The latest releases reviewed
JAMES MACMILLAN: THE WORLD'S RANSOMING; THE CONFESSION OF
ISOBEL GOWDIE
Christine Pendrill (cor anglais), London
Symphony Orchestra/ Colin Davis
LSO Live LSO 0124
****
This London Symphony Orchestra CD, recorded live at the Barbican in London, couples James MacMillan's 1990 Proms success, The Confession of Isobel Gowdie (inspired by the fate of a Scottish Catholic witch), with his later The World's Ransoming for cor anglais and orchestra (Passion music focusing on Maundy Thursday). MacMillan is a surveyor and synthesiser rather than an innovator, and the tensions and conflicts of his music are as graspable as the passionate espousals of his sources of inspiration - his non-programmatic style of overtness has been described as lurid. Colin Davis conducts with a sure sense of trajectory, and the slightly oppressive acoustic of the recordings adds expressive weight. lso.co.uk
MOZART: PIANO CONCERTOS IN G K453; IN D
MINOR K466
Norwegian Chamber Orchestra/ Leif Ove Andsnes
(piano)
EMI Classics 500 2812
****
When it comes to Mozart, Norway's leading pianist, Leif Ove Andsnes, is a cooler customer than Stephen Hough. Andsnes uses a more restricted palette of colour, is more consistently sharp in articulation, and shows an awareness of period performing style in playing along with the orchestra outside of his solo passages. Hough seems to want to relocate the music outside of widely perceived barriers. Andsnes seems to want to show that its extraordinary depths can be plumbed by seeking out subtlety while not so obviously disturbing the sheen of its surfaces. And he secures finely graded, incisive playing that fully matches his purpose from the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. www.emiclassics.com
SPOHR: DAS BEFREITE DEUTSCHLAND OVERTURE;
SYMPHONY NO 4 (DIE WEIHE DER TÖNE); SYMPHONY NO 5
Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana/ Howard
Shelley
Hyperion CDA 67622
***
Louis Spohr (1784-1859) is just the kind of composer you might expect to feature at the Wexford Festival, an early romantic whose high reputation plummeted in the years after his death. His symphonies were once regarded as an essential link between the classical Viennese symphonists and the world of Mendelssohn and Schumann, and Schumann admired Spohr's Fifth (1837) for its "earnest solemnity". This second volume of Howard Shelley's Hyperion survey of the symphonies shows again a composer who, to modern ears, strays uncomfortably close to a style that falls into the easy listening category. Some moments in the Larghetto of the Fifth and in the overture, Das befreite Deutschland, come closest to lift-off. www.hyperion-records.co.uk
A MOZART ALBUM
Stephen Hough (piano)
Hyperion CDA 67598
****
Stephen Hough sets the tone for his first solo Mozart CD in a sleeve-note that dismisses images of porcelain, marble and sugar in favour of an experimentalism he sees as being "as wild as anything to be found in Beethoven". He brings the sophisticated range of his pianistic skill to bear on Mozart in a way that's unprissy and fully open to the forward-looking aspects of two Fantasias in C minor and the Sonata in B flat, K333. He then turns to later work, a Mozartian hommage (by JB Cramer), an arrangement (Ignaz Friedman), "transformations" (his own), and a fantasia (worked on by Liszt and Busoni), where his fertile, romantic temperament is even more fully at home. www.hyperion-records.co.uk
