Barber reviews

Manfred Honeck’s Shostakovich sounds magnificent. From intense pianissimos to the shrieking upper register and full bass thwack of a grand peroration – which Honeck takes surprisingly at face value – there’s faith in what can sometimes seem like a time-serving symphony. I wondered whether Honeck’s determination to probe deep needed a slower tempo before the grinding first-movement development, but if the sequel means the most human and nurtured slow movement in the business, then it’s a small price to pay.

Thomas Hampson’s honeyed baritone and leonine good looks have delighted audiences for decades. A passionate advocate for art song, his latest foray into the studio showcases songs by Schubert, Wolf and Brahms in new arrangements for string orchestra, almost all by the British composer David Matthews, alongside Barber’s Dover Beach and Wolf’s joyous Italian Serenade. This continues a tradition of orchestral song established by figures like Berlioz, Brahms (who himself orchestrated Schubert) and others.

Only a great violinist such as Shapira can take the unchecked gorgeousness of Barber’s Violin Concerto and make it burn. Joselson breathes life into the sadder, more abstract Piano Concerto.

Helen Wallace

Elizabeth Joy Roe cites several correspondences in both art and life as her reason for putting these composers together. But this CD’s real justification lies in the closely related sound-worlds of their concertos. In the helter-skelter opening of Britten’s Concerto we hear echoes of Bartók, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, while Barber’s final movement has some indisputably Shostakovichian stretches: since the Russians were making the musical weather at the time, such influences were inevitable.

For once the cliché is justified: this is emphatically a disc of two halves. It starts competently enough with a performance of Barber’s Concerto in which Keith Jarrett, Dennis Russell Davies, and the Saarbrücken orchestra give a crisply intelligent account of this work which – as Paul Griffiths points out in his liner-note – successfully marries post-Romanticism and post-serialism. Jarrett’s first-movement sallies are spiky and challenging, and he and his orchestra work as one to convey scurrying urgency and burning eloquence.

Several world premiere recordings feature in this exploration of Barber’s piano music. The earliest pieces, from 1923, are especially touching. Fine advocacy from Nuti and, in Souvenirs, De Santis. (JD) 

Samuel Barber, a conservative Romantic at heart, wouldn’t have relished sharing a disc with Steve Reich and George Crumb, leading figures in the stream of new music that swept him aside at the end of his life. And none of the trio, I hope, would approve of the CD’s provocative cover image: part of a bleak Stanley Kubrick photograph of a man and gun, aiming at a police van’s grill. The Quatuor Diotima’s vision of American music clearly doesn’t include the pastoral, the visionary, or Copland’s Appalachian Spring.

Samuel Barber once wrote about the daunting spectacle of ‘those black and white keys in a row, staring at me from across the room’. Yet he never abandoned the piano, and Leon McCawley’s near-complete collection allows us to follow the composer’s endeavours across 50 years. From airy trinkets of adolescence, we pass through wartime Americana, to the muscular post-war Sonata. After that, only music of nostalgia and retreat: a Chopinesque Nocturne; a hard-fought Ballade, written at the bitter end of a once-charmed life.

This lovely singer is here at her best; both in Bach and the vastly different Barber she is ideal in the purity and sweetness of her singing. Excellent accompanists. Michael Tanner

Centenary Barber is saluted in a well-rounded portrait with recent (a 2008 live BPO/Rattle Adagio) and classic recordings (the Endellions’ String Quartet and Leon McCawley’s nimble Excursions). Paul Riley