Micahel Dervan reviews four new releases
MOZART: SYMPHONIES 28, 33, 35, 38, 41 Orchestra Mozart/Claudio Abbado Archiv Produktion 477 7598 (2 CDs)*****
These Mozart symphony performances were recorded at concerts given in 2005 and 2006 by the Orchestra Mozart, which played for the first time under Claudio Abbado in Bologna four years ago. The style is surprisingly soft-spoken, the colouring muted rather than bright. The cutting brass interjections that have become so popular in Mozart have little place in Abbado's conceptions. Some of the tempos are extraordinarily brisk, but the playing is so light on its feet that the speeds seem hardly to stress the players, and the internal transparency of the music-making is often more akin to the world of chamber music than that of orchestras even on an 18th-century scale. Almost anyone else's Mozart will probably sound a little uncouth after this. www.tinyurl.com/5b9s4r
MOZART: VIOLIN CONCERTOS; SINFONIA CONCERTANTE IN E FLAT K364 Giuliano Carmignola (violin), Danusha Waskiewicz (viola), Orchestra Mozart/Claudio Abbado Archiv Produktion 477 7371 (2 CDs)****
The sound is so different you could be forgiven for wondering if this could possibly be the same orchestra and conductor that perform on the Orchestra Mozart/Claudio Abbado symphonies disc. Here the use of period instruments makes for an altogether leaner, more sinewy sound, and, of course, the music is very different, too - the violin concertos are the work of a composer still in his teens. The high point of the set comes in a later and greater work, the Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola, where the two soloists manage minor miracles of balanced expressiveness. Giuliano Carmignola's playing in the actual violin concertos reveals some gestures which sound a little mannered. www.tinyurl.com/5b9s4r
SAUNDERS: BLAAUW; BLUE AND GRAY; DUO; VERMILION; STIRRINGS STILL musikFabrik Wergo WER 6694-2 ****
London-born, Berlin-based Rebecca Saunders, who turned 40 last year, is a composer enraptured by sound in the moment and manner of its creation. She's like a poet obsessed not just with the resonances of vowels or the textures of fricatives, but also with the strange in-betweens, where the strangeness of the sound blurs all possibility of conventional meaning. Saunders's works are trajectories of exploration, opening on this CD with Blaauwfor double-bell trumpet (played into the resonating chamber of an open grand piano with the sustaining pedal down) and Bl ue and Grayfor two double basses, extending gradually to the even stranger, almost unearthly five-instrument world of Stirrings still. Stirring stuff indeed. www.tinyurl.com/6mchwb
REGER: STRING TRIO IN A MINOR OP 77B; PIANO QUARTET IN D MINOR OP 113 Aperto Piano Quartet Naxos 9570785****
Where did the piano quartet go after Brahms? Into a heavily textured chromatic overgrowth, suggests the Piano Quartet in A minor that Max Reger completed in 1910. Reger was at the time preparing a performance of Brahms's Piano Quartet in C minor, and his own heavily burdened piano quartet is, to make a culinary analogy, like an intense reduction of Brahmsian style. The influence in the String Trio in A minor of 1904 is classical, and stemmed from the composer's contention that "what our present age lacks is a Mozart". The performances by the Aperto Piano Quartet, whose members include the Vogler Quartet's viola player Stefan Fehlandt, are sympathetically responsive to these two highly contrasted rarities of the chamber music repertoire. www.naxos.com
