The best classical and opera CDs and DVDs of 2022 so far, from JS Bach to Kurt Weill

CD Kurt Weill – Symphony no. 2, Violin Concerto: Tamás Kocsis and Ulster Orchestra ★★★★★

Some great composers’ music seems to float free of their own time. You don’t think about Counter-Reformation Rome when you listen to Palestrina, or the French Revolution when you listen to Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony (you might think about freedom, but you don’t picture sans-culottes rioting in the streets).

With Kurt Weill it’s different. His music is so imbued with the spirit of 1920s Berlin it’s hard to hear one of his famous songs like “Surabaya Jonny” without thinking of Isherwood’s Goodbye to All That or George Grosz’s angry paintings of street walkers and war-wounded. That may be why his concert music is comparatively neglected, compared with his eternally popular music-theatre works like The Threepenny Opera and Street Scene. We think the “real” Kurt Weill couldn’t possibly be revealed in something called Symphony or Concerto.

This new recording of his Violin Concerto and Second Symphony shows how wrong that view is. Weill’s familiar musical personality blazes out, as unmistakeably as in any of those better-known works. You feel the same bitter sarcasm and anger, followed disconcertingly by tender sweetness. You hear big, defiant tunes that could easily have been sung by Weill’s wife, the music-theatre star Lotte Lenya, backed by the strident sound of side-drum and squeaking woodwind and grunting double-bass like some distorted cabaret band.

Having said that, there are differences. In his music-theatre works Weill made a deliberate attempt to be musically straight-forward. In the concert-hall he could allow himself a little more complication. The Second Symphony, composed after he’d fled Berlin to escape Nazi persecution (Weill was Jewish, and the son of a rabbi), has the heft and sophistication of a proper symphony. In the slow movement, the grieving, dignified trombone melody which appears centre-stage comes back later, but now as a bass line to a new melody – the kind of subterranean connection symphonists like to make, even one as populist as Weill. In this excellent performance from the Ulster Orchestra under Jac van Steen both sides of the piece, the populist and the high-art, shine out beautifully.

The Violin Concerto written ten years earlier in 1924 is a tougher proposition. Weill at this time was an aspiring modernist and his musical language is much more astringent. Another difficulty is that piece is an extraordinary amalgam of cultural references with Bach-like counterpoint, Mahler-like trumpets, proper “modern-music” angularity and high-kicking dances all rubbing shoulders. But one thing this excellent recording makes clear even on a first hearing is the prevailing mood of night-time mystery, tipping sometimes towards menace. The solo violinist Tamás Kocsis, who has a day job leading the Ulster Orchestra, flings off the extraordinary finger-twisting solo part with what sounds like ease, and the orchestral players match him for accuracy and finesse. In all it’s a marvel. IH

Kurt Weill – Symphony no. 2, Violin Concerto is released by SOMM

CD JS Bach – Harpsichord Concertos: Andrew Arthur and Hanover Band ★★★★☆

There are so many reasons to revere Johann Sebastian Bach – greatest composer of counterpoint, greatest harmonist, greatest religious composer, greatest organ composer etc. However there’s another reason that even his admirers tend to overlook, which is that he more-or-less invented the idea of the keyboard concerto. In his day the role of the harpsichord player in the performance of, say, a Baroque string concerto was a humble one. He was there to keep time, fill in the harmony, and create a sense of aural continuity between the bits where only the soloists play and those other bits where everyone joins in.

To us it seems an obvious move, to liberate the harpsichordist from his bondage and give him the same opportunities for solo display that Vivaldi and other composers had already given to the violin, cello, mandolin etc. In the Baroque era it was far from obvious, in fact it needed that conceptual leap that is the prerogative of genius. Step forward Bach. You can hear the liberation accomplished in real-time as it were in Bach’s Brandenburg Fifth Concerto, at that dizzying moment when the harpsichordist decides it’s time to take over the show.

You won’t find that on this new CD, but you will find four of Bach’s wonderful harpsichord concertos, the ancestors of all those later piano concertos from Mozart to Prokofiev that are now the mainstay of classical concert life. They were composed mostly in the late 1730s, when Bach had the job of laying on music entertainments at Zimmerman’s coffee house in Leipzig. Like any jobbing composer before the age of copyright Bach ruthlessly pillaged his own and other people’s music for material. The D major concerto is a reworking of his own E major violin concerto, the D minor one lifts movements from his church cantatas. In every case Bach’s repurposes the music so well you’d never believe they weren’t born as harpsichord concertos.

Space was tight in that coffee house so Bach used only single stringed instruments for each orchestral part, a limitation respected on these recordings. It turns out to be no limitation at all, in fact the intimate and finely-detailed weave of the five string players of the Hanover Band is one of the recording's chief pleasures. Another is the moderate tempos, which some may find unexciting but for me make a pleasant change from the motorically driven speeds of some “early music” recordings. Another is the playing of harpsichordist Andrew Arthur, which always feels alert and responsive to the orchestral parts, and has just enough tempo flexibility and ornamentation to bring Bach’s aural designs to life. The sheer sensuousness of the slow movements, which are taken at a luxuriously slow pace, should win over even hardened harpsichord sceptics. IH

JS Bach: Harpsichord Concertos is released by Signum

DVD Verdi – Falstaff: Maggio Musicale Fiorentina ★★★☆☆

Verdi’s last opera is a masterpiece of swift and light refinement, all the more miraculous because its subject matter is the opposite of lightness and refinement. Falstaff is a “mound of obesity”, a cunning, deceitful lecher, who’ll tell any lie and cheat on anyone in order to gratify his appetites. Yet Verdi’s music paints him and the women who intrigue against him and the men who rage against him in the most delicate, ironic colours.

For those colours to shine out a production needs an equally deft touch. This one recorded at last year’s Maggio Musicale festival in Florence certainly has its good points. Nicola Alaimo as Falstaff has a huge, energising presence, and his voice, though lacking that echt-Falstaffian port-soaked fruitiness is certainly agile as well as strong. Ailyn Pérez is excellent as Alice, the leader of the four women who together hatch a revenge on Falstaff, as are Matthew Swenson and Francesca Boncompagni as the innocent lovers Fenton and Nannetta. Only Simone Piazzola disappoints as the vengeful Ford, particularly in his bitter “revenge” monologue, which should feel like the one truly dark moment in the opera.

John Eliot Gardiner, conducting his third production in nearly 40 years, conjures playing of lovely finesse from the Maggio Musicale Orchestra. But in his determination to savour the music’s ironic tenderness and fine filigree-work Gardiner adopts spacious tempos which at times clog the wheels of the comedy. This is a piece that needs to feel almost-too-fast to really come alive.

A bigger problem is the stage goings-on, which are as heavy-handed as the playing in the orchestral pit is subtle. The dark wooden panelling and late-Elizabethan set designs by Julian Crouch and richly textured period costumes by Kevin Pollard are pleasing to the eye, but director Sven-Eric Bechtolf seems not to realise that if you ham-act comedy with lots of eye-rolling and exaggerated gestures it becomes deeply unfunny. Alaimo catches Falstaff’s rough energy – his two hapless henchman Pistol and Bardolfo have missing teeth and a bloody nose – but misses the opportunities for pathos, as in the wonderful moment when Falstaff, having hauled himself out of the River Thames where he was dumped, reflects on his advancing age and the passing of time. We should feel sympathy at that moment but Alaimo is just straightforwardly arrogant, without a trace of vulnerability, so we don’t. So not a classic performance, but it looks lovely and often sounds lovely too, which are compensations. IH

Falstaff is released by Naxos

CD The Complete Songs of Duparc: Sarah Connolly, Huw Montague Rendall, Nicky Spence, William Thomas, Malcolm Martineau ★★★★☆

To gain an honourable place in the history of music a composer’s output needs to be of some size as well as being top quality. True there is the phenomenon of the “one-hit wonder”, but in those cases such as “The Merry Widow” it’s the piece we remember not the composer.  One of the reasons Alban Berg’s place among the great composers isn’t totally secure is that there are so few works – around 20.

But at least two of those were operas, which are now regularly produced all round the world. The case of Henri Duparc is stranger, and probably unique. In his 85 years (he died in 1933) he composed only 16 songs, all of them before well before he was 40. And yet he’s now counted as one of the great masters of French song, and those 16 songs crop up all the time in song concerts.

Five of those are early and not very characterful works, indistinguishable from the sentimental and richly upholstered songs of Duparc’s peers like Gounod. Then something miraculous happened. Duparc’s songs suddenly become vast in scope and filled with a drugged rapture, or more often black tragedy. There is something of the graveyard about Duparc, even when he’s trying to be joyful, but the way he wrings the maximum from a few ideas and never uses more notes than necessary lends a strange nobility to these dark outpourings.

This new recording of all 16 songs does them proud. They’re recorded in roughly chronological order of composition and shared between four wonderful British singers. Mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly summons a rich and ripe tone in her songs, which catches the prevailing tone of luxuriant melancholy, but I have to say the men summon a bigger variety of tone which is needed if the songs aren’t to become dank and slightly Gothic. Scottish tenor Nicky Spence is his usual fantastically energised self. In Le Manoire de Rosamunde, where the poet laments that love has bitten him like a dog, he sings the word “mordu” (bitten) so intensely I nearly jumped out of my chair. Bass Thomas Randall makes the final song, a setting of Baudelaire’s strange poem “La vie antérieure” (a previous life) seem as huge and awe-inspiring as a graven image.

The best single performance comes from the young and splendidly named baritone Huw Montague Rendall, who really captures the way Phydilé begins in calm radiance, seems to end ecstatically, and then surges to a whole new level of passion. Pianist Malcolm Martineau is hyper-alert to all the little details in the super-refined piano parts that change the emotional colour. Just sometimes, as in La Vague at le Cloche (The Wave and the Bell) I wish he’d foreswear perfection and throw caution to the winds. But overall these are wonderful recordings, which shine a bright light on these lonely eminences in French art song. IH

The Complete Songs of Duparc is released by Signum Classics

CD Liszt – Piano Concertos 1 & 2, Sonata in B minor: Alexander Ullman, BBC Symphony Orchestra ★★★★☆

The two piano concertos of Franz Liszt, completed in the late 1840s after he’d given up his career as a wildly popular travelling virtuoso, are the model of what a romantic piano concerto should be. They have the dreamy inwardness of Chopin plus a fiery and demonic quality that was all Liszt’s own and which Chopin would probably have found ineffably vulgar.

There are dozens of recordings in the catalogue, and to venture to re-record them a young pianist needs to have the chutzpah to go up against Horowitz, Argerich, Earl Wild and the rest, plus an iron-clad technique. British pianist Alexander Ullman, about to turn 31, is not shamed by the comparison. He can handle anything these works throw at him; the titanic double-octaves, the wild leaps from top to bottom of the keyboard, the seductively silver filigree in the slow movements. More importantly he’s aware that to come off these works need the smell of sulphur, particularly in the diabolical sections of the first concerto, and the smell of gunpowder, in the military parts of the second. (The liner notes tell us that some regard the first concerto as wildly Dionysiac and the second as coolly Apollonian, but you could have fooled me).

Ullman is clearly aware that Liszt wanted to be thought of as a “poet of the piano” – it was he who came up with the idea that a concert of solo piano music could be thought of as a “recital”. In many places Ullman offers playing that is indeed pure poetry, as in the melody of the second concerto that sounds at first as if it’s going to simply crib the most beautiful melody in the first, before veering off in a new direction. Ullman is also very alert to the textural subtleties of the music, such as those passages in the sonata where a melody emerges from a swirl of figuration.

If I have a small reservation it’s that Ullman’s determination to be flawless just occasionally leads to a slightly clinical quality. It’s true that perfection in these pieces can take on a haughty, Byronic tone – imagine the hero striking a perfect pose while gazing contemptuously into the abyss – and Ullman’s agile perfection does at times strike that note. At other times I wished he'd relax the tempo a little, and soften the edges of those massive chordal statements, to lend them a touch of misty grandeur. But this is carping. In almost every way, these recordings are tremendous. IH

Liszt: Piano Concertos 1 & 2, Sonata in B minor is released by Rubicon

CD Vaughan Williams – Sinfonia Antartica, Symphony No 9, Norfolk Rhapsody No 1, The Lark Ascending: Hallé ★★★★☆

It has been said, not least by the great critic and one-time editor of this newspaper Michael Kennedy, that the Hallé under its music director of 20 years Sir Mark Elder is enjoying a second golden age, comparable to the one that flowered under its great Permanent Conductor from the 1940s to the 1960s Sir John Barbirolli. Their recording of all nine symphonies of Vaughan Williams, released in instalments over 11 years and now as a complete boxed-set, certainly bears out that view. Throughout the orchestra plays with a combination of intensity, full-throated lyricism and refinement which makes these recordings a joy.

Added to which is their empathy with Vaughan Williams’s emotional world. They understand his passionate engagement with English landscape and folk-song, too intense and questioning to be dismissed as nostalgia, as well as his sudden eruptions of galumphing humour and moments of bleakness and terror in the face of the total war which the 20th century had unleashed.

This isn’t surprising, as the Hallé has Vaughan Williams’s music in its bones. Under Barbirolli (“Glorious John” as VW dubbed him) the orchestra played the symphonies constantly, and actually gave the premiere of the Seventh, known as the Sinfonia Antartica, in 1953. That symphony appears on the final instalment of the complete set, also released this month. Alongside it is the Ninth Symphony, premiered only a few months before the composer’s death in 1958, and shapely, affectionate performances of the Norfolk Rhapsody No 1 and The Lark Ascending.

The Sinfonia Antartica grew from the score Vaughan Williams composed in 1948 for the Ealing Studios production Scott of the Antarctic. His music evokes inhuman coldness, the blank immensity of glaciers and icebergs and uncanny white light in the silvery sounds of celeste and glockenspiel, with giant melodies that sound oddly weightless – a paradox well caught in this recording. Occasionally the music thaws, as in the central Intermezzo with its dreams of home, and in the final movement which portrays the weariness of the men battling against impossible odds.

The Ninth Symphony has a strange mix of rough, almost surreal humour and visionary mystery, but with a newly exotic palette coloured with saxophones and flugelhorn. Mark Elder’s tempos are often slower than the composer’s metronome markings, but the music never feels sluggish as he’s careful to let light and air into textures that on the page seem over-dense. In the final movement he transforms what can feel like a patchwork of different moods into a compelling narrative. At the very end the music resolves into a huge major chord shot through with gleams of some other unearthly harmony, like a vision of some unknown world. “Towards the Unknown Region” was the title of one of Vaughan Williams’s early choral works, and as this wonderful recording shows he was still searching for that region, up to the very end. IH

CD Schoenberg – String Quartets 1 & 3: Gringolts Quartet ★★★★★

Time heals all they say, and it seems to have healed Arnold Schoenberg’s reputation as the hate figure of modern music; though not in the way he would have hoped. Schoenberg had a touching fantasy that his knotted, dissonant style would one day seem straightforward and he would be accepted as a “better sort of Tchaikovsky”. Leaving aside the typically Germanic snobbery of that remark, one can still sympathise with the yearning of a man who however fiercely intellectual he seemed always wrote straight from the heart.

Unfortunately the hatred hasn’t given way to love. While his near-contemporary and great rival Stravinsky seems absolutely secure in musical life, Schoenberg’s music is becoming a real rarity. His Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) is almost the only piece that’s regularly performed, largely because it’s so gorgeously romantic it can be sold with the line, “Try this – you’ll never believe it’s by Schoenberg.”  The later works from the 1920s onwards are composed in his self-invented “12-note technique”. For many their angular complexity epitomises the way modern composers became bewitched by their own cleverness and lost touch with the audience.

But as long as musicians love a particular composer their music can never really die, and fortunately the later works of Schoenberg have their champions. The violin concerto has recently been recorded by Hilary Hahn and Isabelle Faust, and Mitsuko Uchida is fond of the strangely Cubist-Viennese piano concerto. Yuja Wang has even included Schoenberg’s spikily neo-classical Piano Suite in her current tour.

Now comes a new recording of Schoenberg’s “12-note” string quartet No 3 from 1927, from a quartet let by virtuoso violinist Ilya Gringolts. It’s paired with Schoenberg’s early quartet from 1905, and to hear them one after another is fascinating. On one level they couldn’t be more different. The first is full of surgingly romantic melodies that aren’t so far from Mahler, and it moves towards a radiantly major-key close. The later one never offers a familiar harmony, and is often grindingly dissonant.

But as these tremendous performances make clear, they’re actually not so far apart. Schoenberg’s aim was to saturate every part of his music with white-hot expressivity, and the move to the “12-note technique” didn’t change that. Admittedly the lack of recognisable harmonies in the 3rd makes it harder to hear, but you can feel the heat in those angular melodies, and at times there’s even a Viennese lilt, particularly in the Scherzo movement. And it’s not all fierce intensity. The 3rd Quartet tiptoes towards a gently diffident ending which in its way is just as moving as the overtly transcendent D major vision that ends the 1st. Both pieces are like Schoenberg himself: impossibly demanding but also inspiring and, in the end, loveable.  IH

Schoenberg: String Quartets 1 & 3 is released by BIS

CD Strauss – Boston Symphony Orchestra & Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra ★★★★★

While the concert scene continues to languish in the doldrums, the recording business is doing just fine. Some companies reported their best sales ever during the pandemic, as people bought music to stave off the boredom and misery of lockdown. Now classical music’s most prestigious label DG has released something of truly swaggering extravagance: a 7-CD boxed set of the sumptuously upholstered orchestral music of Richard Strauss. The 19 works are shared between two of the world’s greatest orchestras, the Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Boston Symphony. Both orchestras are led by one of the few bankable stars in the conducting world, Andris Nelsons.

It’s an almost-complete survey of Strauss’s orchestral music, with the famous “tone-poems” of the 1880s and 1890s intermingled with suites drawn from his later operas. Many of the pieces are staples of the orchestral repertoire, such as Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel and the suite from Strauss’s smash-hit opera from the halcyon pre-First-World-War period, Der Rosenkavalier. But there are some rarities too, such as the love scene from Strauss’s first opera Feuersnot, the early piano concerto Burleske (which guest soloist Yuja Wang throws off with irresistible brilliance) and the early tone-poem Macbeth. This latter isn’t yet fully characteristic of the composer but already shows his genius for musical pictorialism. Strauss never offered a “programme” to guide us through the musical narrative, but it’s impossible to miss the sly suggestiveness of the clarinets of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, whispering Lady Macbeth’s evil thoughts in her husband’s ear. Among the lesser-known later works are the Symphonic Suites from Die Frau ohne Schatten and the staggeringly grand Festival Prelude for Organ and Orchestra, recorded by the two orchestras together in Boston’s Symphony Hall. You only have to think of the cost of that one recording to know the good times must be rolling at DG. Both orchestras shine, though the Leipzig orchestra’s sound is somewhat deeper and darker than the Boston’s.

Amongst all the orchestral gorgeousness there are witty moments, like the brilliantly realistic imitation of sheep in Don Quixote, and also passages of remarkable daring which remind you why Strauss was regarded as a dangerous modernist, like the haunted ending of Also Sprach Zarathustra and the uncanny depiction of mountain mist in the Alpine Symphony. But mostly it’s pure escapism. The performances and recordings are so sumptuous, the constantly recurring waltz rhythms are caressed so seductively by both players and conductor I couldn’t resist going from one piece to the next. By the time I reached the waltz from the remarkably silly ballet Schlagobers (Whipped Cream) I was starting to feel slightly sick. This boxed-set is absolutely made for binge-listening – but best to keep some Bach or Hindemith to hand, as you’re sure to need some musical Alka-Seltzer before the end. IH

Strauss is released by DG

CD Ésoterik Satie: Noriko Ogawa Plays Erik Satie on an 1890 Erard Piano ★★★★☆

The wonderful Japanese-born pianist Noriko Ogawa has made a speciality of French music, and she captures the subtle colours and fleeting gestures of Debussy and Ravel as well as anybody. In recent years she’s turned her attention to the other great French composer of the turn of the 20th century, Erik Satie. This new recording is the fifth instalment of her complete recording of his music.

If people know Satie’s music at all, it will most likely be the softy swaying, Grecian-urn simplicity of his Gymnopédies, or the surreal humour of his later works. Long before that, in the late 1880s and 1890s, Satie cut a very different figure, religious, reclusive and deeply eccentric. He would wear one of a set of identical velvet suits in all weathers, spend long hours in libraries studying medieval architecture, and was mixed up with the occult circles that were so fashionable in turn-of-the-century Paris.

Among these mystical eccentrics was Joseph Péladan, who set himself up as the Grand Master or “Sâr” of the “Rose-Croix Catholique du temple et du grail”. Péladan actually appointed Satie as his musical director, and one of the pieces Satie composed for him, the Prélude d’Éginhard, appears on this CD alongside 38 assorted little pieces from the same “mystical” period in Satie’s music. They have evocative titles such as Danses gothiques, Prière, and Fête donnée par les Chevaliers Normands en l’Honneur d’une jeune Demoiselle.

All the pieces breathe an atmosphere of stately mystery, though within that there is considerable variety. Sometimes the atmosphere is specifically Christian, with grave ecclesiastical chants announced first in gaunt octaves and then swathed in glowing but entirely unrelated major chords. Sometimes (as in Prière) these are tricked out with “wrong” part-writing that obliquely evokes the Renaissance, an effect that anticipates the “wrong-note” chorales of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale by almost a quarter of a century.

Other pieces are harmonically much stranger and very un-Christian in sound, as in the “mystical and half-Christian” ballet Uspud, based on Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony. The somewhat later Pièces Froides of 1907 show Satie moving towards the deadpan irony of his middle period.

The music has very little in the way of tempo or expression markings but Ogawa’s speeds feel exactly right, slow enough to catch the music’s hieratic solemnity but with a suggestion of flowing movement underneath. Her 1890 Érard piano is very apt for the music, as the sound is a touch austere compared to a sumptuous modern concert grand and yet capable of grandeur and mysterious half-shades – as Ogawa’s recording proves. It has to be admitted this CD could pall if listened to in one sitting. Like some rare strongly scented liqueur, it’s best consumed in small doses. IH

Ésoterik Satie: Noriko Ogawa Plays Erik Satie on an 1890 Erard Piano is released by BIS

CD Mozart – Piano Concertos 22 & 23, Overture to Der Schauspieldirektor: Jean-Efflam Bavouzet & Manchester Camerata ★★★★★

If a regional orchestra wants to attract the world’s attention by making a recording, there are really two ways to go. They can make a virtue of obscurity by focusing on some recently discovered symphony, or a little-known composer, ideally from a group that’s been always been marginalised in classical music. The rarity attracts attention and might also win moral brownie points – and it also minimises the chance of unflattering comparisons being made with other recorded versions by more famous orchestras. The other option is to record a canonical masterpiece that’s been recorded a hundred times before, and that means stepping into the ring with the big boys.

Some years ago Manchester’s excellent chamber (i.e. small-scale) orchestra the Manchester Camerata took its courage in both hands and went for the second, much more difficult option. The orchestra’s conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy invited French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet to record all of Mozart’s 27 piano concertos, some of the most recorded pieces on the planet. So far the recordings have been judged to be strong contenders in a field where the competition could hardly be stronger.

This latest instalment containing the 22nd and 23rd concertos shows why, and it’s not because the recordings are strikingly original or eccentric. They are simply really good, in a way that’s easy to thrill to but hard to describe. If I had to name one quality, it’s that pianist and orchestra and conductor are absolutely equal partners. These concertos are full of tangy orchestral flavours, and the players really make us savour them. The result is more than just sensuously enjoyable, it actually makes the music more expressive. When the music turns to the major key in the sombre minor-key slow movement of the 22nd concerto, the ripe sound of the woodwinds really makes the moment feel operatic, as if a character bearing a consoling message has just walked on stage. Adding to that feeling is Takács-Nagy’s nicely-judged rhythmic flexibility, which rounds off the music’s corners and contributes to the feeling of give-and-take between orchestra and soloist.

As for Bavouzet, he’s a marvel, but again it’s because he’s unfailingly intelligent rather than strikingly original. If Mozart’s score demands severe simplicity he provides it; if it invites luxurious ornamentation he’ll decorate Mozart’s original in a way that feels exactly right. The best is saved for last in the finale of that same concerto, one of the most brilliant and joyous pieces in all music. Here Bavouzet and the orchestra are poised and disciplined but also create that sense of mad unstoppable energy that really sets the music alight. IH

Piano Concertos 22 & 23, Overture to Der Schauspieldirektor is released by Chandos

CD Debussy – La Demoiselle Élue, Le Martyre de Saint Sébastian, Nocturnes: Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France ★★★★☆

“Impressionist” is the label most often pinned to Claude Debussy, and though it annoyed the composer it does catch something essential about his music. The phrase suggests sunshine and movement and fleeting impressions, and some of Debussy’s best-loved pieces have exactly those qualities.

One piece on this excellent new disc has them in abundance: the movement called Fêtes (Festivals) from the Nocturnes. It whirls into being, flitting between sunshine and shadow, and eventually crystallises into a dancing procession which seems to come at us from afar – an effect brilliantly realised in this performance.

Much of the rest of the CD is focused on the other side of Debussy, the side that loved dank haunted castles, ruined temples and all the strange, mythic, occult-tinged world of symbolist painters and poets. The other two Nocturnes edge towards this world. Nuages is an uncannily apt sound-picture of drifting grey clouds, Sirènes an evocation of the Sirens of Greek mythology who lured men to their deaths.

Alongside the Nocturnes is Debussy’s first truly characteristic large-scale work, Le Demoiselle Élue. Based on a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it tells of an ideally virtuous young woman, sung here with affecting tenderness by Melody Louledjian. Decked in symbols of charity and purity, she looks down to earth from heaven after her death, where her beloved is grieving. This performance catches the antique, ecclesiastical serenity of the music (tinged here and there with memories of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde) and also the rising passion of the closing section, which suggest an erotic undercurrent beneath the heavenly purity.

There’s more suppressed eroticism in the incidental music Debussy wrote for Le Martyre de Saint Sebastian, an immensely long verse drama by the extravagantly otherworldly poet Gabriele d’Annunzio. Sebastian, a more-or-less historical figure, was a captain of archers in the Emperor Diocletian’s army who was sentenced to be killed by his own men for the crime of converting to Christianity. As in La Demoiselle, Debussy conjures an atmosphere of solemn mystery but with far more harmonic and colouristic daring, disturbed in the Ecstatic Dance by a sense of pagan darkness. The “symphonic fragments” from the complete music which are recorded on this disc admittedly omit some striking music, but they omit the dull patches too, so they’re a fine introduction to the piece, which is like nothing else in Debussy. All the performances under conductor Mikko Franck are wonderful, not least because of the young voices of Radio France’s children’s choir La Maîtrise de Radio France, who bring a breath of vernal innocence to everything they sing. IH

Debussy: Le Demoiselle Élue is released by Alpha

CD Mozart – Lucio Silla: Insula Orchestra cond. Laurence Equilbey ★★★★☆

It’s amazing to realise that Mozart was just 16 when he composed this ambitious and virtuosic serious opera for Milan. Even more astonishing is that even in our era of operatic revivals, though it has had concert performances, it has never been staged by one of our big opera companies – the earlier opera seria Mitridate has been preferred, which is equally full of showy arias but shows far less innovation in its score.

In Europe, Lucio Silla has been more often taken up, staged by Patrice Chéreau and Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, and there was a first-rate recording of it in 1989 under Nikolaus Harnoncourt, with a starry cast. This new recording, based on a long series of performances and tours by the dynamic Insula Orchestra under one of France’s leading conductors, Laurence Equilbey, takes the revival a step further. She and her cast have got under the skin of this opera, have understood its stylistic position in Mozart’s output, and have also cut it quite ruthlessly to reduce it to performable dimensions.

Like Harnoncourt, she omits one character completely, but then in addition, rather than reducing the long da capo arias in which the music is repeated with decorations and elaborations, she chooses instead to reduce the extensive recitatives to almost nothing, just providing the barest linking mechanism for the plot, shaving over 10 minutes off Harnoncourt’s timings for each of the two discs. The result is a performance of startling concentration and excitement.

The plot revolves around the Roman dictator Lucio Silla (the tenor Alessandro Liberatone) and is indeed over-complex in the manner of many such serious operas. But what the young Mozart does is to characterise the singers and work towards the kind of large-scale structure that would triumph in his later operas. Cecilio, banished by Silla, is the outstandingly agile counter-tenor Franco Fagioli, brilliant and always sharply focussed; Silla’s sister Celia is Ilse Eerens, who while not banishing memories of Dawn Upshaw for Harnoncourt, has a winning aria, “Quando sugl’arsi campi”, with staccato coloratura high notes looking forward to the Queen of the Night.

The weightiest music is for Giunia, betrothed to Cecilio, whose accompanied recitative in the second act veers wildly between moods and is projected with tremendous but sometimes squally fervour by Olga Pudova. Eventually Silla, attacked on all sides, has to give way to Cecilio, and resigns in his favour, living as a simple citizen acclaimed by all. It’s a tortuous tale, but no stranger than many libretti of successful operas. Laurence Equilbey drives her period-instrument orchestra with vivacity and attack, creating ideal forward momentum. Surely it’s time for a major UK opera house to take the risk with this piece. NK

Mozart – Lucio Silla is released by Warner Classics / Erato          

CD This Be Her Verse: Golda Schultz & Jonathan Ware ★★★★☆

Golda Schultz is one of those astonishingly gifted South African singers who are now taking the world’s opera houses and concert halls by storm. In the liner notes to her debut album she tells us that while singing a Schubert song she was suddenly struck by the question: “What if a woman told her own story?” This album is her response to that question, containing songs by five remarkable female composers from the early 19th century to now.

Given its title you might think this album would be a feisty riposte to the subservient view of women you find in most classical song. But although the composers here are women it’s the poets who set the agenda and they haven’t changed. A sad song by Clara Schumann (wife of the more famous Robert, though that could change) has a poem by Wilhelm Gerhard in which a woman pines for her absent husband, who’s gone away across the sea. Later comes a song by Emilie Mayer, an almost-forgotten 19th-century composer, which is actually based on a female poet, one Helmina von Chézy. But you’d be hard pressed to find any signs of rebellion against the male view of “what women really want”. What the protagonist of this song wants is a nice little cottage, “the heavenly peace of blissful innocence, and death in your arms”.

This Be Not Her Verse would actually be a more accurate title for the album. But if one’s willing to accept that, and instead focus on the highly distinctive compositional voice of the five women composers and the extraordinary real-life voice of Schultz, this disc is thrilling. Schultz has a magnificent vocal instrument, rich and glowing throughout the range, with not a weak patch anywhere, and an intensity that can make even the dully conventional songs of Mayer seem gripping. At the end of Clara Schumann’s song “Warum willst du and’re fragen” she rises up to a high note for the final plea, “look into my eyes and see I love you”, and holds it pianissimo, a spellbinding moment which is technically hugely difficult.

The most original composer on the disc is undoubtedly Rebecca Clarke, the British composer of the mid-20th century. Schultz and her excellent accompanist Jonathan Ware catch the mystery and terror of her setting of Blake’s “The Tyger”, and they make the more conventional Debussian impressionism of four songs by Nadia Boulanger seem anything but conventional. The final songs on the album, by contemporary South African composer Kathleen Tagg, are settings of the American librettist Lila Palmer – so finally we have a genuine female view of topics such as marriage (it cramps women’s style), a wedding (where the groom shows up late) and the single man-less life (empowering, so go for it). They’re fresh and charming, though not especially distinctive, and lacking the sardonic humour you might expect. But overall this is a stunning debut disc of a soprano who is well on the way to operatic stardom. IH

This Be Her Verse is released by Alpha

DVD Giordano – Siberia: Orchestra and Chorus of Florence Maggio Musicale ★★★★☆

It is surely only by chance that Dynamic has just released a fine new recording of an opera set mostly in a penal camp in Siberia, which borrows some of the details of its scenario from Dostoyevsky’s great memoir of his prison days, From the House of the Dead. But its grim scenario certainly takes on an extra resonance now. The composer is the wonderful but still underappreciated Umberto Giordano, who in the 1890s and 1900s seem to be a genuine rival to Puccini as a composer of verismo (ie socially realist but still romantic) operas, but then dipped in popularity.

The recording will certainly come as a revelation to anyone who thinks Giordano’s career began and ended with Andrea Chénier, the one work of his which has entered the operatic canon. Siberia was actually Giordano’s favourite among his own operas, and he was especially proud of the way he combined an essentially Italian lyrical style with a vivid evocation of the Russian scenario. At one point he actually makes use of balalaikas, and he also quotes three Russian folk-tunes, including the famous Song of the Volga Boatmen. The dreary atmosphere of the camp is brilliantly captured, as are the rare occasions when a ray of human warmth enters the scene, as in the touching moment when the commandant bestows an Easter blessing on the convicts.

All this and the very different puff-pastry music for the aristocratic palace atmosphere of the first act is summoned up with tremendous vividness by the orchestra of the Maggio Musicale in Florence, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. The central character of Stephana, whom we meet in Act 1 as the “kept woman” of Prince Alexis but who is secretly in love with the army officer Vassili, is played with epic intensity by Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva. None of the other characters is quite on her level, though George Petean is impressive as the oily pimp Gléby who procured Stephana for the prince.

The only slightly weak link is Giorgi Sturua as Vassili, whose killing of the Prince in a duel is what condemns him to a life in Siberia – where Stephana joins him, in an act of noble self-sacrifice. But it hardly matters as everything else is so strong. The closing minutes of the final act, when Gléby (now also condemned to the prison camp) tries and fails to win back the contemptuous Stephana, and then betrays her and Vassili to the guards when they try to escape, takes place at breath-taking speed and yet is deeply moving. Perhaps one day we’ll see Siberia on an operatic stage in the UK – it certainly deserves it. IH

Giordano – Siberia is released by Dynamic

CD Shostakovich – Concerto for Piano Trumpet and Strings, Symphony No 9: Yefim Bronfman & Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra ★★★★★

Some people might question the very idea of giving column inches and warm words to a recording of Russian music, at this moment. And even those who are comfortable with the thought might raise an eyebrow at focusing on these particular pieces by Shostakovich. The works of his that seem appropriate now, faced with the enormous suffering in Ukraine, are his great tragic utterances – the Eighth or Fifth Symphonies, say. What this new recording from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra actually offers is his Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and strings, a heartlessly light piece which ends with a cross between a Keystone Cops chase and a can-can. Alongside it is the Ninth Symphony, which sports a chirpy little piccolo tune of perfect banality, strutting little marches, and at the close another manic can-can.

But Shostakovich was a master of emotional ambiguity and his lightest moments have a strange tension, a disturbing excess of manic energy, like a dance on the edge of an abyss. The Concerto premiered in 1933 is the more straightforwardly optimistic of the two. Although artistic freedom had by then been curtailed by Stalin the piece seems to look back to the heady days of the 1920s when populism was in the air. You can feel the rude energy of the circus and music-hall in those pert march rhythms and sentimental trumpet tunes. The outer movements are played with enormous verve and steel-wristed precision by Yefin Bronfman, and in the slow movement where a strange bleakness and seriousness come over the music it’s trumpeter Hannes Läubin’s turn to shine.

In the Ninth Symphony the emotional switchbacks are more extreme and puzzling. Shostakovich wrote the piece in the aftermath of the Second World War, or “Great Patriotic War” as it is known in Russia, and everyone was expecting a properly serious statement that would express the idea of heroic endurance triumphing over evil. Shostakovich had actually announced just such a symphony, but destroyed the draft of this version and came up with the ambiguously cheerful, light piece we know today. Every so often the piece seems to be heading for a darker tone, only to skip away unexpectedly into lightness, an effect of apparent cynicism this performance captures brilliantly. In the second movement, a bleached-out waltz, the undercurrent of anxiety comes to the surface, but it’s in the fourth movement that a desperate tragic note suddenly breaks out, with massive minatory trombones and a despairing bassoon – which are then banished by the grim-faced jollity of the finale. It’s a difficult trajectory to project with conviction, but this surpassingly vivid performance by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under the late, great Mariss Jansons certainly achieves it. IH

Shostakovich – Concerto for Piano Trumpet and Strings, Symphony No 9 is released by BR Klassik

CD O Jerusalem! City of Three Faiths: Apollo’s Fire ★★★★☆

There can’t be a city in world with musical roots so deep and tangled as they are in Jerusalem. It is a city of supreme importance to the three Abrahamic faiths, which is why it has so often been fought over, and why it now is a place of constant simmering tension. But music has a way of reconciling and harmonising what in other areas of life seem irreconcilable divisions. Different peoples in a city can share the songs and dances of their neighbours, even if the political masters of both parties are at daggers drawn.

That is the hope behind this new CD, which surveys the music of the city across the centuries. It should be said the musicians are mostly not from the Middle East; they are the American musicians of the first-rate “early music group” Apollo’s Fire based in Cleveland, led by the indefatigable Jeanette Sorrell (who recently discovered her own, long-hidden Jewish heritage; her father was deported at the age of 13 to Auschwitz-Birkenau). So we hear sounds of Baroque violins and cellos, recorder, lute, baroque guitar and harp, as well as the choir of Apollo’s Fire, and four solo singers (including the Bombay-born tenor Sorab Wadia and the Jewish baritone Jeffrey Strauss, who is Sorrell’s partner). Mingled in with this are more exotic sounds: the hammer dulcimer, the ney, an end-blown Arab flute, the Arabic ancestor of the lute known as the oud, the qanun (zither) and the long-necked Turkish lute or saz.

Sorrell uses these forces to create a rich musical portrait of the city, arranged as a five-day tour through the four quarters of the city – Jewish, Arab, Christian and Armenian, ending with a “neighbourhood celebration” consisting of an Arab dance and a Christian song sung at medieval processions in Spain and Italy. Nearly all the pieces have been reconstructed either from ancient notation, which gives only an approximation of the music’s real sound, or from the oral tradition, so Sorrell has had to use her creative imagination in arranging the pieces for her band of musicians.

The result is extraordinarily varied in mood. Sometimes a specifically Jewish note of lamentation is sounded, sung either in Hebrew or in the version of Spanish known as Ladino that Sephardi Jews took with them when they were expelled from Spain in 1492. The Arab dances are rumbustious, the secular song sometimes cheerful, sometimes riven with tragedy. We also hear the calm or ecstatic note of prayer, in the Muslim Call to Prayer as well as Christian and Armenian sacred pieces.  There are even two numbers from Monteverdi’s Vespers, which stand out in this context because despite their emphatically Western harmony there’s a wayward, semi-improvised quality in the singing which recalls some of the Eastern music.

And that, of course, points to the message of the recording. It’s not a portrait of the real Jerusalem, more an idealised portrait of Jerusalem as it could be, and perhaps sometimes was in the past. Sorrell is one of those idealistic souls like the Catalan musician Jordi Savall who use their music-making to suggest that despite their political and religious enmities the peoples of East and West can find common ground in music-making. Perhaps through music they can even learn to live together. It seems a forlorn hope, but listening to this wonderful, inspiring CD one could almost believe it. IH

O Jerusalem! City of Three Faiths is released by Avie

DVD Verdi – Rigoletto: Maggio Musicale Fiorentino ★★★☆☆

Verdi’s drama of the court jester who plots revenge on the courtiers and the Duke who mock him, but is doing so causes the death of his beloved daughter, is certainly one of his bleakest. In many productions the bleakness is softened by a sumptuously period setting, but in this one from last year’s “May Music” festival in Florence (conducted by Riccardo Frizza), the director Davide Livermore foreswears that comfort. What period exactly the opera is set isn’t clear. At times we seem to be in the 1950s, the go-to era for so many directors of Italian operas these days. Rigoletto’s daughter Gilda, who in this production is seen working in a launderette (in the libretto she’s actually cloistered indoors by her over-protective father) wears a flared skirt that suggests the 1950s. However the concrete graffiti-covered exteriors, the joyless drug-fuelled parties bathed in red light and swirling dry-ice where the Duke entertains the courtiers, and the underground rail station where Rigoletto discovers he’s caused the murder of his own daughter could be the present-day.

It’s not only the setting that’s dark. Gilda, played by the rising Albanian star Enkelada Kamani, seems oppressed and even disgusted by her father, in a way that makes one suspect child abuse. Javier Camarena as the Duke is oddly charmless in a way that also suggests emotional starvation, and it’s hard to imagine this blank creature inspiring such devotion in Gilda and Maddalena (vividly played by Caterina Piva), the sister of Rigoletto’s hired assassin. Luca Salsi as Rigoletto is a powerfully sombre presence as the obsessive father, but expressively monochrome. After a while one yearns for some light and shade.

On the plus side, the minor roles are all very strong, particularly the humiliated Count Monterone, played by Roman Lyulkin. His curse on Rigoletto makes one’s spine tingle. But it’s Kamani’s performance as Gilda which rescues the production from its own dourness. She spins a tender pianissimo in the earlier scenes where she dreams of the Count, and rises to the occasion in the later scenes when she has to become a full-blooded dramatic soprano. She really is one to watch. IH

Rigoletto is released by Dynamic

CD Hans Werner Henze – Nachtstücke und Arien, Los Caprichos, Englische Liebeslieder: Juliane Banse, Narek Hakhnazaryan, Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra ★★★★☆

Hans Werner Henze was the problem child of German post-war music. Never able to reconcile himself to the horrors of the recent Nazi past, which could have been fatal to him personally (Henze being gay), he fled to lyrical sun-kissed Italy, like Goethe before him. Unlike Goethe, he never left.

Henze was also out of place in the world of “modern music” which in the 1950s was passing through its most rigidly dogmatic phase. Henze flirted with modernism himself but was too in love with music’s past and too instinctively romantic in artistic temperament to go “all the way” – and in those days you had to be totally constructivist and “mathematised” in your approach to music-making, or you couldn’t be admitted to the club. The premiere of Nachtstücke und Arien (Nightpieces and Arias) at a modern music festival in 1958 led to his final break with the hard-liners like Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono, when they ostentatiously walked out.

At a distance of more than 60 years, it’s hard to fathom why there were so angry. Henze’s music is a very long way from the soft-centred neo-romanticism and tinkling, trouble-free harmonies of the post-minimalists which are now so much in vogue. Compared to them Henze seems like an out-and-out modernist but it’s a modernism of a very particular kind, which grows out of the preceding romantic age and often sinks back into it nostalgically. However rapturously beautifully the music may often be there’s always an undercurrent of unease, as if the romantic imagery of Schumann and Wagner has been given an extra, psycho-analytic twist. In between come the Arias, sung with the right fervid intensity by Juliane Banse.

The later Los Caprichos, inspired by the dark and disturbing eponymous prints by Goya inhabit a similar world but sharpened sometimes with a satirical edge. The final piece Englische Liebeslieder (“English love songs”) is a set of six purely orchestral pieces embellished with a solo cello part (played with lovely lyricism by Narek Hakhnazaryan), which were inspired by English love poetry from Shakespeare to Joyce. Here references to older idioms such as Elizabethan viol music appear, like beautiful but unquiet ghosts. All this is beautifully caught by conductor Marin Alsop and the Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra, who make Henze’s dense weave of allusion sound clear and cogent and yet richly mysterious. IH

Hans Werner Henze: Nachtstücke und Arien, Los Caprichos, Englische Liebeslieder is released by Naxos

CD CPE Bach – Sonatas & Rondos: Marc-André Hamelin ★★★★☆

Pity the poor composer sons of JS Bach, always in the shadow of the most staggeringly high-achieving composer in the history of music. The remarkable thing is that, apart from the deeply eccentric WF Bach who went off the rails and had to be rescued from destitution, they seemed untroubled by it. One of them, JC Bach, led a prosperous career in London and was hugely admired by Mozart. The real genius of the three is by common consent Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. The defining feature of his music is its sheer volatility. Instead of the long rolling periods of his father we hear short sighing phrases separated by weird pauses, which are liable to scamper off in a new tempo and mood at the drop of a hat.

This new CD of solo piano music has plenty such moments, and the difficulty for the pianist is how to express them. Do you play up the extreme emotionalism, as the composer did when he performed his own music? Or do you try to discover or invent a genuine musical continuity so the music seems less febrile and short-winded, which is always the danger with this fascinating but difficult composer?

As one would expect, that superb French-Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin manages to steer a perfect middle course. We get the wayward emotionalism in all its vividness, but the purely musical beauty also shines through, as in the delightful E major Rondo, which takes on a lovely silvery glow. We also learn that there’s more to CPE Bach than sighs and exclamations. There are elegant minuets and charming little musical portraits of friends and colleagues. There’s even a hint of his father’s long-breathed grandeur, in the E minor sonata.

Here and there Hamelin’s touch seems a bit over-finicky and hard, and the tone too massive. But it became clear that this is a problem with the piano not the pianist. I’m no fan of “period instrument” fetishism, but the simultaneously wild and aristocratically mannered world of CPE Bach becomes uncomfortably inflated on a modern concert grand; on a clavichord or harpsichord it emerges in its proper proportions. So my first recommendation for this music would be a “period instrument” recording, such as the one from Preethi da Silva on the Centaur label. But if you’re allergic to those instruments and hanker for the sound of a concert grand, you couldn’t do better than this new recording. IH

CPE Bach – Sonatas & Rondos is released by Hyperion