Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture; Sleeping Beauty Suite; Voyevoda; Moscow. Dallas SO/Andrew Litton (Delos)

The livery of the Dallas SO's first CD for Delos suggests a lot about the production. Booklet, jewel-case back and the disc itself, have "Litton" and "Dallas" colourfully dominating the small print given to Tchaikovsky. The fly in the ointment turns out to be the over-the-top "Virtual Reality Recording", tonally gorgeous and viscerally spectacular but so bedevilled with shifting perspectives that the engineering gets in the way of the actual music-making. The choice of repertoire, however, is interesting, mixing the rare (the coronation cantata Moscow, and the symphonic ballad, The Voyevoda) and the popular (a Sleeping Beauty suite and the 1812 Overture in a choral version dreamt up by Igor Buketoff).

Michael Dervan

Barber: Violin Concerto; Bloch: Baal Shem; Walton: Violin Concerto. Joshua Bell, Baltimore SO/David Zinman (Decca)

The early Violin Concerto of 1939 is the simplest, most tuneful and most popular of Samuel Barber's three concertos. Fellow American violinist Joshua Bell (to be heard in Mendelssohn on Monday with the Dallas SO at the NCH) is careful not to overindulge the work's romantic nostalgia. Respecting the innate gentleness of this music pays dividends, and anyone wanting a more sumptuous approach can have it from Gil Shaham on DG. The playing is clean and polished if rather dry in the Walton, but Bell fails to project himself as successfully into the altogether more intense world of Bloch's "three pictures of Chasidic life", Baal Shem.

Michael Dervan

Toru Takemitsu: Works for piano. Izumi Tateno (Finlandia)

The piano music of Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996), fits on to a single CD, yet it charts all the important phases of his development. Self-taught (as a young man, he believed himself to be the only composer in Japan!), his earliest affinity was with French impressionism. The influence of Debussy and also Messiaen can be heard in Uninterrupted Rests, begun in 1952. Greater angularity and harsher dissonances surface in Piano Distance of 1961, and softer contours, often evoking images of nature, particularly water (including two Rain Tree Sketches for piano) permeate the later work. Izumi Tateno seems most at home in the arabesques of the early and late periods, and ignores completely the two Cage-inspired aleatoric pieces Takemitsu wrote in 1962.

Michael Dervan