DVD & Blu-ray

This take on Schubert’s vast, late song cycle Winterreise presents a recital against a backdrop of animations by South African artist William Kentridge, recorded in Aix-en-Provence in 2014. The stage is littered with scraps of paper, overspill from the backdrop onto which the animations are projected.

This take on Schubert’s vast, late song cycle Winterreise presents a recital against a backdrop of animations by South African artist William Kentridge, recorded in Aix-en-Provence in 2014. The stage is littered with scraps of paper, overspill from the backdrop onto which the animations are projected.

Given its Wagnerian antecedents, it seems surprising that Schoenberg’s early, hyper-Romantic song-cycle-cum-oratorio-cum-music-drama Gurre-Lieder had apparently never been staged before this spectacular Dutch National Opera production. Presumably the vast orchestra required precluded all but the largest theatres, while the work’s leisurely, un-operatic pacing presents a real challenge to the inventiveness of any stage director.

There’s always something heroic about Rudolf Buchbinder’s exploits. One thinks of his complete Haydn sonatas, his two Beethoven sonata cycles – one recorded in his twenties, the other in his fifties – and of his live recording of the Beethoven concerto cycle, directed from the keyboard and made in the space of a few pressured hours without a safety net. He never takes the easy route when an option exists to duck a score’s extreme technical demands, and his readings are unfailingly persuasive.

This BBC film, made in Canterbury Cathedral in 1968, was quite a feat for its time. Engineering problems were a constant trial. For one thing, filming required eight cameras – not a problem now, but as there were only nine colour TV cameras in the country the logistics of replacing any that failed were nightmarish. That it feels like a single, organic performance is a huge tribute to producer Brian Large and his team, and of course to Adrian Boult himself, who was able to maintain his sense of Gerontius as a living whole through numerous retakes and sudden interruptions.

This is wonderful playing, and the performance of all three works gains a lot from being seen as well as heard. One always speculates – at least I do – about the dynamics, artistic and personal, of string quartet performers, but I have never felt that I have seen such a happy team as the Cuarteto Casals. Not only their glances and occasional smiles, but their whole body language suggest a harmonious group each member of which retains his or her personality. And the results are wonderful.

Focused, serious and gimmick-free, this DVD does what it says on the tin: it offers two superb performances by Nikolaj Znaider and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly, beautifully filmed, with sound quality to match. There’s an extra frisson for violinophiles: Znaider is playing a Guarneri del Gesù that once belonged to Fritz Kreisler. It looks almost as gorgeous as it sounds and this is the closest we can see its burnished tawny stripes without handling the fiddle itself.

It was Stravinsky who described Schoenberg’s settings of poems from Albert Giraud’s Pierrot Lunaire as ‘the solar plexus as well as the mind of early 20th century music’ – though he admitted it was more the unprecedented range of contrapuntal textures and colours that Schoenberg drew from his five players than the vocal part that impressed him when he first heard the work in 1912.  Schoenberg set the words to wide-ranging phrases of exact pitches, but insisted these should be spoken, not sung, with the voice just touching the pitches before moving

Here’s 80 minutes of the gentlest and most refined music-making imaginable. The performers are the composer György Kurtág and his wife Márta, who for decades have been playing four-handed piano music together. This concert, filmed at Paris’s Cité de la Musique in 2012, falls into the familiar pattern. We hear a sequence of Kurtág’s own tiny miniatures for solo piano, interspersed with his own arrangements of chorale preludes by JS Bach for four hands.

Hans-Christophe Rademann’s audio recording of CPE Bach’s 1749 Magnificat with the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and the RIAS Kammerchor was one of the most handsome 300th anniversary tributes. Recorded live in Berlin’s Konzerthaus, where the composer’s bust sits alongside that of his father, Johann Sebastian, this DVD offers a full reconstruction of the charity concert that CPE Bach conducted in Hamburg on Palm Sunday, 1786. The singing and playing is, as before, lithe and clean.

By and large, this is a lovely performance. Filmed in the Grosses Festspielhaus, Salzburg during the 2013 festival, it features the focused and vital Vienna Opera Chorus and some 50 players from the golden-toned Vienna Philharmonic, with its distinctive woodwind and brass timbres. There is a well-balanced trio of soloists led by the spirited soprano Dorothea Röschmann as Hanne, with the expressive tenor Michael Schrade as Lukas and a particularly impressive assumption of the peasant narrator, Simon, by the firm and even-toned bass Florian Boesch.

This is an unusual memento of a BBC Proms performance from 20 years ago – Yuri Temirkanov’s only recording of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony, with the St Petersburg Philharmonic. It’s introduced by a lively account of Berlioz’s Le corsaire overture, putting the orchestra through its paces and displaying its excellent virtuosity.

There are now several Coro BBC DVDs based on music from Christmas, Easter and the like, but this one is rather different. It attempts to trace the life and achievements of a single musician, ‘perhaps the greatest composer of polyphony in the 16th century’, the Spaniard Tomás Luis de Victoria.

Filmed in June 2011, Phyllida Lloyd’s Covent Garden staging of Verdi’s opera has a good deal going for it; there’s plenty of atmosphere in Anthony Ward’s aptly dark-toned sets, to which the image of the golden cage representing the burden of kingship adds a rare splash of colour. Lloyd’s use of processions can be powerful, especially in the horse-borne line of future kings conjured up by the witches to show Macbeth the future. They, meanwhile, control the action, carrying Macbeth’s letter to his wife and saving Banquo’s son from the assassins.