RECORDINGS

THÈME RUSSE

BEETHOVEN String Quartet no.7 in F major op.59 no.1

‘Rasumovsky’ PROKOFIEV String Quartet no.2 in F major op.92

Eliot Quartet

GENUIN GEN21752

Quartet celebrates folk connections with luminous finesse and a spicy kick

It’s no surprise, perhaps, that when the Eliot Quartet is named after T.S. Eliot’s Beethoven-inspired Four Quartets, it’s again to Beethoven that the four players have turned for this warmly recorded second album with Genuin. The connection they draw between Beethoven’s Seventh Quartet and Prokofiev’s Second is their respective folkloristic elements –

Russian with Beethoven, and Caucasian with Prokofiev.

One further similarity that the booklet notes are keen to draw our attention to is the quartets’ ‘roughedged sound’. Which is interesting, when the actual readings are anything but. In fact it’s the sheer finesse and light delicacy that strike at the opening of the ‘Rasumovsky’. There’s also the lyric flow with which cellist Michael Preuss presents its theme; and his high-register melody in the Prokofiev’s central love song is another stand-out moment, as violinists Maryana Osipova and Alexander Sachs weave their equally ear-pricking luminous, filigree figures around him.

Then when polished beauty is the norm, where the players suddenly hammer roughly down on the first dissonant chord of the Prokofiev finale it’s a delicious shock, and the ensuing rustic dancing delivers a gripping succession of switches between delicate beauty and sharp kick.

CHARLOTTE GARDNER

BARBER String Quartet in B minor op.11 IVES String quartets: no.1

‘From the Salvation Army’, no.2;

A Set of Three Short Pieces Escher Quartet

BIS BIS-2360 (SACD)

American quartets receive wonderfully striking and immediate interpretations

The arresting opening flourish of Barber’s op.11 Quartet sets out the Escher Quartet’s stall for this disc with immediate colour and dynamism. Then the players surround the chorale-like second theme with tonal radiance, and gently question the lyrical più mosso third theme with a nervously syncopated undertone. The second movement (not just any Adagio, this is Barber’s Adagio) is less soupy than the interminable, directionless stepwise movement we sometimes hear especially in string orchestra performances – with leaner colouring and, at the heightened climax, impressive power at the top of the players’ ranges. The Escher also offers the substantial third movement that Barber discarded from the work before its publication. The playing here is lithe and joyful, with innocent charm and palpable optimism.

Rooted in tonality and replete with hymn-tune quotations, Ives’s First String Quartet is less adventurous than his Second, but it’s played by turns with upright vigour and folksy charm. Even the more blatant borrowings emerge naturally, the quartet inserting quotation marks without also throwing in bold and underlining. But the Quartet no.2 is Ives at his dizzying, multilayering, anti-tonal, cluster-harmonic best. Sporting blend, passion, commitment and technical mastery, the players deliver a striking performance.

A fascinating snapshot of American quartets, with a recording that is brilliantly detailed, this is a first-rate release all round.

EDWARD BHESANIA

CHOPIN Cello Sonata; Introduction and Polonaise brillante (arr. Gendron);

Grand duo concertante sur des thèmes de Robert le Diable; Nocturne in E flat major op.9 no.2 (arr. Popper); Nocturne no.20 in C sharp minor (arr. Piatigorsky) Anne Gastinel (cello)

Claire Désert (piano)

NAÏVE V5467

Chopin cello music and arrangements in spellbinding performances

Two of Chopin’s nocturnes, in arrangements by great cellists of the past, bookend this finely crafted album. The first is played with such elegance, its arrays of grace notes including whole runs of magical harmonics, that the listener is left eagerly anticipating more.

In the Sonata that follows, Désert and Gastinel give Chopin’s music plenty of space. Theirs is a fully Romantic interpretation, lavish but with moments of reflection.

The Scherzo is well articulated and the rubato in its trio exquisite, particularly where the players hold back and then let rip. Poetic phrasing, the lovely, liquid sound of Désert’s pianism, some beautiful playing high on Gastinel’s Testore cello’s G and D strings and the disc’s well-balanced and intimate sound combine to make the Largo a thing of beauty.

The Sonata’s dedicatee, Auguste Franchomme, was largely responsible for the cello part in the Grand Duo, which is perhaps why as a piece it fails to charm in the same way as the Introduction and Polonaise brillante. Played with Gastinel’s characteristic poise, however, even the most fiendish double-stop high-tessitura triplets come trickling down as if they’re the easiest thing in the world. The concluding C sharp minor Nocturne, with its finely drawn melodic line and grace notes floating like feathers, left me spellbound.

JANET BANKS

CHAMBER MUSIC FROM THE COURT OF FREDERICK THE GREAT J. GRAUN Viola Sonata in C minor;

Violin Sonata in B flat major; Trio Sonata in A major JANITSCH Trio Sonata in G minor BENDA Viola Sonata in C minor C. GRAUN Cello Sonata in C major Augusta McKay Lodge (violin)Georgina McKay Lodge (viola)Eva Lymenstull (cello) David Schulenberg (harpsichord)

BRILLIANT CLASSICS 96289

Exuberant playing of virtuoso works fit for a music-loving king

The Prussian King Frederick II (known as ‘the Great’) was a proficient flautist and his court was a magnet for the musicians of his time. Someone in Frederick’s orchestra must have played the viola to an uncommonly high standard, judging from the numerous pieces that were composed in Berlin at a time when the solo literature for the instrument was still in its earliest stages. Johann Gottlieb Graun’s Sonata in C minor (elsewhere attributed to Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who may have had a hand in shaping the exuberant keyboard parts of this and Graun’s Violin Sonata) includes several virtuoso passages, idiomatically laid out. Graun achieves great expressive intensity with some tormented chromatic writing and formal experiments: the Violin Sonata’s final movement is twice interrupted by slow interludes. Contrastingly, Graun’s A major Trio for violin, viola and continuo is of a more lyrical, carefree hue.

All the pieces included in this most welcome recital are written in the three-movement scheme (slow– fast–fast but dance-like) and in the empfindsamer Stil (sensitive style) in vogue in Berlin at the time. These players have obviously made a close study of this repertoire’s specific interpretative arsenal, as handed down in treatises by Johann Joachim Quantz – the King’s teacher – and C.P.E. Bach. The intricate embellishments flow elegantly, cadenzas evolving seamlessly and unanimously phrased. The strings are beautifully contrasted in timbre, faithfully caught by the lifelike recording and nicely balanced with the harpsichord.

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE

HAYDN Violin concertos: no.1 in C major, no.4 in G major

STRAVINSKY Le Baiser de la Fée – Divertimento (arr. James Ledger)

The Vondel Strings/ Rosanne Philippens (violin)

CHANNEL CLASSICS CCS43921

Innately musical playing of Haydn concertos peppered with Stravinsky

Rosanne Philippens interprets Haydn’s two concertos with innate musicality. Her energetic accounts of their sprightly outer movements are neatly articulated and incorporate some winning rubato, dynamic contrast and humour. Listeners may have reservations, on historical grounds, about the appropriateness of some of her extempore ornamentation, the content and length of the first-movement cadenzas (respectively by Philippens herself and Anner Bylsma) and the relentlessly driven finales – that of the G major work seems more Presto than Allegro. However, she shapes the central adagios with poetry and artistry, especially the C major’s flowing aria, adorned by David Jansen’s conversational harpsichord contribution. The Vondel Strings, many of whom also emanate from Philippens’ ‘stable’, accompany throughout with unanimity and a palpable sense of enjoyment, and Philippens’s 1727 ‘Barrère’ Stradivari, even-toned across its range, blooms in a church recording that combines immediacy, firmly focused yet transparent textures, and an attractive ambient warmth.

Philippens and friends dispatch the sandwich filling, James Ledger’s arrangement of the Divertimento from Stravinsky’s The Fairy’s Kiss, with rhythmic precision and a ready response to the varied moods and atmospherics expressed, particularly in the Sinfonia and Scherzo. The percussive rhythmic material of the Danses Suisses, too, is especially well graded and the Pas de deux concludes with veritable dynamism.

ROBIN STOWELL

* KLEBANOV String quartets nos.4 and 5; Piano Trio no.2

ARC Ensemble

CHANDOS CHAN 20231

Ukrainian composer’s quartets are an important addition to the repertoire

The ARC Ensemble’s Music in Exile series arrives at the work of Jewish– Ukrainian composer Dmitri Klebanov (1907–87). In an already illuminating series covering music not so much forgotten as never noticed and/or willingly repressed, this may just be the best album yet. Among the highlights of Klebanov’s early career was his playing in the first Soviet performance of Berg’s Wozzeck. He went on to write symphonies, a violin concerto and the three chamber works included here, much of it having been forced into ‘internal exile’. The Soviet authorities liked neither the man’s DNA nor his music.

The composer’s String Quartet no.4 (1946) uses melodies written by the Ukrainian separatist Mykola Leontovych, including his tune known in the West as The Carol of the Bells. Klebanov’s quartet is far more than a medley. It is an agile, clearsighted, harmonically interesting and tightly argued piece that gets a marinated, stylish performance from the Canadian ensemble whose marriage of technique with considered expression is exceptional.

Still, Klebanov’s String Quartet no.5 (1965), which followed a political thaw in the Ukraine, is far more expressive. Cryptic pizzicatos precede the second movement Andante’s sidle into stringent lyricism, before a climactic third and final movement moves from a ghostly sotto voce to an energetic coda full of intriguing spiked harmonies (including a wildly oscillating imitation of an ondes martenot on the cello).

In between, Klebanov’s Piano Trio no.2 (1958) has a French accent, especially in its swirling art nouveau Scherzo. Sometimes you feel the presence of Shostakovich, but Klebanov – with his stern shapes, effective melodies and curious moods – is his own man. Excellent sound, evangelical performances and music that’s a thrill to discover (and, evidently, play). Repertoire-hungry ensembles shouldn’t hesitate.

ANDREW MELLOR

THE SOLO ALBUM

KODÁLY Solo Sonata LIGETI Sonata for Solo Cello CROISÉ Spring Promenade SOLLIMA Alone; Concerto Rotondo for solo cello BURITCH Some Like to Show It Off PEJTSIK Stonehenge Christoph Croisé (cello)

AVIE AV2466

Virtuoso and dramatic exploration of a century of solo cello music

The past hundred years have witnessed a dramatic widening of the cello vernacular. Bar the Ligeti, all the works on this enterprising and warmly recorded disc were written by professional cellists conversant with these developments. Kodály’s 1915

Solo Sonata, for example, already uses advanced techniques. Here the vernacular draws inspiration from Hungarian folk music assimilated into a highly personal language. The main problem with this giant work comes in the last movement, making the sections blend together in a dramatic forward momentum. Christoph Croisé’s virtuoso skill absorbs the challenges with flair, but in fast passagework can sometimes lose a little clarity in effecting a sense of improvisatory rubato. A similar issue comes in the Capriccio from Ligeti’s Sonata where the instruction ‘Presto con slancio’ invites the soloist to go full pelt.

But here it sounds a bit breathless, the all-important semitonal oscillations somewhat obscured.

The second group of works on this disc utilise virtuoso technique but in a jazzier format. Croisé’s chirpy Spring Promenade perhaps recalls the highly effective pedagogical works of Aaron Minsky. Sollima’s Concerto Rotondo successfully fuses scordatura and electronics to effect a delay and canonic effect. Pejtsik’s Stonehenge is conceived in a kind of fusion rock style and brilliantly performed. But undoubtedly Buritch’s Some Like to Show It Off literally steals the show, with Croisé dazzling in delivering this virtuosic encore. This is a great exploration of diverse contemporary works for solo cello.

JOANNE TALBOT

MOZART String quartets: in G major K387, B flat major K458 ‘Hunt’, A major K464

Engegård Quartet

LAWO CLASSICS LWC1219

Elegant, understated yet sparkling playing of Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ quartets

The Engegård Quartet opens Mozart’s G major Quartet K387 in an easy, agile manner, scrupulously observant of the wrong-footing dynamics, and then heightens the drama in the questioning harmonicsideslips that open the development. The Menuetto flows elegantly, paced at the meeting point of three- and one-in-a-bar, and the Andante cantabile has genial charm, graced by leader Arvid Engegård’s light and mellifluous flights of demisemiquavers. Springing rhythms and clipped staccatos mark the high-spirited finale.

After the rhythmically crisp and energetic opening of the B flat major Quartet K458 the players become snappily conversational, tossing snippets one to another, before applying the brakes slightly at the soft beginning of the development.

There is a touch of faux naiveté in the Trio of the second movement, followed by limpid beauty in the Adagio, imbued with supple melodic shaping. The irrepressible finale has the colours and sparkle of a miniature comic opera.

The smooth ebb and flow of part-writing in the opening Allegro of the A major Quartet K464 is woven by subtle and sophisticated playing which belies an air of apparent simplicity, and the following Menuetto is a mixture of emphatic and insouciant. They keep the great Andante moving forward purposefully, full of detail and shifting character. The finale is a model of textural clarity, understated and exquisite. The recording is excellent, close-in with a touch of resonance.

TIM HOMFRAY

MOZART Violin Concertos vol.1: Nos.3 and 4; Violin Sonata K304 1 Francesca Dego (violin) Francesca Leonardi (piano) 1 Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Roger Norrington

CHANDOS CHAN 20234

Dego and Norrington capture the grace of the teenage Mozart’s music

A playing time under an hour may appear parsimonious, but that’s to reckon without the vital podium presence of Roger Norrington, 87 years young, and the sparks struck by his partnership with Francesca Dego. He launches Mozart’s Third Violin Concerto with a jolt of electricity and continues to spring enough surprises in the accompaniment (dynamic tweaks, lightning-bolt attacks, cantabile phrases floated on air) for a whole box set of concertos.

Dego, however, gives as good as she gets, and brings a pirouetting grace to the Third’s slow movement where most soloists aspire towards an ecstatic sublime: think Simone Biles rather than Julian of Norwich.

Endings and cadential landings are likewise executed without clumsy signposting: the Third’s finale vanishes like the Cheshire Cat, leaving just a smile on the air.

Amid all these ideas, Dego is not afraid to play simply, which serves her well in the orchestrally richer, more melodically intricate Fourth Concerto. Not since Isabelle van Keulen’s teenage recording on Philips have I heard a version that so satisfyingly captures the unaffected impudence of Mozart and the music he wrote in his own late-teenage period.

My only gripe with the sonata coupling is that a fortepiano would dovetail better than a piano with Dego’s grasp of 18th-century style and instrumental theatre, despite Francesca Leonardi’s sensitively scaled attack and the close, although not claustrophobic Chandos engineering. Otherwise, bring on the second volume.

PETER QUANTRILL

PENDERECKI Complete Quartets: String Quartets nos.1–4; Der unterbrochene Gedanke; Quartet for clarinet and string trio

Silesian Quartet, Piotr Szymyślik (clarinet)

CHANDOS CHAN 20175

Emotional and committed retrospective of 20th-century composer’s string quartets

Penderecki was that rare composer whose trajectory seemed to go backwards: starting out as an uncompromising modernist he eventually took on a more conservative style until by the end of his life he could almost be described as a neo-Romantic. This pattern is laid bare in his cycle of string quartets, comprising four numbered works and a separate miniature that between them amount to a mere 40 minutes of music.

Where the Tippett Quartet on its recent Naxos cycle (reviewed August 2021) filled out its programme with the String Trio, the Silesian Quartet has instead gone for his remaining quartet, a more ‘classical’ work for clarinet and strings (1993).

The Silesians similarly take a chronological approach, which lays bare that retrogressive journey. Their playing is gripping in the two seven-minute modernist works, nos.1 (1960) and 2 (1968), with all the composer’s experimental additions – percussive and vocal as well as string-based – welded seamlessly into the whole. The music may mellow in the later works, as we end up in a sparer, more meditative world akin to late Shostakovich, but the players here bring intense concentration and emotional commitment alongside their technical prowess. With vivid, forward recordings in the best Chandos style, this is a worthy successor to the Silesian Quartet’s revelatory Bacewicz recordings on the same label.

MATTHEW RYE

THE POLISH VIOLIN: VOLUME 2 SZYMANOWSKI Sonata op.9;

La Berceuse d’Aïtacho Enia op.52; Three Paganini Caprices op.40

WIENIAWSKA Violin Sonata in D minor; Tango BACEWICZ Kaprys polski no.1

Jennifer Pike (violin)

Petr Limonov (piano)

CHANDOS CHAN 20189

Volume two of Pike’s Polish odyssey hits the mark with magical playing

Szymanowski’s early music is semantically elusive – despite moments of explosive 19th-century rhetoric, one can already sense an underlying tendency towards the chromatically intensified exotic.

His opulent sound world leads the ear to expect outbursts of melodic prolificity, yet although his writing is predominantly lyrical in essence, Szymanowski shows no inclination to fall back on indelible melody.

The challenge is to make sense of the music – most notably the op.9 Sonata (1904), included here – which appears stylistically to look backwards and forwards at the same time.

This is where Jennifer Pike and Petr Limonov really come into their own, discovering a magical interpretive path that indulges the music’s luxuriant tendency with exquisite subtlety and musical focus. This becomes still more revelatory in the three Paganini caprice realisations, in which Pike refocuses her glistening virtuosity to create a dream world of haunting reminiscences. So musically entwined are Pike’s and Limonov’s fine-tuned responses to La Berceuse d’Aïtacho Enia, that one wishes this trance-like miniature would go on unfurling indefinitely.

The real discovery, however, is the D minor Sonata by Wieniawski’s daughter Poldowski (pseudonym of Irène Régine Wieniawska, later Lady Irène Dean Paul), whose delicious Tango (also included here) was famously recorded by Jascha Heifetz and Emanuel Bay. Composed only a few years after Szymanowski’s Sonata, ‘Poldowski’ demonstrates at this stage an even surer absorption of late Romantic creative tendencies. In between comes a dazzlingly playful performance of Bacewicz’s solo violin Kaprys polski from Pike, who nonchalantly negotiates its pyrotechnical hurdles. Exemplary annotations from Nigel Simeone and alluringly radiant sound provide further inducements to purchase.

JULIAN HAYLOCK

* THORVALDSDÓTTIR Enigma

Spektral Quartet

SONO LUMINUS DSL-92250

Stunning contemporary quartet music from Icelandic composer

Enigma, by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, is quite simply a magnificent achievement and a major addition to the string quartet repertoire, here given a committed, lovingly crafted performance by the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet, for whom Thorvaldsdóttir wrote it. With commissions from the likes of the Berlin and New York Philharmonics, Thorvaldsdóttir is already a major name in contemporary music, and even in her first work for string quartet, she manages to pose profound questions. Its title feels entirely appropriate: she explores states in constant flux, asking when noise becomes sound, when sound becomes music, and what imbues her music with the huge emotional heft that it wields.

From keening birdsong glissandos to icy harmonics, from massed col legno tapping that skitters across the ensemble to glowing tonal triads, Thorvaldsdóttir butts granitic monoliths of sound up against each other in her slow-burn opening movement, layering them on top of one another in her second, then forming an emotional arch of textures in the final movement. The result makes for challenging and uncompromising listening, certainly, but also seems to strain at the limits of what a string quartet can even be: her expansive soundscapes have horizons so distant that they sound scarcely achievable by four string players, and while there’s an elemental impassivity to much of the music, it feels deeply personal, too, not least in the heart-tugging shifting tonal harmonies and string-scraping ‘breathing’ that end the work.

The Spektral players observe the letter of Thorvaldsdóttir’s microscopically detailed score while injecting the thrill of new discovery, crucially allowing this majestic music the time and space it needs to hit its mark. It’s a mesmerising, cathartic performance, captured in close, authentic sound.

DAVID KETTLE

YSAŸE Poème élégiaque op.12; Six Sonatas for solo violin op.27 Jack Liebeck (violin)

Daniel Grimwood (piano)

ORCHID CLASSICS ORC100179

Some first-class performances of much-recorded violin cornerstones

For many years, Eugène Ysaÿe’s Sonatas were honoured more in the breach than the observance. How much the dedicatees played them, other than at private soirées, is difficult to gauge; and the only Golden Age violinists to record one were Dubois (no.3) and Zimbalist (no.6).

On record at least, the tide has turned. Jack Liebeck’s CD joins at least a dozen other complete cycles – and his performances are both very good and well recorded, by Dave Rowell and Andrew Keener in Henry Wood Hall. The Ysaÿe–Dubois–Grumiaux–Dumay dynasty has always laid emphasis on tonal beauty, and with his Joseph Henry bow Liebeck draws consistently lovely sounds from his 1785 Guadagnini. There is occasional astringency but virtually no discoloured tone.

His dynamic range is exceptional: again and again he plays really quietly, but he can also open up to project grandeur. In the Poème élégiaque, which gave Chausson more than just the title of his own Poème, Liebeck is well balanced with Daniel Grimwood’s piano. If I still prefer Frank Peter Zimmermann, it is because he gives better definition to the dance rhythms, as in nos.5 and 6; but Liebeck often contrives to be both accurate and expressive.

TULLY POTTER

12 STRADIVARI Works by Elgar, Falla, Heuberger, Kreisler, Kern, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, C. Schumann, R. Schumann, Suk, Szymanowski, Tchaikovsky and Vieuxtemps Janine Jansen (violin)

Antonio Pappano (piano)

DECCA 485 1605

FALLING FOR STRADIVARI Directed by Gerald Fox

ASTERISK FILMS

Searching for the souls of twelve Strads: an extraordinary double project with a captivating result

This CD and this film together document an extraordinary project, difficult enough to achieve at the best of times, but harder still with a pandemic ready to sabotage it at every turn. Twelve Stradivari violins were brought together from all over the world to be played and recorded, a great idea but a logistical nightmare brought to fruition by Steven Smith, joint managing director of the violin dealers J.&A. Beare, who borrowed them from artists who could spare them for a few days, from collectors and foundations, from people who never normally let them out of their safes, and then had to deal with transport, insurance and all the myriad concerns of moving objects worth millions of pounds around the world. All this we learn from the film.

Waiting for them were violinist Janine Jansen and pianist Antonio Pappano with a set of 15 short pieces to share out between the fiddles, and a film crew to record them doing it (see last issue). The recorded album would be a joy even if Jansen had just stuck with her own Strad, the 1715

‘Shumsky, Rode’. There are many arrangements, and Kreisler turns up a lot as composer, arranger and owner of two of the instruments. His version of the ‘Danse espagnole’ from Falla’s La vide breve opens the disc, played on his 1734 ‘Lord Amherst of Hackney’, with Jansen sultry and fiery. She shows tendresse rising to extravagant passion in Suk’s Song of love, playing the 1715 ‘Alard’, an instrument admired by everyone. She is languid and beautiful in Szymanowski’s first Mythe, with wonderful tone high on the E string of the c.1699 ‘Haendel’, and again in Ravel’s Vocalise-etude en forme de habanera (1722 ‘de Chaponay’). It is all captivating and well recorded, with comparing Strads a wonderful bonus.

Falling for Stradivari opens with Jansen on a boat to Stockholm talking of the souls of instruments, and the souls of their old players.

This is a recurring theme, as Smith and various makers and collectors discuss in close-up detail such matters as the type of wood Stradivari used in different periods, changes in design, and the particular merits of rarely played instruments. Jansen, seen back on the boat, wonders what she’s got herself into. We see Jansen and Pappano rehearsing, deciding which instrument works best with which piece, and finally recording them. Mostly they have great fun, although her hair is frequently in danger of getting under her bow.

John Dilworth, instrument maker and author, has the best line. Strads, he says, are like ‘little rubber ducks floating on the streams of history’.

TIM HOMFRAY

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