Presto Team Choices - April 2025

'Thomas Adès conducts three suites of his own music culled from larger works. The Luxury Suite from Powder Her Face is given a stylish, swaggering performance, followed by another operatic selection, Five Spells from The Tempest, the highlight of which is a mesmerising performance of the central “spell”, ‘Ferdinand and Miranda’. The album concludes with the Inferno Suite, drawn from one of Adès’s most extraordinary recent compositions based on Dante’s The Divine Comedy, including the haunting ‘Pavan of the Souls in Limbo’ and a raucous reading of ‘The Thieves’ (a hectic, riotous orchestration of Liszt’s Grand galop chromatique).' (James Longstaffe)

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'A marvellous collection of works for two pianos from husband-and-wife duo, Lukas Geniušas and Anna Geniushene. They bring plenty of Latin American flair to Gershwin’s Cuban Overture and Copland’s El Salón México (the latter in an arrangement by Leonard Bernstein), plus an hypnotic account of John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction. For me, however, the highlight of the album is a mightily impressive performance of the fourth of Frederic Rzewski’s North American Ballads, entitled 'Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues', where the plaintive strains of the blues are juxtaposed with fiercely oppressive repeated rhythmic patterns imitating the relentless grinding of mechanical cotton gins.' (James Longstaffe)

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''Rock Music'. Get it? But behind the inevitable pun there's substance in spades; Edward Cowie (one of the few living thinkers who really merits the term 'polymath') has forged a sonata-of-sonatas out of these three works, each based around one of the categories of rock in geology, and spiritually inspired by Beethoven's last three piano sonatas. Each combines passive and active moods - the first, for instance, playing not just with the explosive behaviour of volcanic eruptions but also with the cooling of lava afterwards, and immobile igneous formations like Northern Ireland's Giant's Causeway. Roderick Chadwick's account of these physically and musically demanding works is masterful. Like much of Cowie's work, this is an album that will yield up more of its secrets on repeated listening, yet also holds enough immediate appeal to draw in the first-time listener.' (David Smith)

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'Somewhere between an EP and a full album, this 41-minute performance of Prokofiev's enigmatic Sixth from Gianandrea Noseda and the LSO really shows the colours and liveliness of this work. David Nice's booklet notes ascribe more sardonic bitterness to the music than I think is really there - perhaps understandably, given that it would enjoy only a couple of years of favour before falling foul of the notorious artistic purges of Zhdanovshchina - but there's certainly something deeply mournful about it in places, as Prokofiev recalls the sufferings of the German-Soviet War and the wounds it left behind. The slow movement, indeed, is particularly lyrical, with its long and at times heart-on-sleeve melodies evoking a mood of heroism still unbowed.' (David Smith)

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'This is a distinctively atmospheric recording of Bartók's only operatic music. Karina Canellakis draws playing from the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra which creates the spaces of the castle enchantingly, whilst Gabor Bretz and Rinat Shaham bring the complex characters of Judith and Bluebeard, and the dynamic between them, to life with assurance. Shaham portrays both the manipulative, dark and almost humanely sorrowful sides of Bluebeard, and the tension between them, just as Bretz demonstrates Judith’s mixture of inquisitiveness, longing and fear, both singers using the flexibility of their voices to captivating effect. The text is sung in Hungarian, the sounds of which are crucial to the overall effect of the work, but Pentatone is to be applauded for including a full libretto with English translation in the booklet – not always a given these days.' (Matthew Ash)

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Fiorentino is a pianist I had never come across, despite my lifelong immersion in the history of pianists and piano music. This set piqued my interest, especially when I read comparisons with his compatriot, Michaelangeli - a pianist I greatly admire - and I'm currently about a third of the way through listening to it. His playing is of the aristocratically elegant style, like Michaelangeli but also players such as Rudolf Serkin and Cortot, with a skill for drawing out subtle colours, balancing voices, voicing chords and shaping melodic lines that is precise but sounds entirely organic. In the third of Schubert's Op.90 impromptus, for example, the inner figuration is handled with deft and sensitive propulsion, beautifully balanced with the shifting bassline and with those long melodic phrases floated beautifully on top. Everything fits together so naturally in much of Fiorentino's playing, and although his technique is formidable he comes across strongly as a musician who has chosen the piano as his means of communicating the music. It's a treat, and nicely presented and remastered too. (Matthew Ash)

Available Format: 26 CDs

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'The Italian soprano has been winning plaudits in Puccini of late (including a recent Tosca on Deutsche Grammophon and Butterfly in Berlin last weekend), but this riveting debut recital of Bellini, Donizetti and early Verdi reveals that she's perhaps even more in her element in bel canto - the voice is firm but supremely flexible, with a robust lower register and a distinctive dash of acid in the sound which put me in mind of mid-career Callas. She's also a compelling vocal actress who makes every note (and there are many!) count in dramatic terms, especially in Anne Boleyn's (fictitious) pre-execution mad-scene and Lucrezia Borgia's horrified cabaletta in the wake of her son's death.' (Katherine Cooper)

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'It may lack some of the dramatic impetus of Handel's later setting of the same story (the Israelites spend an awful lot of time chivvying Jephtha into action before things truly get underway), but there's plenty to enjoy in Maurice Greene and John Hoadley's depiction of the military leader who ends up honour-bound to sacrifice his daughter in return for victory over his people's enemies - not least some splendidly martial choruses and a series of plangent arias for the two central characters. The sweet-toned Staples may not sound conventionally heroic but the commanding eloquence of his singing makes it easy to see why the Israelites revere him, and Bevan will break your heart as she accepts her fate (no deus ex machina appears in the nick of time here).' (Katherine Cooper)

Available Formats: 2 SACDs, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3

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