Classical CD of the week
PUCCINI La bohème Anna Netrebko, Rolando Villazon, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, cond Bertrand de Billy DG 4776600
Deutsche Grammophon makes big claims for its new Bohème. This set is “definitive” only in that it defines the future of opera recording and stars the two most marketable young singers of the day who actually sing in opera houses: Anna Netrebko as the wilting consumptive, Mimi, and Rolando Villazon as her passionate on-off lover, Rodolfo. Both are good, but don’t throw away your Freni-Pavarotti, de los Angeles-Björling or Tebaldi-Bergonzi pairings.
Taken from live concerts, with patching, the central duo and the fine conductor are excellent reasons for sampling this performance, despite underpar casting in the supporting roles of Marcello (a nondescript Boaz Daniel) and Musetta (the strident Nicole Cabell). Netrebko sings with expansive, gleaming tone, but doesn’t banish memories of the great recorded Mimis. The jewel of the set is Villazon’s impassioned Rodolfo, a portrayal of overwhelming generosity of spirit that recalls the late Giuseppe di Stefano when, describing his poverty in his Act I aria, Villazon sings “l’anima ho milionaria” (I have the soul of a millionaire). His breakdown at Mimi’s death is more heartrending than the demise of Netrebko’s tough-cookie flower girl. HC
HANDEL Riccardo Primo Kammerorchester Basel, cond Paul Goodwin Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 88697174212
Handel had already chosen a subject based on English history – the conquest of Cyprus by Richard the Lionheart and his marriage there to a princess of Navarre – when George I died in 1727. What may have been planned as a celebration of the composer’s British nationalisation became an appropriate celebration for the coronation of George II, Handel’s patron and friend since Hanover days. Riccardo Primo shows the heroic king torn between love for sweet-natured Costanza and temperamental Pulcheria. Riccardo eventually chooses constancy over beauty, in music notable for its rich ceremonial scoring. Goodwin’s cast is superb, headed by Lawrence Zazzo as the errant king, Nuria Rial as the sweet princess and especially the fiery Geraldine McGreevy as the jealous termagant. The veteran David Wilson-Johnson is in splendid form as the defeated Cypriot tyrant.
HCMOZART String Quartets, K499 in D, K575 in D Klenke Quartett Profil PH04030
The solitary “Hoffmeister” quartet, K499, is a neglected work. Yet, with its masterly opening movement, passionate adagio and enigmatic, teasing, will-o’-the-wisp finale, it is a worthy successor to Mozart’s “Haydn” set and, at the same time, a link to the homelier, leaner-textured “Prussian” quartets of 1789-90, the first of which, also in D major, figures on this disc. The all-female, Weimar-trained Klenke Quartett, an unusually homogeneous ensemble, play them with delicacy and brio, though a slightly broader tempo for K499’s adagio might have made more of the sublime passage leading to the reprise.
DCSCHUMANN Das Paradies und die Peri Dorothea Röschmann, Christoph Strehl, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, cond Nikolaus Harnoncourt RCA Red Seal 88697271552
It sits uncomfortably with our understanding of Schumann’s music, and its misuse as propaganda by the Nazis has unfairly tarnished its reputation. Yet this once popular oratorio about the attempts of a peri (offspring of a fallen angel and a human female) to enter paradise is beginning to reestablish a presence in the repertoire. With this recording, Harnoncourt has made himself its latest, and possibly most persuasive, champion. In charge of the fine Bavarian Radio SO and Chorus, and helped by a first-rate team of soloists, he shapes his tender reading beautifully, positively demanding admiration for the work.
SPSTEVE REICH Daniel Variations, Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings Los Angeles Master Chorale, cond Grant Gershon; London Sinfonietta, cond Alan Pierson Nonesuch 755979949-4
These pieces are as good an example as any of the jogging, jaunty repetition Reich has made his own, and suggest that bold departures from the style are unlikely. The 22-minute Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings goes through the wonted motions and modulations with Reichian rigour, but without the gripping, if awful, power of sheer insistency that marks his 55-minute Music for 18 Musicians, recently given at the Festival Hall. The half-hour Daniel Variations, a memorial for the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, puts tiny slivers of text (Pearl’s own words and some from the biblical book of Daniel) through the repetition mill – but to what purpose?
PD
Hugh Canning, David Cairns, Stephen Pettitt and Paul Driver Rock, pop, jazz PHIL CAMPBELL After the Garden Safehouse SAFE003CD
Decca has been infamous for more than 40 years as “the company that rejected the Beatles”. Perhaps, in 40 years’ time, EMI will be similarly infamous as “the company that rejected Phil Campbell twice”. Or, more accurately, “the company that signed Campbell, then let him go, then signed him again, then let him go again”. Of course, this depends on people in the 2040s remembering what a record label was, and on Campbell getting much more famous. The first seems unlikely, but the second is a better bet. Campbell’s music will be adored by the Later/Jonathan Ross audience, who like proper songs sung by proper singers. He is a gifted songwriter and his work is consistently sing-alongable. After the Garden contains two hits-in-waiting: the slow, brooding, David Grayish Cold Engines and the sublime, self-deprecating, upbeat love song Maps (How I Feel About You): “She could live in a wonderland, but still she hangs around with me.”
ME
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE Narrow Stairs Atlantic 7567899465
Rumours swirled around the making of this sixth album by the US indie-rock four-piece – it was going to be a darker affair than before; they were bent on major-label self-sabotage – and these seemed to be confirmed by a lead single, I Will Possess Your Heart, that clocked in at 8 minutes 35 seconds. What do you know, it is darker. The doomed but in-denial romantic on Bixby Canyon Bridge and No Sunlight, the creepily insistent suitor who makes his pledge on the single, the despairing lover on You Can Do Better than Me – each, in Ben Gibbard’s hands, and with arrangements that spike Death Cab’s customary melodiousness with dashes of sonic bitters and unpredictability, contributes to a superb album, blacker, perhaps, than usual, but up there with their best.
DCMINNIE DRIVER Seastories Rounder 4780436
The British actress can’t be accused of opportunism (“What shall I do now? Oh, I know, I’ll make an album”): before she became a film star, Driver was signed to Island Records, until television success forced her to choose between two careers. If her 2004 album Everything I’ve Got in My Pocket suggested she had made the right decision 10 years before, this follow-up invites a different response. On Seastories, she heads determinedly and fruitfully down the alt-country road, teaming with Liz Phair on the plangent Sorry Baby, and laying down a vocal imbued with anticipated heartache over Ryan Adams’s guitar on Beloved. None of it is going to alarm the horses, and narcosis can threaten at times, but this is still a decent album with quite a nice actress attached.
DCPop CD of the week
BON IVER For Emma, Forever Ago 4AD CAD2809CD
If you’ve had a sneaky feeling that much of the rootsy, lo-fi Americana released is probably being made in a sumptuous penthouse overlooking the beach in Miami, you’ll be pleased to discover that For Emma, Forever Ago is the product of an honest-to-goodness log cabin in Wisconsin, where the man behind Bon Iver, Justin Vernon, took breaks from recording to chop the wood needed to heat the place and to shoot the deer that fed him. All of which would be so much pointless detail if his back-to-basics seclusion hadn’t led Vernon to produce a minimalist masterpiece. Built largely on an acoustic guitar that, instead of strumming, somehow pulses, swells and fades, the songs are relentlessly simple, sometimes barely there, and the meaning of the words is often similarly elusive until the vocal suddenly focuses round a burst of anger or frustration: “I told you to be patient.” Bon Iver’s nearest reference points are perhaps Iron and Wine, maybe Willard Grant Conspiracy; but, in truth, his nearest neighbours are miles away. ME
ELVIS COSTELLO Momofuku Lost Highway 1766583
Recorded in just nine days (and all the better for it) at Sound City, California, this is Costello’s best album for years. The first three tracks tear out of the traps: No Hiding Place is spiky, chippy EC, settling scores; American Gangster Time finds him biting the hand that now feeds him, as Steve Nieve essays an Oliver’s Army-style keyboard motif beneath him; Turpentine recalls the melody of High Fidelity, as Costello and guests, including Jenny Lewis and Pete Thomas’s daughter Tennessee (of the Like), surround the song with an unsettling sonic squall. It’s not perfect – one song’s liberatingly ramshackle approach is another’s self-indulgent meandering – but Costello sounds invigorated, and that remains, even now, a thrilling situation to witness.
DCSPECTRUM MEETS CAPTAIN MEMPHIS Indian Giver Birdman BMR105
When Rugby’s drone duo Spacemen 3 split in 1991, the regrettably named Sonic Boom turned avant-weird with Spectrum, while Jason Pierce cultivated Spiritualized’s calculated rock classicism. These days, however, Pierce plays with free improvisers and his unforgiving rival returns to the acid-blues of their boyhood. Here, Captain Memphis and the celebrated producer and session man Jim Dickinson deep-fry a batch of old Boom numbers, and three originals, in a spicy Southern sauce. Boom sounds almost seductive as Stax horns soak Spacemen 3’s Take Your Time. The Lonesome Death of Johnny Ace finds Dickinson’s dog-growl trapped in a toxic swamp of bubbling boogie and white noise. A strange but successful pairing.
SL
THE BLACK ANGELS Directions to See a Ghost Light in the Attic LITA033
It’s 40 years since the 13th Floor Elevators prised open their third eyes, and now everything, from BBC News to the Mighty Boosh-inspired Sugar Puffs advert, is psychedelic. Purists will welcome the second album from the Black Angels, six furious Texans with multicoloured rays of sound shooting from fissures in their trepanned foreheads. Never/Ever’s sudden surge from sitar drone to guitar meltdown saw me asked to leave the quiet carriage. The 16-minute closer, Snake in the Grass, crawls inexorably forward, sucking phased vocals and backward guitar splurge into its gaping maw.
SLCEU Ceu Six Degrees 6570361129-2
Could this be the most interesting singer to come out of Brazil since Bebel Gilberto? For some reason, this album, which has been bubbling around the transatlantic charts for a couple of years, has taken a long time to reach these shores. It’s certainly worth the wait. The eccentrically named Ceu – real name Maria do Ceu Whitaker Pocas – possesses a strikingly pure voice, and her tastes are unfailingly eclectic. Oddly enough, one of the most potent numbers is her sinuous cover of Bob Marley’s Concrete Jungle. Electro influences are discreetly scattered around; there’s even a hint of fado on Valsa Pra Biu Roque. Add some elegant jazz lite and soul textures, and you have all the makings of a summer hit. Classy, very classy.
CDBILL FRISELL History, Mystery Nonesuch 7559799437
Mark Edwards, Dan Cairns, Stewart Lee and Clive Davis The guitarist’s guitarist is a player who tends to divide audiences down the middle. Some swoon over the slow-burning, bluesy textures; others find it all too self-regarding. His latest venture contains some of his most appealing work so far, but the decision to stretch the contents across two discs was surely a mistake. Working with the violinist Jenny Scheinman, the cellist Hank Roberts and the reeds player Greg Tardy, Frisell finds new angles in evergreens such as A Change Is Gonna Come and Jackying. There’s much to enjoy, but, once again, too many of the longueurs have the aura of tasteful soundtrack exercises. Not that his fans will mind.
CD
