"visions Of"

Lisa Batiashvili is a wonderful violinist, and this fine album of Prokofiev’s two concertos marks another milestone in a career that leaps from mountain peak to mountain peak. She characterizes each work with great insight and style, clearly attuned to the biographical background of this most complex of 20th-century composers. What’s also striking is the range of color and volume with which Batiashvili and Nézet-Séguin invest the music, unusually faithful to the score—the opening of the Second Concerto is done with great imagination and some stunning solo and orchestral playing. Three short Prokofiev pops are delightful extras.

Visions of a November Spring, James MacMillan's First String Quartet, was completed in 1988 and already bears many a stylistic trait of the composer who was to create such a stir two years later with The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, not least a mastery of the singing line and the distinctive, 'keening' quality of the string writing itself. The work is cast in two movements, the much lengthier second of which perhaps doesn't quite add up to the sum of its impressive parts.

As the second album to document the second Mahavishnu Orchestra, this one isn't as, well, apocalyptic as its predecessor, yet it does focus more intently on the band itself. Jean-Luc Ponty's curling electric violin lines help give this Mahavishnu band a more European sound than its predecessor, and some of the orchestral concepts of Apocalypse work their way into the picture via comments by a string trio and trumpet/sax duo. This band also had some interest in a bombastic funk direction that may have been borrowed from Mr. "Chameleon" Herbie Hancock, and would later be followed by Mahavishnu Two's drummer, Michael Walden. Gayle Moran's ethereal vocals don't date as badly as those on many jazz-rock records; at least she can sing.