Presto Editor's Choices,
Presto Editor's Choices - November 2019
Albums with a French connection have dominated my November listening, including striking debuts from the mezzo Adéle Charvet (in English and American song) and tenor Benjamin Bernheim (in French and Italian opera), and Alexandre Tharaud’s beguiling recital of music by composers with links to Versailles; there’s also a Parisian accent to Ukrainian violinist Diana Tishchenko’s terrific first album for Warner Classics, featuring works by four composers who lived and worked in the city in the first half of the twentieth century.
Impeccably sung and vividly characterised, this is a strong calling-card indeed from the young Frenchman, whose bright, focused sound put me a little in mind of the young Piotr Beczała or (rewinding a few decades) Georges Thill. The real magic happens in his native repertoire, particularly the extracts from Werther and the two Faust operas, but everything here is classily done – if only Alfredo’s aria from Traviata had been included in full.
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There’s a wonderful sense of light and space to this programme of music by composers with links to the courts of Louis XIV, XV and XVI (recorded not in Versailles but half an hour down the road in the Salle Colonne); Tharaud conjures some beguiling pearly timbres from his Steinway in Rameau’s Le rappel des oiseaux and Visée’s Sarabande, but the stand-outs for me are the Royer pieces, which often sound quite astonishingly modern here.
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This first recording from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra with their new music director augurs extremely well for their future together – he brings an almost Mendelssohnian fleetness and transparency to Schubert’s writing, but unlike his mentor Teodor Currentzis his approach never seems hard-driven or self-consciously controversial, and like Ticciati before him he has a knack of making the modern-instrument SCO sound like a period band in places.
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This arresting, imaginatively-programmed debut from the Ukrainian violinist (who won the 2018 Long Thibaud Crespin Competition in Paris last year, and here explores the connections between four composers who lived and worked in the city) establishes her as a major talent; her lean, low-cholesterol approach to the Ravel sonata rather reminded me of Alina Ibragimova, and she’s fully alive to the folk influences in Enescu’s Sonata ‘dans le caractère populaire roumain’.
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Porgy & Bess Revisited
Nicolas Dautricourt (violin), Pascal Schumacher (vibraphone) & Knut Erik Sundquist (double bass)
Gershwin’s opera is not so much as Revisited as reimagined and refracted on this rather weird and wonderful sequence of improvisations and composed responses to some of its best-known themes, ranging from a relatively straightforward take on It ain’t necessarily so to wilder flights of fancy inspired by Summertime and Bess you is my woman now. The virtuosic Backstab in particular set off all manner of associations with some of the works on Tischenko’s recital, particularly the Ravel and Enescu.
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This exuberant, engaging programme of American and English song from the fresh-voiced French mezzo is a delight from start to finish: she brings sassiness in spades to Bolcom’s gleefully narcissistic Amor, and great emotional depth to the two darker numbers from Britten’s Cabaret Songs (the low Fs and high C of Johnny posing no problems). Manoff, more commonly associated with French repertoire, has a whale of a time vamping it up in Roven’s Listening to Jazz and Dring’s Song of a Nightclub Proprietress.
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Margaret Bonds: The Ballad Of The Brown King & Selected Songs
Laquita Mitchell (soprano), Lucia Bradford (mezzo-soprano), Noah Stewart (tenor), Malcolm J. Merriweather (baritone/conductor), Ashley Jackson (harp) The Dessoff Choirs & Orchestra
Incorporating elements of jazz and spirituals and full of memorable melodies, Bonds’s 1954 Christmas cantata on a text by the poet and civil rights activist Langston Hughes is a real find, and deserves to be whole-heartedly embraced by choral societies far and wide. All three soloists are excellent, but tenor Noah Stewart shines especially brightly in Could he have been an Ethiope?.
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Katherine Cooper - Head of Editorial
