Alena Baeva and Vadym Kholodenko

The latest new CD to hit my CD player features Alena Baeva, a violinist from Russia and the Moscow Conservatoire, and Vadym Kholodenko, a pianist from the Ukraine. Both are excellent musicians and form a good duo. They play Schubert's Fantaisie D.934, a lovely work of which I already have 19 other recordings. It's a wonderful work for the pianist who has the lion's share of the music, a little less so for the violinist who is often asked to assume the role of an obbligato instrument whilst the pianist has all the tunes. No matter: Baeva and Kholodenko give an excellent performance here.

They go on to play Stravinsky's Divertimento for violin and piano, arranged by Samuel Dushkin. Stravinsky's star has faded since the 1960s; at one time some critic called him "the greatest composer of the twentieth century", but those days have passed. His Divertimento is fine, but it's very much bread-and-butter music, designed to bolster Igor's finances. Baeva and partner give it their best go. Then come Schumann's four Märchenbilder. I revere Schumann for his Lieder, but otherwise he has rarely appealed to me. The Märchenbilder are no great shakes, and it's not surprising they feature little on programmes.

The final Fantasie in this programme so titled is one by Olivier Messiaen. I feared the worst, and my fears were doubly confirmed; the work is seven minutes of tuneless and theme-less note spinning, and why the artists elected to play it here, I cannot think. Maybe it was the only other work they could find with Fantaisie in its title. To be avoided by all lovers of music. The balance and recording of the CD are acceptable. When played via my Spendor loudspeakers -- that always emphasise the bass range -- the piano completely overwhelmed the violin for most of the time in the Schubert Fantaisie. Listened to it again via my Sennheiser wireless headphones, the balance was OK, with the bass less dominant.

Not, then, a "must-have" CD. Thinking of the Messiaen piece: why is it that a century that could boast composers such as Rachmaninov, Sibelius, Debussy, Ravel, Elgar, Britten, Stravinsky, Puccini, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and others, could produce pretty well nobody of note after around 1960? There are many composers of classical music post-1960, but few whose works are ever played more than once.