First published in the Guardian on 19 November, 2015

Mikael Tariverdiev composed music for the 1960s Soviet hit Goodbye, Boys! and hundreds more film and TV scores, but he’s hardly known beyond Russia and movie buffs — this lavish three-disc set is the first anthology ever released in the West. The music is impossibly wistful and full of pastiche (chanson, big band, Piazzolla) but something about it still gets under the skin. Seagulls and tinkly pianos segue to forlorn humming and shuffling rhythm sections. There are plenty of accordions and slow swing from drummers I picture clutching long-dead cigarettes between the teeth. A hazy waltz from The Long Day twangs like surf-rock Shostakovich. The Last Romantic pairs fistfuls of Rachmaninovian chords with a yearning saxophone elegy. Some tracks stand alone better than others without their visual counterparts, but it’s clear that Tariverdiev was a master conjurer of smoke-filled moods. My favourite is the despondent singer on Dolphins — think a Soviet Gainsbourg whose vowel sounds alone will convince you that Russian is the only language for singing about love.

First published in the Guardian on 19 November, 2015

“What would Schubert have done if he had heard Dragonetti play?” Maybe not one of the world’s great musical mysteries — Domenico Dragonetti was a great virtuoso double bassist; Schubert was reasonably fond of the instrument — but this recording pursues the notion and concludes with a fun new version of the C-major String Quintet arranged for string quartet plus double bass instead of the usual extra cello. We forfeit the sweetness of the two cellos crooning their high tenor duets, but instead we get heft, and an extra darkness that’s right for the angst under the tuneful surface of so much late Schubert. The Finale theme gains the umph of a bawdy tavern song and there’s a kick to the Scherzo that’s deep enough to feel in your stomach. The only place the arrangement doesn’t work is the rapturous Adagio, where chunky pizzicato interjections keep things earthbound. The playing is terrific: tasteful phrasing, gracious ensemble intuition and a string sound that’s fibrous, luminous and poised.

First published in the Guardian on 19 November, 2015

Mark Rothko created canvasses so big you could wallow in them: “you paint the larger picture, you are in it,” he reasoned. His mission statement applied to Morton Feldman, too, whose long durational scores — and Feldman scores are almost always long — equal those big pictures in sound. This album features the 1971 choral work composed in tribute after Rothko died, commissioned by the same Texas church for which the artist had been creating a series of murals. It’s a passionate, reverent piece with elegiac playing here from violist Kim Kashkashian — she paints bolder strokes than many dare in Feldman and it’s refreshing — plus warm singing from the Huston choir and a great sense of space and ritual from percussionist Steven Schick. The rest of the album explores a web of mutual composer influences: John Cage’s Four2, Five, ear for EAR and In a Landscape and Eric Satie’s Ogives and Gnossiennes, marvellously strange and weightless in the hands of pianist Sarah Rothenberg.