RECORDINGS

SOUL OF BRAZIL

ASSAD Glitch JOBIM Four Songs (arr.Assad) VILLA-LOBOS String Quartet no.6; Cair de tarde Clarice Assad (singer, piano)

Delgani Quartet

AVIE AV2620

A finely conceived album with a standout Villa-Lobos quartet

The title listing gives away Assad’s versatility as a composer-performer but it doesn’t follow that her writing talents extend beyond her own genres. In fact Glitch sounds like a real quartet, and not a promising idea in a foreign context. The premise is simple: glissandos and ostinato patterns embody a faulty piece of code, which (like in DNA, not computers) can become the next stage of evolutionary development. Better still, the piece ends at an instinctively right time while leaving the ear wanting more.

The European battle over tonal and non-tonal harmony was not one that Brazilian composers ever had to fight, and it leaves no mark on Assad’s piece, or the Sixth Quartet of Villa-Lobos. It’s rhythm that most characteristically makes them sound Brazilian, however, and the Sixth begins with a jerkily syncopated idea, hard to ‘read’ in traditional terms, which previous recordings have either flattened out or played almost as a mistake. The Delgani absorbs it within a performance that utterly beguiles, with the cross-rhythms, samba-bass and moonshine moods of the finale especially convincing.

Only the excessively close and dry engineering discourages a full recommendation, and Assad is recorded in a different acoustic, pop-style, for a quartet of songs by Antônio Carlos Jobim. Her arrangements for quartet, though, show that European distinctions between commercial and art musics are, again, irrelevant: Jobim’s harmony shares a bittersweet complexity with his companions on this richly rewarding album.

PETER QUANTRILL

BEETHOVEN Cello Sonatas nos.1–5; Variations: on Mozart’s ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ op.66, on Handel’s ‘See, the conqu’ring hero comes’ WoO45, on Mozart’s ‘Bei Männern welche Liebe fühlen’ WoO46

Gary Hoffman (cello)

David Selig (piano)

LA DOLCE VOLTA LDV111/2 (2 CDS)

A new Beethoven cycle offers a fulfilling listen

Beethoven’s works for cello and piano span his creative life and illustrate how he gradually transformed the keyboard-dominated ‘accompanied sonata’ of his inheritance into a musical conversation between equal partners. Although the pianist is the more ‘talkative’ in the two op.5 sonatas, David Selig notably displaying his dexterity in their spirited rondo finales, cellist Gary Hoffman tellingly contributes some significant thematic exposition and dialogue. Equality is essentially achieved in the Third Sonata op.69, the serene, lyrical outer movements of which give Hoffman ample opportunity to showcase the mellifluous sonorities of his 1662 Nicolò Amati. The same work’s expansive Scherzo also features some crisply articulated repartee, which is intensified in the more contrapuntal op.102 sonatas, particularly in the development of the Allegro vivace of no.1 and the striking Allegro fugato in no.2’s finale. These players truly plumb the expressive depths of op.102 no.2’s mournful Adagio and offer compelling musical insights in their readings of the lyrical Adagio cantabile of op.69’s finale and the pensive slow introduction and melancholy, dramatic Allegro of op.5 no.2’s opening movement.

Bold Beethoven from Gary Hoffman

WILLIAM BEAUCARDET

Hoffman and Selig dispatch the three variation sets with due aplomb, responding appropriately to the music’s contrasting moods. Selig is again the dominant partner, displaying impressive dexterity in the figural variations of op.66 and WoO45, but Hoffman occasionally grabs the limelight, notably in the rapid-fire triplets of op.66’s seventh variation and the second half of Variation 10. Both engage in closer dialogue in WoO46, particularly in its fifth variation’s playful instrumental interchanges.

The recording is well-balanced but occasionally too present to accommodate comfortably the piano’s higher registers.

ROBIN STOWELL

BERNSTEIN Music for String Quartet COPLAND Elegies Lucia Lin, Natalie Rose Kress (violins) Danny Kim (viola) Ronald Feldman (cello)

NAVONA RECORDS NV6557

A major Bernstein discovery in a compelling performance

A world-premiere recording of a recently rediscovered Bernstein string quartet will naturally provoke a lot of attention – and in this wonderfully propulsive account of the composer’s Music for String Quartet it more than fulfils expectation.

A bit of background: Bernstein composed the piece while an 18-year-old Harvard student in 1936, asking the New England Quartet to try it out two years later. New England violinist Stanley Benson hung on to the handwritten score, which was carefully stored away by his wife and later passed on to Boston Symphony Orchestra librarian John Perkel, who arranged for its live premiere in 2001 and first recording. It was the same four musicians behind both occasions, and it shows: this is an assured, perceptive and thoroughly persuasive account of music that’s far more than simply a student curiosity or something for Bernstein completists. The composer’s trademark blending of jazzy, bluesy rhythms and harmonies with more dissonant modernism are already present and correct, but it also bristles with confidence in the outspoken drive of its longer first movement and the darker, more introspective passions of its second.

With faultless ensemble, the players tackle Bernstein’s protominimalist figurations with determination and a certain deliberateness, slipping into softeredged playing for his sweeter second subject, and maintaining a compelling intensity throughout the inexorable tread of the second movement. The music breaks off inconclusively, as if tantalisingly incomplete – as does the restrained, sometimes austere Elegies for violin and viola by Copland, given a beautifully shaped reading here. Though brief, it’s a beguiling pairing of fascinating works, captured in close, warm sound.

DAVID KETTLE

SOLO

BIBER Rosary Sonatas: Passacaglia in G minor GUILLEMAIN Amusement pour le violon seul op.18 (selection) MATTEIS THE ELDER Ayres for the violin (selection) MATTEIS THE YOUNGER Fantasia in A minor ‘Alia Fantasia’ PISENDEL Sonata in A minor VILSMAYR Partita no.5 in G minor Isabelle Faust (violin)

HARMONIA MUNDI HMM902678

A scintillating solo voyage into rarities of the early Baroque

Hot on the heels of Rachel Podger’s acclaimed Tutta sola album, Isabelle Faust’s disc aims similarly to acquaint listeners with selected, lesser-known solo violin music from the rich 17th-and 18th-century repertoire. She opens with Matteis the Younger’s arpeggio-based Fantasia, shaping it calmly with subtle rubato and, despite its left-hand stretches, the utmost precision. She is equally flexible, poised and artistic in extracts from Matteis the Elder’s Ayres and she dispatches the final three movements of Pisendel’s sonata with buoyancy and rhythmic verve.

Faust’s choices from Guillemain’s Amusement pour le violon seul op.18 vary from single-line movements, such as the contemplative Aria, to those with intricate multiplestopping such as the Variatione. She consistently shapes phrases expressively, adds tasteful extempore ornamentation and captures the mood of each movement; regrettably, she alters the prescribed slurred staccato scalic flourish in the second Altro to a less amusant legato slur, but she nevertheless preserves the movement’s humour and dance character. Following a brief, arpeggio-based Prelude, dances predominate in Vilsmayr’s Fifth Partita; some, such as the Rigodon and Boure, along with the concluding Retirada (pizzicato et al.), find Faust using a more contemporary mode of attack, which spills over into her imaginative and finely judged account of the Passacaglia that closes Biber’s Rosary Sonatas. The recording is exemplary.

ROBIN STOWELL

BRAHMS Double Concerto

DVOŘÁK Silent Woods

VIOTTI Violin Concerto no. 22

Christian Tetzlaff (violin) Tanja Tetzlaff (cello) Deutsches Symphonie- Orchester Berlin/Paavo Järvi

ONDINE ODE1423-2

Siblings inject joy into Brahms and virtuosity into Viotti

The Tetzlaff siblings violinist Christian and cellist Tanja have a track record of playing chamber music together, and probably played the Brahms Double Concerto at home for fun when they were children. It would account for the great empathy in their playing here, the ease of interplay and the sense of intimate communication. The first movement has expressive freedom and space and, dare I say it, a touch of fun. There is heft and grandeur certainly, but this is not the mighty, frowning Brahms. In the F major section of the second movement their phrasing is pliant, its rubato natural and expressive. In the opening of the finale they are delicate and dancing, and they hocket splendidly in their later dialogues.

Brahms had a great regard for Viotti’s A minor Violin Concerto, which he quotes directly in the Double Concerto. It doesn’t get out much nowadays, and is probably best known by college violin students, but in Christian Tetzlaff’s performance you can hear what commended it to Brahms. It is easy to regard this primarily as a showpiece, but he makes light of its technical challenges, the flashy passagework and the gymnastic string-crossing, showing it to be full of elegance and charm. He dashes off the Agitato assai finale with virtuoso aplomb. Tanja Tetzlaff rounds off the disc with Dvořák’s Silent Woods, bringing to it a soulful lyricism. The recording is warm and clear.

TIM HOMFRAY

CHAUSSON Piano Trio RAVEL Piano Trio

Trio Metral

LA DOLCE VOLTA LDV122

A new line-up offers a fresh perspective on two French trios

Pianist Victor may be the last Metral standing in this piano trio, originally formed with two of his siblings. But in its newer formation the Trio Metral would seem to display the same ‘sophisticated interplay of voices’ and ability to ‘raise the temperature’ of its earlier line-up noted by Tim Homfray in October 2019, in its Mendelssohn piano trios (see bit.ly/3S3Polg).

Warm rapport between the Tetzlaffs and Paavo Järvi

GIORGIA BERTAZZI

The players certainly raise the temperature in Chausson’s Piano Trio, which he composed at the age of 26. Whether its musical imprint quite warrants its technical difficulty is open to debate, but these players dive right in, to liberating, even hedonistic effect.

As finely as the Metral grasps Chausson’s rich Romantic idiom – tempered by a scampering intermezzo-like second movement – it captures the frozen beauty of Ravel’s first movement even better (helped by the recording quality: spacious, yet detailed and intimate). In the second theme the musicians bring to mind the magical realm of ‘Le jardin féerique’ from Mother Goose. There’s sprung precision in the second-movement scherzo, but plenty of tonal core too, while the slow tread of the Passacaille (marked ‘Très large’) is well judged, and the cello at its opening is gloriously woody. The ‘sophisticated interplay of voices’ is on display in the finale as much as anywhere: intricate yet confident, closing with real ecstatic abandon.

EDWARD BHESANIA

DUTILLEUX Cello Concerto

WEINBERG Cello Concerto

Edgar Moreau (cello) WDR Sinfonieorchester/Andris Poga

ERATO 5419748933

A striking pairing of Rostropovichinspired concertos

Weinberg’s ascendant star has taken a while to gain widespread recognition. In the case of his Cello Concerto this seems astonishing, given its mesmerisingly melancholic first movement, which seems to embody the trauma of loss experienced by his own personal tragedy and millions of other people in the wake of the Holocaust. Edgar Moreau is subtle and eloquent here – not overplaying the mournful element, although his approach seems a little cool when compared to some other renditions, not least that of Rostropovich, who gave its premiere. However, Moreau adeptly creates dramatic contrast in the bouncy third-movement Allegro, where the rapid figures are crisply delivered, enhanced by a strong rhythmic partnership with the orchestra. He captures both the ironic and playful klezmer-inspired spirit of the second movement, which clearly reflects Weinberg’s Jewish heritage, and puts his spectacular instrumental skills to fine effect in the eloquent cadenza leading into the finale. Here again, Moreau explodes with energy in the Shostakovichinfluenced motifs, before the heartfelt return of the opening melody, engulfing the listener once more in profound sadness.

The shimmering, perfumed textures of Dutilleux’s concerto – a work also written for Rostropovich – are exquisitely conveyed in this warm recording. Moreau conjures up a tantalising range of colours, his sense of when to be prominent and when to recede into the composer’s ethereal timbres perfectly judged.

JOANNE TALBOT

ELGAR Cello Concerto

LALO Cello Concerto

Ofra Harnoy (cello) London Philharmonic Orchestra/ George Pehlivanian Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Antonio de Almeida

SONY CLASSICAL 19658824342

A lost recording is finally resurrected, and has been worth the wait

Ofra Harnoy’s recording of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, made with the

London Philharmonic Orchestra and George Pehlivanian in 1996 at the height of her fame, looked destined to become a best-seller. Instead, for some reason which must surely have been more than carelessness, the files were never edited or released.

Now 27 years on, the lost master tapes have finally been rediscovered and edited by Harnoy together with her husband and producer Mike Herriott. Refreshed with the latest technology, the recording can finally be heard, paired with a remasterered reissue of Harnoy’s 1995 Lalo concerto with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Antonio de Almeida.

It’s hard not to look for clues as to why the Elgar recording was never released. Certainly, there are moments when the solo part deviates from the score – a lazy rhythm in the first movement and unobserved pianissimo markings – and occasional problems of balance with the orchestra. But Harnoy, who took masterclasses on the work with du Pré and studied with her teacher, William Pleeth, enters fully into the concerto’s deeply emotional world. All the Harnoy hallmarks – warm, mellow tone, naturally lyrical phrasing and impressive technique – are present, making for a moving performance.

The Lalo concerto has the edge in terms of more translucence and clarity of recorded sound, but the Elgar definitely deserves the airing for which it has waited so long.

JANET BANKS

TRANSFIGURED MAHLER Four Songs (arr. Poster)

SCHOENBERG Verklärte Nacht

WEBERN Quintet for strings and piano

ZEMLINSKY Maiblumen blühten überall Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective

CHANDOS CHAN20277

A typically thoughtful programme from a rising chamber ensemble

It would take a diagram to illustrate all the links between the works on this CD. The poet Richard Dehmel stands at the centre, with his poetry set by Alma Mahler and her erstwhile teacher Zemlinsky; Schoenberg, another of Zemlinsky’s students and later his brother-in-law, used another poem as the basis of Verklärte Nacht. And Schoenberg’s pupil Webern is here too.

Zemlinsky’s setting of Maiblumen blühten überall for soprano and string sextet is musically kin to the Schoenberg, with superheated harmonies and yearning melodic lines. Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective plays with great fervour and sensitively complements Francesca Chiejina’s singing.

Webern’s 1907 Quintet for piano and strings sounds curiously oldfashioned in this company, with Brahms always hovering nearby. The Collective plays it with febrile intensity, drawing its many changes of pace and character into a compelling narrative. Chiejina sings Alma Mahler’s four songs with beauty of tone and an appealing simplicity, matched by the Collective and Tom Poster’s effective arrangements.

Verklärte Nacht grows from an extremely quiet opening into delicate and seemingly uncertain playing before the robust viola changes the mood. The constant shifts in emotional temperature throughout the work are beautifully caught. The Collective can be fierce and assertive, fragile and ecstatic, all done with textural clarity and exemplary control of pacing. Dehmel would surely have recognised his poem in this performance and approved. The recording is clear and warm.

TIM HOMFRAY

ALMOST UNSEEN

PARRY Haul Away for Heaven; The River; Long Walks in Small Spaces; Lacuna; Three Borders Songs; This Cradle of Hills

Aisling O’Dea (violin) Clea Friend (cello) Hannah Rarity (voice) William Stafford (clarinet) Alexander Taylor (piano)

AVAILABLE FROM WWW.ARTISANENSEMBLE.COM

A meeting of minds in Scotland’s capital city

This (almost) all-Edinburgh recording brings together the city’s Artisan duo – violinist Aisling O’Dea and cellist Clea Friend – and music from Cornish-raised, long-time Edinburgh resident Suzanne Parry, who now lives down the road in the village of Torphichen.

It’s clearly a passion project from O’Dea and Friend: they deliver Parry’s sometimes elusive, mostly radiantly lyrical music with intense commitment and insight. Joined by pianist Alexander Taylor, they sing as well as play their way through the melancholy, shanty-inspired Haul Away for Heaven, bringing accordionlike reediness to its wide-open harmonies and responding to Parry’s free-flowing, fantasia-like form with spontaneity. The garden mazeinspired Long Walks in Small Spaces, in which the trio is joined by clarinettist William Stafford, is far grittier, but the quartet maintains a graceful sense of ensemble throughout, pursuing or leading each other through dark harmonic pathways before reaching its introspective conclusion. O’Dea returns to the earlier sense of rhapsodic fantasy amid the shifting musical personalities of Parry’s Lacuna for solo violin. The composer’s hill-surrounded home provides the backdrop for the disc’s movingly evocative closer: This Cradle of Hills contrasts lyrical, fluid playing from O’Dea and Friend with recordings from the local area, to quietly magical effect. Elsewhere, trad singer Hannah Rarity delivers Parry’s The River and Three Borders Songs with beguiling purity and gentle melancholy.

Anne Harvey-Nagl tackles two mighty sonatas

DAMIAN POSSE

It’s a powerful disc, whose emotional impact belies the slightness of some of the pieces, even if the recording – close and authentic though it is – captures a little more background ambience than it perhaps should.

DAVID KETTLE

RESPIGHI Violin Sonata in B minor

STRAUSS Violin Sonata in E flat major op.18

Anne Harvey-Nagl (violin)

Julia Maria Sliwa (piano)

PALADINO MUSIC PMR0129

Assured accounts of two demanding sonatas are let down by the acoustic

This CD is sadly hampered by a muddy recording which makes the violin sound muted and its tone unduly woody on the lower strings. In the first movement of Strauss’s sonata Harvey-Nagl is sometimes indistinct, which is a shame. She catches the breadth and sweep of the opening paragraph before demonstrating lyrical finesse in the wide-ranging melodic writing. Her approach to the steadily unfolding second movement is thoughtful and exploratory, just as its title, ‘Improvisation’, suggests. The two players make neat work of their quirky dialogue in the finale, although the recorded balance rather favours the piano, but they never quite take joyful flight.

Respighi, like Strauss, was a master of orchestral writing, and in both their sonatas there is a sense at times that a wider instrumental palette is lurking within. In the first movement pianist Julia Maria Sliwa skilfully opens out and balances the busy textures as Harvey-Nagl soars above in ecstatic melody and weaves through Respighi’s sinuous lines. The two of them deftly negotiate the tricksy, unsettling rhythms of the Andante, its pulse constantly subdividing into fives and sixes. Harvey-Nagl despatches the technical demands of the final Passacaglia with flair, and produces some affecting, long-breathed playing in the lyrical passages.

TIM HOMFRAY

SCHUMANN Piano Trios nos.1–3; Fantasiestücke op.88

EsTrio

DYNAMIC CDS7962 (2 CDS)

A young trio boldly launches its recording career with Schumann

The swiftness with which Schumann’s piano trios have moved to the core of the repertoire has been nothing short of remarkable. Far more recordings have been made of these works since the millennium than in the whole of their prior history on record. And whereas an established group such as the Beaux Arts Trio waited a whole 16 years before alighting on them, at least three young groups over the past decade and a half have chosen to make their disc debuts with Schumann.

Now here’s a fourth, from the EsTrio, an all-female ensemble based in Italy. It’s certainly a statement of intent, launching an international recording career with them (a previous disc of Mendelssohn appears not to have achieved wide circulation). And there are many fine moments, much that gives pleasure, without, however, challenging the finest. EsTrio’s players are at their best in lyrical music – such as the outer sections of the First Trio’s slow movement – or in light-hearted writing, such as is found in the Fantasiestücke. The high spirits of the Second Trio come off better than the agitated First or enigmatic Third.

In the First Trio there’s a sense that EsTrio is observant of Schumann’s demands but not fully involved in the emotional maelstrom; similarly, it shies away from the tumbling delirium of the ensuing scherzo. Only in the Ziemlich langsam of the Third Trio do the players have the measure of the awed stasis implied by this slow music; the same movement’s central convulsion, though, feels more generalised.

The modern standard was set by Leif Ove Andsnes and Christian and Tanja Tetzlaff (EMI/Warner Classics). Close miking at the Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano slightly favours Laura Gorna’s violin, especially in the Second Trio, revealing occasional hesitations and lapses in intonation. It would have been good to hear more of cellist Cecilia Radic, and pianist Laura Manzini doesn’t put a finger wrong.

DAVID THREASHER

TABAKOVA Viola Concerto; Cello Concerto; Orpheus’ Comet, Earth Suite

Maxim Rysanov (viola) Guy Johnston (cello) Hallé/Delyana Lazarova

HALLÉ CD HLL 7562.

Masterly premiere recordings make the case for an individual voice

Dobrinka Tabakova, Bulgarian-born but long resident in the UK, often pits restless melodies against ostinatopatterned accompaniments. Not a devastatingly original technique, you might think, but her voice is a personal one and in these two concertos it always sings through the soloist as the lyrical protagonist of a drama without words.

Composed in 2004, the Viola Concerto is a fine example of Tabakova’s early maturity.

I remember Rysanov giving the premiere, and being struck by the freshness of familiar chords and devices in new contexts. Composer and violist between them make the solo part an introverted wanderer in the tradition of concertos by Walton and Bartók. This fusion of east-European and British idioms is exemplified by a rough country dance between slow movement and finale.

Likewise the Cello Concerto of 2008 follows modern archetypes by pitching the soloist into a fight-orflight situation, which is steadily resolved during the course of the first movement. The central elegy is magnificently sustained, again by composer and cellist alike. Johnston makes the most of the part without overcooking it, and Delyana Lazarova is closely attentive to her soloists in music that yearns for the kind of ebb and flow not to be confined by metronome marks and barlines.

The two concertos are sympathetically scored and recorded with string ensemble; the mettle of the entire Hallé is tested by a fizzing concert opener, Orpheus’ Comet, and a 35-minute Earth Suite, much of it furrowed with the angst of the concertos, but with tension released at length by a pounding finale.

PETER QUANTRILL

Guy Johnston with Delyana Lazarova and Dobrinka Tabakova

ALEX BURNS/HALLÉ

WEINBERG Concertino for cello and string orchestra; Concertino for violin and string orchestra; Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes; Symphony no.7

Wen-Sinn Yang (cello) Tassilo Probst (violin) Jewish Chamber Orchestra Munich/Daniel Grossman

ONYX ONYX4237

Another noteworthy album of a formerly neglected Soviet figure

Weinberg’s tragic life experiences are never far from the surface in his music, and the recently discovered Concertino for cello and strings (an earlier version of the Cello Concerto) is no exception. There is a sense of white-hot intensity to this work, written in four days in 1948, during one of the thorniest times for Soviet composers – the Zhdanov crisis that targeted Weinberg’s friend, Shostakovich. The opening movement teems with Hebraic lamentation; the ensuing Moderato espressivo is full of klezmer musical imagery and here the Jewish Chamber Orchestra under Daniel Grossman gets the accompanying rhythms and slight rawness of a folk band to perfection. Wen-Sinn Yang proves a highly accomplished exponent, although he perhaps misses the last word in nuance within the phrase that Pieter Wispelwey captures so poignantly. However, in the cadenza that opens the final movement, Yang really comes into his own, delineating the material convincingly and delivering a highly emotional return of the opening lament.

Tassilo Probst offers impressive subtlety in his phrasing of the Violin Concertino, in which he draws the listener into its reflective, wistful melodies. In the Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes, premiered by David Oistrakh, he perfectly captures its folk elements, and again the orchestra brings an authentic timbre to the accompaniment. The Seventh Symphony features edgy Bach-like harpsichord interspersions within the stark contrapuntal material, depicted here with telling expression.

JOANNE TALBOT

SAMBACH

Works by Abreu, Azevedo, Bach, Bandolim, Barroso, Benjor, Jobim, Rosa, Valente, Valle and Villa-Lobos (all pieces but Bach arr. Zandonade)

Linus Roth (violin) Orquestra Johann Sebastian Rio/Felicia Bockstael

EVIL PENGUIN EPRC0055

Linus Roth conjures a harmonious marriage of opposites

J.S. Bach and Brazilian samba? But yes. This unusual programme – melding the guiding namesake of Rio de Janeiro-based chamber orchestra Johann Sebastian Rio with the music of its homeland – was Linus Roth’s idea for a second, tailor-made collaboration with the ensemble after a Belem music festival brought them together to play Vivaldi.

It takes some doing to glide smoothly between two such contrasting musical languages, but Roth has been clever, using Bachinspired Villa-Lobos (Villa Cantilena and Canção Sentimental ) as a bridge, in an arrangement featuring notably Bachian violin figuration; then for the ensuing solidly samba repertoire, the orchestra retains not just its classical formation but even its harpsichord.

That’s not to say that it isn’t still a touch discombobulating to hear ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ so soon after Bach’s Violin Concerto in E major, but it does sound good. The Bach itself has fine tonal sweetness and an airy springiness. The Villa-Lobos, too, contains some genuine treats, notably the silky sensuousness of Roth’s central cadenza and the orchestra’s re-entry via luminously lucid, softly glassy upper strings.

Add palpably high-resolution audio, immersive listening and even some unusual audience colour – the recording derived from two concerts in Rio’s Sala Cecilia Meireles, and the effortless rhythmic snap and lilt of ‘Mas que nada’ gets the public singing along – and this is classy fun.

CHARLOTTE GARDNER

MUCH ADO: ROMANTIC VIOLIN PIECES

Works by Korngold, Wagner, Brahms, Hubay, Dohnányi, Achron, Zeitlin, Bloch and Kreisler

Danbi Um (violin) Amy Yang (piano)

AVIE AV2615

A competition veteran makes her long-awaited solo debut album

South Korean-born, Curtis Institutetrained Danbi Um received the second prize in the Junior category of the 2004 Menuhin Competition (narrowly beating Ray Chen, who came joint third). Her debut solo album falls into three parts:

Viennese-style high-Romanticism (Korngold, Kreisler, Wagner), Gypsy-influenced music (Brahms, Hubay, Dohnányi) and music by Jewish composers (Achron, Zeitlin, Bloch).

If the first movement from Korngold’s Much Ado About Nothing suite (‘The Maiden in the Bridal Chamber’) could do with a touch more suave charm, and if the sound in the third (‘Scene in the Garden’) might open out a little more, these might both have been helped with a little more lift in the acoustic.

Um brings a rustic swagger to Kreisler’s arrangement of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance no.17 and there’s plenty of colour in Hubay’s ‘The Waters of Maros’ from Scènes de la csárda – ranging from the filigree cadenza-like arpeggios in harmonics to searing double-stopping and pizzicato chords.

In the Jewish pieces Um’s way with line and subtle portamento is winning, but the sound could be warmer and more effortless. Kreisler’s Viennese Rhapsodic Fantasietta closes the disc, though Tessa Lark’s recording of the piece (with the same pianist) swings and sways more.

EDWARD BHESANIA