Presto Editor's Choices,
Presto Editor's Choices - June 2021
Personal favourites from June's crop of new releases include a hugely enjoyable and thought-provoking debut from US violinist Randall Goosby, an illuminating musical tour of Vienna with Scottish pianist Alasdair Beatson, and a superb introduction to the music of Czech composer Vítězslava Kaprálová, who died aged just 25 but emerges as an enormously distinctive voice on a new collection of orchestral works from the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra.
You only have to hear the way he phrases the first three notes of Summertime to realise this young American violinist is something special, but it’s the less familiar fare that really makes this an album to conjure with: Xavier Dubois Foley’s Shelter Island makes for an irresistible opener, the two Perlman Program alumni riffing off one another with giddy exuberance, whilst Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Blues Forms showcases Goosby’s virtuoso chops and distinctive, glassy upper register to perfection.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
It’s impossible to listen to this disc without speculating about what this prolific Czech composer would have gone on to achieve had she survived beyond her 26th birthday, but all the music here speaks of a bold, original voice that was already considerably developed: the Military Sinfonietta blends Stravinsky-ish spikiness with a certain cinematic quality that put me in mind of Korngold, whilst the orchestral songs sound like Berg with a twist.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC
Francisco Coll: Violin Concerto
Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin), Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, Gustavo Gimeno
The main draw here is the Violin Concerto (written for Kopatchinskaja in 2019), often quite sparsely scored and with a ravishing slow movement and cadenza, but everything here is worth your attention – particularly the imaginatively-orchestrated symphonic poem Mural, the grave central movement of which sounds a little like latter-day Shostakovich.
Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC
Bruch may have been over eighty when he composed his Octet for Strings, but much of the piece bubbles with an amiable energy that bears comparison with the teenage Mendelssohn’s much better-known work in the genre from almost a century earlier. The Cologne musicians do it (and the two quintets dating from around the same time) proud, with leader Ye Wu revelling in the ebullient writing for the work’s dedicatee Willy Hess.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Mozart Junior’s at his most inventive when the source-material is least inspired here, treating a motif from his father’s Don Giovanni with understandably cautious reverence but having a ball fashioning a silk purse from the four-square, sow’s ear-ish theme from Henri-Montan Berton’s Aline, reine de Golconde. Dragan’s investment, however, never falters throughout the programme, with oodles of flair in the folk-song sets and flashes of impish humour in the closing Diabelli Variations.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The Scottish pianist proves a congenial and enlightening guide on this whistle-stop tour through nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical Vienna, emphasising the proto-modernity of Schumann’s Faschingsschwank aus Wien (where the clarity and vigour of his playing is quite dazzling) and the lyricism of Schoenberg’s Kleine Klavierstücke from three-quarters of a century later. The crowning jewel on the programme, though, is Korngold’s rarely-recorded Piano Sonata No. 3, with one eye on Schubert and another on Hollywood.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC
André Messager: Passionnément
Véronique Gens (Ketty Stevenson), Étienne Dupuis (Robert Perceval), Nicole Car (Julia), Eric Huchet (William Stevenson), Chantal Santon Jeffrey (Helene Le Barrois); Munchner Rundfunkorchester, Stefan Blunier
Look beyond the champagne-bubbles and bedroom farce antics and it quickly becomes apparent that this Fledermausesque rom-com about an unscrupulous American tycoon and his neglected wife has plenty of heart and soul: Gens brings elegance, wit and pathos to the latter role, and the Act Two duet in which she falls into the arms/bed of her new lover (complete with a cheeky nod to the first act of Die Walküre) really sizzles. Passionnément indeed.
Available Formats: CD + Book, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Katherine Cooper - Head of Editorial
