Latest releases reviewed

CATOIRE: PIANO TRIO OP 14; ELEGY OP 26; PIANO QUARTET OP 31 Room-Music Hyperion CDA 67512 ***

The music of Russian composer Georgy Catoire (1861-1926) has been largely swallowed up in the cracks of time. He had to overcome family resistance to a musical career, Russian resistance to his Wagnerian inclinations, and, in spite of the encouragement of Tchaikovsky, endured unsuccessful relationships with a number of teachers. The floridly overwritten F minor Piano Trio of 1900 parades debts to Tchaikovsky and Franck. The later Piano Quartet in A minor and Elegy for violin and piano, both of 1916, show a development towards a world that's more fluid and Scriabinesque, albeit with frequent anchor points of common chords underpinning the perfumed arabesques. The most successful balance of the stylistic tensions between past and future are found in the short, evocative Elegy. www.hyperion-records.co.uk

Michael Dervan

RACHMANINOV: TRIO ÉLÉGIAQUE IN D MINOR OP 9; SHOSTAKOVICH: TRIO IN E MINOR OP 67 Dmitri Makhtin (violin), Alexander Kniazev (cello), Boris Berezovsky (piano) Warner Classics 2564 61937-2 *****

Rachmaninov's Trio élégiaque, Op 9 (not to be confused with an earlier, slighter Trio élégiaque in G minor), is chamber music in the grandest, heart-on-sleeve style. The model was Tchaikovsky's A minor Trio, which was written on the death of Nikolai Rubinstein. Rachmaninov's trio, in turn, was written on the death of Tchaikovsky. Shostakovich's Trio in E minor, another memorial work, written in 1944 on the death of the composer's great friend Ivan Sollertinsky, is more spare and bleak, more sharply cutting in its blackness and despair, and altogether more individual in its handling of the medium. The three Russian musicians play both works as to the manner born, grappling successfully with the sprawling turmoil of the Rachmaninov, and cleaving a clear and sometimes devastating path through the Shostakovich. www.warnerclassics.com

Michael Dervan

THE ORIGIN OF FIRE -MUSIC AND VISIONS OF HILDEGARD VON BINGEN Anonymous 4 Harmonia Mundi HMU 907327 *****

All good things come to an end, and Anonymous 4, the medieval vocal group whose CD sales run into seven figures, have decided to stop working as a full-time group. The last scheduled Harmonia Mundi CD from this all-female quartet (which, since 1998, have had Irish soprano Jacqueline Horner in their line-up) finds them returning to the music of the medieval visionary, Hildegard von Bingen. Four visions are set in a framework of hymns, sequences and antiphons, all delivered with Anonymous 4's hallmark purity of blend and intonation. The music is at once austere and sensual, plaintive and probing, familiar yet different, as it spins itself to unexpected lengths. www.harmoniamundi.com

Michael Dervan

FOSS: COMPLETE PIANO MUSIC Scott Dunn Naxos 8.559179 ****

Berlin-born Lukas Foss, now in his eighties, moved to the US in 1937 at the age of 15, and wrote the first pieces included here, a Grotesque Dance and Four Two-Part Inventions, the following year. As in the other early works - a Passacaglia (1940), a Fantasy Rondo (1944), a Prelude in D (1951) and a Scherzo Ricercato (1954) -the style is a sophisticated, communicative neo-classicism. Solo works for the composer's own instrument (Foss was at one time pianist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and also a conductor of distinction) are absent from the time of his mid-career engagement with improvisation and the avant-garde. He returned to the piano with Solo in 1981, a dissonant, minimalist moto perpetuo, and followed this with a light Bernstein tribute, For Lenny, Variation on "New York, New York". Neither the early Sonatina nor the late Curriculum Vitae Tango feature in this otherwise admirable "complete" collection. www.naxos.com

Michael Dervan