Pentatone
The album ends up paying dividends, not just for fans and students of 20th-century composition, but for anyone interested in the broader reach and global development of classical music in the last century.
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Pianist Yulianna Avdeeva’s recording of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Preludes & Fugues is a testament to that rarest of syntheses: a total identification of a musician with her repertoire. Pianist Marc-André Hamelin and the Takács Quartet release an album that, on so many levels, is simply a joy.
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Composer Michael Daugherty’s lovely survey of 20th-century touchstones continues; violinist Philippe Quint plays a lineup made up (mostly) of commissions.
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Denis Kozhukin is an inspired guide to music geared toward young players by Sergei Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky; Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst serve up mixed rewards in performances of symphonies by Julius Eastman and Tchaikovsky.
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A conspicuously inviting account of Béla Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, and a welcome surprise: Aram Khachaturian actually wrote a pretty good piano concerto.
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Semyon Bychkov supplies an extraordinarily well-played account of Mahler’s Third; Paavo Järvi’s version of Mahler’s Fifth avoids the more idiosyncratic excesses of Leonard Bernstein’s superb 1987 Vienna recording.
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Wow. Stewart Goodyear can play Prokofiev. The Czech Philharmonic and Tomás Netopil are compelling advocates, playing Dvořák with plenty of rhythmic zest and tonal warmth.
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Not all of Atlanta Symphony Orchestra conductor Nathalie Stutzmann’s ideas about Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony add up, but there is not much to argue with in Czech Philharmonic Orchestra director Semyon Bychkov’s take on Dvorak’s Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Symphonies.
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This album fills out Michael Tilson Thomas’s compositional catalogue, deepening our appreciation of it. More fundamentally, it adds meaningfully to the story of American concert music.
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The performance of John Adams’s “City Noir” is swift and characterful, though sometimes pushed perhaps a bit too hard for its own good. The rendition of Leonard Bernstein’s “Serenade” is clear but a bit too safe.
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Arts Remembrance: In Memoriam — Tom Stoppard