Reviews

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

THIS MONTH’S RECOMMENDED RECORDINGS

Our pick of the new releases

Beethoven powerfully reimagined by Kavakos, Ma and Ax PAGE 85

Alina Ibragimova: beguiling in solo Telemann PAGE 88

Rachel Podger probes solo Baroque rarities PAGE 92

New York

A marathon of virtuosity from Vengerov and Osetinskaya

FADI KHEIR

MAXIM VENGEROV (VIOLIN) POLINA OSETINSKAYA (PIANO) ISAAC STERN

AUDITORIUM, CARNEGIE HALL 20 OCTOBER 2022

Maxim Vengerov’s impressive bow control made for strikingly long phrases in Bach’s B minor Violin Sonata BWV1014, with Polina Osetinskaya at the piano. Whether in the opening Adagio or final Allegro, each movement came off as effortless and lithe, double-stops as smooth as silk and spiccato passages given with a smiling ease.

It was followed by Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, which opened with a mesmerising purity of sound. The focused intensity of the Presto was equally enthralling, and Vengerov’s transitions between the dazzling passagework and lyrical melodies were as spectacular as the writing itself. The duo made the slightly awkward phrasing of the Andante seem elegant, poised and imaginative; and in the ensuing variations playfulness was juxtaposed with intensity and gravity. The finale, with brilliant playing from both musicians, underlined what incredible artists they both are – amarathon of a programme and still only halfway through!

After the interval, the duo presented arrangements of ten of Shostakovich’s op.34 Piano Preludes – awonderful contrast to the first half of the evening. These pieces explored a wide range of human emotion – youthfulness, joy, satire, anger, beauty, passion, humour – and provided a showcase for Vengerov’s versatility.

Two Tchaikovsky works ended the evening – Souvenir d’un lieu cher op.42 was both virtuosic and utterly beautiful, and the Valse-Scherzo formed a suitably magnificent close: the incredibly executed cadenza led to a well-deserved standing ovation.

LEAH HOLLINGSWORTH

Philadelphia

APOLLON MUSAGÈTE QUARTET, GARRICK OHLSSON (PIANO)

PERELMAN THEATER, KIMMEL CENTER 14 OCTOBER 2022

Like hummingbirds alighting on their strings, the four members of the Apollon Musagète Quartet opened Schubert’s Quartet in D major D94 with the most delicate touch imaginable. That gossamer landing was repeated throughout the work’s movements, coupled with finely gauged tonal balance, for a reading that might be a litmus test for performances of the composer’s works. The B flat major Quartet that followed (D36) was gutsier, though still infused with Viennese refinement.

And the ensemble – all standing except the cellist – sounded splendid in the intimate Perelman Theater, its tiers placing almost all audience members in close proximity to the artists.

But arguably, the prize came after the interval, when Garrick Ohlsson joined the foursome for Shostakovich’s eerie, skeletal Piano Quintet. In the first movement, Ohlsson led the initial charge with fervour, before the prayerful second-movement fugue, a long muted sequence with the strings alone.

In the savage Scherzo, the strings drilled the rhythms with robotic precision – like four lieutenants underlining the score’s harsh implacability – coupled with stinging piano accents. The opening of the fourth movement, with its lonely violin melody over gentle cello pizzicato, was exquisitely done.

And then the finale arrived, growing ever more calm, as if energy – perhaps life itself – were gradually being leached away. The packed openingnight audience was respectfully ever so quiet, then burst into applause and cheers, bringing back the musicians for multiple ovations. An encore might have been welcome, but after this, what?

BRUCE HODGES

JERUSALEM QUARTET

PERELMAN THEATER, KIMMEL CENTER 17 OCTOBER 2022

The second movement of Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in E minor op.44 no.2 is peppered with tiny sizzling tremolos, which in this reading by the Jerusalem Quartet seemed apt embodiments of the group’s energy level. The rest of the score – even the Andante that followed – was imbued with similar passion. Though the ticklish finale might have seemed initially daringly fast, by the time the musicians reached the end, well, perhaps it wasn’t fast enough, especially given the technical expertise on display. Some in the audience were moved to stand, and many in the large audience were vocal in their approval.

Webern’s single-movement Langsamer Satz made a luxurious contrast, with the foursome revealing the work’s sensual arc. But despite the idyll, you could sense that the ensemble was eager to rev up the intensity once again, which it duly did in Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet in D major, done with Mozartian vigour and panache. The Andante emerged as the evening’s prayer, as hushed as could be wished for, but surrounded by veritable fountains of colour in the outer movements. In the finale’s closing sequences, the penultimate, deceptively quiet bars were beautifully timed – hesitant and languorous – leading to the unbridled romp of the final moments.

As an encore, the group offered Melody by the Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk (1938–2020), as a sober tribute to the birthplace of the quartet’s two violinists, and an acknowledgement of the sorrowful daily news as the war lingers on.

BRUCE HODGES

Baltimore

STEVEN ISSERLIS (CELLO) CONNIE SHIH (PIANO)

SHRIVER HALL, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 23 OCTOBER 2022

Those in attendance at Shriver Hall heard a recital well worth the price of admission. The occasion was the Piatigorsky Memorial Concert, an annual event which, since 1978, has presented both renowned cellists and promising newcomers. This year’s presented Isserlis, whose mastery at 63 (64 in December) seems to grow with the passing years, in an excellent partnership with the Canadian pianist and Curtis alumna Connie Shih. Their teamwork was delightful to hear. Those, like myself, who were live-streaming the event, experienced it with the diminished immediacy imparted by the audio.

The challenging programme began with a rarity by Reynaldo Hahn (1874–1947), whose reputation comes mainly from his masterly output of mélodies. His Variations chantantes sur un air ancien takes its theme from an opera by the 17thcentury Venetian composer Francesco Cavalli. Hahn’s variations are lyrical rather than bravura in character, and Isserlis and Shih were utterly mesmerising in their performance.

The same mastery and sheer joy came through just as piquantly in the works that followed, by Fauré, Adès, Schumann and Brahms. If Adès’s Lieux retrouvés was the least familiar to US audiences, Isserlis brought it compellingly to life, despite some discomfort in reaching some of the high notes. The second sonatas of Fauré and Brahms and Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro op.70 were all were performed with distinction, as was the Chopin Polish song that formed the encore.

DENNIS ROONEY

London

DANIEL PIORO (VIOLIN) LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA/ANDREW MANZE

ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL 24 OCTOBER 2022

The premise of Tom Coult’s Pleasure Garden, given its premiere in 2021, draws in the listener with the alluring promise of gardens in sound from medieval Japan, Renaissance Italy and Victorian England. The four-movement concerto stands on its own terms, however, without narrative props, thanks not least to a restlessly inventive solo part which rarely takes the same turn twice (unlike a slew of other modern concertos) and to Daniel Pioro’s playful mastery of it.

Rain arrives and falls in the mind’s ear readily enough through the opening movement, but the lasting impression is of a Stravinskian vitality of discourse between soloist and orchestra. The second movement’s introspective cantilena evokes antiquity and distance without resort to neo-Classicism, before a scherzo brings tension and competition to a recitative–arioso form that sets the violinist amid an aviary of fluttering and chirruping.

Rather than the lush cantabile cultivated by violin concertos up to Berg, Pleasure Garden seems to demand a soloist at home with Biber, Bach and the 20th-century’s rich solo repertoire, and Pioro played his part accordingly, modest in projection but engaging with every detail of the score.

Crackling with life: the Australian Chamber Orchestra

NIC WALKER/ACO

After the interval, he treated The Lark Ascending to a makeover even more radical than Pekka Kuusisto’s at the 2022 Proms, in keeping with the stripped-back aesthetic of Coult’s writing, and tapping into the piece’s roots in folk-song.

This particular lark seemed to have flown from Gloucestershire to Cork, to judge from the liberal and unwritten ornamentation; Pioro certainly blew the cobwebs of late Romantic rapture from the piece, but he might have done so no less individually while playing the notes Vaughan Williams wrote.

PETER QUANTRILL

AUSTRALIAN CHAMBER ORCHESTRA/ RICHARD TOGNETTI (VIOLIN) WILLIAM BARTON (VOICE AND DIDGERIDOO)

MILTON COURT, BARBICAN 27 OCTOBER 2022

This first night of a three-day residency by the Australian Chamber Orchestra opened with two pieces by William Barton for didgeridoo and orchestra. Barton was the soloist and, in the first work Didge Fusion, also the impassioned singer and guitarist. This was virtuoso playing, producing a great variety of sounds, popping, barking and rasping, as the strings pounded rhythmically behind him. Thomas Adès’s Shanty – Over the Sea followed, with much portamento and percussive pizzicato. For Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Andante for Strings Richard Tognetti, the ACO’s director and leader, indicated the beat emphatically with his bow as the players all wove slowly around each other in small intervals.

In Tognetti’s arrangement of Janáček’s First String Quartet ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, the musicians switched neatly through the constant changes of gear in the first movement, and produced real heft and attack in the second, with eerie ponticello tremolos. Tognetti’s solos in the last movement were as melancholy as the composer could have wished for.

After George Walker’s warm Lyric for Strings, the ACO performed a remarkable arrangement by Tognetti of Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, rechristened the ‘Bridgetower’ and converted into a violin concerto with Tognetti the dynamic soloist. This was enormous fun (though not for the purists), with the players generating fierce joy in the first movement, nicely conversational solos between Tognetti and principal violinist Helena Rathbone in the second and a thrilling combination of stomping dance and elfin frolics in the finale.

TIM HOMFRAY

BRODSKY QUARTET

KINGS PLACE 29–30 OCTOBER 2022

All 15 Shostakovich quartets in seven concerts over a weekend: on paper it looks like a feat of endurance, for listeners as much as performers. In the event, though (and event it assuredly was), the cycle served to celebrate not only the 50th anniversary of the Brodsky Quartet but also the perennially fresh invention of a composer who, like Haydn, seems to be most reliably inspired, and most fully himself, in the quartet medium.

On the first day in particular, with Quartets nos.1–9 packed into ten hours, details sometimes came and went, though the Brodsky players could always call upon a sweet-toned legato in those rare extended periods (in nos.1, 4, 6 and 7 especially) when Shostakovich allows himself and his players to relax. In any case, neither their two previous recorded cycles, nor these performances, have gone to extremes beyond those already marked out in the scores, and not a bar was played to be different for the sake of it.

Some frailty of line – though almost never intonation – could be expected from players nearer the end than the beginning of their careers. With their perilously exposed parts, however, the later quartets actively demand a tenacious hold onto bare rock, and here the advantages of the Brodsky’s relatively egalitarian balance came increasingly to the fore. With leader Krysia Osostowicz having joined only last year, perhaps the democratic nature of Shostakovich’s four-part hymn and song writing (the opening of the Fourth, say, but also the closing rite of the Eighth) was all the more sonorously woven into one garment.

With nos.10 and 15 late on Sunday afternoon, it seemed that the Brodskys had saved the best until last. The dark but playful humour of the Tenth came up as fresh as a Gogol short story, its brutal scherzo almost comically savage. Second violinist Ian Belton launched the 15th’s long opening Elegy with a simplicity mellowed and bleached by the decades (his own and the composer’s). As the others entered one by one, they did so in matched tones neither laden with funereal vibrato nor italicised by minimalism. In fact the wonder was how six slow movements seemed to pass in a trice, with none save the funeral march feeling especially slow, but rather like a Russian updating of Haydn’s Seven Last Words.

Pre-concert introductions with the Shostakovich scholar Elizabeth Wilson had already enriched an appreciation for Shostakovich the inveterate quartettist and Classicist, but here, finally, he seemed to stand alongside his Viennese forebears, with an economy of means that felt touched less by infirmity than by experience, and genius.

PETER QUANTRILL

Highly characterful playing from the Piatti Quartet

VICTOR ERIK EMMANUEL

PIATTI QUARTET

WIGMORE HALL 30 OCTOBER 2022

The Piatti Quartet opened its Sunday morning concert with Beethoven’s First ‘Rasumovsky’ Quartet, caressing the first theme with care and sensitivity. There were vivid dynamic contrasts in the development, and the first violin’s D flat scalic passages sounded free and explorative, followed by a steady, well-controlled crescendo. Impressive, too, was the way the dialogues between instruments before the recapitulation sounded like intimate reflections. The delicate beginning of the second movement gave way to rambunctious energy, all played with pristine neatness and accuracy. The third movement, Adagio molto e mesto, unfolded as a great arch of profound music making, with a breathless, hymn-like opening and some wonderfully soft playing. The final Allegro molto offered relief, open-hearted and jaunty.

Rebecca Chan led the Beethoven; she swapped places with Michael Trainor for Elgar’s Quartet in E minor. The players wove beautifully around each other in the first movement, with the main voice constantly shifting, all leading to powerful, muscular playing at the emotionally raw climax. There was fluid phrasing and a feeling of freedom of expression in the second movement, marked Piacevole, building surely to the great restatement of the opening theme, and the final Allegro molto was suitably ebullient and colourful.

TIM HOMFRAY