Hilary Hahn’s technique is formidable, her tone is gorgeous, and she never hesitates to take a decisive interpretive stance. Her artistic instincts would be outstanding at any age, but are shocking at this early stage of her musical development. Hahn’s recordings have contained fascinating couplings that demonstrate an extremely diverse repertoire that stretches far beyond the usual warhorses. This recording is her best yet. The Elgar Concerto is a turbulent Romantic work that could be likened to the Busoni Piano Concerto in terms of its sheer size, technical challenges, musical quality, and relative anonymity. It is all the more amazing that this intense and personal work has already become a classical best seller. Though some may reject such a long and introspective piece, most should readily respond to the virtuosic writing for the solo instrument and the work’s gut-wrenching drama, especially in the hands of artists like Hahn and Sir Colin Davis.
      I can’t imagine a better performance of Elgar’s Concerto. Hahn plays the music with pinpoint accuracy and astounding ease. She scrupulously attends to a potential quagmire of fine details without fragmenting the work’s overall structure. Davis is in perfect accord with Elgar’s style and provides plenty of dynamic support for his soloist. The third movement cadenza, which is the dramatic and emotional heart of the score, is breathtaking, as is the intense and dramatic buildup to the exultant final chords. The Lark Ascending is played at a very slow tempo (nearly two minutes longer than Sir Adrian Boult). Hahn and Davis manage to inject a measure of drama without detracting from the idyllic beauty of the piece.
      Until now, DG’s sound for Hahn has not been as good as that of her Sony recordings. Such is not the case here. The solo instrument is silky sweet and has no trace of harshness or wiriness. The best thing about the sound is the nearly flawless balance between the violin and orchestra. Hahn is precisely focused just in front of the orchestra with an amazingly realistic sense of air surrounding her. She is miked slightly more prominently than you are likely to hear in a concert hall, but never to an offensive extent. Arthur B. Lintgen

Can you imagine Herbert von Karajan’s Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra recording Messiaen? Me neither. But, in fact, the BPO has shown it can hold its own in French repertoire—investigate Pierre Boulez’s 1990s Ravel, newly reissued on SACD [DG] as one recent example. Simon Rattle and the Berliners take on Messiaen’s last large-scale symphonic work commissioned for the New York Philharmonic’s 150th anniversary season and first performed in 1992, six months after the composer’s death. Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà... (Illuminations—or Flashes—of the Beyond) is an hour-long, eleven-movement work offering many of the idiomatic features of Messiaen’s musical language: the birdsong, the mathematical permutations, the characteristic chords generated by Messiaen’s “modes of limited transposition” and, of course, a heavy dose of ecstatic Catholic mysticism. There’s a dreamy central slow movement, “Abide in Love,” very reminiscent of “The Garden of Love’s Sleep” from Turangalîla, with the sort of ripe, almost cloying (yet oddly ambivalent) harmonies that Stravinsky once caustically described as “croix du sucre”— “crucifixes of sugar.”
      Rattle’s reading is fluent and spiritually compelling, from the strange, floating progressions of the opening wind chorale, “Apparition of Christ in Glory,” to the apocalyptic drama of “The Seven Angels with the Seven Trumpets.” There have been several recordings of Éclairs since the premiere, including Myung-Whun Chung’s enormously successful version with the Orchestre de l’Opéra Bastille for DG. Chung’s slow movements are more languorous, more perfumed, more French, while Rattle delivers the more animated material, including all that birdsong, in an especially alert and sharply articulated fashion. The two performances are complementary, and I’m happy to have both.
      EMI’s sound is nicely detailed, with plenty of dynamic impact, though there is some homogeneity to certain orchestral textures, such as the first movement chorale. One suspects that high-resolution digital—or good old-fashioned analog—might better approximate these sonorities. Andrew Quint

In this feast of sixteen arias from a dozen Handel operas, Renée Fleming largely abandons her recent tendency to over-interpret and gives lessons in tonal purity, coloratura accuracy, and stylish singing. Here, she uses her magnificent instrument flawlessly with merely a hint or two of the narcissistic tendencies that mar some of her other discs. Thus, in the scena from Rinaldo, “Dunque, i lacci d’un voto… Ah! crudel,” Fleming captures Armida’s despair at being rejected and her wild leaps from love to vengeful fury. She’s as superb in the aria’s plaintive sections as in the angry ones.
      In this selection, as throughout the disc, the accompaniments by Harry Bicket and his original instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, match the singer’s exalted level, with outstanding solo turns from the fluent winds. The band’s trumpet soloist, David Blackadder (yup, that’s his name), even trumps (pun intended) Fleming in “Let the Bright Seraphim” from Samson, where her sustained tones and energetic singing are nothing short of sensational.
      But there are times when Fleming grants vocal beauty precedence over the music’s emotional content. In the ubiquitous “Ombra mai fú” from Serse, she varies her vocal color, introduces limitless tonal and dynamic shadings, floats breathtakingly beautiful high notes, reels off ravishing pianissimos, and shows off delicate trills that entrance. Wonderful singing, but it just misses the heart-touching “speaking” quality and relaxed naturalness with which mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sings the aria on her all-Handel disc for Avie. Similarly, Fleming’s flowing “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Rinaldo lacks the inwardness and intensity of Jessye Norman’s live rendition [Philips], which captures the character of this touching aria in ways that Fleming’s amazingly differentiated trills and thrilling coloratura do not.
      Decca’s engineering realistically depicts Fleming’s voice in its infinite gradations and subtleties, surrounding her gorgeous sustained tones with a bed of air. The orchestra, too, is projected with presence and tonal body that makes it the full, indispensable partner that it is. All in all, a wonderful disc that no Handelian or Flemingite should be without. Dan Davis

John Adams, now 57, is America’s best-known living composer. This is the first recording of On the Transmigration of Souls, his Pulitzer Prize-winning 25-minute threnody for the victims of 9/11, a bold, ambitious, riveting, and soul-wrenching creation. Its power and grandeur come not from histrionics but rather from Adams’ delicacy, restraint, and sense of communal ritual encompassing private emotion. The result both embodies—and transcends—sorrow with a kind of unbearable precision and particularity: in the torment and the consolation of personal memory.
      On the Transmigration of Souls combines orchestral music and choral singing with prerecorded street sounds (footsteps, cars, sirens) and spoken phrases by family members and friends of the victims. The words (“I’ll miss you my brother, my loving brother,” “I see water and buildings,” “She had the voice of an angel,” “I love you”) are taken from missing persons memorials and posters near the ruins of the World Trade Center after its destruction.
      Despite the fragmentary nature of its materials, the piece is seamless and strongly unified in impact, held together by mostly gentle, flowing harmonic concords deployed and reiterated with minimalist simplicity. Over this calm surface are superimposed, in a sort of documentary film-like montage, the sung and spoken texts and, near the opening, a solo trumpet’s chromatic “questioning” motive echoing the one that haunts Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question. At about 16 minutes Adams begins to build toward a climactic catharsis: a slowly gathering, tolling, tremendous, and harrowing outburst of terror, pity, grief—and defiance (the choruses sing “Life, love, life” over and over again, fortissimo)—made more shattering by its contrast to the subdued tenor of the rest of the piece. The work ends peacefully and beautifully, in an undemonstrative, quietly attenuating, seraphic coda above the soft pattering-out of the names of the dead and the words of the bereaved.
      The performance is majestic and heartrending. Nonesuch’s recording—made in concert, before a silent audience, its quiet conclusion appropriately undisturbed by applause—has spaciousness, immediacy, and a wide dynamic range, deploying Adams’ huge performing forces across a broad soundstage and making for a near-ideal re-creation of the concert experience. Mark Lehman

The once-lauded music of Gavriil Popov (1904-1972), one of many Soviet-era artists whose career s were blighted by the Stalinist bureaucracy, has long fallen into obscurity and neglect. His wild and wooly 1934 First Symphony is his magnum opus—it was admired by Shostakovich and inspired that master’s breakout Fourth—and with this new Telarc SACD conducted by Leon Botstein, we finally get a chance to hear this spectacular showpiece in suitably spectacular sound.
      Popov’s grand, extravagant symphony blasts off with an orchestral shriek that jolts you right out of your chair, and his brilliance, intensity, and imagination never flag thereafter. There are three movements: a huge, idea-rich, contrapuntal Allegro energico; a tender, lyrical, post-Mahlerian sixteen-minute Largo cantabile; and a truly remarkable two-part finale that tops off a scherzo pounded out by iron-foundry hammer blows with an exultant, awe-inspiring, day-of-judgment apotheosis in which trilling, ringing, surging waves of sound beam out through the cosmos like a galactic bell-tower. The scoring is astonishingly various and inventive, occasionally spare (as with the gently entwined woodwinds that begin the Largo), at times lush or many-layered, even tornadic in its furious involution and intricacy. The music roils with energy, drama, turbulence, ecstatic abandon; even its moments of idyllic repose are underlain with strange harmonic clashes that hint at sinister threats and forbidden visions.
      Botstein and his Londoners play Popov’s demanding score with unstinting fervency and a thrilling sense of revelation. They’re superb—warm and lustrous—too, in Shostakovich’s chaste, melodious student effort, his Opus 3 Theme and Variations, which fills out the program, sounding rather like Arensky at his most demure, especially after Popov’s torrential outburst. It has a certain wan charm but remains a distinctly minor, immature effort.
      Telarc’s recording is splendiferous: stunning in its presence, timbral fidelity, earth-shaking dynamics, and miraculous transparency even as the orchestra unleashes tectonic forces. The regular CD sounds great, with loads of ambiance, and in the SACD’s multichannel encoding, the glorious acoustics of London’s Watford Town Hall are magically arrayed around the listener as the soundstage balloons out to concert-hall dimensions. Wow. This one’s an astoundment (as HP would put it). Interested audiophools who want all the details can read about the recording’s purist microphone setup and custom electronics at www.sa-cd.net/shownews.php?news=20. ML

The court orchestra at Mannheim, in southwest Germany, was perhaps the finest in eighteenth-century Europe, famous for both virtuosic brilliance and musical innovation. (The “Mannheim steamroller” was a symphonic crescendo effect 200 years before Chip Davis’s new agey Fresh Aire recordings started appearing.) Many of the group’s leading players were composers in their own right, including principal oboist Ludwig August Lebrun, a near-contemporary of Mozart. The somewhat overeager liner notes, written by soloist Bart Schneemann, refer to Lebrun as “the Michael Jackson of the oboe,” an association I’m not sure any musician relishes these days, even a dead one. Suffice it to say that Lebrun was highly paid, toured a lot, and was renowned for his beautiful tone and prodigious technique.
      Lebrun’s concertos—this is Volume 2 from Channel Classics; Volume 1 is on CD—are not Mozart or Beethoven, but neither are they faceless, by-the-numbers pieces. The three works run 20 to 23 minutes, and each holds an expansive, cogently argued opening Allegro, a songful central Adagio, and a playful Rondo finale, all loaded with attractive melody. Schneemann makes a great case for the composer: this is what Lebrun himself must have sounded like. His tone is sweetly expressive and effortlessly produced from top to bottom. He artfully inflects melodic lines, and his technique is faultless. For example, the wide leaps in No. 5’s first movement cadenza sound like the easiest thing in the world. Schneemann gets stylish support from de Vriend and the Radio Chamber Orchestra, a Dutch ensemble that divides its time between period practice performance and avant-garde repertoire.
      For an “encore,” Schneemann performs a reconstruction of the slow movement from a lost Beethoven oboe concerto, probably written when the composer was around 20. This may not add anything to our appreciation of Beethoven, but it’s a gracious conclusion to the disc.
      Sonically, the DCS DSD A/D and D/A converters acquit themselves well here, with smooth, natural instrumental timbres. As usual with this label, the multichannel is subtly executed—if you’re aware of sound coming from the rear speakers, something’s set up incorrectly. AQ

Ervín Schulhoff was one of many European artists whose work, for largely extramusical reasons—his Jewish background and strong Communist sympathies—was designated “degenerate” by the Third Reich. Schulhoff was arrested and died of typhus in a concentration camp at the age of 48. He was an extraordinary talent: Dvorák proclaimed his gifts as a child, and he studied with Debussy and Reger. As a pianist, he was as comfortable with “hot jazz” as with classical material. This Praga SACD, offering four chamber works from the 1920s, shows Schulhoff at the top of his game as a composer.
      Schulhoff’s music is spirited, expressive, playful, sardonic, often jazz-inflected, and impeccably crafted. The Five Pieces for String Quartet are based on dance forms, from a singular take on the Viennese waltz to the vigorous, breathless tarantella that closes the set. Concertino for Flute/Piccolo, Viola, and Double Bass must surely be the only work ever conceived for that combination. Schulhoff fully exploits the wide-open sonorities inherent to this trio, the bowed bass chugging along at the bottom of its range. Schulhoff’s Duo for Violin and Cello is a real tour de force, harmonically and texturally rich despite the involvement of two melody instruments, as inventive and absorbing as the better-known Kodály Duo. As with all the pieces on the program, the performance by a Kocian Quartet violinist and cellist from the Prazák is assured and committed.
      The Sextet for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Two Cellos sounds less like Stravinsky or Hindemith (the latter composer actually participated in the 1924 premiere) and possesses the dark intensity and emotional acuity of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. The third movement scherzo is insistent, a little terrifying—Bruckner catapulted 40 years into the future—while the final Molto adagio ends somberly, leaving the listener with a vague malaise. Potent stuff.
      That we should get such vital and off-the-beaten-track material in splendid high-resolution sound is a bonanza. The vivid DSD studio recording is exceptionally dynamic and immediate, with very natural decay. This program employs all four members of the orchestral string family, and the difference in their size is as apparent as at a concert with one’s eyes shut. When mutes are applied by the players, it’s obvious. The surround version is wonderfully dimensional; a you-are-there listening experience. AQ