Latest releases reviewed

BEETHOVEN: SYMPHONIES 5 & 7
Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela/Gustavo Dudamel
Deutsche Grammophon 477 6228
****

Twenty-five-year-old Gustavo Dud- amel ("the most astonishingly gifted conductor I've ever come across," says Simon Rattle) began conducting at 13, a product of a Venezuelan foundation (Fesnojiv) targetting music at the under-privileged. In the last 30 years it has brought that country over 170 youth orchestras and children's orchestras. Dudamel spurned the likes of the Berlin or Vienna Philharmonics to make his Deutsche Grammophon debut with the young players of the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, a rough equivalent to Michael Tilson Thomas's New World Symphony in Florida. You can almost taste the fundamental pleasure that musicians and conductor alike took in delivering these soft-textured, naturally flowing accounts of Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh Symphonies as their high-profile, international recording debut. Watch this space. www.deutschegrammophon.com

STEPHEN HOUGH'S SPANISH ALBUM
Stephen Hough (piano)
Hyperion CDA 67565
****

This is no ordinary Spanish collection. It opens with an F sharp major Sonata by 18th-century priest Antonio Soler. which has to be one of the most underrated works in the keyboard repertoire. There are more pieces by the still little-known, 20th-century miniaturist Federico Mompou than anyone else. And the longest track is the 11-and-a half minutes of Granados's Valses poéticos. Albéniz and Federico Longas (whose Aragón was dedicated to Horowitz) complete the Spanish line-up. Debussy dominates the celebration of Spain from the moodier perspective of a French imagination, and, among non-neighbours, Hough's own On Falla (say it out loud and you'll see how the Ritual Fire Dance sneaks in) rubs shoulders with Godowsky, Scharwenka and Niemann. Hough plays with his customary freshness and panache.

www.hyperion-records.co.uk

BRAHMS: EIN DEUTSCHES REQUIEM
Susan Gritton (soprano), Hanno Müller-Brachmann (baritone), Evgenia Rubinova, José Gallardo (pianos), Choir of King's College Cambridge/Stephen Cleobury
EMI Classics 366 9482
**

This is a confused and confusing issue. Nicholas Marston's liner notes tell us that Brahms himself arranged the orchestral part of his Requiem for two pianos, but insisted on having his name as arranger removed from the title page. He talks of "the domestic sphere" implied by Brahms's arrangement (the work's first British airing was of the two-piano arrangement in a private house), yet ignores the fact that this new EMI recording was actually made in the Chapel of Jesus College, Cambridge. Only if you regard Brahms's orchestral writing as a mass of cobwebs annoyingly obscuring the choral singing in this work is the often chilly clarity of this new recording likely to suit you. www.emiclassics.com

ENGLISH CLASSICAL CLARINET CONCERTOS
Colin Lawson, Michael Harris (clarinets, basset horns), Parley of Instruments/ Peter Holman
Hyperion Helios CDH 55261
***

There's an Irish connection in this 1996 survey of 18th- and 19th-century English clarinet music now reissued in Hyperion's bargain-priced Helios series. Oxford-born John Mahon (1748- 1834), who was writing clarinet concertos more than a decade before Mozart got around to it, was of Irish extraction, and retired to Dublin in the 1820s. He was no Mozart, of course, and his Second Concerto, with its Scottish-flavoured slow movement, favours the clarinet's upper register in a way that will surprise many modern listeners. Two later duets for husky-toned basset horns have no such limitations. JC Bach (through a Concerted Symphony for two clarinets, bassoon, two horns, two flutes and strings) and James Hook (a backward-looking Clarinet Concerto of 1812) provide meatier fare. The period instruments greatly enhance the appeal of all the music. www.hyperion-records.co.uk