Bach: Partitas and Sonatas for solo violin Vol 2. Rachel Podger (baroque violin) (Channel Classics)
Musical performers are, inevitably, mediators. And like mediators in other spheres of activity, they can be prone to sweeten according to their own taste some of the messages they carry; hoping, perhaps, to gain a wider reception. There's something refreshingly unsweetened about Rachel Podger's solo Bach. She seems to confront the consequences of playing without vibrato more thoroughly than most of her colleagues. It's not that there's no vibrato in her playing, though there's a lot less than from most baroque violinists; it's that its function is different. The result is playing that's impressively granitic, sounding more like something from another age than most of the period-performance music-making that's to be encountered nowadays.
Michael Dervan
Smetana: Chamber Music, Vols 1 & 2 (Supraphon)
If you look at a catalogue of Smetana's music, you'll find the longest list is of piano music. But, outside of his Czech homeland, none of this retains a presence before the musical public. Perhaps the preponderance of dance forms didn't leave him the scope for personal expression he found in chamber music: the early Piano Trio, written in response to the early death of his daughter Bedriska, the First String Quartet, From My Life, autobiographical to the point of depicting the tinnitus of the composer's deafness through a piercing high E. The performances on these two, separately available CDs, are in the best Czech tradition. The Panocha Quartet sound more persuasive on disc than in concert, and the Guarneri Piano Trio bring structural cohesion as well as emotional conviction to the Piano Trio.
Michael Dervan
Constant Lambert - Volume 1, Conductor (Pearl)
If Constant Lambert had left nothing but Music Ho!, his stimulating 1934 study of "music in decline", he would have secured a special place in the annals of 20th century music. Of course, he did much more, as composer, conductor, and arranger. This CD finds him conducting Warlock (a personal friend), Rawsthorne (who later married Lambert's widow, Isabel), and Delius. Warlock's best work is here, the intensely bleak Yeats settings of The Curlew - the finest of 20th century British song cycles - plus the Capriol suite, delivered with light spring and deftness. Rawsthorne, now emerging from obscurity, nearly 30 years after his death, is well served in the Street Corner overture and Symphonic Studies. The three short pieces by Delius, including Cuckoo are sensitively done, too.
Michael Dervan