First published in the Guardian on 14 April, 2017

Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time etc
Krakauer/ Haimovitz/Crow/ Burleson/ Socalled (Pentatone)

Cellist Matt Haimovitz and clarinettist David Krakauer met at a klezmer gathering in Canada and discovered a shared intrigue in Henri Akoka — the Algerian-born Sephardic Jewish clarinettist who premiered Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time at a WW2 prisoner of war camp. In a tribute project called Akoka, they frame Messiaen’s masterpiece with improvisations and a woeful electronic remix by Montreal “beat architect” Socalled (bits of the Quartet layered up with archive radio broadcasts, hip hop rhythms and Sephardic cantorial singing). The multi-faith angle could be interesting — Messiaen’s technicolour catholicism dominates most readings of the Quartet, so a klezmer-style vibrato in the solo clarinet movement, for example, is a valid perspective. And the performance of the Quartet proper is generally classy, especially the immensely expressive and gentle playing of violinist Jonathan Crow. But the add-ons are dire, and doubly so given they segue straight in and out of the Messiaen leaving no room for escape.

First published in the Guardian on 14 April, 2017

New York
Ensemble Intercontemporain/ Pintscher (Alpha)

What does New York sound like? This double-disc collection charts the city’s past century of modern classical music, taking in composers born there (Carter, Feldman, Reich) and composers who made it their home (Varese and Cage plus recent works by David Fulmer and Sean Shepherd). Matthias Pintsher is himself a German composer/conductor who lives in New York and flits across the Atlantic to direct the illustrious Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain; the performances he gets from them are virtuosic, rich, detailed, sober. I yearned for a bit more romp in the shrieks and rituals of Varese’s Integrales from 1925; more ensemble clatter in Elliott Carter’s Clarinet Concerto (the solo part is tackled superbly by Jerome Comte). Inevitably a seven-piece survey will have big repertoire gaps — conspicuously missing is the cheery and too-popular-for-Pintscher brand of post-minimalism championed by the Bang on the Can collective. Depressing, too, to see yet another music history narrative told without a single woman’s voice in the mix.

First published in the Guardian on 13 April, 2017

Schubert: Piano Sonatas D.960 & D.664
Javier Perianes (Harmonia Mundi)

Javier Perianes revealed to the Guardian that his most memorable ever live concert experience was hearing the great Romanian pianist Radu Lupu playing Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat major D 960. He said he would “never forget that emotion from the very first to the very last note”. Now he has recorded that same sonata — Schubert’s last — and made his own very personal account of its huge emotional scope. With Perianes the touch is always warm and the edges are never harsh: the hymn-like opening is whispered and tender, the exploratory passages are wide-eyed and the song-like melodies really sing. He doesn’t get the glimpses of rage and terror that some performances do, but instead gives us sensitivity and unguarded rapture. He pairs D 960 with the blithe A-major sonata D 664 and now brings space and weight to music that some pass off as slight. It’s generous playing.

First published in the Guardian on 30 March, 2017

Shostakovich: Preludes and Fugues
Peter Donohoe (Signum)

Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues pay tribute to JS Bach, but are they parodies? Sometimes they sound it. Peter Donohoe doesn’t think so. Even where Shostakovich’s music is often mined for sarcasm or doublespeak or coded messages, Donohoe treats these piano miniatures with utmost sincerity. His new recording of the complete set isn’t introspective or showy; it isn’t overly reverent or sensationalist. Above all his playing is frank, sometimes to the point of plainness. The A-major fugue could be beguiling — he describes a ‘naive wonderment’ in his booklet notes — but he goes at it staunchly. The biting black comedy of the prelude that follows delivered straight. Elsewhere, though, there is immense dignity and power in Donohoe’s directness. He summons thunderous storm clouds in the D-minor fugue then makes the arpeggios of the D-major Prelude as sparkling as a stream, and the most questioning moments — the three cadences at the end of the F-minor prelude, for example — are thoughtful and poignant.

First published in the Guardian on 30 March, 2017

Kate Whitley: I Am I Say
Multi-Story Orchestra/Stark etc (NMC)

Kate Whitley co-founded the Multi-Story Orchestra in a car park in Peckham with several intentions, chief among them getting an audience closer to the music they were hearing and far away from ingrained listening habits of the concert hall. A similar drive seems to underpin the unpretentious, appealingly vigorous and visceral music she writes. This debut portrait album showcases Whitley, who is not yet 30, as a lush harmonist, an orchestrator who handles instruments boldly — the Viola Concerto flings about from rapt quiet passages to thronging strings — and a melodist who isn’t afraid of big rhapsodic elegies. The performances are direct and excellent: Rolf Hind is full of conviction in the now bruising, now effervescent Five Piano Pieces; Eloisa-Fleur Thom and Asher Zaccardelli are all glint and shimmer in the Duo for Violin and Viola; Shiry Rashkovsky charges fearlessly through the Viola Concerto’s squalls. In the title piece for orchestra, school choirs and soloists, Whitley takes up the noble tradition of writing rousing, robust music for children that takes its young performers seriously.