Top 10 CDs of the year for festive gifts

We all need cheering up at the moment. This year I've been working on an opera libretto (with Roxanna Panufnik, for Garsington 2017) on the theme of war, which has involved consulting former members of the armed forces, including one amazing man who served on the front line in Iraq. The story of the horrors he went through there will stay with me forever. Now off we go to Syria...

To provide a little light relief from the grim news, you might want to listen to some good music, or buy some for your friends and family to enjoy.

As your midwinter festival of choice approaches (please choose from Christmas, Chanukah, pagan fertility celebration, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, anything I've inadvertently forgotten, and December Birthday - mine is, er, the latter)... here are the best discs that have come my way for review, or simply for listening, this year. I list them in no particular order. Where comments are in quotation marks, they are from my reviews for BBC Music Magazine or Sinfini.


Schumann: Etudes Symphoniques Op.13, Kreisleriana Op.16, Toccata Op.7

Nelson Goerner (piano)

Zig-Zag Territoires ZZT352

"To hear Goerner navigating Schumann’s variety of textures with so much delicacy, good sense, beauty of tone and rapt atmospheres is a treat indeed." 

Saint-Saëns: Piano Concertos Nos 2 and 5

Louis Schwizgebel (piano), BBC Symphony Orchestra/Fabien Gabel (no.2) and Martyn Brabbins (no.5)

Aparte AP112

"Louis Schwizgebel, currently a BBC New Generation Artist, won second prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 2012...[he] displays his fine feathers like a vivid young peacock. His touch is gorgeously singing and wonderfully delicate, but can sharpen to serious bling when occasion demands – and he applies it judiciously."

Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No.2; Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No.1

Beatrice Rana (piano)

Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia/Antonio Pappano

Warner Classics 0825646009091

"In the hands of Rana – who as it happens is the same age as Prokofiev was when he wrote it – the Second Piano Concerto becomes a white-hot volcano of intense expression."

Rachmaninov: Music for Two Pianos

Symphonic Dances Op.45; Suite No. 1 in G minor, Op.8; Suite No.2, Op. 17; 6 Duets Op. 11; Romance and Waltz in A; Russian Rhapsody in E minor

Martha Argerich (piano), with Nelson Goerner, Lilya Zilberstein, Gabriela Montero, Daniel Gerzenberg, Anton Gerzenberg, Alexander Mogilevsky (pianos)

Warner Classics 0825646235940 (2 CDs)

"If you like extremely lively Rachmaninov, you will love this. Martha Argerich joins forces with a host of starry younger pianists, live in concert, for a feast of Rachmaninov’s works for two pianos and/or multiple pianists."

Time Present and Time Past

Alessandro Scarlatti: Variations on ‘La Follia’; Górecki: Harpsichord Concerto, Op.40; CPE Bach: 12 Variations on ‘Les Folies d’Espagne’; Geiniani: Concerto grosso in D minor after Corelli’s Op.5 No.12; Reich arr. Esfahani: Piano Phase for Two Pianos; Bach: Harpsichord Concerto in D minor, BWV1052

Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord), Concerto Köln

DG Archiv Produktion 479 4481

“'I am often subjected to all sorts of assumptions about historicity and authenticity and what is right and what is wrong and what can’t belong. I see my recordings as a way of refuting all of that,' Mahan Esfahani writes. At this rate he’ll simply leave others standing – or, perhaps, combing through the embers."

Chopin: 24 Preludes, Op.28; Nocturne in C minor, Op.48 No.1; Piano Sonata No.2 in B flat minor, Op.35; Polonaise in A flat major, Op.53

Seong-Jin Cho (piano)

DG 479 5332

"Oh joy – a new Chopin Competition winner who can really, seriously play superb Chopin." 

Lutoslawski: Piano Concerto; Symphony No.2

Krystian Zimerman (piano), Berliner Philharmoniker/Simon Rattle

DG 4794518

Coruscating intensity and brilliance from the pianist for whom this great concerto was written. Refulgent glow from the BPs.

Coleridge-Taylor: Violin Concerto in G minor; Delius: Suite for Violin and Orchestra; Haydn Wood: Violin Concerto in A minor

Tasmin Little (violin), BBC Philharmonic/Andrew Davis

Chandos CHAN10879

Little and Davis do this rare British repertoire proud. Coleridge-Taylor's Violin Concerto is one of his most beautiful works, not perfect but often very rewarding, especially the gorgeous slow movement. 

Jonas Kaufmann: The Puccini Album

Orchestra dell'Accademia Nationale di Santa Cecilia/Antonio Pappano

Sony Classical 88875092492

One for the Kaufmaniacs, if they haven't got it already, which they probably will have, but hey - this is the vocal album equivalent of a year's supply of chocolate with 90 per cent cocoa solids. 

Biber: The Rosary Sonatas

Rachel Podger (violin), Marcin Swiatkiewicz (harpsichord/organ), Jonathan Manson (cello/viola da gamba), David Miller (theorbo/archlute)

Channel CCSSA37315

Extraordinary music, complex and symbolic and penetrating; playing that offers real empathy and peerless attention to detail. This is anything but easy baroque listening, and all the more rewarding for that.

Tribute to a beloved musician

Tonight the pianist Lorraine Banning is giving a recital at the 1901 Arts Club (which is near Waterloo station) in tribute to her late husband, Raymond Banning. Raymond - a charming, funny, brilliant and delightful man whom I remember well from my days as editor of Classical Piano Magazine back in the 1990s - was tragically struck by a form of early onset dementia in 2010. He died exactly three years ago, aged only 60.

Lorraine's recital is a memorial to him on the anniversary of his death and will raise funds for two of the charities that supported him: the Tibbs Dementia Service and the British Association for Performing Arts Medicine.

Besides music by Granados, Debussy and Bizet, the programme includes the world premiere of S G Potts' The Raymond Variations (Set 1) - Variations on the Andantino Theme from the Raymond Overture by Ambroise Thomas.

Box office 020 7620 3055.

Breakthrough: First female conductor wins titled post in a BBC orchestra

Xian Zhang. Photo: Benjamin Ealovega

Here's a gentle crack in the glass overhead: Xian Zhang has been named principal guest conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. This is the first time ever that a conductor who happens to be female has been given a titled post with one of the BBC's five orchestras. Note the date: December 2015.

Zhang, 42, has also recently been appointed music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and has served as music director of the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi since 2009. Her debut performance in her new BBCNOW post will be on 27 September 2016.

She is interviewed by Tom Service in The Guardian today.

I talked to her last year for Classical Music Magazine's 'Meet the Maestro' series. Here are a few choice quotes:

Zhang, 40, has been at the helm of the [Milan] orchestra – which is known at home as simply La Verdi – for five years, the first woman ever appointed music director of an Italian symphony orchestra. She says that has witnessed a sea-change in attitudes. “In the beginning it was like no-man’s land – or no-woman’s land!” she laughs. “People here had never seen a woman conductor before. Of course I arrived without realising that. It was probably better that way, because otherwise I would have been way too intimidated.”...

....As for what she wryly terms “the woman conductor question”, Zhang suggests: “It’s a matter of time. I think the public is in general very open, but orchestras and people who work in this environment have to be perhaps less self-protective – this is stopping more progress from happening earlier. They don’t necessarily have to be positive about it, but at least to be neutral and see if people are gifted before considering if they are a woman or a man.” In Milan, though, she has spotted a surprise advantage. “A quintessential point in Italian culture is that people greatly respect a mother figure,” she says. “Maybe that helped me to be accepted as conductor of an orchestra. It makes sense! When I first arrived I was seven months pregnant with my first son, so that was how people saw me for the first time. At my first concert after my second son was born, some of the audience gave me presents for the baby. I was so touched.”

Read the whole interview here...

NOTE (4 December): A certain amount of Twitter chatter has questioned whether this counts because JoAnn Falletta was principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra from 2011 to 2014 and the Ulster Orchestra receives some money and broadcasts from the BBC. So let's get this straight: the BBC tells me that the Ulster Orchestra is not "a BBC orchestra" because it is not managed by the BBC. It is an independent orchestra and it has a broadcasting deal. "Principal guest conductor" meanwhile remains a post of significant prominence, one that is held in other UK orchestras by the likes of Daniel Harding (LSO), Pinchas Zukerman (RPO) and Markus Stenz (The Hallé).

Dear JDCMB readers, please get to know this piece

This is the Geistervariationen - literally, 'Ghost Variations' - by Robert Schumann, written at the end of his compositional life just before his incarceration in the asylum at Endenich. Please familiarise yourselves with it. If you read JDCMB regularly, you're going to be hearing a lot more about it in 2016.

The heavenly performance above is by Grigory Sokolov.

Sibelian surprises

So, review from Friday night continued: Susanna Mälkki conducted Sibelius 1 in the second half (after Beatrice Rana's glorious playing in the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto in the first).

Susanna Mälkki. Photo: Simon Fowler

About halfway through I opened my programme to check something. I was wondering if it might be a different version of this symphony - an early draft, or perhaps an unknown revision? - because I was hearing things that I'd simply never noticed before. But no, it was Sibelius 1 through and through; it's just that Mälkki (who is herself Finnish, was principal cello in the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra for several years, and studied conducting with Jorma Panula) took an approach that was light years away from the heavy-duty baked sponge pudding that we so often chew through in this work. All manner of detail became audible; the tempi didn't hang about, because they don't need to; and the pacing of the energy worked a small miracle in the finale.

Sibelius's First Symphony is often, very often, compared to Tchaikovsky - and certainly there are similarities. But Tchaikovsky, well performed, can pay tribute to that composer's passion for Mozart; and here, too, one became aware of the music's classical-era roots: the taut organisation of the four movements, the light-footedness of the lightning bolts near the start, or the timpani-led scherzo. I can't remember how many times I've heard the slow(ish) movement played as a dirge dragging its way through snowy darkness as if it's got frostbite, or the said scherzo thundering along like a herd of elephants. Not necessary; and not so for Mälkki.

The rhythms danced through that scherzo, the energy let the music fly rather than sticking its soles to the ice, and in general the up-tempo approach kept everyone on their toes - while some details that in other hands are blurred emerged sparklingly clear with spot-on ensemble from the good ol' LPO. The finale's big tune is so often milked for every last shred of intensity from its first appearance; instead, it came out warm, strong and dignified, but didn't let rip until the music had built convincingly up to its ultimate appearance third time around, when Mälkki let it go straight for the jugular. This made absolute sense, as well as a superb shape.

But above all, one could hear the layers of texture that make the symphony shimmer from within: the throbbing cross-rhythms at the bottom of the orchestra, destabilising anything that might even consider becoming four-square; the florid harp details lending unexpected glimmers in different cross-rhythms against that Big Tune.

This wasn't a Deeply Tragic View of Life or a Violently Romantic Vision Plunging Into Permafrost Gloom. This was a thrilling first step into the symphonic world by a composer who was going to break extraordinary new ground and was already well on his way. Brava, Mälkki: it was like hearing the piece for the first time.

She has recently been appointed principal conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic and starts there in the 16/17 season. They're on to a very, very good thing. Meanwhile, here's hoping she comes back soon.

The concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and you can hear it on the iPlayer for another 28 days, here.