Album of the week
BEETHOVEN, WAGNER, VERDI
Abscheulicher! Wo eilst du hin? et al
Lise Davidsen (soprano), London Philharmonic Orchestra, cond Mark Elder
Decca 4851507
There is so much to enjoy in the young Norwegian soprano’s singing, I am reluctant not to join in the blanket adulation of a new artist promoted by her record company as a “voice of the century”. It’s early days, and this second album is an advance on her first: the glorious top of the voice shines in an exquisitely graded messa di voce in Pace, pace from Verdi’s La forza del destino. Desdemona’s prayer is subtly done and Davidsen sounds at her most luminous when not under pressure. She does lovely things, too, in Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, though projecting the text meaningfully isn’t one of them. Which leaves the Beethoven: Leonore’s solo scena from Fidelio and Ah! Perfido. Gwyneth Jones recorded these in 1966, when she was four years younger than her successor. Davidsen doesn’t wholly measure up. Hugh Canning
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MOZART
The Complete Multipiano Concertos
MultiPiano Ensemble (Tomer Lev, Daniel Borovitzky, Berenika Glixman, Alon Kariv), English Chamber Orchestra
Hyperion CDA68367
The Salzburg concertos for two and three pianos never quite achieve the exalted level of his great solo concertos for Vienna, but this album brings them together, played by a fine quartet of Israeli pianists. Tomer Lev’s completion of a fragmentary Larghetto and Allegro, with orchestral accompaniment, dates from the early Vienna years, and is worth encountering. HC
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GEOFFREY POOLE
A Pianist’s I Ching
Geoffrey Poole (piano)
Prima Facie PFCD150/151/152
This remarkable three-disc set presents an unfolding of 64 short, colourfully titled piano pieces, each a response to a hexagram of the Chinese divinatory classic. John Cage made much compositional use of the I Ching, but wasn’t as directly expressive and systematic as this. The stylistic range is enormous — the tonal melts into the atonal, the popular into the arcane. At three hours’ duration the total opus is daunting, but you can dip in anywhere and expect to snatch delight. Paul Driver
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SCHUBERT
Winterreise
Joyce DiDonato (mezzo), Yannick Nézet-Séguin (piano)
Erato 9029528414
Few women sing Schubert’s desolate, passionate anti-odyssey of the rejected male lover, but when they do it can be memorable. Never more so than in this superb performance, where Nézet-Séguin is the perfect companion. DiDonato has a voice of rare beauty, but even more heartbreaking than the loveliness of her singing is her endlessly varied dramatic colouring of the text. Incomparable. David Cairns
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