Classical

Since I hit the big 7O next spring, I’m almost pathetically grateful to Sir Thomas Allen, 73, and Daniel Barenboim, 75, for proving there’s lots of life after that milestone. Tom Allen raids the Great American Songbook for a delightful recital. It’s a typically imaginative selection, with three classics from Jerome Kern – They Didn’t Believe Me, All The Things You Are and The Folks Who Live On The Hill – rubbing shoulders with less predictable stuff, such as Kurt Weill’s My Ship, and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Come Home, from Allegro. Two Cole Porter standards – Miss Otis Regrets and Just One Of Those Things – are dispatched with typical Allen élan. As are two Bernstein rareties: Some Other Time from On The Town, and Greeting from Arias And Barcarolles. A stimulating album, made even more so by the addition of soprano Lucy Crowe in three numbers, and Allen’s voice is in great shape, with all the beauty of tone of his prime. Mozart, of course, got nowhere near 70, yet he wrote so much. And an awful lot of fine pieces, like these two piano quartets, pass almost unnoticed. Hopefully Barenboim’s advocacy will win them a wider audience. These quartets were composed in 1785/6 and, the piano parts are so showy that they are viewed by some as actual piano concertos, but only made available to us in the kind of chamber music arrangements Mozart often employed when a full orchestra wasn’t available. All six movements here are of a high standard. The finale of the Quartet No1 is good enough to be included among Mozart’s most exhilarating confections. If you want to broaden your horizons, start here.

David Mellor