Max

Study in Brown features the 1955 version of the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet, a group also including tenor saxophonist Harold Land, pianist Richie Powell, and bassist George Morrow. One of the premiere early hard bop units, this band had unlimited potential. Highlights of this set are "Cherokee" (during which trumpeter Brown is brilliant), "Swingin'," and "Sandu." All of this group's recordings are well worth acquiring.

For two consecutive years listeners to Classic FM have voted Max Bruch’s First Violin Concerto their favourite among 300 classical works. His melodies have instant appeal and it is good to see three comparative rarities on this disc. Bruch loved alto-register instruments such as the clarinet and viola, and he wrote these works in 1911 when giant leaps were taking place in the development of music, all of which he eschewed in favour of mid-19th-century Romanticism. While the clarinet rides orchestral accompaniment with no difficulty, the viola sits right in the middle and can be drowned (a hazard in performing the Double Concerto but avoided in the recording studio). The viola Romance is a gem, while the Eight Pieces are colourful and varied. All the performers do ample justice to this beautiful and unashamedly Romantic music.

Most piano duet arrangements were meant for the home rather than the concert hall. When you sight-read orchestral reductions at the piano, your physical involvement with the material “fills in” the missing instrumental color. Even with skillful four-hand “de-orchestrations” like Max Reger’s of the Bach Orchestral Suites, listeners run the risk of “registral fatigue”. In the main, the Speidel-Trenkner piano duo circumvents these limitations through canny pianistic means. In the C major Suite’s Forlane, for example, the oboe’s hornpipe-like melody bounces on a featherweight accompaniment.

Last year’s Magdeburg Festival Days were marked by an extraordinary event: the revival of Telemann’s last known extant passion composition, the St. Luke Passion of 1748, by the Rheinische Kantorei and the Kleines Konzert under Hermann Max. In the mid-nineteenth century the autograph made its way to Berlin, where it today is preserved as the only source for this composition. The historical edition was prepared especially for the modern repeat performance in Magdeburg. Every four years Telemann returned to the same passion narrative, always employing the language of music to occupy himself in new ways with the gospel message of each of the four evangelists.