Album reviews

MARIA JOÃO PIRES Beethoven’s Piano Concertos 3 & 4 ( Onyx) Pianist Maria João Pires long ago earned a reputation for eccentricity, withdrawing from public view for extended periods and at one point retreating to a farm in her native Portugal, whence she reported that milking goats was doing wonders for the evenness of her trills. Several years ago she moved to Brazil, following a health crisis and the collapse of a Portuguese educational institute she had founded and that left her deeply in debt. A Buddhist, she is drawn to spiritual inquiry, and it is impossible not to hear this in her music-making, where she balances on the razor’s edge that separates (or links) devotion to the score and the imposition of interpretation. Her approach to Beethoven’s Third and Fourth Piano Concertos is infused with Mozartian purity — Mozart and Chopin are the composers with whom she is most associated — which she applies to profoundly personal expression. Her technique is crystalline, her tone opulent, her intent unambiguous, her ego absent. She infuses the first movement of the Third Concerto with a tragic, even shell-shocked mien, and its second movement with contemplative melancholy. Unaccustomed sorrow inhabits the Fourth Concerto, too, yielding an experience of the piece that lies distant from the mainstream. The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Daniel Harding conducting) proves a sensitive, often exuberant partner in these intimately captured, emotionally arresting performances. — James M. Keller LAETITIA SADIER Something Shines (Drag City) Few bands in the history of pop music have a sound as distinct as Stereolab’s. Within just a few bars of Laetitia Sadier’s latest solo album, you can tell it’s a release from that band’s former frontwoman. The acoustic guitar lays out the rhythm, the bass notes come in sounding as rich and sweet as chocolate chips, and soon an electric guitar and organs are making slick runs up and down before horns, flutes, and odd bits of noise get caught up in the eddy. Even before Sadier sings a line in English, she lets her voice feel out the edges of this groove, humming and howling as if to herself. When she does lend her seductively frosty voice, it’s to impart sharply observational and occasionally impressionistic lyrics of romance, life, and the current political climate. “They are a class, they are at war, are determined to win/Their plan is to transfer our wealth to under their sinister wing,” she sings in the biting, acoustic “Oscuridad,” adding an atypical edge to her voice in what is possibly the most direct song she’s ever written. Fortunately, the album as a whole is more uplifting. Her instrumentation and song structures still feel somehow futuistic more than 20 years into her career, and her compositional skills are still extraordinary. What she’s woven here is a tapestry you can return to endlessly, noticing new details each time. — Robert Ker