Yo Yo Ma: prelude to Bach: Unaccompanied Cello Suite no. 1 (2010)
So what five classical CDs or compilations would I take along to my Desert Island? I’m not as sure of this list as I am of the jazz one but here goes.
- First would be the Bach Unaccompanied Cello Sonatas. The version I like best is Yo Yo Ma’s (orig. 1998; reissued 2010). A runner up would be the less well known but almost as brilliant solo cello suites of Benjamin Britten: Cello Suites 1-3 (2001), performed by Truls Mork, one of my favorite cellists. (My favorite cellist at present is Alysia Weilerstein.)
- Picking number two is harder but I‘ll go with Martha Argerich playing the Rach 3: Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3 in D minor (1995). The orchestra is the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and the conductor Riccardo Chailly. As a bonus, the same CD has Argerich with the Symphonieorchester des Bayern Rundfunks conducted by Kiril Kondrashin performing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in B flat minor. .
Argerich young, Argerich now There are a lot of phenomenal pianists around: Argerich and Mitsuko Uchida are probably my favorites but hey, there’s Pierre-Laurent Aimard for modern stuff (and Liszt), Danny Driver for speed and force, Igor Levit’s trilogy of big pieces by Beethoven, Bach and Rzyszewki, Alfred Brendel, Gregory Sokolov, Andras Schiff, and my old favorites Horowitz and Rubinstein, both of whom we had the good fortune to hear live during one glorious summer and fall in New Haven and Paris. 
Third might be an album I purchased recently, violinist Lisa Batiashvili, with the Staatskapelle Berlin, Daniel Barenboim conducting, performing Tchaikovsky’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major and Sibelius’s equally thrilling Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D minor(2016). These are my umpteenth version of each concerto but you can’t have too many versions of them, so good are they.- With numbers 4 and 5 it gets hard, not because the quality drops but because there are too many recordings I’d like to include and picking just two is murder. I ‘d consider a good version of Sibelius’s tone poem, Swan of Tuonela, probably the whole Lemminkaenen suite. But having cheated mentioned that piece, I’ll opt for another: Michel Plasson’s version of Saint-Saens: Symphonie no. 3 (the Organ Symphony) (1997), with Matthias Eisenberg on organ and the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse. Admittedly, I’m biased: my wife picked this piece, in a piano version, for our wedding march fifty-three years ago. But even without that memory, it’s glorious music, showing in one triumphant splash all that orchestra and pipe organ can do in one knockout bundle.
Number 5 has to be Steve Reich’s Different Trains, performed by the Kronos Quartet (1990). It’s paired with Electric Counter-point, guitarist Pat Metheny multi-tracked to produce an overlay of pulses and notes. Counterpoint is good, Trains is superb and deeply moving. In four movements, it evokes life for a Jew during and after the Holocaust, mixing string writing with taped voices and train sounds as its supposed subjects move back and forth across America and Nazi Germany and to an undefined after-location. Reich is a brilliant composer, to my mind the best of the modernists. Trains is, along with Music for Eighteen Musicians (1975) and his early tape loop voice pieces “Come Out” and “It’s Gonna Rain” (in Steve Reich: Early Works [1992]) -the very best of a generally good body of music.
Sigh! Look at what I have omitted. No Chopin. None of C.P.E. Bach’s quirky solo piano pieces. No Alkan. None of the brilliant early modern choral music of Cardoso, Byrd, Tallis (especially his Spem in Alium), Dowland. No Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, not even her glorious recording of Handel arias. And I don’t have my favorite recording of Tosca with Leontyne Price, Cesare Siepi and Giuseppe di Steffano.
(But I found a way to mention them all, didn’t I?)
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Martha Argerich: Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto # 3, 1st mvt (1995)
Tallis Scholars: Thomas Tallis: “Spem in alium” (2001?)
MUSIC & ME 