Anyone who heard last year's Kilkenny Arts Week violin and piano recital by Vadim Repin and Boris Berezovsky will find this impressive duo in equally fine form on their latest CD (Erato 0630-151100-2, 60 mins; Dial-a-track code: 1531). The coupling is an unusual one, Ravel's Sonata in G with the Sonata Epica, Op. 57, by the still little-known composer, Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951). ,Repin and Berezovsky give us an unsweetened Ravel, chunky and argumentative but in no sense shy of the requisite slinkiness. I don't think I've ever heard the central Blues movement sound as well as it does here.
It was not for nothing that Medtner gave the Epic subtitle to his four-movement Third Violin Sonata. At a quarter of an hour, its first movement alone is just some two minutes shorter than the whole of the Ravel, and the complete piece runs to around three-quarters of an hour. Medtner, a Russian of German extraction, was a classicist by conviction. "What is `modernism'?" he asked. "The fashion for fashion ... the tacit accord of a whole generation to expel the Muse." His musical inclinations were rooted in the 19th century and his music has little of the emotional immediacy and openness of his good friend Rachmaninov's; although he was a prolific writer of sonatas, he is now best remembered for his short character pieces, known in English as Fairy Tales.
The Sonata Epica shares with a lot of the composer's output a lack of immediate distinctiveness. The craftsmanship is always fine, but what has been variously called the sense of courtesy" or even the "priestly" feeling embedded in the music can make for an effect of cumulative greyness in spite of the moment-by-moment resourcefulness of the writing. The intention of the new recording, I'm sure, is to win new friends for something close to the performers' hearts by the popular coupling. And it's hard to imagine the Medtner being more persuasively presented than it is here.
Persuasive, too, is Nikolaus Harnoncourt's new collection of Beethoven overtures with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (Teldec 06 30-13140-2, 76 mins; Dial-a-track code: 1641). The COE uses modern instruments, but under Harnoncourt they play with the stylistic sensitivity one associates with period instruments; and transparency of texture is high among this set's virtues. The recordings, mostly live, were made between 1993 and 1996, and include all four overtures associated with Fidelio, and those for Egmont, Die Ruinen von Athen, Coriolan and Die Geschopfe des Prometheus, this last with a surprise ending which takes in the storm music from Beethoven's original sequence of incidental music.
The great Argentinian king of tango, Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) used to be a composer whose name, in this part of the world, was mainly encountered in guita recitals. You won't, for instance, find a listing for him in the 20-volume New Grove of 1980. In recent years, however, the renaissance - of interest in his work has even brought it into the orchestral domain - the Ulster Orchestra featured a number of his pieces in the Sonorities Festival of 1993. For such an inveterate repertoire explorer as Gidon Kremer, Piazzolla almost seems like natural territory, and the Latvian born violinist has just brought out a collection of arrangements under the title Hommage A Piazzolla (Nonesuch 7559-79407-2, 71 mins; Dial a track code: 1751). Predominantly slow and melancholy, these arrangements for ensembles from duo to quintet, give Kremer and his friends a club-atmosphere opportunity, as it were, to let their hair down in smoky, late-night mood. The disc comes with an endorsement note from leading minimalist composer John Adams, whose claims, however inflated ("the discovery of Piazzolla was like the finding of some exotic and dangerous potency drug"), give a clear indication of the veneration which is now accorded this composer.
Veneration for a figure long officially treated with odium was a feature of Stravinsky's visit to the Soviet Union in 1962. The composer's encounter with Russian orchestras unfamiliar with his music can't have been easy. But, in spite of some of the obvious roughnesses, the results, available on Stravinsky In Moscow (Melodiya 7432,1 33220 2, 68 mins; Dial-a-track code: 1861) communicate a palpable, sense of occasion; the disc even includes a few end-of-concert words of thanks from the great man himself.
