CLASSICAL

Michael Dervanreviews this week's classical releases

SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME

Magdalena Kozená (mezzo soprano), Malcolm Martineau (piano)

Deutsche Grammophon 477 6665

There's no exaggeration in the title, says Czech mezzo soprano Magdalena Kozená. Her new CD does, indeed, include songs she first heard as a child from her mother. It's good to hear the title track, from Dvorak's Gypsy Melodies, without the sentimental overlays it acquires in many of the arrangements in which it circulates. Kozená's wide selection covers Dvorak, Novák, Janacek, Martinu, Schulhoff and Eben, with a single glance back to the early 19th century through Rösler. In a gripping recital, Kozená delivers the songs as if she's been overcome by a force of nature in passing them on. Michael Fremuth provides the guitar accompaniment in the Eben songs, and soprano Dorothea Röschmann is the second voice in two of Dvorak's Moravian Duets. www.tinyurl.com/5b9s4r

TCHAIKOVSKY: VIOLIN CONCERTO; SOUVENIR D'UN LIEU CHER

Janine Jansen (violin), Mahler Chamber Orchestra/Daniel Harding

Decca 478 0651

Dutch violinist Janine Jansen plays the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto as if the work holds a special charge for her. Her new recording, made in concert in Santiago de Compostela last July, finds conductor Daniel Harding fully supportive of the way she sometimes seems to want to hug every note of the solo part. The performers' sense of engagement is as accommodating to the work's lyricism as it is responsive to the fieriness which caused the 19th- century critic Eduard Hanslick to write: "The violin is no longer played, it is rent asunder, beaten black and blue". Alexandru Lascae's strings- only arrangement of the Souvenir d'un lieu cher (which includes the concerto's original slow movement) makes an interesting companion piece. www.deccaclassics.com

PURCELL: KEYBOARD SUITES AND GROUNDS

Richard Egarr (harpsichord)

Harmonia Mundi HMU 907428

Richard Egarr is a musician not in the least shy of the wackier side of music. The music of Henry Purcell, he suggests, can be likened to Madame de Sévigné's remark that chocolate "flatters you for a while; it warms you for an instant; then, all of a sudden, it kindles a mortal fever in you". And he relates the twists and eccentricities of Purcell's keyboard music to the zany English humour which produced The Goons, Monty Python and Ricky Gervais. Paradoxically, however, Egarr's playing is best when it is straightest, taking the music's quirks at face value rather than highlighting or exaggerating them. It's then that he most successfully makes the case for the greatness of this still unduly neglected repertoire. www.tinyurl.com/6mchwb

STANFORD: SYMPHONY NO 1; CLARINET CONCERTO

Robert Plane (clarinet), Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/David Lloyd-Jones

Naxos 8.570356

Dubliner Charles Villiers Stanford was 23 when he entered his First Symphony in an 1876 competition held by the Alexandra Palace concert hall in London. The work took second place (behind a symphony by the long-forgotten Francis Williams Davenport), and after its 1879 première lay unheard until the Ulster Orchestra recorded it under the late Vernon Handley in 1991. David Lloyd-Jones's new recording of this accomplished, worthy piece is broader than Handley's and not quite as refined or perceptive in the detail. The 1902 Clarinet Concerto suffered an early rejection (by the great Richard Mühlfeld), which greatly wounded the composer. It's the better piece and is here treated to a deft, lightweight account by Robert Plane. www.naxosdirect.ie