SACDs - Barber, S

“Poltera meets [the Concerto's] technical demands with almost complete ease, and projects the more lyrical moments with subtle inflections of line and beautifully centred tone...Poltera and pianist Kathryn Stott bring out [the Sonata's] Brahmsian ardour and its contrasts between tranquillity and restlessness.” BBC Music Magazine, May 2013 ****

“There are three hits here on one CD...[Poltera] is outstanding and invariably well-supported by the Bergen players under Litton. His high positions are effortless, as are the nasty double thirds...Poltera's duet with the oboe in the slow movement is magical...A feature of Litton's Adagio is the way it creeps in fat the start from nothing. Then it's all beautifully paced, spacious and warm. Recorded quality throughout is top-drawer in a truly winning CD.” Gramophone Magazine, February 2013

“Christian Poltéra is ideally suited to this music, not least because he obtains a gloriously rich and full tone from his 1675 Guarnerius cello. Kathryn Stott, faced with a very full piano part, matches the ardour of his playing...[in the Concerto] Poltéra is a highly persuasive soloist and the accompaniment from Litton and his orchestra is first rate.” MusicWeb International, 3rd May 2013

“The Zurich-born cellist champions — with masterly elan — the unjustly neglected concerto by the American composer...With the pianist Kathryn Stott, Poltera gives us the ideal coupling...and Litton’s excellent Bergen players round off this outstanding disc with an encore in the form of the Adagio for Strings.” Sunday Times, 13th January 2013

“as Christian Poltéra's fierce, theatrical performance demonstrates, [the Concerto is] a ruggedly impressive achievement in its own right...And while we don't need another recording of Barber's Adagio for Strings, Andrew Litton and the Bergen Philharmonic's is wonderfully refined.” The Guardian, 17th January 2013 ****

“The performance is a triumph, superbly well sung by Company Voices, a professional chamber choir that forms one part of the choral ensemble Conspirare.” International Record Review, September 2012

“These are exemplary performances and Johnson represents every nuance of Barber's expression markings...Barber's choral output now has the attention it deserves.” Gramophone Magazine, Awards Issue 2012

“Performances throughout the programme are exemplary, the recorded sound is excellent - I listened in conventional CD format - and the documentation, which is in English, French and German is first class and beautifully laid out. This is an important disc for all devotees of Samuel Barber’s music.” MusicWeb International, October 2012

“The 36 professional of the America choir Conspirare sing with good tuning and clear articulation, their voices beautifully blended in a warm acoustic...Craig Hella Johnson directs a sympathetic performance, with a good team of step-out soloists, led by baritone David Farwig.” BBC Music Magazine, December 2012 ****

“…it is a breathtaking achievement. There is passion, but precision, technically well-nigh faultless.” BBC Music Magazine, March 2008

“Eschenbach's Poulenc is heavily romanticised, squeezing every last drop of pathos from the score and finding many moments of ravishing beauty. Latry is, for the most part, a willing accomplice – only in the swaying rhythm of the subito andante moderato do conductor and soloist seem at odds with each other – and while it is left to him to root out the music's austere and acerbic sides, he clearly relishes Eschenbach's slow tempi in reaching the work's two powerful climaxes.
This performance may miss many of Poulenc's subtleties in its single-minded striving for loveliness but the wildly enthusiastic cheering from the audience seems wholly justified given the unusual breadth of this reading.
The recording was made at the inaugural concerts of the new organ of Philadelphia's Verizon Hall, which included the almost obligatory Saint-Saëns Symphony. Properly, this is more a test of how well an organ integrates with an orchestra than a vehicle for the organ itself, and on those terms this proves to be a wholly successful performance. Eschenbach's intuitive reading casts the work in a rich perspective, the opening possessing a tangible atmosphere of menace while the second movement's Presto positively fizzes with energy.
The organ shows its stature (the booklet tells us that, with 6938 pipes, it is the largest concerthall organ in the US) with palpable depth in the first movement and majestic presence in the finale; but the real star of the show here is the Philadelphia Orchestra itself. Mouth-watering wind solos, gorgeous string-playing and a wonderfully crisp and cohesive sound (as it must be in what sounds a dreadfully dry acoustic) combine to create rather more memorable moments than we have a right to expect; the string entry just before the close of the first section is, as they say, to die for.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“Gian Carlo Menotti took as his starting-point for the libretto of Vanessa the atmosphere of Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales. His story is original, but the ideas that fired him can be found in the stories. One of Dinesen's heroines lives a secluded life, and although beautiful, she's forlorn – 'she knew that she did not exist, for nobody ever looked at her'. Vanessa, too, has lived her adult life waiting for the return of her faithless admirer, Anatol. When he does come, it's an impostor.
For an opera that's so seldom performed, Vanessa has been accorded a generous three complete recordings. This new one, recorded in London's Barbican after a concert in 2003, has splendidly vivid sound. Leonard Slatkin draws full-blooded playing from the BBC Symphony Orchestra, accentuating Barber's use of yearning, Puccini-inspired melodies, laced with a few nods to Berg and Strauss. The weirdest music, that for the ball in Act 3, sounds like some kind of Western barn dance, even though the setting is northern Europe.
Excellent though Susan Graham is as Erika, Christine Brewer is so much in command, and in such splendid voice, there's no doubt it's Vanessa's story. One problem is that the three female voices sound a little similar: Catherine Wyn- Rogers is a youthful old Baroness.
Anatol, the greatest cad in opera since Pinkerton, is made almost sympathetic by William Burden. Neal Davies does what he can with the rather stock figure of the Doctor.
But listening at home one is conscious of an awful lot of generalised mood music. Vanessa was the last gasp of American verismo: its Met première in 1958 was in the same season as Bernstein's West Side Story o” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010