This week's Classical CDs reviewed
Wihan Quartet Nimbus Alliance NI 6100 (3 CDs) ****
Nimbus Alliance is a new venture by Nimbus, the label based in Monmouth, Wales. Nimbus is bringing its name as well as its marketing and distribution clout to recordings not produced by the label. Avie pioneered this model, which leaves ownership and controls with artists that more conventional labels don't. The label's debut project brings live recordings from the Beethoven cycle the Wihan Quartet completed in Prague in 2008. The feeling of live music-making is very strong, enhanced by the forward quality of the recording, which captures the often grainy richness of the Wihan's tone with great immediacy. These are performances that somehow sound at once wise and unstudied. www.wyastone.co.uk
MICHAEL DERVAN
Darragh Morgan (violin), Mary Dullea (piano) Altarus AIR-CD-9027 ***
Composer Simon Mawhinney, who is a lecturer in music at Queen's University, Belfast, seems to have had a musical love affair with one of the 20th century's most musically and linguistically verbose figures: Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, the English composer of Parsi descent whose Opus Clavicembalisticum lasts nearly five hours. There is a skitterish floridity of gesture in Mawhinney's Batufor solo piano that Sorabji would surely have recognised, and a rhapsodic tenacity in the 45-minute Hunshigofor violin and piano that also carries reflections of Messiaen and Feldman. By comparison, the whistles, flurries and explosions of the short Barcode III for solo violin sound like an out-of-date avantgarde. www.altarusrecords.com
MICHAEL DERVAN
Ian Bostridge (tenor), Antonio Pappano (piano) EMI Classics 242 6392f ***
English tenor Ian Bostridge is a singer with a distinctive tone that commands attention. He also knows how to deliver a song so that his listeners always feel that it matters. These qualities are well evidenced in his latest Schubert offering, the factitious song-cycle that the publisher Tobias Haslinger issued under the emotive and commercially astute title Swan Songafter the composer's death. Bostridge frames its 14 songs with four more, which pile on the associations. The singing itself, and the playing of Antonio Pappano, are, in the circumstances, surprisingly generalised, agreeably varied but rarely of a nature that seems to get fully to the heart of the matter. www.emiclassics.com
MICHAEL DERVAN
Various orchestras/André Previn Deutsche Grammophon 477 8114 (6 CDs) ***
This set is being issued in advance of Previn's 80th birthday next month. The selection from his Decca and Deutsche Grammophon recordings is a personal one, which may well explain why around a third of the music is by Previn himself, including the CD debut of his easy-on-the-ear Double Concerto for violin and double bass. It's the Three Dickinson Songswith Renée Fleming which find the composer at his best. Previn the conductor is a warm-hearted romantic, and his birthday indulgences run to Strauss, Ravel, Korngold, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, in performances with leading orchestras from Vienna. London and Boston. The quality of the glow takes rather too much precedence over sharpness of outline. www.tinyurl.com/5b9s4r
MICHAEL DERVAN
