Classical

This week's classical releases reviewed

STRAVINSKY: JEU DE CARTES; AGON; ORPHEUS

BBC Scottish SO/Ilan Volkov Hyperion CDA 67698 *****

Stravinsky's later ballets have never fired popular imagination in the way his early work for Diaghilev did. That's probably got something to do with an abstraction which can extend to both music and subject. The characters in i (1936), for instance, are cards from a game of poker. And Agon(1957) embodied the outcome of Stravinsky's encounter with postwar serialism. All three ballets recorded here do, of course, have a peculiarly attractive Stravinskian tang. Ilan Volkov approaches Jeu de Carteswith a finely balanced spring and energy. He conveys the ritualised fanfares, scrambles and struggles of Agonwith conviction, and the more gentle introspection of Orpheus (1947) with a sometimes featherlight touch. It's a most appealing disc. www.tinyurl.com/ 5jub7c

ADRIANA HÖLSZKY: TRAGÖDIA

musikFabrik/Johannes Debus Wergo WER 6707 2 ****

Adriana Hölszky (born 1953) is a Romanian composer of German extraction who has been based in Germany since 1976. Her Tragödie (Der unsichtbare Raum)/Tragedy (The Invisible Room)was first performed in Bonn in 1997. It's a music theatre piece, "a work with theatrical rooms" for stage set and 18 instrumentalists, tape and live electronics. It's a kind of anti-opera, a work without characters and plot, a venture in which Hölszky explored "the complexity and expressive power of an opera without semantics". Heard as sound only, it communicates the surrealism of a protracted nightmare – suggestive, threatening, sliding through soundscapes of implausible exaggeration, using avant-garde gestures (the 1960s are dead, long live the 1960s) in ways that are strangely compelling. Heady stuff. www.tinyurl.com/lorgve

FRANZ SCHMIDT: SYMPHONY NO 2; FUGA SOLEMNIS

Anders Johnsson (organ), Malmö SO/Vassily Sinaisky Naxos 8.570589 ****

Franz Schmidt's Second Symphony was premièred in 1913, less than nine months after Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, but more than the proverbial million miles away from it in musical intention. Schmidt basks luxuriantly in a romanticism tinged with the warm touch of Bruckner and distils its moments of Viennese sweetness with more than a nod to the manner of Richard Strauss. He likes a long-flowing melody, and is a dab hand at moments that take a 20th-century slant on baroque counterpoint. Vassily Sinaisky takes a gentler approach than other conductors and makes it thoroughly persuasive. The Fuga Solemnis, completed in 1937, two years before the composer's death, is a striking statement for organ, wind and percussion. www.naxosdirect.ie

PURCELL: COMPLETE AYRES FOR THE THEATRE

Parley of Instruments/Roy Goodman Hyperion CDS 44381/3 (3 CDs) ****

Henry Purcell's Ayres for the Theatrewere published in London in 1697, two years after the composer's death. It's a collection of the incidental music he provided for plays in the 1690s and runs to more than 130 numbers, some of them instrumental arrangements of what were originally songs. Purcell's imagination was as distinctive and wayward after its own fashion as, say, Laurence Sterne's in literature. And the brevity of the pieces from these theatrical suites is no barrier to quality. Think of them as the highest kind of often spicy, surpriserich musical finger food, and you'll be on the right lines. The Parley of Instruments' survey, recorded in 1994, makes an attractive bargain re-issue for the 350th anniversary of the composer's birth. www.tiny url.com/5jub7c