Best CDs of 2017 - BBC Music Mag Awards and me

To discover the one of these six favourite discs I reviewed or rated in 2017 which not quite enough of my fellow jurors were persuaded to shortlist, you'll have to head over to the voting page of the BBC Music Magazine Awards 2018. I'm finally free to divulge a little more about the December day at Editor Olly Condy's home in Bristol when seven of us, plied with cake and home-made membrillo plus plentiful cups of strong coffee, thrashed out our choices - and a very amiable conference it was (the others on the panel were Olly, Reviews Editor Rebecca Franks, Nicholas Anderson, Erica Jeal,  Andrew McGregor and Kate Wakeling).

Suffice it to say that of the above, Sean Shibe's first complete solo disc, of British guitar music, Bychkov's recording of Schmidt's Second Symphony and the revelatory Martinů Cantatas on Supraphon won the greatest degree of unanimity among us (my reviews of the latter two should be on the BBCMM website, but the reviews index is patchy and they aren't, yet). I'm also pleased that Alec-Frank Gemmill's enterprise in going flat-out for a CD that wasn't just the usual recital disc - featuring four different period horns, and Alasdair Beatson playing four different period pianos - made the grade.

You are of course free to vote any way you wish, or not at all; these are only my opinions, but I hope a bit more background is helpful. Biggest surprise for me was the electrifying approach of Jean Rondeau - anything but a cool dude in the performances - and Dynastie Bach family harpsichord concertos; since that got its nomination, I can't be too sad that Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque didn't make it too, though I liked her quasi-improvisatory playing just as much.

Instrumental and Chamber were the hardest categories to choose from, overwhelming us with riches; though content with the three nominations in each category, I would have been equally happy with Beatrice Rana's startling Bach Goldberg Variations, up there with Denk and Gould;

another surprise favourite, Shai Wosner's brilliant programming of 'Impromptus', one way forward in recital planning which he shares with fellow pianist Ari Porat;

violinist Daniel Rowland and pianist Natacha Kudritskaya rising to the near-impossible challenges of Enescu's supernatural Third Violin Sonata;

and several quartet discs. I got to know Grieg Quartets played with magical pianissimos where required by a group with whom I was also unfamiliar, the Meccore String Quartet, and another of those imaginatively planned programmes which seem the prerogative of the younger generation comes from the Schumann Quartet(t), linking 'Landscapes' of Haydn, Takemitsu, Bartók and Pärt .

There was an endgame battle for Instrumental because two of us hadn't received Krystian Zimerman's Schubert Sonatas by the day of judgement. Our front-runners pending that included my absolute favourite, Alexander Melnikov's first disc of Prokofiev sonatas (Melnikov was also a top contender with Andreas Staier in very live-wire Schubert piano duets).

Because it's perhaps the finest performance I've ever heard of the Sixth Sonata, and equal first with Richter in the Eighth, I'd put this above Zimerman's Schubert, since he stands alongside quite a few other greats. But still, when I finally heard it, I had to include Zimerman in my final three over Fenella Humphrys' 'Bach to the Future 2' - great playing, but for me there were a couple of duds among the new works. That probably gave Zimerman the edge in the joint final choice. Anyway, Melnikov will be back with Volume Two of his Prokofiev soon, which should give the 2018 panel something to get hold of...

Since this is also about discs which may not be new, but which I discovered in 2017, I have to give an awed salute to pianist Peter Jablonski, whose playing I haven't heard for years and whose fiancee, the vivacious Anastasia Belina, became a new friend last year when we appeared together in a pre-Proms talk.

It would have been my prerogative to simply pass over the discs she sent in silence if there had been nothing special, but they're first rate - I even think I prefer Jablonski's Grieg over Andsnes' (whose Sibelius disc, by the way, nearly reached the Instrumental category, but that was so saturated with good performances this year). Liszt, well, the repertoire isn't so much to my taste, but I can't deny the magisterial diversity of the approach. Wonderful sound from the Japan-based issues, too.

In another hangover from a previous year, having been mesmerised by young Pavel Kolesnikov's selection of Chopin Mazurkas at a lunchtime Prom, I caught up with this disc, which goes right to the top of my Chopin list (or equal first with several, at any rate).

But back to the Awards. Quite a few might-have-beens bit the dust in Orchestral - Paavo Järvi's lithe and clear-lined Strauss Ein Heldenleben and Don Juan just missed the final three by one vote, and Vaughan Williams gave rise to three front-runners - though the fresh kick applied by Andrew Davis to the more Satanic moments of the ballet Job as well as the eerie solos in the Ninth Symphony clinched the chosen one for me. Terje Tønnesen's string-orchestra versions of the Janáček String Quartets may have missed out by being rather hard to categorise, not least because of the excellent adaptation of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata (inspiration for the First Quartet) so well read - in English AND Norwegian - by Teodor Janson.

Sadly my personal favourite Opera/Vocal disc, Daniel Behle's Schubert Arias, wasn't to a couple of reviewers' taste repertoire-wise, and the period-instrument orchestra is not so highly rated

but I'm delighted Ann Hallenberg's delicious programme of Venetian carnival arias made the list. I'm also glad to have made the acquaintance of Louis Andriessen's Theatre of the World. Those who saw the world premiere production say this audio recording leaves more to the imagination, though I'd love to see a director like Richard Jones tackle its black-comedy apocalypse.

I also fought hard for both Louise Alder's and Nicky Spence's Strauss songs (the last a real surprise, conclusion to the excellent Hyperion series) in the Vocal category, but mezzo Jamie Barton's debut disc was a unanimous choice. There's a vocal personality that just leaps out at you; and that's a necessary virtue when you have over 200 discs to listen to and you can't sit there riveted with a score for every one. The special ones always make you stop what you're doing and listen properly.

Very happy with the Choral choices - as well as the Martinů, they included the best Estonian choir of all, Vox Clamantis, whose acquaintance I made at Tallinn's 2017 Estonian Music Days, in a peerless Pärt programme.

Champion oddity of the year for me, one that actually works, was the Japanese percussionist Kuniko giving a whole new, lugubrious and hypnotic meaning to Bach on the marimba. Don't think that even got reviewed in the BBC Music Mag last year, but if it did, it wasn't on the list. 

Is Bach the only composer who can be transferred to just about any instrument? It seems so: another Awards nomination I was sorry not to see reach the final three was the unusual trio of cellist Yo-Yo Ma, mandolinist Chris Thile and bass player Edgar Meyer in trio sonatas and other transcriptions; there's some magically deft playing in the more virtuosic passages there.

Needless to say my most serendipitous discovery of 2017, which I've already chronicled here and here, was the wonder of Helmuth Rilling's Bach cantatas.

It was an easy step from charity-shop purchases to the complete set, which will be keeping me company every Sunday and holy day in 2018.

Today's Cantata for the Third Sunday after Epiphany was BWV 111, 'Was mein Gott will, das g'scheh Allzeit', another gem from January 1725. The adoring, adorning pair of winds this two are oboes, dialoguing with violins in thirds around lively choral counterpoint and a terrific busy bass. This opening chorus may be in the minor, but it's all spritely. The cantus firmus hymn is one from 1547 by Albrecht von Brandenburg, who brought Lutherism to his state. Either his was a lopsided face or Cranach the Elder hasn't quite got it right here.

The cantata bursts with a muscular Christianity in the bass aria and a pounding duet for alto and tenor driven by dotted rhythms  - not quite charming, and it might be one of the few places in the Rilling set where the voices (Helen Watts and Lutz-Michael Herder) aren't perfectly matched, but the impression remains one of forceful vivacity to fit the 'confident steps' ('behertzten Schritten'). The surprise for me was the twist in the short but expressive soprano recitative before the final chorale, reminding us unexpectedly of that final struggle where death tears the spirit from the body, the deathbed a 'battleground' ('Kampftplatz'). The oboes are back at hand to guide the soloist through this final dark night. Lesson for the day: never take the essence of any cantata for granted until it's all over.

Now, on with that voting.

Off-piste CDs of 2016

Probably all the interesting ones are bound to be off-piste, and the smaller labels have all the best tunes now. The disclaimer is that my listening has been very partial, all the discs here until the Prokofiev footnote are ones that didn't make it to the BBC Music Magazine (or rather one did, but not in a review from me) and as a Martinů addict I'm bound for the second year running to choose a disc that furthered my knowledge of a score I hardly knew. In the case of Ariane, his one-act operatic swansong, it was good to hear it first live earlier this year in an intriguing staging by Rodula Gaitanu for the Guildhall School. But undoutedly Simona Šaturová and Tomáš Netopil (pictured above) have the edge in a concert performance from Essen released by Supraphon.

The structure is mysterious: a lovely, light prelude which gets repeated a couple of times suggests a commedia dell'arte treatment of the myth, like Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos. But Martinů's source is Georges Neveux, the author of Juliette ou La clef des songes, which of course elicited from Martinů one of the great operas of the 20th century. The action takes place entirely on Crete, and the Minotaur is the self that Theseus needs to slay, saying goodbye to the potential happiness of a marriage to Ariane.

Without the Guildhall's studio-broadcast setting and Nicola Said's convincing Maria Callas lookalike - based on the news that Martinů thought La Divina would sing the role of Ariadne - the essence of the myth became clearer to me simply in listening. And it seemed abundantly clear that with its central theme of man and woman not understanding each other it would make the perfect prelude in a double-bill to Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle (the music for the Minotaur even resembles that score's more violent passages). Šaturová is exquisite in the big but tender final monologue, and the tenor who sings in the Prologue is beguiling, too. Always a joy, or the opposite in a good sense, to hear Martinů's most acclaimed masterpiece, the Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Timpani and Piano, though it's one of his most light-less pieces - for catharsis, I had to go and put on the finale of the Third Symphony, one of the most transcendental endings to any symphony, with a touch of ambiguity right at the end.

Three soloists have given us outstanding discs. Emily Pailthorpe, wife of flautist Daniel and a top oboist in her own right, makes almost as good a case for a new work by Richard Blackford as she does for the adorable Strauss Oboe Concerto, and it's good to hear some of the BBC Symphony Orchestra wind players alongside here in Janáček's Mládí. Perfect programming; three cheers to Champs Hill Records.

Dunja Lavrova is a most delightful person whose acquaintance I made at the Pärnu Festival this summer where she and harpist Jana Boušková managed not to disappoint (to understate the case) with their Saint-Saëns Fantaisie after the predictable brilliance of Matt Hunt, Triin Ruubel and Sophia Rahman - a good friend of Dunja who brought her in to share the Pärnu spirit - in the best Bartok Contrasts I ever expect to hear. The premise of My Dusty Gramophone is to record violin and piano, or violin solo, miniatures in the style of the old Jascha Heifetz recordings which inspired her. In other words, with the violin very close to the microphone. And her beguiling style or styles withstand the rigorous inspection. I love her legato line in Rachmaninov, and it's good to have the Schumann Intermezzo from the FAE Sonata.

STOP PRESS: Dunja's just put up a YouTube present for her mother which is fun. Introduction included, since I love her delivery and sha'n't forget her and Sophia throwing their heads back and roaring with laughter at the big final party in Pärnu. As she says, you can zoom forward to 2'04 for the music.

Since I met him as a fellow jury-member for the Orkestival competition of school orchestras in the Concertgebouw earlier this year - a real highlight of 2016, and I'm over the moon to have been asked back - Jeroen de Groot has released a beautifully produced two-CD set of Bach's solo sonatas and partitas. I promised him I'd set aside a morning to listen properly before we met in Amsterdam, which I did on Wednesday morning, and was delighted to announce last night how impressed I was.

This is playing you can't possibly have on in the background as mellifluous, objective Bach. De Groot writes in his booklet of how much he respects the 'untouchable' phenomenon of Henryk Szeryng. His own major teacher Herman Krebbers tended to that aspect, making him learn the Bach works by heart as part of a large repertoire - 'but it was not very clear to me what to do with it'.

Then he saw a documentary on Glenn Gould and the Goldberg Variations, which showed him the way to an individual approach. With the prize money from winning at the Oscar Back Concourse de Groot went to study with the great Sandor Vegh, linking back to a tradition which included Joachim and Liszt. Vegh's words in interview which de Groot reproduces in the booklet should be carved out for every interpreter:

Music is a creative art, but so is the interpretation of it. The expression is revived in every musical phrase, and this is different every day. There are mysterious powers, vibrations and radiations that influence my feeling and that I, humble being that I am, cannot grasp at all. I can only say I have good days and bad days.

I assume that de Groot regards the day, or days, on which he recorded the sonatas and partitas, as among the good. The sound is so centred and golden, with the instrument matched to a baroque bow, that the graded forcefulness of the playing never grates. Here he is playing the most famous 'track' of all the solo violin music, the Preludium from Partita No. 3 in E.

There's immense power of expression throughout the two discs, and I love it all - though I'd be inclined to listen in four instalments as there's so much to take on board. And I'm happy to hear it over and over again - a treat to set alongside the Christmas Day 1723 assemblage of glorious Bach on the Dunedin Consort Magnificat disc which I discovered only last week.

Disc of the year hit the mat as late as this December, but I was in no doubt that it's the one, since anyone who storms the heights and conjures all the half-lights in Prokofiev's overwhelming masterpieces the Sixth and Eighth Piano Sonatas can be called a true Olympian, and Alexander Melnikov is one in a million. The sound allows for shattering force, too. More than that I can't say as this one is for the BBC Music Magazine and the review has yet to appear. As there are presumably two more instalments to come, more of this in 2017, please. I'd like to hear the entire Prokofiev piano works from grand master Melnikov.

Shouldn't really presume to make 'best of' choices in genres other than classical and opera, as I didn't see so much theatre, film and art. But I do know that the two December Saturdays devoted to great women in the theatre - the Donmar Shakespeare Trilogy and two consecutive performances of Mary Stuart with Juliet Stevenson and Lia Williams swapping roles (pictured below by Manuel Harlan) - were as exhilarating and thought-provoking as anything I've seen in the theatre.

Disappointing cinema-going earlier in the year was offset by finally catching up with Anomalisa, that astonshing animated meditation on alienated man and a woman in a million, on the telly. And William Kentridge's Deep Time at the Whitechapel Gallery was as full of wonder as any exhibition I've seen. Thought I'd written about it here, but apparently not; must go again and follow it up.

And that's my year's picks over and done with. You can read my Best of Classical 2016 on The Arts Desk here and Best of Opera here.

Rachmaninov and Rossini: soulmates?

Such unlikely bedfellows, you might think, especially from their physical appearances later in life. Yet it was precisely at these stages that depression took a more persistent hold, that the inspiration become sparser - famously no operas from Rossini in the last 39 years of his life, and only five major works from Rachmaninov in the last 25 of his - and also that the quirkiness in what they did compose became more marked. Over the past week I've devoted myself to one or the other - Rossini for the second of my Guillaume Tell classes at the Frontline Club, Rachmaninov for a BBC Music Magazine feature and a pre-performance talk with Vladimir Jurowski at his request before the brilliant finale of his LPO series* matching the best-known works of the composer with the rich and rare.

One element I found the two share in their late(r) works should have been obvious to me but only struck me now: the way they work within conventional harmonic boundaries - essential for Rossini up to a point, almost a point of honour for Rachmaninov as the natural heir of Tchaikovsky living through the 20th century's first three decades of change. It's especially marked with Rossini's last opera and the instrumental pieces how the miniature can be floating along in bel canto or French-Italian manner only to end with a little twist or kick.

Rachmaninov very rarely ends a movement with an obvious gesture; I'm thinking, in the larger scale, of the forlorn descent of the two clarinets at the end of the 'Wedding Bells' sequence in The Bells, but it also applies to many of the songs where the piano coda usually adds something surprising. Never more so than in the rich unfolding of distant harmonies at the end of 'Son' ('Sleep' - or 'Dream'; the Russian word means both). The poem is by Fyodor Sologub (pictured below in 1910 by Serov), so far removed from the world of that bleak novelistic masterpiece The Petty Demon.

I've tried to render its economy in translation:

In the world there is nothing
More desired than sleep.
Enchantment is in it,
It has peace,
It has neither sorrow
Nor laughter on its lips,
And in its fathomless eyes
Many mysteries.
It has two wide,
Wide wings,
Light ones, so light,
Like midnight mist.
No-one knows how it bears us,
Nor where to or on what.
It does not flap its wings
And does not move its shoulders.

A necessary prompt since this performance, which I very much like, by Julia Lezhneva, has no subtitles.

How does Rossini compare? Well, the surprises are often found mid-flow, as in the little woodwind warning that breaks the idyll of the opening chorus in Guillaume Tell; every number in this leisurely first act has something original about it. But to find a song with a novel progression at the end, how about this little gem to which there is more than at first meets the ear. The poet is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no less, a connection with last week's Guillaume Tell session, for which I unearthed a consummate French horn performance of a shepherd's Ranz des vaches known as the 'Rousseau' because the Genevan transcribed it. You can barely make him out in this painting by Dunouy of the master meditating in the park at La Rochecordon

but it chimes with the mood of 'Ariette à l'ancienne':

How the day seems long
When I am far from you!
All nature
Is now nothing to me.

The greenest grove
When you come not there
Is a mere wild place
Without appeal for me.

Rossini repeats the first stanza thrice and the second twice, not always to the same music. But it's the chromatic writing at the end which made me sit up when I was half-listening to later Rossini melodies on a Rossini recital recorded by Cecilia Bartoli back in 1990. The performance on YouTube, with a near-invisible Gyorgy Fischer at the piano, is somewhat later.

Rossini's originality was hard at work in those later decades - exercising harmonic ingenuity around one or two notes from the voice, and having fun with nigh-on 50 settings of Metastasio's very standard sentiments in 'Mi lagnerò tacendo'. I always think it's a shame that Hofmannsthal didn't choose this rather than 'Di rigori armato il seno' for the Italian tenor's aria in Der Rosenkavalier, but the latter is also the text for the Italian singer in the 'Ballet des Nations' in Molière/Lully's Le bourgeois gentilhomme, more relevant to what came next in the Strauss/Hofmannsthal partnership.

Anyway, here's Ceci singing three settings with Jean-Yves Thibaudet, respectively dark, poised and cheeky. La Bartoli's (over) play in the less-than-minute-long finale may cause listeners to miss the rarity of the form - a 'Sorzico', Spanish dance in 5/4, so a very early use of the metre in a classical work, to set alongside the Wedding Chorus in Glinka's A Life for the Tsar - and the spiciness of the vocal twists.

Wednesday night's Rachmaninov concert started with transcriptions none of us had heard before: orchestrations of four early piano pieces by a name hitherto unknown to me, Yury Butsko, comrade of Sviridov and Shchedrin, and arrangements of 10 short songs made for the great Ivan Kozlovsky in the early 1960s by Jurowski's grandfather, also Vladimir - thus enabling me to have chaired two talks featuring three generations of Jurowskis (unforgettable, though sadly by accident unrecorded by the LPO, the chat with his conductor father Mikhail before a blistering performance of Schnittke's First Symphony).

It was news to me how Rachmaninov's non grata status in the Soviet Union began to change with his financial support for the war effort, causing The Bells of all works - Jurowski's absolute favourite for depth and range - to be performed on the eve of the notorious 1948 show trials of 'formalism' in music, though without the organ.

I also nodded vigorously at Vladimir's assertion that the fourth piece arranged by Butsko, 'Easter', the finale of the Suite No. 1 for two pianos, is a precursor of the Minimalists. The basis is a tritone-haunted bell ostinato, as in the Coronation Scene of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, broken occasionally by a famous 'Christ is risen' Orthodox chant. It's a desert island track as played on my recording with Argerich and Rabinovich - still more amazing than the Butsko transcription - but  I was pleased to come across this recording by Anastasia and Lyubov Gromoglasova. Odd that the camera only concentrates on one of the sisters, but that gives you a good idea how the lines are parcelled out.

Any other connection between Rachmaninov and Rossini? Respighi, who transcribed five of the great Etudes-Tableaux and turned Rossini's 'sins of my old age' into the brilliant potpourri ballet La boutique fantasque, which I've been listening to today alongside Britten's Rossinian dance suites the Soirées and Matinées Musicales (the Matinées begin with instrumental innovations on the Pas de six in Act 1 of Guillaume Tell, and end with something outlandishly Brittenesque). I want to get to know Respighi's sources, because if they contain anything like the number of dissonances and twists that appear in the ballet, they'll be more oddities to add to the Rossinian collector's corner.

A last word about two recordings I couldn't be without featuring the music of both composers. After the concert I went back to playing the two versions of Rachmaninov's Op. 39 Etudes Tableaux which kept neck and neck at the end of my Radio 3 Building a Library on this fascinating sequence. I still find it the greatest piano opus in Rachmaninov's susbstantial invention, and I still don't want to choose between Rustem Hayroudinoff and Alexander Melnikov - each has the edge on the other in certain numbers, but both are teeming with imagination throughout.

Yet as a disc Melnikov's is probably No.1 on the Rach shelf  (I'd also need the Kondrashin double of The Bells and Symphonic Dances, probably the Argerich/Rabinovich double act too). That's because it breaks up piano works - the concluding opus is the spellbinding late Variations on a Theme of Corelli - with the last set of songs, composed for Nina Koshetz shortly before Rachmaninov left Russia in 1917. It was here I first heard and fell in love with 'Son'. And the equivalent, much darker and more expensive masterpiece in the piano output, Op. 39 No. 7 in C minor, probably has its spacious apogee in Melnikov's hands (not bad considering Richter is high up among the competition).

I blush to confess that the collection of songs and scenes middle and late from Cecilia Bartoli and the underrated Charles Spencer (once Christa Ludwig's pianist of choice, now Anne Schwanewilms's) wasn't one I'd turned to much until the Guillaume Tell classes. And then I've played it again and again since. The six 'Mi lagnerò tacendo' choices are all fascinating, 'L'orpheline du Tirol' is bigger than I thought, and the gran scena at the end, Giovanna d'Arco is an amiable stunner.
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*Before you accuse me of reviewing a concert in which I played a small preliminary part, let me explain that I asked all my Arts Desk colleagues to step in, met with no success, thought I wouldn't write about it, but then realised that it was too vital and unforgettable an event to ignore. My feeling about writing about the work of performers I know and like is no shame, because I came to know them exactly through being an admirer of their art in the first place. And you can find reviews where I was less than enthusiastic about a Jurowski interpretation.