Includes work(s) by various composers. Conductor: Mikel Toms. Soloist: Roman Mints.

The debut disc of Ksenia Bashmet, the rising Russian pianist who performs three great piano concertos conducted by her father, the legendary viola player Yuri Bashmet with his own ensemble of virtuosi, the Moscow Soloists.

Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensemble: Ying String Quartet.

The debut album of calm and meditative masterpieces from Russian organist Svetlana Berezhnaya

This is the debut disc by the sensational Latvian cellist, Kristine Blaumane. After graduating from the Latvian Academy of Music where she studied with Eleonora Testeleca, Ms. Blaumane moved to England and studied with Stefan Popov at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Kristine Blaumane is regularly invited to play around the world as a soloist with many of the leading orchestras including the London Philharmonic Orchestra with whom she is the principal cellist. As a solo recitalist and chamber musician, Ms. Blaumane has over the years performed with Isaac Stern, Gidon Kremer, Yo Yo Ma and Yuri Bashmet amongst others, and has performed at many festivals including Lockenhaus, Gstaad, Salzburg, Verbier, Basel, Jerusalem, Utrecht, Spitalfields, Cheltenham, Aldeburgh and Homecoming. She is a keen promoter of new music and has performed a number of world premières of works dedicated to her. Ms. Blaumane has twice become laureate of the Great Music Award in 2005 and 2007, the highest prize given by the Latvian State in the field of music.

On the Overgrown Path

BRAHMS Two Rhapsodies, Op. 79. 7 Fantasien, Op. 116. 4 Klavierstücke, Op. 119 • Alexander Kobrin (pn) • QUARTZ 2077 (54: 39) Live: Lied Center, Kansas City and Glinka Museum, Moscow


Alexander Kobrin is the Van Cliburn prizewinner whose recording of Haydn sonatas I praise below. Here he is playing Brahms live in concerts recorded in Kansas City and Moscow. Born in 1980, he must be a confident man. He’s certainly a gifted, disciplined pianist. Perhaps inevitably, when I think of Brahms’s op. 119, I think of the Van Cliburn recording My Favorite Brahms. On the reissue Cliburn plays the two rhapsodies found here and two of the short pieces of op. 116. He ends the four pieces of the loosely connected op.119 magisterially: I don’t know another version that has Cliburn’s stirring martial quality, and yet is also true to its more romantic ruminations. Kobrin’s version is less grand, and to my mind, marginally less exciting. Of course, Brahms presents unusual problems to any interpreter: His formidable intellect is always visible behind even his most impassioned moments, as in the two rhapsodies recorded here. I find Kobrin most convincing in the gentler passages of these pieces. His tone is always beautiful, and he is free of mannerisms and irrelevant romantic gestures. His audience is wildly appreciative. If in most of the works I prefer the grander Cliburn, I won’t discount the appeal of Kobrin’s nuanced playing. There’s of course a lot of competition in late Brahms piano music, including the recordings of Perahia, Katchen, and on certain pieces, Rubinstein.


FANFARE: Michael Ullman

BACH Flute Sonatas: in e, BWV 1034; in C, BWV 1033; in E, BWV 1035; in b, BWV 1030. Partita in a for Solo Flute, BWV 1013 • Elizabeth Walker (fl); Michael Overbury (hpd); Christopher Poffley (vc) (period instruments) • QUARTZ 2086 (69:42)


It wasn’t until I did a little digging into the history of these Bach sonatas that I realized how much about them is still unsettled. To begin with, they were written over a 20-year period between 1720 and 1741, the very timeframe in which the recorder was being phased out in favor of the wooden transverse flute. The program note to Lisa Beznosiuk’s Hyperion recording of the flute sonatas states that after about 1725 compositions specifically for or including recorder became increasingly rare. So, Bach almost certainly intended these sonatas for the newer transverse flute and not for recorder. That’s number one, and to her credit, Elizabeth Walker on the current CD does in fact perform on a wooden transverse flute, albeit a modern one made in 1960 by Harry Seeley for the Flute Makers Guild.


Second, some of the original manuscripts to these works are lost (BWV 1034, 1035, and 1013); others are incomplete (BWV 1032, not played here, is missing 46 measures, and only the harpsichord part exists in autograph for BWV 1030); and others are either of disputed authorship (BWV 1033 and 1031, the latter not on the current disc) or of intended instrument uncertain (BWV 1030 may have been meant for oboe). So, after 250 years’ worth of reconstruction, patching, and piecing together for various performing editions by numerous hands, questions still remain over which of these works are indeed by Bach and, of those that can be authenticated, what instrument one or more of them may actually have been written for.


But there’s yet another point to be made, which Elizabeth Walker, in her own program note to this album, explains very clearly. Apart from the Partita for Solo Flute, BWV 1013, which is a one-off, the remaining sonatas come in two flavors. The Sonata in B Minor, BWV 1030, like the sonatas for violin and keyboard, has a fully written-out harpsichord part that engages with the flute in an equal partnership. This is referred to as “obbligato” sonata. Then there are those (BWV 1033–1035) that are referred to as “continuo” sonatas because their keyboard parts are but a skeletal figured bass line from which the player had to fill in the harmonies and rhythms extemporaneously. This was a skill that Baroque musicians were well trained in, but modern performing editions put the flesh on the bone, so to speak, to save the keyboard player from having to come up with his or her own realizations of the upper parts.


In the three “continuo” sonatas, cellist Christopher Poffley joins harpsichordist Michael Overbury to shore up the bass line. The note does not tell us if Poffley and Overbury (identified on the disc as “Continuum”) play their own realizations or are playing from a prepared edition, but you will immediately note the much simpler chord-like, accompanimental character of the keyboard part in these sonatas compared to the “obbligato” sonata in which the keyboard part is fully composed. Overbury does not participate in the “obbligato” sonata, though technically he could/should have, for it was common practice, even in the type of work in which the keyboardist was coequal, for a cello, gamba, theorbo, or other low-voiced instrument to reinforce the bass line.


One last technical detail about these performances: The harpsichord is not tuned to equal temperament but to the “Vallotti” standard, a tuning system common in Bach’s time. Most listeners probably won’t notice, but to my accursed “Princess-and-the-pea” ear which, for some reason, is unusually sensitive to pitch, Walker’s flute sounds just enough out of tune with the harpsichord when the two alight simultaneously on a common note and at cadence points to send a twinge through my teeth. If you happen to be extra sensitive to pitch variations, the harpsichord’s non-equal temperament tuning is something you might want to consider before acquiring this recording. Those with normal hearing needn’t be concerned.


Elizabeth Walker trained in flute, recorder, and piano at London’s Royal College of Music, following which she continued her studies in Holland with a special focus on Baroque and Classical flute. Thus far, her only other recording, a disc of flute fantasias by Telemann, would seem to make her, on record at least, a specialist in 18th-century flute music.


On the current disc, she produces a warm and mellow, if not always even, tone on her modern copy of a Baroque flute, a tone that blends agreeably with Overbury’s modern copy of a single-manual Flemish-type, Ruckers-style harpsichord, and with Poffley’s Antonio Amati cello. There are, of course, a ton of recordings of these sonatas to choose from, but the field narrows somewhat if one limits the options to performances on period instruments. Walker’s, however, is neither the only one nor necessarily the best of those I’ve heard. The aforementioned Beznosiuk is more technically secure and evenly played, though it asks a higher price for a two-disc set that includes everything Bach wrote for flute along with some things he didn’t.


Another alternative, and an incredible bargain, if you don’t mind a slightly older recording, is Harmonia Mundi’s single disc with Janet See, Davitt Moroney, and Mary Springfels. With that disc, you’ll get BWV 1034 and BWV 1032, which you won’t get on the present disc, but on the HM CD you won’t get the solo partita. So it’s a tradeoff. If you want it all, you’ll have to spring for two singles or a two-disc set because not all of the flute works will fit on a single disc. For this reason, Walker’s album gets a recommendation, but mainly as a supplement to other recordings.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

James Allsopp critically acclaimed saxophonist, received the BBC Jazz Award for innovation in 2008 and the Ronnie Scott Jazz Award for Best Newcomer. Plastic Sun his debut album for Quartz is a highly innovative improvisation album.

'Ilona Domnich gave the most compelling performance...I have ever witnessed.....I have seen a lot of Voix Humaines...this was the first I've ever known to leave me on the edge of tears.' Michael White, Opera Now Ilona Domnich is a young soprano who is getting recognized, her debut disc for Quartz was recently featured on Performing to the Red Light on BBC Radio 4

BACH Suite in a, BWV 818a. Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother, BWV 992. 3-Part Sinfonias, BWV 787–801. Prelude and Fugue in b, BWV 544 (arr. Liszt) • Jacob Katsnelson (pn) • QUARTZ 2084 (59:40)


At first I couldn’t place him, but I knew that somewhere I’d met Jacob Katsnelson before. Then it hit me. He was the pianist who accompanied Maxim Rysanov in a couple of numbers on a two-disc Onyx set of Brahms’s chamber works in viola transcriptions, reviewed in Fanfare 32: 5. Frankly, my focus was so centered on Rysanov that I didn’t pay much attention to Katsnelson at the time.


He was born in Moscow in 1976, entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1993, and since 2001 has taught at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. He has soloed throughout Russia, as well as in Austria, Germany, Spain, and France, done the competition thing, won prizes, participated in festivals, and yada yada. By now it’s an old and familiar story: Gifted youngster enters conservatory, wows competition judges and talent scout, lands recording contract, and makes it big on the international concert scene.


Sometimes, the big splash dissipates in receding ripples on the pond; other times, not. I can’t say what will happen with Katsnelson in the long term; I can only register my reaction to his playing in the here and now, and that reaction is overwhelmingly positive. This is one of the most satisfying Bach recitals on piano to come my way in a long time.


To begin with, as I’ve made clear in the past, when I listen to Bach on piano, I don’t want the artist to apologize for the instrument by playing it as if it were a harpsichord. There’s no hint of that with Katsnelson. He uses the full range of the piano’s dynamic, sustaining, and expressive potential. And his instrument, amusingly credited in the booklet as “a regular piano”—I presume to distinguish it from a fortepiano—is a concert grand, model E-272, from Bayreuth maker Steingraeber & Son, a magnificent specimen if I may say so.


Further research on the company’s website reveals a number of interesting details and specifications about this new instrument: “Unique features include the unusual shape of the sound-reflecting rims, the combined star-shaped and half-timbered braces, and the ‘incredibly agreeable’ (Cyprien Katsaris) touch. The most uncommon feature, however, is the shape of the soundboard in the treble. The resonating space was newly reconstructed, based on the classical relationship between [short] string length and resonating space. Steingraeber strings have 27 percent less wood mass to penetrate than comparable instruments by other piano builders! The result is a tone that is present and singing, even in softer passages.”


The part about softer passages is true. Katsnelson’s pianissimos diminuendo to a whisper. But there’s no compromise in fullness of tone, resonance, or raw power. The recording, made in 2009 at the Steingraeber studio, could serve as a standard against which recorded reproduction of piano sound is measured. Intimate, as in a private music room, yet acoustically alive and vibrant, every subtlety of the instrument’s complex palette is captured and projected with amazing lifelike presence. It stands to reason, of course, that a piano manufacturing firm would design and engineer a perfect acoustic space in which to conduct painstaking measurements and tests of its products. This is the high-tech world of attaching scopes and computers to the sounding board and of analyzing streams of ones and zeros. In this case, it worked wonders.


All would be for naught, of course, if Katsnelson didn’t know his way around Bach, but he does. There are some performance idiosyncrasies, like the tendency to roll chords at cadences, that purists may find objectionable, but in general Katsnelson’s approach is not of the romantic persuasion. He avoids grand ritards and other sins of exaggerated point-making. He does, however, as noted, make full use of the piano’s dynamic range and sustaining power, which means that he crescendos and decrescendos and applies pedals where it makes musical sense to do so. The result is a transparency of voicing that allows every strand of Bach’s counterpoint to be heard with pellucid precision.


For lack of a better term, I’d describe Katsnelson’s tempos as temperate. Fast movements are set within sane ranges of the metronome’s upper regions, an indication that Katnelson is not interested in promoting himself as a virtuosic marvel at the expense of Bach. And slow movements are not pondered and pestered to the point of prostration, an indication that Katnelson does not approach Bach with an attitude of affected reverence that can come across as so much pious posturing. No, Katsnelson’s Bach is refreshingly straightforward and superbly executed. This gets a very strong recommendation.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Barber's aunt was the most celebrated contralto of the day, and her husband Sidney Homer wrote a number of highly successful songs. Barber explained that "writing songs just seemed a natural thing to do." Barber had a fine baritone voice, studying singing as well as composition and piano at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Throughout his career, Barber's instinct for vocal shaping would inform his output; half of his published compositions are vocal, and even his instrumental works frequently possess a lyrical, cantabile quality. Furthermore, Barber's partner, Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007), was also a skilful composer of vocal music, and the pair undeniably influenced one another. In 1964, Menotti argued: "There is a certain indolence towards the use of the voice today, a tendency to treat the voice instrumentally, as if composers feared that its texture is too expressive, too human". This emotive humanity is not something Barber himself shied away from; on the contrary, as both composer and lyricist he was able to cut to the heart of a subject with both concision and beauty. Gweneth-Ann Jeffers is among the best of today's young British singers. She is noted for her commanding voice and vivid personality. She has already been heard in an exceptionally wide range of repertoire including leading roles for Welsh National Opera and Oper Köln as well as concert engagements in Britain, Europe, Australia and Japan. In the 07/08 season, she made several role débuts: Gutrune in Götterdämmerung at the BBC Proms with Donald Runnicles; the title roles in Tosca at the Teatro São Carlos in Lisbon and the title role in Porgy and Bess for the Basel Chamber Orchestra and the Macedonian Philharmonic. She also performed Messiaen's Harawi as part of the Southbank Centre's composer centenary celebrations 'From the Canyons to the Stars' and at the 2008 BBC Proms.

British flutist Elizabeth Walker has recorded albums for Decca and this, her first release for the Quartz label. The award-winning artist has played on modern flute as well as historic instruments. Here she performs the Telemann Fantasias on a wooden flute.

Solo unaccompanied flute works from the Baroque era are rare though the solo flute itself was undoubtedly heard then as now. Telemann's Fantasias are marked “senza basso” effectively meaning solo. In them, Telemann has created miniature masterpieces of baroque invention, filled with idiomatic writing. - ArkivMusic

The innovative and provocative first album by the recently performed partnership of Paul Dunmall and Roman Mints. These two acclaimed creators and performers of new music have come together to produce an album that explores experimental and beautiful sound worlds.

RACHMANINOFF Moments Musicaux, op. 16. MEDTNER Piano Sonata in g. LYAPUNOV Études d’exécution transcendante: Berceuse; Ronde des sylphs; Tempête & • Chisato Kusunoki (pn) • QUARTZ 2089 (75:13)


& SCRIABIN Fantasy in b


One of my fellow Fanfare critics made reference, a few issues back, to the “pretty young things playing Chopin” being pushed by DG. One might be tempted to say that Chisato Kusunoki is a “pretty young thing playing Rachmaninoff and Scriabin,” but she has the gift of exquisite phrasing and imparting a deep feeling for the music to her listeners. Certainly, if she is capable of such a feat through the cold impartiality of a CD, she can also do it in live performance.


Listen, for instance, to the magical way she shapes and colors the third of the six Moments Musicaux, or the smoldering intensity of the fourth ( Presto ). Kusunoki not only knows the notes, as all pianists nowadays do, but she understands what to do between “the piano here and the forte there,” as Toscanini used to say. In short, Kusunoki has a clear view of the music’s structure as well as its color.


Kusunoki’s mastery of Russian music, in fact, is a constant thread throughout this recital. In the Medtner sonata, strong emotion and flurries of counterpoint intermix and complement each other, almost as if the composer were trying to reconcile his twin loves, Bach and Beethoven. Cast in one movement, the music changes mood abruptly and there are several dead stops in it, as if Medtner were trying to decide where to go next, yet the motives are repeated or altered in such a way that a sense of development is created and continuity maintained. At one point, flurries of rapid triplets alternate with slow-moving half notes as if the composer were trying to determine his current mood as much as the listener. At another, he assigns the melody to the left hand while the right plays flurries of 16ths, and occasional tone clusters blur the tonality. Amazingly, Kusunoki is with him every step of the way; listening to her performance, one would almost think that this music reflected her moods and her state of mind.


There is, perhaps, somewhat less drama—or perhaps I should say, fewer contrasting emotions—in her playing of the Scriabin Fantasy. I think, perhaps, that Kusunoki is viewing this music as typical post-Romanticism when, in fact, she should be exploring the mystical quality the music suggests and evokes. In other words, her performance is too outgoing, not personal enough. It is a rare lapse in an otherwise excellent recital, but I hasten to add that it is merely a lapse of musical approach, not a glib or unaffecting performance.


Three of Lyapunov’s 12 etudes close out this recital, and here Kusunoki has judged their musical mood well. Berceuse receives a splendidly warm and intimate performance, both playful in feeling and caressing in spinning out the musical line. Ronde des sylphs could, perhaps, be imparted with a shade lighter touch than Kusunoki gives it, yet her coruscating 16ths have the right angular rhythm and produce their desired effect, and in Tempête she is solidly in her element, caught up as much in the onrush of dazzling figures as the listener.


Despite a bevy of outstanding versions of the Rachmaninoff pieces (including Berman, Ashkenazy, Dejan Lazic, and Ruth Laredo) and competing versions of the Medtner sonata by Gilels and Hamelin, Kusunoki definitely holds her own. In the Lyapunov, I prefer Louis Kentner’s famous and fabulous 1949 recording, currently available on Appian 5620.


A word to the producer of Kusunoki’s records: Please stop using the buzzwords “to great acclaim” when mentioning where she has performed, and if you are going to quote a review from a newspaper or magazine like the London Times, please use the critic’s name. Every young artist nowadays plays “to great acclaim,” even if that great acclaim only comes from a stringer who was assigned the concert because the artist in question was unknown to the principal critic. If you give us the names of the critics who praise pianist X or violinist Y, and we recognize that name as a well-respected critic we can trust, it means much more to us.


Otherwise, this is a superb recital, superbly played and recorded.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley