First published in the Guardian on 20 July, 2017

Milhaud/Martinu: Complete String Trios
Jacques Thibaud String Trio (Audite)

“Chamber music is a genre with which one can express one’s deepest feelings,” said Darius Milhaud, and just listen to the tough, haltering chorales of the Modere from his 1947 String Trio to hear what he means. There are good reasons to pair the music of the Provencal Milhaud and his Moravian-Bohemian contemporary Bohuslav Martinu. Both gravitated to jazz-crazed Paris after the First World War but neither forgot the special rhythms and songfulness of folk music from home. Both headed for the USA in the 1940s (Milhaud as a Jew, Martinů as an exiled Czech) and both wrote for small ensembles with nimble intimacy. This recording from the Jacques Thibaud String Trio gives everything an essential quality. It’s a sound perfect for French music, stripped-back and quicksilver, but I also love their fearless way with Martinu’s jagged edges.

First published in the Guardian on 20 July, 2017

Telemann: Fantasias for solo flute
Ashley Solomon (Channel)

I restarted the first piece on this album about 20 times because the sound of Ashley Solomon’s opening note, played on a granadilla wooden flute modelled on an instrument from 1750 , is just so astonishing. It’s very warm, very grainy, so broad and breathy that it sounds more like a low recorder than a modern flute. Telemann’s Fantasias were meant for instruction as well as performance and they’re a test and a bounty for flautists, a tangle of freewheeling challenges that can easily come a-cropper in lesser hands. Solomon makes them dance and sing. He makes them spacious. The articulation is immaculate; the rhythms are buoyant; the recording quality, done in big church acoustics, is immediate and generous. Solomon doesn’t play the whole thing on granadilla – we get flutes of porcelain and ivory, both instruments made in 1760, both full of charisma.

First published in the Guardian on 20 July, 2017

Dvorak/Suk: Piano Quartets
Josef Suk Piano Quartet (Supraphon)

There’s lineage here: when Josef Suk signed up for composition lessons with Anton Dvorak at the Prague Conservatory in the 1880s, he landed himself not just a mentor but also a father-in-law (he would marry Otilie Dvorak in 1898). Suk wrote his First Piano Quartet under Dvorak’s tutelage in 1890; Dvorak wrote his own Second Quartet around the same time, and one is as youthful and excitable as the other is mature and assured. There are obvious links in the sturdy, earthy sweep of the themes and the intense dialogue between the instruments and both have slow movements of big-hearted beauty. The Josef Suk Piano Quartet is named after the violinist (1929-2011) who was grandson of the composer Suk (and great-grandson of Dvorak); they play with huge sound, loving detail and the kind of conviction and authority that comes from personal connection.

First published in the Guardian on 6 July, 2017

Antoine Beuger: Ockeghem Octets
Various (Another Timbre)

Wandelweiser music is typically gradual, intent, whispered, sparse, not typically big on namable passions. Yet what does Dutch composer/co-founder of the Wandelweiser collective Antoine Beuger believe ‘the art of sounds appearing and disappearing, the art of approximation’ is most reminiscent of? Love. Not some cool or cerebral kind of love, either: Ockeghem Octets is part of a series of ensemble pieces (starting with duos and expanding from there) in which musicians play long, soft notes to incredibly tender and sensual effect. Choice of instruments is key, with the warm, reedy warble of concertina, accordion and harmonium given a tactile glow by cello, melodica, e-bowed zither and a pair of low flutes. The ensemble sensibility on this recording is heroically controlled, relaxed and attentive to one another’s breathing and pacing. Individual lines fade in and out to make close dissonances or almost harmonies – it’s gentle, tantalising stuff. The art of approximation indeed.

First published in the Guardian on 6 July, 2017

Dvorak: Symphony No 9; Sibelius: Finlandia
Chineke! Orchestra/Edusei (Signum)

Chineke! Orchestra doesn’t hang about. Just two years old, the BME ensemble debuts at the Proms next month (youngest ever orchestra to make it into the programme) and has just released is its first recording. The choice of repertoire is symbolic: themes in Dvorak’s New World Symphony were inspired by African American and Sioux Indian music, while Sibelius’s Finlandia became an anthem of small-nation identity struggle (including Biafra during its civil war). But the symbolism stops there because this playing stands for itself. Kevin John Edusei conducts –- neat, direct, with a fine sense of when to push and when to linger — and although the ensemble sound is still taking shape (these things take years to percolate) what is missing in depth and burnish is compensated for in care and dynamism, in the lissom quality of quiet passages, in the tasteful restraint that keeps Finlandia unsentimental and gives the Dvorak a taught, explosive energy.

First published in the Guardian on 6 July, 2017

Ives: Three Places in New England, Orchestral Set no. 2, New England Holidays
Seattle Symphony/Morlot (Seattle Symphony)

What music would Charles Ives have written about today’s America? His portraits of New England from a century ago are so stunningly prescient with their bluster and awe, their undertows of dread and dysfunction. He knew how to capture the feeling of being engulfed by forces too big and messy to make neat sense of: instead of trying to tidy and rationalise, he piled stuff up and let the clashes ring out. This album is the third in an Ives series from conductor Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony. They do brilliantly atmospheric things in the dankest passages of Three Places and New England Holidays -– mercurial textures full of suggestion and threat. But I’m less convinced by their barn dances and fireworks. The glee sounds studied, the celebrations don’t have enough abandon.