RECORDINGS

BACH Solo Partitas: no.1 in B minor BWV1002, no.2 in D minor BWV1004, no.3 in E major BWV1006

Linus Roth (violin)

EVIL PENGUIN CLASSIC EPRC 0040

Lyricism is to the fore in this unaccompanied Bach

Linus Roth produced a CD of Bach’s three unaccompanied sonatas last year. Here are the three partitas to complete the set, performed with rich vibrato and resonant close recording. The opening Allemande of the B minor Partita has crisp dotted rhythms emphasised by firm bowing, and the following Double is in gentle, mellifluous contrast. Later, Roth carries a strong melodic line through the constant broken chords of the Sarabande, though the Tempo di borea is a tad laboured.

The Allemande of the D minor Partita is simply and subtly shaped. The Courante flows elegantly, the Sarabande is stately. And so to the great Chaconne. The opening is airy and lifted, and in the early variations Roth’s tone is almost veiled, allowing the music to progress without undue interference. He lets Bach’s music speak for itself here, not getting in the way. The semiquavers of the central section, slightly detached, have crystalline clarity. Only when he heads back to D minor does Roth become more urgent, and from there he builds slowly to the final statement of the theme.

This is a fundamentally lyrical account, imbued with grace and beauty. The Preludio of the E major Partita is neatly played and many of the following dances are quite delicate; only the Bourrée is truly energetic.

TIM HOMFRAY

BEETHOVEN THE CONQUERING HERO BEETHOVEN Complete music for cello and piano Jennifer Kloetzel (cello)

Robert Koenig (piano)

AVIE AV2450 (3 CDS)

Plenty of gruff rhetoric and a fine, warm-toned period piano

I enjoyed Jennifer Kloetzel’s assertive, tonally assuaging cello line which anchors the Cypress Quartet’s Beethoven cycle on Avie (try the opening of the ‘Harp’ Quartet for its exemplary, forthright address).

Having gone it alone since the quartet disbanded in 2016, she brings the same qualities to the five numbered cello sonatas and three variation sets. A substantial bonus, not included by most of her rivals, is the Sonata op.17, written for a virtuoso horn player and persuasively invested here with intimations of depth not readily suggested by the original.

The gruff speaking tone of her Camillo Mandelli cello is offset nicely by the rounder, avuncular register of a lovely Blüthner piano (still mystifyingly underused on recordings, and undated in the booklet) and contained within a dry but realistic chamber-studio acoustic. Kloetzel’s pacing is expansive but she plays both in continual dialogue with Koenig. Without wishing to make her a hostage to fortune, I found myself thinking of the late Casals recordings (Philips) in the plainspoken nobility of her address to op.69’s first movement.

Throughout the set, as Beethoven’s music demands, there is a sense of argument and engagement, often fierce (op.102), sometimes playful (the Magic Flute variation sets). In a charmingly candid introduction, Kloetzel relates how she ‘couldn’t find a melody’ in her first encounter with op.5 no.2, and she interrogates the pauses and strolling disquisitions of both early sonatas so thoroughly that the listener also loses the thread. The much-compressed rhetoric of op.102 draws from her a firmer cantabile and some subtle portamento to round off the more jagged edges of the quick music. The grave Adagio that forms the centrepiece of op.102 no.2 –a sustained elegy to rival any other in late Beethoven – finds both Kloetzel and Koenig in their element.

PETER QUANTRILL

FAURÉ Ballade (two versions); selected piano pieces; Les berceaux; Piano Quartets: no.1 in C minor op.15, no.2 in G minor op.45 D’INDY Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français Marguerite Long (piano) Ninon Vallin (soprano) Pasquier Trio, Jacques Thibaud (violin) Maurice Vieux (viola) Pierre Fournier (cello) Conservatoire Orchestra,

Colonne Orchestra/ Philippe Gaubert/ André Cluytens/Paul Paray

APR 6038 (2 CDS)

World-beating Fauré from war-torn France

The works of direct interest to readers of The Strad in this well-filled omnium gatherum of Marguerite Long’s Fauré and d’Indy records are the former’s two piano quartets. Recorded on 10 May 1940, the G minor is a legendary performance, one of the few featuring Maurice Vieux, father of modern French viola playing. The Germans were invading the Low Countries, bombs had fallen on Paris during the night and Jacques Thibaud was worried sick about his soldier son Roger (who would be killed on the Sunday).

More unsettled than the popular C minor, the work perhaps suited the prevailing mood. Three of the players had known Fauré well and Fournier was well versed in the style. Seven of the eight 78rpm sides were first takes, only side two needing a second take. The playing is elysian: an inexorable pulse runs through the outer movements; terrific animation is sparked by the piano in the second movement and the Adagio non troppo features Vieux’s solos and Long’s bell evocations.

The C minor from 1956 with Jean, Pierre and Étienne Pasquier is lovely, although it has many rivals, whereas the G minor is hors concours. Again the outer movements have that Fauréan pulse, the scherzo is effervescent and the Adagio very slow and deeply felt.

Engineer Mark Obert-Thorn has done his best with an LP (op.15) and 78s (op.45) that have clearly been well loved and much played.

TULLY POTTER

GERVASONI Clamour; Six lettres à l’obscurité (und zwei Nachrichten); Strada non presa PESSON Respirez ne respirez plus; Bitume; Nebenstück; Farrago POPPE Buch; Zwölf; Tier; Freizeit

Diotima Quartet, Pascal Moraguès (clarinet)

NAÏVEV 7159

A compelling traversal of contemporary quartet repertoire

Three CDs, each dedicated to a different contemporary European composer, form this substantial and serious-minded offering from crack Paris-based new music specialists the Diotima Quartet. Bergamo-born Stefano Gervasoni provides the most uncompromising music, melding a Helmut Lachenmann-like vocabulary of extended noises and effects with more conventional playing. The Diotima players rise magnificently to his challenges, however, in performances that are as microscopically precise as they are compellingly expressive. The quartet attacks the bewildering profusion of sonic effects of his appropriately named Clamour, for example, with plenty of wit and spontaneity, transforming its succession of dramatic episodes into a journey through a strange but vivid landscape.

French composer Gérard Pesson sticks to more conventional performing techniques, but plays mischievous pranks with our expectations in the ghostly march of his Bitume, or his smeary ‘filtering’ of Brahms’s Ballade no.4 in B major through his unreliable recollections in his delicate Nebenstück for clarinet quintet. German Enno Poppe, on the other hand, sets his music growing organically from self-replicating cells, in the brusque, almost minimalist repetitions of the first movement of his Buch, for example, or in queasy, restless glissandos, four flavours of which generate the work’s second movement.

As an overview of particular contemporary trends across continental Europe, this release offers a wealth of contrasting works to provoke and persuade. More importantly, however, the Diotima players – the dedicatees or at least first performers of much of the music here – provide near-ideal accounts that never shy away from articulating the complexities of the composers’ intentions, but do so in expressive performances that focus fiercely on the works’ meanings and messages. It’s a dense but thoroughly rewarding set, recorded in rich, close sound.

DAVID KETTLE

OPALESCENCE

GIPPS Piano and chamber music Joseph Spooner (cello)

David Heyes (double bass)

Duncan Honeybourne (piano)

PRIMA FACIE PFCD 171

Lower strings make the case for Ruth Gipps

This warmly recorded recital represents a significant addition to the revival of British composer, oboist, pianist and conductor Ruth Gipps, offering no fewer than four world premiere recordings: the Cello Sonata of 1978, The Fairy Shoemaker for solo piano (penned when she was eight), the Scherzo and Adagio for unaccompanied cello of 1987, and her final work, the Double Bass Sonata composed for David Heyes himself in 1996.

Gipps was a favoured pupil of Vaughan Williams, but in her day suffered from the fact that she wrote tonal, folk-tinged music in an age when a composer had to be either an atonal modernist or Benjamin Britten, and preferably male, to be taken seriously. Here, Honeybourne brings a refulgent warmth to the Ravelian Opalescence and the Theme and Variations, but it’s her pieces for strings that make the strongest case for revival. The Cello Sonata is particularly fine: it’s cast in a post-Vaughan Williams language and Spooner convincingly conveys its puckishness and longerlined lyricism, and with Honeybourne brings real atmosphere to the central Andantino. The Double Bass Sonata is another intriguing discovery, containing yet another elegiac central movement lyrically brought off, and with some enjoyable interplay between bassist and pianist in its perkily quirky finale.

MENDELSSOHN String Quintets: no.1 in A major, no.2 in B flat major Doric Quartet, Timothy Ridout (viola)

CHANDOS CHAN 20218

Teenage mastery in sensational readings from a crack ensemble

As a welcome bonus for Mendelssohn fans, the Doric Quartet follows up its outstanding quartet series with this enchanting disc featuring the two string quintets, with rising star violist Timothy Ridout. The First Quintet belongs to that select group of teenage masterpieces (including the String Octet) that in terms of their creative originality and accomplishment still beggar belief. If Hausmusik (Virgin/Warner) turn inwards with a relaxed warmth and bonhomie redolent of the salon, the Doric players are more dramatically extrovert, relishing the light-as-air scherzo’s gruff interjections with an earthiness that recalls the contemporaneous heehawing of the Midsummer Night’s Dream music.

The fizzing opening movement of the B flat major Quintet (written two years before his death) is one of those glorious tremolando-in-overdrive Mendelssohnian inspirations that sets the pulse racing, and is perfectly caught by the Doric. The classic Pinchas Zukerman/Guarneri Quartet account for RCA/BMG possesses a majestic, impassioned sweep all its own, yet the Doric ensemble is more overtly detailed in its responses, revealing all manner of textural sophistication that often goes for nothing. Typically lucid ambient sound from producer/engineer Jonathan Cooper helps illuminate and clarify Mendelssohn’s exhilarating invention, even at its most ‘busy’. Another winner from these highly gifted players.

JULIAN HAYLOCK

MOZART Violin Sonatas: no.18 in G major K301, no.20 in A major K303, no.22 in A major K305, no.32 in B flat major K454

Francesca Dego (violin)

Francesca Leonardi (piano)

CHANDOS CHAN 20232

Another winning collection from two fine Mozartians

Mere months after impressing in a pair of Mozart violin concertos (reviewed November 2021), Francesca Dego returns with a programme of sonatas in which she is partnered by her long-time piano co-conspirator Francesca Leonardi. It’s truly a tale of two Francescas, as the balance between them is subtly judged throughout, each responding in the moment to the other, darting in and out of each other’s shadow and complementing each other just about ideally. The approach is moderninstrument with period awareness, the youthful playfulness of much of this music well caught. Repeats – of which there is generous provision – are cheekily ornamented, and Dego draws some beguiling sounds from her instrument (unidentified in the documentation). The sound, captured in the Fazioli Concert Hall in Sacile, 40 miles north of Venice, offers focus within its own natural ambience.

The earlier disc coupled concertos nos.3 and 4 with K304, the only minor-key sonata in the set of six composed in Mannheim and Paris in 1778 and published as ‘op.1’. These are all two-movement works with only short passages of slow music, which seems to suit Dego, who responds vividly to the freshness of three more of these earlier works.

The Largo introduction and the central Allegretto of the later K454 (Vienna, 1784), though, transpire more chastely, a touch less expressively than they do in the hands of, for example, Alina Ibragimova and Cédric Tiberghien (Hyperion). Nevertheless, by and large Dego and Leonardi’s polished and deeply considered performances of all four sonatas provide 70 minutes of unvarnished pleasure.

DAVID THREASHER

NIELSEN Violin Concerto op.33 SIBELIUS Violin Concerto in D minor op.47

Johan Dalene (violin) Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/John Storgårds

BIS BIS-2620 (HYBRID SACD)

Two great Scandinavian violin concertos from a rising star

Swedish violinist Johan Dalene won the 2019 Carl Nielsen Competition and is a current BBC New Generation Artist and ECHO Rising Star. After well-received discs of the Tchaikovsky and Barber concertos and of Nordic chamber music, this is already the 21-year-old’s third recording as part of his exclusive BIS contract.

Playing on the 1736 ‘Spencer Dyke’ Stradivari, he makes a highly convincing case for the Nielsen Concerto, a work that not enough players have made their own, and takes on its virtuosity with apparent ease, striking a balance between the music’s flightiness and sense of melancholy. Even in the most fraught writing, he keeps his cool and tonal lustre: the Poco adagio section of the second movement reveals a mature seriousness, but he’s not afraid to convey the fun and whimsy of the finale proper.

In the Sibelius Concerto he is of course up against a formidable back catalogue, yet he makes his own mark, helped by an individual and obviously well-honed contribution from John Storgårds and the Stockholm orchestra, most notably in the taut rhythms of the finale. Despite Dalene’s youth he presents a fully fledged interpretation, full of insight and conveying the work’s emotional trajectory with a masterly combination of freedom and control.

MATTHEW RYE

CROSSROADS: AMERICAN VIOLIN SONATAS PREVIN Violin Sonata no.2 SCHEMMER Violin Sonata GAY Violin Sonata Aleksey Semenenko (violin)

Artem Belogurov (piano)

BIS BIS-2545 (HYBRID SACD)

Powerful advocacy of three blues-inspired sonatas

There’s plenty of good music still to be written in C major, Arnold Schoenberg famously observed. It’s a maxim that the three composers on this enjoyable disc have clearly taken to heart – not in terms of that particular tonality, but in a jazzy, bluesy classical idiom whose own history stretches back a century. It’s also an idiom that the young Ukrainian violinist and former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist Aleksey Semenenko makes his own here, and one that fits his extrovert, muscular playing like a glove.

André Previn wrote his Second Violin Sonata in 2011 for Anne-Sophie Mutter, who’d been his wife until five years earlier. Semenenko clearly relishes its sophisticated blend of blues and rugged, off-key classical, with vibrato-rich, portamento-laden playing that swoops and sways its way through Previn’s Bernstein-esque writing – even if he can’t entirely distract from its sense of being a succession of vividly imagined but unrelated episodes. Tony Schemmer’s 1981 work began life as an oboe sonata, and ranges widely in its jazz evocations, from crooning blues in its slow movement, dedicated to the composer’s baby son, to the charleston rhythms that interrupt the dashing third movement ‘Omaggio a Django’. Despite the work’s expansive half-hour length, Semenenko makes a persuasive case in an expertly paced, vividly articulated account that moulds itself convincingly around Schemmer’s eclectic influences. Paul Gay’s 1984 Sonata is the most abstract of the three, and the most comfortable embracing dissonance. Semenenko comes into his own in some movingly shaped melodies in its rhapsodic introduction, as well as the exuberant figurations of its dashing toccata. These are warm, heartfelt accounts that showcase Semenenko’s considerable technical expertise, given equally distinctive, committed support by pianist Artem Belogurov, and captured in close, generous sound.

DAVID KETTLE

RAFF Duo op.59; Two Fantasie-Stücke op.86; Two Romances op.182; Cello Sonata in D major op.183

Christoph Croisé (cello)

Oxana Shevchenko (piano)

AVIE AV 2490

Appealing music from this prolific composer, sensitively played

Joachim Raff (1822–82), one-time assistant to Liszt in Weimar and disciple of Wagner, is today remembered, if at all, for his smallscale compositions rather than for the operas and symphonies that made his reputation in his lifetime. He wrote with fluent abundance in a somewhat generic Romantic style, making his distinctive musical fingerprints hard to pin down, despite clocking up almost 300 opus numbers. His works for cello and piano date from between the 1850s and 1870s and combine a lyrical ease with amenable harmonic turns of phrase: ‘charm’ was the word that came to mind most often while listening to this warmly recorded collection from Swiss–French–German cellist Christoph Croisé and Kazakh pianist Oxana Shevchenko.

Croisé is a sensitive player, sometimes perhaps too sensitive as he seems to be holding something back in his playing of the early pieces, the Duo and pair of Fantasie-Stücke, with a veiled tone and smooth bow work that often sound as if hiding behind Shevchenko’s mellifluous piano playing. The same applies to the Two Romances, which were originally written for horn so feel cramped in melodic register, but the subsequent sonata is worthy of its title and its greater musical rigour and sturdiness inspire the most open, robust playing from Croisé on the disc.

MATTHEW RYE

SCHUBERT Complete String Quartets Modigliani Quartet

MIRARE MIR 588 (5 CDS)

Committed playing in an all-too-rarely recorded cycle

As far as most music lovers are concerned, there are three-and-a-bit Schubert string quartets – the trio of magnificent works he composed towards the end of his life, plus the single-movement Quartettsatz of 1820. Perhaps that’s not a surprise, as the eleven quartets he created during his teens are a ragtag collection, owing more to youthful ambition and experimentation than to singleminded development of the form. While Schubert’s symphonies of the same period display an emerging maturity and individuality even as they wear their influences rather obviously, there is little in the quartets of the same period that displays a similar level of assurance, for all that the evolution in the young composer’s confidence, command and character is palpable as they progress.

Accordingly, these early works are conspicuous by their almost complete absence from concert programmes, and usually only turn up on disc as necessary components in ‘complete quartets’ projects such as this one from the Modigliani Quartet. The appearance of all 15 works in a single slimline box from such an estimable ensemble, too, is long overdue. In addition, Mirare provides an ideal soundstage (in three venues in France, Switzerland and Germany), allowing enough space around the four players for the sound to bloom but coming in close enough that each individual instrumental line is heard with due clarity. Combine that with these players’ fastidious attention to Schubert’s markings and you have perhaps the finest possible case for these all but forgotten works.

It’s in the mature quartets that any new recording comes up against stiff competition. While nobody is likely to be disappointed with the Quartettsatz, ‘Rosamunde’, ‘Death and the Maiden’ and G major quartets as presented here, some will have preferences for recordings that achieve greater intensity in the faster music or that more uncannily distil the enigmatic ambiguity of certain slow movements. The Modigliani players hardly put a proverbial foot wrong but their tendency is to open with a feeling of correctness and restraint, before allowing the music off the leash to build to its emotional peak. The A minor’s Menuetto can feel more forlorn than this, the D minor’s opening more furious, the ‘Death and the Maiden’ variations more otherworldly – for all the unanimity of articulation and hushed tone lavished upon the viol-like opening phrases of this celebrated movement.

The G major, though, is a triumph from start to finish, instantly pitching the listener into the emotional turmoil of the opening Allegro’s major–minor vacillations and laying bare the harrowing nervous disintegration of the Andante. Lovers of these epoch-making and influential late works will have their favourites among the many recordings available but, for the whole story, the Modigliani Quartet proves an authoritative guide.

DAVID THREASHER

GÉNÉRATIONS VIVALDI Preludes: in A minor (after Violin Concerto RV355), in C major (after Trio Sonata RV60); Violin Concertos: in B minor RV384, in C major RV179a ‘per Anna Maria’ LECLAIR Violin Concertos: in A minor op.7 no.5, in D major op.10 no.3 LOCATELLI Violin Concerto in E minor op.3 no.8

Théotime Langlois de Swarte (violin), Les Ombres, Margaux Blanchard, Sylvain Sartre (co-directors)

HARMONIA MUNDI HMM902649

Confidence and style underpin this exploration of Vivaldian cross-currents

Théotime Langlois de Swarte explores cross-influences between Vivaldi and two of his younger contemporaries in period violin playing of outstanding calibre, characterised throughout by pinpoint accuracy, tonal purity, clean articulation, sensitive phrasing and a flowing sense of line. He is supported by stylish, alert and expressive accompaniments and well-balanced recordings that combine immediacy, firmly focused yet transparent textures and an attractive ambient warmth, showcasing his 1665 Jacob Stainer violin to optimum effect.

De Swarte introduces Olivier Fourés’ reconstruction of Vivaldi’s solemn concerto RV179a with a flamboyant prelude, forewarning us of its surviving manuscript solo part’s demanding written-out cadenza in the finale and audacious annotated ornamentation in the lyrical central Largo. Flamboyance also characterises the accounts of the outer movements of Vivaldi’s concerto RV384, de Swarte truly whipping up the pace towards the end of its final Allegro. He links Vivaldi to Leclair with another exuberant Vivaldi-based prelude and juxtaposes the more French sensibilities of Leclair’s concerto op.7 no.5 with the Italianate bravura of ‘the French Corelli’s’ op.10 no.3, in which Leclair clearly emulates some of Locatelli’s exceptional pyrotechnics. These latter seem meat and drink to de Swarte in his account of Locatelli’s concerto op.3 no.8, save for a couple of uneasy moments in its final Capriccio.

ROBIN STOWELL

WEINBERG Sonatas nos.1–3 for solo violin Gidon Kremer (violin)

ECM 2705

Craggy brilliance and intensity in these fearsome sonatas

Linus Roth’s dazzling account of Mieczysław Weinberg’s three solo violin sonatas (reviewed October 2016), all relatively late works composed between 1964 and the composer’s death in 1979, set the bar very high. Roth sustains his beguiling, silvery pure sound no matter how extreme the technical pressures exerted by Weinberg’s coruscating invention, and segues between even the most startling musical juxtapositions with his sleight-ofhand legerdemain.

Fascinatingly, Gidon Kremer approaches these bracingly imaginative scores from a different semantic viewpoint. With Kremer one is more aware of the recreative and physical effort involved, which he clearly sees as part and parcel of the music’s sense of struggle. The First Sonata, especially, requires ultra-fast pyrotechnical reflexes, which in a flash may require a stratospheric position change accompanied by extreme transpositions of dynamic and bowing style, and back again. Rather than create the impression of a darting swallow in full flight, Kremer galvanises the attention with the hurtling menace of swooping hawk.

Kremer’s soundboard-buckling élan reaches its zenith in a live recording of the Third Sonata so fearless in its no-holds-barred intensity that at times one fears for the safety of his instrument. ECM’s typically close, fine-detailed engineering enhances the galvanising impression of a musician in peak flow with tactile precision.

JULIAN HAYLOCK

ENGLISH MUSIC FOR VIOLA AND PIANO

Music by Dunhill, Edmunds, Fulton, Harris, Mellers, Pitfield and Richardson Sarah-Jane Bradley (viola)

John Lenehan (piano)

DUTTON EPOCH CDLX 7390

Mid-century rarities brought vividly to life by a winning duo

With the viola music written in early 20th-century England for Lionel Tertis by the likes of Arnold Bax, York Bowen and Benjamin Dale now reasonably well known, it’s good to be reminded of what came next. The pieces featured on this fascinating recital were composed between 1939 and 1957 for the leading players of the following generation, Watson Forbes and Bernard Shore prominent among them.

Thomas Dunhill’s Triptych, still written for Tertis himself, includes some intricate double-stopping typical of his virtuoso style. Composed during the Second World War, the music seems to look back wistfully to happier times. A rousing curtain raiser, Intrada was written in 1939 for Forbes by his long-time collaborator Alan Richardson, as was William Harris’s poignant Suite, which was awarded a Tertis Prize at the Royal College of Music in 1952. The opening movement of Wilfrid Mellers’s Sonata is an imposing passacaglia redolent of Hindemith which is followed by a melancholy scherzo and a cathartic final dirge. Christopher Edmunds’s Sonata, composed for Shore in 1957, is the most recent music on the programme; its somewhat meandering musings suit the viola to a tee. Norman Fulton’s classically constructed Sonata da camera and Thomas Pitfield’s cheeky Sonatina bring the programme to an exhilarating close.

The tried-and-true partnership of Sarah-Jane Bradley and John Lenehan sound as if they have been performing this rare repertoire for years, authoritatively realising each composer’s personal sound world with unerring assurance. A violist himself, producer Michael Ponder provides gorgeous sound and contributes some eloquent booklet notes to boot.

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE

A NIGHT IN LONDON

Music by Avison, Cirri, Geminiani, Handel, Hasse, Oswald and Porpora

Ophélie Gaillard (cello/director) Sandrine Piau, Rachel Camarinha (sopranos) Lucile Richardot (mezzo-soprano) Gabriel Pidoux (oboe) Pulcinella Orchestra

APARTÉ AP274

A recording high on atmosphere, with some genuine rarities

This could easily have been just another disc of 18th-century cello concertos and concerti grossi.

Instead, by mixing genres and styles – concertos, cantatas, operatic arias, Scottish traditional tunes and English folk arrangements – the irrepressible Gaillard and her band create an evocative musical collage of the richness of London’s musical life in the mid-18th century.

A haunting solo cello version of Scottish cellist James Oswald’s She’s sweetest when she’s naked opens the programme, transporting us back in time to Handel’s London, where his operatic rival Nicola Porpora and the latter’s fellow cello virtuoso Giovanni Battista Cirri are represented by two sparkling cello concertos. Gaillard draws her expression from the bow in the elegant twists and turns of Cirri’s Largo, and the outer movements of Porpora’s G major Concerto are particularly exciting, with the rapid string-crossing given with a nice bite.

There is exuberant, percussive playing from the members of Pulcinella, with a sympathetic recording that brings out the depth of texture. Rough edges there may be, but there is energy aplenty as the musicians slam into the accents in Hasse’s Fugue, whipping up a veritable storm of semiquavers; and Geminiani’s English folk-song arrangements and Oswald’s Scottish songs take us into the taverns, with percussion adding to the convivial atmosphere.

JANET BANKS

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