Classical CDs
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Bartók: The Wooden Prince, Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra/Susanna Mälkki (BIS)Bartók's The Wooden Prince is a one-off in the composer's output, an evocative, expansive ballet score that will surprise anyone who's been intimidated by his more abrasive music. Based on a scenario devised Béla Balácz, with whom Bartók had collaborated on Bluebeard’s Castle, The Wooden Prince is softer-edged, a verdant fairytale following a lovestruck prince’s pursuit of a princess. Frustrated at her disinterest, he creates a puppet substitute which is given life by a Read more ...
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Isabelle Aboulker: Mélodies/Songs en français and in English Julia Kogan (soprano), Isabelle Aboulker (piano) (First Hand Records)Never heard of Isabelle Aboulker? Now in her 80th year, she's worked as a choral director and a singing teacher. She's written music for French films and television, concentrating on vocal music and opera since the 1980s. This smartly conceived double album allows us to sample what non-francophones have been missing. Soprano Julia Kogan’s winning advocacy of Aboulker’s music stems from a chance meeting with the composer in a Pyrenean village. Kogan is Read more ...
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Brahms: The Piano Quartets The Primrose Piano Quartet (Meridian)Schoenberg complained that performances of Brahms’s G minor Piano Quartet never pleased him (“the better the pianist, the louder he plays and you hear nothing from the strings”). You suspect that he’d have approved of this recording, the Primrose Piano Quartet’s John Thwaites using an 1870 Viennese piano made by Johann Streicher. Brahms owned and loved an identical instrument. Plus, the other players use gut strings, easier to balance against a lighter-toned keyboard. This is a thrilling, volatile performance: historically Read more ...
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Stewart Goodyear: Callaloo, Piano Sonata; Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue Stewart Goodyear (piano), Chineke! Orchestra/Wayne Marshall (Orchid Classics)Callaloo is Stewart Goodyear’s indecently entertaining suite for piano and orchestra, the title referring to a mixture of diverse elements. Goodyear alludes to having grown up in a polyglot, multicultural Toronto, also taking inspiration here from his Trinidadian heritage. Specifically a recent encounter with the country's Carnival tradition (“I was exposed to Calypso music for two weeks straight, riveted every second”). Visceral excitement Read more ...
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An English Coronation Gabrieli Consort & Players/Paul McCreesh, with Gabrieli Roar and Simon Russell Beale (Signum)The snatch of ambient noise before this set’s first item, coupled with the Gabrieli Players’ performance, could convince the unwary that this is a handsomely scrubbed up historical recording. Elgar’s sombre, introspective Coronation March is performed with real style, the articulation crisp, the transparent orchestral sound allowing every detail to register. What an unconventional march this is, its main theme unfolding in a steady 3/4. But no, these discs were taped in Read more ...
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The Orchestral Music of Jonathan Dove BBC Philharmonic/Timothy Redmond, with Lawrence Zazzo (counter-tenor) (Orchid Classics)Jonathan Dove’s Airport Scenes could be subtitled Four Air Interludes, each movement extracted from his Glyndebourne success, Flight. They're great fun, and conductor Timothy Redmond’s notes spell out what's happening second by second. Who wouldn't like to hear an orchestral version of a jet engine starting up and leave the tarmac? Dove paints his images with such skill, the hints of Wagner and John Adams never concealing his own personality. The other pieces on Read more ...
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David Matthews: Symphony No 9, Variations for Strings, Double Concerto for Violin and Viola Sarah Trickey (violin), Sarah-Jane Bradley (viola), English Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Woods (Nimbus Alliance)Ninth symphonies are usually big beasts, but David Matthews’, completed in 2015, whizzes through five movements in 27 minutes. This is easy music to love, a modern expression of the English pastoral tradition which never descends into easy pastiche. Nods to Vaughan Williams, Britten and Tippett never impede the music’s flow; instead, we're beguiled at Matthews’ ability to write defiantly Read more ...
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Mahler: Symphony No 10, completed and arranged for chamber orchestra by Michelle Casteletti Lapland Chamber Orchestra/John Storgårds (BIS)Other Mahler symphonies have been downsized on CD: there are superb transcriptions of Nos 7 and 9 from Peter Stangel’s Taschenphilharmonie and the Camerata RCO respectively. Michelle Casteletti’s version draws most heavily on Deryck Cooke’s idiomatic performing version (rightly so; the various other completions don't sound like Mahler), played here by just 24 musicians: single winds and a tiny string section, backed up with harp, percussion, piano and Read more ...
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Daniel Elms: Islandia (New Amsterdam Records)Composers have long taken inspiration from landscape, and much of Daniel Elms’ absorbing Islandia is rooted in the ambience, sights and sounds of his home city, Hull. If you’ve not been there, book a weekend break now: Hull is a fascinating, otherworldly place with some superb architecture and a very un-English sense of otherness. The title track is a ten-minute musical voyage, an excitable opening paragraph leading us into choppier waters before returning to a land of “home-cooked food and knitted tea cosies”. Radiant but unsentimental, it Read more ...
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Do You Believe in Heather? Chamber music by Ståle Kleiberg (2L)Ståle Kleiberg's String Quartet No 3 is a masterpiece, I think. Small but perfectly formed, it's unassumingly brilliant. Kleiberg’s use of “extended tonality” is fascinating: listen to this quartet blind and you'd have a hard time placing it chronologically. Structurally impressive and melodically rich, it grips like a benign vice. Especially in the closing seconds, a physically exhilarating tie-up of loose ends which culminates in a deliciously unexpected final chord. Honestly, it's seriously, seriously good, and Read more ...
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Bartók: Complete String Quartets Quatuor Diotima (Näive)Technical infallibility is now a non-negotiable when it comes to Bartók's six fiendishly difficult string quartets. Still, there's much more to these pieces than simply hitting the right notes and ensuring that the pizzicato thwacks ring out in all the right places. An influential early digital set by the Emersons now sounds a little brutal and mechanical in places. It’s easier to love a 1960s DG cycle from the emigré Hungarian Quartet, with hairy moments but plenty of soul. This new set on the revived Näive label comes from the Read more ...
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Mahler: Symphony No 7 Budapest Festival Orchestra/Ivan Fischer (Channel Classics)“It is my best work and it has a cheerful character.” So said Mahler about his Symphony No 7, and on the basis of this exuberant, feisty performance, Ivan Fischer agrees with him (“…may this reading contribute to a revalidation!”). Fischer doesn't see the work as problematic, his love for the symphony expressed without a trace of indulgence. There's so much to enjoy here. The first movement's juddering opening is superbly done, the music's slow awakening rivalling the start of Mahler's 3rd. The jump cuts Read more ...