Classical

The latest releases reviewed.

MENDELSSOHN: MUSIC FOR CELLO AND PIANO Antonio Meneses (cello), Gérard Wyss (piano) Avie AV2140 ***

Mendelssohn's sonatas of 1838 and 1843 are among the major works for cello and piano written between the sonatas of Beethoven and Brahms. They are crafted with the skill you'd expect of the composer who produced the astonishing String Octet at the age of 16, yet to modern audiences they're not the sure-fire successes you might expect. The i's are perhaps too carefully dotted, and the flashiness of the writing in the fast movements can easily tip over into bluster. Meneses and Wyss have an easiness of partnership and a technical facility which allow them to take everything daringly to the edge. On this disc, which also includes the Variations concertantes and some shorter pieces, it's the collective bravura which lingers longest in the memory. www.avierecords.com MICHAEL DERVAN

SHOSTAKOVICH: PIANO CONCERTO NO 1; PIANO QUINTET; CONCERTINO Martha Argerich, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana/Alexander Vedernikov EMI Classics 504 5042 ***

Martha Argerich had just turned 65 last June when these Shostakovich recordings were taped at concerts in Lugano. She plays the concerto, a work full of youthful Shostakovian slapstick, with the caprice of a wilful filly. The music-making is so full of thrills and spills that the centre threatens not to hold. But the playing itself has a kind of gaudy magnificence that wins the day, and the obligato trumpet part is well taken by Sergei Nakariakov. The light Concertino for two pianos gets the grand treatment with Lilya Zilberstein. The least satisfactory performance is the exaggerated reading of the Piano Quintet, where the emotive pulling about can be really unbalancing. www.emiclassics.com MICHAEL DERVAN

VILLA-LOBOS: BACHIANAS BRASILEIRAS; MÔMOPRECÓCE; GUITAR CONCERTO Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/ Enrique Bátiz EMI Classics 500 8292 (3 CDs) ****

Enrique Bátiz's attractive mid-1980s recordings of Villa-Lobos's complete Bachianas brasileiras are part of the first batch of releases in a new EMI series offering three discs for less than the price of one. Only the fifth of the Bachianas brasileiras, for soprano (Barbara Hendricks) and cellos, is at all well-known. The series as a whole offers a strange, sometimes tuneful, sometimes dense fusion of things lofty, garish, garrulous, learned and vernacular. The inclination is mostly towards excess. The couplings include pianist Cristina Ortiz in the fantasy Mômoprecóce (with the New Philharmonia under Vladimir Ashkenazy) and the Guitar Concerto (Angel Romero and the London Philharmonic under Jesús López-Cobos). www.emiclassics.com MICHAEL DERVAN

SCHUBERT: SONATAS FOR VIOLIN & PIANO Andrew Manze (violin), Richard Egarr (fortepiano) Harmonia Mundi HMU 907445 ***

Andrew Manze and Richard Egarr offer here four sonatas which usually masquerade under other names, three of them as sonatinas, one merely as a duo. Manze plays them strangely, with tone attractively textured, but also often slightly blanched, sometimes to the point of astringency. His handling of more lyrical passages is sometimes tentative but at others he ventures to make points grander than the music seems to require. This may well be his way of buttressing his theory that the music is a lot more substantial than it's often taken to be. With violin forwardly balanced in relation to the keyboard, the combination of sound and style here is certainly thought- provoking. www.uk.hmboutique. com MICHAEL DERVAN