Philippe Devillierdevillier

After a first album as part of the harmonia nova collection, which resulted in a well-deserved Victoire de la Musique Classique (category New Instrumental Soloist), Bruno Philippe continues his path on the harmonia mundi label. This programme devoted to Rachmaninoff and the unfairly neglected Myaskovsky is a genuine technical and artistic challenge, which the young cellist has taken up in total harmony with his long term musical partner Jérôme Ducros. Be swept away by the swirling passions of these works, among the most romantic in Russian musical literature.

From the overt Romanticism of Saint-Saëns to the nostalgia-laden modernity of Poulenc, Bruno Philippe takes us on a journey through (almost) a century of French cello music. Alongside Tanguy de Williencourt, he also performs the cello version of Franck's famous Violin Sonata, one of the absolute peaks of nineteenth-century chamber music.

Philippe Herreweghe uses the second of Bach's four versions of the St. John Passion, the one from 1725, which substitutes some of the arias and the opening chorus, along with lesser changes. The result is somewhat more dramatic than the standard version, which Herreweghe recorded previously. Those familiar with the conductor's work will find his usual warmth, making the most of the lyric moments, but they'll also find greater sensitivity to rhythmic and dramatic thrust and a generally livelier approach. The singers are uniformly fine. Padmore is an unusually effective Evangelist, projecting the drama without undue overacting.

From the beginning of time songs of mourning, sorrow and lamentation have been a part of Western music. Aristotle had written that nothing was more powerful than rhythm and song for imitating all the turmoil of the soul. Composers of the Baroque Period strove to deal with nothingness and eternity by exploring the utter depths of the heart. And this is what these songs are all about.

Originally recorded in 1988, this was one of the recordings that made historical performance practice the mainstream when it came to Bach's major choral works. Every moment of the mass was thought through anew, every bit of conventional piety purged. Major B minor mass recordings in the following years have developed one aspect or another further than conductor Philippe Herreweghe does here; Masaaki Suzuki's Bach Collegium Japan chisels out the counterpoint in greater detail, and for grand reverential warmth there's always John Eliot Gardiner. But for a constant sense of wonder that makes even the larger harmonic structure of the mass seem surprising as it unfolds – for a real sense of a group responding not only to a conductor's control but to his artistic vision – this reading by Herreweghe and his Collegium Vocale Ghent remains unexcelled.