This week's classical CDs reviewed

ABEL: THE DREXEL MANUSCRIPT

Paolo Pandolfo (bass viol)
Glossa GCD 920410★★★★★

Carl Friedrich Abel (1723-87) is a kind of anomaly in the history of music. He was a friend and entrepreneurial colleague of Johann Christian Bach in London. The young Mozart copied out one of his symphonies in full as a model to follow. Yet Abel's great claim to fame is that he continued to play and compose for the bass viol (and to give improvisations on it) long after the instrument had been generally abandoned. The pieces that have survived in the Drexel Manuscript (in the library of Thomas Gainsborough, another viol fan, who also painted portraits of Abel) are clearly a passion for Paolo Pandolfo. He makes the mélange of these pieces, a baroque sound world expressed through a classical sensibility not normally associated with it, endlessly fascinating. www.glossamusic.com

HOSOKAWA: TABI-BITO; SEN VI; DIE LOTOSBLUME
Isao Nakamura (percussion), WDR Rundfunkchor Köln/Rupert Huber, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln/Ken Takeseki
Stradivarius STR 35818★★★★
The common thread here is percussion. But don't expect an Evelyn Glennie-style drum-fest. "The silence supports the sound and gives life to it," explains Hosokawa, drawing on an explanation from a master calligrapher that "the line which is visible on the paper is only part of the total invisible line of the movement" of a larger brush stroke. The striking silences of Sen VI (1993) for solo percussion illustrate the point. There is a lot of shimmering evanescence from the orchestra, and lightly touched tingles from the percussion in Tabi-bito(Wanderer, 2000). The haunting clashes of the choral Heine setting, Die Lotosblume(The Lotus Flower, 2006), are presented as a more flowing narrative. www.stradivarius.it

PENDERECKI: UTRENJA
Warsaw Boys' Choir, Warsaw Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra/Antoni Wit
Naxos 8.572031★★★
Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki's oratorio Utrenja (1970-71) takes its title from the Orthodox Church's matins. It's in two parts, The Entombment of Christand The Resurrection of Christ, and Penderecki – at the time a leader in stretching the boundaries of the orchestrally and vocally possible – here throws in the proverbial kitchen sink. It's technically more adventurous than his St Luke Passion, which created such a stir in the 1960s, but the fashionably avant-gardist extremes seem less focused than in the earlier work. It's as if his responses in creating startling effect after startling effect are simply too quick, and the goal too easily won. This finely recorded new Polish performance is as ardently committed as you could wish. www.naxosdirect.ie

RUBINSTEIN: CELLO SONATAS
Jirí Bárta (cello), Hamish Milne (piano)
Hyperion CDA 67660★★★
Anton Rubinstein (1829-94) was a pianist to be named in the same breath as Liszt (with whom he had studied) and a composer whose substantial output was more inclined to German taste than that of his native Russia He wrote 19 operas (including a Christusand a Nero, as well The Demon, seen at the Wexford Festival of 1994), six symphonies, concertos, songs, and lots of piano and chamber music. His sheer facility may have been his undoing – Brahms seems to have thought so. His work is lyrically clear and technically resourceful, but harmonically rather staid. These new performances of his two cello sonatas are clean but sometimes strain too hard at making statements more impressive than the music can sustain. www.tinyurl.com/5jub7c