The latest releases reviewed

JONATHAN HARVEY: ANGELS Noëmi Schindler (violin), Les Jeunes Solistes/Rachid Safir Soupir S215 ****

This disc takes its title from The Angels, premiered at the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in King's College, Cambridge, in 1994, a piece that floats fascinatingly in slow, tethered swirls. It's not the only piece here which sounds as if Harvey has taken effects from the world of electro-acoustic music and recreated them for voices - even the solo violin in Sweet/ Winterhart, a 2001 setting of a Shakespeare sonnet (in both English and Celan's German translation) often sounds like an electronic commentary. Spiritual concerns from East and West infuse most of the pieces here (including a Missa brevis, Marahi, How could the soul take flight, and Dum transisset sabbatum), all crafted with an acute choral ear, and expertly performed by Safir's French singers. www.uk.hmboutique.com MICHAEL DERVAN

ANTONIO VIVALDI, VIRTUOSO IMPRESARIO Mhairi Lawson (soprano), La Serenissima/Adrian Chandler (violin) Avie AV 2128 ****

This is the second volume in Avie's series tracing "The Rise of the North Italian Violin Concerto: 1690-1740". Vivaldi, as you might expect, provides a rich harvest, and La Serenissima's director and violin soloist, Adrian Chandler, includes a handful of rare opera arias from a full-voiced Mhairi Lawson for good measure. The performing style steers away a little from the current norm of chunky vitality and drive. There's a sense of extra time and space, providing an attractive airiness. The pieces themselves (the concertos RV370, 561, 134, 243 and 254) include enough arresting ideas to keep anyone happy, the selection featuring a work that avoids the E string in the solo part, and another with two vociferous cellos. www.avierecords.com MICHAEL DERVAN

CHANSON DISCRÈTE Teodoro Anzellotti (accordion) Winter & Winter 910 124-2 ****

On Teodoro Anzellotti's new CD it's the works by Luciano Berio (Sequenza XIII), Toshio Hosokawa (Slow Motion) and Salvatore Sciarrino (Vagabonde blu) that seem perfectly in place. All were written in the past 12 years, with the accordion actually in mind. You might expect the accordion to carry four pieces by Johann Jakob Froberger rather as an organ could. But it doesn't. The invention of the instrument was a century and a half in the future, and its latter-day associations are just too strong - the effect is more that of piano music played on the harpsichord. The recent pieces raise no such issues: Berio deals with "working- class songs, night-clubs, Argentinian tangos and jazz", Hosokawa evokes aspects of Japanese music, and Sciarrino creates a tremulous, nocturnal scenario. www.uk.hmboutique.com MICHAEL DERVAN

SAINT-SAËNS: CELLO SONATA NO 1; SUITE OP 16; THE SWAN, AND OTHER PIECES Emmanuelle Bertrand (cello), Pascal Amoyel (piano) Harmonia Mundi HMC 901962 ****

The public loves Saint-Saëns's First Cello Concerto and The Swan, the cello movement from his Carnival of the Animals, but pays far less attention to his other music for the instrument. Bertrand and Amoyel make a strong case for his First Cello Sonata of 1872. They bring an imposing, growling solemnity to its opening movement, stoke up a storm in the finale, and find a floating calm for the central Andante, where some of the ideas originated in an organ improvisation. The Swan stands head and shoulders above all of the other pieces here, even the Op 16 Suite of 1866, an early instance of what would later be called neo-classicism. www.uk.hmboutique.com MICHAEL DERVAN