Michael Dervan on four new releases.
MUSICAL BANQUET
Monika Mauch (soprano), Nigel North (lute)
ECM New Series 476 6397
****
The full title of the song collection recorded here is A Musicall Banquet furnished with varietie of delicious Ayres, Collected out of the best Authors in English, French, Spanish and Italian. It was published in London in 1610 under the name of Robert Dowland, the 19-year-old son of the famous composer John Dowland, who is now generally credited with having made the musical selections. German soprano Monika Mauch, who regularly performs and records with the Hilliard Ensemble, sings with a clear and plaintive tone that is entirely apt to the often piercing melancholy of the texts. Yet there's also a coolness to her performances, as the consistent beauty of the sound she produces doesn't always engage fully through the words themselves. Nigel North's lute-playing is exemplary.
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MICHAEL DERVAN
MENDELSSOHN: STRING QUINTETS
Danilo Rossi (viola), Fine Arts Quartet
Naxos 8.570488
***
The Fine Arts Quartet's new recording of Mendelssohn's two string quintets is a disc that's full of point-making. They play the works in reverse chronological order, placing their highly charged account of the Quintet in B flat, Op 87, from the last year of the composer's life, before the altogether more relaxed teenage Quintet in A, Op 18 (written just after the miraculous Octet) - they include the original Minuettoas well as the Intermezzowith which Mendelssohn replaced it six years later in 1832.
Mendelssohn's inspiration burned as brightly in later life as in youth, they seem to be saying. The playing has a kind of heightened responsiveness, with a trigger-wire sensitivity that tends to favour portamento-rich climaxes. But there's certainly never a dull moment.
www.naxos. com
MICHAEL DERVAN
BIBER: ROSENKRANZ SONATEN
Riccardo Minasi (violin), Bizzarrie Armoniche
Arts 47735-8 (2 SACDs)
***
Biber's Rosary(or Mystery) Sonatas have found a place on disc that they probably never have in the concert hall. Biber, himself a virtuoso violinist, requires the violin strings to be tuned in different ways for different sonatas, which in practice necessitates the use of multiple violins by a single performer. This new recording of one of the greatest violin works of the 17th century begins in an aggressively virtuosic style, as if Riccardo Minasi and the players of Bizzarrie Armoniche are out to justify the group's name.
The struttingly emphatic style, with husky whispering included for heightened contrast, is wonderfully exciting in small doses but less attractive in longer spans, where the extremely close balances of the recording can fatigue the ear.
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MICHAEL DERVAN
NIELSEN: PIANO MUSIC
Martin Roscoe (piano)
Hyperion CDA 67591/2
***
Carl Nielsen, Denmark's greatest composer, was also a violinist and conductor, but never distinguished himself as a pianist. He did, however, write for the piano throughout his life, including some still under-rated teaching pieces, aptly titled For Young and Old, and an imposing Chaconne, written around the same time as the InextinguishableSymphony of 1916.
In his last major work, the Three Piano Pieces, Op 59, published posthumously in 1937, he seems to be setting out into new musical territory. He also left a number of pieces in shorter and lighter style, and an early, arresting Symphonic Suite. Martin Roscoe's accounts of this rarely heard music live very much in the moment in an impressively big-boned and muscular way, but sometimes at the expense of a broader and more holistic view.
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MICHAEL DERVAN
