Bruckner: Symphony No 8; Symphony No "0". NSO/Georg Tintner (Naxos, 2 CDs, £9.98) As in his 1996 NCH performance, veteran Austrian conductor Georg Tintner uses the rarely-heard, earliest (1887) version of Bruckner's Eighth, and delineates it with a sure and steady hand. His reading has a natural-sounding expansiveness that makes the pioneering Teldec version under Eliahu Inbal sound positively hasty. Inbal's sharp edges and eagerness for climactic pointing inclined one to hear this version as a clear instance of later thoughts being better. Tintner's inwardness, his softer contours, longer-breathed paragraphs and sense of deeply-rooted faith in the music make it sound closer to the core of the Bruckner canon. The NSO's responses are fully in sympathy, as are the blends, distances and dynamics of Naxos's recording. The generally drier approach to Symphony No "0" is not quite as successful.
Yehudi Menuhin plays so- natas by Beethoven, Brahms and Bartok (Biddulph) Yehudi Menuhin first met Bela Bartok in 1943, to subject his performance of the First Violin Sonata of 1921 to the composer's scrutiny. The normally severe Bartok responded, "I did not think music could be played like that until long after the composer was dead". Menuhin's 1947 recording of the dissonant 1921 Sonata with Adolf Baller tells all. There's not a note without a probing suggestiveness, not an angle turned without a telling inflection, not a phrase without a special charge. Brahms's Op 108, even with the thick chording and rhythmic brusqueness of his sister Hephzibah at the keyboard, is hardly less fine, though Beethoven's Op 96 proves less pliable to the siblings' approach.
Krommer: Bassoon Quartets Op 46; Reicha: Bassoon Quintet. John Heard (bassoon), Mary Harris (viola), Veronika String Quartet (IMP Classics) Until recently, the chamber music of early 19th-century Czech composers was largely the preserve of the Czech Supraphon label. This new CD, however, was recorded in Ohio, with a local bassoon professor and his viola colleague joining the Ohio-based Russian Veronika Quartet (trained in Moscow by the Borodin Quartet's Valentin Berlinsky). Krommer's two quartets are, unusually, scored for bassoon, two violas and cello, and the restriction to lower instruments is extremely effective. The music is light and amiable, and the deft performances are caught in close focus in a resonant acoustic. So successful is Krommer's scoring that, by comparison, Reicha's Quintet for bassoon and string quartet, sparked by some wayward violin playing, sounds unusually bright. Michael Dervan
