ONE hundred years ago, before the days of radio, people heard great music mainly as it was played on the domestic piano. The great composers often arranged their music for commercial profit so that it could be heard in the home, and Felix Mendelssohn was a welcome guest at Windsor Castle to play his music.
The piano duo, Tai and Groethuysen, give us a flavour of those occasions by playing on a new Sony CD the Octet and 1st Symphony arranged for four hands, and mellifluous it is. No wonder that Queen Victoria was amused!
The viola, the frequent butt of orchestral jokes, has, in fact, the most beautiful sound of any instrument, as is determined by a new recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto. Raise hands in horror if you will, but the composer’s friend Lionel Tertis made the arrangement with Elgar’s approval, and actually conducted several performances with the great violist. The beauty of sound more than makes up for the loss of some depth of tone of the cello, and David Aaron Carpenter gives a fine performance with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach, adding the delightful Schnittke Concerto on this disc released by Ondine.
Angela Hewitt plays the Schumann Piano Concerto soon at the Liverpool Phil, but on a new Hyperion release she devotes herself to sonatas by Haydn and Suites by Handel, thus hitting two centenary targets in one go. The Handel also includes the Chaconne and 21 variations, and, in her sleeve notes, Miss Hewitt reveals how much her earliest days at the piano still influence the way she plays this music today.
Rachmaninov’s short opera, The Miserly Knight, has a second scene written for the voice of the great bass Chaliapin. On a new disc from Chandos the Russian bass Ildar Abdrazokov sings the part with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, under Gianandrea Noseda. This 60-minute work has a mainly Russian all-male cast, and is notable for the richness of the orchestral music, superbly realised by Noseda and his Orchestra.
The London Proms this year featured the Stravinsky ballets, and three of them appear on a Hyperion disc from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ivan Volkov. Jeu de Cartes, Agon and Orpheus show a variety of styles, as they were written over a period of 20 years, and make comfortable listening on this well-planned Hyperion disc.
Similar good sense is found in another Hyperion CD of Prokofiev. The Symphony Concerto for cello and orchestra is well known to us, but less so the Cello Concerto in F minor. But Alban Gerhardt wisely places them together as one emerged from the other. Prokofiev was dissatisfied with the Concerto, so gave it a complete reworking to turn it into the Symphony Concerto, and they each show themselves to be a fine work in their own right, the latter clearly the masterpiece. Gerhardt tackles the virtuosity with aplomb and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, under Andrew Litton.
