Ardour Teebs

Brainfeeder kingpin Flying Lotus has a talent for stargazing. The label's ranks include jazz fusionists (Thundercat, Austin Peralta), psych-rap futurists (Samiyam, Teebs), and the endearingly inscrutable (Matthewdavid) existing together in dazzling constellation. But when Baths signed to Anticon, Brainfeeder lost their experimental pop artist, the kind of producer who could marry head-swiveling beats to ghostly vocals.
Consider that niche filled. Lapalux, aka Stuart Howard, makes a similar type of sparkling deconstructed pop. He fits the Brainfeeder aesthetic perfectly, as he likes to envision his songs as aural paintings– a visual tie-in obviously appealing to a synaesthete like FlyLo. Lapalux's snares first started snapping on his remix of Thundercat's "For Love I Come"…

The Doric gives outstanding, virtuoso performances of William Walton’s two string quartets. The first of them, formidable in its technical demands and harmonic language, is virtually unrecognisable from the Walton of maturity, embracing as it does the avant-garde ideas he flirted with in his youth. Walton said it was “full of undigested Bartók and Schoenberg”, but, when played with such panache, it provides a pungent contrast to the clarity and spry rhythmic sparring of the later A minor Quartet.

Incandescence refers to the state of being extremely bright after being subjected to extreme heat. Drawing on that, Stéphanie Moraly and Romain David gather on this recording Brahms’s last violin sonata, his most passionate, Respighi and Dohnányi’s sonatas and Szymanowski’s Romance, composed during his youth. These four pieces indeed share the same sense of engagement, ardour, and extreme expressivity, seeking to express human passions at their most profound in the final splendours of postromanticism.

SOMM Recordings celebrates the 10th anniversary of the acclaimed piano duo Julian Jacobson and Mariko Brown with Manhattan to Montmartre, dazzling keyboard arrangements of American giants George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein.

It is grand to hear novice players so successfully take on three of Chopin's chamber pieces, the Cello Sonata, Piano Trio, and Grand Duo for cello and piano. There have certainly been great recordings of these works in the past – one thinks immediately of those by Mstislav Rostropovich and Jacqueline du Pré – but the energy, enthusiasm, and sincerity that cellist Andreas Brantelid, pianist Marianna Shirinyan, and violinist Vilde Frang bring to this music more than justifies preserving their performances. Brantelid has a big but nuanced tone, an elegant but impressive technique, and an obvious affinity for the music, and he is well-matched by Shirinyan's polished technique and empathic accompaniments and Frang's easy virtuosity and lyrical interpretation. The ensemble is poised but comfortable and the interpretations are cogent and compelling. Captured in close but smooth digital sound, these performances deserve to be heard by anyone who loves this music, or great chamber music playing.

The Artis Quartet have all the right Viennese qualifications to play Schubert – their playing is graceful and stylish, with genuine warmth of tone and expression. In the A minor Quartet they take their cue from Schubert’s many expression marks – making the accents and crescendos sound absolutely spontaneous; pointers to the underlying emotion.

Anyone who knows and loves the warmth of expression in Bruch's famous first violin concerto will find the same lyrical gifts amply displayed here - the slow movements are particularly heartfelt and Bruch, even at this late stage in his life, seems to have had an undiminished fund of touching melody. That is not to suggest that the Romantic ardour of these works is solely confined to the slow movements, though: the opening 'allegro' of the octet, for instance, contains writing of deeply felt passion too, as does the development section of the string quintet's first movement.