The international success of after its premiere in 1859 completely overshadowed all of Gounod’s subsequent operas. He had known Goethe’s masterpiece for two decades and brought to the text his gifts for memorable melody and rich orchestration. Added to this, the plot of Faust’s ageing and the heroine Marguerite’s redemption, offered the opportunity for the most spectacular stage effects. Heard here in its 1864 London version with an additional air and without spoken dialogue or ballet, Faust represents 19th-century French opera at its peak. © Naxos

One morning in 1822, Schubert wrote down an enigmatic text in which all his ghosts seem to take shape: wandering, solitude, consolation, disappointed love. Inspired by this dreamlike narrative, Raphaël Pichon, Pygmalion and Stéphane Degout have devised a vast Romantic fresco, combining resurrection of unknown treasures with rediscovery of established masterpieces. © harmonia mundi

Together with the Berlin-based Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester (DSO) Mari Kodama and her husband Kent Nagano have now completed the recording of all of Beethoven's piano concertos by jumping, as it were, back in time twice: the last element of this recording series that has spanned more than 13 years was Beethoven's concerto "number nought" (WoO 4) – personally edited by Mari Kodama from the autograph score. The original manuscript of this piano concerto is kept at the State Library in Berlin. This is not a completed score, because there is no orchestration. That said, Beethoven annotated the short score, especially in the first two movements, with indications as to which instrument was to play which part. The orchestra score which is available today was written in the early twentieth century based on those annotations. The only problem is: "Today, armed with the knowledge we now have acquired about the young Beethoven, we would perform this concerto quite differently in places," explain Mari Kodama and Kent Nagano in unison. They therefore present a very personal adaptation that emerged during rehearsal with the orchestra and at the recording sessions, and which reflects Kodama's and Nagano's individual image of Beethoven. They aim to make audible the exuberant freshness and urgent sense of awakening in the young, almost childlike Beethoven's writing shortly before his artistic powers were to burst forth, the joie de vivre and vital energy in a style that owes something to the playfulness of both Haydn and Mozart. That is Mari Kodama's intention, and she plays it in precisely such a versatile manner. Combined with the classical canon of the piano concertos nos. 1–5, the resulting comprehensive edition is complemented by the Triple Concerto for piano, violin and cello op. 56, the Rondo WoO 6 and the Eroica Variations op. 35, offering insight into the artist's longstanding involvement with her musical companion Ludwig van Beethoven. And the recordings of his works seem to lead the listener through the composer's life. "If you play all of them, it is like accompanying Beethoven on a journey through his life," explains Mari Kodama, and Kent Nagano adds: "You acknowledge the musical genius and at the same time you recognise the development of European music, because Beethoven was undoubtedly its pioneer." He led the way in changing the structure, form and harmony of music, just as there was an equally radical shift in the world around him; after the French Revolution society and business and the incipient industrial revolution began to alter the way people lived. "He is and remains an optimist, someone who can do no other than believe in what he wishes to communicate to us through his music," explains Kodama. She says this helps her. The fact that she herself is an optimist can partly be attributed to Beethoven. Kodama, Nagano and the DSO – one might imagine them almost as a trio where all the musicians have blind faith in each other and are therefore able to produce a degree of musical intensity that brings the young Beethoven back to life. © Berlin Classics

The vogue for performing classical music in nightclubs has seemed to recede in its original homeland, the U.S., but not so in Europe, with the icily perfect Anne-Sophie Mutter as the somewhat unlikely representative of the trend. Mutter, who was apparently inspired to try this by her 20-something children, shows why she's one of the world's greats, adapting to the demands of the medium, and by all appearances having a lot of fun. Mutter and a handpicked group called Mutter's Virtuosi, featuring the superb Mahan Esfahani on harpsichord, essentially offer a program of familiar late Romantic tunes that might have been heard in the nightclub's nearest analogue of a century ago, the Viennese café, spicing it up with syncopated material (Gershwin and the Jamaican Rumba) on one hand, and Vivaldi and Bach on the other. Mutter pushes herself into tempo extremes she might not ordinarily try, and she gets a big cheer from the crowd with a couple of movements of the Vivaldi Four Seasons and, more unexpectedly, two Bach concerto movements. The whole thing has a loose, enthusiastic feel with the flavor of Mutter showing the youngsters what she can do, and it may be that she's hit on a more promising direction for such releases than her much younger American counterparts. Recommended and fun.© TiVo

The Vienna Stories title of this release by harpist Anneleen Lenaerts is more personal than thematic. Only some of the pieces are from or about Vienna (although the inclusion of An der schönen blauen Donau, Op. 314 ("The Blue Danube Waltz") qualifies the collection as Viennese in the end. Lenaerts is the principal harpist of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, where she has become an emerging star of her instrument. At the end of the program, she brings in some of her Philharmonic colleagues as a small string group. This is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the program, which evokes unusually nicely the atmosphere of a salon harp concert of a century or more ago. Most of the pieces are transcriptions of various ages, and Lenaerts contributes a Fantasy on La Bohème by Puccini of her own; it is indeed good to hear a new entry in the operatic paraphrase genre, which any 19th century listener would have taken as natural, but which is mighty rare these days. Listen to the 1914 harp version of Smetana's The Moldau by Hans Trneček, where Lenaerts' clean, liquid runs help establish her as a major player of her instrument. There's an X-factor here in the frequent presence of the harp's lyrical charm, of which any viewer of The Marx Brothers' films is aware but which is sometimes lost in the sheer technical difficulties of the instrument. The sound environment of the Casino Baumgarten in Vienna is appropriate, but Lenaerts is miked too closely, picking up extraneous noise that would have been inaudible to hearers of such a program in 1914. Save for that, a lovely harp recital.© TiVo

Cinq-Mars is an 1877 opera by Charles Gounod, written a dozen years after his last big hit, Roméo et Juliette. It's based on a historical novel by Alfred de Vigny about the Marquis of Cinq-Mars, a nobleman who attempted to rally resistance to Cardinal Richelieu and in 1642 was executed for his pains. The work harks back to the tradition of French grand opera and was never very successful. It fell into a series of numbers at a time when audiences were getting a taste of a different way of doing things, not just from Germany, but from Verdi also. But it does contain numbers that show Gounod's undiminished melodic gift: sample the "Cavatine" of the Princess Marie Gonzaga, the linchpin of the wholly fictitious romantic subplot added by Gounod and his librettists. Marie is sung by Véronique Gens, who leads a cast of uniformly strong singers, and this live performance, with the Munich Radio Orchestra and Bavarian Radio Choir under the direction of Ulf Schirmer, has plenty of energy. The recording is available in a sumptuous hardback package with beautiful classic design; the event may not live up to the presentation, but the idea, as a counterweight to the instant reproducibility of art in the Internet age, is a good one.© TiVo