Scintilla/Riccardo Minasi Sony 88985430862 51:51 mins

Notwithstanding the publicity around this recording, Juan Diego Flórez’s Mozart CD marks no dramatic development in his artistic profile. It’s not, in fact, BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Opera Reviews Reissues Reviewed by Christopher Cook Melba’s Farewell Arias by Verdi, Puccini, Gounod, Bemberg, Massenet, Lotti et al Eloquence 482 8093 (1926) 77:24 mins Amazing that Nellie Melba was 65 when she said farewell to Covent Garden with such a youthful sounding Mimì. Forget the surface noise – Melba’s technique triumphs throughout. ★★★ The People’s Tenor: Luciano Pararotti Arias by Puccini, Verdi, Donizetti et al Decca 483 2742) 139:20 mins (2 discs) If there’s anyone under 30 who hasn’t yet heard Luciano Pavarotti in his prime, here it is. Best to draw a discreet veil over CD 2 of Italian songs. ★★★ Fritz Wunderlich Operetta Arias by Lehár, Kalman, Fall, Stolz, Dostal, Tauber SWR Music SWR19038CD (1954-65) 118:53 mins (2 discs) Tenor Fritz Wunderlich brings his burnished tone and immaculate legato to operetta from the Silver Age opera as well as opera. ★★★★ Classical Arias Arias by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert SWR Music SWR19048CD (1956-63) 124:36 mins (2 discs) These re-mastered radio recordings remind us what was lost when Fritz Wunderlich, the finest German tenor of the post-war period, died so young. ★★★★

his first-ever Mozart recording (in Decca’s starry 1998 Mitridate he took part as Marzio); nor is it his first-ever venture into 18th century Classical opera (his 1996 La Scala debut was in Gluck’s Armide, and during the last decade he’s championed widely Gluck’s Orphée). In any case, the gap of substance and style is hardly significant between Mozartian heroes like Idomeneo and Tito, and the tenor leads of Rossini’s serious and semi-serious operas in which some of the Peruvian tenor’s momentous early successes were achieved.

What does stand out about the disc, an exhilarating listening experience almost throughout its absurdly short duration, is the mature warmth of musicodramatic approach informing both singing and characterisation.

These accounts of Idomeneo’s ‘Fuor del mar’ (climaxed with a ringing top D) and Tito’s ‘Se dal impero’, with their famously terror-inducing semiquaver flourishes, are not just thrilling: in every word and note the characters’ kingly stature is defined.

For some listeners’ tastes, a want of traditional Mozartian

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mellifluousness may count against Flórez’s ‘Un’aura amorosa’, ‘Dalla sua pace’, and his Zauberflöte portrait aria (sung in carefully studied German). Throughout, though, his combination of technical brilliance and imaginative sentience, of longbreathed phrasing and fearless attack across the tenor compass, makes this a superb and splendid achievement. The Orchestra La Scintilla (members of the Zurich Opera Orchestra) under Riccardo Minasi make a fine contribution to this altogether excellent album.

Max Loppert PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Wagner Die Walküre (DVD) Peter Seiffert, Georg Zeppenfeld, Vitalij Kowaljow, Anja Harteros, Anja Kampe, Christa Mayer, Johanna Winkel, Alexandra Petersamer, Brit Tone Müllertz, Christina Bock, Stepánka Pucálková, Katrin Wundsam, Simone Schröder, Katharina Magiera; Staatskapelle Dresden/Christian Thielemann; dir. Vera Nemirova (Salzburg, 2017) C Major DVD: 742808; Blu-ray: 742904 235 mins

This Salzburg production was billed as a recreation of Herbert von Karajan’s classic 1967 staging, but on this DVD ‘recreation’ acquires inverted commas – advisedly, because it’s nothing of the sort.

Günther Schneider-Siemssen’s monumental sets are reproduced, yes, by another hand. However, their atmospheric, integrated lighting and projections used in his Ring cycles at Covent Garden, the Met and Warsaw are replaced by flatly lit, pallidly revamped images, the costumes with charity-shop and campy winged-helmetry. And Karajan’s straightforward but dramatic staging is replaced by Vera Nemirova’s even less imaginative attempt. Character direction is conventional, static, and larded with meaningless gestures. There’s no tension, sexual or otherwise, between Sieglinde, Siegmund and Hunding; Wotan, in an overtight suit and improbable Legolas wig, hands Brünnhilde a toy rocking horse; Fricka is heaved on in an armchair by ram-headed musclemen; the Valkyries simply line up downstage while zombiefied warriors stagger behind them; the magic fire is a puff of flame and a few torch-bearers.

And so on, offering neither the consistency of tradition nor the vitality of reinterpretation.

Nor is this as distinguished musically as it suggests. Peter Seiffert’s lumbering Siegmund, at 63, is a shadow of his younger voice, Anja Harteros’s Sieglinde brightvoiced but uncharacteristically uninspiring, Georg Zeppenfeld a light-voiced, unimpressive Hunding. Vitalij Kowaljow’s Wotan is robust but unsubtle, often with choppy, short-breathed phrasing.

Alongside acceptable Valkyries and Christa Mayer’s Fricka, Anja Kampe’s Brünnhilde provides the finest singing, but despite some whole-hearted vigour she too seems somewhat directionless. And while Karajan isn’t my ideal Wagner conductor, playing his recordings highlighted the drama and passion I missed in Christian Thielemann’s weighty, slow-flowing reading, especially a turgid Act I; even the Dresden orchestra sounded muted.

Next to many, even most DVD performances, for example Daniel

Barenboim’s and Simon Rattle’s, this seems pointless and uncompelling.

Michael Scott Rohan PERFORMANCE ★★ PICTURE & SOUND ★★★

Quella Fiamma Arie Antiche: works by Durante, Falconieri, Caccini, Carissimi, Handel, Conti, Bononcini et al Nathalie Stutzmann (contralto); Orfeo 55 Warner Classics 9029576529 73:06 mins

This selection box of Baroque arias comes from the popular 19th-century anthology of Arie Antiche edited for voice and piano by Alessandro Parisotti and widely used by vocal students even today. For this recording, Stutzmann and Orfeo 55 have revived the original versions of the arias, interweaving them with contemporary instrumental works, to produce a colourful potpourri.

The 25 tracks embrace Baroque hits like Handel’s ‘Piangerò la sorte mia’ (from Giulio Cesare in Egitto) and ‘Ah, mio cor, schermito sei (from Alcina), as well as melodious, lovelorn and humorous works by Caccini, Caldara, Carissimi, Cavalli, Alessandro Scarlatti and others.

Contralto Nathalie Stutzmann plays a dual role here, both as soloist and as director of the instrumental ensemble Orfeo 55. Her approach is highly expressive, coaxing performances that are nothing if not fiery. Stutzmann wrings every ounce of meaning and emotion from the texts, lending them real dramatic power – even outside their original context. She has an impressive range, too (the voice particularly plummy in its lowest register), and her vivid contrasts of light and shade would make even Caravaggio turn green.

The drawbacks to these high-octane performances are that the voice is often forced and, as a result, it takes on an edgy tone, while her ample vibrato, dynamic swells, and a tendency to swoop up to notes, rather than attack them cleanly, all become rather intrusive mannerisms.

The vocal numbers are interlaced with movements from Italian Baroque sonatas and concertos, realised with an apt balance of lyricism and brio by Orfeo 55.

Kate Bolton-Porciatti PERFORMANCE ★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

TRAVEL FOR THE ARTS

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with the LSO at the Barbican Symphony No 1 with Sir Mark Elder Thursday 8 February Symphony No 2 with Sir Mark Elder Sunday 11 February Cello Concerto with Susanna Mälkki & Daniel Müller-Schott Sunday 15 April

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Choral & Song JS Bach

CHORAL & SONG CHOICE

Magic and mystery from the Middle Ages Anthony Pryer applauds the Sollazzo Ensemble’s style and scholarship on its debut album

First impressions: the Sollazzo Ensemble launches on disc

Sato) and exquisite tenderness of voice from Perrine Devillers in Pour che que je ne puis. There are also hilarious imitations of a bleating lamb in Angnel son biancho, and an atmospheric, and a cacophonous Works by Ciconia, Giovanni da Firenze, Andrea market scene in Cacciando per gustar. da Firenze, Paolo da Firenze, Franceso Landini, The instrumentalists (Anna Danilevskaia, her Niccolò da Perugia, Solage & Teramo Sollazzo Ensemble sister Sophia, and the harpist Vincent Kibildis) Linn CKD 529 45:53 mins perform two of the tracks alone, and in Hont paur, manage to sound both poised and rhapsodic. And This is the first recording from the prize-winning Vivien Simon’s singing in Solage’s Sollazzo Ensemble and in this This is an impressive Le basile has humanity far beyond ingeniously assembled collection they delight us with a songs of first recording from the polished but lapidary version

by Gothic Voices (on Avie), though defiance and gentle rebuke directed against the gossips and naysayers of the Sollazzo Ensemble the texture is rather muddy, and they might have performed the 14th and 15th century society. The result is a magical sound-carpet of music drawn from third verse as well. That said, this is altogether an impressive and revelatory first recording from the repertories not given convincing attention since the Sollazzo Ensemble, which was founded just four efforts of the Medieval Ensemble of London, David years ago. And the writer of the booklet notes – Anne Munrow, and Gothic Voices some decades ago.

Stone – really knows what she is talking about.

The fluid ‘conversational’ style of these accomplished musicians (they perform some of these PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ pieces without the music) enables them to provide RECORDING ★★★★ especially realistic and vivid projections of the texts.

Hear extracts from this recording and the rest of We get an explosive opening in Dal traditor (a bitter this month’s choices on the BBC Music Magazine song of betrayal), a distressed speech of complaint in website at www.classical-music.com Va Fortune (projected with superb rhetoric by Yukie

MARTIN CHIANG

Parle Qui Veut: Moralizing Songs of the Middle Ages

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Mass in F; Cantata: Süsser Trost, mein Jesus kömmt, BWV 151; Magnificat in E flat Hannah Morrison, Angela Hicks, Charlotte Ashley (soprano), Reginald Mobley (alto), Hugo Hymas (tenor), Gianluca Buratto, Jake Muffett (bass); Monteverdi Choir; English Baroque Soloists/John Eliot Gardiner Soli Deo Gloria SDG728 73:53 mins

Recorded straight after the Monteverdi Choir’s European tour in 2016 celebrating Christmas in JS Bach’s Leipzig, this festive programme irons out many of the misgivings commentators had of the live performances. In the acoustics of St Jude’s, Hampstead, Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s step-out soloists are consistently strong, and their varied contributions mirror the alluring array of affects achieved by the ensemble as a whole.

The momentum, clarity of texture and incisive lines of the Mass in F establishes the assured tone of the programme, before Cantata, BWV 151, Süsser Trost, reveals an intimate vision of Mary through the eyes of Bach. The adoring mother, also a jubilant woman hitching her skirts to dance, is exquisitely portrayed in flautist Rachel Beckett and soprano Angela Hicks’s extraordinary blend and stylish turns of phrase.

The Magnificat in E flat is a sparkling, action-packed affair – especially with seamlessly-added laudes (songs of praise), and proves a fascinating comparison with its later, better known, incarnation in D major. Out of context, ‘Omnes generationes’ and ‘Fecit potentiam’ verge on a race; however in situ, with astonishingly fine trumpet playing, they provide an element of risky exuberance and high drama, sharply contrasting the surrounding movements. Soprano Hannah Morrison’s ‘Quia Respexit’ unfolds with gleaming repose and alto Reginald Mobley’s ‘Esurientes’ encapsulates whimsical pathos, while bass Gianluca Buratto’s puffed up ‘Quia Fecit’ turns on a dime to soften and declare ‘Holy is his name’.

An accompanying, lengthy interview with Jonathan FreemanAttwood in the booklet notes

Choral & Song Reviews provides an insightful view into Gardiner’s personal take on the project. Hannah French PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★

JS Bach Mass in B minor (DVD) Christina Landshamer (soprano), Elisabeth Kulman (alto), Wolfram Lattke (tenor), Luca Pisaroni (bass); Dresdner Kammerchor; Gewandhausorchester Leipzig/ Herbert Blomstedt Accentus ACC20415 113:36 mins

Bach’s B minor Mass and Leipzig have long been entwined for conductor Herbert Blomstedt. It was one of the works with which he bade farewell to the city’s Gewandhaus Orchestra when he relinquished the music directorship in 2005 – and the performance recorded at that year’s Leipzig Bachfest is still readily available on DVD. Just weeks before his 90th birthday last summer he returned to the orchestra and to St Thomas’s Church to conclude the 2017 Bachfest with the same work.

It’s a present to himself. A labour of love. And an astute combining of two facets of the B minor Mass’s backstory since if the instrumental forces acknowledge a city home to Bach’s last quarter century or so, the Dresdner Kammerchor serves as a reminder that the work started life as a ‘Missa’ calculated to advance Bach’s cause at the Dresden Court.

Noted for his Bruckner and the big symphonic repertoire, Blomstedt might not at first sight seem an obvious choice as conductor for Bachfest’s finale; but as a near contemporary of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt, he’s evidently not allergic to the changing face of Baroque performance style over a long lifetime. Come to that the orchestra, in its set of the Christmas Oratorio under Riccardo Chailly, must hold the land-speed record for the opening chorus.

Unlike Chailly however, Blomstedt is never bent on pointscoring didacticism. His is a truthful account; prayerful, reverential, intent on welding the disparate movements into a caressing, over-arching entity. The opening of the Credo professes a private

faith rather than an expression of the church militant, and a silkily ethereal ‘Et Incarnatus’ yields to a ‘Crucifixus’ that’s unexpectedly serene, avuncular even – though Blomstedt’s scrupulous calibration of the Mass’s final chorus engineers a blaze of magisterial, hope-filled trust. Among the soloists Christina Landshamer and Elisabeth Kulman enthral. Paul Riley PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Gibbons In Chains of Gold – complete consort anthems Fretwork; His Majesty Sagbutts & Cornetts; Magdalena Consort/ Peter Harvey Signum Records SIGCD511 66:38 mins

When composer Thomas Morley urged performers to draw listeners ‘in chains of gold’, he might well have been reviewing this recording.

Under the direction of Peter Harvey, the synergy of the Magdalena Consort, Fretwork and His Majesty’s Sagbutts and Cornetts, unveils Orlando Gibbons’s Consort Anthems and In Nomines in all their pious glory and passionate devotion.

Prompted by a surviving manuscript, the multidimensional Consort Anthems celebrate specific events or services commissioned either for private worship, or for the Royal Chapels of Greenwich, Whitehall, and Hampton Court.

Gibbons revels in the genre, blending voices and instruments as readily as the text intermingles praise for heavenly and earthly kings. Charles Daniels sets an experienced tone, leading a stellar team of high tenors who, at the high pitch of A=466, maintain the original inner parts without the need for female or male altos. This high pitch and vocal distribution, mirrored in the viols (which include original instruments of the period), is a telling case of historical description – ‘rare, diffused and aery’ – prompting new sonorities.

And it works. Fretwork shine in the In Nomines, relishing exchanges steeped with the references to Taverner, Ferrabosco and Bull.

Highlights in the hugely-varied anthems abound, from the sumptuous sound of Blessed are all they – transcending its scandalous backstory – to the delightful

Baritone brilliance: Derek Welton gives a standout turn singing Martinu˚

evocations of dancing in Do Not Repine and the wistful sheen of mystery in We Praise thee, O Father – these performances glimmer with all the yearning, devoutness, and splendour of the age. Hannah French PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★

Martinů The Epic of Gilgamesh Lucy Crowe (soprano), Andrew Staples (tenor), Derek Welton (baritone), Jan Martiník (bass), Simon Callow (narrator); Prague Philharmonic Choir; Czech Philharmonic/Manfred Honeck Supraphon SU 4225-2 50:59 mins

From 1940 until his death in 1959, having lost both his Czech homeland and his beloved composer-muse Vitezslava Kaprálová who died aged only 25, Bohuslav Martinů was preoccupied with thoughts of death and possible transfiguration. The Epic of Gilgamesh, shot through with the extra-strange spareness of his late style, took him back to a powerful Babylonian myth of c2000 BC to illuminate what he called ‘the fundamental human problem’.

We have been blessed with two recordings in Czech conducted by the late, great Jiří Bělohlávek – one from 1976, which I have on a Supraphon LP, and a 1995 BBC Symphony Orchestra concert performance, released as a cover disc by this magazine. Now for the

first time The Epic of Gilgamesh is recorded in the original English that Martinů worked on from R Campbell Thompson’s seminal 1929 translation. There are very minor problems of pronunciation for the excellent Prague Philharmonic Choir, hardly any for the bass soloist, Jan Martiník, and the benefit of instant impact from Simon Callow’s minimal narration, soprano Lucy Crowe, tenor Andrew Staples and, best of all, Derek Welton in Gilgamesh’s questioning of his friend Enkidu’s spirit. Add to that love music, a brief fight, bleakness offset by brief transcendence in the central sequence, and the supreme mystery of the final dialogue, and all life is here in compressed mastery.

Idiomatically conducted by Manfred Honeck and vividly recorded live in Prague’s Rudolfinum, this is the definitive performance of a 20th-century choral masterpiece.

David Nice PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Monteverdi Selva morale e spirituale Balthasar Neumann Choir & Ensemble/Pablo Heras Casado Harmonia Mundi HMM 902355 58:22 mins

Recordings of Monteverdi’s monumental collection of sacred music, the Selva morale (1641), are not in short supply since we have very commendable (nearly BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Choral & Song Reviews Reissues Reviewed by George Hall Borghild Bryhn Langaard Works by Wagner, Grieg, Kjerulf, Bull, Verdi , Puccini et al Nordic Sound NOSCD1987 (1908-1916) 67.63 mins Surprisingly vivid sound in these ancient recordings by the Norwegian soprano Borghild Bryhn Langaard, who studied with Grieg’s wife Nina The Wagner extracts are especially impressive. ★★★★ Marteau Lieder Solo Musica SM 263 (1956) 53.11 mins Henri Marteau (1874-1934) is remembered in song performances by mezzo Vesselina Kasarova that suffer from poor intonation, plus stronger archival recordings by Fischer-Dieskau. ★★★ Brahms Lieder Orfeo C941171B (1965) 61.06 mins The velvety richness of Grace Bumbry’s mezzo is captured near the start of her international career in this Brahms programme with pianist Beaumont Glass at the Salzburg Festival. ★★★★ Haydn • Mozart Scenes & Arias Decca Eloquence 482 5049 (1956-60) 63.01 mins The English soprano Jennifer Vyvyan was noted for her excellence in contemporary music and especially Britten’s, but her excellence can also be felt throughout this disc of Viennese classics, performed with imagination and personality. ★★★★

complete) examples from – among others – The Sixteen (on Coro), La Venexiana (Glossa), Junghänel (Harmonia Mundi) and Lasserre (Zig Zag). This offering by the Balthasar Neumann performers comprises only a single disc and so covers fewer than half of the 37 works in the collection. That said, all the main genres are represented – spiritual madrigals, psalms, hymns, Marian antiphons, the Magnificat, Mass movements and solo motets.

On balance the performances are better in the full-textured works.

The Magnificat is rousing, the Mass movements solid and sustained, and the spiritual madrigals (especially Voi chi ascolte) sprightly and flexible. These accomplished instrumental players provide an important supporting role, though there are some issues of balance and appropriateness, especially in the works for solo voice. In Ut quaeant laxis the violins are replaced by less pliant cornetti, and in Iste confessor the voice is almost swamped. The words can also be indistinct at times (Dixit Dominus a8). In the Salve Regina a3, where the bass instrument doubles the voice, the former ornaments the line while the latter

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does not, and it would have been good if the vocal soloists attempted a little more ornamentation – for example in the musical repetitions of the strophic Iste confessor. In my view the benchmark recording for these pieces is the version by Junghänel, which, oddly, is also on the Harmonia Mundi label.

Anthony Pryer PERFORMANCE ★★★ RECORDING ★★★

Grace Williams My Last Duchess; Two NinthCentury Welsh Poems; Four Mediaeval Welsh Poems; Two Welsh Folk Songs; Six Welsh Oxen Songs Jeremy Huw Williams (baritone), Paula Fan (piano, harpsichord), Rachel Kay Green (harp) Lorelt LNT140 76:43 mins

An irony of Wales’s moniker, ‘The Land of Song’, is that Welsh art song composers have often struggled to find a platform at home – especially for Welshlanguage settings. In 1976, a year before her death, Grace Williams

(see ‘Background to’, below) commented, ‘I love the sound of Welsh poetry, particularly the mediaeval poetry, and have set some of it to music. The difficulty lies in getting it sung, because of singers’ inability (or unwillingness) to cope with the language – even among Welsh singers.’

No such concerns hinder baritone Jeremy Huw Williams, who proves a passionate advocate in both English and Welsh of the composer’s shamefully neglected art songs and folk song arrangements, strongly supported by Paula Fan (piano and harpsichord) and Rachel Kay Green (harp).

Of 28 songs, half are grouped into collections of two to six, and all but four are in Welsh. The album is named for the final, most substantial piano song of Williams’s output: dated 1975, My Last Duchess sets Browning’s chillingly Bluebeardesque poem with a declamatory intensity reflecting its subheading, ‘Scena’ – to which JH Williams rises with sometimes unbridled vibrato, but potent characterisation.

Elsewhere, the mood can be lighthearted; among early arrangements, the Six Welsh Oxen Songs (1937) for instance.

But composer and performers alike are at their most sonorously vivid in characteristically darker, yearning territory – notably the Four Mediaeval Welsh Poems (1962).

With a brittly resonant major-minor accompaniment pairing harp and harpsichord, these settings combine a modal romanticism with ancient Welsh poetic forms to eerily beautiful effect.

Steph Power PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Celebrating English Song Songs by Ireland, Venables, Vaughan Williams et al Roderick Williams (baritone), Susie Allan (piano) Somm SOMMCD 0177 72.42 mins

Roderick Williams, with his frequent accompanist Susie Allan, continues his welcome foray through English song. Blending familiar and less so, the programme is always interesting. Newcomers may find Williams, with his almost tenorial top, less full-voiced and sturdy than distinguished precursors like Sirs Thomas Allen and Bryn Terfel.

Yet he has a mellow, refined tone, distinctively poetic delivery, and is keenly sensitive to the words.

And with Allan’s lively support, he can unleash sufficient vigour in the emotional contrasts of Butterworth’s Shropshire Lad songs, in particular Is my team ploughing?’s haunted unease. He does likewise in the heartier elements of Ireland’s Hardy and Masefield settings, and Warlock’s sprightly Jillian of Berry.

Williams doesn’t quite catch the heroic defiance of Vaughan Williams’s Vagabond, and Gurney’s less boisterous Captain Stratton’s Fancy probably suits him better than Warlock’s version would.

But the other, deeply felt Gurney songs are particularly striking, as are Venables’s Hardy and Graves settings, contemporary but very much in the classic manner.

Vaughan Williams’s idyllic Silent Noon, plangent Quilter and lyrical Moeran are equally impressive.

Britten’s Down by the Sally Gardens and The Ploughboy probably can’t

BACKGROUND TO…

Grace Williams (1906-77) Grace Williams was the first Welsh composer to write a symphony (in 1943), and the first female British composer to write a score for a feature film, Blue Scar (1949). Born in Barry, on the coast of South Wales, Williams studied at Cardiff University and then with Gordon Jacob and Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music. After living in London and Lincolnshire, Williams returned to Barry in 1945. From pieces like Sea Sketches to Ave Maris Stella, the coastal landscapes and sounds of the sea were a profound influence on her music.

Choral & Song Reviews help recalling Peter Pears, but the underrated Finzi Shakespearian group which follows again brings out Williams’s darker shadings and nuances, and Allan makes much of the piano part. Michael Scott Rohan PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Gold

For King’s Singers fans, this set is an automatic purchase. For others, its extraordinary versatility and consistent enjoyability are warmly recommended. Terry Blain PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Serenade

The King’s Singers

Includes works by Gounod, Bizet, Meyerbeer, Chabrier, Chausson and Magnard

Signum Records SIGCD500 193.89 mins (3 discs)

Thomas Hampson (baritone), Maciej Pikulski (piano)

Fifty years ago a group of choral scholars from King’s College, Cambridge formed a six-man vocal ensemble they called The King’s Singers. The rest is, as they say, history, and this three-disc set is the latest slice of it.

Gold is not a selection of archival recordings by the different King’s Singers line-ups over the decades.

Instead, the current group has mined repertoire from the Singers’ performing history, added selections of its own (including nine new commissions), and made brand-new recordings of all 60 items.

CD1 is branded ‘Close Harmony’, and comprises mainly traditional songs and pop material. The famed King’s Singers attention to pin-point pitching, slick ensemble, and deft balances between the voices are present in abundance.

The two Beatles arrangements are particularly successful. The harmonic underlay to And I love her burbles like a happy marimba, while in I’ll follow the sun Paul McCartney’s unusual chord changes have a deliciously silken quality to them. The brief, spectacular Bobby Shaftoe is a hoot, and shows that the current King’s Singers have lost none of their predecessors’ ability to sing at ridiculous velocities, without skittling their consonants all over the bowling alley.

Can the Singers do ‘serious’ repertoire too? CD2, ‘Spiritual’, addresses that question. The answer is clearly yes. Byrd’s Sing joyfully receives a vibrantly bright-toned performance, while Palestrina’s Sicut cervus is sensually shaped and expressive. On CD3 (‘Secular’), John Rutter’s Be not afeard stands out both for the immaculate performance, and for some of its composer’s most harmonically adventurous writing.

Pentatone PTC 5186 681 (hybrid CD/ SACD) 57.36 mins

Works from various periods

This is a welcome French recital from Thomas Hampson. Given his long and distinguished pedigree in the operas of several composers presented here, it is surprising that he has explored their songs so little on disc. Especially so given that the Mélodie has a particular association with the baritone voice, and Hampson’s charm, insight and care rightfully take their place in that tradition.

Bearing the title ‘Serenade’, this collection is full of stimulating connections, progressions and juxtapositions, all captured in Pentatone’s typically warm, natural sound. Bizet’s night-time warning La Chanson du Fou is followed by the more carefree amorous nocturne of Meyerbeer’s Sicilienne. The ducks of Chabrier’s skittish Villanelle des petits carnards might appear to have little in common, yet, for a few moments, the piano introduction seemingly echoes the Meyerbeer.

With the finely judged support of pianist Maciej Pikulski, Hampson’s changes of mood and character between and within the songs reflect his long experience. So, too, does his attention to detail, as is evident in the opening Gounod Serenade.

Many a lesser singer would take an easier option with the flourishes that end each section, but Hampson punctiliously articulates each note.

Here, as elsewhere, this is even when his approach draws attention to areas where his voice has lost a little of its former lustre and sparkle. Such moments are rare, though, and his tone and phrasing in the closing Les roses de l’amour by Magnard are simply exquisite.

Christopher Dingle PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★

Chamber JS Bach

CHAMBER CHOICE

Powerful reflections from a world at war Steven Isserlis reveals the greatness of sonatas by Fauré, Debussy and Bridge, says Helen Wallace ‘Deeply poignant’: Steven Isserlis plays three great sonatas

The Cello in Wartime

maximum expression from threadbare resource. Is it my imagination or does a sad seriousness weigh on this Debussy Sonata’s opening, more heavily ‘risoluto’ than usual? No matter, it gathers pace into a kaleidoscopic Steven Isserlis (cello), Connie Shih (piano) whirlwind. Isserlis and Connie Shih offer a new depth BIS BIS-2312 (hybrid CD/SACD) 65:38 mins of perspective on Bridge’s turbulent Sonata – in which he threw off the shackles of Edwardian pastoralism If IKEA were to make a cello, this would be it. Built by – creating a riveting narrative through its Adagio’s WH Hill around 1900, the quaint trench cello played phantasmagorical labyrinth. here packs up into what could be Crowning all this is perhaps the an ammunition box – doubling as In Steven Isserlis’s finest recording of Fauré’s First its body – with a slot-in neck and hands, the trench cello Sonata I have ever heard: Isserlis’s screw-in end-pin. Owned originally sounds remarkably fine recording with Pascal Devoyon by keen amateur Harold Triggs may offer more tonal lustre, but of the Royal Sussex Regiment, it here he reveals the full stature of this extraordinary accompanied him to the trenches in World War I. work. At its heart lies the visionary Adagio: opening So how does it sound? In Steven Isserlis’s hands, in a state of shimmering drift, it here acquires titantic remarkably fine – though he only uses it for a handful momentum. They take the finale swiftly, and it pays of evocative miniatures, including Jerusalem and off in an outpouring of effervescent joy.

God Save the King. Saint-Saëns’s The Swan is deeply poignant here: the sound may be boxy and reed-thin, PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ but Isserlis’s transformative artistry shines through all RECORDING ★★★★★ the more luminously.

Hear extracts from this recording and the rest of On Isserlis’s Stradivarius cello, Webern’s skeletal this month’s choices on the BBC Music Magazine Drei Kleine Stücke make a clever connection between website at www.classical-music.com this soundworld and the great sonatas of the period:

JEAN BAPTISTE MILLOT

Cello Sonatas by Fauré, Debussy and Bridge; plus works by Webern, Saint-Saëns, Parry, Novello and trad.

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Passacaglia in D minor, BWV 582; Aria Variata alla Maniera Italiana in G minor; Canzone in D minor, Goldberg Variations Concerto Italiano/Rinaldo Alessandrini (harpsichord) Naïve OP 30575 68:17 mins

Concerto Italiano’s latest ‘musical offering’ taps into a long tradition (from Mozart to Webern) of Bach arrangements: here, sundry variations originally for keyboard instruments are dressed up for a chamber ensemble of strings and harpsichord. The plangent string sound suits the melancholy Passacaglia BWV 582 – as does its transposition to D minor, the hues of which were regarded as ‘serious and pious’ by Bach’s contemporaries.

The varied instrumental timbres highlight the ‘ingeniously intertwined’ contrapuntal threads that so amazed Schumann a generation later. Concerto Italiano’s robust accents stress the Passacaglia’s dance origins – despite one or two slightly unsettling fluctuations in tempo. The Aria Variata BWV 989 is cranked down from the original key of A to G minor, and its bravura, Italianate style transfers well to solo violin – deftly played by Nicholas Robinson, with lithe continuo support.

The disc’s warhorse, though, is the arrangement of the Goldberg Variations, which not only paints the work in fresh colours but also throws up more radical changes.

Alessandrini has added parts to some of the variations, and – though hardly Stokowski – the results can sound over-blown. Somewhat problematic, too, are those idiomatic figurations that sit naturally on the keyboard but are ungainly on strings: the fiddly ornaments of Variation 14, and the rapid, sinuous passagework of Variations 20 and 26 suffer particularly. More successful are the canons, to which the ensemble’s spikey articulation adds bite and clarity. The end results may not always be entirely convincing, but it’s an interesting project which allows us to hear Bach’s protean music in new guises.

Kate Bolton-Porciatti PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Chamber Reviews JS Bach

Fauré

Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord No. 3 in E, BWV 1016

Violin Sonata No. 1 (arr. Bezaly)

Beethoven

Prokofiev

Sonata No. 10 in G

Busoni

Franck Violin Sonata (arr. Rampal) Flute Sonata in D

Sonata No. 2 in E minor

Sharon Bezaly (flute), Vladimir Ashkenazy (piano)

Yuuko Shiokawa (violin), András Schiff (piano)

BIS BIS-2259 (hybrid CD/SACD) 75:06 mins

ECM 481 5767 74:08 mins

Sharon Bezaly dominates the tiny, rarefied space afforded to full-time solo flautists – and this disc demonstrates why: the Swedish-based Israeli has phenomenal strength and versatility, combined with crystalline clarity of sound.

Her 24-carat gold, custom-built Muramatsu flute is reminiscent of James Galway, but this is not a marketing fad; the luxurious sound is partly attributable to the glorious instrument.

The Prokofiev Sonata, inspired by the flute playing of Georges Barrère, is notorious among the flute community for its challenging and rarely used top D. Naturally, this note – and the rest – cause no issues for Bezaly, who swoops through the movements with incredible power. It’s virtually impossible to imagine that, when the work was premiered in 1943, it was criticised for its meandering solo part, which the composer quickly re-gifted to violinist David Oistrakh. Happily, by the time Galway and Martha Argerich recorded the piece in 1975, the work had been returned to the flautists; Bezaly’s cleaner lines on this new version are preferable.

In a neat twist of irony, this disc pairs the Prokofiev with transcriptions of two violin sonatas, both, curiously, in A major.

Franck’s Sonata, originally written for Eugene Ysaÿe, begins with restrained, plaintive melodies, before moving into complex canonical writing for both flute and piano, performed here by the dazzling Vladimir Ashkenazy.

Bezaly begins the Fauré – her own transcription – at a trot, never a step out of pace with her pianist. The later movements are a boisterous chromatic canter.

Claire Jackson PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Listening to violinist Yuuko Shiokawa and her pianist husband András Schiff is to be reminded that in the Classical era, duo sonatas were usually designated as ‘for piano with the accompaniment of…’. Not that Schiff overwhelms, but so often his musical personality tends to have first call on the listening ear.

Of course the trio sonata textures of the Bach Sonata inevitably find him shouldering two thirds of the argument; but even so, a beautifully coloured chord in the Busoni, a strategically pointed bass trill in the Beethoven can detonate an illuminating ambush.

The programming here is astute. While that hyphenated phenomenon known as BachBusoni is decoupled, other couplings are encouraged. The Finale of Busoni’s Op. 36a is a set of (arguably over-extended) variations on a Bach chorale, while Beethoven’s G major Sonata similarly espouses variation form – to very different effect.

The Bach is beautifully realised, Schiff relishing a serene duetting rapport with Shiokawa in the second Adagio, and, despite a measured tempo, coaxing a beguiling sparkle out of the first Allegro. In the Busoni, Shiokawa’s innate cantabile comes into its own in the shadowy variations – having robbed the ‘Tarantella’ of some of its truculence – and she’s particularly at home in the gemütlichkeit of the central Trio of Beethoven’s Scherzo (if not quite incisive enough in the carefully calibrated sforzandos of its spiky frame). There might be ties that bind the Busoni and Beethoven, but Beethoven’s Violin Sonata swansong, a miracle of trills and aerated felicities, turns out to be the perfect foil. Paul Riley PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★

Into the wild: Cecilia Zilliacus plays Amanda Maier’s Sonata

Maier Violin Sonata in B minor; Nine Pieces; Four Songs; Brahms: Auf dem See (arr. violin) Sabina Bisholt (soprano), Cecilia Zilliacus (violin), Bengt Forsberg (piano) dB Productions dBCD182 66:68 mins

The second volume of music

by Swedish violinistcomposer Amanda Maier (1853-94) provides further evidence of a considerable talent silenced at a tragically early age. Maier described her B minor Violin Sonata as ‘a little wild’ – not in the Berlioz sense, I suspect, but rather because of its impassioned sense of Schumannesque fantasy.

Overflowing with enchanting lyrical invention, the Sonata compels the listener along with a keen sense of emotional narrative.

Cecilia Zilliacus and Bengt Forsberg play this ravishing score with a melting sensitivity, phrasal intuitiveness and infectious spontaneity so completely at one with the music, it feels as though one is on a hot-line to the composer’s original source of inspiration.

That same sense of glowing expressive candour informs the set of nine captivating violin-andpiano pieces Maier composed in 1878, of which only six were published at the time. Dating from the same year are four settings of Carl-David af Wirsén, probably composed for Swedish soprano Louise Pyk, whose Mendelssohnian

grace and Brahmsian vigour is brought sparklingly to life by Sabina Bisholt. To round things off in style, Zilliacus and Forsberg perform Brahms’s Op. 106 song Auf dem See (a popular Maier encore) on Maier’s own 18th-century Fiscer violin.

Julian Haylock PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Silvestrov Three Pieces; Elegy; 8.VI. 1810…to R.A.Sch.’s Birthday; Moments of Silence and Sadness; Abendserenade; Augenblicke einer Serenade; Lacrimosa; 25.X.1893…in memoriam P.I.Tch.; Waltz of the Alpine Bells Anja Lechner (cello, tam tam), Agnès Vesterman (cello) ECM 481 5692 61:70 mins

Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov presents a compositional tour de force in this intriguing programme. Admittedly, the parameters which Silvestrov employs here are relatively limited with a predilection for disjunct wisps of sound using harmonics, nostalgic disconnected melodies sometimes alluding to a long forgotten 19th-century ‘Song without Words’ and gently strumming guitar-like pizzicato broken chords. Since dynamic levels rarely rise above mezzo-forte, with quite a few pregnant moments of silence to boot, there is every chance BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Chamber Reviews for the listener to switch off. And yet this musical concoction somehow casts a magical spell, drawing you into the intimacy of Silvestrov’s musical language and holding your attention throughout the disc.

Undoubtedly the extraordinary rapport that exists between Anja Lechner and Agnès Vestermann plays a considerable role in all this.

What Lechner and Vestermann achieve in the works for two cellos, such as Three Pieces, Serenades and the homages to Schumann and Tchaikovsky, is a well-nigh perfect synchronicity of ensemble coupled with an almost improvisatory delivery of melody that sounds as if from one player and one instrument.

Of the pieces for solo cello, the Elegy, which also includes the notable introduction of two tamtams at salient points in the music, is especially mesmeric, as is Moments of Silence and Sadness composed for and dedicated to Lechner. But perhaps the most moving musical experience of all is the Waltz of the Alpine Bells – an exquisite dreamlike miniature with fragmentary sounds that dissolve and then disappear into the ether. Erik Levi PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★

Telemann Paris Quartets: Fugue in A minor, TWV 30:14; Quartet in B minor, TWV 43:h2; Quartet in F, TWV 43:F1; Quartet in G, TWV 43:G1; Quartet in E minor, TWV 43:e4 NeverMind

FRANCOIS SECHET

Alpha Classics ALPHA 299 64:08 mins

Paris Quartets has become the catch-all term for four different Telemann collections printed in Germany and Paris between 1730 and c1752. This attractive disc contains a quartet from the 1730 set, printed in Hamburg and later pirated by a French publisher, two further quartets from Telemann’s most accomplished set issued under the composer’s auspices in 1738, and a single work from the c1752 Paris collection, once more unauthorised.

Telemann was much admired during his lifetime for his trios and quartets. It is not hard to see why for these elegantly and idiomatically crafted pieces scored for flute, violin, viola da gamba and harpsichord are full of melodic enchantment

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Tecchler’s Cello: from Cambridge to Rome

Beautiful but not Bach: Amandine Beyer plays misattributed gems

Works by Beethoven, Barrière, Gjeilo, D Matthews, M Simpson, C Bray and Respighi Guy Johnston (cello); with Magnus Johnston (violin), Sheku Kanneh Mason (cello), Tom Poster (piano); Orchestra Dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia/Carlo Rizzari; Choir of King’s College, Cambridge/Stephen Cleobury King’s College KGS0026 75:36 mins

and expressive nuance. Such is the case with the concluding Modéré of the E minor Quartet, a melancholy chaconne in the character of a sarabande. Elsewhere, we find a rich variety of styles sometimes, as in the recitative-like opening Adagio of the F major Quartet, seeming to foreshadow the ‘empfindsamer Stil’, at others drawing upon French and Italian characteristics and the folk music idiom of central Europe thus demonstrating the mixed style of which he was a consummate master.

These excellent performances by NeverMind explore the rewarding subtleties of Telemann’s writing with intimacy and an unerring sense of stylistic decorum. I hope that they will finish the task that they have embarked upon. Nicholas Anderson PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★

BWV… or not?

Violin Sonatas in C, BWV 1024 & in D minor, BWV 1036; Trio Sonata in G, BWV 1038; Fugue in G minor; Suite in A, BWV 1025; Musical Offering – Sonata sopr’il Soggetto Reale; Goldberg: Trio Sonata in C Amandine Beyer (violin); Gli Incogniti Harmonia Mundi HMM902322 90:00 mins

This unusual disc is a compendium of works that – for the most part – are not by Bach, but at some stage in their history have been attributed to him. There is some captivatingly

lovely music here, regardless of whose signature should be attached to it, and it’s captivatingly playing, too. The anthology is bookended by Bach’s own intricate and graceful arrangements of lute pieces by Silvius Leopold Weiss and the Sonata from The Musical Offering – a work which JS Bach crafted from a theme by the flute-playing King Frederick the Great. Between them, we leaf through a handful of chamber sonatas including the C minor work catalogued as BWV 1024, now bearing a (doubtful!) attribution to Johann Georg Pisendel (the 18th-century’s Paganini), its music roaming from the fiery to the airy. In the Sonata BWV 1038, flute, violin and continuo intertwine in a delightfully galant idiom – probably a result of the intertwining hands of Papa Bach and his son Carl Philipp Emanuel. In turn, the wunderkind harpsichordist who gave his name to Bach’s Goldberg Variations seems to be the author of the C major Sonata posing as BWV 1037 – a delicious confection for two violins in which melismatic swirls of melody decorate fugal and danceinspired movements.

The six instrumentalists of this international ensemble play with a true entente cordiale, exchanging gracious dialogues and animated conversations. Balance, ensemble and intonation are beautifully judged, and the sound is seductively transparent. In short, fine inauthentic Bach, played in fine authentic style. Kate Bolton-Porciatti PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★

At one level ‘Tecchler’s Cello’ is about an instrument and the three works its current custodian Guy Johnston commissioned for its tercentenary. The project also has elements of an autobiography whose narrative accounts for a distinctly singular approach to programming.

Improbably, most of the segues just about work, even if the Respighi Adagio con variazioni proves something of a jolt after Charlotte Bray’s bracing Perseus. Yet with the exception of Beethoven’s Ghost Trio – despatched with a visceral, no-holds-barred brio – the specially commissioned pieces far outshine the autobiographical interlopers.

The Beethoven is linked with the Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival Johnston established in 2012, while a cello-embroidered O Magnum Mysterium by Gjeilo recalls his time as a chorister at King’s College Cambridge. Barrière’s amiable Sonata for Two Cellos in G major unites him with fellow BBC Young Musician of the Year Sheku Kanneh-Mason. It’s a delectably nuanced performance, capped by a finale brimming with frothy filigree delight.

Respighi brings the Tecchler’s journey full circle to its birthplace in Rome, but even Johnston can’t disguise the piece’s shortcomings.

However, he meets the challenges of the ‘newbies’ magnificently.

Immaculate intonation is combined with an expressive palette ranging from warm fullness of tone in David Matthews’s Ein Celloleben, an ingenious historical conspectus, to the spectral, half-whispered trills at the end of Mark Simpson’s Un Regalo, and an interpretive acuity that illuminates the obsessive elements of Bray’s darkly brooding Perseus. Paul Riley PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

CONCERTS & EVENTS SPRING 17/18

The Sixteen Sun 18 February, 7.30pm Colin Currie Group Sat 10 March, 7.30pm Paul Lewis Sun 18 March, 3pm Courtney Pine Thu 12 April, 7.30pm Bernstein at 100: BBC Symphony Orchestra Sat 5 May, 7.30pm

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Academy of Ancient Music & Nicola Benedetti Mon 28 May, 7.30pm

Instrumental INSTRUMENTAL CHOICE

Revelatory Brahms from another age Michael Church welcomes the long-overdue release of recordings by a great but neglected Russian pianist Lyricism and power: Akopian-Tamarina brings out Brahms’s colours

Brahms

time. And it’s a revelation: I’ve never heard Brahms’s Handel Variations played like this. The music seems to come from a distant place and time, but it draws Nelly Akopian Tamarina (piano) us in with the most heart-warming immediacy. It’s Pentatone PTC 5186 677 (rec. 1995-96) 63:38 mins partly the singing line and the pearlised glow she puts on the notes, and partly the fact that she lets each Born in 1944, the Russian pianist Nelly Akopianvariation unfold in a natural and unhurried way, Tamarina won the gold medal in the Zwickau as though she and we have all the time in the world.

Robert Schumann competition at 19; she was one When the score calls for lyricism of the last students of Alexander Goldenweiser, and the first of Her Handel Variations she finds a caressing tone, and it demands assertiveness she’s Dmitri Bashkirov. As a soloist of draws us in with heart- when absolutely there, but the drama is the Moscow State Philharmonic warming immediacy restrained until the towering fugue she was one of the bright hopes at the close. of Soviet pianism, but her sister Her playing of the Ballades (recorded 1995-96), married a Jew and emigrated to the West. As a result, with their reflection of Schumann’s influence Akopian-Tamarina’s career was blocked by the censors, preventing her from recording or performing writ large, is intensely poetic, amply justifying the analogy with the seasons which she draws in for more than a decade; she turned to painting her liner-note. instead. Moving to the West, she carved out a niche as a recitalist and won a devoted following, but her PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ discography has remained very small. Her celebrated RECORDING ★★★★ recording of Chopin’s Preludes, made in 1967, is a Hear extracts from this recording and the rest of reminder of what might have been. this month’s choices on the BBC Music Magazine This recording of her Brahms was made at Snape website at www.classical-music.com Maltings in 1995, but is only now released for the first

ALAMY

Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel; 4 Ballades, Op. 10

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JS Bach Solo Violin Sonata No. 3 in C, BWV 1005; Partita No. 1 in B minor, BWV 1002

Ysaÿe Solo Violin Sonatas Nos 4 & 6 Antje Weithaas (violin) Avi 8553381 71:40 mins

The opening Adagio of the C major Sonata (No. 3) is arguably the thorniest movement of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for a violinist to unravel technically and make musical sense of. What on paper is an Italianate movement of gently pulsating legato is seemingly undermined at nearly every turn

by Bach’s crossed-string harmonic accompaniment – no wonder well-meaning researchers came up with the ‘Bach bow’ in an effort to iron-out the rough edges. By gently cushioning her bow strokes and sustaining double-stops with infinite subtlety, Antje Weithaas avoids the ‘snatched’ effect familiar from even the most distinguished accounts of this extraordinary movement. The tricky fugue that follows is no less pliant in its multiple voicings, exchanging the pseudo-contrapuntal thrust of traditional readings for an exultant sense of wonder that spills over into the ‘double’ variations of the B minor Partita (No. 1).

Weithaas’s bewitching ability to make the violin ‘sing’ whatever the technical pressures involved reaches its apex in Ysaÿe’s one-movement Sixth Sonata. Even the most hairraising sequences of upward and downward double-stopping sound delectably seductive here.

The Fourth Sonata is dedicated to Kreisler, a fact that many players appear to ride roughshod over, whereas Weithaas embraces the opening Allemande with a golden cantabile that imbues every phrase with warm sensuality. The gentle pizzicatos that frame the contrapuntal intricacies of the central Sarabande sound unerringly like a mistress standing at her spinet in Weithaas’s inspired reading, and she somehow finds time to shape the finale’s restless undulations with a series of exquisite temporal inflections. Julian Haylock PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★

Instrumental Reviews Debussy Préludes, Books 1 & 2; l’Isle joyeuse Angela Brownridge (piano) Challenge CC 72727 (hybrid CD/SACD) 77:18 mins

‘One must forget the piano has hammers’.

Debussy’s advice to pianists applies to the kind of touch needed to play his music. That mysterious relationship between the way each finger depresses each piano key and the effect that has on the complex mechanics of the hammer is naturally important, especially when concerning the remarkable variety of the two books of Préludes. Angela Brownridge has moments that could provide a masterclass with careful control of nuance, the chords in ‘Canope’ seemingly emerging without attack.

Yet the hammers are all-toopresent, and not simply due to some hard-edged playing, such as the higher bells of ‘La cathédrale engloutie’. Keeping rhythm supple is as important as touch, and Brownridge, though hardly metronomic, lacks the natural elasticity of the best interpreters.

‘Danseuses de Delphes’ is mannered, the fairies trip over their feet in ‘Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses’, and the chords in ‘Les tierces alternées’ periodically judder into each other like trucks being shunted. Her sometimes generous use of the pedal and the decidedly resonant sound, whether in stereo or surround, do little to temper the sense of Brownridge’s undoubted virtues shining only intermittently. There are enjoyable things here, but there are more compelling recent versions such as Francesco Piemontesi’s accounts (Naïve). Christopher Dingle PERFORMANCE ★★ RECORDING ★★★

Howells

fancied himself to be composing directly onto Pergolesi’s score, Howells’s manuscript paper was metaphorically spread over the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. The opening number, ‘Lambert’s Fireside’, seems to be dreaming its way back into a Tudor world before what follows can reinvent that world in Howells’s own image.

Ravel was underwhelmed. Perusing a copy, all he could venture to the young composer was ‘well it’s printed nicely’! Undeterred, a dozen years later work began on two follow-up volumes entitled Howells’s Clavichord, both straying much further from the Elizabethan blandishments of the first set.

Although Howells sanctioned the use of piano as an alternative (presumably on practical grounds), there’s no doubt that the clavichord brings us closer to the time-travelling wellspring of his imagination – he was proud of Vaughan Williams’s characterisation of him as ‘the reincarnation of one of the lesser Tudor luminaries’! – and these handsomely produced discs represent the first complete recording to engage with the instrument. Sharing the loot between three well-chosen specimens, Julian Perkins tackles the 32 miniatures with panache and empathy to spare.

What fulsome tones he draws out of the Pavane named for Vaughan Williams; an invigorating tally-ho spurs on ‘Berkeley’s Hunt’; and a wry nod to William Walton in Coronation best bib and tucker rounds things off with an abracadabra of a celebratory flourish. Against all the odds: hurrah for Howells! Paul Riley PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Komitas Seven Songs; Msho Shoror; Seven Dances; Pieces for Children; Toghik

Lambert’s Clavichord; Howells’s Clavichord

Lusine Grigoryan (piano)

Julian Perkins (clavichord)

Very few great composers had so tragic a life, or left behind such a tiny oeuvre, but Komitas (1869-1935) goes on making waves.

This latest Komitas album was recorded during the same sessions as the CD by Levon Eskenian and the Gurdjieff Ensemble two

Prima Facie PFCD 065-66 80:27 mins (2 discs)

How to describe Lambert’s Clavichord?

Pastiche won’t cover it (even if there are moments that run it close). Perhaps, like the Stravinsky of Pulcinella who

ECM 481 2556 43:55 mins

Enigmatic figure: pianist-composer Charles Alkan

From the archives

Andrew McGregor explores the legacy of a bafflingly overlooked pianist-composer from the Romantic era ‘Charles Valentin Alkan has just died. It was necessary for him to die in order to suspect his existence’. So read an obituary notice 130 years ago for one of the greatest pianist-composers of his, or probably any, age. Yet while the music of his great friends Liszt and Chopin is celebrated, recorded and played incessantly, Alkan remains specialist territory. Why? Sample Alkan’s Op. 15 Trois Morçeaux, dedicated to Liszt (and detested by Schumann). The first begins like a Chopin Nocturne, but evolves into something Alkan evangelist Ronald Smith commented might have been designed for an extinct race of seven-fingered pianists. Then try the Op. 76 Grandes Etudes, studies for right and left hand that leave listeners (and most mortal pianists) open-mouthed at the inhuman challenges and complexity. The technical demands sometimes obscure the originality, ingenuity and sheer beauty of the music itself, and not everyone who plays Alkan is able to distil it.

Fortunately the main pianist in this Alkan Edition (Brilliant Classics 95568; 13 CDs) is Vincenzo Maltempo; the recordings he made (originally for Piano Classics) are fine, and the big works like Alkan’s astonishing Grande Sonate (written before Liszt’s) and the Symphony for Solo Piano come off well. Mark Viner’s account of the Op. 35 Etudes is another highpoint, as is Kevin Bowyer’s traversal of Alkan’s organ music in Salisbury Cathedral. The disc of chamber music (licensed from Naxos) is good to have, as are Alkan’s three early, simpler chamber concertos from pianist Giovanni Bellucci with Italian orchestra. The other pianists here are less assured. Laurent Martin in Alkan’s Esquisses isn’t as fluent or colourful as Steven Osborne, and the novelty of hearing Alkan on period pianos is undermined by playing and recording.

Two major pluses are the excellent contextual essay and the budget price. It’s a steal. If there’s an Alkan-shaped hole in your life, start here, then carry on with Smith, Osborne and Marc-André Hamelin. But do start – Alkan really deserves our attention.

Andrew McGregor is the presenter of Radio 3’s Record Review, broadcast each Saturday morning from 9am until 12.15pm BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Instrumental Reviews Reissues Reviewed by Claire Jackson

WWW.ARMENOPHILE.COM

Sviatoslav Richter Works by Franck, Grieg and Ravel SWR Classic SWR19409CD (1994) 77:34 mins Captured at the Schwetzingen Festival in 1994, this remastered recital recording doesn’t show reluctant recordee Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997) at his best, with the notable exception of the effervescent Miroirs. ★★ Beethoven Piano Sonatas Nos 7, 21 & 32 Orfeo C939171B (1970) 80:15 mins Another remastered concert recording, this time from 27-year-old Daniel Barenboim at the Salzburg Festival in 1970 – fully a world-class pianist, as this special performance reveals. ★★★★ Bach/Busoni Chaconne Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 3 Orfeo C943171B 39:21 mins (1965) Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s Bach/Busoni Chaconne is dispatched with angular dispassion on this second Salzburg Festival concert recording. The similarly cool attention to detail in the Beethoven is tempered by a playful scherzo. ★★★ The Edison Recordings Works by Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Tausig and Mozart Naxos Historical 8.111407 (1919) 71:46 mins These archival gems are a must listen. Sergei Rachmaninov’s brilliance cuts through the constant crackle on these fledgling Edison recordings; the background fIzz becomes a comfort rather than an irritant. ★★★★

years ago, and is a companion to it. Komitas arranged traditional Armenian songs and dances for piano, Eskenian rearranged them for the folk instruments on which Komitas would originally have heard them; now Eskenian’s wife Lusine Grigoryan performs them in Komitas’s original piano arrangements.

Piano music seldom comes so bare and unadorned: the usual recipe is a single-note melody in the right hand with a single-note accompaniment in the bass. But look at the dates of composition: the Seven Songs were composed in Constantinople in 1911, when Komitas and his Armenian compatriots were starting to feel the lash of anti-Christian prejudice; the Pieces for Children were mostly composed in 1915, as the Genocide which would destroy Komitas’s sanity was getting into gear. Behind these artless-seeming pieces lie intimations of terror to come, and also a remembered realm of rustic happiness.

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The soundworld of a grand piano could not be further removed from village music making, but with judicious use of staccato and pedalling Lusine Grigoryan manages to suggest the original folk instruments: the duduk oboe, the zurna trumpet, the tar lute, and the daf drum. The tripping, swaying or sinuouslycurving syncopated dance rhythms are charmingly evoked; the pervasive modal scale works its own demure magic. As Paul Griffiths observes in his liner note, this is a torn page waiting to be sewn back into music history.

Michael Church PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★

Here’s a dark, wintry vision for sure (with suitably snowy cover), and the closeness of Schubert’s A minor Sonata to the aesthetic of Winterreise is abundantly clear in Lucas Debargue’s thoughtful, profoundly sensitive interpretation.

He delves into Schubert’s and Szymanowski’s variously tortured souls and teases out, with velvety tone and eloquent phrasing, nuances that bring fresh insights and carry us deep below the surface. Risks abound, but they’re in the service of the music’s spirit and they pay off. For instance, tempos teeter on the edge of excess: the A minor first movement is rather slow, the finale rather fast – but it’s never too much and the progression of pace across the Sonata certainly convinces.

Pairing D784, one of the blackest of the Schubert sonatas, with one of the supposedly sunniest, D664, Debargue leaves no doubt of the latter’s illusory nature: in his hands, its translucent, longing-for-spring atmosphere can seem (appropriately) even more tragic than the icy winds of the A minor work. His touch is as singing and tender as Schubert could hope for – harsh moments arrive only if the music is harsh too.

Szymanowski’s rarely-performed Second Sonata, written in 1911, is a suitably anguished conclusion (though admittedly, a third A-based piece can start to be a little wearing on the ear). Debargue deftly carves a path through the composer’s lavish harmonic forest, with admirably vivid and powerfully articulated results. Recorded sound is excellent, close, warm and clear. Jessica Duchen PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★

Sibelius Piano Works, Vol. 2: Piano Sonata in F, Op. 12; Four Lyric Pieces, Op. 74; Five Characteristic Impressions, Op. 103; Six Bagatelles, Op. 97; Piano Sonatinas, Op. 67 Nos 1-3; Kuolema, Op. 44 Joseph Tong (piano) Quartz QTZ 2123 73:22 mins

Schubert Piano Sonatas: No. 13 in A, D664; No. 14 in A minor, D784

Szymanowski Piano Sonata No. 2 Lucas Debargue (piano) Sony 88985465632 65:34 mins

If you want to investigate Sibelius’s fascinating and all too rarely heard body of piano music, there are three options. First, the complete works

on Naxos, played by Håvard Gimse; second, a selection of selections, in the exquisite recent disc by Gimse’s fellow Norwegian Leif Ove Andsnes (on Sony, reviewed December 2017); and lastly, the selections of complete opus numbers that we have here from Joseph Tong. And for all Andsnes’s careful sifting, the top works – the tree and flower pieces of Op. 75 and 85 respectively, found on Tong’s Volume 1 set – merit hearing in sequence. Here, the bright E major Sonatina No. 2 is evocatively flanked by its more introspective companions (Nos 1 in F sharp minor and 3 in B flat minor), while the Op. 97 Bagatelles and Op. 74 Lyric Pieces offer perfect, quirky contrasts.

Unfortunately dynamic range and rapid mood changes aren’t best served by Tong’s mezzo-forte-toforte mode. Always clear, he misses some of the nuances and fails to fly.

The loud, chordal conventions of the Five Characteristic Impressions come off least happily, and the Valse Triste transcription never leaves the ground.

I was delighted, though, to hear Tong contradict the booklet note for the Andsnes release, which proclaims that the early (1893) F major Sonata is a ‘poor standard bearer’ for Sibelius’s piano-mastery (or perceived lack of it). True, the first movement has some ungainly chromatics in the left hand, but the second is mesmerising in its evocation of the kantele or five-stringed Finnish zither, and the third gives us a joyous piano-bound alternative to Lemminkäinen’s homecoming.

Yes, I’d like to hear the Andantino and the Vivacissimo orchestrated, but they’re never unrewarding for the pianist. David Nice PERFORMANCE ★★★ RECORDING ★★★★

Telemann Twelve Fantasias for solo flute Ashley Solomon (flute) Channel Classics CCS 40617 58:22 mins

Telemann published his 12 Fantasias for solo flute in either 1732 or 1733. They are inventive and idiomatic in no small part owing to the composer’s practical performance knowledge of the instrument for which

Instrumental Reviews he was writing. As Telemann himself remarked in one of his autobiographical sketches he had become at an early age conversant with a wide range of instruments including the transverse flute.

Stylistic eclecticism was a distinctive feature of music by German composers of the mid to late Baroque. Among these richly varied Telemann pieces Italian and French styles – and that pleasing blend of the two which the composer Quantz later termed the mixed or German style – effortlessly share in the dialogue.

Distinctively French, for instance, are the opening dotted ‘Alla Francese’ rhythms of Fantasia 7.

While these Fantasias are well represented on record not all competitors realise the element of fantasy with such intuitive and spontaneous flair as flautist Ashley Solomon. He rings the changes between two flutes that are almost contemporaneous with the music, and a third which is a modern copy of an instrument from Telemann’s own time.

Channel Classics’s recorded sound is sympathetic and Solomon’s accompanying essay is thoughtful and informative. Just occasionally I was aware of very small intonation discrepancies but they did nothing to diminish my enjoyment of stylish

BACKGROUND TO…

Komitas (1869-1935) Born Soghomon Soghomonian in Küthaya in Turkey and orphaned by the age of 12, Komitas was taken to the Gevorgian Seminary in Vagharshapat to be a chorister. In 1894 he was made a vardapet (archimandrite), and took the name Komitas after a seventh-century Armenian hymn writer. He went first to Tiflis to study music theory, then to study in Berlin (1896-99)). An A expert on Armenian folk music, he collected over 3,000 pieces, somee of which he reworked iin his own compositions. Komitas moved to Constantiinople in 1910, but lost hiss sanity during the notorious Armeniann genocide that took place in 1915.

and sympathetic playing.

Nicholas Anderson PERFORMANCE RECORDING

★★★ ★★★

Midnight at St Etienne du Mont Briggs: Le tombeau de Duruflé; Duruflé: Suite Op. 5; Tournemire: Improvisation sur le Te Deum (arr. Duruflé); Vierne: Suite No. 3, Op. 54 – IV: ‘Fantômes’; Symphonie No. 5 in A minor, Op. 47 – V: Final; Symphonie No. 6, Op. 59 – III: Scherzo Joseph Nolan (organ) Signum SIGCD470 78:35 mins

I continue to be puzzled by Louis Vierne. There are his songs, many of them elegant with imaginative but logical harmonies, there is his magnificent Piano Quintet, dedicated to the memory of his son killed in the First World War at the age of 17... and then there are his organ works. I get the impression that much of these – and certainly the three pieces included here – stem from a different part of his brain: one that evades anything too comfortable to the ear, that is driven largely by his virtuosic fingers, and that delights in chromatic complexity for its own sake (one 12-bar passage from the Fifth Symphony Finale contains no fewer than 215 accidentals). I do find all three pieces hard going and some louder moments are just a jumble.

Duruflé’s transcription from a disc of Tournemire improvising on the plainsong Te Deum offers more acceptable fare, if nothing startling, while David Briggs’s memorial to Duruflé is nicely put together and allows Joseph Nolan to find some attractive sounds; but I should point out that the tune of ‘Adeste fideles’ (and not ‘fidelis’ as printed here)) is thought to derive from the 17th centtury at the earliest and is nothing to do with plainsong.

Duruflé’s Suite is by some way the best work w on the disc and, although the composer came to dislike the final ‘Toccata’ (eeven his wife wasn’t allowed tto practise it in his hearing), N Nolan brings it off with all th he virtuosity and verve one co ould ask for. Roger Nichols PE ERFORMANCE ★★★★ RE ECORDING ★★★

Brief notes Our collection of 25 further reviews, including several impressive debut discs Albéniz Piano music Miguel Angel R Laiz (piano) Naxos 8.573779

There’s a beautiful lyricism to Albéniz’s piano writing and more than a hint of Chopin (including a charming portrait of Mallorca where the Polish composer spent some time). (OC) ★★★ JS Bach The Art of Fugue Accademia Bizantina/Ottavio Dantone Decca 483 2329

We will forever argue over the scoring of Bach’s final fugal utterances. Dantone directs performances on harpsichord, chamber organ and string ensemble in all combinations.

Illuminating. (OC) ★★★★ Beethoven Piano Sonatas Nos 28 & 30; Bagatelles, Opp. 119 & 126

Bizet Carmen and L’Arlesienne Suites

Mathieu Piano Concerto No. 3 Gershwin An American in Paris

R Strauss Violin Concerto; Aus Italien

Barcelona Symphony Orchestra/Pablo González Naxos 8.573546

Alain Lefèvre (piano); Buffalo Phil/ JoAnn Falletta Analekta AN29299

Kowalski (violin); Orchestra della Svizzera italiana/Poschner CPO 5551262

An aptly theatrical performance of the suite from Bizet’s most renowned work. The Barcelona musicians’ playing is richly textured. (FP) ★★★★

Canadian André Mathieu clearly adored the music of Poulenc, Ravel and Rachmaninov if this reconstructed concerto is anything to go by. Bewitching. (OC) ★★★★

Strauss penned his violin concerto while he was a teenager, and his Italy-inspired tone poem when he was 22. Engaging performances. (RF) ★★★

Brahms Piano Trio in B; Hungarian Dance No. 6 (arr. L Ries) Dvořák Piano Trio ‘Dumky’

Ponniah Marvellous Light

Thompson Symphony No. 2; plus works by Barber and S Adams

The Z.E.N. Trio

A showcase of Ben Ponniah’s sacred music, including three sets of anthems and the Requiem in Blue. He’s a name to watch. Sarah MacDonald draws radiant sound from her choir. (RF) ★★★★

Deutsche Grammophon 481 6292 70.43

Here’s the auspicious debut from a trio of BBC New Generation Artists. Z.E.N. stands for the musicians’ initials – and their philosophy.

Vivid playing. (RF) ★★★★

Selwyn College Choir/MacDonald Regent REGCD495

National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic/Ross Naxos 8.559822

Three American symphonic works of contrasting character, heard in powerful performances. Samuel Adams’s atmospheric Drift and Providence is a worthwhile discovery. (JP) ★★★★

Pugnani Violin concertos

Ishay Shaer (piano)

Enescu Pièces Impromptues; Suite No. 2; Regrets

Orchid Classics ORC100076

Sina Kloke (piano)

An accomplished debut CD from Israeli pianist Ishay Shaer. Thoughtful accounts of two late sonatas sandwich two groups of lively Bagatelles. (RF) ★★★★

MDG MDG 904 2039-6

Sina Kloke gives considered, clean and understated performances of George Enescu’s expressive Piano Suites Nos 2 and 3 (Pièces impromptues). (FP) ★★★★

Roberto Noferini (violin); Orchestra Nuove Assonanze/Alan Freiles Magnatta Tactus TC731601

Neither the Classical elegance of Pugnani nor the earnestness of the soloist can, alas, prevent the scruffy orchestral playing and bathroom acoustic from dragging this into two-star territory. (JP) ★★

Wieniawski Violin Concerto No. 2 Bruch Scottish Fantasy Wawrowski (violin); Stuttgart Phil/ Daniel Raiskin Warner 9029580844

The rich-toned Wawrowski meets the virtuoso challenges of Wieniawski with aplomb, but his Bruch sounds just a little too polished. (JP) ★★★★

Beethoven Piano trios Oliver Schnyder Trio

Gibbons Fancies for the viols

Rosauro Percussion concertos

Sony Classical 88985445822

L’Acheron/Francois Joubert-Caillet

There is a good deal of wit and frivolity in Beethoven’s Trios which the Schnyders tackle with clean, warm grace, although a smidge more weight would be welcome in places.

(OC) ★★★★

Ricercar RIC 384

Ney Rosauro, Roland Härtner (percussion); Pforzheim Chamber Orchestra/Timo Handschuh

Bernstein Serenade Haydn Violin Concerto in C

GETTY

Kolja Blacher (violin); Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn

The long, intricate lines of Gibbons’s sumptuous music for viols are stunningly rendered. The playing is alive to subtle phrasings and imitative counterpoint.

(OC) ★★★★ Joubert St Mark Passion; Missa Wellensis; Locus iste

Profil Hänssler PH17070

The Core-Tet Project Improvisations Evelyn Glennie (percussion), Jon Hemmersam (guitar, Szilard Mezei (viola), Michael Jefry Stevens (piano)

Percussion concertos are fairly rare beasts, but don’t set your expectations too high – composer Rosauro’s melodic, tonal style often strays towards the twee. It’s quite an amiable listen, though. (JP) ★★★

Naxos 8.573804

Glennie’s ensemble brings global musical traditions together in its debut disc – which is wholly improvised.

It’s an exciting, varied listen.

(FP) ★★★★

Coviello Classics COV91711

Soloists; Wells Cathedral Choir/ Matthew Owens Resonus RES10198

Seitz Concertos for violin and piano Nos 1-5 Hyejin Chung (violin),

Frozen Time Works by Cage, Hosokawa and Susteck

An imaginative pairing brings together Bernstein’s animated philosophical debate between soloist and orchestra with Haydn’s more genial discussion.

Blacher sparkles. (JP) ★★★★

Exemplary singing in this disc marking John Joubert’s 90th birthday. JS Bach’s music is threaded through the St Mark Passion; the Missa Wellensis is an engaging companion. (RF) ★★★★

Warren Lee (piano) Naxos 8.573801

Susteck (organ) Wergo WER73682

I’m not sure Seitz’s third-rate concertos warrant a whole disc, but there we are.

Chung and Lee give these amateurish works a decent outing. (OC) ★★★

A dynamic programme, with improvisations and pieces inspired by chance. All four works push the instrument to its limits. (FP) ★★★★

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Into Silence Works by Vasks, Pärt, Górecki and Pelecis

The month in box-sets

Tamara-Anna Cislowska (piano); Tasmanian Symphony/Fritzsch ABC Classics ABC 481 6295

The ‘chillax’-style packaging sells this short. While moments such as Vasks’s Balta ainava do have a mesmeric quality, Górecki’s Piano Concerto and Pärt’s Passacaglia are livelier. (JP) ★★★★

Chilean great: the pianist Claudio Arrau in 1961

Intuition Works by Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Dvořák, Elgar et al Capuçon, Ducros; Paris Chamber Orchestra/Boyd Erato 9029588395

Gautier Capuçon sheds fresh light on popular classics, and performs newer pieces by Sollima and Ducros with virtuosity and lyricism. (FP) ★★★★ Last Leaf Nordic and other folk tunes arr. Danish String Quartet Danish String Quartet ECM 481 5746

This is the gorgeous follow-up album to the 2014 Wood Works disc. The four Scandinavians offer their own stylish arrangements of Nordic folk music – plus a couple of their own tunes. (RF) ★★★★ The Voice of the Trumpet Works

by Vivaldi, Gershwin, Rossini et al Lucienne Renaudin Vary (trumpet) et al; Orchestre de Lille/Rizzi Brignoli Warner 9029588832

The young trumpeter chooses a variety of opera arias, songs and jazz standards for her debut. Vibrant orchestral playing, though the trumpet could be crisper. (FP) ★★★ 3 x 3 Piano Trios by Ravel, Shostakovich and Weinberg Lukas Geniušas (piano), Aylen Pritchin (violin), Alexander Buzlov (cello) Melodiya MEL CD 10 02491

The Ravel and Shostakovich might be regular trio fare, but it’s not so often that Weinberg’s intriguing 1945 Trio gets an outing.

Gutsy live performances.

(RF) ★★★★ Reviewers : Oliver Condy (OC), Rebecca Franks (RF), Freya Parr (FP), Jeremy Pound (JP)

Spotlight on pianists past and present A look at the finest historic recitals and unmissable composer portraits Jonas in concert isn’t known. The Expect plenty of Debussy this three recitals gathered in a set year, the centenary of the from SWR Music (SWR19054CD; French composer’s death. His 5 CDs) all date from later – piano works are being recorded Ludwigsburg in 1954 and 1960 afresh by many artists, but for (both released for the first time) a complete set available now and Schwetzingen in 1963. They turn to Alain Planès (Harmonia offer a pianistic feast, including Mundi HMX 2958209.13). He Debussy, Chopin and Arrau’s recorded these five discs over beloved Beethoven. a decade from 1997-2007 on We jump forward now to the two historical pianos (Blüthner music of Terry Riley, showcased and Bechstein) and a modern Alain Planès’s set of by pianist Sarah Cahill. (Irritable Steinway. Well worth exploring.

Debussy piano works Hedgehog IHM 020M; 4 CDs).

Chopin was the cornerstone of pianist Maryla Jonas’s is well worth exploring ‘Terry’s piano music feels satisfying in the hands, the repertoire, and three of the way Ravel or Brahms feels; four discs she recorded feature everything fits perfectly,’ explains Cahill, who his music – united here for the first time (Sony regularly works with the composer. As well as 8898439182). Her story is remarkable. Born in Riley’s solo and four-hand piano works, the set Poland in 1911, she was a child prodigy and includes two discs of pieces commissioned to studied with Paderewski. She escaped the mark the American minimalist’s 80th birthday.

Nazis by walking from Warsaw to the Brazilian There’s more contemporary music on embassy in Berlin, and then travelling to Rio de a compilation from the superb Estonian Janeiro. Jonas made her Carnegie Hall debut Philharmonic Chamber Choir and conductor in 1946, but it was poorly attended. However, word got round of her brilliance, and her second Paul Hillier (Harmonia Mundi HMX 2908795; 3 CDs). No Riley, but instead a look at Baltic recital there just six weeks later was sold out. composers, including works by Rautavaara, Claudio Arrau moved to New York in 1941, Tormis, Pärt, Vasks, Grigorjeva and Saariaho. though whether the Chilean pianist heard BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Jazz Roger Thomas picks out six of the best new jazz releases to enjoy this month February round-up

JAZZ CHOICE

Running deep Henry Lowther’s band Still Waters releases a second album after a 20-year pause National treasure: Henry Lowther, a giant of British jazz

Henry Lowther’s Still Waters Can’t Believe, Won’t Believe Henry Lowther (trumpet & flugelhorn), Pete Hurt (tenor sax), Barry Green (piano), Dave Green (double bass), Paul Clarvis (drums)

MONIKA JAKUBOWSKA, GETTY

Village Life 171013VL 46:56 mins

Trumpeter Henry Lowther has been a creative mainstay of British jazz for half a century and he’s as happy playing mainstream standards as he is duetting with a computer musician in free improvisation. He’s the man who reassured Miles Davis (Dave Holland introduced them) that yes, playing jazz trumpet in a rock context was perfectly possible.

Now, a couple of decades since 1997’s ID, Lowther’s band Still Waters, formed to explore his compositional interests, has released a new album of gorgeous, limpid tunes that make for thoroughly seductive listening. This impeccably recorded music is by turns playful, elegant and ingenious, with Lowther’s legendary warm, rich tone very much to the fore. The band is highly empathetic, with saxophonist Pete Hurt as the perfect fellow frontman and drummer Paul Clarvis knowing exactly when to give the music a cheeky prod. One to cherish. ★★★★★

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It’s one of those months when the assorted styles of music that coexist under the jazz umbrella seem more diverse than ever, a fact that’s always worthy of celebration. As it happens, the idea of celebration also figures directly in Roscoe Mitchell’s Bells for the South Side, a two-disc set of 12 gnarly trio compositions presented at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in honour of the AACM (the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) and Mitchell’s 71st birthday.

The formal constraints imposed by the ensemble size and instrumental make-up throw the works themselves into sharp relief, with the unique mix of intuition and intellect that typifies the hardcore Chicago avant-garde being compellingly deployed here by a pool of musicians that includes Hugh Ragin and William Winant. Good stuff.

(ECM 571 1952 ★★★★★) Fellow saxophonist David Murray is of the generation that followed Mitchell’s but he revives and updates a tradition that predates both of them by making the performance poetry of Saul Williams central to Blues for Memo. Williams moves between heartfelt, post-rap declamatory recitation and expressive singing, conveying a mixture of the surreal and the lucidly political with both conviction and musical sensibility.

Murray’s Infinity Quartet plus guests provide a perfectly judged musical context, as both counterpart and background. (Motéma Music 256) ★★★★★) Making the leap to the vocal style of Stacey Kent from that of Williams is perhaps a contrived link too far, but I Know I Dream: The Orchestral Sessions is provocative in its own way. This may be a surprising contention, but intimate balladeering backed by lush, expertly crafted orchestral

arrangements isn’t really an obvious choice for her precise diction and no-nonsense vocal style. There’s also the artificial balancing of a single voice with an orchestra that’s more than 50 strong, resulting – as it always does – in a production statement that would be nearimpossible to achieve in the real world. All that aside, it works well enough on its own admittedly lavish terms, and fans will love it (Sony/Okeh 88985462882 ★★★★) Finally, two recordings by pianists that are also poles apart from each other. Bugge Wesseltoft returns to the theme of seasonal reflection that he began in 1997 with his first disc for ACT. Everybody Loves Angels is a further beguiling mixture of delicate tunes, many of which have been culled from the classic poprock catalogue but subjected to just enough subtle jazz-friendly tinkering – a chord substitution here, a tasteful section of redevelopment there – to ensure that the results are tranquil but never boring. It’s really rather good.

(ACT 9847-2 ★★★★) Of course, not everyone needs tranquillity, in which case The Influencing Machine, from pianist Elliott Galvin will serve you well. A hyper-driven cocktail of crashy piano chords and electronic interventions that swirls around the listener with impetus added by a rhythm section of Tom McCredie (bass and guitar) and Corrie Dick (drums and percussion), this is angsty neo-expressionist stuff that you’ll either love or be baffled by, but it’s executed with the kind of no-holds-barred conviction that is sure to energise the more robust breed of listener. The title has an extraordinary origin story that I won’t spoil by repeating here.

(Edition Records EDN1103 (CD), EDNLP1103 (LP) ★★★★)

Fast and furious: Art Blakey, leader of The Jazz Messengers

From the archives

BACK ISSUES

DECEMBER 2017

CHRISTMAS 2017

JANUARY 2018

Can new light be shed on Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto?

Isabelle Faust tells us how she revitalised a Romantic masterpiece.

Your complete guide to Radio 3’s Spirit of Bach season, with details of all the programming, plus special features on the Baroque master.

Join us to celebrate the centenary of the great US conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, with a look at his Anniversaries.

Geoffrey Smith surveys two legendary drummers of the hard bop era, Art Blakey and Max Roach

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From the very beginning, one of the iconic images of jazz has been the drummer attacking his kit in a creative frenzy, his magnetic athleticism the visual counterpart of the music’s energy.

Unfortunately, that popular charisma has often overshadowed the true essence of jazz percussion and the contribution of its best players. Which is why a pair of Avid compilations is particularly welcome, showcasing the achievement of two drum giants, as collaborators and leaders.

A byword for commitment, conviction and relentless swing, Art Blakey was a mentor to two generations of talent through the unstoppable juggernaut of his Jazz Messengers. Inspired by the leader’s example and propelled by the thunder of his whooshing rolls, counter-rhythms and cymbal crashes, Blakey’s men absorbed the message of his fierce dedication to jazz and their place in it. Avid’s Four Classic Albums (Second Set) (Avid AMSC 1270) offers a Blakey feast from 1959-61, including Moanin’, with its funky title track and several originals by tenorist Benny Golson, plus the fiery trumpet of Lee Morgan. Replacing Golson on The Big Beat and A Night in Tunisia is rising star Wayne Shorter, while Mosaic features Freddie Hubbard on trumpet and adds Curtis Fuller on trombone, bringing more lustre to the Blakey brand.

Just as passionate as Blakey, but more varied and subtle, was Max Roach. The fluency and complexity of his playing defined bebop drumming, setting a new standard for musicality, and the same qualities inform the groups he leads on his Four Classic Albums (Avid AMSC 1269). Recorded 1959-62, they display Roach’s characteristic mix of musical ambition and social consciousness. Quiet as it’s Kept is a quintet session without piano, including a foray into 5/4 time, while We Insist! – Freedom Now Suite denounces racial discrimination with the likes of Eric Dolphy, Coleman Hawkins and singer Abbey Lincoln. Percussion Bitter Sweet and It’s Time reflect his determination never ‘to play anything that does not have social significance’, making his finely tuned art a unique expressive voice.

■ We’re sorry, but issues of BBC Music published more than 12 months ago are no longer available.

Geoffrey Smith explores jazz’s greatest players and their music in Geoffrey Smith’s Jazz, a weekly programme broadcast on Saturdays 12am-1am

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Books Our critics cast their eyes over this month’s selection of books on classical music performance, while oboist Melinda Maxwell presents an intriguing ‘nuts and bolts’ discussion of Holt’s works for her instrument, charting the frustrations and delights of performing such complicated music: ‘its essence has filtered into my consciousness.

It has taught me to redefine my instrument.’ With a generous array of colour-plates and numerous musical examples, the book is a richly-textured resource.

Kate Wakeling ★★★★

The Pro Arte Quartet: A Century of Musical Adventure John W Barker University of Rochester Press ISBN 978-1-58-46-906-7 366pp (hb) £25 rrp

In this detailed account of the Pro Arte Quartet’s 100-year existence, the generous appendices are almost worth the cover price alone.

There’s a complete discography (both commercial and unofficial), exhaustive listings of commissions, dedications, premieres, and the 150 submissions made in response to a mid-1980s invitation for new chamber music pieces (including works by Babbitt, Cage, Cowell and Crumb). Not to mention synopses of fictional works inspired by the quartet (notably viola player Bernard Milofsky’s The Fiddlers Four), and clarification regarding the question of whether Benny Goodman performed Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet with them in the mid-1930s (he didn’t) and went on to record it (he walked out of the sessions).

The main text is a meticulously researched chronology, tracing the main phases of the quartet’s existence, changes in personnel (remarkably there have been only four different violists), interpretative profile, repertoire, concert appearances and recordings. Some may find the attention to detail overwhelming, but for quartet devotees this is something of a must.

Julian Haylock ★★★★

Counterpoints: Dialogues between music and the visual arts Philippe Junod

CLIVE BARDA/ARENA PAL

Reaktion Books ISBN 978-1-78023-811-1 320pp (hb) £30 rrp

Scholarly to a fault (nearly half the book consists of footnotes), this is a comprehensive, historical introduction to the relationship between music and art. Philippe Junod examines that idea of an original unity between the arts,

Gypsy Music: The Balkans and Beyond Alan Ashton-Smith Meet Simon Holt: a new book offers insights to his music

their battle for supremacy and the complex interweaving of parallels, analogies and synaesthesia (could colours be used like notes in a scale?). This flourished in the 19th century until Abstraction seemed finally to offer visual art a liberation from its own limitations: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’, as Walter Pater put it.

JS Bach then became a central focus, seen as a contemporary figure, incarnating the idea of pure form: between 1890 and 1990 hundreds of ‘fugues’ and homages to Bach were created by artists ranging from Klee to Kandinsky, Albers to Blanc-Gatti.

While it’s fascinating to encounter works by artists like Henri Nouveau, François Simecek and Jack Ox, Junod himself identifies a methodological problem in comparing two art forms, which perhaps explains his reluctance really to interrogate and unscramble intentions and outcomes in his

examples. But this is a valuable and eloquent reference work, taking us to the dissolution of categories we find today. Helen Wallace ★★★

The Music of Simon Holt Ed. David Charlton Boydell Press ISBN 978-1-78327-223-5 362 pp (hb) £65 rrp

Simon Holt is a leading presence in contemporary music. Influenced

by Messiaen, Xenakis and Feldman alongside visual artists such as Goya, Giacometti and Brancusi, his scores chart an exquisite balance between impulse and intricacy. This beautifully-presented volume of essays offers a comprehensive survey of Holt’s creative life and a welcome celebration of this fine composer.

The book’s great strength is the variety of voices it brings together, offering a wealth of taut (but largely accessible) musicological analysis alongside broader essays by performers, conductors, artists and critics. An interview with conductor Thierry Fischer gives fascinating insight into the challenges and rewards of shaping Holt’s intricate scores in

Reaktion Books ISBN 978-1-78023-823-4 224pp (pb) £9.95 rrp

Cigani, Zigeuner, Gitano, Sipsiwn, Yiftos – the Roma, as Gypsies call themselves, have for centuries been persecuted in Europe as ‘dirty’ and ‘dangerous’. Yet they have also fired the Romantic imagination – think of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Bizet’s Carmen, and the music of Liszt. Alan Ashton-Smith’s principal aim – to define Gypsy music – is hampered by its endlessly labile nature, but he doggedly pursues it across the continent in its many different forms. Using ‘Roma’ when referring to the Romani people, and ‘Gypsy’ to signify the mythologised and exoticised construction which outsiders put on them, he makes a useful distinction.

He’s most interesting on the history of Gypsy music in Russia. Unfortunately, however, his book suffers from a drab lecture-room tone, and by an obsessive regurgitation of quasiacademic clichés. For the real deal on Balkan gypsy music, read Garth Cartwright’sPrinces Among Men. This is dashingly written, brilliantly informative, and profoundly insightful. Michael Church ★★ BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Audio choice Our audio expert Chris Haslam inspects the very best entry-level record players THIS MONTH: PLUG-AND-PLAY TURNTABLES HIGH END CHOICE

BEST BUY

Pro-Ject Audio Juke Box E £369 (£499 with speakers)

Based on the award-winning Pro-Ject Primary turntable, the Juke Box E is a brilliant combination of digital and analogue audio. As well as a built-in phono stage (for connecting an amplifier and a turntable) there’s a pre-amp and a 50W power amp, so you can simply plug in the speakers and play. There’s also an RCA input for

connecting another source such as a CD player, a Bluetooth receiver for digital streaming in near-CD quality (aptX) and there’s even a digital display and remote control. Features count for nothing if a turntable sounds awful, but Pro-Ject has produced another superb entry-level deck that’s a pleasure on the ears and has a compelling performance that bubbles with enjoyment. You can buy bettersounding turntables for the price (try the Rega Planar 2) but if you’re looking for a vinyl-centred do-it-all device that can act as the heart of your hi-fi system you won’t find better. project-audio.com

Hit the decks: the Juke Box E is the perfect do-it-all turntable

BUDGET PRICE CHOICE

Roberts Radio RT100 £249 Launched to celebrate Roberts’s 85th birthday, the RT100 is a stylish turntable. It has a nicely finished wood veneer, auto-start (so the record spins when the needle is moved towards it) and a push button 33/45rpm speed-changer plus a hard-wearing AT3600L cartridge.

It can be plugged into any speaker with a 3.5mm input, but you can also bypass the built-in pre-amp via a switch on the back. Plugged into a vintage Roberts radio, Martha Argerich’s performances of Chopin’s Piano Concertos 1 & 2 (Warner) managed to engage, but textural detail didn’t materialise until I switched off the pre-amp and plugged it into my Marantz HD-AMP1 amp. robertsradio.com

MID-RANGE CHOICE

Teac TN-400BT £349 It’s not the cheapest option if you’re looking to re-engage with your analogue past, but the Teac TN-400BT turntable is one of the most flexible. With a built-in aptX Bluetooth transmitter it can stream near-CD quality direct to a compatible speaker, hi-fi or even headphones. It has a built-in phono amplifier for wired connections and you can record to your computer via USB in 16-bit/48kHz. Unusually, the turntable can also play 33, 45 and 78rpm speeds, making it perfect for anyone intrigued by the piles of old gramophone records found in the corners of charity shops. teac-audio.eu

TURNTABLES CHECK-LIST Budget If you spend £150-£250 you’ll get a great sounding turntable, but beware anything less than £100 as cheaper components tend to wear vinyl quicker.

Speakers If you want to plug speakers into your turntable it will need to have a built-in

power amp. If you wish to plug them into a hi-fi system that doesn’t have a pre-amp then go for a turntable with one built in, but if your system doesn’t have a pre-amp you’ll need a box like the Pro-Ject Phono Box (£80).

USB record player This type of turntable plugs into your computer via a USB cable

and allows you to rip (record) your vinyl to a digital format like MP3.

Cartridge If you have an old turntable it could be worth upgrading the cartridge for more detail. A moving magnet cartridge is £25£30 but the pricier moving coil cartridges (from £150) offer a more dynamic sound.

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Live choice

Paul Riley picks the month’s best concert and opera highlights in the UK Explore Ensemble & Exaudi St John’s Smith Square, 18 Feb Tel: +44 (0)20 7222 1061 Web: www.sjss.org.uk London’s Principal Sound Festival returns, this time marrying Morton Feldman with the late works of Luigi Nono.

The final concert, directed by James Weeks, features the premiere of a new choral piece

by Linda Catlin Smith, set among works spanning Machaut to Nono’s powerfully concise Sarà dolce tacere and violin miniatures by Kurtág.

Venue of the month The UK’s best concert halls

5. The Queen’s Hall

ALAMY, JÜRGEN FRANK, PATRICIA TAYLOR

Where: Edinburgh Opened: 1979 Seats: 900

Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall is one of the city’s finest concert venues, located on the Southside, about a 15-minute walk from Princes Street.

The former church, built in 1823 as Hope Park Chapel, was designed by architect Robert Brown who is also responsible for other Grade A-listed Georgian buildings in the city. The church’s closure in the 1970s coincided with the search for new premises by two recently formed ensembles, the Scottish Baroque Ensemble (founded 1969) and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (founded 1974). After a fundraising campaign that included a concert by flautist James Galway, The Queen’s Hall opened its doors in 1979.

Queen Elizabeth II attended the opening ceremony. Due to the hall’s excellent natural acoustics, John Drummond, the director of the Edinburgh Festival (1977-83) was keen to use it for chamber recitals, a tradition which continues to this day with regular Radio 3 broadcasts. The hall now hosts 200 concerts a year, from a variety of genres, plus premieres by contemporary composers. In 2012 Oliver Searle’s Technophobia showcased the talents of three young musicians with disabilities and pupils from the City of Edinburgh Music School.

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SOUTH Czech Philharmonic

Love notes: soprano Diana Damrau explores Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch

LONDON

Philharmonia

Theatre of Voices

Southbank Centre, 15 Feb Tel: +44 (0)20 3879 9555 Web: www.southbankcentre.co.uk The Philharmonia’s principal guest conductor Jakub Hru˚ša takes charge as the orchestra continues its journey into the Mahler symphonies with the Adagietto-enshrining Fifth.

Before it, Piotr Anderszewski plays Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1.

Kings Place, 9 Feb Tel: +44 (0)20 7520 1490 Web: www.kingsplace.co.uk Stockhausen’s vocal sextet Stimmung notches up its half century, and to mark the anniversary the Theatre of Voices revisits director Paul Hillier’s 2006 version. The ensemble’s subsequent recording instantly earned the composer’s approval.

Nash Ensemble Wigmore Hall, 10 Feb Tel: +44 (0)20 7935 2141 Web: www.wigmore-hall.org.uk After a pre-concert featuring Duruflé’s only surviving chamber work, the latest instalment in the Nash Ensemble’s ‘French Connection’ series is built around Boulez’s arrangement of Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis (sung by soprano Sophie Bevan).

Fauré, Ravel and Stravinsky complete the programme.

Jonas Kaufmann & Diana Damrau Barbican, 16 Feb Tel: +44 (0)20 7638 8891 Web: www.barbican.org.uk Just days before mezzo Joyce DiDonato stars in the UK premiere of Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, the Barbican affords more intimate vocal pleasures as tenor Jonas Kaufmann and soprano Diana Damrau tackle Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch.

The pianist is Helmut Deutsch.

Colston Hall, Bristol, 11 Feb Tel: +44 (0)117 203 4040 Web: www.colstonhall.org It’s quite a month for Bristol’s Colston Hall as the London Symphony Orchestra and Czech Philharmonic go head to head.

The Londoners bring Franck, Ravel and Brahms (the Violin Concerto performed by Alina Ibragimova) on 21 February; but first, conducted by Tomáš Netopli there are Bohemian rhapsodies aplenty as Dvorˇák’s Symphonic Variations and Ninth Symphony are programmed alongside Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1.

Steven Osborne The Concert Hall, Reading, 22 Feb Tel: +44 (0)118 960 6060 Web: www.readingarts.com Ravel’s seductive Miroirs and Berg’s single-movement Piano Sonata, Op. 1 are at the heart of a piano recital devoted to 20thcentury masterworks. They are flanked by Prokofiev’s youthful Sarcasms and the last of his ‘War Sonatas’ – No. 8 in B flat.

Bath Bachfest Bath, 22-24 Feb Tel: +44 (0)1225 463362 Web: www.bathbachfest.org.uk If BBC Radio 3’s Spirit of Bach season has left a hunger for more, Bath Bachfest has just the solution with five concerts,

February Live including a nod to Dresden from tenor James Gilchrist in the company of Florilegium, and Brecon Baroque in pursuit of Vivaldi. The Academy of Ancient Music consolidates the Italian angle with Corelli, Pergolesi and Handel – ceding a B minor Mass grand finale in Bath Abbey to The English Concert and Erebus.

EAST Jean-Guihen Queyras & Alexander Melnikov Peterhouse Theatre, Cambridge, 15 Feb Tel: +44 (0)1223 300085 Web: www.cameratamusica.org.uk Quatuor Ebène’s Peterhouse Theatre concert on 26 January is powered by early and middle-period Beethoven, but cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras (partnered by pianist Alexander Melnikov) has the late Sonatas Op. 102 in his sights for an all-Beethoven programme on 15 February. He also embraces the mighty Op. 69 Sonata and the Variations in F on Mozart’s ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’.

Academy of Ancient Music The Apex, Bury St Edmunds, 20 Feb Tel: +44 (0)1284 758000 Web: www.aam.co.uk Directed by Christian Curnyn, the first of Corelli’s Op. 6 Concerti Grossi sets the scene for a couple of Italian cantatas

by Handel and Pergolesi’s evergreen Stabat Mater. The soloists are soprano Keri Fuge and countertenor Tim Mead.

MIDLANDS & NORTH & WALES Verdi’s La forza del destino Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, from 2 Feb Tel: +44 (0)29 2063 6464 Web: www.wno.org.uk Launching a Welsh National Opera Verdi trilogy spread over three years, erstwhile music director (now conductor laureate) Carlo Rizzi presides over a new production by David Pountney of La forza del destino. It headlines a season under the banner of ‘Rabble Rousers’ that fans the flames with Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Puccini’s Tosca.

Bangor Music Festival Bangor, 2 & 3 Feb Tel: +44 (0)1248 382828 Web: bangormusicfestival.org.uk North Wales’s annual dalliance with the new turns a telescope

on the heavens with celestial music by George Crumb, Maja Palser and Patrick Nunn. Zubin Kanga traverses contemporary piano works, and the Large Hadron Collider (the world’s most powerful particle accelerator) inspires Canadian composer Scott Wilson.

BACKSTAGE WITH… Mezzo-soprano Christine Rice

Armonico Consort & Baroque Orchestra Malvern Theatres, 3 Feb Tel: +44 (0)1684 892277 Web: www.malvern-theatres.co.uk Extended across a gargantuan 53 parts, and probably written to mark the 1,100th anniversary of the Salzburg Archdiocese in 1682, Biber’s Missa Salisburgensis renders 40-part motets by Tallis and Striggio tiddlers by comparison.

Christopher Monks marshals his supersized forces.

CBSO & Ex Cathedra Symphony Hall, Birmingham, 4 Feb Tel: +44 (0)121 780 3333 Web: www.thsh.co.uk Carolyn Sampson leads a quartet of fellow sopranos as Jeffrey Skidmore conducts a programme in praise of ‘Mozart’s Women’. Excerpts from the C minor Mass salute Constanze Mozart, while ‘Der Hölle Rache’ from The Magic Flute lights the blue touch paper with a flurry of vocal pyrotechnics.

BBC Philharmonic Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, 17 Feb Tel: +44 (0)161 907 9000 Web: www.bridgewater-hall.co.uk Colin Currie is the soloist in surely the only percussion concerto to have been inspired by a taxidermist. Simon Holt’s a table of noises prefaces that most enigmatic of Mahler symphonies: the seventh.

John Storgårds conducts.

Spirit of destiny: Christine Rice is inspired by Greek mythology

Your concert at Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh (20 Feb) is about heroines of ancient Greece. Are there any unusual works?

There is a string version of Haydn’s cantata Arianna a Naxos (1789). I’ve only ever sung the version for soprano and piano, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what sort of difference that makes. It’s a nice one-woman piece that is satisfying to sing and moves between recitatives and arias. It takes the audience from the moment that Arianna wakes up on the island of Naxos, to her climbing the hill and realising that she can see Theseus’s ship sailing off (meaning she is stranded).

Which other Greek heroines are you including?

We are performing two of the main arias from Berlioz’s Les Troyens – featuring Didon, the Queen of Carthage and the prophetess Cassandre. And we’ve also included ‘Dido’s Lament’ from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, as we thought it would be really interesting to compare Purcell’s Dido with Berlioz’s. Violinist Matthew Truscott has given a lot of thought to this programme, with the Scottish Ensemble, and to knitting together a thematic arc of storytelling.

Why does Purcell’s ‘Dido’s Lament’ have an enduring appeal?

It’s an exquisite piece of music and it’s very simple but it’s also so truthful to the human emotional state. The last time I sang it was at the benefit concert for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire and it was one of those moments where you think its appeal is universal.

SCOTLAND & N IRELAND

on John Gay’s 18th-century Beggar’s Opera. It’s conducted

by Sinead Hayes.

deck as Jonathan Dove’s 1998 airport saga Flight is cleared for its debut Scottish take-off.

Weill’s The Threepenny Opera

Dove’s Flight

Scottish Ensemble

Lyric Theatre, Belfast, 27 Jan – 10 Feb Tel: +44 (0)28 9038 1081 Web: www.niopera.com Northern Ireland Opera’s new artistic director Walter Sutcliffe masterminds the Company’s new production of The Threepenny Opera, Kurt Weill’s and Bertolt Brecht’s sassily critical ‘play with music’ based

Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 17-24 Feb Tel: 0844 871 7647 (UK only) Web: www.scottishopera.org.uk Scottish opera is taking a contemporary swerve. Not only does it revive Joe Hill-Gibbins’s production of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Greek (previously unveiled at last year’s Edinburgh Festival) but conductor Stuart Stratford also mans the flight

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 20 Feb Tel: +44 (0)131 668 2019 Web: www.sco.org.uk The two tableaux of Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète frame a Greekthemed programme showcasing mezzo Christine Rice (see box, above) in Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos, an excerpt from Berlioz’s Les Troyens and ‘Dido’s Lament’ from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

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TV&Radio

Your complete guide to what’s on Radio 3 this month, plus TV highlights

FEBRUARY’S RADIO 3 LISTINGS Schedules may be subject to alteration. For up-to-date listings see Radio Times

Three to look out for Alan Davey, the controller of BBC Radio 3, picks out three great moments to tune into this February

Wagner’s Parsifal New York’s Met Opera has a long association with Wagner’s Parsifal as it was, in 1903, the first opera house to stage it outside Europe, flaunting the composer’s wishes that it should only be performed at Bayreuth. In this new Met Opera production, broadcast on Radio 3, the quest for the Holy Grail is led by tenor Klaus Florian Vogt.

Opera on 3; 17 Feb, 4pm

Bath Bach Festival Since 2012 Bath’s Bachfest has attracted some of the greatest Baroque names to the city’s historic venues.

This year is no exception with soprano Lucy Crowe lined-up for the monumental Mass in B minor at Bath Abbey. For this In Concert Harry Bicket conducts the English Concert and Erebus Ensemble.

Radio 3 in Concert; 26 Feb, 7.30pm

Animal life Bass-baritone Ashley Riches, a Radio 3 New Generation Artist, pairs up with pianist Joseph Middleton for a Lunchtime Concert that explores animal-inspired works, including Vernon Duke’s humorous song-cycle Ogden Nash’s Muiscal Zoo. Lunchtime Concert; 19 Feb, 1pm

1 THURSDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Handel 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert live from City Halls, Glasgow.

Tippett Symphony in B flat, Mozart Horn Concerto No. 4, K495, Stravinsky Petrushka.

Alberto Menéndez Escribano (horn), BBC Scottish Symphony

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Orchestra/Martyn Brabbins 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay 11pm-12.30am Late Junction

2 FRIDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Handel 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert

live from the Barbican, London.

Finzi Cello Concerto, Op. 40, Shostakovich Symphony No. 10. Paul Watkins (cello), BBC Symphony Orchestra/ Sir Andrew Davis 10-10.45pm The Verb 10.45-11pm The Essay 11pm-1am World on 3

7.30-9pm Radio 3 in Concert from the European Broadcasting Union (tbc) 9-10.30pm Drama on 3 Love is not new in this country

by Qais Akbar Omar and Stephen Landrigan 10.30pm-11.30pm Early Music Late

3 SATURDAY

5 MONDAY

7-9am Breakfast 9am-12.15pm Record Review – Building a Library 12.15-1pm Music Matters 1-3pm Saturday Classics 3-4pm Sound of Cinema 4-5pm Jazz Record Requests 5-6.30pm Jazz Line-Up 6.30-9.30pm Opera on 3 at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. Verdi Il trovatore.

Maria Agresta (Leonora), Anita Rachvelishvili (Azucena), Yonghoon Lee (Manrico), Quinn Kelsey (Di Luna), Štefan Kocán (Ferrando), Orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera House/ Marco Armiliato 9.30-10pm Between the Ears A cow a day 10pm-12 midnight Hear and Now 12 midnight-1am Geoffrey Smith’s Jazz

6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Takemitsu 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert from Wigmore Hall, London.

Mozart An Chloe, K524, Das Lied der Trennung, K519, Schubert Heimliches Lieben, D922, Romanze zum Drama Rosamunde, D797 No. 3b, Suleika I, D720, Suleika II, D717, Beach Three Browning Songs Op. 44, Carter Cantata.

Golda Schultz (soprano), Jonathan Ware (piano) 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert (tbc) 10-10.45pm Music Matters (rpt) 10.45-11pm The Essay All Miss Brodie’s Girls 11pm-12.30am Jazz Now

4 SUNDAY 7-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Sunday Morning 12 noon-1pm Private Passions Frances Barber, actress (rpt) 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert (rpt) from Wigmore Hall, London.

Sibelius Andante festivo, Puccini Cristantemi, Grieg String Quartet No. 1, Op. 27.

Apollon Musagète Quartet 2-3pm The Early Music Show 3-4pm Choral Evensong (rpt) 4-5pm The Choir 5-5.30pm The Listening Service 5.30-6.45pm Words and Music 6.45-7.30pm Sunday Feature a profile of the American writer Alex La Guma (1925-85), known as the ‘black Dickens’

6 TUESDAY BBC Radio 3 marks the centenary of women’s suffrage with a day of special programmes. (See Radio Times for further details).

6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Takemitsu 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from City Halls, Glasgow.

Prokofiev Symphony No. 1

On guard: tenor Klaus Florian Vogt takes the lead in Wagner’s epic opera Parsifal, 17 Feb

‘Classical’, Shostakovich Chamber Symphony in C minor (arr. Rudolf Barshali), Op. 110a, Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 ‘Emperor’, Op. 73.

Elisabeth Leonskaja (piano), Scottish Chamber Orchestra/ Clemens Schuldt 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay 11pm-12.30am Late Junction

7 WEDNESDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Takemitsu 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-3.30pm Afternoon on 3 3.30-4.30pm Choral Evensong from St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle (an archive recording from February 1998) 4.30-5pm New Generation Artists

February TV&Radio

Grand plans: Radio 3 spends a day (6 Feb) marking the suffragettes centenary; (below) Bath Abbey hosts Bach’s Mass in B minor (26 Feb)

5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert live from the Royal Festival Hall, London. Stravinsky Scherzo fantastique, Funeral Song, Rimsky-Korsakov Piano Concerto in C sharp minor, Op. 30, Stravinsky The Firebird. Alexander Ghindin (piano), London Philharmonic Orchestra/Vladimir Jurowski 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay 11pm-12.30am Late Junction

GETTY

8 THURSDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Takemitsu 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape

7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert (tbc) 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay 11pm-12.30am Late Junction

9 FRIDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Takemitsu 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert live from Brangwyn Hall, Swansea. Sibelius King Christian II Suite, Op. 27, Nielsen Flute Concerto, Sibelius Finlandia, Symphony No. 5, Matthew Featherstone (flute), BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Thomas Søndergård 10-10.45pm The Verb

10.45-11pm The Essay 11pm-1am World on 3

10 SATURDAY 7-9am Breakfast 9am-12.15pm Record Review – Building a Library 12.15-1pm Music Matters 1-3pm Saturday Classics 3-4pm Sound of Cinema 4-5pm Jazz Record Requests 5-6.30pm Jazz Line-Up 6.30-9.30pm Opera on 3 from the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. Donizetti L’elisir d’amore. Pretty Yende (Adina), Matthew Polenzani (Nemorino), Davide Luciano (Belcore), Ildebrando D’arcangelo (Dulcamara), Orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera House/ Domingo Hindoyan 9.30-10pm Between the Ears a look at the work of Ronald Drever, the physicist who developed the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-

Wave Observatory) based in Livingston, Louisiana 10pm-12 midnight Hear and Now 12 midnight-1am Geoffrey Smith’s Jazz

11 SUNDAY 7-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Sunday Morning 12 noon-1pm Private Passions Bernard Cornwell, writer 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert from Wigmore Hall, London (rpt). Mozart An Chloe, K524, Das Lied der Trennung, K519, Schubert Heimliches Lieben, D922, Romanze zum Drama Rosamunde, D797 No. 3b, Suleika I, D720, Suleika II, D717, Beach Three Browning Songs Op. 44, Carter Cantata.

Golda Schultz (soprano), Jonathan Ware (piano) 2-3pm The Early Music Show 3-4pm Choral Evensong (rpt) from St George’s Chapel,

Windsor Castle (an archive recording from February 1998) 4-5pm The Choir 5-5.30pm The Listening Service 5.30-6.45pm Words and Music 6.45-7.30pm Sunday Feature Kinsey and the genderquake.

A look at the Indiana Universitybased Kinsey Institute that was founded by Dr Alfred Kinsey in 1947 to research sexuality and relationships 7.30-9pm Radio 3 in Concert from the European Broadcasting Union (tbc) 9-10.30pm Drama on 3 The Name 10.30pm-11.30pm Early Music Late

12 MONDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Sibelius BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Sibelius 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from Milton Court, London.

JS Bach St Matthew Passion (arr. Mendelssohn). Nicholas Mulroy (Evangelist), Bragi Jónsson (bass), St James’ Baroque, BBC Singers/ Peter Dijkstra 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay Walking the Lobster 11pm-12.30am Late Junction

Founding father: Terry Riley, a Minimalist pioneer

14 WEDNESDAY

FEBRUARY TV CHOICE Minimalism A two-part series about Minimalism begins on BBC Four this month, presented by conductor Charles Hazelwood, exploring the life and works of godfathers of the musical form – Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The first part will trace the origins of Minimalism in the 1950s, with a look at composers on America’s West Coast (Riley and Young), before part two moves to New York in the 1960s and beyond, with a spotlight on works by Glass and Reich. Contributors include presenter/singer Jarvis Cocker and composers Max Richter and Julia Wolfe. BBC Four ; date and time tbc

Maestros of the camps

GETTY

Sky Arts is broadcasting a documentary about the pianist and musicologist Francesco Lotoro who has spent over 25 years travelling the world, tracking down, archiving and performing music written and composed in concentration camps during World War II. His research includes visits to concentation camps, including Auschwitz, to meet with survivors as well as descendents of musicians who were imprisoned and died. Over 4,000 pieces of music – many composed on scraps of paper, have been restored. Sky Arts; date and time tbc

1-2pm Lunchtime Concert from Wigmore Hall, London.

Beethoven Wind Sextet in E flat, Op. 71, Poulenc Sonata for clarinet and bassoon, Beethoven Octet in E flat, Op. 103. SCO Winds 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from Royal Festival Hall, London. Mendelssohn Overture – Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, R Strauss Ständchen, Op. 17 No. 2, Morgen!, Op. 27 No. 4, Meinem Kinde, Op. 37

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6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Sibelius 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-3.30pm Afternoon on 3 3.30-4.30pm Choral Evensong live on Ash Wednesday from New College, Oxford 4.30-5pm New Generation Artists 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from Bridgewater Hall, Manchester. Schuller Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee, Ives Central Park in the Dark, Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue, Walker Lilacs, Antheil Symphony No. 6. Joshua Ellicott (tenor), Peter Donohoe (piano), BBC Philharmonic/John Storgårds 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay Walking the Lobster 11pm-12.30am Late Junction

15 THURSDAY

No. 3, Wiegenlied, Op. 41 No. 1, Ich wollt’ ein Sträusslein binden, Op. 68 No. 2, Säusle, liebe Myrte, Op. 68 No. 3, Mahler Symphony No. 4.

Chen Reiss (soprano), Philharmonia/Lahav Shani 10-10.45pm Music Matters 10.45-11pm The Essay Walking the Lobster 11pm-12.30am Jazz Now

6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Sibelius 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert live from City Halls, Glasgow.

Elgar Overture ‘Cockaigne (In London Town)’, Cello Concerto, Walton Symphony No. 1.

Leonard Elschenbroich (cello), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/John Wilson 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay Walking the Lobster 11pm-12.30am Exposure

13 TUESDAY

16 FRIDAY

6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics

6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics

12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Sibelius 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert live from Sage Gateshead.

JC Bach Symphony in No. 6, Schumann Violin Concerto in A minor, Pärt Wenn Bach Bienen gezüchtet hätte…, Mendelssohn Symphony No. 5 ‘Reformation’.

Alina Ibragimova (violin), Royal Northern Sinfonia/ Clemens Schuldt 10-10.45pm The Verb 10.45-11pm The Essay Walking the Lobster 11pm-1am World on 3

17 SATURDAY 7-9am Breakfast 9am-12.15pm Record Review _ Building a Library 12.15-1pm Music Matters 1-3pm Saturday Classics 3-4pm Sound of Cinema CHOICE 4-10pm Opera on 3 from the Metropolitan Opera, New York. Wagner Parsifal. Klaus Florian Vogt (Parsifal), Peter Mattei (Amfortas), René Pape (Gurnemanz), Orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera/Yannick Nézet-Séguin 10pm-12 midnight Hear and Now 12 midnight-1am Geoffrey Smith’s Jazz

18 SUNDAY 7-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Sunday Morning 12 noon-1pm Private Passions 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert from Wigmore Hall, London (rpt). Beethoven Wind Sextet in E flat, Op. 71, Poulenc Sonata for clarinet and bassoon, Beethoven Octet in E flat, Op. 103. SCO Winds 2-3pm The Early Music Show 3-4pm Choral Evensong (rpt) from New College, Oxford 4-5pm The Choir 5-5.30pm The Listening Service 5.30-6.45pm Words and Music 6.45-7.30pm Sunday Feature Patrick Kavanagh; the inexhaustable adventure of a gravelled yard 7.30-9pm Radio 3 in Concert from the European Broadcasting Union (tbc) 9-10.30pm Drama on 3 The Last of the Volsungs by Melissa Murray 10.30pm-11.30pm Early Music Late

Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Dowland CHOICE 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert from Wigmore Hall, London. Schubert Die Forelle, D550, Die Vögel, D691, Der Alpenjäger, D588, Fauré Le papillon et la fleur, Op. 1 No. 1, Saint-Saëns La coccinelle, Massenet La mort de la cigale, Ravel Histoires naturelles, Duke Ogden Nash’s Musical Zoo. Ashley Riches (bass-baritone), Joseph Middleton (piano) 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff.

BBC National Orchestra of Wales (programme tba) 10-10.45pm Music Matters 10.45-11pm The Essay New ways through the blues 11pm-12.30am Jazz Now

20 TUESDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Dowland 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert from Bath Mozart Festival 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert (tbc) 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay 11pm-12.30am Late Junction

21 WEDNESDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Dowland 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-3.30pm Afternoon on 3 3.30-4.30pm Choral Evensong live from King’s College, Cambridge 4.30-5pm New Generation Artists 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from Bridgewater Hall, Manchester. Holt a table of noises, Mahler Symphony No. 7.

Colin Currie (percussion), BBC Philharmonic/John Storga ˚rds 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay 11pm-12.30am Late Junction

19 MONDAY

22 THURSDAY

6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon

6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon

February TV&Radio Original Gershwin: pianist Jeremy Denk plays the jazz band version of Rhapsody in Blue, 27 Feb

Weekly TV & radio highlights

6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Dowland 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert live from Victoria Hall, Hanley.

Ravel Mother Goose Suite, Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations, Rachmaninov Symphony No. 2. Guy Johnston (cello), BBC Philharmonic/Ilan Volkov 10-10.45pm The Verb 10.45-11pm The Essay 11pm-1am World on 3

24 SATURDAY 7-9am Breakfast 9am-12.15pm Record Review – Building a Library

25 SUNDAY 7-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Sunday Morning 12 noon-1pm Private Passions Anne Sebba, British biographer 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert (rpt, from Wigmore Hall) 2-3pm The Early Music Show 3-4pm Choral Evensong (rpt) from King’s College, Cambridge 4-5pm The Choir 5-5.30pm The Listening Service 5.30-6.45pm Words and Music 6.45-7.30pm Sunday Feature Literary Pursuits – Lord of the Flies 7.30-9pm Radio 3 in Concert from the European Broadcasting Union (tbc) 9-10.30pm Drama on 3 10.30pm-11.30pm Early Music Late

26 MONDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon

Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Richard Strauss 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert from Wigmore Hall, London.

A programme of solo piano works by Beethoven (tbc).

Aleksandar Madžar (piano) 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape CHOICE 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert from Bath Abbey, Bath. Bath Bach Festival. Bach Mass in B minorr Lucy Crowe (soprano), Anna Harvey (mezzo-soprano), Nick Pritchard (tenor), Ashley Riches (bass-baritone), The English Concert, The Erebus Ensemble/Harry Bicket (director, organ, harpsichord) 10-10.45pm Music Matters 10.45-11pm The Essay Are You Paying Attention?

11pm-12.30am Jazz Now

27 TUESDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Richard Strauss 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert live from Milton Court, London.

Byrd, Gesualdo, Monterverdi (arr. Denk) Motets, Stravinsky Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, Nancarrow Selection of piano solos, Milhaud La création du monde, Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue (original jazz band version).

Jeremy Denk (piano, pictured above), Britten Sinfonia 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay Are You Paying Attention?

11pm-12.30am Late Junction

28 WEDNESDAY 6.30-9am Breakfast 9am-12 noon Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Richard Strauss 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-3.30pm Afternoon on 3 3.30-4.30pm Choral Evensong from Durham Cathedral Chapter House (sung by the Cathedral Consort of Singers and recorded in January 2018) 4.30-5pm New Generation Artists 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert live from the Lighthouse, Poole.

Haydn The Creation. Lucy Crowe (soprano), Benjamin Hulett (tenor), Christopher Purves (bass), Bournemouth Symphony Chorus & Orchestra/ David Hill

10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay Are You Paying Attention?

11pm-12.30am Late Junction Highlights on BBC Radio 4 this month include: Behind the Scenes (21 Feb at 9pm), a profile of the life and work of the British pianist Joanna MacGregor over the course of a year. The performer juggles her teaching commitments, as head of piano at the Royal Academy of Music, with her work running the Dartington International Summer School and her solo concert work. She also faces the challenge of recording and performing all of Chopin’s Mazurkas.

QUIZ ANSWERS from p116

23 FRIDAY

12.15-1pm Music Matters 1-3pm Saturday Classics 3-4pm Sound of Cinema 4-5pm Jazz Record Requests 5-6.30pm Jazz Line-Up 6.30-9.30pm Opera on 3 (tbc) 9.30-10pm Between the Ears 10-12 midnight Hear and Now 12 midnight-1am Geoffrey Smith’s Jazz

1. a) Tchaikovsky; b) Gilbert and Sullivan; c) Malcolm Arnold 2. Henry Purcell 3. Solomon 4. Clarinet 5. Till Eulenspiegel 6. Scat (or Skat) 7. Frank Bridge 8. Puccini’s La fanciulla del west 9. Shostakovich 10. Basset

Essential Classics 12 noon-1pm Composer of the Week Dowland 1-2pm Lunchtime Concert 2-5pm Afternoon on 3 5-7pm In Tune 7-7.30pm In Tune Mixtape 6.30-7.30pm Composer of the Week (rpt) 7.30-10pm Radio 3 in Concert (tbc) 10-10.45pm Free Thinking 10.45-11pm The Essay 11pm-12.30am Exposure

On our website each week we pick the best of the classical music programmes on radio, TV and iPlayer.

To plan your weekly listening and viewing, go to classical-music. com or sign up to our weekly newsletter to be sent information about the week’s classical programmes directly to your inbox.

FOR WEEKLY TV & RADIO CHOICES GO TO WWW.CLASSICAL-MUSIC.COM BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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The BBC Music Magazine PRIZE CROSSWORD NO. 317 Crossword set by Paul Henderson

The first correct solution of our crossword to be picked at random will win a copy of The Oxford Companion to Music and a runner-up will win Who Knew? Answers to Questions about Classical Music (both available at www.oup.co.uk). Send answers to: BBC Music Magazine, Crossword 317/Feb, PO Box 501, Leicester, LE94 0AA to arrive by 22 Feb 2018 (solution in May 2018 issue).

THE QUIZ Play your cards right in this month’s quiz…

1. Who wrote the following stage works: a) The Queen of Spades (1890); b) Patience (1881); c) Solitaire (1951)?

2. With a libretto by poet John Dryden, King Arthur is a 1691 opera by which composer?

3. ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’ is a brief instrumental moment from which 1749 oratorio

by Handel?

4. Jack Brymer (1915-2003) was one of the foremost exponents of which instrument in the 20th century?

5. Name the joker who meets a sticky end in an 1895 eponymous tone poem by Richard Strauss.

Your name & address

6. And which word links a card game beloved by Richard Strauss with a type of singing?

7. The composer pictured above shares his surname with a popular card game. Who is he?

GETTY, MARTIN RICHARDSON

8. In which 1910 opera does Jack Rance pin two playing cards to the jacket of Sid to indicate that he’s a cheat?

DECEMBER SOLUTION No. 314

DECEMBER WINNER Sue Brown, Northampton

9. Which composer described himself as ‘unlucky in cards, unlucky in love, unlucky in profession’ after a particularly wretched night at the poker table in 1936?

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10. What word links a card game that was particularly popular in the 17th century and a large member of the clarinet family?

See p113 for answers

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ACROSS 1 Flattery and cunning observed in opera heroine (9) 6 Happen to hear a song (5) 9 Curtail a British composer (7) 10 I am following good and bad in director once at ENO (7) 11 Monk’s song recalled after forte beginning to resound (5) 12 British composer sonic kind, possibly (9) 13 Dine freely revolutionary hot food in festival venue (9) 15 French composer expected to take on publicity work (5) 16 Performers with energy and class (5) 18 Young fellow engaged in performing, ignoring unknown early church music (9) 20 Russian composer represented Baikal (very curtailed in retrospect) (9) 23 Wagnerites initially going to superior quality club (5) 24 Spotted jazz fan, English, engaged in old dancing (7) 25 Perhaps Zukerman, I realise, reduced performing (7) 27 Popular support backing source of Rimsky Korsakov’s song? (5) 28 Indians and Africans, perhaps, wanting opening dropped from The Planets, surprisingly (9) DOWN 1 Half of Bach cantata’s ending with sound of sheep safely grazing? (3) 2 Italian composer’s skill brought in money head for Italy! (7) 3 Most of finale’s solid, not too bad to listen to (9) 4 Suggestion to include river following Irish composer’s journey of discovery (5,4) 5 Youth orchestra giving inaugural concert initially adopting Hindu philosophy (5) 6 Stringed instruments for some?

One supports small group (5) 7 Purist upset over piano slips (5,2) 8 Pop group huge with alumnae, possibly (5,6) 11 Composer, one standing under wall painting, very stark (11) 14 Teacher wrong about source of oddness in falsetto? (4,5) 15 British jazzman revised work with time in hand, possibly (9) 17 Joined small piano left in the cold? (7) 19 One bad end to recital should be reviewed, mate (3,4) 21 Opera lead emerging from pack at Yale (5) 22 Top part of violin, not bottom, primarily (5) 26 More than one provisional statement is written about forte (3)

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PAUL LEWIS The British pianist tells Claire Jackson about his year of Haydn, plus his exciting plans for the Leeds International Piano Competition

F R EE r CD

Carl Maria von Weber Konzertstück in F minor K Cover star pianist Paul Lewis joins the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Tadaaki Otaka (left) PLUS! Tenor Mark Padmore and pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout talk Winterreise with James Naughtie; Brian Wisee on the influential soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey; Michael Beekk watches film screenings with live orchestra; plus profiles of two women composers: Anna Beerr on Lili Boulanger and Shirley Thompson on Florence Price

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Jan-Dec 2016 – 35,734 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

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Music that changed me

Alison Balsom Trumpeter Alison Balsom first came to prominence as a finalist of BBC Young Musician in 1998. A former student of Håkan Hardenberger and a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, she has performed at the Last Night of the Proms and has released a string of best-selling discs on EMI, performing on both natural and modern trumpets. Appointed an OBE in 2016, Balsom is visiting professor of trumpet at the Guildhall and has recently been appointed artistic director of the Cheltenham Music Festival.

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W

hen I took up the trumpet at seven, my teacher had us playing Bach chorales in a brass quartet. I didn’t know it was Bach, I just knew it was incredibly beautiful. At the same time I started playing the cornet in my local brass band we played hymn tunes every practice and I loved that satisfyingly homogenous, warm colour you can only get from British brass bands.

It made me realise how important it was to open my ears and understand how to fit in with others.

The first CD I owned was MAHLER’s Fifth Symphony played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Georg Solti.

For me, it’s still the most devastating recording and performance of that piece. The orchestra seems to transcend anything as mundane as a recording studio; it’s compelling and life-enhancing.

Before that my uncle gave me a cassette of harpsichordist Trevor Pinnock directing BACH’s Brandenburg Concertos, Nos 4-6.

I was about 11 and I remember putting the Walkman on and feeling almost as if I were flying! I wasn’t aware of what the Baroque period was, or who was playing, but you could feel it crackling with energy. That’s completely Trevor, as a man and a musician. It is such an honest and authentic recording and is something that’s influenced me throughout my life.

Trevor was and is a true pioneer, and it was 118

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

Mahler memories: ‘When I hear the Third Symphony, I feel 16 again’

The choices Mahler Symphony No. 5 Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Georg Solti Decca 433 3292

JS Bach Brandenburg Concertos Nos 4-6 English Concert/Trevor Pinnock Deutsche Grammophon 478 3385

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra/ Roger Norrington Hänssler HAEN93119

Mahler Symphony No. 3 Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/ Bernard Haitink BR Klassik 900149

Bartók Bluebeard’s Castle John Tomlinson, Sally Burgess; Opera North Orchestra/Richard Farnes Chandos CHAN3133

the performance that made me fall in love with the period instrument movement.

As an adult, I performed a new concerto with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Roger Norrington, and in the second half they played TCHAIKOVSKY’s Symphony No. 6 Pathétique. Norrington was a real proponent for playing without vibrato

and the orchestra had to find everything they could to express this masterpiece using other tools. Everyone knew that this was special evening it was a ravishing, taut, electrifying performance. It was also a great example of rethinking stylistic fashions and reinterpreting these pieces without unnecessary embellishments.

I joined the National Youth Orchestra as a young teenager and it was an incredibly influential period in my life. It was overwhelming to join an exceptional orchestra of over 160 players and to explore masterpieces in depth. My first year included music such as Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, Wagner’s Liebestod and Mahler’s Third Symphony with Sir Mark Elder conducting. It was a memorable summer for us all, conjured up by that extraordinary Mahler just one of those magical moments where a piece of music can define and encapsulate your teenage years. When I hear it I feel 16 again…

Another piece that comes back and haunts me in a wonderful way is BARTÓK’s Bluebeard’s Castle. I played it with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra at an impressionable age.

Certain chord progressions, the layering of colours and the dark beauty of Bartók’s writing changed my taste in music in general. Bluebeard still moves me deeply the way he’s able to paint with sound, there’s nothing quite like it.

Becoming artistic director of the Cheltenham Music Festival is a wonderful opportunity to programme my favourite music. But I also want to continue to focus on new music, for which Cheltenham has always been renowned. Fundamentally, I want to give people the same experiences I’ve described here we arrive at any concert with open ears and an open mind, and the best of them leave us thrilled.

Finding ways to create those moments of revelation and discovery seems to me more important than ever.

Interview by Amanda Holloway

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