RECORDINGS

BACH Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin BWV1001–1006

PISENDEL Sonata for Solo Violin Amandine Beyer (violin)

ALPHA CLASSICS ALPHA610

Classy, light take on sonatas by Bach and his contemporary countryman

For some reason this set begins with the First Partita rather than the usual First Sonata, in which the opening Allemande displays many of the qualities of what follows. It is spacious and measured, with much subtlety of phrasing contained within its gentle simplicity. After the similarly unhurried Double the Courante is deft and fleet, but nonetheless using a considerable dynamic range. The Sarabande is meditative and quiet, the tripleand quadruple-stops rippling nicely – there is no chordal crunching here. The bourrée is sprightly and detached. This general lightness of touch persists through the set.

The opening grave of the A minor Sonata is lucid and intimate, and the great Fugue, like its cousins in the other two sonatas, has great shape and purpose maintained through its huge span, with exemplary clarity of counterpoint and balancing of parts. The Andante is masterly, with its beautifully moulded melody and steady pulsing quaver accompaniment. The Allemande, Courante and Gigue of the D minor Partita all sparkle, their contours fluidly shaped. In the great Chaconne there is a sense of organic growth and increasing purpose and energy before it relaxes into the warmth, and occasional drama, of the D major section. There is articulate lyricism in the Largo of the C major Sonata, and profound meditation in the Adagio of the G minor. The central movements of the E major are like courtly dances.

Pisendel’s Sonata is extrovert and entertaining, with some cheerfully exhibitionist doublestopping. Beyer is always technically superb. The recording is clean with a touch of resonance.

TIM HOMFRAY

BACH’S LONG SHADOW BACH Partita no.3 in E major BWV1006 YSAŸE Solo Violin Sonata op.27 no.2; Poco lento, maestoso (Sonata for Two Violins) 1 KREISLER Recitativo and Scherzo (arr. Loiseleur, Fullana) ALBÉNIZ Asturias TÁRREGA Recuerdos de la Alhambra (arr. Ricci)

Francisco Fullana (violin)

Stella Chen (violin) 1

ORCHID CLASSICS ORC100165

Imaginative and sometimes wild take on Bach and his solo violin legacy

Built on Bach’s legacy, Francisco Fullana’s enterprising programme explores various musical and personal interconnections. Fullana uses some ‘period’ tools in his account of Bach’s Third Partita (BWV1006) but adds, in repeated sections, extempore ornamentation that is intrusive and decidedly unhistorical. Nevertheless, his light bowing, phrasing and dynamic shading in the Preludio are engaging and his Loure has a pleasing lilt; but his slick tempos in the other dances and unusual E natural in Menuet II (bar 19) confirm his interpretation’s egocentricity

BWV1006 is metamorphosed into an obsessive virtuoso display in Ysaÿe’s Sonata op.27 no.2, Fullana interpreting its striking outer movements as if a madman. He also brings the morbid Dies irae theme consistently into focus and characterises the third movement’s variations with flair and imagination.

Fullana’s Spanish ancestry is celebrated in arrangements of Albéniz’s Asturias and Tárrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra, the latter less successfully realised in a hiccuplike interpretation seemingly lacking fluency and control. However, he dispatches Kreisler’s Recitativo and Scherzo with the requisite solemnity, drama and virtuosity and encores (partnering Stella Chen) with an intensely sonorous opening movement of Ysaÿe’s Sonata for Two Violins. Fullana’s liner notes combine philosophical, poetic and nostalgic sentiments and his 1735 ‘Kreisler’ Guarneri ‘del Gesù’ benefits from natural, warm recorded sound.

ROBIN STOWELL

BEETHOVEN Violin Concerto SCHNITTKE Violin Concerto no.3 Vadim Gluzman (violin) Lucerne Symphony Orchestra/James Gaffigan

BIS BIS-2392 (HYBRID SACD)

Poised performances threaded through with a sense of Russian melancholy

Alfred Schnittke wrote cadenzas for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto at the behest of Gidon Kremer, who famously described the devices as ‘open window[s] in the space of a composition’. That is precisely what Schnittke’s are, not in the least ill-fitting or bizarre (as some have claimed). The first includes a collage of quotes from violin concertos by Shostakovich, Brahms, Berg and Bartók, all of them ‘motivically justified’, to borrow from Horst A.

Scholz’s booklet note. Neither seems in the least incongruous here. As the first errs toward atonal disintegration, Schnittke deploys the timpani strokes of Beethoven’s opening to anchor it in context.

What is incongruous is the inclusion of these cadenzas in Gluzman’s performance of the concerto proper, which is as conservative as they come, with sure vibrato deployed throughout and a finale that dampens any fireworks and irons out rhythmic gameplay.

This is clearly Gluzman’s idea of the piece and it is highly considered; for all its stentorian poise, it manages to avoid the grand. But it feels odd to have Schnittke underline Beethoven’s outspokenness while robbing Beethoven himself of the chance.

Schnittke’s own Violin Concerto no.3 (1978) gets a highly engaging performance, the intensity of its opening tremolando monologue showing the best of the intense, echt-Russian sound Gluzman gets from his 1690 ‘Leopold Auer’

Stradivari, cleanly and atmospherically caught by BIS’s microphones. It is a haunting, moving and entertaining piece, one of Schnittke’s most successful. Does the sense of melancholy and remembrance here explain Gluzman’s veiled take on the Beethoven?

ANDREW MELLOR

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

An appealing approach by the Aris Quartet

MICHAEL REH

BEETHOVEN String Quartet no.7, op.59 no.1 ‘Rasumovsky’ RESCH String Quartet no.3 ‘Attacca’

Aris Quartet

GENUIN GEN21736

An intense, tightly wound Rasumovsky plus expressive contemporary response

Now in their twelfth year together, the musicians of the Aris Quartet have won most of the young-artist prizes and bursaries worth having, and their 2017 album of op.131 and the Third ‘Rasumovsky’ raised expectations which this account of op.59 no.1 satisfies from the edgy momentum of the opening bars. The pure intonation and direct appeal of their approach to Beethoven’s mesto mood in the Adagio anticipate the great outpourings of solitude in Bellini and Berlioz, answered but not resolved by the surging euphoria of the finale.

Such a risky but precisely calibrated take on the First ‘Rasumovsky’ is prefaced by Gerald Resch’s newly composed response to the piece, transforming Beethoven’s material more or less explicitly into four continuous movements – as the ‘attacca’ subtitle implies – without courting pastiche or parody. This is not Resch’s first engagement with his Viennese Classical heritage, after a brief and ingenious variation on Schubert to complement the ‘Trout’ Quintet (Pond and Spring, recorded on CAvi). The tautly drawn nerves of the Aris’s Beethoven find an expressive match in the belated expressionism of Resch’s classically balanced quartet writing. The well-judged, detailed but not analytical recording and usefully unpretentious booklet notes by Resch are further assets to an album worth noticing.

PETER QUANTRILL

DIALOGO BRAHMS Cello Sonata no.2 in F major op.99 LIGETI Sonata for solo cello SHOSTAKOVICH Cello Sonata in D minor op.40

John-Henry Crawford (cello)

Victor Santiago Asuncion (piano)

ORCHID ORC100166

Impressive playing by young cellist fresh from competition success

Young American cellist John-Henry Crawford, first prize winner at the 2019 Carlos Prieto Cello Competition, chooses a weighty programme for his debut disc.

Playing his grandfather’s 19thcentury cello of unknown provenance, smuggled out of Austria under the Nazis, Crawford particularly excels in Ligeti’s solo Sonata, unpublished until 1990.

In Dialogo, the first movement, Crawford presents the folk-like theme clearly and simply, building to more intense heights of expression. His glissando pizzicatos and doublestops ring out with a rich clarity.The clean, close recording is like seeing everything through a very powerful lens – in the virtuosic second movement the torrents of rapid notes and frenzied, biting semiquavers are right in your face.The final chord resounds for a full seven seconds.

Crawford finds a wide range of tonal colours in Shostakovich’s Sonata, digging deep into his eloquent C string and finding an intense sound on his top string at climactic points.The clarity of his attack and crisp staccato in the Allegro movements and his thoughtful reading of the inward-looking Largo make this a striking interpretation.

Brahms’s Second Sonata contains some decisive playing and subtle rubato. I liked the focused sound of Crawford’s lower strings but found the high tessitura tone rather tight and the last movement too conservative in tempo.

JANET BANKS

The Linos Piano Trio distils the spirit of big orchestral works

COURTESY LINOS PIANO TRIO

STOLEN MUSIC DEBUSSY Prélude à l’après-midi d’un Faune (arr. Linos) DUKAS The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (arr. Linos) SCHOENBERG Verklärte Nacht (arr. Steuermann)

RAVEL La Valse (arr. Linos)

Linos Piano Trio

CAVI-8553035

Extraordinarily good reimagining of 20th-century orchestral classics

I’ll cut right to the chase and say that this is among the most imaginative, inventive and gloriously surprising chamber releases I’ve heard in recent times.

Stolen Music presents pianist Prach Boondiskulchok, violinist Konrad Elias-Trostmann and cellist Vladimir Waltham’s own transcriptions of four iconic 20th-century orchestral works. These are not the sorts of straight transcriptions that end up sounding like watered-down versions of the originals, but complete reimaginings based on how the music might have been written had it been originally conceived for their forces; and that subtle conceptual shift has yielded dramatic results right from Prélude à l’après-midi d’un Faune’s curtainraising breathily throbbing siren of a violin line, which is so languorously and seductively snaking, so perfectly poised, that all memory of solo flute is blown out of the water.

It is impossible to pick highlights from this feast of clever textural, timbral and tempo tinkering, but La Valse is a showstopper: a darkly rumbling piano-driven cauldron of volatility to open; boldly rakish strings serving up their portamenti with swagger, and their Viennese froth with a side order of acid; the louche bombast of its final crescendo. It’s all compelling, dramatic, fascinating and unfailingly musical.What a ride.

CHARLOTTE GARDNER

FAGERLUND Nomade; Water Atlas Nicolas Altstaedt (cello) Finnish Radio SO/Hannu Lintu

BIS BIS-2455 (HYBRID SACD)

Finnish composer’s cello concerto is convincing in the hands of its dedicatee

The titular nomad of Sebastian Fagerlund’s concerto from 2019 is the cellist as wanderer: not through any particular landscape, though the solo part’s modal contours might evoke a terrain on the fringes of Europe or beyond it, but rather undertaking an interior journey.

The continuously arranged eight sections and almost 40-minute duration of Nomade also establish a sense of scale comparable to Strauss’s Don Quixote, while Fagerlund’s acknowledged debt to Lutosławski surfaces positively in the restless tonal shifts of the orchestral texture. Tuned and keyed percussion often set the scene: a ticking reminder of time passing in the tough opening Espressivo, an almost Feldmanesque presence of gentle indifference in the central, sarabande-like Lento, a catalyst for transcendence in the finale’s slow dissolve.

Edited from two concerts presenting the concerto’s Finnish premiere, the performance has transferred well to record, betraying no sign of an audience and catching even the soloist’s scordatura descent below bottom C in the closing bars. Fagerlund wrote Nomade with Nicolas Altstaedt in mind, and his response is outstandingly dexterous and fluid, cantabile even in the Prokofiev-like rough and tumble of the second movement scherzo, secure in the flautando and harmonics of a long cadenza placed before the finale. Repeated plays dispel initial impressions of a diffuse and somewhat narrow expressive register – this nomad wanders with the weight of the world on his shoulders like the mythological giant of the companion tone-poem – but Altstaedt’s performance is one I’d want to experience in the flesh. The orchestral piece Water Atlas surges and heaves with the underlying momentum and overlapping tempo shifts of notable forebears such as Sibelius and Lindberg: fellow Finn Hannu Lintu has its full measure.

PETER QUANTRILL

THE VIENNESE VIOLA GÁL Sonata in A major op.101 FUCHS Six Fantasy Pieces op.117; Sonata in D minor op.86 SCHUBERT Four Songs Emma Wernig (viola)

Albert Cano Smit (piano)

CHAMPS HILL RECORDS CHRCD163

Debut album of Viennese delights demonstrates poise and promise

This album, recorded in the welcoming acoustic of the Music Room, Champs Hill, is part of the first prize that Emma Wernig was awarded at the 2017 Cecil Aronowitz International Viola Competition.

The Austrian–German musician introduces a trio of little-recorded pieces by Viennese composers (by training if not by birth), Robert Fuchs and Hans Gál, with Schubert songs as the mellifluous encores.

When listening to Fuchs’s lovely Six Fantasy Pieces, it’s hard not to think of the compliment Johannes Brahms paid to his younger colleague: ‘Everything is so fine, so skilful, so charmingly created! One is always pleased!’ One is indeed, particularly when each three-minute miniature is as beautifully shaped as they are here by Wernig in close collaboration with her piano partner, Albert Cano Smit: their readings ooze that uniquely, untranslatably Austrian quality, Gemütlichkeit.

Hans Gál’s sonata was written in 1941 after the composer, forced to leave his home country when the Nazis came to power, had found a safe haven in Edinburgh.Understandably the music looks back wistfully to a lost world, speaking much the same language as Fuchs.Wernig is completely at home in this suggestively romantic sound world, consistently finding subtle variations of sound quality, vibrato and articulation. Her vivid musical imagination makes this listener look forward to further acquaintance with this highly promising artist.

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE

Vivid playing from Emma Wernig

HAYDN Baryton Trios Valencia Baryton Project: Matthew Baker (baryton) Estevan de Almeida Reis (viola) Alex Friedhoff (cello)

NAXOS 8.574188

The baryton enjoys star billing in delightfully inventive Haydn

What would have become of the baryton if Prince Nikolaus of Esterházy hadn’t developed a taste for it? The instrument, invented in England in the early 17th century, had always inhabited the most recondite of niches. Basically a viola da gamba with added wire strings, it boasts the unique feature that said wire strings may be plucked by the player’s left thumb, thus adding an accompanying line to the melody played on the upper gut strings. Most of the music written for baryton can be traced back to Nikolaus, whose court kapellmeister Joseph Haydn alone wrote over 160 compositions for the instrument in various combinations, including some 125 trios with viola and cello. The present collection represents the tip of this particular iceberg.

The six trios included have been very well chosen to demonstrate Haydn’s inexhaustible creative fantasy. First movements can be in sonata form either fast or slow (eg the majestic Moderato of Hob.XI:9), or a set of variations (as in Hob.XI:69), while each of the obligatory minuets exhibits individual traits. The ensemble’s members have been well recorded in the friendly acoustics of a Spanish castle. While Matthew Baker has pride of place as the player of Nikolaus’s instrument, Haydn – who back then probably took the viola part – has ensured the others are by no means reduced to accompanying lackeys. The trio prove themselves a well attuned team, always alert to the music’s mercurial nature.

CHRISTOPHER ROGERS-BEADLE

THOMAS JAUK

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE

HAYDN String Quartets vol.13: op.74 nos.1–3 Leipzig Quartet

MDG 307 2224-2

A golden-toned and old-school, if somewhat serious, approach to Haydn

For all the cherishable variety of interpretative approaches available on disc in Haydn’s string quartets, most tend to fall into one of two main camps: those who view these endlessly inventive scores from an essentially 19th-century perspective of golden-toned espressivo and cantabile legato or those who sound more seduced (whether using modern or authentic set-ups) by the crisper articulation, tonal transparency and subtle inflections of historically informed practice.

The Leipzigers belong proudly to the former, without being as opulently sonorous as the Angeles (Philips), nor as vibrato-laden as the Amadeus (DG), while bringing a lighter touch to the ‘slow’ movements and minuets than either the Aeolian (Argo/Decca) or Kodály (Naxos).

Some might prefer a more playful approach to Haydn’s musical in-jokes and greater sense of uplift and joy when his inspiration goes into top gear, yet by tempering their exuberance, the Leipzigers bring a compelling sense of structural wholeness to each movement, undistracted by passing moments of creative ingenuity, and gently enhanced by the undistracting naturalness and airy textures of the engineering.

An excellent example of their overall approach is the opening movement of op.74 no.2, whose introductory ‘brass’ fanfares are delivered without a hint of ‘knowing’ martialistic pomp. Yet experienced in the context of a superbly cultivated reading, in which nothing is allowed to deflect attention from Haydn’s enchanting soundscape, few would dispute that in the long run ‘less’ really can be ‘more’.

JULIAN HAYLOCK

JOURNEY THROUGH A CENTURY KREISLER Recitativo and Scherzo-

Caprice op.6 PENDERECKI Capriccio (2008) PROKOFIEV Sonata in D for solo violin op.115 REGER Prelude and Fugue in D minor for solo violin op.117 no.6

SCHNITTKE A Paganini (1982 version)

STRAUSS Daphne-Etüde WEINBERG Sonata no.2 for solo violin op.95 YSAŸE Sonata in E for solo violin op.27 no.6

YUN Königliches Thema Sueye Park (violin)

BIS BIS-2492 (HYBRID SACD)

Treasure trove of a solo recital spans a hundred years of violin music

Sueye Park was 19 when she recorded this ‘Palgrave’s Golden Treasury’ of 20th-century music for solo violin (the Penderecki brings it into this century). Her 1785 Ferdinando Gagliano violin is beautifully recorded; she uses an 1850 bow by Nicolas Maline of Mirecourt.

What is striking is how each piece catches her imagination. The Reger, written for Adolf Busch and reflecting on the Brahms Concerto, has terrific presence. Her dynamics in the Kreisler range from a whisper to full strength, with galloping impetus in the Scherzo-Caprice. She really attacks the Ysaÿe, with its Spanish tinges for Manuel Quiroga; Strauss’s morsel is a lovely gift. The Prokofiev has crunchy chording in (i),eloquence in (ii) and clarity in (iii). The seven brief sections of the Weinberg move from inwardness to intensity, via character, whimsy and declamation. The Yun, based on Bach’s Musical Offering theme, has life in every variation. The Schnittke positively tingles, and Penderecki’s Capriccio tops off a remarkable recital.

One might name this or that artist more in touch with this or that piece; but with her third CD, this young South Korean confirms that she is not just promising but fully formed.

TULLY POTTER

Sueye Park is a violinist fulfilling her promise

MOZART Violin Concertos: no.3 in G major K216, no.5 in A major K219; Symphony no.29 in A major K201

Sebastian Bohren (violin) CHAARTS Chamber Artists/Gábor Takács-Nagy

AVIE AV2459

Violinist aims for perfection in elegant and well-balanced Mozart concertos

Here is a twice-cooked recording. After doing it all once, Sebastian Bohren decided they hadn’t done Mozart justice, so they went back to record it all again. Bohren has a clarity akin to what in an actor would be called perfect diction, at the service of style and drama. This is lucid, colourful playing, full of strength but always light on its feet.

His tone is sweet, with a vibrato both warm and discreet. That vocal quality is apparent in the central Adagio of the G major Concerto, a wonderfully shaped aria unfolding with all the time in the world. The finale has charm and elegance.

The opening tutti of the A major Concerto has an operatic quality, vivid and thrusting onward, with prominent horns and dramatic pauses heightened by the generous acoustic.After his graceful opening Adagio Bohren brings great rhythmic energy to the Allegro aperto, with gleaming tone on the E string and springing staccatos. Forte–piano dynamics are vigorously punched by soloist and orchestra alike. The Adagio is suave, with separated notes and phrases all but joining within the prevailing legato, and the finale trips along happily before Takács-Nagy and the orchestra milk the Turkish section for all the drama it will give. They also give a spirited performance of the Symphony no.29. The recording is a model of balance and clarity.

TIM HOMFRAY

FIRST LIGHT MUHLY Shrink GLASS The Orchard; String Quartet no.3 ‘Mishima’ (arr. Muhly) Pekka Kuusisto (violin) Nico Muhly (piano) Norwegian Chamber Orchestra

PENTATONE PTC5186745

Pioneering violinist spotlights two New York composers in a moving album

The Sitkovetsky Trio is perfectly at home in French repertoire

COURTESY BIS

Finnish violin pioneer Pekka Kuusisto’s pairing of Philip Glass and Nico Muhly on this very satisfying, really quite moving new disc makes a lot of sense, both biographically and musically. Young New York composer Muhly worked for a period as Glass’s musical assistant, and his own music often seems to take Glass’s distinctive rippling arpeggios and run with them in unexpected directions – as is the case in Muhly’s witty, spirited violin concerto Shrink, written for Kuusisto in 2019. There are a few passages in its first movement that could even have been written by the elder composer, though Muhly’s Stravinskian brightness and rhythmic urgency, and the high-flying rhapsody of his lyrical slow movement coalesce into a voice all his own. Shrink gets a dazzlingly athletic but also deeply thoughtful account from Kuusisto: he’s alive to every minute detail of Muhly’s articulations in the energetic opening movement without ever sounding calculated, and even makes winding through one of those simple arpeggios into a journey of sonic discovery.

Kuusisto’s chamber orchestra arrangement of Glass’s Third Quartet, derived from his score to the 1985 movie Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, brings a welcome added heft and depth to the work, while losing none of its luminous transparency, and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra plays with bags of character, as if each brief movement is indeed a separate scene in a larger story. Recorded pandemic-style, separately on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Kuusisto and Muhly manage a remarkably supple reading of the reflective The Orchard from Glass’s score to Genet’s The Screens. It’s a disc of vivid, compelling playing, captured in close, warm sound.

DAVID KETTLE

RAVEL Piano Trio in A minor SAINT- SAËNS Piano Trio no.2 in E minor op.92 Sitkovetsky Trio

BIS BIS-2219 (HYBRID SACD)

Perfectly judged, poised ensemble in lovingly sculpted French piano trios

The Sitkovetsky Trio really has the measure of Ravel’s Trio, from the impeccable octaves in the sultry first entry of violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky and cellist Isang Enders to the work’s fiery, trill-laden conclusion. Ensemble, in this ideally balanced St George’s Brandon Hill recording, is well judged throughout, and makes one wonder what Ravel’s qualms about tackling the medium, over doubts about combining strings with piano, was all about. These three (including pianist Wu Qian) demonstrably play as one. Among other highlights are the whirlwind they create in ‘Pantoum’ and the sense of mystery brought to the ‘Passacaglia’; the work’s Basqueinspired rhythms are given propelling force without either string player forcing the tone.

Saint-Saëns’s writing for the medium, in his five-movement Second Trio of 1892, is inevitably somewhat less adventurous (though Ravel claimed him as an influence) and the forms are more conventional, but even he could play against type by writing a tripping Allegretto in 5/8 time, made to sound all the more whimsically disruptive by the Sitkovetsky Trio’s perky playing here. Elsewhere, the composer’s surging string themes over bubbling piano accompaniments are lovingly sculpted, and in the more equitable, contrapuntal sections, such as the fugue in the finale, the interplay is an object lesson in give and take.

MATTHEW RYE

VIVALDI The Four Seasons; and music by Zili, Kreisler, Massenet and Bazzini Christian Li (violin) Timothy Young (piano) members of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

DECCA 485 1824

Teenage violinist’s insightful and original debut augurs well for the future

Still aged only 13, Christian Li combines technical savvy and interpretative insight to a remarkable degree in one so young. Violin prodigies often struggle to find their own personal voice, yet blessed with a winning combination of the 1737 ‘Paulsen’ Guarneri ‘del Gesù’ and a François Peccatte bow, Li already produces a highly distinctive tonal fusion of beguiling warmth and clarity. His is not a sound that blows your socks off in the manner of the young Michael Rabin or Shlomo Mintz, but is closer to the cantabile eloquence of Cho-Liang Lin or Midori.

Li also has strong, individual ideas about even an old warhorse like The Four Seasons, which extend not only to his own playing, but his talented band of Australian musicians, who respond with alacrity to his every whim and fancy. Li uses an additional lute continuo throughout (both harpsichord and lute are given improvisatory freedom and are captured boldly by the full-throated recording) and employs a wide range of evocative, colouristic devices, including a suitably icy sul ponticello in ‘Winter’.

However, it is in the four ‘encore’ items with pianist Timothy Young that Li really shows his mettle, capturing an old-world charm in Kreisler’s Tambourin chinois to rival even Henryk Szeryng, and a playful virtuosity in Bazzini’s La ronde des lutins (effortless arco and harmonics in tenths, slightly less poised lefthand pizzicato) that augurs well for the future.

JULIAN HAYLOCK

PRIMAVERA 1: THE WIND Music by Bielawa, figgis-vizueta, Heggie, Iyer, Little, Machover, Okoye, Sanford, Schwendinger, Sierra, Sizemore, Smith, Sosa and Woolf Matt Haimovitz (cello)

PENTATONE OXINGALE SERIES PTC 5186286

Auspicious start to an ambitious, Botticelli-inspired commission project

Primavera is the latest project from Matt Haimovitz, the Israel-born, US-based cellist who is equally likely to play Bach suites in a nightclub or record Beethoven sonatas on a period instrument as he is to collaborate with Philip Glass and other contemporary composers. In all, 81 composers have been commissioned to respond to Botticelli’s seminal allegory of spring and to Germanborn artist Charline von Heyl’s 2020 reinterpretation of it. In this first instalment of 14 pieces most composers maintain some sort of kinship with tonality, and the instrument finds it hard to shake off its historic association with darktoned expression.

Haimovitz’s playing is thoughtful and committed throughout, the only technical challenge being the balletic section of Nkeiru Okoye’s Eubas Dance, with its perilous interlacing of double-stopping and pivot notes. The audio quality belies the fact the tracks were recorded at von Heyl’s artist studio in Texas. Jorge Sosa’s Reimagined Spring underlines the narrative eloquence of the cello; it is followed by inti figgis-vizueta’s the motion between three worlds, which, alongside its string-crossings and open chords, explores harmonics in a way that attractively opens up the transitional space between the material and immaterial.

There’s a winning streak from track eight onwards. These include works by Luna Pearl Woolf (also Haimovitz’s wife), who focuses on the Three Graces of the paintings; Tod Machover and Roberto Sierra, the two most senior figures represented, who both turn 68 in autumn 2021; the relatively unknown Asher Sizemore (whose Six Graces incorporates tolling open-string pizzicatos); and Jake Heggie, whose Spring Forward begins as a Baroque Prelude and transforms into a gigue–tarantella hybrid.

EDWARD BHESANIA