BBC Legends
The top recommendation in the latest batch of gems culled from the BBC archives must go to a 1959 Berlioz Requiem with the Royal Philharmonic under Beecham. The mono sound from the Royal Albert Hall is truthful and spacious, no barrier whatsoever to the visionary grandeur the conductor brings to this most visionary and grand of works. A second CD captures a fiery Beethoven Seven replete with encores and announcements from the platform in Beecham's inimitable drawl. Raw immediacy of emotion is the hallmark of Barbirolli in Elgar's In the South (coupled with Walton and Britten); on a second CD, Mahler Four doesn't brook the approach quite as well. A CD of Emil Gilels catches the great pianist on top form: noble ardour in Schumann's First Sonata, delicious deftness in Scarlatti.
By Michael Dervan
Chopin: Ballades; Berceuse; Barcarolle; Scherzo No 4. Evgeny Kissin (piano) (RCA)
If pianistic mastery is your thing, then Evgeny Kissin's new disc of Chopin will provide you with untold delights. The quickest to sample is probably the opening of the Fourth Scherzo, fleet, with impeccably light, precisely placed, rapid chords. You'll get a flavour later on (though not a full one) of Kissin's particular, thunderous style of barnstorming. But the feeling elsewhere is of a peculiar mis-match between performer and music. Kissin wants to help Chopin along, to nudge and cajole, re-write linear and temporal relationships; in short, to engage in hyperbole. It's the sort of approach pianists can get into the habit of from Rachmaninov, where it holds the centre when the music dilates. In Chopin it merely tends to produce false bluster.
By Michael Dervan
Handel, Schoenberg, Spohr, Elgar. Lark Quartet, San Francisco Ballet Orch/Jean-Louis LeRoux (Arabesque)
This fascinating collection prefaces Schoenberg's String Quartet Concerto of 1933 with the Handel Concerto Grosso (Op. 6 No. 7) of which it is a sometimes unrecognisable reworking. The piece is a chameleon of style, now one thing, now the other, sometimes both, the effect so disconcerting it's hard to know whether it's straight-faced or tongue-in-cheek. The performance here is as lucid as I've heard. The last concerto written by Louis Spohr (1784-1859) harnesses the composer's considerable instrumental imagination to purposes of innocent gratification. Elgar's Introduction and Allegro, the most famous piece for quartet and orchestra, here thrusts and tilts in slightly unexpected ways at the hands of US players. A disc worth exploring.
By Michael Dervan