RECORDINGS

AKIHO LigNEouS Suite; Deciduous; Speaking Tree

Ian Rosenbaum (marimba) Andy Akiho (steel pan) Kristin Lee (violin) Dover Quartet

AKI RHYTHM PRODUCTIONS ARP-R003

Strings and percussion unite in a striking tree-inspired project

Now based between Portland, Oregon, and New York, composer and percussionist Andy Akiho had an unusual first-study instrument at college: the steel pan. It shows: there’s a sense of rhythmic and melodic drive that gives his music an immediately identifiable character, assured and accessible, but uncompromisingly complex, too, certainly in its restless metric modulations, shifting emphases and almost cartoonish exuberance, like a mix of PhD-level maths and grinning frat-boy humour.

They’re all qualities deeply embedded in this inspiring and brilliantly entertaining new disc of Akiho’s music, with a theme of wood and natural growth running through it. His LigNEouS Suite gets its arboreal name from the material predominantly employed in its unusual instrumentation of marimba and string quartet, with Akiho expanding his rich sound palette even further with scratchy string tones, snap pizzicatos and clattering, headless marimba mallets. It’s a joyfully extrovert piece, full of pulsing rhythms and big build-ups, but also subtle and cannily judged in its organic development of ideas. Though Ian Rosenbaum’s marimba is quite forwardly placed, the Dover Quartet gives a blisteringly intense performance, so crisp and precise that it sounds almost machine-made, with wheezing, bandoneón-like chords in

the slower second movement and gradually unfolding quasi-Expressionist melodies in the fourth. It’s a startlingly accomplished, fiercely committed account.

Akiho himself joins Kristin Lee for the steel pan-and-violin Deciduous, with Lee contributing plenty of flickering light and shade to Akiho’s agile, beautifully nuanced playing, and a gloriously hard edge to her violin sound in the more rhythmic music. Tendrils of melodies curl around the darker strings-and-brass Speaking Tree, inspired by a late-night cemetery snooze, the most overtly Minimalist work here, and just as captivating as the rest of the music. Recorded sound is generally close and rich.

DAVID KETTLE

REFLECTIONS

BACEWICZ String Quartet no.4

SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet no.5 in B flat major op.92; Seven Preludes from op.34 (arr. Judith van Driel and David Faber) Dudok Quartet

RUBICON RCD1099

A young award-winning quartet on characterful form

After the somewhat grim opening of Shostakovich’s Fifth Quartet, the Dudok Quartet brings a charming naivety and swaying lilt to the G major tune. The playing is forceful but always clear, and the viola and cello spar splendidly in the heights. In the slow threnody of the Andante the balance between instruments is meticulously realised, paying close attention to Shostakovich’s dynamic distinctions, with sweettoned simplicity in the Andantino section. The third movement, finely paced, builds inexorably to its central climax.

The first movement of Grażyna Bacewicz’s Fourth String Quartet has moments of sadness, played with touching intimacy, but there is fierceness as well, with the Dudok players biting into the strings and driving forwards. Bacewicz slithers in semitones through the gentle, caressing opening of the central Andante; here, the musicians keep a steady pace and clear narrative line through the variety of melodic material and shifting, sometimes uneasy, textures. They find lighthearted good humour in the spiky, lopsided dances of the finale, full of off-centre accents, before entering a more mysterious world at its centre, with flowing triplets, not quite an ostinato, in the second violin. The arrangements made by the Dudok’s leader and cellist of seven of Shostakovich’s Piano Preludes op.34 are well done and convincingly played. The recording has clarity and just the right amount of warmth.

TIM HOMFRAY

BACH–ABEL SOCIETY

Works by Abel, Bach, Haydn and Schröter Les Ombres

MIRARE MIR 584

A delightful re-enactment of 18th-century London music making

Three years after Bach’s youngest son Johann Christian met viola da gamba virtuoso Carl Friedrich Abel in London, the two of them started up a select subscription concert society that ran from 1765 until Bach’s death in 1782.

This disc by French period ensemble Les Ombres aims to recreate the type of chamber programme that the wealthy London subscribers would have been treated to, and a very engaging mix it is.

NIGEL PARRY

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Les Ombres’ joint directors Margaux Blanchard on viola da gamba and flautist Sylvain Sartre are joined by violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte and Justin Taylor (fortepiano) for some delightful quartets by the ‘English Bach’ and Abel in the galant style, keeping a light, airy texture in free and fluid performances.

In two unaccompanied viola da gamba preludes by Abel, Blanchard makes light of virtuosic demands as feathery arpeggiated figures fly across the six strings. Having a fortepiano rather than harpsichord accompaniment in the sonata is an interesting reflection on the instrumental changes happening at the time.

Langlois de Swarte, in sonata movements by J.C. Bach and the composer’s protégé Johann Samuel Schröter, playing totally without vibrato, gets maximum expression and has a lively grace to his phrasing. The sound quality is excellent: intimate and immediate with an enlivening resonance.

JANET BANKS

BEETHOVEN FOR THREE BEETHOVEN Symphony no.6 in F major ‘Pastoral’ op.68 (arr. Wosner); Piano Trio no.3 in C minor op.1 no.3

Leonidas Kavakos (violin) Yo-Yo Ma (cello) Emanuel Ax (piano)

SONY CLASSICAL 19439940142

A stellar trio offers familiar Beethoven in unorthodox garb

In the 18th and 19th centuries, composers used to prepare (or authorise) chamber arrangements of their orchestral works to enable a wider audience to play, hear and – jsut as importantly – buy their music.

It could be argued that such exercises in reduction are redundant now that you can hear virtually everything at the click of a mouse, but it’s more to the point to enjoy the performance on its own terms, revelling in the virtuosity of the players and the ingenuity and imagination of the arranger. In this case it’s not a 19th-century reworking of the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony but a new one by Shai Wosner. Look elsewhere if the absence of plump woodwind tone or the lack of thwack from timpani is likely to discombobulate you. Come to this winning performance instead to hear the way the work’s musculature ripples under its melodic skin. The blend and balance between these three hugely experienced players is just about ideal in the relaxed outer movements and in the ‘Scene by the Brook’, while the ‘Peasants’ Merrymaking’ is as rustic and playful as the ‘Storm’ is disruptive.

Ax, Ma and Kavakos: sophistication at the highest level

I suspect Kavakos and Ma are incapable of making an ugly sound. They are just as urbane and sophisticated in the C minor Piano Trio – very much an 18th-century work, in which the young Beethoven, newly arrived in Vienna, imprints his own emerging musical personality upon the forms and styles he inherited from Mozart (dead barely four years) and Haydn (very much still alive). This is Ax’s stamping ground and he brings his stringplaying friends along with him for a performance that beguiles and delights from beginning to end.

DAVID THREASHER

DAMCKE Piano Trios: no.1 in E major op.42, no.2 in G minor op.48; Cello Sonata in D major op.43; La Demande: Allegro caractéristique op.16; La Veillée: Pastorale op.38; Les Saisons: Deux morceaux de salon op.39; Les Saisons: Quatre pièces caractéristiques op.30

Ilona Then-Berg (violin) Wen-Sinn Yang (cello) Michael Schäfer (piano)

CPO 555 521-2 (2CDS)

Premiere recordings of a forgotten German Romantic

Berthold Damcke, born in Hanover in 1812, was successful in his lifetime and feted especially in Russia before settling in Paris, where he was a great friend of Berlioz. The works on these CDs, all first recordings, suggest his music is worthy of exploration.

The first piece here is his Second Piano Trio, which has tints of Mendelssohn and Beethoven. It opens with a severe unison, which leads to a dancing melody with easy charm and flexibility. There is great give-and-take between the players, with pianist Michael Schäfer having the lion’s share as the strings play with grace and energy. In the light and scampering scherzo the playing is imbued with mercurial vitality, contrasting with a more expansive trio. The Andante starts with a melody of Classical grace, though

COURTESY DYNAMIC RECORDS later the piano has a passage of proto boogie-woogie. The finale is variously grand, uplifting and contrapuntal, always pressing urgently ahead and constantly inventive, with the players meeting its challenges with relish.

At the other end of this two-CD set is the First Piano Trio, with another unison beginning followed by a bucolic, naive melody that Damcke uses to switch between emotional planes. The minuetto has a debonair opening, played with gentle and mellifluous sensitivity by cellist Wen-Sinn Yang. After an amiable Larghetto the finale is positively Beethovenian.

Yang is urbane and expansive in the first movement of the Cello Sonata, which is congenial and sometimes unsettled, with outbursts of fiery rhetoric. In his hands the broad lyrical landscape of the Andante flows smoothly, and the rhythmically impetuous finale works up a good head of steam. All is captured in a recorded sound that is fine and full.

TIM HOMFRAY

Rarities from the Oinos Baroque Trio

SAMMARTINI Six Sonatas for violin and basso continuo (‘Viennese’) Oinos Baroque Trio

DYNAMIC CDS7959

Newly unearthed Baroque sonatas hampered by technical issues

For its debut disc the recently formed Oinos Baroque Trio offers worldpremiere recordings of six of Sammartini’s violin sonatas from manuscripts preserved at the Austrian National Library in Vienna. Sammartini’s agreeable music showcases his early Baroque style and budding mid-career Classicism, but, though well grounded, these performances are variable and fail to set the world alight. Moreover, the recording is over-reverberant and its balance not ideal.

In the flat-key sonatas (nos.1, 4 and 5), violinist Stefania Gerra’s intonation is not precisely centred, particularly in no.1 in E flat major, and her realisation of Sammartini’s florid, scripted ornamentation tends to be straitjacketed to the pulse, often impairing the shaping of phrases, as in the Largo of no.1. Indeed, the slow movements, especially no.5’s Affettuoso and no.4’s second Grave, with its two short cadenzas, cry out for more expressive interpretations.

The continuo pairing offers solid, if sometimes unforgiving support, but some variety of instrumentation is offered in the later, more Classically inclined third and sixth sonatas, in which Simonetta Heger swaps the harpsichord for a fortepiano. Highlights include the jaunty allegros of no.2, neatly accomplished, the opening Allegro of no.5 and the Presto finale of no.4; but the overall lack of tonal variety, dynamic range, flexibility of ensemble and flair disappoints.

ROBIN STOWELL

SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet no.3 in F major WALTON String Quartet in A minor (1946)

Albion Quartet

SIGNUM SIGCD727

An enterprising coupling linked by a single year

The year 1946 is the key date here, linking two composers who had endured very different wars – Shostakovich fighting fires in the siege of Leningrad, Walton holed up in an English manor house – and their efforts in the aftermath to define a new creative direction through the medium of the quartet.

Walton’s abrasive essay is a tantalising tale of what might have been, had he continued down the same path. The virtue of the Albion’s account, though, lies in the players’ grasp of how the quartet takes its place in the story of a career linking the abrasive, Bartókian edges of the unnumbered, pre-war quartet and the First Symphony to the bittersweet, harmonically conservative elegies of the later Cello Concerto and Second Symphony.

Its sound is attenuated, refined and entirely modern, beautifully contoured to the first movement’s febrile energy and the ‘night music’ skitterings of the scherzo. Ravishing pure tone in the upper strings sets an expectant scene for the warmth of the viola’s solo like a premonition of the love music in Walton’s Troilus and Cressida, which briefly raised hopes of a new English Puccini.

Alina Ibragimova: a veritable Pied Piper in solo Telemann

EVA VERMANDEL

Rather than older and more easy-going versions of the piece, the Albion’s approach resembles the Chiaroscuro Quartet’s Haydn, for example, and such intimacy and deft articulation makes perfect sense of the Classical sonata-form to open Shostakovich’s Third. The heavy Russian pathos and grinding machinery of (say) the Borodin Quartet in this music is a world away from the Albion’s lightness of being. The recording catches the players on the very edge of audibility in the tiptoeing trio of the first scherzo and in the finale’s protracted coda, drawn out here some way beyond the composer’s metronome mark but convincingly so: not so much a laying of the recent past to rest as a portent of a troubled future.

PETER QUANTRILL

TELEMANN 12 Fantasias for violin without bass TWV40:14–25

Alina Ibragimova (violin)

HYPERION CDA 68384

The sheer eclecticism of Telemann’s imagination is laid bare in solo fantasias

Alina Ibragimova negotiates her way through Telemann’s heterogeneous fantasias with persuasive, nononsense accounts that fully embrace these works’ mixture of styles and textures. Her interpretations combine accurate and fleet left-hand athleticism with light, crisply articulated bowing in the fast movements, notably the spiky Presto of no.7 and the Spirituoso of no.8, and expressive shaping of the lyrical slow movements, especially the Largo of no.10, the reposeful Soave of no.11 and the poignant Largo of no.7, with its yearning long appoggiaturas.

Ibragimova’s extempore ornamentation is surprisingly conservative, even for repeated sections within movements. Nevertheless, she dutifully observes most dynamic contrasts, spreads chords with the utmost care and is suitably rustic in movements such as the Allegro of no.10. She skilfully creates the illusion of multilayered textures, particularly in the fugal movements of nos.2, 3, 5, 6 and 10, and performs with all the freedom, timing and expression you could wish for, introducing some pleasing rubato, such as in the prelude-like opening movements of nos.1 and 5. In essence, she sounds so beguilingly natural that even her speedy tempos for the allegros of nos.4 and 10 and the Vivace of no.12 complement the music well.

The recording is pleasingly resonant, with a degree of warm background reverberation.

ROBIN STOWELL

THOMAS JAUK

WALTHER Scherzi da Violino Bojan Čičić (violin) Illyria Consort

DELPHIAN DCD34294 (2CDS)

Stimulating performances of a man once described as the Paganini of his age

Johann Jakob Walther (1650–1717) may be less of a household name than his near contemporaries Biber and Westhoff (let alone their Italian confrères Corelli, Vivaldi et al), but he was one of the 17th century’s most renowned and influential violinistcomposers. Indeed it was Walther who was singled out by the music historian Joseph-François Fétis as ‘the Paganini of his age’. Born in Thuringia, Walther spent some crucial years at the ducal court in Florence, an experience that doubtless helped to secure him a position as primo violinista da camera at the Italianate electoral court of Dresden. An edition of Walther’s Scherzi da Violino Solo, published in 1687 in Mainz, where he spent his last years, bears an effusively thankful dedication to his Tuscan employer, Grand Duke Cosimo III.

The collection’s title rightly suggests that nothing stuffily academic is to be expected therein. Only the first piece is a traditionally built, four-movement suite. Its opening Allemande includes six progressively intricate variations; here and in the following dances, Walther has written out all the repeats in what amounts to a free lesson on the art of embellishment. The following eleven scherzos are each in one multisectional movement, Walther giving free rein to his fantasy in short segments that thoroughly explore different aspects of Baroque violin virtuosity: multiple-stopping, fast runs, up-bow staccato, bow vibrato or arpeggiando passages, both slurred (ondeggiando) and bouncing. Bojan Čičić takes everything that is thrown at him comfortably in his stride, seasoning his Tononi’s slender sound with tastefully varied vibrato.

Walther’s tenth piece, titled Imitatione del cuccu, must have been in Vivaldi’s mind when he set to music a cuckoo of his own in ‘Summer’ from The Four Seasons. Both composers embed the two notes that make up the cuckoo’s call within furious passages of bariolage, but Walther also features them prominently within an imitative context, and hints at them in a Sarabande-like section. Čičić adds a further turn of his own by embellishing the last chord with a final recollection of the motif. His imaginative embellishments are a joy throughout this beautifully produced set, as is the kaleidoscopic realisation of the continuo by the Illyria Consort.

Sueye Park: rhapsodic in Yun

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE

YUN Silla; Violin Concerto no.3; Chamber Symphony no.1

Sueye Park (violin) Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra/Osmo Vänskä

BIS BIS-2642

Asian and European worlds combine in music of rhapsodic beauty

Born in Korea but resident in Germany for much of his later life, composer Isang Yun likewise blended a sometimes challenging European avant-garde thorniness with a distinctly Asian focus on momentary sound and colour in his often ravishing music, as displayed in the three substantial works from his final years (he died in 1995) collected by the Seoul Philharmonic and Osmo Vänskä on this hugely enjoyable disc.

And there’s a definite sense that Yun intended this music to be enjoyed: he leads the ear – certainly in the Third Violin Concerto (1992), the disc’s centrepiece – from one vivid soundscape to another, teasing us with passing flashes of tonality or sudden explosions of vigour, all set within fluid, ever-evolving textures. South Korean violinist Sueye Park is alive to Yun’s rhapsodic, athletic solo writing, in an agile, nimble account that’s demonstrative but not showy, and unfailingly elegant – even if that results in a slight sense of detachment in some of Yun’s more passionate moments. The rich recording places Park very much within the mix, rather than prominently out front as soloist, sometimes slightly obscuring the details of her line, but also drawing attention to the composer’s intricate, soloistic orchestral scoring, guided eloquently by Vänskä.

The opening Silla, a homage to Isang Yun’s Korean heritage, is played with a similarly thrilling sense of detail, while the closing First Chamber Symphony – more of a concerto grosso for pairs of oboes and horns – offers more substantial, assertive music.

DAVID KETTLE

ROOTS Works by Bonfa, Colombo, Doga, Falla, Gamliel, Gang, Gardel, Hristovski, Muréna, Prado, Robin, Shelem, Soloviev-Sedoy, Stojakovic and Zhanhao Nemanja Radulović (violin) Double Sens

WARNER CLASSICS 9029619839

A whistle-stop world tour by a major violinistic talent

Nemanja Radulović’s debut release for Warner Classics grew out of the Covid pandemic. Unable to perform his core repertoire in the normal way, he began exploring world music, and the resulting album journeys through Italy, Macedonia, Russia, Japan, Brazil and India with a joyous collection of 17 stylistically varied miniatures, supported by Double Sens (a hand-picked ensemble drawn from France and the Balkans). The playing is captured in rich, dynamically wide-ranging sound.

Radulović and Double Sens thrill on their musical world tour

Albums of this kind – naming no names – can easily descend into an unintentionally caricaturised sequence of worthy attempts to ‘hang loose’ and be ‘cool’. Not here: Radulović’s silken, dreamy legato in Gardel’s Por una cabeza, possesses an alluring inner glow, voluptuously phrased, yet turn to a medley of Serbian composer Aleksandar Šisič’s folk-inflected dance melodies, and you’d be hard pressed to think it the same player.

A haunting adaptation of Chen Gang and He Zhanhao’s The Butterfly Lovers Concerto finds Radulović inflecting the oriental melody with exquisite subtlety. No less captivating is the Romani anthem Gelem, Gelem, complete with evocative vocals from Ksenija Milošević and Miloš Mihajlović.

JULIAN HAYLOCK

EDOUARD BRANE/DG

FRITZ KREISLER: THE BELL

TELEPHONE HOUR RECORDINGS Volume 1: BRAHMS Violin Concerto in D major op.77 – Adagio BRUCH Violin Concerto in G minor op.15 – Vorspiel & Adagio MENDELSSOHN Violin Concerto in E minor op.64 – Allegro molto appassionato MOZART Violin Concertos: in G major K216 – Allegro, in D major K218 – Allegro VIOTTI Violin Concerto no.22 in A minor G97 Volume 2: CHAUSSON Poème op.25 CORELLI Violin Sonata in D minor op.5 no.12 ‘La folia’ RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Fantasy on Russian Themes op.33 and works by Albéniz, Dvořák, Falla, Massenet, Nevin, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky Fritz Kreisler (violin) Bell Telephone Hour Orchestra/ Donald Voorhees

BIDDULPH 85019-2 & 85020-2

Newly reissued recordings from a musical legend

For decades Fritz Kreisler, like his friend Sergei Rachmaninoff, set his face against playing for the radio. Only after Rachmaninoff’s death did his wife Harriet persuade him to accept an offer of $5,000 per appearance from the Bell Telephone Hour.

On 17 July 1944, aged 69, he performed the first movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto and two pieces with NBC SO musicians under the competent Donald Voorhees. The Mendelssohn and Albéniz’s Tango are here; Kreisler’s own Caprice viennois was issued as a V-disc.

You will not hear the Kreisler of the inter-war years on these discs. In 1941 he had a terrible accident and was in a coma for months. Much of his facility can still be discerned – his golden tone, wonderful phrasing and fine double-stops. The acetate recordings are mostly good for the era but occasionally noisy.

The main treasure is the complete Viotti A minor Concerto, from two 1945 concerts. As soon as Kreisler enters, his lovely tone is paramount; some carefulness in the Moderato and Adagio from soloist and orchestra is redeemed by his interesting cadenzas. The finale is delightful.

Also not previously recorded by Kreisler is the Mozart K216 Allegro, remarkable when you consider he had just turned 75 when it was recorded. The orchestra sounds a bit ropey, the tempo is quite fast and forthright, but Kreisler introduces a note of graciousness and again his cadenza is absorbing.

The highlight of Vol.2 is Rimsky-Korsakov’s Fantasy, a 1945 reading in which Kreisler plays his own edition with freshness and brio. Corelli’s ‘La folia’ has nice moments but the orchestra gets in the way, fogging the aural picture. In Chausson’s Poème, the violinist is clearly putting his heart into it.

An arrangement from Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto is vile and I never want to hear this rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Andante cantabile again; but mostly the short pieces and remakes of concerto movements are up to snuff.

The notes make errors, the most egregious being the assertion: ‘Rachmaninoff and Kreisler… performed together frequently in concert recitals’ (they did once appear on the same bill, but not together).

TULLY POTTER

EDU CALICHER

DOPPIO ESPRESSIVO: Double Concertos for Bass Instruments VIVALDI Concertos: in G minor for cello and double bass RV531, in E minor for double bass and bassoon RV409; ‘Vedrò con mio diletto’ (all arr. van Prooijen) BOTTESINI La serenata; Passioni amorose (arr. Furtok); Duetto for double bass and bassoon (arr. van Prooijen) ERNST Élégie (arr. Bottesini and van Prooijen)

Imaginative flair from Rick Stotijn

Rick Stotijn (double bass) Johannes Rostamo (cello), Olivier Thiery (double bass) Bram van Sambeek (bassoon) Camerata RCO

BIS BIS-2509

A Dutch double bass superstar offers flair aplenty

Rick Stotijn’s prowess lies not only in his assured technical fluency but also in his interpretative imagination, tonal diversity and instinctive ability to communicate. Apart from Ernst’s lyrical Élégie, poignantly conveyed, and Anastasio’s aria from Vivaldi’s Il Giustino, carefully phrased and coloured by Sören Leupold’s stylish theorbo contribution, he turns collaborator in this varied programme of arrangements for two soloists, strings and, where applicable, continuo. He and cellist Johannes Rostamo despatch with aplomb the energetic allegros of Vivaldi’s Double Concerto RV531 and imbue its central Adagio with poetic lyricism. Stotijn is joined by bassoonist Bram van Sambeek for Vivaldi’s Double Concerto RV409 and Bottesini’s Duetto, both works charismatically performed with a mix of refined melodious playing and sparkling virtuosity.

You can sense a real chemistry between Stotijn and fellow bassist Olivier Thiery, whether it’s in their flexible repartee in Bottesini’s operatic La serenata or their winning partnership in his Passioni amorose, displaying full mastery of its recitatives, arpeggiated harmonics and other virtuoso challenges. The one-per-part string ensemble responds alertly to the soloists’ subtle nuances and freedom of pulse; occasionally, though, as in the dramatic opening Allegro of Passioni amorose, it seems to lack sufficient body. The recording has just the right mix of clarity and bloom.

ROBIN STOWELL

TUTTA SOLA 

Works for solo violin by Bach, Corelli, Gasparini, Lonati, Matteis the Younger, Nogueira, Purcell, Tartini, Vilsmayr, Vitali and Westhoff Rachel Podger (violin)

CHANNEL CLASSICS CCSSA44422

A typically unorthodox journey through solo Baroque repertoire

Rachel Podger explores a selection from the rich solo violin repertoire that preceded the monumental works of Bach, constantly probing each composer’s intentions and forging telling, meaningful interpretations. She frames her choices with a familiar Bach attribution, the Toccata and Fugue BWV565, given a new, lighter guise in Chad Kelly’s idiomatic transcription, and Tartini’s Sonata Piccola in D major op.26 no.17, the central ‘Aria del Tasso’ of which she delivers with a winning variety of expression.

Podger meets head-on the advanced technical requirements of Westhoff’s Suite (1683) and makes perfect sense of its polyphonic textures and Bachian amalgam of styles, especially the flamboyant arpeggiations in the Prelude. Similarly, she dispatches the prelude of Matteis the Younger’s Fantasia in C minor with temporal suppleness and demonstrates a clear understanding of the voice-leading in the ensuing fugal section. She completes her programme with a prelude, various dances and ‘arias’ from Vilsmayr’s Artificiosus Concentus pro Camera, preludes from a John Walsh compilation intended for technical improvement and some fantastical gems from the Nogueira and Klagenfurt manuscripts, all communicated with a beguiling mix of technical sophistication, variety of expression, rhetoric, spontaneity and intimacy.

A resonant church acoustic gives full bloom to the clear, sonorous tone of Podger’s 1739 Pesarini violin.

ROBIN STOWELL

SENSATIONS

Works by Arlen, Barber, Bernstein, Brel, Brown, Dvořák, François, Grieg, Kaempfert, Legrand, Loiguy, Morricone, Prokofiev, Puccini, Revaux, Smetana, Villa-Lobos and Williams Gautier Capuçon (cello) Jérôme Ducros (piano) Fatma Said (soprano) Lucienne Rencaudin (trumpet) Orchestre National de Bretagne/Johanna Malangré; Ensemble Capucelli

ERATO 9029615713

A popular recital by a cellistic chameleon fails to ignite

On the one hand, Gautier Capuçon produces commanding performances of Haydn and Shostakovich cello concertos with front-ranking orchestras, and operates a class of excellence in Paris, where his comments on his students’ playing are detailed and perceptive. On the other, he is a great populist of the cello, making a wide range of music available that caters for all tastes.

The constantly questing Rachel Podger

THERESA PEWAL

This volume is a case in point, and the perfect Christmas stocking filler for those who like a good melody served with consummate artistry.

Capuçon certainly manages to make this programme, which is dominated by somewhat sentimental fare, sound surprisingly effective, his glorious control of the bow serving these well-known themes from films and popular singers with seamless legato lines. Jérôme Ducros is an elegant partner in the piano arrangements, while the orchestral contribution is warm and well-honed.

There are a few more lively items, such as Bernstein’s Mambo, where Capuçon is joined by former students from his class of excellence, and they also lend a hand in the fifth of Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasilieras with Fatma Said as a wonderfully expressive soloist. Yet, even though Capuçon has established a reputation as an ambassador of the cello, this release seems to tread old ground. I wonder if future projects could be more ambitious, showcasing contemporary techniques and exploring the sheer diversity of repertoire at his disposal.

JOANNE TALBOT