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Following her recording of the songs of Fanny Mendelssohn, Susan Gritton has provided one of the most generous and best-documented recitals on disc of Clara Schumann's Lieder. Almost every song was written as a gift to Clara's husband, Robert: audaciously for her time, she became wife, mother and career-woman, as the Wunderkind developed into a composer and travelling pianist of fierce ambition and huge energy. The 12 Rückert settings and the Six Lieder, Op.
With Lamentations and Praises its nice to find John Tavener firmly back on earth after Song of the Cosmos at last year's Proms. Even composers of the New Spirituality can err; Tavener's problem, having so long been branded thus, is that something transcendent is now expected from each new work, whereas the truly religious know how only the sacraments yield the truly transcendental.
David Daniels's latest disc features three of Vivaldi's sacred works for solo voice: Stabat mater (1712), Nisi Dominus (1717) and the motet Longe mala, umbrae, terrores (1725). The first two are among the composer's loveliest and most-lauded pieces. HC Robbins Landon, for example, has written of the Stabat's 'extraordinary sense of spirituality and profound sadness', and described 'Gloria Patri' (from Nisi Dominus), where the voice is shadowed by viola d'amore, as 'like some marvellous dream, a trance of beauty'. Longe mala, if less well known, is hardly less exquisite.
Since its Naxos debut in 1999 with music by Herbert Howells, the Choir of St John's College, Cambridge, under Christopher Robinson, has gone on to make excellent discs of Britten, Rubbra and Tavener. Now, in time for the centenary, comes a selection of music by William Walton.
Ivan Moravec is a great artist, a penetrating, infinitely sophisticated musician and a warm-hearted, communicative performer, yet he remains a connoisseur's pianist. In some ways, he's a rather old-fashioned player. His Mozart here (1963-82) is full of delicacy, extraordinarily imaginative 'scoring', and a wonderful wholeness of vision, but in its truly symphonic scope and lavish sound-world (quite unlike the exemplary Uchida's on Philips), the very thought of the fortepiano, with its lean, crystalline, sometimes even astringent properties, never arises.
Michael Tilson Thomas recorded the Charles Ives symphonies for Sony in the Eighties and Nineties, performances that have been highly regarded as a cycle. This RCA disc of orchestral, vocal and choral items provides a fascinating tangential addendum to those recordings. Derived from concerts at San Francisco's Davies Hall in 1999 (not that you would guess from the uncharacteristically silent audience), it is a consciously varied programme taking in the whole range of Ives s idiosyncratic output.
Harnoncourt has an impressive track record as a Dvorák interpreter, with some landmark performances on disc of the composer’s later symphonies and symphonic poems. This new recording of the two sets of Slavonic Dances sets the seal on a well-deserved reputation. Along with the best interpreters of these works, notably Karel Šejna, Harnoncourt interacts with the rhythms of the dances rather than hammering them out with overly forced accentuation.
Leclair and Locatelli were two of the most exciting composers for the solo violin in the late Baroque. While the first excelled in a distinctive and satisfying blend of French lyricism and Italian virtuosity, the other pushed the boundaries of technique to almost incredible feats of bravura. The performances by Manfredo Kraemer, Pablo Valetti and the remaining members of the Rare Fruits Council - ten out often for whoever thought up that wonderful title for the group - are exhilarating.
Boccherini has never had it so good, with discs of his chamber music tumbling off the presses almost every month. None, though, is likely to give more pleasure than this collection of string quintets with two cellos, the medium he made his own. First on the agenda is the E major Quintet with the world's most famous minuet, the very epitome of perfumed rococo elegance.
Pierre Boulez essentially composed his six-movement Livre pour quatuor at the age of 23 in 1949, although the fourth movement, never quite finished, remains unperformed and unpublished. The other five movements — premiered piecemeal between 1955 and 1960, revised, withdrawn, un-withdrawn — still constitute one of the most challenging phenomena in the string quartet repertoire, for players as well as listeners.