Franck: Piano Music. Ashley Wass (Naxos)
This new issue in Naxos's Laureate Series is a double celebration - of the winner of the 1997 World Piano Competition, Ashley Wass, and of the large but largely neglected body of piano music left by Cesar Franck. The best-known piece here, the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, is not the one to show Wass in the most favourable light. He comes across mostly as a gentle-spirited player, much concerned with the projection of nicely-rounded tone, and often persuasive in moments of languid lingering. The larger early works, an Eglogue and Grand Caprice written when Franck was in his early twenties, show Wass in a favourable light. The Prelude, Chorale and Fugue and Prelude, Aria and Finale need a tightness of bonding over long spans that he doesn't yet quite manage to sustain.
- Michael Dervan
Mahler: Symphony No 8. Chicago SO/Solti (Decca). Mahler: Symphony No 8. Vienna PO/Mitropoulos (Orfeo)
Just over a minute (and 11 years) separate these two recordings of Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand. The forceful dynamism and tonal splendour of Solti's 1971 account, spectacularly recorded in Vienna when the Chicago SO was on tour, have long made it a sonic benchmark in its field. Dmitri Mitropoulos's 1960 Salzburg Festival performance, here transferred from the original radio tapes, sounds a lot more spacious in conception than its extra minute would lead you to expect. Perhaps it's Solti's busy fondness for local climaxes which makes him seem faster than he is. Solti's is certainly the version to stimulate the senses. Mitropoulos' is the one which, justifying its still special reputation, is more likely (even in mono!) to stir the soul.
- Michael Dervan
Gidon Kremer plays Glass, Rorem, Bernstein (Deutsche Grammophon 20/21)
Gidon Kremer is well know as a passionate proselytizer on behalf of avant-garde music from the former Soviet Union. His musical sympathies are much wider than that, of course, as this reissue of three works by US composers demonstrates. It's the oldest of them (in what is, incidentally, the oldest recording, too, from 1979) that makes the strongest impression: Bernstein's sombrely reined-in, Plato-inspired Serenade of 1954. Ned Rorem is an unreconstructed romantic of French sympathies, but his concerto, significantly, lacks the French piquancy of harmony. Philip Glass is, well, Philip Glass. Nothing is added either to the picture of Glass or of the violin concerto in this encounter. Kremer handles all three works with typical perceptiveness.
- Michael Dervan