The heart of Schumann’s quartets is revealed at last
The Emerson String Quartet’s performance of these three works is a revelation, says Stephen Johnson
R Schumann
String Quartets Nos 1-3 Emerson String Quartet Pentatone PTC 5186 869 76:46 mins It seems that at last people are really starting to get Schumann’s chamber music. The Piano Quintet has always been popular, but the three string quartets he wrote the same year are marvels too. It’s just that they’re subtler, less extrovert, at times more enigmatic. Here’s playing that penetrates this music to a degree that surprised even a fully paidup fan like me. The Emerson are such a fine ensemble, but they’re also four strongly individual personalities. The element of dialogue in Schumann’s quartetwriting is forefronted beautifully. At times it’s tender and intimate, like a conversation by the fireside in Schumann’s Leipzig home; at others it’s more troubled and inward – as though this time the voices are contending within Schumann’s own head.
A potential problem with this music is the amount of rhythmic repetition, especially of oddly off-beat figures, but the Emersons have such a natural, vital feel for this that it leaves one wondering why people ever had a problem with it. As for structure, the lines are persuasively shaped, and structurally all the quirks and lateral side-steps make perfect sense.
This is also, hand on heart, the first time that I’ve really grasped these three works as a cycle. Listen to them in one sitting if you can: it’s wonderfully illuminating and moving. Far more than his protégé Brahms, and in a very different way from Beethoven, Schumann had a truly Classical, Haydnesque feel for what made the string quartet genre unique.
The recordings serve the performances admirably. Recommended to believers and agnostics alike.
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
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Bartók
String Quartets Nos 1, 3 & 5 Jerusalem Quartet
Harmonia Mundi HMM 902240 75:24 mins
Despite stiff competition from his contemporaries, Bartók’s is perhaps the greatest 20th century contribution to the quartet literature and we can never have enough recordings. So it is welcome news that the outstanding Jerusalem Quartet, who released the even-numbered works on the same label back in 2016, has now with this album completed their cycle.
Dating from the early phase of Bartók’s career, the First Quartet reflects the same unhappy love affair with Stefi Geyer as the Violin Concerto, taking up the ‘Stefi theme’ as well. It opens in a state of lonely desolation, and the feeling of suspense is superbly captured by the Jerusalems, who also find the earthy folksiness to remind us that Bartók’s language is rooted in multi-ethnic Transylvania. Equally impressive in the Fifth, a towering masterpiece based symmetrically around its third movement (‘Alla bulgarese’), they play the finale with whirling virtuosity.
They also meet all the technical innovations of the Third, but this is where my slight reservation creeps in: such highly cultivated playing as the Jerusalems produce perhaps renders the work’s strangeness not quite mesmerising enough.
John Allison
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
The musicians have such a natural, vital feel for this music
Erkki-sven Tüür
String Quartet No. 2 ‘Lost Prayers’*; Fata Morgana; Synergie†; Lichttürme
†Florian Donderer, Harry Traksmann (violin), Marrit Gerretz-traksmann (piano), Leho Karin, †Tanja Tetzlaff (cello); *Signum Quartett
ECM 481 9540 54:40 mins
Erkki-sven Tüür is best known for his robustly elemental orchestral writing, with nine symphonies and a host of concertos and other large-scale
pieces composed to date. Yet, as this album of chamber works attests, he is equally at home with far smaller forces where his trademark dramatic extremes and expansive gestures take on a powerful immediacy close-up.
Named after Tüür’s String Quartet No. 2, Lost Prayers, this album’s collected works are striking for their consistency and coherence over a span of 15 years. Each deploys motivic seeds which, as they grow and mutate, generate organic structures that knit the work together as it were from the inside.
Whether in the quartet (2012), the violin-cello duo Synergie (2010) or piano trios Fata Morgana (2002) and Lichttürme (2017), the resulting idiom is ferociously intense: dissonant with dark, tonal-atonal underpinnings, and replete with pauses and explosions that ricochet outwards in molten trails before re-gathering. All are delivered with exemplary drive and luminosity: the Signum Quartett respond vividly to the changing textures of Tüür’s imagined Lost Prayers, while Florian Donderer (violin) and Tanja Tetzlaff (cello) create pools of colour as they stretch and entwine in the aptly titled Synergie.
But it’s in Fata Morgana and especially Lichttürme (Towers of Light) where the harmonic fields are most resonant, the piano in each case affording a rippling sustain that unites the earthly with the ethereal. Both are beautifully navigated by Harry Traksmann (violin), Leho Karin (cello) and Marrit Gerretztraksmann (piano).
Steph Power
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
Walton
Piano Quartet; Toccata in A minor; Two Pieces for Violin and Piano; Violin Sonata Matthew Jones (violin), Sarah-jane Bradley (viola), Tim Lowe (cello), Annabel Thwaite (piano) Naxos 8.573892 74:11 mins
Listeners new to William Walton’s music would get a lopsided impression of his achievements from this sturdily performed collection covering all his chamber works featuring the violin and piano. From the bundle of early 20th-century influences romping through the teenage Walton’s Piano Quartet we reach the gnarled and ferocious Toccata (hard to enjoy, even harder to play), composed by a determined 1920s iconoclast. Jumping over Walton’s peak years, we pass through the wispy Two Pieces from the 1940s and land on his fussy if ardent Violin Sonata, receiver of mixed reviews following its 1950 London premiere. You could compare it all to the equivalent of a restaurant meal of teasing hors d’oeuvre and a comforting dessert, but lacking the chef’s signature dish.
Even so, it’s fascinating to hear Walton’s complex musical personality gradually form through imitation and experimentation, only to loosen after the Second World War. Violinist Matthew Jones and pianist Annabel Thwaite need all the finger fire at their command for the extravagantly ‘modern’ 1923 Toccata, the one work here with a limited outlet for the lyrically Romantic strand so pleasantly featured in the Piano Quartet. Walton later labelled that piece the product of a ‘drooling baby’, though he still regarded it fondly.
As for the Violin Sonata, the temperature of his creative imagination may have dropped, but you can’t deny magic moments like the finale’s fifth variation, all filigree beauty and wonderfully conveyed here. A vivid recording adds to the album’s rewards.
Geoff Brown
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Weinberg
String Quartets Nos 2, 5 & 8 Arcadia Quartet
Chandos CHAN 20158 68:24 mins
It’s a mark of the increasing levels of recognition accorded to Mieczys aw Weinberg in recent years that we now have the prospect of savouring ongoing recorded cycles of his 17 string quartets from two different ensembles as an alternative to the much-acclaimed pioneering set by the Quatuor Danel released over ten years ago by CPO. First out of the blocks was the Silesian Quartet, who has thus far released three excellent discs on the Accord label. This Polish group is now joined by the Arcadia Quartet, who make a very auspicious impression for their first Weinberg entrée that brings together three of the composer’s most accessible contributions to the genre, all recorded in a warmsounding acoustic.
In their illuminating booklet notes, the Arcadia Quartet players explain the joys they experienced from playing these works for the first time. They describe Weinberg’s music as sounding ‘like a glow of light surrounded by the darkness of the unknown: we felt instantly captivated by his deeply inspired melodies and perfectly shaped structures.’
The Arcadia’s evident enthusiasm for the music is perfectly conveyed here with playing that maximises the emotional range explored in each work, as well as exploiting to the full the music’s tonal and textural varieties and its underlying sense of unease. These contrasts are placed in sharp relief when comparing the relentless Bartókian ferocity they achieve in the rhythmically dynamic Scherzo from the Fifth Quartet with the easygoing geniality that is projected in the opening movement of the Second, or the austere solemnity that characterises the slow sections of the Eighth.
Erik Levi
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
The Art of the Mandolin
Works by Beethoven, Ben-haim, David Bruce, Henze, D Scarlatti, Giovanni Sollima and Vivaldi
Avi Avital, Alon Sariel (mandolin), Sean Shibe (guitar), Anneleen Lenaerts (harp), Ophira Zakal (theorbo), Yizhar Karshon (harpsichord), Patrick Sepec (cello); Venice Baroque Orchestra DG 483 8534 55:17 mins
Avi Avital’s latest release looks back over 300 years of mandolin music, starting with Vivaldi’s enchanting Double Mandolin Concerto (partnered by Alon
Sariel), which is brought sparklingly to life, with the Venice Baroque Orchestra providing deftly engaging accompaniment. Staying in the Baroque period, Domenico Scarlatti’s D minor Keyboard
Sonata K.89 belongs to a handful of works that modern scholarship suggests may have been conceived originally for the mandolin – after hearing Avital’s engagingly dynamic performance, one is certainly inclined to agree.
Beethoven’s Adagio ma non troppo WOO 43.2 is one of four delightful pieces he composed for the singer/mandolinist Countess Josephine of Clary-aldringen, a society ‘looker’ who seems to have well and truly caught the composer’s eye.
Moving forward in time to the last century, Hans Werner Henze’s Carillon, Récitatif, Masque is a minimasterpiece of bracingly inventive pasticherie, and although Paul Benhaim’s Sonata a Tre for mandolin,
guitar and harpsichord possesses a similar nostalgic stylistic trajectory, it is closer to the neo-baroque re-imaginings of Villa-lobos’s Bachianas brasileiras.
Bringing us virtually bang up to date is David Bruce’s Death is a Friend of Mine, a dazzling mélange of dancing inspiration climaxing in a Rodrigo-like finale, and Giovanni Sollima’s solo mandolin Prelude, an effervescent three-and-a-half minuter, featuring an exhilarating tarantella. Julian Haylock PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Correspondances
Barratt-due: Duo for Viola and Piano ‘Correspondances’;
A Benjamin: Viola Sonata; Hindemith: Viola Sonata, Op.11/4; Enescu: Concertstück; plus works by Vieutemps and Ysaÿe
Eivind Ringstad (viola),
David Meier (piano)
Rubicon RCD 1050 69:14 mins
The Norwegian violist Eivind Ringstad won the Eurovision Young Musicians competition in 2012, and this is his debut recorded recital. It is anything but a play-safe piece of programming.
Arthur Benjamin’s Sonata for viola and piano is the opener, and both Ringstad and his excellent accompanist David Meier catch vividly its unsettled wartime atmosphere (it dates from 1942), especially in the nervy instability of the Waltz movement. The hyperactive Toccata finale is technically testing, but Ringstad’s attack is never ugly and his intonation seems infallible.
Hindemith’s Viola Sonata (the Op. 11, No. 4 ) also features, and its opening ‘Fantasie’ showcases Ringstad’s ripe, rhapsodic tone and the cleanness of his fingerwork in the outbursts of elaborate filigree. Charm and panache are in Ringstad’s armoury too, in a transcription of Ysaÿe’s Caprice d’après l’étude en forme de valse de Saint-saëns (originally for violin and orchestra).
But the most interesting piece on the disc is probably Peder Barrattdue’s Correspondances, premiered by Ringstad at the 2018 Edinburgh Festival. A sharp-edged work that juxtaposes spiky, staccato rhythms with a keeningly lyrical central section, it shatters preconceptions of the viola as a somewhat stuffy, conservative instrument, especially in Ringstad’s commandeering performance. Terry Blain PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
A Family Affair
Dvoˇrák: Bagatelles, Op. 47; Rusalka – Song of the Moon;
Korngold: Die tote Stadt –
Mariettas Lied; Suite, Op. 23 Raphaelle Moreau, David Moreau (violin), Edgar Moreau (cello),
Jérémie Moreau (piano)
Erato 9029524112 65:23 mins
This release highlights the capacity of extraordinarily gifted musical families to perform chamber music with a level of instinctive precision that is rarely matched even by longstanding professional groups. We already know from Edgar Moreau’s previous discs what a superbly talented cellist he is in his own right, and these qualities are admirably demonstrated here in highly expressive accounts of the famous ‘Song to the Moon’ from Dvo ák’s Rusalka and Mariettas’s Lied from Korngold’s Die tote Stadt.
But Edgar also shows an ability to tame his strong musical personality and work in perfect accord with other members of his family. In this respect, the performances of the Dvo ák Bagatelles and the technically far more challenging Suite for Piano Left Hand, two violins and cello, which Korngold composed for Paul Wittgenstein in 1930, are immaculately delivered with much fine attention to detail, and the dryish recording admirably communicates the intimacy of the music making.
The downside is that some emotional characteristics in both works remain understated. Admittedly, the Dvo ák might have benefited from being performed in its more intimate original instrumentation with a harmonium replacing the more blandly scored piano alternative. But setting this issue aside, the technical fluency of the playing can’t really compensate for a lack of charm, elegance and exhilaration in this interpretation. The Korngold on the other hand is engaging, particularly in the musically austere Präludium und
Fuge and the heartfelt Lied. At the same time, I missed an essential ingredient of Viennese nostalgia in the haunting Waltz, and the ensuing Groteske movement could be far more unhinged to make a really powerful impact. Erik Levi PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
Mirrors
– 21st Century American Piano Trios
Works by S Belimova, Ciupinski, G Cohen, WD Cooper, Higdon and R Moya
Sarah Shafer (soprano);
Lysander Piano Trio
First Hand Records FHR 111 71:26 mins The traditional piano trio – violin, cello and piano – has been the go-to pianobased ensemble for great composers throughout history: Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann all focused efforts on arrangements for three players, and Ravel, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich also favoured the format. In spite of contemporary chamber music’s inclination for unusual instrumentation, this centuries-old combination has continued to flourish – in part thanks to the work of the Lysander Piano Trio, which has promoted and premiered several major works. The ensemble’s ten-year anniversary project Mirrors comprises six first recordings of 21st-century pieces – including four commissions.
As its title and cover artwork suggests, this album draws on reflections, particularly those found within the arts at large. Shakespeare is the inspiration behind Gilad Cohen’s Around the Cauldron, which evokes the three witches in Macbeth via a grumbling bass (sometimes played on the bridge, imitating an electric guitar) and sighing bent notes. The Bard is also central to Sofia Belimova’s compact Titania and Her Suite, a fleeting, fairy-like tribute to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Lysander Piano Trio takes its name from the play, applying the character’s famous line ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’ to their work as a musicians.)
Sarah Shafer joins the trio for Jennifer Higdon’s Love Sweet,a five-part cycle that uses texts by American poet Amy Lowell (18741925). Shafer’s lyric soprano suits the wistful melodies; the addition of cello and violin to the usual voice-and-piano art song is highly evocative. Four novels, a religious text and a painting technique inspire the remaining featured works. Claire Jackson PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Mon ami, mon amour
L Boulanger: Two Pieces (arr. Haimovitz); N Boulanger: Trois pièces; Debussy: Cello Sonata; Poulenc: Cello Sonata; plus works by Fauré, Milhaud and Ravel Matt Haimovitz (cello),
Mari Kodama (piano)
Pentatone PTC 5186 816 62:05 mins
In his excellent liner note, Matt Haimovitz singles out structure and joie de vivre as two salient characteristics of French music, and his playing fully endorses this judgment. His tone (on his beloved cello now happily restored after a serious accident) embraces both the light-hearted and the solemn without ever becoming scratchy or dull, and he is sensitively supported by his accompanist. His two transcriptions are both entirely successful: Ravel’s song ‘Kaddish’, at a slow speed beyond the ability of most singers, is deeply moving, aided by his transposition of the central section down an octave, while that of two violin pieces by Lili Boulanger catches the soulfulness of the first and the playfulness of the second – his invented sul ponticello being a particularly apt touch. It’s very good, too, to have three pieces by her sister Nadia who, after Lili’s early death, wrote only half a dozen songs in 1922, devoting herself from then on to promoting Lili’s works and to her own teaching: the third piece exhibits a jazzy Nadia unknown in later years.
I have only a few quibbles. In the second movement of the Poulenc Sonata, the tempo at fig. 4 is considerably above what is marked, and at fig. 9 in the third movement there is a curious and unwelcome burst of speed. In the central movement of the Debussy Sonata, the structure is built on the games between staccato and legato, not always in place here. But overall this is an impressive and enjoyable disc. Roger Nichols
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
JS Bach
6 Partitas, BWV 825-830 Asako Ogawa (harpsichord) First Hand Records FHR92
150:30 mins (2 discs)
Asako Ogawa is a noted soloist and continuo player, and is also a Baroque coach at the Guildhall; the people she has studied with include Laurence Cummings and Steven Devine – she therefore comes with the best credentials.
Yet by the time I had listened to the first 30 minutes of this recording, I had taken against her. The opening Praeludium was clean and unfussy, and the first Allemande had hints of pensive rubato, but her playing seemed to have no heart. The first Sarabande had no plangency, and the operatic sweep of the first Sinfonia was reduced to a stilted froideur; in the Allemande of the second Partita, expressiveness was replaced by the careful plod of a teaching exercise. The prospect of two more hours of that didn’t bode well.
But as the second Partita progressed, she began to loosen up, revealing rhythmic subtlety and a refined control of tone-colour. And with the Ouverture to Partita No. 4 – placed next in the sequence on this double disc, and coming over as a sustained fantasy – I realised that Ogawa’s soundworld was a place where I was very happy to live. From this point on her playing radiated excitement, and a vivid sense of the character of each individual piece. Her liner note speaks of these Partitas as reflecting the ‘laughter and tears’ of Bach’s own life during the period when he wrote them, and that was the impression her recording leaves in the mind. Particular pleasures include the Gavottes, the Sarabandes in Partitas 3 and 4, the lovely breadth and grandeur of the closing Toccata and the graceful treatment of the final Gigue, which many other pianists turn into a circus act. Michael Church
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Beethoven
Symphonies Nos 1 & 2
(trans. Liszt)
Hinrich Alpers (piano)
Sony Classical G0100044108877 (digital only) 63:05 mins
Before orchestral recordings existed, piano reductions designed for home use were a major industry, and duet publications of Beethoven’s symphonies almost literally two-a-penny. The solo piano versions made by the Beethoven-admiring Liszt were a rather different idea – not keyboard reductions but, as he insisted, fully
fledged piano scores in their own right, involving as much orchestral detail as could tellingly be fitted in. The masterful results, while not quite demanding a full-on Lisztian keyboard technique, were still beyond what most home-based amateur players would have been able to manage, and were intended more for the concert platform.
Also they really do amount to something more than a connoisseur’s experience for dedicated Lisztians. Today we tend to think of Beethoven’s first two symphonies as relatively small-scale compared to the epic masterworks to come, but contemporary audiences were startled by their previously unimagined firepower and rhythmic energy. The skilfully concentrated layout of these arrangements recaptures those qualities remarkably – as in the closing stages of the Second Symphony’s finale, whose eruptive impact here subverts any sense of over-familiarity with the music itself. Hinrich Alpers has finely mastered the art of presenting Liszt’s transcription idiom on a modern concert grand, so that those densely written left-hand chords sound powerful rather than overturgid (they would have balanced naturally on pianos of the period). And passages like the trio section of the First Symphony’s Scherzo movement come across with a lovely singing quality, happily connecting with the spirit of Beethoven’s original. Malcolm Hayes PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Beethoven
Symphony No. 6
(arr. piano four hands)*;
Piano Sonata No. 17 ‘Tempest’ Theodosia Ntokou,
*Martha Argerich (piano)
Warner Classics 9029516403 65:37 mins Martha Argerich has mentored Greek virtuoso Theodosia Ntokou for over a decade now, and on the evidence of this engaging performance of former Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung editor Selmar Bagge’s piano duet arrangement of the Pastoral Symphony, they have been learning from each other. The key here is Ntokou’s dramatically poised, Classically aware, emotionally supple, refreshingly unhurried reading of the Tempest Sonata. While most pianists make the outer movements conform to a Sturm und Drang style, Ntokou reminds us that Beethoven was one of music’s supreme thinkers, as she subtly articulates the music’s structural narrative rather than coming over all moody and ‘tempestuous’ at the slightest provocation. As a result, the sublime central Adagio is experienced as a vital part of the music’s organisational fabric, rather than a mere sonic buffer zone between two high-tension soundscapes.
Likewise, the reading of the Pastoral Symphony here is the polar opposite of impulsive or spur-of-themoment. Argerich is as engagingly spontaneous and pianistically responsive as ever, yet here she plays with exquisite refinement, as though distilling her interpretative essence to its essentials. Ntokou counterbalances Argerich’s inspired pianism with captivating flair, textural acuity and fine-graded tonal matching. Julian Haylock PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★
Chopin
Ballades; Nocturnes – selection Lara Melda (piano)
Champs Hill CHRCD 153 76:12 mins There is much to admire here: total technical control, sensitivity to linear balance, a wide range of dynamics and warm tone. If the Nocturnes seem to be more Lara Melda’s natural territory, that’s mainly because the Ballades throw up more searching questions of structure.
Only two points concerned me, but both are crucial. Firstly, rests. Mozart famously declared, ‘The music in not in the notes, but in the silence in between.’ Of course he was exaggerating, but to a good purpose: just because the sound stops, our ears and brains don’t stop with it. While rests with a pause mark can be treated variously, plain rests do need strict observance as contributing to the overall rhetoric. While Melda’s rubato is generally subtle and persuasive, the holes in the discourse are considerably less so. Allied with this is the whole question of slowing down at the ends of phrases. To ban this completely (even if Dutilleux demanded it in his own music) would be taking Puritanism to an extreme. More helpfully, pianists should be aware of the law of diminishing returns. If a majority of phrases end with a ritardando, the impact gradually withers, to the point that the result actually becomes irritating. The motto is ‘Choose your rits stingily and meaningfully!’
It’s a pity that Melda leaves her worst infraction to the final bars of the disc, playing the four chords at the end of the Fourth Ballade at twice their notated speed, ruining the majestic close to one of Chopin’s greatest works. Roger Nichols PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★
Reicha
L’art de varier, Op. 57
Ivan Ili (piano)
Chandos CHAN 20194 86:50 mins
Now in its third volume, Ivan
Ili ’s exploration of the piano works of Anton Reicha is making those works’ cognate origin with the works of Beethoven yet more abundantly clear. And cognate is exact, in that the two musicians were born in the same year, played side by side in the Bonn court orchestra when they were 15 and remained friends in adulthood. But their careers diverged sharply: while Beethoven rose to fame, Reicha, who worshipped Haydn, settled in Paris, ploughed an austere furrow as a mathematician and musical theoretician and gave celebrated classes to students including Berlioz, Gounod and César Franck.
‘My study of algebra gave me an analytical outlook,’ he claimed, and that is what gives the Op. 57 variations their tensile strength.
For almost 90 minutes he subjects a simple, songful theme to the most kaleidoscopic imaginable treatment, and – thanks in part to the freshness and clarity of Ili ’s playing – the wonder is that I don’t get bored.
The first variation is a demure little embroidery on the theme, and the second thunders in Beethovenian style. Then, after establishing these polarities, he’s off on a voyage full of drama and incident, sometimes adumbrating Chopin and sometimes Liszt, and often demanding fullblown virtuosity. Harking back to Bach, the penultimate variation is a po-faced fugue, and the finale is a perky little Presto; Reicha’s invention never flags for a moment. It would make an arresting programme for a Wigmore concert. Michael Church PERFORMANCE ★★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★
Schubert
Collected Piano Works Ll r Williams (piano) Signum Classics SIGCD 645 574:18 mins (8 discs)
As Ll r Williams points out in his preface to the disc’s booklet, any pianist embarking on a survey of Schubert’s sonatas needs to decide which of the early works
to include. Schubert made his first sustained attempts with the genre in 1817, when he was just 20. Of the works he composed at that time, Williams includes only the Sonata D575, in the unusual key of B major. Several of the companion pieces were left incomplete, but still it’s a pity to be without the E flat Sonata D568, which is a later revision of a work originally written in the key of D flat; or the E minor D566, with its beautiful rondo in the major clearly modelled on the rondo from Beethoven’s two-movement sonata in the same key Op. 90.
On the other hand, Williams does include the largest and greatest of Schubert’s unfinished sonatas, D840, composed in the spring of 1825. Only its first two movements stand complete, and most pianists choose to play just those. However, there have been attempts at rounding out the remainder, by Ernst K enek and Paul Baduraskoda among others. Williams opts for a completion by the American composer William Bolcom; and while it’s good to hear the minuet, which Schubert nearly finished, the finale is much weaker than the rest, and he was surely right to abandon it.
Slightly extraneous to Williams’s cycle is the last of the eight discs, featuring a generous selection of Liszt’s transcriptions of Schubert songs. If something of an acquired taste, there’s no denying their ingenuity. Williams dispatches the dazzling display pieces such as Erlkönig, Auf dem Wasser zu singen, and Die Forelle (The
Trout) brilliantly.
Among the sonatas, perhaps he’s most at home in the D major D850, where he conveys the sweep of the unusually quick and energetic opening movement admirably.
He’s very good in that early B major sonata and the late A major
D959, too, but there are occasions elsewhere – and particularly in the slow movements, almost all of them marked ‘Andante’ – where he sounds rather ponderous. While there’s no mistaking his innate musicality, pieces like the Andante of the unfinished C major Sonata, or the big A minor D845 and the genial little A major D664 all need to flow more naturally. A mixed bag, then, but at their best these are very impressive performances. Misha Donat
PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
All Around Bach
JS Bach: Solo Concerto, BWV
979; Solo Concerto in F, BWV 971 ‘Italian’; Chorale Preludes – excerpts (arr. Busoni); Phantasy and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542 (arr. Liszt); Franck: Prelude, Fugue et Variation, Op. 18 (arr. saxophone and piano)*; Liszt: Phantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H *Asya Fateyeva (saxophone),
Stepan Simonian (piano)
Cavi-music AVI8553988 67:38 mins Russian-born German pianist Stepan Simonian presents a collection of works based on Bach, journeying from JSB’S own arrangements in the 18th century to adaptations by Busoni, César Franck and Liszt in the late 19th.
From the outset, Simonian reveals his dazzling technique with blazing passagework and spirited rhythms in the fast movements of BWV 979, balanced with wistful and lyrical playing in the slow movements. Here, and in the Italian Concerto, Simonian exploits the piano’s vast expressive range and the potential of its pedals to enhance dynamic and colouristic effects, offsetting a big, concert-hall sound with moments of hushed intimacy. Despite the resonant recording, contrapuntal lines and ornaments remain lucid.
Two works by Liszt form the core of the programme: the celebrated Fantasia and Fugue on the letters of Bach’s name, and his arrangement of Bach’s own Fantasia and Fugue BWV 542. Simonian brings beefy, Russianschool virtuosity to the former, building the musical architecture into a towering monument. The Fantasia of the latter work is rather pummelled out, but the Fugue is crisp and beautifully articulated. Interweaving these warhorses are Busoni’s arrangements of three chorale preludes to which Simonian brings muscular certitude (‘In dir ist Freude’), gravitas (‘Jesus Christus, unser Heiland’) and joie de vivre (‘Nun freut Euch’). An arrangement for piano and soprano saxophone of César Franck’s Prélude, fugue et variation, Op. 18 seems a schmaltzy addition, though it’s gracefully played by Simonian and his saxophonist wife, Asya Fateyeva. Kate Bolton-porciatti PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Casta Diva
Piano transcriptions by Chopin, Ginzburg, Liszt, Thalberg, P Wittgenstein et al
Vanessa Benelli Mossell (piano)
Decca 485 5291 67:49 mins
The young Liszt’s arrangement of Bellini’s Réminiscences de Norma, an opera transcription intended to showcase the capabilities of the newly created piano, forms the centrepiece of Vanessa Benelli Mosell’s new album. The Italian pianist harnesses the greater technical abilities of today’s Steinway Model D to bring a spiky, slightly acidic reading of the melodic highlights from Bellini’s tragic opera.
With Liszt’s reflections from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Verdi’s Rigoletto and Rossini’s William Tell Overture, Mosell faces stiff competition, primarily Louis Lortie’s Liszt at the Opera (Chandos) and Leslie Howard’s collection of the same name for Hyperion, but she stands up to the challenge. Her varied programme also includes Chopin’s take on the march from Bellini’s I puritani, a piece written for Hexaméron, a volume of Bellini transcriptions from six of the greatest keyboardists of the day.
This compact – often overlooked – variation shimmers and sparkles, while Ginzburg’s version of Rossini’s Barber of Seville has the required pizzazz. Wittgenstein’s left-hand transcription of the sailor’s chorus from Madam Butterfly provides a thoughtful pause before the closing William Tell canter. Claire Jackson PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★
Mysteries
Bacri: Piano Sonatas Nos 2 & 3; Fantaisie, Op. 134;
Myaskovsky: Piano Sonatas Nos 2 & 3; Eccentricities, Op. 25
Sabine Weyer (piano)
Ars Produktion ARS 38 313 74:33 mins
In principle, it was a striking idea to pair Russian and Soviet music’s most lugubrious voice, Nikolay Myaskovsky, with a much more recent composer influenced by his oppressive style, Frenchman Nicolas Bacri. In practice, this is way too much to take, though listen to the four sonatas – two by each composer – in isolation and there’s much to admire, at least, for the authenticity of their despair.
Most companionable is Myaskovsky’s pre-first World War Third Sonata: the lyrical theme in it provides a Scriabinesque lightening of the mood, and the introduction of the Dies Irae provides another contrast, if much of the same predominant heavy weather. Bacri’s obsessive qualities come to the fore in the hypnotic oscillations of his Third Sonata. Relief of sorts only comes in the miniature Prichudy (translated here as ‘Eccentricities’) in which Myaskovsky pays homage to the Sarcasms and Visions fugitives of his good friend Prokofiev. There’s some dynamic lightness here, too; the sonatas would benefit from a much wider range, with more extremes of loud and soft. On this evidence Sabine Weyer is a formidable technician, but a mezzofortist kind of musician. David Nice PERFORMANCE ★★★ RECORDING ★★★★