Classical CDs Weekly: Boyle, Martin, Rachmaninov

This Saturday we’ve a new recording of a famous Russian symphony played by an Italian orchestra under their London-based principal conductor. There’s a rare Shakespearean opera written in the 1950s by a Swiss master using a German text. And a Scottish composer celebrates his 60th birthday with an invigorating collection of piano and chamber works.

Rory Boyle: Music for Solo Piano, Phaethon’s Dancing Lesson

James Willshire (piano), Bartholdy Trio (Delphian)

As a 12-year-old I sang in the first performance of Scottish composer Rory Boyle’s children’s opera Alfege. Dressed in grey tights and wearing a tabard made from what looked like bits of old carpet, my role involved rushing centre stage in an early scene and shouting out the word “Pillage!” It was a shock to read that this anthology of piano and chamber works is released to celebrate the composer’s 60th birthday – I can still recall a wiry, impossibly youthful figure. The works chosen have a broad stylistic range. You start listening to Arrivals and Departures, four beguiling short pieces commemorating the births or deaths of family friends, and you’re instantly seduced. Then Reeling bursts into life, the thrilling, dissonant toccata figurations brilliantly sustained by the work’s dedicatee, James Willshire.

Boyle’s compact, pungent Sonata makes for compelling listening, especially the central Recitatives and Dreams with its bell-like sonorities. There’s an ingenious Bach tribute, three enigmatic, thorny Studies for the one in the middle, and Boyle’s piano trio, Phaethon’s Dancing Lesson. Here, the myth of Phaethon driving the sun chariot allows Boyle to compose a compact sequence of five bleak, pithy dances. It’s not a comfortable listening experience, but it’s so, so exciting. Turn to the tiny, charming Tatty’s Dance, a two-minute birthday gift for the composer’s wife, and you’re converted. It’s unmistakably the work of the same composer though – you sense it in the shifting metres and darkly coloured chords.

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Frank Martin: Der Sturm (The Tempest)
Soloists, Netherlands Radio Choir and Philharmonic Orchestra/Thierry Fischer (Hyperion)

Swiss composer Frank Martin’s 1954 opera receives its belated first recording in a live performance directed by Thierry Fischer. Martin used a famous German translation of Shakespeare’s text, effectively retaining the essence of the original. Musically, Der Sturm is a joy – Martin’s distinctive, highly chromatic Neo-Classicism resulting in music of rare beauty and wit. You hear this in the Prelude’s gently swirling lines, and in the brief, memorable chord progressions which knit the score together. Martin saw Ariel as the voice of Nature, his ethereal outpourings sung by an offstage chorus with tinkling harpsichord accompaniment. Naturally, Caliban’s twisted vocal lines are, in the composer’s words, "edgy", and murkier harmonically. There are hints of Weill and Eisler in Gonzalo’s urbane, jazzy music. The disparate elements fuse seamlessly, and as the various threads are tied up and your eyes moisten during Prospero’s weary final monologue, you can’t help feeling immensely saddened that this work has never received a professional staging in Britain.

Thierry Fischer’s immaculate concert performance was taped in the Concertgebouw in 2008. Martin’s lucid textures have a cool radiance and the casting is strong, led by bass Robert Holl’s charismatic Prospero and Christine Buffle as Miranda. This piece demands to be heard – it’s unshowy, tautly constructed and often heartbreaking. Excellent notes and a full libretto are provided. What are you waiting for?

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Rachmaninov: Symphony No 2, Lyadov, The Enchanted Lake
Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Roma/Antonio Pappano (EMI)

Anatoly Lyadov is remembered, if at all, as a minor footnote in musical history. Near the end of his life he was Diaghilev’s first choice to compose a ballet based on The Firebird, a job which eventually fell to a young composer called Stravinsky. Lyadov excelled as a creator of perfumed miniatures, and The Enchanted Lake fits this template perfectly. Rarely performed today, it provides an apt companion piece to Antonio Pappano’s live account of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony. Sadly, it’s easy to understand the neglect; Lyadov’s little tone poem is perhaps too brief and elusive for popular taste, a tiny gesture compared to the symphony’s heavy, emotive posturing.

I like the sound of Pappano’s Rome orchestra; there’s a satisfying richness to the lower string sonority which gives the glowering introduction a brooding intensity. The tiny touches of rubato, of ebb and flow, are unobtrusively applied; the first movement’s lyrical second theme emerges haltingly, hesitantly. I’d never realised before how closely Rachmaninov modelled the movement on Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, with an apocalyptic brass-led climax leading to a passage where it feels as if we’re picking ourselves up off the floor. The scherzo’s fugal processional glitters, and there’s a nicely audible stopped horn pedal rattling away near the close. Pappano’s Adagio flows sweetly, and his Allegro vivace is uplifting but never over-sentimental. It’s a wonderful work, and a good performance can make me rheumy-eyed in a way that Mahler and Tchaikovsky never can. This is a really good performance. I blubbed.

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