Field: Complete Nocturnes
Alice Sara Ott, piano (Deutsche Grammophon)
The Irish composer John Field (1782-1837) is commonly said to have invented the nocturne as a piece for piano, passing the form along for his younger contemporary Frédéric Chopin to perfect. If sometimes forgotten, Field’s contributions have hardly escaped notice. Liszt himself published an edition of nine of them — “where else would we encounter such perfection of incomparable naïveté?” he asked in a preface — and recordings periodically appear to remind listeners of their many virtues.
Alice Sara Ott, perhaps the most prominent pianist yet to set them to disc, gives them all the care and affection they deserve. Her playing is simply gorgeous, as shapely and subtle and sensitive as anyone could ask. Crucially, Ott has no interest in making these works into anything that they are not. Almost all of them are in major keys, and with a few exceptions the mood is more placid and genial than in Chopin’s set; Ott gives a Mozartean charm and simplicity to the “Noontide” Nocturne in E, for example. Best of all is her way with the “Rêverie-Nocturne,” its left-hand chords singing evocatively as the right hand twinkles with dappled light. Time seems to stop; the effect is breathtaking. DAVID ALLEN
‘Lines of Life: Schubert & Kurtag’
Benjamin Appl, baritone; Pierre-Laurent Aimard, James Baillieu, Gyorgy Kurtag, piano (Alpha Classics)
When it comes to lieder singers, the baritone Benjamin Appl plays against type. He doesn’t brood, navel gaze or revel in heartbreak. With his mild temperament and easy-on-the-ears timbre, he skates over the surface of art songs that others plumb for darker depths.
It’s exactly those qualities that make him a transfixing interpreter of the Hungarian miniaturist Gyorgy Kurtag, whom he calls “Gyuri bacsi” (Uncle George) in the album’s liner notes. Appl, who prepared the material with Kurtag himself, describes working out the tiny inflections that make the brief pieces infinitely challenging. He lavishes a voice of elastic loveliness and technical security on Kurtag’s prickly gems.
In “Hölderlin-Gesänge,” a largely a cappella cycle of six songs on esoteric texts, Appl’s singing is plastic and alacritous. His tone can be succulent, natty, ghostly or blooming. Strange turns of phrase, queasy melismas and a bombastic outburst or two are the closest Appl gets to unpleasantness. He doesn’t fight his sound’s youthful vitality.
Schubert songs make up nearly the rest of the album. That could have simply been a trick of juxtaposition, but the intense concentration required of Kurtag’s style seems to bring Appl closer to the feeling of melodies like “Ganymed” and “Litanei auf das Fest Allerseelen.”
At the piano, James Baillieu is a warmly gracious Schubert interpreter, and Pierre-Laurent Aimard is acerbically exacting in the Kurtag — who also takes the keys on the final song, Brahms’s “Sonntag,” elaborating a patience and will to silence that come off like contentment. OUSSAMA ZAHR
Stravinsky: ‘Pulcinella’ and Divertimento From ‘Le Baiser de la Fée’
Isabel Leonard, Paul Appleby, Derek Welton; Toronto Symphony Orchestra; Gustavo Gimeno, conductor (Harmonia Mundi)
If you just looked at this album’s cover, you would think it was simply a release of two works from Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical period. It mostly is, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra turns in very fine performances of both works under the direction of Gustavo Gimeno, its music director. The ensemble plays the Divertimento from the ballet “Le Baiser de la Fée” with unusual elegance and pop, showcasing its pungent winds and brass. In “Pulcinella,” which Gimeno programmed in its complete version rather than the suite, he makes the rhythms airy and spry, just as its 18th-century origins would require. The three vocal soloists cope well with Stravinsky’s rather unforgiving lines.
But there’s (literally) more here than meets the eye. Though listed nowhere on the cover, the album also contains a world premiere recording: “Curiosity, Genius and the Search for Petula Clark,” by the Canadian composer Kelly-Marie Murphy. A Toronto Symphony commission, it was written in 2017 to celebrate Glenn Gould’s 85th birthday. The piece takes inspiration from a Gould radio documentary in which he drove around Canada to hear Clark’s “Who Am I?” on the radio. Murphy’s score is ingeniously orchestrated and full of shifting textures. What Gould would have thought is anyone’s guess, but at the very least it deserved to be mentioned beside this album’s better-known works. DAVID WEININGER
Brahms: ‘Ein Deutsches Requiem’
Various choirs; Hamburg State Philharmonic Orchestra; Kent Nagano, conductor; Kate Lindsey, mezzo-soprano; Johann Kristinsson, baritone; Veronika Eberle, violin; Thomas Cornelius on organ (Bis)
The Good Friday premiere of Brahms’s “Ein Deutsches Requiem,” or “A German Requiem,” in 1868 at Bremen Cathedral was a major success for the 34-year-old composer, who conducted the performance in front of 2,500 listeners. But what they heard was not the “Requiem” cherished by concert audiences today. Brahms had yet to compose the fifth of what would, in its final form, become seven movements. And to appease local religious authorities who took issue with the texts that Brahms had set — excerpts from scripture about death and consolation that included no mention of Jesus — he interwove his own music with works by other composers.
That original version was reconstructed and recorded in 2022 at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, featuring 400 singers from eight community choirs. It is an unexpectedly moving testament to the living historical traditions and communal piety that influenced Brahms. Instrumental interludes by Bach, Tartini and Schumann create meditative pockets amid the austere tenderness of Brahms’s choral numbers. After offering a heart-rending aria from Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion,” Brahms gives the last word to Handel, concluding this “Requiem” — however scandalously to modern ears — with the radiant “Hallelujah” chorus. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 15
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; Bernard Haitink, conductor (BR Klassik)
Shostakovich’s final symphony is his most enigmatic orchestral work, in which death seems to hover everywhere but alight nowhere. In place of the anguish on full display elsewhere in his output, we hear the innocence of childhood, melodies that spin into dead ends, mysterious quotations from Rossini and Wagner and, at the end, a clatter of percussion that may represent the machinery in a dying patient’s hospital room. Or it may mean nothing at all.
The 15th Symphony was a specialty of Bernard Haitink, who released two excellent recordings of it during his lifetime. Even by those lofty standards, this live account with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, from 2015, is special. Haitink’s approach to the piece seems to have grown ever more objective — not out of detachment from the music’s emotional power but as a way of honoring it, as if he were increasingly reluctant to press an interpretation onto a piece that so tenaciously resists one. Whatever the conductor’s thinking, the finale’s piercing dissonances and invocation of the fate motif from Wagner’s “Ring” have rarely sounded more chilling. The result, thanks to playing with incredible sensitivity and dynamic range, is a performance of the quietest intensity, and all the more devastating for that. DAVID WEININGER
