Classical music

Poèmes, Works by Maurice Ravel, Olivier Messiaen and Henri Dutilleux; Renée Fleming, soprano; Orchestre National de France, Seiji Ozawa, conductor. Any new work by Henri Dutilleux (b. 1916) needs to be considered a major event. Perhaps unparalleled among composers since 1950 for his attention to details, harmonic sophistication and orchestral timbre, Dutilleux can be considered the final representative of the great Gallic tradition dating back to Debussy and Ravel. Renée Fleming, to whom the brief but poetically dense song-cycle Le temps l’horloge is dedicated, provides a sumptuous vocal palette. The disc also features Ravel’s Shéhérazade and the rarely recorded orchestral version of Olivier Messiaen’s song cycle Poèmes pour mi (1936).

Passion and Resurrection, by Eriks Esenvalds; Carolyn Sampson, soprano; Polyphony, Britten Sinfonia, Stephen Layton, conductor. The young Latvian Eriks Esenvalds (b. 1977), a former Baptist seminarian and church music director in Riga who holds a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, is one of the most promising composers of his generation. Equally at home writing in a resolutely modernist idiom as in a crossover style, his music is attractively melodic while never short on artistic and spiritual substance. His half-hour Passion and Resurrection (2005) for soprano solo, chorus and strings is a work whose influences are eclectic. Listeners may hear echoes of Górecki, Britten and Shostakovich as well as Byzantine liturgy and Renaissance polyphony—all welded into a highly personal and expressively satisfying whole.

In Tempus Praesens, by Sofia Gubaidulina; Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin; London Symphony Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, conductor. Gubaidulina celebrated her 80th birthday in 2011. Her rich vein of creativity in the years following her monumental St. John Passion and St. John Easter is nowhere better exemplified than in her second violin concerto, In tempus Praesens (“In the present time”). It was written a quarter of a century after Offertorium (1980), which first introduced her to an international audience. Combining lyrical poignancy with memorably dramatic passages, the intensity of this work never flags. Gubaidulina’s work is one of a notable series of major additions to the repertoire for violin and orchestra written for Anne-Sophie Mutter. (The album also has Bach’s violin concertos nos. 1 and 2.)