This week's classical CDs reviewed
THE CELTIC VIOL
Jordi Savall (treble viol), Andrew Lawrence-King (Irish harp, psaltery) Alia Vox AVSA 9865 ****
Catalan viol supremo Jordi Savall dates his passion for Celtic music back to a visit to Kilkenny in the late 1970s. He’s now decided to tackle traditional Irish and Scottish music on the treble viol (using a range of instruments and tunings), playing 12 of his 29 chosen pieces as solos, with Andrew Lawrence-King (who features in this weekend’s Galway Early Music Festival) accompanying the rest on Irish harp and psaltery. The approach is, in Savall’s words, “deliberately sober”. He doesn’t just want to emulate existing performing style, but to offer something different through an approach that’s soaked in his own experience playing Renaissance and Baroque music. The refinement that results is genuinely fascinating. Irish and Scottish feature in the multilingual notes. www.alia-vox.com
LIVE FROM THE LUGANO FESTIVAL 2008
Martha Argerich and Friends EMI Classics 267 0512 (3 CDs) ****
Martha Argerich's recent appearance at the NCH may spark Irish interest in the latest set of live recordings from her Progetto Martha Argerich at the Lugano Festival. Familiar chamber groupings from duo to quintet (Schumann, Shostakovich, Arensky) are spiced up with works for piano duet (Mozart, Dvorak), two pianos (Saint-Saëns, Rachmaninov, Ravel), Piazzolla arrangements, the seven players needed for Janacek's Concertino, and a saccharine Swiss Fantasy for two pianos and orchestra, written and conducted by Mikhail Pletnev. The big surprise in this collection of high-powered music-making is the two-piano arrangement of Ravel's Introductionand Allegro, played by Giorgia Tomassi and Alessandro Stella. But, then, the arrangement is by that expert, Ravel himself. www.emi classics.com
THE BERLIN RECITAL
Gidon Kremer (violin), Martha Argerich (piano) EMI Classics 693 3992 ****
Schumann and Bartók were the composers on the menu for Gidon Kremer and Martha Argerich’s collaboration at the Philharmonie in Berlin in December 2006. Two violin and piano sonatas frame a solo work for each instrument, and the pairing of these mercurial players is predictably electric.
They weave with extraordinary independence through Schumann’s Sonata in D minor, Op 121. And, in spite of the prominence of Argerich’s piano in the sound picture, Kremer casts an often silvery light on the harsh, gutsy, earthy world of Bartók’s First Sonata. Kremer’s solo offering is Bartók’s extremely challenging Solo Sonata. The solo piano work is Schumann’s Kinderszenen, something of an Argerich speciality. Two Kreisler encores are included. www.emiclassics.com
A PLACE BETWEEN
Patricia Rozario (soprano), Callino Quartet, Michael McHale (piano, celeste), Ioana Petcu-Colan (violin), Vourneen Ryan (flute), Stephen Kelly (percussion) Louth Sounds LCMS 901 ***
The longest work in this moodily atmospheric collection is Henryk Górecki’s 1990 elegy Good Night. Like John Tavener’s Ikon of Joy and Sorrow (a first recording), it features the haunting voice of Patricia Rozario. The other shorter pieces are by Arvo Pärt (including the almost viol-like nasality of the Callino Quartet in the first recording of the string quartet version of Da Pacem Domine), Alexander Knaifel, Valentin Silvestrov, Henryk Górecki with John Cage’s In a Landscapeas an interloper from more than six decades ago. The caring performances on this quiet disc are compromised by close miking, which limits the atmosphere of the slightly synthetic-sounding recording. www.louthcms.org
