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Marina Thibeault: Toquade (ATMA)

By Kiersten van Vliet on 1 June 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Contemporary, Romantic, Strings

Toquade Marina Thibeault, viola; Janelle Fung, piano ATMA 2017. ACD2 2759, 66 min 58 s. With the first recording of her career, violist Marina Thibeault strikes a balance between spirited and sentimental, tradition and innovation, accessibility and abstraction, leaving us with a clear and compelling understanding of the breadth of both the repertoire and the instrument itself. Thibeault has a sensitive but firm touch, painting long lines in which sounds become ideas. The disc opens with the Valse sentimentale from Tchaikovsky’s Six Pieces Op. 51. The transcription of the piece, originally written for piano, highlights the thematic binaries – the…

Jazz – Festival fare Off the Record

By Marc Chénard on 1 June 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Experimental Jazz, Mainstream Jazz

Donny McCaslin Beyond Now / Motema Music Tenorman Donny McCaslin saw fit to doff his cap towards the man once known as Ziggy Stardust, including two of his tunes (“A Small Plot of Land” and “Warszawa”) on this his latest release. His appearance on Blackstar, Bowie’s musical testament issued but two days before his passing in early 2016, represents quite a career boost for this most deserving saxophonist. Not a tribute album per se, this outing has all the earmarkings of the slickness and polish of pop music that Bowie excelled at. In the disc’s nine tracks (a tenth available…

Windermere String Quartet: Inner Landscapes (Pipistrelle Music)

By Kiersten van Vliet on 1 June 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Chamber Music, Contemporary, Romantic

Inner Landscapes Windermere String Quartet; Elizabeth Loewen Andrews, violin; Michelle Odorico, violin; Anthony Rapoport, viola; Laura Jones, cello Pipistrelle Music, PIP 1216, 71 min 22 s. With Inner Lanscapes, the Windermere String Quartet shows how far they’ve come since their 2012 debut The Golden Age of String Quartets, which featured the Classical masters: Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart. This disc features a commission by Canadian composer Robert Rival, Traces of a Silent Landscape, which was inspired by the Beethoven and Mendelssohn quartets on either side. The group plays on Classical period instruments, a bit lighter in tone perhaps, but no less…

Review – Vincent Bélanger: Pure Cello (Audio Note Music)

By Olivier Gentil on 1 June 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Strings

Pure Cello Vincent Bélanger Audio Note Music Available on CD, as well as on vinyl (45 RPM) for maximum resolution, this solo cello album will delight music lovers as much for its sound quality and for the originality of its recording technique as for its original program. We find notable works by Cassado, J.S. Bach, and Reger as well as, as a flagship offering, etudes 5 to 8 from the Elite Etüden by F.W. Grützmacher (recorded here for the first time). As a result, the repertoire is varied and well balanced. The register and the colors of the cello are…

Akoka: Reframing Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (Pentatone)

By Orphée Russell on 1 June 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Contemporary

Akoka: Reframing Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time David Krakauer, Akoka; Olivier Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du temps; Socalled, Meanwhile… David Krakauer, clarinet; Matt Haimovitz, cello; Jonathan Crow, violin; Geoffrey Burleson, piano; Socalled, electronics Pentatone Oxingale Series 2017. PTC 5186 560. 63 min 45 s. “Recorded live, AKOKA drives home the gravity and impact of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and affirms its relevance in the 21st century. As the forces of fundamentalism, intolerance, and violence intensify in today’s world, Messiaen’s prophecy seems all the more timely,” says cellist Matt Haimovitz. Quartet for the End…

Lebrecht Weekly – Dmitri Shostakovich: First Symphony (Pentatone)

By Norman Lebrecht on 26 May 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly

Great recordings are easy to review. Likewise bad ones. About 99.5 percent of all releases fall somewhere in between. Of these, four in five quickly outlast their initial attraction. I had high hopes for Shostakovich’s first symphony from the Luxembourg Philharmonic and its Spanish music director, Gustavo Gimeno. The orchestra has announced a multi-record contract with the Dutch label, Pentatone, one of the last remaining labels that puts sound quality first. Gimeno, until lately principal percussionist with the Concertgebouw orchestra, has got plenty of wind in his sails. So what’s wrong with this release? Hard to isolate it. I ordered…

Lebrecht Weekly – Kathleen Ferrier Remembered (Somm)

By Norman Lebrecht on 19 May 2017 Art Song, CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

When the English contralto Norma Procter died a few weeks ago at the age of 89, readers remembered seeing Kathleen Ferrier in her audience at Norma’s London debut, at Southwark Cathedral, in 1948. This was typical Ferrier. Six years before she had been a switchboard operator in Lancashire with no hopes of a music career. Now an international star, she took every opportunity to offer support and encouragement to others on the way up. Hearing that Norma was studying in London with her own teacher, Roy Henderson, Ferrier invited her to stay over at her own West Hampstead flat rather…

Lebrecht Weekly – Impromptu (Onyx)

By Norman Lebrecht on 12 May 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano, Romantic

The trouble with keeping records is that library science has yet to devise a method of telling you where any piece of music will be just when you really need it. The Schumann piano concerto, for instance. If I look under Schumann, I find two versions. But then there are four more under Grieg – that’s how the record industry likes to pair them up – and heaven knows how many more in box sets of the lifetime works of individual great pianists. Online, it’s no easier, since the same recording will crop up a dozen times under different covers…

Lebrecht Weekly – Mahler: Third symphony (Channel Classics)

By Norman Lebrecht on 5 May 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

There is no wholly recommendable performance on record of Mahler’s third symphony. The earliest, by F. Charles Adler in 1952, is faultlessly idiomatic, as is Jascha Horenstein’s 1970 LSO account, but both are marred by inferior orchestral playing and poor sound. Claudio Abbado’s 2007 DVD from Lucerne is as good as it gets, though even a lifelong Mahlerian like Abbado struggles with the lop-sidedness of this amalgam of nostalgic pastoralism and saloon-bar philosophy. No-one can satisfactorily explain what Friedrich Nietzsche is getting at in the fourth movement contralto solo. It’s just odd. If you listen just to the second disc…

Lebrecht Weekly – Alexander Lokshin: Clarinet quintet & c. (Melodiya)

By Norman Lebrecht on 28 April 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly

In the dying years of the Soviet Union I became aware of dozens of symphonists who survived on the fringes of musical society, tolerated by the authorities but never given a proper hearing. Once I got past the immense, historic figures of Mieczyslaw Weinberg and Galina Ustvolskaya, both pivotal in the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, I kept discovering other samizdat composers who, for some reason, seemed to speak my language. At a time when western musicians were subjected to a dictatorship of style and serial ideology if they wanted to get on the BBC, these covert Russians were free to…

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