Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas reigned unchallenged as the greatest English opera for over 250 years, until it was supplanted by the prodigiously talented Benjamin Britten’s series of stage works, as concentrated and inventive as the older composer’s. Both are represented in recent CD issues. The Purcell has been recorded with such luminaries as Tatiana Troyanos, Janet Baker, and Lorraine Hunt, among many others. So why this new one?
      One reason is Susan Graham, a Dido to rank alongside her predecessors—the voice warm and full, the emotions vivid. Graham’s “Ah! Belinda” is a heart-stopping lament, her final scene, the ultimate in disillusioned resignation. Another reason: conductor Emmanuelle Haïm, who tears into this music with a ferocity that startles after staid interpretations of the past. The dance music bursts with vivacity and the period instruments crackle with fresh crispness. Fate’s unfolding is portrayed with a devastating inevitability.
      That would be enough to set this version apart, but there’s more. Luxury casting has countertenor David Daniels in a tiny walk-on part that he imbues with character; contralto Felicity Palmer is a Sorceress who actually sings instead of mugging her way through; and tenor Paul Agnew’s rendition of the Sailors’ Song is gorgeous. It’s not all on this level, though. Tenor Ian Bostridge is miscast as an Aeneas unconvincing both as hero and as lover, and Camilla Tilling’s chirpy, bright Belinda isn’t to my taste, though it may not bother you. Well-balanced, transparently detailed sound is another reason to get this disc, though there’s some hardness on loud, high soprano notes.
      Far from Purcell’s late seventeenth century is Britten’s Henry James-based opera, The Turn of the Screw, written in 1954. Both operas have small, chamber orchestras and seven-member casts. In a sense, they’re both ghost stories: Purcell’s ghosts are made visible in the persons of the sorceress and her minions, Britten’s in the presence of the dead Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, and inhabiting the mind of The Governess, here wonderfully sung by Felicity Lott.
      Steuart Bedford, who worked with Britten at Aldeburgh, leads a tight, but flowing performance, striking just the right moods and portraying the tragedy’s inexorable progression with a vividness that makes for hypnotic listening. The many instrumental interludes glow in Britten’s amazingly apt orchestrations. The thirteen players sound like a full orchestra at times; at others, extended instrumental solos capture moods and move the story along. The singing is virtually flawless—Philip Langridge is a properly oily Quint, but also a firmer devilish presence than the higher-voice Peter Pears in Britten’s own recording. The bewitched children, Miles and Flora, are portraits of malevolence disguised as innocence.
      This recording was part of a Bedford-conducted series of Britten operas on the defunct Collins label, now being reissued by Naxos. The original 1993 engineering was first-rate, and it emerges as such here—Act II’s “The Bells” sequence is a sure-fire audiophile feast. The Turn of the Screw has fared well on disc, but this one’s superb, and a steal at Naxos’ price. Dan Davis

After seventeen years and more than a dozen good-selling CDs, Anonymous 4 is calling it a day. This season’s tour will be its last; American Angels and a still-to-be-released disc of Hildegarde of Bingen material are its final recordings for Harmonia Mundi. The current disc, subtitled “Songs of Hope, Redemption & Glory,” explores the Anglo-American sacred music tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries. There are psalm settings, fuging tunes, hymns, camp revival, and gospel songs—material that originated from the New England countryside, the rural South, and Northeastern cities. Included are “shape-note” compositions, which employ an early American system to facilitate music reading (different pitches had differently shaped note heads, representing the traditional European solmization syllables: do, re, mi, fa, sol, etc.).
      Some folk music purists may be suspicious, assuming that A4’s approach to this music will be stiff, too refined, too “perfect” in terms of intonation and enunciation. And it’s true. You won’t confuse Anonymous 4 with Ralph Stanley. But these artists have devoted their entire career to music with a spiritual content, and the results are absolutely convincing. The singing is beautifully shaped, heartfelt, and stylistically apt, with appropriate inflections to the beginnings and ends of notes. They delineate well the varied tone of the selections—the insistent, fervent promise of salvation offered in “The Morning Trumpet”; the gentle resignation of “Wayfaring Stranger”; the shining and ultimately triumphant gospel tune “Shall We Gather at the River.” The program was recorded at Skywalker Ranch and captures the moderately reverberant but non-obscuring acoustic Anonymous 4 has favored on disc and in concert all these years.
      Soir, dit-elle is only the second release from Trio Mediaeval, but these three Scandinavian women are already widely regarded as A4’s logical successors. Individually, they probably have even more distinctive and flexible voices—soprano Anna Maria Friman can really nail a high note when required—but TM’s most salient strengths are those of the American group: a flawless vocal blend, a profound musical intelligence, and a deep spiritual connection to the texts. Soir, dit-elle intersperses the four sections of a fifteenth-century mass (“Alma redemptoris mater”) by the English composer Leonel Power with new works written for Trio Mediaeval by Oleh Haravyy, Gavin Bryars, Andrew Smith, and Ivan Moody. The effect of the program is spellbinding, as the Trio moves effortlessly back and forth across the span of 600 years without ever breaking the musical mood. All of the new music is exemplary, but the two pieces by Moody, The Troparion of Kassiani and A Lion’s Sleep, which set ninth- and tenth-century texts that give voice to the two Maries associated with Christ (His mother and Mary Magdalene), are especially wonderful. The exquisite recording, taped in an Austrian church, offers a closer perspective than HM, with excellent resolution of the three voices but a pleasing spaciousness as well. Andrew Quint

The 1950s Haydn Symphonies Recordings. Vienna Symphony, Volksoper Orchestra, Hermann Scherchen, conductor. James Grayson and Kurt List, producers. Deutsche Grammophon 471256 (6 CDs)

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At last—reissues of Hermann Scherchen’s inimitable Haydn symphony recordings for Westminster. Nineteen are here, all bearing the personal stamp of a conductor with encyclopedic interests, a champion of the new who excelled in making the old sound as radical as it did in the days when these works burst upon an unsuspecting world.
      That’s how Scherchen plays these symphonies, with wide dynamics, energetic allegros, whiplash prestos, expressive slow movements, and minuets that take the music out of palace ballrooms and into their contemporary equivalents of discos. Attacks are fierce; slow movements, as in the glorious Symphony No.88, are taken at tempos that would drag in other hands, but have a time-stopping power in his. All the while, he makes us aware of structurally important details others gloss over. Scherchen’s Haydn doesn’t have the charm of Beecham’s, the warmth of Walter’s, or the precision of Szell’s, to mention a few of his contemporaries. But he’s their equal, saving the composer who revolutionized the symphonic form from the stereotyped “Papa Haydn” image.
      Such originality, from composer and conductor, demands to be heard, and this well-transferred, generously filled budget-priced box is the way to do it. All but one of the symphonies are in clear, well-defined mono; the exception is a wide-ranging “Farewell” Symphony from 1958 where stereo enhances the device of the players saying auf wiedersehn as they leave the stage at the close. There’s more Scherchen where this came from; here’s hoping DG gives it to us.DD

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5. Romeo and Juliet. Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Daniele Gatti, conductor. Robina G. Young and Stephen Johns, producers; Brad Michel, engineer. Harmonia Mundi 907381

The first time I played Daniele Gatti’s new recording of Tchaikov-sky’s Fifth Sym-phony, I felt almost the same excitement I experienced when I heard the work the first time four decades ago. Gatti pays unusually careful attention to the score’s tempo markings and dynamic indications. The first movement opens more quickly than is traditional, but its tone and tread are so appropriately weighted that it has the requisite feel of an objective prologue to the drama of fate and romantic perseverance that follows. The great melancholy song on the French horn that opens the Andante is played with such quiet beauty and hushed intensity as to make one catch his breath. This movement must be for Gatti the emotional center of the whole work, individual anguish crushed by implacable fate when the motto theme returns with shattering power. The Valse then follows like a distant dream of happier times, but they too are dispatched by the fate motif. In the finale Gatti eschews the customary display of mere orchestral virtuosity in favor of a sobriety that, despite the overall tonal shift from E minor to E major, never lets us forget that Tchaikovsky’s is a true tragic vision. Thoughts of Yeats’ great rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem fill the imagination, the coda’s march suggesting less clarion triumph than exhaustion, the hero most vanquished when, paradoxically, he is most victorious. This marvelous performance is a triumph: at once as literal as any score watcher could desire and yet completely individual.
      The makeweight Romeo and Juliet, an earlier recording on a different label that Harmonia Mundi licensed for release here, exhibits the same virtues—note, for example, the carefully controlled dynamic levels in the exciting central section. Gatti is clearly a superior conductor, with a keen rhythmic sense and fine ear for orchestral textures. He has the ability to shape phrases and melodies with great warmth and plasticity, and to build climaxes with extraordinary inevitability. The Abbey Road recording is excellent: the perspective forward, the soundstage a bit short on depth but very, very wide, the dynamic range considerable. Paul Seydor

The first half of the Twentieth Century brought an explosion of possibilities to the musical exploitation of instrumental color and timbral combinations. No composer of that era loomed larger in this expansion of sonic resources than Béla Bartók, so it’s a distinct pleasure to see some of his masterpieces beginning to appear on high-resolution multichannel recordings. Praga’s new SACD encodes Bartók’s magisterial 1937 Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion in a potent and expert performance by musicians who know this music in their bones, and attains a vivid immediacy and tonal truthfulness I’ve never heard on any previous recording. I listened to it on both my home multichannel setup, and with Jonathan Valin on his world-class SACD stereo system (Sonus Faber Stradivari speakers, Aesthetix preamp, Tenor amps, EMM Labs/Meitner player); both renditions were thrilling.
      Praga’s engineering—which doesn’t hesitate to put a perhaps-rather-larger-than-usual amount of information into the surround channels—reveals subtle nuances in drum timbres as they bounce back and forth almost polyphonically at times, and filigree details in the ricocheting piano martellato interplay, that had simply never been audible before. Attacks are crisp, charged with energy, and the percussion fully integrated into the musical discourse rather than (as too often) seeming an extraneous seasoning sprinkled on at random. The hard-edged athleticism, the mystery, and the fierce joy of this music come to life as until now only possible in a fine concert performance. This is one of those dazzling recordings that triumphantly validate SACD technology.
      Praga fills out the program with two-piano arrangements of Bartók’s early Two Pictures—not a particularly memorable effort—as well as of his lurid and bizarre 1925 ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin. On the keyboard the Mandarin reveals more clearly inner voices and accompanimental figures submerged in the orchestral panoply—but as a stand-alone composition it’s not really a success. Those lascivious clarinet pirouettes, diminished to the piano’s dry neutrality, just don’t have the same seductive entrancement. But who cares? The great Sonata’s easily worth the price of the disc.
      Enigmatic and troubling, haunted and haunting, Bartók’s only opera—a one-act, hour-long psychodrama from 1911—conveys its forlorn majesty with an astonishing and still-unsurpassed array of orchestral invention. The music emerges from deep-velvet, enshrouded gloom, now slowly and sadly, now in florid, rhapsodic fanfares, now grandly (breaking out into an unforgettable paean of exultation in the “fifth door” scene where Judith gazes out over the vista of Bluebeard’s vast estates), now erupting into tragic fury, now in rapid, flame-like flickerings that trace the air with lingering sonic afterimages (in the mournful “sixth door” that opens onto Bluebeard’s lake of tears), now rising to a shattering final threnody before sinking into desolate exhaustion as Bluebeard solemnly intones “Henceforth all shall be darkness, darkness, darkness.”
      Iván Fischer conducts with absolute command of this music (I heard him lead a performance here in Cincinnati’s Music Hall that left the audience so moved they sat in stunned silence for several seconds before breaking out into thunderous applause), and Polgár and Komlósi are superb vocal embodiments of Bartók’s persistent, doomed Judith and sinister, tormented, fatalistic, also-doomed Bluebeard.
      Bluebeard’s Castle is one of the greatest operas of the modern or any other era—even though it renounces one of the key elements of musical drama: spectacle. There is so little to see that the staged and concert versions are equally effective. This makes it ideal for recording; there’s no sense of an incomplete experience lacking a crucial visual component. All the better, then, that this new Philips SACD is terrific. It has gorgeous tonal richness and purity, sharply-focused detail, encompassing ambiance, huge dynamic range, and powerful impact. Try track 7—the “fifth door” scene—to come as close as you dare to importing the awe-inspiring glory of the full orchestra on open throttle into your listening room. The multichannel sound is so deep and wide, it’s positively oceanic. Mark Lehman

Mahler: Symphony No. 3. Lilli Paasikivi, mezzo-soprano. London Philharmonic Chorus Women; Tiffin Boys’ Choir. Philharmonia Orchestra, Benjamin Zander, conductor. Elaine Martone and David St. George, producers; Jack Renner, engineer. 2 Hybrid multichannel SACDs + 1 CD. Telarc 60599 (Sonic rating: 7)

I have a knowledgeable friend whose wife is fond of remarking that if you ask him a question about something, he can’t resist telling you everything he knows about it. I’ve sometimes thought of this fellow as I’ve listened to the spoken essays that accompany Benjamin Zander’s ongoing Mahler cycle for Telarc. Zander’s vast knowledge and erudition, his deep insights, his teeming energy, and his ebullient love for all aspects of Mahler’s work make these bonus discs exceptionally rewarding.
      Fortunately, Zander’s performances have also been excellent. Almost no conductor relishes Mahler’s orchestral colors, his strange combinations of instruments to produce the most expressive dissonances, as keenly as Zander. His balances and textures are among the most translucent of all conductors, and he has in the Philharmonia an instrument with which he enjoys a rare unanimity of purpose. The middle four movements come out strongest. In the Scherzando, he is the only conductor on record to use an actual post horn—instead of the flugelhorn specified in the first edition—and it sounds with a peerless evocation of pastoral innocence. The shifting variations of the second movement, by turns bucolic and sinister, are vividly characterized; in the fifth, Telarc’s engineers place the children’s chorus above and behind us to delightful effect.
      Doubts arise principally in the large-scale structures of the first and last movements. The former has countless beautiful, exciting passages, yet they feel like a succession of events that never quite hold together over 33 minutes. Also missing is a degree of Pan-like exuberance. And if the final, transcendent Adagio doesn’t overwhelm and transport, then it doesn’t matter how gorgeously played or recorded it is. Here it doesn’t, despite Telarc’s spectacular medium-distance sound that’ll thrill those with multichannel rigs.
      If Zander’s Ninth—the one indisputably great performance in his series so far—is any indication, concerts appear to liberate him in a way studios do not. That disc gives the impression Zander has moved beyond a thoroughly mastered score to a living, breathing realization of the music. In this Third, as in his Fourth and Fifth, the music seems, in some subtle and difficult-to-define way, tyrannized by his attention to the score and his desire to make sure we appreciate it as fully as he. PS

There is surely a Pictures at an Exhibition for everyone out there among its gazillion recordings. Beyond Arturo Toscanini’s incandescent mono performance, which will probably never be equaled, Fritz Reiner (RCA), Sir Georg Solti (Decca), James Levine (Deutsche Grammophon), and Yoel Levi (Telarc) should certainly rank near the top of any short list. Reiner’s recording is so well known in audiophile circles that no further comment is necessary. Solti’s performance is similarly bright and virtuosic with some amazing brass sonorities from the same Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and flashy sound that nicely complements the orchestration. Though his tempos are similar to Solti’s, Levine sounds more expansive, and the Met orchestra matches the CSO. The generous coupling includes an underrated Le Sacre du Printemps in what may be the best-sounding DG CD I have ever heard. Levi’s Pictures should be heard for his flawless terracing of the dynamics in the successive climaxes of “The Great Gate of Kiev,” and Telarc’s well-integrated bass drum.
      In comparison, Slatkin sounds too tame. He does project the grotesquerie of “Gnomus” effectively, but “Bydlo” sounds more like a NASCAR event than a lumbering oxcart. “The Great Gate of Kiev” is quite good. Slatkin gets the bells and gong just right. His main SACD competition is Valery Gergiev, who manages to draw a rather coarse Russian sound from the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (Philips). The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra does better by Ravel’s suave, sophisticated orchestration.
      The principal controversy with Ivan the Terrible centers around the version the conductor utilizes. Abram Stasevich (the soundtrack conductor) arranged an oratorio for narrator, soloists, chorus, and orchestra which Riccardo Muti plays with the Philharmonia Orchestra in a spectacular EMI recording that essentially reproduces his amazing live Philadelphia performances, one of the few highlights of his tenure there. Muti captures the power and grandeur better than anyone, but his recording is plagued by the ubiquitous shouting narrator. Valeri Polyansky conducts the complete score on Chandos without the narrator, but the music is episodic and the sound cavernous. Neeme Järvi gets around the narrator problem with a concert scenario arranged by the late, great Christopher Palmer. It’s quite good on its own terms, even if it omits too much substantive music for purists. Gergiev, on Philips, and Slatkin offer the best solution by basically playing Stasevich’s oratorio (or something close to it) without the musically irrelevant narration. Again, Gergiev is very dramatic, despite some ragged orchestral playing and murky sound. Slatkin’s orchestra is better, but his swiftly paced, relatively civilized interpretation lacks the unrestrained wildness inherent in this music. In the final analysis, when you consider conducting, orchestral execution, and sound, Slatkin gives the best performance of the preferred version of Ivan.
      In typical Nickrenz-Aubort fashion, the sound of both of these recordings is strong on ambient and spatial information, and presented from a mid-hall perspective. The resemblance ends there. The engineers capture the huge forces required for Ivan the Terrible with clarity and ease. Whereas Pictures sounds excessively smooth and muffled, the highs in Ivan have real bite. Multichannel further enhances natural hall sound with no important directional distortions, but does little to intensify the impact of these colorful showpieces. In sum, stick with any of the previously mentioned Pictures in standard stereo. Slatkin is a good choice for the most musical version of Ivan the Terrible with fine sound, but I will never part with Muti’s powerhouse performance. Arthur B. Lintgen