BORODIN

Piano Quintet; String Quartet No. 2; Goldstein: Cello Sonata Goldner String Quartet;

Piers Lane (piano)

Hyperion CDA 68166 77:57 mins

There wasn’t much of a Russian chamber music tradition in Borodin’s time, so he had to go where instinct took him – at least at first. He finds persuasive advocates in the Goldner Quartet, still in its original line-up after 22 years, and pianist Piers Lane.

Written in 1862, the Piano Quintet in C minor is lopsided, opening with a brief movement breathing the twin atmospheres of Russian folksong and orthodox chant, skitting through a scherzo and culminating in a gloriously overegged finale longer than the first two movements put together. Borodin can’t let go of his triumphant last theme, but the Goldners’ obvious enjoyment of it doesn’t affect their crispness or impeccable tuning.

The cello was Borodin’s instrument. His 1860 Sonata survived incomplete and was reconstructed by Mikhail Goldstein – something of a joker, known for his ‘discovery’ of an entirely fictional symphony by an equally fictional composer. His version of the Cello Sonata, however, seems entirely legit. Goldner cellist Julian Smiles is in eloquent form; in the finale, Lane’s light touch keeps charm to the fore.

This is a glowing performance of the Quartet No. 2, written two decades later and audibly more mature. Could the Scherzo sound a touch more playful, the finale more exuberant? Perhaps – but the quartet’s playing is consistently fine. Erica Jeal boundless imagination – and his own straddling of the hemispheres: born in Argentina in 1931 to Russianjewish refugees, Kagel moved to Germany in 1957 where he remained an avant-garde insider-outsider until his death in 2008. These eight fantastical pieces, beautifully recorded together here for the first time, were composed between 1989 and 1994 during his turn towards a less combative, more subtly metaphysical cultural critique.

Gradually getting longer as

Kagel became enraptured by the possibilities, each piece offers a dazzling, topsy-turvy musical expedition from a different location to a point on the compass for which it is named. South-west, for instance, sails from Mexico to New Zealand via Pacific islands while North-east gazes towards Brazil from southern Argentina – and, on a European train journey, East lies ‘somewhere between Trans-carpathia and the Gulf of Finland.’ Perspectives are challenged and boundaries not so much crossed as shown not to exist.

Kagel’s soundworld is multihued and panoptic, beguiling and unsettling in equal measure. Witty and refined, through a wonky kaleidoscope of ragtime, tango, klezmer and oompah-inflected indigenous percussion, Ensemble Aleph thumb their noses at bourgeois Eurocentrism. They prove a wonderfully kinetic salon orchestra; swerving in a moment from ghostly fin de siècle colonialism to shamanic ritual and whirling, laughing dances. The result is a potent magic-realist brew. Steph Power Mozart sonata series with two further outstanding releases. As before, Tiberghien’s limpid phrasing, radiant cantabile and velvety, cushioned tone proves a continual source of pleasure, complemented ideally by Ibragimova’s silvery-toned exploratory zeal, as she delights in Mozart’s gentle textural interplay, as though discovering its special qualities for the very first time.

Included in the first set are three out of the four sonatas (Kk6-9, composed in Paris/versailles) that comprise Mozart’s first published music. In the very first sonata – cast uncharacteristically in four movements – Tiberghien (most unmistakably in the finale) subtly adapts his playing style so as to uncannily suggest the tonal properties of an early piano, but in modern Steinway terms.

In the sole example here from Mozart’s second set of sonatas

(No. 10 in B flat, K15, composed in London), the violin assumes a greater degree of expressive and thematic independence, and Ibragimova embraces the gentle enhancement of her role with just the right degree of smiling enchantment.

From England, Mozart (along with his father Leopold and sister Nannerl) travelled to Holland where he composed a further set of six sonatas, including No. 14 in D, K29, in which Tiberghien and Ibragimova relish the music’s enhanced thematic interest, pointing the way forward to the later works. The opening Allegro of K305 in A (No. 22) is perhaps a shade too ‘molto’ in its exhilarating forward momentum, yet the accompanying theme and variations are delightfully turned, as is the opening Allegro of K376 (No. 24), with its in-joke of starting with the kind of emphatic chords normally reserved for the end of a movement.

By placing two of the earlier sonatas – No. 12 in D, K27 and

16 in B flat, K31 (both from the Dutch set of 1766) – centrally on each of the second set’s two discs, the music with which these early delights are surrounded seems all the more remarkable. No. 17 in C, K296 and 23 in D, K306, the first and last of seven sonatas Mozart composed in 1778, find Tiberghien and Ibragimova rejoicing in the wideeyed sparkle of the outer movements and capturing inimitably each central movement’s flow of poetic inspiration without resorting to espressivo overloading. Those used to the post-romantic aesthetic of Henryk Szeryng or Itzhak Perlman might prefer a more spacious, majestic approach to K454’s opening