Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2021 i BBC Music Magazine

Jessica Duchen Author and journalist ‘My jealous cat tried to push over my computer. There I was, writing about other animals – musical ones! – while grinning broadly and googling “history of the glass harmonica”. All for the sake of Saint-Saëns.’ Page 26 Simon Broughton Writer and documentary maker ‘Nightingales are celebrated in folk myth as nature’s greatest musicians! Going to hear them with folk musician Sam Lee opens your ears not just to the birds, but to the forest and the nature of music itself.’ Page 50 Leah Broad Writer and academic ‘Ruth Gipps is such a fascinating composer that writing about her is a real pleasure. I’m delighted her music is having a renaissance and am looking forward to hearing it performed at this year’s BBC Proms!’ Page…

Tennstedt gets the bird I have been interested in your article and subsequent letters about unwanted recording-studio noise. There was a similar occurrence when the London Philharmonic Orchestra was recording Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, with Garrick Ohlsson as soloist and Klaus Tennstedt as conductor, for HMV in the 1970s. A sparrow had somehow gained access to Studio 1 at Abbey Road, and cheeped at certain points during the finale, as though certain notes triggered an auto-response. At first, the matter seemed comical, until the conductor’s patience expired. The producer offer two possibly solution: ‘Either I send for a man who has an air-gun, or we ignore it and edit it out later’. The orchestra were horrified by the former option, so Tennstedt was ‘persuaded’ to carry on. At the mixing,…

83 … half-marathons to be attempted by priest Fr Vladimir Felzmann, 83, to raise funds for a new organ at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. 375,000 … pounds paid for Betty’s Notebook by Nicholas Reeves, the first piece of music to have been bought on the blockchain. 3 … further years with the Bergen Philharmonic for conductor Edward Gardner, who has extended his contract in Norway to 2024. 45 … days taken, including quarantine, for percussionist Fang Zhang to travel from Zhengzhou, China to Manchester, UK for the BBC Young Musician final.…

An aspiring young landscape gardener named Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown is said to have visited Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire in 1741 (where he certainly returned in 1771), and set in train a number of changes to the layout of the estate surrounding it. These included creating a ten-acre lake, which 37 years later had tragic consequences for English music. There, on 5 August, 1778, the English composer Thomas Linley the Younger perished in a boating accident, just three months after his 22nd birthday. Even by that age, Linley had already blazed a brilliant trail in his professional activities. Born into a highly musical family – his father, Thomas senior, was a composer and teacher – Linley was performing in public by the age of seven, playing a violin concerto at the Hot…

Les Dennis (left) is to make his English National Opera debut in October, when he appears in Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. The actor and comedian, familiar to many as Michael Rodwell in Coronation Street and as former host of TV’s Family Fortunes, will play Sir Joseph Porter, the First Lord of the Admiralty who hopes to marry Josephine. He will be by no means the first celebrity to have trod the G&S boards… Though Alfred Marks was, like Dennis, also an actor and comedian, he possessed a very fine bass-baritone voice which he put to use as Wilfred Shadbolt in a 1982 video of Yeoman of the Guard. The following year, even starrier names were rolled out for director Wilford Leach’s film of Pirates of Penzance: alongside pop singer…

Steph Power In opera, artistic and technological innovation have often been intertwined – and the Royal Opera House’s ‘hyper-reality opera experience’ Current, Rising (pictured above) proved a breathtaking contemporary example, inspired by the liberation of Ariel at the close of The Tempest. Donning a virtual-reality headset alongside three fellow travellers, I marvelled at the dark, ominous, ecstatic beauty of the aural-visual world I found myself inside. An enthralling glimpse of possible operatic futures from composer Samantha Fernando, director Netia Jones and the team.…

Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals, a ‘Grande fantaisie zoologique’ no less, lands with all four paws in the territory of the most popular pieces ever created. Through its pages its creatures roar, twitter, swim, rattle, bray, scamper and practise their scales with such joy and relish that it could only have been created by a mind whose freshness and imagination was second-to-none. Saint-Saëns was unusual among composers for being a veritable polymath. He was an expert mathematician, zoologist, botanist, fossil hunter and amateur astronomer, and was intensely inspired by the world of nature, however Parisian he might seem at first hearing. On one occasion, he used the proceeds of some duos for harmonium and piano to commission a telescope constructed to his own specifications so he could examine the…

You will look in vain in most histories of British music to find even a mention of the man who designed the Royal Albert Hall. Born in Plymouth, Henry Young Darracott Scott received a military education, and in 1840 was commissioned as second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers. Promoted and eventually appointed in 1855 instructor at the Royal Engineer establishment at Brompton, Chatham, he was in charge of the chemical laboratory there and invented a new form of cement from grey chalk – now known as Scott’s cement. He also perfected a method of representing ground in military maps through the use of hachures. His resourcefulness led to his employment in 1865 with the commission of the Great Exhibition at South Kensington. By the following year, he had been entrusted…

How have you shaped this year’s season with the ever-changing Covid-19 restrictions? We’ve had to make a series of calculated guesses. Even with the worst-case scenario, we should hopefully be able to get 1,000 people into the Albert Hall. We’re only doing one Prom a day, whereas in usual times we run a crazy schedule. Putting on a concert in Covid times is much slower and more laborious. We initially had 11 or 12 international orchestras pencilled in for this summer, but we’re focusing on UK musicians, which doesn’t feel like a compromise. It feels like we’re supporting who we should be at this time. What have the main challenges been? The challenge has been the newly commissioned works, because composers tend to write for very large forces. However, we’ve…

The painter Sir Sidney Nolan (1917-92, pictured above in 1960) spent the last decade of his life at The Rodd Farm, Presteigne. Nolan was a close friend of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears; many of his paintings were inspired by Britten’s music and exhibited at Aldeburgh Festival, including responses to Peter Grimes, Rejoice in the Lamb and Children’s Crusade. Best known for his epic series of canvases depicting the life of Australian bandit Ned Kelly, Nolan was also a theatre designer, whose commissions included the 1964 Kenneth MacMillan production of The Rite of Spring for the Royal Ballet, and Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila for the Royal Opera. His former home is open to the public and hosts creative residencies and exhibitions.…

1921 LIFE: Ruth Gipps is born on 20 February in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, where her mother, Hélène, is founder and principal of the Bexhill School of Music. TIMES: The British Liberal Party’s Margaret Wintringham wins the Louth by-election, and is the second woman, after the Conservatives’ Nancy Astor, to take her seat in the House of Commons. 1942 LIFE: After studies at the Royal College of Music with Vaughan Williams, Gipps enjoys an early success when Henry Wood conducts her tone poem Knight in Armour at the Last Night of the Proms. TIMES: Presented by Roy Plomley, Desert Island Discs is broadcast for the first time ever on the BBC Forces Programme. The first ‘castaway’ is British actor and radio comedian Vic Oliver. 1955 LIFE: She founds the London Repertoire Orchestra…

Christian Tetzlaff (violin) Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Hannu Lintu Ondine ODE 1317-2 Of all the great 20th-century violin concertos, Bartók’s Second has one of the richest recording legacies, stretching back to the very first performances. These include the world premiere by Székely and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in 1939, the second US performance, given in the presence of Bartók, by Tossy Spivakovsky and the Cleveland Orchestra in New York in 1943, and the first commercial recording from Yehudi Menuhin in 1946. Inevitably, the sound quality in all these performances calls for a good deal of tolerance, since many of the subtleties in Bartók’s orchestration are lost. Fortunately, Menuhin’s long-standing connection with this work, which he studied with the composer, is better represented in later recordings, especially the one he made in…

When Do We Dance? Gershwin: When Do We Dance?; Tatum: Tea for Two; Bolcom: Graceful Ghost Rag; Waller: Viper’s Drag; Piazzolla: Libertango; Ginastera: Danzas Argentinas, Op. 2; Falla: El amor brujo; Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales; Saint-Saëns: Étude en forme de valse; Debussy: Mazurka, L. 67; Bartók: Romanian Folk Dances; Stravinsky: Tango; Scriabin: Waltz in A flat major, Op. 38; Rachmaninov: Polka Italienne in E flat major Lise de la Salle (piano) Naïve V5468 73:08 mins Born 33 years ago in Cherbourg, Lise de la Salle is a bit of an enigma. It’s an understatement to say she looks striking: she radiates bad-girl teenage wildness alternating with a timeless porcelain purity, and her big, widely-spaced eyes suggest an animal hyper-alertness which is richly borne out by her playing. When her…

Brahms Symphony No. 1; Academic Festival Overture NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic/ Giancarlo Guerrero NFM ACD 277 59:57 mins There’s a really strong historical connection between Brahms and the Polish city of Wroclaw (or Breslau, as the composer would have known it). We know, for example, that the great man not only took an active interest in musical life there, but also that he composed the Academic Festival Orchestra in 1880 as a thank you to the local university for awarding him an honorary doctorate. Little wonder then that the Wroclaw Philharmonic feels a special bond with this work, delivering a performance that bristles with energy and good humour, whilst projecting an exemplary lightness of touch. The First Symphony, of course, is a much more highly charged affair, and here Giancarlo Guerrero…

Subtitled ‘In the Far West’, Bantock’s Serenade was first published in 1912. The four-movement work for string orchestra is, in fact, an adaptation of his turn-of-the-century String Quartet in C minor. That earlier work was inspired by a visit to the United States, which the composer took as part of a travelling show in the 1890s. The four movements, themselves full of the Romantic drama and exoticism Bantock was known for, also feature nods to popular American tunes such as ‘Swanee River’.…

John Corigliano The Ghosts of Versailles Teresa Perrotta, Peter Morgan, Ben Schaefer, Jonathan Bryan, Spencer Britten, Kayla Siembieda, Joanna Latini, Emily Misch, Christian Sanders, Brian Wallin; Orchestre de l’Opéra Royal/Joseph Colaneri Château de Versailles CVS 036 145:12 mins (2 discs) It was brave of John Corigliano to choose the French Revolution for a new opera for the Met in a century that that lauded André Chénier and Dialogues des Carmélites; and then to raise the cultural stakes by adding Mozart and Rossini to the mix after reworking the third of Beaumarchais’s Figaro plays. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and their court are ghosts at a performance of Figaro’s last adventure with the Almavivas plotting to rescue the queen from the Revolution. William M Hoffman’s libretto is never as dramatically light-footed…

Coleridge-Taylor Heart & Hereafter: African Romances, Op. 17; Sorrow Songs, Op. 57, etc. Elizabeth Llewellyn (soprano), Simon Lepper (piano) Orchid Classics ORC100164 55:34 mins The Song of Hiawatha, hugely popular a century ago, is still the work most commonly associated with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Much of his other music – he had 80 opus numbers to his credit when he died in 1912, aged 37 – lies unrecorded, so this new recording of songs by the London-born composer is a refreshingly bold act of recuperation. It’s also the English soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn’s debut recital disc, and she’s a persuasive advocate for this largely unknown repertoire. Llewellyn has extensive operatic experience – she starred in the Metropolitan Opera’s Porgy and Bess two years ago – and it shows in the Six Sorrow…

JS Bach Homage to Bach: Solo Violin Sonatas Nos 1-3, BWV 1001, 1003 & 1005 (arr. Paul Cassidy) Brodsky Quartet Chandos CHAN 20162 62:58 mins Mendelssohn and Schumann both added piano accompaniments to the D minor Chaconne from Bach’s solo violin Partita BWV 1004. And Bach himself plundered its companion sonatas, reworking BWV 1001’s Fugue for organ, and the entire A minor Sonata (transposed into D minor) for keyboard. So the Brodskys’ violist Paul Cassidy can claim a distinguished pedigree underpinning his appropriation of the sonatas for string quartet. But how are we to engage with the result? As new works breathing the idiomatic language of a medium foreign to Bach? Or perhaps as arrangements in which the theatre of Bach’s implicit harmonies, the space surrounding them an invitation to…

Bach’s Long Shadow JS Bach: Solo Violin Partita No. 3, BWV 1006; Ysaÿe: Solo Violin Sonata in A minor etc; plus works by Albéniz, Kreisler & Tárrega Francisco Fullana, Stella Chen (violin) Orchid Classics ORC 100165 57:38 mins Fullana captures the music’s restlessness with intensity Verdi once observed that all post-Baroque composers were to some extent ‘sons of Bach’. Solo violin music since Bach almost invariably has a tendency to pay homage to his Sonatas and Partitas. As a creative springboard for the remainder of this recital, Francisco Fullana includes the E major Partita, employing gut strings, Baroque bow and authentic ornamentation. In so doing, he finds a compelling middle-way between Romantic and period-instrument rhetoric, inflecting phrases with a smiling affection that feels entirely natural. It is a particularly apt…

Adam La Filleule des fées Queensland Symphony Orchestra/ Andrew Mogrelia Naxos 8.574302-03 Adolphe Adam’s best-known ballet is Giselle, but he penned many more – of which this is one of the most colourful. Despite a few slips in synchronicity, the orchestra brings this fun score to life with great momentum. (FP) ★★★ Richard Blackford Niobe; Kalon; Blewbury Air Tamsin Waley-Cohen (violin), Raphael Wallfisch (cello) et al Nimbus NI6420 Ranging from the Shostakovich-like angst of Niobe for violin and orchestra to the more Romantic wanderings of Blewbury Air for cello and piano, this is an excellent introduction to Blackford’s varied soundworld. (JP) ★★★★ Borodin • Glinka • Rimsky-Korsakov Orchestral Works Kirill Maximov (violin), Tonkünstler-Orchester/Emmanuel Tjeknavorian Tonkunstler TON1007 This Scheherazade recording is one of the finest recent examples on disc. Sublime sound…

Alan Davey , the controller of BBC Radio 3, picks out three great moments to tune into this August Organ Road Trip From Paris to New York, David Briggs takes us on a tour of his favourite organs – and the churches and cathedrals they inhabit. Tune in to hear recordings of these magnificent instruments and learn more about them. Sunday Feature: 8, 15 and 22 August, 6.45pm Slow Radio: Lundy For half an hour, you’ll be transported to the remote island of Lundy, a rocky outcrop off the coast of North Devon. Home to just 20 people, the island turns off its generators at midnight and falls silent, with just the sounds of the local puffins, guillemots, kittiwakes, Manx shearwaters and seals audible. Slow Radio: date and time TBC…

Pianist Manchester-born pianist Peter Donohoe has enjoyed a major international career for 40 years, ever since he was joint winner at the 1982 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. He has appeared many times at the BBC Proms and has been acclaimed for recordings of composers from Mozart to Prokofiev. His new recording of Busoni’s solo piano music is out now on the Chandos label. My attraction to the piano was obvious to my family: at the age of four I was already picking out nursery rhymes from kindergarten and popular tunes from the radio on my mother’s piano. From a local market stall my father bought a wind-up gramophone and a selection of 78s that included BEETHOVEN’s Emperor Concerto (No. 5) with the first disc missing. I played the records…

Working on this month’s issue involved a visit to the back of the garage to hunt through my dusty old vinyls. Lurking among my once-cherished Tenpole Tudor and Madness albums was, as I’d hoped, the first classical music LP I can ever remember listening to: Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals (see p26), played by pianists John Ogdon and Brenda Lucas with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Louis Frémaux. I don’t suppose my six-year-old self spotted how various rogue beasts had randomly sauntered onto the album cover – there are no rhinos, tigers or cows in the Carnival – though I’m sure I must have giggled at the apt name of the writer of the sleeve notes: Leonard Duck. What I do recall is that I played it obsessively…

Truly honoured This year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours have provided a rich haul for classical music, including a Damehood for pianist Imogen Cooper (above). Also heading to Buckingham Palace in their finest garb in the near future will be cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, composer Eleanor Alberga and Michael Volpe, founder of Opera Holland Park (OBE), plus saxophonist Jess Gillam, composer Huw Watkins, horn player Sarah Willis and tenor Allan Clayton (MBE). Heading for Oz Jaime Martín has been named as the new chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra from 2022. The Spaniard will have three different continents on his roster, as he is also music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and chief conductor of Dublin’s RTÉ National Symphony. In Melbourne, he succeeds Andrew Davis, chief conductor from 2014-20.…

Purcell From silent shades Catherine Bott (soprano), David Roblou (harpsichord) Decca 476 2099 I listened to a lot of recordings when I was learning this song at college, and this one has always stuck out. Singers worry quite a lot about sounding perfect, and I really love how Catherine Bott throws caution to the wind – early music doesn’t need to be sung in a precious way. She doesn’t hold back from making unusual sounds and sometimes slips into the chest voice to demonstrate the hysterical nature of the song. Stravinsky The Rake’s Progress Paul Franke (tenor) et al; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra/Igor Stravinsky Naxos 8.111266-67 I went through a phase of being completely in love with the tenor aria from this opera; I just couldn’t stop listening to it and…

Jeremy Pound Acting editor Having recently walked the 25-mile Cheltenham Circular Footpath with a group of friends on a very hot and sunny Sunday, I now have my sights firmly set on the 34 miles of the nearby Gustav Holst Way, named after my home town’s musical hero. Preparation for the walk will, of course, include listening to Holst’s Cotswolds Symphony, evoking the glories of the Gloucestershire countryside, and also his Beni Mora, inspired by the composer’s own lengthy wanderings while on holiday in Algeria. Alice Pearson Cover CD editor A member of the five Russian composers known as the ‘Mighty Handful’, César Cui (pictured above) is often overlooked as a composer. Unfairly so. He had an affinity for the piano, in particular, and dedicated his 25 Preludes…

Güher & Süher Pekinel (piano) et al; Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France/ Marek Janowski Apex 2564621252 (1990) Accompanied by a large ensemble, the Pekinel twins lead us through Saint-Saëns’s bestiary at quite a lick. It all makes for a thrilling ride. Frank Braley & Michel Dalberto (piano), Renaud Capuçon (violin), Gautier Capuçon (cello), Emmanuel Pahud (flute), Paul Meyer (clarinet) et al Erato 545 6032 (2003) A smaller-scale affair than the above, performed by an all-star cast, not least cellist Gautier Capuçon as soloist in ‘The Swan’. Martha Argerich & Antonio Pappano (piano) et al; Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia Orchestra Warner Classics 9029575555 (2017) Argerich and Pappano are in riotous form here – contrast the high jinks of their wayward ‘Pianists’ with the more straightlaced and sensible Pekinels. Richard Casey…

Cambridge is renowned for its all-male collegiate choirs, most famously of King’s College and St John’s College. Yet a number of other Cambridge colleges, such as Corpus Christi, have hosted mixed voiced choirs in their chapels since at least the 1960s. Typically, though, these were recruited not only from the chapel’s own college, but also from neighbouring colleges (a practice which continues today, voices from all-women’s colleges such as Newnham typically joining mixed choirs in other colleges). The real breakthrough in public perception, though, came in 1971 when Clare College appointed the visionary Peter Dennison as its director of music. He promptly founded the first dedicated mixed-voice college choir in Cambridge, a year ahead of Clare’s first admission of women undergraduates; when Dennison left for Melbourne in 1975, John Rutter…

RAH = Royal Albert Hall CH = Cadogan Hall FRIDAY 30 JULY FIRST NIGHT OF THE PROMS 2021 7.30pm RAH Vaughan Williams Serenade to Music; Poulenc Organ Concerto; James MacMillan When Soft Voices Die (BBC co-commission with Help Musicians, world premiere). Elizabeth Llewellyn (soprano), Jess Dandy (contralto), Allan Clayton (tenor), Michael Mofidian (bass-baritone), Daniel Hyde (organ); BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Orchestra/Dalia Stasevska SATURDAY 31 JULY THE GOLDEN AGE OF BROADWAY 7.30pm RAH Programme to include overtures by Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers. BBC Concert Orchestra/Richard Balcombe SUNDAY 1 AUGUST ORGAN RECITAL 11.45am RAH JS Bach Prelude and Fugue in E flat ‘St Anne’; Latry Improvisation on Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E flat; JS Bach Fantasia and Fugue in G (Pièce d’orgue); Latry Improvisation on Bach’s…

“ Scientists have little doubt that music is so basic to human nature that it goes back to our earliest days as a species” Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon is among the most critically acclaimed musical expressions in contemporary recording history. It propelled the group to international fame, huge wealth and recognition for its members. But if we listen carefully to the lyrics, there is an entirely different story. ‘The lunatic is on the grass’ is a de facto reference to the erratic behaviour and underlying ill-health of band member Syd Barrett. It is the balance of the mind, the product of the brain’s activity, that is the key – ‘they are sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing,’ as the Bard…

Latin name: Luscinia megarhynchos Size: c16.5cm Eats: Berries, plus insects including beetles, ants and flies Nightingales arrive in the UK in mid-April, remaining until late-summer. Most common in the southeast of England, they can be found in an area stretching from Devon in the south west to the Humber Estuary in the north. They are widespread in southern Europe, where they are also less shy than in the UK. Nightingales have often made appearances in classical music over the centuries. A famous instance is Stravinsky’s 1914 opera, Le Rossignol (‘The Nightingale’), based on an 1840s tale by Hans Christian Andersen. Unsurprisingly, there are songs aplenty featuring the nightingale, including by Tchaikovsky (The Nightingale), Rimsky-Korsakov (The Nightingale and The Rose), Brahms (An die Nachtigall) and Howells (King David). For an instrumental…

When faced with Ruth Gipps as a student, Sir Hugh Allen, the director of the Royal College of Music, declared that she ‘will go far because she is obstinate. She is damned obstinate!’ Allen’s assessment proved correct. She was indeed an ambitious, determined and uncompromising woman. Those who knew her found her difficult and stubborn, yet without these personality traits Gipps might never have become the figure she did, with multiple successful careers as a composer, conductor, pianist and oboist. Gipps (or ‘Wid’, as she preferred to be known) was a musical prodigy. Taught piano by her mother Hélène, she made her public debut as a pianist aged five, and had her first, prize-winning work published by the time she was eight. This short piano piece, The Fairy Shoemaker, caused…

The work  Over gently strumming harp chords, a solo violin sculpts a fervent melody that projects a bewitching mixture of anguish and tenderness. The emotional ambiguity of the opening passage to Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto sets the scene for a compelling dialogue between soloist and orchestra encapsulating an astonishing variety of moods. The solo violin’s fervent opening melody is a bewitching mixture of anguish and tenderness The Concerto was written for the virtuoso Zoltán Székely, one of Bartók’s most distinguished recital partners and the dedicatee of his Second Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra. Székely had long campaigned for Bartók to write him such a work, but the composer steadfastly resisted the suggestion. Perhaps his reluctance had much to do with the painful experiences surrounding his First Violin Concerto. This work,…

Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin) Drawing upon her vast experience of playing Eastern European folk music, Patricia Kopatchinskaja creates a very different sound palette from other violinists. Her tone can be powerfully hard-edged in one passage and then tenderly lyrical in the next. Recorded in 2012, this a febrile performance, full of fantasy and fluidity that holds you spellbound from first bar to last. Conductor Peter Eötvös shares Kopatchinskaja’s unique vision of the Concerto, inspiring the Frankfurt Radio Symphony to deliver some extraordinarily visceral orchestral playing. ( Naïve V 5285 ) Isabelle Faust (violin) Isabelle Faust projects a leaner sound than Christian Tetzlaff’s, and is more understated than the mercurial Kopatschinkaja. Nonetheless, hers is an interpretation of great subtlety and sophistication that probes beneath the work’s virtuosic surface and encompasses a wealth…

It’s that time of year when we want to escape to the outdoors and enjoy warm days and fresh air. But be sure to take music with you; whether it’s in the car on the way, in your ears as you walk or on the speakers (at a respectable volume) as you trim the hedges. Though you’ll obviously want to listen to the BBC Proms, I urge you to make time for some of this month’s reviewed recordings. Not least of all our delightful dance-inspired Recording of the Month (see right). We’ve also got big names: Argerich plays Debussy, the Brodsky Quartet plays Bach. We’ve got big books: tomes on Vaughan Williams and Gurney. And we’ve got the big screen, with my own round-up of some recent must-hear soundtracks and…

Dutilleux Le Loup; Flute Sonatine*; Oboe Sonata**; Sarabande et Cortège† *Adam Walker (flute), **Juliana Koch (oboe), †Jonathan Davies (bassoon); Sinfonia of London/John Wilson Chandos CHSA 5263 (CD/SACD) 56:23 mins The brass blazes superbly and every rhythm is alive In January 1953, Paris was hit by a vicious outbreak of flu. One of the few who escaped was Henri Dutilleux, thanks to a substantial consignment of whisky brought from Dublin by his wife Geneviève. Thus inspired, in a mere four weeks this normally slow worker composed the whole of his ballet Le Loup (The Wolf) , commissioned by Roland Petit. It seems the whisky affected not only quantity but quality; and maybe it also played a part in making this wonderful score one of Geneviève’s favourites among her husband’s works. The…

Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat, Op. 83; Capriccio in F sharp minor, Op. 76 No. 1; Intermezzo in E flat, Op. 117 No. 1; Capriccio in B minor, Op. 76 No. 2; Intermezzo in A, Op. 118 No. 2; Capriccio in C, Op. 76 No. 8  Anna Tsybuleva (piano); Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin/Ruth Reinhardt Signum Classics SIGCD 674 71:42 mins This is a far from ordinary performance of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2, a work that is too often beefed up with brawn at the expense of its darker emotions. Anna Tsybuleva, a former winner of the Leeds International Piano Competition, and the conductor Ruth Reinhardt take a collegial approach: this is not combat but conversation between piano and orchestra, which often meld together into a satisfying texture,…

Verdi Falstaff (DVD) Michael Volle, Barbara Frittoli, Alfredo Daza, Nadine Sierra, Daniela Barcellona, Francesco Demuro; Staatskapelle Berlin/Daniel Barenboim; dir. Mario Martone (Berlin, 2018) C Major 757608 (DVD); 757704 (Blu-ray) 142 mins Alfredo Daza as Ford is deliciously plangent in his Act II state of torment Sir John Falstaff, a laid-back boor in leather jacket and jeans, inhabits a grungy world on the fringes of society, hanging out with bikers and tarts on a graffiti-daubed inner-city street corner. Windsor’s ladies-who-lunch spend their days lounging around a rooftop pool. Making Windsor Great Park an alfresco fetish club may initially feel like ‘gratuitous opera cliché number one’, yet even this conceit is ultimately made to work. Purists should look away now, but I found this production by Mario Martone tremendous fun. Verdi’s last…

Monteverdi Lagrime d’Amante – madrigals La Compagnia del Madrigale Glossa GCD 922810 76:34 mins The singers bring dramatic fervour and expressive subtlety This attractively presented and thoughtfully assembled programme features a cappella madrigals from the six collections which preceded Monteverdi’s Venetian period. The disc title takes its name from the most extended of the pieces here, drawn from the Sixth Book of Madrigals. It commemorates the death in 1608 of the 18-year-old singer and pupil of the composer, Caterina Martinelli. Monteverdi’s own wife had died in the previous year, and so the theme of loss prevalent throughout this Book feels especially intense. Shorter, but hardly less affecting is Petrarch’s ‘Zefiro torna’, also from Book Six, containing towards its close images and startlingly dissonant harmonies of almost unbearable poignancy. The voices…

The King’s Alchemist – British String Trios Sally Beamish: The King’s Alchemist; Finzi: Prelude and Fugue, Op. 24; Moeren: String Trio in G; Hugh Wood: Ithaka Eblana String Trio Willowhayne WHR 067 50:17 mins The Eblana Trio play with incisiveness and patient concentration In what appears to be their recording debut, the Eblana String Trio offer works by four well-established British composers. Yet we are mostly far from homely pastoral, even with the opening Finzi Prelude and Fugue (1938), which starts sounding like serial Stravinsky, with muted strings piling up dissonance upon dissonance; this then unexpectedly resolves in conscious tribute to the counterpoint lessons Finzi received in the 1920s from RO Morris. It is a striking start to a piece which eventually takes up Finzi’s usual pastoral style, yet never…

August round-up It’s over 20 years since Shadow of the Vampire first captivated audiences. The film, a fictionalised account of the making of FW Murnau’s 1922 silent classic Nosferatu, earned Willem Dafoe an Oscar nomination for his role as Max Schreck. Just missing out on a nomination was Dan Jones’s enthralling music, which has been remastered and reissued digitally. His rich tapestry of moods and colours takes us from the bright lights of Berlin to the dark corners of Count Orlock’s castle, where life is apparently beginning to imitate art. From subtle sound effects and Eastern-European inflections to some big-boned and beautiful orchestral romance, this is great musical storytelling. (Wave Theory Records WT2021016D ★★★★★ ) Lois Weber’s 1923 silent film A Chapter in Her Life was recently restored by Universal…

August round-up This month’s Jazz Choice (see left) heads up a selection of releases that do nothing to settle the old arguments regarding where jazz begins and ends, yet they all carry aspects of jazz into their own territories. Multi-instrumentalist ECM veteran Stephan Micus, for example, gives each project a freshly-minted context that any open-minded jazz listener could relate to. Winter’s End offers hypnotic explorations of a range of instruments including the 12-string guitar, the charango (Andean stringed instrument), the kalimba (also known as the finger harp, originating from Africa) and more. A collector of instruments and musical ideas from many cultures, his career began at a time when world music also meant the quest for an actual ‘world music’ – a kind of global musical lingua franca – in…

If you can’t make it to the Albert Hall in person, there is of course another way to watch the action unfold. Twenty Proms from this year’s line-up are being filmed for broadcast and will be available on BBC iPlayer for 30 days after the Last Night. Among this year’s Proms broadcasts are Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, performed by memory by the Aurora Orchestra, and a new work by Elizabeth Ogonek conducted by Elim Chan. The Kanneh-Masons appear together on BBC Four in Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals (see p26), and Jeneba, the third eldest Kanneh-Mason, makes her Proms debut as the soloist in Florence Price’s Piano Concerto with the Chineke! Orchestra. Away from the core classical repertoire, you’ll find Proms with singer Moses Sumney, who is joined by Jules…

Cage on stage It was good to read about Julius Eastman in your July issue. The story about John Cage being angry with Eastman’s performance in Song Books is important, but when Claire Jackson writes ‘… surely this is the very essence of chance performance’, that is to misunderstand Cage’s ideas. John Cage said he used chance operations in composition so that nothing would be left to chance in performance. Eastman was actually trying to out Cage as being gay, but John considered his sexuality a private matter. Petr Kotik, of the SEM Ensemble, told me that on that occasion John furiously thumped the table and said to Eastman: ‘Of course, anything goes; but you can’t just do what you want.’ Think about it; it makes great sense. Robert Worby,…

Johanna Wallroth Soprano Born: Stockholm, Sweden Career highlight: Singing two of my favourite pieces – Anne Trulove’s aria ‘No Word from Tom’ from Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, and Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 – in a livestreamed concert with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic earlier this year. Musical hero: The mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter uses her voice in so many different ways across a variety of musical genres. She always has genius phrasing and a great understanding of the text, regardless of its language. Dream concert: To have been the soprano soloist in Verdi’s Requiem with the Swedish Radio Chorus under the late Claudio Abbado. Alexander Soares Pianist Born: London, UK Career highlight: Performing Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time under the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral…

American harpist Yolanda Kondonassis has launched a new music project with an environmental focus. Five Minutes for Earth sees 15 new works, of five minutes or less, being written for the harp by innovative composers including Chen Yi, Michael Daugherty and Aaron Jay Kernis. Azica Records will release an album in March. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra headed to St John’s Smith Square in London recently for a recording of Sibelius symphonies with conductor Owain Arwel Hughes. Their recording of Symphonies Nos 2 & 4 is scheduled for release in February by Rubicon. The label also has a disc of Liszt piano concertos and sonatas in the works, to be recorded in September by Alexander Ullman and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Meanwhile, in Prague, horn player Ondrej Vrabec and the Pavel…

The director Ridley Scott has a lot to answer for: yes, that Ridley Scott, and his most famous contribution to advertising. In 1973, he created an image of a prelapsarian otherworld, as remote from our lives as the xenomorphs in the dark watches of space, to advertise a particular brand of bread. A boy on a bike makes his way up a vertiginously cobbled street to deliver his loaves to Ma Peggotty’s place, and the music that accompanies this wheatgermy idyll is the sonic cuddle of a brass band, playing the slow movement from Dvorák’s New World Symphony. That advert sums up the clichéd idea of the freshly-baked musical conformity and aesthetic conservatism bands are thought to embody. Ever since Enderby Jackson put on the first major brass band competition…

Kate Wakeling I’ve loved being able to tune into the musical extravaganza that is the Bali Arts Festival. Indonesian gamelan is one of the most vibrant musical cultures on the planet; it’s a spellbinding type of percussion ensemble that’s inspired everyone from Debussy to Britten to Björk. This annual festival showcases a wealth of traditional and contemporary Indonesian music (plus some terrific costumes). Normally you’d need a plane ticket to get there, but this year’s festival is live-streamed on YouTube so it’s been a joy to watch from my sofa.…

My children and grandchildren have been a delightful, if expensive, part of my life for over 35 years. For an even longer period, I have run a choir with children in it. But can I make a confession? I still cannot predict whether a certain piece of music will appeal to children or not. That wouldn’t matter a jot, except that I suspect this particular failure of empathy is shared by many composers – even some of those who have written music designed to appeal to children. In this issue, Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals is explored in some detail by Jessica Duchen (starting on the next page). That’s a work which, in my experience, does appeal. Children love the zoological images it evokes with such deft eccentricity. Yet the…

You and your brothers and sisters released a recording of Carnival of the Animals last year. Had you played it together as a family before? We played it for the first time during lockdown, so although we’d heard it before we were discovering it together as musicians. It came from a very intense period because we were all living in the same house; you’d walk past different rooms and everyone was practising the same piece. We’d rehearse in different combinations, record ourselves and evaluate our performances. Which are the movements that you enjoy playing most as a pianist? Definitely the ensemble movements – ‘Aquarium’ and ‘Fossils’ in particular. They’re not necessarily the most pianistic, but I loved the chamber element and being in a soundworld with other musicians. We all…

In 1993, the journal Nature published a report that 36 university students took part in an experiment involving a series of mental tasks: before each task, they were given ten minutes of silence, or ten minutes of a recording of relaxation instructions, or ten minutes of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos, K448. It was found that those who listened to the Mozart performed best, though the effect only lasted about 15 minutes. This modest finding stirred marketing firms into something of a frenzy, perhaps encouraged by Mozart’s enhanced profile after Milosÿ Forman’s film Amadeus , followed by the composer’s 1991 bicentenary celebrations. It was claimed that if you exposed your young child to Mozart, they would absorb something of the legendary child prodigy’s genius and intelligence. The author Don Campbell…

English Pastoral: Gipps viewed her music as ‘English’. Both she and her reviewers positioned herself as a successor to Vaughan Williams, one critic saying that in her best work ‘she can achieve the lyrical intensity of The Lark Ascending.’ She often drew on English folk music and set texts by English poets. Romanticism: As well as the English school, Gipps’s music is also heavily influenced by composers like Tchaikovsky, Grieg (above) and Rimsky-Korsakov. She wanted her music to be accessible and enjoyable for a wide audience, and tried to bring the emotional immediacy of the Romantic music that she loved to her own work. Anti-modernism: In a period where most were experimenting with modernism, Gipps was adamantly against it. Her music is full of dissonant and unexpected harmonies, but she…

Bartók was 57 years old when his Second Violin Concerto was premiered in Amsterdam, and about to embark on a final chapter in his life that would see him leave his beloved Hungary for the US. His life had already seen its fair share of upheaval – not least in terms of affairs of the heart – which is echoed in the turbulent nature of much of his music. Of equal importance to his musical style, though, was his break away from classical-style tonalism, partially through the influence of folk music which, with fellow composer Zoltán Kodály, he had spent much time collecting and recording.…

What was your starting point for this recording? I really adored dance when I was a young girl and it never went away. It started with ballet and then later on I discovered modern, contemporary and jazz. The essential thing for this, though, was movement and rhythm, the two big notions that are fundamental in music and dance. I knew I wanted big pieces like the Ravel, and I really wanted to play ‘Tea for Two’ because it has been with me for years and I adore it. Why did you want to focus on this specific time period? The idea really was to explore all the diversity, characters and emotions that were happening at that time, all over the world. I’ve always had a big fascination for that century,…

Shostakovich Piano Concertos Nos 1* & 2; Piano Trio No. 2 *Andrei Kavalinski (trumpet), Aleksandar Krapovski (violin), Alexander Somov (cello), Simon Trpceski (piano); Janácek Philharmonic Ostrava/Cristian Macelaru Linn Records CKD 659 69:38 mins As David Fanning observes in his liner note, Shostakovich came late to the piano, only beginning lessons when he was nine. But once started he went like the wind, and was playing the Hammerklavier at 15. Coming a disappointing eighth in the Chopin Competition in 1927, he decided to major in composition, and put his pianism on the back burner, reserving it for playing his own works. Trpceski’s performance lets rip wildly in the final explosion of joy This recording, co-produced by and starring Simon Trpceski, makes a lovely shop window for what the composer could do…

Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden A popular opera following its premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre in January 1882, it was also said to have been the composer’s favourite. It came less than a decade after Alexander Ostrovsky’s play of the same name and features a libretto by the composer himself. Ostrovsky was pleased with the adaptation, which is faithful to his Paganist tale of changing seasons and mythic figures. Rimsky-Korsakov incorporates leitmotifs for the characters and folk melodies for the townspeople.…

Coleridge-Taylor’s African Romances  The year before he started work on Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor composed the African Romances. A set of seven songs, the work – written for voice and piano – is based on a set of poems by the African-American novelist and poet Paul Dunbar. One of the most influential black writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (he died in 1906), Dunbar was introduced to the composer while on a visit to London in the 1890s. These songs are largely based on poems from the writer’s 1895 collection Major and Minors.…

JS Bach Partitas Nos 1-6, BWV 825-830 Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord) Hyperion CDA68311-2 147:22 mins (2 discs) If the first volume of Mahan Esfahani’s foray into Bach’s keyboard music showcased the youthful flamboyance of the Toccatas, the sequel embraces a composer pushing at the boundaries of the suite, upscaling its possibilities through an encyclopaedic assault buttressed by assorted national styles, compositional techniques old and new and an array of ‘Galantieren’ ranging from Rondeau and Capriccio to Burlesca and Scherzo. All keyboard life is there, and they raise plenty of issues for a performer. Esfahani is keen to tackle them head on, and his liner notes make for required reading as a starting point – otherwise you might wonder why the usually Frenchified opening of the C minor Partita has been interpreted…

Confessions of a Music Critic Christopher Morley Brewin Books 174pp (pb) £11.95 Confessions of a Music Critic opens with a description of a last-minute press trip to Milan, where the critic Christopher Morley was whisked off to see The Flying Dutchman at La Scala in 1988. These firsthand accounts of the ‘good old days’ are catnip to millennial journalists who may have been lucky enough to catch the tail-end of healthy marketing budgets and anathema to aspiring Gen Z critics who may never know such opportunities. Having notched up over 50 years in the classical music industry, Morley has seen it all. He once reassured the notoriously prickly Stockhausen before the 1992 Birmingham performance of Sternklang and, while watching a performance from the wings of the Teatro La Fenice, saw…