Classical

Messiaen: Poemes Pour Mi; Sept Haikai; Reveil des oiseaux

Messiaen: Poemes Pour Mi; Sept Haikai; Reveil des oiseaux. Cleveland Orchestra/Pierre Boulez (DG)Messiaen's Poemes pour Mi is a celebration of marriage. Mi was the composer's familiar name for his first wife, Louise Justine Delbos, and he provided his own texts to the nine songs for dramatic soprano. Francoise Pollet, Pierre Boulez and the Cleveland Orchestra fully capture the cycle's enticing world of exotic spiritual sensuality. Reveil des Oiseaux, for piano (the inspiring Pierre-Laurent Aimard) and orchestra, is an orgy of nature, tracing the song of 38 French birds from midnight to mid-day. Birds feature, too, in the more ritualistically austere Sept Haikai, inspired by a 1962 visit to Japan. Another first-rate homage from Pierre Boulez to his great teacher. Michael DervanSalzburg Festival Lieder Recital. Lisa Della Casa (soprano), Arpad Sandor (piano) (EMI)The Swiss soprano Lisa Della Casa is best remembered by record collectors for her Strauss, particularly her glowing account of the autumnal Four Last Songs with the Vienna Philharmonic under Karl Bohm. She made her Salzburg Festival debut in 1947, and although she was long a regular in festival opera productions, her attractive, silvery voice was heard only once in recital at Salzburg. That 1957 programme - Schubert, Brahms, Strauss, Wolf, Ravel and the prolific Swiss song composer, Othmar Schoeck - appears now in the Festival Documents series. Della Casa's style is one which eschews the expressive guile of a Schwarzkopf in favour of an unaffected sincerity which touches the heart directly, tellingly, without fuss. The booklet provides German texts but no translations.Michael DervanRachmaninov: Piano Concerto No 2; Grieg: Piano Concerto; Grainger: In a Nutshell. Artur Rubinstein, Percy Grainger, Hollywood Bowl SO/Leopold Stokowski (Biddulph)Edvard Grieg, grand old man of Norwegian music, and Percy Grainger, young Australian iconoclast, hit it off well when they met in 1906. The younger man was widely admired for his playing of the Grieg Piano Concerto but never recorded it commercially. There's hardly a dull moment (though there are a few rough ones) in his 1945 collaboration with Leopold Stokowski at the Hollywood Bowl. Tightly-reined, brilliantly fiery, yet managing to melt without ever wilting, the 63-year-old Grainger was still a powerful force at the keyboard and this recording will be of great interest to piano fanciers. Michael Dervan