The best classical albums of 2024 so far

By the time that press release was crafted, the fast-rising Aigul had already begun recording tracks for this debut album, built round her big claim to fame: fiery starring appearances in Bizet’s Carmen in productions subsequently seen at Covent Garden in April, with Glyndebourne immediately looming.

That being so, it’s a pity Decca didn’t make more of the company’s prize. A Carmen highlights album would have been one way to go. Instead we get a scrappy 50-minute opera recital (with unreadable booklet texts), with Carmen dispatched in four tracks and Bellini, Rossini and Massenet chucked in, plus the obligatory ethnic tip of the hat: a folk song from the singer’s corner of Russia, learnt at her grandmother’s knee.

None of that, of course, knocks out Aigul’s multicoloured, mobile voice, impressively dark lower down but able to leap up to its ringing top without any hint of strain. The voice alone, however, gives little indication of her dramatic skills. Assisting artists on the album include the tenor Freddie De Tommaso, the Royal Philharmonic and Daniele Rustioni, her Met conductor. But you’re still left wanting quite a bit more. Geoff Brown

Gesualdo Six

Queen of Hearts
Hyperion
★★★★☆
If the listener doesn’t go weak at the knees at the warmly immaculate opening chords of the Gesualdo Six’s latest album then a hospital visit is recommended. Owain Park’s all-male vocal ensemble varies in numbers between three and seven, but the splendours continue uninterrupted in this selection of 15th and 16th-century fare venerating either the Virgin Mary or her “terrestrial counterparts” (the booklet’s phrase) in the royal courts of Austria and England.

The star composers here are Josquin des Prez and Antoine Brumel, though each of the 23 tracks, including two 21st-century interlopers, earns its place in the album’s tapestry through the music’s intricate compositional skill, moments of the tenderest beauty and the thrilling sounds emanating from three, four, six or seven singers thinking, breathing and feeling as one. GB

The best classical albums of 2024 so far

Arcadia Quartet plunge into Weinberg’s music without fear

Arcadia Quartet

Weinberg
Chandos
The composer-critic Robin Holloway, bracingly iconoclastic, once wrote that comparing Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets to Beethoven’s mighty 16 was like comparing a housing estate with the Acropolis. How would he then describe the 17 by Shostakovich’s colleague and soulmate, the Polish-Russian Mieczyslaw Weinberg? A row of beach huts? Cardboard boxes?

Neither option should come to the mind of anyone listening to the fourth issue in the Arcadia Quartet’s series exploring the output of this anguished composer, which is being fruitfully reassessed nearly 30 years after his death. Two of three pieces gathered here, quartets 6 and 15 (from 1946 and 1979), are big and striking with wide emotional spans and a kaleidoscope of stylistic traits — from cryptic utterances to fortissimo fury, consoling sighs to puncturing pizzicatos — laid out in multi-movement structures that defy conventional logic. As to which composer of the two is copying which, the situation seems fluid.

Whatever the music’s texture and temperature, the Arcadia group, formed in Romania in 2006, plunge in without fear, doubly armed with their sturdy technique and total commitment to Weinberg’s cause. The shorter and more convoluted 13th quartet, slipped in between its meatier siblings, may have less immediate appeal. But this doesn’t detract from the power and resonance of its two companions: quartets that might not reach the loftiest Acropolis standard but are far from lowly buildings that one should automatically pass by. GB

LSO/Elder

Le prophète
LSO Live
It’s incredible to think that Giacomo Meyerbeer’s 1849 opera The Prophet ever left our stages, since it features an apocalyptic cult, self-immolation and a ballet on rollerskates. But this is a decadent age we live in and the extraordinary spectacles from the German composer who had Paris in his thrall have today been swapped for other blockbusting franchises.

True, the pleasures of the Meyerbeer Operatic Universe alternate with longueurs. Le prophète is a sprawling opera about a false messiah, Jean, who is stuck between some manipulative Anabaptists, his beloved Berthe and a tigress of a mother, Fidès. Mark Elder and the London Symphony Orchestra bring great panache to a pick-and-mix score — Elder finding bel canto delicacy in more intimate passages while having a rock-solid grip of the set pieces. The highlight is a coronation scene at which Meyerbeer threw everything bar the kitchen sink. Three and a quarter hours (the physical product runs to three discs) don’t exactly fly by, but the cast, led by John Osborn as Jean and Elizabeth DeShong as Fidès, is excellent. Get your rollerskates on, seek it out. NF

Rebeca Omordia

African Pianism Vol 2
Somm
In the past pianists could easily sustain their careers playing little but the established golden oldies: you could go a long way with Chopin alone. That isn’t Rebeca Omordia’s way. Born to Romanian and Nigerian parents, she has recently been promoting music from composers of African ethnicity, opening our ears, hearts and minds to new and worthwhile repertoire.

Lingering echoes from Debussy and other French impressionists appear alongside traditional influences from Morocco, Nigeria and further south. Chopin himself surfaces in the grandiloquent sweep of Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre (the oldest piece here, from 1929), while Elita — Cry of Joy by the Ethiopian Girma Yifrashewa is seven ecstatic minutes featuring highly decorative treatments of endearing simple material.

The concluding items — three from the Nigerian composer Akin Euba’s vigorous and skilful Studies in African Pianism — make a particularly strong impression. But every track benefits from Omordia’s sparkling technique, rhythmic panache and deep sympathy with music that brings fresh air, a smile and sunshine into our lives, whatever the state of play in the world outside. GB

Stéphane Fuget’s L’Orfeo will tug at your heart

Stéphane Fuget

L’Orfeo
Château de Versailles
It’s a situation none of us would want to be in. You’re about to be happily married when a messenger arrives to tell you that your bride has been fatally bitten by a snake. Your luck gets no better when you try to rescue her from the Underworld. And just when you think your fortunes have changed, you turn to gaze at your beloved, against instruction, and the situation becomes even worse. No wonder the hero in L’Orfeo, Monteverdi’s pioneering opera of 1607, spends so much time lamenting.

With high emotion packed into Monteverdi’s music and the Greek legend, the last thing required is a cool, correct performance. Even so, the amount of florid outpourings and off-pitch wails in this new account by Stéphane Fuget’s ensemble, Les Épopées, may take some by surprise.

But that is Fuget’s house style, and this second release in the group’s Monteverdi opera series abundantly shows the value in baroque repertoire of being theatrical and throwing discretion to the winds. From Julian Prégardien’s anguished Orfeo, through Gwendoline Blondeel’s Eurydice, to the frightening sounds of Luigi De Donato’s obdurate ferryman, none of Fuget’s singers is a shrinking violet, and every word and note they utter seriously tugs at your heart.

Fuget’s instrumental forces play their part, boldly colouring textures — especially during the middle acts set in the Underworld, where raspy organ tones and an attack force of five trombones reinforce the dank and dismal air.

Meanwhile, piquantly twanging guitars and lutes constantly enliven the longest recitatives. The only real disappointment in this dynamic interpretation is the opera’s “happy ending”, where Orfeo (spoiler alert) is whisked up to heaven and told that he will find his loved one’s likeness among the stars. Hmm. Not quite the same thing, is it? GB

John Wilson

Eric Coates
Chandos
In 2019 the conductor John Wilson delighted British light-music fans with an album dipping in to the output of Eric Coates, composer of so much more than the theme tune to Desert Island Discs. And Wilson didn’t stop there: this latest excavation with the BBC Philharmonic is actually his fourth.

Several pieces may suggest a composer twiddling his thumbs, but these are easily forgiven when so many others invigorate or disarm the listener with their swaggering good humour, wistful beauty and peppering of dance band syncopations. The Three Bears fantasy is a particular winner, also the Four Centuries suite. But every track is performed with the necessary blend of flair, finesse and, most importantly, love. GB

The pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen

Mishka Rushdie Momen

Reformation
Hyperion
Born in London, Indian parentage, uncle a famous novelist: please welcome Mishka Rushdie Momen, a pianist who might not have jumped into prominence through winning a big competition prize but has risen steadily through a safer method, concert by concert, and word of mouth.

Reformation is her first solo recital, and it’s a triumph. Repertoire warhorses have been temporarily shunted aside. Instead, she offers 77 minutes of Tudor keyboard music — principally Byrd, John Bull and Orlando Gibbons — played without apology on a modern Steinway, recorded in an Edwardian-era church small enough to clasp the music in an intimate embrace while still allowing for the wider resonance that some works need.

Rushdie Momen’s stated hope is for these fantasias, pavans and complex ruminations on popular songs to became part of the modern pianist’s canon. They fully deserve it, too, whether the piece is a contrapuntal dazzler like Byrd’s The Bells, a big and brilliant variation set (Bull’s Walsingham) or a tender snippet that immediately pierces your heart (Bull’s My Grief).

She further enhances the repertoire’s profile by interpreting the music with clarity and a natural ease never compromised by her myriad subtleties of dynamics, touch and tone. I wish the album had a more alluring title than Reformation — it’s too dour, too abstract — but that’s the one small cloud in an otherwise blazing blue sky. GB

Oliver Leith & Matt Copson

Last Days
Platoon
Do you need to get dressed up to go to this opera, or can you just come as you are? So asked one waggish reader when The Sunday Times first covered Oliver Leiths’s opera about the death of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, *Last Days*. Well, now that the 2022 work has been recorded (Platoon), you can listen to it sitting at home in your underwear, with the curtains drawn — which is probably what many disconsolate Gen-Xers will do.

As befits a work about a tragic suicide, this is a darkly introspective piece, low in plot; terrifying in its intimacy and dislocation. It’s beautifully scored for the players of the 12 Ensemble conducted by Jack Sheen. They are joined by special guests, among them Sean Shibe on rock guitar, a kind of proxy for Cobain himself, who never sings a note. There’s also Caroline Polachek (partner of the librettist Matt Copson) doing a ravishing pastiche of an opera singer — one of the many voices in a fabulous cast who fail to perk up the doomed hero. Leith has a live showcase in Bold Tendencies in south London in September — worth checking out. Neil Fisher

Protean Quartet

Tempus omnia vincit
Linn
The Protean Quartet, schooled in Berlin and Basel in what’s called “historically aware” performances, announce that one of their specialties is promoting Spain’s musical heritage. That would appear to leave out Schubert and Purcell, the main composers in Tempus omnia vincit, although their music is played with such volatility that the pair seem to have become temporary Spanish citizens.

The approach especially suits Purcell, whose G minor Pavan and Gavotte soar through pungent dissonances with a fiery glow made even hotter by the clear and characterful recording conjured up by Philip Hobbs from the medieval church at the heart of York’s National Centre for Early Music. Josquin des Prez’s version of the French chanson Mille regretz is another beneficiary.

Iberian heat may bring fewer extra benefits with Schubert, although the Protean team play with such vim, in an acoustic to match, that enjoyable listening is still guaranteed. Two quartets are juxtaposed: the early Quartet No 4, mostly cheerful, and the sadder, wiser and longer Rosamunde Quartet (No 13). GB

Robin Tritschler

Songs for Peter Pears
Signum Classics
In the distant past, song recitalists often used to build up their programmes without any overarching theme, as if bundling clothes of every sort into the washing machine. Now they are choosier and separate out by fabric, manufacturer, you name it. Previous albums by the Irish tenor Robin Tritschler have explored the First World War and the development of the song cycle. Now he’s focusing on repertoire written for or otherwise associated with the distinctive voice of Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten’s partner in love and music.

This is a powerful and rewarding release. The music, mostly accompanied by the excellent pianist Malcolm Martineau, is uniformly strong. Britten’s florid and declamatory Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo sits at the centre surrounded, among others, by moody wonders from Lennox Berkeley, quirky miniatures by Geoffrey Bush and the lyrically tortuous Tom O’Bedlam’s Song of Richard Rodney Bennett. Tritschler’s tenor has more colour and volume than Pears’s reedy pipings, although Pears remains the bigger master of eloquent diction, inflection and the floating of long phrases.

Sometimes the metallic blaze at the top of Tritschler’s range knocks out the outlines of the words — none of which, partly for copyright reasons, are printed in the accompanying booklet. But I still listened with plenty of pleasure, buoyed by Tritschler’s intelligence, the music, and its multiple shades of feeling, particularly in Berkeley’s Five Housman Songs from 1940, plausibly written as a memorial to the love relationship that the composer craved with Britten, but never actually achieved. GB

Osmo Vanska

Mahler
BIS
Reading a Kingsley Amis novel the other week, I was intrigued to find the narrator, a classical music critic to boot, referring to “Mahler’s enormous untalentlessness”. Immediately into the listening machine went Osmo Vanska’s Minnesota Orchestra performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony, 100-plus minutes of ingenious, imaginative music that the untalented could never devise.

The BIS label’s recording of this hymn to nature and the celestial heavens makes the symphony’s virtues more than usually obvious by its crystal clarity and wide dynamic range. Every orchestral layer glistens, with individual timbres from contrabassoon to glockenspiel brilliantly defined. The recording balance welcomes the mezzo Jennifer Johnston and assorted choirs in a warm, uncluttered embrace, while Vanska drives the whole forward with the combination of fierce control and tenderness that usually delivers the goods in Mahler. This marks the splendid end of Vanska’s Mahler cycle with the Minnesotans, and Kingsley Amis, admittedly dead for 29 years, needs his head examining. GB

Pavel Kolesnikov/Samson Tsoy

Trompe l’Oeil
Harmonia Mundi
Piano duettists at war with each other can rarely be successful, even if they have a piano to themselves. The rule applies more strictly still if the two sit at the same instrument, like Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy. Happily, no one should fear conflict with these musical and personal partners who first met as students in Moscow in 2007. They may have distinct artistic personalities (Kolesnikov leans towards the poetic, Tsoy is more flamboyant), yet they know perfectly how to pool resources and complement each other.

Besides, on most of this album they’re playing Schubert, and who could come to blows doing that? Reading the booklet notes might, admittedly, spread some alarm: there’s talk of paper scraps and a silk scarf inserted into the Yamaha piano’s innards to modify the sound. But any qualms fall away under the loving attention paid to touch, articulation, dynamics and resonance as these assiduous and mesmerising musicians traverse the deceptive simplicities of the Divertissement à la Hongroise and the grander fare of the F minor Fantasia, written in 1828, the year Schubert died.

In between, we get the piece the pair premiered at last year’s Aldeburgh Festival, Leonid Desyatnikov’s 20-minute Trompe l’Oeil — essentially a fantasia on Schubert’s Fantasia, demanding great finger dexterity, plus a little more patience from the listener than I was able to muster. But once the real Schubert returns, you do listen to him in a new light: the point of the exercise in the first place. As for the brief intrusions of paper and silk, they’re quickly over. Besides, Kolesnikov and Tsoy, and Schubert too, don’t need any add-on tricks to hold the listener’s attention. GB

Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy

CHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMES

Graeme Steele Johnson

Forgotten Sounds
Delos
The reviews were mixed when Charles Martin Loeffler’s Octet for five strings, two clarinets and one harp was premiered in Boston in 1897. “The new work,” one critic wrote, “took nearly everyone by storm”, but another thought it dry and uninteresting. After hearing its first revival in 125 years, engineered by the clarinettist Graeme Steele Johnson, I’m with the storm-swept. It might not be a missing masterpiece, but the work’s mellifluous flow is appealing: imagine Brahms with French trimmings.

I’d love to hear the Nash Ensemble dig into its rich textures. In the meantime, Johnson’s team, performing with gusto, have definitely revived something worthwhile. The album also includes Johnson’s chamber version of Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune: a perfect signpost to the heady bloom of Loeffler’s forgotten Octet. GB

Janine Jansen/Klaus Makela

Sibelius/Prokofiev
Decca
Finnish, just 28 and very theatrical on the rostrum, Klaus Makela is the young conductor that every orchestral management seems to want. From autumn 2027 he, his baton and floppy arms will be controlling both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. His recorded performances, however, have not up to now been particularly thrilling except for this addition — although the reason for that is not Makela, but the supremely wonderful Janine Jansen.

From her opening note in Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, the Dutch violinist (just about old enough to be Makela’s mother) grabs our ears and never lets them go. She is anguished and ardent, gutsy and tender, or whatever else the music requires, with every emotional inflection firmly embedded in the composer’s long singing lines. Playing at full strength, the Oslo Philharmonic sometimes sounds a touch blowsy, but individual details can be striking (the baleful wind colours, for instance) and nothing intrudes at Jansen’s expense. The one stretch where conductor and soloist obviously deserve equal applause is the concerto’s conclusion, jointly delivered in a muscular way, fully justifying the final bars that can easily seem grandiose posturing without careful preparation.

Jansen’s kaleidoscopic range and technical brilliance are just as clear in the smaller, more brittle confines of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No 1, whether her tone is lyrical or cynical, rough or smooth. But it’s the Sibelius performance that makes this album special. GB

Christopher Glynn and Claire Booth

SVEN ARNSTEIN

Claire Booth/Christopher Glynn

Expressionist Music
Orchid Classics
The booklet cover for Expressionist Music shows the soprano Claire Booth and the pianist partner Christopher Glynn, hands in pockets, sauntering down a street. Their nonchalance is in direct opposition to the music they perform: 22 songs and two piano pieces by Arnold Schoenberg, the tonality-busting founder of the Second Viennese School, famous, in the popular view, for killing off tunes.

Booth and Glynn mounted this recital as a rescue mission and it’s largely a success. Cleverly grouped round the titles of eight Schoenberg paintings (duly illustrated), the early 20th-century repertoire twists tonality into knots but doesn’t leave it a corpse. Booth lavishes close attention on every word and is thrilling when soaring, exultant, into the skies. I’d like to have seen her push harder at times and be more theatrical: she needs to snarl in the songs illustrating the painting Hatred, and she doesn’t. It’s nonetheless a pleasure to find these gifted performers digging up beauty in thorny places and treating Schoenberg with love. GB

Michael Berkeley

Collaborations
Orchid Classics
You are probably more likely to know the broadcasting voice of Michael Berkeley — as smooth and satisfying as an aged cognac — than his compositional one. Berkeley is the long-serving helmsman of Radio 3’s Private Passions, the sophisticate’s choice of musical interview format over Radio 4’s headline-hogging Desert Island Discs. He is also a craftsman of finely wrought musical works and, as his new album Collaborations (Orchid Classics) suggests, has an excellent contacts book.

The album is something of a scrapbook collated from past years; Berkeley is not one for epic statements, and there is none here — as both broadcaster and composer he shares a spirit of stimulating inquiry. A charity single for Ukraine called Zero Hour, sung by Neil Tennant with a guitar solo from David Gilmour, adds celebrity lustre, but its sappy, seraphic style sounds out of kilter.

Two collections of keyboard miniatures depict the natural world — the superior, spikier one is Insects, performed by the harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani. Pendant-style choral works performed by the BBC Singers show the slow evolution of Berkeley’s sparer language. The jewel in this set is a 1995 recording (unreleased until now) of the song cycle Speaking Silence, settings of poetry on lost love that burst into flame thanks to the ardent delivery of the mezzo-soprano Alice Coote, who was then on the brink of stardom. NF

Magdalena Kozena towers over an album of Czech orchestral songs

VIT SIMANEK/CTK PHOTO/ALAMY

Magdalena Kozena

Czech Songs
Pentatone
The booklet cover shows a photographic cut-out of the mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena towering over the rooftops of a city in her Czech homeland — just as she towers over this most delectable album of Czech orchestral songs, drawn from two live concerts with Simon Rattle conducting the Czech Philharmonic.

The running time is 61 minutes, a modest amount these days, but no one could possibly feel short-changed. Throughout, Kozena sings with a mature, rounded tone and depth of expression beautiful to hear, and the accompanying sounds of Rattle’s musicians are always sensitive and idiomatic. The music, meanwhile, is consistently refreshing, especially Bohuslav Martinu’s early Nipponari (1912), a work of delicate fantasy. It’s a setting of seven often melancholic Japanese folk songs, heard through European ears, with piquant instrumental contributions from flute, celesta, harp and changing configurations of strings. Kozena’s voice is wonderfully supple and heartfelt, and equally so in the selection of Dvorak’s Evening Songs.

The mood changes with the grotesque phantasmagoria of Hans Krasa’s German-language Four Orchestral Songs of 1920, drawn from the nonsense poetry of Christian Morgenstern. The kaleidoscope changes again in the concluding orchestral version of Gideon Klein’s Lullaby, which rocks a baby to sleep in the hope of a happier tomorrow, written during 1943 in the Terezin concentration camp when Krasa himself was in Auschwitz. Neither survived. But their music lives on in these powerful performances, vividly recorded. GB

The Takacs Quartet

AMANDA TIPTON

Takacs Quartet

Schubert
Hyperion
Next year the Takacs Quartet — Hungarian-born but long based in the US — turns 50. Only the impassioned cellist Andras Fejer remains from the original line-up, but the group’s defining qualities — fire, poetry, clarity, balance — never seem to change. The major work on their latest release is Schubert’s String Quartet No 15 — one of his most grandiose. It’s spellbinding right from the opening bars, when a tussle between major and minor keys gives way to a spacious becalmed landscape pre-echoing passages in Bruckner symphonies.

Structurally and harmonically, Schubert in this mighty piece is always springing surprises, but the Takacs players, always persuasive whatever the twist, take everything in their stride. The album’s companion quartet, No 8, written when Schubert was 17, is slighter and more conventional, though the emotional instability of the tarantella finale certainly hints at the future. The Takacs team play as marvellously as ever, while never quite dispelling the aura of musicians biding their time, waiting to swoop on the juicier music lying ahead. GB

John Luther Adams

Waves and Particles
Cold Blue Music
Who is Taylor Swift’s favourite composer? Perhaps the unlikely answer is 71-year-old John Luther Adams, the creator of vast epics inspired by the natural world. His breakout success was 2013’s Become Ocean — a 45-minute flood of sound that, at its midpoint, runs in reverse order, like the tide returning to the shore. When Swift heard it she was so impressed that she made a $50,000 donation to the orchestra that had given its premiere.

Don’t expect to hear JLA’s music on the Eras show: it’s too intricate and (sorry, Swifties) requires a little more concentration. However, another whopper by Adams, Vespers of the Blessed Earth, arrives in the UK the same week that Swift does, and is given its UK premiere on June 6 by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. And newly out is a premiere recording of Waves and Particles, Adams’s mesmerising 2021 string quartet. The JACK Quartet do astonishing things with this work, which is apparently based on subatomic analysis, but you don’t need to know anything about that to enjoy — or at least succumb to — its juddering collisions, icy interludes and, in the end, intoxicating pulse. NF

Benjamin Grosvenor, Nicola Benedetti and Sheku Kanneh-Mason

Benedetti/Kanneh-Mason/Grosvenor

Beethoven
Decca
Wandering through the album’s booklet, past the photos of the three famous soloists having a wonderful time, I came across the copyright notice, assigned to Universal Music Operations Ltd. It was the word “operations” that got me, so redolent of a business deal, not a cultural enterprise. In a flash I could see the executives poring over a list of the star musicians under contract to Universal’s subsidiary, Decca. “How about using a bunch of them at the same time?” one of them mused. A pause for thought, then a brainwave struck: Beethoven’s Triple Concerto!

The music is most winning, of course, though with violin, cello and piano pitted against a busy orchestra, getting a judicious sound balance is difficult no matter who is performing. Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s cello first enjoys the spotlight, laying out the first movement’s theme with the most succulent velvet tones. Nicola Benedetti then grabs the ears, soaring so sweetly with her violin. The dominating performer turns out to be Benjamin Grosvenor, simply because the piano is the loudest instrument.

Crisp and bouncy, he also takes the instrumental lead in the Beethoven folk song settings that follow, where Benedetti offers airy melodic wisps and Kanneh-Mason is barely audible. The singing (excellent) comes from the bass-baritone Gerald Finley, contracted for the occasion like the trio’s concerto playmates, the conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali and the Philharmonia Orchestra.

So was the operation successful? In the business sense, absolutely. In the artistic sense, mostly yes. The players interact rather than project their own stardom; if anything, Kanneh-Mason often sounds overly withdrawn. For a full triumph, however, they would have to perform something other than Beethoven’s Triple Concerto: such lovely music, but acoustically always a tricky customer. GB

Fieri Consort

The Excellence of Women
Fieri Records
Concerts and recordings have familiarised us with the music of the 17th-century Italian singer and composer Barbara Strozzi. But we have some catching up to do with her 16th-century predecessor, Maddalena Casulana. Three years ago, a manuscript discovery suddenly enlarged Casulana’s available output. The present album rounds up 22 madrigals, duets and solo songs, sprinkled with six by Strozzi.

Bathed in a warm church acoustic, the Fieri Consort, a British vocal and instrumental ensemble, agreeably sail through music that might not match the heady poetic conceits of the texts being set, but easily displays enough melodic fluency, chromatic diversions and structural strengths to please the modern listener of an album deservedly called The Excellence of Women. GB

Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Schubert
Pentatone
Well, here’s an unusual album. The pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard is one of those French intellectual musicians with three brains, fearlessly wading through Boulez and other thickets of the contemporary repertoire. So what is he playing here? A healthy selection of Schubert’s Ländler: popular dance pieces written for domestic consumption, so brief and simple that this 68-minute album contains more than 100 of them, mostly in waltz rhythms — all over just after they’ve begun.

Since it’s Schubert, simplicity doesn’t mean superficiality. “Schubert,” Aimard tells us, “manages to plunge us into the heart of the sweetness, ambiguity and vertigo of the realm between life and death.” But whether you feel plunged into such twilight or not, it’s abundantly clear that Aimard’s approach to these miniature jewels is entirely suitable and rewarding. He shapes and shades the notes with poise and subtle inflections, yet nothing becomes overdone, precious or brittle.

The 70-year-old Steinway he plays (we’re given its exact model number) is equally special, with a particularly bright upper register perfect for spotlighting the intimacy and vulnerability of Schubert’s melodies, as fragile and beautiful as butterflies as they flit over the keyboard with a lifespan of 30 or 40 seconds. Under the authentic Schubert spell, I would happily have listened on for much longer. GB

Rachel Podger

The Muses Restor’d
Channel Classics
There’s a novel feature about the latest album by Rachel Podger, the British goddess of the gut-stringed violin, supported by a quartet from her period instrument band, Brecon Baroque. The repertoire remains centred on the 17th and 18th century, but after more than 30 releases she has finally put mainland Europe aside and turned to the wonderful instrumental output of the British Isles. A sonata by that famous German visitor Handel may start us off, but the heart of the matter lies in English consort suites by three quirky genre masters (William Lawes, Matthew Locke, John Jenkins), with the adventurous and relatively unknown Richard Jones thrown in for good measure.

Podger’s playing lacks nothing in expressivity. The Jenkins and Locke prove wonderfully bouncy, and the album’s selection of adapted folk tunes couldn’t be more charming if they tried. Above all, Podger and her Brecon colleagues radiate infectious delight in the music they perform. GB

Marek Janowski

Die Schöpfung
Pentatone
Scanning the headlines these days, the world appears in such a mess that it’s reasonable to wonder if the best thing for humankind might be to start from scratch in another one. And that’s just the attraction offered in this week’s top album, Haydn’s oratorio The Creation of 1799, presented under its original German title of Die Schöpfung. Chaos reigns at the start until God creates Heaven, Earth and light. Greenery follows, then birds, whales, tigers and such, and eventually Adam and Eve. Happiness radiates from Haydn’s harmonies, melodies, the soloists, chorus and orchestra: almost all the 34 sections are in major keys.

Christiane Karg

Enjoyment of this requires no particular religious belief; the music’s sunny spirit and direct appeal easily carry the day. Marek Janowski’s account with the Dresden Philharmonic, taken from two concert performances in 2022, spreads its own joy through the musicians’ lively attack, the conductor and recording team’s successful quest for clarity and balance, and a programme note that requested from the audiences the “greatest possible quiet”. I didn’t even hear a pin drop.

Among the soloists, the idiosyncratic timbre of the bass Tareq Nazmi may not be ideal, especially when he’s Adam, duetting with Christiane Karg’s endearing Eve. But to err is human, to forgive divine, and with the buoyant appeal of tenor Benjamin Bruns and the MDR Leipzig Radio Choir, pleasing voices still come out on top. All in all, I’ll happily move to Haydn’s planet, especially if there are no snakes. GB

Trio Gaspard

ANDREJ GRILC

Trio Gaspard

Haydn: Complete Piano Trios, Vol 3
Chandos
Haydn magic arrives in the third volume of Trio Gaspard’s series exploring the composer’s substantial body of piano trios (45, including those lost or the partial work of other hands). Here we get four of them, one after the other; though like a bottle of champagne this music isn’t ideal for drinking in one go. A glass here, a glass there: that’s the best way to savour Haydn’s dancing subtleties, kaleidoscopic textures and sprightly wit, wonderfully conveyed by Trio Gaspard. It’s still delightful listening. You also get a newly commissioned and engaging five-minute romp by Kit Armstrong as a 21st-century encore. GB

Mark Elder

Elgar
Hallé
It’s unusual now for any conductor to stay wedded to the same orchestra for 25 years. Rising stars like to move on. Sometimes one side will sue for divorce. But Mark Elder and the Hallé have been together so long, and so fruitfully, that it’s mournful to note that Elder’s last concert as the orchestra’s music director is only two months away.

When appointed in 1999, Elder announced that his goal was to make the Hallé pre-eminent in British music, following the example set by the conductor Hans Richter, a great champion of Elgar, more than a century ago. So what do we have here in this new album? Elgar!

These live performances of the composer’s two official symphonies date from 2018 and 2021. They show conductor, orchestra and music working together in perfect harmony. Obvious signs? Well, there’s the natural feel of Elder’s tempos, never forced. There’s the musicians’ punch and finesse during every emotional twist in these expansive, deeply moving works. Attentive ears might also note the judicious use of portamento, the expressive sliding between two pitches that formed part of the string player’s normal toolkit in Elgar’s day.

The only drawback I could detect was the slightly shallow and dry acoustic of Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall. But it would take more than that to flatten the Hallé’s warmth and vitality as they glide with Elder through the first symphony’s heartfelt opening theme, colour the second’s rondo with menace, and bask in every subtle sonority conjured up by a master orchestrator. Both performances conclude with fervent audience applause. It’s easy to see why. GB

Benjamin Nabarro, Tim Horton and Gemma Rosefield play Huw Watkins

KAUPO KIKKAS

Huw Watkins

Chamber Music and Works for String Orchestra
Resonus
The music composed by Huw Watkins is concise (the 2012 Piano Quartet takes eight and a half minutes). Form, rhythm, and harmony? As expected, more complex. Yet Watkins never completely ditches tradition, and his material and textures remain fresh and ingenious whatever the instrumental forces. I’d single out for special praise the pungent account of his Little Symphony (Orchestra Nova conducted by George Vass) and the coruscating Piano Trio No 1 (Leonore Piano Trio). But every track brings satisfaction. GB

Yunchan Lim

Chopin Études
Decca
The first thing you notice is that the artist’s booklet photos appear to have been taken during last week’s total eclipse — a perverse choice for a record label trying to promote a hot new pianist and his official debut album.

Still, there’s nothing murky about the music-making. Listening to these performances of Chopin’s two sets of Études, it’s obvious why Yunchan Lim, from South Korea, stunned audiences at the Van Cliburn Piano Competition in 2022, when he took the top prize, aged 18.

He recorded this recital at 19. It’s easy enough to spot signs of youth (there’s a need for more delicacy, more quietude), but the dazzling impression still remains of a pianist in complete command of his instrument and his technical resources. What could be more thrilling than the opening Étudefrom Op 10, fingers racing across the keys, fully justifying Lim’s description of the piece as a cosmic explosion, a big bang?

You might be less struck by other analogies Lim dangles before us in the booklet. This Étude, he says, is about moths; that one about Helen’s abduction by Paris of Troy. “Oh yes,” I murmured to myself, “and this one expresses the sorrow of discovering an overdue library book.” But these are harmless enough fancies, and none of them stopped me from staying absorbed by his authoritative panache and powers of persuasion in these brilliant, poetic piano jewels. GB

Ivan Fischer

Ivan Fischer

Beethoven
Channel Classics
Beethoven can be exhausting, but the Eroica — subject of the latest release in Ivan Fischer’s symphony cycle with his Budapest Festival Orchestra — gives the listener time to reflect. Fischer’s players make the most of the slow movement’s funeral march, although the performance is at its finest in the fire and crisp attack of the opening allegro and the scherzo’s dancing colours. (Oh, those gorgeous hunting horns!) Placed alongside these, the comparatively peaceful finale carries less conviction than one would like, especially when Fischer’s booklet note presents the symphony as a lesson for world leaders in turning conflict into harmony. But this is a thoroughly decent release nonetheless. And no funny faces on the cover. GB

Helmut Lachenmann

My Melodies
BR Klassik
Helmut Lachenmann is a veteran contemporary composer dedicated to making us experience musical instruments and structures afresh. The 44 minutes of My Melodies, completed after revisions in 2023, might not offer much that Bach would consider a tune. But there are other ways of fixing the listener’s attention, and Lachenmann’s elaborate creation for eight horns and an 86-piece orchestra easily offers enough exuberant eruptions, fanciful smudges and interesting heavy breathing to keep curious ears engaged. The unflinching Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Matthias Hermann, and the result is a sonic spectacular. GB

Les Arts Florissants

Bach Cantatas
Harmonia Mundi
Johann Sebastian Bach’s two hundred or so extant sacred cantatas collectively form one of the greatest mountains in all musical literature. But what’s the best way to climb it? Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt, the first to launch a dedicated assault more than 50 years ago, famously took the pedantic path, never diverting from the unchronological catalogue listing established by the musicologist Wolfgang Schmieder. The conductor Paul Agnew and Les Arts Florissants have chosen a more imaginative route, offering selected cantatas by Bach, and a few others, in a chronological attempt to understand Bach’s life, personality and times.

Listening to this first release, however, it wasn’t the concept that knocked me sideways as much as the dynamic effect of the group’s stylistic choices. Speeds and attack mode? Generally fast, extremely lively. Number of participants? Very modest: eight singers at most, with fifteen instrumentalists, a mix resulting in evenly balanced textures that clarify every line of Bach’s counterpoint, and a refreshing community spirit.

Above and beyond the group elan there’s the music itself, the volatile, endlessly imaginative product of Bach in his early twenties. An older composer, Johann Kuhnau, is also heard from, and makes his own impression with a simpler, striking setting of the same text as Bach’s Christ lag in Todes Banden, the cantata that launches this splendid album. I should doff my cap too to Benjamin Alard’s organ solos, Thomas Dunford’s sprightly theorbo, Miriam Allan’s radiant soprano and every member of Agnew’s team. In my book they’ve already conquered Everest. GB

Thomas Dausgaard

THOMAS GRNDAHL

Thomas Dausgaard

Bartok
Onyx
When a well-established 20th-century composer turns 143, as Bela Bartok did this week, you might assume that the music composed can spring no further surprises. Sample the first track, however, on the third of the Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard’s albums devoted to Bartok’s orchestral output, and you could still be pulled up short.

What work is the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra playing, with its magical, slightly Wagnerian sounds suggesting the natural world waking up via a sustained and tremulous C-major chord, dappled with horn calls and early morning mist? It’s the pantomime ballet The Wooden Prince, completed in 1917 shortly before Bartok wrote its more famous and lurid stablemate, The Miraculous Mandarin. The score should be much better known, and Dausgaard’s recording of the composer’s rarely heard revised version makes a compelling case for its kaleidoscopic beauties, grotesqueries and piquant woodwind solos.

The orchestra’s City Halls home in Glasgow may not have the most sympathetic acoustic, but its clinical aura never deadens Bartok’s vivid depictions of every stage in Bela Balazs’s narrative about a fairytale princess who falls in love not with the handsome prince but with his wooden stand-in. Poetic and symbolic complications follow, brilliantly scored for a large orchestra, and played here with all necessary precision and vim. The Romanian Folk Dances and the later string Divertimento fill out a most agreeable album. GB

Christopher Jackson

Matthäus-Passion
Analekta
Performances of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, one of the pinnacles of classical music, proliferate around Easter — although this hasn’t always been so. Two hundred years ago, a century after its completion, the work was barely known in Britain. It was Felix Mendelssohn in 1829 who presented Bach’s creation to the wider world in a rearranged and shortened version, initially performed in Berlin with a bulbous choir of 158 voices and some 70 orchestral musicians: far beyond the lean forces mostly encountered now.

This new recording from Christopher Jackson and the Bach Choir of Bethlehem (that’s Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) gives us an uncommon chance to travel back to Victorian times and taste Mendelssohn’s version for ourselves. Selected arias and chorales disappear. The instrumental line-up is refreshed: goodbye viola da gamba, hello clarinets. The Evangelist’s recitatives are abbreviated, with accompaniments often cut back to a fortepiano rippling away as if in a domestic parlour. For all that, Bach still reigns in glory.

There’s something equally homely and straightforward about the whole performance. Jackson’s forces give us commitment and heart, not affectation. Dann Coakwell’s Evangelist is sometimes wonderfully tender; William Sharp’s Jesus sounds interestingly worried; and Elizabeth Field’s violin solos made me keen to hear her play Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, which she’s almost doing in some decorative bars. It’s all fascinating and endearing. GB

Duncan Ferguson

The Crucifixion
Delphian
More time-travelling is involved in the latest release from Duncan Ferguson’s excellent Choir of St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh. The work is John Stainer’s The Crucifixion of 1887, the top Victorian oratorio of its time, which was based on the framework of Bach’s passions but infused with the cosier atmosphere of a Sunday service in an Anglican parish church.

A dry and clinical recording would be ruinous to the sweet disposition of Stainer’s harmonies, so the big warm bath of St Mary’s acoustic is mostly a boon, except when the words of the congregational hymns start to become mush. A sceptical performance wouldn’t work either. Luckily, all the participants, from the expressive tenor Liam Bonthrone to the diligent organist Imogen Morgan, radiate sincerity in a work weak on drama but comfortingly strong on gentle feelings. GB

Yo-Yo Ma

Beethoven for Three
Sony Classical
No programme notes come supplied with the top album this week. There also aren’t any running times. The listener, it seems, is simply meant to go with the flow, and when the performers are the sunny cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the congenial pianist Emanuel Ax and the mercurial violinist Leonidas Kavakos — we get prominent pictures of all three — I’m prepared to follow them anywhere.

This album is another edition in their series offering miniature editions of Beethoven symphonies. This time it’s No 4 from 1806, a largely bouncy and playful work, unlike the more heavily-scored and considered symphonies written on either side. Even so, the music’s arranger, pianist Shai Wosner, still had some difficulty handling its slow introduction, which sounds very undernourished. But once the notes multiply and the speeds increase, we’re on the way to seventh heaven.

Ax’s ten fingers provide most of the symphony’s harmonic support, leaving Ma and Kavakos free to concentrate on melodic charms and quirks. All unite in ensemble verve and kaleidoscopic hues: qualities that equally mark Beethoven’s Archduke trio of 1811, which follows. The Fourth Symphony this time round might not be properly symphonic, but intimate chamber music playing doesn’t come much better than this. GB

Tim Posner

TING-RU LAI

Tim Posner

Cello Works
Claves
Connoisseurs of instrumental colour should especially relish the dark throb of Tim Posner’s cello in the early bars of Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo, the first attraction in a programme that displays technical excellence walking hand in hand with open emotion. This youngish British musician hasn’t taken numerous cello masterclasses with the soulful Steven Isserlis for nothing.

The choice of repertoire also invites the yearning tone. After Bloch’s Hebraic Rhapsody, both lyrical and declamatory, we get the Protestant Bruch’s touching Kol Nidre, inspired by Hebrew melodies. Soaring song finally turns cheerful in Erno Dohnányi’s early Konzertstück of 1904, blessed with one of those long-legged romantic melodies which are hard to shake off after hearing. The Bern Symphony Orchestra and the Austrian conductor Katharina Müllner make decent sounds alongside, although the recording is a bit constricted, sometimes squeezing Posner in the process. Not enough, though, to snuff out this cellist’s special gifts. GB

Semyon Bychkov

Ma Vlast
Pentatone
Nothing is sparkle-free in Semyon Bychkov’s dynamic account of Bedrich Smetana’s symphonic poem cycle, Ma Vlast, with his Czech Philharmonic. Whether the nationalistic mood being struck is lyrical or martial, Bychkov’s musicians deliver idiomatic rhythms, incisive string playing and equally pungent brass wind and brass, all caught in the warm acoustic of the Rudolfinum ― the orchestra’s home base in Prague for 60 years. Everything too appears freshly considered and deeply felt. Nothing is overplayed. And no one is pictured clutching a flower. GB

Jonas Kaufmann as Parsifal

Jonas Kaufmann

Parsifal
Sony Classical
Will Vladimir Putin be listening to this Parsifal? Probably not. The opera is by Wagner; it lasts four hours. It’s also drawn from the 2021 Vienna production directed and designed via video link by one of Putin’s most prominent critics, Kirill Serebrennikov, when under house arrest in Moscow.

Taking his cue from personal circumstances, he made the chief setting a prison constructed from little but metal bars and strip lighting. Characters sported trainers, tracksuits, revolvers and high heels: all accoutrements Wagner avoided in his variant of a medieval romance about the Arthurian knight Parsifal and his quest for the Holy Grail.

While this release from Sony Classical is audio-only it’s striking how much of Serebrennikov’s jarring staging lingers in the physical packaging. Grimly lit photos abound. Every page is designed with a bar motif. From visuals alone, no one would imagine that the opera was meant to be a redemptive experience, for listeners as well as the characters.

Happily, most of the singing is marvellous. Much of Act I is dominated by the loquacious top prisoner Gurnemanz, sung with slightly tiresome solidity by Georg Zeppenfeld. Livelier emotions surge forward with Ludovic Tézier’s tortured Amfortas, Wolfgang Koch’s insidious Klingsor, and Elina Garanca’s Kundry, the volatile witch woman recast as a photojournalist.

The titular hero pops up too, but Jonas Kaufmann’s finest stretches as Parsifal comes in later acts, when his passions fly, top notes ping, and dark timbres shake the rafters, alongside strong competition from Garanca’s bloodcurdling screams.

You’re lucky too that this audio edition avoids Serebrennikov’s device of shaping Acts I and II as flashbacks, where the mature Parsifal was seen revisiting his past while a young wordless actor took care of his actions ­­— clumsy compensation for casting the 50-plus Kaufmann as a character frequently referred to as a “boy”.

No split identity affects the Vienna Philharmonic members who form the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, or the confident conductor Philippe Jordan, a masterful Wagnerian who knows instinctively when to move forward or how long to pause, sometimes more than Wagner himself. Highly recommended, then, but for listening with eyes closed. GB

Richard Galliano

Rhapsody in Blue
Pentatone
A new barrier has just been broken with an exuberant account of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue played on an instrument that can no longer be regarded as just an old squeezebox. The performer here, the genre-hopping French veteran Richard Galliano, has already brought us albums of Bach, Vivaldi, and Mozart, though creating an accordion distillation of Gershwin’s concert-jazz classic (it premiered 100 years ago this month) brought special challenges.

An accordion can’t smear the notes as the solo clarinet famously does in the original, nor can exchanges between piano and orchestra be clearly characterised. Even so, Galliano’s dexterity is spectacular enough for the nervous jazz rhythms to still come through, and his love for the music is infectious. This remarkable performance is available as a digital single; an entire Gershwin album will follow in the autumn. GB

Bojan Cicic

Handel
Delphian
The scene is the interior of Britain’s last remaining physical record store. A customer discovers an album offering Handel’s complete violin sonatas. Since this music lover never realised that Handel wrote any violin sonatas, the excitement stirred is limited. But then the name of Bojan Cicic is spotted on the cover: “Quick, where’s my credit card?”

The presence of this Croatian-born violinist is definitely a big attraction, particularly after last year’s superlative album of Bach’s solo sonatas and partitas. His keyboard partner, Steven Devine, is no slouch either, and both find innumerable delights in the seven sonatas, plus five bits and bobs, from a composer mostly known for his operas, oratorios and keyboard prowess, not for fiddling about with a bow and four strings. The opening D major sonata, dated about 1750, is especially splendid, featuring strong dancing rhythms and a first movement fully deserving the expressive marking “affettuoso” (with feeling).

Armed with his 1703 baroque violin, Cicic’s eloquent, gracefully ornamented delivery of Handel’s melodic flights sits perfectly alongside the sprightly sounds of Devine’s 1756 harpsichord — an instrument, we’re told, that Devine has known since childhood. Listening to the results made me realise how much time I wasted twiddling with my mother’s accordion and pushing Dinky toys across the floor. GB

Christian Poltera/Ronald Brautigam

Brahms Cello Sonatas
BIS
Given his rude behaviour when in company, a personal visit by Brahms to your living room would not be recommended. Having his chamber music resound through your house is another matter entirely, and I’ve derived intense pleasure from Christian Poltera and Ronald Brautigam’s full-blooded performances of his two cello sonatas (with Schumann’s Five Pieces in Folk Style placed in between). Superbly recorded, Poltera’s cello of 1711 and Brautigam’s modern copy of an 1868 piano appear to be in the room with you. The first sonata wins the top prize, culminating in a fantastic fugal allegro, where Brahms’s trenchant writing and Poltera’s busy fingers really send the temperature soaring. GB

Igor Levit

ROBBIE LAWRENCE

Igor Levit

Lieder ohne Worte
Sony Classical
Igor Levit has never been a pianist with his head in the clouds. To give succour to internet audiences and himself, he streamed daily recitals from his home during the first Covid lockdown. Two years earlier in 2018, the accidental death of a close friend prompted a substantial and gripping album called Life. Life and death are equally intertwined in his latest response to world events: a short recital generated in response to last year’s Hamas attacks of October 7, with proceeds donated to two Berlin organisations fighting antisemitism.

The bulk of Levit’s repertoire consists of 14 of the 48 official Songs without Words written by Mendelssohn — lyrical pieces simply designed, with melodic lines in the right hand and accompanying harmonies in the left. If overworked and sentimentalised, a string of them could easily become cloying. Levit wisely treats them with restraint, letting their beauty and sadness (eight are in minor keys) tug at our hearts and minds no matter how one feels about the continuing Middle East war.

Levit’s masterstroke, however, lies not so much with his Mendelssohn interpretations as with his powerful final track: an enigmatic piano prelude by the eccentric Charles-Valentin Alkan, written in 1844. The title is Song of the Mad Woman on the Sea Shore. Its forlorn melody is repeated with variants and fragmentations over crunched and insistent left-hand chords — a wordless song of despair that casts Mendelssohn’s reserve aside and lets pain and anguish run free. Point taken. GB

Ruby Hughes

End of My Days
BIS
Vocal magic arrives in the shape of the soprano Ruby Hughes’s typically thoughtful recital with four gorgeously expressive string players from Manchester Collective, recorded two years ago when lockdown challenges weighed more heavily upon us than they do now. Even so, time has done nothing to dim the glory of Hughes’s clean and intensely expressive singing, or the manifold pleasures of a wide-ranging collection that might deal in part with loss and death but resonates most of all with the joy of loving and living.

The composers range from Debussy and Mahler to modern-day Brits, interspersed with Dowland laments, the vitamin C jolt of Caroline Shaw’s Valencia and a Shetland folk song from the mists of time. Nothing appears out of place, everything is deeply felt and I sat happily throughout, basking in beauty and wonder. GB

Magdalena Kozena

Marc Minkowski

Alcina
Pentatone
Here’s a warning for listeners of the conductor Marc Minkowski’s recording of Handel’s opera Alcina. There is no plot synopsis. So, with the usual baroque complexities, the unwary might follow the words and music still unsure about many things. Who are these characters? What are their relationships? Who’s in disguise? Who isn’t? Who is male? Who is female?

One aspect is resoundingly clear: the performances are almost entirely splendid. The first voice to enchant is the high-flying soprano of Erin Morley as Morgana, one half of the sibling witches in the impossible plot, carved from the monster verse epic Orlando Furioso. But the most stunning singing comes from Magdalena Kozena as her volatile, man-hungry sister Alcina. Kozena imbues her voice with enough tender feelings and anguish to make you forgive the character for turning former lovers into wild animals and lumps of rock. Other roles are delivered with panache, though it’s a pity that Valerio Contaldo’s tenor suggests a door whose hinges need a squirt of oil.

Vocal accomplishments are complemented by the lively ensemble spirit generated by Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre. They decorate Handel’s top-notch score with piquant colours and instrumental finesse, and keep the pace moving. All in all, no listener should feel left out even if the plot’s niceties remain a mystery. GB

Gabriel Prokofiev

Pastoral 21
Signum Classics
No need to shrink from Pastoral 21, a project performed at COP26, in which Gabriel Prokofiev’s partly electronic musings interrupt movements from a string sextet arrangement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Considering the natural world’s present state, I expected more anger from Prokofiev’s music. But ruefulness can be telling too, especially when conveyed via the excellent string playing of the UNLTD Collective. GB

Louise Berlin

Fausto
Bru Zane
Sometimes with today’s excursions into neglected repertoire, the dominant sound isn’t music of high quality so much as the noise of a box being ticked. That’s not the case with the opera Fausto, staged in 1831 then lost from sight for 190 years. Yes, the composer’s a woman, Louise Bertin. Yes, she was disabled by childhood polio. But as we listen to this Italian-language adaptation of Goethe’s Faust, her personal circumstances take second place to the extraordinary invention and power of the opera itself.

The ringing conviction of Christophe Rousset’s Les Talens Lyriques and a high-octane cast led by Karine Deshayes tell their own story. They know they’re not performing dross. The overture sets the scene: adventurous harmonies, irregular phrasings, piquant instrumentation. The music of Berlioz, a Faust setter himself, leaps to mind. The adventures continue through two opening numbers until a tinkling flourish on a fortepiano plunges us back towards Mozart and Rossini. It’s as if Bertin is playing hopscotch, jumping between music’s past and future, all with a verve that only fades in the final act, where Faust is dragged down to hell with no whelps, no shrieks, just a shivering tam-tam.

Rousset’s performers offer their own flair, though with one complication. Following indications in a pre-production libretto, Faust’s role is assigned to a mezzo-soprano, Deshayes, rather than the tenor voice heard at the 1831 premiere. Deshayes’s vocal powers are obvious, but with an opera heard rather than seen the register switch tends to blur the dramatic profile of Faust’s scenes with Karina Gauvin’s young innocent, Margarita. Nothing blunts the evil force of Ante Jerkunica’s Mefistofele, Nico Darmanin’s ardent portrayal of Margarita’s brother, or the attractiveness of Bru Zane’s recording and packaging. Give it a whirl! GB

Sol Gabetta and and Bertrand Chamayou

MARCO BORGGREVE

Gabetta/Chamayou

Mendelssohn
Sony Classical
From “dazzling genius” to “mild talent”: that’s how the music critic Eric Blom characterised Felix Mendelssohn’s composing career 100 years ago, when the artistic world was in revolt against most things Victorian. Today we’re more accommodating. Certainly the recording industry is, for here are two albums presenting music that may sometimes be corseted by 19th-century conventions but scarcely deserves the adjective “mild”.

What’s mild about the cellist Sol Gabetta going full tilt in the happy turmoil that closes his Cello Sonata No 2 or moving our hearts with her melancholy sighs? The florid piano writing in her album devoted to Mendelssohn’s cello output is, if anything, even more striking, partly helped by the ear-catching colours flying from Bertrand Chamayou’s fingers and the keys of his 1859 Blüther piano.

Timidity, I grant, dominates Mendelssohn’s thinking in the first half of his Variations concertantes but definitely not in the second. The notion of the composer as an old fossil may also be eased by an appendix of short complementary pieces commissioned by Gabetta, ranging in manner from wispy, intense and fragmentary to Jörg Widmann’s effective mix of the conventional and the haywire. This is a refreshing album. GB

David Temple

Mendelssohn/Hensel
Chandos
A few cobwebs hang over parts of a new collection by David Temple, featuring assorted soloists, the 91 voices of the Crouch End Festival Chorus and the London Mozart Players. But the spangled splendour that opens the cantata Vom Himmel hoch (essentially Bach in 19th-century dress) is immediately engaging.

There’s the fascination too of getting pleasantly exposed to part songs and a cantata by Mendelssohn’s gifted elder sister, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, who was told by their father that, because of her sex, music could “never be the root of your being and doing”. Oh yes it could.

Two drawbacks should be acknowledged. One is the Victorian cantata format, which can cramp the music’s flight, as in Felix’s Goethe setting, Die erste Walpurgisnacht. The other is the tentative sound of the choir’s sopranos, who always seem in need of a little push to conquer their top notes. That said, both Mendelssohns remain Mendelssohns: tuneful, engaging, rarely mild for long. GB

Sandrine Piau

SANDRINE EXPILLY

Sandrine Piau

Reflet
Alpha Classics
It would be interesting to know the French soprano Sandrine Piau’s electricity bills. A declared connoisseur of that play of light and shadow we call chiaroscuro, does she spend winter nights contemplating dappled gloom? Would blazing candelabras make her shriek?

There’s no such glaring brightness anyway in Reflet, her latest album of orchestral songs and a companion to Clair-Obscur three years ago, when the repertoire was all in German.

This time the language is French, even when one of the composers is Benjamin Britten, and the fusion between the music and the shifting colours of her voice is deliciously complete. Nothing could be more beguiling than the opening track, Le Spectre de la rose from Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été, where the sad caress of Piau’s phrasings come admirably blended with the muted sounds of the Orchestre Victor Hugo, conducted by Jean-François Verdier.

Diaphanous beauties continue in two songs by Duparc and Ravel’s ever intriguing Mallarmé settings. Piau’s nimble, unaffected delivery serves equally well in unfamiliar delights by the maverick Charles Koechlin and Britten’s Quatre chansons françaises (startlingly accomplished settings from a composer who was only 14).

Any criticisms? Well, some of Piau’s consonants would have benefited from having a harder edge. But that’s all. And no one should complain about the 57-minute running time: the ideal length for exposure to nonstop, concentrated French subtlety and charm. GB

Christophe Rousset

Atys
Chateau de Versailles
The prologue and five acts of Lully’s lyric tragedy Atys eat up three hours, and Lully can be a bit of a plodder, at least in his recitatives. Nonetheless I was grateful for the time spent with Christophe Rousset’s vigorous account.

The hero may turn into a pine tree at the end, but the cast sing as though every action and passion is understandable. Reinoud Van Mechelen’s anguish as Atys is crystal clear even if some of his words aren’t. Marie Lys is especially touching as his lover, while the chorus and Rousset’s Les Talens Lyriques enhance every compositional nicety and dramatic exchange. After this I won’t pass a pine tree without shedding a quiet tear. GB

Dalia Staesvska

Dalia Staesvska

Helvi Leiviska
BIS
Interested in starting the new year with a new experience? How about listening for the first time to the music of Helvi Leiviska, Finland’s primary female composer of the 20th century?

If this sounds like PC-orientated box ticking, it should only take the austere eloquence of the Symphony No 2 of 1954 or the soulful lower string polyphony launching her Sinfonia brevis for the realisation to dawn that we’re dealing with a composer who should easily demand attention through merit alone.

It’s clear that personable Dalia Stasevska (known here as the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s principal guest conductor) feels utterly at home with music that fully acknowledges the Finnish giant Sibelius but still projects a satisfying and striking personal voice.

Stasevska’s orchestra, the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, appears equally at ease, whether Leiviska is weaving dark fugal textures, indulging in a pastoral lullaby, engineering crashing dissonances or paring things down to a solo flute flying high over plucked strings (the memorable ending of the very impressive Second Symphony).

The Sinfonia brevis is taut but meaty, with simpler pleasures following in the early Orchestral Suite No 2, derived from film music. Happily, the album is labelled Orchestral Works Vol 1, so more may be expected from a composer whose output is not large but deserves rediscovery and a place in the sun. GB

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