• The Sinfonia of London, if any reminder is needed, has had two lives: as a recording orchestra in the 1950s with at least 300 film soundtracks to its name, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo; and as a special projects orchestra, with an emphasis on recording, relaunched in 2018 by the British conductor John Wilson. Players, several with principal roles in other orchestras, meet a few times a year. The description may make it sound like a standard freelance band. Instead, it is fast becoming one of Europe’s elite orchestras.
Characteristically, their latest album, Ravel, Berkeley, Pounds: Orchestral Works (Chandos), is a marriage of the familiar and the scarcely known, all with interconnections. Maurice Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin – played with impeccable virtuosity and a sense of weightless clarity, follows on from the ensemble’s recent release of the complete ballet Daphnis et Chloé, by the same composer. Lennox Berkeley’s Divertimento (1943) is an elegant, many-faceted work, with French accents, worthy of a place in the mainstream.
The album is completed with a premiere recording, the Symphony No 3 by Adam Pounds (2021). Himself a pupil of Berkeley, Pounds (b.1954) wrote the work in lockdown, dedicating it to Wilson and the Sinfonia. Emotional, melancholic, persuasive, the symphony has a swirling waltz (second movement) and an acknowledged debt to Bruckner. Chandos’s commitment to Wilson and the Sinfonia of London, and their chosen repertoire, deserves celebration.
• The pianist Igor Levit, Russian-born, based in Berlin, has been fearless in putting his artistry to the service of his beliefs. His album Lieder ohne Worte (Sony), a selection of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, is a heartfelt response to the 7 October attacks on Israel. These much-loved romantic miniatures are urgent with inexpressible feeling, from tenderness to sorrow. Alkan’s Prélude Op 31, No 8, La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer, is a bonus, almost mystical in mood. Proceeds will be donated to the Ofek Advice Centre for Antisemitic Violence and Discrimination and the Kreuzberg Initiative Against Antisemitism.
• Catch up belatedly, via Opera on 3, with Anthony Davis’s jazz-inspired opera, to a libretto by Thulani Davis: X: The LIfe and Times of Malcolm X, about the black civil rights leader, written in 1986 but which only received its Met premiere last November. On BBC Sounds.
