• Best known for his film scores for Alfred Hitchcock, including Vertigo, Psycho and The Birds, Bernard Herrmann (1911-75) had parallel ambitions to write music for performance away from the silver screen. His three-and-a-half-hour opera based on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, completed in 1951, was not staged in his lifetime. He partly funded the only recording of it. Now the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (Chandos), conducted by Mario Venzago, have recorded an hour-long suite from the opera, arranged by Hans Sørensen, played atmospherically and with top singers: soprano Keri Fuge as Cathy and baritone Roderick Williams as Heathcliff. Williams’s opening cry of “Cathy!” sets the chilling tone, with the orchestra’s brooding gusts transporting us instantly to the windswept Yorkshire moors. The suite is coupled with Echoes for string orchestra (another Sørensen arrangement, originally for string quartet). The opera doesn’t entirely sustain that first promise, or make you wish to see it on stage, but don’t pass up this chance to hear another side of this fertile composer.
• Classically trained, steeped in his early experiences working with Art Blakey and Miles Davis, the American pianist Keith Jarrett is most famous for his live Köln concert (1975, ECM), part of a long relationship with Manfred Eicher’s distinctive independent label. Alongside his own compositions, throughout his career Jarrett always explored the central keyboard repertoire of JS Bach, Handel, Shostakovich and others. Perhaps in recognition of the pianist’s declining career, owing to ill health, ECM has belatedly released his lithe, intelligent performances of the six Württemberg Sonatas by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, written for harpsichord in 1742-3. The fifth child of Johann Sebastian Bach, with his own bright streak of individuality, “CPE” bridges the baroque era of his father and the coming age of Haydn and Mozart. Recorded by Jarrett in his Cavelight studios, New Jersey, in 1994, these sparkling, almost improvised-sounding sonatas chime with the pianist’s own ingenuity and virtuosity. Paul Griffiths has provided an elegant booklet note.
• After a European tour fraught with incident, the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, the Monteverdi Choir and soloists led by Alice Coote and Michael Spyres arrive at the Proms with Berlioz’s epic opera The Trojans. Dinis Sousa conducts. Tomorrow, 4pm, Radio 3/BBC Sounds.
