Berwald: Piano Trios 1-3. Andras Kiss (violin), Csaba Onczay (cello), Ilona Prunyi (piano) (Naxos)
Sweden's greatest composer of the 19th century, Franz Berwald (1796-1868), had such a difficult time making a career out of music that he engaged in a miscellany of other activities. He opened an orthopaedic institute, managed a glass factory, launched a saw mill, but only heard one of his four surviving symphonies in performance. The disillusioned composer abandoned the symphony in 1845, and turned to chamber music. The three piano trios here were written between 1849 and 1851. Berwald, who had little formal training, had a streak of musical individualism which distinguishes him from a host of other figures whose work hovered in the loose ambit of Mendelssohn. The best of the trios, full of characteristic invention, is the first, and the Hungarian ensemble's playing is sensitively idiomatic.
- Michael Dervan
Beethoven: The Named Piano Sonatas (Nos 8, 14, 15, 21, 23, 26, 29). Artur Schnabel (Pearl, two CDs)
As the first pianist to record the complete sonatas of Beethoven, Artur Schnabel (1882-1951) was assured a particularly influential position in the history of performance. His was a challenging art, as Pearl's new two-CD compilation of seven major nicknamed sonatas (GEMS 0004) amply demonstrates. It's not for nothing he published a collection of essays under the title Music and the Line of Most Resistance. Schnabel was a profound musical intellectual (he also composed atonal music of high dissonance), but what comes across from his playing is a special eagerness and urgency of communication. To have such visionary music-making expressed with such immediacy and force - sometimes even appearing to tumble over itself with enthusiasm - makes for essential if often uncomfortable listening.
- Michael Dervan
Mauricio Kagel: Playback Play. Ensemble MusikFabrik NRW (Winter & Winter)
It was in 1996 that Mauricio Kagel, creator extraordinaire of music theatre pieces, visited a music fair for the first time. The outcome was Playback Play, a radio piece subtitled "News from the Music Fair". Kagel revels in the incongruity of it all - the sheer diversity of sounds and musics, the unlikely collisions, the blending of voices (announcements) and instruments, the shoulder-rubbing of the serious, the trivial, and the downright trashy. Of course, he's at pains to point out, it's not really a representation, but an interpretation of "incessant professional patter" mixed into "an unimaginable polyphony". Kagel has long had a fascination with these kinds of conjunctions, whether derived from reality or imagination. This latest will surely infuriate as many people as it enthrals. Explore with caution.
- Michael Dervan
Bartok/Weiner/Enescu: Folk Inspirations (Chandos Collect)
With jazz, trad and world music practitioners making so much use of Eastern European ideas these days, this is a timely compilation; but how do Bartok's Hungarian Pictures, Weiner's Hungarian Folkdance Suite and Enescu's Romanian Rhapsodies sound to 21st-century ears? Quaint, is the answer. Weiner wraps his peasant tunes in a lush orchestral wrapping, and if Enescu's skittering, sighing rhapsodies hit a more exotic note, it is Bartok's simple folk melodies which have the sharpest, spiciest flavour. Neeme Jarvi leads the Philharmonia and Royal Scottish National Orchestras in spirited performances of these merry dances, recorded in 1990.
- Arminta Wallace
