Schoenberg Gurrelieder Riccardo Chailly

Chailly's Mahler Tenth has certainly withstood the test of time since its original release in 1988. Simon Rattle's new Berlin recording offers perhaps a more highly inflected, characterful performance, but Chailly has both the better playing and sound, and this pays particular dividends in the dark, rich string textures of the opening and closing movements. Both Rattle and Chailly use Deryck Cooke's revised performing version (Chailly sticks to it more literally than does Rattle), and this remains the edition of choice. Recent releases of other completion attempts, including a pretty ghastly one by Remo Mazzetti, only confirm the excellence of Cooke's work.

During the four years that separated Alexander Zemlinsky's Symphony in D minor and the premiere of the Symphony in B flat major (his first two efforts in the genre, aside from an incomplete work penned during his student years), the young composer had caught the eye and the fancy of the Viennese musical world. "The work's fresh, original ideas and genuinely exalted, youthful fire made a great impression on the audience and unleashed an intense salvo of applause," wrote one critic in response to the 1896 premiere of Zemlinsky's Waldegespräch (for soprano and chamber ensemble). These years also saw Zemlinsky winning two prestigious awards, the Luitpold Prize and the Beethoven Prize. His compositional skills had been refined during the mid 1890s as well. The Suite for Orchestra from 1895, for example, gave Zemlinsky an opportunity to create more adventurous orchestral colors than had been found in the admirable but conservative D minor Symphony. Thus, when one compares the B flat Symphony to his earlier symphonic effort, one notices that, while the same amalgamation of influences and styles is represented, more of the composer's own voice comes through – prompting one observer to suggest two different ways of looking at the work: "either as Zemlinsky's last early work or his first mature one."

Along with Wit's Naxos recording, this is one of the best versions of Messiaen's phantasmagoric Turangalîla-Symphonie available, and it's very different: swifter, more obviously virtuosic in concept, perhaps a touch less warm in consequence, and engineered with greater “in your face” immediacy. The playing of the Concertgebouw, always a wonderful Messiaen orchestra, is stunning throughout. Chailly revels in the music's weirdness. The Ondes Martinot, for example, is particularly well captured. It's interesting how earlier performances tended to minimize its presence, perhaps for fear that is would sound silly, which of course it does, redeemed by the composer's utter seriousness and obliviousness to anything that smacks of humor. In any case, it's not all noise and bluster. The Garden of Love's Sleep is gorgeous, hypnotic, but happily still flowing, while the three Turangalîla rhythmic studies have remarkable clarity. Jean-Yves Thibaudet plays the solo piano part magnificently, really as well as anyone else ever has.

It's incredible that a work considered as securely at the core of the Western musical canon as J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion didn't receive a complete recording until after the Second World War, and that prior to that, unabridged performances were exceptionally rare; even Mendelssohn's momentous 1841 Leipzig performance was heavily cut, and Mendelssohn's son reported that even so, much of the audience "fled yawning before it was over." The earliest nearly complete recording was made in 1941 with Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra and Thomanernchor, and those same forces are brought together again, along with the Tölzer Knabenchor, in this 2009 performance led by Riccardo Chailly.

La Cenerentola is one of the few operas to have an important subtitle, "The Triumph of Virtue". This Salzburg production makes a point of its being a moral tale rather than a mere fairy tale like the version reflexively sung by Angelina in her "Cavatina": the defeat and forgiveness of the stepsisters and their greedy father is a settling of moral accounts. The production is also tremendous fun–partly because of gimmicks like the mechanical coach and horses that arrives on stage in the high wind of the Act Two storm–but mostly because of the endlessly energetic pulse of Riccardo Chailly's conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic.

This is a great little set, coupling a ravishing Apollon musagète with a truly stunning Rite ofSpring. The Petrushka is equally fine. The fact that Stravinsky's revision of Apollon dispensed with 'half the woodwind, two of the three harps, glockenspiel and celesta from the original scoring' hardly constitutes the bleaching process that a less colour-sensitive performance might have allowed. Part of the effect comes from a remarkably fine recording where clarity and tonal bloom are complementary, but Chailly must take the credit for laying all Stravinsky's cards on the table rather than holding this or that detail to his chest.

Complete with the obligatory ballet demanded by the French grand style this opera now invariably known under its Italian title of I Vespri Sililiana was specially commissioned for the Great Exhibition of Paris of 1855. It is now the common practice to adhere to the Italian libretto and to dispense with the lengthy ballet sequence of Act III. Such is the case with this 1986 production from Bologna under the baton of Riccardo Chailly. The performance is notable for the fine singing of both the chorus and the four leads.

Puccini's Il trittico is a triple-bill which is seldom performed as such. Of the three one-act short operas that compose it, only Gianni Schicchi is regularly seen on stage; Suor Angelica is second, but perhaps more often performed in concert form, its only famous piece being the aria "senza mamma", while Il tabarro is a real rarity. The effort to set up three different operas which demand quite different casts is certainly one of the reasons for this situation. Il tabarro calls for real spinto voices in the main roles, while Angelica is also quite demanding for the singer in the title role, not to mention the huge number of principals it calls for.

Claude D'Anna's film of Verdi's Macbeth is a gloomy affair, stressing the descent into madness of the principal villains. It's acted by the singers of the Decca recording of the opera (with two substitutions of actors standing in for singers) and the lip-synching is generally unobtrusive. The musical performance is superb, conducted by Riccardo Chailly with admirable fire, and sung by some of the leading lights of the opera stages of the 1980s. Shirley Verrett virtually owned the role of Lady Macbeth at the time, and she delivers a terrific performance, the voice equal to the role's wide register leaps and it's suffused with emotion, whether urging her husband on to murder or maddened by guilt in the Sleepwalking Scene.

Chailly has radically rethought his approach to these works, re-examining the scores and returning to the recorded interpretations of a generation of conductors alive during Brahms lifetime, principally Felix Weingartner and one of his Gewandhaus predecessors Bruno Walter.