A confession: I know very little of the music of Alessandro Scarlatti, but I did not want this significant anniversary to get passed over, for it is 300 years to the day since his death in Napoli.
Alessandro was renowned primarily as a vocal composer, but also made a number of innovations in instrumental music – picked up by his son Domenico, a prolific composer in this area.
Opera and church music were Alessandro’s main forms of musical currency, but we begin with an invaluable guide to his music from Brilliant Classics, presenting a sequence of concertos, sinfonias and sonatas:
Following this is one of Alessandro’s principal compositions for the church, his Dixit Dominus in a fine performance with Trevor Pinnock conducting the English Concert and a starry team of soloists:
Finally, here is a link to what some regard as Alessandro’s best opera – the three-act drama Telemarco:
Published post no.2,695 – Thursday 22 October 2025
April Fredrick (soprano), Brennen Guillory (tenor – Trost im Unglück, Der Tambourg’ sell; Revelge), Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra / Kenneth Woods
Mahler Symphony no.4 in G major (1892; 1899-1900) Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Lied des Verfolgten im Turm; Des Antonius von Padua; Fischpredigt; Trost im Unglück; Rheinlegendchen; Der Schildwache Nachtlied; Der Tambourg’sell; Revelge
Colorado MahlerFest 195269364564 [two discs, 89’22”] Producer Jonathan Galle Engineer Tim Burton Live performances at Macky Auditorium, Boulder, Colorado, 20 May 2023 (Des Knaben Wunderhorn), 19 May 2024 (symphony no.4)
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
Recorded coverage of Colorado’s MahlerFest continues with these performances taken from the past two editions, duly confirming the significance of this event in the annals of Mahler interpretation and the increasing excellence of the orchestral playing under Kenneth Woods.
What are the performances like?
It may be the shortest of his cycle and the one which initially gained his music acceptance in the UK and US, but Mahler’s Fourth Symphony received as rough a reception as any of his premieres and it remains a difficult work fully to make cohere. While he undoubtedly has its measure, Woods might have pointed up those expressive contrasts in its opening movement a little more directly; the music only finding focus with a development where the emotional perspective opens out to reveal an unforeseen ambiguity. The remainder is unfailingly well judged, while the scherzo impresses through a seamless transition between the sardonic and the elegance of its trio sections. Alan Snow sounds just a little tentative with his ‘mistuned’ violin, but the unexpected panorama of enchantment prior to its coda is meltingly realized.
At just over 20 minutes, the Adagio feels relatively swift (surprisingly so), even if Woods is mindful never to rush its unfolding double variations and what becomes a contrast between intensifying expressive states whose Beethovenian antecedent is not hard to discern. If the climactic ‘portal to heaven’ lacks little in resplendence, it is that hushed inwardness either side such as sets the seal on a reading of this movement to rank among the finest in recent years. Nor is its segue into the finale other than seamless – Mahler having realized that an earlier vocal setting was the natural culmination to where his symphony had been headed. Suffice to add that April Fredrick’s contribution is of a piece with Woods’s conception in its canny mingling of innocence and experience prior to an ending of deep-seated repose.
The second disc features seven songs taken from Mahler’s settings of folk-inspired anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn. April Fredrick is truly in her element with a Rheinlegendchen of winning insouciance and a Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt of deftest irony. Brennen Guillory comes into his own with the final two numbers, Der Tamboursg’sell distilling the darkest humour as surely as Revelge conveys that innate fatalism behind the resolve with which the soldier meets his destiny. Woods provides an astute and sensitive accompaniment.
Does it all work?
Yes, insofar as the collection of folk-inspired poetry proved central to Mahler’s evolution as both a song and symphonic composer. It might have been worthwhile to include the original version of Das himmlische Leben, not least as its appreciably different orchestration shows just how far the composer’s thinking had come during eight years, but the present selection is nothing if not representative. Hopefully those Wunderhorn songs not featured will appear on a future issue from this source, maybe in tandem with the Rückert songs of the next decade.
Is it recommended?
Yes it is. The symphonic cycle emerging from MahlerFest is shaping up to be a significant addition to the Mahler discography, with the latest instalment no exception. Hopefully this year’s account of the Sixth Symphony will find its way to commercial release before long.
Jennifer France (soprano), London Philharmonic Orchestra / Edward Gardner
Abrahamsen let me tell you (2012-3) Mahler Symphony no.4 in G major (1892, 1899-1900)
Royal Festival Hall, London Friday 3 October 2025
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
Tonight’s London Philharmonic Orchestra concert featured the welcome revival of a 21st-century classic. Hans Abrahamsen’s recent output may be relatively sparing, but the works that have emerged represent a triumph of quality over quantity and not least let me tell you.
Set to fragmentary lines drawn by Paul Griffiths from his eponymous novel, this centres on the character of Ophelia – its seven songs falling into three larger parts whose outlining of a ‘before, now and after’ trajectory gives focus to the arching intensity of its 30-minute span. The first, fourth and sixth of these anticipate what comes to fruition during the second, fifth and seventh – the exception being the third whose speculative vocal line is underpinned by a stealthy progress in the lower registers evoking the motion, if not the form, of a passacaglia. Elsewhere the voice evinces an intricacy and translucency that effortlessly carries the word-setting as it pivots between thought of oblivion and transcendence, before eventually being subsumed into the orchestra for a conclusion among the most affecting in recent memory.
The LPO acquitted itself ably in music which is texturally complex for all its harmonic clarity, though it was Jennifer France (above) who (not unreasonably) most impressed with a rendering of the solo part as did ample justice to its high-lying melisma and airborne flights of fancy. Edward Gardner directed with an innate sense of where this music was headed, not least in those final bars with their tapering off into silence. Relatively few pieces are recognized as seminal from the outset, but let me tell you is one such and seems destined to remain so well into the future.
France then returned (or rather stole in) for the finale of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony after the interval. His setting of ‘Das himmlische Leben’ from the folk-inspired anthology Das Knaben Wunderhorn had actually been written almost a decade earlier and was once envisaged as the finale to the Third Symphony, but it makes a natural conclusion to a successor whose relative understatement is sustained right through to this movement’s intangible end: a ‘child’s vision of heaven’ whose intended innocence becomes informed with no little experience by the close.
Gardner had steered a convincing trajectory through the preceding movements – not least the opening one whose mingled whimsy and wistfulness took on a more ominous demeanour in its eventful development, before conveying unalloyed resolve in a warm-hearted reprise and beatific coda. What is among the most striking of Mahler’s scherzo’s proceeded with audible appreciation of its pivoting between the sardonic and sublime, Pieter Schoeman’s ‘mistuned’ violin being first among equals in music whose soloistic textures were thrown into relief by the homogenous stability of the Adagio. Its double variations unfolded with a fluid intensity capped by a coda whose ‘portal to heaven’ yielded thrilling resplendence as subsided into a transcendent raptness that, in other circumstances, could have made a satisfying conclusion.
That this lead so seamlessly into the vocal finale says a great deal for Mahler’s foresight, but also Gardner’s ability to fashion so cohesive a symphonic entity. As the music subsided into subterranean chords on harp, the audience was (necessarily) held spellbound a while longer.
April Fredrick (soprano), Angharad Lyddon (mezzo-soprano), Robert Murray (tenor) Paul Carey Jones (bass), Dr Rowan Williams (narrator); Côr Heol y March, BBC National Chorus and Orchestra of Wales / Adrian Partington
Lyrita SRCD442 [66’41’’] Latin / Welsh text and English translation included Producer / Engineer Adrian Farmer, Engineer Simon Smith
Recorded 20-21 January 2024 at BBC Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
Lyrita continues its coverage of Grace Williams (1906-1977) with her largest concert work, Missa Cambrensis, in a recent studio recording which confirms it as the defining statement from a composer who, almost half a century since her death, is only now receiving her due.
What’s the music like?
As Paul Conway observes in his typically thorough booklet notes, Missa Cambrensis is one among a number of works by Williams that is Welsh only in a titular sense. Premiered at the Llandaff Festival in 1971, it was well received by fellow composers, critics and public alike but not heard again until 2016 in a performance one recalls as originally intended for release on Lyrita and which can be heard via the composer’s dedicated website. Not that the present account is other than successful in conveying the essence of this powerful yet elusive piece.
Many settings of the Mass since Haydn have unfolded a symphonic trajectory, but Williams goes further with the division into five clearly defined movements. The initial Kyrie Eleison not only introduces most of those salient motifs but also establishes that tone, mystical in its undulating equivocation, such as characterizes this work’s long-term expression: the contrast here between choral and soloistic textures duly accentuated by their hieratic and supplicatory quality. This duly sets up an emotional contrast intensified in the Gloria, outwardly the most straightforward part of the work but with a calmly ecstatic response at Laudamus te then an eloquent Dominus Deus that are nothing if not personal, together with an intensely wrought Cum Sancto Spiritu whose culminating Amen’s convey a distinctly ambivalent affirmation.
As most often, the Credo is the most substantial portion but Williams rings the changes by dividing this into halves, a pertinent division coming at Et homo factus est and Crucifíxus étiam pro nobis. In between are interpolated a setting of Saunders Lewis’s Carol Nadolig (A Christmas Carol) for children’s voices with viola, cello and harp of melting pathos, offset by a starkly narrative treatment of the ‘Beatitudes’ prior to a mostly ruminative resumption of the Credo. Pivoting between contemplation and elation, the Sanctus is rounded off by a joyful Hosánna in excélsis which is not to be heard again after the subdued eloquence of the Benedictus. An anguished response to the Agnus Dei feels the more acute, as also a searching Dona Nobis Pacem which brings the work full circle to its contemplative close.
Does it all work?
Yes, and with an understated while readily identifiable personality that surely makes this the most potent setting of the Mass from a Welsh composer. Subliminal influences might not be hard to discern, among them Britten’s War Requiem, but they never detract from Williams’s own idiom. The soloists cannot be faulted in terms of commitment, with Rowan Williams a notably incisive reciter, while Adrian Partington secures a lustrous response from his choral and orchestral forces. Overall, it is hard to imagine the work given with greater conviction.
Is it recommended?
It is indeed, not least in the hope that further live hearings of Missa Cambrensis may prove forthcoming. Good news, moreover, that Lyrita has now acquired the premiere performance of Williams’s only completed opera, The Parlour, which is scheduled for imminent release.
Arlen arr. Bekmambetov / ed. Woods The Song of Songs (1953) Arlen ed. Woods The Poet in Exile (1988, rev. 1994)
Anna Huntley (mezzo-soprano), Gwilym Bowen (tenor), Thomas Mole (baritone), BBC Women’s Chorus of Wales, English Symphony Orchestra / Kenneth Woods
Signum Classics SIGCD879 [52’21’’] Producer / Engineer Phil Rowlands, Engineer Andrew Smilie
Recorded 17-20 February 2022 at BBC Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
Kenneth Woods and the English Symphony Orchestra continue their exploration of music by composers murdered or forced into exile during the Third Reich with this release of Walter Arlen, whose recent death at 103 enabled him to experience a renewed interest in his music.
What’s the music like?
Although he remains best known through his trenchant music criticism for the Los Angeles Times, the Vienna-born Walter Arlen (Aptowitzer) also made a distinguished contribution to music administration and left a not inconsiderable output. Several albums featuring his songs and piano music can be heard on the Gramola label, while this latest ESO release provides a welcome introduction to two of his works that involve larger forces – the one drawing on an ancient Jewish source and the other upon poems by a seminal author from the post-war era.
Whether or not The Song of Songs is the harbinger of monogamy in the Judeo-Christian moral code, it contains some of the eloquent expression found in either Biblical testament. In just 30 minutes, Arlen’s ‘dramatic poem’ takes in the main narrative, its lively initial chorus featuring intricate polyphony for female voices and incisive orchestral textures. As the piece unfolds, its emotional emphasis is placed on the solo contributions – whether those of Solomon sung with burnished warmth by Thomas Mole, those of the Shepherdess with poise and insouciance by Anna Huntley, or those of the Shepherd given with virility and tenderness by Gwilym Bowen. Nor is the BBC Women’s Chorus of Wales wanting in intonational accuracy. If the resolution does not bring expected closure, this direct and unaffected setting certainly warrants revival.
The real discovery is The Poet in Exile, a song-cycle to texts by Polish-born American author Czesław Miłosz. These profound poems are not easily rendered in musical terms, and it is to Arlen’s credit that he goes a considerable way to achieving this. As the composer states, they ‘‘dealt with situations echoing my own remembrance of things past’’ – as holds good from the trenchant rhetoric of ‘Incantation’, via the sombre rumination of ‘Island’ then wistful elegance of ‘In Music’ or controlled fervour of ‘For J.L.’ (with its striking harpsichord obligato), to the confiding intimacy of ‘Recovery’. Some may have heard these songs with Christian Immler and Danny Driver (GRAM98946) but this orchestration by Woods, after the arrangement by Eskender Bekmambatov, offers a wider-ranging context for assured singing by Thomas Mole.
Does it all work?
Pretty much, and not least because the ESO is heard to advantage in the spacious acoustic of Hoddinott Hall while directed by Woods with unerring sense of where to place the emotional emphasis – especially important in conveying the meaning of the songs. A pity, however, that neither texts nor translations could be included here – not least as that by Leroy Waterman of The Song of Songs is appreciably different from those which have been previously set, while the Miłoz poems are worth savouring on their own terms and need to be approached as such.
Is it recommended?
It is. If not a major voice, Arlen’s music is always approachable and often thought-provoking. Initiates and newcomers alike will enjoy getting to know these works and hearing them given so persuasively – a worthy present, indeed, for this composer as he neared his 102nd birthday.
Arcana.fm 