Beethoven: String Quartets Vols III & IV. Vanbrugh Quartet (Intim Musik)

The Vanbrugh Quartet continues its cycle of the Beethoven Quartets, recorded last year for the Swedish label Intim Musik, with two discs of middle-period works, the three Rasumovsky Quartets of Op. 59, and the Harp, Op. 74. As in the earlier volumes, the playing is extrovert, strong on immediacy and animation, and the recording has exceptional vividness to match. The Vanbrugh's particular search for tonal richness brings with it phrasing that's often peakily accented, the musical dialogue showing, as it were, the raised voice of public speaking. With a pretty consistent firmness of drive, the Vanbrughs favour an assertiveness of utterance which downplays elements of mystery and ambiguity in the music.

By Michael Dervan

Haba: Violin Works. Antonin Novak. (Supraphon)

Czech composer Alois Haba (1893-1973) was one of the daddies of microtonal music. He began his work with quarter-tones in his Suite for strings of 1917 and was later involved in the invention of quarter-tone pianos (with two and even three manuals) and other microtonal instruments. Antonin Novak, leader of the Prague National Theatre Orchestra, has recorded eight of the composer's violin works, including two quarter-tone pieces for violin solo, and one for quarter-tone violin and quarter-tone piano. The earlier violin and piano works strain uncomfortably at the limitations of an almost salon style. The quarter-tone pieces do the opposite, clothing the microtonal novelty in conventional melodic formulae. The violin playing, at its best in the late solo Suite, Op 93, elsewhere sounds exploratory, even tentative, rather than confident.

By Michael Dervan

Mikhail Pletnev plays Chopin (DG)

In front of the orchestra he founded - the Russian National - Mikhail Pletnev, gold medallist at the 1978 Tchaikovsky Competition, is a sober, searching interpreter. At the keyboard in Chopin he's freewheeling and fanciful, engaging in musical journeys which are full of hesitations to inspect incidental detail and detours to present the familiar in an unexpected light. Anyone who was at either of his Dublin recitals will know to expect pianism of magic and wonder, and the experience of playing with so little discrepancy between imagination and finger is undeniably thrilling. But with most of the music on this disc (including the Sonata in B minor and the Fantasy in F minor), the impression is that he's not so much playing it as playing with it.

By Michael Dervan