The latest releases reviewed

If you think of Brahms's piano music as being rich, heavy, earnest and portentous, then Nicholas Angelich's new recording of the four late sets of piano pieces is just the thing for you. Angelich's delivery tends towards the emotionally overwrought. He emphasises the gravity of what's being communicated, and makes copious underlinings and hesitations to drive home the weightiness of the undertaking. There's no doubting the fine technical control in this very single-minded, often one-sided view. But the lighter connotations of the titles Capriccio, Intermezzo, Fantasia, are overlooked, as they have been by so many players. www.virginclassics.com    MICHAEL DERVAN

SCHUBERT: STRING QUINTET; STRING TRIO IN B FLAT D471
Raphael Ensemble
Hyperion CDH 55305
*****

The members of the Raphael Ensemble, led by Irish Chamber Orchestra artistic director Anthony Marwood, had fire in their bellies when they made this recording of Schubert's great C major String Quintet back in 1994. The playing has a kind of disciplined abandon that's rare enough on the concert platform and rarer still in the recording studio. The sound is forward and immediate enough to catch some moments of roughness in the tone. But the thrust is unfailingly persuasive, and the players are as sensitive when they delve inward as when they effectively seem to be playing their hearts out. www.hyperion-records.co.uk    MICHAEL DERVAN

SCHUMANN: CELLO CONCERTO; BRAHMS: SERENADE NO 1
Natalia Gutman (cello), Mahler CO/ Claudio Abbado
Deutsche Grammophon 476 5786
***

Natalia Gutman seems to take the "Not too fast" marking for the first movement of Schumann's Cello Concerto to mean it shouldn't sound fast at all. It's a matter of animation more than speed and, pleasing as it is to hear so uncluttered an approach, the ultimate effect, as throughout her performance, is a distancing one, the perfection of preservation rather than the rough and tumble of life. Brahms's two early serenades, major orchestral works pre-dating his First Symphony,

are scandalously neglected by orchestral programmers. In the first of them Claudio Abbado takes a rich-hued, autumnal approach which suits this nearly 50-minute work very well. www.deutsche grammophon.com   MICHAEL DERVAN

BACH: MOTETS
Hilliard Ensemble
ECM New Series 476 5776
***

The Hilliard Ensemble singing Bach's motets could be a match made in heaven, and this new ECM recording is certainly a remarkable achievement. The general level of technical control and, in particular, the clarity the singers achieve in the complex contrapuntal writing have to rank as exceptional. But there is a levelling force. The music rarely breathes naturally, the phrasing peaks in a way that creates a kind of plateauing effect, and there's more than a bit of English cathedral-style hooting. Also, crucially, the frequent perfection of small-scale detail doesn't result in a presentation that's persuasive as a whole. These immaculately recorded, one-voice-to-a-part performances are both thrilling and frustrating. www.ecmrecords.com

MICHAEL DERVAN