Norman Stinchcombe reviews the latest classical CDs
Janáček, ‘The Excursions of Mr Brouček’: Hoare, Crowe, Briscein, Tenebrae, London Symphony Orchestra / Rattle (LSO Live 2 CDs & SACDs) ★★★★★
For those who know Janácek’s operatic output from the domestic dramatic tragedies ‘Katya Kabanova’ and ‘Jenufa’ or the charming nature fantasy ‘The Cunning Little Vixen’ – all recorded by the LSO under Sir Simon Rattle – the partnership’s latest release will be a disorientating mind-boggler. The conductor puts it succinctly: “‘The Excursions of Mr Broucek’ is probably his most eccentric opera, and for Janácek that’s really saying something. It’s beautiful, off-the-charts surreal, and nobody can really imagine what he was thinking when he wrote it.” Don’t let that put you off though, it’s good fun and receives a super performance from singers and orchestra, vividly recorded with a straight-from-the-footlights immediacy. Yorkshire tenor Peter Hoare brings to life the boozy, sausage-eating Prague pub landlord Brouček who, regretting his drunken marriage proposal to Málinka (Lucy Crowe) escapes into dreams of an alternative life on the moon. This being a satire the moon is filled with aesthetes and artists Brouček loathes. Returning to Prague he travels back in time to 1420 with our anti-hero expected to join the Hussites in the war of independence. Finally he ends up back in his pub. The versatile cast, including tenor Aleš Briscein, play multiple roles and are full of verve. The score is a wide-ranging one with a gorgeous little shimmering tone poem for the journey back to the earth from the moon, and a rousing 15th century Hussite battle hymn delivered with gusto by the Tenebrae chorus under Nigel Short – surely Janáček’s tribute to his fellow Czech Smetana’s patriotic epic ‘Má vlast’. Rattle and the LSO play with panache, with the various musical styles all vividly etched. The set comes with full libretto and translation.
Honegger, 'Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher': Bonnet, Dutrieux, Czech Philharmonic / Vasilek (Animal Music CD) ★★★★★
Musical works which don’t fall neatly into established and concert-friendly formats are often undervalued or completely overlooked. Berlioz’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, neither symphony nor cantata, and ‘Damnation of Faust’, neither oratorio nor opera, are such victims. But they are platform favourites compared to a work by another French composer Arthur Honegger, whose 'Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher', with a text by the poet Paul Claudel, was premiered in 1938. It depicts St Joan’s life in a series of flashbacks as she awaits execution. Acceptance of Honegger’s hybrid work – using a choir and solo singers – has been made even more difficult because the two principal parts of Jeanne and her confidant Frère Dominique are for actors not singers. Musically the work is wildly eclectic, with Honegger blending liturgy with jazz – the orchestra has three saxophones and pianos – folk music and medieval modes. Listeners will to embrace this variety are in for a treat: this is a passionate, stimulating and moving work which gets a blazing (no pun intended) performance by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Prague Philharmonic Choir and Children’s Choir under conductor Lukáš Vasilek. Audrey Bonnet is little known in Britain but she is theatrical royalty in France, a multi-award winning stage actress and here convinces as the naive country girl who hears the voices of the Virgin Mary and Saints Catherine and Marguerite – the recording makes their distant voices convincingly unearthly – but also as the religious zealot battling against the English. Sébastien Dutrieux as Frère Dominique guides her to a martyrdom that makes the work’s climax a triumph rather than a tragedy. The choirs are versatile and passionate, small parts are all despatched with vigour and the orchestral playing has power and zest – Honegger’s strange sonorities ear-ticklingly interesting. The musically curious and open-minded listener will find much to enjoy in this set which comes with an informative booklet.
Shostakovich: Royal Scottish National Orchestra / Jarvi (Chandos 8CDs) ★★★★
In the 1980s during the classical recorded music boom years Chandos Records took on the big name companies by recording complete symphony cycles of mainstream repertoire. With digital recording and superb engineering their recordings were praised for their lifelike concert hall acoustics. They launched the career of Mariss Jansons with a best-selling and critically acclaimed Tchaikovsky cycle. The backbone of their catalogue was provided by the immensely prolific Estonian conductor Neeme Jarvi who recorded 300 albums with Chandos, many of them with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, of which he was principal conductor from 1984 to 1988. They included excellent cycles by Prokofiev and Dvorak, the latter coupled with his wonderful late tone poems, then relatively little-known. Jarvi and the RSNO did not record a complete Shostakovich symphony cycle but between 1984-88 captured some trenchantly played and vividly recorded performances of his finest symphonies, omitting those requiring choirs or solo vocalists. This repackaged box set includes Symphonies 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 ‘Leningrad’, 8, 9, and 10. Jarvi’s approach is direct, straightforward and energetic with generally brisk tempi. The ‘Leningrad’ does not have the monumental quality of Bernstein’s epic Chicago recording – all 84 minutes of it – but its 69 minutes crackle with energy and Chandos’s engineers give the Scottish brass section a visceral impact. The sometimes overlooked No.4’s manic energy and sardonic humour is well to the fore, making this one of Jarvi’s best recordings. The set includes Jarvi partnering Lydia Mordkovitch for a superb coupling of Shostakovich’s two violin concertos, a worthy Gramophone Award winner in 1990. Enjoyable too is a disc of the four Ballet Suites, all arranged from Shostakovich’s stage, film and ballet works and were edited for publication in 1949 by Lev Atovmyan, these are packed with infectious melodies, jolly tunes and high jinks, all despatched with aplomb here.
Mozart, ‘Don Giovanni’: Schuen, Pisaroni, Persson, Bengtsson, Budapest Festival Orchestra / Fischer (Channel Classics 3 CDs) ★★
Iván Fischer conducts a driving, energetic and occasionally breathless performance with his hand-picked orchestra recorded live in October 2025 at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. While using modern instruments the orchestral playing is light and lithesome in ‘period’ style. There is a close rapport between André Schuen as Don Giovanni and Luca Pisaroni as Leporello and their interchanges are lively with some sparks flying. The experienced Swedish sopranos Marie Bengtsson (Donna Anna), and Miah Persson (Donna Elvira), and German Samantha Gaul (Zerlina) are good too. What all the above lack though is the individuality, moments of intense beauty or biting wit that the finest recordings have, and Schuen lacks the charm and menace of Thomas Allen’s Don for Haitink. Note also Fischer’s decision to cut the final chorus after the Don’s descent into hell.
Brahms & Reger: Michael Collins, Escher Quartet (Bis CD & SACD) ★★★★★
In his long and distinguished career clarinettist Michael Collins has recorded all the major concertos and chamber music for his instrument – several times in the case of Mozart. He recorded Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet with the Brodsky Quartet for Chandos in 2014 and now performs the elegiac masterpiece with the Escher Quartet. Collins’ latest interpretation has one major change; his approach to the second movement, the emotional heart of the work. He’s just as passionate as before but at a noticeably quicker tempo so that he can obey Brahms' Più lento direction without the music dragging. This is Collins’ first recording of Reger’s quintet and anyone new to the work is in for a treat. Reger has a misleading reputation as a dull master of counterpoint but listen to Collins’ and the Escher’s warm and winsome Largo and their effervescent Vivace and you’ll be delighted. Bis’s recorded sound is warm and detailed.
Albion Records are the passionate proselytisers of English music especially that of Ralph Vaughan Williams. The company has two stimulating new CDs released, one featuring rare recordings and the other including compositions by the composer's friends and pupils. ‘From Ursula With Love’ ★★★ includes four works which were privately recorded and given to the composer’s widow Ursula Vaughan Williams between 1961 and 1966 which she gave to The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society in 1996. There are 17 tracks on the album, 13 of which have never been commercially issued on record. The wartime film ‘The Story of a Flemish Farm’ has vanished in obscurity but three movements from the score, recorded by the BBC Scottish Orchestra conducted by Graham Treacher, make a very pleasant pastoral sequence. The finest items here are performed by the Aeolian String Quartet: the Phantasy Quintet and String Quartet No. 2 in A minor. For Elizabeth Maconchy and Grace Williams, Vaughan Williams’ students at the Royal College of Music, and long-lasting friends, the composer was “Uncle Ralph” - always available to offer advice and support and ‘Mentor and Muse: songs by Vaughan Williams and the women around him’ ★★★★ includes music by both. There are seven songs by Elizabeth Maconchy, the earliest written as a 17-year-old student, while Grace Williams’ cycle of four poems ‘Billows of the Sea’, is from 1969. There are also nine songs by Vaughan Williams: settings of ‘Four Poems’ by amazingly-monikered Fredegond Shove; ‘Four Last Songs’, on poems by Ursula and ‘The Sky Above the Roof’ Mabel Dearmer’s translation of a poem by Verlaine. What makes this release special is the quality of the singing by mezzo-soprano Kitty Whatley, sensitively accompanied by pianist William Vann. Whatley not only sounds lovely but her versatility makes the songs come to life: she’s equally at home in the gentle pastoral lyricism of Vaughan Williams ‘The Water Mill’ and the distraught heroine of Maconchy’s ‘Ophelia’s Song’.
‘Metanoia’, Late Piano Works of Franz Liszt: Yulianna Avdeeva (Pentatone CD) ★★★★
The dictionary definition of “Metanoia” is “a fundamental change of heart” or, in its original theological sense, a spiritual conversion. Yulianna Avdeeva’s survey of Liszt’s late piano works follows the composer’s own change from the swashbuckling keyboard wizard and seducer who fascinated and outraged in equal measure to the Abbe Liszt embracing Catholicism. Whatever the philosophical subtexts of these short and mysterious works may be, musically they rock the foundations of tonality and anticipate the Second Viennese School by decades. Avdeeva’s sinister rendition of the ‘Bagatelle sans tonalite’ of 1885 and ‘Unstern! – Sinistre’ show Liszt as a musical explorer, while her ‘Csárdás macabre’ combines Liszt’s new disturbing style with the diablerie of his earlier romantic style. This is top class playing, bold explorations captured in excellent sound. I found her performance of Liszt’s great Piano Sonata in B minor less interesting, the swiftly paced first movement lacking sufficient mystery and the brisk finale likewise.
Mahler: Mahler Academy Orchestra / von Steinaecker (Alpha Classics CD) ★★★★
This recording of Mahler’s Symphony No.5 is the second in conductor Philipp von Steinaecker and the Mahler Academy Orchestra’s cycle of Mahler’s symphonies on period instruments. This recording will sound different not only because of the change in sonority using period instruments, less vibrato and more glissandi, but also because the new Breitkopf & Härtel Urtext edition was used, which includes the composer’s numerous corrections. The aim of conductor and orchestra is to get as near as possible to the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic around 1900. The orchestra’s string sound is light and mobile, not the richly saturated vibrato-laden one modern orchestra’s too often use. The litmus test for this symphony is the famous Adagietto, a musical love letter to Mahler’s wife Alma. Willem Mengelberg and Bruno Walter, musical disciples of Mahler, took eight minutes for a piece that has become transmogrified as a threnody – Haitink, in his 1989 Berlin recording, dragging it out to 14 minutes. On this recording it’s a flowing passionate 9 minutes and all the better for it too. This disc is a stimulating and refreshing traversal of this great work.
Beethoven String Quartets Vol.3: Doric String Quartet (Chandos 2 CDs) ★★★★
This latest volume in the Doric String Quartet’s cycle of Beethoven quartets mixes works from the composer’s early, middle, and late periods. Crowning the set are the composer’s two late quartets Op. 132 and Op. 135. On the top of the Op.132 score he wrote: “Sacred Song of Thanksgiving from a Convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian Mode” and on this recording the Molto Adagio third movement sounds appropriately liturgical and almost organ-like, austere and devout. By contrast Op.135’s Lento assai is, in the Doric’s hands, a serene and charming oasis of calm. They apply some zinging pizzicato for the opening of String Quartet No. 10 in E flat major, Op. 74, leaving the listener clear as to why it earned its nickname ‘The Harp'. This fine set, captured in bright and warm sound, is completed by String Quartet No. 3 in D major, Op. 18 No. 3 and String Quartet No. 9 in C major, Op. 59 No. 3.