Gramophone Awards 2002

“If Saint-Saëns's idiom once answered – and maybe still does – to qualities fundamental to the French musical character, it must be said straight away that Hough sounds the complete insider. He commands the range of the big statements, whatever their character, as well as sparkle and panache, a sense of drama and seemingly inexhaustible stamina; and he can charm. Yet perhaps most delightful is the lightness and clarity of his decorative playing.
It's a bonus for the virtuoso passages not to sound hectic or overblown – for Saint-Saëns, virtuosity always had an expressive potential.
There's an air of manufacture about the writing sometimes, certainly, but as Hough knows, there must be nothing mechanical in its delivery.
Sweeping across the keyboard, dipping and soaring through the teaming notes, he flies like a bird. He manages to convey what makes these pieces tick: fine workmanship, fantasy, colour, and the various ways Saint-Saëns was so good at combining piano and orchestra. The orchestra has plenty to do. These scores are textbooks of lean but firm orchestration from which at least one major French composer learned (Ravel, another eclectic, who must have seen the 'old bear' as a kindred spirit). The days are past when the CBSO under Louis Frémaux was considered Britain's 'French' orchestra, but with Sakari Oramo it does splendidly here, playing alertly with its inspiring soloist as he does with it (another plus). The recording balances are fine, with lovely piano sound and plenty of orchestral detail in natural-sounding perspectives.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“Marvellous performances of these delightful and ever inventive works from Stephen Hough, full of joy, vigour and sparkle, with Oramo and the CBSO acompanying spiritedly and with the lightest touch...An easy first choice for this repertoire.” Penguin Guide, 2011 edition

“on this disc Cecilia Bartoli makes clear that Gluck was a formidable musical dramatist even in his early, pre-'reform' works...This CD, in short, is a tour de force of dramatic singing, in the widest sense of the term: and it is also full of really beautiful sound; rich, warm, out.” Gramophone Magazine, 2001

5 star BBC Music Magazine

“Few readings have been more assiduously toured or generally acclaimed than Wand's Bruckner Eighth yet Wand himself struggled to better on record the exact and far-seeing account of the symphony he made with the Cologne RSO in 1979. In January 2001 he harnessed the Berlin Bruckner sound to his own particular ends, a potentially Sisyphean task for a man then nearing his 90th birthday.
And the rewards are here. This Eighth is exceptionally fine. When in the Scherzo you sense that the mountains themselves are beginning to dance, you know you're onto a good thing; on this occasion, Olympus itself seems to have caught the terpsichorean bug. Not that anything is exaggerated or overblown. Wand knows where each peak is and how best to approach it. His reading is broader than it was 20 years ago, yet nowhere is there any sense of unwanted stasis. Wand draws from the orchestra, the brass and strings in particular, sound of great power and transparency which the engineers have translated in a record- ing of uncommon reach and splendour. This is a grand and worthy memento for the tens of thousands who heard Wand conduct the symphony in the concert hall.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“So what's so special about the performance? Try Canadian tenor Ben Heppner, outdoing his fellow countryman Jon Vickers on Sir Colin's first recording of Les Troyens. The other principals are very fine too...The playing is formidable, revelatory, and the big set-pieces have an epic sweep to them.” Matt Fernand, bbc.co.uk, 20th November 2002

“Davis's second live recording...magnificently crowns his whole career as a Berlioz interpreter on record, generally outshining even his pioneer version of 30 years earlier...[Lang] is superb, firm, rich and intense, investing every phrase with emotional power, instantly establishing her dominance...Heppner excels himself” Penguin Guide, 2011 edition

“The splendiferous climax of Davis’s first Berlioz cycle” The Times, 10th May 2013

“Andsnes penetrates the psyche of this music, and his playing of consummate artistry and insight. Not only does he have keen poetic feeling but magisterial pianistic finesse.” BBC Music Magazine, Proms 2007

“Once again on home ground, Andsnes reminds you of his capacity to go directly to the heart of the matter. Taking you on a journey of increasing subtlety and introspection, he makes you aware that so much of this music is for those long winter nights. At the same time the music is so richly varied: 'Melody's insistent dactylic rhythm creates a strange unsettling poetic ambience, while the central oasis of calm in 'Wedding Day at Troldhaugen' would surely melt a heart of stone.
All Andsnes's performances have that deceptive simplicity which is his touchstone. His playing is always sensitive, never sentimental and with a bracing and essential 'touch of the codfish' (Grieg) when required. And while one would never want to be without Gilels' rapt DG performances (see below), praise could hardly be too high for a pianist who so enviably captures the poignant nature of a composer who Tchaikovsky once claimed had 'a glance like a charming and candid child'. Grieg's piano, with its distinctive timbre, provides an added touch of nostalgia.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“The Takács do a fine job here: controlled, well paced and impeccably balanced.
They manage to balance the music's vertical and horizontal aspects beautifully, long-breathed contrapuntal lines gliding serenely above a sharp, occasionally dramatic accompaniment – masterful playing indeed and typical of this first lap of the Takács' projected Beethoven cycle.
The Takács hold both line and rhythm in Op 59 No 1 with imposing control. Their manner of badinage in the mischievously hocketing second movement is more intense than the rival account by The Lindsays, and their tempos consistently swifter. In Op 59 No 3 the Takács approximate the Busch in a broad, soulful Andante con moto. And in the fugal finale they're almost on a par with the Emersons, whose demonic DG account is one of the most viscerally exciting quartet recordings around. The finale of Op 59 No 2 is a tautly braced canter whereas in the Scherzo of the Harp, Op 74, taken at a hair-raising lick, the Takács make obsessive music of the dominating four-note idea – and there's absolutely no let up in tension for the cello-led trio. Indeed, the Takács' Harp is one of the finest ever recorded, with fiery reportage of the first movement's central development and a delightfully playful account of the finale, the 'tipsy' first variation especially.
The jewel, then, is Op 59 No 2, though you'd be hard pressed to find a rival digital set of Opp 59 and 74 that's better overall. Andrew Keener's recording (St George's, Bristol) reports a realistic 'edge' within a sympathetic acoustic. You won't find a finer quartet recording anywhere.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“Strauss singing doesn't come much better than this. No doubt the composer himself, with his love of the soprano voice, would have been enthralled by Isokoski's glorious singing. He might also have approved of Janowski's straightforward, quite brisk conducting as he was never one to sentimentalise his own music. With a combination of free, unfettered tone, not a hint of strain in high-lying passages, a fine legato and an amazingly long breath, Isokoski fulfils every demand of her chosen songs. To those attributes she adds just a hint of quick vibrato, which she uses unerringly to expressive purpose throughout.
Add the depth of feeling she brings to inwardly emotional pieces such as Befreit, Ruhe meineSeele! and, above all, Morgen!, a perfect realisation of this oft-recorded piece, and you have performances to rival any of the greats of the past.
She reminds one most of Lisa della Casa, the first soprano to record the Four Last Songs, and Sena Jurinac. She has the same smiling timbre, the same natural style, the same avoidance of wallowing in music that contains its own proportion of sentiment. Try the ecstatic execution of the final verse of 'Beim Schlafengehen' and you'll understand. If, on the other hand, you prefer a more leisurely approach, there are always Janowitz and Karajan.
Janowski is obviously at one with his soprano, not only here but also in Zueignung. Refined playing from the Berlin Radio Symphony and an open recording complete the pleasure.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“This is something very much out of the ordinary. These eight arias, taken variously from Gluck's early operas (those preceding his 'reforms' that began with Orfeo in 1762) or his non-reform later ones, are almost wholly unfamiliar, but they have great power and character; and they're sung with an extraordinary emotional force and technical skill, not to say a sheer beauty of tone, that can't be matched by any other singer today. Cecilia Bartoli's range is formidable. In the first aria, from La clemenza diTito, she sings with trumpet-like tone and brilliance of attack, throwing off wide-spanning arpeggios with evident abandon and dispatching coloratura with fluency and precision, each note articulated and perfectly tuned. The second, an elegantly pathetic little piece from the later IlParnaso confuso, is a tour de force of delicate, tender pianissimo singing. The third, from Ezio, begins with an orchestral recitative of thrilling dramatic urgency and goes on to an aria of great passion. Bartoli is described as a mezzo-soprano here, and her voice does indeed chiefly lie in that range; but most of these are soprano arias, and she happily goes well above the stave – there's one slightly squally high C sharp in the first aria but she's usually pretty comfortable in her top register. The accompaniments are splendidly sensitive and alert. A quite outstanding disc that no one who loves fine singing can miss.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“From Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire to Boulez's Le marteau sans maître and Kurtág's Messages of the late RV Troussova, modernist composers have used the medium of voice with mixed instrumental ensemble for their most allusive and personal utterances. Birtwistle's Pulse Shadows (1991-6) belongs in this company. While not easy listening, it deals with some of the most elemental and profound topics in contemporary culture, and this recording rises to the score's many challenges, both technically and interpretatively.
Pulse Shadows is subtitled 'Meditations on Paul Celan', acknowledging the poet-author of the texts for the nine vocal movements, and indicating that the nine movements for string quartet with which the vocal movements are interleaved reflect on – shadow – the emotions that setting Celan (mainly in Michael Hamburger's English translations) created in the composer. The poems are oblique rituals, meditations on the state of human consciousness after the Holocaust, and Birtwistle's music links that quality with the kind of innately melancholic, stoical, intensely humane spirit that informs most of his finest works. Claron McFadden proves herself the most mellifluous singer of this music.
Together with the precision and empathy of the Arditti Quartet and Reinbert de Leeuw, not to mention the admirable recorded sound, this is a disc to live with, and be haunted by, for years to come.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010