Classical

Latest CD releases reviewed

RAVEL:VALSES NOBLES ET SENTIMENTALES; GASPARD DE LA NUIT; SONTAINE; LA VALSE

Romain Descharmes (piano) Audite 92,571

French pianist Romain Descharmes, first prizewinner of the 2006 Dublin International Piano Competition, here offers a well-made selection of works by fellow-countryman Ravel, recorded in Berlin for a German label on a Japanese Shigeru Kawai piano. Ravel featured prominently in Descharmes's Dublin competition performances, but there's something missing from the very cleanly conceived and executed playing he offers here. He's punctilious rather than fantastical in Gaspard de la Nuit. He always retains his composure, but sometimes the sense of calm drifts into slackness. The measured approach works better in the Sonatine than in the Valses nobles et sentimentales. The arrangement of La Valseis carried off with shallow brilliance. www.audite.de MICHAEL DERVAN

IAN WILSON:SULLEN EARTH

Belgrade Strings Dusan Skovran/Ian Wilson***

The three string orchestra works recorded here traverse more than 10 years. Limena, "for piano and muted strings" (1988), makes the greatest impression. It begins in media res, with solo piano (Hugh Tinney) and orchestra appearing to drift in different musical worlds, the piano dribbling in a kind of melancholy rumination, the strings engaged in a distant commentary, independent-seeming yet related. It's like something forever feeding fascination to the corner of your eye. The 2005 violin concerto Sullen Earthfrom 2005 (soloist Gordana Matijevi -Nedeljkovic) plays a more conventional line with quarter tones and reminiscences of the musical past. The colourful, Giacometti-inspired The Capsizing Man and other stories(1994), originally for string quartet, stretches its effects too far. www.rvrcd.com MICHAEL DERVAN

MENDELSSOHN: ORGAN SONATAS

Jos van der Kooy (Organ)Challenge Classics CC 72315 ****

In 1844 the English publisher Charles Coventry commissioned Mendelssohn to edit Bach's organ music and to write a set of voluntaries for organ. The shape of the second commission changed by mutual agreement, and the result was six organ sonatas, which have long been the most popular of all the composer's sonatas. They are imbued with Bachian echoes of chorale and fugue, and make for a fascinating blend of baroque and 19th-century sensibilities. Jos van der Kooy's new recording has the benefit of the splendid Müller Organ at St Bavo's in Haarlem, which has been captured in a recording that's full without being too forward. And the control and surge of the playing prevents the elaborateness of the writing from sounding overwrought. www.challenge.nl MICHAEL DERVAN

FURWANGLER LIVE IN BERLIN, THE COMPLETE RIAS RECORDINGS

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Wilhelm Furtwangler Audite 21,403 ****

Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954), Karajan's direct predecessor at the Berlin Philharmonic, was a controversial figure, a musical individualist whose performances provoked sharply divided responses, and a man tainted by remaining in his post under the Nazis, in spite of his having protected Jewish musicians. This set offers clean transfers of the surviving radio archive tapes of his post-war concerts for the broadcaster RIAS Berlin. The repertoire ranges from unfashionably (by 21st-century standards) heavily weighted baroque (Bach and Handel) to contemporary (Hindemith, Blacher, Fortner), with the bulk devoted to 19th-century greats, where Furtwängler's fire-in-the- belly music-making fascinates and thrills. www.audite.de MICHAEL DERVAN