(+++) BYWAYS WORTH A VISIT

Offenbach: Maître Péronilla. Véronique Gens, Antoinette Dennefeld, Chantal Santon-Jeffery, Anaïs Constans, Diana Axentii, Éric Huchet, Tassis Christoyannis, François Piolino, Patrick Kabongo, Loïc Félix, Yoann Dubruque, Matthieu Lécroart, Raphaël Brémard, Jérôme Boutillier, Philippe-Nicolas Martin, Antoine Philippot; Chœur de Radio France and Orchestre National de France conducted by Markus Poschner. Bru Zane. $42.99 (2 CDs).

Vieuxtemps: Grande Sonata for Piano and Violin, Op. 12; Franck: Andantino quietoso; Mélancolie; Fauré: Berceuse, Op. 16; Saint-Saëns: Élegie, Op. 143; Saint-Saëns/Ysaÿe: Caprice d’après l’Étude en forme de Valse. Bruno Monteiro, violin; João Paulo Santos, piano. Et’cetera Records. $15.

Christopher Tyler Nickel: Concerto for Piccolo; Concerto for Four Wagner Tubas. Sarah Jackson, piccolo; Oliver de Clercq, Laurel Spencer, Valerie Whitney and Holly Bryan, Wagner tubas; Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra conducted by Clyde Mitchell. AVIE. $19.99.

     Stage works were all the rage in 19^th-century France, with tremendous competition among composers and performing venues not only in the high-minded and serious sphere of opera but also in the decidedly lighter-hearted and often modestly risqué field of operetta. Offenbach was by no means the highly dominant figure in lighter music in his lifetime that he appears to be retrospectively, certainly not after the Franco-Prussian  War (1870-71) changed the face of Europe and not coincidentally brought Offenbach into disrepute and bankruptcy because of his German birth and connections to the Second Empire. The nature of Offenbach’s music changed after 1871, moving more toward the lyricism and warmth of opéra-comique and away from his stock-in-trade opéra-bouffe, with its ever-present slapstick and on-stage confusion. Offenbach was so prolific that a great many of his 100-or-so stage works remain quite obscure – for a variety of reasons, only very rarely involving the quality of the music. One of the most interesting of these from the postwar years is Maître Péronilla, a very late work (1878) for which Offenbach himself wrote the libretto. In line with its stated aim to rediscover and explore French musical heritage from 1780 to 1920, Palazetto Bru Zane has assembled, in its usual lovely book-and-CD packaging, a thoroughly winning account of Maître Péronilla from a June 2019 performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The story involves a scheme through which “elderly” aunt Léona (age 39, but insisting repeatedly that she is 29) tries to prevent the 19-year-old Manoëla from marrying the love of her life, Alvarès, whom Léona wants for herself. Thanks to some clever machinations and a hard-of-hearing notary, Manoëla ends up inadvertently and scandalously married both to Alvarès and to the old, ugly and perpetually befuddled Don Guardona (the work was originally going to be called Les Deux Maris de Manoëla, but that seemed a bit too scandalous). Through the courtroom artistry of the title character, who is Manoëla’s father – a famous maker of chocolate and a onetime practicing lawyer – everything is sorted out in the end, with Alvarès getting Manoëla and Léona hooking up, not unwillingly, with Guardona. Offenbach’s libretto is not particularly coherent, especially in the initial setup of the premise, and it is hard to escape the feeling that he focused much less on the story than on the chance to create various thoroughly winning songs that tend to have little or nothing to do with advancing the dramatic action (hence the comparatively chilly reception of Maître Péronilla in its own era, when it played only 50 times, and its near-total obscurity afterwards). Be all that as it may, the recording led by Markus Poschner gives the work as much impetus as it is likely ever to have. Poschner paces the numbers very well, keeping the action moving (albeit occasionally at the expense of some of the lyricism) and facilitating the interplay among the many characters (20 or so separate roles – another likely reason for the piece’s obscurity). The really wonderful musical numbers include a Malagueña solo that was the work’s biggest hit by far; Péronilla’s Couplets du Chocolat, extolling the virtues of being a chocolate-maker rather than a lawyer; and the waltz from the second-act finale, Mon coeur, prenons courage, fault-il gémir toujours! The best singing here comes from Antoinette Dennefeld as Frimouskino, the friend of Manoëla and Alvarès whose machinations bring about the happy ending. But other voices are quite fine as well. Anaïs Constans is suitably naïve if a touch heavy as Manoëla, Chantal Santon-Jeffery sings well as Alvarès despite a voice that is slightly pinched at the top, Véronique Gens is suitably unpleasant (in a comic way) as Léona, and Éric Huchet handles the title role with aplomb. Although casting complexities and a less-than-effective libretto make further revivals of Maître Péronilla unlikely, the first-rate music and the chance to hear the ways in which Offenbach continued to develop his art toward the end of his career and life make this recording very much worth having and this stage work very much worth experiencing.

     The French composer most focused on showing the continuing validity of non-stage music in the 19^th century was Camille Saint-Saëns, and there was some intriguing instrumental focus in French-speaking Belgium as well. Much of this music, like much of Offenbach’s, remains obscure today – and as a result is well worth exploring by interested performers and audiences alike. An especially pleasant rediscovery is the Grande Sonata for Piano and Violin, Op. 12, by Belgian violinist/composer Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-1881), who nowadays is best-known for turning Beethoven’s Violin Concerto into part of the standard repertoire through his tireless advocacy of the music. Vieuxtemps, although a considerable virtuoso in his own right, focused more on lyricism than fireworks in his music – in fact, in string quartets he preferred to play the viola, whose sumptuous sound and warmth led him to write a viola sonata that is now one of his few fairly well-known works. Much less familiar is this Grande Sonata, whose combination of lyrical beauties, majesty and patient thematic development comes through to excellent effect in a very well-balanced and thoughtfully conceived performance by Bruno Monteiro and João Paulo Santos. Charm and grace pervade the second-movement Scherzo, which Monteiro and Santos handle with just the right degree of delicacy, but the real gem of the sonata is its third-movement Largo, ma non troppo, a movement whose initial hymnlike theme eventually builds toward a radiantly intense climax offering near-religious fervor. After this, the well-balanced finale is notable for not containing over-the-top elements, and it is very much to Monteiro’s credit that he does not overplay the music or try to turn it into any sort of display piece: this movement’s success lies in elegance, not fireworks. Vieuxtemps’ 45-minute sonata takes up most of a new Et’cetera Records disc, with the balance of the CD given over to shorter works that in many cases are just as neglected as the Grande Sonata, and just as undeservedly. Franck’s Andante quietoso features an elegiac violin melody interacting with a regular bass-line piano pulse in an attractive salon-music idiom. Franck wrote it in 1843, when he was 21, for himself and his violinist brother to perform in, yes, salons, and its poise and pacing look forward to later Franck works – including Mélancolie, written in the mid-1880s but not published until 1911, long after Franck’s death. This is essentially a solfège exercise, and a very effective one as heard on this disc. Much better-known is Fauré’s Berceuse, Op. 16, although its original violin-and-piano version (specifying violin con sordino) is less familiar nowadays than the composer’s later one for violin and orchestra. This little work is quite popular and has been arranged for many instruments, but Monteiro and Santos make a strong case for its original scoring, which does not dispel its air of conventionality but which allows for an attractive presentation of its soft dynamics and pleasantly rocking accompaniment. Saint-Saëns is present as well on this nicely programmed CD. His late (1915) Élegie – actually the first of two, the second dating to 1920 – is not often heard, having a rather unsettled atmosphere because of its tonal ambiguity and ongoing modulations. It has the feeling of improvisation about it, which Monteiro and Santos communicate effectively. This recording then ends with Caprice d’après l’Étude en forme de Valse, the only outright tour de force on the CD. Violinist/composer Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931) here arranged the last of Saint-Saëns’ 1877 Six Études pour piano, Op. 52, which is really not much like a waltz (its title notwithstanding). The work, which is undanceably quick, is full of bravura writing in which Monteiro and Santos revel as they bring this wide-ranging yet focused recital to a fully satisfying conclusion.

     Of course, it is not necessary to return to the 19^th century or even the 20^th to find music that is off the beaten path but that is nevertheless worth exploring – in some cases precisely because it is off the beaten path. A new AVIE disc featuring very recent works by Christopher Tyler Nickel (born 1978) is a short CD – just 45 minutes – but one that provides plenty of sonic engagement and a modicum of thoughtfulness in the creation of two works featuring solo instruments that are rarely heard front-and-center. Nickel’s skill as a film composer is evident in the way he paces and maintains the aural attractiveness of his 2022 Concerto for Piccolo, commissioned by the soloist and conductor who offer it here. The difficulty of setting a high-pitched and usually quiet instrument against a full orchestral complement is adeptly handled by Nickel by having much of the solo part take place against portions of the ensemble rather than the entire Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra. This works somewhat better in the slow central movement than in the more-angular, more-emphatic opening one. The dancelike but, as with Saint-Saëns’ Étude en forme de Valse, undanceable finale pulls the piccolo into its highest register, setting it against brass exclamations in a way that produces an effect akin to that of a piano being played at the bottom and top of the keyboard simultaneously. The piercing piccolo cadenza near the movement’s end contrasts with the emphatic tutti that concludes a work worth hearing once but perhaps not a great deal more often. The 2021 Concerto for Four Wagner Tubas is something quite different. Wagner tubas, four-valve brass instruments that combine tuba and French horn elements and are actually close to horns than tubas in sound, are well-known in Des Ring des Nibelungen, for which they were created, but otherwise rarely heard – and never as a solo quartet, as they are in Nickel’s work. Much less frantic than the piccolo concerto and filled with a level of lyricism not often found in Nickel’s music, the Concerto for Four Wagner Tubas may put listeners in mind of Schumann’s 1849 Konzertstück for Four Horns and Orchestra, although it owes nothing directly to that work. It is worth noting, however, that Schumann kept his three-movement piece on the short side and made sure to keep each movement distinct from the others, while Nickel creates a longer work in which the massed sound of the Wagner tubas is paramount and the first two movements strive for (and sometimes attain) a similar level of magisterial pronouncement within which the solo instruments – almost always as a group – sound forth. It is only in the lighter finale that Nickel explores the Wagner tubas’ ability to produce hunting-horn calls, strongly rhythmic passages and a certain level of brightness, although here too they function mostly as a subsection of the orchestra rather than as individual solo instruments. The Concerto for Four Wagner Tubas is a more-interesting work than the Concerto for Piccolo, and both will certainly be attractive to performers on the respective solo instruments. But this (+++) CD is likely to have little staying power for listeners in general: it contains intriguing experiments that are intellectually engaging, but not much that is likely to be musically nourishing over the longer term.

(+++) SOUNDS FOR ALL SEASONS

A Lullaby Carol: Christmas at Christ Church. Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, conducted by Steven Grahl. AVIE. $19.99.

Lee R. Kesselman: Vocal Music. Haven Trio (Lindsay Kesselman, soprano; Kimberly Cole Loevano, clarinet; Midori Kogo, piano); Allison Rich, cello. Blue Griffin Records. $15.99.

Cantus: Alone Together. Signum Classics. $17.99.

     Despite the seasonality of Christmas, its underlying messages of wonder and hope transcend any specific time of year, and even penetrate the thoughts of many who may look for routes to salvation that differ from those based on Christ. Notwithstanding the tremendous commercialism that has come to pervade the season, Christmas remains a time for reflection, beauty and thoughtfulness for a great many people – and music, both old and new, is a major element of it. The Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, does a particularly lovely job of communicating the sacred underpinning of the holiday on an AVIE recording called A Lullaby Carol – a title reflecting such contents as Lullay, lullay, litel child by David Maw (born 1967), O nata lux by conductor Steven Grahl (born 1979), and the spiritual Glory to the newborn King as arranged by Robert L. Morris (born 1941). Maw’s work is surprisingly dissonant despite the beauty of the vocal blending; Grahl’s has the flavor of plainchant; and the Morris arrangement effectively sets different vocal ranges as well as chordal and melodic elements against and beside each other. These three works and the 18 others here show just how wide a variety of music can be used to express the feelings underlying the Christmas season. And the musical selections, although mostly written comparatively recently by such composers as William Walton and Peter Warlock, also include some traditional material such as Silent night! Holy night! (arguably the most beautiful Christmas song of all) and Maw’s arrangements of I Saw Three Ships and Away in a Manger. It is in this more-familiar material that the choir shows its fully devotional side. The prayerful quality, for example, is brought to the fore in Silent night! Holy night! The simple beauty of Away in a Manger – which includes accompaniment on organ (played by Benjamin Sheen) – is inspirational. And Sheen is also heard in the organ solo Improvisation on Adeste, fidelis by Francis Pott (born 1957), a piece that strays rather far from the work known in English as Oh come all ye faithful but that shows to what extent music of Christmastime can go beyond the slow-paced homophony so often associated with carols. Like all releases focused on this specific time of year, this one is unlikely to be played repeatedly after the Christmas season is over. But the beauty of the singing and depth of expressiveness of the music will make its annual reappearance in listeners’ homes likely.

     Contemporary vocal music tends to reach out to a narrower audience than do seasonal Christmas works – and composers generally want to make points that have meaning at any time, not just in specific seasons. The Blue Griffin Records collection of world premières written for and performed by the trio known as Haven is a case in point. Lee R. Kesselman (born 1951) draws on a variety of sources for these seven works, two of which are song cycles. He looks back to some earlier composers, sets some lyrics from non-Western sources, and also produces music in which he is both lyricist and composer. Thus, Piangerò (2012) is loosely based on music from Handel’s Giulio Cesare but is thoroughly contemporary in harmonic and declamatory style. I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise is Kesselman’s 2018 arrangement of the Gershwin song – and is effective precisely because it pays close attention to the original and does not try to force it into an entirely new form or guise. Make Me a Willow Cabin (2014) is entirely Kesselman’s own music, but the words are Shakespeare’s, from Twelfth Night; and the accompaniment, which starts out as both perky and dissonant before becoming slower and serious and still dissonant, is largely at odds with the lyrics (for example, multiple repetitions of “my soul” make the point less rather than more effective). The words for How I Hate This Room (2007) are scarcely Shakespearean – they are by James Tucker – but Kesselman’s style fits better with this more-modern, more-prosaic and less-poetic verbiage. As for influences from abroad, the CD opens with Kesselman’s 2018 arrangement of the Japanese folksong Sakura, handled with the same sensitivity accorded Gershwin, and then offers the eight-movement Ashes & Dreams (2016) based on Japanese poetry. A societal point underlies this work – it alternates haiku, traditionally written by men, with waka, traditionally written by women. From a musical standpoint, the poised and graceful, wordless Prelude introduces items that are indeed made to sound different in accompaniment based on their form, but that all share a certain predisposition to push the voice in ways that reduce, sometimes greatly, any elegance inherent in the original poetry. The other song cycle here, which has both words and music by Kesselman, is Would That Loving Were Enough (2021). It includes four explorations of contemporary personal issues that are of little consequence objectively but that loom large in many relationships. It strives for significance and meaningfulness but comes across as more assertive than convincing. Kesselman does have rather wide-ranging interests that may make at least some works on this disc attractive to listeners interested in modern art songs.

     There are some world premières as well on a new Signum Classics CD featuring the low-voice vocal ensemble Cantus: seven of these 19 works have not been recorded before. The theme stated as the disc’s title, Alone Together, is a typical one for contemporary composers – Kesselman’s How I Hate This Room and Would That Loving Were Enough fit right into it – but Cantus chooses to illustrate the concept with works as different as Beethoven’s Gesang der Mönche, Simon and Garfunkel’s A Most Peculiar Man (which immediately follows the Beethoven), and those seven first recordings (four by Libby Larsen and one each by Gabriel Kahane, Jeff Beal and Rosephanye Powell). The Larsen items – actually parts of a multi-movement work interpolated within and among the various other pieces here – are specifically about technology and the ways in which it both facilitates connection and undermines it. The other pieces on the disc connect to the overall theme, and to each other, in a variety of ways, some more apparent than others. What is true throughout, even when the concept overreaches and somewhat undermines its ideas through over-sincerity, is that Cantus is a very fine singing ensemble. Sharon Durant’s Chinese Proverb is practically whispered at times, but always with emotional impact; the Lennon/McCartney She’s Leaving Home is jauntier than the Beatles made it and for that reason more pointed in its message; Arcade Fire’s Deep Blue effectively sets foreground narration against a kind of sound-cloud background that highlights the words’ pathos to good effect; Saint-Saëns’ Calme des Nuits (arranged by Chris Foss) sounds forth as a choral hymn blended with beauty; and so on, and on. Whether the disc as a whole fully reflects its title is almost immaterial – not to Cantus, certainly, but to the audience, since the individual components of the recording are put across with such expressiveness that the CD is a pleasure to hear even if its title is something of an indulgence: should the theme of loneliness and disconnection be associated with so many vocal pleasantries? Individual listeners will come at this material in different ways and come away from it with different impressions – but of the sheer quality of the ensemble’s aural blending there will be no doubt.

(++++) FOUR FROM THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE

Winnie-the-Pooh Classic Collection. By A.A. Milne. Decorations by E.H. Shepard. Farshore/HarperCollins. $35.

     When it comes to children’s literature, a few books have gained the designation as classics and retained it for many generations of young people – often aided over time, for retention purposes, by transformation into new media, as J.M. (James Matthew) Barrie’s Peter Pan changed from a character in a novel for adults to the central character in a stage play to the protagonist of a novel for young readers. Barrie himself spurred and managed that evolution, and after the death of Barrie (1860-1937), many other hands shaped and reshaped the Peter Pan character in a wide variety of media. But unlike Peter Pan, described by Barrie in his play as “the boy who wouldn’t grow up,” real-life children do age through and eventually past childhood – a circumstance notably relevant to A.A. (Alan Alexander) Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh.

     Winnie’s wonderful adventures were always intertwined with the life of Milne’s son, Christopher Robin, for whom Milne created the character – named Winnie because real-life Christopher met a tame London Zoo bear called Winnipeg and was enchanted by the encounter. It is the enchantment that père Milne transferred so beautifully to his stories of Winnie and his friends, which take place in the Hundred Acre Wood, derived from the Five Hundred Acre Wood in real-world Sussex, England. And it is the enchantment that continues to imbue Pooh’s world even long after the time of A.A. Milne (1882-1956) and Christopher Robin Milne (1920-1996). It is a continuing pleasure to introduce children to Winnie and the other denizens of the Hundred Acre Wood, and that pleasure is in full flower with this handsome slipcased Classic Collection of all four books in which Winnie-the-Pooh appears: the poetry collections When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six, and the story collections Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.

     Adults who buy this delightful set for today’s kids (or for themselves!) may be surprised if they remember Pooh and his friends primarily from the animated Disney versions of their adventures. Those are great fun on their own, and do a good job of maintaining much of the spirit of Milne’s writing, but the balancing act between narrative and art is quite different in the original books – with their utterly adorable “decorations” by E.H. (Ernest Howard) Shepherd. Instead of looking like roly-poly cartoon characters and more-modern stuffed toys, Pooh and friends are imagined by Shepherd in a style that fits with the original teddy bear, which dates to 1902; indeed, real-world Christopher Robin actually named his toy bear Edward before later calling it Winnie. Interestingly, the bear that Shepherd used as a model for his art was not the one belonging to Milne’s son but one owned by his own son, Graham, because it seemed more cuddly (although it was named Growler). The drawing style used by Shepherd now evokes a much earlier time, although it was aptly contemporary when the Pooh books were first published. As a result, there is nostalgia associated with the Pooh stories in their original form that accentuates the emotional content that they always included.

     That emotion always had real-world elements – Milne’s focus on the stories as relating to his son never wavered – but the connection became especially close and a touch tear-stained by the end of the last of the four books, The House at Pooh Corner. It is worth remembering – adults may not recall this and may even be surprised to find it out from this four-book set – that Pooh first emerged (as Edward) in a single poem in When We Were Very Young (1924). The story collection Winnie-the-Pooh appeared in 1926, after which Pooh showed up 11 times in the 35 poems contained in Now We Are Six (1927) – and then, at last, came The House at Pooh Corner (1928). None of this history and intertwining of poetry and prose is necessary for today’s children to meet and enjoy Winnie and his friends, but adults may want to consider it when engaging with all the non-Pooh poetry in the two verse collections – a great deal of which is, like the Pooh material, thoroughly charming. Milne had a lovely concept of Pooh as “a bear of very little brain” who is nevertheless thoughtful and friendly and a reasonably talented poet. The message of being true to oneself, no matter what one’s gifts may or may not be, carries down through the decades very effectively, and the underlying kindness of all the characters’ interactions is a form of sensitivity that retains its relevance today – and may perhaps be needed now more than ever.

     Children do grow up, though, and the bittersweet conclusion of The House on Pooh Corner – which Milne apparently did not intend as being anything more than a pleasant farewell now that real-world Christopher Robin was growing older – will likely affect today’s readers at least as much as it did those of 1928. In the last story, Christopher Robin has to leave the Hundred Acre Wood – the reason, his aging out of early childhood, is never explicitly stated – because he cannot simply “do nothing” anymore; the animals disappear one by one until only the boy and his bear are left in “an Enchanted Place” in the forest and go off together. Wistful and hopeful at the same time, this final scene may be one that modern parents need to absorb and digest on their own before reading it to or with children: it really does bring on tears, even if that was not its intent. The Pooh poems and stories fully deserve to be deemed classics of children’s literature as well as souvenirs of a time long ago when there was still magic in stuffed animals – a type of magic that, however greatly transformed and updated in the 21^st century, can still captivate children who are privileged to encounter it in the guise of the Hundred Acre Wood a hundred years in the past.

(++++) KEYBOARD REVISITS

Liszt: Piano Concertos Nos. 1-3; Concerto Pathétique; Rhapsodie Espagnole; Malédiction; Totentanz; Fantasia on Hungarian Folk Themes; Wanderer Fantasy. Joshua Pierce, piano; State Symphony Orchestra of Russia, Moscow State Philharmonic Orchestra, and RTV Symphony Orchestra of Slovenia conducted by Paul Freeman; Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Kirk Trevor. MSR Classics. $19.95 (2 CDs).

Bach: Harpsichord Concertos in D minor, BWV 1052, and F minor, BWV 1056; Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. Jeannette Sorrell, harpsichord and conducting Apollo’s Fire. AVIE. $19.99.

Idil Biret Archive Edition, Volume 21: Waltzes and Dances by Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt, Ravel, Debussy, Kreisler/Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Bartók, Mimaroglu, and Johann Strauss Jr. Idil Biret, piano. IBA. $19.99.

Idil Biret Archive Edition, Volumes 22-23: Prokofiev—Piano Sonatas Nos. 2, 4, 7, 8, and 9; Toccata in D minor. Idil Biret, piano. IBA. $29.99 (2 CDs).

     The relative ease with which older recordings can now be remastered and reissued has led to something of a flood of performances that are decades old – sometimes many decades old – and that have historical value or curiosity value. But they do not always have musical value, and it can be hard to figure out to whom some of these reissues are designed to appeal if both their performance value and their sound quality have been superseded in more-recent years. On the other hand, the same comparative ease that allows reissue of somewhat mediocre material also has made it possible to hear (or re-hear) some truly excellent performances that have fallen by the wayside for no better reason than that newer readings by other performers are available. In fact, some older recordings – and they are really not all that old – can truly be revelatory on several levels. That is the case with the MSR Classics reissue of lots of Franz Liszt’s piano-and-orchestra music, all featuring Joshua Pierce and recorded from 1993 to 1996. First of all, the sound throughout is first-rate, quite as good as pretty much anything to be heard in this repertoire in more-recent releases. Second of all – and this is really first – Pierce is an absolutely top-notch Liszt performer, and in fact it was his highly dramatic debut with Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in Moscow, in 1993, that launched his international career (a situation reminiscent of the launch of Van Cliburn’s worldwide fame through his 1958 Moscow performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1). And with this recording we have, lo and behold, Pierce’s performance of the Liszt with, yes, the State Symphony Orchestra of Russia. It is not the career-launching performance, but it is contemporary and excellent on all levels. And it is offered not only with the second Liszt piano concerto but also with the third, a work not even known until the 1980s and one of which Pierce has become something of a champion. Throw in the fascinating Concerto Pathétique, published in this version after Liszt’s death and incorporating material from very early in his career as well as from his final years, and you have a splendid CD that is a genuine event to be celebrated by Liszt lovers. And it is only the first of the two discs in this release. The second collects five of the composer’s almost-concertos, several of which are a bit more on the level of “display pieces” than are the concertos themselves, but all of which repay the musicianly attention of Pierce to excellent effect, giving audiences highly impressive and often genuinely thrilling listening experiences. The decidedly strange Malédiction, Liszt/Busoni Rhapsodie Espagnole and Schubert/Liszt Wanderer Fantasy – the last of these lasting longer than any of the numbered concertos – are particularly impressive, but all the pieces are more than worthwhile and very much worth owning in this comprehensive set. Yes, the recording involves two conductors and four orchestras of differing provenance and quality (the two Russian ensembles are the most impressive); but it is Pierce’s music-making that is in the forefront here, and it is so effective on so many levels that it fully justifies the reissue of this exemplary set of performances.

     The keyboarding is of a different sort and on a different level in the AVIE re-release of Bach harpsichord concertos as played and conducted by Jeannette Sorrell – and this too is an again-available recording deserving of rejoicing. It is billed as a “25^th anniversary edition,” in recognition of the fact that the Brandenburg concertos as played by Sorrell and the period-instrument ensemble Apollo’s Fire were released in 1999 – with the non-Brandenburg D minor and F minor harpsichord concertos as bonuses. Here as with Pierce’s Liszt, albeit in very different ways, the recording has lost none of its quality and none of its charm. These are charming performances, with lilt and brightness that make it sound as if the musicians are having a lot of fun producing the music and sending it out for audiences to hear. Given the frequent stodginess with which Bach is often delivered – even by period-instrument groups and sometimes especially by them – this lighter, serious-but-just-slightly-frothy approach is thoroughly winning. Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, a harpsichord concerto in all but name, especially benefits from Sorrell’s handling of the music: the overall ensemble is very clear, the musical lines beautifully balanced against each other, and the harpsichord kept tucked neatly and expertly into its traditional role until it isn’t – emerging from the responsibility of undergirding the music into the spotlight on its own in a way that sounds not only inevitable but also simply right, as if the concerto could not possibly have gone any other way. Because the solo-level expectation regarding the harpsichord is absent in Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, there is an element of pleasant surprise when the keyboard becomes more and more dominant within the ensemble, providing a version of the delight that Haydn was later to create with his all-of-a-sudden harpsichord solo in the finale of his Symphony No. 98. The D minor and F minor concertos, of course, are expected to focus on the harpsichord, and Sorrell makes sure that they do so in the historically informed milieu within which Apollo’s Fire makes music: there are no Lisztian fireworks or anything approaching them here, but there is primus inter pares camaraderie aplenty and, as a result, Bach performances that delight and captivate 25 years after their original release.

     Neither Pierce’s recording nor Sorrell’s ought really to be designated as “historic,” but that adjective does apply to the reissues in the long-running Idil Biret Archive Edition, which makes available recordings by the excellent Turkish pianist dating back considerably more than 25 or 30 years – in many cases as digital remasterings of original analog productions. The two latest releases from IBA continue to showcase the series’ unerring focus on this justifiably renowned pianist, who was born in 1941 and is still going strong. She was very much in her prime as a performer when the performances on these releases took place. Volume 21 is a potpourri of lighter and mostly familiar music, in effect a full CD of encore material, with recordings made as long ago as 1961 – although in one case (Liszt’s Tarantella from Venezia e Napoli) dating to 2011 and in another (Debussy’s La plus que lente) recorded as recently as 2018. The main thing that this disc shows is that Biret has been sensitive to the expressive nuances of these not-always-consequential little pieces throughout her career, and that her technique remains as consistent as her thinking about the music. The last two works on the disc are especially interesting. The penultimate is Pieces Sentimentales by Ilhan Mimaroglu, who is really known only for his electronic music but who created this pleasant (and tonal) piece early in his career. And the final work here is the Leopold Godowsky arrangement of Johann Strauss Jr.’s Künstlerleben, a version that extends and decorates the music far beyond what Strauss ever intended and in so doing creates a pianistic firebrand that Biret appears thoroughly to enjoy putting on display.

     Matters are considerably more serious in the IBA Volumes 22-23, which are devoted – both CDs – to piano sonatas by Prokofiev. The recordings here were made as early as 1960 and as late as 1977, all therefore in analog form, and they include some sonatas that she often played in recital as well as two – Nos. 8 and 9 – that she apparently recorded only once, for radio airplay. Biret has had a longstanding affinity for Russian music, especially the works of Rachmaninoff, but her handling of Prokofiev’s sonatas is more uneven, in the sense that she performed some frequently and others rarely. What is clear from the readings on this two-CD set, however, is that Biret thoroughly understands the structures of these sonatas and their differing intentions and emotional impact. She also displays remarkable consistency over the decades in handling the works’ technical and expressive challenges: Sonata No. 7 is offered here two separate times, once near the start of the first CD (as recorded in 1961) and once at the end of the second (as recorded in 1977). There is nothing formulaic or strictly duplicative in the two renditions, each of which has slightly different emphases and slightly differing tempo choices. But both are clearly reflective of Biret’s sensibilities and her understanding of Prokofiev’s music and his thinking about keyboard style, which means listeners to this release get even more insight into Biret as a thoughtful as well as technically accomplished pianist than the IBA discs usually provide. It is an out-and-out joy to have these recordings, like those by Pierce and Sorrell, readily available to music lovers everywhere.