CLASSICAL

Bach: Brandenburg Concertos. Il Giardino Armonico. (Teldec) Dial-a-track code: 1311

Il Giardino Armonico is an Italian period-instruments ensemble founded in 1985. It's a free-spirited group which on disc has hitherto been heard only in music by Italian composers. The group is directed by Giovanni

Antonini, who's also heard as a soloist on recorder and flute in Concertos 2, 4, and 5. He favours bnsk, bright-as-a-daisy tempos, is inclined to light textures (there's some wonderfully svelte natural trumpet playing in Concerto No. 2) and airy phrasing. The playing is always fine, but there are more than a few details to test the taste of any Bach lover, not least the lute-laden continuo in Concerto No 6 and the brazen chortling of the horns in the first movement of No 1.

Brian Boydell: Violin Concerto etc. NSO/Colman Pearce. (Marco Polo) Dial- a-track code: 1421

This new CD brings together work from three different decades. The plaint In Memoriam Mahatma Gandhi is probably the 80-year-old composer's best-known orchestral work and dates from 1948. The heavily Bartok- influenced Violin Concerto was completed in 1954 and is here played with incisive commitment by Maighread McCrann. The Megalithic Ritual Dances of 1956, mix big orchestral gestures in primitive colours with sections of gentler pastoralism. The shorter Masai Mara, an ecologically concerned 1988 response to a visit to the great Kenyan park, contains some effective nature evocation. Colman Pearce secures playing that's warm-hearted but not always ideally balanced or clean.

Bartok: Piano Works Vol 4. Zoltan Kocsis. (Philips) Dial-a-track code: 1531

The description "Bartokian" has become synonymous with percussiveness in piano playing. But this is not how the composer played his music or wished it to be played - fortissimos are far more sparingly marked than many performers would have one believe. Zoltan Kocsislacks nothing in forcefulness of expression, yet he achieves a judicious shaping and weighting that both balances and enlivens Bartok's often heavy dissonances. In this fourth volume of his ongoing survey he brings his illuminating touch to bear on the three key works of 1926 (the Sonata, the Out Of Doors Suite, and the Nine Little Piano Pieces) as well as the Petite Suite arranged from the Duos for two violins.