Latest CD releases reviewed
BEETHOVEN: 3 SONATAS OP 10; PATHÉTIQUE SONATA
Maurizio Pollini (piano) Deutsche Grammophon 474 810-2
****
These are the earliest of Beethoven's sonatas that Maurizio Pollini has tackled on disc, the first to take him back to the Beethoven of the late 1790s, for the extraordinarily varied sonatas of Op. 10 and the Pathétique. As might be expected, Pollini offers full-toned Beethoven playing of high technical finesse. There's no denying a certain severity in expression, even at times a burliness of manner which seems intended to leave no listener in doubt about Pollini's take on Beethoven's seriousness of purpose, a seriousness which is conveyed with often riveting conviction. The limitation is at the other extreme. It's not that these performances shy away from lightness of touch, but that, even when the music's humour is at its highest, Pollini's way of conveying it can be, well, a bit earnest.
www.dgclassics.com
Michael Dervan
BRIDGE: THE SEA; ENTER SPRING; SUMMER
New Zealand SO/James Judd Naxos 8.557167
***
British music was slow in catching up with European trends during the early decades of the 20th century. In the 1920s, Frank Bridge (1879-1941) became one of the first British composers to follow European leads, though the development was more pronounced in his chamber music than in the nature-inspired orchestral works here. For all its movement and colour, Judd's performance of the four-movement suite, The Sea, lacks the suggestive motion which is so difficult to remove from Debussy's La Mer, written six years earlier. Bridge's most famous pupil, Benjamin Britten, conducted this as less of an armchair experience. There's softer music here (Summer and Two Tone Poems) and more angular (Enter Spring of 1927), but the playing, though clean and neat, doesn't always generate the necessary degrees of atmosphere and amplitude.
www.naxos.com
Michael Dervan
JANÁCEK: CHAMBER MUSIC, ORCHESTRAL WORKS
Various performers Decca 475 523-2 (5 CDs)
***
This set marking the 150th anniversary of the birth of Leos Janácek combines the bulk of the London Sinfonietta's 1970s recordings of his piano (Paul Crossley) and chamber music (conducted, where necessary, by the modernistically dry David Atherton) with superior recordings of orchestral music under Charles Mackerras (the Sinfonietta and Taras Bulba), Riccardo Chailly (Glagolitic Mass), François Huybrechts (Lachian Dances) and Neville Marriner (Suite for Strings), and the string quartets from the Gabrieli Quartet. The music covers the full span of Janacek's career, from works that are 19th-century in spirit as well as date, through the development of his individual voice up to the highly characteristic, tightly-woven collages of short-breathed motifs into which, as an old man, he breathed such powerful fire.
www.deccaclassics.com
Michael Dervan
SATIE: RELÂCHE; VEXATIONS; MUSIQUE D'AMEUBLEMENT; HINDEMITH: CONCERTPIECE FOR TRAUTONIUM
Michel Dalberto (piano), Ensemble Ars Nova/Marius Constant, Oskar Sala (trautonium), Munich CO/Hans Stadlmair Apex 2564 60259-2
***
This unusually provocative CD couples repetitive, non-narrative music by Erik Satie with a piece Paul Hindemith wrote in 1931 for Friedrich Trautwein's new electronic instrument, the trautonium. Satie's Musique d'Ameublement was written as an experiment in background "furniture" music in 1920. Out of context, this can seem almost as maddening as the entr'acte which accompanied, mostly with detachment, the images of a surrealist film by René Clair, shown between the acts of the 1924 "ballet instantanéiste", Relâche (scenario by Picabia). The piano piece Vexations of 1893 invites 840 repetitions (just 10 minutes' worth is given here), an invitation famously taken up by John Cage. The trautonium, clarinet and trumpet-like on the one hand, reaching to cheap synthesizer-like phasey effects on the other, finds Hindemith in functional mode.
Michael Dervan
