Classical CDs: Soft toys, starlings and tarantellas

Passage Secret – music by Bizet, Debussy, Fauré, Ravel, Aubert Ludmila Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle (piano duet) (Alpha Classics)

There are many reasons to acquire this disc of French piano duets, one being the inclusion of the Feuille d’images by one Louis Aubert (1877-1968).  A composer, pianist and teacher, Aubert sang the “Pie Jesu” in early performances of Fauré’s Requiem, and Ravel dedicated the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales to him. Auber’s delightful five-movement work is ripe for rediscovery, one of its quirks being the technical demands of the lower duet part, the simpler upper part written for a pupil. You really hear this in the “Serenade” and “Danse de l’ours en peluche”, the latter featuring a some appropriately growly low piano writing. Ludmilla Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle’s latest anthology is sequenced in chronological order, so Aubert’s 1930 suite is the closing item. Passage Secret opens with Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants, its 12 miniature movements superbly characterised here. These depictions of soap bubbles, hobby horses, spinning tops and assorted playground games sparkle, the final galop’s harmonic sidesteps sounding like Prokofiev here. I first got to know Debussy’s Petite Suite through Henri Büsser’s orchestral transcription; hearing the sharper piano original was a revelation. Berlinskaya and Ancelle have fun with the “Ballet”, the music thinning out and almost dissolving two minutes in.

Fauré’s Dolly is sweetly played, with a deliciously woozy account of “Tendresse” and a sparky, superbly coordinated performance of “Le Pas espagnol”. And there’s Ravel’s Ma mère l'Oye in its original incarnation. When the performance is this good, who needs the (admittedly marvellous) orchestral transcription?  Ravel’s pared-down keyboard writing means that there’s nowhere to hide. Every note is perfectly placed. “Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodes” glitters, and there are some wonderful bestial rumblings in the fourth movement. “Le jardin féerique” has to be one of the most affecting things Ravel ever composed, and it’s difficult to stay dry-eyed when Berlinskaya and Ancelle dispatch it with this much poise and affection. Splendid stuff, in other words.

Prokofiev: Piano Concertos 2 & 3, Piano Sonata no.7 Stewart Goodyear (piano), BBC Symphony Orchestra/Andrew Litton (Orchid Classics)

Stewart Goodyear is prolific in both aspects of his double musical life, as pianist and composer. Previous discs for Orchid have included a complete Beethoven Piano Concerto cycle, and a terrific composer portrait from 2019 with Chineke!, which featured his joyous ersatz-piano concerto Callaloo, intermingled with his youthful Piano Sonata and Rhapsody in Blue. Gershwin is an obvious influence on Callaloo, with Caribbean music standing in for Gershwin’s jazz, and it also has nods to Milhaud and Prokofiev. Which makes this new album a very fitting successor: Goodyear tackling the latter’s Second and Third Piano Concertos (with Andrew Litton and the BBC Symphony Orchestra), and the Seventh Piano Sonata. Goodyear writes about having played Prokofiev a lot as a young musician – revelling in its “vitality and speed” – but then not for 20 years. He returned to the composer in his mid-40s in the wake of his mother’s death, which started a “new chapter of my life”. The Second Concerto is notoriously demanding but Goodyear meets its demands head on, always finding the necessary quicksilver wit without missing the seriousness of the music. The long cadenza in the first movement has epic scope, almost sounding like Rachmaninov in this reading, the “Intermezzo” feels operatic and fierce – while in the finale both pianist and orchestra are able to relax, as the tone becomes more straightforwardly good-natured.

I recently reviewed the Third Concerto at the Proms, where Lahav Shani directed the orchestra from the keyboard. Here we have a more conventional arrangement for what is not just Prokofiev’s most popular concerto, but one of the most loved of all piano concertos. The tempos are fast and the playing crisp, the recorded balance with the orchestra giving a suitable spotlight to the soloist. Goodyear’s playing has sparkle but also, in the theme-and-variations second movement, moments of inwardness. The final movement is pure extraversion, and the final minute’s sprint for the line is as exciting as you could wish.

The joker in the pack is the Seventh Piano Sonata, coming from a different time and musical world from the concertos. Written in Russia during WWII, there is an audible level of angst – but we have to be careful with that kind of interpretation, because Prokofiev was writing the melodious and euphonious Cinderella at the same time. Rather we can maybe see this as return to Prokofiev as enfant terrible, ready to take on the musical world with his bracing dissonance and frantic pianism. Goodyear revels in the rapid changes of pace and intensity, and is very touching in the “little-boy-lost” section towards the end of the first movement. Bernard Hughes

Benedict Sheehan: Akathist Choir of Trinity Wall Street et al, Artefact Ensemble/Elaine Kelly (Bright Shiny Things)

This is a hugely wide-ranging and substantial oratorio, Mahlerian in its ambition and scope, eclectic in its musical resources. According to the publicity, it “weaves together medieval chant, Anglo-American hymns, gospel, and jazz” in a plea for healing in what is portrayed as today’s broken world. The text is a poem written in a Stalinist labour camp, discovered after the unknown author’s death, and subsequently absorbed into Eastern Orthodoxy under the name "Akathist".

Not that there is much evidence of the Orthodox musical tradition in this piece. For all its stylistic catholicity it mostly sounds more like something Karl Jenkins might do. The music is well-crafted and the sincerity shines through, but, despite the booklet’s claim, “groundbreaking” it is not. It is mostly in a fairly mainstream “American” choral vernacular, although there are some striking moments. “I see thy heavens” is very beautiful, starting with a slowly unfolding soprano solo that ever-so-gradually becomes a bluesy haze. Likewise, “On a feast day”, with its trumpet fanfares stand out. On the other hand “How wonderful thy greatness” veers into Christian rock territory, and the preponderance of slow, contemplative movements offers diminishing returns as the piece goes on.

Benedict Sheehan is not a composer whose work I know. He is the founder and artistic director of the Artefact Ensemble and a leading choral conductor in the US. This album is never less than listenable and has a monumental quality: the massed choirs have heft and conductor Elaine Kelly musters her vocal and instrumental forces effectively. There are a number of excellent solos – it is invidious to single any out, but I might particularly commend mezzo Helen Karloski in “When in childhood” and bass Steven Hrycalek in ‘Night”. Bernard Hughes

Kurt Weill: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2, Die sieben Todsünden Konzerthausorchester Berlin/ Joana Mallwitz (Deutsche Grammophon)

The performance of Weill’s First Symphony here, a work written at the age of twenty-one, when the composer was about to enter Ferruccio Busoni’s composition class, is absolutely revelatory. Compare the opening here with, say, a recent recording by H.K Gruber and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, and whereas Gruber offers the worldly-wise, detached Weill we think we know, Mallwitz produces urgency, passion, coarseness and real power which are truly remarkable. I cannot get enough of the sheer omph and energy which she and the  Berlin Konzerthausorchester bring to the opening. The conductor muses in the (excellent) booklet that for Weill "even the smallest notes have teeth...constantly spiked with subliminal aggression." And that is exactly what we hear.

 The whole venture, and the performance of the first symphony in particular – the score’s journey via an Italian convent in the booklet essay is also well worth a read – carries with it a sense of triumphant arrival. Weill himself only ever heard the work on two pianos. This album also celebrates Joana Mallwitz having spent her first year (of a five-year contract) as Chief Conductor of the Berlin Konzerthausorchester – and as the first ever female chief conductor of a Berlin orchestra. Any orchestra which has had Ivan Fischer as its principal conductor for six years (2012-18) is going to have its sound and character sorted out. This album lets us hear a confident orchestra sounding incredibly young and purposeful. From the evidence of this album, the Mallwitz relationship is really working. With the second Symphony No 2. or Fantaisie Symphonique, we are in a more familiar part of the Weill landscape. A special round of applause goes to the trombone soloist who gives the first statement of the slinky Weill-ian theme in the second movement.  Mallwitz’s reading has wonderful flow and coherence throughout.

The alertness and the quality of the orchestral playing is also a remarkable feature of Die sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins), Weill’s ‘Ballet chanté in nine scenes’ with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht. I wasn’t totally convinced by the singing of Katharine Mehrling or that of the male singing cohort, but that is probably because I can’t help dreaming that Austrian movie actor Birgit Minichmayr will one day take this work and finally produce a version which is fit to stand alongside vintage analogue versions from Lotte Lenya and Gisela May. Sebastian Scotney

Two Violas Now Peter Mallinson, Matthias Wiesner (violas), with Evgenia Startseva (piano) (Meridian)

Brief Encounters Peter Mallinson, Lynn Arnold (piano) (Meridian

There’s been a bit of a viola drought on this site in recent months, so here’s a double bill from an enterprising British soloist. Two Violas Now is what the title says it is: a collection of new pieces for a pair of violas, Peter Mallinson joined by his BBC Symphony Orchestra colleague Matthias Wiesner. Deborah Pritchard’s The Heart is a set of three gnarly canons taking inspiration from Old Testament heart-related texts. The third one, “My Heart” is especially effective, a disruptive, dissonant opening giving way to an uneasy, elevated serenity, Pritchard basing the notes on a snatch of Psalm 61: “…when my heart is overwhelmed, lead me to the rock that is higher than I”. Sonata for Three by the veteran British composer Edwin Roxburgh adds a piano to the mix (Evgenia Startseva). Dissonant but expressive, the sonata’s busy final movement is the most instantly appealing, its final bars like a door slamming shut. The other two works are less confrontational. Simon Rowland’s Suite for two violas is my favourite work on the disc, Rowland’s writing during this sequence of five short movements really exploiting the instruments’ potential; there are moments when you think you’re hearing a string quartet. The fourth section’s slow chords are heart-stopping. The “pale blue dot” in John Alexander’s work for two violas and piano is the Earth, as photographed by Voyager 1 in 1990. Melting glaciers and starling murmurations are mentioned in the notes, Mallinson, Wiesner and Startseva closing the final section in a mood of uneasy calm.

Brief Encounters teams Mallinson with pianist Lynn Arnold, their mission to celebrate “pieces of music which, in different ways, confront or embody a notion of brevity”. 37 tracks fill this double album, the majority less than five minutes in duration. The pair have exhumed some absolute gems: Ruth Gipps’ Jane Grey is a beguiling folksy fantasy, originally scored for viola and strings, and it’s followed by an incisive Ritournelle by Vítězslava Kaprálová. Three Pieces by Nadia Boulanger are engaging, particularly a witty, motoric “Danse espagnole.” We get attractive miniatures by Dorothy Howell, Rebecca Clarke and Amy Beach and a host of engaging rarities. A tiny volcanic tarantella by Russian viola virtuoso Vadim Borisovsky is a blast, and a pair of dance numbers by the African-American bandleader James Reese Europe are gems. There’s another tarantella by Zemlinsky and a host of other pieces by composers you’ve possibly heard of but almost certainly won’t have actually heard. Francis Purcell Warren? Rosemary Glyde? Tom Wiggins? Muriel Herbert? Kalitha Dorothy Fox? All here, plus Billy Mayerl and a neatly renamed closing number by Kai Mortensen. I’m a brass player, so the prospect of 140 minutes of music for viola and piano scared me. I needn’t have worried, and neither should you – this superbly annotated anthology is a gift which keeps on giving.

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