Shelley Vishwajeet

Joan Shelley returns with The Spur her fi­rst new album in three years. The twelve song set is a profound meditation on light and darkness, recorded in the spring of 2021 at Earthwave Farm in the Kentucky countryside. James Elkington serves as co-producer (alongside Shelley) and the album features collaborations with Bill Callahan, Meg Baird and the British novelist Max Porter along with Shelley’s musical partner and husband Nathan Salsburg.

In a world full of couplings of Schumann and Grieg's Piano Concertos in A minor, this disc offers three distinct advantages. First and most obviously, it offers an additional work, Saint-Saëns' Piano Concerto in G minor, which brings the disc's total playing time up 78 minutes. Second, it offers up a soloist who's also the conductor, the multitalented Howard Shelley who directs England's Orchestra of Opera North from the keyboard.

This is a welcome re-release from Hyperion on its budget Helios label. When these performances first appeared in 1990, critical opinion was divided as to their merits. The back of this CD quotes statements of high praise from the American Record Guide and Classic CD, among others. From memory, the review that appeared in Gramophone Magazine was harsh in its criticism. For my part, I incline more to the former view. This disc has much to recommend it.

Shelley is outstanding in this music, blending classical and Romantic elements perfectly.
These two concertos are wonderfully infectious. The E major occupies a kind of bridge between Mozart and Chopin, although Mozart's depth and subtlety are in a different vein. Hummel is more of a show-off, and his music almost smiles at you, its charm and sparkle eschewing any pretentiousness. Throughout, Shelley conveys the music's joie de vivre, revelling in the figurative passagework. The Double Concerto may have been inspired by Mozart's Sinfonia concertante, K365; it doesn't have the same harmonic or lyrical variety as the E-major Concerto, but it's a charming work, especially when so persuasively played. Shelley's well-proportioned piano part is perfectly complemented by Hagai Shaham's sweet-toned violin.

Howard Shelley is an acknowledged expert in the area of early Romantic piano music. With this disc, Shelley presents the first installment of a six-volume set of Mendelssohn's complete solo piano music - perhaps the least well-known part of the composer's repertoire. Mendelssohn composed or began nearly two hundred works for piano. However, only about seventy were published during his lifetime.

Howard Shelley directs the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra from the piano in this latest volume of The Romantic Piano Concerto series. As ever, they perform unknown music with consummate style and deep understanding, making the best possible case for the works. We have reached Volume 63 and the works of French composer Benjamin Godard, a figure who is almost totally forgotten today. He is described by Jeremy Nicholas in his booklet note as ‘a composer who combines the sentimental melodic appeal of Massenet with the fecundity and technical facility of Saint-Saëns’.

The Romantic Piano Concerto series reaches Volume 61, and continues to probe into the obscurest depths of the nineteenth-century piano world. Döhler’s Piano Concerto in A major and Dreyschock’s Salut à Vienne are both first recordings. The two composer-pianists were contemporaries, both child prodigies and both hugely admired in their day. Today their names are not even faintly familiar to concert-goers.

This program is simply delicious As with other releases in this series, Howard Shelley plays Hummel with elegance and flair. Much of this music, particularly in the shorter concert works, is very brilliant and highly decorative, but Shelley never makes you feel as though it consists of empty note-spinning. The London Mozart Players accompany sensitively and with aplomb. A good time was clearly had by all, including the engineers, who provide vivid sonics.