Reviews

Yourmonthly critical round-up of performances, recordings and publications

CONCERTS

New York

MOMENTA QUARTET

BROADWAY PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 16 SEPTEMBER 2022

Over the past few years, the Momenta Quartet has championed the string quartets of Mexican composer Julián Carrillo (1875–1965), known for creating a theory of microtonal composition called Sonido 13 (Thirteenth Sound). On the second night of the ensemble’s four-night festival (delayed owing to the pandemic), the musicians marked Mexican Independence Day on 16 September with two stunning examples of his work.

Dating from 1937, no.5 is an early quartet – not microtonal though it sounds as if it could be – which opens with a luxurious splash for the ensemble, before plunging into the composer’s world of trills and torrential scales. Though the work is atonal, at one point a waltz sequence appears with surprising echoes of old Vienna. The instrumental hues tickled the ear, helped by the musicians’ immaculate polish.

By the time of no.11 (1962), Carrillo was in full quarter-tone mode, and its three movements show a refined, compressed energy – at times kept at bay, but at others allowed to explode. The microtones produce even more brilliant colours, with a relentless tangy edge. And it has to be said: though the intonation demands are extraordinary, the foursome kept everything pristinely tuned. Imagine a violent descending scale – all in quartertones – with the musicians creeping down in close chords, and you get a hint of the difficulties.

As a postscript, this past summer, the ensemble – which consists of violinists Emilie-Anne Gendron and Alex Shiozaki, violist Stephanie Griffin and cellist Michael Haas – has recorded Carrillo’s quartets nos.5, 6, and 13, as part of a complete survey of all 13 quartets for Naxos.

BRUCE HODGES

PARLANDO

MERKIN CONCERT HALL, KAUFMAN MUSIC CENTER 22 SEPTEMBER 2022

Parlando, a group ‘dedicated to creating educational and accessible listening experiences by integrating dialogue with historical and musical context in short classical concerts’ was founded in 2019 by conductor Ian Niederhoffer. September’s performance in Merkin Hall was packed and received enthusiastic applause at every turn; clearly it’s doing something right (beyond the free cookies handed out afterwards).

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Niederhoffer’s remarks before each work were just what he claimed they would be: educational and accessible, illuminating not only the pieces being performed but also the reasons behind their inclusion in the programme.

Reena Esmail’s work Teen Murti began with well-played solos by the principal strings before moving into an energetic section with resonant pizzicato in the cellos and basses and a memorable second theme introduced by the violas. A return to the opening material featured an extensive solo by principal cellist Diana Golden.

Harpist Parker Ramsay’s knowledgeable introduction to Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane was a treat but even more so, his mesmerising and virtuosic performance. This was followed by a string-orchestra arrangement of the two last movements from Beethoven’s op.130 String Quartet; while I personally much prefer this work as originally intended, especially in the case of the Cavatina, the Grosse Fuge came across compellingly. It takes a certain amount of energy and articulation to keep 24 instrumentalists from simply sounding overly heavy and Niederhoffer achieved this, with the lyrical moments played with shape and character. A Massenet encore concluded the evening with a rich and tender string sound.

LEAH HOLLINGSWORTH

LARA ST JOHN (VIOLIN) THE CRYPT AT THE CHURCH OF THE INTERCESSION 29 SEPTEMBER 2022

The intimacy of the concerts presented as a part of Death of Classical’s series ‘The Crypt Sessions’ is not only unique, but also important, for it’s about experiencing music as it should be heard. Although the artistic quality is invariably high, the musicians themselves are not elevated on a pedestal away from the audience – metaphorically or otherwise. Instead, the audience can hear every breath, see each bead of sweat, and is thus drawn into the artistic experience in a personal and authentic way.

This month Lara St John presented a marvellous programme of works from her recent album she / her / hers, all by women composers. While each piece shared some similarities – aplethora of doublestops, drones, pizzicatos, harmonics – St John’s introduction to each helped to point out the differences and made clear the unique voice and story of each composer. Milica Paranosic’s Bubamara opened the proceedings and demonstrated St John’s impressively clean playing and rich, resonant sound, despite double-stopping that could have come off as aggressive or harsh. The muted double-stops of Jessica Meyer’s Confronting the Sky gave way to harmonics and then a more violent middle section – but still given with purity of sound. Gabriela Lena Frank’s Luciérnagas flew all over the instrument and provided rich contrast. Adah Kaplan’s Whitewashed followed, a reflective piece written in response to the Black Lives Matter movement during the height of the pandemic – and by a 14-year-old!

Other highlights included Laurie Anderson’s Statue of Liberty, which used Tibetan bowls, played with a gong that hung from St John’s right arm and the highly virtuoso Kommós by Melissa Dunphy, whose dizzying demands St John brought off with aplomb. Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté’s Danse marocaine successfully brought the colours, flavours and rhythms of Morocco to the crypt, while St John’s stunning bow control was revealed in Ana Sokolović’s Danza 2, the most playful work of the night. Jessie Montgomery’s Rhapsody no.2 closed the evening perfectly.

LEAH HOLLINGSWORTH

Berlin

BORODIN QUARTET

KONZERTHAUS 27 SEPTEMBER 2022

I have vivid memories of a series of concerts given by the Borodin Quartet in the Small Hall of Berlin’s Konzerthaus, counterpointing music by Beethoven and Shostakovich. Looking up the dates, I was shocked to realise that they had taken place almost three decades ago! Fast forward to September, when the group returned to the same venue for a programme that included Beethoven’s op.132 and the monumental threnody that is Shostakovich’s final quartet, no.15. Of course, it was a completely different line-up from the one I had heard in the 1990s, Messrs. Kopelman, Abramenkov, Shebalin and Berlinsky all having retired during the intervening years. Alas, I had only one chance to hear the group live during Ruben Aharonyan’s tenure as leader; the concert under review was part of the group’s first foreign tour with his successor, Nikolai Sachenko.

Sachenko is a virtuoso for whom Beethoven’s intricate lines, which so nonplussed the piece’s first interpreters, hold no terrors, but on this showing he sounded almost too flamboyant for this sublime piece, particularly alongside his reticent violin colleague.

But that is a minor reservation: that Sachenko is indeed the man for the job was forcibly demonstrated by the Borodin’s devastating reading of the Shostakovich, its unbroken 40-minute arch sustained with the utmost intensity. Vibrato – or the absence thereof – was perfectly gauged by the four players in the opening Elegy, while their pianissimo entries in the following Serenade emerged inaudibly from the preceding sforzatos. Sachenko’s cadenza-like runs in the Intermezzo were judged to perfection and punctuated by perfectly calibrated chords from his colleagues. The piece’s desolate Epilogue was followed by a seemingly interminable silence.

An encore appeared out of the question, but the Borodin surprised and delighted us with the first movement from Shostakovich’s First Quartet, ending the concert with Tchaikovsky’s gorgeous Andante cantabile.

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE

Perth

NICOLA BENEDETTI (VIOLIN) SCOTTISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA/MAXIM EMELYANYCHEV

PERTH CONCERT HALL 28 SEPTEMBER 2022

James MacMillan has pointed to a possible shift in his compositional direction, kicked off by his large-scale, choral Fifth Symphony, unveiled at the 2019 Edinburgh International Festival. It was more than evident, too, in the radiant lyricism, the seamless flow between ideas and a certain thoughtful introversion in his Second Violin Concerto, written during the pandemic’s first period of lockdown, and premiered by its dedicatee, Nicola Benedetti, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Maxim Emelyanychev. And though Benedetti had plenty of demanding, showy writing (often of a somewhat determined, angst-ridden, even aggressive character) with which to demonstrate her talents, it felt significant that her entry – with three quiet pizzicato notes as part of far richer, broader orchestral harmonies – left her virtually inaudible.

Indeed, MacMillan’s solo part was very much integrated into the orchestral writing, distracted and diverted by an intrusive march theme, for example, or engaged in some eloquent one-on-one dialogues with orchestral colleagues towards the end of the work. Benedetti played the concerto with such passion and conviction that it felt as if she’d known it for years, though, as so often with MacMillan, there was the nagging sense, too, of a story being told – that intrusive march, those sudden anguished exclamations from the soloist, those consoling duets – whose specifics were being denied us. Nonetheless, it was an elegant, passionate, somewhat modest and contained piece, whose sense of concision and focus were compellingly conveyed by Benedetti.

DAVID KETTLE

London

TRIO GASPARD

WIGMORE HALL 18 SEPTEMBER 2022

Trio Gaspard captured all the many facets of Shostakovich’s First Piano Trio, from its early vehemence, sublime repose in the cello melody to the big ‘Hollywood’ finish. The first movement of Haydn’s C major Trio Hob.XV:21 was sprightly, fast-paced and rhythmically pointed, with violinist Jonian Ilias Kadesha wielding his bow energetically. This was followed by a graceful and shapely reading of the Andante molto, with warm legato from Kadesha and intense sound, while the final Presto was taken at a gleeful sprint, with a quirky violin cadenza which drew smiles from his colleagues. Altogether, an exuberant exhibition of vitality.

In the opening of Smetana’s G minor Trio op.15, written in the aftermath of the death of his beloved daughter Bedřiška, Kadesha was intense and keening on the G string, and produced more vibrant solos in the heights; the muscularity of the playing here created an emotional maelstrom that was vivid and raw. The second-movement Allegro, ma non agitato danced, with the Alternivo sections creating contrast – in the first the violin was light and fluid, in the second there were fierce dotted rhythms. The players drove hard in the finale, balm arriving in the second subject, with exquisite and tender playing from cellist Vashti Hunter. There were many emotions on display in this performance, the predominant one being tragedy.

TIM HOMFRAY

DANISH QUARTET

WIGMORE HALL 23 SEPTEMBER 2022

Britten appeared at both ends of this concert, which opened with his arrangement of Purcell’s Chacony in G minor. The Danish Quartet shaped it nicely, with robust playing and an affecting feather-light ending. The players were energetic and bright-toned in the opening Allegro non troppo of Mozart’s E flat major Quartet K428, which was dramatic and full of dynamic contrast. The Andante con moto was exquisite and delicate, treated as if it would crumble under undue pressure, with beautiful balance between the musicians. After the elegant simplicity of the Menuetto, with its touches of humour, the final Allegro vivace was conversational and exuberant.

In the opening movement of Britten’s Second String Quartet, Allegro calmo, senza rigore, the Danish Quartet produced a range of voices and colours, superbly controlled and catching the almost picaresque switches of character. There was spectral drama in the central Vivace, its tricky rhythmic interplay superbly dispatched. For the finale Britten produced a Chacony of his own, to which the Danish musicians brought wonderful subtleties of dynamics, with extended lyrical paragraphs and passages of anguished theatre, all slowly shifting in intensity. Through it all their intonation was impeccable.

TIM HOMFRAY

ZEMLINSKY QUARTET

WIGMORE HALL 25 SEPTEMBER 2022

After the disquieting opening of Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ Quartet K465 the Zemlinsky Quartet scampered along, passing streams of sparkling semiquavers to each other. There was an urbanity to its playing, which gave way to fervour, with the players sometimes rising from their seats at crucial musical moments. In the Andante cantabile the musicians constructed arcs of narrative and produced a suitably veiled tone in the suspensions over the cello semiquavers. After the finely crafted elegance of the Menuetto (with the cello’s open C left ringing at the end) the Allegro molto finale had Haydnesque touches of humour, with surprise dynamic shifts and tiny hesitations before a phrase’s repeat, teasing our expectations.

In the opening Allegro ma non troppo of Dvořák’s E flat major Quartet op.51 the Zemlinsky players swayed with the opening arpeggios and bobbed up on the accents. The gracious, sparkling dance which followed had much to delight, with apt touches of rubato and portamento. The melancholy manner in which the first violin (František Souček) opened the ‘Dumka’ second movement was gently echoed by violist Petr Holman, and there was a hint of swing in the energetic Vivace. The Romanze was poised and affectionate, the finale nimble and floating.

TIM HOMFRAY

RECORDINGS

☆ ADÈS Märchentänze; Hotel Suite from ‘Powder Her Face’; Lieux retrouvés; Dawn Pekka Kuusisto (violin) Tomas Nuñez (cello) Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Nicholas Collon

ONDINE ODE 1411-2

World-premiere recordings that beguile and entrance

Although it may at first appear an unlikely source for four worldpremiere recordings of recent works by Thomas Adès, this devotedly performed and sympathetically engineered album was inspired by an Adès Festival presented by these artists in Helsinki in autumn 2021.

For readers of The Strad, the main item of interest will probably be Märchentänze (‘Dances from Fairytale’, 2020), a four-movement suite originally for violin and piano, and subsequently orchestrated, played by long-term Adès champion Pekka Kuusisto. This is one of Adès’s most immediately approachable scores, featuring two exuberant dances framing a hauntingly elegiac meditation and a movement evoking the skylark. Throughout, Kuusisto demonstrates an intuitive feel for the work’s enchanting rusticity.

Of similar length and also cast in four movements is the orchestral version of 2016’s Lieux retrouvés (‘Rediscovered Places’), originally for cello and piano. This is a darker, more introspective work than Märchentänze, throughout which Adès solves the notorious problem of balancing solo cello and orchestra with intuitive ease and an exuberant ear for colour and texture. Tomas Nuñez traces the music’s emotional contours with compelling immediacy.

Also included here are beguiling performances of the ‘Hotel Suite’ from Adès’s 1995 opera Powder Her Face, and 2020’s ravishingly atmospheric Dawn, subtitled ‘Chacony for orchestra at any distance’.

JULIAN HAYLOCK

PORTRAIT: ALEX BARANOWSKI

BARANOWSKI Works including Wiosna, Boy and Bird, Don’t Quit, The Windermere Children, Thoughts of Home, For the Love of It All La Pietà/Angèle Dubeau (violin)

ANALEKTA AN28750

A programme best taken in small doses rather than swallowed whole

Canadian violinist Angèle Dubeau and her all-string ensemble La Pietà have already produced several well-received portrait discs, devoting entire CDs to music by composers including Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, John Adams and Max Richter. In the case of London-based Alex Baranowski, however, his music might have been better served in smaller doses.

He has worked extensively in film music – indeed, several of the disc’s collection of short tracks come from his movie scores – and clearly has a knack for putting together emotionally involving, slow-moving, quietly radiant music that (at its best) can sound a lot like something by Pēteris Vasks. The opening Wiosna (‘Spring’), for example, inspired by his grandfather’s resilience after imprisonment in a Soviet forced labour camp during the Second World War, exudes a deep sense of melancholy throughout, matched by Dubeau’s silkysmooth, immaculate and gloriously unadorned solo playing, and her ensemble’s uncanny sonic mix of To browse through more than a decade of The Strad ’s recording reviews, visit www.thestrad.com/reviewsrichness and almost icy purity. This is the most substantial and arguably the most successful work on the disc, and many of the other tracks tend to reiterate its slow-moving harmonies, soaring violin line and gently chiming piano, such that by the end the elements of Baranowski’s distinctive musical vocabulary have lost much of their charm.

He rings the changes, however, with a darker, more chromatic ‘Winston and Julia’ (from his score for Northern Ballet’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) and the achingly slow waltz of ‘For Then’. Despite the disc’s musical sameyness, Dubeau and her ensemble are unfailingly committed, in graceful, eloquent performances. There’s plenty to enjoy here – though it’s perhaps best dipped into rather than consumed end to end – and it’s captured in close, warm sound.

DAVID KETTLE

BEETHOVEN Violin Concerto op.61

STRAVINSKY Violin Concerto

Vilde Frang (violin) Kammerphilharmonie Bremen/Pekka Kuusisto

WARNER CLASSICS 0190296676437

Classical and Neoclassical masterpieces enthrall in readings of great immediacy

Beethoven, in the most symphonic of violin concertos, demands absolute complicity between soloist and conductor. They must be in on the job together, and here they are, to a degree rivalled in my experience only by Veronika Eberle and Simon Rattle (whom I heard live in concert; there’s a projected LSO Live CD in the pipeline). So you might expect from Kuusisto, who must have played the solo part himself even more often than Frang, but drop into the first movement’s G minor side-chapel of prayer to hear Frang and the Bremen players in full communion, without any sentimental slackening of the movement’s steady basic pulse.

Those in search of fuller tone from their soloist have plenty of alternatives, though there’s nothing hair shirted about Frang’s supple vibrato, the grave cantabile she brings to the Largo or her playfully spontaneous approach to the finale’s main theme (echoed by some offthe-cuff woodwind ornamentation). All I would wish is that her highly articulate phrasing did not lead to quite so many gabbled and swallowed notes in the outer movements.

For the Stravinsky, Frang pulls out a dirtier sound that stands up well to the Parisian circus orchestration. She defies any notions of the piece as an exercise in Neoclassical alienation with a sinewy commitment to the opening Toccata’s balletic combat, finding contrasting modes of inner turmoil within the two arias and a sense of euphoric release in the finale. Despite the brightly lit studio ambience, it’s easy to picture the hair flying off her bow. With Frang, we can hear what Balanchine heard when he choreographed the concerto not once but twice.

PETER QUANTRILL

BRAHMS ‘Double’ Concerto in A minor

C. SCHUMANN Piano Trio in G minor

Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin) Pablo Ferrández (cello) Lambert Orkis (piano) Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/Manfred Honeck

SONY CLASSICAL 19658 74110-2

Brahms playing big on personality but which fails to engage emotionally

Anne-Sophie Mutter’s 1983 recording of Brahms’s ‘Double’ Concerto long held the status of a classic, despite Karajan’s languid conducting and the mismatch between her rather wiry tone and cellist Antonio Meneses’s grandiosity.

Almost four decades on, her sound is silkier and her partner a player from the new generation, the Spanish cellist Pablo Ferrández, born eight years after that DG recording was made. They’re two big personalities, taking their time when the spotlight is upon them, milking every rallentando and pouncing on every sforzando. The effect, in this paradigmatic work of reconciliation, is of two great actors declaiming their new-found eternal fidelity from the stage before leaving the theatre in separate cabs. They sing together, sure enough, and Manfred Honeck’s Czech PO provides epic accompaniment in a not unappealingly resonant acoustic. But there’s intimacy to be found in the ‘Double’ Concerto, too, and among digital recordings you may hear it more readily from the Capuçon brothers in their standard-setting reading with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester under Myung-Whun Chung (Virgin/Erato) or in the humaneness and humility of Antje Weithaas and Maximilian Hornung with Andrew Manze’s NDR Radiophilharmonie (CPO).

More engaging is the rather unexpected coupling, Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio in G minor, easily the finest of her large-scale works and a far cry from the foursquare phrasing and unimaginative development of her youthful Piano Concerto. Mutter and Ferrández work well together, even if pianist Lambert Orkis is occasionally a little reticent – as if he were wary of treading on his colleagues’ toes – surely the wrong tack to take in a work composed by one of the finest pianists of her era.

DAVID THREASHER

BRAUNFELS String Quartets nos.1–3; String Quintet Minguet Quartet, Jens-Peter Maintz (cello)

CAVI-MUSIC AVI8553018 (2CDS)

Persuasive performances of music by a figure banned by the Nazis

No one can have felt life’s ironies more bitterly than Walter Braunfels himself: in 1933 the Nazis had effectively ended his career by placing him on their list of banned composers. Born a Jew, he had converted to Christianity and fought on the frontline during the First World War. His three sons were then sent to fight for the Nazis, and only two came back. Meanwhile Braunfels kept writing, and no wonder if, in 1944, the First Quartet does not always succeed in slipping free of a professionally crafted, contrapuntal knottiness, for all that he drew its themes from an epic religious opera, Verkündigung, written in the mid-1930s.

In fact any of the music here could have been composed a quarter of a century earlier. Also from 1944, the Second is more distinctive, sharing a heroic–tragic goal (and at least one head-motif ) with Beethoven’s ‘Rasumovsky’ no.1. The scherzo still suffers from a tendency to go round in circles, exacerbated here by taking every repeat, compared with the Auryn Quartet on CPO. By the time of the Third Quartet from 1947, Braunfels had rediscovered the voice of his successful orchestral music through a tauter form and the angular melodic profile of Schoenberg’s Expressionist period.

The wartime String Quintet in F sharp minor uses the second cello to introduce a late-Straussian opulence to the harmony. Ilya Gringolts and his colleagues (on Profil) pile on the late-late-Romantic agony and ecstasy; the Minguet’s experience with the quartets gives these players the edge. A Bartókian astringency to their sound serves them (and the music) well in building the paragraphs of the Brucknerian Adagio, and they never press the angst button too hard or too soon. Solid, closely miked radio-studio engineering.

PETER QUANTRILL

MARTEAU Complete works for string quartet vol.3: String Quartet no.3 op.17; Eight Songs op.10

Isasi Quartet, Karine Deshayes (soprano)

CPO 555130-2

Telling readings of quartets by a violinist-composer marrying French and German styles

Henri Marteau (1874–1934) was born in Reims of a German mother (who had been a pupil of Clara Schumann) and a French father. He was a child prodigy violinist (among his early achievements was the US premiere of Brahms’s Violin Concerto aged 19) and later taught violin and chamber music in Geneva before moving through many of the leading music schools in Germany. This musical bilingualism – caught between ‘French elegance’ and ‘German thoroughness’, as one early critic put it – was his undoing in the First World War, when he was rejected as a runaway by the French and interned as an enemy alien in his adopted Germany.

It was against this background that he composed the last of his three string quartets in 1918, an unusual work that also displays a duality with Franco-Belgian cyclic form meeting Lisztian thematic metamorphosis. A rather demure C major opening movement is followed by an intense ‘Hymn to Sorrow’ slow movement, fantastical part-pizzicato, part-waltzing scherzo and triumphant finale. The members of the Isasi Quartet have obviously worked hard to bring these two musical worlds together, and the result is more convincing in sound than the music appears on paper.

☆

The accompanying song-cycle dates from 1905 and is probably the first work to couple string quartet with soprano voice, predating the better-known examples by Schoenberg, Respighi and Barber. The string writing, atmospherically played here, enhances the rather precious poetry of Marteau’s first wife Agnes (the first poem is by Lenau), but with singer Karine Deshayes the results are effective.

MATTHEW RYE

☆ MOZART ‘Prussian’ Quartets: no.1 in D major K575, no.2 in B flat major K589, no.3 in F major K590 

Chiaroscuro Quartet

BIS BIS-2558 (SACD)

One of today’s greatest quartets shines a light on late Mozart

The Chiaroscuro Quartet, led by Alina Ibragimova, has largely confined its repertoire for BIS to the First Viennese School, and here alights upon Mozart’s last three quartets. These were composed in 1789 and 1790 following a visit to the cello-playing Friedrich Wilhelm II, King of Prussia, and to flatter the king Mozart is assiduous in providing plenty of exposed writing for his instrument – even more so than Haydn in his op.50 for the same patron. For

the sake of balance, that means solos for all, and this is where the four individual characters of the Chiaroscuro come in, Ibragimova’s focused sound contrasting with the generous tone of second violinist Pablo Hernán Benedí, Emilie Hörnlund’s eager viola finding its foil in the gently rounded voice of cellist Claire Thirion.

As ever, these players’ unity of approach and close observation of the score pay dividends, too: the almost other-worldly sotto voce marked at the opening of K575 means that the sudden forte all of 19 bars later makes its full impact. Some may feel that this hushed tone becomes a default dynamic whenever anything below mp is asked for; others will relish the range of colours available to the ensemble as recorded – closely but not clinically – at Snape Maltings.

Slow movements come off especially well, notably the big Andante of K590, affecting in its apparent simplicity. All that’s missing is the playfulness essential to Mozart. Try the Doric’s account (Chandos), where the whimsicality of the finale of K590 is more acutely captured. That’s on two discs thanks to some more expansive tempos than the Chiaroscuro; also on a single disc is the Engegärd Quartet (LAWO Classics), which is less refined but every bit as enjoyable.

DAVID THREASHER

MUSTONEN String Quartet no.1; Piano Quintet

Engegård Quartet, Olli Mustonen (piano)

AWS LWC 1243

A melting pot of styles is brought together by committed performances

Olli Mustonen will be most familiar to many as a pianist, but he has long come into his own as a composer, with symphonies to his name as well as a broad range of chamber music. From the two examples here, it’s difficult to pin down his specific style, since the influences of composers as wide-ranging as Bartók, Shostakovich and Sibelius, as well as more recent trends in minimalism and neo-Baroque, have all been absorbed into his compositional make-up.

The String Quartet of 2017, played here with great commitment and immediacy by its dedicatee, the Engegård Quartet, is arresting from the start, with its initial musical challenge answered in modified form by the finale, which resolves into an energetic Con fuoco all’Ungharese. In between come a robust scherzo and a rhythmically insistent slow movement dominated by what appears to be one of his signature stylistic features, a long procession of triads.

The slightly earlier Piano Quintet (2014) is spun from similar cloth, and here features the composer himself alongside the Engegård in a performance imbued with biting force, conviction and technical ease. Its highlight is probably the central Passacaglia, which has insistent power and seems to convey all the angst of our century. The power of these recordings is enhanced by an acoustic with plenty of air and bloom.

MATTHEW RYE

NÁPRAVNÍK Piano Quartet op.42; Violin Sonata op.52

Nina Karmon (violin) Diyang Mei (viola) Justus Grimm (cello) Oliver Triendl (piano)

CPO 555405-2

Spirited accounts of chamber music by a composer admired by Tchaikovsky

Eduard Nápravník (1839–1916) was central to Russia’s concert life for nearly half a century, conducting innumerable symphony concerts for the Russian Imperial Music Society between 1869 and 1881, and over 4,000 performances, invariably from memory, as principal conductor of the Mariinsky Theatre. Remarkably, he also found time to compose around 200 works, mostly during the summer months when he would also be preparing for the new season.

His 1882 Piano Quartet (here receiving a world-premiere recording) is cast in the standard four movements, with the scherzo second and, typically for its period, is designed more for concerthall impact than the intimacy of the salon, with a virtuoso piano part (Nápravník was a by all accounts a gifted player). Stylistically the quartet takes its lead from Schumann, intensified by Tchaikovskian melodic yearning, Brahmsian double sixths, and (in the scherzo) a startling premonition of Shostakovich. This fine team plays with compelling freshness allied to a grand sweep that carries the listener irresistibly along.

The Violin Sonata dates from 1890 and Tchaikovsky thought so highly of it, plans were put in place to premiere it alongside his own Souvenir de Florence string sextet. And little wonder, as this time around the music has a more Russian cosmopolitan feel, but with the piano again taking the lead. If Lana Trotovšek and Ludmil Angelov (on Toccata Classics, the first release in a series of Nápravník’s complete chamber music) tend towards a more trenchant, darker sonority, Nina Karmon and Oliver Triendl play with a lighter touch and real sense of flow, matched by the ambient clarity and textural transparency of CPO’s sonics.

JULIAN HAYLOCK

SCHUBERT String Quintet D956; Quartettsatz D703 Brodsky Quartet, Laura van der Heijden (cello)

CHANDOS CHAN 10978

Cross-generational magic from the Brodskys and Laura van der Heijden

Even in the context of marking the Brodsky Quartet’s 50th anniversary, this is a wonderfully distinctive recording of Schubert’s great String Quintet. And, while the choice of Laura van der Heijden as additional cellist would always be a boon, it’s an especially emotionally resonant touch given that the age gap between her and the quartet is similar to the one between the Brodsky players and their mentor Terence Weil when they performed this work with him.

As for defining features, think buoyancy and definition – with plenty of air surrounding the staccatos, and crisply precise notevalues into which at times come expertly weighted rubatos and pauses. There’s also fine dynamic clarity, and a dry-toned lucidity intoned with aching sweetness one moment and acerbic punch the next. The work’s quietness, fragility and violence all feel grippingly magnified. Highlights include, in the Allegro ma non troppo, the tiny pulls at ends of the second subject phrases that create a delicate hesitancy; the Adagio’s outer sections of prayer-like quiet and high textural contrasts, then the shock of its central, angrily churning instability; and the proud poise of the last two movements.

The Quartettsatz is no less successful, and the whole lot is captured with clarity. Highly recommended.

CHARLOTTE GARDNER

SMYTH String Quartet in E minor

DELIUS String Quartet (1888)

Villiers Quartet

NAXOS 8.574376

A Delius discovery is brought to life with compelling musicianship

Ethel Smyth wrote her E minor Quartet in two parts: the first two movements date from 1902 and the last two from 1912, but there’s no obvious stylistic imbalance. The first movement opens with a rhythmic figure reminiscent of a genial fragment of Morse code, presented by the viola and much used later. The movement is marked Allegretto lirico and the Villiers Quartet is accordingly gentle and lyrical, the weaving figures near the start deftly played by first violinist Katie Stillman; there’s some impish staccato semiquaver playing, and a warm-blooded outburst in the development when Smyth moves to C major, but for the most part sweetness is to the fore. There’s an elfin lightness to the second movement (Allegro molto leggiero), with violist Carmen Flores taking the lead and all four players executing Smyth’s dancing semiquavers with rhythmically taut neatness. The great extended passages of the Andante are beautifully crafted, and the sparkling final Allegro energico is full of incidental detail.

The last two movements of Delius’s early C minor Quartet were lost until 2018, when they turned up at auction. The work has a wide emotional range, grim at the opening, granitic and forbidding at the end, with drama, dance and fervent lyricism in between. The Villiers Quartet gives it a fine first recording, captured in warm and well-balanced sound.

TIM HOMFRAY

ELLEN TAAFFE ZWILICH Cello Concerto; Peanuts Gallery; Romance for violin; Prologue and Variations for string orchestra

Zuill Bailey (cello) Joseph Edelberg (violin) Elizabeth Dorman (piano) Santa Rosa Symphony Orchestra/ Francesco Lecce-Chong

DELOS DE3596

A brand-new cello concerto from a Pulitzer prize-winner

A cello concerto by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b.1939) was always going to be big news. Hitherto, the renowned American composer has written a Double Concerto for violin and cello and a Cello Symphony featuring the whole cello section, but no solo work for cello and orchestra.

The Cello Concerto’s premiere took place in March 2020, just before the covid lockdown; now its dedicatee, Zuill Bailey, commits it to disc for the first time. His formidable technique and profound involvement with the music lend extra power to this sassy, jazzy work in which Zwilich’s hallmark propulsive energy in passages of incisively bowed syncopated semiquavers, alternates with moments of profound calm. The orchestration is original and very effective, with the solo cello – placed forward within the recording – dialoguing with different instruments, and sounding particularly effective when playing in its uppermost reaches, above high violins, at the start of the third movement.

☆

Zwilich is also represented here by two works from her middle years which made a more profound impression on me than the concerto, which by comparison felt only skin deep. The tightly worked Prologue and Variations (1983) shows a particular affinity for the string-orchestra medium, and the Romance, for the composer’s own instrument, is beautifully characterised by concertmaster Joseph Edelberg. Zwilich’s popular Peanuts Gallery for piano and orchestra features a different character from Schulz’s cartoon strip in each movement, with ‘Snoopy Does the Samba’ particularly fun.

JANET BANKS

☆ WHERE IS HOME / HAE KE KE Works by Selaocoe, Platti and Bach

Abel Selaocoe (cello, voice) various artists

WARNER CLASSICS 9029622433

An album announcing the arrival of a major new boundary-defying talent

Cellist, singer and composer Abel Selaocoe brings together in this recording the musical idioms of his native South Africa and interlaces them with Baroque music. He embraces everything from solo cello to ensembles of instrumentalists and singing in the distinctive South African choral and solo styles, with a theorbo, a string quartet, a kora (West African harp) and a talking drum featured along the way. Most importantly there is improvisation.

The opening track, Ibuyile I’Africa, features Selaocoe singing and playing together with a group of players (which includes Yo-Yo Ma) and singers. After a delicate fluttering opening for solo cello, presumably improvised, there is a slow sung hymn with rich harmonies and Selaocoe providing a reflective obbligato. It’s followed by a short solo improvised number, Dipolelo, inventive and captivating, full of double-stops. After Zawose, in which the percussion comes into its own, underpinning singers and strings, comes the first piece of Baroque music: Giovanni Benedetto Platti’s Cello Sonata no.7, played with fine Baroque sensitivity and incorporating improvisations for cello and kora, the bright-toned West African harp. Later there are two Bach Sarabandes, in the first of which, from the Third Suite, Selaocoe sings over the first repeat.

There is much here that is wonderful, full of invention and vitality and superbly well played and sung, captured in a recording that is vivid and sometimes very close.

TIM HOMFRAY

BOOKS

The Creative Worlds of Joseph Joachim Eds. Valerie Woodring Goertzen, Robert Whitehouse Eshbach

353PP ISBN 9781783276547 BOYDELL PRESS £70

This compilation of essays forms the published record of an international conference held at Boston’s Goethe Institute in 2016. Editors Valerie Woodring Goertzen and Robert Whitehouse Eshbach bring order to conference paper chaos by organising their book into three sections.

Following Eshbach’s introductory essay, in which he reviews the available literature about Joachim, the first two parts of the volume embrace some less usual aspects of the virtuoso violinist’s life and creativity. Part One (‘Identity’) comprises three informative studies exploring aspects of Joachim’s youth: the profound influence of Mendelssohn in his formative years (R. Larry Todd); his Jewish ancestry and associated anxieties, and his early assimilation into Christian society (Styra Avins); and his Hungarian background and empathy with Hungarian, and specifically Romani, music as well as violinists such as Ferenc Bunkó and Gyula Benczy (Mineo Ota).

‘Joachim as Performer’ is the theme of the second part, which includes essays on his performances in Britain, both generally, courtesy of recently available personal papers of his family (Ian Maxwell), and more specifically at London’s Saturday Concerts (Michael Musgrave) and Monday Popular Concerts (Therese Ellsworth), concentrating on issues of repertoire and critical reception. Of particular interest to readers of The Strad will be Ruprecht Kamlah’s investigation into the provenance and subsequent ownership of some of the violins associated with Joachim, and Sanna Pederson’s survey of Joachim’s foremost pupils and their subsequent careers in the profession. Joachim’s predilection for string quartet performance is Robert Riggs’s topic for examination, focusing on the significance of the Berlin Joachim Quartet and its varied membership, and Karen Leistra-Jones considers Joachim’s powerful spiritual connections to Beethoven and the reception of his performances as examples of Kunstreligion or sites ‘of re-enchantment’. Finally, Beatrix Borchard compares the impact of Joachim’s programming on performance history with that of his contralto wife Amalie and William P. Horne examines the influence of Joachim’s and Brahms’s performing experiences on the Trio section of the third movement of Brahms’s Piano Quartet op.26, making interesting connections with Beethoven’s Violin Sonata op.30 no.2 and Schumann’s String Quartet op.41 no.3.

Part Three is dedicated to Joachim’s compositions. Following her monograph on Joachim’s music (2018, reviewed in The Strad, April 2019), Katharina Uhde re-examines how some of his ‘audience pleasers’ as a youthful performer, notably pieces by violinist–composers such as Bériot, Ernst and David not only impacted on his own fantasies and other early compositions (1841–53) but also contributed to his eventual rejection of pronounced virtuosity in both his programming and compositional approach.

Vasiliki Papadopoulou then offers a greatly enhanced understanding of the genesis of Joachim’s Violin Concerto no.1 in G minor and its substantial revisions and Valerie Woodring Goertzen analyses the Overture to Henry IV op.7 as an extended single-movement symphonic drama making skilful use of thematic transformation within a sonata-related design. Joachim’s religious identity and Jewish ancestry are revisited in Marie Sumner Lott’s survey of the Hebräische Melodien op.9, along with the contemporary vogue of Romantic medievalism and anti-Judaism. Robert Riggs’s second contribution uses Tovey’s analytical essay on the ‘Hungarian’ Violin Concerto op.11 as a starting point for deeper discussion of the work’s structure, violin writing, historical significance and the style hongrois. Riggs disagrees with Tovey on various issues and makes a case for the work’s relationship to piano concertos by Beethoven (no.3) and Brahms (no.1).

Incorporating an extensive bibliography and index, 27 illustrations, 18 tables and 40 music examples, this compilation comes with all the requisite scholarly trimmings. It will doubtless interest a wide and diverse readership and fill several voids in published information about this renowned German violinist, composer and pedagogue, his wide circle of musicians and the musical aesthetics, culture and styles of their time.

ROBIN STOWELL

The Caldersmith Papers: Writings on Guitar and Violin Acoustics

Graham Caldersmith

194PP ISBN 9780648588016 MUSICBOOKS PRESS $34.95

This is both a memorial to an interesting character and a kind of time capsule of the scientific approach to instrument making just before the computer age changed the way everything was done. Graham Caldersmith was an Australian guitar and violin maker who had a scientific training and took a keen interest in applying acoustical measurements and interpretation to add an additional set of tools to his workshop equipment. I have clear memories of his engaging personality and enquiring mind, from a visit he made to Cambridge in the late 1970s.

This book is a reprinted collection of Caldersmith’s writings covering roughly the period 1970–2000, reflecting his various interests in guitar and violin design, acoustics and innovation. Some are written for a technical scientific audience, but most are aimed at instrument makers or general readership. The editor has done a good job of grouping the contributions by topic and then by chronology to impose some order on the book, but still the disparate nature of the material makes this something that most readers would want to dip into, rather than read from cover to cover. There are things here to please acousticians, things to please violin or guitar makers, things to please Australians – and things that will bring a whiff of nostalgia to anyone of a certain age.

One lifelong interest of Caldersmith is well represented in the book – the design, construction and promotion of innovative stringed instruments. Perhaps inspired by the Carleen Hutchins octet of acoustically scaled violins, Caldersmith created a family of scaled classical guitars. The first step was a baritone model, tuned a 5th lower than a standard guitar. We learn that he received encouragement from John Williams based on his prototype instrument, and went on to add a bass and a treble model, framing the baritone and standard guitar to form a quartet. He also turned his guitar maker’s eye on the design of the violin, and created a family of novel bowed instruments, the ‘Almas’, designed to place the major resonances in a similar place in the playing range to what is found in guitars.

The most substantial block of technical acoustics concerns the behaviour of guitars. Although the hand-annotated graphs, drawn by an old-style chart recorder, look rather quaint now, Caldersmith’s understanding of how the first few resonances of a guitar body work to turn the energy from the strings into sound is quite complete and modernsounding. It comes as something of a surprise to realise how little our understanding of this scientific question has changed since the 1980s – in part because of the insightfulness of his contributions.

One theme running through a lot of the technical material is the behaviour and selection of wood for instrument making. Caldersmith was a great advocate of Australian native timbers. This sustainability-flavoured theme is typical: in many ways he was ahead of his time. Not many instrument makers in the 1980s had an acoustical measurement set-up in their workshop, but nowadays there are a number of high-profile makers who routinely do measurements. Indeed, some of them present technical papers at conferences and write software packages for instrument measurement. They have inherited the spirit of Graham Caldersmith and other pioneers like him.

JIM WOODHOUSE