Classical CDs: Voice flutes, flugelhorns and froth

Corelli/Handel: Sonatas  (recorders), Monika Knoblochová (harpsichord), Libor Mašek (cello), Jan Krejča (theorbo) (Supraphon)

This disc’s bright, piquant flavour makes it an irresistible acquisition. I dived into recorder player Michaela Koudelková’s new album after several days spent wallowing in Vaughan Williams orchestral music (see below), and it made for an invigorating palate-cleanser. Try the little “Furioso” from Handel’s Recorder Sonata in D minor, two minutes of exuberant froth, Koudelková’s dancing solo line having the upper hand (just) over a frenzied accompaniment. Cellist Libor Mašek’s rapid semiquaver runs defy belief: how is it possible to play so fast, so accurately? Interestingly, the Handel is the only work on this well-filled CD originally composed for recorder, the other works transcriptions of sonatas for transverse flute, oboe and violin. Five different recorders are used by Koudelková, her rationale for using each one explained in Jana Spáčilová’s sleeve note. Handel’s HWV 359b Sonata in E minor, written for flute, has Koudelková playing a ‘voice flute’, a variant of the tenor recorder with a wonderfully woody timbre, while the G major HWV 363b work began life as an oboe sonata in F. It’s performed here on a ‘sixth flute’, a high-pitched soprano instrument with a tone that never grates. Try the tiny fourth movement “Bourrée” for evidence, theorbist Jan Krejča a perfect foil for Koudelková.

The three Corelli sonatas were all composed for violin. Koudelková’s expressivity in Corelli’s slow movements is startling, and she draws some exquisite colours from her treble recorder in the slow fourth movement of the Sonata in F. The best comes last, the single-movement Sonata in D minor (better known as “La Follia”) sounding thoroughly idiomatic recast for descant recorder. This performance generates a terrific head of steam, harpsichordist Monika Knoblochová a rock-steady presence underneath the recorder’s pyrotechnics.

Dave Douglas: Alloy Dave Douglas, Alexandra Ridout and Dave Adewumi (trumpets) (Greenleaf Music)

The phrase ‘trumpet blow-out session’ in this album's press release immediately had me salivating. A detailed perusal revealed that veteran trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas actually intended the album to be “a warm-hewed, lyrical release”, though there are plenty of thrilling loud moments. Brass is an alloy, the title also referring to the sound made by three different trumpeters. Douglas is teamed up with former BBC Young Musician Jazz Award winner Alexandra Ridout plus the young New York player Dave Adewumi, backed by a three-piece rhythm section, Patricia Brennan’s vibraphone a potent ingredient.

“Announcement Vigilance” is an arresting call to attention, the three-part trumpet writing at the start suggesting Stravinsky’s Octet and Ebony Concerto, before each player gets space for an extended improvisation. “Alloy” and “Fields” are busier, the latter’s chattering opening one of many arresting moments on an album that’s a timbral delight. There’s an abundance of superb solo playing on display but the most striking moments are when the three trumpets act together, as they do from 4’40” in “Future Community Furniture”.

Holst & Butterworth Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Andrew Manze (Onyx)

George Butterworth (1885-1916) was perhaps the greatest British musical loss of World War I. From a privileged background – alumnus of both Eton and Oxford – he joined Cecil Sharp in collecting English folksongs, the sound world of which colours his small output. Having set poems from A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad in 1909-11, the orchestral rhapsody that opens this album was described by the composer as “an orchestral epilogue” to the song cycle. It uses melodies and motifs from the songs, but turned into an expansive 10-minute piece that could stand as a summation of English music of the tail-end of the “long 19th century”.

Conductor Andrew Manze, although initially a baroque music specialist, has hit his stride in in this kind of repertoire in recent years, notably with a fine Vaughan Williams symphony cycle, also with the RLPO on Onyx. The playing here is loving, but clean and unsentimental and with all the merits of the Vaughan Williams set – you can hear the synergy between the music of Butterworth and RVW, who were great friends. The Banks of Green Willow, premiered by Adrian Boult in his first professional concert, is a folksong setting, heard here alongside the Two English Idylls. All three are attractive, but missing the bite of Bartók or the wit of Warlock.

Gustav Holst was granted a longer life – although he didn’t make it to 60 and was plagued by ill-health throughout his life. The St Paul’s Suite that ends this recording – as it does so many – is familiar, but I am much less acquainted with Egdon Heath, having been put off by reading Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native at an impressionable age. The opening chapter is a word-portrait of the heath, and Holst’s music was inspired by visiting Hardy at his home, experiencing the barren landscape of Rainbarrow for himself. The music is suitably slow and bleak, although the orchestral playing, right from the opening for double basses alone, keeps things moving (Richard Hickox’s version is some 3 minutes longer). It is undoubtedly a substantial work, and I will return to this recording.

Livelier, though, is the Fugal Concerto, written on a boat to America in 1923. Scored for two solo winds (flute and oboe) and nine strings, it has something of the brittle neoclassicism in the air at the time. It is certainly cheerful and doesn’t outstay its welcome, and Cormac Henry and Helena Mackie are excellent soloists, but I am left with the feeling that I always get when I hear something by Holst that isn’t The Planets: viz., “this isn’t as good as The Planets.” But then again, what is? Bernard Hughes

Poulenc Plays Poulenc and Satie (Somm)

Another late arrival to the Erik Satie anniversary party, the big plus being that a well-chosen selection of the eccentric Parisian’s piano music is played by here by Francis Poulenc. His Satie performances were set down in 1950 at CBS’s 30th Street Studio, a late-lamented recording venue which at various times accommodated musicians as diverse as Miles Davis, Glenn Gould and, er, Cliff Richard. Though previously available on CD, Lani Spahr’s new transfers, presumably made from an original LP, are a tonic. Some Satie recordings can sound echoey and badly-focussed, but Poulenc’s performances are bright, immediate and rhythmically alert – try his punchy “Sur un casque” from the Descriptions automatiques. The ubiquitous “Gymnopédie No. 1” is completely devoid of sentiment, and he finds real tenderness in the “Sarabande No. 2” (in D# minor!), later dedicated to Maurice Ravel. We get the delicious “Gnossienne No.3”, and the Croquis et agaceries d'un gros bonhomme en bois, nicely played. And listen out for the Chabrier quote in “Españaña”.

The rest of this disc has Poulenc playing his own music. A 1930 recording of the Aubade was recorded in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées with the Orchestre des concerts Straram under Walther Straram, an English conductor who’d carved out a successful career in France. The performance sounds incredibly vivid in this restoration, the wind solos oozing character. Poulenc is a terrific soloist – listen to him easing his way into the ballet’s delicious “Rondeau”, surely one of this composer’s greatest, most characteristic tunes. A live performance of the Concerto for Two Pianos dates from 1962, Poulenc teamed up with Jacques Février and conducted by Georges Prêtre. It’s enormously enjoyable if a tad scrappier than the EMI studio recording made in the same year. Plus, we get Poulenc’s sparky accounts of his Suite Française, Mouvements perpétuels and Nocturne in C major, taped in 1950 along with the Satie pieces. A lovely, life-enhancing collection - as historical releases go, this album is self-recommending.

Dobrinka Tabakova: Sun Triptych Maxim Rysanov (viola), Dasol Kim (piano), Roman Mints (violin, hurdy gurdy), Kristina Blaumane (cello), BBC Concert Orchestra/Tabakova (ECM New Series)

Composer Dobrinka Tabakova describes the magical world from which the two works for string orchestra here - Sun Triptych (2007-9) and Fantasy Homage to Schubert (2013) - as ‘very nebulous and still”. The outer movements of Sun Triptych in particular have a wonderful sheen. The composer has a fascination for long, sustained, almost tantric phrases which is completely irresistible. She has said that she likes writing for strings because the limitations of breath don’t get in the way, that lines can be sustained. She achieves it brilliantly – what we hear is self-evidently so much more than an ‘effect’ but rather the result years of consistent and concentrated effort, refinement and distillation.  

The aesthetic here is to let music find its pace, to allow it to emerge from silence and then retreat back into it – try the gorgeous ending of “Dusk” from the triptych. All of this also feels like common ground for Dobrinka Tabakova and producer Manfred Eicher, indeed between them there would appear to be something admirably counter-cultural going on. Dobrinka Tabakova’s first album on ECM, String Paths received a Grammy nomination. At the beginning of 2014. Did ECM leap frenetically into action or feel the imperative to “drop” a follow-up disc? Er, no. It has taken more than twelve years – almost a third of the composer’s life to date – for ECM to release the next one. But it has been worth the wait.

Despite the long interval between them, Sun Triptych is the impressive sequel to String Paths, and there are all kinds of clear threads and connections to link the two albums.  The vivid presence of folk modes (here particularly in Spinning a Yarn) and church modes (in Organum Light) are just as much a part of Tabakova’s musical language as much as the harmonic alchemy – and what she calls “the sincerity and purity, the honesty” of Schubert. Another common thread is the presence of very fine string players who were members of the composer’s Guildhall cohort: Latvian-born cellist Kristina Blaumane and violist Maxim Rysanov, originally from the Donbas. Rysanov is the totally convincing dedicatee of the Suite in Jazz Style which is remarkable for the creation of a very different vibe, flow and mood for each of its three contrasting movements.

I was fascinated to discover recently that Iannis Xenakis gave the composer very specific encouragement when she was a fifteen-year-old. “Don’t be afraid to be different.” His advice has stood the test of time remarkably well: The poise, grace and eloquence of the music of Dobrinka Tabakova makes it unique; and the world a better place. Sebastian Scotney

Vaughan Williams: Symphonies 5 and 9 London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Antonio Pappano (LSO Live)

Some recorded performances are impossible to dislodge from one’s memory, André Previn’s 1971 RCA LP of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5 a disc that left an especially indelible impression on me as a 16-year-old lucky to have it as an A Level ‘set work’. Previn’s expansive reading, gorgeously played by the London Symphony Orchestra, still sounds marvellous. As does this nicely engineered live account from the same orchestra under Antonio Pappano, the Barbican acoustic allowing plenty of detail to emerge, Vaughan Williams’ lower string lines ideally clear. Pappano’s tempi are swifter than his predecessor’s but not unduly so – moments like the shift to E major 3’34” into the “Preludio” are gloriously handled, and the movement’s heady climax has plenty of bite. Augustin Gorisse’s cor anglais solo in the “Romanza” is as good as any I’ve heard, and the return of the symphony’s opening theme halfway through the “Passacaglia” is superbly managed . Pappano secures some radiant string playing in the symphony’s final minutes – in short, this deserves shelf space alongside Previn.

Symphony No. 5 can be played by a chamber orchestra, whereas the underrated 9^th is scored for a large orchestra including flugelhorn and three saxophones. Early drafts included the headings “Wessex Prelude” and “Tess” for the first two movements, Vaughan Williams later deleting these Thomas Hardy references in case they distracted audiences. If you’re a fan of Holst’s austere tone poem Egdon Heath you’ll enjoy this symphony, its textures veering from lush to skeletal. You hear this in the opening minutes, a craggy tutti abruptly dissolving into a lonely solo clarinet. Pappano relishes the quirkiness without underselling the work’s fleeting beauty. The first movement’s hushed close is disquieting and there’s  magic in how he and the LSO strings handle the closing minutes of the “Andante sostenuto”, to my ears one of the most tender and affecting passages in any Vaughan Williams symphony. Pappano’s galumphing scherzo is ideally paced, and the finale’s extraordinary ending, a Technicolor E major chord fading as if someone’s turning the lights out, left me needing a quiet sit down. 

Elegy Mary Bevan (soprano), Joseph Middleton (piano) (Signum)

Here’s a lovely sequence of songs of mourning, reflection on death and the comfort to be found in music, by the established pairing of soprano Mary Bevan and pianist Joseph Middleton. It began life as a recital programme, put together for Dartington in 2022, when Bevan was mourning the death of her father, and it is clearly a very personal project.

The opener, Ravel’s “Kaddisch” from 2 Mélodies hébraiques, is stunning, Bevan’s melismatic, microtonal keening supported by the most minimal of piano accompaniments. Three Schubert songs offer differing perspectives, from the trudging old man’s music of “Nachtstück” to the more passionate fire of “Auflösung” (Bevan’s tone more anxious, Middleton’s playing more edgy) to “Die junge Nonne” with one of Schubert’s magical switches from minor to major, and back again. Britten’s arrangement of Purcell’s “Evening Hymn” is sublime, and Clara Schumann’s “Die gute Nacht, die ich dir sage”, written for her husband’s birthday, has a deliciously ambiguous tone, by turns warmly romantic and then distant. Clara’s friend Brahms’s “O Tod, wie bitter bist du” is more straightforwardly lamenting, Middleton’s bass register ringing out richly.

Errollyn Wallen’s “Peace on Earth” overcomes a kitsch (self-penned) text with music that is anything but. Meanwhile, Bevan describes Robert Schumann’s “Requiem” as the emotional heart of the “rest from pain-wracked toil”. Bevan’s singing is assertive, before melting into a still last few bars. There are other pleasures – Pauline Viardot’s “Lamento” with its insistent piano arpeggios, the bleakness of Barber’s brilliant “The Desire for Hermitage” – but the best thing overall is the exploration by the album of all aspects of mourning, from the despair of the Ravel to the open-eyed optimism of Strauss’s “Morgen!” at the close: “And tomorrow the sun will shine again”. This is singing that completely believes that. Bernard Hughes

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