Robert Schumann was never more purely Romantic than in his set of piano pieces Kreisleriana, Op. 16. The set is of extramusical, literary inspiration, taking its name from a character in stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann, and it features the explosive imagination of the young Schumann at its best. Schumann announced the work, which he apparently wrote in four days, rather breathlessly to his inamorata, Clara, and more than almost any other work of his, it seems to spill over the boundaries of the short piano piece. Hélène Grimaud has recorded the work before, but she seems to have added intensity this time around. She is nervously excited in the faster virtuosic numbers, but sample No. 4 to hear her marvelous control over the tonal instability that appears in many of these pieces. The Brahms Intermezzi, Op. 117, were also "For Clara," sent to Clara Schumann toward the end of his life; the two had remained friends, and here, in Grimaud's evocation of tempestuous old-school pianism, one is stirred to wonder what Clara sounded like playing this music. The connection of the nine Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 32, of Brahms to Clara is less clear, and the set, with baritone Konstantin Krimmel on the vocals, may seem like an afterthought; the three performances on the album were all made at different places and times. However, taken on its own terms, it is a fine performance of this set, consisting entirely of settings of texts by Eastern poets. Krimmel catches the rather mystical nature of the songs, and Grimaud, with whom he has worked in the past, is effective as an accompanist. This is an important entry in Grimaud's catalog, with a Kreisleriana that is as fine as any.© James Manheim /TiVo

Taken from several live performances at the Gasteig in Munich in early 2023, this recording of Wagner's Siegfried made classical best-seller charts later that year. It is part of a series that began in 2016, intending to record the entire Ring Cycle live. The recordings have all been successful, and this is testimony to the skills of conductor Simon Rattle. There are conductors' Wagner performances, and there are singers' Wagner performances. This is the former. The Bavarian Radio Symphony seizes the listener's attention from the opening bell, and the energy never flags. There is nothing objectionable about the singers, but few of them will stick in one's head. The exception, perhaps, is soprano Anja Kampe as Brunnhilde (and Danae Kontora as the Voice of the Forest Bird); Kampe, of course, doesn't enter until the end, but at that point, everything comes together for a really thrilling conclusion of "radiant love, laughing death." Although these were live performances, they might just as well have been made in a studio; Bavarian Radio's engineering in its hometown is superbly detailed, and the audience discipline is awesome (no applause or other crowd noise of any kind is retained). There is a liveliness to Rattle's Wagner that sets it apart from performances in the German tradition, and it is fully on display in this recording.© James Manheim /TiVo

In these love songs in waltz style for chorus or solo voices accompanied by piano four hands, Brahms freely indulged his taste for Viennese folk music. The RIAS-Kammerchor instils a wonderful inner life in these musical landscapes, sometimes cheerful, sometimes melancholy, punctuated here by a selection from the Hungarian Dances – also eminently popular in their inspiration. © harmonia mundi

The live recordings of the venerable Cleveland Orchestra have been gaining wider attention since the beginning of the group's distribution deal with the London Philharmonic's in-house label, and these recordings of works by Berg and Richard Strauss offer a good example as to why. The production values of the recordings have been very high, for one thing, and producer Elaine Martone snared a Best Classical Producer Grammy nomination in 2023 for her work here and elsewhere. The high strings of the orchestra sparkle in the Three Pieces from the Lyric Suite for strings of Berg, which lives up to the "lyric" designation despite its 12-tone construction. Both there and in the Strauss Suite from Der Rosenkavalier, Op. 59, the orchestra plays beautifully for conductor Franz Welser-Möst, achieving carefully etched detail. This is vintage Welser-Möst, sacrificing expression for precision, and some may like a more Viennese flavor in this nostalgic work from Strauss, but it certainly offers many details on hearings and rehearings. An added attraction is that this is not the usual 20-minute Rosenkavalier suite but a longer one devised by Welser-Möst himself, based on an earlier effort by Robert Mandrell, that seamlessly incorporates other orchestral music from the opera into a 42-minute romp. The recordings of the two pieces come from different concerts, one of which also included George Walker's Lilacs for voice and orchestra. It might have been nice to open this album with that performance (there was time available), creating a sequence of three works whose language progressively relaxes, but the pairing here also works beautifully and should draw new listeners to the orchestra's series.© James Manheim /TiVo

Japanese-British pianist Mitsuko Uchida continues to impress with recordings that are not so much intellectual as simply well thought out, making a challenging yet extremely satisfying overall impression. Consider the three works by Robert Schumann recorded here. Only the Waldszenen, Op. 82 (Forest Scenes), are well known. The Piano Sonata No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22, is an early but not immature work, composed in 1830 and supplied with a new finale in 1838 at the suggestion of Clara Schumann, who pointed out that while she could play the original version, few others would be able to. There is already plenty to chew on here, for Schumann incorporates motivic links to the first movement in the new finale. Clara was lukewarm about the work (calling it "not too incomprehensible"), but Schumann himself thought highly of it. The genesis of the work is fascinating; it began with a song Schumann composed in his student days, and Schumann incorporated it into an inner voice of the slow movement. Rather like Beethoven's theater music, it does have the feel of an innovative composer's ideas being forced into an older mold. But Uchida, with her precise yet explosive style, is the perfect interpreter of the work, which seems to spill over the boundaries of sonata form with quasi-improvisatory ideas. Her performance connects the work to the rest of the output of the young Schumann in an ideal way. Also interesting are the Gesänge der Frühe, Op. 133 (Dawn Songs), one of the last things Schumann finished before going insane: they are strangely serene little miniatures. The Waldszenen themselves are full of fresh, even daring interpretations. Decca's engineering staff outdoes itself with its capture of an ideal sound environment for the work: not the usual concert hall or studio but the well-known audiophile venue the Reitstadel in the German city of Neumarkt. An essential Schumann release.© TiVo

Final volume of Paul Hindemith’s (1895–1963) youthful and fresh Kammermusik series from the 1920s includes Kammermusik Nos. 4–7 performed by Kronberg Academy Soloists and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra under a true Hindemith specialist, Christoph Eschenbach, who has won a Grammy for a previous Hindemith album on Ondine. These four works by Hindemith can be considered as full-bodied concertos for violin, viola, viola d’amore and organ. These work feature four young talented soloists, Stephen Waarts, Timothy Ridout, Ziyu Shen and Christian Schmitt. Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 4 (‘Violin Concerto’) is scored for a larger orchestra than its three predecessors and includes 24 instrumentalists. Kammermusik No. 5 (‘Viola Concerto’) the composer premiered himself by playing the solo part. In total, Hindemith performed this work for 85 times during the next 11 years! In a letter, Hindemith described the viola d’amore as “the most beautiful thing that you can imagine in sound”. The composer fell in love with the instrument and wrote his Kammermusik No. 6 with this instrument in mind. Hindemith’s final Kammermusik (No. 7) was written to a commission by the Southwest German Radio: the premiere of this Organ Concerto was transmitted live in 1928. The radio broadcast had a decisive role in the composer’s choice of instrumentation. © Ondine

The "Bach Pilgrimage" of conductor John Eliot Gardiner, with his English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, is among the most ambitious musical projects of recent decades: a concert tour devoted to Bach's complete church cantatas, matched to the liturgical year in something like real time, and passing through the cities where Bach lived and worked but also stopping in churches in other countries. The funding itself was a minor miracle. His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, is the first name listed, but corporations also kicked in, and individual donors could help out with single concerts along the way. The recordings designate themselves as live; actually, they represent final dress rehearsals rather than concert performances, but they have that edge-of-the-chair quality that dress rehearsals sometimes attain, and they're not marred by coughs, creaking pews, and doors opening and closing. The performances are, furthermore, not perfect. In this two-disc set of Epiphany cantatas, rounded out by the motet Jesu, meine Freude, soprano Joanne Lunn is severely challenged by the devilish (sorry, JSB, but that's the right word) quick-triplet mode mixtures in the "Wirf, mein Herze" aria in the Mein Gott, wie lang, ach lange?, BWV 155 (CD 1, track 4). Gardiner's overall treatment of the cantatas is quiet and reverential, and he can go to extremes in pursuit of this ideal; the bass aria "Ächzen und erbärmlich Weinen" (Groaning and pitiable weeping) in the cantata Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen, BWV 13 (My sighs, my tears) is taken at a grindingly slow tempo and extended to a 10-and-a-half-minute length. Gardiner justifies this decision with reference to symbols of the Cross he finds in the score -- always a risky business. Any complaints one might have, however, are swept aside by the great virtue of these performances -- the intensity of the performers' response to the texts. Gardiner seems to put himself in Bach's shoes as Bach sought to find individual meaning in well-worn Lutheran texts. His observations, expressed in a sort of road diary that serves as booklet notes, are acute, and people will be reading them a century hence to find out what Bach meant to listeners of the early twenty-first century. (They're admirably personal and colloquial -- if you've ever wondered how to say "hair shirt" in German, you can find out from the booklet here.) What's really remarkable, however, is the way Gardiner has involved his performers in his creative response to the texts. The performance of Jesu, meine Freude at the end of disc 2 is one of the very best ever recorded, with absolute conviction from the Monteverdi Choir in singing lines like "Lass den Satan wittern" (Let Satan storm). Those who approach Bach's cantatas from a specifically religious perspective may well find these performances definitive, and they are, from any perspective at all, documents of extraordinary commitment and musical enthusiasm. © TiVo