May: String Quartet; Fleischmann:

Piano Quintet. Hugh Tinney (piano),

Vanbrugh Quartet

Marco Polo, 8.223888 (55 mins) Dial-a-track code: 1201

Sixty years ago Frederick May (1911-85) and Aloys Fleischmann (1910-92) constituted the vanguard of, Irish composition. The Vanbrugh Quartet's new CD in Marco Polo's Irish Composer series brings together two works from this period, May's Quartet in C minor, completed in 1936, and Fleischmann's Piano Quintet, written two years later. The two men were up to remarkable things in these years. May, having studied in Dublin with Larchet and in London with Vaughan Williams, had planned to study in Vienna with Berg, a remarkably adventurous allegiance, for a young Irishman to be considering. His plans were thwarted only by Berg's untimely death at the end of 1935 - an event which, like May's encroaching deafness, found reflection in the music of his quartet.

Fleischmann, German born and trained, knew his destiny lay in Ireland; wouldn't for the world stay in Munich, the Celtic pull was too strong." And at the tender age of 24, just four years before the writing of his Piano Quintet, he secured an appointment as Professor of Music at University College Cork, and became a major pillar in the musical life of the city.

It's perhaps unsurprising, then, that the more overt traces of Irishness are to be found in the quintet, a four movement work clearly rooted in the European tradition of romantic nationalism. The quartet is more forward looking, a landmark work in which May introduced for the first time a flavour of modernism to Irish music. In this new issue the Vanbrugh Quartet, sensitively partnered by pianist Hugh Tinney in the Fleischmann, are strong advocates of both works, and their handling of the May is generally lighter in texture and more subtle in shading than the Aeolian Quartet on their pioneering Claddagh LP.

Mahler: Symphony No Adagietto from Symphony No 5. Benita Valente (soprano), Maureen Forrester (contralto), London Symphony Chorus, Ardwyn Singers, BBC Welsh Chorus, Cardiff Polyphonic Choir, Dyfed Choir, LSO/Gilbert Kaplan. Conifer Classics, 75605 51277 2 (139 mins)

Dial-a-track code: 1311

Gilbert Kaplan has a major obsession: Mahler's Second Symphony. Kaplan is a successful publisher (of the Institutional Investor in New York) whose interest in Mahler's Second seems to know no bounds. He owns the composer's manuscript score and has published it in a lavish facsimile. He studied conducting with the sole purpose of being able to conduct it - which, at this stage, he's been called upon to do with more than 30 orchestras. And in, the late 1980s he recorded the work, in order to provide an even wider dissemination for his attempt to get as close as possible to the composer's intentions.

Now, in a two disc set proudly headlined The Kaplan, Mahler Edition, he's gone even further. As well as the Second Symphony, the new set includes the Adagietto front the Fifth Symphony, a 1992 digital recording of the piano rolls made by Mahler in 1905, and some 20 minutes of reminiscences collected in the 1960s from people who knew and worked with the composer. That's by no means all, however. There's a 144 page booklet to bolster the rationale of the performance (the five movements of which have been cued into more than 40 tracks) and provide relevant back ground information, including over 100 letters. There's also a reproduction of the first printed edition of the score, running to another 200 pages plus. The cornucopia is rounded out with The Mahler Album, an interactive CD ROM presentation of photographs, paintings, caricatures and text (with background music!) to be found on the second disc.

The actual performance is finely calculated and executed, with a recording that's both detailed and spectacular. Kaplan's cherished tempo choices and his retrieval of detail are, it must be said, sometimes carried through at the expense of naturalness of flow. But it's rarely hard to work out what point is being made, for, if ever there was a recording with an agenda, this is it. Unique, not only in the annals of amateur conducting; and in its own way unmissable.