HANDEL: CONCERTI GROSSI OP 3; SONATA A 5
Academy of Ancient Music/Richard Egarr Harmonia Mundi HMU 907415
***

Last September Richard Egarr became music director of the Academy of Ancient Music, the pioneering period-instruments band which has been orchestra-in-residence at Cambridge University since 2004. Nine months before taking up his new post he had already been in the recording studio preparing his CD debut with his new band, the first instalment in a new Handel series for Harmonia Mundi. The style in Handel's Op 3 concertos is smooth and rather slick. If you like your baroque concerto with bite, then this is probably not for you. The manner is agreeably light, the colours nicely blended. But the overall effect, even with diversions into flute and recorders, as well as the often wonderful presence of baroque bassoons, tends towards the bland side of pleasant. Michael Dervan  www.uk.hmboutique.com

MENDELSSOHN: VIOLIN CONCERTO IN E MINOR; BRUCH: ROMANCE IN F; VIOLIN CONCERTO NO 1
Janine Jansen (violin), Gewandhaus- orchester/Riccardo Chailly Decca 475 8133
***

The young Dutch violinist Janine Jansen had the luxury of choosing Mendelssohn's own Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig for her first coupling of romantic concertos by Mendelssohn and Bruch. She also had the benefit of instrumental loans: the Barrere Stradivarius for the concertos, and a Guadagnini viola for the Romance by Bruch. She's an able, fresh-spirited player, lacking nothing in the get up and go that the two evergreen concertos require. And Jansen is lucky in her conducting partner, Riccardo Chailly, whose attentive musical observations add greatly to the appeal of this disc. The limitation in her playing at the moment comes from a certain sense of striving that limits her natural lyricism. If Jansen didn't make one aware of how hard she's sometimes trying, the music would flow that much more easily. Michael Dervan www.deccaclassics.com

SHOSTAKOVICH: COMPLETE PIANO MUSIC
Boris Petrushansky Stradivarius STR 33763 (5 CDs)
***

Some of Shostakovich's Bach-inspired Preludes and Fugues from Op 87 have become reasonably well known. But the set as a whole remains more admired than performed or recorded, and the bulk of the composer's other solo piano music is altogether less familiar. Boris Petrushansky's useful survey, recorded between 1992 and 2006, brings to wider attention such works as the First Sonata, a piece so ambitiously wild that few players have ever taken up its challenges (the Second, from 1943, is altogether more civilised); the sometimes wry, sometimes mordant 24 Preludes of 1933 (which somewhat bridge the stylistic gap between the two sonatas); and a host of other, mostly small pieces. Petrushansky's accomplished manner extends to both gravitas and turbulence, though if it's the Op 87 Preludes and Fugues you want, there are more probing performances available. Michael Dervan www.uk.hmboutique.com

ELGAR: SYMPHONIES 1 & 2; IN THE SOUTH; GRANIA AND DIARMID (EXC); INTRODUCTION AND ALLEGRO; SERENADE FOR STRINGS
London Philharmonic Orchestra/Adrian Boult EMI Classics 382 1512
****

The year 2007 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Elgar, and EMI, with a capacious back catalogue that includes the composer's own recordings, has rich holdings to explore. It was Adrian Boult who was chosen in the 1940s to make the recordings that would supersede the composer's own conducting of his symphonies (Elgar had admired his younger colleague's work). The versions issued here are Boult's last, from the late 1970s. He brings an implacable grandeur to these expressions of the Edwardian spirit in music. He wants you to see the pieces at once whole and in all their glorious detail, and he's greatly helped by recordings which are spacious and sonorous, although the violin tone of the 1970s London Philharmonic is sometimes on the light side. The selection of couplings makes for a generously filled pair of discs. Michael Dervan www.emiclassics.com

CD reviews compiled by Tony Clayton-Lea