Classical CDs: Shrouds, silhouettes and superstition

Kabalevsky: Cello Concerto No. 2, Schumann: Cello Concerto Theodor Lyngstad (cello), Copenhagen Phil/Eva Ollikainen (OUR Recordings)

This disc’s sleeve note suggests that Kabalevsky’s Cello Concerto No. 2 “owes an obvious debt to the composer’s colleague and one-time neighbour Dmitri Shostakovich”. It does indeed, several passages sounding like direct pastiche. That doesn’t make the work any less enjoyable and entertaining, the first movement’s “Allegro molto e energico” section very similar in tone to the opening movement of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1. Though Kabalevsky begins his 1964 work very differently, with a brooding slow introduction full of lonely wind solos and ominous pedal notes. An edgy central scherzo features a prominent part for solo saxophone before the finale opens wistfully, introspection finally winning out over extroversion. This concerto deserves to be better known, and Danish cellist Theodor Lyngstad makes a persuasive case for it. Eva Ollikainen’s Copenhagen Phil relish the black humour, with pointed contributions from bassoons and horns.

The coupling is Schumann’s late Cello Concerto, Lyngstad pointing out that this is another emotionally complex work in three linked movements, a piece “where happiness seems never to have been far away from despair.” As with Schumann’s Piano Concerto, there’s no long tutti introduction, the cello entering in the fifth bar with a sinuous cantabile theme. Light scoring means that the soloist is never swamped by orchestral forces and Lyngstad’s performance often feels like chamber music, especially in the brief slow movement. He’s marvellous in the little accompanied cadenza near the close of the finale, Schumann’s shift into sunny A major a real feelgood moment.

Arvo Pärt: Credo Estonian Festival Orchestra/Paavo Järvi (Alpha Classics)

I instinctively think of Arvo Pärt as a monochrome, ECM New Series type of composer, and not in a pejorative sense – his music is typically spare, orderly and uncluttered. This 90^th birthday tribute from friend and fellow Estonian Paavo Järvi caught me by surprise, the fortissimo choir entry 35 seconds into Credo almost knocking me off my chair. Composed in 1968, this is the earliest work on this remarkable album, conductor Paavo Järvi recalling in James Jolly’s booklet note that his father Neeme Järvi conducted the premiere. Pärt juxtaposes the C major Prelude from Book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier with passages in his more abrasive early style with the choir singing words from Christ’s ‘Sermon on the Mount’. The audience in Tallinn present at first performance demanded an immediate encore, after which the work was banned by the Soviet authorities and Järvi père was blacklisted.

Credo and a genuinely delightful Estonian Lullaby are the only works featuring a choir on this disc, the other pieces all purely orchestral. There’s not a dud among them. 2006’s La Sindone was a commission for the 2006 Winter Olympics, its title alluding to the Turin shroud. The ear-splitting coda is another fall-off-your-chair moment, a stark Brucknerian outburst giving way to bell sounds and a barely audible string chord. Pärt’s more familiar Fratres is heard in a version for strings and percussion, Paavo Järvi’s Estonian Festival Orchestra strings playing with rare warmth and expressivity. They’re equally passionate in the Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, the music warmer, richer and more colourful as a result.

2014’s Swansong should be a repertoire standard, its six ripely scored minutes a depiction of swans in flight. The big tutti section three minutes in is another point at which you’ll be wondering where this music has been in your life. Silhouette was a gift for Järvi when he was Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, the said silhouette belonging to the Eiffel Tower. Elegant, mysterious and imposing, the soft fade is exquisite. Für Lennart In Memoriam was composed for the funeral of Estonian President Lennart Meri, who Pärt met whilst working for Estonian Public Radio in the 1960s. Da pacem Domine is an elegiac string piece first performed in Barcelona, conducted by Jordi Savall. Mein Weg began life as an organ work, Pärt arranging this uncharacteristically busy, fast-moving piece for 14 strings and percussion in 1994. There’s a pertinent quote from Järvi in the booklet, recalling how Pärt transformed the colour of an orchestral chord by asking the musicians to play it with more love. You hear that love in these incandescent performances, each work recorded during this year’s Pärnu Music Festival in July (videos are available to view on the festival website). An important and uplifting release, and one of the best-sounding orchestral albums I’ve heard in ages.

Ned Rorem: Choral Works St Martin’s Voices/Andrew Earis (Resonus)

Lucy Walker: Choral Works St Martin’s Voices/Andrew Earis (Resonus)

Here’s a double bill of composer portrait albums by the excellent St Martin’s Voices (a professional ensemble of young singers based at St Martin in the Fields in London) and their conductor Andrew Earis, one of an under-exposed American composer of the 20th century and the other of a British composer still in her 20s.

I am not really familiar with the work of Ned Rorem (1923-2022) and that is my failing. He is best known for his songs, and his published diaries, narrating the life of an out gay man in the 20th century New York. This album is an introduction to his choral works, which seems a good place to start with his extensive output. The 13-strong St Martin’s Voices, under Andrew Earis, are supplemented by the Piatti Quartet in three pieces, but most of the tracks are the young singers alone, the group’s trademark no-nonsense clarity and commitment very much to the fore.

As fits a song composer, Rorem is concerned about the audibility of the words, so his textures are largely uncluttered and the word setting direct, such as in the hymn Sing my soul, his wondrous love. Festive Alleluias, uses just the one word in an array of settings with an appropriately joyous mood. Only occasionally do we get counterpoint, most notably in the elusive, slip-sliding O Magnum Mysterium. There are four musical sets, of which the biggest is Seven Motets for the Church Year (1986). These small pieces of 1-3 minutes are clearly intended to be used separately in a liturgical setting, but make a pleasing group. They range from the simplicity of the Christmas opener While all things were in quiet silence, to the ascetic bareness of Praise him who was crucified and the angular lines of Today the holy spirit appeared, which features an elegant solo by soprano Daisy Walford. The tracks with string quartet are both in arrangements by Tom Shorter: the psalm setting How lovely is your dwelling place and a poised and striking Little lamb, who made thee from 1982. The third, and perhaps the loveliest music on the disc, is Two Psalms and a Proverb, in which the quartet is joined by bassist Toby Hughes.

Lucy Walker (b.1998) was appointed St Martin’s Voices first Composer-in-Residence in 2023, and this album includes some of the fruits of that collaboration, with 10 of the 16 tracks being first recordings. I have enjoyed what I have previously heard of Walker’s music, and this collection confirmed my opinion. Her work is appealing, warm, singable and harmonically rich in a style very different from some of the knottier passages of the Rorem. There is a mixture of sacred and secular pieces, and perhaps I slightly preferred the secular, including the first track, Today, one of Walker’s earliest pieces, in which she hits the ground running. There are some nods to Eric Whitacre but the confidence of the writing by a nascent composer is very impressive. Here, Home, celebrates the long tradition of St Martin in the Fields as a friendly haven for the homeless, has a striving quality, emerging out of its hymnic chords.

The music tends towards the introspective and gentle, with a common shape being a progression from fragility to strength. This can be heard in There is no rose, sung here with the utmost sensitivity, while Let all the world, accompanied by organist Stephen Farr, offers a rare change of pace, and I would have welcomed some more pieces in this vein. The highlight of the album was the three-part Bird Raptures, written specially for this album and which, the composer says, “draw inspiration stylistically from twentieth-century partsong”. The settings of Christina Rossetti, Sara Teasdale and Samuel Taylor Coleridge pretty much sum up Walker’s musical world, especially in the luminous second movement and springy bounce of the last. This is an impressive debut disc by a young composer – and credit to Earis and St Martin’s Voices for the range and richness of their recent output. Bernard Hughes

Satie Surprises Christina Bjørkøe (piano) (OUR Recordings)

It’s a pity that the centenary of Erik Satie’s death seems to be passing without fanfare. Erato released Alexandre Tharaud’s collection of previously unpublished Satie pieces in July and here’s a selection of seldom heard miniatures from pianist Christina Bjørkøe. Hers is a beguiling selection, beautifully played, most of the numbers boasting typically abstruse titles. Who wouldn’t want to hear such gems as “Son binocle”, “Froide songerie” or “Prélude canin”? Frustratingly, OUR’s booklet contains an excellent biographical essay about Satie by composer Torben Enghoff but nothing about the actual pieces themselves, so keep your laptop handy if you want to learn more about the “Facheux exemple” or “Songe-creux”.

Personal favourites among the 27 tracks on Bjørkøe’s disc include three “Airs à faire fuir” from Satie’s Pièces froides, the second of which is loosely based on the outline of a Northumbrian folk song (“The Keel Row”). It’s delightful, and just over a minute long. Compare it with the first and third of Satie’s 5 Nocturnes, late, serious works lasting well over three minutes each – epics by Satian standards. Even longer is the “Prélude de la porte héroïque du ciel”, composed in 1894 as an introduction to a long-forgotten "drame ésotérique" and a piece which Satie was so proud of that he dedicated it to himself. Bjørkøe’s flowing tempo suits the music perfectly, leaving no space for sentimentality. It even includes the direction "superstitieusement". In short, a fabulous Satie collection, warmly recorded and splendidly played.

Abel Selaocoe: Four Spirits Abel Selaocoe (cello, voice), Bernhard Schimpelsberger (percussion), Aurora Orchestra/ Nicholas Collon (Warner)  

It is now 15 years since Abel Selaocoe (b. 1992) first came from South Africa to study at the RNCM in Manchester, but 2025 has been the year of a major breakthrough for him. He made a big impression at the West Holt stage with his Bantu ensemble on the final day of this year’s Glastonbury Festival, and this live recording – and the extensive touring that preceded it – have put down another marker.

Selaocoe’s new concerto Four Spirits, arranged by Benjamin Woodgates, was co-commissioned in 2022 by orchestras based in Seattle, Glasgow and Maastricht/Eindhoven, but the piece has been evolving and becoming more personal and improvised ever since. The performance captured on this recording was at the Southbank Centre, and followed on directly from a six-date tour of the work with Aurora Orchestra in major concert halls in Germany and Belgium. It was later performed at the Edinburgh Festival, where a couple of critics – while unavoidably acknowledging Selaocoe’s phenomenal performance energy and his unbelievable capacity to create a sense of community in the hall – had a go at biting a chunk out of the piece, for an alleged lack of substance and coherence. I beg to differ. There is a wonderful quote from the late Bheki Mseleku in Gwen Ansell’s reference work on South African music “Soweto Blues” which describes exactly and in a profound way the substance that I think I can hear running through this work. Mseleku describes a “simple minimalist song, at the same time a very complex one... one line... the kind of line that has an answer in itself. It resolves itself, working within a time signature that is not explicitly thought, but controlled naturally by your way of breathing. That comes from a tradition. Old women in the rural areas are singing this kind of melody.”

The remarkable thing about this live recording is how exactly this kind of musical language and this spirit, a very different kind of musical flow from classical music, can so infectiously and effectively inhabit a larger ensemble, as it does here. All it takes is one charismatic, dominant South African musician and the power of this music to change all of those around him. This recording has captured all that authenticity very well indeed. Abel Selaocoe’s work is surely symptomatic of a broader trend from the striving for perfection to the finding of authenticity. Try the YouTube video of the Sotho song “Tsohle tsohle” in a packed Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. Sebastian Scotney

Tippett: A Child of Our Time London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir/Edward Gardner, with the London Adventist Chorale, Nadine Benjamin (soprano), Sarah Connolly (mezzo-soprano), Kenneth Tarver (tenor), Roderick Williams (baritone) (LPO)

Is there a more uneven leading composer than Michael Tippett? As the rhyme goes, when he is good he is very, very good but when he’s bad he’s horrid. And his self-penned texts are mostly, as the kids say, cringe. But A Child of Our Time is Tippett at the top of his game – words and music – and this new recording by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Edward Gardner is a welcome addition to the discography. Taped live at the Royal Festival Hall in November 2022 (it’s taken while to emerge) the excellent line-up of soloists is supported by some colourful orchestral playing and terrific choral singing.

Nadine Benjamin’s Part 1 solo “How can I cherish my man in such days”, segueing into the spiritual “Steal Away”, is one of several a magical moments, the passion of her aria becoming a dreamy sustained note under which the enters. The spirituals – substituting for the chorales in a Bach passion – are delivered eloquently and with carefully controlled dynamics by the LPO Choir and the London Adventist Chorale, especially “Go down, Moses”, in its barely suppressed fury. Other highlights include the opening, which sternly sets out the mood of what is to follow, Edward Gardner taking a spacious, unhurried approach. This is unlike the nervous energy of orchestral introduction to the tenor solo “I have no money for my bread”, dolorously delivered by Kenneth Tarver.

Roderick Williams is excellent as ever in the Narrator’s recitatives, setting out the bare-bones story, while Sarah Connolly finds range of characters in short order in the knotty aria “The soul of man is impassioned like a woman”. The emotional core of the piece is in the final sequence, and it is powerfully projected here. An orchestral “Preludium” offers a sudden pastoral optimism (the LPO winds to the fore) then each soloist offers a summatory thought and a lamenting but hopeful final chorus melts into “Deep River”. It is powerful stuff. A Child of Our Time feels quite current at the moment, as “the world turns on its dark side” once more and the camp ground currently feels a way off. Tippett’s positivity is a stretch right now, but I was still comforted by listening. Bernard Hughes

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