CD Review (The Straits Times, January 2019)

RUSSIAN SERENADE

Gamma Majoris Ensemble

Champs Hill Records 138 / ****1/2

Imagine a salon in turn-of-the-century Moscow or Saint Petersburg, just before the Great War. This 77-minute album showcases music likely to be enjoyed by the moneyed class or bourgeoisie during those troubled fin-de-siecle times. 

The music comprises Russian art songs or “romances” by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, arranged and performed by Gamma Majoris Ensemble, four young Russians comprising soprano Anastasia Prokofieva, pianist Yulia Chaplina, violinist Ksenia Berezina and cellist Alisa Liubarskaya.

Of the 25 tracks, twelve are sung accompanied by various combinations of instruments, including Tchaikovsky’s Serenade, By an Open Window, It Was in Early Spring and On This Moonlit Night. His well-known None But the Lonely Heart and Amid the Noise of The Ball surprisingly take the form for cello and piano duo only. For piano solo, Tchaikovsky’s Nocturne in F major, Meditation and Un Poco di Chopin make lovely interludes.

Rachmaninov accounts for just six numbers, including songs Before My Window, Do Not Sing, My Beauty, They Answered and the violin showpiece Gypsy Dance from the early opera Aleko, but these merge seamlessly with Tchaikovsky’s typically bittersweet and melancholic idiom. Performed with much feeling and unmistaken sense of nostalgia, this collection could have been called From Russia With Love.

CD Review (The Straits Times, August 2018)

FROM VIENNA

London Conchord Ensemble

Champs Hill Records 115 (2 CDs) / *****

This double-disc album is an illuminating two-and-half-hour musical tour of Vienna from the classical era of Mozart to the 20^th century iconoclasm of Schoenberg. Seen through the lenses of woodwinds, piano and strings, clarinettist Maximiliano Martin and pianist Julian Milford are ever-present in all seven works performed.

The first disc opens with Mozart's “Kegelstatt” Clarinet Trio K.498, delightfully scored for clarinet, viola and piano. Its congeniality and warmth continues into the famous pair of Piano Quintets (piano with winds, namely clarinet, oboe, bassoon and French horn) by Mozart and Beethoven, perfect partners heard alongside each other. 

The Second Viennese School occupies the second disc. But first listen to the Trio in D minor for clarinet, cello and piano by Alexander Zemlinsky, better known as teacher and brother-in-law of Arnold Schoenberg. Its late Romantic and Brahms-influenced idiom receives a shock to the system when followed by Schoenberg's compact Chamber Symphony No.1 (transcribed by his student Anton Webern) which openly flirts with atonalism.

The ground-breaking 12-tone idiom becomes established with the Adagio from Alban Berg's Chamber Symphony, but the music has vestiges of lushness and sentimentality. To close, Johann Strauss the Younger's Emperor Waltz, arranged for septet by Schoenberg, makes for a particularly delicious encore.