Classical
Hugh Canning, David Cairns, Stephen Pettitt and Paul Driver
DONIZETTI
Dom Sébastien, Roi de Portugal
Orchestra of the ROH, cond Mark Elder
Opera Rara ORC33
This is an edited live recording of concert performances at Covent Garden in
September 2005. There is little evidence of an audience here, but the
performance is vividly atmospheric, thanks to Elder’s pacy, theatrical
conducting and some lusty, if not always ingratiating, solo singing. The
work itself is a revelation — an epic five-act grand opera in which
Donizetti out-Meyerbeers Meyerbeer with this yarn of the doomed Christian
king of Portugal pursuing a catastrophic confrontation with Islam. Giuseppe
Filianoti’s tight-voiced Sébastien, Vesselina Kasarova’s blowsy Zayda and
Carmelo Corrado Caruso’s blustery Camoëns make heavy weather of the French
text, but Simon Keenlyside’s virile-sounding Abayaldos makes ample amends. Three
stars HC
SCHUMANN, SCHUBERT
Frauenliebe und Leben, Dichterliebe, Winterreise
Lotte Lehmann (soprano), Bruno Walter/ Paul Ulanowsky (piano)
Naxos Historical 8.111244
Lehmann was in her fifties when, in 1941, she made these recordings, the voice
still rich and lustrous. There is no reason why an operatic star who
excelled in Wagner and Strauss shouldn’t be a fine lieder singer. The
rapture, intensity of line and mastery of word-painting that made her loved
as few singers have been serve Schumann and Schubert just as well. The
Schumann performances are full of memorable insights, to which Bruno Walter
(on a rather dry-sounding piano) contributes, though his “Im wunderschönen
Monat Mai” is strangely prosaic. The Winterreise excerpts are superb.
Three stars DC
COUPERIN
Tic Toc Choc
Alexandre Tharaud
Harmonia Mundi HMC 901956
Precious few notable pianists working today would dare to step publicly on
this territory. Alexandre Tharaud, however, sees no reason why the clock
should not be turned back and François Couperin’s music played once again on
the piano, as it used to be. He is quite right, as he is about assembling
his own sequence of 19 mostly miniature pieces. Tharaud plays this music as
if it were written for piano, joyfully and elegantly exploring the full
range of colours and employing the sustaining pedal lavishly, enhancing the
beguiling, liquid textures of Les Baricades Mistérieuses. He points the way
forward to a more explicitly pianistic style by ending with the beautiful La
Pothouïn, by Couperin’s successor Jacques Duphly. Four stars
SP
STEPHEN DODGSON
String Quartets, Volume One
The Tippett Quartet
Epoch, Dutton Digital CDLX 7182
Dodgson has dedicated his long composing career to the goals of economy and
purity. He has written plenty of vocal and dramatic music, but it is his
abstract thinking that stands out. It is enshrined in a body of quartets now
totalling nine, being released by Dutton in three volumes. This first
contains Nos 1, 5, 6 and 7, dispatched with vigour and incisiveness by these
young players. The idiom reflects the diverse influences of the English
string fancy, Tippettian counterpoint, Janacekian ecstasy. The two-movement
No 1 is a compelling structure, while the reiterative opening of No 7 is
beguiling and its development altogether powerful. Three stars PD
Classical CD of the week
MOZART
Piano Quartets
The Nash Ensemble
ASV Gold GLD 4015
Today, it surprises us that these now beloved masterpieces — completed within
eight months of each other, between October 1785 and June 1786 — found
favour neither with Mozart’s publisher, Hoffmeister, nor with the Viennese
public, which judged them both too difficult to play and too avant-garde to
listen to. Certainly, the opening movements of the G minor (K478) and E-flat
major (K493) works have moments of Mozartian turbulence — sudden shifts of
mood and harmony — that we now regard as typical of his genius in the last
decade of his short life. The Nash players — Ian Brown (piano), Marianne
Thorsen (violin), Lawrence Power (viola) and Paul Watkins (cello) — avoid
overdramatising the angst-ridden aspects of both works, but they register
the subtle changes of emotional temperature with the accomplishment of
seasoned chamber musicians. The playing is faultless, exquisitely polished
and nuanced, full of verve and energy in the propulsive outer movements,
serenely expansive in the Andante of K478 and the sublime Larghetto of K493.
The catalogue already rejoices in superb recordings of this music, but this
newcomer is worthy of such exalted company. Four stars HC
Pop, rock, jazz
Mark Edwards, Dan Cairns, Stewart Lee and Clive Davis
MAVIS STAPLES
We’ll Never Turn Back
Anti 6830-2
On We’ll Never Turn Back, the gospel star Mavis Staples revisits some of the
songs most closely associated with the civil-rights movement of the 1960s.
You might therefore expect the album to have more historical significance
than musical merit, but three factors bring this album to life. First,
Staples is reliving her own past — the Staple Singers worked alongside
Martin Luther King — and draws on personal memories to give a new angle to
old songs. Second, her producer, Ry Cooder, whose recent solo album, My Name
Is Buddy, was overthought and underfunked, is right back in the groove here,
sculpting brooding, ominous backdrops that match and enhance the power of
Staples’s voice. Finally, Staples’s belief that the struggle continues — “We
need a change now more than ever” — adds relevance and fire to her
performances. Four stars ME
MARIA McKEE
Late December
Cooking Vinyl COOKCD399
It has taken Maria McKee more than 20 years to get round to covering A Good
Heart, the song she wrote for Feargal Sharkey. It’s probably just as well
that she waited, because there are times during her strangely shaped career
when she might have ruined it. But on Late December, she has reined in her
more ridiculous instincts (there are only a couple of songs here that sound
like tracks Jim Steinman might have written) to concentrate on the more
simple, more direct songs that showcase her tremendous voice so much better
than the over-the-top belters. Who needs mini-operas when you’ve got the
Motown beat of No Other Way to Love You, the classic pop vibe of the title
track, and the Panic in Detroit riffing of Too Many Heroes? An unexpected
return to form. Four stars ME
ARCTIC MONKEYS
Favourite Worst Nightmare
Domino WIGCD188
Four tracks in, the signs aren’t good: Brianstorm, Teddy Picker, D Is for
Dangerous and Balaclava glory in Alex Turner’s razor-sharp vignettes, but
the unvarying underlay of garage-rock guitar and bass, and the lyrics’
wearyingly caustic slant, ooze surliness, superiority and complacency.
Fluorescent Adolescent, though, vividly captures a group in transition
(which they surely are), an impression confirmed by Do Me a Favour and the
beautiful Only Ones Who Know. The songs’ tenderness, vulnerability and
musical variety point the way forward for a young band accelerated to fame,
garlanded with absurd amounts of praise; a band who have made a second album
that will thrill disciples, but may strike agnostics as not quite the
masterpiece it is hailed as. Three stars DC
JEAN MICHEL JARRE
Téo & Téa
Atlantic 2564699766
Three decades after Oxygene, the Gallic son-et-lumiãre knob-twiddler releases
a new opus into a market arguably more jaded about technology than ever
before and unlikely to get terribly excited by some old roué plugging in his
sequencer again and revving up the BPMs for les kids . Sounding like
Rick Wakeman collaborating with Faithless, Téo & Téa maxes on
cheesy synths and sudden beat explosions, and reminds you how much you hate
house music these days. The absolute nadir is Beautiful Agony, which
features joyless soft-porn groaning of the type no doubt emitted by a
ready-reckoning eastern European as she lies beneath a potbellied
billionaire on a Monte Carlo yacht. Classy. One star DC
BRUISE
We Packed Are Bags
Foghorn FOGCD008
The saxophonist Tony Bevan, who assembled Bruise, is barely into his fifties,
but embodies the spirit of British free improvisation’s 1960s progenitors.
Bevan’s playing on the second of three live tracks, Long Face, may be too
lyrical for the movement’s most astringent followers, but electronic
interference from Spring Heel Jack’s Ashley Wales, the percussion of Orphy
Robinson and the London scene’s current rhythm section of choice (John
Edwards and Mark Sanders) help him tow Bruise into uncharted waters. On the
closing track, Bard, the group drift in a shifting Sargasso, haunted by the
ship’s bell of a lone, pounding drum. Three stars SL
RHODRI DAVIES AND KO ISHIKAWA
Compositions for Harp and Sho
Hibari hibari09
The harpist Rhodri Davies atones for his membership of Charlotte Church’s
touring group, joining Ko Ishikawa, master of the Japanese bamboo pipes, on
four tracks. Aka To Ao recalls nursery-school hearing-test tones, and one
emerges from its nostalgically disorientating 18 minutes expecting a medical
assessment. Torso introduces the slow-motion water-droplet plunks of the
harp. Three Drops of Rain uses sensory deprivation to suggest nonexistent
sounds. Then Strings and Pipes of the Same Length Float on Waves does
something brilliant with sine waves, generating stabs of piercing, sustained
scrapes, changing the colours of the intervening silences. Four stars SL
ELLA FITZGERALD
Forever Ella
UCJ 984 8373
Ella remixed? Rest assured that only two of the tracks on this compilation —
marking the 90th anniversary of the singer’s birth — have been subjected to
the dark arts of the DJ. Wait Till You See Him and Angel Eyes are reduced to
innocuous dancefloor music, but in fairness, the original songbook discs
themselves contain a certain amount of orchestral boilerplate, and
Fitzgerald did try her hand, none too successfully, at postBeatles pop. It
really would be hard to create a dull Ella compilation, even if some of us
would be more than happy to forgo another hearing of Ev’ry Time We Say
Goodbye. Three stars CD
HOT CLUB OF DETROIT
Hot Club of Detroit
Mack Avenue MAC 1030
While the Motor City is not synonymous with the music of Django Reinhardt, the
members of the HCOD are living proof that the virtues of gypsy jazz can
survive the transatlantic voyage. Joie de vivre — a quality you don’t
automatically associate with contemporary jazz — flows in abundance on this
celebration of the swing era. The twentysomething lead guitarist, Evan
Perri, possesses a crisp acoustic technique, and the combination of Dave
Bennett’s elegant clarinet and Julien Labro’s accordion lends the sextet an
authentic cafe aura. They stretch out to full effect on Nino Rota’s
Godfather Theme. Four stars CD
Pop CD of the week
FEIST
The Reminder
Polydor 9848785
The Canadian’s third album is like a summer love affair: passion, lust,
abandon, doubts, ennui, recrimination and rapprochement are all evoked over
the course of its 13 tracks. Recorded in just two weeks, in a house outside
Paris, the follow-up to the hit Let It Die will delight fans of that album
and surely win Leslie Feist new ones. Collaborating again with Gonzales, she
has fashioned the perfect platform for her cracked croon: gliding in with
the downhearted So Sorry, upping the ante with I Feel It All and My Moon My
Man, and languishing in the midsummer heat on The Park. Feist’s cover of
Nina Simone on the retitled Sea Lion Woman is a thrillingly unbridled
reading; Past in Present and 1234 find her soaring; while on The Limit to
Your Love, she hushes to a whimper. It’s amazing to think she once fronted a
screamathon punk band; now, she’s one of the greatest female singers working
today. Five stars DC
Download Past in Present at www.apple.com/itunes
