Classical music
Richard Osborne
Since elements of the English coronation service date back to the late tenth century, Paul Mccreesh’s superb two-cd album An English Coronation 1902-1953 chronicles only a fraction of that time, albeit a magnificent one musically. Cased, illustrated, and with a full order of service, this exceptionally handsome set recreates the modern ceremony, live as it were, with music selected from the 1902, 1911, 1937 and 1953 coronations. Beginning with Elgar’s Coronation March and ending with Walton’s Crown Imperial, it takes in along the way a rich array of choral music dating back to 1544 and Thomas Tallis’s five-part setting of the Litany in the Cranmer translation. (Signum SIGCD569, £18.00).
In a not dissimilar register, hearing Berlioz’s epic yet astonishingly intimate Grande Messe des Morts performed live in St Paul’s Cathedral on the very day of the 150th anniversaryof the great man’s death in Paris in March 1869 must be accounted oneof the musical events of 2019. Filmed by medici.tv and recorded by Warner Classics, this spectacular performance featuring some 350 musicians in this picturesque space is now as a special edition CD+DVD release (Erato 9029543064, £11.50).
Berlioz first met Felix Mendelssohn – ‘enormously, extraordinarily, superbly, prodigiously talented’ – in Rome in 1831, the year the 22-year-old Mendelssohn completed the firstof his two mature piano concertos. No concertos dazzle quite like these, as Jan Lisiecki, the 24-year-oldpolish-Canadian prodigy proves in a fine new recording in which the virtuosi of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra are directed from the keyboard by Lisiecki himself. Also on the disc are the evergreen Rondo capriccioso and the Variations sérieuses, the sternest and most dramatic of Mendelssohn’s compositions for solo piano. (Deutsche Grammophon 483 6471 £11.50).
When Mendelssohn died of overwork at the age of 38, Clara Schumann wrote, ‘If I tried to put into words everything that one loved in him, I should never make an end’. Clara was one of Richard Ingrams’s Pin-ups in the first Oldie Annual in 1993. (‘Pianist and mother of seven, she inspired the best music of Schumann and Brahms.’) To mark her bicentenary Hyperion has added her youthful Piano Concerto in A minor (the key of her husband’s more famous piece) to its longrunning series The Romantic Piano Concerto, elegantly realised by Howard Shelley and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. The disc also includes contemporary pieces by Ferdinand Hiller, Henri Herz and that most conceited of early nineteenth century keyboard virtuosi, Friedrich Kalkbrenner. (Hyperion CDA68240 £12.75). Jean-jacques Offenbach was also born in 1819. He added immeasurably to the gaiety of nations, not least France, his adopted home, whose manners and politics he mercilessly ribbed. Provided you’re not allergic to the bat-squeak of the coloratura soprano, you may enjoy Belgian soprano Jodie Devos’s collection of Offenbach rarities Offenbach Colorature (Alpha Classics 437,£12.75), though a more varied collection of rarities is to be had in Opera Rara’s classic 2007 anthology Entre Nous:celebrating Offenbach. Happily, this remains available in its original 2-CD boxed form, as opposed to some faceless download stripped of all annotation. (ORR243, £30).
Staying in anniversary mood, the Heifetz of the harmonica, Tommy Reilly, is well remembered on the centenary of his birth with A Life in Music: Vintage Tommy Reilly, a splendidly chosen anthology of light classic pieces, consummately played. (Chandos CHAN20143, £12.75).
If the French ended by being sniffy about Offenbach, they began by being sniffy about Olivier Messiaen, whose organ music only came to wider notice with Simon Preston’s trend-setting mid-1960s King’s College, Cambridge and Westminster Abbey recordings of Messiaen’s two great organ frescoes
L’ascension and La Nativité du Seigneur. Now another young Kingsman, Richard Gowers, has recorded La Nativité on the expensively refurbished (2016) King’s College organ. Frenchsounding it ain’t but again the colours glow and the spirits soar. (King’s College, Cambridge KGS0025 £12.75).
Bruno Monsaingeon has made many memorable films but none greater than L’archet indomptable ( The Indomitable Bow), his recent filmed biography of the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. The documentary is as much about politics and the human cornucopia that was Rostropovich himself as it is about music, though when the three collide, as they frequently do in this two-hour epic, it makes for exhilarating viewing and inspiring listening. (Naxos DVD 2110583 £20). Note: retail prices may vary