Mozart: Violin Concertos. Pamela Frank, Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich/David Zinman (Arte Nova, 2 CDs)
This new set of Mozart's five numbered violin concertos (plus the concerto from the Haffner Serenade) avoids the cult of personality which mars so many recordings of these works. Soloist Pamela Frank and conductor David Zinman are not just a duo with a spring in their step. They bring to these pieces what you might call an aerated energy. The pleasures they offer are those of pointed, Mozartean articulation, and a lightness of touch which is achieved without in any way compromising the music's expressivity. Zinman, who, by the way, provides most of the cadenzas, also has a fine ear for the teenage Mozart's wind writing, balancing strings and wind in a way that always seems judicious and never attention-seeking. A real winner at under a tenner for the pair of discs.
Michael Dervan
Gunther Schuller: Sextet; Fantasy-Suite; Duologue (Bridge)
Gunther Schuller, now in his mid-seventies, is the man who, in 1957, devised the description "third stream" for music which straddles the worlds of jazz and art music. His colourful career included playing in the horn sections of the Cincinnati Symphony (as principal at the age of 17) and the New York Met, before taking to composition as full time as can be managed with a busy conducting and teaching schedule. As a composer, Schuller is self-taught. Playing in the orchestra was, he says, his teacher. And his practical, performer orientation is obvious in the three polished, eclectic - and well-performed - pieces here, the Sextet (influences from Brahms to ragtime) and Duologue from the mid-1980s, plus the rather more formally austere Fantasy-Suite for guitar from 1994.
Michael Dervan
Brahms: The Serenades. Scottish CO/Charles Mackerras (Telarc)
Much has always been made of the lateness, with which Brahms, aged 43 and consciously in the shadow of Beethoven, completed his first symphony in 1876. Long before that, in the late 1850s, around the time of the titanic struggle of his First Piano Concerto, he had written his first orchestral work, the substantial Serenade, Op. 11. There's nothing in the quality of its music, or that of its companion, Op. 16 (with its string section shorn of violins), to justify its continued neglect. Charles Mackerras's new recording will surely win many new friends for both pieces. His approach, following in the style of his highly-praised Brahms symphonies, sounds leaner and less rounded in string tone, and with altogether more penetrating brass, than more genial rival versions.
Michael Dervan