Me’Shell opens with a cover of a 30 yr. old classic hip hop song ‘Friends’ by Whodini with some sweeping electronica to fanfare proceedings and long time collaborator Christopher Bruce’s excellent guitar work; a multi disciplined technician who delights throughout this varied set. Me’Shell explains ““I grew up listening to hip-hop, and I get mad at my peers and older people who are not really open to modern music, especially rap music. I wanted to show how intricate the music is, if you really listen deeply. On this track, for example, if you take away the vocals, it’s got really intricate things going on. There’s keyboard element, which on my version is the guitar. And then they added a half beat to each bar, which is why it has a kind of shift in it. “There’s something in music called “chopped and screwed” where you “screw” the track, which I wanted to emulate. If you hear the original version on the record, you’ll understand.”.

After being introduced to her work through ‘Cookie’ and ‘Comfort Woman’ I went to see her play Camden’s Jazz Cafe, many years ago, where she played a purely instrumental set of free jazz and refused requests for familiar songs from some obviously disappointed fans. I wondered then if she produced her commercial output simply to allow her freedom to play improvisational jazz and to stretch her electric bass explorations; since then, having ardently followed every subsequent release, I have abandoned that theory. She is a multi-talented musician who naturally expresses herself lyrically and melodically as a singer/songwriter, arranger and producer as well as being a world class jazz bassist.

This record is as good an introduction to her work as any but I would also highly recommend ‘Plantation Lullabies’, ‘Comfort Woman’, ‘Cookie:The Anthropological Mixtape’, ‘Peace Beyond Passion’, ‘Bitter’ and her gorgeous 2012 dedication to Nina Simone ‘Pour une ame souveraine’. Every release has a different flavour and tone, some meditative and some provocative, some deeply chilled and others hard tight funk but all showcasing her precise and fluid bass playing and her soothing (even when angry) vocals.

This album also features special guests Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond) and Doyle Bramhall, along with safe ‘old hands’ Jebin Bruni (keys), and Earl Harvin on drums.

Though born in Argentina, Bernarda Fink is of Slovenian extraction and her husband (a diplomat rather than another musician) is Austrian, so perhaps one can infer a special spiritual connection with Mahler: after all, the composer famously took time away from the stresses and politicking of Vienna at his house on the Wörthersee in Carinthia, the region of Austria that borders Slovenia.

The idea for this album came from Fink herself. Conceived to trace Mahler’s progress as a composer of songs, and to highlight their relationship to his symphonies, it offers repertoire ranging from rarely-heard early songs – such as the exuberant Im Lenz of 1880, written to Mahler’s own text – to the mature cycles. Before recording it, Fink gave a series of concerts with the other musicians who appear on the disc, and her voice is presented in a variety of settings: with piano (her partner is Anthony Spiri), with a chamber ensemble (in the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, arranged by Schoenberg in 1920, two years before he made his hauntingly stark chamber version of the marvellous Song of the Wood Dove from Gurrelieder), and with orchestra. All five songs of Kindertotenlieder are duly accompanied by the Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich under Andrés Orozoco-Estrada, but the four songs from Rückert-Lieder – the cycle’s lightest-hearted component, ‘Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder!’ is omitted for some reason – are presented in a hybrid format: two with orchestra and two with piano; one of the latter, rather surprisingly, is ‘Um Mitternacht’, which surely makes a stronger impact with a triumphant brass choral at its climax.

Fink is not the kind of interpreter who emphasises the neurosis, fatalism and even grotesquerie that can be found in Mahler. She is essentially a well-mannered singer who respects the music and the text and does not impose her will upon it in an arbitrary or point-making fashion. Nor does she have a voice that sears itself into the brain: it is a warm, unforced and appealing lyric mezzo, perhaps less honeyed today than it was five or so years ago, which suggests a sympathetic presence in an intimate environment rather than a Wagnerian diva in a grand hall. Though it is hard to fault her – especially when thinking of some singers’ contrivances in Mahler – she could tug the heart strings more strongly at certain key moments. A case in point occurs in the single selection from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’, when the girl says to her (dead?) lover: “Willkommen, lieber Knabe mein, so lang hast du gestanden!” (Welcome my dearest lad, you have waited so long!). Fink is by no means inexpressive, but she does not quite achieve a potent fusion of heartache, longing and love.

Her relatively discreet approach is echoed by the other performers on the disc: the accompaniments are not weighed down by dragging tempi or appliqué expressivity. Recorded in natural-sounding acoustics in Berlin and Grafenegg, near Vienna, this disc makes a refreshing antidote to the excesses to which performances of Mahler have sometimes become prone.

Charles Dutoit, the erstwhile French-Swiss director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, in his Decca contract years – as inheritor of the mantel of Ernest Ansermet – never really ventured further into the Austro-German repertory on disc than a cycle of Haydn’s ‘Paris’ symphonies.  It is intriguing to report in our global age that his orchestra under American conductor Kent Nagano, with at least some of the old principals and many French names in its ranks, still manages to play Mahler with a hint of Gallic nostalgia. It should be said the main reason for purchasing this Sony recording of Mahler song cycles is the extraordinary and very personal singing of the German baritone Christian Gerhaher. Mahler’s songs have always been a cornerstone of Gerhaher’s repertoire and every word and phrase tells. It is also a completely distinct voice – in its top range (where this music often is) he sounds as much like a heroic tenor as a baritone.  In the end it is the commitment and lustrous power of the singing that will continue to demand attention rather than perhaps being the most representative version of these works on disc:  a hypnotic disc nevertheless.

I can’t detect any orchestral French accents the LPO’s disc of Das Lied von der Erde despite the fact that the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin is a native of Montreal and a Dutoit protégé, but it is an outstanding recording of this work, comparable with the great recordings of Klemperer and Kubelik, with even better sound. Both soloists excel: Sarah Connolly has a brighter voice than such alto rivals as Christa Ludwig and Janet Baker, let alone Kathleen Ferrier. The concentration of both Connolly and Nézet-Séguin in the final movement is almost miraculous – walking the tight-rope of maintaining a drifting effect rather than actually drifting as so many performances do.

Both records reviewed here are from live performances, the Gerhaher disc recorded in the Montreal orchestra’s new concert hall, the LPO disc at the RFH, but it is interesting to note that the sound in the LPO recording, with its production team of two –Andrew Walton and Mike Clements – is much more focussed than in Montreal, where the audience is a rustling presence despite a Sony production team of nine.

This Bartok CD is an excellent starting point, as, in many ways, it is a bridge between the lyricism of the old and the uncertainties of the new. 

However before I Review the actual CD, I want to create some reference points. Where might one naturally start to explore 20th century virtuoso Piano? The iconic and best known CD is that from Maurizio Pollini, Deutsche Grammophon, offering Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Prokofiev’s extraordinary  7th Piano sonata and other music by Boulez and Webern. I think it is fair to say that this is the Gold standard of 20th Century piano playing. The Prokofiev 7th Sonata is without doubt the most extraordinary, exciting and exuberant performance of demonic, percussive piano, I have ever heard. The other protagonist who has helped me into the garden of 20th century piano genius has been John Lill, with his wonderful, evocative and accessible Prokofiev Piano sonatas  -Volume 3 with Sonatas 7, 8 and 9 being my suggestion.

So now the question is: “How does Bela Bartok’s Piano music, and his latest advocate – pianist  Alain Planes, compare as an entrée into 20th century  solo piano?”

This CD offers much for the intrepid explorer. Planes’ includes both the beautiful and the startling. The Andante of the Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs might leave one wondering if we are back in the era of Chopin and Brahms.

In complete contrast, The Dance Suite, with its jaunty opening, soon reminds us that all is not well in the garden of lyricism. The second movement, (Track 2), has a staccato sound that has resonances of Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Indeed Stravinsky spent much of his career denouncing Bartok’s obsession with folk music, before confessing, towards the end of his life, that his own music had been similarly influenced.

The Piano Sonata, composed to celebrate the unity of Buda and Pest, also is also steeped in the folk songs that were so important to Bartok.

Of the Six Romanian Folk Dances, the dance from Bucsum bears nostalgic witness to its Jewish roots.

The CD is a wide ranging introduction to the new musical world that Bartok inhabited, and comforts us with the more traditional. As part of a wider exploration of 20th Century Piano music, this CD offers important insights and vignettes. We are in the hands of a true Bartokian Pianist, and this increases  our enthusiasm for the journey.

Further 20th Century Piano, including Bartok

Bartok Piano Concerto no 3 (with Prokofiev’s piano concertos 1&3) played by Martha Argerich and conducted by Charles Dutoit – EMI Classics

Bela Bartok Piano Works. Pianist  Alain Planes

• Dance Suite Sz 77
• Fifteen Hungarian Peasant songs Sz 71
• Four Old Songs
• Piano Sonata  Sz 80
• Six Romanian Folk Dances Sz 56
• Fourteen Bagatelles Op 6 Sz 38

That respect for the spirit of classical form and tonality can, I think, sometimes dampen the effectiveness of the late Brahms. The String Quintets, however, are supremely powerful statements of classicism’s continuing expressive possibilities. This is, perhaps, because the Quintet as a musical form in the hands of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert always lent itself to a certain looseness of construction.

The now US-based Tackas Quartet’s performance  is extraordinary , the latest in a set of equally compelling Hyperion discs surveying the Romantic and 20th century chamber music repertoire. The sound is engineered with Hyperion’s typical brilliance and makes the most of the band’s uncanny ability to combine the rubatos characteristic of the great Middle European tradition of string playing with the precision and crispness of tone demanded by current tastes.  Hopefully, the focus on Beethoven, Webern, and Shostakovich in the Tackas Quartet’s 2014 Wigmore Hall concerts is a clue as to what we can expect from them on disc in the not too distant future.

Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, written between 1925 and 1927 and dedicated to Serge Diaghilev, is a polyglot creation. Set to a Latin translation of an original French text by Jean Cocteau, with a narration in French, which is often given in the language of the audience, it is a free adaptation of the Greek drama by Sophocles, Oedipus the King. This is a deliberate device designed to intensify the impact of the drama; the remote language emphasising the power of the myth and Stravinsky’s neo-classical, anti-romantic music capturing the ritual in the Greek original, as well as propelling the dramatic power of the plot in which Sophocles’ eponymous anti-hero whose relentless enquiry in pursuit of the truth leads to his own destruction. The core of Sophocles’ tragedy is that it lays bear the ruthless irony inherent in a human thirst for knowledge that is so compelling that it is blind to the consequences of what that knowledge may uncover. Oedipus is metaphorically blind until finally he learns the truth, and then, seeing at last, he physically blinds himself out of horror and remorse at the tragic outcome that is revealed. The music Stravinsky writes is entirely unsentimental. With influences ranging widely from baroque oratorio to 19th century Italian opera, it pitches deliberate stylistic mismatches against one another to invoke Aristotelian terror and pity in an entirely original way. Scored for large orchestra, soloists and male chorus it can be performed in the concert hall as an oratorio, as it is here in this new recording, or fully staged as an opera.

This new recording of Oedipus Rex, released on LSO Live, was recorded live in concert last year at the Barbican in celebration of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s 70th birthday with the LSO, a fine roster of soloists and the Gentlemen of the Monteverdi choir. Oedipus is sung by current ENO favourite Stuart Skelton, more heroic than either Vinson Cole for Esa-Pekka Salonen on Sony or Ronald Dowd for Sir Colin Davis, now on Classics for Pleasure, he copes well with the at times high lying tessitura, and sounds marked out by fate right from the outset. He misses some of the hubris that Dowd finds in the role and which makes Oedipus’ fall that much more tragic, but more than compensates with firm, ingratiating tone, and he produces some lovely sympathetic and sensitive phrasing. The Jocasta of the young English mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston catches all the aspects of the Queen’s changing emotions in the short space of her contribution; from the regal opening of her aria, ‘Nonn’ erubeskite, reges’, through to her bitter rejection of the oracles and her recounting, tinged with sadness, of the murder of her husband, to finally her desperate entreaties to Oedipus not to seek out the oracles. It is Anne Sophie von Otter on Sony who gives the finest performance of Jocasta on record, but Johnston is in no way embarrassed by the comparison. Gidon Saks is a reliable Creon, and David Shipley threatening in his utterances as Tiresias. The French actress Fanny Ardent gives an earthy, involved account of the spoken narration in the original French, a world away from the terribly English rendition from Sir Ralph Richardson for Davis.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts a vital and dramatic account of the score, more opera than oratorio, helped no doubt by the live occasion. The Gloria chorus, here given its repeat at the start of Act II, in Gardiner’s hands is less like scared liturgical music and more like a triumphal chorus from an Italian grand opera, and he allows the timpani thuds that underpin the opening chorus their full impact, setting the portentous atmosphere right from the start. Throughout Gardiner makes you aware that Stravinsky’s music is not just about rhythm but contains much melodic invention too. Try for example the woodwind traceries, finely played by the prominent LSO soloists, which weave around the vocal line in Joscata’s aria.  

Which brings me at last to the real star of this recording – or rather I should say stars: the Gentleman of the Monteverdi choir. Their singing is incisive and disciplined, with well differentiated tenors and basses allowing the interplay between the vocal lines to emerge clearly, and their diction superb. They are real participants in the drama – no detached observers – they come right into the action, living and experiencing the horror of the tale as it unfolds along with the protagonists, and vividly communicating to us their response to it.

Of the versions that I have listened to for comparison, only the classic recording by Karel Ančerl on Supraphon with Czech forces from 1965 matches, and at times surpasses, Gardiner for visceral impact. Ančerl has a lyrical, civilised Oedipus, a terrifying Tiresias, and in Vĕra Soukupová, who was Böhm’s Erda at Bayreuth, the grandest of Jocasta’s. Only Ančerl’s choir cannot match the virtuosity of the Monteverdians. 

It is common to read criticism of the Barbican as a recording venue and the difficulty in managing the dry acoustic. However, I hear nothing here that should detract from anyone’s enjoyment of this fine performance. The substantial filler, at more than 30 minutes, is the ballet Apollon musagète, given an affecting performance, and completing a generously filled disk at over 79 minutes of music. Full text and translations are provided in the accompanying booklet. To anyone coming new to Oedipus Rex, or looking for a fine modern recording in excellent sound, will not be disappointed by this new release from LSO Live. But do not ignore Karel Ančerl, who is a must hear for anyone seriously interested in Stravinsky’s masterpiece.

Tamerlano, first performed at London’s King’s Theatre in 1724, is one of Handel’s most ambitious and sophisticated operas. It is unusual in the composer’s canon for the star status accorded to the tenor. In recent years, even the ever-questing Plácido Domingo has assumed the role of the captive Ottoman sultan Bajazet (historically, Bayezid), composed for Francesco Borosini – a native, like another tenor idol of the late 20th century, of the city of Modena. Borosini was perhaps the first tenor in history to acquire international star status, and Handel ensured that he was in the most prestigious of company: the castrato Senesino, the toast of London and a rival for Farinelli, took the virtuoso role of the politicking Greek prince Andronico, with the tempestuous diva Francesca Cuzzoni as his love interest (and Bajazet’s daughter) Asteria – a character who seems to presage the formidable Odabella in Verdi’s Attila.

Another castrato, Andrea Pacini, created the title role of the wilful Turkic conqueror otherwise known as Timur or Tamerlane. He is embodied in this recording by the Catalan countertenor Xavier Sabata, who last year released an album on the Aparte label called Handel: Bad Guys. Tamerlano is not exactly a good guy, but Sabata (like Handel) doesn’t believe in painting his characters in black and white, and his mellow tone and elegant phrasing lend a sensual, feline menace to the Central Asian warrior. As Andronico, Cenčić, with his fuller and more penetrating sound, is more overtly ferocious in his brilliant Act II aria ‘Più d’una tigre altero’ – but his Italian sounds stilted in the eloquent accompanied recitative before his Act 1 aria ‘Benché mi sprezzi’. If some distinctly Anglo-Saxon pronunciation compromises John Mark Ainsley’s Bajazet, he brings captivating warmth and nobility to the role – not least in his dying moments, another accompanied recitative, but strikingly free in form. As Asteria, Karina Gauvin upholds her reputation as one of the world’s finest Handel sopranos, though she now sounds less succulent than on her gorgeous album of operatic and sacred arias released on the Canadian Atma label five years ago. Mezzo-soprano Ruxandra Donose makes a velvety and dignified Irene (Tamerlano’s spurned betrothed) who finds a staunchly and richly voiced advocate in the Leone of the bass Pavel Kudinov.

Under the dynamic baton its director, Riccardo Minasi, il Pomo d’Oro sounds nothing less than thrilling, with strings that can scamper, throb and clatter, and oboes that both can both coo and call to arms, complementing and amplifying the characters’ struggles of power and love.

Handel: Tamerlano

Xavier Sabata (Tamerlano), Max Emanuel Cencic (Andronico), John Mark Ainsley (Bajazet), Karina Gauvin (Asteria), Ruxandra Donose (Irene), Pavel Kudinov (Leone) Il Pomo d’Oro, Riccardo Minasi

Naive V5373 (3CD)

By contrast, the Easter Oratorio is perhaps the most dramatic of Bach’s sacred works. Lacking a narrator, this reworking of an earlier but now lost secular cantata portrays, in sung dialogue, the interaction among Peter, John, Magdelene, the Virgin, and others on Easter morning after finding the empty tomb. Performed for the first time in Leipzig, the dramatic form is as much attributable to the early 18thcentury Lutheran custom of performing Easter plays as it is to the shape of the secular materials from which it was constructed.

The performances are both exquisite, partaking of the intensity and artistry which has characterized Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir’s recording of the last couple of years. During the late 90s, it often seemed that Gardiner and his instrumental and vocal associates had lost some of the spark that characterized their earlier work and, unfortunately, many of the Pilgrimage recordings sound a bit weary and drawn even though sung and played with technical perfection. Perhaps it is the freedom and purpose that came with the creation of Solo Dei Gloria or perhaps it is just that revival of power and inspiration characteristic of the late careers of many great artists but Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir have, over the last five years, gifted listeners with a sequence of incredible performances. The Actus Tragicus and Easter Oratorio are of that same high calibre and should take one through the Easter weekend nicely, with the Actus Tragicus forming a perfect backdrop for Holy Saturday reflections and the Oratorio serving as the soundtrack for Easter celebrations.