Musica baltica. Musica Antiqua Koln/Reinhard Goebel. (Archiv Produktion)
What Reinhard Goebel has collected here is 17thcentury music disseminated through the Hanseatic League, travelling along trade routes, exported and consumed like the goods which created those routes in the first place. The names are unfamiliar - Paul Luetkeman, Vincenzo Albrici, Johann Vierdanck, Thomas Baltzar, Nicolaus Hasse, Andreas Kirchoff, Dietrich Becker, Johann Fischer, Johann Valentin Meder - the musical styles less so, as these composers were often well schooled by men like Lully, Schutz and Schmelzer. It was all part of a development, says Goebel, that would end in the emergence of Buxtehude. Musica Antiqua Koln's re-creative care creates a sense of Baltic glory centuries older than Arvo Part.
Michael Dervan
Menuhin in Japan (Biddulph, 2 CDs)
Yehudi Menuhin's Japanese tour of 1951 was an important gesture of post-war goodwill, as well as a major musical occasion for the Japanese. The schedule was gruelling; 20 recitals (five different programmes) plus 10 concerto performances (four different works) in a month. And, somewhere in the middle of it all, he agreed to two days of unscheduled recording for the Japanese Victor Company. The technical quality is poor - Biddulph has obviously had to work hard to counter problems with noisy surfaces, pitch fluctuations and imperfections in the original pressings. But the music-making (solo Bach, Beethoven's Spring and Kreutzer Sonatas with Adolf Baller, and a clutch of shorter pieces) finds Menuhin at his unfettered best. An apt human and musical memorial to a great man.
Michael Dervan
Scriabin: Preludes for piano. Andrei Diev. (Arte Nova, 2 CD set, £9.98)
In Scriabin, the dividing line between genius and madness was alarmingly indistinct. Although most of his music was written for solo piano, he envisaged composing a mammoth Mystery, to embrace all the arts. With himself as Messiah, it was to have been like a religious service, producing an ecstasy after which the human race would be replaced by new, higher beings. Quite a distance for someone to have travelled, whose earliest works relate so clearly to Chopin. The preludes, which are threaded through his piano output, map his development thoroughly, through increasing mysticism and ever more exotic harmonic and rhythmic practices. Diev, reliable rather than inspired, is the only player to chart the journey from beginning to end on disc.
Michael Dervan