Recording of the Year & Concerto category

Tippett Triple Concerto 

György Pauk vn Nobuko Imai va Ralph Kirshbaum vc London Symphony Orchestra / Sir Colin Davis (Philips) 

Producer: Mike Bremner; Engineer: Hans Lauterslager

Tippett's Triple Concerto is a work of enormous richness and musical satisfaction, and one presenting formidable problems to performers and recording engineers alike. The formal disposition of the work is unusual; the soloists are in a very original relationship to each other and to the rest of the players; and the orchestra contains some very unfamiliar instruments, used with high originality. How pleasant, then, to find that a major new work by a composer of Tippett's stature has been recorded with such triumphant success.

Sir Colin Davis's understanding of Tippett's constantly evolving idiom is masterly; the soloists, György Pauk, Nobuko Imai and Ralph Kirshbaum, really do play as three soloists, not as a string trio; and the LSO contribute beautiful and individual playing, themselves providing some fine solo performances from instruments as rare as the bass oboe. It is striking, too, with what musical percipience producer and engineer have responded to a work that sets quite exceptional problems of understanding. Tippett has asked for some very unfamiliar pieces of balance, such as alto flute sustaining a marimba solo, while also requiring a full orchestral sound at climaxes. He gets what he wants from everyone: this is indeed an outstanding record. John Warrack

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Choral

JS Bach Mass in B minor

Judith Nelson, Julianne Baird sops Jeffrey Dooley, Drew Minter altos Frank Hoffmeister, Edmund Brownless tens Jan Opalach, Andrew Walker Schultze basses Bach Ensemble / Joshua Rifkin (Nonesuch)

Producers: Marc J. Aubort, Joanna Nickrenz; Engineering: Elite Recordings

There is a charming irony in the success here of Joshua Rifkin’s recording of the B minor Mass; for its central thesis is that a chorus isn’t a chorus, at least in the modern sense. The choral numbers here are sung one-to-a-part – with a ‘chorus’ of five members, or at most eight.

Leaving aside the question of historical justification, we have a performance of unexampled fineness and clarity. Gone is the sense of a massive, collective celebration; in its place is something more personal, more intimate, and in many ways more intense. The quick-moving contrapuntal music profits especially by its sheer precision and improved audibility.

But the set’s merits do not lie in its scale alone. No amount of musicology can serve without the support of high musicianship; and that we have, in Rifkin’s carefully chosen, quickish tempos and his alert shaping, in the subtlety and refinement of the Bach Ensemble’s playing, and in the impeccably tuned singing of the soloists-cum-chorus, a team headed (in more than one sense) by Judith Nelson’s warm, unaffected, musicianly soprano.

Right or wrong in theory – what does it matter? – Rifkin’s ideas prove themselves triumphantly in practice and open our ears to fresh delights in this great work. Stanley Sadie

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Chamber

Borodin String Quartets  –  No 1 in A; No 2 in D

Borodin Quartet (HMV Melodiya)

Producer: Yuri Kazhayan

Having lavished praise on this disc both in Gramophone and over the air, and having given it pride of place in my list for 'Critics’ Choice,' I am delighted to find that my colleagues evidently share my enthusiasm. I ended my original review by declaring that 'I don’t ever expect to hear these two cherishable quartets more persuasively played,' and subsequent re-hearings have no whit diminished my delight.

The familiar Second Quartet gains in this performance by the team’s feeling for flexibility and continuity, the impeccable precision shown in the finale, and the cellist’s rapturous statement of the Nocturne theme, never more seductive than here.

The First Quartet has for long been quite unjustly neglected, and here the team’s idiomatic absorption of the numerous changes of pace, its expressive rubato, its assurance in the treacherous artificial harmonics of the Scherzo, its finely adjusted internal balance throughout, and not least its beauty of tone, make this a performance to cherish. Lionel Salter

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Contemporary

Boulez Pli selon pli

Phyllis Bryn-Julson sop BBC Symphony Orchestra / Pierre Boulez (Erato/Conifer)

Producer/Balance Engineer: John Rushby-Smith

To say that this year’s list of nominations in the Contemporary category presented the judges with an embarrassment of riches is a positive way of admitting that the task was even more difficult than usual. Nevertheless, with three overriding criteria – a work of major significance, in a particularly authoritative performance, and a recording of the highest standards – the choice was unanimous.

Pli selon pli is one of the most crucial and personal post-war masterpieces in the way it expresses a subtle, poetic response to Mallarmé’s images and techniques through a brilliantly imaginative and powerfully structured orchestral tapestry.

Boulez’s first recording had stressed the challenging instability of the result, and while my original review of this new version expressed a reservation about the composer’s more spacious approach, longer acquaintance suggests that the slower tempos help to make the music more accessible without undermining its dramatic force and lyrical sweep.

Pli selon pli is that rare phenomenon, a contemporary masterpiece which stands the test of time, and all involved in this recording – from the excellent Phyllis Bryn-Julson and the BBC SO to the engineers in the BBC’s Maida Vale No 1 Studio – combine to convey that drama and lyricism with maximum effect under Boulez’s own commanding direction. Arnold Whittall

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Early Music (Baroque)

Charpentier Actéon

Dominique Visse alto Actéon; Agnès Mellon sop Diane; Arthebuze; Les Arts Florissants Vocal and Instrumental Ensemble / William Christie (Harmonia Mundi)

Producer: Michel Bernard; Engineer: Claude Armand

Entries from the baroque period amounted almost to an embarras de richesses. Eventually, it was the subtlety and pathos of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s little opera de chasse, as he called it, enchantingly realized by William Christie and his group Les Arts Florissants, which won the day.

This opera in miniature is an astonishingly rich score containing many ingredients of the French tragédie en musique. There are six well-contrasted scenes in the course of which Actaeon’s wretched fate – first being turned into a stag and then being torn to pieces by his own hounds – unfolds with a remarkable intensity of expression.

Its choruses and colourful dances – the scoring consists of flutes, oboes, bassoon, strings, and harpsichord – are just two of several engaging features which reveal Charpentier’s original turn of mind, but the overture too, in its departure from the standard Lullian pattern, is hardly less appealing.

Here is music which, though not yet in any sense popular, ranks amongst the best things of its kind from seventeenth-century France. Here is a record, too, which gives another slant upon a gifted yet still comparatively unexplored composer, known primarily for his church music.

Even so, this fine recording had strong contenders, the closest runner-up being a record of Purcell’s Ten Sonatas in Four Parts. Nicholas Anderson

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Early Music (Medieval & Renaissance)

Hildegard of Bingen 'A feather on the breath of God'

Gothic Voices / Christopher Page with Doreen Muskett symphony Robert White reed drones (Hyperion)

Producer: Martin Compton; Engineer: Tony Faulkner

The entries submitted for this year's Early Music award were strong ones, and plentiful, too. 'How early – or rather how late – is Early Music?' enquired DA when writing about these awards in March 1982. It's a question which is becoming more and more frequently asked as interest grows in this vast field of repertoire. This year the panel decided that the sheer expanse of centuries, extending from the twelfth to the eighteenth, justified considering two awards rather than the single one of previous years. Roughly speaking, our dividing line fell between Medieval/Renaissance and Baroque. In both areas the panel looked for enterprising repertoire, well presented and performed with skill and conviction.

In the earlier period it was a collection of sequences and hymns by the twelfth-century mystic and religious writer, Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, which narrowly defeated the panel's other choice of secular music by Ockeghem performed by the Medieval Ensemble of London. How, or exactly where, this music was performed is, of course, a source of speculation but here the repertoire, some accompanied and the remainder unaccompanied, is simply and directly performed without undue artificiality by a first-rate group of singers. It has to be said that the considerable devotional and declamatory impact of the music came as a revelation to this reviewer. Nicholas Anderson

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Engineering & Production

Shostakovich Symphony No 5 in D minor, Op 47

Concertgebouw Orchestra / Bernard Haitink (Decca) 

Producer: Andrew Cornall; Engineer: Colin Moorfoot

As always, our final choice in this category was made only after hair-splitting comparisons with other shortlisted candidates. Certainly this example from the Haitink/Concertgebouw/LPO cycle of Shostakovich symphonies finds the Decca recording team totally at home in the warmly ambient acoustics of the Concertgebouw. Each instrument appears properly distanced from the listener, with completely natural timbres and very impressive balance and dynamics. If this symphony was indeed the composer’s 'response to justified criticism', the engineering and production are in their turn of such sustained excellence as to silence once and for all any remaining criticisms of digital techniques. The 'quite magnificent performance,' to quote MEO, is matched by a recorded sound of truly demonstration standard.

Close runners up included the Tippett Triple Concerto (our Record of the Year), the Pittsburgh/Previn recording of Ravel’s Ma mère l’oye and Saint-Saëns’s Carnaval des animaux, the Ulster/Bryden Thomson recording of Bax tone poems, the ECO/Sir Alexander Gibson disc of Britten works and Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder and Tod und Verklärung performed by Lucia Popp and the LPO conducted by Klaus Tennstedt. John Borwick

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Historical (non-vocal)

Bartók at the Piano, 1920-45, Vol 1

(Hungaroton/Conifer)

Producer: Dóra Antal; Engineers: Judit Lukács, Endre Radányi

The kind of record we are looking for to qualify for an Historic award should fulfil two conditions, quite apart from the excellence of the transfer and presentation: it should offer insights to be found in no modern recording and should enrich our knowledge of the gramophone's legacy.

Schnabel's Beethoven fulfils the first, save for the fact that giving Schnabel an award for his Diabelli Variations would be like giving the Booker Prize to Tolstoy, and in any event his performances have been reissued before.

We also considered the fascinating Friedman recital which certainly illuminates a school of piano playing now lost to the platform, but none of our discs seemed to fulfil our conditions so completely as the Bartók Record Archives, Vol I. It was the riches it offers that finally inclined us to override the objection that we had already given one record from it an Historical award for 1980 when it was issued by CBS.

Most of the material here will be new to UK collectors and throws new light on Bartók’s pianism; he is to be heard playing Scarlatti and Liszt, as well as accompanying folk-song arrangements by Kodály and himself. No praise can be too high for the devoted care and scholarship that have gone into the production of this impressive set, and also into the wonderfully documented booklets that are included. Robert Layton

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Historical (vocal)

Schubert Historical Recordings of Lieder (1898–1952)

Various artists (HMV mono)

Transfer Engineer: Keith Hardwick; Producers/Engineers: including Robert Beckett, George Dillnutt, Fred and Will Gaisberg, Franz Hampe, Douglas Lartner, W. Sinkler-Darby

The success of EMI’s reissue of the Hugo Wolf Society albums (3/81), duly celebrated in last year’s Gramophone Record Awards, owed much to the variety of the singers involved. Two recent boxed sets, the first of eight records, the second of seven, have followed this up, so that in Schubert Lieder on Record as many as 64 singers are heard, several of them more than once, and in the later Wagner on Record 33 are listed along with 18 conductors. Both are magnificent achievements, imaginatively conceived and scrupulously presented; and in both the quality of recorded sound in transference from the old originals is superlative.

Our prize goes to the Schubert album partly because of the wider historical range of the collection, from 1898 to 1952, partly for its provision of rare and previously unissued material, and partly – perhaps principally – on account of the delight and interest so liberally afforded. Take Side 5 as a sample. It begins with Elisa Elizza, silvery, haunting and unexpected; then Ottilie Metzger’s glorious contralto; Friedrich Brodersen singing Sei mir gegrüsst, intensely expressive; magical touches of Hempel; finally superb Kipnis and the opportunity of comparing his Gruppe with Metzger’s or with Hotter’s unpublished one, and his Erlkönig with no fewer than four others. John Steane

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Instrumental

Liszt Piano Works

Alfred Brendel (Philips) 

Producer/Balance Engineer: Volker Strauss

Lisztians have long thought highly of Brendel's early recordings of this composer, once available on Turnabout, and he was overdue to record the B minor Sonata again. A comparison between this new version and the old (7/70) shows how much more complex his interpretative aims and achievements have become. The wider tonal palette and greater range of nuances are not just a result of improved recording (or even pianistic) techniques.

Equally remarkable is the Andante sostenuto’s stillness; no wonder Brendel, in the essay accompanying this LP, asserts the Sonata's true climax lies in this middle section rather than in that frantic assertion of B major, with flailing octaves and hectically repeating chords, which precedes the introverted coda.

Concerning the Legendes he writes of the 'noble simplicity and quiet grandeur' that Liszt bestows on the two saints. Yet it sounds, in this performance, as if it were they, or some higher power, who lent these qualities to his music. As Brendel implies, the evocations of birdsong and a rough sea appear miraculous; or perhaps it is this music's suggestion of the meaning which lies behind such things. Appropriately, the two versions of Liszt's La lugubre gondola came much later, and are here shown as grey, distant hallucinations. Max Harrison

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Orchestral

Strauss Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings. Tod und Verklärung

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / Herbert von Karajan (DG)

Producers: Gunther Breest, Michel Glotz; Engineer: Gunther Hermanns

Ideally the outstanding orchestral record should be more than a distinguished performance recorded with all the clarity of modern techniques: it should be the best recording of the work in question for many years past. In reviewing Karajan's Tod und Verklärung I spoke of it as 'quite electrifying with superb playing from all departments and a life-and-death intensity to the climaxes'. It is in the pacing of these climaxes, each exceeding its predecessor in power, that its great strength resides.

Having heard at one time or another over the past years, all 11 versions listed in the current catalogue, and not forgetting such distinguished absentees as Kempe, Toscanini and Furtwängler, one can say that this is arguably the best Tod und Verklärung yet committed to disc, and supersedes either of Karajan’s earlier versions.

Much the same may be said of his moving account of Metamorphosen (though I would not want to be without Clemens Kraus's eloquent mono version of 1953 on Harmonia Mundi, 1/83) which is better played and recorded than all its rivals. This record is, I’m sure, destined for classic status and I can't imagine it being surpassed for a very long time to come. Robert Layton

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Operatic

Janáček The Cunning Little Vixen

Lucia Popp sop Vixen, Young Vixen; Eva Randová mez Fox; Dalibor Jedlička bass Forester; Beno Blachut ten Pasek; Vienna State Opera Chorus; Bratislava Children's Choir; Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra / Sir Charles Mackerras (Decca)

Producer: James Mallinson; Engineers: John Dunkerley, Simon Eadon, James Lock

Decca's Janáček opera series under Sir Charles Mackerras continues to be one of the most rewarding groups of recordings currently being made, and a prime reason is the proper care that has gone into every aspect of each set. Sir Charles is not only among the finest of all conductors of Janáček's music: he is a scholar, and one whose insistence on standards has been fully backed up.

The cast is scrupulously chosen, and enchantingly led by Lucia Popp as the Vixen: one may prefer some individual performances from other sets of the past, but still find the present ensemble well chosen and wholly responsive to the direct, humorous, unsentimental style of the performance. The recording is extremely intelligent in its care for Janáček's orchestration, often a severe problem whether in the concert hall or the recording studio: here, the woodland music is particularly well managed. And not least, the set is admirably presented, not with the glossy nonsense that accompanies some opera sets but with a lively new translation (Deryck Viney), a brilliant long account of the work, incorporating new research (Dr John Tyrrell), and 50 of the drawings which first amused and touched Janáček and drew him to write this wonderful opera. John Warrack

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Solo Vocal

Brahms Lieder 

Jessye Norman sop Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau bar Daniel Barenboim pf (DG)

Producers: Cord Garben, Renata Kupfer; Engineers: Karl-August Naegler, Hans-Peter Schwiegmann

Fischer-Dieskau has recorded Brahms's songs, or some 150 of them, before: here we now have over 200 songs, virtually the full list as given in the new Grove. His voice has, of course, changed in the seven or so years since the earlier set, but it is a measure of his extraordinary artistry that these are re-interpretations and in no way repeats. In Von ewige Liebe, for instance, he no longer commands the old power and richness: instead of pretending it, as a lesser singer might, he achieves a new interpretation by means of a rapt steadiness of line that is also a true response to this great song.

Even he can seldom have given finer performances of the Vier ernste Gesänge ("Four Serious Songs"). His old tendency to over-emphasize colourful words has given way to a more inward, deeper understanding of poetry. Jessye Norman is an admirable partner in the set, encompassing both a rich warmth and sometimes also a delicious lightness of touch and a bubbling gaiety that is the more welcome for being by no means the dominant characteristic of Brahms's songs.

Barenboim is a marvellous accompanist, responsive to each of these two fine artists and at the same time contributing individual performances of character and insight. John Warrack

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