Arleen Auger, American soprano (Delos Double, 2 CDs)
When the Los Angeles-born soprano Arleen Auger succumbed to a brain tumour in 1993, a few months short of her 54th birthday, a radiant light was extinguished in the world of music. She was one of those performers who made it easy to imagine that the art of singing was simply that of making beautiful sounds. But hers was an art that was underpinned by intelligent musicianship and sharp observation. Delos's new collection demonstrates her apparently artless artfulness in arias by Bach and Handel (with the Mostly Mozart Orchestra under Gerard Schwarz), in the fifth and best-known of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas brasileiras (with the Yale Cellos under Aldo Parisot), and in an extremely wide-ranging selection of 25 songs with Dalton Baldwin at the piano. Trivia jostles with works of genius, but all glow in the abundance of gentle-spirited beauty that Auger lavishes on them.
Russian Images 2. Vassily Savenko (bass-baritone), Alexander Blok (piano) (Hyperion)
The real curiosity in bass-baritone Vassily Savenko's second Hyperion collection of Russian songs is the set of Three Romances, written by Alexander Mossolov in 1949. Mossolov, a leader of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s, fell foul of official attitudes in the 1930s, and turned to the study of folk-song and the writing of folk-inspired music. Of the urban Mossolov of The Iron Foundry (played by the NSO last May), there's not a trace in these later, romantically impassioned songs. The collection mixes the well-known (Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky) with the altogether less familiar (Arensky, Taneyev, Medtner), and reaches back to Glinka (including the breathless helter-skelter of his train-inspired Travel Song). Savenko's grainy, occasionally gritty delivery matches the overriding melancholy of the music.
Joachim: Violin Concerto No 3; 2 Overtures. Takako Nishizaki, Stuttgart RSO/Meir Minsky (Naxos)
The great composer as interpreter is an altogether better-known phenomenon than the great interpreter as composer. But figures as diverse as Wilhelm Furtwangler, Antal Dorati, Artur Schnabel and Wilhelm Kempff left sizeable portfolios of compositions. The Hungarian-born violinist Joseph Joachim, for whom Brahms wrote his Violin Concerto, was also a composer in his own right, and his Hungarian Concerto maintained a place in the repertoire for many years. His Third (and final) Concerto has a long-arched breadth of phrasing - well respected by Takako Nishizaki - which you wouldn't expect from a minor composer. And the two overtures, Hamlet and In Memoriam Heinrich von Kleist, support the picture of a man whose earnestness as a creator matched his character as a performer.
