CLASSICAL

Latest releases reviewed

TELEMANN: SUITE IN A MINOR; CONCERTO IN C; OUVERTÜRE IN C, HAMUBURGER EBB UND FLUT
Maurice Steger (recorder), Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin Harmonia Mundi
HMC 901917
***The suite, Hamburger Ebb und Flut, which Telemann wrote for the centenary of the Hamburg Admiralität in 1723 (often referred to as his Water Music) is one of his finest pieces. The somnolent start on this new recording heralds a performance by Berlin's Akademie für Alte Musik which often chooses to underplay the music's quieter moments. There's boisterousness aplenty in Triton's merry-making, and the music-making goes all woozy for the celebrations of the jolly sailors. But there's a more consistent sense of both sonic fibre and musical purpose in both the Suite in A minor and Concerto in C for treble recorder, where Maurice Steger's solo playing fully matches the shapely vitality of the orchestra. www.uk.hmboutique.com

MOZART: PIANO TRIOS
Nikolaj Znaider (violin), Kyril Zlotnikov (cello), Matthias Glander (clarinet), Felix Schwartz (viola), Daniel Barenboim (piano)
EMI Classics 344 6432
**

What you make of this new recording of six Mozart piano trios will likely depend on how you respond to the piano playing of Daniel Barenboim. It's often actually quite appropriate for the pianist to be the dominant player in these works. But Barenboim is not just dominant, he's highly capricious, shifting freely from feathery lightness into probing angularity and sometimes effectively turning the music inside out with his chosen emphases. His colleagues - Znaider and Zlotnikov in the piano trios, Glander and Schwartz in the Kegelstatt Trio - have no real option but to play along as a kind of secondary citizen. The playing is highly polished, but enough of it sounds self-admiring for it to seem precious rather than insightful. www.emiclassics.com

CHOPIN: 14 WALTZES; RAVEL: VALSES NOBLES ET SENTIMENTALES
Stephen Kovacevich (piano)
EMI Classics 346 7342
****

Stephen Kovacevich has not spent much time with Chopin in his long career in the recording studio. This new performance of the standard set of 14 Waltzes has a rewarding and cogent spontaneity of spirit to make that seem a shame. Pianist Kovacevich, who plays the works in what seems like a jumbled order (it's actually the chronological order of composition), has the knack of creating, in studio, the feeling of music-making caught on the wing. In each piece it's almost like witnessing the unfolding of a finely judged process for which the outcome is by no means fixed. He's not quite as consistently successful in Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales, where the delivery is more polarised, with moments of over-indulged, rhythmically dilatory dreaminesssuggesting he's chosen to take his cue more from the "sentimental" of the title than the "noble". www.emiclassics.com

TCHAIKOVSKY: DANCES AND OVERTURES
National Symphony Orchestra of the Ukraine/Theodore Kuchar
Naxos 8.554845
***This is a disc that resolutely steers clear of the obvious. Dances and overtures, says the title, but don't expect excerpts from the Nutcracker, the Polonaise from Eugene Onegin or the 1812 Overture. What's offered instead are dances from the kind of Tchaikovsky opera that the Wexford Festival targets (the best-known music is the overture to The Queen of Spades), along with the early symphonic poem Fatum, of which Tchaikovsky destroyed the score; only after his death was it reconstructed from the orchestral parts. Its portentous gravity results in overblown moments which make it clear why Tchaikovsky responded so radically to the criticism the work received. Yet, in this collection, it's easily the piece which works best. The operatic excerpts suffer from a kind of fish out of water effect away from their original contexts.

www.naxos.com