The latest releases reviewed
BRAHMS: PIANO CONCERTO NO 1 Krystian Zimerman, Berlin PO/Simon Rattle Deutsche Grammophon 477 6021 *****
It's more than 20 years since Krystian Zimerman made one of the slowest ever recordings of Brahms's First Piano Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic under Bernstein, even slower than the performance with Glenn Gould that Bernstein notoriously distanced himself from publiclyin 1962. Zimerman's new performance, still on the slow side, is in every movement slightly faster than before, Simon Rattle is a far stronger partner than Bernstein, and the state-of-the-art recording completely outclasses the earlier version. So Zimerman can now have his cake and eat it. He indulges fondly in a sometimes old-mannish, time-stilling concern for minute detailing. But he can also let his guns blaze and blast as appropriate, and the pianistically impeccable performance packs a powerful punch. www.dgclassics.com
Michael Dervan
SCRIABIN: SONATAS 2, 3, 9; PLUS SHORTER PIECES Alexander Melnikov (piano) Harmonia Mundi HMN 911914 *****
Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov has been making a good impression in concert in Ireland for a number of years, and he adds to that lustre with his new Scriabin CD in Harmonia Mundi's Nouveaux Musiciens series. The tenor of Melnikov's own booklet essay suggests that he is well-attuned to the paradoxes of Scriabin, both as man and composer. The playing breathes the right air and speaks with the right accent, and he's as careful with the delicate gestures of the shard-like miniatures as with the grander pieces. Melnikov's pacing is sensitive, he has that all-too-rare knack of allowing sound to drift, as if it were dye dissipating in water, and he's chosen the repertoire wisely, from the backward-looking, Chopinesque early work to the mystically rapt, later music. www.uk.hmboutique.com
Michael Dervan
US composer Gloria Coates, a Munich resident, is already in the record books as the most prolific female symphonist in history. This new Naxos CD offers the First (Music on Open Strings, 1972-3), Seventh (1990) and Fourteenth (Symphony in Microtones, 2001-2) of her 14 symphonies to date. You may be surprised at some of the things which emerge within Coates's world in these three works: early American music, Chinese melody. The composer's sonic trademark is a skein of glissandos (usually slow), which she uses in ways that feel as elemental as an entrail-gripping force of nature. The music is raw, sometimes even naive, always strangely compelling.www.naxos.com
Michael Dervan
TCHAIKOVSKY: SYMPHONIES 4-6 Leningrad Philharmonic/Evgeny Mravinsky Deutsche Grammophon Originals 477 5911 (2 CDs) *****
These 1960 Tchaikovsky symphony recordings with the Leningrad Philharmonic have long been a byword for expressive intensity and orchestral discipline. Evgeny Mravinsky took charge of the orchestra in 1938 and ruled it with a fanatical perfectionism until his death in 1988. This reissue (the first on CD at less than full price) approvingly quotes a reviewer who describes the orchestra as playing "like a wild stallion, only just held in check by the willpower of its master". The fever is sometimes manic, the tension wound up to almost an almost unimaginable degree, the tempos driven into a region where control would normally dissolve. And at the other extreme, there's no underplaying of tenderness, which is never sentimentalised. Three and a half decades on, these recordings remain essential, dangerous listening - dangerous because there's so little else that can readily stand comparison with them. www.dgclassics.com
Michael Dervan
