People often ask me to recommend good modern music, accessible but not cheesy or playing to the gallery; interesting and thoughtful, with rich ingredients and a kick to its step. People like Steve Reich, John Adams, Michael Torke, Arvo Pärt, Gavin Bryars and the Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova (born 1980) are invariable answers, the ultimate proof in Tabakova’s case being a new Hallé CD (CD HLL 7562, released 6th Oct 2023) where Delyana Lazarova conducts the Orchestra for Tabakova’s Earth Suite, Viola Concerto (with Maxim Rysanov), Cello Concerto (soloist Guy Johnston) and to start with, Orpheus’s Comet, a sort of road runner with the opening of Monterverdi’s Orfeo its ultimate – and thrilling – final destination.  The nature-inspired Earth Suite has a topical connection in its busily upbeat finale, ‘Timber and Steel’. Sir Henry Wood’s orchestral players affectionately nicknamed him “Timber” and Tabakova invests her music with an excited sense of Wood’s wide-ranging hobbies as well as hinting at elements of industrialisation, still fresh when Wood was born in 1869. Her own creative industriousness audibly brims over. The Cello Concerto is often soulful, even when the music is mostly mobile (as in the first movement) though the Viola Concerto’s ‘passionate and nostalgic’ second movement goes that extra mile in terms of deep expression. If Tabakova is at the moment but a name on your musical horizon, here’s your chance to do some exploring.

Violist Maxim Rysanov offers a compelling performance of Tabakova’s Viola Concerto and his presence on the Hallé disc gives me an opportunity to plug an important older release, Romanian Rhapsody featuring the pianist Mihaela Ursuleasa with violinist Gilles Apap on Berlin Classics 0016642BC, c£12.75. In 1995 Ursuleasa won the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition but was tragically found dead from a cerebral hemorrhage  in her Vienna home on 2 August 2012. She was just 33. Rysanov paid homage to Ursuleasa with his 2012 album “PAVANE” (BIS BIS1773) and reckoned her as both a wonderful musician and a very special person. ‘Romanian Rhapsody’ is simply stunning. It opens with Enescu’s First Romanian Rhapsody in the sort of solo virtuoso piano performance that years ago would fan the flames of Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody. Schubert’s Three Piano Pieces D.946 offer us some idea of Ursuleasa as a lieder accompanist (a role she apparently relished). There’s locally flavoured music her compatriot Paul Constantinescu and works by Bartók, the two spicy Romanian Dances (very different to the less playful Six Romanian Dances) and the Second Violin Rhapsody, which is where Apap comes in (the two players append a Gipsy-style prelude before the piece gets going). Ursuleasa was one on her own, a true original, unpredictable, dazzlingly brilliant but also capable of poetic flights of fancy (as in the Schubert). If you can find this CD (Presto list it at https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/7997323–romanian-rhapsody#reviews), then take the plunge. You won’t regret it, I promise you.

Two aspects of Bartók’s three piano concertos that tend to get lost in translation are lightness and a sense of play. Maurizio Pollini (DG) is celebrated for his brilliant performances of, in particular, the often belligerent Second Concerto, driving the first movement as if it’s a pantechnicon in the fast lane. Turn to Géza Anda with Ferenc Fricsay in Berlin (DG) or, from June last year, Pierre-Laurent Aimard with the San Francisco Symphony under Esa-Pekka Salonen (on Pentatone PTC 5187 029, c£13.00) and there’s elegance and poetry as well as energy, strongly projected rhythms and a teeming cloud of colour, as if petals had blown in from near-by fields (Bartók is always outdoors). In the slow movement mystery alternates with rustling activity (Aimard’s fast repeated notes are miraculous) while the finale finds us confronting big drums for a real romp. Salonen and his players also have the full measure of the piece and Pentatone’s recording is spectacularly good, dynamic as well as transparent (thank you recording producer James O’Connell).  The Third Concerto’s central Adagio religioso conjures more sounds of nature, prayer among birdsong this time you might say, whereas the more angular First Concerto opens with a primitivistic war dance before shedding seven veils – or more – in the hypnotically twirling second movement. This for me is the best set of Bartók piano concertos we’ve had in a very long while, much to be recommended.

If Ursuleasa’s album ‘Romanian Rhapsody’ takes us on a bold journey along fronts that are either folkish or songful, a somewhat different route is taken by Alpha Classics’ ‘Infinite Voyage’, ALPHA1000, c£12.75 where the Strad-like soprano Barbara Hannigan weaves seamlessly in and among the tonally seductive players of the Emerson String Quartet, who sadly are due to disband in the Autumn. The programme opens with Hindemith’s haunting Melancholie, one of the composer’s most melodically appealing works, heartfelt and heart breaking and that according to Hannigan’s own admission she’s carried around with her for years. I couldn’t imagine it being more compellingly performed than here, nor Arnold Schoenberg’s quietly revolutionary Second String Quartet – which even after the passage of well over a century seems perennially new. The texts set (in the last two movements) are by the German symbolist poet (and translator of Dante) Stefan George. Though the work bears the dedication “to my wife”, it was written during Mathilde Schoenberg’s affair with their friend and neighbour, artist Richard Gerstl, in 1908.

Chausson’s deeply sensual Chanson perpétuelle (1898) finds that fine pianist Bertrand Chamayou enriching the ensemble further. The work’s text comes from a poem by Charles Cros that describes the suffering of an abandoned woman. And although the Emersons have previously recorded Alban Berg’s emotionally absorbing and musically inventive Lyric Suite (for DG), the more overtly romantic String Quartet Op. 3 (shades of the similarly demonstrative Piano Sonata) has up until now been absent from their discography. Better late than never is what I say, the work’s discordant closing chord delivered with unchecked ferocity. A most absorbing programme, superbly recorded.