CLASSICAL

Schubert: "Winterreise" Wolfgang HoIzmair (baritone), Imogen Cooper

(piano)

Philips 446 407-2 (69 mins)

Dial-a-truck code: 1201

Irish audiences have already had the privilege of hearing Schubert's

Winterreise in concert from the Austro-British partnership of Wolfgang Holzmair and Imogen Cooper. That was in November 1994, the month in which they also recorded the work in Salzburg for Philips. Holzmair's tone has a tenor-like lightness and he favours an undemonstrative manner, eschewing the word- pointing of a Fischer-Dieskau in favour of moods and modes which are cast in altogether longer arches. Yet he seems to lose nothing of the chilling, numb bleakness of either music or text, and lmogen Cooper shows probing psychological acuity in her handling of the piano part.

Some listeners might find Holzmair wanting in vocal allure (try, for instance, the second song, Die Wetterfahne, or the seventh, Auf dem Flusse, to test your sensibilities in this regard), but, for me, there are compensating qualities in abundance. What other performer has found musical expression for such drained rigidity in the closing encounter of Der Leiermann? Highly recommended.

Messiaen: "Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jesus" Joanna MacGregor (piano)

Collins Classics 70332 (128 mins)

Dial-a-track code: 1311

Messiaen marked the Regard De Pere at the opening of his Vingt Regards to be played "extremely slowly, mysteriously, with love". Joanna MacGregor takes him at his word, and the haloed acoustic of the Snape Maltings concert hall is a major ally in helping her to sustain the raptness of her quietly sonorous, deeply sensual vision of the music. Throughout this performance, the slower passages are as beautiful in MacGregor's hands as you are ever likely to hear.

The penalty for such beauty is that not everything in the fast movements is as sharply-etched as everyone might wish for. Pianists in the mould of Michel Beroff and the composer's widow, Yvonne Loriod, play the Regards with an altogether more acute angularity, driven, perhaps, by a concern to convey in the music a distinct flavour of modernism. MacGregor, on the other hand, could be felt to be forging a stronger link with the virtuoso tradition of Ravel and Liszt. On balance, it seems to me that her greatest asset, her ear for harmony (every chord carefully weighted, every harmonic nuance picked up) is ultimately the more telling. And the recording quality, from the hammering bottom of the piano tam-tam in La Parole Toute-Puissante to the Christmas bells at the top in the succeeding Noel serves her extremely well.

Prokofiev: Zdravista; Tchaikovsky: Ode to Joy; Romeo and Juliet (original version). Alla Ardakov (soprano), Ludmilla Shemchuk (contralto), Alexander Naoumenko (tenor), Dimitri Kharitonov (bass), Geoffrey Mitchell Choir, London Philharmonic Choir, LPO/Derek Gleeson. Carlton Classics

30366 00122 (63 mins)

Dial-a-truck code: 1421

This first recording from Dub liner Derek Gleeson - with the London Philharmonic, no less - focuses on three Russian rarities. Prokofiev's cantata Zdravista was commissioned in celebration of Stalin's 60th birthday in 1939, a fact which goes some way to explaining the continued neglect of the folk-inspired work; the version recorded here is actually doubly sanitised, following up the 1960s removal of reference to Stalin by excising mention of the Communist party!

Tchaikovsky's Ode To Joy came into being as a graduation exercise and, with text from the same source as Beethoven's Ninth, is cast in an epic style which the young composer was not well able to support. However, the first version of Romeo And Juliet is well worth hearing. It's substantially different from the final reworking, both in material (you won't find the familiar chorale at the start, for instance) and the development of material which is common to both versions.

The tone of Gleeson's performances is serious, probing (too much so, perhaps at the opening of Romeo And Juliet, where a simpler forward flow is needed). Zdravista is characterfully done, but the inherent bombast in Ode To Joy is not redeemed by this performance.