Welcome to this month’s Classical Choices. Summer isn’t quite over yet here in the UK, but I’m already looking back fondly to my own summer live-music travel adventures: Italy for Parma’s Toscanini Festival and Cremona’s Monteverdi Festival; Switzerland for the Verbier Festival, and Montana USA for Tippet Rise. Each trip came with its own unique and precious musical experiences. Sometimes though, there’s no place like home – and the UK has of course put on its own summer feast of festivals, headed by the world’s largest, the BBC Proms, which also happens to have perhaps the world’s lowest-priced festival tickets.
Where else could you have heard the Czech Philharmonic under Jakub Hrůša for a mere £8, as I did a few days ago at the Royal Albert Hall? The concerto on that programme was Dvořák’s Piano Concerto in G minor, sparklingly dished out by soloist Mao Fujita, which in turn has inspired me to select an older reading of that virtuosic work as this month’s archive opener: the first movement of Sviatoslav Richter’s 1976 EMI recording with Carlos Kleiber and the Bavarian State Orchestra.
Our new releases then begin with Augustin Hadelich and Orion Weiss’s multi-faceted violin and piano recital, American Road Trip. We then remain Stateside for a new major album from New York-based British composer Anna Clyne – SHORTHAND, performed by Eric Jacobsen’s The Knights with a stellar line-up of soloists including cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Completing the trio is Eastern Reflections, a debut album from clarinettist Jonathan Leibovitz, whose recent successes include a 2024 Borletti-Buitoni Fellowship Award, and being the grand prizewinner of the Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) and Concert Artists Guild (New York) international auditions in 2022 – the same year he was nominated as a Classic FM ‘Rising Star’. Three superb, highly contrasting albums for you to explore.
American Road Trip
Augustin Hadelich & Orion Weiss
Warner Classics
One of the strange features of the classical music world is that there often seems to be something of an invisible border between America and Europe, with a surprising number of top composers and musicians never crossing the Atlantic. Violinist Augustin Hadelich is perfectly placed to bridge that divide, long-steeped as he is in both traditions: born in Italy to German parents, he now resides in the US, where he first arrived 20 years ago to study.
The pieces he has selected for American Road Trip highlight the degree to which American classical music is a melting pot of different styles. There’s the European-breathed late 19th early 20th century Romanticism of Amy Beach’s short Romance op.23 (1893). Then there’s the quirky polytonality of Charles Ive’s ‘Children’s Day’ Fourth Violin Sonata (1916), reminiscing over the summer camps he attended as a child by way of snatches of hymns and marches, and the depiction of humid New England heat. Minimalism comes in the shape of John Adams’s rhythmically charged, three-movement Road Movies, depicting the joy of driving California’s freeways. There’s also plenty of jazz and folk-inspired music, from famed names – Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland – to the increasing-known contemporary composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, plus others still largely unknown beyond America such as Eddie South (1904-1962) and Daniel Bernard Roumain (b.1971).
The disc thus thoroughly lives up to its title, displaying myriad different musical landscapes and languages. Hadelich adapts his clean-lined silvery sound to each piece’s world, from the portamento’d, gently rubato’d Romanticism of the Beach (saccharine-free, thanks to its unfussy momentum), to the entirely different brand of slides with which he colours his own arrangement of Howdy Forrester’s Wild Fiddler’s Rag, and the starker atonalism, busy counterpoint and extended techniques of Stephen Hartke’s (b.1952) Netsuke – an especially exciting piece of multicoloured partnering between him and Weiss.
In this month’s playlist you’ll find their whimsically, nimbly, playfully virtuosic reading of Eddie South’s Black Gypsy (notice and appreciate the silky evenness of Hadelich’s double-stops), followed by the aforementioned Adams, and finally, good old ‘Somewhere’ from Bernstein’s West Side Story.
Anna Clyne: SHORTHAND
The Knights, Eric Jacobsen
Sony
US-based Brit Anna Clyne feels like a composer whose music – distinctive, imaginative, simultaneously broad-appeal and of a taut complexity that doesn’t allow for sitting back and letting it just wash over you – will survive into posterity. She’s already much recorded, but SHORTHAND is a major event: recorded in Dolby Atmos over the space of two years, and representing over ten years of artistic friendships and collaborations, it’s the first full-length album comprised entirely of her works since 2020’s Mythologies, and is performed by some of today’s most exciting musicians: Eric Jacobsen’s dynamic New York chamber orchestra, The Knights, joined by stellar soloists including cellist Yo-Yo Ma, mandolinist Avi Avital, and violinists Colin Jacobsen and Pekka Kuusisto.
As ever with Clyne, poetry, art and other music feature strongly as inspirational forces: Prince of Clouds, the double violin concerto featuring Kuusisto and Colin Jacobsen, draws on Baudelaire’s poem L’Albatros. The title work and its reimagining, Shortland (Redux), for cello and string orchestra, muses on Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and the same-named novella by Tolstoy, its title coming from Tolstoy’s statement, ‘Music is the shorthand of emotion’. Within Her Arms, scored for 15 individual string parts and written as a tribute to Clyne’s mother, is named after a poem by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, Thích Nhất Hạnh. The Knights’ reading of the latter piece is fabulous, its many lines delivered with lucid-textured clarity, while its swells and contractions in volume and scoring are phrased with sensitivity and drama. SHORTHAND, featuring Ma, plays emotively to his affinity for Asian music, with his cello emulating the tense, yearning song of a human voice, and The Knights following this stylistic lead to powerful effect.
On the playlist you’ll find her mandolin concerto for Avi Avital, Three Sisters, which originally premiered in 2017 with Kremerata Baltica at the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie. The piece reflects upon the three stars found in the constellation of Orion (all three movements thus sharing DNA), but is most strongly inspired by Avital’s own combination of dexterity, virtuosity and tenderness. Avital displays all those qualities here, while the The Knights’ bring fabulously dark-shaded, under-its-skin partnering.
Eastern Reflections
Jonathan Leibovitz, Joseph Havlat, Charlotte Saluste-Bridoux
Delphian
Delphian’s series in collaboration with YCAT (the Young Concert Artists Trust) has been yielding constant pleasures since its inaugural offering in 2020 (recorder player Tabea Debus’s Ohrwurm, which I enthusiastically reviewed here). This eighth instalment – a debut album from clarinettist Jonathan Leibovitz, joined by pianist Joseph Havlat and violinist Charlotte Saluste-Bridoux – stays true to its unbroken story of thoughtful programming, classily performed.
Eastern Reflections brings together mid-20th century works by Eastern European and Soviet composers that drew on the folk music heritage of their respective native lands while responding, either directly or obliquely, to the trials of fascism, war and state-controlled communism. These range from the only piece Bartók wrote for clarinet, his 1938 Contrasts – three movements melding Hungarian and Romanian folk idioms (although in fairly masked form) with jazz, for the American jazz clarinettist and band leader Benny Goodman – to Ligeti’s overtly folky, dissonance-peppered Baladă și joc (Ballad and Dance) of 1950, originally for two violins but performed here on clarinet and violin. A further Ligeti work – A bujdosó (The errant one, No 4 from Öt Arany-dal: Five Songs on Poems by János Arany) – Lutosławski’s Dance Preludes and Shostakovich’s Prelude No 17 complete the programme.
This is one of those albums that really spins an atmosphere; and while it is largely a sober one, it’s not depressingly so – it’s simply a world that beckons you in to reflect. Leibovitz is a master storyteller throughout, spanning the tonal gamut from low, velvety lyricism to harder-edged irony, with fantastic long-lined architectural handling and technical control. Just listen to the emotionally charged hush with which he delivers the final phrases of Weinberg’s Clarinet Sonata of 1945 (Weinberg’s own story being that of a Jewish Pole forced to flee the Nazis first from Warsaw in 1939, and then from the Soviet Union in 1941, before settling in Moscow under the protection of his friend Shostakovich). Havlat is the perfect partner, attuned both to the music’s every cue and to Leibovitz’s. It was an inspired idea to bring Saluste-Bridoux in for the aforementioned Contrasts and Ballad and Dance, both for the change in energy and texture her superb partnering brings.
I’ve given you Ligeti’s Ballad and Dance, followed by the Weinberg, for the playlist.
