The Music of Edward Elgar

I first met Elgar's quintet for piano and string quartet during a concert many years ago at Boxgrove Priory in Sussex (flanked by three of my four sisters). For me, it was love at first hearing and I have always found the quintet to be special ever since that evening long ago. The work, written in 1918 after the devastating Great War, positively aches with nostalgia for a vanished age – a vanished age both musically and socially. The recording by the Goldner String Quartet with Piers Lane strikes me as well-nigh ideal, with excellent tempos, good recording quality and an admirable balance with the piano centred within the quartet. Maybe Elgar's finale is not quite up to the standard of the first two movements but, then, finales rarely are.

As an Englishman living only an hour or so from Elgar Country in Worcester and Malvern, I always have the impression Elgar's music speaks to me directly, though I am not an uncritical admirer of his output. I love the violin concerto and the cello concerto. In the right mood, I love both the symphonies. The Introduction & Allegro is superb, as are the Enigma Variations and many of the short pieces Elgar wrote, especially those for violin – his instrument – and piano. The music of the Dream of Gerontius is often terrific, but I really cannot stomach the words (poem by Cardinal Newman). All those Holy Marys and Holy Spirits get on my nerves; I'd probably enjoy the work sung in Finnish or Hebrew where the text would pass me by.

Lisa Batiashvili

For me, although there are many, many first class violin concertos, there are only three great ones: those of Beethoven, Brahms and the first concerto of Shostakovich. I have multiple recorded versions of all of them, of course, including 43 of the Shostakovich concerto. This evening I listened to a performance of the Shostakovich by Lisa Batiashvili; she achieves the remarkable feat of being my preferred violinist for modern recordings of all three great concertos: Beethoven, Brahms and Shostakovich.

Batiashvili is, of course, a superb violinist. She makes a lovely sound. She is intensely musical, and everything she does is dictated by the work she is playing, not by a desire to grand-stand or to impress. Her playing is marked by a very high degree of intellectual concentration. In a crowded field of exceptional modern violinists, she has always been my favourite, and this evening I was glued to every note of Shostakovich's familiar A minor concerto.

It's a shame that, even though of Georgian origin, she seems never to have played or recorded the almost unknown F minor violin concerto by Otar Taktakishvili -- a concerto seemingly only ever recorded by Liana Isakadze. If Batiashvili will not play it; who will? I love it.

Paganini, Kreisler, and Laurent Korcia

Niccolò Paganini revolutionised the technique of violin playing, and he also wrote a lot of agreeable music for the violin. Not as agreeable, however, as that of later great violinists such as Heinrich Ernst, Wieniawski, Vieuxtemps, Sarasate and Kreisler. Fritz Kreisler re-wrote the first movement of Paganini's first violin concerto, and the resulting interesting pastiche is sometimes played and recorded (including a 1936 recording by Kreisler himself). I have just been listening to it played with molta bravura by Laurent Korcia, the somewhat abrasive French violinist who is, nevertheless, always interesting to listen to. Paganini-Kreisler in the D major concerto should be played more often; one does not have to be too fastidious about historical reconstruction, or letter of the score, when tackling Paganini's music. Korcia's new CD bears the title “Mr Paganini”; from the works on the welcome little disc, it could also have been called “.. and Mr Kreisler”.

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi

Too many composers died young: Purcell, Mozart, Bellini and Schubert in their mid-30s, Guillaume Lekeu when only 24, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi when only 26. I have just been listening to a new recording of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater; what a masterpiece, completed just before his death from tuberculosis. A new recording features Julia Lezhneva (my current favourite baroque soprano) and Philippe Jaroussky (one of the very few counter-tenors I find entirely acceptable). With I Barocchisti in the background (Pergolesi's orchestral band does not have a major part as it would have done with Bach or Handel) this recording should end up as a modern classic. And the music is sublime.

The Busch String Quartet in Brahms

When the Busch String Quartet was finally formed in 1919 in Berlin after the end of the war, Brahms had been dead only some 20 years -- Adolf Busch was six years old when Brahms died. Listening to the Busch Quartet playing Brahms string quartets, one does have a sense of authentic performance (as the modern passion mandates). Almost certainly, this would have been how Brahms' quartets would have sounded when the composer was alive. Pristine Audio has issued the Busch playing the three string quartets, plus the first piano quartet. Though not a convinced lover of Brahms' chamber music, I listened with both interest and enjoyment to all these works and, as always, marvelled at the sheer musicality of the Busch Quartet.

As Andrew Rose notes on the Pristine website, these performances are also striking for what they tell us about advances in recording technology. 1925 was, of course, the first major technological breakthrough, with the advent of the microphone and electrical recording. The four works on the current CDs were recorded in 1932, 1947 and 1949 and the sound improves with each step (by 1949, HMV was recording using tape rather than the old shellac masters). Transfers, as we have come to expect from Pristine, are excellent. Busch and Serkin, the Busch String Quartet, and the Busch Chamber Players recorded extensively during the 1930s -- Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms. I sincerely hope that, before long, all Busch recordings will be available in good, modern transfers. Meanwhile: thanks, Andrew Rose!

Tianwa Yang and the Final Sarasate Volume

The eighth and final CD of Naxos's traversal of all Sarasate's music for violin has now appeared and completes this excellent series in a fine fashion. Apart from one work (Sarasate's Souvenir de Faust de Gounod) all the pieces on this CD are arrangements by Sarasate. Though there is some evidence of barrel scraping – Sarasate's arrangements of Bach's Air on the G string, or Handel's “Largo” are hardly essential listening – well over an hour of the over 79 minutes of music here are well worth hearing, in particular Sarasate's Chopin arrangements (waltzes and nocturnes). Bravo Naxos, and bravo Pablo de Sarasate.

And a big bravo to Tianwa Yang, the violinist on all eight CDs. Sarasate's music, and his playing, were characterised by elegance and sophistication; Pablo was no barnstormer, as we can hear (distantly) from his playing on a few pieces of his own music captured in 1903. His playing was supremely elegant and, commentators affirmed, devastatingly accurate. As a player of mainly salon music during the later decades of nineteenth century France, he became extremely rich. Tianwa Yang is able to enter the sound world of Sarasate and to emulate his elegance. It makes one hope she will go on to explore the violin music of Vieuxtemps and Saint-Saëns. The extremely talented Julia Fischer has a Sarasate CD coming out shortly, and I have it on order since I can't resist Sarasate's music. I'll be surprised if Julia Fischer is able to equal the playing and interpretation of this remarkable young Chinese woman.

Igor Stravinsky

Some people, particularly younger people, love lists of “the best” or “the greatest”. This can become ridiculous; whilst it is not too difficult to suggest the three greatest composers, it is much more controversial to pinpoint the five greatest. Or the greatest French composer (there are many truly excellent French composers, but “the greatest”?) And so with “the greatest composer of the 20th century”. I happen to think there was not a greatest, just very many extremely good composers.

One (young) musical journalist once nominated Igor Stravinsky for this title; a puzzling choice. Since my teens I have enjoyed the Firebird, Petrouchka, Rite of Spring, Symphony of Psalms, Soldier's Tale, Agon, Threni and a few other pieces of the carefully controversial but carefully commercial Russian professional emigré with a constant desire to make money in France, Switzerland or America. His violin concerto -- like his piano concerto -- has never really made the big time. I have thoroughly enjoyed his violin concerto recently played by Patricia Kopatchinskaja (henceforward: PK. The girl's name simply has too many finger-twisting syllables). PK recorded it with Vladimir Jurowski, and also played it on-air conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy, and PK is probably the ideal soloist for this semi-baroque, semi-modern, semi-important violin concerto. She is technically brilliant (of course) but also brings a spirit of adventure and freshness to the music. PK is firmly in my pantheon of superb modern women of the violin (which includes Alina Ibragimova, Vilde Frang, Tianwa Yang and Lisa Batiasvili). But even PK at her finest cannot convince me that old Igor was a “great” composer -- let alone the 20th century's greatest.

Two Great Piano Trio Recordings

Four major string players playing together do not make for a great performance of a string quartet. However, piano trios often bloom when three major players get together. I have just been listening with enormous pleasure to the famous 1926 recording of Schubert's B flat piano trio played by Cortot, Thibaud and Casals, a legendary recording of the past very well restored by Ward Marston (for Naxos). These three played together regularly, and all three lived in Paris and had similar musical strengths. A recording to enjoy until the end of time, with a sound that still holds up well some 88 (!) years later. The primary adjective for this kind of playing is: elegant (also in the G major Haydn trio on the same Naxos CD).

A similar great historical success was the Tchaikovsky A minor piano trio recorded in 1952 by Gilels, Kogan and Rostropovich. The three musicians all lived in Moscow and played together regularly (until, like the Parisian three, politics broke them up). The Tchaikovsky still awaits satisfactory audio restoration -- Russian recording techniques were not great in the 1950s -- though the DoReMi transfers are not too bad. Perhaps Pristine Audio will come forward one day. But Gilels, Kogan and Rostropovich playing Tchaikovsky is really very, very special.

Vilde Frang - Again

My Christmas period had been scheduled to be based on Johann Sebastian Bach. Instead, because of postal deliveries, it ended up being based on Vilde Frang playing Tchaikovsky, Nielsen, Prokofiev and Sibelius. She really is a wonderful violinist; as well as the freshness I've already noted, there is much tenderness in her playing -- a somewhat rare quality, not to be confused with sentimentality, that often reminds me of the playing of Fritz Kreisler. In the hands of Miss Frang, Tchaikovsky's concerto reminds us that it was written for and with his then-current boyfriend on an idyllic holiday near a lake in Switzerland. The violin part of the concerto is full of tender melodies and reflections, and it was good to hear the work transformed from the usual macho Russian violin warhorse it has become. Vilde Frang is currently touring with the Britten and Korngold concertos, and I really hope she records them soon. I would have much preferred them to Carl Nielsen's concerto that is played with the Tchaikovsky; I'm not yet old enough to appreciate the Nielsen violin concerto.

Little music over my New Year period that will be spent in France helping to reduce the oyster population of Europe.

Vilde Frang, and Young Artists

Si jeunesse savait. Si vieillesse pouvait, runs the French adage. This is often applied to musicians; young musicians are go-getting and bursting with technique, but lack musical wisdom. Old musicians know the scores, but find difficulty in playing them as they would have wished, due to failing hands, arms and co-ordination.

Thus speak most critics. However, many young musicians give pause for thought such as, at the moment, Vilde Frang (violin) and Igor Levit (piano). I have already praised young Igor Levit and his courageous -- and highly impressive -- traversal of the late Beethoven piano sonatas. I have now discovered the Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang and thoroughly enjoyed her playing of Prokofiev's first violin concerto (and also the Sibelius concerto, on the same CD). The term that comes to mind when listening to Miss Frang is: freshness. She has, of course, technique to spare. But what appealed greatly to me was the freshness and enthusiasm she showed in her playing. The enthusiasm of youth, but Prokofiev was only 24 when he began to write his first violin concerto -- about the same age as Miss Frang when she is playing it -- and it is not some deep, profound work that reflects on human destiny. Some works -- the late Beethoven string quartets, the later Bruckner symphonies, for example -- may need to reflect the wisdom of age and experience. But much music benefits from being played with love and enthusiasm, and it is probably often easier to summon up love and enthusiasm when you are in your early 20s and works are still fresh, rather than when in your later 50s and you are giving your 250th performance of a popular concerto, with your reputation made long ago and an adoring public applauding “the star”. Experience does not always trump youth, and it is not as clear cut as many critics maintain, as shown by Igor Levit or Vilde Frang, inter alia.

Vilde Frang was an EMI artist. EMI has now been acquired by Warner Music, an American "entertainment" company that bears the same relationship to European classical music as Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut do to good restaurant eating. Americans are excellent at some things -- such as guns, weapons, computer software and aircraft manufacture. But they don't really "do" European classical music on a long-term investment basis. Hopefully, BIS, a Swedish company, will snap up Miss Frang.

Fritz Busch and Don Giovanni

There is a band of Opera Lovers (OLs) who remain somewhat distinct from Music Lovers. OLs set great store by opera plots, even if before the 19th century, most opera plots were pretty formalised and often downright ridiculous. OLs are keen on staging, however absurd the staging may be, and the stage director gets their preference over the music conductor. OLs are positive groupies when it comes to voices and singing, but give little attention to the orchestral playing or the conducting.

I am definitely not an OL. For me, it is very much a case of prima la musica e poi le parole. My rare visits to opera houses have usually seen me with my eyes shut; if the score says “a rocky cliff in Brittany” I do not want to find that some trendy director with an ego problem has read this as “a cell in the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay”. It is easy to see a rocky cliff in Brittany, or a room in a castle in Seville, or a harem in a Turkish fortress -- in one's mind's eye. I am not a purchaser of operas on DVD, but I do have a largish collection on CD. Yesterday I ventured into Mozart's Don Giovanni and revelled in ... la musica. La musica came from the famous 1936 recording by the then Glyndebourne forces conducted by Fritz Busch, with a good, solid, professional group of singers. The transfer (Ward Marston) is excellent though, inevitably, the orchestral detail is somewhat smudgy and remote. We hear a good, solid, well-rehearsed performance of a great opera and, my ears tell me, it really does take place in Seville many centuries ago; no one, striving for notoriety, has “updated” it.

Masaaki Suzuki's Final Cantata Volume

I bought the 55th (and final) volume in Masaaki Suzuki's journey through all of Bach's cantatas (numbering some 200, in all). The earliest I have was recorded in 1995; the latest in 2013. The overall consistency has been excellent from my sampling over the years, and all praise to Masaaki Suzuki, Johann Sebastian Bach, Robert von Bahr (of BIS records) and the Bach Collegium Japan in Kobe. The last volume features the current line-up of faithful soloists: Hana Blazikova, Robin Blaze, Gerd Türk and Peter Kooij, making this mammoth venture a true Japanese-European one.

As has been usual, the BIS engineers have produced a well balanced and well recorded disc.The project started in 1995 in Kobe, and over the course of 18 years BIS and Suzuki have marched triumphantly side by side. The smaller companies such as BIS, Naxos and Harmonia Mundi can do these kinds of things. Music lovers must always regret that in America – that was safe and wealthy during the decades 1930-60 – the large music labels such as Columbia and RCA were sparing in their fidelity and long-term views, thus RCA refusing to record its exclusive artist, Sergei Rachmaninov, in all of his own music, or to give much recording space to Mischa Elman or Toscha Seidel. Would that BIS or Naxos had been around at that time!

Nathan Milstein, and Lisa Batiashvili

It is good to see old classic recordings being re-issued in improved sound. The latest I have received is Nathan Milstein's rightly famous 1957 recording of Goldmark's genial violin concerto. This is Milstein in his prime, and in his element. It seems to me that, like Jascha Heifetz, Milstein is heard at his best in works that enabled him to show off his superb violin playing; certainly his playing in the Goldmark grips the attention and invokes smiles of delight. The Praga Digital refurbishment in SACD sound produces astonishing results; the solo violin sound, in particular, is of demonstration quality.

Also on the CD, and also in excellent sound, is Milstein playing the Brahms concerto with Anatole Fistoulari and the Philharmonia (1960). The two Ukrainians give a fleet performance, ignoring Brahms “non troppo” qualification for the first and third movements. The adagio is pretty rapid, and the Philharmonia throughout the work sounds like a loyal accompanist rather than an equal participant. The genial Brahms from North Germany is not too much in evidence. Exciting it doubtless is, and played effortlessly by Milstein; but is it Brahms? Turn to Lisa Batiashvili and Christian Thielemann with the Staatskapelle Dresden to find a different world, and a far more mellow Johannes Brahms. In her way, Batiashvili is as fine a violinist as Milstein, and her track record in the Beethoven, Brahms and first Shostakovich violin concertos suggests she is also a musician of considerable stature. Milstein's violin playing in the Goldmark concerto is what matters there, but in the Brahms concerto we need more than just superb, breathtaking violin playing.

Wilhelm Kempff

Being driven in either a bus, a taxi or a car, there are times when one sits back relaxed and confident. Then there are times when one winces and tenses on frequent occasions. It depends on your feelings about the driver. Thus, for me, with soloists and conductors in music. Either you feel at ease and bask in the music; or you tense up.

The parallel occurred to me listening to Wilhelm Kempff playing Mozart in the 1960s and 1970s. When Kempff is playing Mozart, you suspend your critical faculties and anxieties and just sit back and enjoy the music and the playing. On a double CD pack, Kempff plays the 21st, 22nd, 23rd and 24th piano concertos, plus the youthful No.8. Performances I have known for around forty years, and still enjoy immensely.

My double CD pack arrived (at a cheap price) from Kentucky in America, courtesy of Amazon and prompted nostalgia for the days when I would browse LP racks (later CD racks) in large classical records emporia starting with my home towns, then London, then Paris, then New York, then San Francisco, then Vienna. One would return with treasures; my original Ginette Neveu Angel LP was hunted down for me by a much grumbling sister on a visit to New York, a city where I also later hunted down LPs of the (then) rare Michael Rabin (accompanied by a much grumbling daughter). In Vienna I hunted down Russian Leonid Kogan LPs. Those were the days. Hunting today is just mouse clicking, and I acquired my new transfers of the Kempff Mozart recordings from Kentucky via four mouse clicks. Times change.

Spendor Speakers

The hunt is over. After four sets of loudspeakers in three years, my fifth set is perfectly fine for everything except my bank account. I bought the smallest, cheapest pair of Spendor bookshelf speakers in the company's catalogue. I am happy, at last. The sound is well-rounded, violin-friendly and entirely high fidelity to the sound on the original medium. That's it, for the next 15 years.

I have no connection whatsoever with Spendor (except as a happy customer). And no connection whatsoever with Audience, the hi-fi shop in Bath. But, together, they have solved my listening problem as a lover of violin playing and music. If there are any benevolent benefactors out there: the only thing that could please me more would be a couple of upper-range Spendor speakers. Only a thousand or two or three more, when all is said and done.

Katrin Scholz

Composed in 1806, Beethoven's violin concerto can sound like either the last of the classical violin concertos, or the first of the romantic. Played by violinists such as Heifetz, Oistrakh, Stern, etc it was firmly anchored in the 19th century tradition. In much of the German tradition, however, it comes over as a late classical work, which is the case with the very fine recording by Katrin Scholz with the Kammerorchester Berlin under Michael Sanderling. Scholz plays the work on a double Berlin Classics CD album that also contains the main three Mozart violin concertos (3rd, 4th and 5th) plus a violin concerto by Haydn. Scholz's playing in all the works here is firmly in the tradition of violinists such as Busch, Schneiderhan, Röhn and Kulenkampff, eschewing any suggestion of a "grand international virtuoso" approach; nothing is over-inflated, and I enjoyed all the works immensesly.

Katrin Scholz first came to my notice several years ago when I acquired a recording of her playing pieces by Sarasate, of all people. Sarasate is not that easy to play, stylistically, but Scholz played with a delicacy and sense of style that was utterly convincing (much as, later, the Chinese violinist Tianwa Yang is so convincing in Sarasate). Ms Scholz is not a heavily promoted international star. But she is a superb violinist and a superb musician. Forget the hype and the PR make-overs. For a paltry £9.58, the two and a half hours of music and violin playing on these two CDs have given me immense satisfaction, with the three Mozart concertos being absolutely top rank; competition is fiercer in the Beethoven, but Scholz holds her own. She conducts and plays in all but the Beethoven concerto, where Michael Sanderling takes over the rostrum. And, yes, the Berlin recordings are also very fine.

Shostakovich, and the Hammerklavier

I did not much like Shostakovich's fourth symphony on a first hearing, so yesterday I gave it a second hearing – and still did not like it much. It did not seem to have much depth to it – a lot of posturing and clever writing. Almost certainly not the fault of the talented Vasily Petrenko and the Liverpool Philharmonic. A disappointment. Still, Shostakovich wrote fifteen symphonies and some of them I like very much indeed; you can't win them all.

So on to Ludwig van Beethoven and his Hammerklavier sonata, a work I have struggled to enjoy for many decades as played by Pollini, Gilels, Yudina, Solomon, Schnabel .. and now Igor Levit. The first two movements are fine, but the long, long, long adagio finds my concentration wandering, and the finale sounds pretty bizarre in places, even played by the supreme pianistic gallery above. In his final years Beethoven seems to have wandered off frequently into obscure pastures: the Große Fuge is a wonderfully strange work, but Beethoven's friends were certainly right in persuading him to detach it from the B flat major quartet – if only someone could have persuaded him to abandon the inflated finale of the ninth symphony, an ending that always spoils the fine first three movements for me.

Mattieu Arama, and Igor Levit

Vaguely alarming, this immense deluge of highly talented young pianists and violinists. Every day seems to bring a handful of great new violinists, mainly from France, Germany, Hungary, Czech & Slovakia, Russia, Japan, Korea and China -- with a good dash of Canadians. Were there always such numbers in the past, but it was just that they never had a chance to make their names before the advent of several hundred record companies, YouTube and music downloads? Yesterday saw me listening to Matthieu Arama's début CD on which he offers a number of attractive virtuoso works by Wieniawski, Paganini, Sarasate et al, interspersed with welcome morsels from Elgar and Tchaikovsky. His technique is exemplary; the musicianship impeccable; the recording excellent. Most enjoyable. Arama is French, and hails from Bordeaux. As with pretty well all these modern virtuosi, one does not get the individuality of a Kreisler, Szigeti or Heifetz. But then, one also does not get the peculiarities of Jan Kubelik or Bronislaw Huberman, or the later precarious technique of Ruggiero Ricci.

Then on to Igor Levit, a Russian who grew up in Germany and who has now reached the advanced age of 26 years old and has been heralded as a genuine great pianist by pretty well everyone in the universe. Swayed by the crowd, I bought his début recording -- the last five piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven. Some début. Beethoven's later works - sonatas and string quartets - are the works of an individual who was no longer too concerned about wowing audiences, nor about catering to the foibles of sundry pianists or string players. The works are ideally interpreted by someone who eschews all posturing and external effects, and who forgets about the 18th century, critics, and audiences. Levit here is such an interpreter. I admire his concentration, his refusal to play to any gallery, his immaculate technique (of course) and his total immersion in these difficult works. I know the last sonata, Opus 111, extremely well having first acquired it in the 1950s played by Julius Katchen. Suffice it to say that, as played here by Igor Levit, all other versions I possess are quite blown away by this latest one. Marvellous playing, and marvellous musicianship. I long to hear Levit next in late Schubert.