Welcome to this month’s Classical Choices! Our playlist begins with an archive recording honouring one of my personal live music highlights from this season: Martha Argerich’s recital of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, performed with Charles Dutoit and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo at Wrocław’s magnificent Wratislavia Cantans festival.
It was a pleasure to witness both Argerich’s technique and the incredibly moving play of emotional darkness and light which she brought to Beethoven’s familiar work. To mark the occasion, I’ve selected the first movement of an earlier Argerich recital of the same piece, performed in 1985 with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Giuseppe Sinopoli.
From there, it’s on to a trio of new releases, which this month share a focus on vocal repertoire. We begin with a genre-crossing voice and guitar programme from Lotte Betts-Dean and Dimitris Soukaras, before moving on to a gorgeous choir and viol celebration of Arvo Pärt from SANSARA and Fretwork, then a generous Dowland and Purcell programme from mezzo soprano Lea Desandre, lutenist Thomas Dunford, Ensemble Jupiter and guests.
Everything you’ve ever lived
Lotte Betts-Dean and Dimitris Soukaras
Delphian
The title to this addictive first joint album from singer Lotte Betts-Dean and guitarist Dimitris Soukaras draws on the idea of re-encountering familiar situations even as life and social circles progress, and Soukaras’s experience of having recurring dreams featuring figures from his childhood who are no longer with him. The result is a programme deeply inspired by themes of family, childhood and eternity, which explores the spaces between reality and unreality, wakefulness and dreaming, and genre-wise, between art song, folk music and pop.
Baden Powell’s ‘Canto de Ossanha’ opens, from the Brazilian bossa nova movement. From there, the album takes us through the work of various artists and composers, from Sinead O’Connor to Burt Bacharach, My Brightest Diamond, Ravel, Britten and de Falla. Some might describe it as having a mixtape feel, but there’s a real sense of cohesion throughout. Most of the tracks are heard in new arrangements by Soukaras and to me, the set feels like a jam session with a friend, where genre becomes irrelevant and musicians are free to play whatever comes into their mind.
If you’re yet to discover Betts-Dean’s wide, powerful and pure, otherworldly voice with its tremendous range, you couldn’t hope for a more multi-faceted introduction, from the ethereal punch and sensuality she brings to the aforementioned ‘Canto de Ossanha’; to her wide warmth and depth in Caroline Polacheck’s ‘Go as a Dream’, and ethereal treble registers in Debussy’s ‘Les Angélus’.
Soukaras’s technique and colouristic paintbox is equally diverse, between but also within individual pieces – listen to all the different shades he’s travelled through even before Betts-Dean enters in his album-closing arrangement of Armando Soares’ ‘Sodade’, a Cape Verdean song made famous by Cesária Évora. Fans of Ravel’s Cinq mélodies populaires grecques cycle can also enjoy two of its songs restored here to their original language.
I’ve given you an uninterrupted chunk of the programme, from Ravel’s two Greek folk songs through to Britten’s ‘The Second Lute Song of the Earl of Essex’ from his opera, Gloriana, for the playlist.
Sublime Calculations
SANSARA and Fretwork
Platoon
This year has been filled with the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, in honour of his 90th birthday, and this new collaboration between vocal collective SANSARA and viol consort Fretwork is one of my favourite homages to date.
Sublime Calculations takes the listener on a journey through Pärt’s distinctive signature tintinnabuli style, its spiritual weight created through simplicity, with Pärt refining musical expression down to its absolute essence.
The album title reflects his belief that “the most intense concentration on the essence of things” is achieved through reduction, whether that be a note or a silence. The programme places choral masterworks such as Magnificat, Nunc Dimittis and Da pacem Domine alongside brand new viol arrangements by Fretwork’s Richard Boothby of Fratres, Summa and Stabat Mater, plus a new arrangement of ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands’, composed by Pärt and based on the poem by Robert Burns. The piece features a wonderful guest appearance from countertenor Iestyn Davies, whose otherworldly-flavoured rich, tonal clarity marries delectably with the viols’ luminously stringy upper-register work.
SANSARA singing packs an equal punch with its clean, simple purity, technical control and lightly worn spirituality. Their blend with Fretwork’s viols is uncanny, the two almost meeting tonally in the middle at points, voices taking on an almost instrumental quality, and the viols moving close to human tones. I’ve given you Magnificat, My Heart’s in the Highlands, and the album-closing Da pacem Domine, for the playlist.
Songs of Passion
Thomas Dunford, Jupiter, Lea Desandra
Erato
Songs of Passion is the latest in a series of voice and lute programmes from mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre and lutenist Thomas Dunford – the most recent of which, Idyll, presented French love songs from three centuries. Their latest collaboration however, which features the English music of John Dowland (1563) and Henry Purcell (1659-1695), looks deeper and further, back to Dunford’s own musical beginnings as the child of viol players whose family roots can be traced to the Scottish borders. As the programme travels through Dowland’s highly intimate, nuanced brand of melancholy, to the later more theatrical, sensual and emotionally diverse world of Henry Purcell, there’s a palpable sense of this being music that both artists are deeply rooted in – so much so that this is not about understanding, instead it is simply their language.
Joining Dunford, Desandre, and their time-honoured partner Ensemble Jupiter, is a stellar quartet of other rising-generation singers: baritone Huw Montague Rendall, contralto Jess Dandy, tenor Laurence Kilsby and bass Alex Rosen. The all-Dowland first half opens with all singers together for a brightly, lovingly rousing, fluidly handled reading of the madrigal, ‘Come again! Sweet love doth now invite’, each and every word articulated with crystal-clear clarity and warm feeling. Next comes an organically managed segue into the sombre Pavan, ‘Semper Dowland semper Dolens’ from his five-part Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares – an instant colour-change with its slide into minor-tonality melancholy, which sends out haunting echoes of the madrigal in its contours and rhythmic figures.
This degree of emotionally and musically sophisticated programming continues as the album proceeds, as does the gracefully expressed warm-blooded passion, and the sense of music and metre happening as felt in the moment – epitomised in the programme’s ultimate climax, Purcell’s ‘When I Am Laid in Earth’. Long-standing Ensemble Jupiter admirers will be pleased to see that the bonus track parting shot is another of their whimsical modern creations, penned by Dunford and Jupiter bassist Doug Balliett. For the playlist, I’ve given you a selection from each end of the album.
