Latest releases reviewed

IMPROMPTU
Finghin Collins (piano)
RTÉ Lyric FM CD 104
***

PFinghin Collins's new CD for the RTÉ Lyric fm label runs from Daquin's Le Coucou and Handel's Harmonious Blacksmith Variations through favourites from the 19th century to an excerpt from Janacek's On an Overgrown Path (The Madonna of Frydek) and Rachmaninov's arrangement of The Flight of the Bumble Bee, with Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, and Debussy represented by two pieces each. The style is free, fluent and easy, racing and romping in Field's Rondo in E flat and Mozart's Rondo alla Turca, and lingering indulgently in Brahms's Waltz in A flat, and Schubert's Impromptu in G flat. The playing is tonally cultured and harmonically reposeful, but the style doesn't always avoid a certain blandness of character- isation. www.rte.ie/shop

AKUTAGAWA: RAPSODIA; ELLORA SYMPHONY; TRINITA SINFONICA
New Zealand SO/Takuo Yuasa
Naxos 8.555975
***

Yasushi Akutagawa (1925-89) was born into an artistic family in Tokyo. His father, who committed suicide in 1927, wrote the story on which Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film, Rashomon, is based. The musical straight- forwardness of socialist realism was an early inspiration for Akutagawa. The influence is unmissable in the tuneful, colourfully orchestrated Trinita Sinfonica of 1948, as is the ostinato technique he borrowed from one of his teachers, Akira Ifukube. The often Gothic Ellora Symphony of 1958 was inspired by the sexual content of the reliefs he saw on a visit to the Ellora Caves in Deccan, India, and its idealistic attempt to depict masculine and feminine was undertaken at a time when the composer was under the sway of avant-garde techniques. It's the most interesting work on this vividly recorded disc of music that's at once sophisticated and simplistic. The Rapsodia of 1971 puts some of the avant-garde learning at the beck and call of the socialist realist leanings. www.naxos.com

TAKEMITSU: GARDEN RAIN
Various performers
Deutsche Grammophon 20/21 Echo 477 5382
****

Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) is, of course, the best-known of Japanese composers in this part of the world. His mediations of East and West were sometimes overt - pairing an oboe in multiphonics with the Japanese mouth organ, the sho, in Distance, evoking aspects of the world of the Japanese bamboo flute, the shakuhachi, in the theatrical Voice for solo flute - sometimes covert, as in the strange stillness of Garden Rain for brass ensemble. The works here, which also include Le Son calligraphié for string octet, Elegy for violin and piano, Folios for guitar, Stanza II for harp and tape, and Eucalypts I for oboe, flute, harp and ensemble, were all written between 1958 and 1974 and recorded in the 1970s in atmospheric and gesturally-potent performances by leading players - among them Heinz and Ursula Holliger, Aurèle Nicolet, Ida Kavafian, Peter Serkin, and the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble. www.dgclassics.com

ENESCU: SYMPHONIES 1-3; VOX MARIS
Monte-Carlo Philharmonic, Orchestre National de Lyon/Lawrence
Foster EMI Classics 586 6042 (2 CDs)
****

Forget the folksiness of the famous First Romanian Rhapsody; the three symphonies by George Enescu (completed in 1904, 1914 and 1918) are from a different world. On this new disc, the composer's development is charted from a manner that might be called post-Brahmsian to one of his last works, the symphonic poem Vox Maris, completed in 1954, which reveals his growing fascination with heterophony. Enescu stands far enough apart from the mainstream of his time to have attracted the description pre-postmodern, and Lawrence Foster's recordings (the First and Second Symphonies from the early 1990s, the other works from last year) show a fine grasp of the challenging idiom. www.emiclassics.com