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1 week ago | 
msn.com | Andrew Clements
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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
Bruckner and Gesualdo may be the two composers highlighted on the cover but, in fact, this first disc from the Monteverdi Choir since its traumatic split from its founding conductor John Eliot Gardiner last year begins with music by Palestrina. More accurately, it’s Palestrina refracted through 19th-century sensibilities – an arrangement of his Stabat Mater for double choir that Richard Wagner made for a concert in 1848, and which apparently has never been recorded before.
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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
According to the sleeve notes, the two concert performances of Wagner’s most compact and regularly performed stage work that Edward Gardner conducted in Oslo last year are likely to be the only occasions on which Lise Davidsen will appear as Senta, since it’s not a role that she intends to sing on stage.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
‘Every great composer wrote some kind of quartet with piano”, says Krystian Zimerman. “It’s a fantastic richness of music history that is often underestimated.” That’s even true of the three examples by Brahms, which are certainly less often heard than many of his other chamber works, such as the piano quintet and piano trios.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
After collections devoted to Duparc, Fauré and Poulenc, pianist Malcolm Martineau adds Ravel to the surveys of French song he has curated for Signum, nicely timed for the composer’s 150th anniversary this year. As before, Martineau is partnered by a lineup of mostly British singers, who tackle the songs as if determined to demonstrate that this repertoire should never be seen as the exclusive preserve of Francophone artists.
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
The six works in Sonya Bach’s collection are well-chosen to provide a handy guide to the evolution of Bartók’s piano music, from its Lisztian beginnings in the early years of the 20th century, through its celebration of the wealth of his native Hungarian folk music to the expressionist power of his writing for the instrument in the 1920s.
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
Performing Shostakovich has been one of Andris Nelsons’ calling cards during his first decade as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. What began as a project to survey all of the symphonies, with recordings of them subsequently released by Deutsche Grammophon, was extended to include all the concertos, and ended in spectacular fashion in January last year with concert performances of Shostakovich’s most ambitious and controversial stage work, the 1934 opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
The 150th anniversary of the birth of Maurice Ravel has so far been one of this year’s less noted musical anniversaries. Bertrand Chamayou’s tribute, a supplement to the survey of Ravel’s piano music that he recorded almost a decade ago, is characteristically fresh and original.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
During his lifetime, “work in progress” became a familiar label in Pierre Boulez’s list of compositions, as many of his pieces were repeatedly revised and elaborated over the course of his career. Most did eventually reach what Boulez regarded as a definitive state, but the ones that remained in compositional limbo the longest was his only string quartet, which he had begun to plan in 1948 (the year of his Second Piano Sonata and the cantata Le Soleil des Eaux).
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
Though these days Mahler is generally regarded as an Austrian composer, and spent the last decade of his life living and working in Vienna, he was born in Kaliště, in eastern Bohemia, in what was then part of the Austrian empire and is now in the Czech Republic. On disc at least the Czech Philharmonic, the country’s leading orchestra and in the right repertoire one of Europe’s finest, never seems to have taken Mahler’s music to its heart.
