LATEST ADDITIONS

Devotees will need little convincing of the merits of HD Krall, resolving her soft dynamics and expanding the silences of this 1997 album of love song standards performed with her trio guitarist Russell Malone, whose rhythm figures verge on the subliminal at times, while Christian McBride returns to double bass duties provided previously for Ms Krall’s sophomore release, Only Trust Your Heart. Lacking that album’s percussion (though often retaining its high levels of vocal reverb – witness the sparse take on Billy Myles’ ‘My Love Is’), this fourth album’s vibe is even later-night and lighter, and Ms Krall’s confidence higher, her vocals pushing out for the Peggy Lee sass ’n’ swing of ‘I Don’t Know Enough About You’, but more often purring her parts with that delicious delicacy – her Chet vocal and sensitive piano dynamics a particular delight on ‘Gentle Rain’. JF Sound Quality: 85% Hi-Fi News Lab Report This 96kHz rendering shows the same slightly elevated (analogue) noise floor we’ve seen with other DK albums. Vocal harmonics (real or from a downstream limiter) often extend out to 20kHz.

96kHz/24-bit ALAC/FLAC/WAV, moscd4010 (supplied by www. naimlabel. com) It’s not uncommon that a recording identified as compromised in the Lab Report might still sound quite marvellous to these ears. Here, however, something was clearly wrong, with distortion hovering at the edge of audibility, pressuring the peaks and affecting image clarity on busier tracks like ‘Listen To Me’ and the surprising bottle-neck blues of ‘Dust My Broom’.

Recorded for the German jazz label ACT at the end of 2012 at Nilento Studio, Gothenburg, this is Korean singer Youn Sun Nah’s third album (Same Girl, from two years before, is also available from highresaudio. com but so far not Voyage, from 2008). Lento takes its name from Scriabin’s E minor Prelude, Op. 16:4 and is the opening track.

This debut programme by duoW begins, not with the great Kodály unaccompanied cello sonata, but with a less familiar duo for violin and cello (his Op. 7); it ends with an arrangement of ‘The Stars And Stripes Forever’. The Servai/Léonard extravaganza Grand Duo de Concert draws upon our own National Anthem and ‘Yankee Doodle’, while the Halvorsen is based on a Handel passacaglia – their 2011 music video of this, Ghosts And Flowers, was apparently a viral hit. The two gifted string players have Masters degrees from Juilliard and they aspire to bring classical music to a younger generation.