Classical

Vrána, Janácek Phil Ostrava/Hron
Kaprálová: Military Sinfonietta, Piano Concerto, Suita Rustica
CPO 555568-2 (two discs; downloads to 96kHz/24-bit resolution)

Kaprálová is a voice worth investigating amid the clamour of pre-WW2 music, despite her early death from typhoid fever, in 1940. Her forms are taut, her harmony spicily Bartókian, not obviously indebted to her teacher Martinů. The Hollywood of Korngold and Rózsa never feels far away in the upbeat Military Sinfonietta, recently championed by Jakub Hrůša at the BBC Proms. Telegraphed Czech character infuses the Rustic Suite, but Kaprálová never resorts to picturesque nostalgia. Tomáš Vrána brings fairy-tale light and percussive violence to a pair of piano-concertante works. Alena Hron keeps all the cross-rhythms on a tight leash, but she lets Kaprálová’s best tunes soar: this deserves more than the category of ‘worthy obscurity’. PQ

Sound Quality: 90%

Sydney SO/Robertson, Explore Ens
Illean: Arcing, Stilling, Sending, Sathering, etc
NMC NMCD264 (downloads to 48kHz/24-bit resolution)

Lisa Illean’s music slips through the fingers like sand. Born in Sydney in 1983, and now living in London, she found unusual tunings of sound via a childhood mandolin, but the pieces here all plot a confident harmonic journey. The album’s title work unfolds in four unhurried (but compact) movements. Influences of Bill Evans and Galina Ustvolskaya seep through a pervasive sense of time suspended. The orchestral Land’s End slithers and shudders on the fringe of tonality. A Through-Grown Earth sets three poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins with acute attention to the turn and texture of his verse. I’d gladly hear any of these pieces live, but this is no mean substitute. PQ

Sound Quality: 90%

Claire Booth, Christopher Glynn
Schoenberg: ‘Expressionist Music’
Orchid ORC100306 (downloads to 96kHz/24-bit resolution)

The Schoenberg anniversary year was crying out for a tribute as imaginatively wide-ranging as this survey of his song output. The opening Erwartung is a delicious tease: a luscious setting of a Dehmel poem, a musical world (but only a decade) away from the expressionist monodrama. Booth picks and chooses her way through the early opus numbers, alighting on a love-song here, a magical nature-sketch there. Glynn leans gently on the revolutionary spirit of the Six Little Piano Pieces Op.11. Without the armoury of Gurrelieder’s huge orchestra, they confide Tove’s climactic love-song as an uncanny precursor to Pierrot Lunaire. Spine-tingling. PQ

Sound Quality: 85%

Mishka Rushdie Momen
‘Reformation’ – Byrd, Bull, Gibbons, Sweelinck
Hyperion CDA68445 (downloads to 96kHz/24-bit resolution)

It takes a special spirit of sympathy with a lost age – and some technical finesse – to bring these 400-year-old pieces to life on a modern piano. Mishka Momen’s long and thoughtful booklet essay does more than give the usual historical context. She writes as she plays, with a light touch and an irresistible evocation of a world of courtly dances and folk songs, which Byrd and Bull gently pulled and turned into a keyboard genre of private contemplation and delight. Recording and performance are probably best-suited to late-night listening, maybe on headphones, where her finely graded touch inflects the variations of Bull’s Walsingham with a Goldberg-like depth. PQ

Sound Quality: 80%