MICHAEL DERVANreviews this week's classical music pieces...

Haydn: Symphonies 49 & 80; Violin Concerto NO 1

Freiburger Barockorchester/Gottfried von der Goltz (violin)

Harmonica Mundi HMX 2962029 ****

It’s not really that Haydn’s nicknamed symphonies get more than their fair share of attention, but rather that the nameless ones get too little. The brooding melancholy of the Symphony No 49 in F minor, La Passione, has long made it a favourite. Part of the fascination of the less popular No. 80 in D minor is the way it opens in stormy mode but then steps in and out of an altogether lighter world. And its finale is at once finger- snappingly clear and fascinatingly elusive. The period instruments players of the Freiburger Barockorchester and their director Gottfried von der Goltz play with sharp conviction. The Violin Concerto in C is a slighter and less rewarding work. www.harmonia mundi.com

Beethoven: Septet; Serenade

Ensemble 360

Nimbus Alliance NI 6112 ****

Beethoven’s Septet, Op 20, and Serenade, Op 25, both written in the 1790s, are at the lighter end of the composer’s output. The Septet featured in Beethoven’s first Viennese benefit concert in 1800, but he came to dislike it because his later and more challenging work was so unfavourably compared to it. Yorkshire-based Ensemble 360’s performances are relaxed and soft-spoken, as if everyone involved is more interested in what their colleagues are playing than in projecting their own particular line. This is as true in the flightier passages of the Serenade (which is scored for flute, violin and viola) as in the warmer, richer sonorities of the Septet. And the recording captures everything in agreeably natural perspective, too. www.wyastone.co.uk

Brahms: Strings Quartet in C Minor Op 51 No1: Piano Quartet

Akiko Yamamoto (piano) Quatuor Ébene

Virgin Classics 216 6222 ****

Brahms boasted of having papered a room with rejected works, so that “I had only to lie on my back to admire my sonatas and quartets”. He claimed to have written some 20 string quartets before writing one that satisfied him, the Quartet in C minor of 1873. It’s such a highly individual, strangely argued piece that it can sound almost futuristic. His Piano Quintet was so troublesome it went through versions for string quintet (which he destroyed) and two pianos (which he published). France’s Quatuor Ébène approach both pieces with grandeur and guts, and their big-boned account of the quintet, with Akiko Yamamoto a like- minded partner, almost delivers the work as a kind of substitute symphony. www.emiclassics.com

David lang: The Little Match Girl Passion & Other Works

Harmonica Mundi HMX 2962029 ****

It’s a great idea – Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the little match girl treated in the spirit of an 18th-century setting of the passion – and it won David Lang a Pulitzer Prize in 2008. The Little Match Girl Passion was heard in Dublin last year, but in an arrangement he made for the National Chamber Choir. Here, Paul Hillier conducts the original, where the solo voices of his Theatre of Voices ensemble are gentler, more intimate, more personal. The work has something of a minimalist, blank-canvas quality, but the message of the story still packs a punch. Four choral works from Ars Nova Copenhagen fill out the picture of Lang’s pared-back writing for voices. www.harmoniamundi.com