Latest releases reviewed

Franz Xaver Richter (1709-89) featured four decades ago on the first Telefunken LP from Nikolaus Harnoncourt's Concentus Musicus. The little-known German composer has been credited with writing a string quartet that predates Haydn's. The six symphonies recorded here certainly predate those of Haydn - the younger composer was 12 when they were published in 1744. They show a serious musician who has a penchant for strikingly original touches and also occasionally allows himself to rotate through some baroque ruts. The impact of this little-known music is greatly helped by the astringently fresh playing of the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra under Aapo Häkkinen. www.naxos.com  - Michael Dervan

What are the best-known solo piano works of the Second Viennese School doing coupled with the music of New York-born George Tsontakis? His 40-minute piano concerto, Man of Sorrows(2005), was inspired by a 15th-century Byzantine icon, and presents itself as a resourcefully handled mixture of the old and the new - Messiaen's bird-chatter and colours processing material from Beethoven with the comfort of some old-style tonal chording. Perhaps Hough wants to present the eclectic Tsontakis as in some sense the true successor to the compact expressive potency of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. I'm not so sure. The performances, however, all sound first-rate. www.hyperion-records.co.uk -Michael Dervan

The German soprano Irmgard Seefried (1919-88) spent most of her life in Vienna. She made the act of singing sound remarkably easy, the voice unfailingly lovely, the tone straight and true, the words handled with the rhythmic deftness of flexible speech. She was a perceptive musician whose range extended beyond the German repertoire she's most closely associated with. Here, in this selection of recordings made between 1953 and 1962 with the impeccable Erik Werba, you can hear her in Mussorgsky's The Nurseryand Bartók's Village Scenes(both in German) as well as Schumann's Frauenliebe und -Leben.And if you ever thought Mozart's songs were dull, Seefried says otherwise. The set, also without texts or translations, includes songs by Brahms, Wolf and Schubert. www.deutschegrammophon.com- Michael Dervan

Finnish duo Kriikku and Karttunen commissioned a concert-length clutch of pieces in 1990. Erik Bergman's Karanssi takes the pair through a myriad of unusual playing techniques in a piece where the music theatre sometimes approaches cartoon-lurid melodrama. There's comedy, too, in the chasing games of Jukka Tiensuu's Plus IIand Magnus Lindberg's Buster Keaton-inspired Steamboat Bill Jr. Kaija Saariaho's Oi Kuuevokes the sonic landscape of electro-acoustic music, and Kimmo Hakola's Capriole, an exuberant joyride with Gerald Barry-ish extremes, includes both the disc's moment of greatest calm and its most gutsy evocation of folk music. Also in this well-conceived and often brilliantly executed collection are pieces by Olli Kortekangas, Usko Meriläinen, Erkki Jokinen, Tapani Länsiö and Paavo Heininen. www.uk.hmboutique.com - Michael Dervan