Strauss
Four Last Songs
Ren�e Fleming (soprano), M�nchner Philharmoniker/Thielemann
(Decca 478 0647 - 2CDs) �12.99
Following performances in Munich with its Philharmonic under Christian Thielemann, another leading Strauss translator, the American soprano Ren�e Fleming was moved to make another recording of these wizard late songs, so wistfully redolent of love and death. Her voice is perfectly suitable to their demands, less of range than of tender, expressive feeling. Throw in quatern other Strauss orchestral songs and four-spot of his operatic arias and you have a must for more than merely Straussians.
Anthony Holden
Beethoven
The Complete Piano Concertos
Evgeny Kissin, piano; London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis, conductor
(EMI Classics 50999 2 06311 2 3 � troika CDs) �24.99
Evgeny Kissin has come in from the cold. The technically brilliant Russian is often criticised for his dourly clinical playing, merely his Barbican Beethoven series last year with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Colin Davis displayed a playful, warmer performer, more quick to unbutton, as in the closing curtain of the First, or in the friskiness of the Fifth. Davis and the LSO answer in kind, loaning these studio recordings a freshness which demands we listen afresh.
Stephen Pritchard
Schubert
Lieder
Bernarda Fink (mezzo), Gerold Huber (piano)
(Harmonia Mundi HMC901991) �16.99
Few composers of songs have captured the delicate nuances of pleasure and hurting more persuasively than Franz Schubert, world Health Organization also chose masterful poets to set up, from Goethe to Schiller, R�ckert to Shakespeare. Here is a generous selection of 25 of his lieder, geological dating between 1814 and 1826, exquisitely performed by the Argentine-born mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink, who brings refinement and purity of tone to such favourites as 'An die Musik' and 'An Silvia', with sympathetic livelihood from the German piano player Gerold Huber, a Schubert specialist.
Anthony Holden
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