Volume 21 Issue 2 - October 2015

intimate voice make this recording’s premise very persuasive. While
capable of the softest pianissimos and mellowest hammer strikes,
Schiff’s fortepiano still delivers some powerful full-throated chords
and he uses this capability masterfully throughout his program.
The familiar Moments musicaux D780 and Impromptus D935 take
some getting used to but hearing them this way eventually suggests
that a smaller performance conception is actually credible and
perhaps this is closer to what Schubert had intended. The Sonata in
B Major D906, however, is perhaps the most difficult to accept in this
sonically smaller way. Too many years of hearing it from large concert
grands have left a mark not easily erased.
If this project and its argument were in the hands of someone less a
pianist and musician than Schiff it would be far less persuasive. But it
seems the 1820 Brodmann has become Schiff’s new muse and that he
has found a new voice. We are bound to pay attention.
Michael Lewin has recorded Debussy’s
Préludes Book 1 and Book 2. As separate CDs,
Starry Night (Sono Luminus SL 92190) and
Beau Soir (Sono Luminus DSL 92175) both add
other Debussy works to fill the discs. The set
also includes the first recording of a Beau Soir
transcribed for piano by Koji Attwood.
Anyone undertaking a recording project
on this scale has to understand the composer
at the most profound level. Brilliant technique is not enough to play
through all the Préludes and explore Debussy’s
24 character constructions using his unique
keyboard vocabulary. Lewin’s approach seems
to be one that allows the music to take all the
time it needs to unfold. He never rushes a
phrase or resolution but prefers to let it hang
until it completes itself as in Des pas sur la
neige. By contrast, he drives the Steinway
through the impossibly rapid repetitions that
Debussy demands in La danse de Puck, Jardins sous la pluie and
other similar tracks. Lewin also draws key motifs effortlessly out of
Debussy’s familiar pools of swirling harmonies.
His performance avoids the pitfall of self-indulgence, so tempting
with this repertoire. He never loses himself in the hypnotic but stays
in complete control. This gives him the advantage when delivering the
rhythmic angularity of La sérénade interrompue and Golliwog’s Cake
Walk. Recorded a year apart, the set should be owned together. Each
recording also includes a Blu-ray Pure Audio Disc.
Italian organist Stefano Molardi has undertaken an ambitious
project with Kuhnau Complete Organ
Music (Brilliant Classics 95089). The 3-CD
set contains all the Sonatas, Preludes,
Fugues and a single Toccata. Kuhnau was
Bach’s immediate predecessor at the Leipzig
Tomaskirche and made a significant impact on
the music of his time.
The entire project was recorded in the
summer of 2014 on two different instruments
that might well have been known to Kuhnau. Both built by Gottfried
Silbermann, the 1714 cathedral organ in Freiburg and the smaller 1722
organ of the St. Marienkirche in Rötha both show the typically bright
mixtures and overtone-rich reeds of the German Baroque.
Molardi approaches the Six Biblical Sonatas in a way that exploits
their highly programmatic content. Using all the colours and
effects available on the Freiburg organ, he retells the numerous Old
Testament stories that Kuhnau portrays. As late baroque style goes,
there is an amazing freedom of expression in the writing that includes
great fantasia-like sweeps as well as rigid fugal architecture. Kuhnau
must have had a ball writing these.
Even more impressive are the individual Preludes, especially the
Prelude in E Minor and the Prelude alla breve in G Major. Both are
regal in presentation and use the full scale of their instrument to fill
the Freiburg cathedral. Both organs are, of course, trackers and so give
us some audible mechanical action noise during soft passages. This a
wonderful document for serious organ buffs.
TERRY ROBBINS
Duo Concertante, the Newfoundland-based duo of violinist
Nancy Dahn and pianist Timothy Steeves, have followed
up their outstanding set of the complete Beethoven Sonatas
with an equally satisfying CD of Double Concertos for Violin,
Piano and Orchestra by Felix Mendelssohn and Andrew Paul
MacDonald (Marquis Classics MAR 81463). Marc David conducts
the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra, apparently in their
recording debut.
The Mendelssohn D Minor Concerto is a remarkably assured work
written – quite astonishingly – when the composer was only 14 years
old. It is performed here in the version with winds and timpani that
Mendelssohn added to the original string scoring shortly after the first
private performance of the work in 1823. There are clear stylistic links
with Mozart and Beethoven, but the grace and lyricism of the mature
composer are already in evidence. Dahn and Steeves both display the
perfectly judged tone and style that made their Beethoven set such an
outstanding success, as well as shining in the virtuosic passages.
The MacDonald Double Concerto Op.51 was commissioned by Duo
Concertante some 15 years ago after they heard the composer’s Violin
Concerto and was premiered with the NSO in 2000. It really is a very
attractive and convincing work, essentially in traditional concerto
form but cast in a single movement with the three sections separated
by cadenzas. The Duo has performed both concertos numerous times
since then, and the two works are perfect companions on a really
attractive CD.
The NSO apparently includes student and community members as
well as professionals, but you’d never know it – the playing here is
never less than top-notch.
The Russian violinist Lydia Mordkovitch, who died last December at
the age of 70, lived the second half of her life in
Britain and was a founding artist for Chandos
Records, for whom she made over 60 recordings.
The 2-CD set of British Violin Concertos
is one of four re-issues of her recordings
that the label released in July as a Lydia
Mordkovitch Tribute, and it’s simply stunning
(CHAN 241-53). The four concertos are by: Sir
Arnold Bax, recorded in 1991 with the London
Philharmonic Orchestra; Sir George Dyson, recorded in 1994 with the
City of London Sinfonia; Sir Arthur Bliss, recorded in 2006 with the
BBC National Orchestra of Wales; and John Veale, recorded in 2000
with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Bryden Thomson conducts the
Bax; Richard Hickox the other three works.
The concertos by Bax (1938) and Bliss (1955) are exactly what you
would expect from two main-stream mid-20th-century English
composers in their prime: wonderfully strong, richly melodic works
with outstanding idiomatic solo parts and brilliant orchestration.
The music of John Veale was completely new to me, which was
somewhat puzzling given that I was still living in England when he
would have been in his prime; his romantic tonal music, however,
had been swept aside by the avant-garde movement in England in
the mid-1960s, when the likes of Stockhausen, Boulez and Henze
ruled the roost, and there were virtually no performances or broadcasts
of his work. As a result Veale wrote nothing for 12 years, and the
striking Violin Concerto from 1981-84 marked his return to composition.
Certainly his style hadn’t changed: you can hear echoes of his
work in the British film industry in the 1940s and 1950s, and also
more than a hint of two of his favourite composers, William Walton
and – in particular – Samuel Barber. The slow movement is absolutely
beautiful.
The real gem here, though, is the Dyson, again someone whose
orchestral music will be new to most people. It’s a simply glorious
four-movement work from 1941: large (44 minutes), expansive,
sweeping, lushly orchestrated, and quite symphonic in feel.
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