Review 2005 / Music: Michael Dervan surveys the best classical releases of the year
THE mantra hardly changes. The classical record industry is in crisis. And the reality remains the same. The stream of recordings, flows with bewildering prolixity from labels large and small.
True, the great orchestras of the world don't dominate the way they used to. Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw has joined the ranks of those issuing their own CDs. The Philadelphia Orchestra has signed a contract with a small Finnish label, Ondine. And the bargain-priced Naxos empire continues to colonise, with a kind of across-the-board appetite unmatched by any other label. I've particularly enjoyed their piano re-issues of Artur Schnabel from the 1930s as well as Robert Craft conducting Stravinsky and Schoenberg from the 1990s.
2005 was a good year on a number of fronts. The new generation of string quartets are redefining the bounds of technical possibility and approaching their repertoire with fascinating interpretative slants. Cuarteto Casals's ultra-modern sounding Debussy (coupled with Zemlinsky's Second Quartet on Harmonia Mundi HMI 987057) was an outstanding issue, and the Belcea Quartet's Britten (EMI) and the Artemis's Ligeti (Virgin) were also highly impressive.
The edge-of-the-seat immediacy of René Jacobs's approach to the oratorio Saul places it at the peak of Handel issues this year (with Concerto Köln on Harmonia Mundi HMC 901877.78, two CDs). Matthew Halls's performances of Handel's Op 4 Organ Concertos provide pure delight (on Avie) and the 1979 recording of 16 Handel keyboard suites shared between pianists Sviatoslav Richter and Andrei Gavrilov now demands attention at a rock-bottom price (EMI).
Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky was involved in two striking issues, unerringly characterful in piano trios by Rachmaninov and Shostakovich with violinist Dmitri Makhtin and cellist Alexander Kniazev (Warner Classics 2564 61937-2), and dazzling in accounts of some of Leopold Godowsky's crazily intricate re-workings of Chopin Études (Warner Classics 2564 62258-2). Other memorable piano-related issues included Philippe Cassard's Schumann (Ambroisie), a Mozart recital by Alfred Brendel (Philips), Mikhail Pletnev in rare but rewarding chamber music by Taneyev (Deutsche Grammophon), and a big set of Friedrich Gulda's crystalline 1950s recordings of Beethoven (Decca Original Masters).
Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre pilfered far and wide in the music of Rameau, throwing purism to the wind to create their sparkling Une Symphonie Imaginaire, the symphony that "Rameau never wrote" (Archiv Produktion 477 5578). And German baritone Thomas Quasthoff hit the jackpot with a collection of three Bach cantatas (Nos 56, 158, 82) with Rainer Kussmaul directing the Berliner Barock Solisten (Deutsche Grammophon 474 5052). Other memorable early music issues came from William Christie's Les Arts Florissants in Marc-Antoine Charpentier's celebratory Te Deum and inward Grand Office des morts (Virgin), and Emma Kirkby's hand-in-glove performances with Fretwork of intricately woven consort songs by William Byrd (Harmonia Mundi).
In the outer reaches of the 20th century, I was greatly struck by Ensemble Recherche's approachably visceral collection of works by Brian Ferneyhough, one of the most challenging of living composers (Stradivarius STR 33694). Stradivarius also produced a set of the eight concertos for orchestra by Italian composer Goffredo Petrassi (STR 33700, two CDs), an impressive body of work well handled by the Netherlands Radio SO under Arturo Tamayo.
In the core 19th-century orchestral repertoire, I found myself utterly charmed by a spirit-lifting account of Grieg's music for Peer Gynt with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra under Paavo Järvi (Virgin Classics 545 7222).
