Classical Music
RICHARD OSBORNE’S classical CD selection
Richard Osborne
Few composers have added more to the gaiety of nations, while recognising the thinness of the ice on which civilisation skates, than that precociously gifted child of war and revolution, Gioachino Rossini.
Who can forget those madcap ensembles in The Italian Girl in
Algiers and The Barber of Seville? Nonplussed by events, the characters find themselves frozen to the spot before dashing lemming-like over the cliff as the music accelerates away? Classic productions of both operas have recently appeared on DVD.
The Italian Girl in Algiers (Unitel DVD 801808 £27.99, www.amazon.
co.uk) derives from the 2018 Salzburg Whitsun Festival, with that consummate Rossinian Cecilia Bartoli. Her longstanding stage collaborators, Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier, are famed for their ability to turn stereotypical opera buffa plots into gilt-edged comedy, and this is no exception.
Even more remarkable is Laurent Pelly’s finely-honed neo-classical staging of The Barber of
Seville (Naxos DVD 2110592 £23.36, www.europadisc.
co.uk), recorded live in Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-élysées in 2017. It’s a joy to see Pelly dipping his bucket into a well from which such practised French comedians as Beaumarchais (author of the original stage play), Feydeau, and the great Jacques Tati have already drawn copious draughts. Every gesture and move in this superbly cast production takes its cue from jokes Rossini himself has already embedded in the music.
Rossini wrote 39 operas, Offenbach nigh on 100. That may explain why Offenbach’s elegant and engaging three-act opéra bouffe
Maître Péronilla (Bru Zane 2CD BZ1039 £31.00, www.prestomusic.
com) – a late-flowering bloom with a Spanish setting and a Viennese lilt – has never been recorded. At one point in the action, the delectable 19-year-old Manoëla finds herself married (ecclesiastically) to an ardent young music-teacher and (civilly) to an elderly dolt.
All these limited-edition releases from the Venice-based Palazzetto Bru Zane come with the discs inserted into an elegantly produced 180-page hardback book, complete with background essays, text, and translation. Look out, too, for Gounod’s perennially popular Faust, (Bru Zane 3CD BZ1037 £32.50,
www.prestomusic.com), heard here for the first time on record in the wittier, more down-to-earth original version of 1859.
The country having recently got its knickers in a twist over a phrase in Thomas Arne’s Rule, Britannia!, it’s good to cool off with an exquisitely realised account of Henry Purcell’s patriotic ‘semi-opera’ King Arthur (Signum SIGCD589 £18.00, www.
signumrecords.com). Poet Laureate John Dryden, who wrote the libretto, thought Purcell’s music ‘destined for immortality’ but the manuscript was lost. That’s why it’s taken conductor Paul Mccreesh the best part of 25 years to reassemble the parts. His exemplary two-disc recording with the Gabrieli Consortalso comes in a small hardback book, nicely illustrated with black-and-white photographs of the very landscapes and trades – wool, grain, fish – that by Stuart times had made Britannia rich.
For anyone coming new to Chopin’s music, the pianist is as important as the work itself. Which is why it’s something of a win-win situation with Benjamin Grosvenor’s recent account of the two Piano Concertos (Decca 485 0365 £11.16, www.amazon.co.uk). Grosvenor has studied the playing of the old masters, yet he has his own wizardry, too.
The young Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson’s idea of juxtaposing the keyboard music of Claude Debussy with that of his 18th-century soul mate Jean-philippe Rameau shows intelligence and sensibility of a special order. The result, Debussy & Rameau (Deutsche Grammophon 4837701 £12.75, www.
prestomusic.com) is a gem of a disc that works both musically and as therapy in strange times. Finally, Our Father in the Heavens, (Regent REGCD543 £12,
www.prestomusic.com) is a superb disc of church anthems by Sir Edward Bairstow (1874-1946), the longserving organist of York Minster and the North Country’s erstwhile Mr Music. Sturdy and sensitive, the anthems are royally served by organist Carleton Etherington and Simon Bell’s Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum – the Tewkesbury Abbey Choir in effect – now based in Dean Close School, Cheltenham.
A choir that sports boys’ voices of stellar beauty alongside the work of professional lay clerks is a rarity these days, and could soon be extinct if the cost-cutters, diversity lobbyists and anti-religionists of the New Britain have their way.
Hurry while stocks – and the culture – last.