Latest CD releases reviewed

FANTASIE

Nicola Benedetti (violin) Deutsche Grammophon 476 3399 ***

This is likely to both delight and frustrate fans of young Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti. There's the typically gutsy playing of some warhorse favourites (Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen, Saint-Saëns's Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Ravel's Tzigane with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrekno) as well as altogether more inward accounts of Rachmaninov's Vocalise, Fauré's Après un rêveand Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegelwith pianist Alexi Grynyuk. But the disc has been padded out with existing recordings of Vaughan Williams's Lark Ascendingand Massenet's Meditation,which fans will already have. Benedetti, by the way, has a busy season in Ireland, playing the Tchaikovsky concerto with the Czech Philharmonic on October 27th and on tour with the RTÉ NSO in March. www.tinyurl.com/ 5b9s4r

HUBAY: VIOLIN CONCERTOS NOS 1 & 2; SCÈNES DE LA CSÁRDA NOS 3 & 4

Chloë Hanslip (violin), Bournemouth SO/Andrew Mogrelia Naxos 8.572078 ***

The renaissance of interest in the Hungarian composer and violinist Jenö Hubay (1858-1937) continues apace with this new disc from English violinist Chloë Hanslip. Hubay was a near contemporary of Mahler, Strauss and Debussy, but his music was cast in the romantic mould of an earlier generation. One of his most famous short pieces, Hejri Kati, in delicious Hungarian dance style, is included here. It rather outclasses the first two of his four violin concertos, which journey skilfully but rather too anonymously through familiar late 19th-century violinistic hurdles. Chloë Hanslip plays with taste and character, but the orchestral handling of conductor Andrew Mogrelia is rather routine. www.naxosdirect.ie

Phantasm Linn Records CKD 339 ***

This disc brings together all the five-and six-part viol concerts by the Jacobean composer John Ward (ca 1589-1638). His style does not place Ward among the most overtly exciting composers of the genre. He’s a patient explorer of gently rolling countryside rather than a man who wants to climb rocky peaks or explore dramatic scenery. That doesn’t, however, remove all surprise from these pieces. Ward does engage in chromatic adventures, which are a bit like the unexpected discovery of a gentleman’s folly in an otherwise decorous landscape. The four members of Phantasm, joined by Emilia Benjamin and Mikko Perkola, play, with flowing ease, these pieces from a repertoire praised in its day for its “pathetical stories” and “divine rapture” www.linnrecords.com

SORABJI: LEGENDARY WORKS FOR PIANO

Michael Habermann (piano) BMS BMS427-429CD (3 CDs) ***

It’s third or fourth time around the block for Michael Habermann’s pioneering recordings of the piano music of the English composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (aka Leon Dudley, 1892-1988). Sorabji had a famously thorny public persona, and for most of his life discouraged public performances of his work. Habermann received permission to play them in the mid-1970s, and these recordings (made between 1979 and 1995, some of them at the concert premières of pieces a half-century old) document the idiosyncratic style of one of British music’s strangest figures. Most approachable in these dedicated performances are the impressionistic earlier works, where Sorabji was absorbing lessons from Scriabin and Busoni, and before his extraordinary musical gigantism became often impenetrable. www.wyastone.co.uk