Kreisler: String Quartet. Kreisler et al (Biddulph)
Fritz Kreisler's 1919 A minor String Quartet is not the sort of work you'd expect the history books to spend much time on. It's as important to the course of 20th-century music as the most recently consumed delicious Viennese Torte is to the fate of culinary art. Kreisler's sentimental "avowal of Vienna" has never sounded as attractively honeyed as when, in 1935, the master himself sat at the first violin desk in the recording studio, surrounded by a hand-picked team - Thomas Petre, William Primrose and Lauri Kennedy. Those Dublin audiences which release a sigh of anticipatory pleasure at the announcement of a Kreisler encore will find here an unalloyed 27 minutes of heaven . . . followed by more than a dozen of those encores which granted Kreisler's name an aura it has never lost.
Michael Dervan
Spanish Piano Music. Alicia de Larrocha (Decca)
For many people, Alicia de Larrocha, here highlighted in four two-for-the-price-of-one sets, is the Spanish piano. After an obeisance to the 18th-century, Scarlattiesque Soler, Larrocha moves into the catchy, characterful dances and Goya celebrations of Granados, the pictorial rhapsodising of Albeniz (the complete Iberia is here), and the spare but tangy world of Falla. The piano music of these three composers continues, in arrangements, to provide the backbone of many a popular guitar recital. To round off there's music by lesser-known figures, the exuberant Turina, the introverted Mompou, and men like Montsalvatge, Nin-Culmell, Surinach and Ernesto Halftter who brought the nationalist tradition into our own time. All played with typical tautness and a range of colour that's personal and distinctive.
Michael Dervan
Giacomo Puccini: Il Trittico (EMI)
An operatic triptych is a dodgy proposition at the best of times; when the composer is Puccini, it seems like theatrical lunacy, emotional overkill gone crazy. So it has proved with Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi: the melodrama of the first, and the high-camp morality of the second, sit uneasily beside the rather cruel comedy of the final piece. On record, of course, it's a different matter - and on this sumptuous recording conductor Antonio Pappano overcomes all objections by the sheer beauty of the sound he produces. Such is the scale of the thing, that opera dream team Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu, as a pair of minor lovers, slip in and out almost unnoticed.
Arminta Wallace