ARNOLD: CLARINET CONCERTO NO.

VICTORIA: LAMENTATIONS, TENEBR

This recording received a 1998 "Critic's Choice" award from Gramophone
magazine.
REVIEWS:
American Record Guide (11-12/97, pp.161-62) - "...A wild card in the Conifer series is the inclusion of both versions of some songs (`Night', `Where Art Thou, Little Star?')....I could live happily with either [Boris] Christoff or Leiferkus..."

Less than a year after the first recording of this culminating work in Sir Malcolm Arnold’s cycle of symphonies comes this rival version, providing a different slant, equally valid, on what, for all its simplicity of texture, is an enigmatic work. With a unique coupling of two oboe works, superbly played by Nicholas Daniel, it makes a formidable alternative, even though one has to remember that the earlier Naxos issue comes at super-budget price.

The contrast of recording quality, with the Conifer issue presenting the orchestra much closer, with textures made warmer and beefier, matches the broad contrast of interpretations. Where the slight distancing of sound on the Naxos issue keeps the music at one remove, the weight of sound which Handley draws from the Bournemouth Symphony in his fuller-bodied recording goes with a rather more expressive style, so that unison string melodies, as in the Trio of the third movement Scherzo or through the long, slow finale sound more obviously Mahlerian.

The result is that Handley’s version is not just warmer, it is less desolate in its presentation of that extended slow finale, almost all of it in two parts only, with the the two main contrasting themes hypnotically repeated. Both Handley and Penny sustain tension superbly, with the momentary modulation into the major (track 8, 7'36'') made just as easeful here as in the earlier version. There is much to be said for Penny’s balder, chiller treatment in music which, as the composer himself has explained, reflects a period when he had “been through hell”. With Handley the final brief resolution on to a major chord is all the more positive, where Penny leaves you more in doubt. Handley with his weight of sound clearly has some advantage in the swaggering Scherzo, the only movement which relates directly to our established image of Arnold, though Penny capitalizes on the way that his brass section rides over the slightly distanced strings.

What the new performance reinforces is the value of the work, defying the shameful reluctance of anyone to perform it over a decade, with the glowing exception of the late Sir Charles Groves. It may have looked very thin on the page, with so much argument reduced merely to two parts, but judging both by these recordings and live performances, it is a masterly conclusion to Arnold’s unique, keenly original symphony cycle.

The fill-ups are most welcome. The Concertino, not to be confused with Arnold’s Oboe Concerto, has been arranged by Roger Steptoe from the charming Sonatina for oboe and piano written for Leon Goossens in 1951, with a flowingly lyrical first movement, followed by a deeply melancholy slow movement and a jig finale, the whole piece lasting barely nine minutes. The Fantasia for solo oboe, written for a wind competition in Birmingham in 1966, makes one marvel at such variety over such a brief span with an instrument offering limited tonal contrasts.'

Edward Greenfield, The Gramophone, 4/1997

}Gramophone (1/97, pp. 93-5) "...Levinsky's record chiefly consists of the '16 Children's Songs', the best of them delightful pieces in Tchaikovsky's most direct and well-crafted vein....excellent series..."{

Praetorius (c1571-1621) was the first great musical commentator and elaborator of the Lutheran chorale. Prolific he certainly was, with over 1,000 chorale settings (quite apart from a mass of other work in compositional and theoretical fields), but his level of invention is remarkable too. This CD presents 32 settings and one of its great merits is that in choosing chorales from the Advent, Christmas and Epiphany seasons the tunes are likely to be familiar to many listeners. So one can follow, for example, the orderly six-voice unfolding of Nun kommt der Heiden Heiland, appreciating not just Praetorius’s pliable working of the familiar melodic material, but also sensing the simple, strong theological substance the chorale bears. Rhythmic wit and textural variety abound, from the catch-as-catch-can soprano duet of Wachet auf to the veritable compositional playground he creates out of Puer natus in Bethlehem for double choir. It is affectionate music of great intellect and charm.

As for the performances, perhaps the most significant issue is that Richard Marlow has opted for unaccompanied performance throughout. Praetorius himself offered exhaustive and famous advice in his Syntagma musicum (1614-19) on the use of instruments together with voices, and though a cappella performance is certainly valid, to devote a 70-minute CD to this one option out of a whole range of possibilities is rather risky. In truth, the choir’s German is really rather anglican, especially in the matter of vowel colour, and lacks the native textual accentuation that would bring the words themselves to life, yet the musical properties inherent in the settings are so nimbly and euphoniously realized that the performances (luminously recorded) are certainly enjoyable and command attention, particularly if this CD is dipped into, rather than heard at one sitting.

-- Patrick Russell, Gramophone [3/1996]

Includes work(s) by Peteris Vasks. Ensemble: Riga Wind Quintet.

STRAVINSKY: MASS GESUALDO: RE

RAMEAU: PLATÉE & DARDANUS SUIT

This set includes a bonus sampler CD containing the Brahms, Mahler and Bach pieces.

REVIEWS:
American Record Guide (11-12/97, pp.124-25) - "Toby Spence sings `Farewell to Arms' (1920s-1945) with expressiveness....Rebecca Evans's soprano is as luxuriant as it was in `Dies Natalis'....The program is also well organized, the oboe work placed in the middle of the five vocal pieces..."

'It is not you who are under my influence, but I who am under yours,' wrote Shostakovich to Ustvolskaya. Certainly, though their music shares sorrow, grotesquerie and violence, Ustvolskaya has a vision all her own. The Octet appears to be an obsessive rite; violins worry over the same narrow range of notes, and cower before the relentless timpanic beating. Leiferkus’s speaking voice provides the only real music in the arid Symphony. Welcome to the Gulag. Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet, spare as it is, arrives like a shower of delightful opulence.

-- Helen Wallace, BBC Music Magazine

RACHMANINOV: SONGS NINA RAUTI

This selection is a High Definition Compatible Digital (HDCD) recording.

The first point worth making is that the Royal Philharmonic strings sound more secure, more lustrous and more tonally distinctive here than on most of their recent discs, a qualitative leap that is due in no small part to Daniele Gatti's positive influence. Bartók's scrupulously crafted Divertimento offers plenty of scope for textural contrast, primarily in the first movement's dramatic alternation of tutti and solo, but also in the ghostly pianissimos that haunt the Molto adagio (note also Gatti's stealthy handling of those nightmare crescendos) and the lungingfortissimos in the same movement, with stunned piano phrases sleepwalking in their wake. Noteworthy detail emerges almost as a matter of course — vividly trilling sforzando violas at bar 55 in the finale, gipsy-style slides in the little violin cadenza at 316" and much subtle colouring elsewhere. The second violins' fractionally delayed pp entry at the start of the Molto adagio sounds like a telling rhetorical gesture and my only quibble concerns a certain lack of raw energy... The opening Andante non troppo [of the Concerto for Orchestra] is delicately phrased, and note how sensitively the violins accompany the clarinet at 639". Bassoons audibly pepper the texture at 443" into the "Giuoco delle coppie" (a particularly effective piece of characterization) and the burbling woodwinds at the start of the "Elegia" recall the damp, cloistered world of Bluebeards Castle (the forte restatement of the first movement's principal violin theme — for example, at bar 34, or 213" — is immensely powerful). Gatti takes the slowest of BartOk's metronome options for the beginning of the finale, wisely I think given that he achieves clear articulation, and the tempo for the second movement is more or less on a par with Boosey & Hawkes's 1993 'revision' of crotchet=94... A musicianly production, then, well prepared, warmly recorded and full of telling interpretative observation...

-- Gramophone [1/1998]