First published in Gramophone, December 2015 issue

Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja isn’t one for towing the line. Her performances of core repertoire are emotionally super-charged: some listeners balk at the extremities, while others (myself included) tend to be enthralled by the energy. She plays barefoot, often dressed the part in folk costume for Bartok or androgynous trouser suits for Tchaikovsky. Regardless of whether a specific interpretation works or doesn’t, there’s no doubting her capacity to jolt an audience into engaging with the repertoire afresh.

Continue reading →

First published in Gramophone, December 2015 issue

There’s a neat Cornelius Cardew quote about how best to approach the works of Morton Feldman: “almost all Feldman’s music is slow and soft … Only when one has become accustomed to the dimness of light can one begin to perceive the richness and variety of colour.” This disc from Paris-based Serbian-American pianist Ivan Ilic taps into the richness and the variety, and adds something of his own inquisitive voice. It is Ilic’s third Feldman disc, and to me it’s his most spacious and searching yet.

Continue reading →

First published in the Guardian on 17 December, 2015

This album opens with a 53-second piece called Tender: sweet, husky, tentative sounds circling in space like a mobile. Later we get Tender Second Version — just 47 seconds this time, but now with more tremble and more pain. Michigan-born experimental composer Joseph Kudirka uses simple terms to say significant things. His music is considered; he doesn’t shout or clutter the edges or overfill the gaps. 21st Century Music is a slow and starkly beautiful cycle of downward shifting intervals; Wyoming Snow was inspired by a drive through a wintry landscape; Beauty and Industry does what the name suggests, alternating soft-hewn gestures against clangy dark ones. The scores often leave a lot open to interpretation there are two or three versions of several pieces on this disc, each one an insight into the astutely calibrated quiet textures made by Apartment House.

First published in the Guardian on 17 December, 2015

Swiss composer Jürg Frey said recently that all good music should be felt in some part of the body, and that his music is intended to be felt just inside of the ear drum. It’s a neat image from the master of calm instrumental textures — a Wandelweiser group composer who explores silence as much as sound and writes egoless music that feels as though it’s always just been there. Montreal’s Bozzini Quartet gave a virtuosically still performance of his Third String Quartet at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and the group’s recording of the half-hour piece is beautiful for the up-close, quiet, grainy realness of the string timbres, every bow hair and every arm quiver audible. It’s an audaciously fragile performance. Also on the disc is an earlier Frey work, Unhörbare Zeit (Inaudible Times), made of danker chords and even longer vistas of open space.

First published in the Guardian on 17 December, 2015

Leos Janacek wrote down thousands of rural Czech songs during his lifetime; he loved the twisting modal tunes, the jagged lyrics. The title of his most important published collection — Moravian Folk Poetry In Song — hints at how much attention he paid to the rogue rhythm of the words as well as the melodies. His settings never over-prettify the music, keeping vocal lines direct and a strong flavour of cimbalom, organ, fiddle and stomping feet in the piano accompaniments. Mostly he believed these songs should feel like real life: “the dance song should choke in sweat, in people’s vapour and steam, while the melancholy weeping of the bride should be reflected in wedding songs.” Some operatic voices overstate or over-gloss the raw spirit, but soprano Martina Jankova and baritone Tomas Kral get it just right with light, clear, candid voices and a striking sense of space from pianist Ivo Kahanek.

First published in the Guardian on 3 December, 2015

Next year is Henri Dutilleux’s centenary (the French composer died in 2013, just shy of reaching 100) and bring on the excuse to sink into his majestic, finespun musical universe. No better place to start than Tout un monde lointain, one of his most seductive scores: a rapturous cello concerto written for Rostropovich in the late 1960s and full of sumptuous sounds. The name is borrowed from Baudelaire and each of the five movements quotes the poet, from Enigma’s ‘strange and symbolic nature’ to Surges’ ‘dazzling stream’ to Mirrors’ ‘immense torches’. James Gaffigan and the Lucerne orchestra tread that tricky Dutilleux line between sensuous imagery and intense technical refinement, while Emmanuelle Bertrand makes stunning sounds on her cello — now breathy and exquisite, now deep and spicy. The disc opens with Dutilleux’s mystical little solo Strophes and also contains a gleaming performance of Debussy’s Cello Sonata from Bertrand and pianist Pascal Amoyel.

First published in the Guardian on 3 December, 2015

The music of Toshio Hosokawa is dense and lightweight at once: music that takes itself awfully seriously, every gesture loaded with Zen concepts of breath souls or blossoming flowers, but somehow the sum of its parts never feels hugely substantial. Luckily musikFabrik isn’t an ensemble to indulge the ponderous or the self-important, and this album of Hosokawa chamber works from the past two decades is as straight and unpretentious as you’ll hear his music performed. It begins and ends with pieces from the ten-part Voyage series exploring the relationship of soloist (man) against ensemble (nature). In the eighth, Melvyn Poore rumbles, whispers and sings through his tuba; in the tenth, Tadashi Tajima’s shakuhachi flute wafts airy phrases across dank ensemble textures. There are some carefully poised songs-without-words for flute and piano (Lied) and oboe and harp (Arc Song), and the Messiaen homage Stunden-Blumen sounds inquisitive and alert under conductor Ilan Volkov.