VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: ON WENLOCK EDGE & OTHER SONGS

The expressive extremity of the music and the notoriety of the life seem inextricably bound together where Gesualdo is concerned. Here, his Maundy Thursday Tenebrae Responsories provide the climax of a program which opens with an astonishingly fine rendition of the Tallis Lamentations.

Mendelssohn may have published only one violin sonata (the early Op.4), but that does not signify any lack of inspiration in the others - left in manuscript. The F major sonata which, opens this program from Alina Ibragimova and Cedric Tiberghien is a particularly substantial and ambitious work.

Bach's Cantatas Nos.35 and 169 may have been written for an outstandingly gifted boy alto in Bach's Leipzig, but listening to these peerless accounts from countertenor Iestyn Davies, it's impossible to believe he could have approached the flawless technique and profound interpretative insight.

A diverse selection of works, many written to commemorate state occasions in Westminster Abbey itself, by three composers who demonstrate a particular affinity for choral music.

A sequence for the souls of the departed, to be heard by those who remember them is how Owain Park characterizes this latest release from The Gesualdo Six. As always with this remarkable group, performances are equally outstanding whether of Tallis or Tavener.

The music of C.P.E Bach makes complex stylistic demands of the performer like little else of it's time, the extraordinary drama and intensity tempered by Enlightenment elegance and the influence of the Baroque. Marc-Andre Hamelin's performances set new standards in this endlessly absorbing repertoire.

Howard Shelley's survey of the piano music is an undoubted highlight of the Mendelssohn revival. In this, the final instalment of the series, he focuses on late works and posthumous publications.

The Penguin Guide to Compact Discs awarded a rosette to Stephen Hough’s earlier Gramophone Award-winning Hyperion recording of Mompou, and this successor is equally fine. Música callada comprises twenty-eight exquisite miniatures, brief in duration yet rich in allusion: music which makes its mark with subtlety, understatement and a unique economy of means.

REVIEW:

Hough is the ideal guide to the music of Mompou. He wholly inhabits the music’s mystical atmosphere, its holy simplicity. Exquisite sensitivity is matched by a steely strength. Sounds coalesce and insist on their presence, before disappearing into the ether. Austerity blends with warmth.

— BBC Music Magazine

Two CD set.

The 'Missa Faulte d'argent emerges as a major work in this, it's first complete recording. With the inclusion of a selection of motets (also in first recordings), the present program marks an important addition to our understanding and appreciation of this prolific figure.

This latest instalment of Angela Hewitt's Beethoven is bookended by the great 'Tempest' and Op 109 sonatas. The performances-incentive enough to acquire this release-are as usual complemented by Angela's own booklet notes which provide real insight into how she approaches these masterworks

Gerald Finley and Julius Drake's previous recordings of Schubert have been praised as "faultless" (Winterreise) and "richly satisfying" (Schwanengesang). These exalted standards are easily maintained on their new version of "Die sch ne Mu¨llerin".

Piano recordings do not come much more exhilarating (or entertaining) than Marc-Andre Hamelin's survey of some of his own recent works. Listening to one of the most formidably complex musical minds of today is a rare and rewarding privilege: prepare to be astonished.

The 'fount of grace' of the title is the Virgin Mary, to whom Machaut addresses his appeals for mercy during a turbulent period in France's history.

El León de Oro and Peter Phillips offer a collection of works representative of a school of Flemish composers living in Madrid towards the end of the Renaissance and all employed by Philip II of Spain, who held composers from the Low Countries in particularly high regard. La Hèle's Mass, here receiving it's first complete recording, is a major discovery.

This attractive and virtuosic program from pianist Piers Lane's features three substantial sets of variations-by Glazunov, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov-plus a delightful amuse-bouche from John Field, who settled in St. Petersburg in the early years of the nineteenth century.

Leonore Piano Trio - BARGIEL: PIANO TRIOS NOS. 1 & 2 - The name of Woldemar Bargiel may be little known today-although he was the half-brother of Clara Schumann, no less-but he was highly regarded by Brahms and the Schumanns. These are two delightful, richly melodic works.

The infallible Gesualdo Six trademarks of consummate musicianship and scholarly integrity are much in evidence here. Queen of Hearts addresses and reflects on queens spiritual (the Virgin Mary) and temporal (Mary Tudor and Anne Boleyn, among others) in a program of music largely of the sixteenth century, but spiced with two short works from the twenty-first.

Encountering a palace of riches is how pianist (and Hyperion debutante) Mishka Rushdie Momen describes her experience of playing Tudor keyboard music, a varied selection of which is included here. It's a description which could apply equally to the listener discovering the music in performances as convincingly idiomatic as these.

The challenges and rewards of performing early music are here vividly illustrated by The Binchois Consort, as creative scholarship comes to the aid of two substantial-but fragmentary-works by Jacob Obrecht, and an audacious recorded sound attempts to recreate the experience of the original performers 500 years ago. A novel twenty-first-century motet is also included, emerging from the prevailing Renaissance textures to reflect on themes of mourning and loss.

For Mahan Esfahani, Bach's Inventions and Sinfonias were more than just the tools by which his children and pupils were to acquire a prodigious technique. These 'tiny gems' (as Esfahani call them) reveal expressive depths to rival the major keyboard works and make considerable demands of the performer's musical mettle. The is the sixth instalment in his unmissable complete Bach keyboard survey.

The teenage Korngold possessed a compositional fluency and maturity which belied his youth. In contrast, Tchaikovsky feared - wholly unjustifiably - his own creative powers to be on the wane when writing "Souvenir de Florence". The Nash Ensemble brings passion and conviction to both.

From the late-Romantic Andante e Allegro con fuoco by Guido Alberto Fano and Dallapiccola's early wartime concerto to the final, much later work by Cristian Carrara, this album provides a welcome overview of the piano concerto in 20th and 21st century Italy. All four works benefit from the playing of Roberto Prosseda, whose talents as a champion of Italian contemporary music and of undiscovered piano music make him the ideal advocate.

The 11th and final release in The Orlando Consort's comprehensive Machaut survey easily maintains the standards of it's predecessors. The closing couplet of the final track - "Their singing will be sublime / Harmoniously will they render him praise" - might well serve as a motto for The Orlando Consort's achievement, not only in this album but throughout an illustrious career.