Holiday Recordings : It’s Ring-a-Ling Recordings Time : Classical : A Subtle Reminder of Tasteful Treats From the Past Year

Calendar music critics and writers present their opinions on the year’s recordings to help you through the holiday season. Some of the reviews may assist the gift-impaired: See our Top 40 Shopping Guide for the nation’s most popular or critically acclaimed albums, and subsequent tips on the year’s best children’s recordings, the class of classical releases, which boxed sets are wothwhile (and which are merely long and expensive) and a spin through jazz and pop holiday music. The ratings range from one star (poor) to four (excellent). Five stars are reserved for outstanding historical retrospectives.

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For starters, 1993 was a year marked by (almost) industry-wide recognition of the fact that opera isn’t all leather lungs and rafter-ringing. There is also a repertory, and artists suited to it, conveying subtler, more intimate messages. Among them are the relatively little-known ensemble operas of the young Rossini, of which some half-dozen appeared during the past year.

Outstanding among them was the 22-year-old’s amazingly clever and sophisticated “Il Turco in Italia,” with Neville Marriner leading a uniformly accomplished, largely Italian cast and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields with the wit and incisiveness that made his work one of the consistent delights of home listening at the start of his career a quarter-century ago (Philips 434 128).

Although word failed to reach most big-label A&R; directors, this was a Monteverdi year, the 350th anniversary of the death of the first great, shining light of the high Baroque. His thrillingly rich “Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria” received its first truly representative recording in ’93 from period forces under the enlightened direction of Rene Jacobs, with mezzo Bernarda Fink as a moving Penelope and Christoph Pregardien, the Domingo of period-performance opera, as Odysseus (Harmonia Mundi 901427/29).

Still on the subject of vocal music--for which it was a particular happy year as regards non-standard repertory--it’s impossible to overlook the premature passing of two sopranos who nonetheless had long careers and almost miraculously durable voices: Lucia Popp, among whose last recordings was her captivating contribution to the Hyperion label’s Schubert Song Edition (33017), and Arleen Auger, who gave us a ravishing live-performance collection of songs by Schumann, Mozart, Purcell and the touching “Sonnets from the Portuguese” by the contemporary American Romantic Libby Larsen (Koch 72480).

Soprano Roberta Alexander, happily very much with us, offered a knockout Samuel Barber program including “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” and “Andromache’s Farewell,” delivered with intensely expressive, creamy vocalism, handsomely backed by Edo de Waart’s conducting of the Netherlands Philharmonic (Etcetera 1145).

Also cheering these ears was the activity attendant on the birth 150 years ago of Edvard Grieg. Among the many tributes was a collection of his songs, presented with vocal grace and textual sensitivity by mezzo Anne Sofie von Otter, with the collaboration of pianist Bengt Forsberg (Deutsche Grammophon 437 521).

Another program that ranks among the vocal high points of the year centers on Poulenc’s delectably nonsensical “Le bal masque,” with more sedate, if hardly less enjoyable, material by Ravel, Ibert and Frank Martin. The protagonist is Jose Van Dam, with his astonishing illumination of words and suave, seemingly ageless baritone. Kent Nagano and the Lyon Opera Orchestra are his expert collaborators (Virgin 59236).

Of what little standard repertory I cared to hear this year, the major thrills were recycled blasts from the past: the five Beethoven Piano Concertos (52632), erratically, joyously, always imaginatively played by the irreplaceable Glenn Gould as part of Sony’s huge memorial tribute to the Canadian pianist, who died a decade ago, and the late Arthur Grumiaux’s wonderfully alert and stylish readings--with conducting to match by Colin Davis--of the Mozart Violin Concertos in a bargain-priced Philips set (438 323).

In a brand-new release there was a reminder, too, of the all-but-vanished grandeur of old-time Middle-European tradition from 80-year-old Gunter Wand, conducting Hamburg’s NDR Symphony in the Bruckner Seventh Symphony (RCA 61398).

Among repertory rarities whose acquaintance could be made this year were a pair by Sibelius: from the beginning of his career, the massive “Kullervo” Symphony/Cantata, and from its twilight, the magically evocative incidental music to Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” The former is presented with gloriously uninhibited enthusiasm by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Helsinki University Chorus under Esa-Pekka Salonen (Sony 52653), the latter, with exquisite refinement by orchestral and vocal forces from the small Finnish city of Lahti under the baton of Osmo Vanska (BIS 581).

Different sorts of discoveries could be made in ’93 with two American originals: Charles Ives, some of whose most far-out miniatures are in the super-skilled hands of the German-based Ensemble Modern and their conductor, Ingo Metzmacher (EMI 54552), and, in contrast, the grandiose prankishness of Alan Hovhaness’ “Mount St. Helens” Symphony, with its daft mix of Eastern modalities and Baroque fugueing, capped by the titular volcano blowing its top in a percussive orgy that segues into a slinky Middle Eastern dance--nature’s joyous hoochy-kooch. The performance by the Seattle Symphony under Gerard Schwarz sounds like the fulfillment of a composer’s dream (Delos 3137).

Among young-performer newcomers of ‘93, one of the less-hyped was to these ears the most impressive: Japanese violinist Kyoko Takezawa playing Bartok’s Second Violin Concerto with an ideal combination of modernist aggressiveness and luxuriant lyricism, strongly backed by Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony (RCA Victor 61675).

Although he has been burning up the London scene for several years, the name of Russian emigre pianist Nikolai Demidenko has only recently reached these ears, latterly through a spectacularly deep, dark and powerful Chopin recital comprising the Four Ballades and the B-minor Sonata (Hyperion 66577).

The year’s indispensable chamber-music recording came via the super-budget Naxos label: the latest addition to its projected traversal of all 80-odd Haydn string quartets with the Budapest-based Kodaly Quartet. The series reaches a peak with the ever-surprising six quartets of Opus 64, played with terrific wit and aplomb by the Kodalys, who are, furthermore, accorded a sharp-focus, lifelike, specifically string-quartet sonic ambience that would seem to be beyond the capabilities--or the desires?--of the bigger labels (Nos 1-3, Naxos 550673, 4-6, 550674).