French Chamber Songs. Anne Sofie von Otter (mezzo soprano). This is a well-chosen collection. It ranges from the beautiful subtlety of Ravel's Trois poemes De Stephane Mallarme, through the graphic exoticism of Maurice Delage's Quatre Poemes Hindous to the downright iconoclasm of Poulenc's Rapsodie negre. Milder compositional voices are represented in Chausson's Chanson Perpetuelle, Frank Martin's Trois Chants De Noel and Saint-Saens's Une Flute Invisible. And the final work is Faure's elusive La Bonne Chanson in the version with string quintet and piano. Von Otter's singing is here at its most alluring - ethereal in the Ravel, mock-baritonal in the Poulenc - and her team of Swedish musicians are chameleon-like in their responsiveness.
Michael Dervan"Saxazione": Suddeutsches Saxophon-Kammerorchester/Linda Bangs-Urban (Phono Suecia) The opening piece on this new Swedish CD, the soft and respectful Concerto For Baritone Saxophone And String Orchestra by octogenarian, German-born, Werner Wolf Glaser, is the most conventional in scoring. Thereafter the disc moves into the rarefied world of music for saxophone orchestra, to Glaser's slightly more colourful Three Pieces For 11 Saxophones, and the finer accomplishment of Erland von Koch's svelte Moderato Ed Allegro (for the same combination). Hungarian-born Miklos Maros's ricocheting, slithering, minimalist Saxazione for 18 saxes, gives the disc its title and, more than any of the other pieces, delivers on some of the potential you might expect from these unusual combinations.
Michael DervanCPE Bach: Hamburg Symphonies. Capella Istropolitana/Christian Benda. (Naxos, £4.99) The symphonies of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach were a cause of wonder in his own time and remain so today. Their extraordinary swings of mood, unusual both for their speed and severity, race the listener through a veritable switchback-ride of the emotions. These new performances are well-turned and cultured, clean-cut and lithe. Ultimately, though, they're a bit too comfortable. They try to smooth the contours of Bach's abruptness, and miss out on the full extent of his music's adventuring and strangeness. For pieces so thoroughly concerned with contrasts of passion, the voice of reason is articulated too clearly in these performances.
Michael Dervan
