• The UK-based American mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, versatile in repertoire from early to ink-still-drying, is skilled at building diverse material into a satisfying theme. Her 2020 album Arianna explored the abandonment of Ariadne by Theseus. Her latest, Tiranno, with Arcangelo conducted by Jonathan Cohen (Alpha Classics), examines tyranny and oppression through the figure of the Roman emperor Nero.
In addition to Handel’s turbulent dramatic monologue Agrippina condotta a morire, and Alessandro Scarlatti’s Il Nerone, two works are given premiere recordings: Bartolomeo Monari’s La Poppea and Scarlatti’s La morte di Nerone. The exchange between Nero and Lucan (tenor Andrew Staples) from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea is a particular highlight. Emperor and poet spin whispered, ever more erotic lines in drooling celebration of love. The players of Arcangelo deftly match their subtle colours. In the celebrated duet Pur ti miro, Lindsey is joined by the rising-star soprano Nardus Williams as Poppea, both pressing the dissonant harmonies almost to a point of distortion, to expressive and ecstatic effect.
• Conductors regularly work well into their 80s without our need to comment. The American-born Swedish conductor Herbert Blomstedt is 93. Let’s celebrate his longevity. His Brahms Symphony No 2 & Academic Festival Overture with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (Pentatone) is fresh, lithe and generous, and surpasses this partnership’s first in the cycle, Symphony No 1 & Tragic Overture.
Brahms’s Symphony No 2 (1877) shares some of the glowing melancholy of the Violin Concerto he composed a year later, in the same key of D (and in the same Austrian lakeside resort of Pörtschach). This is the mood Blomstedt favours in the warm, flowing contours of the opening Allegro, with transparency and attack shaping the other three movements. Riccardo Chailly, recording his own Brahms set with the Gewandhaus players (2014), chose quicker tempi than Blomstedt, achieving a leaner urgency. Both offer rewards. In the Academic Festival Overture, the orchestra – of which Brahms himself was once conductor – plays with brilliant energy and finesse.
• For an insider’s view about orchestral life behind the scenes, try the podcast LPO Off Stage, presented by the saxophonist YolanDa Brown. Lively and revealing insights into what musicians really think, and how one orchestra differs from another.
