The latest releases reviewed

REICHA: OCTET OP 96; VARIATIONS; GRAND QUINTETTO
Czech Nonet Praga Digitals PRD/DSD 250 244 ***

Czech composer Antonín Reicha (1770-1836), a friend of Beethoven and an important theorist in his day, is now best remembered through his wind quintets. The Czech Nonet here offer some rather less well-known pieces. The earliest, an agreeable Octet of 1807, is the least distinctive of the three, and its cause is not helped by a performance that can seem a couple of degrees too earnest. Bassoonist Pavel Langpaul and horn-player Vladimirá Klánská help infuse the jolly variations (1818) and the large-scale quintet (1829), a work that combines geniality and virtuosity, with altogether greater character. www.uk.hmboutique.com

HAYDN: PIANO CONCERTOS NOS 3, 4, 9, 11
Sebastian Knauer, Cologne Chamber Orchestra/Helmut Müller-Brühl Naxos 8.570485 ****

Although the names of Haydn and Mozart are often bracketed together, there's not much equality between them when it comes to their output of concertos. Only one of the four concertos in this new Haydn collection is at all well- known, the Concerto in D, Hob XVII: 11, which has attracted the attention of pianists as diverse as Brendel, Kissin, Michelangeli and Pletnev, as well as Andreas Staier on fortepiano and Ton Koopman on harpsichord. Sebastian Knauer's stylish new account combines nimbleness and grace with a suggestion of tonal weight, and the veteran conductor Helmut Müller-Brühl offers sensitive support. The music- making is equally agreeable in the three lesser but always well-turned works. www.naxos.com

ERNST: OTHELLO FANTASY; SIX POLYPHONIC STUDIES; ELEGY; ERLKÖNIG
Ilya Gringolts (violin), Ashley Wass (piano) Hyperion CDA 67619 ****

Paganini didn't have a 19th-century monopoly on composing or playing brilliantly difficult violin music. But he had a huge influence on the Moravian Heinrich Wilhelm von Ernst (1814-65), who managed to impress the older Paganini by learning some of his unpublished works by ear. For all their devilish difficulties, if not always exactly because of them, Paganini's pieces usually lack substance. Ernst, at least in the hands of Ilya Gringolts, is rather more meaty. The sixth of the Six Polyphonic Studies for solo violin, a set of variations on The Last Rose of Summer, is the best-known piece here. But there are intriguing challenges in the other works, too, not least a reworking of Schubert's Erlkönig for solo violin. www.hyperion-records.co.uk

FELDMAN: THE VIOLA IN MY LIFE
Marek Konstantynowicz (viola), Cikada Ensemble, Norwegian Radio Orchestra/Christian Eggen ECM New Series 476 5777 ***

What leads me to begin a composition, Morton Feldman once told an interviewer, "is a weight, an orchestration, which is new for me". The four pieces in his series The Viola in My Life (a fifth was sketched but never completed) date from 1970 and 1971. The pieces are conventionally notated (a departure for Feldman at the time), and the scoring ranges from viola and piano (No 3) through mixed ensemble (Nos 1 & 2) right up to viola and orchestra (No 4). The viola often swells gently on single notes or shapes melodies that rise out of floating, feathery, rumbling backgrounds that typically hover on the cusp of silence. Traces of vibrato in Marek Konstantynowicz's viola playing remind one of a world Feldman hoped to put behind him. www.ecmrecords.com