CLASSICAL

Latest releases reviewed

Die Schwindlinge Wergo WER 6313 2

Not even the index volume of the latest edition of The New Grove includes a listing for Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948). Yet this protean artist left at least one major work that continues to fascinate musicians, the Ursonate, an extended sound-poem constructed on musical principles, although it was written with the conventional German alphabet rather than with musical symbols. With three voices, two male and one female, the trio Die Schwindlinge are free to engage in a lot of playful interchanges in a performance that's rhythmical and sing-song-ish enough to make Schwitters's own sound almost unduly earnest. The couplings are some two dozen sound poems that are not a million miles from the entertaining, mock-onomatopoeic, rhythmic rhubarb of Ernst Toch's Geographical Fugue.

www.harmoniamundi.com Michael Dervan

Paul Silverthorne (viola), Bournemouth Symphony Chorus, Bournemouth SO/Paul Daniel Naxos 8.557276

Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony, written in the early 1930s, represents the composer at his grittiest. Paul Daniel takes its grinding dissonances at face value, leaning with the composer into the exploration of blacker realms of the human spirit. Where other conductors have sought to retain the composer's familiar accent while accommodating this at times remarkably bleak work, Daniel relishes the unexpected brush with harsh modernism. The pastoralism for which Vaughan Williams is better known surfaces in the much earlier Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 of 1906 and in Flos Campi for viola, chorus and orchestra, inspired by The Song of Songs, and Daniel relaxes the tension appropriately.

www.naxos.com Michael Dervan

Una Hunt (piano), Justin Pearson (cello), Triantán RTÉ Lyric fm CD 103

Limerick-born composer and pianist George Alexander Osborne (1806- 1893) is one of those 19th-century Irish musicians known to music lovers, if he's known at all, only through the pages of encyclopaedias and dictionaries of music. He trained under Kalkbrenner, knew Chopin and Berlioz when he lived in Paris, and was an influential figure in London after he settled there in the 1840s. Una Hunt and RTÉ Lyric FM are to be congratulated on their enterprise in bringing his music once again before the public. The CD includes five pieces for solo piano, a Cello Sonata in B flat and a Piano Trio in G, all written in a style that's unfashionably light for modern taste, a kind of diluted Mendelssohn, aimed at the pleasure centres of the performers and the background earshot of listeners otherwise engaged in the delights of a convivial salon. Una Hunt takes the florid decorations of the solo pieces a bit too woodenly straight. She's better in the concerted pieces, where the music benefits from the extra colours provided by the string instruments.

www.buy4now.ie/rte Michael Dervan

Daniel Barenboim (piano). Deutsche Grammophon Collectors Edition 477 5159 (7 CDs) ***

The romantic piano music on offer here, seven-and-a-half hours of it recorded between 1973 and 1982, runs to Chopin's Nocturnes, Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words (both complete), and a mixed bag of Liszt, from Wagner transcriptions, the three Petrarch Sonnets, six Consolations and three Liebesträume to the first set of Années de pélerinage, the Sonata in B minor and Après un lecture de Dante. Barenboim comes across as a big-hearted player, generous of tone, and sound in his responses to the music, if at times rather too generalised. Yet there are touches of magic, unexpected colourings, flashes of technical brilliance, which momentarily lift the playing well above the routine.

www.dgclassics.com Michael Dervan