Bartók & Korngold: Piano Quintets / Lane, Goldner String Quartet
HYPERION
CD
$18.33Jan 03, 2020
Youthful piano quintets from Korngold, the arch-Romantic, and Bartók, in his pre-modernist vein, make a fascinating comparison. This album, from Piers Lane and the Goldner String Quartet, offers a snapshot of early twentieth-century Austro-Hungarian chamber music as represented by two of it's most individual voices.
The titular 'lion of nobility' was (probably) King John II of France, making the most expansive work on this album a lament for a historical event: the French defeat at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. Elsewhere, Machaut's protagonist continues to scrutinize the joys and sorrows of courtly love in obsessive detail.
MacMillan's Viola Concerto was written for Lawrence Power, who brings a unique authority to it's first recording. A major addition to the repertoire, the fourth symphony is a generous and appropriate coupling. Both works incorporate and transform musical elements from the distant past.
Under Mahan Esfahani's hands - and occasionally fists - the harpsichord is transmogrified into an elemental force, by turns supported or menaced by an astonishing arsenal of electronics. Concerned listeners please note: no harpsichords were harmed in the making of this album.
The choral versions of La mort dOphélie and Sara la baigneuse may be relative rarities on record but both are vintage Berlioz, short and striking, which should be much better known. Yet further incentive to acquire a terrific account of the Symphonie fantastique.
Gerald Finley and Julius Drake return to Schumann, following a magisterially intense Dichterliebe which won them a third Gramophone award. Here they focus on the two contrasting Liederkreis (song-circle) cycles based upon texts by Heine and Eichendorff. Heine's poetry in Schumann's Op.24 contains extremes of elation and despair that call all of Finley's considerable dramatic powers into play. Eichendorff's seductive, crepuscular 'night-songs' of Op.39 require the velvety tone for which this singer is equally revered. Separating these two great works are the Sechs Gedichte aus dem Liederbuch eines Malers, which find Schumann in more homespun, folksong-influenced vein.
Telemann may have written his twelve fantasias for the amateur market, but he would surely have rejoiced to hear such superlative performances as these. Alina Ibragimova again demonstrates just what can be accomplished on the four strings of a solo violin.
However cultivated the European centers of Habsburg imperial power may have been, few could regularly have boasted musicians of the caliber of Cinquecento. On this release, their ongoing exploration of Franco-Flemish repertoire from the sixteenth century uncovers major works by Johannes de Cleve and Jacobus Vaet.
A re-creation of the music combined with a technological reconstruction of the acoustics in Linlithgow Chapel, this project from The Binchois Consort and Andrew Kirkman offers a fascinating perspective on how such repertoire might originally have been heard.
This album's program represents one phenomenal composer-pianist's homage to another. Marc-André Hamelin has long been a champion of the music of Samuil Feinberg. Hamelin's performances are sensitive to all it's shadows and anxieties while being fully equal to the prodigious technical demands.
In this wonderfully planned programme the whimsical poetry of York Bowen's Hans Andersen 'fragments'-music for a fully-fledged technique, despite the fairy-tale titles-is pleasingly complemented by the bravura of the studies. Nicolas Namoradze proves more than equal to the demands of both.
Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra perform one of the mightiest of first symphonies ever written. Vaughan Williams's setting of Walt Whitman creates a very special sense of occasion. The coupling is Vaughan Williams's later, virtually unknown, setting of Whitman's 'Darest thou now, O soul' for chorus and strings.
