Latest releases reviewed

OVERTURES FOR THE HAMBURG OPERA
Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin
Harmonia Mundi HMC 901852
****

In 1678 the first public opera house in Germany opened in Hamburg. This new CD presents music written by five composers associated with the enterprise between 1693 (Philipp Heinrich Erlebach's French-flavoured Ouverture No 4) and 1726 (Georg Caspar Schurmann's Ludovicus Pius Suite and the overture to Reinhard Keiser's Le Ridicule Prince Jodelet). In between come a suite of dances from Handel's Almira (1705) and the first of Johann Christian Schiefferdecker's Musikalische Concerte, published in 1713. The Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin play the music with the imaginative fervour of players discovering lost masterpieces, making even the most humdrum of movements swing, swirl or swoon.

www.harmoniamundi.com

TURNAGE: ÉTUDES AND ELEGIES; RIHM: CANZONA PER SONARE; CUTS AND DISSOLVES; BENJAMIN: OLICANTUS
Michael Svoboda (alto trombone), Orchestre Symphonique de la Monnaie/Kazushi Ono
Warner Classics 2564 60244-2
****

George Benjamin flashed onto the new music scene over a quarter of a century ago as a brilliant teenager. His output has been relatively small, and in spite of important associations (including a residency with the Berlin Philharmonic) his name is no longer as prominent as in his youth. His three-minute Olicantus (2002), a 50th birthday present for fellow composer Oliver Knussen, has a glowing aura of tender elegy that makes one wish his work was heard more often. Mark-Anthony Turnage's Études and Elegies combine funkiness and the comforts of lush sonic upholstery with streetwise skill. The ever-remarkable Michael Svoboda is the soloist in Wolfgang Rihm's demanding trombone concerto, Canzona per Sonare (2002), music that's worlds away from the fragmentary, fleeting sketches of Cuts and Dissolves (1976-77). The performances under Kazushi Ono are excellent. www.warnerclassics.com

SCHUMANN: PIANO QUINTET; BRAHMS: PIANO QUARTET IN A, OP 26
Clifford Curzon (piano), Budapest String Quartet
Naxos 8.110306
****

The English pianist Clifford Curzon, whose teachers included Artur Schnabel, Wanda Landowska and Nadia Boulanger, was a player of what you might call muscular reserve. This equipped him ideally for the longest of Brahms's chamber works, the lyrical, often introverted Piano Quartet in A, Op 26. Curzon played it with a velvet touch that he could firm up at will, without undue aggression of manner or forcing of tone. His partners from the Budapest String Quartet sing their lines sweetly, and the interplay between all four musicians is perfectly knit. The 1952 mono recording, made for US Columbia, is dry but beautifully blended. The playing in the Schumann Piano Quintet, recorded a year earlier, is nearly as fine, but the recording in this LP transfer has intrusive rough edges of distortion. www.naxos.com

SCULTHORPE: EARTH CRY; MEMENTO MORI; PIANO CONCERTO; FROM OCEANIA; KAKADU
William Barton (didgeridoo), Tamara Anna Cislowska (piano), New Zealand SO/James Judd
Naxos 8.557382
****

Tasmanian-born Peter Sculthorpe, now in his mid-70s, has been the figurehead for new music in Australia since the 1960s. He takes inspiration from local culture and landscape, and has shied away from European influences in favour of the flavours of the Pacific. "Straightforward" is a word that crops up more than once in his notes on the five pieces recorded here, and it applies as aptly to the driven percussion of From Oceania (1970, revised 2003) or the rhythmically agitated outer sections of Kakadu (1988) as to the didgeridoo-haunted Earth Cry (1986), the more sombre Memento Mori (1993) and the darkness into light journey of the Piano Concerto (1983). These are effective, colourful pieces by a composer as fully connected to his roots and his listeners as the doomsayers of contemporary music want composers to be. www.naxos.com