The classical music of the week reviewed...

MENDELSSOHN: PIANO TRIOS

Benvenue Fortepiano Trio Avie AV 2187 ****

Mendelssohn is a composer who can sound, well, just too carefully coiffured for his own good. The elaborate virtuosity can come to seem just too tidy. These period-instruments performances of his two piano trios by the Benvenue Fortepiano Trio (Monica Huggett, violin, Tanya Tomkins, cello, and Eric Zivian, fortepiano) neatly avoid the obvious pitfalls by tempering the music's neatness of effect. It's not just that the instruments' actual sounds work to diminish the prettiness – which they do. The players are also careful to avoid the musical equivalent of facile rhymes in the patterning. And their style of music-making favours a lyricism that tends towards lightness rather than intensity. Even moments of what sound like genuine technical strain can be positive in effect. See url.ie/55bd MICHAEL DERVAN

REBEL: LES ÉLÉMENTS; VIVALDI: FOUR SEASONS

Midori Seiler (violin), Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin/Georg Kallweit, Clemens-Maria Nuszbaumer Harmonia Mundi HMC 902061

If you enjoy pictorialism in music then this coupling is just for you. Les Éléments by Jean-Féry Rebel (1666-1747) opens with a representation of Chaos that deserves to stand beside the much more famous music with which Haydn opened his oratorio, The Creation. The brazen clashes are strikingly modern, and although Rebel's responses to air, fire, water and earth are more conventional, they are no less attractive. Berlin's Akademie für Alte Musik and soloist Midori Seiler give a musically lusty account of Vivaldi's evergeen Four Seasons, snapping with fine bite, celebrating with spirit, swooning with sensual langour, and generally having a ball of a time. See url.ie/55ay MICHAEL DERVAN

RACHMANINOV: SYMPHONIC DANCES; THE ISLE OF THE DEAD; THE ROCK

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Vasily Petrenko Avie AV 2188

Rachmaninov's Chekhov- inspired fantasy The Rock(1893) was the work of a gifted 20 year-old. The brooding, Böcklin-inspired tone poem The Isle of the Dead(1906) was by a mature composer who had weathered a stifling crisis triggered by the disastrous première of his First Symphony. And the Symphonic Dances(1943) is a confidently vital

late work that ends with self quotations that have raised questions about premonitions of death. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic's star conductor, Vasily Petrenko (who took charge of the orchestra at the age of 30 in 2006), gives performances of beautifully gauged colour and finely spun tension that manage to keep the music sounding fresh in spite of its challenging recursiveness. url.ie/55bd MICHAEL DERVAN

SOR: EARLY WORKS

William Carter (guitar) Linn Records CKD 343

This is a guitar record with a difference. And, as William Carter explains, it all comes down to fingernails. Unlike most guitarists, he has chosen to play the works of the Catalan composer and guitarist Fernando Sor (1778-1839) by plucking with the tips of his fingers rather than his fingernails, and quotes the composer himself in support: "Never in my life have I heard a guitarist whose playing was supportable if he played with the nails." The sound is smaller, rounder, more malleable and more seductive than the norm. The music itself is light, even flimsy, with the composer's most famous work, a set of Mozart Variations, taking pride of place. The gentle performance style does a lot to enhance the charm of the music. See url.ie/55bm MICHAEL DERVAN