Elgar: Violin Concerto, Salut d’amour, Chanson de nuit, Sospiri etc Thomas Bowes (violin), Sinfonia Arcadiana/Nic Fallowfield (Rubicon)
It’s taken me decades to get to grips with Elgar’s Violin Concerto, my Damascene conversion taking place during an accomplished amateur performance I took part in, everything clicking into place during the finale’s long cadenza. I’ve loved it ever since, this sprawling, complex work making more and more sense with each hearing. This new recording (actually taped in 2022) is something pretty special, a performance of incredible energy and personality which packs a huge emotional punch. Recording the concerto was a labour of love for Thomas Bowes, his reading taped at the same Abbey Road studio where Elgar and the 16-year-old Yehudi Menuhin made a famous recording in 1931, Bowes recruiting a high-end session band containing a slew of famous names along with conductor and colleague Nic Fallowfield. The orchestral playing is consistently impressive, Elgar’s bass lines superbly caught. I’ve rarely heard so many details in the extended opening tutti so clearly; sample the lower brass at 2’30”, or the descending horn figure at 2’42”.
There’s something cinematic about the solo violin’s entry three minutes in, as if Fallowfield’s switching from widescreen spectacular mode to a handheld camera and natural lighting. We’re instantly sucked in; it’s like listening to a very English take on Scheherazade. Bowes’s fireworks are spectacular (try the final minutes of the first movement) but he does intimacy equally well, the opening theme of Elgar’s “Andante” played without any affectation, sensitively accompanied by Fallowfield. The huge finale flies by, Elgar’s revisiting of material in the spectacular accompanied cadenza incredibly potent in Bowes’s hands. The dash to the finish is thrilling, the horns magnificently clear in the final bars. You’ll want to cheer, or weep, or both – it’s that good.
The couplings are five short Elgar pieces originally composed for violin and piano, newly arranged for orchestra and solo violin by Bowes’s wife (and occasional duet partner) Eleanor Alberga. The Salut d’amour and Chanson de matin are deliciously done, the highlight being a rapt, intense take on the haunting Sospiri. Intended as another salon piece, it’s a jewel, an epic, tragic slow movement condensed into less than five minutes. Bowes’s very personal sleeve note, tracing his ongoing relationship with Elgar’s music, is a moving read, and it’s sweet that the portrait that the 14-year-old violinist painted of Elgar is reproduced on the booklet cover. I loved this disc. You will too.
Dvořák: Symphony No. 9, Carlos Simon: Four Black American Dances Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Manfred Honeck (Reference Recordings)
Manfred Honeck’s glorious 2014 recording of Dvořák’s 8th Symphony finally gets a sequel, this live performance from February 2025 another zinger. Honeck has a knack for choosing interesting and apposite couplings for warhorses, here giving us Carlos Simon’s Four Black American Dances. First performed in 2023, this short, punchy suite is a set of genre pieces, superbly orchestrated. “Ring Shout” has one of the percussionists banging a sturdy stick on a floorboard, Simon describing a transcendent and religious ritual, the Pittsburgh brass sounding resplendent. There’s a lilting and otherworldly waltz, Simon inspired by the music played at segregated debutante balls in the 1930s. “Tap” recreates dance steps with sharp blows on a snare drum rim and “Holy Dance” is an expression of wild joy, Simon’s overlapping textures suggesting a congregation speaking in tongues.
This disc would be recommendable for the Simon alone, as you’ve probably got umpteen versions of Dvořák 9 already. But, even if that’s the case, this account is incredibly persuasive and magnificently played. Honeck’s typically detailed notes outline his take on how the work should be performed, and he’s invariably convincing. Having the timpani play the orchestral strings’ bass notes at 2’33” (instead of being limited to just E and B) sounds good to me, as does a pronounced gear shift for the lyrical flute theme four minutes in. Dvořák’s “Largo” is expansive but well-sustained, Honeck’s notes reveal that the tuba plays just eight bars in the entire work, and you can hear them clearly in the brass chorale which bookends the movement. The “Molto vivace” is full of fire, and there’s a real sense of closure as the finale draws to a close. The dissonant brass chords in the final seconds have real bite, before Dvořák finishes the work with a quiet wind chord and silence. I prefer the 8th symphony overall, but I’ve never tire of listening to No. 9. Honeck’s performance is a handy reminder of what a great work this is, an emotionally rich, well-constructed and superbly orchestrated popular classic. A shout out to Reference Recordings’ production values; the engineering is high end and the booklet notes are in decent-sized print on a white background.
Ghedini: Chamber works for violin, cello and piano Trio Vasari: Sarah Pastine (violin), Natania Hoffman (cello), Giulia Contaldo (piano) (Da Vinci Classics)
I’d never heard of Giorgio Federico Ghedini (1892-1965) before this disc landed on the pile. The booklet essay gives a useful potted biography; Ghedini, born in northwest Italy, began studying music at an early age and was active as an opera conductor before concentrating on composition from the 1920s onwards. Several teaching posts culminated in his arrival at the Milan Conservatoire in 1941, Ghedini becoming director 10 years later; his notable pupils included Guido Cantelli, Claudio Abbado and Berio, Ghedini’s sizeable compositional output including works in almost every genre, much of it reflecting his interest in renaissance and baroque music. Composed between 1915 and 1946, the chamber works assembled on this disc make a compelling case for Ghedini as an underrated 20th century talent, the Sette Ricercare from 1943 a brilliant sequence of contrapuntal vignettes for piano trio. Ghedini described them as "music written with devotion", brilliantly crafted and texturally interesting; compare the busy fugal writing in the opening "Vivace" to the spareness of the third. Longest and deepest is the final "Grave e dolce", the music winding down and thinning out to chilling but magical effect.
Ghedini's two Canoni for Violin and Cello appeared three years later and show him dabbling in dodecaphony. The angular "Adagio" remains intensely lyrical, the 'Allegretto moderato" knottier, full of sharp edges and stabbing pizzicato notes. We get the Elegia Drammatica from 1930 for violin and piano and a 1923 Elegia for cello and piano, both gravely beautiful, and the Due Intermezzi (1915) scored for piano trio. The second, titled "Bizzarro", is a rare thing indeed: four minutes of Ghedini in genial, affable mood. Trio Vasari's performances are excellent and the recorded sound is warm and clear - this is a fascinating anthology.
Mentor and Muse: Songs by Vaughan Williams and the women around him Kitty Whately (mezzo-soprano), William Vann (piano) (Albion Records)
This is a charming release juxtaposing Vaughan Williams songs (to texts by women writers) with those by composers he mentored, and in whom he maintained an avuncular interest to the end of his life. I didn’t know the Four Poems by Fredegond Shove from 1925 but they are lovely – and Fredegond Shove (RVW’s niece) instantly goes on my list of favourite author names. Kitty Whately and William Vann are well versed in this repertoire and the performances have a delightful “lived-in” feeling. In “The Water Mill” the composer seems to be channelling Schubert in his accompaniment figuration, while the melody line is pure RVW, and the combination extremely winning. Whately is mostly intimate in this set but occasionally – notably in “The New Ghost” – shakes off the fetters and soars, Vann almost telepathic in the way he goes with her. The Four Last Songs, published posthumously, set words by Vaughan Williams’s second wife, Ursula. They don’t have the sweep and breadth Strauss’s last songs, but are rather humble, small and modest. They punch above their weight, however, not least in their touching representation of the happy marriage between composer and poet. “Hand, eyes and heart”, RVW’s last song, is exquisite: hymn-like and sincere, reverently sung.
Elizabeth Machonchy was one of the younger composers he mentored that Vaughan Williams most respected, but according to the liner notes he wouldn’t have heard any of the seven songs presented here. The first couple of song date from the 30s and don’t have the grittiness I enjoy in Maconchy’s string quartets – they are, to tell the truth, a bit anonymous. Rather more to my taste were the creepy “The Exequy”, Whately still and unflinching, and “Come away, death”, Vann’s grimly tolling piano occasionally leavened with sweetness. Maconchy’s great friend and correspondent Grace Williams was also a student of Uncle Ralph. This is the premiere recording of her Billows of the Sea cycle from 1969. It’s a substantial cycle – the first song is 8 minutes in duration – but I most enjoyed the shortest, “Sweet and Low”, in which Williams subverts Tennyson’s lullaby with a sense of unease. Credit to Albion Records for promoting this repertoire, including full texts and notes in the CD booklet, in such fine performances. Bernard Hughes
British Music for Strings V Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester Pforzheim/Douglas Bostock (CPO)
I’m not sure why there is so much great British music for string orchestra from the 20th century, but there is. Much is widely celebrated – Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia, Tippett’s Corelli Fantasia, Britten’s Frank Bridge Variations – and it has always been well-represented on discs by British ensembles. Recently John Wilson has made several brilliant albums including, alongside these familiar heavyweights, more out-of-the-way discoveries of music by, for example, Herbert Howells and Lennox Berkeley. But I was unaware of the British string music series by the Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester Pforzheim until its fifth iteration, out now, and it is heartening to see this national treasury celebrated outside its home country.
None of the six pieces here were familiar to me, and sometimes the composers previously only names to me. There are two I will definitely keep on my playlist, and nothing I didn’t enjoy, even when confirming my prejudices. Imogen Holst’s bracing The Unfortunate Traveller was her graduation piece from the Royal College of Music, originally for brass ensemble but later converted to string orchestra. (This unlikely re-instrumentation is the same as that of John Ireland’s A Downland Suite, one of my favourite of all string pieces.) Holst’s music takes inspiration from English folk dance tunes and is played with gusto by the SKP and its British Principal Conductor Douglas Bostock. Eugene Goossens’s Miniature Fantasy is another student piece, from 1911 when he was studying with Stanford, and was apparently considered quite adventurous at the time. Now it sounds very late-Romantic English, quite Elgarian and not very memorable – and not as interesting as Dorothy Howell’s Two Pieces for Muted Strings, written in 1926 but only rediscovered in 2020. The fizzling out of her early-career promise is one of the sadnesses of 20th century British music.
Balfour Gardiner’s Movement for Strings in C Minor channels Wagner, even in Percy Grainger’s quirky instrumentation, and William Mathias’s Prelude, Aria and Finale has an energy and harmonic crunch to the music absent elsewhere, especially in the tense and gripping third movement. But one piece stands head and shoulders above the rest and that is Gordon Jacob’s Variations on an Air of Henry Purcell. Clearly following the model of Vaughan Williams (right down to the opening pizzicato presentation of the theme), this 17-minute work, if not quite the equal of Vaughan Williams, Tippett and Britten, is a very fine piece and one I have already given repeated hearings. It was premiered in 1932 but the score was subsequently lost, and only rediscovered in 2002. I am glad it was. The variations on Purcell’s tune are varied in character and scoring and maintain interest throughout. The scoring is rich and idiomatic for the instruments and the playing committed and focused. I am pleased to know it. Bernard Hughes
Pocket Universe EXAUDI/James Weeks (NMC)
A new album from EXAUDI is always good news, and here they are doing what they do best: giving technically unimpeachable performances of adventurous new music, animated by a joy in the act of bringing unusual sounds to life. Pocket Universe has four pieces, all between about 15 and 20 minutes long, and all commissioned by EXAUDI between 2013 and 2019. Conductor and driving force behind EXAUDI James Weeks finds some points of connection between the pieces – their use of consonance, their use of older singing traditions newly imagined, and singing as a form of celebration – but they are really characterised by the diversity of their composers’ approaches. Of the four pieces, one has had a significant afterlife of performances post-premiere, but no recording till now. It is Cassandra Miller’s Guide, in which the singers sing freely a half-remembered folk melody to “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah”. They overlap, collide, intertwine and blend in fascinating ways. The score demands a great deal of freedom from the singers – and I can only imagine the whole thing is an enormous challenge to record, given the absence of edit-points. But EXAUDI capture the spontaneity and celebratory tone, as well as a sense of dogged independence in sticking to their own lines. After 12 minutes or so of everyone singing full-on, the last couple of minutes, with the whole texture reducing and dissolving, is touching and beautifully paced.
Andrew Hamilton’s setting of the Proclamation of the Republic, read out at the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, is the most serious of the pieces. Fragments of the text are repeated as metamorphosing loops, and the rhetorical power comes from its accruing of new musical elements to this basic pattern. It’s a very demanding piece for the singers, who are constantly grading their tone colour and tempo: it’s a gripping performance of a striking piece. In Leo Chadburn’s Affix Stamp Here, the texts are taken from postcards from 20th century Britain, charting the mundane events that make up people’s lives, with occasional approaches to profundity or poetry. “The weather has been hot since Saturday.” “We had a lovely time at the zoo.” “I arrived home safely. No one ran off with me.” “Boulogne-sur-Mer. 1983. They don’t understand me here any more than you do.” Each postcard is introduced by a laconic spoken date and place, and then the contents are sung as solo melodies over electronic drones. There is no development, the music is inscrutable, the performances undemonstrative – and the effect quite hypnotic.
Much as I enjoyed the first three, the fourth pieces was my favourite: Geoff Hannan’s tour de force Pocket Universe. Described by the composer as “zany”, the piece sets – if that is the word – passages from Galileo and Newton, which are chopped up, distorted, combined and generally treated with a bracing lack of respect. The structure of the piece leaps with jump-cuts from section to section, each with highly contrasted characters and stylistic reference points, “snapping together… like pieces of LEGO”. (Hannan’s liner note is also the most fun.) He has a magpie aesthetic, “driven by a spirit of play and discover”, in which everything is on the table, and he offers a gourmet spread of textural delights. And the end is magical. Having driven the singers mercilessly to new levels of virtuosic commitment for 15 minutes, Hannan suddenly switches to a chorale, like the ending of a Bach cantata, its relative simplicity a brilliant theatrical stroke. No one but EXAUDI could, or does, sing this music, and so the group is to be applauded and garlanded for being, within its niche of the radical and extreme, the very best in the business. Bernard Hughes
Contes: songs by Jeanne Bernard, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc et al Sandrine Piau (soprano), David Kadouch (piano), Ophélie Gaillard (cello) (Alpha Classics)
Another glorious album from this top-flight partnership, following on from the marvellous Voyage Intime (reviewed here). With another thoughtful and detailed booklet explaining the idea – 50 pages this time rather than 44 previously. This is another fascinating and eclectic collection of songs, glorious singing and fabulous, flowing, empathetic piano playing.
We find well-known repertoire approached with real confidence and wisdom. Piau and Kadouch nail exactly the right mood for each of the “Cinq Mélodies populaires grecques” and to make them work as set too. Poulenc’s “La Courte Paille” gets a performance to banish the idea that Poulenc’s late songs don’t reach the heights of a quarter of a century earlier. There is also plenty of unfamiliar repertoire, and Sandrine Piau in the liner note salutes the work of Héloïse Luzzati of the Cité des Compositrices for her advocacy of composers such as Jeanne Bernard – it was a bold move to start the programme with three of her songs, but it is validated absolutely – and Louise Didier.
This is a disc to go back to in order to find new treasures on each listening. The partnership of legato singing and stellar piano playing in Strauss’s "Träume" from Op. 41 is stunning. The final stanza of Poulenc’s “La reine de cœur” the emotional heart of “La Courte Paille” is deeply affecting, and when one discovers the circumstances in which “Wiegala” (in a beautiful arrangement by Alberto Martin Díaz) was first sung in Auschwitz, it is impossible not to be deeply moved.
What’s not to like, then? Nothing. If I am going to be really picky, the idea of dressing up Sandrine Piau as a fairy and making her stand on a chair for the cover image (Contes de fées/ fairy tales, geddit?) was just silly… and I can’t work out why this album has been declared to be the second part of a diptych, implying that the work is done, rather than leaving the door open for a series. Piau and Kadouch are so good, surely there will be more? Sebastian Scotney
