First published in the Guardian on 20 October, 2016

Meredith Monk: On Behalf of Nature
Meredith Monk & Ensemble (ECM)

“I work in between the cracks,” says vocalist/composer/performance artist Meredith Monk, “where the voice starts dancing, the body starts singing, the theatre becomes cinema.” Is a way everything she does is about ecology — that interconnectedness; those wild vocal noises — and now On Behalf of Nature is a treatise without text, an outcry without words. She wants the work “to expand our awareness of what we are in danger of losing” and does that by making music that sounds like it comes from the earth, feet planted in the mud, voices erupting and gusting and keening. As a live show its physical gestures were a bit stilted and obscure; for me it’s more articulate as music alone. And though Monk’s incredible technical range is going, the softer stuff is still enthrallingly playful and ritualistic. Sometimes it feels weird being a bystander to her music: this kind of elemental rite should involve us all.

First published in the Guardian on 20 October, 2016

Bach: Christmas Oratorio
Dunedin Consort / Butt (Linn)

Way-too-early seasonal content (sorry) but this latest release from the Dunedin Consort is too good to wait. It’s surely one of the finest accounts now available of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. The approach of scholar/conductor John Butt is never authenticity-or-die, but full of historical investigation without purporting to recreate what Bach might have actually done. (Which would be tough, anyway, given the original 1734 vocal soloists probably doubled on an instrument or two.) The singers here are Dunedin regulars including Joanne Lunn, Clare Wilkinson, Nicholas Mulroy, all excellent, with Mary Bevan as a standout newcomer. The choral sound is pert, sinewy, natural; the instrumental playing is punchy, broad, charismatic. Butt’s navigation of the sprawling six cantatas is tremendously enjoyable — it’s not just how he handles tempo and gait to make us feel the character of individual movements, but how he turns corners and paces the big picture.

First published in the Guardian on 20 October, 2016

Mozart: Violin Concertos
Isabelle Faust / Il Giardino Armonico / Giovanni Antonini  (Harmonia Mundi)

Mozart was 19 when he wrote his violin concertos, a cocky teenage genius. The music is astoundingly elegant but it also prances and preens, and I had wondered what Isabelle Faust — most refined and intellectually scrutinising of today’s violinists — would do with all that cheek and bravado. Turns out she makes it fly where it counts, and always on her own terms. This is the kind of recording whose booklet notes list the instrument pedegree of every single member of Il Giardino Armonico, which might seem precious if the ensemble playing wasn’t so fresh and buoyant, if it didn’t sound like every player was an alert and integral part of the whole. Giovanni Antonini conducts but the music seems to be led from everywhere. Meanwhile Faust’s touch is light, finespun, pristine — often her bow hardly glosses the strings, but there’s proper robustness to balance in the chunky, sparky cadenzas.

First published in the Guardian on 6 October, 2016

Beethoven: Piano sonatas Op. 90, 101 & 106
Steven Osborne (Hyperion)

This is Steven Osborne’s 25th recording for the Hyperion label and what marker it is. The Scottish pianist plays with an authority built on intelligent, very human musicianship: his accounts of these three late-period Beethoven sonatas are hugely personal but are never about him. He orders the music in reverse, starting with the fearsome Hammerklavier and playing the explosive outer movements with a high-definition élan that makes this wildest of Beethoven sonatas sound even wilder. Slow movements are tender, plain-speaking, profound; there are marvellously shaded places in Opus 101’s third movement and subtle, joyous colour changes every time the golden theme of Opus 90’s second movement comes around. Meanwhile the piano’s damper pedals rise and fall with audible percussion — nice to hear some tangible mechanism noises in a recording, but distracting in playing that invites such close listening.