Composers in New York: Copland, Schuman, Gould, Barber. I Musici de Montreal/Yuli Turovsky (Chandos)
The published edition of Aaron Copland's Clarinet Concerto includes changes made to passages "too difficult for Benny Goodman", for whom the piece was written. Following a lead from the composer's autobiography, US clarinettist Charles Neidich has now restored the high notes Copland had to remove, the biggest change being a passage near the end where the composer substituted orchestral piano for the original clarinet. Neidich's account, highly personal, colourful, rhythmically free, and without rival in the version it uses, is self-recommending for Copland fans. The Musici de Montreal are rather small in number for the sonorities required in the Copland, as also in the works by Morton Gould (Spirituals for Strings), Samuel Barber (Adagio) and William Schuman (Symphony No 5).
Michael Dervan
Debussy: Chamber Music.
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Centre (Delos, 3 CDs)
This is a valuable collection which interprets "chamber music" in the broadest sense, to include works for two pianos and piano duet, played by Lee Luvisi and Anne-Marie McDermott. Two of the late works for two pianos - the war-influenced En blanc et noir and the ever-enigmatic Six epigraphes antiques - help give a much fuller picture of the developments in Debussy's music that were to be cut off by his untimely death in 1918 at the age of 55. In most of the performances here the players sculpt with a fine rhythmic sense, avoiding intrusive rubato and capturing the essential harmonic glow. Other highlights include an affectingly direct reading of the early String Quartet by the Orion Quartet, and a lightly floated account of the late Sonata for Violin and Piano from Ani Kavafian and Anne-Marie McDermott.
Michael Dervan
Susanne Kessel: Piano Portrait. (Arte Nova Classics)
The German pianist Susanne Kessel has a catholic taste in repertoire. On this new CD derived from radio recordings she ranges through the 20th century, from hothouse accounts of Szymanowski's Scriabinesque Preludes, Op. 1, and an extremely slow, between-the-cracks search for profundity in Grieg's Forest Quiet, Op. 71 No. 4, to Tariqa I, a 1982 "study in Eastern idiom" by one of her teachers, Peter Feuchtwanger, and the mostly sparse and angular Five Haiku of 1990 by the emigre Romanian, Ilana Schapira-Marinescu. In between she finds time for the evocative extra-keyboard activities of Henry Cowell's Aeolian Harp of 1923, a 1931, folk-influenced set of Five Drops by the French-trained Turk, Ulvi Cemal Erkin, and Helmut Lachenmann's 1956 badge of arrival, his Schubert Variations. A thoughtful and thought-provoking collection.
Michael Dervan
