‘Mozart for the Masses’

Committing themselves to filling an entire CD with music composed only by Mozart inevitably has an air of strategy about it, as the ACO moves forward through its six-disc collaboration with BIS. This one should certainly keep the deal sweet, even if purchasers come to it knowing or caring little about which label they are buying into. The content and the quality of this performance are all they need to hear.

These two violin concertos represent Mozart only just moving out of his teens, at a creative high point. He would soon be ready to start thinking about how his future might unfold if he were to change his lowly status under patronage in Salzburg for the lure of independence in Vienna – or perhaps he had already taken the plunge. As if in belated reply, Tognetti takes his ensemble eagerly through the challenge of giving the young master as much of an encouragement as he might ever have hoped for.

The first movement is infused with a searching spirit both improvisational and meditative, as though always leading up to something. Richard Tognetti plays the opening cadenza with imaginative flair and the first movement has restless yet flexible freedom. The connecting passage to the slow movement and the second movement has some of the finest playing for its glowing warmth tinged with melancholy. The third movement, with its persistent, dance-like theme, is playful and skittish.

Prokofiev’s quirkily attractive chamber music commands a wide timbral palette from the players but it is always delivered with poise and elegance; the same qualities that seem to seep out of the music, no matter how ‘rustic’ or ‘Soviet’ the composer was trying to be. String Quartet No.1, a commission from the US Library of Congress, is classical in tone while String Quartet No.2 is based on folk themes from the Kabardinian region in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains. By way of interlude, we are given the rarely heard Sonata for Two Violins.

What do the music of Chopin, the bowler hat and the paintings of Mark Rothko have in common? Only someone as thoughtful as Stephen Hough would pose such a riddle and provide such an interesting answer. Hough’s thoughtfulness is also brought to bear on the riddle that is the music of Frederic Chopin. Doubtless this year’s Chopin bicentenary will delight diehard romantics but it will also reinforce just how difficult it is to capture the emotional essence of his music.

The performance here by the Goldner String Quartet and Piers Lane has sinewy strength and expressive flexibility, with a rich recorded string sound counterpoised by piano playing of distinctive colour and clarity, and subtle musical charm from Lane. This is most prominent in the poignant and melodically sweet second movement, written in the style of a Dumka, a generally mournful folk ballad punctuated by sections of vitality and energy. The expressively expansive first movement has flexibility and a sound sense of structure.

The fast music in general, however, has vivid immediacy and vitality, so the whole performance captures Dvorak's distinctive contribution to music's architectural principles - the balance of reflective beauty and exuberance.

The rush of Mahler recordings in this year's sesquicentenary of his birth is welcome, bringing younger perspectives to bear on music which, in its melding of powerful expression and deep uncertainty, transcendence and neurosis, appeals so strongly to our age. Gergiev's measured tempo in the first movement of the fourth symphony, the lightest and brightest of the set, allows the mixture of pseudo-Mozartian phrasing to gleam and the ironic peasant quality of the second movement, with off-key fiddle, is well-pointed and admirably clear.

Bruno Walter, who knew Mahler but not Bruckner, thought that, like Mahler's fifth, it marked the transition to mature mastery. This performance, by the Residentie Orchestra in the Hague under Neeme Jarvi, captures its carefully crafted slabs of sound and polyphony, wrought with such obsessive care, with reverent precision and wonderful tonal balance. In the solemnly plangent second movement, Jarvi maintains strict tempo discipline, so the cross rhythms against plucked strings and the mournful oboe theme sound fateful and monumental. The finale, perhaps in imitation of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, starts with a brief snapshot of the music of the earlier movements before rushing into a vigorous fugue. Jarvi shows incisive and cogent understanding throughout.

Planes has reconstructed a program based on a concert in which Chopin participated (along with others) in 1842 and the instrument used gives some indication of the colours open to the composer, which are more delicate and within a narrower range than those of a modern instrument, and the singing style of the upper melody in the nocturnes has light sweetness.

Lewis’s performance partner is Jiri Belohlavek, conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Belohlavek is more usually heard conducting opera, but that is no liability. In fact, the dramatic sense he brings to these works is part of what makes these recordings so effective. There is nothing in the booklet notes to state whether these are live performances or not. They are made in conjunction with BBC Radio 3, which suggests they were the next best thing – especially recorded for broadcast, with the same zest and spontaneity of a live concert recording. Paul Lewis is an assured pianist in this repertoire, growing in authority through the cycle until its apotheosis in the grand Fifth, Beethoven’s ‘symphony for piano and orchestra’.

Beethoven's piano concertos trace his public career as a pianist. Unlike his works for solo piano, which extend into the musically solitary years of his fourth and fifth decades, when deafness ruled out public performance altogether, the piano concertos bow out at roughly the same time he stopped playing publicly. He entrusted the first performance of the Fifth and last to his stalwart pupil, Carl Czerny, after which he avoided public performance, while his one further attempt at a piano concerto in 1815 was incomplete. The hallmark of this set is the care, intelligence and considered nature of Lewis's playing. It is marked by thoughtfulness and respect for the natural grace of each musical idea, rather than heroics, fieriness, quirkiness or bravura. Nothing is ill-considered or ill-judged and the recorded sound from both orchestra and piano is rich and clear.

Lewis avoids gruffness and is never blunt, even when Beethoven might have been. The musical thought of both conductor Jiri Belohlavek and soloist has judicious respect for the intended shape of each phrase, preserving the sense of line without false emphasis. Lewis plays the famous opening of the Fourth Concerto in G with unpretentious simplicity and the first movement is marked by a search for cantabile where the sense of endless song remains uninterrupted through the wealth of Beethoven's contrasting ideas. In this movement, one particularly appreciates the excellence of the pitch in the BBC orchestra, bringing glowing transparency to the sound with creamy brightness in the piano sound in filigree passages. Lewis's handling of the transition of tempo in the cadenza is done with cogent subtlety, bringing back the opening tempo after the central section as something that was always hidden there, under the turbulence. In the slow movement, the soloist conquers the stertorous stiffness of the orchestra with simple reserved cantabile. There is plenty of energy from the orchestra in the finale, though the soloist remains reserved, stressing the music's dreamier moments.

In the famous Aria, I found Staier's speed a little slow, lending the opening a somewhat mannered, over-stylised type of expression. However, in the ensuing music, this sense of style becomes a telling point of contrast for each variation. Staier's understanding of the expressive connotations of the genres Bach adopts as he develops the theme - a toccata, a fugue, an allemande, an overture, and, famously at the end, a quodlibet (meaning a hotch-potch of tunes) - is intelligent and born of deep understanding of the baroque.