Diva
Angela Gheorghiu (soprano), Various Orchestras
EMI Classics CD 5 57705 2
Angela Gheorghiu certainly hasn't lacked success, but she has never managed to win over this reviewer. I wait to be impressed, and am routinely left cold. For me her voice lacks body, and she doesn't seem willing to take emotional risks with the music. I am looking for something to overwhelm me, and I keep trying to give her voice a fuller quality by adjusting the controls, but it doesn't work. If you go for self-effacement and a deferential tone, Gheorghiu may be for you. But for me, opera is about passion, whereas what you have here is tastefulness and restraint. The items from French operas on this disk consequently work best, but the Italians Bellini, Verdi and Puccini, all represented here, didn't write their magnificent music for voices like this.
Brahms
String Quartet No: 1, String Quintet No: 2, Belcea Quartet, with Thomas Kakusa
EMI ClassicsCD 5 57662 2
These Brahms chamber works are complexly wrought music and repay repeated listening. It would be forgivable to consider the quartet as something in the way of an appetizer here because it's the superb quintet that makes this CD worth buying. It's a wonderful work, and when he wrote it Brahms hinted it might even be his farewell to music. Fortunately it wasn't, but it remains a major piece, crammed full of invention and swirling, sometimes almost tidal, emotion. The young British quartet, plus Thomas Kakusa playing the extra viola, give it a very fine performance, dramatic, tender, wistful, introspective. All in all, this quintet, together with the Eroica Trio's versions of Beethoven, constitute the finest purely musical items on offer this month. Recommended.
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