CLASSICAL

Latest cds reviewed

YSAE: SOLO VIOLIN SONATAS
Thomas Zehetmair 
ECM New Series 1835

The active repertoire for solo violin is very small indeed, and the six sonatas written by the Belgian violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe (dedicatee of important works by Franck, Chausson and Debussy) have been the subject of increasing attention in recent years. They were inspired by the solo Bach playing of Joseph Szigeti, and each is dedicated to a major violinist of the generation after Ysaÿe himself - Thibaud, Enescu and Kreisler among them. Like the solo violin works of Bach, their challenges are musical as well as virtuosic, a fact that is well and effectively registered in Thomas Zehetmair's new recording. Zehetmair's rare combination of re-creative imagination and technique enables him to probe these works in unusual depth. Simply put, I have never heard them sound so well. www.ecmrecords.com

HARRISON BIRTWISTLE: THESEUS GAME; EARTH DANCES
Ensemble Modern/Martyn Brabbins, Pierre-André Valade, Ensemble Modern Orchestra/Pierre Boulez
Deutsche Grammophon 20/21 477 0702

Harrison Birtwistle's Theseus Game, recorded by DG at its première in Duisburg last year, calls for two ensembles and two conductors (Brabbins and Valade), with individual players shifting loyalty from one to the other. Brass players periodically take up positions at the back, calling to each other across the ceaseless shifts of this labyrinth, and soloists emerge from the ensembles, positioning themselves at the front where they spin a ceaseless thread of melody. The effect is at once rugged, as you would expect from Birtwistle, and lucid, as complex in detail as it is straightforward in general outline. Earth Dances for large orchestra, also of half-hour-plus duration, has been called "a Rite of Spring for the 1980s," although the metaphor of the title is actually geological. Pierre Boulez's conducting captures it with refinement and impact.

www.dgclassics.com

MARTINU: CELLO SONATAS
Steven Isserlis (cello), Peter Evans (piano)
Helios CDH 55185 

Martinu's First Cello Sonata dates from 1939, when the composer was still living in Paris. The Second Sonata was among the first works he wrote after settling in the US in 1941, and the Third followed 11 years later, while he was still in exile from his native Bohemia. The first two sonatas contain some of his most highly charged music, the somewhat lighter Third being more dependent on the repetitive tics which can mar his style. These recordings by Steven Isserlis and Peter Evans, made in 1988, now appear on Hyperion's lower-priced Helios label. The players respond as well to the music's lyricism as to its discordance, and the music-making is characterised by a highly effective sprung energy.

www.hyperion-records.com

JANÁCEK: TARAS BULBA; CONCERTINO; SINFONIETTA
Rudolf Firkusny (piano), Bavarian Radio SO/Rafael Kubelik Deutsche
 Grammophon Rosette Collection 476 2196

Pianist Rudolf Firkusny and conductor Rafael Kubelik were unstinting in the advocacy of the music of their great fellow Czech, Leos Janácek. The three works heard here date from the extraordinarily fruitful final decade of Janácek's life. The composer once referred to the turbulent Taras Bulba, completed in the last year of the first World War, as "my musical testament, a Slavonic Rhapsody for orchestra", and the orchestral Sinfonietta as "a nice little Sinfonietta with fanfares" -in actual fact, the piece requires over a dozen trumpets. The Concertino for piano and chamber ensemble (with a programmatic theme of spring, and about which he wrote, "There's a cricket, midges, a roebuck - a sharp torrent - yes, and a man!") is, if anything, even more wonderfully strange than the other works. These 1970 recordings capture the spirit of all three with full-flavoured zest. www.dgclassics.com