Watership Angela Morley

Angela Gheorghiu leads a magnificent cast in Franco Zeffirelli’s iconic production of Puccini’s La Bohème – filmed live at the Metropolitan Opera in Hi-Definition. This grand, sumptuous production of Puccini’s timeless masterpiece is brought to you on DVD by EMI Classics, continuing its collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera and its hugely successful Metropolitan Opera : Live in High-Definition series.

Angela Bofill's 1983 albums, both released while the singer was with Arista, are combined on this reissue from David Nathan's soulmusic.com label. Too Tough, a number six Billboard R&B hit produced with Narada Michael Walden, is one of her best albums. It contains two of her bigger hits: the upbeat pop-funk title track and the quiet storm favorite "Tonight I Give In." Walden's once again prominent on Teaser, which wasn't nearly as major. Although it reached number 20 on the R&B chart, the material let her down. The most notable number is the ballad "I'm on Your Side."

Angela Hewitt has applied the same intense study to Chopin's Nocturnes and Impromptus as she does to any composer's keyboard works. The result is a set of pieces lovingly played and appreciated, with personally felt emotion. The most outwardly emotional displays, as in the Nocturnes, Op. 15, are never wildly loud and always return to an introverted state afterward. In the Nocturnes she uses little touches of rubato so frequently as to almost stretch the melodies out of shape, as in Op. 9/1, but she plays many of the Nocturnes a tick faster than other pianists so that they stand up to that kind of manipulation better, and she never slows down to fit in ornaments. Her ornaments always fit right into the melody, both in her timing and her phrasing, and are feathery soft.

As one of the world's foremost interpreters of Baroque keyboard music on the modern piano, Angela Hewitt has established a fine reputation for impeccable playing and fresh musical insights. Listeners who cherish her award-winning recordings on Hyperion of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach have already experienced her exquisite playing, and they will be delighted to hear this selection of sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, Bach's contemporary and an innovator whose compositions influenced the development of the Classical sonata. Some of these selections are well known, particularly the Sonata in C major, Kk159, the Sonata in D major, Kk96, and the Sonata in E major, Kk380, which are often anthologized, though Hewitt hasn't packed this disc with greatest hits (with 555 sonatas to choose from, there are many less familiar that deserve attention). Hewitt's performances are thoughtfully phrased, polished in tone, and rhythmically precise with a modicum of rubato, and she is alert to the subtleties that make this music so beguiling. Hewitt recorded these 16 sonatas in the Beethovensaal in Hannover, where she made her first Bach recordings for Hyperion 20 years previously, and the acoustics are nearly ideal for her style.

Diva is an entertaining and attractively packaged compilation of Angela Gheorghiu's EMI recordings made between 1996 and 2002. All of the selections have appeared on previous releases, but some of them only in the context of complete operas. As a one-disc snapshot of Gheorghiu's career so far, Diva does pretty well, and it would make a good first choice for anyone looking to get to know her work.

This is the fifth volume of Angela Hewitt’s cycle of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and she is recording a full set of Mozart’s concertos too; and yet she is still probably best known for her Bach. So perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s when Beethoven slips into Bach-style fugues in the final movement of Op 110 that Hewitt sounds most masterful. Elsewhere she is incisive and thoughtful too, even if the two earliest works here, Op 2 no 2 and Op 10 no 1, demand a certain lightness of touch that they don’t quite get – the flurries and flourishes sound like collections of notes rather than single, self-propelling gestures. The second movement of Op 78 is a deft dialogue of question and answer, and Hewitt brings an inevitability to Op 110 that makes sense of its changes of direction even if she doesn’t obviously revel in the full extent and novelty of its inspiration.

For many listeners, the keyboard works of Gabriel Fauré epitomize French music of the fin de siècle, typically because its languorous melodies and subtle harmonies are at times evocative of late Romantic parlor music. Yet Angela Hewitt defends Fauré's piano music from such a superficial judgment, demonstrating that it is much more substantial in content than the conventional piano pieces of the time, and that the difficulties one encounters in his music are akin to the complexities in Bach. Hewitt's polished performances of the Thème et variations, two Valses-caprices, three Nocturnes, and the Ballade are proof of her longtime commitment to this music, and her penetrating insights into Fauré's expressions and technical artistry reveal levels of inventiveness that are often missed in less competent performances. Of course, having played Fauré for most of her life, Hewitt has intimate knowledge of the music, and her sensitivity and control communicate precisely the effects she wishes, so the music never seems sloppily sentimental or vaguely sketched.

This delightful disc offers a selection from the wealth of piano transcriptions of Bach's music. The Bach revival that gathered momentum during the nineteenth century created a climate for many composer-pianists to interpret his works through their own piano transcriptions, whether of chorale preludes, organ works or other instrumental music. Much of Bach's music was made domestically available via such arrangements (and the tradition continued well into the twentieth century, even after Bach originals were well known). Indeed, the practice of such transcriptions was widely used by Bach himself, who freely adapted his own and others' music for different instrumental settings.