Haydn: Sturm und Drang Symphonies. Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/Frans Bruggen (Philips)
This is a generous bargain; five CDs priced as four, and including 19 symphonies from that extraordinary experimental period in Haydn's output that has been dubbed Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress). It was the time of the greatest minor key symphonies, whose nicknames - Lamentatione, La Passione, Mourning - characterise their emotional world. Even the less well-known works are full of wonderful touches, like the dramatically unexpected silences of No 39 in G minor. Bruggen brings out the fullness of Haydn's invention with a light touch. He's a discreet guide, uncovering the essence of the music with quiet authority, as alert to its playfulness and wit as to its formal or textural ingenuity and psychological burden.
Michael Dervan
Gretchaninov: Vespers Op 59. Holst Singers/Stephen Layton (Hyperion)
IF you're familiar with the name of Alexander Gretchaninov (1864-1956), it could well be that you played a piece or two of his as a child. The two areas he's regarded as having made his own are children's music, unpatronising and attractive, and liturgical music. The Vespers recorded here date from 1912, when the composer still lived in Russia (he moved to Paris in 1925 and the US in 1939). He had already upset traditionalists by including instruments in liturgical works, which automatically debarred them from Orthodox use. His unaccompanied Vespers are finely wrought for voices and momentarily splendid in effect, but simpler of harmony and altogether less stirring than Rachmaninov's more famous setting of three years later.
Michael Dervan
Lutoslawski: Orchestral works Vol 6. Polish National Radio SO/Antoni Wit (Naxos)
This valuable addition to Naxos's Lutoslawski series ranges from the 1947 Symphony No 1 to Chantefleurs et Chantefables, written in 1991, three years before the composer's death. Lutoslawski was a late developer. He was 34 when he finished the First Symphony and 38 when he wrote the folk-song settings of the Silesian Triptych, works in a style quite different from the mature Jeux venitiens, where, inspired by a radio broadcast of John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra, he first introduced chance elements into his work. Chantefleurs et Chantefables, aerated, linear settings of Robert Desnos' "poems for wise children", are beautifully done here in a light, unoperatic style by the soprano Olga Pasiecznik.
Michael Dervan
Chanticleer: Colors of Love (Teldec)
over the past decade, choral music has turned out to be the accessible face of the contemporary classical scene. Here the American a cappella ensemble Chanticleer - named for the "clear-singing" rooster in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - has assembled a number of new works which it was instrumental, pardon the pun, in commissioning. The group encompasses 12 male voices ranging from soprano (oh, yes - check out Jay White's solo line on the fourth of August Read Thomas's five miniature Love Songs), and the pieces are all settings of various musings on the theme of love (hence the dodgy CD title), from Bernard Rand's Canti d'Amor, a setting of Joyce's Chamber Music lyrics, to Chen Yi's Tang Poems, based on ninth-century Chinese texts. Molto easy on the ear, this is an album for dreamy strawberry evenings.
Arminta Wallace
