Welcome
Debuts and discoveries abound this month, with first studio recordings from The Castalian Quartet (see Recording of the Month), soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen and violinist Esther Abrami. There’s another landmark project from pianist Samantha Ege, who premieres works by a selection of overlooked Black women composers, plus chamber works by Ruth Gipps and a new opera from Jeanine Tesori. We’ve big-boned ballet from Simon Rattle and the LSO, another triumphant recording from John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London, plus fine turns from powerhouse pianists Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Steven Osborne, Mitsuko Uchida and Grigory Sokolov. And if you like something a little vintage, check out our Historical round-up.
Michael Beek Reviews editor
This month’s critics
John Allison, Nicholas Anderson, Michael Beek, Kate Bolton-Porciatti, Geoff Brown, Michael Church, Christopher Cook, Martin Cotton, Christopher Dingle, Misha Donat, Jessica Duchen, Rebecca Franks, George Hall, Malcolm Hayes, Julian Haylock, Claire Jackson, Daniel Jaffé, Stephen Johnson, Berta Joncus, Erik Levi, Natasha Loges, David Nice, Roger Nichols, Bayan Northcott, Ingrid Pearson, Steph Power, Anthony Pryer, Paul Riley, Jan Smaczny, Sarah Urwin Jones, Kate Wakeling, Helen Wallace, Alexandra Wilson, Barry Witherden
KEY TO STAR RATINGS
Outstanding
Excellent
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Disappointing
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RECORDING OF THE MONTH
Time is of the essence in this assured debut
The Castalian Quartet takes the listener on a philosophical journey in its beautiful and original first album, says Kate Wakeling
Between Two Worlds
Lassus: La nuit froide et sombre (arr. Simonen); Beethoven: String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132; Thomas Adès: The Four Quartets; Dowland: Come Heavy Sleep (arr. Simonen)
The Castalian String Quartet Delphian DCD34272 66:43 mins
This outstanding disc offers listeners a true philosophical journey. Perceptively programmed, Between Two Worlds explores the mystic properties of time through a series of intricately connected works, each performed with rare beauty and originality by a quartet working at the height of its powers.
The disc opens with a mesmerising, near-whispered performance of Lassus’s ‘La nuit froide et sombre’ (arranged by the quartet’s own first violinist Sini Simonen) which charts the cycle of night and day as a mirror of the human propensity to oscillate between hope and despair. From here, we move to Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132, a piece which travels ‘from the terrestrial to the celestial and back’. This work, the second of Beethoven’s five late quartets, was composed in the summer of 1825, just two years before the composer’s death. By now, Beethoven’s hearing loss was profound and he was intermittently stricken with a horribly painful intestinal problem. The score reflects it all with heartrending intensity, in the words of Simonen ‘moving from the anguished to the heavenly before crashing back to earthly suffering’.
The Castalian Quartet is intimately alive to every shift of colour and mood in this extraordinary score and succeeds in conjuring the sense of both deep contemplation and vivid spontaneity. The quartet is especially daring with timbre, sometimes stripping back the sound to viol-like clarity while also being unafraid to dig in with a refreshing rawness when the score so demands. The quartet’s rendering of the work’s monumental third movement – subtitled Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart (Song of Thanksgiving from a Convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian mode) – is nothing short of a revelation in its lucidity of line and sheer beauty of sound.
The score of this same Beethoven quartet was reportedly spread across TS Eliot’s desk as he worked on his seminal Four Quartets. In turn, these four poems have a powerful if elusive connection to Thomas Adès’s bold and mysterious The Four Quarters (2010), which charts the progress of a day before ‘breaking free of time altogether’. The Castalian Quartet here draws out all the wondrous strangeness of Adès’s work, from the eery chatter of ‘Nightfalls’ to the criss-cross of pizzicato in ‘Morning Dew’. The final movement, ‘The Twentyfifth Hour’, is propelled by an array of fiendish rhythmic sequences in 25/16 time and the quartet handles this mindboggling complexity with total assurance to unleash a wonderfully wild zeal, before the score thins to fragile harmonics and the ensemble is once more a picture of poise. Fittingly enough, the disc ends where it began with a return to the Renaissance – this time a soulful account of Dowland’s lute song ‘Come, Heavy Sleep’.
The quartet handles Adès’s mind-boggling complexity with total assurance
The album is further enhanced by Andrew Mellor’s terrific sleeve notes which draw together the philosophical strands of the programme with clarity and insight. This is indeed a special release from Delphian and the Castalian Quartet which deserves the very highest praise.
PERFORMANCE
RECORDING
Bacewicz
Divertimento; Sinfonietta; Symphony; Concerto
Amadeus Chamber Orchestra of Polish Radio/Agnieszka Duczmal
DUX DUX 1828 54:53 mins
In a posthumously published collection of autobiographical anecdotes, Grażyna Bacewicz wrote: ‘I normally do not walk but run; I speak fast; even my pulse beats faster than others.’ So it does in the music this major Polish composer wrote, certainly in the outer movements of the spirited string pieces collected here, ranging from the 1935 Sinfonietta, when she was just past her student years in Paris, to an even more pungent Divertimento, written 30 years later. The music’s rhythmic vitality, wonderfully amplified in these gutsy vintage performances (the oldest is from 2004), is the most obvious sign of Bacewicz’s uniquely determined spirit, though her slow movements, whether reflective or anguished, never show any loss of muscle.
Whatever the stylistic influences at work – Baroque, neo-classical, early-20th-century French – her bright ideas keep bubbling out, sometimes poured into vessels too small to reap their full benefit (the three-movement Divertimento lasts just over six minutes). She luckily gives herself more room to breathe in the Concerto and Symphony, kaleidoscopic and vital post-war pieces from the 1940s, and among her most impressive.
Agnieszka Duczmal and her Amadeus Chamber Orchestra plunge into every work with tremendous fire and flair: if the movements are marked ‘vivo’, they really move fast, though not at the expense of ensemble precision. The acoustic of the University Auditorium, Poznán, might lend the performances a little shrill edge, but who wants to sink into plush velvet with music and music-making this dynamic and full of life? Geoff Brown
PERFORMANCE
RECORDING
Sibelius
Symphonies Nos 2 & 4
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Owain Arwel Hughes
Rubicon RCD 1072 87:04 mins
In great works so multifariously recorded as these, the pretext for yet further interpretations can only be that the performers feel they have something new to say about them. It seems that Owain Arwel Hughes’s main idea is to take things rather steadily – though never so slowly as such extremists as Bernstein or Leif Segerstam. In Symphony No. 4’s dark, fragmentary slow movement, his careful pacing enables a real tension to accumulate as the players of the Royal Philharmonic feel their way from one fraught phrase to another. Yet that same carefulness robs the finale of much of its wonted urgency and climactic struggle – a disappointment underlined by Hughes’s resort to that dubious tradition – unsupported by Sibelius’s score – of drastically slowing down the bleak final pages.
Again, the relatively ample unfolding of the Allegretto opening of Symphony No. 2 goes nicely, but then Hughes only marginally modifies his beat throughout the rest of the first movement, where Sibelius asks for many fluctuations and speed-ups. The cumulative development section not only lacks excitement but, at times, sounds almost like a cautious first readthrough, while the full, but slightly confusing acoustic of St John’s Smith Square suggests it may not be the easiest venue in which to record a full orchestra. These are honest, straightforward accounts, but there are many more vital, characteristic and insightful recordings in the catalogue. Bayan Northcott
PERFORMANCE
RECORDING
Stravinsky
The Firebird; Petrushka; The Rite of Spring
London Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle
LSO Live LSO 5096 (CD/SACD)
116:30 mins (2 discs)
In the booket note, Simon Rattle tells us that performing these three great Stravinsky ballet scores in a single programme was an idea he put several decades ago to the then management of the Philharmonia, who turned it down flat. The idea endured; and these 2017 live recordings come from the opening concerts of Rattle’s tenure as LSO music director.
The result is a remarkable feat by any standards. The orchestra responds to the challenge with a spectacular display of sustained firepower, rhythmic control and individual artistry. And there’s much evidence, too, of Rattle’s superlative ear for detail, bringing out exactly what the composer has written down: the atmospheric Introduction to Part 2 of The Rite of Spring comes across with mesmerising vividness. Some of the tempos (as in ‘Dance of the Earth’) feel perhaps a notch too quick for the music’s full momentum to build, but in the context of the occasion’s heady excitement, this is a small reservation. A slightly less small one concerns the wider sense, in the other two ballets, of something missing – as if these are performances, however impressively delivered, of abstract works rather than (also) masterpieces of musical storytelling. The Firebird needs to take you on a journey through its Russian fairytale world, just as Petrushka should leave you
feeling that you’ve actually been to St Petersburg’s Shrovetide Fair in the pre-revolutionary ‘Old Russia’ where Stravinsky grew up. Somehow neither adventure of the imagination quite happens here. Malcolm Hayes
PERFORMANCE
RECORDING
Psappha Commissions
Works by John Casken, Tom Coult, Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade, Alissa Firsova, Tom Harrold, George Stevenson and Mark-Anthony Turnage
Psappha Ensemble
Psappha PSA1008 73:09 mins
Psappha’s 30th birthday present to itself (see feature, p52) does exactly what it says on the tin. revisits half-a-dozen works written specially for the ensemble over the past 12 years, and in a multiplicity of styles, speaking to Psappha’s versatility and to the broad church that is, an evocation of Northern landscapes underpinned by Casken’s characteristic glitteringly incised translucence and gestural sure-footedness. Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Holocaust-remembering on the other hand at times seems to summon up the refracted spirit of Kurt Weill and was written with the distinctive timbres of jazz vocalist Ian Shaw in mind.
