• The title Love and Death (Orchid Classics) could incorporate nearly all music ever written. The Navarra String Quartet, whose playing has a transparent, febrile energy, explain it as a stark expression of opposites: “the seductive courting of the matador before a final paso doble with the bull”. This British-based group’s new album combines three dark-themed glories of the repertoire: Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, D810; Janáček’s Quartet No 1, “Kreutzer Sonata”; and I Crisantemi, which Puccini wrote in haste after the death of a friend. Two tiny string pieces by György Kurtág and the elegiac The Bullfighter’s Prayer by the to me unfamiliar Spanish composer Joaquín Turina (1882-1949) complete the disc, recorded last year but dedicated to all who have suffered during the current pandemic.
• Hardly a note of Nicholas Maw (1935-2009), prolific and well-performed, especially in the 1980s, has been played since his death. For that reason I wanted to hear the selection of works – Spring Music, Voices of Memory and Sonata for Solo Violin (Lyrita) – expertly performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conductor William Boughton, and violinist Harriet Mackenzie. In his lifetime, Maw was somewhat out of step in adopting an unfashionably direct, lyrical style. Returning to his music now, it’s easier to hear – and accept – him as part of a neo-romantic British tradition, with robust, modernist barbs. Worth listening.
• Osman Kavala, the human rights activist and philanthropist, and the snails he tended in a Turkish prison – he is still detained – are the subject of Osman Bey and the Snails, a lockdown world premiere, composed by Nigel Osborne and produced by Opera Circus, that stars, among others, Nadine Benjamin and Lore Lixenberg as the unexpectedly beguiling snails. Persuasive musically, and technically a coup, it’s opera with a cause: the 10-minute work is being shared through Amnesty International, PEN and Open Democracy.
