Handel followed his successful London operatic debut, Rinaldo, that spectacle of sorcery and heroics, with this surprisingly modest Arcadian pastorale.

Scored for a simple orchestra of woodwinds, strings and continuo, Il pastor fido’s compact arias are accompanied by basso continuo, only blossoming into string ritornelli at their conclusion. Some of the music is recycled from Handel’s Roman cantatas – your best reference point for its sound-world.

As one witness complained, even the costumes had been recycled, so financial constraints may have been behind the sudden gear change. Either way, London was underwhelmed and after a few performances the opera sank into oblivion, until Handel relaunched it with an extreme makeover, more successfully, in 1734.

This is the original 1712 version’s premiere recording (though I’ve read this disputed) and it gets disarming advocacy from English ensemble La Nuova Musica, under the direction of David Bates.

Dramatically, its lovesick nymphs and shepherds are about as individualised and compelling as the ones you’ll find on Jasperware. Act One in particular is like a slow trip around a Wedgewood urn; its arias a succession of stock emotional postures, with a few sprigs of recitative hacked from the source material and thrown in to locate the characters in some kind of narrative landscape.

But who expects drama from a vase? Il pastor fido still has plenty of charm, brought to life by the winning delicacy and nuance this team bring to recitatives and arias alike. The tone and weight of the work seem perfectly captured and the cast’s three sopranos, mezzo, countertenor and bass baritone are all impeccable.

And Act Two is altogether stronger, including an exquisitely realised sighing aria and a brilliantly scored sleep scene. As the opera’s bunnyboiler, Eurilla, watches over the sleeping Mirtillo, riffing about his lovely eyes and plotting to ruin his relationship with her rival, pizzicato violins and cellos in octaves and repeating harpsichord arpeggiati capture every element: her obsessive love, her furtiveness and his otherworldly slumber. Genius.

The set is beautifully packaged, has excellent notes and a bargain price. This recording is La Nuova Musica’s first and I was pleased to read there are more on the way.

 --Guest reviewer Max McLean has had a long association with Thomas’ Music. He was previously a reviewer for 24 Hours magazine.

7½/10

Cantatas by such disparate composers as Alessandro Scarlatti, Handel, and Haydn may at first appear to be odd companion-pieces on a CD, if for no other reason than because they span both baroque and classical periods of music history. However, featured as they are on Australian mezzo-soprano Fiona Campbell’s first solo CD release, they are united by a common theme: Love + Loss. Cantatas were an enduringly popular genre for the music makers and listeners throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offering all of the dramatic scope of opera but packaged in a miniature format eminently suitable to the drawing room or for performance in a larger program. The cantatas on this disc, being no exception to the rule, are wonderful vehicles for expressive and subtle singing and playing, of which Ms Campbell and her accompanying ensemble, led by Neal Peres Da Costa, take full advantage.

The Arcadian charm of the opening cantata, Alessandro Scarlatti’s Bella madre de’fiori, is tempered with moments of poignant melancholy particularly in the central aria of the work, Vanne o Caro. The Haydn cantata, Arianna a Naxos, takes us from the age of the basso continuo and the vestiges of modal harmony to almost a century later into a proto-Mozart sound world of fully formed diatonic harmony and fortepianos, not to mention a new pitch standard! This stylistic leap, together with the sparse texture of a single accompanying instrument and ultra-secco recitative, was a bit startling on my first listen through. Indeed the liner notes advise taking a break between each cantata precisely because of this aural jolt, and I would recommend heeding this advice. Break duly taken, a second and isolated listening to the Haydn revealed its colour and appeal, and the dramatic finale, after an otherwise subdued and measured work, was particularly exciting.

Equally spectacular is the opening of the last cantata on the disc, Handel’s La Lucrezia. The highly-charged continuation of the work gives Ms Campbell much opportunity to demonstrate her emotional range, and the climax reached in the penultimate arioso is thrilling for all its chromatic and vocal audacity, but is also highly effective as an expression of Lucrezia’s despair as she resolves to end her life.

Despite the eccentric program choices, these are fine performances of rarely heard works and the committed listener will be well rewarded.

9/10

Only rarely does a CD like this come along—deceptively familiar repertoire played on a once appreciated but now entirely forgotten instrument. It is at least forty years since I first bought an LP of Lionel Rogg (or was it Gustav Leonhardt?) playing Bach’s C minor Passacaglia on the pedal-harpsichord, a radical departure for the era but almost mainstream nowadays. At the same time I was taking organ lessons, and my teacher owned a true exotic, a pedal-piano. Just as early eighteenth century organists might have used the pedal-harpsichord as a practice-instrument when an organ (or heater!) was unavailable, so nineteenth century organists presumably used the pedal-piano, although even then it was not a common instrument. In fact, the works of Alkan that the great Kevin Bowyer has recorded for organ were mostly intended for pedal-piano. Nonetheless, I do not recall in all my years of collecting discs of ever seeing another pedal-piano recital, or even another pedal-piano —it is the thylacine of instruments. Apparently there is one other CD available using the newer Doppio Borgato form.

Olivier Latry, best known for his recording of the complete Messiaen organ works on DG, debuts this wonderful instrument in characteristic repertoire: assorted chunky works by Alexandre Boëly, a Brahms Prelude and Fugue, a pair of Alkan Préludes, the Schumann Vier Skizzen which are more familiar on the organ, and two sizeable Liszt works—one the original version of the BACH Prelude and Fugue. His instrument on this CD is a gloriously sonorous 1853 Erard resembling the one owned by Alkan, which optimises the sense when listening of being engaged in time-travel. While I would not pretend that all, or indeed, much, of this music is truly great, the pleasure of hearing these archaic-sounding works on such a fine instrument is considerable. The effect of performing these works in this fashion is to deliberately blur the boundaries between organ and piano works; the composers were all notably fine pianists and organists—in the case of Alkan and Liszt, the very finest. Consequently there is absolutely no sense of these works being unidiomatic in their pedal-piano garb; organists practise fingered rubato, minimising the impact of the absent sustain pedal (no spare feet!). There can be no doubt, though, that while the other works are wonderfully endearing, the stand-out pieces here are the two huge Liszt pieces, the Évocation à la Chapelle Sixtine, a strange, pious work that manages to include a complete transcription of Mozart's Ave verum corpus within its compass, and the BACH Prelude and Fugue in its unfamiliar initial organ version, which is different again from both the revised organ and solo piano revisions that LIszt later made, making this performance a lovely, arcane musical pun, a reverse-engineered 'first piano version' of the piece.

Beyond the enjoyably nostalgic experience of hearing this wonderful old instrument in its native repertoire, there is much to relish in Latry’s astute program. Needless to say, his technique is more than a match for anything the pieces demand, even in the terrifyingly hard Liszt pieces, and he finds unexpected expressivity in what is often regarded as rather dry fare. I thoroughly enjoy this CD.

8/10

Sometimes a CD comes along that is so intriguing that one just has to review it. Jean-Frédéric Neuburger’s recital on 14 January 2011 at the Cité de la Musique in Paris (“cadre Rising Stars”, apparently) has been faithfully issued as a single CD that catches the singularity both of his programming and playing. The sequence he has selected—Liszt’s Funérailles, a Neuburger première, Barraqué Sonate pour piano, and cryptic Debussy to close—is, in this 200^th anniversary year of Liszt’s birth, impressively well-judged, and Neuburger’s performance demonstrates clearly that he knows exactly what he is about. Indeed, my CD player started to re-play the first track after the last had ended, and it segued perfectly—a brilliant exemplification of ‘ma fin est mon commencement’.

He approaches Liszt’s complex Funérailles with a brisk tempo; the pummeling bass oscillati are genuinely thunderous and yet rigorously controlled, while he manages to find a satisfying tenderness in the lyrical middle section. The militaristic bravado of the ending peaks well, and his left-hand octaves are truly impressive, but the recurrence of the theme as a ghostly envoi rather peters out. Nonetheless, Neuburger clearly understands the bleak psychology of the piece: after the anguished opening, melancholy passing bells peal throughout his performance.

Neuburger’s own work, Maldoror, named after the sinister symbolist ‘songs’ of Lautréamont, is anamalgam of high modernist and fleetingly-recalled Schumanny gestures. The primary soundworld of the piece, however, is dissonant and sonorous, with a group of prepared bass pitches providing an otherwordly flavour. I wish I could report that the work had a strong character, but for those comfortable with music of the sixties it will certainly provide an enjoyable twenty minutes, even if it does not make one wish to actively seek out more of Neuburger’s music. It is clear why he chose to play it before Jean Barraqué’s immense, awe-inspiring Sonate, which is, in my view, the outstanding piano work of the 1950s, written long before Xenakis or Finnissy had started their radical overhaul of what consituted standard piano technique, and legendarily an influence on the Boulez Sonates. There have been few prior recordings of this mammoth work, by Herbert Henck, Messiaen’s wife Yvonne Loriod, Stefan Litwin, and particularly, the adventurous Australian Roger Woodward, among others. It seems to take Neuburger a few minutes to settle in to the work:  the first movement only gradually acquires a telling expressivity, achieved through a deep layering of dynamcs and electrifying rhythmic contrast, coupled with a dexterity that allows Barraquè’s distinctive harmonies to emerge. Neuburger does not over-emphasise the contrast between the strict serialism and the looser sections in this first movement as some performances do—I think I miss the resulting structural clarity—but over time the sophisticated discourse draws one in. Towards end of the first, dialectical, movement, Neuburger starts to effectively presage the gestural hollowness of the balancing second movement, in which the carefully-assembled structural edifice of the first movement is dismantled. He holds this second movement together with an iron will, resisting the music’s tendency to disintegration and emphasising the gestural linking of phrases. The result is compelling. While this is not my favourite performance of the craggy work (that is probably Henck on ECM), it is certainly a convincing one, and, let’s be honest, any recordings of it are welcome. I heard no page-turns in this live recording: did Neuburger actually memorise it? That is impressive.

Neuburger closes the concert with a beautifully elusive performance of Debussy’s Et la lune descend sur la temple qui fut from the second book of Images; evocative and bell-like, with an exquisitely nostalgic melody, this piece captures a mood of calm melancholy. One could read the program as journeying from the anguish and immediacy of the battlefield via impassioned modernity and intense abstraction, to a detached resignation (but the one thing it is not, despite the CD blurb, is ‘excessive’ or ‘sensual’). However one decodes it, however, Neuburger’s adventurous progamming certainly works.

The whole live recital is performed with real panache, extraordinary technical ease and musicality, and is pedalled very discreetly, allowing for even tiny details to really speak. This is exceptionally fine pianistic artistry, a marvel of clarity and chiselled abstraction. For those who are put off by the substantial element of modernism in this CD Neuburger has recently demonstrated both his range and reliability as the soloist in a fascinating recording of 19^th century Piano Concertos by Hérold, also on Mirare—a very different soundworld, and well worth investigating. The present disc will doubtless appeal primarily to adventurous listeners--enjoy!

This is one of those CDs that I have played repeatedly since it first arrived—after the tenth or so listen it dawned on me that it is really rather special. It is pleasing to see husband and wife team Pascal and Ami Rogé joinging forces to provide this duo appendix to the cycle of solo piano works by Debussy that Mr Rogé has been engaged in for some years for the Onyx label. In fact, his affiliation with the music of Debussy goes back at least thirty years; his previous set of recordings is still available as a double-Decca. If anyone were going to provide a truly idiomatic reading of these pieces for four hands at one or two pianos it would be the Rogé partnership.

The CD begins, however, with three solo piano works that were never gathered into one of Debussy’s collections. The opening piece, Masques, is replete with the kinds of innovative technical difficulty that Debussy’s piano works offer: awkward and exposedIslameyesque repeated-note figurations that are themselves reused over and over again, martellato chordal textures that have to be exactly even in tone, all with minimal pedal. For despite his reputation, Debussy’s textures rarely hide behind pedal haze—only when appropriate, as in the piano Prélude, Brouillards, for instance. Even Rogé, the supreme technician, is only just fluent in these radical new pianistic imaginings. Tricky or not, he succeeds marvellously in providing this characteristically mercurial work with psychological continuity. He continues his program with an early Nocturne, exquisitely melodic and shadowy, with faint redolences of Rimsky, and then Debussy’s final piano work, the sombre Elegie.

It is quite extraordinary to think that Debussy’s most well-known piano duet, the Petite Suite, was written in 1886-89, when he was in his mid-twenties. It has quite a lot in common with his slightly later solo piano Suite Bergamasque but the two-player work is subtler and more knowing, not just in its sly recollections of Massenet and Wagner—digs we hardly notice today—but in its remarkably forward-looking harmonies and textures, and its almost facile brightness, which borders on the swaggering: I find it hard not to think of les Six, nearly fifty years later. Certainly it displays a surefootedness and confidence rare for a composer of that age. Astonishing also is the Marche Ecossaise, written at the behest of a Scottish general. Ludicrous though the commission sounds, Debussy managed to produce a work both idiosyncratically his own and distinctly tartan. The Scottish flavour must have appealed to him, as he returned to the theme by using the folksong ‘the Keel Row’ in his orchestral Images. For my taste, however, the stand-out work among his piano duets is the archaic and wistful set of Epigraphes Antiques from 1914, which were reworked from a series of instrumental miniatures Debussy wrote for a presentation of Pierre Louÿs’ Bilitis poems—more recently Pierre Boulez has written a replacement for the lost celesta part and the works are performed under the title Chansons de Bilitis. These aphoristic, atmospheric works have a maturity and concision that few composers could match. By contrast, the three pieces of en Blanc et  Noir of 1915, more famous by far, strike as brash heard directly after the Epigraphes. The “Black and White” pieces inhabit a soundworld closer to Debussy’s late Etudes than his Preludes, and have a muscular expansiveness—and are renowned for their difficulty. The two Rogés make light of the pianistic challenges, and their ability to match their respective piano tones gives the music a radiant unanimity. Drawing the CD to a close is an exhilarating rendition of Lindaraja, yet another Spanish-flavoured Debussy work.

Beyond their sheer technical difficulties, these four-hand pieces make huge demands on the psychic attunedeness of their performers, and Pascal and Ami Rogé deliver marvellously nuanced performances. The key to why I am so impressed by this CD lies in the subtle rightness of the Rogés’ readings—there are few enough consummate solo Debussyans, and to be able to produce such insightful performances in tandem is rare indeed.