LAST week my May edition of BBC Music, the only music magazine to which I subscribe, dropped in early through the letter box.
I do like this magazine by and large: it's packed with news from the music industry, from the concert circuits, the festival paths and the recording studios. There are behind the scenes interviews and plenty reviews of CDs, books, apps and so on. I like its tone, mostly, though I find less interest in its big features and columns. There's a BBC bias, inevitably, but the mag pretty successfully steers a path around the pedantic, the didactic and the pompous. It's user-friendly. It does, alas, have a Twitter Room, which is a bit of a witter room for twits who tweet. But I guess that's the way of the world.
It comes with a cover CD, and there are two strands of Scottish interest there this month, to start with. The main work on the album is a performance of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony by Donald Runnicles and the BBC SSO, recorded from their Usher Hall performance last September. And in the coupler on the disc there is also an oblique Scottish accent, so to speak, in that it is a performance of John Adams' electrifying Short Ride in a Fast Machine, conducted by the deeply-impressive Thomas Sondergard, who is, of course, principal guest conductor of the RSNO, though this performance features Sondergard with his own orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, of which he is chief conductor.
May is a big month for the magazine, because it is announcing the winners of its tenth annual BBC Music Magazine Awards. These may not yet have the veteran prestige of the historic Gramophone Awards or the genuinely historic status of the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards; but they are young yet, are gathering clout year on year, and are much respected throughout the music business. And, critically, the award winners, from a shortlist of recordings announced in February, were voted for by the readers of the magazine, who responded in their thousands. So there is no smoke-filled room with dusty academics or crusty critics venting their prejudices.
Which brings me to the point. One particular award absolutely leapt out and seized my attention. That was the chamber music award (the magazine simply calls it Chamber Award). It went to three established soloists, pianist Alexander Melnikov, violinist Jean-Guihen Queyras and violinist Isabelle Faust for their Harmonia Mundi recording of a brace of Beethoven's Piano Trios, including the flawless Archduke Trio. The three musicians have worked and recorded together before, severally and collectively, but, without any apparent lessening in the momentum of their individual solo careers, seem to be thinking of themselves more and more as a trio. Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov is a lynchpin in the group. He is a specialist period-pianist and breathes freshness into everything he touches. On the award-winning Beethoven Trios disc, he plays his own 1828 piano (apparently he has a collection). But it is their next project, launched this month on Harmonia Mundi, which has captured my imagination and ignited my interest at full-burn. The three musicians have issued a collective statement on their new CD, that, while they were on tour performing Schumann's opus 80 Piano Trio, the three of them conceived the idea, as passionate devotees of Schumann's music, of putting the composer's three Piano Trios into a broader context that would illuminate them mutually.
And that concept will result in a trilogy of discs on which each of the musicians, as a soloist, will play one of Schumann's concertos (Faust the Violin Concerto, Queyras the Cello Concerto, and Melnikov the Piano Concerto) while the three will then team up as chamber musicians to play, disc by disc, the three Piano Trios. The two string players will each use gut strings on their instruments, with the aim of bringing lightness, lucidity and transparency to Schumann's still-sometimes mis-read textures, while Melnikov will use an appropriate keyboard instrument from his collection. And of course they needed an orchestra and a conductor. According to the three musicians, their decision to invite the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and conductor Pablo Heras-Casado on board was pretty-much "spontaneous". The first CD, with Faust playing the Violin Concerto, is out now. I'll review it very soon in our regular Sunday CD slot, but 's quite breath-taking and raises many questions about a piece which has an almost incredible history, running right through the second half of the 19th century, from systematic attempts to bury it, to its hijacking for anti-Semitic purposes by the Third Reich. As I've reiterated here in recent years, there is still some ground-breaking work going on out there with Schumann's music. This new project, I sense, will amount to more.
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