Music to inspire you
RICHARD OSBORNE picks the best classical CD buys
Thanks to some interesting anniversaries and a bumper crop of rising young stars on the classical music scene, this last year has produced more than its fair share of collectable CDS and DVDS.
The 25-year-old Russian Daniil Trifonov is currently the world’s most talked about pianist. His latest disc Transcendental (Deutsche Grammophon 479 5529) is devoted to Liszt concert studies, though it’s with the music of Rachmaninov that he’s been most closely associated. A dazzlingly played Rachmaninov collection which features the Chopin and Corelli variations for solo piano and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with Yannick Nézet-séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra also includes Trifonov’s own Rachmaniana, a five-movement suite which demonstrates how deeply attuned to Rachmaninov’s art and craft the young prodigy is (Deutsche Grammophon 479 4970).
Another instrumentalist blessed with a technique that would be rare in any age is the young Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang, who has long dreamt about bringing together on record the violin concertos of Erich Korngold and Benjamin Britten. The neglect of these two 20th-century masterpieces has little to do with the quality of the invention, everything to do with the fact that this bittersweet, often stratospherically beautiful music is damnably difficult to play – though not, happily, for Vilde Frang (Warner Classics 2564 600921).
Less jaw-droppingly brilliant though no less remarkable musically is a coupling by Janine Jansen of the Brahms Violin Concerto with the lyric two-movement First Concerto of Béla Bartók. There’s an old-fashioned sweetness of tone and address about Jansen’s playing that is deeply satisfying (Decca 478 841-2).
I can’t recall any pianist having the courage to release as a single album music’s two greatest sets of keyboard variations, Bach’s Goldberg and Beethoven’s Diabelli. The Russian-born
Igor Levit has done just that, with a quality of music-making that has landed him this year’s Gramophone Recording of the Year award (Sony 88875 060962).
‘Bach and Beethoven erected temples and churches on the heights, I only wanted to build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home.’ So wrote Edvard Grieg of his several volumes of intimate Lyric
Pieces from which pianist Stephen Hough has made a typically discriminating selection (Hyperion
CDA68070). Technically adept and richly considered, Hough’s performances have the singular virtue of bearing much repetition, as any good recording should.
When I came across the name of the great French gastronome Anthelme Brillat-savarin in James Pembroke’s erudite but laugh-aloud Growing Up
in Restaurants, I had no idea that Savarin’s writings had been royally spoofed by the French composer Jean Françaix. His Ode à la gastronomie is included on I Fagiolini’s collection of 20th-century French choral music Amuse-bouche (Decca 478 9394). Some of these ‘choral delicacies’ will be caviar to the general. But who can resist a disc that begins with a match being struck, a contented exhalation and Poulenc’s song ‘Hôtel’ (‘I don’t want to work, I want to smoke’)? The disc ends with an hypnotically beautiful choral arrangement by baritone Roderick Williams of the slow movement of Ravel’s G major Piano Concerto.
Never having been greatly overjoyed to see Herbert Howells’s name on the scorecard at matins or choral evensong, I was strangely taken with a superb disc of the four canticle settings
Collegium Regale which were commissioned by King’s College, Cambridge during the Second World War. The typically matchless performances are by the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge under Stephen Layton (Hyperion CDA68105).
My Christmas choral choice would be The Sixteen’s new anthology, Song
of the Nativity, in which traditional classics sit side by side with shrewdly chosen classics-in-waiting by Bob Chilcott, John Gardner (the refreshingly fleet-footed ‘When Christ
‘My Christmas choral choice would be The Sixteen’s new anthology, Songs of the Nativity’
was born of Mary free’), James Macmillan and Will Todd. A piece such as Todd’s glorious close-harmony ‘My Lord has come’ needs the kind of pitch-perfect performance that has long been the trademark of Harry Christophers and The Sixteen (CORO 16146).
Meanwhile if you are looking forward to the 2017 Vienna New Year’s
Day Concert – Gustavo Dudamel the surprise choice of conductor – don’t neglect the 2016 concert conducted by Mariss Jansons. Even when set alongside classic New Year concerts under Krauss, Karajan and Carlos Kleiber, the Jansons is very much a collectors’ item, both for the repertory and the performances (Sony 8887 5174772, also on DVD).
Ian Bostridge’s handsomely packaged Shakespeare Songs is a notable addition to the Shakespeare quatercentenary. The 29-song anthology mixes settings by English composers with settings from beyond these shores by Haydn, Korngold, Poulenc, Schubert and Stravinsky. Since all the songs are sung in English, the anthology is tailor-made to show off Bostridge’s uncanny ability to engage with English text. The lovely opening group, Gerald Finzi’s Let Us Garlands
Bring, is particularly fine. Antonio Pappano and lutenist Elizabeth Kenny are the distinguished accompanists (Warner Classics 2564 6106639). • Single CDS usually retail at £11.75/£12.75; two-cd sets £14.75.