Jan Järvlepp: Concerto 2000 & Other Works Pascale Margely, flute. Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra/Stanislav Vavřínek;, Zagreb Festival Orchestra/Ivan Josip Skender; Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra/Petr Vronský Navona Records NV6291 ★★★★✩ Enfant terrible of the Canadian contemporary music scene, the Ontario composer Jan Järvlepp last year released Concerto 2000 & Other Works on the Navona label. Known to the general public for his audacious Garbage Concerto (1995), this composer delivers an impressive array of works that affirm the postmodern character of his approach by rejecting the dogmas of new music. Freed from these conceptual shackles, Järvlepp returns unabashedly to tonality and offers accessible…

Schubert: Winterreise Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, piano Erato 190295284138 ★★★★★ Schubert’s late song cycle Winterreise (Winter’s Journey) is based on poems by Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827), one of the composer’s contemporaries. Like Schubert, he died young, at the age of only 32. The poems and the song cycle tell no story as such; they simply express the pain of unrequited love. While the composer intended the song cycle for a tenor voice, it has sometimes been performed by women. In fact, there are outstanding recordings by women of the stature of Lotte Lehmann, Brigitte Fassbaender, Christa Ludwig and our own…

Matthew Larkin plays the organ of St. Paul’s Anglican Church Music by Couperin, Bach, Mendelssohn, Franck, Reger, Howells, Willan, Duruflé, Messiaen, MacMillan, Jongen, Jarrett, Ager and Mallory ATMA Classique ACD2 2857 (two CDs) ★★★★✩ This two-disc recital by the British-born Ottawa organist Matthew Larkin covers a vast stylistic territory but sits you squarely in the centre of a resonant Canadian church – St. Paul’s Anglican in Toronto, to be precise. Many Casavant instruments have a majestic sonority but Op. 550 of 1914, also called the Blackstock Memorial Organ, is particularly admired for its “scope and beauty,” to quote the title…

Soleil noir. Arias written by and for Francesco Rasi Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, tenor; I Gemelli Naïve V 5473 ★★★★✩ Francesco Rasi (1574-1620) is generally characterized as a tenor of the Florentine school who dabbled with some success in composition and poetry, created the title role of Monteverdi’s Orfeo and beat a murder rap thanks to the protection of the Gonzaga family – a troubling biographical detail that links him to another killer, Carlo Gesulado, in whose service Rasi might actually have done some singing. In this recital Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, a Swiss tenor of Chilean descent, combines some melancholy and…

Brahms: Piano Sonatas Op. 1 and Op. 2; Rhapsodies Op. 79 Garrick Ohlsson, piano. Hyperion CDA68344 ★★★★✩ Most of Brahms’s published output is familiar through repeated performance. Oddly, his first two Piano Sonatas – Op. 1 in C Major and Op. 2 in F Sharp Minor – are generally ignored, though their only crime as evidenced by this valuable recording is a failure to rise quite to the level of the altogether admirable Sonata Op. 5 in F Minor. The veteran American virtuoso Garrick Ohlsson renders both the heroic first movement of Op. 1 (where the influence of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier”…