HAYDN: DIE SCHÖPFUNG
RIAS Kammerchor, Freiburger Barockorchester/René Jacobs Harmonia Mundi HMC 992039.40(2 CDs + DVD) ****

You’ll either love or hate René Jacobs’s new period-instruments recording of Haydn’s best – and best-loved – oratorio. On the one hand, it’s a performance on the tightest of interpretative reins. Not that it’s rigid, but the interventionist Jacobs shapes the music as if it were as pliable as putty in his hands. On the other hand, there are improvisatory freedoms in the fortepiano accompaniment to the recitatives that may well take your breath away. With strong choral singing and soloists (Julia Kleiter, Maximilian Schmitt, Johannes Weisser) who integrate fully with the conductor’s vision, this performance is refreshing, thought-provoking, and sometimes just downright provocative. www.tinyurl.com/ 6mchwb

BRAHMS, RACHMANINOV, SCHUBERT, RAVEL

Martha Argerich, Nelson Freire (two pianos) Deutsche Grammophon 477 8570*****

The audience at the NCH last April loved Martha Argerich’s long- awaited return to Dublin. This recital of two piano music with Nelson Freire was recorded a few months later at the Salzburg Festival, and finds the long-standing duo in fine form. The motto has to be, expect the unexpected. In Brahms’s Haydn Variations, the playing shows well-oiled smoothness and surges of great power. But the piece still sounds like something of a warm-up for the highly charged, kaleidoscopic spunk of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances. There’s a fascinating feline grace in Schubert’s Rondo in A.

And Ravel's La Valseis both so coquettish and tumultuous that those piano competition wizards who like to play the two-handed version seem plain and even puny by comparison. www.dgwebshop. com