From big orchestral showpieces to intimate chamber-music programmes, grand operas (including on Blu-ray/DVD) to solo piano recordings, The Times and Sunday Times critics select the best new classical albums for you to buy or stream this year. We will review the latest releases from the starriest conductors, singers and instrumentalists, but also go off the beaten track, choosing from boutique record companies as well as the major labels, and spotlighting less well-known artists for you to explore.
Which classical music albums have you been enjoying and which have we missed? Do you agree with our verdicts? Let us know in the comments.
This week’s best releases
Christophe Rousset
Cublai, gran kan de’ Tartari
Aparté
★★★★☆
After the play and film Amadeus, we all know the composer Salieri. Jealous of his rival’s genius, didn’t he poison Mozart? It’s all rot: the poisoning certainly, and his own music is far from terrible. Witness Cublai, gran kan de’ Tartari — a bizarre satirical opera completed in 1788, then banned, forgotten and finally staged in 1993. This premiere recording, exceptionally lively, follows a further revival in Vienna last year, promoted by Salieri fan Christophe Rousset and his sprightly ensemble, Les Talens Lyriques.
Freed of the necessity to dress like chocolate confectionery and drag queens (the Vienna staging was one of those productions), Rousset’s singers really let rip. Braggadocio oozes from Mirco Palazzi’s Cublai, the pleasure-seeking ruler of Cathay. Marie Lys is on fire too as Alzima, the Bengal princess needed for his dynastic plan. Pleasing arias follow characterful recitatives. True, it’s long (159 minutes), yet fast-moving, with music that might not make Mozart jealous but still earns the right to be heard and enjoyed. Geoff Brown
The best of the rest
Lise Davidsen
Der fliegender Holländer
Decca
Yollohey! Hussahey! When an opera chorus sings words like that, it can only mean they are Norwegian sailors in Wagner’s early opera The Flying Dutchman. The chorus here, a lusty bunch, has the extra advantage of being from the Norwegian National Opera. Their lustre, though, dims behind the megawatt glow of the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, one of those cherished singers born to tackle Wagner’s female roles. This time it’s Senta, the sea captain’s daughter, who catches the eye of the Dutchman condemned to sail the seven seas for ever unless he can find true love.
Enthusiastically conducted by NNO’s new music director, Edward Gardner, the recording draws upon concert performances given in Oslo last August. Davidsen has said that her Wagner diary is now so crowded that this first spin as Senta might be her last. Well, it’s good publicity for her album, and with her powerful but flexible voice she certainly creates a distinctive Senta, not so much a star-struck girl as someone driven by greater forces to achieve the Dutchman’s redemption.
The Dutchman himself — like Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western trilogy A Man With No Name — is interpreted rather more quietly by Gerald Finley. Sensitive, thoughtful, weary; this too is a striking characterisation, though the Dutchman could have been a little more exultant when Senta solves his love problem by basically saying, “Yes, OK.” Other roles are forcefully sung, with minor technical imperfections, and the final stretch has all of the overblown radiance that typically makes Wagner Wagner. I recommend it. GB
Christian Curnyn
Jephtha
Chandos
Christian Curnyn and his Early Opera Company have been successfully showcasing baroque operas for 30 years, but there’s always something new to discover. This time it’s an early British oratorio (1737) by Handel’s friend and rival Maurice Greene. Handel later retold the Old Testament tale in his own Jephtha oratorio, but Greene’s slimmer treatment has many things going for it — melodic charm, instrumental sparkle, emotional power — plus lesser drawbacks such as static pockets and fusty words.
With clean and spirited performances from Curnyn’s singers and instrumentalists, it’s a work well worth getting to know. Mary Bevan is a particular joy as the warrior Jephtha’s virgin daughter, the unintended target of her father’s vow to celebrate his battle victory with a sacrificial offering. One issue remains: the miscasting of the tenor Andrew Staples, who never sounds like a soldier and might be old enough to have a toddler, but not someone who sings like Bevan. My advice: swallow the snag and move on. GB
Leif Ove Andsnes
Franz Liszt
Sony Classical
Would you care to enter the soul of the starry virtuoso pianist and composer Franz Liszt? That’s the journey the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is offering in his latest album. To make the prospect a little less daunting, the music he chooses reflects the later contemplative, religious Liszt, not the rock star heartthrob of earlier years whose cigar stubs and handkerchiefs were pounced upon as souvenirs.
Even so, listening to Via Crucis, his singular late choral work based on the Easter devotions of the Fourteen Stations of the Cross, remains a slightly unsettling experience. Skirting the 19th-century boundaries of tonality, the music calmly spreads over 35 minutes (some performances take up to 15 minutes more), with a piano accompaniment often so bare that it’s as if water damage has blotted out swathes of notes in the score.
Apart from supporting various singers and the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir (the conductor is Grete Pedersen), Andsnes and his piano handle several Stations on their own, all without disturbing the strange drifting radiance that settles over the work as a whole.
Following Via Crucis, Andsnes finally has the floor to himself, offering Liszt’s six meditative Consolations and two of his masterly Harmonies poétiques et religieuses: 27 minutes of solo piano music, most sensitively delivered. Welcome ballast, some might feel, after spending half an hour in an unusual position, on our knees, at one with the composer’s soul. GB
Raphaël Pichon
Bach: Mass in B minor
Harmonia Mundi
Raphaël Pichon and his choir and period instrument group Pygmalion like to tackle unusual projects. Remember Enfer, their French operatic tour of hell? Or their version of Mozart’s Requiem, reconfigured as the composer’s trip down memory lane?
However, the only unusual aspect of this account of Bach’s Mass in B minor is the adoption of some very brisk speeds. Pichon’s foot really is on the accelerator in the Gloria section’s Cum Sancto Spirito; the same, too, in the Credo’s Ex expecto.
A blot on the landscape? Not really. In this rendering Bach’s magnificent work might lose a little nobility, but it certainly gains in human drama and excitement. Christian Immler’s two bass solos, so lively and characterful, bring immense pleasure; so do the piquant instrumental colours in all the aria accompaniments.
The choir of 30 singers is occasionally swamped in the sound balance by the 33 instrumentalists, but it would take much more than that to stop me reaching for this recording whenever I needed a big Bach uplift and a shot in the arm. GB
Krystian Zimerman
Johannes Brahms: Piano Quartets Nos2 & 3
Deutsche Grammophon
It is 50 years now since Krystian Zimerman, aged 18, won the International Piano Competition in Warsaw. One of the fruits was a lifelong contract with the Deutsche Grammophon label. Thirty-five albums have since emerged — a surprising total for a perfectionist who wants to perform only on a piano of his own, customised for each occasion. Here, he serves as his own producer, playing alongside four quietly excellent and hand-picked string players. The repertoire? Two of Brahms’s three meaty and wonderful piano quartets.
What could possibly go wrong? The answer comes with the opening of the third quartet in C minor. Absolutely nothing. Zimerman lays down his unison notes with exactly the right poise and weight, vividly contrasted with the wistful phrases emanating from Maria Nowak (violin), Katarzyna Budnik (viola) and Yuya Okamoto (cello). This is the kind of playing you get from musicians entirely at ease in each other’s company, happy to unite in the common goal of interpreting high-calibre chamber music by a composer who doesn’t waste a single bar, a single note.
Flabby playing in taut music would bring disaster, even death. Neither is a possibility here, not in the turbulence of the C minor quartet (partly reflecting Brahms’s early passion for the married Clara Schumann), nor in the expansive lyricism of the second quartet in A major. Whether his touch is forceful or delicate, Zimerman excels without ever upsetting the ensemble’s balance, while each string player contributes felicities of their own to performances that couldn’t be more absorbing if they tried. A wonderful album. GB
Karina Canellakis
Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
Pentatone
In her booklet note commenting on the easy flow of the Hungarian bass-baritone Gabor Bretz in Bartok’s opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, the Netherlands-based American conductor Karina Canellakis writes that Bretz “makes me feel as if Bluebeard is a friend”. A friend? Someone who lives in a castle housing a torture chamber, lots of blood and three former wives locked in a room? Bretz’s almost conversational delivery certainly avoids overt villainy, though it is clear enough from the increasing horror in Rinat Shaham’s voice that Bluebeard’s latest amour is not too pleased with her tour of the castle amenities.
However one interprets the libretto’s spin on the original French folk tale, Canellakis, her expressive singers and the feisty Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra definitely give value for money, with the one caveat that Shaham’s voice sometimes doesn’t stand out enough from the surrounding orchestra. But the opera’s brooding power remains and Canellakis is a very good conductor. GB
John Harle
Art Music Remixed
Sospiro Noir
Twelve years ago, the saxophonist and composer John Harle issued Art Music, an album inspired by the paintings of Lucian Freud, David Hockney and others. The musicians involved included Sarah Leonard, soaring high in the stratosphere, usually weaving around Harle’s soprano sax. In honour of the soprano, who died last year, Harle has remixed the album, allowing us to enjoy anew the four intriguing tracks devoted to Freud, ponder over the heavy musical colouring weirdly applied to Hockney’s vibrant landscapes, and savour the chugging pieces that remind us that both Harle and Leonard once performed with the Michael Nyman Band.
The longest work, Arcadia, dawdles a bit over one of John Craxton’s vivid paintings from his years in Greece, but finishes with a taut and infectious finale. Thoughtful, friendly, often foot-tapping, this is an album well worth exploring, and all proceeds go to the Association of English Singers and Speakers’ Sarah Leonard Fund for commissioning works from young British composers. GB
Mark Elder
Simon Boccanegra
Opera Rara
Not for nothing does the chorus in Simon Boccanegra sing a line that translates as “what mystery has suddenly arisen?” And at that point there’s another two acts of Verdi’s opera to go! Some of the confusions in the original version of 1857, resurrected by Mark Elder during his final weeks as the Hallé orchestra’s music director, may be caused by particular failings of its librettist. But we’re still left with a plot where two characters, following a narrative jump of 25 years, become known under different names and the titular hero, a 14th-century doge of Genoa, has so many personalities that it’s hard keeping him in focus.
You know you’re in for something special with the prelude’s stabbing opening chords: an early sign that Elder knows exactly how to generate tension, crucial in minimising audience fog patches later on. The singers, two of them late replacements, also deliver the goods. Germán Enrique Alcántara’s flexible baritone easily weathers the hero’s switches from corsair to patrician to tender father, while Eri Nakamura, as Boccanegra’s long-lost daughter, makes beautiful sounds in a score with relatively few set arias. Meanwhile, Iván Ayón-Rivas’s impassioned tenor voice finds a perfect home in the role of Gabriele, who’s sometimes a good guy, sometimes a bad guy, but always vocally adorable.
The Chorus of Opera North and RNCM Opera Chorus contribute with gusto, helped along by spatial separations that impart stage atmosphere to this vivid recording made in the orchestra’s rehearsal centre, Hallé St Peter’s. Verdi’s revised version of 1881, more florid, less taut, may still dominate the opera houses but Elder’s splendid resurrection of the original can’t be ignored. GB
John Wilson
William Walton
Chandos
John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London have always been at their best with British repertoire, further confirmed by this album of music by William Walton. You might be tempted to purchase just on the basis of the super exhilarating 5 minutes and 40 seconds of the overture Portsmouth Point. But there are plenty of other pleasures.
Admittedly, Christopher Palmer’s symphonic suite arranged from the post-romantic opera Troilus and Cressida never fuses arias, fanfares and orchestral anguish into a convincing whole. Yet listeners can still enjoy a whirlwind ride, with dramatic climaxes excitingly punched out and delicious stretches of lyrical melancholy. There’s more in that vein in the 1939 Violin Concerto written for the great Jascha Heifitz, and here tossed off with both quiet beauty and much virtuoso fire by the Sinfonia’s leader, Charlie Lovell-Jones. Thumbs up!
Not for nothing does the chorus in Simon Boccanegra sing a line that translates as “what mystery has suddenly arisen?” And at that point there’s another two acts of Verdi’s opera to go! Some of the confusions in the original version of 1857, resurrected by Mark Elder during his final weeks as the Hallé orchestra’s music director, may be caused by particular failings of its librettist. But we’re still left with a plot where two characters, following a narrative jump of 25 years, become known under different names and the titular hero, a 14th-century doge of Genoa, has so many personalities that it’s hard keeping him in focus.
You know you’re in for something special with the prelude’s stabbing opening chords: an early sign that Elder knows exactly how to generate tension, crucial in minimising audience fog patches later on. The singers, two of them late replacements, also deliver the goods. Germán Enrique Alcántara’s flexible baritone easily weathers the hero’s switches from corsair to patrician to tender father, while Eri Nakamura, as Boccanegra’s long-lost daughter, makes beautiful sounds in a score with relatively few set arias. Meanwhile, Iván Ayón-Rivas’s impassioned tenor voice finds a perfect home in the role of Gabriele, who’s sometimes a good guy, sometimes a bad guy, but always vocally adorable.
The Chorus of Opera North and RNCM Opera Chorus contribute with gusto, helped along by spatial separations that impart stage atmosphere to this vivid recording made in the orchestra’s rehearsal centre, Hallé St Peter’s. Verdi’s revised version of 1881, more florid, less taut, may still dominate the opera houses but Elder’s splendid resurrection of the original can’t be ignored. GB
Rosa Feola
Son regina e sono amante
Pentatone
Puccini operas we know about. But the operas of Piccinni? In the 18th century, one of his comic operas, La buona figliuola, was all the rage in Naples, Rome, Paris and beyond. And there were more than a hundred other operas, comic, tragic or sentimental. However, what strikes the listener immediately in the eight arias collected here is not Piccinni’s artistry but the quality of the recitalist’s voice.
Best known for singing Gilda in Rigoletto (her Royal Opera House debut in 2022), the Italian soprano Rosa Feola doesn’t appear to have cracks anywhere in her vocal register. Up, down, middle, sideways: the tone stays steady with impeccable control of breathing and phrasing. The one possible quibble concerns the tone’s timbre, a touch pinched and fenced in. Like a dentist, I kept wanting her to “open wide”. But that’s just the timbre her voice has, and it never substantially damages her authority or dramatic impact.
In a rather high-minded move, Feola and her conductor Antonio Florio chose to bypass arias from La buona figliuola — hardly things that most people whistle — in favour of operas even less familiar. Musical pleasures still await, whether Feola is Dido, the suffering Queen of Carthage, or a noblewoman’s comic maid. The orchestral playing from Florio’s Cappella Neapolitana is neat and tidy, though an injection of flamboyance to match the singer’s would have spread greater joy. GB
Martyn Brabbins
New Year
NMC
An agoraphobic heroine falls for an intergalactic visitor from the future. Whisked off in a spaceship, she’s offered a life of happy oblivion but chooses to return and make the world better. Well, that’s one way of slicing the baffling shenanigans of Michael Tippett’s final opera New Year, written (words and music) in audacious old age and premiered to raised eyebrows in 1989.
No recording could bring this chaotic multi-styled creation to heel (this is the first, derived from the BBC’s concert version performed in Glasgow last spring). Jazz, ska, blues, quaint electronica, vocal flights suggesting strangulated Monteverdi: anything goes. But the conductor, Martyn Brabbins, still maintains an impressively firm grip, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra vividly highlight the imaginative orchestral textures encountered en route, along with the boring electric guitar.
The singing from Rhian Lois, Robert Murray and company is forthright and impassioned, though it’s a pity that some soloists seem locked in a contest over who can produce the most bothersome vibrato. Flaws and all, this is an important recording of a significant work. I’m glad it exists. GB
Timothy Ridout
Telemann, Bach, Britten, Shaw
Harmonia Mundi
Always a bridesmaid, never the bride: that’s so often the fate of the viola, the string instrument family’s alto voice. It is hard for any viola, however, to hide in the shadows when it’s sitting under the chin of the outstanding British musician Timothy Ridout, who plays, the album’s publicity tells us, “with all the fire of youth”. He’s 30 this year.
The publicity, however, isn’t wrong. This is a solo viola recital and it’s a joy hearing him soaring and dancing through his repertoire in the warm acoustic of St Silas’s Church in north London. Admittedly, only one work was actually conceived for the viola: Britten’s early Elegy, a melancholy piece written as soon as he left boarding school. But it would a poor listener who bridled at Ridout’s choices because violin music by Bach and Telemann was being played in an altered key and with a darker timbre. Rather that than genuine viola music by that meticulous bore, Hindemith.
The musical pinnacle is reached with Bach’s D minor Partita, the one that tops the usual dances with a monumental Chaconne, given a most powerful and gutsy rendition. Note as well the dazzling brio of the Courante, and the depths of sadness reached in the Sarabande. Earlier pleasures include Caroline Shaw’s In manus tuas (21st-century ruminations on 16th-century Tallis), and two engaging fantasies by Bach’s friend Telemann, who composed as easily as he drew breath. You could say something similar about Ridout’s viola playing: so fluent, so confident, so glad to be alive. GB
Olga Pashchenko
Guess Who?
Alpha Classics
The cover image of Olga Pashchenko’s album, in which she seems to be standing inside her piano, suggests a musician trying too hard. That’s not a quality found in her generous selection of the wordless songs for piano written by Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny, elegantly performed on a restored 1836 fortepiano whose delicate tones when played pianissimo could easily be confused with those of a harp.
The title of Guess Who? invites us to listen blind as she plays 30 pieces by the famous brother and the sister whose social circumstances restricted her musical career. But both are adept at spinning effective pictures of a galloping horse rider, a singing gondolier, a lover’s sorrows or a Roman knees-up (that’s Fanny’s delirious Saltarello Romano). Pashchenko certainly makes no distinction between the two, treating what might appear to be salon music with the dignity and subtlety that these polished and thoughtful miniatures deserve. All very refreshing. GB
Stephen Hough
Piano Concerto
Hyperion
A familiar publicity photo of Stephen Hough shows the great pianist seated at a concert grand, grinning without showing any teeth. He looks rather mischievous. I imagine the man famously listed in 2009 as one of “20 living polymaths” bore exactly the same expression when writing his piano concerto The World of Yesterday two years ago. (The title comes from Stefan Zweig’s memoir of the Habsburg Empire’s twilight.)
As Hough notes, composers who performed as pianists were the norm in the 19th century and the early 20th too — part of the “world of yesterday” inhabited by his delectable concerto, which began life as music for a proposed film. Flourishes and fireworks, an imposing cadenza, Viennese waltzes, calorie-rich twists and turns, contortions suggesting Korngold or Richard Strauss: they all find a place in this 20-minute creation, performed with shiny panache by its creator and the Hallé orchestra conducted by Mark Elder. Other musical worlds visited include Copland-style Americana and a little cool jazz, whipped into the mix by a composer-pianist with a magpie mind and a mischievous grin.
Two solo piano pieces complete this brief (but I’m not complaining) album: Hough’s tiny Sonatina nostalgica, revisiting late-Romantic harmonies and his Cheshire childhood home, and a more extensive Partita, both statuesque and sparkling. The album also serves as a cheering portrait of Hough himself, someone who loves the piano and its repertoire, just as he does thinking and feeling. In short, he loves life. GB
• Stephen Hough interview: ‘We don’t have to be serious all the time’
James Way
Benjamin Britten: Canticles
Delphian
The tenor James Way leads the young performers in Delphian’s new album of Britten’s five Canticles, although the voice of Peter Pears, Britten’s partner and vocal inspiration, inevitably hovers in the air. Way sounds least like Pears when singing soberly and quietly; the resemblance is strongest when the pitch is high, the volume is increased and the notes are florid. He’s never less than eloquent, however, and blends wonderfully with the mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean as the voice of God in Abraham and Isaac. Singing alone as Isaac, Betts-Dean scarcely suggests the voice of a child, but then what was child-like about the contralto Kathleen Ferrier at the work’s premiere in 1952?
Other talent on display includes the solid pianist Natalie Burch, the indispensable countertenor Hugh Cutting and the horn player Annemarie Federle, who disappoints at the start of Still Falls the Rain but soon improves. The most brilliant turn of all comes from Way alone, singing Priaulx Rainier’s starkly powerful Cycle for Declamation from 1954. A fascinating and rewarding release. GB
Abel Selaocoe
Hymns of Bantu
Warner Classics
In under an hour of music, you travel far in distance and time on Abel Selaocoe’s second album. The Manchester-trained cellist who grew up in a Johannesburg township spins a web stretching from Sesotho anthems to Bach, throat-singing to the Takamba music of Mali and Niger.
Bantu is a group of languages, and this evocative release — without stressing the point — is really about communicating. “I decided to speak my language into this piece,” Selaocoe says of the standout track, a cello and vocals adaptation of a morsel from Marin Marais’ Les Voix Humaines. A French baroque suite is transformed into something rich and stirringly strange.
This is a group effort, too, with Manchester Collective players joining percussion soloists such as Dudù Kouate, but no one treading on any toes. What it sometimes lacks is the spontaneous, uproarious quality of Selaocoe’s concerts, and if the two baroque-adjacent works by Giovanni Sollima make a change of pace, they also feel shoehorned into what is as much a Selaocoe compendium as a manifesto. Yet when it’s all played (and sung) with such warmth, the effect is mostly irresistible. Neil Fisher
Fatma Said
Lieder
Warner Classics
It’s always pleasant having friends over in the evening and the Egyptian soprano Fatma Said has so many of them: three pianists, a baritone, a clarinettist, a harpist, a male vocal group, a string quartet. All of them gathered for this album devoted to what she tells us is her “greatest love”: German lieder.
Yet is this genre her greatest strength? It didn’t seem so at a Milton Court recital last year, though I’m always open to changing my mind. Her voice, with its distinctive fast vibrato, certainly makes some succulent sounds singing wonderful Schubert and Schumann, plus the two Mendelssohns and Brahms. Meanwhile a variety of colour and texture across the 24 tracks is increased by the changing roster of supporting artists.
Said’s goal, she says, was to express the texts rather than obsess over beautiful singing. Sometimes she transposes songs in order to favour her speaking voice (purists beware), though the words and feelings ring out clearly even when she doesn’t and beauty is never comprised for long. We start on a high with Schubert’s Ständchen, tenderly rendered with typically subtle piano playing from Malcolm Martineau. The Schumann selection is equally strong, Widmung especially.
A passing cloud arrives with Said’s misguided decision to replace the piano for some of the Brahms with Anneleen Lenaerts’s harp, inserting an otherworldly mood that distances the emotions expressed. And Fanny Mendelssohn’s song is weak. But such is the congenial nature of the enterprise that the listener still feels a grateful guest at this musical soirée, probably with a tasty supper to follow. GB
Laurence Equilbey
Beethoven
Erato
Imagine Beethoven’s surprise if he knew that his music had become the soundtrack to an “immersive motion-manga space opera”. But how could he have known how the 21st century would turn out? Assuming the afterlife has restored his hearing, he would hopefully enjoy the gusto and punch of this digital-only album’s romp through his incidental music to King Stephen and The Ruins of Athens. Commandeered by the conductor Laurence Equilbey, her period-instrument Insula Orchestra and the chorus Accentus for the interplanetary, ecologically aware multimedia show Beethoven Wars, it premiered in Paris last May.
Complete, but out of order, the 49-minute collage of cues is fidgety — many last under a minute. But the album still shows how many stirring and inventive works Beethoven’s incidental music offers. Performances are first-rate and copious booklet illustrations hint at the visual delights (or horrors) lying in wait if the stage show visits London. GB
Benjamin Appl
Lines of Life
Alpha Classics
The German baritone Benjamin Appl’s previous release, The Christmas Album, twinkled too much for me. Here we have the antidote: a rigorous but eloquent recital interleaving the miniature enigmas of the Hungarian veteran Gyorgy Kurtag (almost 99) with seven heartbreaking Schubert songs and a slice of plum pudding by Brahms.
At its centre lies Kurtag’s Holderlin-Gesange, six mostly unaccompanied songs where Appl’s warmly beautiful voice is at its most alert and varied, colouring each note differently, with shock interjections from a tuba and trombone. Schubert’s songs as usual deal with loving and loss, topics raised across the recital, assembled in the wake of the death of Kurtag’s wife and piano partner, Marta. The pianists here include Pierre-Laurent Aimard (all fiery attack), James Baillieu (more malleable) and, very touchingly, Kurtag himself. This album is something special. GB
Claire Booth
Paris 1913
Nimbus/RTF Classical
It’s now 20 years since the British soprano Claire Booth burst on to the scene scaling the scariest heights in new scores by Oliver Knussen, Birtwistle and others, delivered with bright purity and passion. Over the years she has proved equally powerful with composers of other stripes, expressing the music’s drama as fiercely as the notes themselves. But she has also been compelling in intimate recitals, and the present album with the expressive pianist Andrew Matthews-Owen finds her exploring songs composed, as the title suggests, in and around Paris in the tremulous year of 1913.
That was when Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring had its noisy Paris premiere. The First World War was around the corner. It was also the year of Ravel and Debussy’s piquant settings of Mallarmé’s elusive poems, of late autumn fruits by Saint-Saëns and Fauré, and quasi-atonal settings of Rabindranath Tagore from the largely forgotten Louis Durey, L’Offrande lyrique (the lyrical offering).
Booth’s own offering is always lyrical and crystal-clear, even when Mallarmé makes her sing about raspberry laughter, bearded lapdogs and the tawny agony of leaves. And if music and verse threaten to become overly refined, up pops something from pranksters like Georges Auric or Satie, or a little charm bracelet by Cécile Chaminade. Whatever the mood and whatever the composer, Booth and Matthews-Owen always leave the listener pleasantly rewarded and refreshed. GB
Alice Sara Ott
John Field: Complete Nocturnes
Deutsche Grammophon
We all know about Chopin, right? But what about his early 19th-century forebear John Field, the gifted and bibulous Irish composer and pianist who handed down to Chopin his invention of the “nocturne” genre — short and wistful piano contemplations of the dark hours? Numerous recordings of Field’s Nocturnes have been made, though the repertoire is usually bypassed in live recitals and Alice Sara Ott only discovered them during the Covid epidemic after contemplating a playlist that would reflect, she says, her “mildly depressed state of mind”.
Her own recording of Field’s 18 specimens shouldn’t depress anyone. Chopin’s nocturnes might be more complex, more deeply poetic, but Field’s more whimsical offerings have a playful spirit all their own, with memorable melodies regularly peppered with decorative runs somewhat akin to whorls of icing sugar enthusiastically squirted over a cake. No 1 is particularly haunting melodically, while No 12, a nocturne cheekily labelled Noontide, finishes with a winning bell effect, conjured from a plucked string. Ott’s playing can just occasionally seem too neatly manicured, but her heart is always in the right place. So are her fingers. GB
Seong-Jin Cho
Ravel
Deutsche Grammophon
You know a pianist has achieved a certain stature when the album’s packaging identifies the fashion label promoted by the performer. Here, we’re told that “Seong-Jin Cho wears Gucci”. Nice for him, I’m sure, but purchasers of Cho’s seventh Deutsche Grammophon album will probably be more interested in how well the 2015 winner of the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw plays his chosen repertoire: the complete solo piano music of Ravel.
The short answer is very well indeed, though the composer’s constantly fastidious textures makes sustained listening of a programme lasting 131 minutes more demanding than you might expect. Ticket holders to Cho’s similarly complete Ravel recital at the Barbican (May 2) should bear this in mind. The music is presented chronologically, so we begin with the Sérénade grotesque of 1893: undeniably slight, but typical enough for Cho to give full rein to the qualities that equally mark the remaining 32 tracks, from a dazzling range of colours, densities and dynamics to agreeably fluid phrasing.
Further on, Jeux d’eau trickles brightly through Cho’s fingers like water itself. Indeed, clarity and a slightly cool temperature are always Cho’s goal, whether Ravel is painting pictures of moths, a ship at sea, or a dead infanta, or remodelling waltzes and courtly dances in his own refined image (Valses nobles et sentimentales, Le Tombeau de Couperin). Beautiful music-making, all of it — but like fine wine, best imbibed in small doses. GB
Enrico Onofri
Mozart: Serenades
Harmonia Mundi
Enrico Onofri rose to eminence as concertmaster of the strictly period instrument ensemble Il Giardino Armonico. But he’s a flexible soul, and this double album finds him with the Munich Chamber Orchestra mixing modern strings and winds with the tarter sounds of period brass and timpani. Plus, double basses play with gut strings. “Historically informed”, the approach is called, and it entirely suits Onofri’s repertoire of three invigorating Mozart serenades with three attendant marches — music composed for special occasions, usually out of doors.
The so-called “Haffner” serenade, an omnivorous whale of work with a violin concerto swallowed up inside, was written for the wedding (or 20th birthday) of the daughter of a former Salzburg burgomaster. I bet she gave it little attention, though chances might have increased had she heard the violinist Isabelle Faust splendidly fiddling through the concerto, or been close enough to appreciate Mozart’s imaginative handling of orchestration, structure and harmony. All told, there are 142 minutes here of regularly surprising music in very congenial performances. I found it irresistible. GB
Patricia Kopatchinskaja
Exile
Alpha Classics
Within the past five years or so, the wild and gutsy violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja has become ubiquitous. A new album it seems every other month. Regular stints around the world as artist in residence — appointments that can be dangerous, because there’s much less chance of a higher authority responding to her flakier, more self-indulgent projects with a firm “No”. The good news is that her latest album, by her standards, finds her on relatively solid ground, working with the cellist Thomas Kaufmann and the Camerata Bern on a programme of worthwhile music on the resonant and capacious theme of exile.
Kaufmann (Camerata Bern’s chief cellist) gets his best showcase in an orchestral transcription of Alfred Schnittke’s Cello Sonata No 1, climaxed by a sorrowful and eerie slow movement, hard to forget. But it’s PatKop who is everywhere, whether she is leading the Camerata strings, chomping through engaging folk music from Russia, Ukraine and her native Moldova, guiding us through the “existential loneliness” of Schubert in a pensive minuet, or showcasing the melodic strengths of the Polish exile Andrzej Panufnik’s 1971 Violin Concerto.
The motley but persuasive bill of fare also includes a querulous microtonal string quartet (Ivan Wyschnegradsky) and an agonised cry from the heart from the exiled Belgian Eugène Ysaÿe. But whatever the repertoire, the playing remains passionately expressive, while the recording is so clear and vital that PatKop and her friends seem to be in the room with you. So take care, and enjoy. GB
Maxwell Quartet
Haydn
Linn
The Maxwell Quartet’s albums of Haydn string quartets, complemented by tracks of Scottish folk music, have been so invigorating that it’s sad to find the series stopping after eight quartets when the composer wrote 60 more. The two quartets here, op 77, were the last two that Haydn completed, and both are dazzling creations, whether he’s being jaunty and playful, harmonically adventurous, or beguilingly simple and folk-like. Whatever the moods, everything is tied together with a flourish, and the Maxwell’s forthright and spirited performances, stunningly well recorded by Philip Hobbs, are exactly what this repertoire needs.
Given the “common touch” in Haydn’s own music, the musicians’ separate Scottish interludes — reels, a strathspey, a march, a jig — offer useful variety without ever seeming outright intrusions. In a subtle and affecting touch, the final track, an arrangement of James Scott Skinner’s fiddle tune Hector the Hero, features tiny quotes from the two Haydn quartets in its final bars. It’s a lovely and graceful way for the Maxwells’ splendid series to bring down the curtain. GB
Simon Rattle/Magdalena Kozena
The Seven Deadly Sins
LSO Live
The shiny allure of the USA feels particularly porous at the moment, so it’s a good time to have another crack at Weill and Brecht’s The Seven Deadly Sins, a grimy journey through an America of broken dreams; our macabre guides two sisters named Anna. They are sung fervently here by Magdalena Kozena, but perhaps that’s the problem — she’s a dash too artful, and ultimately too sympathetic a singer to let the caustic, scabrous verse sting.
Simon Rattle, who turned 70 this month, conducted this live concert with the London Symphony Orchestra, which embraces Weill’s mocking ballads and jazzy dissonance superbly, not just in the Sins but also the Kleine Dreigroschenmusik. Balance issues with vocal soloists noticed by critics at the time have been largely ironed out — although Andrew Staples still sounds stretched by a number from Weill’s operatic musical Street Scene, he is excellent in the Walt Whitman setting Dirge for Two Veterans. The brooding rarity on the album, Weill and Brecht’s Vom Tod im Wald, is given a darkly imposing rendition by Florian Boesch. Neil Fisher
James McVinnie
Dreamcatcher
Pentatone
Mozart may have called the organ “the king of instruments”, but organists have rarely been regarded as royalty in the music world. Audiences in concerts can easily appreciate pianists and violinists. With concert organists we’re lucky if we see their backs and legs; in churches and cathedrals we see nothing.
Happily, James McVinnie, like Anna Lapwood, is one of a visible new British breed, presenting programmes designed to show that an organist’s life can extend far beyond the repertoire classics and hiding behind stonework accompanying hymns.
For five tracks on Dreamcatcher, McVinnie also plays a piano, but it’s always the organ — Ralph Downes’ lithe and brilliantly voiced 1962 creation at St Albans Cathedral — that nourishes our ears the most.
Every work dates from the late 20th century and beyond. Two of the piano pieces quickly fizzle out: Gabriella Smith’s Imaginary Pancake and build-it-yourself by inti figgis-vizueta — a composer who clearly loathes capital letters.
The big compensation is British maverick Giles Swayne’s utterly absorbing Riff-Raff, close to 18 minutes of organ bliss written for St Albans, cross-hatching classical stylistics with rock riffs and native African music.
Each chord at some point uses a different registration, but McVinnie and his magnificent organ easily rise to every challenge, as does sound engineer Liam Byrne. Nico Muhly’s organ suite Patterns (especially its last movement) is also well worth a listen, as are McVinnie’s organ transcriptions of pieces by Meredith Monk and electronics specialist Laurie Spiegel. A few blotches aside, this is a very stimulating album. GB
Stile Antico
Palestrina
Decca
Palestrina, influential master of late Renaissance music, might be 500 years old this year: his exact birthdate is unknown. But even if he’s only 499, any celebration of his art is welcome, especially when the singers are the British group Stile Antico: 12 voices who sing without a director, typically forming a circle.
No matter how elaborate the counterpoint, there are no hesitations, no rough edges: even if there were, the echoing shroud of the London recording venue’s cathedral-like space (All Hallows Church, Gospel Oak) would lend a helping hand.
The main work is the majestic Missa Papae Marcelli, though some of the smaller pieces interspersed might bring more immediate delight. One is the motet Sicut cervus, tenderly simple and direct. Two others are Jublilate Deo and Laudate Dominum, both of which bounce around from word to word and one choral division to another, spreading nothing but joy. GB
Nash Ensemble
Debussy
Hyperion
Under the careful control of its co-founder, Amelia Freedman, the suave and buoyant Nash Ensemble has been enhancing our lives for so many years (60 to be exact) that it’s easy to take the group’s accomplishments for granted.
This Debussy album sharply reminds us why we shouldn’t. All chamber music relies on performers happy in each others’ company, confidently interacting; but the late works of Debussy, adventurous masterpieces such as the 1916 sonata for flute, viola and harp, especially need skilful and well-acquainted musicians to flourish.
The lyrical fire and fantasy of the violin and cello sonatas, featuring violinist Stephanie Gonley and cellist Adrian Brendel, also demand quick wits and perfect timing. The stakes are notably higher in the fragmentary mosaic and novel instrumental colours of Debussy’s miraculous creation for flute (Philippa Davies), viola (Lawrence Power) and harp (Lucy Wakeford) — a piece that sounds eternally new even after more than a century.
The two other items are the impassioned and kaleidoscopic early String Quartet and French oboist David Walter’s transcription of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, where the original’s half-light splendour meets competition from earthy woodwind hues and Richard Watkins’ very noticeable and beautiful horn. Not that I’m complaining. Sixty years have told us that with the Nash Ensemble’s musicians, whatever their repertoire, nothing can ever really go wrong. GB
Hervé Niquet
La Caravane du Caire
Chateau de Versailles (DVD)
What French opera clocked up a phenomenal 506 performances and over a million ticket sales in the four decades following its premiere? The answer, apparently, is André Grétry’s opera-ballet La Caravane du Caire, which first set feet tapping at the Palace of Fontainebleau in 1783. It did so again 18 months ago in a staging at the Chateau de Versailles, and you can gauge the results on this entertaining DVD release.
Lovers of sturdy libretti might wish to look the other way, along with those unable to bear even the most lightweight entertainment where the historical plot involves slavery and women’s exploitation in the Ottoman Empire.
But the avoiders would be missing some of Grétry’s delightful arias and dances, plus a production that will delight the eyes and ears of those who keep a sense of proportion. Stand-out singers include Robert Gleadow as the cartoon villain of Pasha and Hélène Guilmette, radiantly sincere as the woman of his dreams. The dancing is great fun, the scenery is colourful, and no humans were harmed during the making of this DVD and Blu-ray. GB
Petr Popelka
Ma Vlast
Supraphon
A diet of sour cream might not seem the wisest course for a New Year detox. Nonetheless, that is what I’m proposing. The reason is a scintillating three-disc album devoted to the orchestral music of Smetana, whose surname is indeed the Czech equivalent of “sour cream”. The cream’s served up by the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, not an outfit automatically regarded as one of the world’s finest, but that is how they sound under the leadership of their dynamic principal conductor, Petr Popelka.
What is his secret? Top-level musicianship, plainly. Also a total belief in the value and richness of what he conducts, including Smetana’s uneven but engrossing Festive Symphony, offered and spurned in 1854 as a wedding present for Emperor Franz Joseph and his bride, Princess Elizabeth of Bavaria. The huge offering here, however, is Ma Vlast, the cycle of six symphonic poems celebrating the composer’s homeland and history and a work frequently recorded, though rarely with the gusto, momentum and instrumental splendour found here.
One of the Prague orchestra’s distinctions is its blended sound when playing at full tilt, though its characterful brass and wind sections still cut through on special occasions when battles are being fought and flags waved.
The patriotic rhetoric in some of these selections has the potential to be oppressive, but Popelka’s orchestra projects such warmth and positivity that the music soars beyond the nationalistic to become a rousing celebration of life itself. Smetana’s stylistic habits — linear progressions, rotating themes, wriggling harmonies — are equally intoxicating. All in all, I can’t think of a jollier album for ushering in 2025. GB
Ceruleo
Voices of Longing
Resonus
The make-up of the British ensemble Ceruleo is unusual: two sopranos plus three accompanying instrumentalists. Not fit for every occasion, then. But it’s ideal for exploring the output of Barbara Strozzi, the prolific 17th-century Italian composer and singer who seems to have kept herself afloat without consistent patronage from the church or nobility.
Whether singly or joined at the hip in virtuosic duets, Emily Owen and Jenni Harper sail through Strozzi’s highly expressive extravaganzas with refreshing ease and directness. The peak is reached in Amante ravveduto, the memorable seven-minute rampage of a disillusioned woman as she gives her former lover the boot.
Five pungent instrumental tracks from other composers of the period add useful variety to a very refreshing album, although I wish the song’s texts in the booklet were easier to read. GB
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