Mozart: Piano Concertos in B flat, K450, and D, K537 (Coronation). Robert Levin (fortepiano), Academy of An- cient Music/Christopher Hogwood (L'Oiseau Lyre) The American scholar and fortepianist, Robert Levin, is in the middle of recorded cycles of the Mozart and Beethoven piano concertos. His latest disc was recorded in Salzburg on a fortepiano owned by Mozart (silvery if you like the tone, tinny if you don't) and deals with one of the composer's most problematic works, the Coronation Concerto, which survived in a text with many gaps.
Levin is a keen reinstater of the lost art of improvisation in 18th-century music, improvising not only all embellishments and cadenzas but also all of the "missing" parts of this concerto (as well as playing along in the orchestral tuttis, too). The result of his sharply-etched endeavours is arresting, fresh and invigorating.
Michael Dervan
Japanese works by Takemitsu, Matsumura, Miyoshi, Yoshimatsu. Minoru Nojima (piano), Yomiuri Nippon SO/Tadaaki Otaka (ASV) Western music has taken strong root in Japan - Toyko has more symphony orchestras than any European city - but the work of Japanese composers is not yet widely known in the West. The 10-year-old Twill By Twilight of Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996), exhibits the finely-crafted impressionism typical of Japan's greatest composer. The longest piece here, however, is the 34-minute Second Piano Concerto (1978) of Teizo Matsumura (born 1929), a stream of ceaselessly doodling repetitions spiced with noisy outbursts. Akira Miyoshi (born 1933), director of Tokyo's Bunka Kaikan hall, projects a strong if hardly subtle gestural style in his Noesis (1978). More successful is Takashi Yoshimatu's (born 1953) atmospheric strings and piano elegy, Threnody To Toki (1980), inspired by the threatened toki bird.
Michael Dervan
Robert Schumann: "Genoveva" (Teldec)
On paper Schumann looks like the ideal opera composer: an astute writer on musical subjects and a melodist par excellence. Sadly, though he wanted to write an opera more than anything else, he hadn't quite got the hang of it when insanity intervened, and we are left with Genoveva, his first and only effort in the genre. It wasn't a success in his own day, and is hardly ever dusted off nowadays, what with critics muttering about second-rate Wagner; the truth is, it's nothing like Wagner, once you discount the high-flown courtly subject matter (a knight, his lady and a lustful employee, with a bit of crusading thrown in for good measure) but is akin to a series of orchestral songs, and in this new, live recording with the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, the Chamber orchestra of Europe and a brace of fine young singers, Nikolaus Harnoncourt has made of it a thing of real beauty.
Arminta Wallace
