The Columbia Symphony may not have been a first-class orchestra, but Bruno Walter trained to do the right things, and it responded with first-class accounts of the Brahms symphonies. While there are instances of less-than-crack ensemble, there is also some very fine first-desk playing, and the performances as a whole are marked by a natural feeling of movement, phrasing, and expression. Walter’s approach to the music is kindly, caring, wonderfully whole – sunny but not overly brilliant, warm but not overly heated, sincere but not overly impassioned. Anyone who thinks that means the conductor was slow, shapeless, or indulgent should listen. There is thrust here, and plenty of momentum. The recordings are closely miked and somewhat bass-heavy, but in Sony’s 20-bit remastering the sound is wonderfully alive and direct. – Ted Libbey, author of The NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection

An essential box set of Graingeresque delight.

2011 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Percy Grainger’s death and the event has witnessed the reissue of a number of important recordings. This isn’t one such, because it’s remained in the Nimbus catalogue throughout, but I did want to draw brief attention to this super-abundant, characterful, and wholly marvellous five CD set of the complete piano music, played by the indefatigable, stylistically apt Martin Jones. He’s one of the undersung masters of a variety of repertoire – as good in Iberian music as he is in British, I’d suggest.
 
Here his encyclopaedic survey acts as a modern day cornerstone. You should hear his recordings, if you are excited by Grainger, and compare and contrast them with the composer’s own recordings which fortunately – all the 78s at any rate – have recently been reissued in a five CD set by APR [7501]. The experience is both exciting and diverting. But Grainger only recorded (and re-recorded) a fraction of his own pieces, whereas Jones has collared the lot. And how!
 
The first disc starts with some classic Grainger; the brio, clarity and speed of Jones’s take on Handel in the Strand is a tonic whilst To a Nordic Princess rises to a passionate pitch of assertion. In a Nutshell is a suite the charms of which seldom pall, and in this performance Jones crafts an unusually expressive Pastoral, slow and spare then incrementally building up in sonority, power and speed. The playful and vibrant badinage of The Immovable Do is especially well realised – one of the very best moments in this opening disc - though the reflective and beautiful Colonial Song runs it, very differently, close. Those who have never come across the roistering cakewalk of In Dahomey are in for a treat.
 
The second disc is given over to arrangements. To a degree it’s of less pressing interest to the Grainger novice, but it’s essential ground for those who want to understand his enthusiasms and the musical means by which he conveyed them. The opening of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto makes some fearsome demands on the intrepid solo pianist whereas the Brahms Cradle song that cannily follows it is delightfully spun – lissom legato, not lion-hearted virtuosity. His arrangement of Nimrod is probably quite well known but that of Rachmaninoff – the finale of the Second Concerto – probably less so. I must admit that the Dowland transcription, of Now, O now, I needs must part, is absolutely irresistible in Jones’s performance. He really does have the touch for refinement in these works. Of the other works, it’s interesting to contrast Grainger’s own 1929 78 of the Rosenkavalier with Jones’s. Then there’s the convoluted tribute to Stephen Foster, the well-known Bach Blithe Bells and the same composer’s Fugue in A minor – it reminds one of Bach’s importance to Grainger, as performer and composer.
 
The third disc offers 28 examples of Graingeresque delight. Some are very concise folk-songs and traditional songs, others better known examples of his art. Let me just suggest a few which I think especially illuminating or unusual. If you’ve not come across The Merry King, try to do so, and you won’t regret it; it’s hauntingly beautiful. A Jutish Melody was recorded by Grainger in one of his very rarest 78s – a double-sided 1929 Columbia. He takes it a touch faster than Jones. Spoon River is played with vibrancy but Jones is ever alert as to treble colouration. There are also the simple and complex versions of One more day my John.
 
The fourth disc is a curious collection but that only makes it the more valuable for completists. We have Stanford’s Four Irish Dances, the deeply sensitive Fauré songs – what a shame Grainger didn’t record them – and the opening movement transcription of the Schumann Piano Concerto, which, like the Rachmaninoff, is probably best known by close readers of Grainger’s work in this field – a virtuosic single-voiced domestication, as it were, of the concerto literature. Another such is the better remembered Grieg Concerto first movement, also in this disc. His homage to Delius comes via the Air and Dance – but there are plenty of things to occupy the eager ears in this disc. Uppermost amongst them we find Angelus ad Virginem, a lovely carol, and then some of Grainger’s early works. These include the Schumannesque Klavierstücke in E, and the other early pieces which are variously awkward and Brahmsian or, in the case of the one in B flat, incomplete. There’s also the one in D, which Grainger dedicated to his father. The Bigelow March, an insouciant piece, was actually written by Ella Grainger, Percy’s wife.
 
The final disc has bigger works, ending with The Warriors. It also includes those pieces written for four hands on one piano, four on two pianos, six on one piano and six on two pianos. Children's March: "Over the Hills and Far Away" is a sonorous and ebullient example of Martin Jones and Richard McMahon playing on two pianos. But all these pieces are richly exciting and attractive. In the midst of all this don’t overlook the calm solo Grainger fashioned from William Byrd – The Carman’s Whistle or indeed Gershwin’s Embraceable You. The resilience of the performers and the clarity of the six-handed, two-piano, arrangement of The Warriors elevates it to a must-hear experience.
 
I hope this has given some indication of why this is so essential a box for admirers of the composer. I appreciate that Nimbus’s sound in these 1989-91 recordings is not to everyone’s tastes, but it will certainly do, and the booklet notes are classy. What a splendid undertaking this was.
 
-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

David Shifrin, clarinet; Chamber Music Northwest. Delos DE 3066 [Quintet].

Despite its name, Chamber Music Northwest is an assembly of New York regulars. They offer a subdued rather than searing account of the Clarinet Quintet, with leisurely tempos and a feeling more of point-to-point navigation through the score than of a single, seamless utterance. The ensemble is excellent, with sisters Ani and Ida Kavafian quite remarkably well matched on violin, their unisons, octaves and thirds uncannily together. The fluid, singing quality of Shifrin’s playing is admirable, and he shows an interpretive restraint in keeping with his view that the clarinet part should not be treated as a solo, but as one strand among five. The recording, made in March 1989, is intimate and highly satisfying. – Ted Libbey, author of The NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection.

It would be hard to imagine more amiable performances of these two strongly characterized Brahms works...intense as well as warm, plainly derived from long experience performing this music in concert... The romanticism of the Nash approach comes out particularly strongly in the opening Andante of the Horn Trio, with the horn soloist, Frank Lloyd, producing exceptionally rich, braying tone to remind one of Dennis Brain. After relaxed accounts of the first three movements the galloping finale is then given with great panache, conveying more fun than the more virtuoso reading from Ashkenazy, Perlman and Tuckwell. Thanks partly to the CRD recording, the Nash performances are made to sound satisfyingly beefy, almost orchestral, though some may find the full-bodied sound a degree too reverberant, with the piano rather in front of the strings. The disc can be strongly recommended, particularly as this is the only available coupling of these two works.

-- Edward Greenfield, Gramophone

Richard Marlow's Trinity College Choir of Cambridge has established itself as one of the premier groups of its kind, recording prolifically for Conifer and staking out a swath of repertorial turf that encompasses devotional music from the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Unlike their better-known counterparts at King's College, the Trinity choristers are an all adult ensemble, using women instead of boy trebles and achieving a more professional sound as a result.
CHORAL MOODS is a well-filled two-disk compilation which offers an excellent survey of sacred choral music, though one might have hoped for a little more J. S. Bach. What is here, above all, is beautiful music, well sung and recorded. There are some substantial pieces, such as the Gregorio Allegri "Miserere," Felix Mendelssohn's anthem "Hear My Prayer" and the complete "Messe Basse" (Low Mass) of Gabriel Fauré, as well as some less frequently encountered works such as Henry Balfour Gardiner's "Evening Hymn" and Camille Saint-Saëns "O Salutaris Hostia." It adds up to make a highly commendable anthology.

In the late 1850s, Brahms was doing a number of things involving symphonies and pianos. He was having a heck of a time getting his first symphony to fly, and while working on a D minor sonata for 2 pianos, he decided to turn that work into a symphony. However, finding the pianistic ideas intractable, he ended up with his Piano Concerto No. 1. A few years later, he embarked on a multi-movement "symphony serenade" for small orchestra, which was published in 1860 as the Serenade No. 1 in D major, along with its companion, No. 2 in A major.
Despite the initial notion that these might be proto-symphonies, they are relaxed, genial works, well suited to the name "serenade." Brahms also published them in four-hand piano scores, an arrangement to which they adapt quite nicely. They sound wonderfully fresh here, given invigorating performances by the German piano team of Silke-Thora Matthies and Christian Kohn.

It's good to report Naxos again sweeping aside the competition not only in price, but in the quality of both performance and recording as well. Not that Brahms's organ works have received quite as much exposure on CD as one would have expected. The 11 Chorale Preludes, Brahms's swan-song (the cynics would describe it as a deathbed conversion), for all their popularity are elusive works attempting a synthesis between the essentially functional chorale prelude form and the intimate, personal language of an impromptu. They may well be "a high point in German Romantic organ literature" (to quote Parkins's own note) but their curious blend of impersonal formality and deep emotion renders really satisfying performances something of a rarity.

Robert Parkins hits the nail absolutely on the head. He paces each one perfectly, the second "Herzlich tut mich verlangen (No. 9) seems almost to float on air while "0 Welt, ich muss dich lassen" (No. 3) avoids any hint of self-indulgence in its heartfelt statement of impending death, Of course this excellent instrument helps. Registrations have to be subtle rather than obtrusive with a strong bias towards unadorned eight-foot tone. Parkins chooses his stops with care and sensitivity—the gentle caressing of a Tremulant throughout "Schmiicke dich, o liebe Seele" (No. 5) transforms a pleasant sound into a ravishing one.

The whole disc (the four early works fare equally well) is a significant addition to the recorded literature of both the organ and Brahms.

-- Gramophone [12/1994]