Roslavets: Piano Music. Marc-Andre Hamelin (Hyperion) Nikolai Roslavets (18811944) was an important early Russian modernist whose music gathered dust in the long, dark shadows of the official culture of the Soviet era.
A self-taught composer, he devised a system of composition which has chordal affinities with Scriabin as well as independently arrived at 12note concerns. The style of piano writing evident in the three surviving piano sonatas and 16 short pieces here is exploratory and forward-looking in a manner usually more Scriabinesque than Schoenbergian. Canadian super-pianist MarcAndre Hamelin (who'll be playing in Northern Ireland's Quebecois! Festival next month) captures their individuality and multilayered complexity with superb aplomb.
Michael Dervan
Simon Rattle conducts Percy Grainger (EMI) Australian composer and pianist Percy Grainger (1882-1961), best-known as an arranger of folk-tunes (of which he was an avid collector), was one of the century's great musical eccentrics. Sexually deviant (he liked to take a few dozen whips with him on tour), with decidedly un-PC views on race, and behaviour that could be downright perplexing (he liked to run to venues to play concerts), he ended his life working on music machines, including a "Kangaroo-Pouch Free Music Machine".
Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's gorgeous-sounding, swaggeringly played new collection (which includes In A Nutshell, Lincolnshire Posy and The Warriors) squeezes the last ounce of exuberance and fun from Grainger's colourful orchestral imagination.
Michael Dervan
Korngold: Symphony; Much Ado About Nothing Suite. LSO/Andre Previn (DG) This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, composing wunderkind and successful Hollywood composer.
The youthful efforts of this son of a music critic were, if anything, even more prodigious than Mozart's, and his Hollywood rewards came at the highest level - two of his film scores were awarded Oscars. The magnum opus of his later years was the Symphony in F sharp (1947-52), coupled on this new recording with the early Much Ado About Nothing suite for chamber orchestra. Andre Previn takes an expressionistic, make-the-most-of-the-moment approach to the symphony in a performance that misses out dangerously on connective symphonic sinew. The simpler music of the suite fares better.
Michael Dervan
