Claire Booth/Christopher Glynn
(Avie)
A ‘cradle-to-grave songspiel’ describing the arc of a woman’s life is brilliantly conceived by soprano Booth and pianist Glynn
Modest Mussorgsky is indisputably one of the greatest of 19th-century Russian composers, but getting a real sense of his unruly output has never been easy. Well-meaning later composers – Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel, Shostakovich – rearranged his most famous works, attempting to impose civilised accessibility on music that is anything but elegant and accommodating, and often obscured the radicalism and originality of his works in the process.
Soprano Claire Booth and pianist Christopher Glynn’s approach to this quirky genius is through his piano music and 60-odd songs. They spent a year sifting through them all before creating the sequence that appears on this disc, following the scheme of their earlier collections for Avie of Percy Grainger and Edvard Grieg. The selection includes numbers from Mussorgsky’s three song-cycles, The Nursery, Sunless and Songs and Dances of Death, alongside stand-alone settings and piano pieces.
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