Raymond Deane: Orchestral works (Marco Polo)
This new CD in Marco Polo's Irish Composer series collects three works by Raymond Deane, Quaternion (1988), Krespel's Concerto (1990) and the Oboe Concerto (1994), in performances by the NSO under Colman Pearce. It's the latest work which in many ways is the most radical, a concerto premised on an openly combative encounter between the soloist (here Matthew Manning) and a large orchestra, an encounter in which the oboe faces frequent obliteration. Quaternion, for orchestra and piano (Anthony Byrne), also plays around with the conventions of the concerto, leaving, at one point, the soloist's role effectively with the celesta. Krespel's Concerto for violin (Alan Smale), re-composed from a radiophonic opera of 1983, is the weakest of the three pieces, meandering and shallow.
Michael Dervan
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No 6 (Pathetique); Romeo and Juliet. Kirov Orchestra/Valery Gergiev (Philips)
One of the most immediately striking features of Valery Gergiev's new recording of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony is the gravitas it assumes, not only in the introductory Adagio, but also the first movement's main Allegro non troppo and, indeed, even in the altogether lighter third movement Scherzo. With the apparent wish to leave no one in any doubt about the importance he attaches to the Pathetique subtitle, Gergiev consistently weights balances in favour of the lower instruments. This makes for a reading which is sombre and sonorous even when the sound is at its most splendid - and splendid it often is, in a spectacularly engineered recording. And he applies the approach with equal consistency to the Shakespeare-inspired fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet.
Michael Dervan
Schreker: Orchestral music. BBCPO/Vassily Sinaisky (Chandos)
For a while in the early decades of the 20th century, the work of Franz Schreker (1878-1934) rivalled that of Richard Strauss in popularity on the operatic stages of Europe. The lavish, often impressionistic sensuality of Schreker's mature orchestral writing caused him, in his own time, to be ranked as a daring atonalist. Today, the dissonant excursions seem more the incidental result of his exotic colouristic extravagance. Chandos's luscious-sounding new collection represents the heady, lateromantic melting-pot of fairy-tale and eroticism that was Schreker's most famous opera, Der ferne Klang (1912), as well as earlier (Ekkehard Op. 12, Fantastic Overture, Op. 15) and later (Prelude to a Drama and Der Schatzgraber) works.
Michael Dervan
A History of Baroque Music: (Harmonia Mundi)
This is volume God-knows-what of a sweeping survey of the baroque period, and it runs to five CDs, devoted to The Madrigal, The Birth of Opera, England in the 17th Century, A Century of French Opera and The Reign of Opera Seria. The more obscure areas of the era are explored in a series of superb extracts, dragging glorious fragments by such neglected composers as Francesco Cavalli, Antoine Dauvergne and Carl Heinrich Graun into a well-deserved limelight. A little more documentation of the "who's-doing-what-to-whom" variety wouldn't have gone astray; but that's a minor quibble in the face of a major triumph for Harmonia Mundi.
Arminta Wallace