\n<\/p>\n
Alice Sara Ott, piano (Deutsche Grammophon)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The Irish composer John Field (1782-1837) is commonly said to have invented the nocturne as a piece for piano, passing the form along for his younger contemporary Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Chopin to perfect. If sometimes forgotten, Field\u2019s contributions have hardly escaped notice. Liszt himself published an edition<\/a> of nine of them\u00ad \u2014 \u201cwhere else would we encounter such perfection of incomparable na\u00efvet\u00e9?\u201d he asked in a preface \u2014 and recordings periodically appear to remind listeners of their many virtues.<\/p>\n Alice Sara Ott<\/a>, perhaps the most prominent pianist yet to set them to disc, gives them all the care and affection they deserve. Her playing is simply gorgeous, as shapely and subtle and sensitive as anyone could ask. Crucially, Ott has no interest in making these works into anything that they are not. Almost all of them are in major keys, and with a few exceptions the mood is more placid and genial than in Chopin\u2019s set; Ott gives a Mozartean charm and simplicity to the \u201cNoontide\u201d Nocturne in E, for example. Best of all is her way with the \u201cR\u00eaverie-Nocturne,\u201d its left-hand chords singing evocatively as the right hand twinkles with dappled light. Time seems to stop; the effect is breathtaking. DAVID ALLEN<\/p>\n Benjamin Appl, baritone; Pierre-Laurent Aimard, James Baillieu, Gyorgy Kurtag, piano (Alpha Classics)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n When it comes to lieder singers, the baritone Benjamin Appl plays against type. He doesn\u2019t brood, navel gaze or revel in heartbreak. With his mild temperament and easy-on-the-ears timbre, he skates over the surface of art songs that others plumb for darker depths.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s exactly those qualities that make him a transfixing interpreter of the Hungarian miniaturist Gyorgy Kurtag, whom he calls \u201cGyuri bacsi\u201d (Uncle George) in the album\u2019s liner notes. Appl, who prepared the material with Kurtag himself, describes working out the tiny inflections that make the brief pieces infinitely challenging. He lavishes a voice of elastic loveliness and technical security on Kurtag\u2019s prickly gems.<\/p>\n In \u201cH\u00f6lderlin-Ges\u00e4nge,\u201d a largely a cappella cycle of six songs on esoteric texts, Appl\u2019s singing is plastic and alacritous. His tone can be succulent, natty, ghostly or blooming. Strange turns of phrase, queasy melismas and a bombastic outburst or two are the closest Appl gets to unpleasantness. He doesn\u2019t fight his sound\u2019s youthful vitality.<\/p>\n Schubert songs make up nearly the rest of the album. That could have simply been a trick of juxtaposition, but the intense concentration required of Kurtag\u2019s style seems to bring Appl closer to the feeling of melodies like \u201cGanymed\u201d and \u201cLitanei auf das Fest Allerseelen.\u201d<\/p>\n At the piano, James Baillieu is a warmly gracious Schubert interpreter, and Pierre-Laurent Aimard is acerbically exacting in the Kurtag \u2014 who also takes the keys on the final song, Brahms\u2019s \u201cSonntag,\u201d elaborating a patience and will to silence that come off like contentment. OUSSAMA ZAHR<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Isabel Leonard, Paul Appleby, Derek Welton; Toronto Symphony Orchestra; Gustavo Gimeno, conductor (Harmonia Mundi)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n If you just looked at this album\u2019s cover, you would think it was simply a release of two works from Stravinsky\u2019s Neo-Classical period. It mostly is, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra turns in very fine performances of both works under the direction of Gustavo Gimeno, its music director. The ensemble plays the Divertimento from the ballet \u201cLe Baiser de la F\u00e9e\u201d with unusual elegance and pop, showcasing its pungent winds and brass. In \u201cPulcinella,\u201d which Gimeno programmed in its complete version rather than the suite, he makes the rhythms airy and spry, just as its 18th-century origins would require. The three vocal soloists cope well with Stravinsky\u2019s rather unforgiving lines.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s (literally) more here than meets the eye. Though listed nowhere on the cover, the album also contains a world premiere recording: \u201cCuriosity, Genius and the Search for Petula Clark,\u201d by the Canadian composer Kelly-Marie Murphy. A Toronto Symphony commission, it was written in 2017 to celebrate Glenn Gould\u2019s 85th birthday. The piece takes inspiration from a Gould radio documentary in which he drove around Canada to hear Clark\u2019s \u201cWho Am I?\u201d on the radio. Murphy\u2019s score is ingeniously orchestrated and full of shifting textures. What Gould would have thought is anyone\u2019s guess, but at the very least it deserved to be mentioned beside this album\u2019s better-known works. DAVID WEININGER<\/p>\n Various choirs; Hamburg State Philharmonic Orchestra; Kent Nagano, conductor; Kate Lindsey, mezzo-soprano; Johann Kristinsson, baritone; Veronika Eberle, violin; Thomas Cornelius on organ (Bis)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The Good Friday premiere of Brahms\u2019s \u201cEin Deutsches Requiem,\u201d or \u201cA German Requiem,\u201d in 1868 at Bremen Cathedral was a major success for the 34-year-old composer, who conducted the performance in front of 2,500 listeners. But what they heard was not the \u201cRequiem\u201d cherished by concert audiences today. Brahms had yet to compose the fifth of what would, in its final form, become seven movements. And to appease local religious authorities who took issue with the texts that Brahms had set \u2014 excerpts from scripture about death and consolation that included no mention of Jesus \u2014 he interwove his own music with works by other composers.<\/p>\n That original version was reconstructed and recorded in 2022 at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, featuring 400 singers from eight community choirs. It is an unexpectedly moving testament to the living historical traditions and communal piety that influenced Brahms. Instrumental interludes by Bach, Tartini and Schumann create meditative pockets amid the austere tenderness of Brahms\u2019s choral numbers. After offering a heart-rending aria from Bach\u2019s \u201cSt. Matthew\u2019s Passion,\u201d Brahms gives the last word to Handel, concluding this \u201cRequiem\u201d \u2014 however scandalously to modern ears \u2014 with the radiant \u201cHallelujah\u201d chorus. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM<\/p>\n Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; Bernard Haitink, conductor (BR Klassik)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Shostakovich\u2019s final symphony is his most enigmatic orchestral work, in which death seems to hover everywhere but alight nowhere. In place of the anguish on full display elsewhere in his output, we hear the innocence of childhood, melodies that spin into dead ends, mysterious quotations from Rossini and Wagner and, at the end, a clatter of percussion that may represent the machinery in a dying patient\u2019s hospital room. Or it may mean nothing at all.<\/p>\n The 15th Symphony was a specialty of Bernard Haitink, who released two excellent<\/a> recordings<\/a> of it during his lifetime. Even by those lofty standards, this live account with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, from 2015, is special. Haitink\u2019s approach to the piece seems to have grown ever more objective \u2014 not out of detachment from the music\u2019s emotional power but as a way of honoring it, as if he were increasingly reluctant to press an interpretation onto a piece that so tenaciously resists one. Whatever the conductor\u2019s thinking, the finale\u2019s piercing dissonances and invocation of the fate motif from Wagner\u2019s \u201cRing\u201d have rarely sounded more chilling. The result, thanks to playing with incredible sensitivity and dynamic range, is a performance of the quietest intensity, and all the more devastating for that. DAVID WEININGER<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\u2018Lines of Life: Schubert & Kurtag\u2019<\/h2>\n
Stravinsky: \u2018Pulcinella\u2019 and Divertimento From \u2018Le Baiser de la F\u00e9e\u2019<\/h2>\n
Brahms: \u2018Ein Deutsches Requiem\u2019<\/h2>\n
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 15<\/h2>\n