Page 85 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

After nearly two years in which record companies were seriously

compromised in what they could record, whether live or in the studio, things began to
get back to normal in 2022. Whether the shifts in genres and repertoire – away from
studio recordings of large-scale orchestral and operatic works and towards releases
derived from live performances – were part of a gradual change in emphasis that had
set in before the pandemic, though, or a direct consequence of it, was hard to
determine.

Certainly the cost of embarking on studio-made recordings of complete operas now
looks likely to ensure such projects become permanent rarities. Instead, their places are
being mostly filled by CDs and DVDs derived from staged and concert performances,
sometimes directly warts and all, sometimes with discreet patching after the event.
René Jacobs’s typically quirky account of Weber’s Der Freischütz was an exception to
that rule, but in the longer term it looks likely that it will mainly be baroque operas with
their smaller casts and orchestral forces that get bespoke studio treatment. There were
fine examples of these this year with recordings of Handel’s Amadigi from Christian
Curnyn’s Early Opera Company and the rarely performed 1749 score of Rameau’s
Zoroastre from Alexis Kossenko and Les Ambassadeurs – La Grande Écurie.

And, indeed, heading my list this year is François-Xavier Roth’s revelatory period-
instrument version of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, which stemmed from a staged
production in Lille (although, because of Covid restrictions at the time, it was streamed
but never performed before a live audience). The most interesting opera sets were also
derived from live performances. There was Edward Gardner’s magnificent account
of Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage, a worthy successor to Colin Davis’s classic
version; the Boston-based Odyssey Opera’s version of Saint-Saëns’s epic Henry VIII;
and Heinz Holliger’s delicate, elusive Lunea, with the baritone Christian Gerhaher in
the central role of the poet Nikolaus Lenau.

Gerhaher and Holliger (as conductor) were also responsible for one of the most
worthwhile revivals of a concert rarity – Othmar Schoeck’s quietly melancholic song
cycle Elegie. Other welcome rarities from the early 20th century included a disc
of Charles Koechlin’s wonderfully luminous orchestral music, including his Seven Stars
Symphony, conducted by Ariane Matiakh, and one of the works inspired by Finland’s
national epic The Kalevala from composers other than Sibelius. Baritone Roderick
Williams’s collection of English songs, in his own orchestrations, was a quiet delight; a
complete survey of Samuel Barber’s songs, and one of Sibelius’s orchestral songs from
the Norwegian mezzo-soprano Marianne Beate Kielland were valuable reminders of
just how much of the 20th-century song repertory there is to be explored.

But exceptional new recordings from the orchestral mainstream were few and far
between. Some, however, were unexpectedly rewarding. These include Adam
Fischer’s Brahms set, recorded with orchestral forces of the size that were employed in
Brahms’s time; Domingo Hindoyan’s disc of French ballets, by Debussy, Rousseau and