Classical/Opera

Brahms: "Songs" Alexander Kipnis. (EMI References)

The Ukrainian bass Alexander Kipnis (1891-1978) was one of the great singers of the century. He had a distinguished international career in opera and was also a highly-regarded recitalist. The voice was imposingly large, but also fine-grained. It was the dramatic awareness gained from the opera stage that he successfully brought to the intimacy of the Brahms songs he recorded in 1936 and

1940 rather than the vocal mannerisms of the typical opera singer. It seems almost invidious to single out the magisterial Vier ernste Gesange as representing Kipnis at his finest, as everything here is so thorough-goingly cherishable. EMI's transfers from 78s are clean and smooth, but meanly, the mid-

price disc comes without either texts or translations. Michael Dervan

Debussy: "Pelleas et Melisande" (Naxos) For all its airy-fairy, pre-

Raphaelite surface gloss - long-haired damsels wafting about in the forest, wise old men, wide-eyed little boys et al - Debussy's symbolist drama, based on a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, actually engages quite forcefully with the unseemly wrestling matches we call "relationships". Not that Debussy would ever be forceful the way Wagner, say, would be forceful: but this vigorous reading by a young French cast under the baton of Jean-Claude Casadesus certainly emphasises the work's restless energy as well as its dreamy voluptuousness. The

ArmenianFrench baritone, Armand Arapian, is particularly effective in the central role of Golaud, sympathetic as well as sinister. Mireille Delunsch is a fluttering Melisande who is obviously on a knife-edge and Francoise Golfier sounds uncannily child-like as the boy Yniold. Arminta Wallace

"Wien Modern III". Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester/ Claudio Abbado. (DG)

This live recording of the impressive Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra comes from a

1992 concert in Vienna's Wien Modern festival and features four works not currently available on CD. Xenakis's Keqrops (1986) takes piano soloist (Roger

Woodward) and orchestra through characteristic landscapes of astonishing elemental violence. Dallapiccola's Piccola musica notturna (1954), is compact and subtly expressionist, making the orchestral excerpts from Henze's operas

Boulevard Solitude (1953)) and Die Bassariden (1965) sound, by comparison, filmically indulgent. Paolo Perezzani is a pupil of Salvatore Sciarrino, whose

Primavera dell'anima (1990) cunningly conjures up a shimmery world of oscillating falsetto. Michael Dervan