This week's classical releases reviewed
HANDEL: TRIO SONATAS OP 2 & OP 5
Academy of Ancient Music/Richard Egarr (harpsichord)
*****
He took the words out of my mouth. My first response to the Academy of Ancient Music’s new recording of 13 trio sonatas by Handel was delight in how they conveyed the music from the inside, immersing the listener in the tensions and perspectives of the performers. After all, these sonatas were written in the first instance for the enjoyment of the players rather than an audience of passive listeners. And there, on page two of the liner notes, Richard Egarr states that “this really is music to be played, not X-rayed and analysed”. The pleasure of these recordings is that Egarr’s attitude is so successfully conveyed in the ensemble’s playing. An inside job, and a top-rank one, to boot. www.tinyurl.com/6mchwb
STENHAMMER: PIANO CONCERTOS
Seta Tanyel, Helsingborg SO/Andrew Manze
*****
Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series is a kind of Wexford Festival for the piano – dusting off, shining up, and recirculating neglected works by composers that are often long-forgotten. The latest instalment, volume 49, features the two piano concertos by one of Sweden’s leading composers, Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927). They date from 1893 and 1907, and have the kind of bone and sinew that many of Hyperion’s excavations have lacked. Stenhammar, himself a virtuoso pianist, had made his concerto début in Brahms’s D minor Concerto, and his own concertos are chewily Brahmsian rather than showily virtuosic. Seta Tanyel and Andrew Manze capture the music’s brooding passion to perfection. www.tinyurl.com/5jub7c
MOZART: PIANO CONCERTOS IN C MINOR K491, IN A K488
Cleveland Orchestra/Mitsuko Uchida
Decca 478 1524 ****
The complete set of Mozart piano concerto recordings that made Mitsuko Uchida such a CD favourite in the late 1980s were conducted in studio by Jeffrey Tate. Uchida has now chosen to approach Mozart again, this time directing from the keyboard in performances that were recorded live in Cleveland’s Severance Hall last December. Her coupling of two of the greatest concertos – one dark, one bright – is projected with a calm energy that eschews the prancing effects that used to be part of her style. It’s as if everything is now more contained, more reflective, and the smallness of scale is reflected in decisions to reduce the orchestral strings to solo lines from time to time to accompany a hushed-breath gentleness from the piano. www.deccaclassics.com
