Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2021 i BBC Music Magazine

Jan Swafford Composer biographer ‘My piece endeavours to correct the myths and misperceptions of those things in the popular imagination – call it the ‘Amadeus effect’ – which have left us with a highly fanciful version of Mozart and his art.’ Page 26 Fiona Maddocks Writer, editor and critic ‘I admit my knowledge of Nordic traditional music was scant, but when the highly engaging Pekka Kuusisto shared the secrets of Finnish folk fiddling and the oblique connections with Sibelius, a new world opened up.’ Page 32 Richard Wigmore Writer and critic ‘It’s been exhilarating to delve into the heady period in the German arts labelled Sturm und Drang, whose cultivation of emotional extremes paved the way for Romanticism a generation later.’ Page 52…

Mirga moves on Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla is to step down as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the end of the 2021/22 season. She will, however, retain her links with the ensemble as its principal guest conductor. The Lithuanian, who has proved a major hit at Symphony Hall since taking over from Andris Nelsons in 2016, wishes to focus her energies on purely musical, rather than administrative, activities. New beats Another maestro on the move is Vasily Petrenko, who in September is to become the artistic director of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia ‘Evgeny Svetlanov’, taking over from Vladimir Jurowski. At the beginning of the 2022/23 season, meanwhile, Rafael Payare, former chief conductor of the Ulster Orcehstra, will be beginning his new job as music…

2nd: The composer and violinist Carl Eberwein dies aged 81. Born in Weimar, Eberwein held several positions in the German city, where he was championed by and worked closely with Goethe. He set many of Goethe’s texts as songs and, in 1829, composed music for an 80th-birthday performance of Faust . 5th: In England, CH Gould is awarded a patent for the stapler. Though his design is the first to receive official recognition, staplers of some description are known to have been existence since the reign of Louis XV in 18th-century France. Two years prior to Gould’s patent, George McGill has received a US patent for a small bendable brass paper fastener. 9th: Ambroise Thomas’s opera Hamlet premieres at the Paris Opéra with a cast including baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure in…

Ysaÿe Posthumous Solo Violin Sonata, Op. 27 Philippe Graffin (violin) Avie AV2399 I grew up in Belgium, so I’ve always been very familiar with Ysaÿe’s violin sonatas. This year, I remembered that Philippe Graffin had rediscovered another sonata at the Brussels Conservatoire; it was a great experience to explore this new piece. The second movement is very special; the way it grows and builds is beautiful. Red Sun SamulNori Amadeo 841 222-2 I’ve never lived in Korea but I am familiar with traditional Korean music. I recently became curious to learn more about the collaborations that exist between western music and traditional Asian music. I stumbled across this album which, I learned, was the first ever to combine jazz and what we call Gugak music. It’s very dynamic, interesting and…

Is it coincidence or something more ominous that six top UK orchestras are losing their music directors in quick succession? There was much press speculation when Simon Rattle announced he was quitting the London Symphony Orchestra after six years (barely a third of the time he served in Birmingham or Berlin), acquiring a German passport and moving to the excellent Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Clearly things haven’t worked out as the LSO would have wished. But his departure is just the most newsworthy of many. A week later, the highly rated Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla announced she was relinquishing the music director job at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Like Rattle, she cited ‘personal reasons’. That can mean anything. Add to that the imminent departures of Vladimir Jurowski and Esa-Pekka Salonen…

In April 1770, the 14-year-old Mozart and his father Leopold arrived in Italy on the latest leg of their European tour. Visiting St Peter’s in the Vatican, father and son sat down to enjoy Allegri’s (above) Miserere. Back then, performances were limited to the Vatican – the Pope forbade the music to be performed anywhere else. So the story goes, the young Mozart heard it once, and returned to his lodgings to transcribe it from memory, note perfect. But as Jan Swafford writes in his Mozart biography, the truth is a little different. Yes, Leopold reported the feat in a letter home, but what isn’t true is that there were no copies outside St Peter’s. In fact, three copies of Allegri’s work existed outside the Vatican including one in Bologna,…

It’s obvious enough that London has a place in music history. Vaughan Williams wrote a ‘London’ Symphony. Haydn composed 12 of them (not that they tell you much about the city). Elgar celebrated London’s earthy vigour in his Cockaigne Overture (a word that for Victorians referred to a general kind of ‘Cockney’ naughtiness). And Holst commemorated Hammersmith in an exquisite minor masterpiece for wind band. “London has done best when it has embraced the wider world, welcoming musicians from abroad” But how London ranks against the other leading music cities of the world is more equivocal. One school of thought is that London has done best when it has embraced the wider world, welcoming musicians from abroad to come and be part of the party – sometimes taking the party…

Had Friedrich Maximilian Klinger stuck by the original title of his 1776 Sturm und Drang, one suspects the play would never have found its name applied to a literary movement and, later, musical term – Haydn’s ‘Wirrwarr Symphonies’ (‘Muddle Symphonies’) doesn’t exactly hit the mark. Klinger, who hailed from Frankfurt am Main and was a childhood friend of Goethe, changed the name of the play at the suggestion of author Christoph Kaufmann shortly before its premiere in Leipzig on 1 April 1777. Set against the background of the American Revolutionary War, Sturm und Drang tells a Romeo and Juliet-style tale of love amid the feuding Bushy and Berkly families. Unlike Shakespeare, however, Klinger brings things to a happy conclusion, though things did not turn out so rosy for the playwright…

Anatoly Lyadov is widely known as the indolent Russian composer who unwittingly gave the young Igor Stravinsky his big break by failing to write The Firebird. His low compositional output, partly owing to the amount of time he took to complete each work, has only reinforced this reputation. Then there is the oft-repeated charge, originating from his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, that Lyadov was ‘incredibly lazy’. Contemporary accounts reveal that Lyadov was a composer held in the highest esteem Yet contemporary accounts and memoirs by Lyadov’s colleagues and pupils, including Stravinsky himself, reveal a composer not only held in the highest esteem but also widely loved. Indeed, Lyadov excited the enthusiasm of some of Russia’s greatest creative minds, including all five members of the ‘Mighty Handful’ group of composers while he was…

Colin Davis Davis’s approach in his third recording of this symphony is more Brucknerian in its grand inevitability, but there’s still room for plenty of Sibelian drama and volatile passion. In fact this is overall a very warm performance, in keeping with the expressive generosity of the ‘late’ Davis style. It brings extra charm to the waltz-like second dance episode, and extra poignancy to the coda. Davis makes the ending more affirmative, less ambiguous that the scrupulously literal Vänskä, but it’s very moving. ( LSO Live LSO0074 ) Herbert von Karajan The sense of personal investment in Karajan’s Sibelius comes across powerfully. And as in the best Karajan performances, the structural engineering is superb – how anyone could listen to this and deny that Sibelius was a top-class symphonic thinker…

With lockdowns still very much in place, recent months have presented a good opportunity to listen to more music. But if you’ve already exhausted your go-to composers and works, perhaps now’s the time to tread some newer paths. If you’re in need of a guide, then this issue features plenty of music, composers and performers that are well worth discovering. We have concertos by Fesch, Romberg and Rosetti, works for percussion, operas by Stephen Dodgson and Salieri, new music from Caroline Shaw and David Matthews and thrilling debuts from soprano Hera Hyesang Park and pianist Mehani Teave. All that, plus the usual selection of Brief Notes, a World Music round-up and some great books, too. Enjoy exploring! This month’s critics John Allison, Nicholas Anderson, Terry Blain, Kate Bolton-Porciatti, Geoff Brown,…

Haydn Symphony No. 15 in D; Symphony No. 35 in B flat; Symphony No. 45 in F sharp minor ‘Farewell’; Scena di Berenice, Hob.XXIVA:10* *Sandrine Piau (soprano); Il Giardino Armonico/Giovanni Antonini Alpha Classics ALPHA684 77:34 mins A remarkable range of expression is drawn from the period forces This is the latest release in Giovanni Antonini’s project to record all of Haydn’s symphonies by the tercentenary of his birth in 2032. It centres on two great ‘farewell’ works: the fiercely concentrated Symphony No. 45, from which the players gradually depart at the end, and the emotionally charged Scena di Berenice, premiered together with the Symphony No. 104 towards the end of Haydn’s last London visit in 1795. The booklet notes strain somewhat to link the other two symphonies: No. 35 is…

Plaisirs illuminés F Coll: Les plaisirs illuminés; Ginastera: Concerto for Strings; Veress: Musica concertante; plus works by Bartók, Kurtág and Ligeti Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin), Sol Gabetta (cello); Camerata Bern/Francisco Coll Alpha Classics ALPHA580 75:26 mins Camerata Bern’s performances come across with fiery spirit Two threads run through this adventurous disc – the spirit of Béla Bartók and the Camerata Bern’s prowess – but the force of personality at the centre of it all comes from the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who since 2018 has been ‘artistic partner’ of the ensemble. It opens with Sándor Veress’s Musica concertante per 12 archi, written in 1965-6 for the then newly formed Camerata Bern, and which in this performance comes across with fiery, searing spirit. Veress had been a pupil of Bartók, and in turn…

I Am Hera Park’s coloratura and cadenzas are always at the service of the drama Bellini: Arias from I Capuleti e i Montecchi; Gluck: Arias from Orfeo ed Euridice; Handel: Aria from Giulio Cesare; Mozart: Arias from Idomeneo, The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute; Puccini: Arias from La bohème and Gianni Schicchi; Rossini: Arias from The Barber of Seville and Il Turco in Italia; plus works by Joowon Kim, Pergolesi and Un-Yung La Hera Hyesang Park (soprano), Johannes Maria Bogner (harpsichord); Vienna Symphony Orchestra/Bertrand de Billy DG 483 9456 66:35 mins Hera today, but hopefully not gone tomorrow. The young Korean soprano Hera Hyesang Park has recorded one of the most satisfying debuts for many a day. This is a voice that rises to every challenge. Listen to…

Caroline Shaw Narrow Sea; Taxidermy Dawn Upshaw (soprano), Gilbert Kalish (piano); So Percussion The five-movement work is at once joyful and mesmeric Nonesuch 7559791789 28:22 mins Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw continues to make waves with her imaginative and expressive works that glide effortlessly between genres. This short but exquisite disc showcases Shaw’s 2017 Narrow Sea, recorded by its outstanding original performers: So Percussion, soprano Dawn Upshaw and pianist Gilbert Kalish. Exploring the importance of refuge and the idea of water as a passage between this world and the next, Narrow Sea draws on texts from The Sacred Harp, a collection of American hymns first published in 1844. Shaw reworks these powerful texts with new melodies, adding fresh colour but retaining the emotional directness of the original hymns themselves. The…

Beethoven Bagatelles Vladimir Feltsman (piano) Nimbus NI 6399 67:15 mins Vladimir Feltsman has courted a good deal of controversy, to the extent that I thought he was no longer recording the masterworks of whose idiosyncratic accounts he made a name for himself. This new recording is ideal for him, for it consists of Beethoven’s whimsical ideas, where problems of large-scale forms don’t arise, because they are an average of three minutes long. In Beethoven’s large-scale works there are passages of strange, seemingly irrelevant music before an evidently organic element recurs. These bagatelles are like fragments taken out of grave contexts, and conveniently they come from his first, second and last periods, the final ones as mischievously sublime as certain passages in the late piano sonatas and the last quartets. Fortunately…

Tibet Ritual Traditions of the Bonpos Ocora C 583016 63:27 mins Even before the pandemic, the flow of ethnographic recordings had declined to a trickle, and it’s now almost drying up. That is why this page focuses on the products of just two labels, and why some of the contents were recorded 40 years ago: Ocora is having to ransack its archives, as field recordings have become a public-health no-no. Moreover, present-day China wouldn’t have allowed the recordings in Tibet to have been made: the Bonpos were a Tibetan minority sect who have now dispersed to the West, where they are attracting devoted adherents. Bon is a religion which predates Buddhism, and its rituals included exorcism and divination, but as in Buddhism its adherents believe that meditation and rituals are…

March round-up This isn’t the first time that a selection of recordings featuring instrumentally subtracted lineups (see Jazz Choice) has reached this column in a cluster, almost as if they were huddling together for mutual protection. Happily, everyone can relax: there’s more than enough skill on display here to make creative use of the attendant breathing space. Drummer Will Glaser puts his name to Climbing in Circles, a fine undertaking that sees him merging two pre-existing duos with saxophonist Matthew Herd and pianist Liam Noble, having already made individual recordings with each of them with confusingly similar titles. Trying to keep up with all this brings us to a likeable third album, shot through with the kind of thrown-together spontaneity that can easily collapse in less capable hands but that…

Giving It Away – Classical Music in Lockdown and Other Fairytales Paul Carey Jones Self-published 216pp (pb) £7.99 Back in March 2020 – which feels centuries ago now – bass-baritone Paul Carey Jones visited London with his girlfriend for a birthday trip to the theatre. He was preparing to return to Cardiff when new quarantine guidelines and lockdown rules prevented him from doing so. Shortly afterwards, he lost every single one of his singing contracts, which were either cancelled or indefinitely postponed. He began to record his thoughts on the developing pandemic crisis and its impact on the world of classical music from the perspective of a UK opera singer in a blog called Coronaclassical, which attracted wide attention. Sections of the blog are reproduced here in book form. His…

Born and brought up in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, Nigel Hess’s career as a composer has spanned nearly 50 years. His work includes well-known music for television (Wycliffe, Vanity Fair), theatre (the Royal Shakespeare Company), film (Ladies in Lavender) and the concert hall. His latest recording, The Way of Light, on Orchid Classics, features a selection of stirring concert works for voices, brass bands and orchestras. I’m told I started early as a pianist – at two-and-a-half, I heard Eric Coates’s The Dam Busters March on the radio, picked out the tune and added some harmonies! Musical talent must have skipped a generation: my great-aunt was Myra Hess, the pianist who, from 1939 onwards, entertained war-weary Londoners with her one-shilling concerts in the National Gallery. She died when I was 12, but…

Just a few weeks after we announced the nominations last year for the BBC Music Magazine Awards 2020, we found ourselves working from home. The past 12 months have been almost impossibly difficult for the music world, but through it all, recordings have still been made and released, a testament to the record industry’s resourcefulness and determination to keep going. So it’s with absolute delight that we present the nominations for this year’s awards – imaginative releases of unknown operas, song recitals, chamber discoveries and revelatory performances of well-known repertoire, each album a lifetime of listening pleasure. On p36, you will see details of all the short-listed recordings in all seven categories. We now need you to decide who wins. Go to classical-music.com/awards, listen to excerpts from each recording and…

Jessica Cale Soprano Born: Penarth, Wales Career highlight: My solo debut at the Berlin Philharmonie in Mendelssohn’s Elijah with a German orchestra and a Welsh choir – a wonderful European collaboration! Another highlight would be winning first prize at the Kathleen Ferrier Awards competition last year. Musical hero: Maria Callas’s performances were always so honest, raw and truthful. She always spoke about singers needing to be at the service of the composer and the music, which is advice I always try to follow. Dream concert: Singing Handel’s Messiah at the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam or the Welsh national anthem at the opening of a Six Nations rugby game. Arsha Kaviani Pianist Born: Dubai, UAE Career highlight: I love playing unjustly neglected piano works, and when I performed a…

Krystian Zimerman has returned to Beethoven’s complete piano concertos 30 years after his first recorded run at them under Leonard Bernstein. This time Simon Rattle and the LSO joined the pianist for the challenging sessions, which were carried out under strict COVID-19 safety measures in Jerwood Hall at LSO St Luke’s. Deutsche Grammophon releases the full set in April. The pandemic itself has inspired violist Hiyoli Togawa to commission pieces on a theme of isolation from 11 composers. The result, called Songs of Solitude, features works by the likes of Kalevi Aho and Rhian Samuel and is released on BIS Records this month. Orchid Classics recently launched a new digital-only imprint called Orchid Creative. It gives artists the opportunity freely to create recordings, video material and playlists for streaming…

It’s something we do 17,000 times a day, without giving it enough thought: breathing. It’s the physical necessity without which speaking, singing and whole families of instruments couldn’t be quickened into life, from didgeridoos to French horns, and saxophones to ophicleides. But some composers have paid proper attention to this continuous miracle of inspiration and exhalation, in pieces that use the arc of the human breath as structural and expressive necessity, like the framing sections of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, or Richard Reed Parry’s album Music for Heart and Breath. Yet few musicians have delved as deeply as the flautist Kathryn Williams. Williams’s Coming Up For Air project is a series of commissions – around 100 of them so far, with 40 pieces released on a 2019 CD…

Richard Howard Banstead  I’ve recently listened to all 14 of the recorded symphonies by Kalevi Aho plus some of his concertos, most notably the recent release of his stunning Fifth Symphony coupled with the Percussion Concerto, Sieidi. This Finnish composer is a major voice in symphonic music and has created concertos for many diverse instruments. His inventiveness in work after work, both thematically and textually, is extraordinary, and the concertos for theremin and contrabassoon are other fine examples. Chris Vine Loughborough I wonder if BBC Music Magazine has any plans to mark the centenary of the death of French composer Déodat de Sévérac (above) at any point this year? OK, probably not, so let me do it here. Sévérac was best known for vocal music, but his solo piano music…

“My encounter with a Finnish fiddlers band made me rethink everything about the violin ” Spring is short in Finland, winter long. The snow outside Pekka Kuusisto’s window at the turn of the year may have melted by the time you read this, turning this ‘land of a thousand lakes’ green. On the day we speak via Zoom, however, he has been out early with the snow-plough, clearing his daughter’s path to nursery school. The violinist loves this white, muted world, calling it ‘a landscape con sordino (with mute)’ but he regrets that ‘proper snow’ is no longer automatic in the south of Finland where he lives. Climate change is one of Kuusisto’s myriad preoccupations, as anyone who has seen his film with Greenpeace, concerning the destruction of the Great…

‘If you want to be an artist,’ Pauline Viardot wrote, ‘you must try to be indifferent to everything except your art. I had order in my affairs, despite my nature, because of my willpower. Oh, how many bad things I should have done but for that willpower – the almost inseparable sister of my conscience.’ Viardot was born Pauline Garcia in Paris on 18 July 1821. Before she was 20, she was already becoming one of the great opera singers of her day. In her youth she sang to Chopin’s accompaniment; in her final years she knew Debussy. Her long life became a golden thread connecting the disparate worlds within musical Romanticism; and now, 200 years after her birth, some of her compositions are finally receiving the recognition they deserve.…

Since 2010, London’s Kings Place concert venue has made all manner of musical explorations with series called ‘Unwrapped’, from the initial ‘Beethoven Unwrapped’ to last year’s ‘Nature Unwrapped’. In 2021, it is staying firmly at home with ‘London Unwrapped’. At the time of going to press, performers and dates are all subject to change, but the plans are to celebrate the capital’s music scene and its famous visitors from the 1500s onwards. At the earlier end of the timescale are the likes of The Sixteen and Phantasm, who relive the Tudor and Stuart eras in the company of Tallis, Byrd, Lawes and co, while the glories of the late-17th and 18th centuries are in the able hands of ensembles such as The English Concert and Instruments and Choir of Time…

MAMIL? Strava? Such cycling concepts are nothing new. Perhaps Elgar was more of a Middle Aged Man In Tweed, rather than Lycra, when he enthusiastically took up biking in 1900, but he explored the lanes round Worcester and Malvern so comprehensively that his Ordnance Survey maps, showing his routes logged in red, look every inch like the modern online cyclist’s ‘Strava heat map’. So, we’ll ride from Worcester to Hereford, cities he knew and worked in, through the countryside that inspired him – starting outside the Cathedral, by his statue, near his father’s music shop. (It’s now a branch of H&M, so you may not find the Bolero you expected.) Worcester boasts more orchestras than its size would suggest. Worcester Symphony Orchestra – set up by Elgar in 1905 –…

Concision Lyadov quipped that he got bored of music lasting more than five minutes, and he rarely wrote a movement lasting that long. Yet such is the concentration of his inspiration and his fulfilment of it that usually each piece seems far more substantial. Atmospheric orchestration As a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov and an admirer of Tchaikovsky, Lyadov combined their relish of instrumental colour with an appreciation of Glinka’s (above) translucent scoring – he knew how to orchestrate sparingly yet effectively. This is evident in the vivid colours of his three late fairy-tale tone poems, or in the charismatic glamour of his Polonaise (1899). Contrapuntal craft Lyadov had a remarkable facility for counterpoint. As well as writing some beautiful Bach-style fugues (Op. 41 presents a particularly fine pair), he enlivened a…

Sibelius was 58 years old when he conducted the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in the premiere of his Seventh Symphony in March 1924, just short of 25 years since the premiere of his First Symphony. The intervening years had seen him battle with alcoholism and successfully emerge from an operation for throat cancer and, while feted both in Finland and abroad, his financial situation was rarely stable. Only two major orchestral works – The Tempest and Tapiola – would follow the Seventh Symphony, though he lived for a further three decades.…

Why has Eccles’s version of this story been so neglected? When people think of Semele , they inevitably think of Handel’s version. When Handel came to England he conquered everything before him. With this opera by Eccles, it’s an intriguing ‘what if?’ in musical history; what would have happened had Handel not come to England? How different are Handel and Eccles’s versions? This is a very different work to Handel’s. In Handel’s version the character of Semele comes across as a sort of voluptuous sex-kitten; it’s so exuberant, with its wonderfully florid, excessive vocal runs. Eccles captures a much darker, more brooding Semele; and it’s probably worth remembering William Congreve worked with Eccles on this libretto, so there was a synergy between composer and librettist. Handel’s is based on Congreve,…

Having gained profile with such works as Shaker Loops for string septet (1978) and Harmonium, his large-scale choir and orchestra setting of poems by John Donne and Emily Dickinson (1980), Adams suffered an 18-month creative block. He then had a dream in which, while driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge, he saw an oil tanker on the water below abruptly turn upright and take off like a Saturn V rocket. This inspired the opening of Harmonielehre (1984-5), described by Adams as ‘a statement of belief in the power of tonality at a time when I was uncertain about its future’.…

Salieri (left) was just 20 when he first attempted the challenging genre of opera seria. He chose a story already made famous by Tasso’s 16th-century epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, concerning the love affair between the Christian Crusader Rinaldo and the Saracen sorceress Armida; Lully and Handel had both written operas on that subject. Inspired by Gluck’s renovations of opera, Salieri’s drama involves just four characters. First performed on 2 June 1771 in Vienna, the three-act opera’s originality and dramatic effectiveness secured Salieri’s reputation throughout Europe.…

Beethoven Sonata No. 8 in G, Op. 30/3 (arr. Pahud)*; Serenade in D, Op. 25†; Allegro and Minuet in G, WoO 26††; Trio Concertante in G, WoO 37*^ Emmanuel Pahud, ††Silvia Careddu (flute), ^Sophie Dervaux (bassoon) †Daishin Kashimoto (violin), †Amihai Grosz (viola), *Daniel Barenboim (piano) Warner Classics 9029513974 77:34 mins Beethoven didn’t write much chamber music for flute, but Emmanuel Pahud and an impressive team of colleagues here make lovely, lively work of what the great composer did produce for the instrument, not to mention something he didn’t: the G major Sonata Op. 30 No. 3, originally for violin but periodically co-opted by flautists almost ever since. Pahud starts the disc with this, in his own arrangement, with Daniel Barenboim picking out clear, focused detail in the piano part. If…

Rapa Nui Odyssey JS Bach: Chromatic Fantasia & Fugue in D minor, BWV 903; Chopin: Nocturnes Nos 1 & 19, etc; Handel: Keyboard Suite, HWV 430 in E; Liszt: Ballade No. 2 in B minor; Vallée d’Obermann; plus works by Rachmaninov and Scriabin Mehani Teave (piano) Rubicon RCD1066 102:32 mins (2 discs) There’s genuine virtuosity without a note of bluff or bluster It’s not often that a recording with a ‘backstory’ turns out as impressive as this. The stringed instrument collector David Fulton, on a cruise in the South Pacific, found himself at a concert by pupils of the Easter Island Music School, concluded by its founder, Mehani Teave. Her artistry bowled him over; this, her first recording, is the happy result. Teave studied at the Cleveland Institute in the…

Babadzhanian • Chebotaryan • Piazzolla Piano Trios Trio de L’Île Divine Art dda25211 Rich Romanticism combined with touches of folk, hints of orientalism and, in Piazzolla’s Estaciones Porteñas, the sharp heels and smokiness of tango. This is terrific stuff, excellently played. (JP) ★★★★ David Five String Trios David-Trio CPO 555 4122 From light-footed and sprightly to hauntingly elegiac, the 20th-century Austrian Johann Nepomuk David’s string trios have a touch of Bartók about them. Well worth investigating. (JP) ★★★★ Elgar • Gareth Farr Cello Concertos Sebastien Hurtaud (cello) et al Rubicon RCD1047 Hurtaud gives really potent performances, his deep connection to both works undeniable. Farr’s remarkable Chemin des Dames, honours the role of women during the First World War. (MB) ★★★★★ Philip Glass Works arr. for guitar Gerard Cousins (guitar) Orange…

QOW Trio QOW Riley Stone Lonergan (tenor saxophone), Eddie Myer (double bass), Spike Wells (drums) Ubuntu UBU0068 The double bassist associated with respected indie strum-rockers Turin Brakes convenes a superb band featuring a veteran Britjazz drummer who doubles as a priest and an award-winning young tenor sax player. Hands up if you saw that coming. Ornette Coleman’s mid-1960s trio with David Izenson and Charles Moffett inspired a whole sub-movement in which the absence of a traditional chordal instrument freed jazz from constraints that it was ready to outgrow, and created a rich and varied legacy that ranged from the prog-jazz of Back Door to the searing ferocity of Charles Gayle. Naming these names is to praise rather than to bury this animated unit that surely belongs in such company if…

Alan Davey , the controller of BBC Radio 3, picks out three great moments to tune into this March Cardiff Week We’re going live to Cardiff for a week of lunchtime and evening concerts featuring the city’s finest ensembles: Sinfonia Cymru, the Welsh National Opera Orchestra and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Lunchtime and Evening Concerts: 16-19 March International Women’s Day For 24 hours, Radio 3 will feature music exclusively written by female composers, including two new commissions by Natalia Klouda and Ella Jarman-Pinto. Conductor Jessica Horsley will make her debut with the BBC Concert Orchestra, with music by the multi-talented composer Ruth Gipps. Radio 3: 8 March Soundscapes for Wellbeing Do virtual nature experiences boost well-being? Take part in our ‘Virtual Nature Experiment’, exploring audiences’ responses to digital…

Bach arr. Hess Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring Myra Hess (piano) Appian APR7504 Walton Belshazzar’s Feast Donald Bell (bass-baritone); Philharmonia Chorus & Orchestra/Walton Warner 968 9442 Korngold The Sea Hawk etc National Philharmonic Orchestra/ Charles Gerhardt RCA Victor GD87890 Fauré Requiem Choir of King’s College, Cambridge; New Philharmonia/Willcocks Warner 379 9942 Mahler Symphony No. 2, ‘Resurrection’ Schwarzkopf (soprano); Philharmonia Chorus & Orchestra/Otto Klemperer Warner 9992668355…

Rutter delight Last Thursday I took with me your February edition to keep me company during my first Covid vaccination experience – I am 91. All went well, and during our last 15 minutes’ rest I called out to a passing nurse when I saw the mention of John Rutter’s commission to write in praise of the Oxford scientists (Déja Vu). I am happy to say that she did know of him. Long ago, I had him as a TV tutor, long curls and all, at the Open University. The only missing link was that on Thursday ours was the Pfizer, not the Oxford, vaccine! Anne Mills, Tonbridge The editor replies: You may be interested in our news story on p17 this month! Not the first With apologies to readers,…

0 …more letters to be delivered by the sea shanty-singing sensation Nathan Evans (pictured above), who has given up his job as a postman after being signed up by Polydor. 1,500 …pounds in prize money for the winner of Opera Festival Scotland’s recently announced Young Artists Singing Competition. 9.71 …per cent average increase in IQ shown by those who have taken up an instrument as a hobby, reveal tests. 76 …per cent of British musicians in a survey believe Brexit regulations will prevent them performing in Europe.…

Born in February 1842, by the time Arrigo Boito turned 26, he was already a man on a mission. Impatient with the entrenched conservatism of Italian opera – his disparaging comments had irritated the great Verdi – he had looked to Germany for inspiration, specifically Wagner, whose operas had cast their futuristic spell upon the young Italian composer. On 5 March 1868, Boito was ready to make his own personal statement. Brimming with ambition, he had taken the German writer Goethe’s epic drama Faust and written a libretto based on it. The opera that resulted, Mefistofele – about a man who sells his soul to the devil for a life of selfish indulgence on earth – was set to premiere at Milan’s La Scala theatre, the epicentre of operatic activity…

Sitting at home in front of the TV during lockdown has brought an unexpected boom in old-style hobbies, it seems. Thanks in particular to the Netflix series Bridgerton, based on Julia Quinn’s novel The Duke and I (set in the early 1800s), Brits have been taking up needlework, reading novels and – hurrah – learning the piano in their droves. It’s not the first time that period drama has had an impact on classical music’s fortunes… Though Michael Nyman was already an established name in classical music circles by the 1980s, it was his score for Peter Greenaway’s 1690s-set film The Draughtsman’s Contract that really made the wider public aware of his talents. The neo-Baroque bassoon chuntering of Nyman’s ‘Chasing sheep is best left to shepherds’ proved particularly popular, and…

Oliver Condy Editor Moving house in a pandemic was always going to be stressful. So this month, to calm the nerves, I’ve been revisiting an old favourite – those marvellous recordings of Mozart piano concertos made by Daniel Barenboim and the English Chamber Orchestra in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Fifty years later, they sound as fresh as any performance today, and they make perfect accompaniments to wallpaper-stripping. Jeremy Pound Deputy editor Putting together a pub quiz music round based on a theme of ‘hammers’ gets me listening to The Beatles and Peter Gabriel, Mahler symphonies and Wagner operas. But once I’m onto Igor Levit’s recording of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier my research gets derailed – from the exuberant opening fanfare, I’m thrilled and delighted by Levit’s command of…

Mozart’s protosurreal sense of humour is revealed in a letter he wrote to his cousin Maria Anna Thekla Mozart (left), with whom he was doing some sort of fooling around. This is not one of his notorious rabidly obscene letters, but he could be hilarious even in his less rowdy moments, though there are various innuendos here for the careful reader: ‘Now, where was I? – oh yes, will come, – yes, yes, they will come – well, who? – who will come? – oh yes, now I remember: letters, letters will come… Now Numero 2: I’m asking you, why not? – I’m asking you dearest numbskull, why not? – if you are writing anyway to Madame Tavernier in Munich, please include regards from me to the two Mad.elles Freysinger,…

Why feature just one Kuusisto on a disc when you can have three? In 2011, the BIS label released a disc of Symphony No. 1 and Concertino Improvvisando by Ilkka Kuusisto (above), a leading Finnish composer who is perhaps best known for his many operas – not least 1974’s Moomin Opera, written in collaboration with author Tove Jansson and featuring the much-loved illustrated book characters. Ilkka Kuusisto, now 87, has also written a large number of vocal works, one of which, Kun talo alkaa soida (‘When the House Begins to Resound’) can also be heard on that same BIS release, performed by baritone Jorma Hynninen and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra’s leader at the time was Ilkka’s older son Jaakko, who has also recorded as both a violin soloist…

Le dernier sorcier The third of Viardot and Turgenev’s operettas, this is a delightful fairytale showcasing Viardot’s melodic flair at its finest. Die Sterne In one of her most beautiful songs, Viardot evokes rapt stargazing, the music yearning upwards towards the heavens. Cello obbligato adds a layer of dusky gorgeousness. 6 Mélodies Published only in 1880, this collection includes a few of Viardot’s best loved songs. Among them, ‘Hai luli’ shows a girl longing for her absent lover. Sonatine in A minor for violin and piano Pauline’s son Paul (dedicatee of Fauré’s Violin Sonata No. 1, pictured left) became a fine violinist and composer. She wrote several pieces for him including this Schubertian Sonatine. Cendrillon The exact date of Viardot’s last operetta isn’t known, but it was probably after Turgenev’s…

Sturm und Drang – ‘Storm and Stress’. For many music-lovers the label evokes the tempestuous minor-keyed symphonies Haydn composed around 1770: the ‘Lamentatione’ (No. 26), incorporating Gregorian plainchant; the ‘Mourning’ (No. 44); ‘La passione’ (No. 49); and the ‘Farewell’ (No. 45), whose charming associated story belies its violent intensity. Other composers of the day mined a similar vein amid reams of the brighter, more amenable works in the major. Yet Sturm und Drang is not a term Haydn or his contemporaries would have recognised. For one thing, the chronology is wrong. The Sturm und Drang literary movement took its name from a 1776 play by Maximilian Klinger set against the background of the American Revolution (see p56). By then Haydn’s turbulent Sturm und Drang phase was already over. And whereas…

Elgar was a Worcester boy who learned his composing craft practically, in the regional music scene. He was never a college or conservatoire student, and despite eventually being knighted, never felt comfortable in ‘the establishment’ (partly because of his Catholicism). Arguably England’s first great international composer, he wrote works of great spirit and sweep that reflect his local landscapes round the Malverns, which he roamed thoroughly by bicycle in 1900-08. Though his later years were spent in London and Sussex, he was buried back home in Malvern.…

1855 LIFE: Anatoly Lyadov is born in St Petersburg, the second child of the chief conductor of the Russian Opera. Showing talent from an early age, he receives piano lessons from his aunt. TIMES: Alexander II begins his reign as Tsar of Russia. Over his 26-year rule, he will carry out major reforms including emancipating the serfs. 1873 LIFE: He is introduced by Rimsky-Korsakov, his teacher at St Petersburg Conservatoire, to Borodin, Cui and Musorgsky, who hails him as ‘a new, unmistakable, original and Russian young talent’. TIMES: Russia and Austria-Hungary are persuaded by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck to form the League of Three Emperors, intended primarily to prevent any alliance with France. 1894 LIFE: He meets Alexander Scriabin and becomes a loyal champion of his music, later conducting…

Osmo Vänskä Minnesota Orchestra BIS BIS2006 Osmo Vänskä’s first recorded Sibelius cycle, with Finland’s Lahti Symphony Orchestra, was hailed as a major achievement when it appeared over 20 years ago. But this more recent Seventh, recorded in 2016, takes the insights to a new level of perfection. Vänskä’s approach can seem dauntingly literal: he’s a great believer in following Sibelius’s written instructions down to the last detail. But in this case the letter really is the gateway to the spirit. So many conductors seem to struggle with the Seventh Symphony’s finely engineered transitions of tempo and texture. Listening to Vänskä, you might conclude that all you have to do is take Sibelius at his word and the rest will follow. In this recording, Vänskä takes his insights to a new…

Eccles Semele Anna Dennis (soprano), Richard Burkhard (baritone), Helen Charlston (mezzo-soprano), Héloïse Bernard (soprano), Graeme Broadbent (bass) et al; Cambridge Early Opera; Academy of Ancient Music/Julian Perkins AAM AAM012 121:27 mins (2 discs) John Eccles’s sexy, sparkling opera bursts to life – finally! Shelved in 1706, Semele has never been professionally recorded, so this production was worth waiting for. Cast, band, director and sound are all top-notch, restoring Eccles’s score to its full glory. The project grew out of Julian Perkins’s November 2019 Cambridge Handel Opera Company concert performance, with rising-star soloists singing alongside the more seasoned professional names. It’s astonishing that Eccles’s Semele is obscure: the libretto, by William Congreve, is as yummy as Eccles’s music. Adapting Ovid, Congreve has Semele joyously join Jupiter in illicit love, escaping thereby…

John Adams My Father Knew Charles Ives; Harmonielehre Nashville Symphony/ Giancarlo Guerrero Naxos 8.559854 69:03 mins The title of John Adams’s 2003 symphonic triptych My Father Knew Charles Ives intrigues and misleads. Adams’s dad did not know the celebrated American composer – at least, not literally. Instead, the work refers to shared familial connections with New England, where both Ives and Adams once lived. The first movement, ‘Concord’, evokes the sounds of Adams’s hometown (rather than the Massachusetts location from which Ives’s Second Piano Sonata takes its name). Here and in ‘The Lake’, Adams plays with pastiche, invoking Ives’s signature off-stage trumpets and layered, cross-purpose melodies. A short clarinet solo provides an autobiographical note to recall the instrument Adams learned as a child, while a solo piano represents his father’s…

Elmas Piano Concertos Nos 1 & 2 Tasmania Symphony Orchestra/ Howard Shelley (piano) Hyperion CDA68319 73:12 mins Here’s one of the most obscure discoveries in Hyperion’s long-running Romantic Piano Concerto series. According to the informative booklet note, Stéphan Elmas (1862-1937) was a widely admired child prodigy pianist, and enjoyed the distinction of being the first composer of Armenian descent to write piano concertos. He dedicated a set of Études to Liszt in 1884 and befriended influential musicians such as Jules Massenet. After a severe hearing loss in 1897, his career took a nosedive. Settling in Geneva, aged 50, Elmas withdrew from public life, becoming increasingly bitter at his isolation. Judging from these two works, Elmas’s musical idiom was hardly original, owing a great deal to Chopin. His piano writing is…

Dodgson Margaret Catchpole: Two Worlds Apart Kate Howden, William Wallace, Nicholas Morris, Richard Edgar-Wilson; Perpetuo/Julian Perkins Naxos 8.660459-61 165:36 mins (3 discs) Stephen Dodgson (1924-2013) – a distant relative of Charles, aka Lewis Carroll – left a notable body of work that, under the auspices of The Stephen Dodgson Charitable Trust, is edging towards the recognition it deserves. Margaret Catchpole: Two Worlds Apart (1979) is one of Dodgson’s three operas – this is its first recording. Ronald Fletcher’s unfussy libretto is based on Richard Cobbold’s novel, a fictionalised retelling of the true story of a Suffolk woman who was sent to the newly established penal colony in Australia for stealing a horse, after becoming entwined in a love triangle with a smuggler and a childhood friend. It would be a…

Elgar From the Bavarian Highlands; Five Part-songs from the Greek Anthology, Op. 45; The Reveille, Op. 54; Spanish Serenade; Go, song of mine, etc. Radoslaw Szulc, Julita Smolen (violin); Bavarian Radio Choir/ Howard Arman; Max Hanft (piano) BR Klassik 900522 65:37 mins A German choir performing Elgar’s partsongs in English? Doubts dissolve mere seconds into From the Bavarian Highlands, where the infectious pointing of dance rhythms in the opening song of the cycle, and the lilting playing of pianist Max Hanft, draw the listener effortlessly in. At 50 voices, the Bavarian Radio Choir is fairly large, but shows a chamber-like delicacy of nuance in ‘False Love’, with open, airy vowels and intelligently contoured phrasing. The choir’s English conductor Howard Arman – currently in his fifth season as artistic director –…

Mozart String Quartets Vol. 3: K155, 168, 172, 387, 575 & 590 Armida Quartett CAvi-music AVI8553032 116:19 mins (2 discs) The Armida play with exquisite nuance and much inquisitiveness The latest instalment in the Armida’s ongoing Mozart quartet series in conjunction with Urtext publishers Henle (due to be completed this year) is a triumph, both musically and technically. Encapsulating the best of all worlds, the Armida play with the exquisite nuancing of the finest old-school outfits, yet with a take-nothing-for-granted interpretative inquisitiveness that takes historically informed practice to a whole new level. They open with the well-loved K387 in G (No. 14) – the first of the ‘Haydn’ Quartets – and one is immediately struck by the lucidity of both the playing and recording. Gently articulating the music with exquisitely…

March round-up Armenia: The Art of the Duduk reflects a venerable instrumental tradition in its purest form. This apricot-wood oboe has ten finger holes and the span of a mere octave plus a third, and its unique double-reed mouthpiece requires much skill to master. Performers come in twos, one providing the melodic line and the other a drone, but the palette of colour is remarkable: it can be hard as iron or caressingly sweet, with a gamut of emotion in between. Haig Sarikouyoumdjian is the soloist here, and gives us a taste of traditional Armenian improvisation as well as examples of regional styles. His sound seems infinitely malleable, and his improvisations roam thrillingly. (Ocora C 560287 ★★★★★) Cape Verde: An Archipelago of Music is the result of a recording trip…

Final E500 £20 This Japanese brand make some of the best – and pricey – headphones, but they also use their audiophile experience to create designs like this, boasting impressively clear and balanced sound for just £20. hifiheadphones.co.uk Focal Celestee £999 Made in France using sumptuous materials, these closed-back headphones ooze sophistication and have sound quality to match, with electrifying detail and timing. One listen and you’ll understand where the money was spent. focal.com Sony WH-1000XM4 £335 My current favourite wireless headphones, these are light and comfortable, have brilliant Active Noise Cancelling, a 30-hour battery and sound wonderful. If your budget is smaller, last year’s WH-1000XM3 (£218) are almost as good. sony.co.uk…

Two new programmes from Radio 3 are now available on BBC Sounds, hosted by Brit Award-winning singers Celeste and Jorja Smith. Downtime Symphony with Celeste features escapist, down-tempo tracks from various fusion styles ranging from classically infused house to hip-hop and jazz mixes. The series was inspired by the popularity of the stress-busting Mindful Mix on BBC Sounds during lockdown. Tearjerker with Jorja Smith, meanwhile, aims to create a safe space for audiences to listen to melancholic music and shed a tear. In each episode, Smith explores the healing powers of melancholy music from all genres, including film scores by Alexandre Desplat, music for prepared piano by Aphex Twin and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Both programmes are now are available to stream or download from bbc.co.uk/sounds.…