Classical

BBC PO/Andrew Davis, Martyn Brabbins
‘King Of Kings’ – Bach Orchestrations by Andrew Davis
Chandos CHAN20400 (downloads to 44.1kHz/16-bit resolution)

As the final album made by Sir Andrew Davis before his death in 2024, this is a sentimental choice, but a worthy one all the same. For anyone familiar with Bach transcriptions by Stokowski, Schoenberg or the gothic ruin that is Mitropoulos’s take on the G minor BWV542, Davis’s versions are more Bachian – more musical? – while exploiting the full orchestra. Several chorale preludes omit the violins so that the melody is illuminated by a gently blended glow from violas and saxes. Davis conducts as he arranges, with intimate knowledge of the originals under his fingers. He couldn’t finish them all so his baton is passed to Brabbins, his pre-eminent successor. Producer Mike George contributes a moving booklet tribute. PQ

Sound Quality: 90%

Julia Lezhneva, Alexander Melnikov
Rachmaninoff: Chopin Variations, Romances
Harmonia mundi HMM902751 (downloads to 96kHz/24-bit res)

Often dismissed as the poor cousin to Rachmaninoff’s Paganini and Corelli sets, the Chopin Variations are no less a tour de force, in both virtuosity and imagination. In the booklet, Melnikov finds parallels with Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes, and his fingers are faithful servants of his own entrancing imagination as a performer. And on Rachmaninoff’s own Steinway, no less, at his Swiss home. The sense of history is intensified by Lezhneva’s singing of 21 Romances. Despite the acoustic she holds nothing back, each phrase has a poetic shape, and the final ‘What happiness!’ should pin you to the back of your chair. PQ

Sound Quality: 90%

Signum Quartett
Works For String Quartet From South Africa
ECM New Series ECM2787 (downloads to 192kHz/24-bit res)

This is anything but folksy or ‘local’: all six composers have serious things to say. Yes, Mokale Koapeng’s Komeng is a gentle revoicing of a ritual song, but the voice feels as authentic as it does in Matthijs Van Dijk’s explosive elegy rage (rage against the). Péter Louis van Dijk evokes both Feldman and Dowland in the tender, static world of iinyembezi (‘tears’). Written in wartime London, Arnold van Wyk’s Five Elegies range from Brittenesque introspection to Bartókian flurries. In Glimpses Of A Half-Forgotten Future, Robert Fokkens plays teasingly with both tunes and tuning. But the Signums save the best for last with Priaulx Rainier’s String Quartet. PQ

Sound Quality: 85%

Beauty Farm
Agricola: Missa Malheur Me Bat, Missa In Myne Zyn
Fra Bernardo FB2468128 (two discs; downloads to 96kHz/24-bit res)

We tend to think of 15th-century Masses as music to pray by, unfolding in a distant gallery. Beauty Farm bring you close, as if you were peering at the brushwork of a van Eyck. Both these 50m Masses are effectively vocal quartets, sung by single voices, with heroic stamina over long overlapping lines. Alexander Agricola? Active in Ghent around the 1490s – so half a century after van Eyck – he shares a habit of playing arcane rhythmic games with Ockeghem. The harmony goes wonky now and then – Agricola or his singers? Either way, I love Beauty Farm’s exposed sound-world (captured here in a c14 Austrian monastery) as much as their offbeat covers. PQ

Sound Quality: 85%