OPERA

SACCHINI: OEDIPE A COLONE
Soloists: Francois Loup, Nathalie Paulin, Robert Getchell, Tony Boutte, Kirsten Blaise. Opera Layafette Orchestra and Chorus Conductor: Ryan Brown
Naxos 8.660196-97
****

The record companies continue to find lesser known or forgotten masterpieces from the Baroque era, and this work certainly has enough fine music to deserve wider recognition. Widely known in his lifetime in the mid-18th century, Sacchini made a career in Venice, London and Paris, where he had the patronage of Marie Antoinette. This opera, his last work, is widely considered his best and was regularly performed at the Paris Opera after his death in 1786 until well into the 19th century, where Berlioz, among others, was a committed admirer. The subject is based on a play by Sophocles, and while the general musical style is that of contemporary French Opera with overtones of Gluck the detail is very much the composer's own, with some fine melodic and dramatic writing. www.naxos.com Colman Morrissey

CLASSICAL

EARLY RECORDINGS
Emil Gilels (piano)
Deutsche Grammophon 477 6370 (2 CDs)
****

The great Russian pianist Emil Gilels, who died in 1985, would have celebrated his 90th birthday late last year, and Deutsche Grammophon has issued a number of sets to mark the anniversary. Along with his almost complete Beethoven sonata cycle and a two-disc set of Mozart, there's a two-disc set of little-known early recordings, all made before cold-war politics had thawed to the point of letting artists like Gilels appear regularly in the West. The proudly displayed virtuosity of the young Gilels may surprise listeners familiar only with the studio work of his maturity. He blazed through Schumann's Toccata as a teenager, and 15 years later revelled in the high jinks of Liszt's Ninth Hungarian Rhapsody. There's some wonderfully deft playing of Scarlatti and Rameau, magisterial Beethoven (the Sonata in C Op 2 No. 3), and the fragrant virtuosity of the Sonata in G minor by Nikolai Medtner. www.deutschegrammophon.com - Michael Dervan

CRUMB: VOX BALAENAE; FEDERICO'S LITTLE SONGS FOR CHILDREN; AN IDYLL FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN; ELEVEN ECHOES OF AUTUMN, 1965
New Music Concerts Ensemble
Naxos American Classics 8.559205
***

Naxos continue its documentation of the work of George Crumb with a disc that includes one of his best-known pieces, long a favourite of Jane O'Leary's Concorde Ensemble, Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale) for masked players on amplified flute, cello and piano. It's fully characteristic of Crumb's control of unusual unexpected sonorities - refined ripples and ruffles, strange stirring soughings, and occasional storms and explosions emerge from a carefully controlled stillness. The moments of vocalisation are not the strongest in these performances, which should still provide a useful introduction to this composer whose work was highly fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s. www.naxos.com - Michael Dervan

ROBERT SIMPSON: SYMPHONIES 1-11; NIELSEN VARIATIONS
Royal PO/Vernon Handley, Bourne- mouth SO/Vernon Handley, City of London Sinfonia/Matthew Taylor
Hyperion CDS 44191/7 (7 CDs)
*****

The English composer Robert Simpson (1921-97), who spent the last decade of his life in Tralee, wrote 11 symphonies and 16 string quartets, and also important books on the symphonies of Nielsen and Bruckner. In his music he sought to reincarnate something of the spirit of Beethoven in an idiom of the dissonant 20th century. His symphonies are austerely imposing works through which the spirit and sometimes the letter of the composer's exemplars can be very clearly discerned. His techniques and procedures don't work as well as those of his less consistently dissonant tonal models, where access to memorable and stirring surfaces was more ready. For all the heat he can generate, Simpson's climaxes can be garish and his lyricism a bit anaemic. The music is clever, monkish, ideologically focused, grand in a grey kind of way. In these recordings, made between 1987 and 2003, Vernon Handley (Symphonies 1-10) and Matthew Taylor conduct as to the manner born. www.hyperion-records.co.uk  - Michael Dervan

MOZART: HORN CONCERTOS; PIANO AND WIND QUINTET
Dennis Brain (horn), Philharmonia/ Herbert von Karajan, Philharmonia Wind Ensemble, Walter Gieseking (piano)
Naxos Historical 8.111070
*****

The English horn player Dennis Brain was in his early 20s when his playing inspired Benjamin Britten's Serenade for tenor, horn and strings. And when, in 1953, he made his most famous recording, of the Mozart horn concertos with Herbert von Karajan, he was 32. Less than five years later he died in an accident, driving back to London from a concert at the Edinburgh Festival. His playing was peerless for its poise and precision, and the years have not dimmed the allure of the easy musical grace and effortless-seeming technical command of his Mozart. Now at bargain price on Naxos, the concertos are attractively coupled with a 1955 recording of Mozart's Piano and Wind Quintet, with Walter Gieseking at the piano. www.naxos.com - Michael Dervan