Classical: The Compact Collection

Rob Cowan on the Week's New CD Releases

CLASSICAL MUSIC that enters the popular consciousness is usually overheard rather than listened to. It may harbour a powerful pocket of atmosphere, or serve as a potential sound-track for the mind's theatre; but the encounter is invariably casual.

When the saxophonist Jan Garbarek first collaborated with the Hilliard Ensemble for ECM's Officium in 1994, the haunting combination of early choral music and smooth sax improvisation suggested a lone jazzer loitering against a cathedral wall. It was an in-store favourite, a heady blend of the sacred and the profane: heavens-teasing and provocative on the one hand, soothing and sensuous on the other.

Mnemosyne (Memory) has a tougher edge than Officium; its musical material is more varied, ranging in style from a dissonant Delphic paean, through Hildegard's ecstatic "O Ignis Spiritus" and a Tallis anthem to a Peruvian folk-song and Garbarek's own "Strophe" and "Counter-Strophe". Everything is carefully planned.

Mnemosyne is a sort of collaborative original composition that plays for one-and-three-quarter hours, and ECM's photographic presentation toys with air, earth and spirit much as Garbarek and the Hilliards do in musical terms.

Jazz is probably better listened to than talked about, though if words are to enter into the experience, no one was better qualified to use them than Leonard Bernstein. Hearing Lenny explain the rudiments of jazz is a revelation, and no matter if you already know - or think you know - the basic facts. Rhythm, melody, harmony, instrumental colouring, form - it's all there, effortlessly explained without either jargon or condescension.

Bernstein's music examples are pertinent and often highly amusing (a Bessie Smith blues classic scrubbed up as a squeaky-clean ballad) and there are a couple of additional concert items. WC Handy's St Louis blues Concerto grosso has Bernstein conducting and the Louis Armstrong Quintet taking a concertante role, and Howard Brubeck's Dialogue for Jazz Combo and Orchestra features brother Dave. But it's Lenny's spoken contribution that makes the CD indispensable.

Switching from Bernstein to the Bard, albeit via Boito's Italian-language refashioning, finds us in the company of Verdi's Otello and a gripping 1960 recording in which Jon Vickers offers a tortured though vocally distinctive statement of the title role. The conductor is Tulio Serafin, a master of Verdi's idiom who studied alongside both Boito and Otello's first conductor. Serafin doesn't miss a trick: his is a fire tempered not by age, but by discretion, and he always gives his singers room to breathe.

Tito Gobbi portrays a resolute Iago and Leonie Rysanek a noble Desdemona. Sample tracks 17-20 on the first disc, ending with the magnificent "Vengeance" duet. Verdi was rarely closer to Wagner, and these lovers never lose sight of that crucial connection. Toscanini's magnificent mono recording (also on RCA) is not so much displaced as supplemented.

Mnemosyne/Garbarek, Hilliard Ensemble ECM 465 122-2

What is Jazz?/Bernstein Sony Classical SMK 60566

Verdi/Serafin RCA "Living Stereo" 09026 63180 2 (two discs)