Latest releases reviewed
RACHMANINOV, SCRIABIN, FALLA, GRANADOS, GINASTERA, CHOPIN, LISZT
Gabriela Montero (piano)
EMI Classics 558 0392 (with bonus CD)
The torrent she creates in the opening piece, Rachmaninov's Moment musical in E minor, sets the tone for Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero's new disc. She gives the impression of being one of those performers who plays as she feels, with impetuous emotion and freewheeling technical ease. The results may not always be subtle, and she sometimes relies too much on the haze of the sustaining pedal. But the playing is mostly thrilling, and it's easy to see why Martha Argerich, the queen of the mercurial in piano playing, is promoting Montero's career. A headlong Liszt Mephisto Waltz rounds things off in the spirit in which they began. The bonus disc runs to 12 of Montero's lounge music-style improvisations. www.emiclassics.com
CRAWFORD SEEGER: VOCAL AND CHAMBER MUSIC
Naxos 8.559197
Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-53) is a composer with a substantial reputation as an important early American modernist, but whose music is all too rarely heard in concert. Most of her output was written by her early thirties, after which she concentrated on folk-music studies. Around 1930, her music became tighter and more concentrated, and the New York group Continuum's selection represents the earlier manner best through the Violin Sonata and two of the Preludes for piano, the later through the Study in Mixed Accents for piano and a number of striking vocal works (Three Songs and Two Ricercari, setting texts by HT Tsiang and Carl Sandburg) delivered with persuasive point by mezzo soprano Nan Hughes. Well worth investigating. www.naxos.com Michael Dervan
A TRIBUTE TO NORBERT BRAININ
Amadeus String Quartet, Cecil Aronowitz (viola)
Deutsche Grammophon 477 5739 (2 CDs)
The Amadeus Quartet flourished as performers from 1948 until the death of viola player Peter Schidlof in 1987, and the surviving members have since remained active as highly influential teachers. This new set is issued in memory of the man most closely identified with the Amadeus's musical character, leader Norbert Brainin, who died last April. Brainin was a characterful, charismatic violinist who managed to seem endlessly resourceful in his responses, even if he was sometimes a little wayward in the way he took stylistic ownership of the music. The selection here ranges from a real rarity, Bruckner's mature String Quintet in F (made with Cecil Aronowitz in 1965), and a clutch of tapings from the late 1970s, both familiar (Smetana's From My Life and Dvorak's American Quartet) and less so (Verdi's E minor Quartet and Tchaikovsky's First), all done with the Amadeus's distinctive panache. www.dgclassics.com
TROUBADOUR OF THE PIANO
Géza Anda (piano), various orchestras and conductors Deutsche Grammophon
Original Masters 477 5288 (5 CDs)
Hungarian pianist Géza Anda (1921-76) provided the Mozart concerto (part of a cycle he directed from the keyboard) for the soundtrack of the film Elvira Madigan. This new retrospective focuses elsewhere, on 19th-century repertoire, in recordings made between 1942 (at the age of 21) and 1966. Anda has been described as "a born virtuoso who regretted that he wasn't born a poet," and the balancing of inclinations could result in performances - in Brahms's Second Concerto, Schubert's late B flat Sonata, and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations - where the approach was decidedly and sometimes grotesquely the opposite of understatement. Chopin's Preludes and the best of his Schumann (the Davidsbündlertänze) find him on-target. So does Bartók's early Lisztian Rhapsody, as well as pure Liszt (Waldesrauschen) and Liszt tarted up by Busoni (La Campanella). www.dgclassics.com
