John Kinsella: Symphonies 3 & 4. NSO/Proinnsias O Duinn (Marco Polo)
The two symphonies of John Kinsella recorded here, both programmatic, are in his later tonal style, with copious echoes of Nordic symphonists and Bruckner - the influence of Bryden Thomson's mid-1980s programming or of the presence in Ireland of the similarly influenced symphonist Robert Simpson? The Third (198990) is subtitled Joie De Vivre, and its Scherzo is one of the most successfully extended affirmative movements to have been penned by an Irish composer. The patchwork of the Fourth, (1990-91), The Four Provinces (the original Birmingham Six title has been dropped) is more diffuse, less convincing. The manner here is not always well supported by the material, which too often relies on an almost ingenu directness.
Michael Dervan
Katia and Marielle Labeque: "The Debussy Album" (Philips)
There's a precision in the Labeque sisters' playing of Debussy which I'm sure would have impressed that most critical and exacting of composers. But the French duo take such a delight in that precision, they sometimes seem to have their hearts set on some sort of world record for speed typing. Their style favours brightness and glitter at the expense of the subtle, often muted sonorities which are such a characteristic of the later Debussy of En Blanc Et Noir and the Epigraphes Antiques. If you like your Debussy to incline more to friskiness than to sensual languor, and favour phrasing with sharp angles rather than soft curves, the Labeques are the players for you.
Michael Dervan
Lourie: String Quartets 1-3; Duo for violin and viola. Utrecht String Quartet (ASV)
What sort of a composer was the Russian Arthur Lourie? The answer very much depends on where you choose to look; or, rather, listen. Born in St Petersburg in 1892, this one-time Musical Commissar, who lived in Paris from 1924 and in the US from 1941 until his death in 1966, seems to have functioned as a musical chameleon, or, rather, a highly absorbent musical sponge. His identity can change not just from work to work, but, within a work, from moment to moment. The experimentalism diminished with age. The pieces here, from the Russian and early Paris years of a man once described as being "too brainy for his talent", fascinatingly document the stylistic flux of the transition towards the sparer, modal preoccupations of his later years.
Michael Dervan
