Latest CD releases reviewed

BACH & BEYOND
Gabriela Montero (piano) EMI Classics 351 4452
***

It was Martha Argerich who encouraged Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero to take her talent for improvisation more seriously. Montero included some improvisations on a bonus CD with her first recital disc for EMI, and now she's recorded a whole set sparked off by the music of Bach. By the standards of the typical organ recital improvisation, Montero's are blessedly free from piled-up layers of empty rhetoric, and it's blessedly short. There's a certain lounge-bar ambience to some of them, and she buys time when necessary with chomping left-hand patterns. But she's also quite capable of heading off in totally unexpected directions, bringing the whole-tone scale to bear on Bach, for instance, and can glide in and out of her raw material with enviable ease. She's even thinking about all-improvised concerts. So watch out! www.emiclassics.com   Michael Dervan

John Dowland (1563-1626) has achieved public recognition as one of the most successful of melancholic composers. Nigel North, who here begins a survey of the composer's 100-odd lute pieces for Naxos, begs to differ. He's subtitled his collection Fancyes, Dreams and Spirits, and argues that Dowland's music "explores the complete range of human emotions with a unique blend of spirit, heart and intellect". His performances, finely balanced between freedom and firmness, are both lucid and probing. And they prove an eloquent testament to his well-founded faith in the individuality and greatness of Dowland's compositional voice. www.naxos.com   Michael Dervan

MEMORY
Lang Lang (piano) Deutsche Grammophon 477 5976 (includes bonus CD)
**

Lang Lang recorded this recital last August, and he replicated the bulk of the programme at the NCH the following November. The piano tone on disc is more rounded, more beautiful than in the concert hall, but many of the musical misjudgements of the recital are on the disc, too. Dilatory pacing and fussy melodic shaping break the back of Chopin's Sonata in B minor. The playing hardly gets below the surface of Mozart's Sonata in C, K330. Even the miniatures of Schumann's Kinderszenen fail to gel and the pyrotechnics of Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody à la Horowitz are less entertaining in the studio than they were live. Lang Lang's musical ideas are certainly different, but far from successful. This is one for the fans, who are generously provided with no less than 12 images of the pianist. www.dgclassics.com   Michael Dervan

KUMMER: CELLO DUETS
Phoebe Carrai, Tanya Tomkins Avie AV 2060
****

The recorded catalogue of early music accords plenty of space to music so light it lives primarily through the sensual pleasures of timbre and texture generated in inspirational performances. This selection of cello duets by Friedrich August Kummer (1797-1879), a cellist of note as well as a composer, shows that the simple pleasures of lighter baroque music were also explored in the 19th century. There are five complete duets on the disc, plus a single movement from another. And however thoroughly you register the musical content as unpretentious fluff, Phoebe Carrai and Tanya Tomkins have the technical graces and the command of sonority to entice you to live in the moment as they dance, prance and warble, all the while revelling in the glorious fact that two cellos can be made to sound a lot more magical and enticing than just one. Rest your thinking apparatus, and give in to your senses. www.avierecords.com  Michael Dervan