CD Reviews

The benign-looking score of Bach’s six Motets conceals a host of textual questions. Why has only Lobet den Herrn an independent continuo line (and is this four-part piece actually by Bach)? The eight-part Der Geist hilft is provided with instrumental parts doubling voices; are the others to be performed a cappella? Two four-part choirs are often pitted against each other in dialogue or contrast; should they be spatially separated if voices later converge in four-part counterpoint?

Lithe, athletic, confident, and spaciously recorded, Paul Daniel’s is a superb Enigma, backed by equally impressive renditions of the two string pieces. P&C 1 swaggers and bristles. A top Elgar recommendation. Terry Blain

As Mike Ashman’s notes say, Valencia’s extraordinary Ring ‘proved controversial with both purists and those attached to complex intellectual production concepts’. Indeed, it controversially questions whether such concepts are intellectual, necessarily, or just tired old Brechtian posturing.

Its brilliant use of computer graphic backgrounds and acrobatic mimes shows one can stage a truly modern, theatrically adventurous Ring without distorting its genuinely central concepts – Wagner’s.

 Some of Glyndebourne’s more entrenched punters took umbrage at Richard Jones’s updating of Falstaff to a 1940s Ealing-comedy Windsor. Most, though, as you can hear throughout this film, roared at the gags in a production so sharply coordinated with the music.

Consummate singer-actor Christopher Purves swaps the beans of Jones’s WNO Wozzeck – surely worth capturing on DVD – for the cabbages of this Falstaff (note how Jones can take a line in each opera and weave a whole fantasy around it).