Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CD releases
Walton: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Yamada (Deutsche Grammophon CD 83 minutes) ★★
The first recording by the CBSO and its new music director is a huge disappointment. Their combination has produced some wonderful music-making at Symphony Hall and unforgettable concert evenings. The two captured here in live recordings were not amongst them. Unlike the London critic who gave this disc a rave review I actually attended the concert at which Walton's second symphony was performed, along with his 'Orb and Sceptre' march, composed for the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. While he hailed them, as heard on disc, as an "unbridled success" I failed to discern in them any great insights or indeed any affinity with Walton's music from Yamada. Unless one values the motto "slow is best", for here and in the accompanying performance of Walton's First Symphony, Yamada's tempi are (except for Haitink's monumentally wrong-headed reading) the slowest on disc. In the second symphony's Lento assai Yamada's tempo is plausible, but listen to Charles Mackerras, and hear how beauty can ripple and flow rather than meander. The first symphony gets off to a good start, and there's some fine feisty brass playing, but it pales next to the blistering pace and sizzling energy of Andre Previn's 1967 London Symphony Orchestra recording. Continuing to the next movement, the infamously bitchy Presto, Con Malizia (with malice) and the contrast is even greater, Yamada seems unaware of the music's subtext and motivation. He is more at home in the rumbustious extrovert 'Orb and Sceptre' but even here he misses a trick. There's an ad libitum part for an organ in the score which Yamada ignored. Andrew Litton, in his excellent Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra survey of Walton's music on Decca includes it - listen to what a difference it makes in weight and majesty. The London reviewer claimed the disc boasts "impressively realistic engineering" clearly he doesn't travel up the M1 much to attend Symphony Hall concerts whose spacious acoustic is never evident here. DG's recording is a fatal compromise: not really live, no audience sound, no concert atmosphere, but recorded too close (to eliminate noise) to have any air or bloom around the instruments. Here the CBSO sound pretty ordinary which is a travesty of their fine playing. Listen to the live recordings the small German independent company Orfeo made with the CBSO under Andris Nelsons and hear how the engineers captured great live concerts. I was at Symphony Hall when, for example, they recorded Shostakovich's 'Leningrad' Symphony (2011) and Strauss's 'Alpine Symphony' (2010) on discs which capture the scope, enormous power and winning combination of fine orchestra and great venue. Hear the roof resounding with roaring applause at the end of the 'Leningrad'. Now that really is "impressively realistic engineering"!
Barber 'Vanessa': Heaston, Bridges, Polenzani, Graham, Hampson, University of Maryland Concert Choir, Jason Max Ferdinand, director, National Symphony Orchestra / Gianandrea Noseda (NSO 2CDs & SACDs) ★★★★★
The American composer Samuel Barber is most famous for his three concertos, especially the evergreen melodic one for violin, and his Adagio for Strings. His major masterpiece is perhaps his opera 'Vanessa' which received its premiere at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1958. The libretto, written by Barber's partner the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, is a Gothic tale in which Vanessa, deserted by her lover Anton for twenty years has become a recluse pining for his return and covering the mirrors of the house so that she cannot see her aged appearance. When Anton does arrive it's the son of the original lover - cue romantic angst when Vanessa's niece Erica falls for Anton, and a here-we-go-again ending with Erica now living in the lonely house waiting for a returning lover. This live recording conducted by Gianandrea Noseda uses Barber's 1964 revision of his score, cut from four acts to three and theatrically tighter. The cast is uniformly excellent with Nicole Heaston a lyrical sympathetic Vanessa with Matthew Pollenzani's Anton a charismatic incisively sung lover. The two senior roles are consummately delivered by seasoned veterans; mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, as Vanessa's arrogant aristocratic mother The Baroness, and baritone Thomas Hampson as the Old Doctor. The set's highlight is J’Nai Bridges in the role of Erica, the opera's emotional pivot, beautifully sung and a fully realized character. This new recording does not supersede the all-star Met recording but it does outshine it in the realization of Barber's rich orchestral score, winningly played by the National Symphony Orchestra under Noseda's astute direction, and the high-definition recording captures every detail. The NSO label's presentation is excellent; a small hardback book housing discs, libretto, essays and cast details and photographs.
The award-winning combination of conductor John Wilson and his hand-picked Sinfonia of London have two excellent new discs released for the summer. The first is a terrific compilation of French Orchestral Favourites (Chandos CD & SACD) ★★★★★ which is tailor-made for Wilson's flair for orchestral colour, musical drama and infectious rhythms aided by some superlatively extrovert orchestral playing. Several of the pieces included here were once regularly programmed by British orchestras but have fallen out of fashion, which makes this disc all the more cherishable. Ever since Mickey Mouse played the hapless apprentice in Disney's 1940 musical 'Fantasia', Paul Dukas's 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' (L’Apprenti sorcier) has been a favourite. Listen to the galumphing contrabassoon, vividly captured by the Chandos high-definition recording, funny yet menacing, and madly increasing tension, ratcheted up by Wilson for the climax. Saint-Saens 'Danse macabre' is just as good, the Sinfonia's first violin suitably daemonic, with Wilson's pacing spot-on. Relaxation comes with a delicate and sumptuous Debussy 'Clair de lune' and Ravel's unjustly neglected atmospheric 'Une Barque sur l’océan'. Chabrier's 'Joyeuse Marche' and an all-the-famous-tunes collection of Bizet's Suites from ‘Carmen’ complete a super collection. The recording, made at Church of St Augustine, Kilburn, is superlative. Wilson's Puccini Orchestral Music (Chandos CD & SACD ★★★) explores less familiar territory. In April I reviewed Carlo Rizzi conducting the CBSO in a concert featuring his own arrangement, in two suites, of Puccini's music from 'Tosca' and 'Madama Butterfly' which worked well. Wilson opts for short items from the composer's earlier operas, and of pieces of stand-alone orchestral music like the 'Preludio sinfonico' and 'Capriccio sinfonico' and 'Alla memoria di Amedeo di Savoia Duca d’Aosta' a haunting work arranged for string orchestra by Duncan Gillies. The operatic items include Preludes to Acts I and III of 'Edgar' the Prelude to Act II and Intermezzo for Act III of 'Manon Lescaut'. An interesting collection well played but a leaven from more familiar sources would have added to its attraction.
Copland & Walker: London Symphony Orchestra / Pappano (LSO Live CD & SACD) ★★★★
Aaron Copland's Symphony No.3 is a difficult work for a conductor. It was completed in 1946, heralded as the first great postwar American symphony, bursting with optimism at the end of World War II and the return home of troops from Europe and the Pacific. The musical conundrum is that Copland utilized his immensely popular 'Fanfare for the Common Man' of 1942 as the crowning glory of the symphony's concluding fourth movement. I once saw a performance of the symphony in concert in which the first three movements emerged as just a gigantic prelude to the final Fanfare, not helped by Copland dropping references to the theme in them. Sir Antonio Pappano triumphantly circumvents the problem by making those three movements far more exciting and involving than usual, aided by virtuoso playing from the LSO. Copland's wonderful ballet scores 'Appalachian Spring' and 'Rodeo' are justly famous for their sweeping "great outdoors" feel, their musical landscapes and vistas. Pappano emphasizes just these aspects in the early movements. The third (Andantino quasi allegretto) is all quiet anticipation, the Fanfare theme makes a ghostly entrance and then we are straight into the blazing finale. Pappano's reading is rewardingly integrated. The symphony's optimism is now a faraway Elysian age before the Kennedy assassinations, Vietnam, the 2008 financial crash and Trump (twice). And of course the country's racial divisions, vividly captured in Sinfonia No 5 ‘Visions' (2016) by black American composer George Walker (1922-2018). It was his final work a white hot angry explosion of righteous indignation at the 2015 murder of nine African American churchgoers by a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina. The LSO's percussion section is the focus for Walker's violent and tortured aural onslaught and Pappano doesn't try to ameliorate its jagged textures, vividly captured in the close-miked high definition sound. It's a disc which demonstrates why LSO Live has been awarded Label of the Year at the 2026 International Classical Music Awards for its artistic excellence, innovation and commitment to bringing the orchestra’s music to audiences around the world.
Donizetti Songs Volume 8: Alamo, Rizzi, Korth (Opera Rara CD) ★★★★★
The epic journey has reached its conclusion. Opera Rara's ambitious project surveying Donizetti’s songs, around 200 of them, many of which have never been heard in living memory, has been completed by the release of Volume 8. It was a labour of love for Opera Rara’s Repertoire Consultant Roger Parker who began it as a Covid lockdown project in 2020 and eventually found him researching archives and collections at home and in Italy, France, Austria, Sweden and Australia. It has resulted in a new edition of the Donizetti solo songs, a collaboration with Ian Schofield, and will be published by Casa Ricordi and made publicly available. The first two CD volumes were released together and the second featured baritone Nicola Alaimo accompanied on piano by conductor Carlo Rizzi and fittingly they are here to round things off. We have 14 songs, half of them around two minutes long but towering over them is the album's highlight, 'Il conte Ugolino' a twenty-minute dramatic scena by the ambitious young composer from 1826, and later revised. Its meaty material comes from Dante's 'Inferno', the Count is in Hell and gnawing on the skull of his arch enemy Archbishop Ruggieri who had imprisoned and starved the Count and his friends, forcing him into eating their corpses. It's a tour-de-force from Alaimo who never lapses into mere histrionics but subtly varies his tone and volume in the long stretches of arioso, hovering between recitative and aria. Rizzi has an important role in the performance, introducing and interjecting material from the depths of the piano's lower register, the sound suitably dark for the sepulchral nature of the work. A grisly story is also the basis for 'Non loin de Montfaucon' set by the village's gibbet, "dreaded by the living, even on the most beautiful day," but much more extrovert and theatrical with Alaimo relishing the chance to curdle the blood. There's a Gothic flavour to the hunting song 'Voici la trace du cerf dix-cors' (Here is the trail of the ten-point stag) where Alaimo and Rizzi are joined by Nicholas Korth on horn, the quintessential instrument of the hunt. An appearance of the supernatural " black hunter with his sepulchral voice," lets Alaimo, and Rizzi's tremolo piano, switch to eerie chromatic melodrama. Another stimulating release with immaculate performances. Opera Rara’s presentation is, as always, exemplary; the CDs and booklets housed in sturdy cardboard cases with the latter containing essays, full texts and translations and individual notes by Roger Parker on the songs.
'Vesper': Sean Shibe (Guitar) (Pentatone CD) ★★★★
Sean Shibe is not a typical classical guitarist: don't expect old favourites from the Spanish repertoire or another 'Concertio de Aranjuez' from the Scottish virtuoso. His albums include one of English music from Dowland to Arnold and Berkeley's concertos, a collaboration with Lebanese tenor Karim Sulayman and one where he plays both acoustic and electric guitars. His latest disc is just as enterprising, featuring three British composers; Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle and James Dillon. In the booklet notes he wrote that he aimed “ to explore the potential of the guitar...especially playing repertoire on one crafted in 2021," which refers to the brightly painted Sylvette pictured on the front cover. The music requires Shibe to explore some weird sonorities, strange sound worlds as well as new ways of looking at old musical forms. Adès’s 'Forgotten Dances' is an homage to the mainstay of baroque music, the dance suite with a few surprises, listen out for sudden harmonic jolt in 'Overture, Queen of the Spiders'. James Dillon’s 12 Caprices are lyrical, dream-like and occasionally meandering but Shibe often makes their sound-world entrancing. The biggest surprise here is the five miniatures from Birtwistle, three of them for piano arranged for guitar by Forbes Henderson. The placid 'Oockooing Bird' was composed when Birtwistle was a schoolboy, while 'Berceuse de Jeanne' and 'Sleep Song' are lullabies, the latter written for the composer's young son. In 'Beyond the White Hand', at 18 minutes the longest work on the disc, Birtwistle appears in his familiar persona as the master of the twisted nerve and grating dissonance with Shibe somehow holding the bunch of musical shards together.