Latest releases reviewed
CELLO COUNTERPOINT Los Angeles Master Chorale/Grant Gershon, Maya Beiser (cello) Nonesuch 7559-79891-2 ***
In You Are (Variations) Steve Reich mixes new and old. He's moved away from his prolonged preoccupation with video projects to create a setting of four singleline English and Hebrew texts for 18 voices and amplified ensemble. The opening of the new work takes one back to the chugging keyboards and rapidly lapping voices of The Desert Music. Later there's a piling-up of chords which Reich rightly calls "new and surprising harmonic territory," the familiar having led him into things he says he never knew he knew how to do. The relentlessly choppy Cello Counterpoint is an addition to the series of works pitting a solo instrument against a multi-tracked background of similar instrumental gestures and colours. This new one works less on the level of overt counterpoint than on that of texture. www.nonesuch.com
Michael Dervan
DVORAK: CELLO CONCERTO; DUMKY TRIO Jean-Guihen Queyras (cello), Prague Philharmonia/Jiri Belohlavek, Isabelle Faust (violin), Alexander Melnikov (piano) Harmonia Mundi HMC 901867 ***
This attractive if unusual coupling pairs the greatest cello concerto of the 19th century with one of its most effortlessly tuneful piano trios. Effortless, however, is not the word to describe soloist Jean- Guihen Queyras's strenuous approach in the concerto. He strikes poses of self-aggrandising heroism and angst, as if he's involved in a struggle to out-perform the orchestra. The playing of the lean-sounding Prague Philharmonia under Jiri Belohlavek is so fresh and deft that there's really no need, and the heroics – including Queyras's re-thinking of the rhythm of the opening – can sound overdone. The mixing of the jolly and the melancholy in the Dumky Trio is altogether more successful. www.warnerclassics.com
Michael Dervan
LUTOSLAWSKI: 20 POLISH CHRISTMAS CAROLS; LACRIMOSA; FIVE SONGS Olga Pasichnyk (soprano), Jadwiga Rappé (alto), Polish Radio Chorus, Kraców, Polish National Radio SO (Katowice)/Antoni Wit Naxos 8.555994 ****
Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski used to be seen as a late beginner, flowering suddenly with his Concerto for Orchestra and Musique funèbre in the mid 1950s, when he was over 40. Much of his early music was destroyed in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The Lacrimosa of 1937 (part of a projected Requiem) is the earliest of his orchestral writing to survive, and echoes the sensuality of his older countryman, Karol Szymanowski. The Christmas Carols, written in 1946 but not orchestrated until the 1980s, are a sheer delight. And the Five Songs of 1957 (setting children's rhymes by the Lithuanian-born Kazimiera Illakowicz) lighten their harmonic effect and maximise their allure through their often delicate and highly atmospheric orchestration. www.naxos.com
Michael Dervan
BRAHMS: SONATA FOR TWO PIANOS; 5 WALTZES OP 39; 2 HUNGARIAN DANCES; SAINT-SAËNS: BEETHOVEN VARIATIONS Güher & Süher Pekinel (pianos) Warner Classics 2564 61959-2 ***
The portly, bearded, cigar-smoking Brahms of the photographs that were taken late in his life is clearly far from the minds of the Pekinel twins in their new recording of the composer's works for two pianos. The Turkish duo are at times audaciously capricious in the two-piano version of the Piano Quintet in F minor, engaging in some magical intertwining of lines, and often making the music sound intriguingly fleet where others choose gruffness. And yet the gravitas of the music seems to survive. They are also fascinatingly individual in two Hungarian Dances and Brahms's own arrangements of five of his Op 39 Waltzes. Saint-Saëns's Beethoven Variations (on the leaping Trio from the Minuet of the Piano Sonata in E flat, Op 31 No 3) is done with appropriate lashings of frothy display. The recording, sadly, shows signs of oldfashioned overloading at some climaxes. www.warnerclassics.com
Michael Dervan
