Barbican, London
The UK premiere of the composer’s concerto written for Anne-Sophie Mutter was placed alongside two of Stravinsky’s ballet scores in this musically rich and vivid concert

The list of composers who have written concertos for violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is a long and varied one, from André Previn and John Williams to Wolfgang Rihm and Unsuk Chin. The latest name to be added to that distinguished list is Thomas Adès; Mutter gave the premiere of his Air at last year’s Lucerne festival, and she was also the soloist in its UK premiere, with the composer himself conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.

Composed during lockdown in 2020 and 2021, Air carries the subtitle Homage to Sibelius, and certainly there is an echo of the modal opening of that composer’s Sixth Symphony in the way that it begins, not in obvious thematic terms, as much as in the sense of tranquil reflection that the works share, as Adès’s soloist weaves a gossamer thread of sound through the orchestra’s stepwise descending lines, which gradually build, layer on layer, colour on colour, until the full ensemble is involved.

Takács Quartet
(Hyperion)
The group’s new recording of G major quartet is strikingly different from their intense 1997 recording, while the Haydnesque B flat is a model of good manners

The Takács have recorded the G major quartet, the last and most ambitious of Schubert’s string quartets, before, on a disc released by Decca in 1997. Both the first violin Edward Dusinberre and the cellist András Fejér on that disc are still members of the group today, and play on the new version, which was recorded in the UK a year ago, but in some respects the two performances feel strikingly different.

Where the earlier reading seemed to be driven by nervous energy, every rhythm taut, every accent sharply etched, the new one seems much more relaxed, and distinctly less intense. The tempos for the first and last movements in particular feel markedly slower this time around, and the great first movement, one of Schubert’s most sublime tragic statements despite its major key, takes almost two minutes longer than before. Of course, it almost goes without saying that technically the performance is as precise as ever, and the account of the rather Haydnesque B flat quartet D112 that’s also on the disc is a model of good manners, but the G major quartet just doesn’t quite compel attention in the way the Takács’s playing so regularly has in the past.

Booth/Glynn
(Orchid)
Soprano Claire Booth and pianist Christopher Glynn turn to Schoenberg’s early and little known songs in this immaculate recording

Soprano Claire Booth and pianist Christopher Glynn follow their earlier discs of songs by Mussorgsky, Grieg and Grainger with this thoughtfully assembled Schoenberg collection. As they point out in a sleeve note, Schoenberg’s songs are very much a neglected part of his output, but in the first third of his career, at least, it was poetry that fired his creativity and through setting it he found his voice.

The 24 songs that Booth and Glynn include are taken from six different sets, grouped thematically, so that there are three songs under the heading of “Expectation”, three under “Flesh”, three “Nocturne” and so on. Most were composed in the first few years of the 20th century, though they also include one of the two songs of Schoenberg’s Op 14 from 1908, when his music was just beginning to move into atonality, and another from Op 48, written 25 years later, in a fully fledged 12-tone style; Booth also sings one of Tove’s arias from the lushly romantic oratorio Gurrelieder, while Glynn punctuates the sequence with two of the little piano pieces from Schoenberg’s Op 19.