First published in the Guardian on 25 May, 2017

Laurence Crane: 6 Trios, 2 Solos and 1 Quintet
Ives Ensemble (RTF Classical)

Laurence Crane’s music does so much with so little. The gestures are frank and ambiguous, bemused and sincere, self-deprecating and alert, unadorned and unpretentious. Take 2011’s Piano Quintet, the central work on this lovely new disc from the Ives Ensemble. It starts as a lumpen waltz, as endearing as awkward dancers who don’t give a damn, then subsides into little phrases that tug repeatedly, now hopeful, now fretting. The means are simple but the impact is deep. In his booklet notes, Crane points out that this collection spans three decades.“What has changed in the intervening years?” he asks of his own creative evolution. The answer seems to be about scale and structure – longer movements, more complex ways of organising material – but the uncluttered courage of those early pieces is still there. It is all performed with a clean graciousness that sounds way easier than it is.

First published in the Guardian on 25 May, 2017

Prokofiev: Piano Concertos 1 & 3
RLPO/Petrenko/Trpčeski  (Onyx)

Prokofiev wrote his First Piano Concerto as a homework assignment for the St Petersburg Conservatory. (“Give him a good mark,” said the president of the judging panel, “but personally I can’t stand this music.”) A decade later he finished the Third and generally cheeriest of his five piano concertos. In the hands of Simon Trpčeski both really crackle: fiery articulation, brazen rhythms, an ability to navigate corners with a swagger that feels sturdy and nimble at once. The Macedonian pianist doesn’t go in for dark introspection – slow themes tend to be inquisitive rather than outright melancholy – and makes an exception to the rule that all Prokofiev should be laced with sarcasm and subversion. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra sounds seriously good under Vasily Petrenko – particularly in the proud sweep of the First Concerto’s main theme, the flashes of piquant wit in the extra track, Overture on Hebrew Themes.

First published in the Guardian on 25 May, 2017

Faure / Franck: Violin Sonatas
Papavrami/Goerner (Alpha)

Patriotic music isn’t all pomp and anthems. These febrile violin sonatas were designed to be explicitly, defiantly French. Gabriel Fauré and César Franck were members of the Société Nationale de Musique. They helped found the group in 1871 with the rousing motto Ars gallica and the aims of promoting a new kind of national style and, most important, of beating the Germans at their own symphonic and chamber music game. Pianist Nelson Goerner and violinist Tedi Papavrami clinch the muscular, urgent nature of the music as well as its sensitivity and flux; the rigour and classicism as well as the whimsy. It’s very much an equal partnership, with Goerner urging things on and Papavrami responding with generous, full-toned lyricism. The Franck sonata gets a particularly fine performance – intelligent, forthright playing from both musicians.

First published in the Guardian on 11 May, 2017

James Weeks: Mala Punica, Walled Garden
Exaudi/Hortus Ensemble/Weeks (Winter & Winter)

This is a seductive thing: lush, finespun music by James Weeks performed by his peerless vocal ensemble EXAUDI and the excellent instrumentalists of the Netherlands-based Hortus Ensemble — artfully recorded, too, by the Winter & Winter label. Mala punica (the name means pomegranate) is a set of eight pieces based on the Egyptian and Mesopotamian love poems of the Song of Songs. Walled Garden comprises three pieces for strings and flute trios that weave around the voices to create the image of an enclosed aural garden where beautiful sounds can grow. Weeks hones in on horticultural imagery in the texts so we get vine tendrils and flowers waving in the breeze, all treated with a close, gentle sensuality that shimmers and beguiles but never gets lurid. There’s a refinement and definition to the writing that sounds just right in EXAUDI’s chiselled-but-definitely-not-chaste delivery.

First published in the Guardian on 11 May, 2017

Brahms: String Sextets
Mandelring Quartet/Glassl/Schmidt (Audite)

Brahms held off writing string quartets in his 20s: maybe he was nervous to touch the venerated form that Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven had all made their own. He would get there eventually, but first he turned his hand to the ultra rich and gutsy textures of the string sextet — standard quartet plus extra cello and viola. A recent recording of both sextets fronted by the Capucon brothers went for litheness and brilliance; this account from Germany’s long-standing Mandelring Quartet with violist Roland Glassl and cellist Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt is more august, more hefty, with stately tempos and broad, well-fed textures. It’s fine ensemble work, no doubt, but an autumnal sound for such youthful music, and to my taste it overdoes the gloop and solemnity. If you’re of the school of thought that all Brahms is essentially melancholy and thwarted desire then it might be for you.

First published in the Guardian on 11 May, 2017

Shostakovich/Gubaidulina: Violin Concertos
Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra/Lamsma/Gaffigan/Leeuw (Challenge)

Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma pairs concertos by Shostakovich and Sofia Gubaidulina, composers who both earned disfavour from the Soviet regime, who both use the solo violin to articulate deeply personal tenderness and torment. Lamsma is a terrific player with a beautiful, resilient sound, but at times that beauty is her handicap: she doesn’t do ugly or grim, which makes her interpretations of this dark music feel like a gloss. In Shostakovich’s First Concerto — composed in the late 1940s, laced with venom, suffused in angst — she’s not insistent enough in the tugging theme of the Passacaglia. In Gubaidulina’s In Tempus Praesens — an even darker work, if that’s possible; at one point the orchestra effectively crucifies the violinist with violent stabs — she holds her own defiantly, but again, the delivery is unfailingly gleaming. The orchestra sounds broad and a little unfocused conducted by James Gaffigan in the Shostakovich and by Reinbert de Leeuw in a live performance of the Gubaidulina, page-turns and all.