Concerto Royeaux

Concerto Köln – the silver-toned Rolls-Royce of period ensembles – handles this journey with suave style and flawless control…Valer Sabadus makes for a refined Farinelli, and where his smoky voice lacks in power, it gains in agility. He breezes through the coloratura arias, with their virtuoso roulades and vertiginous leaps…He really shines, though, in the more intimate arias.

If Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto for cello and orchestra and Shostakovich's Second Concerto for cello and orchestra had heretofore seemed to be late works shot through with nostalgia and bitterness, that's certainly entirely understandable. Rostropovich, the works' dedicatee who gave both their world premieres, played them that way in his recorded performances and most subsequent cellists have naturally followed his lead.

Only a few Austrian composers (Webern, for example) elected to stay in their homeland after Nazi Germany annexed the country in 1938. Of those who left, some went to America (Schoenberg) while others went to England (Egon Wellesz). Whether they stayed or left, Austrian composers continued to write distinctly Austrian music in their own distinctive voices. In this disc of Wellesz's 1933 Piano Concerto and 1961 Violin Concerto, the musical language remains the same, fundamentally tonal in harmony, though with strong chromatic and atonal accents and essentially romantic in style, though with a dash more irony and a dollop more anguish. Both pieces are given exemplary performances by conductor Roger Epple leading the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, with Margarete Babinsky as the soloist in the Piano Concerto and David Frühwirth in the Violin Concerto.

The magnificent Norman cathedral on the rock, part of the World Heritage site shared by Durham University and Durham Cathedral, was the setting for the world premiere of Jon Lord’s “Durham Concerto” commissioned by the University to commemorate its 175th anniversary. The 1,000 strong audience rose spontaneously to its feet as the final climax reflected Sir Walter Scott’s vision, which is engraved on “Prebends Bridge: “Grey Towers of Durham/Yet well I love thy mixed and massive piles/ Half church of God, half castle ‘gainst the Scot”. The work emotionally evokes the sense of history, scholarship, place and community evident in Durham – an unbroken line from St Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede, Europe’s leading scholar of the 7th and 8th centuries, to the modern day university.

For those new to Mendelssohn's music, this might look like a recording of some major works of the composer; be aware that they're virtually unknown music of Mendelssohn's early teens, first published in complete form only in 1999. For those already a fan of Mendelssohn, however, they're very intriguing works that show the developing talents of the young composer in a different light than do the set of twelve-string symphonies that are his most frequently performed works of the period.

Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers are rightly considered to be one of the greatest monuments of Baroque church music. Stephen Stubbs, with the ensembles Tragicomedia and Concerto Palatino, along with a group of top-notch singers, began to perform the Vespers on a yearly basis at the Pieterskerk in Leiden in 1998. The event developed into a musical capella, something like what Monteverdi must have had at St. Mark’s. The beautiful acoustics of the Pieterskerk, the inspirational "voice" of the great organ there, but most of all the warm atmosphere of a yearly “family” event that included both the musicians and the staff and visitors of the church have created what one might be tempted to call the "Leiden Vespers." This is the wonderful experience that has been captured on this exhilarating CD.

The last of his orchestral compositions and one of his most enduringly popular pieces, Mendelssohn's violin concerto is as much a crowd-pleaser now as it was when premiered by Ferdinand David and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1845. Its unassuming focus on melody and dynamic interaction between soloist and orchestra – rather than merely on technical feats and virtuosic showmanship – ensures its place at the heart of the violin concerto repertoire.

This generous coupling of Brahms’s two concertos for stringed instruments has become relatively common in the age of CD thanks to compilations like the Philips disc of Szeryng and Starker‚ analogue recordings dating from the early 1970s. Modern digital recordings expressly designed for issue in coupling are much rarer‚ the Teldec issue of Kremer and Clemens Hagen being the most notable one.

Listeners will likely finish this recording of the Elgar violin concerto and feel at least a little conflicted. There are moments of austere beauty and exquisite sound quality that are sadly juxtaposed by periods of poor intonation and curious articulation choices. The first movement opens with an extended orchestral tutti for which the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and conductor Vernon Handley deserve praise. The orchestra provides a powerful, rich, and extremely sensitive backdrop throughout the recording that simply cannot be faulted.