Presto Editor's Choices,
Presto Editor's Choices - June 2020
Personal favourites from June include Thomas Adès’s vivid depiction of the Genesis Creation story, two contrasting sets of Seasons from Arabella Steinbacher, an astonishingly precocious one-act opera from the teenage Korngold, and African-American composer William Dawson’s masterly Negro Folk Symphony (premiered by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934) from the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and Arthur Fagen on Naxos.
Adès: In Seven Days
Kirill Gerstein (piano), Thomas Adès (piano/conductor), Tanglewood Music Centre Orchestra
The brazen bravura of Adès’s Lisztian paraphrase on themes from his controversial first opera Powder Her Face is great fun, and it’s good to be reminded that The Exterminating Angel contained moments of real lyrical beauty as well as nightmarish cabin-fever – but the main event here is Adès’s telling of the creation story from Genesis, which rivals Haydn’s version for pictorial inventiveness. First light startles, birds skitter and swoop, and an entire menagerie is brought vividly to life. It’s glorious, and I’ll be revisiting it for many weeks to come.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Music of the Spheres
Iestyn Davies (countertenor), Pekka Kuusisto (violin), Sam Swallow (vocalist), Aurora Orchestra, Nicholas Collon
Adès in cosmic mode makes another appearance on this imaginatively-programmed album from Aurora, which features his 2005 violin concerto Concentric Paths, its appropriately stratospheric writing despatched with fearless aplomb by Pekka Kuusisto. The main attractions, though, are an electric Jupiter Symphony (played from memory, and it shows in the best possible way) and Nico Muhly’s haunting arrangement of Dowland’s Time Stands Still, sung with ethereal beauty by Iestyn Davies.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The performance perhaps feels a little staid in places (I’d love to hear what CHINEKE! might do with this score), but the energy and imagination with which Dawson treats material from traditional spirituals speaks for itself, with some especially arresting writing for cor anglais and horns; this is a hugely attractive and powerful work which really deserves to be programmed far and wide, and the two shorter, more Expressionist works by Ulysses Kaye are equally worthy of attention.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Having enjoyed her immaculately elegant Strauss album a couple of years ago, the smoky, dirt-under-the-fingernails verve of Steinbacher’s Piazzolla Seasons (given here in a new arrangement for violin and orchestra by Peter von Wienhardt) took me slightly by surprise; its impact is heightened by the fact that she treats their Vivaldi counterparts relatively straight, with no Kennedy-esque excesses but plenty of subtle imaginative touches.
Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Park’s choral writing is engaging and approachable for singers and listeners alike, but never lapses into blandness or sentimentality; there are whispers of his mentor John Rutter in the opening track Louisa, but the Shakespeare Songs of Night-Time are altogether darker and edgier, the text delivered with unmannered clarity by the fresh young voices of the Epiphoni Consort. He makes imaginative use of solo instruments, too, in Antiphon for the Angels and Sing to me, windchimes.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
There’s a lovely old-school, almost Ferrier-esque quality to this young Liverpudlian mezzo’s timbre, as evinced by her upcoming Sea Pictures with Vasily Petrenko, and it suits Harty’s pleasantly fulsome musical language down to the ground; she’s delightfully unaffected in the Irish songs, and Glynn sparkles in the slight but charming solo piano pieces, Idyll and Arlequin and Columbine.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Verdi: Otello
Jonas Kaufmann (Otello), Federica Lombardi (Desdemona), Carlos Álvarez (Iago), Orchestra e Coro dell'Academia Nationale di Santa Cecilia, Antonio Pappano
It’s not Kaufmann’s Lion of Venice which is the main draw here (though he sounds more fully inside the role than he did three years ago at Covent Garden and is supremely moving in his death-throes, I’m still not convinced it’s a natural fit): you’ll want to hear this for Pappano’s propulsive account of the score with his Roman orchestra, the crackling energy of the opening storm barely abating over the course of the next three hours. Newcomer Federica Lombardi is a luminous Desdemona, and Álvarez exudes motiveless malignity as Iago.
Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Korngold: Violanta
Annemarie Kremer (Violanta), Michael Kupfer-Radecky (Simone Trovai), Norman Reinhardt (Alfonso); Orchestra e Coro Teatro Regio Torino, Pinchas Steinberg
It almost beggars belief that this claustrophobic, often outrageously sensual one-act opera about revenge and taboo passion in Renaissance Italy was the work of a seventeen-year-old: Korngold’s score has one foot in the world of Puccini’s Trittico and another already edging towards Hollywood, particularly in the love-duet for the eponymous heroine and the man she’d originally planned to have murdered. I couldn’t help wishing John Wilson was on hand to make things really throb and glow, but Annemarie Kremer supplies voluptuousness aplenty in the title-role.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Katherine Cooper - Head of Editorial
