The ultimate ‘authentic’ performance, lavishly expressive, playing just for the love it. Take 20 minutes out of your day and treat yourself …. and thank you Eric Wen for the loan of the recording.

With Granddaughter Elizabeth a month ago after a fish supper!

Here is just a handful of ideas for musical gifts – recent cd releases – for anyone who has a birthday at around the same time (or at any other time for that matter).

Yunchan Lim’s dazzling set of Chopin’s Etudes (Decca 4870122), piano playing of rare distinction, deeply expressive and with an old-world style of virtuosity that I find impossible to resist.

Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances with the Prague Symphony Orchestra under Tomas Brauner (Supraphon SU 4332-2), more symphonic than folksy perhaps, big-boned playing with a keen sense of rhythm – a throwback to Václav Talich

Smetana’s Ma vlast idiomatically performed by the Czech Philharmonic, the Orchestra sounding more its vintage self under Semyon Bychkov (Pentatone PTC 5187 203) than it has for many a year. Great sound too.

The ‘Allan Pettersson Complete Edition’ (BIS BIS-9062 SACD, 17 discs). At the heart of this grand enterprise are the 17 symphonies (the last an uncompleted fragment) by Sweden’s greatest composer, massive, granitic music, Sibelius and Nielsen writ large, unpeopled terrains to wander around in wonderstruck. Christian Lindberg and Leif Segerstam are the principle conductors and the sound is magnificent.

Tchaikovsky’s First and Second String Quartets played by the Dudok Quartet (Rubicon RCDH03), the Second a dramatic essay in whirring counterpoint, as cerebral as anything Tchaikovsky wrote (exciting too), played with spirit and precision.

Music in the stream of life? Mutually reflective or separate worlds? I’d say the former, as anyone who has experienced a Proustian moment when a certain piece, even a particular musical phrase, sparks a significant memory. And there are cases where music lends emotional and/or moral support to people who need it most, as the Jewish pianist Igor Levit does by devoting his proceeds from the sale of his latest album to “two wonderful organisations that work in my hometown here in Berlin to help people who experience anti-Semitism and to avoid young people avoid falling into the clutches of anti-Semitism.” The music chosen a sequence of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words and Charles-Valentin Alkan’s eerie Song of the mad woman on the sea shore, (Sony Classical 19658878982, c£13:50) where a meandering high octave melody sings atop solemn dark, low chords before briefly flying off the handle then reposing exhausted, the woman’s head resting in her hands in utter despair. What does this music represent? You could imagine a boat nearby where the woman, made mad through grieving, is about to join fellow refugees fleeing the anti-Semitic land where up to now she has lived, happily. Mendelssohn’s adorable miniatures make up the main body of the programme, whether Venetian Gondola Songs, or songs without titles, all given by Levit with a fluid touch and a refreshing lack of affectation. This is a sublime, idealistic world, the death of which (I’m imagining) sent the woman by the sea shore mad ….. coming from Leipzig maybe, where Mendelssohn’s statue was wilfully pulled down, removed by a gang of Nazi sympathisers two years exactly before the notorious pogroms of Kristallnacht. So you have a Jewish maverick – Alkan – anticipating, in theory of course, the expulsion of a Lutheran-Jewish composer. It’s a humbling programme released in support of a worthy cause.

Journeying further into the anti-Semitic maelstrom, Riga-born violinist Gidon Kremer had a Jewish father who survived the Holocaust and being the universalist he is, draws on a wealth of personal experience to enrich his considerable art as a musician. Among the many unusual composers he has championed over the decades is Warsaw-born (and Jewish) Mieczysław Weinberg, described by the conductor Thomas Sanderling as, “a great discovery. Tragically, a discovery, because he didn’t gain much recognition within his lifetime besides from a circle of insiders in Russia,” others have called him “the third great Soviet composer, along with Prokofiev and Shostakovich”. Kremer’s cd Songs of Fate (ECM  4859850, c£13.50) with his ensemble Kremerata Baltica includes a number of Weinberg’s pieces, the Nocturne for violin and orchestra being among the gentlest, the Aria perhaps the most beautiful. The Latvian composer Giedrius Kuprevicius’s Chamber Symphony ‘The Star of David’ is represented in excerpt, ‘The Luminous Lament’ with soprano Vida Miknevičiūtė being charged with atmosphere, also two settings of music from the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish. But for me the disc’s most entrancing tracks are the first and the last, Raminta Serksnyte’s evocative ‘This Too Shall Pass’ (violin, cello, vibraphone and chamber orchestra) and Jekabs Jancevskis’s Lignum (string orchestra, svilpaunieki [traditional Latvian instruments], chimes and wind chimes). Jancevskis (b1992) is the youngest composer represented. His piece suggests a Mahlerian variant on modernism, desolate, lonely, deeply expressive, yet profoundly intimate. This sort of private, inwards-looking production is typical of ECM-founder Manfred Eicher’s sound world. At around the six minute mark pizzicato strings suggest a passing shower before the tension mounts and Mahlerian portamenti, or slides, lift us shoulder high into a brighter world. It’s pure magic, the shofar-like svilpaunieki marking the specific space where the music was born. The work closes on quiet high strings, next to silent in fact, like a soft wind reaching through ancient, cracked window frames.

Lignum is the work of a gifted 25-years-old – someone to keep an eye on, obviously – whereas Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s String Sextet (superbly played by the Nash Ensemble, Hyperion CDA68406, c£12.25) was written by a budding genius while in his mid-teens. How is it then possible that a mere kid could summon feelings of such depth and sophistication? The Adagio is, again, Mahlerian – meaning not that it sounds like Mahler, but that it feels like Mahler. Seasoned fans of Korngold’s genius will know what to expect, or should I say know never to expect the obvious.The coupling is Tchaikovsky’s frisky and tuneful Souvenir de Florence, a lovely piece but child’s play next to the dazzlingly original Korngold. Maybe you can tell me this: how come the Nazis, who claimed such hatred on ‘degenerate’ music, could ban a score such as Korngold’s Sextet – which they by rights should have been proud of – and celebrate instead real musical decadence such as Strauss’s Salome? I’m not saying that Salome isn’t a remarkable composition, but am I missing something? An obvious answer I know, but the further you walk away from it the more ludicrous it seems.

I have to admit I’m a real pushover when it comes to boxed sets that combine the familiar with the unfamiliar, especially if performance and recording standards are high. Sony Classical’s 12-cd set Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet: the compete Columbia Album Collection 19658813262, c£39.00 achieves just that, whether in mono-recorded Mozart and Beethoven Quintets superbly balanced and trimly executed in collaboration with pianist Rudolf Serkin, or an equally poised though relatively cool Mozart Quintet in excellent stereo with Robert Casadesus. I should point out that the stereo recordings achieve pin-point clarity with focused spatial information that brings you straight to the sessions, especially if you’re listening on cans.

A disc of Italian woodwind music from Vivaldi to Ponchielli delights the ear and a programme of pastorales conceived by bassoonist Sol Schonbach (one of America’s best ‘back in the day’) ranges from Percy Grainger’s ‘Walking Time’ to Schubert’s ‘Shepherd’s Song’ (Rosamunde) and two versions of Stravinsky’s ‘Pastorale’. A rare novelty is Ernest Toch’s Five Pieces for Winds and Percussion, music that is both whimsical and entertaining, as well as his Sonatinetta for flute, clarinet and bassoon. The same CD includes – as a bonus – the melodious, stylistically Bartókian 5^th String Quartet by Henry Cowell beautifully played by the Beaux-Arts String Quartet. Janácek’s Concertino calls on the idiomatic pianism of Rudolf Firkusny – a real master in this repertoire (try the snappish clarinet-and-piano second movement) and as for Poulenc’s Sextuor who could resist the composer’s own piano playing at 2:26 into the first movement: totally gorgeous. Add, among other goodies, Samuel Barber’s Summer Music and Wind Quintets by Nielsen and Schoenberg, not to mention Forms and Sounds by (and featuring) Ornette Coleman, and you get the drift, ‘room music’ (as Grainger might have called it) shared among five or more, with rarely a note wasted.

In case anyone tells you that Eugene Ormandy: The Columbia Stereo Recordings 1958-1963, 88 cds, 19439977432, c£178.00, is prematurely deleted I can assure you that it isn’t. The fact is that Sony sold out within five days and to make matters worse international territories under-ordered. But I’m told that while I write this, the set is reprinting so even if it doesn’t quite make Christmas – your stocking might need to hang there empty until early in the New Year – it’ll be available soon afterwards. And believe me there are so many spectacular recordings included – wide, spatially cinematic productions, handsome in the extreme for an orchestra (the Philadelphia) and conductor that justify the efforts taken on their behalf – it’ll be worth the wait. I’ll note just a few highlights.

The Russian-Soviet repertoire is especially memorable, Prokofiev, Symphonies Nos. 4-6 for starters, the Fifth a fairly famous recording, taut and epic in scale (though never ponderous), the playing superb, most notably in the quacking scherzo. I’m pretty sure that the Fourth (revised version) and Sixth were receiving their first stereo recordings in the West. Both are given big, muscular readings, their first movements enormously imposing – especially No. 6 with its ominously marching development section – their finales boldly conclusive.  Shostakovich Symphony No. 4 is definitely a Western stereo premiere, and again Ormandy and his players really go for broke, the strings raging wildly in the first movement, the work’s coda a short-lived reign of terror before the Symphony ends among unanswerable questions.

Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings is both sumptuous and disciplined – the ideal classical/romantic synthesis in fact – and there are strongly projected, unsentimental accounts of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, as well as the ‘Symphony No. 7’, revised, instrumented end edited by Semyon Bogatyrev, an account that has probably never been bettered. The narrative aspect of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade has rarely been so vividly captured and the closing movement from The Golden Cockerel Suite outclasses even famous recordings under Markevitch and Doráti. There’s also music by Rachmaninov, including a famous recording of the Second Symphony, a favourite version among many collectors young and old.

On the classical front, Ormandy was a stylish Mozartean and his recordings of wind concertos with Philadelphia desk leaders (including John de Lancie in the Oboe Concerto) are both poised and polished. Great concerto recordings abound, not least Robert Casadesus in Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand – the sound here unusually vivid, with a strong bassline. And with Rudolf Serkin, both Mendelssohn and Brahms Concertos and, on a similar scale to the Brahms, Max Reger’s Concerto, Op.114. There are works by Richard Strauss and lighter fare from the Viennese Strauss family, as well as music by George Rochberg, Ottorino Respighi (the Roman Trilogy), Charles Ives, Ferde Grofé (Grand Canyon Suite), Grieg, Bach (including a fine B minor Mass), Handel (not least, a more than worthy, even majestic Messiah), César Franck, an especially lovely – and beautifully recorded –  Delius programme (including Brigg Fair), Edmund Rubbra’s dazzling orchestration of Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, and so much more.

A second volume of Columbia recordings is due next year. For this volume yours truly has written the booklet notes (I hope you don’t mind – which is why I shan’t duplicate material about Ormandy the man and musician here). All I’ll add is that in my book Ormandy is too often underrated as a serious contender among the Greats of his era and overrated for flirting with luscious sound for its own sake, which he virtually never did. Eugene Ormandy’s rostrum idol was Arturo Toscanini and his best performances had a Toscanini-style rigour that made them durable, which is why I can recommend this set with such sincere enthusiasm. I know it’s expensive but the outlay will, over time, justify itself many times over.

For many listeners the name Frederick Delius conjures, in musical terms, the transitional seasons and gentle nostalgia – pieces like ‘On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring’, ‘Brigg Fair’ and ‘La Calinda’. Less familiar is the blazing affirmation that arrives in Part Two of Delius’s Nietzsche-inspired choral masterpiece ‘A Mass of Life’ -‘ ‘Herauf! nu herauf ….’, ‘Up now, up you great noon!’, music to be performed ‘with vigour and a sense of elevation’. Unpack CD 2 on Sir Mark Elder’s Bergen Philharmonic recording of ‘A Mass of Life’ (Lawo LWC1265), bask in the nocturnal introduction, then leap to your feet as the music soars skywards, Nietzsche’s poetical-philosophical epic Also sprach Zarathustra providing Delius’s prompting inspiration. Other Zarathustra-inspired works are of course highly significant (Strauss and Mahler being obvious candidates) but Delius’s brave escape into a new zone of experience (a cross between the passion of ‘A Village Romeo & Juliet’ and the sense of yearning that fills ‘A Song of the High Hills’) is perhaps the greatest of them all. Roderick Williams is the persuasive baritone soloist and the sound is excellent. A real treat for any lover of large-scale late Romantic masterpieces.

Writing in Gramophone some while ago I prepared a ‘Gramophone Collection’ feature on Debussy’s symphonic sketches La Mer. Sir Mark Elder’s sumptuous and judiciously paced Hallé Orchestra recording came out on top. It remains a firm recommendation but a new contender by the orchestra Appassionato (Appassionato le label APP001) is equally imposing, the low brass and percussion especially impressive at the close of “From dawn to noon on the sea”. Mathieu Herzog directs a performance that is both subtle and impactful and this imaginative water-based programme also includes Dukas’s perennially entertaining Sorcerer’s Apprentice – where the untrained apprentice floods the workshop until his master returns – and the exceptionally vivid and all-but-unknown Journal De Bord by the French composer and seafaring naval commander Jean Cras, who served with distinction in the Adriatic Campaign during World War I. A wonderful listen.

It’s not too far from the sea to a rugged coastline filled with pirates, a scene that opens Part 2 of Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloé, a high point of John Wilson’s Chandos recording of the whole ballet with the Sinfonia of London Chorus and the Sinfonia of London (Chandos CHSA 5327). As always with Wilson, clarity is married to a keen sense of atmosphere, the result – just about the best Daphnis we’ve had since Pierre Monteux’s classic Decca account with the LSO. No-one who loves this miraculous score is likely to be disappointed, especially as the sound is so spectacularly good.

A SOVIET MASTER PIANIST REDISCOVERED

It was back in 2000 that I chanced upon a flawed but charismatic’ 1963 live (mono) recording of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto by the Soviet pianist Yakov Flier with the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein. I had recently made my one and only trip to New York (so far!) which took in a visit to the Philharmonic’s head office, where I was offered the opportunity to audition something from the Orchestra’s archive that might otherwise prove difficult to locate.

Flier’s Rachmaninov was a real ear-opener – forceful and impassioned – and I was delighted to encounter it again in the context of Scribendum’s 15-cd ‘The Art of Yakov Flier’ (15 CDs, Scribendum  SC841, c£84.50) especially as this generous collection also contains a rather scrawny 1941 recording of the same work where a more fleet-fingered but equally engaging Flier joins forces with the Moscow Philharmonic under Boris Khaikin.

Other concerto recordings include a taut, boldly virtuosic stereo version of the Khachaturian under Kyrill Kondrashin (try the start of the third movement), a 1973 ‘live’ Beethoven C minor Concerto under Konstantin Ivanov that harbours a particularly beautiful account of the Largo, Ravel’s Concerto for the left hand with Yevgeny Svetlanov conducting from 1965 (the warlike central section blares relentlessly), and Liszt’s Second Concerto, a grandly conceived vision of the piece reminiscent of Claudio Arrau, recorded in 1948 under Nikolai Anosov with a lovely cello solo at 7:46. More notable cello playing arrives courtesy of the great Daniil Shafran for a 1956 recording of Rachmaninov’s Sonata, a performance at once emotionally charged and tonally seductive. Note in particular the way these consummate artists handle the close of the Andante (from 4:46 to the end).

Flier, a pupil of the legendary Konstantin Igumnov, was a contemporary of, and sometime rival to, Emil Gilels, with whom he duets (on two pianos) in Albéniz’s Navarra, another 1941 recording and the last track in the set. Equally effective – and far better recorded – is a sequence of Brahms Hungarian Dances where Flier plays alongside Igor Aptekarev (1910-1975), a Samiil Feinberg pupil who like Flier was a noted colourist, performances rich in spirit and temperament (try the Second Dance in D minor, or No. 17 in F sharp minor).

Other notable inclusions are a notably symphonic reading of Schumann’s Fantasie, five sensitively turned Songs without Words by Mendelssohn (I’d recommend sampling Nos. 2 or 46), Poetic Tone Pictures by Dvorák, and pieces by Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Liszt (the Second Ballade being especially memorable), Medtner, Debussy, Scriabin and much else. Certainly, if you’re as yet unfamiliar with this fine pianist’s playing, Scribendum’s admirable, decently transferred collection is as good a place as any to start exploring.

A BBC ex-colleague of mine once suffered a rap over the knuckles for describing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, on air, as being “what Mr. and Mrs. Goldberg got up to on their wedding night”. Had the ‘powers that were’ at the Beeb of the day heard Vikingur Ólafsson’s 2023 recording of the Goldbergs (DG 4864553, c£12.75) they might have nodded in agreement. The serene ‘aria’ itself might be heard as prayers under the chuppah (a symbol of God’s presence at a Jewish wedding) before Ólafsson suggests an energetic sense of play with the first variation then proceeds through the succeeding 30, brilliantly (try Variation 5 on track 6), argumentatively, dreamily, analytically (the right hand definitely knows what the left is doing), poetically, contemplatively, songfully, and with a mindful understanding of what every voice is up to. Furthermore repeats virtually always deviate from first-time performances of any given variation, whether by strengthening the left hand, modifying rubato or accentuating a staccato accompaniment. I love the way beyond the celebrated ‘Black Pearl’ Variation (No.25, nearly ten minutes as played by Ólafsson) the sequence rushes breathlessly towards the crowning ‘Quodlibet’. Numerous other Goldbergs arrest our attention in different ways – think of Klara Würtz, Rosalyn Tureck and of course Glenn Gould (my preference is for his 1981 recording) – and while remaining loyal to those versions also, Ólafsson’s fresh-minted approach re-awakens the excitement I felt when I first heard this wonderful music sixty or more years ago. Do at the very least give it a try.

An even more ethereal aspect of Bach unravels at the close of his ultimate fugal masterpiece The Art of Fugue, the final fugue left unfinished at the top of a heavens-bound musical stairway. Why? Was he distracted away from completing it (the probable reason) or did he simply not live long enough to finish the job? Various efforts to take it forwards on his behalf have ventured this way or that but perhaps the most adventurous is Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica which is the joint-musical centrepiece of Igor Levit’s Fantasia album (Sony Classical 19658811642, 2 cds, c£16.75), where Busoni takes his place alongside Bach pure and simple (a tiptoeing version of the celebrated ‘Air’ and the improvisatory Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue) and the other ‘biggie’, Liszt’s B minor Sonata where rather than storming the keys or rushing his fences Levit concentrates on musical structure and harmonic architecture. Try the grand Andante sostenuto section on disc one, track five, from say 2:44 and you could as well be listening to Beethoven. He tails this greatest of Romantic monoliths with Liszt’s humbling visitation on what’s perhaps the most terrifying of all German lieder, Schubert’s Der Doppelgänger. And there’s Alban Berg’s 12-minute Sonata Op. 1 opens with the sort of smoky eroticism that recalls, in its effect, Wagner’s Tristan Prelude. Always with Levit there’s something to learn, a telling connection (or connections) that you never made before.

If Bach via Busoni takes us skywards then Gabriel Faure’s late Nocturnes and Barcarolles (played by Marc-André Hamelin on a Hyperion double featuring the complete sets of both, 2 CDs, CDA68331-2, c£23.40) give the sensation of gravity being turned off for the duration, releasing terra firma’s hold so we float upwards into the ether. Try Nocturnes No. 9, or 10,  or from 4:05 into the 7^th and witness the soundscapes that we pass while soaring skywards, Fauré ever the narrator of contrapuntal intricacies, Hamelin adept at seeing between and beyond the phrases as well as charting the whole with consummate expertise. Not since Germaine Thyssens-Valentin (Testament) have I heard Fauré playing of such subtlety and conviction.

a bit of fun -and some great music

The Three Seasons of Antonio Vivaldi (Arcana A550, 3 cds, released on 8^th September, c£29.25) is not, you’ll be relieved to know, the ‘famous four’ minus one but an ingenious sequence of violin concertos, many of them unfamiliar, that takes us through three stages of Vivaldi’s creative career, symbolised by Spring, Summer and Autumn.  Sometimes there are allusions to the well-known (the dolorous pizzicato-accompanied Larghetto from the B minor Concerto, RV.390 – the last concerto in the set) but most works offset the common but unfounded accusation that Vivaldi rewrote the same concerto hundreds of times. Nothing could be further from the truth.  Mind you that impression is down largely to the expertise of violinist Giuliano Carmognola and Accademia dell’Annunciata under Riccardo Doni whose performances are consistently alert and alive.

I’d start with the third disc, ‘Autumn’, the darkly driven C minor RV201, its accompaniment including a twanging theorbo and downwards rushing scales (which also storm the opening Concerto on the Summer CD, in C major, RV.189). This is Vivaldi thinking – and feeling – outside of the box, truly sturm und drang (‘storm and stress’) and quite unlike the more pastoral world of various other Vivaldi violin concertos, the finale, a rhythmic tour de force. The brightly coloured B flat major Concerto RV.367, which harbours at its centre one of Vivaldi’s loveliest Andantes, is presented in its original version (a world première recording), and I love the hopscotch opening allegro of the G minor Concerto, RV.327.

Then you might switch to the ‘Spring’ (ie first) CD for a couple of better-known concertos, the D major for example from the collection ‘L’Estro Armonico’, often recorded, but which Carmignola sings with sundry embellishments (especially in the central Larghetto where occasional stresses sound as if they may even be interpolated human voices). Also from ‘L’estro armonico’ is the chirpy E major Concerto, RV.265 which leads straight into the conversational esprit of the D major Concerto RV.210 from the ‘Il Cimento dell′ Armonia e dell′ Inventione’ set. A further highlight from the second ‘Summer’ CD is the G minor RV.330 Concerto, which ricochets into action at top speed whereas a mellower Vivaldi informs the disc’s last Concerto, in B flat RV.380. All in all, this is a superb collection featuring the player who is probably Vivaldi’s master interpreter for the 21^st Century. The recorded sound is thrillingly immediate.