A twist on tradition

Despite efforts to portray it as an art for the aging, classical music has always been a young person’s game. No other form of art or entertainment requires such early training. Kids often learn Bach on the piano long before they get around to mimicking Jimi Hendrix on the guitar.

Prodigies, in fact, are classical’s business model.

We don’t dote on cantos, paintings or films by the teenage Dante, Picasso or Orson Welles, but we do on early Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Shostakovich and even today’s Thomas Ades. The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s recent International Youth Orchestra Festival tapped surprisingly large reserves of renewable musical resources.

Moreover, the CD market is brimming with recordings by major soloists younger than 30, recordings of interest for lots of reasons. Cheese, wine and interpretations of late Beethoven piano sonatas obviously age well. Still, freshness sells. We take biological pleasure in witnessing rebirth, be it in art or anything else. New soloists sometimes have new ideas. Performance is part athletic, so youth has a physical advantage as well.

And this being the Christmas shopping season, CDs by young artists are great gifts. You might even find that new, young listeners are more readily attracted to Beethoven or Bach played by a fetching, frisky contemporary than by a forbiddingly formal elderly gent or grande dame.

So for a survey of some recent CDs, I’ve tried (and mostly succeeded) not to trust anyone over 30. Plus, I’ve steered clear of those who are already big stars -- such as Lang Lang or Gustavo Dudamel -- and tried to give attention to performers who have had little or no local exposure.

Science is still attempting to discover whether it was a genetic mutation or something else that created a new breed of super-violinist: smart, technically brilliant, fearless, energetic, sexy, gorgeous and mostly female. But whatever the reason, the members of this breed just keep coming and impressing. Following in the footsteps of Anne-Sophie Mutter and, more recently, Hilary Hahn and Leila Josefowicz are many more.

No crystal ball is needed to predict that Julia Fischer will go far. At 24, she has recorded a good deal of standard repertory; she is the youngest music professor in Germany; and this month she was voted Gramophone magazine’s artist of the year (not young artist of the year -- that went to an older conductor, Vasily Petrenko, who is 31!).

Fischer is an intensely serious musician who comes across in interviews as having her act almost scarily together. She plays with supreme confidence, and you can’t go wrong with a Julia Fischer recording. The Dutch label PentaTone, which records everything in superior SACD sound, practically seems to exist for her sake. Her regular collaborator is the youthful (early 40s) Russian conductor Yakov Kreizberg, who is equally reliable.

I was particularly taken with their release this year of the Brahms Double Concerto (with the young cellist Daniel Muller-Schott and the Netherlands Philharmonic), in which autumnal music remembers summer. Now Fischer and Kreizberg have a Mozart disc highlighted by the Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola (Gordan Nikolic) that has similar virtues. Gramophone overstates her case -- Fischer has further to go before she will be a real musician of the year. She is, if anything, too mature for her years, undoubtedly having sacrificed sowed oats to build an early career. But she’s young and has time to sow and grow.

Lisa Batiashvili, a 28-year-old violinist from the Georgian Republic, has similar self-possession. Her new recording, on Sony Classical, is of the Sibelius Violin Concerto paired with Magnus Lindberg’s Violin Concerto, which she premiered last year.

The Sibelius, taken from a live performance in Finland (with Sakari Oramo conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony), is big-boned and probing. Lindberg’s concerto is a rich, rhapsodic piece, full of thick, dark orchestral writing and fabulous full-toned solo trickery.

Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto is presently on every self-respecting young violinist’s music stand. Last year, Josefowicz released an impassioned account, also with Oramo. But the concerto has come around again -- twice -- this time by way of a 26-year-old Latvian, Baiba Skride, and a 22-year-old Armenian, Sergey Khachatryan (the only male fiddler in the bunch).

Skride’s cleanly etched approach (carefully seconded by Mikko Franck conducting the Munich Philharmonic on a live Sony recording) is fast, distinct and sophisticated, allowing Shostakovich no wallowing, little Weltschmerz, while revealing telling details. It is the most sophisticated performance of the concerto I know. Khachatryan is a prodigious old-school virtuoso, but he is kept in line by Kurt Masur, who conducts the Orchestre National de France on a Naive disc that also contains Shostakovich’s Second Concerto. The result is a more traditional take on the bipolar Shostakovich, dramatically switching between moody and hysterical.

Janine Jansen is yet another violinist being marketed for her sex appeal by her label, Decca. This 29-year-old Dutch fiddler, who had a hit with her illuminating recording of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” a season ago, is back with Bach. She offers a stunningly modernistic account of the Partita No. 2 for solo violin sandwiched between versions of keyboard inventions arranged for string duo and trio. These are curiosities, amusing and exhilarating at first but in the end a little dull.

Pianists hold their own

For some reason, pianists have not been making as much of a splash of late as violinists, even with Lang Lang and Yundi Li giving the string players a run for their money. However, Lise de la Salle, 19 and French, has genuine potential. She has lately followed her striking debut recording of Bach and Liszt with a CD set on Naive of Mozart and Prokofiev that includes a DVD feature on her as well. Petite and angelic of mien, she plays Mozart’s D-major Sonata with a joyous sparkle. She makes Prokofiev sting, which is equally irresistible.

David Fray, 26 and also French, is a pianist with a gleaming, percussive sound and a gimmick. On his first recording for Virgin Classics, he intersperses Bach with Boulez, and it works.

Simone Dinnerstein, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-born pianist, takes precisely the opposite approach with Bach. At 34, she’s an exception to the under-30 rule, but she started late. Two years ago, she raised the money to make a record of the “Goldberg” Variations, and eventually she talked Telarc into releasing it. Her flirtatious, glowingly romantic interpretation makes for addictive listening and has become a surprise bestseller.

Like Dinnerstein, Dejan Lazic, born in 1977 in Zagreb in what is now Croatia, deserves attention for having recorded a piano landmark: Schubert’s incandescent last sonata (in B flat). This was not his first recording. Along with being a piano virtuoso, he is a clarinetist, and he burst on the scene some years ago as soloist in a recording of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. He is an active composer too. But as a pianist, he functions like an undercover agent: He lies low in quiet lyrical sections, patiently waiting for opportunities to explode. Channel Classics’ SACD sound helps him at both extremes.

The market for young singers is seemingly insatiable. Deutsche Grammophon is making much of having signed the high-spirited Measha Brueggergosman, a 30-year-old Canadian soprano with a voice as bubbly as a malt-rich ale. Her new recital disc of classy cabaret songs by William Bolcom, Schoenberg and Satie, called “Surprise,” is terrific. It begins with a vocal firecracker (Bolcom’s “Surprise”) and goes on to one winning number after another -- some naughty, some nice. David Robertson conducts the BBC Symphony, and Bolcom is the pianist for three Satie songs. If you want to buy only one vocal recording this year, your shopping has just been made easier.

Danielle de Niese, born in Australia 27 years ago and raised in L.A., is the latest hot Handel soprano, and on her Decca debut disc she sounds like a wild young Beverly Sills. All she needs is a conductor who knows everything about Baroque style and is able to give her the right amount of vocal rope. And that is exactly what she gets for this animated all-Handel recital with William Christie and his period instrument ensemble, Les Arts Florissants.

If De Niese could be the next Sills, EMI aims to steal Renee Fleming’s crown with Kate Royal. On her first solo CD, the 28-year-old British soprano makes a lovely sound with pretty Strauss, Canteloube and Rodrigo songs, along with arias from Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” and a few other items. Her diction is mush, but it’s agreeable mush. Sick of Christmas carols in the background? Royal offers an attractive, innocuous alternative.

For something less hackneyed, a young singer leaps seemingly out of nowhere in a new recording of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” led by Rene Jacobs on Harmonia Mundi. The Don on this set was to have been the popular British singer Simon Keenlyside, but according to Gramophone, the conductor decided that his understudy, Johannes Weisser, a 26-year-old Norwegian baritone barely out of school, was something special and used him for the sessions instead.

Jacobs is the Dr. Frankenstein of Mozarteans: He sets off sparks and watches his creations come to life. And Weisser may be his greatest creation: an irrepressible Don overflowing with testosterone who displays sexual attraction as nature’s most powerful force.

To the ranks of up-and-coming conductors, add Yannick Nezet-Seguin, a 32-year-old Quebecois. He is music director of the Orchestre Metropolitain du Grand Montreal, with which he records for ATMA Classique. Nezet-Seguin offers Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 as an unusually sweet and lyrical confection for those who prefer decadent Wagnerian sensuality to the typically uptight majesty associated with Bruckner’s symphonies. Next season, he will succeed Valery Gergiev as music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic in the Netherlands.

Most of these discs can be downloaded at iTunes, Amazon or the EMI and Deutsche Grammophon label sites. This allows the creative shopper to download individual works and make personalized CDs. It also saves money.

Even so, I don’t recommend it until the sound gets better. Deutsche Grammophon’s new dgwebshop.com is an improvement over iTunes (360 kbps versus 128 kbps). But that’s still about 2,000 times less sonic information than on a typical CD. So for now, stick to old media.

Impatiently trying to kill off the CD before waiting for downloads to get better is, I’m afraid, one thing the kids got wrong. But vive la jeunesse anyway.

--

mark.swed@latimes.com