Classical CDs: Wolf-pelts, clowns and social realism

Bliss: Miracle in the Gorbals, Metamorphic Variations BBC Philharmonic/Michael Seal (Chandos)

We are coming towards the end of the year marking 50 years since the death of Arthur Bliss, and I’m pleased to have covered a number of live performances and recordings that have exposed some underexposed music. The latest of these is a recording pairing his ballet Miracle in the Gorbals, a big success in its time, and the expansive Metamorphic Variations, played by the BBC Philharmonic under Michael Seal.

This was Bliss’s 1944 follow-up to his hit ballet Checkmate of 1937. Where the latter was a high-spirited and witty take on a game of chess, Miracle in the Gorbals mixes Glaswegian social realism with religious symbolism. It struck a chord with the wartime public, and continued to be revived repeatedly till 1950, when it largely disappeared from the repertoire. While this might be to do with the slightly clunky storyline, the music itself very much deserves to be heard. This is echt Bliss, once the young revolutionary of British music, now firmly established in his conservative, richly scored and highly characterised style. The music is even Tchaikovskian in places – the waltz “The Young Lovers” is almost pastiche – but elsewhere, as in the scene-setting “The Street”, the music is more decidedly Bliss.

The score is very balletic all the way through and a gift for the choreographer. It is also a treat for the orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic revelling in the deftly realised textures. These extend from the sombre “The Suicide’s Body is Brought In” to the big band jazz of the “Dance of Deliverance”. Miracle in the Gorbals is as stylistically diverse as anything by Bliss, a score totally assured in bringing together its diverse elements and a charming work which deserves a future in the concert hall

The Metamorphic Variations come from 1972, part of a late flowering in Bliss’s last years. This is the first complete recording, reinstating two movements cut at the premiere. It is a long work (43 minutes) and perhaps Bliss was right to make the cuts. It’s less easy to love this piece than the variation set that is for me his masterpiece, the Meditations on a Theme by John Blow, but it receives a very committed performance by the BBC Philharmonic, and it is certainly good to have the complete version available. The Chandos CD is beautifully presented, with extensive notes and illustrations. Bernard Hughes

Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem Pygmalion/Pichon (BIS Records)

There has been a recent slew of new recordings of Brahms’s peerless Ein Deutsches Requiem, taking their place in an already extensive catalogue. As well as this present version by Pygmalion and Raphaël Pichon, there has been the Bach Collegium Japan and Masaaki Suzuki, a recreation of the premiere by the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg under Kent Nagano, a shortly forthcoming one by the Luxembourg Philharmonic, and my own favourite, Edward Gardner’s January 2025 release with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. They’re all very fine in their different ways and, if the Gardner is the pick of the bunch, both that and this Pygmalion recording will take their place in my library alongside John Eliot Gardiner’s (1991) and Karajan’s vintage – in every sense – classic with the Berlin Philharmonic

Pygmalion specialise in period performance of Baroque repertoire – their St Matthew Passion is terrific – and they bring the best aspects of that approach to Brahms, the textures unclogged and the tempos on the fresh side. But it is a requiem, and they do introspection, the choir unafraid to sing quietly (and the mixing keeps the orchestra in the foreground). This becomes a slight problem in the third movement, when baritone Stéphane Degout feels too recessed. Soprano Sabine Devieilhe is given more space in her movement though, in which has a pleasingly light touch.

The German Requiem is a slow starter – I never really feel it kicks into gear till the second movement. But the timpani in “Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras” grab the attention, with the choir spinning on a sixpence from direct sternness to sweet cantabile. But the sternness wins out, the playing and singing monumental and impassive. My favourite movement is always “Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen, Herr Zabaoth”, the shortest but the most ineffable, and gorgeous here. The sixth movement has the most massive climaxes – the passage from 3.40 is fast and thrilling – and a couple of moments that made me smile with their sheer exhilaration. Raphaël Pichon is something of a musical magician – very charismatic in live performance and clearly inspirational in the studio. And if the recent Gardner just gets the nod from these recent releases, I would be quite happy listening to the Pichon from now on and not feel disappointed. Bernard Hughes

Lise Cristiani: works by François Servais, Offenbach and Schubert Sol Gabetta (cello), Capella Gabetta, Irina Zahharenkova (piano) (Sony)

This 80-minute collection of early 19th century works is altogether more substantial, interesting, varied and cleverly thought through than might appear from a first look at the track-listing. And that is not least because Sol Gabetta is such a highly persuasive player and communicator.

Part of the story here is one of cellists themselves creating the repertoire for an instrument that didn’t yet have much. About a third of the album is made up of works by the Belgian cello virtuoso François Servais (1807–1866). In the hands of Gabetta and her chamber cohort Capella Gambetta, the “Fantaisie sur deux airs russes” comes across as far more than a potboiler or a facile set of rumty-tum variations. The opening section has full-on drama (a radio producer to whom I recommended it snapped it up), and the finger-busting virtuoso sections always give way to episodes with real character, and these are very persuasively played.

The album also serves as a homage a unique figure in the history of music, the early nineteenth century cellist Lise Cristiani. Gabetta’s album is an invitation to explore the improbable story of her all-too brief life. Her cello playing was so admired by Mendelssohn when he heard her play in Leipzig that he dedicated to her the only one of his Lieder ohne Worte to have a part for another instrument (rather than solo piano), his Op. 109. That piece is not on this disc – Gabetta recorded it on her recent, fine Mendelssohn set. Cristiani was a special musician then, but her story is also that of an explorer who travelled giving concerts, covering at least 19,000 kilometres travelling around Russia with her Stradivarius cello wrapped in wolf-pelts, and who died of cholera while still in her 20s. The best place to go for that story is the remarkable book by Kate Kennedy (Bloomsbury, 2024). Fact here really is stranger than fiction. Cristiani was also not averse to doing her own myth-making. “I will not entrust to paper the secret of how old I am…,” she wrote. The bicentenary of her birth (as Agathe Barbier) is almost certainly on Christmas Eve this year, but then again, it might be in 2027. Cristiani’s lyrical playing is caught here in popular songs arranged by cellist Alexander Batta, of which the most appealing is of Schubert’s “Ständchen” (D 889) with quiet, atmospheric double-stopping. The whole set has been well-recorded in Switzerland, and comes complete with fascinating essays by Servais specialist/archivist Peter François and a vivid account of Cristiani’s life by writer Waldemar Kamer. Sebastian Scotney

Philip Glass: Piano Etudes 1-20 Vanessa Wagner (piano) (Infiné)

I’m on the fence when it comes to Philip Glass, have being wowed by ENO’s production of Akhnaten in the mid-1980s but baffled by some of the later orchestral works. A couple of epic operas aside, Glass’s personality and style are most clearly expressed when writing on a smaller scale. You hear this in his 20 Etudes for solo piano, composed between 1991 and 2012. Organised into two books of ten pieces apiece, those in the first volume are in the classical etude tradition, works written for Glass himself to play, “pieces written to address my own deficiencies as a pianist”. They’ve been recorded frequently, Glass admitting that “if I’m to be remembered for anything, it will be for the piano music, because people can play it.” Up to now my reference version has been an intimate, expansive complete set performed by Australian composer Sally Whitwell on the ABC label. Víkingur Ólafsson’s recent selection on a DG is a sonic spectacular but I find DG’s recorded sound feels too big and boomy for this repertoire. French pianist Vanessa Wagner’s double album is closer to Whitwell’s approach, if not her relaxed tempi: these are clean, unfussy readings which nail each etude’s character. Take Wagner’s version of the lovely 2^nd Etude, Wagner easing herself into it as if she’s settling into a bath. The faster numbers in Book 1 are terrific – No. 4 has a wicked glint, and No. 6 is taken at a real lick. Wagner finds plenty of dark humour in No. 10, the music stopping abruptly, as if the plug’s been pulled.

The second volume’s technical demands are more extreme. No. 13’s perpetuum mobile is exciting here, and Wagner brings out the jazziness lurking in No. 14’s left-hand writing. Nos.18 and 19 are darkly romantic here, and Wagner steers a clear path through the long final etude. Drawing on material written for a 2013 film score, it provides a thoughtful, sober finale, Glass’s quiet final bars sounding here like a door closing. Excellent stuff, then, and well-engineered: an album to convert Glass sceptics.

Les Divas d’Offenbach – extracts from operas, operettas, opéras-bouffe Véronique Gens (soprano), Orchestre National et Choeur des Pays de la Loire, Hervé Niquet (Alpha Classics/ Palazzetto Bru Zane)

 “À quoi servent les maris ?” (What’s the use of husbands?). Female solicitor Patchouline puts the question to a four-part "chorus of solicitors" in the “Valse du Divorce” just after the beginning of Act 2 of the 1871 opéra bouffe Boule de Neige. It’s just one of many interesting and highly unusual stop-offs in this selection of nineteen numbers from Offenbach’s mighty catalogue of more than 100 stage works. Here, a complaint of grinding poverty from the streets of eighteenth century Lima in La Périchole jostles for attention with instructions to a hairdresser from La Diva, laden with nudge-nudge double meanings. Familiar classics sit alongside premiere recordings. To take a cue from the fun album cover of a diva adjusting the mirror of her Citroen 2CV, the instruction is to fasten our seatbelts and enjoy the ride. Another positive about this disc, from the Alpha Classics label, working with support of the Palazzetto Bru Zane foundation, is that it proves again and again that Offenbach was a truly inspired melodist. It’s an amazing story: Offenbach’s father, a synagogue cantor from Cologne, managed to get the fourteen year-old a life-changing audition with Cherubini to enter the Paris Conservatoire, an encounter which led him to make his career in France, first as cellist and then as composer/impresario at the heart of Paris’s musical life.

This disc makes another point well too: there is probably nobody as good as Véronique Gens to show off such a diverse range of material in the specifically French space between speech and song. She does it with panache, character, individuality and sass. The two tracks from La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein here are enough to give a glimpse of how much artifice, subtlety and definitive characterisation she could bring to the entire title role. But there is a problem, which the “Valse du Divorce” illustrates well. The recording sessions in Angers with the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire conducted by Hervé Niquet are all a bit workaday. Whereas in this lilting E major waltz, the bass section needs to give a bounce to each first beat, here they land leadenly, the whole thing just drags. Similarly, whereas the “Symphonic Entr’acte” from Act 2 of Robinson Crusoé sounds as if it might, in the right orchestral hands, be revealed as a wonderfully vivid tone poem, that potential is sadly not realised here. This is one of those tantalising "what-might-have-been" albums. It’s great that the recording has been made and that more of this repertoire is now available, but that goes hand-in-hand with a sense of disappointment.

 That thought led me back with real pleasure to revisit another album of Offenbach arias from Alpha/Bru-Zane: Offenbach Colorature, the magnificent debut album by Belgian soprano Jodie Devos, who died so tragically young from cancer last year. Recorded in Munich in 2019 when she was 29, it is a glorious and now poignant document. The two albums together make a great case for Offenbach, but I will be revisiting the stunning youthful energy of the earlier album more often than this fascinating, surprising but slightly worthy collection. Sebastian Scotney

Prokofiev: Symphony No. 7, Myaskovsky: Sinfonietta in A minor Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra/Vasily Petrenko (Lawo Classics)

Nikolai Myaskovsky (1881-1950) remains a shadowy figure, a prolific, serious-minded symphonist and long-serving professor of composition at the Moscow Conservatoire whose career eclipsed by the rise of precocious younger composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich. His Sinfonietta in A minor is a late work based on a set of four piano pieces written between 1907 and 1912. Scored for strings, it’s charming but anonymous, Myaskovsky’s opening flourish promising more than the first movement actually delivers, the two middle movements sweet but unmemorable. That flourish returns at the start of the lively finale, the music finally taking wing. Interesting to hear, then, but it’s not prompted me to disappear down the Myaskovsky rabbit hole.

Whereas the tunes in Prokofiev’s 7^th and final symphony have been lodged in my brain for decades. Inexplicably neglected, this late work was completed in 1952. Often perceived as a piece intended for youthful audiences, Pravda reported that the symphony was able to "satisfy the aesthetic demands of the artistic tastes of the Soviet people". Me, I’ll never tire of the soaring string theme which dominates the first movement, and the wistful wind and percussion idea which follows it. Vasily Petrenko and the Oslo Philharmonic are alert to the music’s shady underbelly, the brittle C sharp minor chord that ends the movement distinctly unnerving. The waltz which follows sounds like a discarded ballet number, but it’s played here with real panache. Prokofiev follows it with a bittersweet, intermezzo-like “Andante elevato”, its gently dissonant final chord a sweetly introspective gesture. The return of the first movement’s big tune implies that we’re heading for a radiant apotheosis, but the music peters out, the glockenspiel writing suggesting a faltering heartbeat. It’s an exquisite farewell, looking ahead to a similar moment at the close of Shostakovich’s 15^th Symphony. I’ll confess to quite liking the upbeat coda which Prokofiev later added against his will, but the introspective quiet ending feels instinctively right. Petrenko makes a persuasive case for this underrated and lovable work, aided by superb orchestral playing and glowing sound.

Shostakovich and Prokofiev: Violin Concertos Daniel Matejča (violin), Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra/Tomáš Netopil (Supraphon)

These two concertos make for a fascinating pairing, the fresh-faced innocence of Prokofiev’s D major Violin Concerto the polar opposite of Shostakovich’s imposing A minor masterpiece. Young Czech violinist Daniel Matejča’s new disc faces comparison with a famous recording by Maxim Vengerov, the LSO conducted by Rostropovich. He’s got nothing to fear – the playing here is fabulous, with some sparky, colourful backing from Tomáš Netopil’s on-form Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra. Matejča’s Prokofiev is swifter than Vengerov’s, the scherzo zipping along, Netopil whipping up a storm five minutes into the finale. The passage which follows, Prokofiev’s grey clouds dissipating as the concerto’s fairy tale opening returns, is superbly done; you can sense Matejča smiling as the fluttering solo line flies ever higher. A lovely performance.

"Lovely" isn’t an adjective you could apply to Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1, a large-scale work composed in 1947/1948 but not performed until 1955. Matejča’s opening “Nocturne” is again faster than Vengerov’s and all the better for it, this spare, spectral movement never sagging. I like the way he digs into the scherzo’s opening phrases, and the orchestra lets rip in the klezmer theme at 2’48”, xylophone prominent in the mix. Where this performance really hits home is in the “Passacaglia”, Matejča’s solo line increasingly intense and impassioned as the movement unfolds, the cadenza’s wilder passages hair-raising. The closing “Burlesque” is riotous, its final minutes unequivocally triumphant in this reading. Two of the 20^th century’s best concertos, brilliantly played, nicely recorded and on a single disc – what’s not to like?

Walton: Cello Concerto, Symphony No. 1, Scapino Sinfonia of London/John Wilson, with Jonathan Aasgaard (cello) (Chandos)

The big draw on this latest slice of John Wilson Walton is the autumnal Cello Concerto, my favourite of the composer’s three concertante works. Mervyn Cooke’s booklet note outlines the piece’s chequered history in alarming detail, his account taking in lost scores, nervous breakdowns and a collision with a cement lorry. The great Ukrainian-born cellist Gregor Piatigorsky commissioned the concerto in 1954, its first performance taking place with Charles Munch’s Boston Symphony in January 1957. An RCA Living Stereo recording made with the same forces is still available and sounds excellent for its age, despite a few odd balances. Too many later recordings take the first movement much too slowly, diluting the quirkiness and lyricism in the process. Thankfully, John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London’s principal cello Jonathan Aasgaard avoid that trap, taking just 7’31”. The opening is magical, a Prokofiev-like ticking clock over which Walton’s beautiful, angular first theme sings out. Aasgaard is perfectly balanced, the exposed wind and horn solos nicely done, and Wilson adds plenty of Hollywood sheen to the string entry at 4’14”. Aasgaard is witty and athletic in the central scherzo, and he and Wilson manage to make the discursive finale cohere, the return of the concerto’s opening music in the closing minutes a moment to savour. The quiet fade is perfectly judged, and it’s hard to understand why Piatigorsky requested a more intense and punchy ending. Walton eventually provided one in 1974, adding a strident tutti that to my mind feels totally wrong. Listen to Jamie Walton’s recording of it on Signum and you’ll hear what I mean. I still love Paul Tortelier’s 1970s performance, but this new one is an excellent modern alternative.

The big coupling is Walton’s iconic, brooding Symphony No. 1, Wilson’s reading swift and exciting, with excellent brass playing and spiky winds. His first movement is fractionally faster than André Previn’s famous 1960s LP but doesn’t quite hit the same heights, largely because the recorded sound is more diffuse and distant – earlier Chandos versions from Edward Gardner and Alexander Gibson have so much more heft. Try the string theme at 1’48”, which, though beautifully played, lacks weight here. Walton’s mercurial “Presto con malizia” is exciting, and there’s no lack of intensity in the slow movement. Wilson’s enthusiasm makes the finale hang together, and there’s a moving trumpet solo near the gleefully overblown close. It’s very good, but I wanted more sonic heft. As a bonus, we get the 1940 comedy overture Scapino in its more transparent 1950 revision. Wilson takes it at a real lick, with whooping horns, shrill high winds and prominent percussion. It’s insubstantial but highly entertaining – let’s hope that these forces tackle Walton’s effervescent Partita before too long.

ad tendo – music by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Hildegard von Bingen, Heinrich Biber et al Simone Porter (violin) (Bright Shiny Things)

Violinist Simone Porter’s arresting solo album is inspired by a quote from philosopher Simone Weil (”absolutely unmixed attention is prayer”), the title ad tendo actually the Latin root of the word “attention”. As you’d expect, ad tendo isn’t a disc for background listening but something that demands detailed attention. In Porter’s words, “total absorption offers a kind of deliverance.” It’s all too easy to multitask while consuming recorded music, and ad tendo didn’t make much of an impression when I listened to it during a rush-hour tube journey. My second attempt came a day later in a quiet house, my quest for total absorption easier to attain. Drishti (दृष्टिi) by Indian-American composer Reena Esmail is a sequence of ten miniatures linked by a high E harmonic, the fixed gaze or “drishti” of the title. Look at the track titles and you’ll marvel at Esmail’s ability to reflect words like "diaphanous", "yearning" and "brewing" in pieces lasting barely a minute. “Brewing” is a mini marvel, the solo line swirling and expanding in range over 1’40”, the mood abruptly punctured by 28 seconds describing “Wild, erratic.” Porter premiered the work in 2022 – that she owns the music is apparent in the gutsiness and swagger of her playing.

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Lachen Verlernt is a ten-minute chaconne inspired by a Pierrot Lunaire quote, a serious clown attempting to teach an audience to laugh again. An excitable, fluttering close suggests that he’s succeeded. Olivia Marckx’s Improvisation riffs on a theme by Hildegard of Bingen, and Andrew Norman’s Sabina was prompted by a sunrise a experienced in a Rome church, Porter filling the space with sound as the daylight floods in. Porter ends the album with a magisterial reading of Biber’s Passacaglia in G minor. An invigorating anthology, beautifully recorded.

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