Page 86 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

Dukas; Andrew Davis’s Berg collection, including a fine performance of the violin
concerto with James Ehnes as soloist; Vladimir Jurowski’s set of the early Stravinsky
ballets with the London Philharmonic, and Franz Welser-Möst’s Strauss tone poems
with the Cleveland Orchestra.

If some of the most interesting chamber music releases – Mendelssohn string
quintets, and sextets by Ferdinand Ries – have been of neglected repertoire rather than
core masterpieces, then the outstanding piano discs have ranged across the repertoire.
There was Mitsuko Uchida’s Diabelli Variations, a work that she had long wished to
record, Maurizio Pollini’s severe Hammerklavier Sonata, Krystian Zimerman’s dazzling
Szymanowski, Leif Ove Andsnes’s Dvořák miniatures, Bertrand Chamayou’s
Messiaen and Peter Jablonski’s exuberant disc of Grażyna Bacewicz’s pieces. They were
each very worthwhile, although the most fascinating of all the year’s keyboard offerings
was Igor Levit’s two-disc, Tristan-themed collection, dominated by Hans Werner
Henze’s Tristan concerto (only recorded once before), but also including piano
transcriptions of Wagner and Mahler.

A pairing of Stockhausen’s Carré and Mauricio Kagel’s Chorbuch hardly qualifies as
contemporary music – the Stockhausen piece is now more than 60 years old – but both
works still sound as if they could have been written yesterday. György Kurtág’s Kafka
Fragments, wonderfully sung and played by Anna Prohaska and Isabelle Faust,
deserves classic status too, while a double set celebrating Wolfgang Rihm’s
70th birthday, a new version of Hans Abrahamsen’s beguiling Schnee, as well
as Rebecca Saunders’s outstanding Skin, and Heiner Goebbels’s typically eclectic A
House of Call, are recent works that are all likely classics in the making.

The top 10 classical releases of 2022

François-Xavier Roth during the dress rehearsal of Pelléas et Mélisande at the Théâtre des
Champs-Elysées in Paris in 2021. Photograph: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images

1 Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande
Julien Behr/Vannina Santoni/Alexandre Duhamel/Les Siècles/François-Xavier Roth

We said: “In an opera whose drama depends so much on the minutest nuances of the
word-setting and the web of orchestral motifs underpinning it, the use of gut strings
and turn-of-the-20th-century woodwind and brass adds an extra dimension to the
expressive palette. The gains are obvious right from the opening, where the dark, slowly