Michael Dervanchooses this week's classical CDs
MESSIAEN: POEMES POUR MI; LES OFFRANDES OUBLIÉES; UN SOURIRE
Anne Schwanewilms, Orchestre National de Lyon/Jun Markl
Naxos 8.572174****
German soprano Anne Schwanewilms sings Messiaen's Poèmes pour Miwith sensual liquid beauty and her compatriot Jun Märkl conducts the Orchestre National de Lyon with a luxuriant colouring to match. The song-cycle, written in 1936 to poems by the composer himself as an expression of love for his wife (pet-name Mi), shares the disc with purely orchestral works from either end of Messiaen's career, Les offrandes oubliées(1930) with its sections of held-breath stillness framing a violent outburst, and Un sourire(1989), a homage to Mozart that's still pure Messiaen, with mysticism and birds to the fore. Märkl cradles the quiet sections with the utmost tenderness. www.naxosdirect.ie
CHOPIN CHEZ PLEYEL
Alain Planes (1836 Pleyel piano)
Harmonia Mundi HMC 905052
It always comes as something of a shock to hear Chopin played on a piano of the composer’s time. The sound seems so dry, especially in the highest register, and the sound of climaxes can be so strained by comparison with modern instruments. And there’s often a surprise to follow. The ear adjusts, sometimes so thoroughly that returning straight away to the fuller tone of a modern instrument can be a second shock. Alain Planès’s new recording has other twists and turns as well. He attempts a partial reconstruction of a concert Chopin gave at the Salons Pleyel in February 1842, and he leans on the research of Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger for textual variants passed on to pupils by a composer who didn’t usually play exactly what he wrote. Listen, and be surprised. www.tinyurl.com/6mchwb
SCHUMANN, STRAUSS, VOLKMANN, BRUCH
Daniel Muller-Schott (cello), NDR Sinfonieorchester/Christoph Eschenbach
Orfeo C 781 091 A***
So many cellists are such outgoingly passionate and romantic performers, it seems a kind of paradox that so few of the great romantic composers left concertos for them to play. Daniel Müller-Schott here focuses on German repertoire. He gives a gutsy, outgoing account of Schumann's concerto, the daddy of romantic cello concertos (though he's not always persuasive in moments of introversion), and is gorgeously lush in Bruch's Kol Nidrei. He also includes two little-known works – Robert Volkmann's Concerto in A minor (which followed hot on the heels of the Schumann), where Müller-Schott handles the heavy- duty bravura with aplomb, and the intensely songful Romanze by the teenage Richard Strauss. http:// tinyurl. com/ya8y392
SIBELIUS: SYMPHONIES 1-7; KULLERVO
London Symphony Orchestra/Colin DavisLSO Live LSO 0191 (4 CDs) ****
Colin Davis’s live Sibelius symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra (recorded at London’s Barbican between 2002 and 2008) are here collected as a four-disc set. Davis is a veteran Sibelian (this is his third cycle of the symphonies on disc), and he knows how to balance the Tchaikovskian elements of the early symphonies, to control the disturbing tension of the Fourth, to find a persuasive path through the strange and very different landscapes of the Third and Sixth, and project the long vistas of the Fifth and Seventh. The rarely heard Kullervo is not really a symphony (it’s been imaginatively described as a “picaresque cantata”), but it makes a nice bonus to this sober cycle. www.tinyurl. com/ctth2r
