CLASSICAL

The latest CDs reviewed

Finghin Collins Claves 50-2601/02 (2 CDs)

The Swiss label Claves's survey of Schumann's piano music is supported by the Clara Haskil Competition, and Dubliner Finghin Collins, who took the competition's top prize in 1999, recorded the first pair of discs in the new series last August. Collins is a suave, avuncular guide to the major works included here: the Fantasy Pieces Op 12 (with a rarely heard addendum) and Op 111, the Humoreske, the Kinderszenen, the Romances, Op 28, and the Waldszenen. He's strong on beauty of tone, and has that ease of delivery which the Germans call Fingerfertigkeit - finger-readiness. Interpretatively, Collins is happy to emphasize regularity of incident rather than generate strong forces of internal tension. Even at its most impassioned, this is actually rather mild-mannered Schumann playing. The set also includes three standalone short pieces: the Arabeske, the Blumenstück and the Allegro, Op 8. www.claves.ch

Michael Dervan

Dietrich Henschel (baritone), Fritz Schwinghammer (piano) Harmonia Mundi HMC 901875

Travel broadens the mind, and Dietrich Henschel's recital of travel-related songs certainly finds the German baritone stretching himself in less familiar territory - Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel and three Petrarch settings by Ildebrando Pizzetti. Throughout the programme, which also includes a selection of Duparc (whose L'invitation au voyage gives the collection its title) and Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Henschel brings to mind the intelligence, flexibility, musical responsiveness, and even at times the very timbre of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau at his best. www.uk.hmboutique.com

Michael Dervan

Ensemble New Art/Fuat Kent Naxos American Classics 8.559290

The music of American composer George Crumb, who will be 77 next October, has lost the prominence it attained in the 1960s and 1970s. Theatricality and novel sounds achieved through extended playing techniques were the hallmark of a style that could often be pared back to melodic gestures which were contoured and coloured by an extremely refined ear. Crumb's output thinned out in later life, and this new disc usefully pairs his Lorca setting, Songs, Drones, and Refrains of Death, from the late 1960s (Lorca settings constitute an important strand through his music), with Quest, a major work for guitar and ensemble which he struggled with through the 1980s, finally completing it in 1994. Crumb is one of those composers who has suffered from an abundance of cheap imitations. It's good in these first-rate performances to be reminded of the exquisite surfaces of the original. Sadly, not for the first time, the Naxos booklet promises online texts which are not yet to be found on the label's website. www.naxos.com Michael Dervan

Bruce Levingston (piano) Orange Mountain Music OMM0025

The starting point for this disc is the 2004 Musical Portrait of Chuck Close that pianist Bruce Levingston commissioned from Philip Glass - a 1981 portrait of Glass by Close has long been one of the best-known images of the composer. The musical portrait has the familiar Glass fingerprints, though sometimes moving at a faster rate of change than usual. Levingston's approach here, and in the rest of the programme (movements from Ravel's Miroirs, Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus and Catalogue d'Oiseaux, and three early pieces by Satie), is a levelling one. He seeks out the expressive in Glass and tends to highlight the other composers' pattern-making. As an interpretative stance it's curious rather than persuasive. Satie and Glass come off best; parts of Ravel's Alborada del gracioso sound rather like a struggle.

www.orangemountainmusic.com

Michael Dervan