Classical

The latest releases reviewed.

MOZART: SYMPHONIES 28-41 Staatskapelle Dresden/Colin Davis Decca 475 9120 (5 specially priced CDs) ***

Universal Music has just reissued two finely played surveys of late Mozart symphonies. One favours a weight of sound, and sometimes heavily treading slow tempos, that seek out the expressive traction of a later age than Mozart's. The other has a lighter touch and greater transparency, though it still uses the tone of a modern orchestra with a fullness that's well-removed from period instruments practice. The first is DG's repackaging of recordings under Leonard Bernstein, the second the Dresden Staatskapelle series under Colin Davis, who turns 80 this week. Bernstein scales some heights that are not in Davis's ken. But Davis shows greater consistency, and a stronger affinity for those characteristics which make the music of Mozart so, well, Mozartian. www.deccaclassics.com MICHAEL DERVAN

KATE ROYAL Kate Royal (soprano), Academy of St Martin in the Fields/Edward Gardner EMI Classics 3944192 ****

Kate Royal's debut recital album is anything but hackneyed. A lot of the material has folk associations, some of Canteloube's Songs of the Auvergne jostling with Spanish flavours refracted through the sensibilities of Ravel, Delibes, Granados and Rodrigo. There's also some Richard Strauss and Debussy, plus snippets from Orff's Carmina Burana and Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. Royal is one of those singers who conveys a great sense of pleasure in what she does. I enjoy my lovely voice, she seems to be saying, and you will too. The sound is rich and full, thinning a little on high notes, and stronger on lusciousness than sharpness of detail. Conductor Edward Gardner provides warmly coloured backgrounds. www.emiclassics.com MICHAEL DERVAN

HARTMANN: CONCERTO FUNÈBRE; SOLO VIOLIN SUITES & SONATAS Alina Ibragimova (violin), Britten Sinfonia/Jacqueline Shave (violin) Hyperion CDA 67547 ***

Karl Amadeus Hartmann wrote his Concerto funèbre for violin and strings in 1939, using a Hussite chorale and a Russian revolutionary song "to offer a sign of hope against the desperate situation of thinking people". He stayed in Germany after 1933, and shut down his career in Nazi-ruled territories. The concerto, his most famous and most-performed work, was first heard in Switzerland. Alina Ibragimova and the Britten Sinfonia, directed by Jacqueline Shave, approach it with a sweetening romanticism that tempers harshness in favour of nostalgia. The pairs of highly demanding suites and sonatas for solo violin are less well-known. They date from 1927 and align Hartmann with the sometimes acid neo-classicism of Paul Hindemith. www.hyperion-records.co.uk MICHAEL DERVAN

ALDO CLEMENTI: WORKS WITH GUITAR Geoffrey Morris (guitar), Elision Ensemble/Carl Rosman mode 182 ***

The past seems always to be present in the works of the 82-year-old Italian composer Aldo Clementi. But even when it's most audibly so - the Fantasia su frammenti di Michelangelo Galilei uses only borrowed material - the sources dangle before the listener in ways that make them seem out of reach. Clementi likes processes that unwind through canonic writing that sounds oddly but relentlessly out of kilter. The effect is often of a stasis that's slowly crumbling. This selection of works, written between 1978 and 2002 for solo guitar and ensembles involving guitar, often highlights the extraordinary challenges of making the mechanistic bluntnesses of the composer's idiosyncratic style sound persuasive in performance. The guitar solos come off best. www.uk.hmboutique.com MICHAEL DERVAN