‘Brahms’
The pianist Igor Levit’s strategy in recordings? Go big or go home. His latest, three-hour release takes on not just one, but both of Brahms’s mighty piano concertos. Then he goes a step further, with a third disc capturing the late solo pieces, Op. 116-119, some of the most eloquent works this composer ever wrote.
It’s all excellent. Levit can be ruminative and poetic, then calmly commanding and even stormy without ever sounding harsh. As always, his most remarkable quality is avoiding seeming indulgent as he conveys personality and spontaneity. Under Christian Thielemann, the Vienna Philharmonic makes wonderful sounds: Listen to the otherworldly bit near the end of the first movement of the second concerto, or how, coming out of the piano’s solo in the first concerto’s slow movement, the clarinets and bassoons are quietly humid before the full orchestra comes in with that slicing heat you want in Brahms.
If the Philharmonic seems slightly reserved, that may be simply a contrast with Levit’s marvelous flexibility. His solos are elegantly autumnal: Take in, among other treasures, his restrained passion in the great Romance in F (Op. 118, No. 5) and his dignified desolation in the Intermezzo in E flat. ZACHARY WOOLFE
‘An Atlas of Deep Time’
One day, the composer John Luther Adams picked up a shard of white coral in the desert. He thought about the life that flourished there hundreds of millions of years ago, a distance in time virtually incomprehensible to humans. Nevertheless, he tried to make sense of it. The result was his symphonic “An Atlas of Deep Time.”
This piece premiered two years ago, with the more than capable South Dakota Symphony Orchestra under Delta David Gier; now, their recording has been released, an awe-inspiring experience through headphones that mightily conjures the scale and tectonic force of Adams’s ambition.
“Atlas” is written for large orchestra and six scattered instrumental choirs, a theatrical and acoustic element that doesn’t translate on disc. Even so, the sound that comes through is Adams at his best: channeling the natural world with a sense of wonder and urgency, letting his reverence speak for itself with subtle activism.
Adams condenses more than 4 billion years of history into 42 minutes, beginning with the brooding low sounds of double basses and bass drums, and erupting to include the entire ensemble. There is some forward motion, but mostly a deceptive stasis, with phrases that convulse then smoothly recede into a broad texture. It’s only in the closing seconds that humans enter the picture; hauntingly, that’s also when the music fades to nothingness. JOSHUA BARONE
‘Bach — Abel — Hume’
The cellist Anja Lechner has been such a bright star on the ECM firmament, that it’s hard to believe this is her first solo album for the label. Having engaged with musical traditions including tango, Armenian folk songs and Byzantine hymns, she now mines the deeply personal repertoire of viola da gamba music to reframe some of the most treasured works written for cello.
Using a Baroque bow and a modern cello, Lechner brings the sighing, ruminative quality of a viola da gamba to some of the darker pages of Bach’s First and Second Cello Suites. In lyrical passages, the cello’s silky sound billows and yields as if controlled by breath; in fast movements, her articulation is airy and fleet. Her improvisational flair comes out in a selection of sharply sketched “Musical Humors” by Tobias Hume, a Scottish composer and mercenary soldier who promoted the viola da gamba in print and performance, but also took pains to make clear that “the onely effeminate part of me hath beene Musicke.” Lechner brings out both his rueful tenderness and experimental zest. With Carl Friedrich Abel, the solo gamba experienced a final flourishing before falling out of fashion for good. The sinuous intimacy Lechner brings to his melancholic Adagio in D minor makes an affecting argument for cellists to revisit his legacy. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
Still: Songs & Piano Music
William Grant Still isn’t exactly unknown; he is paid something like due attention in surveys of Black composition. But what about sustained attention? That’s been harder to come by.
I thought about this recently, after hearing his Fourth Symphony performed by the New York Philharmonic. Right after enjoying that performance, I immediately recalled this recent album, a focused, hourlong look at Still’s songs. The pianist Hartmut Höll brings across the martial energy of “Rising Tide” and the cynical harmonic edges of the accompaniment in a tune like “Parted” (from “Songs of Separation”). He throws in three brief solo piano works, too.
The mezzo-soprano Yajie Zhang deploys precise intonation in “From the Hearts of Women,” and her “Midtide” is particularly affecting, full of the pensive feeling Still dictates. But the baritone Gabriel Rollinson is the real star here. He has a healthy, fast vibrato — plus a true calling for Still’s mature, “universal” aesthetic, which sought to bridge the music of Europe and the United States. Rollinson sings the French of the “Poème” just as authoritatively as he does the text of a spiritual in “Here’s One,” during which he contrasts the conclusion of a ringing phrase with a disarming movement into vocal smoothness. He knows how to keeps these interpretations vital. SETH COLTER WALLS
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Op. 106 & Op. 2 No. 3
Epic, monumental, colossal, titanic — adjectives like these have attached themselves, barnacle-like, to Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” piano sonata. Not without reason: This sonata’s language and technical hurdles were unprecedented in its time and still astonish today.
However, as I listened to Marc-André Hamelin’s new account — this eminent pianist’s first Beethoven recording — very different descriptors presented themselves. A virtuoso’s virtuoso, Hamelin marshals his considerable skills for a reading of the “Hammerklavier” that clarifies and illuminates rather than simply overpowers. Key to this achievement are a lighter touch and precise articulation that put some spring into Beethoven’s dense chords in the opening movement. If Hamelin misses the edgy satire in the Scherzo, his way with the great Adagio seems near-perfect, mesmerizing but always with a quiet sense of forward motion. As for the legendarily taxing fugue in the finale, once thought to be unplayable, he makes it sound improbably pianistic.
Pairing the “Hammerklavier” with Beethoven’s early Sonata in C is an inspired choice. Of Beethoven’s first three essays in the genre, this is the one most indicative of the growth and evolution to come. Hamelin captures its brash confidence without trying to make more out of the piece than is there. DAVID WEININGER
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