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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Fiona Maddocks

Classical home listening: Sinfonia of London’s Ravel, Berkeley, Pounds: Lieder ohne Worte from Igor Levit

Conductor John Wilson and composer Adam Pounds at the recording of the Sinfonia of London’s new album.
Conductor John Wilson, left, and composer Adam Pounds at the recording of the Sinfonia of London’s new album. Photograph: Courtesy of Adam Pounds
Ravel, Berkeley, Pounds: Orchestral Works album cover

• The Sinfonia of London, if any reminder is needed, has had two lives: as a recording orchestra in the 1950s with at least 300 film soundtracks to its name, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo; and as a special projects orchestra, with an emphasis on recording, relaunched in 2018 by the British conductor John Wilson. Players, several with principal roles in other orchestras, meet a few times a year. The description may make it sound like a standard freelance band. Instead, it is fast becoming one of Europe’s elite orchestras.

Characteristically, their latest album, Ravel, Berkeley, Pounds: Orchestral Works (Chandos), is a marriage of the familiar and the scarcely known, all with interconnections. Maurice Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin – played with impeccable virtuosity and a sense of weightless clarity, follows on from the ensemble’s recent release of the complete ballet Daphnis et Chloé, by the same composer. Lennox Berkeley’s Divertimento (1943) is an elegant, many-faceted work, with French accents, worthy of a place in the mainstream.

The album is completed with a premiere recording, the Symphony No 3 by Adam Pounds (2021). Himself a pupil of Berkeley, Pounds (b.1954) wrote the work in lockdown, dedicating it to Wilson and the Sinfonia. Emotional, melancholic, persuasive, the symphony has a swirling waltz (second movement) and an acknowledged debt to Bruckner. Chandos’s commitment to Wilson and the Sinfonia of London, and their chosen repertoire, deserves celebration.

igor levit album cover

• The pianist Igor Levit, Russian-born, based in Berlin, has been fearless in putting his artistry to the service of his beliefs. His album Lieder ohne Worte (Sony), a selection of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, is a heartfelt response to the 7 October attacks on Israel. These much-loved romantic miniatures are urgent with inexpressible feeling, from tenderness to sorrow. Alkan’s Prélude Op 31, No 8, La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer, is a bonus, almost mystical in mood. Proceeds will be donated to the Ofek Advice Centre for Antisemitic Violence and Discrimination and the Kreuzberg Initiative Against Antisemitism.

• Catch up belatedly, via Opera on 3, with Anthony Davis’s jazz-inspired opera, to a libretto by Thulani Davis: X: The LIfe and Times of Malcolm X, about the black civil rights leader, written in 1986 but which only received its Met premiere last November. On BBC Sounds.

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