San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas: Copland, The Populist (RCA)
Is it not a bit too obvious, you might ask, to record Copland's three best-known ballets in this, the year of his centenary? No, not for Michael Tilson Thomas, whose Copland, The Modernist collection is already four years old. Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1944) are works which have come not only to dwarf the composer's weightier works, but also to epitomise the expression of an outdoor, rural America which Brooklyn-born Copland himself hardly knew at the time. The style was set in motion by Virgil Thomson's 1930s film scores, but its finest expression was to be Copland's gift. These new readings are fresh, sharply coloured, and high in percussive impact, though the full Appalachian Spring is not quite as persuasively energised as the other two.
- Michael Dervan
Weigl: String Quartets 1 & 5. Artis Quartet (Nimbus)
In his day, Karl Weigl (1881-1949) was celebrated and performed by the great and the good of the musical world, Mahler, Schoenberg, Furtwangler and Pablo Casals, among them. In his youth he was a member of the Schoenberg circle. But he clung to the comforts of tonality, and on his enforced emigration to the US in 1938, Schoenberg's letter of recommendation called him "one of the best composers of the old school". In essence, this all means that his music is actually a lot better than you might expect from a composer so thoroughly forgotten. In fact, it's the earlier quartet here, written in 1904 at the age of 23, which is the more impressive, tautly argued, tightly integrated, and fully aware of the musical tendencies that were in the air at the time. The sweeter luxuriance of the Fifth Quartet of 1933 reaches with determined nostalgia back into the 19th century.
- Michael Dervan
Alfred Brendel plays Mozart (Philips)
The sonatas of Mozart, in the words of Artur Schnabel, are unique, because "they are too easy for children, and too difficult for artists". This paradox emerges in performance at one extreme as playing which is too simple, and, at the other, too complicated. It is, of course, possible for simplicity on the surface to be suggestive of altogether deeper undercurrents. Alfred Brendel ploughs a different course. As one of the great musical thinkers of the age, he wears the results of his deep consideration openly in the sonatas here (K331, K570 and K330, plus the A minor Rondo, K511), nudging, hesitating, or dilating, to make his expressive points. This is not to suggest that the playing is mannered - the famous Rondo alla Turca from the Sonata in A, K331, sober, giddy and imposing, is alone enough to reveal the sort of stimulating complexity Brendel deals in.
- Michael Dervan
