Sibelius: Violin Concerto; Serenades 1 & 2; Humoresque Op 87 No 1. AnneSophie Mutter, Staatskapelle Dresden /Andre Previn. DG 447 895-2 (49 mins).
Dial a track code: 1641 "Historical Sibelius Recordings"
Finlandia, 1576-58810-2 (58 mins); Dial a track code: 1751
Anne-Sophie Mutter's new recording of the Sibelius Violin Concerto offers the music of the Finnish master in a typically intense, live for the moment style of music making. There's a fineness of detailed nuancing that draws attention to itself in virtually every bar she plays. Forget about the wood, forget about the trees, it's the leaves and the bark and the droplets of dew which get all the attention here.
Listening to Mutter's chilly, vibrato less opening (a response to the composer's request for "sweet and expressive") or the convoluted rubato of the grace notes at the end of the slow movement (to take just two details), I found it hard to see what smidgin of a justification Sibelius provided for such ideas. Leaving the composer aside, it's easier to see such examples of interpretative extremism emerging out of the performer's extended rapture in the altogether extraordinary facility at her command. Conductor Andre Previn and the DG sound engineers are willing partners in the transMutterisation of the music. This is playing which, quite simply, sets itself apart from anything else you're ever likely to hear in this work.
By comparison, the reissue of one of the work's earliest recordings sounds plaintive and simple, but ultimately a lot more truthful. The soloist on the disc "Historical Sibelius Recordings"
is the Anja Ignatius (the first Finn to record the work), and her performance was captured in Berlin in 1943 in partnership with Sibelius's brother in law, the conductor Armas Jarrielelt.
Martinu: Memorial to Lidice; Nono: Canti di vita e d'amore; Schoenberg: A Survivor from Warsaw; Hartmann: Symphony No 1. Sarah Leonard (soprano), Cornelia Kallish (contralto), Thomas Randle (tenor), Udo Samel (speaker), Male Chorus of the Bamberg SO, Bamberg SO/Ingo Metzmacher.
EMI CDC 5 55424 2 (58 mins). Dial a track code: 1861
The German conductor Ingo Metzmacher is engaged on recording the complete symphonies of Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905-1963). The latest issue gives a good flavour of the exploratory spirit in which he's undertaking the exercise - Hartmann's powerfully expressed, dark First Symphony, which sets texts by Walt Whitman, was written as an anti Nazi protest (it's subtitled "Essay for a Requiem") in the late 1930s, at a time when the composer had withdrawn his music from public performance under the rule of the Third Reich. There's a Hartmann revival underway in Germany at the moment, and the visceral immediacy of the First Symphony gives a good indication of what all the fuss is about.
Metzmacher's couplings all relate to the subject of oppression - Martinu's "Lidice" lament incited by the wartime destruction of a Czech village, Nono's 1962 "Canti di vita e d'amore" an unfashionable (at the time of its composition) fusion of avant garde technique and humanitarian political concerns, and Schoenberg's undimmable "A Survivor from Warsaw", here benefitting from the central European accent of the narrator, Udo Samel. A first rate collection.
Bach: Organ Works Vol 3. Ton Koopman.
Teldec 4509-94460-2 (75 mins). Dial a track code: 1971
The third volume of Ton Koopman's Teldec Bach series is devoted to the six so called Trio Sonatas, BWV525-530. Koopman has recorded them on the recently restored 1693 Arp Scnitger organ of the St Jacobi Kirche in Hamburg, an instrument that's a tone higher than modern concert pitch. Koopman's quietly radiant performances have a sense of loving intimacy (often highly embellished) rather than the overt technical display that this music so often calls forth. The rich venue ambience of the recording adds to the individual, not to say idiosyncratic, character of this latest offering from one of the organ world's most characterful performers.
