CHOPIN

Piano Concerto No. 1; Ballades Seong-jin Cho (piano); London Symphony Orchestra/gianandrea Noseda

DG 479 5941 68:55 mins

Eighteen months since winning the 2015 Chopin Competition, Seongjin Cho has already made his second album for Deutsche Grammophon. Actually this is his first studio album, as the previous recording – part of the winner’s ‘package’ – was taken from live performances during the competition. The Seoul-born pianist may not have been the first name on everyone’s lips during the tense wait for the final results, yet few were surprised when the announcement was made and he became South Korea’s first gold medallist in the competition’s history. As this new release confirms, his playing is unfailingly cultivated and his sound beautifully focused and poised.

It is good to be able to revisit his Concerto in E minor, the work that sealed his success in Warsaw, even if it now comes without the spontaneity of that momentous night. The London Symphony Orchestra sounds perhaps more well-upholstered than is ideal in this music, and Gianandrea Noseda is a reliable rather than inspiring accompanist. But right from the fortissimo octaves of the piano’s entry, Cho commands the work, and he leads the dance in the finale.

Though composed over about a decade, Chopin’s four Ballades require the same mix of lyrical restraint and virtuosity, and if Cho is perhaps inclined to overindulgence in the first, G minor piece, he strikes a more patrician tone in the rest. John Allison is Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, but it is the pieces by Nadia Boulanger and Germaine Tailleferre that steal the limelight. Boulanger’s

Fantaisie (variée) (1912) is inevitably an early work, for she stopped composing after the death of her younger sister, Lili. Closer in spirit to Massenet or Saint-saëns than the impressionists, with occasional bursts of primitivist brass and ear-caressing touches of exoticism, there is no sign of immaturity in this absorbing piece of late Romanticism.

The extraordinary disembodied opening of Tailleferre’s Ballade

(1920–22) is a world away from her contemporaneous larks with Les

Six, her neo-classical spirit emerging much later in the piece. This nuanced and devoted performance from Uhlig and the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie under Pablo González provides yet more confirmation the relative scarcity of Tailleferre’s music in concert programmes compared to Poulenc, Milhaud or Honegger is down to chauvinism.

Depending on your perspective, the Concerto by Françaix is either a delightful Gallic romp or a vapid soufflé. Regardless, Uhlig is a fine advocate, nimbly frollicking through the outer movements and lovingly sustaining the Andante.

The Ravel concerto has bags of character, with some wonderfully wheezy lower reeds. There could be greater clarity to some of the fingerwork in the opening solo, but there is a great sweep, Uhlig and González masterfully pacing every ebb and flow. The disc’s value comes, though, from the excellent advocacy of Boulanger and Tailleferre.

Christopher Dingle transcriptions successful. While the repetitive patterns in Glass’s writing are challenging for violinists, they are virtually impossible for woodwind – unless you can master circular breathing, as Dickson has.

The saxophonist’s stamina is impressive. Her Concerto is a kaleidoscope of colour; the phrases blend together with mechanical precision. Dickson captures the explosive emotion, particularly in the second movement. Her collaborators, the musicians of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, are on fine form. It is, quite literally, a breath-taking performance.

However, Dickson fans may feel short changed, as the Concerto has appeared on another recording:

Glass, Tavener & Nyman (also Sony, 2009). The work is re-released here as part of a collection to mark Glass’s 80th birthday. But fear not, there’s plenty to make this purchase worthwhile, including a new transcription of the Violin Sonata. In this work, Dickson demonstrates the saxophone’s sophisticated versatility; as with the Concerto, this is not just an arrangement, but a work in its own right.

The disc also features two pieces from the soundtrack to The Hours, arranged by Dickson and her husband, composer Jamie Barclay. The saxophone’s plangent tone evokes the original’s mournful anxiety, but Dickson adds an even deeper sense of the unbearable claustrophobia felt by the film’s protagonists. Claire Jackson