Reviews

Your monthly critical round-up of performances, recordings and publications

CONCERTS

THIS MONTH’S RECOMMENDED RECORDINGS Our pick of the new releases

Francesca Dego: Dazzling on Paganini’s own violin PAGE 84

Exhilarating Haydn from the Chiaroscuro Quartet PAGE 85

A stunning birthday tribute to Tigran Mansurian PAGE 88

Live: USA

PINCHAS ZUKERMAN (VIOLIN) PALM BEACH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/GERARD SCHWARZ KRAVIS CENTER, WEST PALM BEACH 24 JANUARY 2021

The inaugural concert of the PBSO’s 47th season was played primarily for an audience viewing via streaming. However, I was one of a small group who were admitted to the room, observing social spacing and wearing masks. It was the first concert I attended since March 2020 and I jumped at the chance to hear music live.

I last heard Pinchas Zukerman play the Beethoven Concerto with the New York Philharmonic about 15 years ago. I recall that performance had a certain expressive anonymity. On this occasion, however, he seemed fully involved. Nonetheless, his conception of the work is decidedly austere and unsentimental, with no obvious hint of lushness, which often leads to understatement despite playing that is always brilliant. However, I was unsettled to hear some slack articulation of phrase endings, particularly descending ones, as if to suggest that he had already moved on to the next musical thought, leaving the earlier one to trail off. He played the Kreisler cadenza pleasingly, although it was not reminiscent of the elder violinist’s tonal warmth. The performance improved in the remaining two movements. The solo instrument was dreamily eloquent in the high tessitura of its duets with the woodwinds. The Rondo achieved its gaiety because that quality is embedded in the music, rather than from the performance itself.

Schwarz, in his first full season as the PBSO’s music director, was a workmanlike interpreter of the two other Beethoven works, and the players were well rehearsed and performed with complete professionalism. But such familiar music needs more than that to engage the listener. The Coriolan Overture had virtually no dramatic impact, with little in the way of dynamic contrast and overly reticent accents. The Seventh Symphony’s moods of effervescence, drama, jocosity and Dionysian exuberance were unappealingly miniaturised, which too often suggested the need for additional stands of violins and more than three double basses.

DENNIS ROONEY

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Live streams: US

SETH PARKER WOODS (CELLO) ATLANTA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ MAXIM EMELYANYCHEV SYMPHONY HALL, ATLANTA, GA, 14 JANUARY 2021

Responding to worldwide restrictions due to Covid-19 with online concerts, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra presented an evening featuring For Roscoe Mitchell (2020) by Tyshawn Sorey, a multi-talented composer and percussionist who received a MacArthur Foundation award in 2017.

Sorey wrote the piece with the adventurous cellist Seth Parker Woods in mind, who gave the work’s world premiere last November with the Seattle Symphony. Well known in avant-garde circles, Woods recently donned a wetsuit to play a cello carved from ice – a collaboration with composer Spencer Topel.

Inspired by the jazz composer and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell (b.1940), who founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sorey has written what he calls a ‘non-concerto’, in which the cello and ensemble perform as an integrated whole, with no flashy cadenzas on the premises. The result evoked Morton Feldman, though more tense and unsettling, perhaps a nod to a tumultuous year.

Against static woodwind chords, Woods countered with repeated close intervals, and double-stops in major and minor seconds. Near the end, quiet, breathy brass chords made a subdued backdrop for enigmatic pizzicato notes. It was mesmerising to watch Woods’s quiet focus, especially in navigating some of the work’s high harmonics (enhanced by camera close-ups).

Before that came Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia, with guest conductor Maxim Emelyanychev encouraging stirring tone from the ensemble’s strings. The concert ended with Haydn’s ‘Drumroll’ Symphony, a bit restrained at first, but ultimately capturing the work’s delicacy and ebullience.

BRUCE HODGES

KRISTIN LEE (VIOLIN) ORION WEISS (PIANO) MUSIC@MENLO, CA, 17 JANUARY

Violinist Kristin Lee and pianist Orion Weiss delivered a delightful recital of Ravel and Gershwin, presented online by Music@Menlo. Lee’s thoughtful vibrato use allowed tremendous flexibility and fluidity in Ravel’s Violin Sonata no.2: Lee moved effortlessly between a rich depth of sound and an effervescent poignancy as the musical characters changed. A moderate tempo in the second movement allowed for a measured approach. Precise articulation and clarity of line lent a vivacity and electric energy to the final movement, showing off Lee’s technical prowess.

Five Selections from Porgy and Bess, arranged for violin and piano by Jascha Heifetz, was a brilliant programmatic choice, and Lee and Weiss gave a stunning performance with unexpected emotional depth. Lee’s slides were sultry, her double stops perfectly in tune, and her spiccato impeccable – although I do wish she could have had more fun with the rhythm (which was always exact). Ravel’s Vocalise – Étude en forme de Habanera was a terrific segue into Tzigane. Although Lee played every flourish and run with technical excellence, more powerful was the elegance of her performance. The Lento quasi cadenza was filled with pregnant pauses and thoughtfully timed entrances; each phrase was considered. Nothing was ever hurried or rushed through, but exquisitely played – and then finally the ending erupted in raucous energy. Lee and Weiss gave a lovely encore: the first Gershwin Prelude, also arranged by Heifetz. Intimate videography and stellar musicianship made this virtual recital a true delight.

LEAH HOLLINGSWORTH

ZUILL BAILEY (CELLO) MICHAEL BUTTERMAN (PIANO) MEMBERS OF THE BOULDER PHIL BOULDER MUNICIPAL AIRPORT, CO, 23 JANUARY 2021

This concert by cellist Zuill Bailey and musicians from the Boulder Philharmonic was performed and filmed in a unique setting: an aeroplane hangar at Boulder Airport. The thoughtfully planned programme opened with Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise, demonstrating nuanced playing and timing. Bailey’s showmanship – which sometimes can be distracting – translated well for a virtual performance and resulted in a delightful recital.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Cello Concerto followed, in the world premiere of a new quintet arrangement by the composer for solo cello, violin, viola, bass and piano. The music is both compelling and accessible; reminiscent of Gershwin with its syncopations, sultry slides, and slightly French influences.

Excellent sound engineers and wonderful videography really helped to bring the piece to life. The opening to the third movement was Arvo Pärt-like in its harmonics and ethereal ambience, and the performers embraced the more melancholy atmosphere. Overall, Bailey’s performance never seemed overly dramatic nor out of character. Rather, it came across as quite absorbing.

Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet completed the programme. Despite some moments of questionable intonation and mismatched note lengths, the performance was enjoyable. The Scherzo-Presto was taken at a moderate tempo, with some hesitancy going into the Presto, but it was nice to hear it played so thoughtfully. The concert ended with good energy and flourish.

LEAH HOLLINGSWORTH

Live streams: UK

LEONIDAS KAVAKOS (VIOLIN) LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/SIMON RATTLE LSO ST LUKE’S 7 JANUARY 2021

This concert, with the Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos, was dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the Greek revolution, and began with a rendition of the Greek national anthem. The LSO, each player in splendid isolation, formed an archipelago around Simon Rattle (is he easy to follow from behind?), while the brass players performed from the balcony. As is usual these days, there was no audience; the concert was streamed by Marquee TV.

Kavakos played Berg’s Violin Concerto with a keen, refined sweetness of tone, present from the gentle searching opening, maintained as his playing gained steadily in purpose, and carrying through all the vicissitudes and formidable technical demands of Berg’s score. The bewitching sound was often complemented by delicacy, heard in the light scherzando dance of the Allegretto section of the first movement and the free reflective musings which followed, high on the E string and skipping through light staccato arpeggios.

Kavakos was fierce at the outset of the second movement, emphatic but always eloquent. After deftly executing the chordal counterpoint of the cadenza, his build-up to the climax was tremendous. The following chorale, so simple at first, built to real passion before subsiding to ethereal calm. This was a beautiful, transcendent performance. To follow, Rattle and the LSO gave a majestic account of Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony.

TIM HOMFRAY

WIGMORE SOLOISTS WIGMORE HALL 8 JANUARY 2021

Making its debut in this concert, the Wigmore Soloists is one of three new ensembles put together by hall director John Gilhooly. There was only one work, Schubert’s Octet, which among its many qualities is a happy entertainment, much needed in these woebegone times, and this was a delightful performance. The strings in the opening Adagio were lush, and the brisk Allegro was full of joie de vivre, with leader Isabelle van Keulen’s semiquavers sparkling away and bassist Tim Gibbs enjoying his moment to the fore in the development. The Adagio was correspondingly spacious, with clarinettist Michael Collins graceful in the opening melody, and cellist Kristina Blaumane elegant when her turn came.

Blaumane then produced a nicely shaped walking bass in the Trio of the third movement Allegro vivace, a mix of robust energy and refinement. Van Keulen gave a fluent and shapely account of the variation theme in the Andante, and later dispatched her demisemiquaver commentaries with finesse, lightly dancing into the stratosphere. There was some fine horn playing from Alberto Menéndez Escribano in the third variation, and Blaumane brought a hint of swing to variation VI. The last-movement Allegro was a joyful dance.

TIM HOMFRAY

APARTMENT HOUSE WIGMORE HALL 9 JANUARY 2021

‘Meaty’ and ‘muscular’ are adjectives not often applied to performances of the sparse, fragile, near-silent music of Morton Feldman. But they feel particularly apt in relation to the day of Feldman’s music, spread across three concerts, given by London-based contemporary music group Apartment House (below). Indeed, the pandemicprovoked absence of audience and camera close-ups on ensembles and individual musicians felt particularly fitting for this introspective music in which detail is everything. And the Apartment House musicians approached the works with a no-nonsense directness: rather than stressing the music’s meditative stillness and otherworldly spirituality, what emerged was a sonic landscape of jagged, unpredictable irregularities, surveyed sensitively, but also with an honest objectivity that let the music speak for itself.

Apartment House’s middle concert was devoted to the 90-minute Piano and String Quartet of 1985, a late work in which Feldman explores time and scale in music that feels never-changing yet never exactly repeats. It was a beautifully balanced, expertly paced account, one that traced the music’s journey into swelling richness and bleak austerity, with pianist Mark Knoop finding Messiaen-like radiance in Feldman’s extravagant harmonies. The four string players – including Apartment House’s founder Anton Lukoszevieze on cello – played with impeccable ensemble, as if they’d lined up their attacks and chord weighting under a microscope.

In the earlier concert, violinist Gordon Mackay found a child-like simplicity, even folksiness, in the arching figures of For Aaron Copland, while cellist Lukoszevieze returned in the final concert to blur his sonorities with those of horn player Letty Stott in the surprisingly fast-moving Two Instruments. These were concerts of quiet revelations, in terms of both their seldom-heard repertoire and their disarming directness.

DAVID KETTLE

COURTESY WIGMORE HALL KALEIDOSCOPE CHAMBER COLLECTIVE: MATTHEW HUNT (CLARINET) ELENA URIOSTE (VIOLIN) SHEKU KANNEH-MASON (CELLO) TOM POSTER (PIANO)

WIGMORE HALL 11 JANUARY 2021

Whether full or empty, Wigmore Hall always feels like a natural home for Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. It’s a piece that creates its own breathless hush in any halfway decent performance. This one was assuredly better than that. Appropriately for the name of the ensemble, Kaleidoscope majors on collective unanimity and sensitivity rather than individual brilliance, although Matthew Hunt’s clarinet stood out for its poetry of reserve even before the long, dark night of his ‘Abîme des Oiseaux’ solo.

In the long stretches of octave and unison writing, Sheku Kanneh-Mason played attentive partner to Elena Urioste’s more characterful violin. Even his glissando at the end of the Intermède was self-effacing to a fault, and his ‘Louange’, while tenderly shaped, lacked the fragile urgency and goal-driven radiance of Urioste’s finale. I especially liked the darker, copper colours of her D and A strings before the unsentimentalised ascent into the wide blue yonder.

She and her husband, pianist Tom Poster, supplied an early highlight of lockdown life online with their concerts at home. The unison ‘Danse de la fureur’ was another high point – not too careful, even in the studio-like conditions, but hurled out with a few singed corners.

PETER QUANTRILL

ALINA IBRAGIMOVA (VIOLIN) EMMA BELL (SOPRANO) DAVID BUTT PHILIP (TENOR) ORCHESTRA OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT/ MARK ELDER

 GLYNDEBOURNE THEATRE 11 JANUARY 2021

With Glyndebourne’s Beethoven-anniversary production of Fidelio cancelled in the summer, this concert by the OAE, recorded in December 2020, opened with the overture and a trio of sung numbers from the opera. Glyndebourne’s music director Robin Ticciati was stranded in Germany, so Mark Elder stood in, bringing his rich operatic insight to bear on a performance that highlighted the opera’s darkness as well as the fortitude of the heroine Leonore.

Playing barefoot in a floor-length dress, Alina Ibragimova rocked a wild-child look in Brahms’s Violin Concerto. As much as this matched her free-spirited playing, it turned out simply to be the result of a shoe-packing blunder.

While lacking nothing in sweetness or delicacy, she pressed deep in the first movement to create searing tension, occasionally straying into cries of despair. The cadenza, fiery, driven and streaked with spontaneity, came out as a dramatic scena. It contrasted with a blissful wind-down before the movement’s close.

The slow movement was a diversion on a different plane, Ibragimova’s eloquence never halting the flow but somehow simultaneously arresting time. The finale showed the kind of passionate abandon that ought to result in slips and mishaps, but none happened. Errant footwear notwithstanding, there was no hint of cold feet in this performance.

EDWARD BHESANIA

RECORDINGS

BEETHOVEN Duos and Piano Trios 

Isabelle Faust (violin)

Jean-Guihen Queyras (cello)

Alexander Melnikov (piano)

HARMONIA MUNDI HMX2908873.78 (6 CDS)

A collection of superb Beethoven performances, all in one place

This anniversary collection of earlier issues comprises accomplished accounts of Beethoven’s last two piano trios and most of his violin/ piano and cello/piano music. Delicately inflected by selected tenets of historical performance, Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov’s 2008 interpretations of the violin/piano sonatas adopt a conversational approach that abounds in vitality, stark contrasts and subtle shadings, particularly in the restless outer movements of op.23 and op.30 no.2. They convey the expansive lyricism of op.24’s opening Allegro and colour slow movements such as those of op.12 no.3 and op.30 no.1 with an imaginative, expressive palette and discreet violin vibrato usage. Their outer movements of op.47 are as dynamic and extrovert as those of op.96 are leisurely and intimate. Some extempore ornamentation is of dubious classical taste.

Melnikov partners Jean-Guihen Queyras in unanimous, meaningful performances of the cello/piano works, captured in 2013. He plays the predominant role in the sharply characterised variations and op.5 sonatas, but Queyras demonstrates his virtuosity in the later sonatas, especially in op.69’s exhilarating final Allegro vivace. Vibrato is sparingly employed largely to enhance phrasing, notably in the tragic Adagio of op.102 no.2, and the op.102 finales’ intense counterpoint is intelligently unravelled and skilfully articulated.

In the trio’s award-winning 2011 accounts of op.70 no.2 and op.97, Melnikov substitutes a restored Alois Graff fortepiano (c.1828) for a Steinway and his colleagues adapt their technical and interpretative approaches accordingly. Balance and transparency are transformed, particularly in the dramatic, thicktextured op.97, and fresh insights are revealed, most notably in the humorous Scherzo and solemn Andante. Recording standards are exemplary throughout.

ROBIN STOWELL

BRIGHT SHENG Let Fly1 ; Zodiac Tales ; Suzhou Overture

Dan Zhu (violin) Suzhou Symphony Orchestra 1 Shanghai Symphony Orchestra 2 /Bright Sheng

NAXOS 8.570628

Chinese–American fusions prove more than simple cultural tourism

You know where you are with Bright Sheng – specifically, somewhere in the Pacific, between the open prairie of his adopted United States and the airy folk song of his Chinese birthplace. Let Fly, the composer’s 2013 violin concerto for Gil Shaham, is all lyricism, inspired by the unleashed qualities of Shaham’s playing, and seeming more fixated on wide American horizons than on the Chinese elements that make up the other works on this disc.

Musical tourism? Yes, even down to the Mexican trumpet of the first movement, which layers up as heavily as Szymanowski and occasionally pushes soloist Dan Zhu beyond his limits. Sheng knows what he is doing, in every sense of the phrase, but there’s a lot of superior playing going on across these three standard movements with cadenza, even if the violinist uses some extended techniques including natural harmonics. The finale is flimsy, its interjections from a frantic orchestra feeling baseless.

Let Fly has its place but the other works here are better, despite being of less interest to readers of The Strad. There are some fascinating machinations at work in the Concerto for Orchestra, which is about as Chinese as the concerto is American. Sheng writes effective dances and dialogues and uses the orchestra well; the lethargic trombone solo of the final movement is one moment in which the composer’s technique is at the service of something personal and genuine. The Overture is more than orchestral glitz and cultural handshakes. Sound is good and present and the orchestra plays with style.

ANDREW MELLOR

IL CANNONE 

BOCCADORO Come d’autunno 

CORIGLIANO The Red Violin Caprices 

KREISLER Recitativo & Scherzo-Caprice op.6 

PAGANINI Cantabile in D major op.17 

PAGANINI-KREISLER La campanella 

ROSSINI Un mot à Paganini 

SCHNITTKE A Paganini 

SZYMANOWSKI Three Paganini Caprices op.40

Francesca Dego (violin)

Francesca Leonardi (piano)

CHANDOS CHAN 20223

A dazzling and delightful recital played on Paganini’s own priceless ‘del Gesù’

That Francesca Dego was allowed, aged 30, to record this tribute to Paganini on the master’s 1734 Guarneri ‘del Gesù’, ‘Il Cannone’, speaks volumes for her reputation in Italy. She and the other Francesca, Leonardi, have been a duo for 16 years. The playing is superb, often dazzling, with hardly a sign that the violinist had only a few days in which to acclimatise herself to an instrument at which, as a little girl, she gazed wonderingly as it reposed in its cabinet in Genoa.

To browse through more than a decade of The Strad ’s recording reviews, visit www.thestrad.com/reviews

In Kreisler’s arrangement of La campanella, deftly done, Dego’s tone is light and lovely. In his solo Recitativo she seems to relish the resilient sound of the violin, really making it speak. The Scherzo-Caprice is fleet and fluent, with fine spiccato. Corigliano’s theme and five variations, derived from film music, are rendered both beautiful and brilliant. Carlo Boccadoro’s 2019 Come d’autunno, inspired by a brief Ungaretti poem and dedicated to Dego, displays uncanny intonation in the very highest register.

Then, two agreeable forays into bel canto, Paganini’s familiar Cantabile with a new accompaniment by Boccadoro and Rossini’s tribute, subtitled Élégie, a miniature operatic scena from his ‘Sins of Old Age’. Schnittke’s kaleidoscope of Paganiniana, a sort of study in tremolo interrupted by two cadenzas, gets a splendid performance, as do the three Caprices worked over by Szymanowski – I sometimes wish he had not, but the two Francescas persuade me. The recording team has also done well.

TULLY POTTER

ENGLISH MUSIC FOR STRINGS 

BRITTEN Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge 

BLISS Music for Strings 

BRIDGE Lament 

BERKELEY Serenade for Strings 

Sinfonia of London/John Wilson

CHANDOS CHAN CHSA 5264

File under B, but it’s an A-plus for this superb collection of British music

Britten’s virtuoso Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge has been extremely lucky on disc, boasting at least three classic accounts from Yehudi Menuhin (who uncredited plays the fiddle solo in the Bourrée classique variation, EMI/Warner), Neville Marriner (Argo/Decca) and Britten himself (Decca). Yet none can equal the magnificent, in-depth sonics captured in Kilburn’s Church of St Augustine for Chandos.

This is one of those rare occasions when the body, weight and beauty of sound generated by the Sinfonia of London can be said to have been fully realised by the recording team. And for sheer range of character and expression, John Wilson rivals even Britten’s account with the ECO, often at daringly fast speeds, most notably in the Moto perpetuo, in which the quick-fire exchanges between upper and lower strings are relished to thrilling effect.

Turning the emotional coin over, Wilson discovers an uplifting, ecstatic charm in Lennox Berkeley’s enchanting Serenade for Strings, capturing a heart-rending wistful quality both here in the Lento finale and Frank Bridge’s haunting Lament. Arthur Bliss’s Music for Strings is a tougher emotional nut to crack, with its often startling interchanges between pastoral tenderness and Hindemith cool. Rather than adopt a comforting interpretive strategy, Wilson and the Sinfonia of London on resplendent form, embrace the music’s changeability with a sensitivity to mood and atmosphere that is deeply compelling.

JULIAN HAYLOCK

HAYDN String Quartets op.76 nos. 4-6 

Chiaroscuro Quartet

BIS-2358

Superbly fresh textures highlight the exhilarating invention of this music

Haydn’s op.76 is the most strikingly inventive and varied of all his quartet sets. No two works are remotely alike in terms of mood, texture or formal design, yet until fairly recently, the post-Romantic performing tradition appeared determined to create unity out of diversity at all costs. As a result, most mainstream interpretations on modern instruments have a tendency to smooth over Haydn’s trail-blazing innovations in the interests of Classical decorum.

This is where the Chiaroscuro Quartet, in the second volume of op.76, comes into its own. Vibrato is employed with exquisite subtlety from a senza default line, the dynamic range is extended, often to startling effect, particularly at the lower end of the spectrum, intonation is pure rather than smoothly ‘tempered’, and textures are aerated and ear-tweakingly transparent – enhanced by BIS’s detailed, impactful engineering – so that one is more than usually aware of four individuals forming a musical collective.

Yet despite an exhilarating sense of nothing being taken for granted, the Chiaroscuro creates a disarming sense of simplicity and naturalness. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fifth of the set in D major, which, partly due to its tonal centre and sublimely lyrical opening, is often voiced with a cushioned sonority, whereas here everything is articulated with a clarity and unvarnished honesty that appears to transport this glorious music from the chamber room into the open air.

JULIAN HAYLOCK

VIOLINS OF HOPE 

HEGGIE Intonations: Songs from the Violins of Hope SCHUBERT Quartettsatz in C minor D703 MENDELSSOHN String Quartet in F minor op.80

Daniel Hope, Kay Stern, Dawn Harms, Sean Mori (violins) Patricia Heller (viola) Emil Miland (cello)

Sasha Cooke (mezzo-soprano)

PENTATONE PTC 5186879

Intense musical drama, expressiveness – and hope – from a harrowing Holocaust history

The violins themselves form the focal point of this remarkable disc, instruments that were owned by Jewish musicians before and during the Holocaust, some of which accompanied their owners fleeing Nazi Germany, and others of which remained and were played in the concentration camps.

It’s a powerful, harrowing context, but the question remains as to whether the music featured and the performances of it can reflect that background. They certainly do. These are intensely expressive, provocatively raw accounts, recorded live (though with applause edited out) and shot through with heartfelt emotion and a somewhat unadorned authenticity.

US composer Jake Heggie’s semi-theatrical Intonations was commissioned specially to tell the instruments’ histories, and does so very movingly through mezzosoprano Sasha Cooke’s dramatic storytelling and soloist Daniel Hope’s swooping, klezmer-inspired lines. From the seething fury of ‘Ashes’, telling of a violin mysteriously filled with human remains, to the pitchblack humour (and Mendelssohn quotations) of ‘Motele’, the story of a violin prodigy who plots his revenge on the Nazi officers who killed his parents, Heggie wrings every drop of vivid musical drama out of his eclectic, all-embracing style.

The Schubert Quartettsatz and Mendelssohn F minor Quartet that complete the disc are somewhat raw and rough-edged, but all the more immediate and compelling for that. Recorded sound is close and warm, with each instrument clearly located in the spatial mix.

DAVID KETTLE

JANÁČEK String Quartets: no.1 ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, no.2 ‘Intimate Letters’; Two Sonnets (arr. Gjelsten) 

New Zealand Quartet

NAXOS 8.574209

A trip around the world for temperate performances of Czech quartets

Recorded in Toronto by an ensemble based in the Antipodes, this coupling of Janáček’s two string quartets might seem to be as physically divorced from the composer’s Moravian homeland as it is possible to be. And yet, while these performances may lack the bite and fervour of the best Czech interpreters, there’s plenty to enjoy and admire here in music making that brings out the universality of the message.

If you prefer your Janáček clean and spruce rather than a bit rough around the edges, then this is the disc for you. Sometimes a little more risk-taking would have been welcome, however. Janáček can be profligate with his expressive markings and there are occasions when the players here give the impression of being a little coy about obeying the more extreme of them. This clinical impression is aided by the analytical recording in which the tonal quality is warm but the emotional temperature cool.

Two tiny fillers complete the disc: a pair of sonnets written for four violins as student exercises in c.1875 and arranged here for string quartet by the New Zeland Quartet’s cellist Rolf Gjelsten. Ironically, the performances are more indulgent of emotion than one always senses in those of the mature quartets.

MATTHEW RYE

IL LABIRINTO ARMONICO 

LOCATELLI Violin Concertos op.3: no.9 in G major, no.11 in A major, no.12 in D major 

Finnish Baroque Orchestra/

Ilya Gringolts (violin)

BIS-2445 (SACD)

Gringolts and co have no problem finding their way around this maze of inventive music

Ilya Gringolts here ditches his ‘ex-Kiesewetter’ Stradivari for a gut-strung c.1770 violin by Ferdinando Gagliano and indulges his interest in historical performance as an adjunct to his wide-ranging repertoire. He masters the extreme technical demands of three concertos from Locatelli’s ‘L’Arte del violino’ collection, including the daunting capriccios appended to their outer movements. The disc’s title references particularly the labyrinth of technical and interpretative challenges posed by op.3 no.12. As with the outer movements of nos.9 and 11, Gringolts negotiates its musical maze with brio, breathtaking athleticism and commendable artistry.

Intonation throughout is nearperfect, even in the fingerboard’s stratospheres, and his spontaneous performances have a winning flexibility and sense of timing, allowing space for phrases to breathe and for contrasting moods and structural pillars to be clearly defined. He takes advantage of the postcapriccio extempore cadenza opportunities afforded him and adds tasteful ornamentation, particularly in the central slow movements, which abound with expressive gesture and refined musicality.

The small-scale Finnish Baroque Orchestra provides sterling support, its section leaders partnering Gringolts in the various solo passages and its lutenist also making especially telling contributions. The reverberant church recording, with the continuo instruments realistically balanced, has a palpable sense of space and separation.

ROBIN STOWELL

CON ANIMA 

MANSURIAN Agnus Dei, Sonata da Chiesa, Con anima, String Trio, String Quartet no.3, Die Tänzerin 

Movses Pogossian, Varty Manouelian (violin) Kim Kashkashian, Teng Li (viola) Karen Ouzounian, Michael Kaufman (cello) Boris Allakhverdyan (clarinet) Steven Vanhauwaert (piano)

ECM NEW SERIES 2687

Haunting music from Armenian composer, now in his ninth decade

This recording, dedicated to the Beirut-born Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian on his 80th birthday, represents a labour of love from the whole team involved. The works included are excellent examples of Mansurian’s late style, one that seeks a symbiosis of Armenian religious chants and modernistic Western European compositional techniques. The String Quartet no.3 (1993) progresses from motoric, dance-like beginnings of folkloristic hue to a grandly tragic final Adagio. Chant-like repetitions, an incidental feature of this latter movement, play a protagonic role in Con anima (2006–7), a singlemovement string sextet in which the first viola assumes the role of a cantor leading the congregation. This part is taken here by Kim Kashkashian, a veritable prima inter pares who shapes her every phrase with overwhelming expressivity, communicating with such immediacy that one fancies overhearing words of prayer in her playing.

Mansurian’s celebration of the viola as an instrument of song is continued in the two-movement Sonata da Chiesa (2015); recitativelike sections alternate with songful phrases featuring Oriental-sounding embellishments, both finding an uncannily empathic interpreter in Kashkashian, who conjures a wealth of colours from her Greiner instrument. After a beginning that further confirms Mansurian’s partiality towards the viola sound, the String Trio (2008) develops into a virtuoso vehicle, impressively dispatched by Movses Pogossian, Kashkashian and Karen Ouzounian. The slightly earlier Agnus Dei – written for the same forces as Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time – features some ethereal sounds from clarinettist Boris Allakhverdyan. This beautifully produced CD bears witness to ECM’s continuing championship of Mansurian’s hauntingly eloquent muse.

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE

MOZART Violin Concertos: no.3 in G major K216, no.4 in D major K218; Sinfonia Concertante in E flat major K364

Aisslinn Nosky (violin) Max Mandel (viola) Handel and Haydn Society

CORO COR16183

Nimble and airy live performances of chamber-music scale are a joy to hear

Aisslinn Nosky, concertmaster of the Handel and Haydn Society, stepped out for these concertos, recorded live at three separate concerts spread over four years. In the G major Third Concerto, recorded in 2017, she sets out her stall with light, airy playing and a genuine chamber-music partnership with her orchestral colleagues. Her playing in the central Adagio is exquisite, a small voice gently singing Mozart’s extended cantilenas. The Rondeau finale is quicksilver, clipped and lively. In the D major Fourth Concerto, recorded in 2020, she brings vitality and drive to the first movement and a rich tone to the second, particularly on the lower strings. There is courtly elegance in the Andante sections of the finale from which Nosky breaks away, fleet and dancing, in the Allegros.

Violist Max Mandel has a dark, woody tone which nicely complements the light and gleaming Nosky in the Sinfonia Concertante, recorded in 2018. There is a sense of wonder in their playing, as if the music is all new and intoxicating. They chase each other gleefully through the semiquaver passages of the first movement and bring improvisatory rhythmic freedom to the cadenza. Free-flowing charm in the Andante is followed by dynamism and high good humour in the finale. The recorded sound is consistently clear and well balanced.

TIM HOMFRAY

NØRGÅRD Sonatas nos.1–3 for solo cello RUDERS Bravourstudien 

Wilhelmina Smith (cello)

ONDINE ODE 1381-2

Technically testing contemporary Nordic cello music played with poetic conviction

These sonatas stand or fall by the tonal variety the soloist is able to elicit. Per Nørgård’s technique of thematic metamorphosis makes this all the more imperative, as the main motif in each work undergoes continual evolution, much in the way of a caterpillar to butterfly, or bud to bloom. Along the way a full armoury of devices come into play used within the vast range of the cello. This is to no avail if the performer misses the poetry and breathing in the music.

All this Wilhelmina Smith captures in this impressive and atmospheric recording, sculpting each rhythmic articulation with verve, to bring personality and contrast to each work. Prayer 1 in the Third Sonata is a good example of both this compositional technique and interpretation, with extreme dynamics, and variety of bow technique, carefully and convincingly choreographed in Smith’s delivery.

Poul Ruders uses a similar concept of variation but in different clothes. He utilises cameo titles to etch a particular character on the theme – in this case the Medieval melody ‘L’Homme Armé’. He also resorts to using a wide variety of timbre, both in terms of dynamics and techniques. At one stage Smith whistles along to the tremolando notes in the Intermezzo, and then projecting glissandi harmonics in the Fantasia. There is a whisper of jazz in the Serenade 2, whereas the final movement simply states the theme as before. In this work, too, Smith proves that contemporary musical vernacular, in all its guises, is totally under her skin.

JOANNE TALBOT

ROSETTI Three Violin Concertos 

Lena Neudauer (violin)

Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester Pforzheim/Johannes Moesus

CPO 555381-2

Graceful performances of concertos from a Czech contemporary of Mozart

Since making her superb debut album of Ravel on Hänssler (reviewed in January 2013), Lena Neudauer has become an experienced recording artist. She has not always received the alert partnership that she deserves – her 2014 set of Mozart concertos was restrained by dull and sluggish accompaniment – but the experienced Johannes Moesus has the measure of his live-wire soloist, as Marcus Bosch did in Neudauer’s refreshing account of the Beethoven Concerto, also on CPO.

Appropriately for a one-time teenage winner of the Leopold Mozart International Violin Competition, Neudauer is right at home in this trio of concertos by a Czech-born contemporary of Mozart, though she now dares to put a little more tonal flesh on the bones of her part than in 2014, without obscuring some needlepoint cantabile or passagework of exceptional grace and agility. The opening C major features the most brilliant writing and some dreamily elaborated trills, while a sombre D minor Andante moderato in the F major Concerto briefly ventures beyond Rosetti’s habitual realm of unclouded serenity.

Neudauer resists the temptation to lay on the rustic character of the same concerto’s finale with a trowel; listening in deep midwinter, the album arrives like a postcard from the summer to come, promising happier times. One or two edits caught my attention on headphones, but the engineering is otherwise sympathetic. My only complaint is that there was room for another concerto.

PETER QUANTRILL

SAINT-SAËNS Violin Sonata no.1 in D minor op.75; Cello Sonata no.1 in C minor op.32; Piano Trio no.2 in E minor op.92

Renaud Capuçon (violin) Edgar Moreau (cello) Bertrand Chamayou (piano)

ERATO 9029516710

Three Frenchmen play music by their countryman with charm and brilliance

Three top French musicians mark the centenary of one of their country’s 19th-century greats with this disc of some of his best chamber works. A brilliant pianist himself, Saint-Saëns never stinted on the piano parts and Chamayou deserves a medal for putting in at least six notes for every one in the strings, playing throughout with effortless technical facility.

Capuçon turns in a particularly clean and elegant performance of the Violin Sonata no.1, of Proustian fame. The first movement feels truly agitato, the Adagio’s flowing, improvisatory arabesques are graceful and pretty, and the duo whip up a storm of excitement with their passionate octaves towards the close of the work. The low ranges of the more Brahmsian Cello Sonata are explored to great effect by Moreau, with a lovely, rich focused sound and beautifully shapely phrasing, although his occasional grunts and breaths at moments of intensity are somewhat distracting.

The five-movement piano trio receives a charming and captivating interpretation. The Andante, while not quite intense enough to live up to its Appassionato marking, is gracefully played, the violin and cello octaves are clean and sparkling in the scherzo and the finale’s brilliant fugal section is played with precision and vitality. The sound is consistently crisp and well balanced.

JANET BANKS

SCHUMANN Cello Concerto 

LUTOSŁAWSKI Cello Concerto 

TCHAIKOVSKY Rococo Variations 

Andrzej Bauer (cello) Polish National RSO/Jacek Kaspszyk

FRYDERYK CHOPIN INSTITUTE NIFCCD072

Cellist provides an original and spirited voice in three impressive performances

Forget Rostropovich. These performances operate on another planet from the Russian bear-hug approach – which anyway tended to suffocate the sweet nothings of Schumann’s intimate dialogue, and inflate the delicate neo-Classicism of Tchaikovsky’s score. You might even wonder if Andrzej Bauer has forgotten his first entry to the Rococo Variations – but the engineering fits his finely judged reticence, which could initially be confused with diffidence.

Through the gathering momentum of both Romantic scores it becomes clear that his conception of their rhetoric is more intimate and less heroic than we’re used to even in these period-conscious times. Equally impressive, however, is the sense that Bauer is too good and too experienced a musician to fall into feyness or mannerism. His bowing is uncommonly free and relaxed in the Tchaikovsky, lending its slow variation and cadenza a lightness of spirit that harmonises with the legerdemain of the finale to relieve the piece of anachronistic strain and stress.

Surely the Lutosławski Concerto is another matter – dedicated to Rostropovich, after all, and dramatising in the most vivid and painful terms a story of fight and flight, the one against the many. Bauer, too, discussed and played the piece with the composer, and his second recording (much more sharply characterised and accompanied than the first, on Naxos) takes its cue from Lutosławski’s French connections – his love of its poetry and literature, his fastidiously Ravelian orchestration – to give the solo part an aquiline and at times aristocratic profile, as though conceived rather with Tortelier in mind. The production team have recessed the more violent orchestral outbursts while keeping solo woodwind to the fore; if they had split the Tchaikovsky and Lutosławski with track points, I would award full marks.

PETER QUANTRILL

BURNING THROUGH THE COLD 

SHOSTAKOVICH Piano Trio no.2 in E minor op.67 BABADJANIAN Piano Trio in F sharp minor KHACHATURIAN Sabre Dance for Piano Trio RACHMANINOFF Vocalise op.34

ZEN Trio

DG 4855046

Young trio unearths a musical nugget of gold with Armenian rarity

It’s Soviet piano trios for this second DG recording from the ZEN Trio, who met as BBC New Generation Artists in 2015, and Shostakovich’s second trio makes for an attentiongrabbing start – those eerie cello harmonics sounding remarkably steady and clear, creating an impression more of otherworldly beauty than of broken fragility. Onwards, and polished attack and beauty are the watchwords, always with a strong singing quality, and while the final movement march feels rather polite, lacking in desperation and acerbic forward thrust, you at least still have the genuinely exhilarating scherzo still ringing in your ears.

The stand-out performance is unquestionably the Babadjanian Piano Trio, with its interesting disconnect between the 1952 composition date and an older, more post-Romantic language (due in part to its culturally conservative Soviet-era Armenian context). For starters, it’s very welcome to have this neglected beauty presented on disc by musicians of this calibre. But the performance also delivers in spades: warmly impassioned and beautifully shaped; the many long lines truly feeling like endless, unwaveringly taut, organic unfurlings; razor-sharp definition to the ensemble phrases, rendering its silences all the more deafening.

Add crisp, natural engineering giving us a non-obtrusive sense of place – Liverpool’s The Friary, recorded pre-Covid in November 2019 – and the Babadjanian alone makes this worthy of your time.

CHARLOTTE GARDNER

WEINBERG Violin Concerto op.67; Sonata for Two Violins op.691

Gidon Kremer, Madara Pētersone (violins) Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra/Daniele Gatti

ACCENTUS MUSIC ACC30518

Expert interpreter captures all the music’s complex, shadowy atmosphere

Gidon Kremer admits in the booklet CD to being initially sceptical about Weinberg’s Violin Concerto. He has since played it many times, and this recording has an air of authority.

He launches into its punchy opening with fierce intensity, which opens out on a virtuosic course towards a floated second theme set against harp and celeste. This returns at the end of the movement, a calm passage with Kremer reflective and beautiful after the constant turbulence and formidable technical demands preceding it, which Kremer tackles with gritty style. He uncoils the long, hushed cantilena of the secondmovement Allegretto with seamless legato, and goes on to explore its shadowy world with beautiful, veiled tone, through to its strange, otherworldly cadenza, a far cry from the usual technical workout, impressive in its quiet control.

Kremer subtly crafts the endless undulating melody, imbued with melancholy of the Adagio third movement. He is stern, nimble and rhythmically precise in the marchlike, emotionally uneasy finale before it falls away to its disconsolate conclusion. There is sterling playing from the Gewandhaus Orchestra under Daniele Gatti. Kremer and Madara Pētersone have often performed Weinberg’s Sonata for Two Violins, and it shows in their consummate account of this complex and challenging work. The recording is clear and warm.

TIM HOMFRAY

BOOKS

Singende Saiten: Die schönsten Solostücke für Violine oder Bratsche Ed. Felix Forrer

32PP ISBN 9790004792100 NEPOMUK £17.55

Singing Strings is the first in a series of three books of ‘the most beautiful pieces for violin or viola’. The first half of this volume contains an interesting mix of English folk songs from John Simpson’s c.1756 The Compleat Tutor for the Violin interspersed with tunes from various Handel operas, while the remainder of the book is a collection of suites by assorted Baroque composers. The pieces are sparingly and sensibly edited, and are suitable for students playing at ABRSM Grades 2 to 4.

The book’s unique selling point is that every piece is presented on a stave with only four lines. To play each piece, the performer first needs to draw a line across either the top (for violin) or the bottom (for viola) of the printed staves, then insert a clef and key signature at the beginning of each line. With nearly 50 pieces in the book, that’s quite a lot of line drawing and clef and key signature writing, and while I can imagine a certain amount of eye-rolling from some of my students about this, there’s no denying that it would give them some much-needed practice in this area.

As I worked through the book, diligently constructing my staves and writing in my clefs and key signatures, I ran into a few issues. Although I was reasonably careful to draw my lines neatly, when playing the pieces I found it hard to cope with being able to see the printed leger lines under my hand-drawn lines, and my fingers fumbled momentarily on notes such as F sharp (top line, treble clef). In addition, the usual stem directions of some of the notes were reversed, which made my brain ache a little. To test out the author’s assertion that ‘the special notation… is an ideal form to facilitate the “conversion” from violin to viola’, I duly had a go at a few pieces on both instruments, but with only moderate success. Although the notation allows the pieces to be played on the violin or the viola with the same fingering, the pieces are (as the author acknowledges) played in different keys, which felt rather unhelpful. And, since there is only one version of the tune presented in the book, switching between instruments and clefs involved an awful lot of rubbing out and redrawing of lines, clefs and key signatures. There are definitely simpler and more effective ways for a violinist to try out the alto clef, and vice versa.

I really wanted to fall in love with this book, with its homely looking hand-drawn cover and its editor’s clear passion for his system. It is obvious that a great deal of thought has gone into selecting, organising and arranging the book’s musical contents, and the theory geek in me revelled at the prospect of being able to ask students to write their clefs and key signatures so many times. I liked the pieces and the way they were grouped by key, and I particularly loved the inclusion of the Baroque dance suites, which would each make a lovely set for a young student to work towards performing. But ultimately I found that the ‘unique four-stave format’ just didn’t work for me. Which is not to say that it won’t work for you. So, if you are looking for something a bit different, perhaps a quirky gift for an open-minded upper strings player, or simply something unusual for yourself, then this book might be exactly the hidden gem you have always been searching for and I recommend you give it a go, just to see.

CELIA COBB

The Viola d’Amore: Its History and Development Rachael Durkin

ROUTLEDGE 193PP HARDBACK: £96 ISBN 9781138358966 E-BOOK: £29.59 ISBN 9780429433993

As a rule, research on the viola d’amore has been undertaken – not inappropriately – as a labour of love, by players wishing to find out more about this uniquely fascinating instrument and the music written for it. In her introduction to this publication Rachael Durkin acknowledges the books of Harry Danks (1976) and Heinz Berck (2008) as the standard works on the subject, although since neither was a musicologist, Durkin can claim to have written ‘the first scholarly study’ of the instrument.

The viola d’amore was first mentioned in 1649 in Hamburg, and its earliest detailed description stems from a 1679 entry in John Evelyn’s diary: it is an instrument ‘of 5 wyre-strings, plaied on with a bow… Lyra-way’ (i.e. varying tunings were used and the music was written in tablature, as with the lyra-viol). Wire strings – otherwise used only on plucked instruments – were the viola d’amore’s distinctive trait before it acquired the sympathetic strings we associate it with today. The instrument’s beginnings need to be

pieced together from isolated, sometimes contradictory reports that can’t always be unequivocally related to the actual instruments that have come down to us. For the most part, Durkin is a reliable guide through the terminological maze, but I do take exception to her rather bizarre interpretation of the German words ‘englische’ and ‘englisch’, which she translates respectively as ‘English’ and ‘angelic’ (both can mean one or the other, the different endings having grammatical reasons). We may never know for sure whether the phrase ‘das englische Violet’ is a poetical description of the instrument’s sound or just indicates its country of origin (to compound the problem, the name was variously Italianised as ‘viola angelica’ and ‘viola all’inglese’!)

The book’s central chapters provide much valuable information about the viola d’amore’s relationship to the aforementioned englische violet and other sympathetically strung instruments such as the baryton. A copious and well-reproduced iconography – photographs and historical drawings – illustrates the instrument’s manifold patterns, soundhole shapes and ways of securing the sympathetic strings. The final chapter on the viola d’amore’s revival in the 19th and early 20th centuries somewhat insularly concentrates on the work done by Arnold Dolmetsch and Montagu Cleeve in England, while relegating the instrument’s Continental advocates – Louis van Waefelghem and Paul Hindemith among them – to passing mentions. Examining the instrument’s role within historically informed performance practice, Durkin rightly points out that, with such an instrumental variety, one would ideally need ‘a clutch of violas d’amore of different stringings… for the Baroque era alone’. This is just one of the reasons for the fascination the viola d’amore continues to exercise on string players, and this book is a valuable addition to our knowledge about it.

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE

Once Upon a String Fiddle Method: Vol.1 Shamma Sabir

72PP ISBN 9781705107737 HAL LEONARD £12.99

This first volume of Once Upon a String follows on from Shamma Sabir’s previously released ‘Fiddle Fundamentals’. It presents the early stages of violin string technique with music from North American fiddle repertoire. Do not be put off by this: it contains super advice and strategies, directly or indirectly applicable to other genres of fiddle playing.

Sabir is clearly a thoughtful and caring teacher. She espouses the importance of always warming up, not practising too long at a time, especially if becoming physically tired, nor worry unduly about mistakes, and always listening to the music to develop the ear alongside the technique. All her advice is presented clearly and encouragingly, so young and old musicians alike will be able to relate to it.

The book is best used in the order in which it is presented. Advice on how to use it is given in the introduction. The main content is divided into fiddle warm-ups, and larger sections working in the keys of A and D major. Each presents new concepts of technique, including bow division, slurs, repeated up bows and retakes. Many tunes from the folk tradition, deploying these concepts, are provided in organised progression. The warm-up exercises are clearly described and an experienced player will quickly understand them. For the less experienced, some pictures and/or a link to video illustration would have been a valuable bonus.

There are great strengths in this volume. To get us to notice things in the music, Sabir asks us questions. For ‘Memories of Paris’ she asks: ‘Have you noticed anything interesting about this song yet?’

Answer: the end is a descending A major scale. This kind of observation is an important start to musical analysis for all young musicians. Sabir also points out repetitions, making tunes less tough to learn. In ‘The Stool of Repentance’ she colour-codes repeated phrases, showing that 6 bars out of 16 have already been learnt. Given Sabir’s emphasis on good technique, I have one quibble about the otherwise enchanting illustrations by Sarah Parsons. I tell my own students that they must never cross their legs when playing. It leads to physical imbalance and instability. So I find it a pity that the cartoon characters in this book regularly appear playing with crossed legs.

The other strengths of this volume are the tips, challenges and reviews. The reviews especially give the user a real sense of achievement. This splendid book can be used by any young fiddler and teacher. The folk tunes are very accessible and the book is charmingly presented.

ALEX LAING