RECORDINGS

BACH Goldberg Variations Reimagined Rachel Podger (violin) Chad Kelly (harpsichord) Brecon Baroque

CHANNEL CLASSICS CCSSA44923

An audacious rethinking of a Baroque masterpiece bears musical fruit

Conceived during lockdown and brought to fruition after much discussion with Rachel Podger, creative instrumentation and last-minute experimentation during the recording process, Chad Kelly’s ‘re-imagination’ transforms Bach’s work from its somewhat monochrome original for a two-manual harpsichord into one of glorious Technicolor, involving strings, flute, oboes, bassoon and harpsichord. It deftly captures the particular style, genre and mood of each variation and brings out the individual timbres and qualities of the period instruments employed, admirably highlighting Bach’s contrapuntal intentions. Segue groupings of variations assist with a sense of fluidity.

Rachel Podger and friends: reimagining the Goldbergs

Podger’s contribution throughout is outstanding. She introduces the Aria’s melodic content over Kelly’s simple harpsichord accompaniment, featuring the passacaglia-like bass line that provides the variations’ foundation, and gives a heart-rending account of the mournful var.25. Other highlights include the Brandenburgstyle variations (nos.8, 14 and 19), the tortured minor-mode canon in contrary motion (var.15), the French Ouverture (var.16) and the numerous passages featuring woodwind sonorities, most notably in vars.2, 7, 13, 18, 21 and 22. Kelly provides imaginative continuo accompaniments, modifying his contribution in repeated sections, and finally enjoys some solo limelight in var.29. The light-hearted Quodlibet (var.30) flows straight into the Aria’s reprise, re-scored to present a final kaleidoscope of instrumental colour. The recording is exemplary.

ROBIN STOWELL

COURTESY BRECON BAROQUE

BACH Solo Sonatas and Partitas vol.2: Partita no.1 in B minor BWV1002; Sonatas: no.1 in G minor BWV1001, no.3 in C major BWV1005

Frank Peter Zimmermann (violin)

BIS BIS-2587 (SACD)

A second volume fails to make its mark in a much-recorded field

Like Augustin Hadelich and Bojan Čičić before him, Frank Peter Zimmermann used the pandemic lockdown to immerse himself in Bach’s solo violin works and subsequently record them (vol.1 was reviewed by Peter Quantrill in May 2022).

Zimmermann offers interpretations that are accurate and assured, if occasionally experimental and idiosyncratic. He has given much thought to the significance of note lengths, tonal colour and pliability in delineating Bach’s part-writing, especially in the First Partita and the sonatas’ fugues, and he has also embraced some aspects of historically informed performance. He adopts for the most part a light, well-articulated bowing style, although occasional forceful interjections, as in the sonatas’ adagios, seem as if bolts from the blue. He also uses a narrow vibrato selectively and introduces extensive extempore ornamentation, sometimes to the point of misguidedness, as in one arpeggiated section in the fugue of BWV1001 and in BWV1002’s doubles.

A sound sense of musical architecture underpins the direction and pacing of most movements, but the express finales of both sonatas tend merely to resemble exercises in left-hand finger dexterity. The dynamic range overall is not especially wide-ranging, but there is some striking soft playing in the double of BWV1002’s Sarabande.

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Captured in two different venues, the recordings seem pitched sharper than the norm, but are otherwise clear and resonant.

ROBIN STOWELL

GEORGE GARNIER

BEETHOVEN Violin Concerto; Violin Sonata no.9 ‘Kreutzer’ Nemanja Radulović (violin) Double Sens

WARNER CLASSICS 505419774339

A new ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata transcription is the star of this Beethoven programme

You can count on Nemanja Radulović to bring a showman-like self-penned arrangement to a core repertoire programme, and for his play-directed Beethoven that has meant following the Violin Concerto – featuring the Kreisler cadenzas, perhaps surprisingly for this innovator – with his reimagining of the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata for string ensemble.

Performing the concerto in its original scoring has necessitated a first-ever expansion of Radulović’s Franco-Serbian strings ensemble Double Sens, but its players sound as impeccable as ever. The Larghetto is especially successful: evoking luxurious tranquillity, with Radulović silkily floating his lines over an equally ardent-sounding ensemble. But while their springing finale also charms, Radulović’s liberal firstmovement rubato makes its episodic structure overly bitty, and he himself seems slightly off-mic against the warmly immediate ensemble sound.

The ‘Kreutzer’, though, is an unequivocal success. Placing Radulović first among nimbly virtuosic equals, this dishes out a veritable feast of contrasting colours, textures and dynamics, one that far exceeds the remit of a simple transcription; its highlights include the first movement’s injections of Eastern European folk swing, the frequent spotlights on ensemble players and the final exuberant canter to the finish.

CHARLOTTE GARDNER

BEETHOVEN String Quartets: op.18 nos.1 and 6, op.59 no.1 ‘Rasumovsky’, op.95 ‘Serioso’, op.127 Doric Quartet

CHANDOS CHAN20298 (2 CDS)

A quartet sets off on a new adventure with impressive confidence

One or two points of emphasis in op.18 no.1 feel excessive in the moment – especially on repeat – and yet the musical instincts of this new cycle are so strong and sound that such bumps in the road are soon forgotten. In terms of a sound palette, these op.18 performances take off where the Doric’s excellent Haydn op.76 set left us, on the cusp of the 19th century.

Schubert is just around the corner; the Brontë sisters too, in the fleeting, spring-like joy with which the Doric launches a strikingly muscular ‘Rasumovsky’ no.1. A little more rubato has its stylistic place, especially in the gaunt and tragic cast of the Lento, but these studio accounts hold the momentum of a concert performance, with healthy flourishes of cadenza virtuosity as they arise, such as cellist John Myerscough in the first movement’s development.

He also sets the tone for op.95’s Allegretto, which is done with welcome restraint compared to the overwrought pathos of many older ensembles, setting the scene for a biting but again not overdone Scherzo. The album as a whole draws its energies in ever more concentrated form towards a tremendous unwinding of tension in a broad and inward account of op.127’s Adagio.

Finesse and focus from the Doric Quartet

Offsetting it with a novel grasp of the quartet’s architecture, the outer movements recover a Haydnesque equilibrium, at least until the finale’s magical dissolve into something like early Schoenberg. Intelligent, spontaneous-sounding, technically immaculate, these are Beethoven performances that will not go out of date any time soon.

PETER QUANTRILL

BEETHOVEN String Quartets: op.74 ‘Harp’, op.130

Chiaroscuro Quartet

BIS BIS-2668 (SACD)

Revelatory middle- and late-period Beethoven from the Chiaroscuro

Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto is op.73, and yet this account of op.74 already belongs to another, inner world. Forget the standard platitudes of the quartet’s sunny disposition. The Chiaroscuro answers those passing beams of pizzicato sunlight with fiercely furrowed accents that intensify through the development section, in which Emilie Hörnlund’s viola makes an especially strong impression.

There is just enough warmth to the vibrato of violinists Alina Ibragimova and Pablo Hernán Benedí to bring songful consolation rather than existential chill to the Adagio. Indeed, one notable feature of these performances is a palpably established sense of place and time in such apparently timeless music. This sensitivity brings the variationform finale of op.74 to rest with a nicely judged equilibrium that still has one foot in the 18th century.

Pure tone in op.130 inevitably delivers more of a shock on first listening. It turns out that a narrower-than-usual range of dynamics may still get to the heart of the first movement when the bowing and phrasing does not strain for a modernist effect. Indeed, the modulating turn to the major (8’30”) is as hauntingly tentative as I have ever heard it. So too the Danza tedesca transports us to a briefly recovered world of Haydnesque charm, while serving admirably as the preface to an intensely felt and poised Cavatina that, especially in Ibragimova’s hands, forms the culmination to a remarkable album. If the replacement finale pulls us back to earth, that is no fault of the musicians.

PETER QUANTRILL

The Chiaroscuro Quartet brings trademark intensity to Beethoven

SUSSIE AHLBURG

BEETHOVEN String Quartet op.131 SCHUBERT String Quartet D810 ‘Death and the Maiden’ Sacconi Quartet

ORCHID CLASSICS ORC100265

Two Everests of the quartet repertoire are approached with keen focus

The Sacconi Quartet’s 21st-birthday present to itself is this recording. Two works from the cusp of the Classical and Romantic eras, two penultimate quartet statements – but, more importantly, two works that have accompanied the ensemble throughout its career. Accordingly, these are lived-in interpretations, observant of details yet giving the long view of these substantial quartets. Neither journey is embarked upon without full knowledge of the destination, and the Sacconi players are knowledgeable guides.

Both pieces are journeys involving the soul as musical argument, and the Sacconi vividly depicts the two characters behind them. Schubert’s troubled world comes instantly to life in the stunned opening motif of ‘Death and the Maiden’, while a more patient intensity builds as the counterpoint of op.131’s opening movement gradually unfurls. In the expansive sets of variations that lie at the heart of both quartets, these four players prove compelling storytellers.

The ensemble takes its name from the Italian luthier Simone Fernando Sacconi (1895–1973); all but cellist Cara Berridge (on a 1781 Gagliano) play Sacconi instruments from the 1920s and 1930s. The blend is ideal, although just occasionally there are moments when intonation goes minutely awry under pressure or in high-lying passages (the fourth variation in the Schubert, for example). Nevertheless, these are impressive performances, with concentration never allowed to lapse for a second. Happy birthday, Sacconi!

DAVID THREASHER

BRAHMS Violin Sonatas nos.1–3 Yulia Berinskaya (violin) Alessandra Ammara (piano)

DA VINCI CLASSICS C00757

A new Brahms set can’t compete with the competition

The market for Brahms’s violin sonatas is a crowded one and to enter it is to go head to head with Renaud Capuçon, Augustin Dumay, Alina Ibragimova, Leonidas Kavakos and Tasmin Little, to mention just a few. This release from Russian-born, Milan-based Yulia Berinskaya is sadly not in the same league. Her technique is certainly sound and if phrase endings seem to tail off sharply, with little tapering of the tone, this could be in part an unforgiving acoustic. But too much of the time, Brahms’s lyrical flow is undernourished. New themes are often under-characterised, or enter without event: the second theme of the First Sonata’s first movement, for example, stumbles in as if by accident.

There could be more leaning in to chromatic interest, and more variety of tonal shading (the First Sonata’s Adagio lacks the searching mystery of other performances). Figuration, accompanying and sometimes even melodic, can sound lifeless, and rests between phrases become empty chasms rather than silent incubators. The piano isn’t especially well captured, sounding a little flattened in expression.

The overall impression is more of a rehearsal-room playthrough than a real performance; the Presto agitato finale of the Sonata no.3 has good bite but the journey to get there is long and often dispiriting.

EDWARD BHESANIA

DVOŘÁK Cello Concerto; works arr. cello and cello ensemble Kian Soltani (cello) Staatskapelle Berlin/Daniel Barenboim; Cellists of the Staatskapelle Berlin

DG 483 6090

Charismatic playing of a much-loved concerto, caught on the wing

After his bright, forthright opening statement of Dvořák’s B minor Cello Concerto, Kian Soltani produces dancing spiccato and energetic bravura on his way to the second subject, which is meditative and beautiful in its simplicity. It all forms a thrilling first paragraph. And so he continues, with playing that ranges in character from intimate to heroic, with sparkling virtuosity and a lot of finely judged rubato. There is fervent yearning in the second movement, with rich, woody-toned melody in the lower register. There are passages here, with the superb woodwind in close attendance, that are akin to chamber music. Soltani’s range of voices is apparent again in the finale, where he morphs eloquently between inwardness and extrovert grandeur, the rhythm at times of military precision and at others free and expressive. This is a live performance. The rest of the CD is a studio recording from two years later, with the sound warm and well-balanced in both. Here are short works for cello and cello ensemble (plus double bass), mostly arranged by Soltani. He is plaintive in Goin’ Home (taken from the slow movement of Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony), shows a delicate sensitivity in the fourth of the Songs my mother taught me, and is soulful in Silent Woods.

TIM HOMFRAY

FAURÉ Après un rêve; Papillon; Romance FRANCK Violin Sonata (arr. Descartes) POULENC Cello Sonata SAINT-SAËNS Cello Concerto no.1 Bruno Philippe (cello) Tanguy de Williencourt (piano); Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra/Christoph Eschenbach

HARMONIA MUNDI HMM 902316

Plenty to admire here, with Poulenc’s underrated sonata stealing the show

This enterprising and beautifully recorded programme, combining elements of late-Romanticism with Neo-classicism, provides cellist Bruno Philippe with a suitably wide stylistic range. Indeed, his magnetic playing proves to be a triumph, not least because his approach is selfeffacing in allowing the music to speak for itself, thereby creating interpretations that are both natural and subtle. His duo partner Tanguy de Williencourt is equally masterful. In the dense textures of the Franck sonata Williencourt deftly controls the timbre, skipping in and out of the textures as soloist and accompanist with quixotic speed. The duo is particularly impressive in navigating the turbulent ebb and flow of the second movement of the Franck.

Fauré’s salon pieces are exquisitely performed with elegance and sensitivity and a real understanding of his modal melodic invention and side-slipping harmonies. Philippe’s interpretation of Saint-Saëns’s First Cello Concerto revels in its underlying Classical restraint, while offering sufficiently theatrical playing in the bravura passages; the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra under Eschenbach combines wonderfully precise and expressive playing.

Christoph Croisé shines a light on 1883

Even more alluring, however, is Poulenc’s Cello Sonata. This underplayed work is exceedingly difficult to make rhythmically neat and expressive – needing performers who are alert to its rapidly changing moods and virtuosic demands. Both artists ensure that every bar sounds amazingly fresh and spontaneous.

JOANNE TALBOT

1883 FAURÉ Élégie GRIEG Cello Sonata STRAUSS Cello Sonata Christoph Croisé (cello) Oxana Shevchenko (piano)

AVIE AV2632

A programme built around a single year produces interventionist performances

What a propitious year 1883 must have been to inspire such seminal works for the cello. It certainly proves to be an excellent idea for generating a varied yet cogent programme. Of course, with late Romantic works, the piano parts are extensive in range and timbre, and need an astute touch for the lower registers of the cello not to be overwhelmed. Oxana Shevchenko rises to this challenge with supreme deftness, bringing much colour to the piano’s role. Christoph Croisé is an eloquent partner, eliciting an impressive range of dynamics so essential in large-scale works.

He evokes a tremendous spontaneity and freshness in the early Strauss sonata, whose first-movement melodies are teeming with energy and joie de vivre, and in the turbulent and passionate Grieg. All in all, the duo musters a feathery brilliance in the finale of the Strauss, and brings lots of intensity to the full-blooded passages in the opening movement of the Grieg.

My only caveat – and this really percolates through the whole programme – is a tendency to over-complicate quieter passages with too much fussy nuance, as for example in the central movement of the Strauss and the Fauré Élégie. Often a simpler delivery is ironically more expressive. In the Grieg sonata, the finale’s oscillation between the folk-like main theme and the more tranquillo passages is also slightly overdone, which tends to fragment the invention and thus stifle the work’s momentum.

JOANNE TALBOT

SVEN GERMANN

NACHMANOVITCH Music from Before the Beginning Stephen Nachmanovitch (violin, viola, violectra, voice, electronics)

BLUE CLIFF RECORDS BIT.LY/49KN9IA

An engrossing box of delights from an American polymath

Psychologist, philosopher, academic, writer, even computer pioneer, mind-boggling US polymath Stephen Nachmanovitch is also a performer across several stringed instruments, both acoustic and electric, and a long-standing blurrer of boundaries between composed music and improvisation. It’s probably no surprise, then, that his most recent release takes a weighty subject as its underlying theme: the earliest forms of life, and processes of organic evolution.

If that sounds forbiddingly esoteric, don’t be put off: Music from Before the Beginning is full of wit and light, of music to charm and entertain, as well as to provoke deeper considerations. Just take the absurdist multi-layered chanting of ‘Nay Yama Dodo Tulu’, for example – surely not meant to be taken entirely seriously! Elsewhere, though, there’s far more lyricism and insight, in the complex multitracked scrubbings of the brooding opening track ‘Hydrothermal Vent’, for instance, or the strangely moving dialogue between Nachmanovich’s electronic violectra plus recorded mockingbirds and crow in ‘To Be in the World’. His ‘Waters of Innocence’ plays ear-tweaking games with unconventional tunings in the context of an Indian raga, while the closing ‘Clouds Unfold’ – the disc’s most dissonant track, but also probably its most expressive, if not downright trippiest – demonstrates Nachmanovitch’s skill with freeflowing melody.

Nachmaninovitch is never less than an intriguing, eloquent presence, blending roles as creator, improviser and performer. A collection of sometimes oddball delights, captured in close, detailed sound.

DAVID KETTLE

CLOSING STATEMENTS SCHOENBERG Phantasy op.47 SCHUMANN Violin Sonata no.3; Phantasie in C op.131 SILVESTROV Post Scriptum Sophie Rosa (violin) Ian Buckle (piano)

RUBICON RCD1119

An unusual programme lent distinction by characterful playing

Sophie Rosa and Ian Buckle are not the first to put together a programme of late and last works. As the booklet essay points out, the catch is that the composers of course didn’t know they were last works when they wrote them. The only one here that consciously sums up what has gone before isn’t a last work at all:

Silvestrov described his Post Scriptum sonata as ‘a postscript to Mozart and the whole Classical tradition.’ He wrote it in 1991, and he’s still with us.

The duo opens with bold playing of Schumann’s Third Violin Sonata, Rosa eloquent in the curling melodies of the first movement, with both capturing the wistful quality of the lyrical scherzo. After a gentle Intermezzo they are lively in the finale, with a fine sense of where to push forward and where to hold back. Schoenberg’s Phantasy really was his last work. Here the musicians skilfully produce a narrative line through the gnomic, fragmentary utterances of the opening, and Rosa brings to the Grazioso a sultry, seductive lyricism. She nips neatly through the sky-rocketing scales of Schumann’s Phantasie (in Kreisler’s arrangement for violin and piano), stylishly negotiates the passagework, and gives a muscular account of the cadenza. After all this heated emotion Silvestrov’s sparsely written threemovement sonata is like a welcome glass of cool water, played with gentle sensitivity. The recording is close and resonant.

TIM HOMFRAY

Isabelle Faust’s Schumann project ends on a high

FELIX BROEDE

SCHUMANN Piano Quartet op.47; Piano Quintet op.44

Isabelle Faust, Anne Katharina Schreiber (violins) Antoine Tamestit (viola) Jean-Guihen Queyras (cello) Alexander Melnikov (piano)

HARMONIA MUNDI HMM902695

Period instruments prove revelatory in two Romantic icons

Period practice has been slower to infiltrate Schumann’s chamber repertoire than it has his orchestral music. The landscape shifted with the arrival at this repertoire of Isabelle Faust, Jean-Guihen Queyras and Alexander Melnikov, whose 2014 recordings of Schumann’s trios and concertos were highly acclaimed. Now they belatedly complete the project with two pinnacles among the composer’s miraculous ‘chamber music year’ of 1841.

Right away, in the Piano Quartet’s slow introduction you notice the string blend, a product of Faust’s laser-like, focused sound and Queyras’s subtle gradations of tone, joined by violist Antoine Tamestit – high-class casting indeed. He and Faust both play Strads – his from 1672, hers the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ of 1704 with which she has become almost synonymous – while Queyras’s cello is a 1696 instrument by Gioffredo Cappa which comes into its own in the arching phrases of the slow movement. Melnikov’s 1851 Pleyel sounds remarkably well maintained and has the ability to surge rather than shout in louder moments.

Anne Katharina Schreiber joins in for the Piano Quintet on an anonymous Dutch violin of c.1700. Here the balance is yet more remarkable, Schumann’s distribution of voices ensuring that all are heard as soloists and ensemble players, the ring of the Pleyel launching the work with irresistible joy. The throaty baritonal colours of Tamestit’s viola are a highlight of the funeral-march second movement and the bite of gut brings dark colours to the convulsion of its agitato section. Such is the concentration of these players that the finale’s magical contrapuntal denouement, combining the themes of the first and last movements, comes as a moment of true revelation.

DAVID THREASHER

Rakhi Singh: captivating assurance

DESTINATION PARIS Works by Bizet, Debussy, Fauré, Gounod, Offenbach, Rameau and Ravel; French chansons and film themes arr. Ducros Gautier Capuçon (cello) Jérôme Ducros (piano, harpsichord) Maîtrise de Radio France; Paris Chamber Orchestra/Lionel Bringuier

ERATO 5419772146

Plenty of affection in a cellist’s homage to his home city

Billed as a ‘love letter to his home city’, Gautier Capuçon’s latest release encompasses music from Paris’s opera houses, cinemas, salons and cabarets in a nostalgic look back at the past century and beyond.

Capuçon has chosen pieces central to French culture, but mostly less well known to English speakers. Of the 22 tracks only one, Fauré’s Sicilienne, was originally written for cello; the rest offer a cornucopia of attractive arrangements.

The mix is eclectic, to say the least. The Habañera from Bizet’s Carmen, played by Capuçon with a coquettish elegance, rubs shoulders with a striking, beautifully hushed theme from the 1963 film Le Mépris; Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, maybe losing some of its delicacy in this Romantic interpretation, is flanked by Morricone and Charles Aznavour. There is a relaxed, shoes-off feel to the album, with its warm recorded sound. Capuçon plays with ease and assurance, obviously enjoying performing his personal selection.

The specially commissioned centrepiece, Goldman’s Pense à nous, features Capuçon’s wonderful 1701 Gofriller cello soaring high over the voices of hundreds of schoolchildren.

A short introduction by Capuçon is all that is offered by way of programme notes in the booklet, which is otherwise a photographic appreciation of Paris and of Capuçon himself, posing on the rooftops.

JANET BANKS

PHIL SHARP

PURNIMA Works by Gordon, Groves, Hall, Singh and Wolfe Rakhi Singh (violin)

CANTALOUPE MUSIC CA21193

A Manchester Collective founder makes waves in her solo debut

Music director and Manchester Collective co-founder Rakhi Singh is also a formidable solo violinist, as this compelling and at times deeply moving Anglo-American disc demonstrates. It’s released on New York-based Bang on a Can’s Canteloupe Music, and its second half is devoted to two of that organisation’s founders. Julia Wolfe’s LAD is fast becoming a 21st-century classic – originally for nine bagpipes, it’s slightly softer and more thoughtful in Singh’s own version for multitracked violins, though her account lacks nothing of the original’s wall-of-sound monumentality. This is bookended by two short pieces by Wolfe’s husband, Michael Gordon – the bright and breezy, samba-inspired Tinge, and the aching Light Is Calling, whose floating melodies show off Singh’s simple eloquence to fine effect.

The disc’s all-British first half is no less impressive. Singh navigates the glistening tremolos of Alex Groves’s Trace I with radiant confidence, highlighting otherworldly details in what might have simply been ambient textures. She offers a strongly spoken account of Emily Hall’s folk-like, three-movement OutShifts in a rich and perceptive performance. Singh’s own Sabkha feels all too brief, a sonically gorgeous blend of rippling arpeggios, unpredictable harmonies and electronic washes.

Captured in warm, close sound, Purnima offers a collection of pieces that captivate and challenge, and demand you to return to again and again.

DAVID KETTLE