Benny Goodman: Clarinet Classics (Pearl)
The gem here is the recording of the trio for clarinet, violin and piano that Benny Goodman commissioned from the great Hungarian composer, Bela Bartok. Goodman, put up to the idea by the violinist Joseph Szigeti, requested a two-movement work, to fit on two sides of a 78rpm disc. What he got, with apologies, was in three movements and twice as long. All three men assembled in Los Angeles in 1940 for the premiere recording, an enterprise in which each managed to retain his own individual character. Goodman is a lot freer and looser in Bartok than in the Mozart Quintet (with the Budapest Quartet), and there's something unusually casual in the tone he produces in the E flat Sonata from Brahms's Op 120. The disc usefully broadens the picture of a player now mostly remembered for his work in jazz.
- Michael Dervan
George Rochberg: String Quartets 3-6. Concord Quartet (New World, 2 CDs)
American George Rochberg, who turned 80 last year, is famous as a serialist composer who unexpectedly turned and embraced tonality again. The change was occasioned by the death of his teenage son in 1961. Serial techniques, he felt, simply couldn't deliver what he found himself wanting to put into his music. He didn't actually abandon serialism or atonal writing, he simply added tonal passages and movements, often with direct quotations from the classics, and even, in the Sixth Quartet, a set of variations on Pachelbel's Canon. It's an approach for which he's been both derided and praised, and the style is well exemplified in the Concord Quartet's excellent 1970s and 1980s recordings of works they were intimately associated with.
- Michael Dervan
Messiaen: Lucy Shelton (soprano), John Constable (piano) (Koch International)
Messiaen's Harawi is the first part of an unusual Tristan and Isolde trilogy, the others being the Turangalilasymphonie and the choral Cinq rechants. Inspired by the culture of the Incas (harawi is a kind of Indian love song), Messiaen wrote the text himself, sometimes using Quetchua words for their incantatory sound value rather than their meaning. The exoticism and ecstasy of the song cycle place it in a class of its own. There really is nothing quite like what Paul Griffiths characterised as "one of the few surrealist masterpieces in music". It calls for supercharged singing, a voice with a sense of effortless amplitude, which, unfortunately Lucy Shelton doesn't quite have. It's the most brittle moments which come off best.
- Michael Dervan
