London Symphony Orchestra / Simon Rattle BEETHOVEN Christ on the Mount of Olives

 

CHRIST ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES

 

Elsa Dreisig / Jonathan Ware MORGEN

                                                                         MORGEN

Wiener Philharmoniker / Franz Welser-Möst THE PEACE CONCERT VERSAILLES

A setlist like no other, a never-heard-before compilation of deeply moving musical pieces highlighting numerous aspects of war and peace. This is how the Wiener Philharmoniker, led by Franz Welser-Möst and supported by an all-star line-up, among them singular pianist Yuja Wang, tackled the highly anticipated concert in commemoration of the end of the 1st world war. 100 years after the first of the devastating humane catastrophes of the 20th century officially ended at Versailles, a group of inspired musicians gathered at the historic site for a concert that will live on in the memory of those who have seen or heard it.

Quatuor Arod THE MATHILDE ALBUM

With this album of works by Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Webern – key figures in Vienna’s musical life in the early 20th century – the Quatuor Arod honours the woman who became Arnold Schoenberg’s wife in 1901. Mathilde was Zemlinsky’s sister and the dedicatee of her husband’s String Quartet No 2, an innovative work in both its tonal language and its integration of a soprano – here Elsa Dreisig. It was completed in the summer of 1908, a tumultuous period in the Schoenbergs’ marriage.

Elsa Dreisig / Orchestre National de Montpellier Occitanie / Michael Schønwandt MIROIR(S)

Miroirs is the debut album from the young French-Danish soprano Elsa Dresig. The winner of Plácido Domingo’s Operalia singing competition in 2016, she has performed opera in Berlin, Paris, Zurich and Aix-en-Provence and sung with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic in Berlin, Salzburg, Lucerne and Paris.

Miroirs showcases her vocal and dramatic range with different ‘reflections’ on a situation or character in arias and scenes from operas by Gounod, Massenet, Rossini, Mozart, Puccini, Richard Strauss and the rarely-heard Daniel Steibelt. The album includes two world premiere recordings.

Thibaut Garcia BACH INSPIRATIONS

The 24-year-old Franco-Spanish classical guitarist Thibaut Garcia’s third recording – his second for Erato – revisits the music of Bach and Latin America. But where the first, ‘Demain dès l’aube’, included Bach’s Sixth Partita, BWV830, and the second, ‘Leyendas’, Piazzolla’s Estaciones Porteñas, ‘Bach Inspirations’, as its title suggests, focuses on Bach’s influence on subsequent composers, not just from Latin America but also from Poland and the Balkans.

In his flowing, pellucid interpretations Garcia himself seems to be inspired by Bach’s name, and throughout much of the programme there’s a compelling tension between the rippling enunciation of lighter paragraphs and the precipitous propulsion of more dramatic passages. This is most obvious in Garcia’s thrilling, magisterial performance of Bach’s D minor Chaconne, where he also relishes the ringing campanella effects while injecting a mesmeric fluidity into the rapid scale and arpeggio passages that throw into sharper relief the cleanly etched architecture of the sunlit major section. But it is also there from the beginning, with Barrios’s melancholy La catedral, and later, in the less often-heard Inventions of Alexandre Tansman and Dušan Bogdanović’s superb Suite brève.

An expressive, sweet-toned Elsa Dreisig joins Garcia for the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria and the aria from Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No 5, while the latter’s Bachian Prelude No 3 looks past the Bogdanović to the most sheerly beautiful takes on Bach’s ‘Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme’ and ‘Jesus bleibet meine Freude’ I’ve heard from any guitarist to date: clear, relaxed and full of feeling. (William Yeoman / Gramophone)