BACH Cello Suites, BWV 1007–1012 • Suren Bagratuni (vc) • BLUE GRIFFIN BGR 119 (2 CDs: 131:56)

Two things struck me immediately upon putting on Bagratuni’s new recording of Bach’s solo cello suites. The first was the overly resonant recorded sound that inflates the performances, which seem also to have been recorded closely enough to capture Bagratuni’s occasional groans and deep breathing. The other was the speed with which he took the Prelude to the Suite in G. There was a time when these pieces were supposed to be impossibly difficult. Bagratuni, who won a silver medal at the 1986 Tchaikovsky Competition, doesn’t seem to notice. He scurries through the Prelude as if he is looking for a challenge until he decides to hold a climactic note and let it drift off into space.

This is most impressive playing, but it’s also slightly unnerving. Like many listeners of a certain age, I learned these pieces through the hardly restrained Pablo Casals, about whom Stravinsky famously said he’s made a career of playing Bach as if it were Brahms. Later I came to admire the patrician recordings of Pierre Fournier. It is almost shocking to go from the dignified performance of that Prelude in G by Fournier to Bagratuni’s oversized scamperings. Of course, he plays the various minuets with more grace, but still, the emphasis is on the size of the sound as he digs in. There’s little of the lilt that Fournier brings to some of these movements, or the terraced dynamics that someone like Yo-Yo Ma employs. Bagratuni’s is a more rugged Bach, less nuanced than my preferred recordings, but perhaps to some listeners’ taste. Nonetheless, I am wondering what it would be like to hear Bagratuni live in a hall with excellent acoustics. I hope I get the chance. Michael Ullman

KRIEGER Sonatina . Nina . Sonatas: No. 1; No. 2. Prelúdio e fuga. Choro manhoso. Estudo seresteiro. Estudos intervalares • Alexandre Dossin (pn) • BLUE GRIFFIN BGR 125 (64:32)

This album is subtitled “A Touch of Brazil.” The cover art is a reproduction of a folk art painting of a peasant fisherman. It’s all a bit deceiving; I was expecting a pleasant collection of folksy Iberian-based material from this composer hitherto unknown to me. Instead, we have here a profile of Edino Krieger, a highly sophisticated Brazilian musician with broad technical skills and an individual voice. At the heart of the program are the sonatas, written, in order, in 1954 and 1956. They are not at all adventuresome in a harmonic sense, but are keenly etched and well balanced. Krieger’s sense of tonal modernism as well as his melodic gift is reminiscent of Barber.

The pianist, Brazilian-born Alexandre Dossin, contributes his own notes, with a theme that celebrates Krieger’s multiculturalism. The comparison to the great man of Brazilian music, Heitor Villa-Lobos, is inevitable, and Krieger even dedicates the second movement of his First Sonata to him. But the folkloric element in the music of Villa-Lobos was more overt. His masterpiece, Bachianas brasileiras , is a carefully designed homage to melded cultures. Krieger’s Brazilian voice is much more subdued, even in a work such as Prelúdio e fuga, directly inspired by Villa-Lobos. The studies show off Krieger’s technical prowess, and the Sonatina exhibits the same taut and original style as the sonatas. The lovely waltz Nina , written in 1997, begins as a sweet, fluffy toss-off, but even this music has surprising grit and energy. Dossin plays this compelling music with great heart and skill. Well worth a listen. Peter Burwasser

A Touch of Brazil. Piano Music of Edino Krieger

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DEBUSSY Cello Sonata in d. RACHMANINOFF Cello Sonata in g. STRAVINSKY Suite Italienne . Suren Bagratuni (vc); Andrian Oetiker (pn) . BLUE GRIFFIN 105 (68:37)

Whether or not you already have one or more recordings of these three works in your collec­tion, this Blue Griffin Recording release is well worth the capital outlay. It is a beautifully played and superbly recorded program, one that has given me a great deal of pleasure, and one that I know I shall replay many times.

Dracula. The music.
by Lawrence Cosentino

For me, the scariest thing about “Dracula” wasn’t the bats, the dead baby, the crazy fly-eating guy, yadda yadda. Try talking to a sallow, exhausted, sunken-eyed Russian composer who has just spent weeks in his basement with knobs and dials and is now in the throes of post-creation anxiety.

“I have done nothing else for the past month,” said Sergei Kvitko of his mad, way-better-than-necessary score for Riverwalk’s production of “Dracula.” What made Kvitko weave furiously evocative fugues and passacaglias when a few judiciously placed schlock chords would have done the job? What made him wring a heart-rending faux oboe solo out of his electronic palette where others would have settled for synthesized, zee-wee-ahh atmospherics?

And what’s up with that tiny Philip Glass reference that gets run through with a musical stake after about seven seconds? “I hate Philip Glass,” says Kvitko. “I spend a great deal of time thinking about how much I hate Philip Glass.”

Big clue there. No short cuts, no cut-and-paste minimalism will suit this man. Just as film director Eric von Stroheim insisted that his actors wear period underwear, Kvitko wove a borderline insane level of care and sophistication into every bar of his score even when you can barely hear it.

OK, so the howling wolf groove thing is cheesy. PETA won’t like it one bit. But that’s just intermission music. As far as I’m concerned, while the show is on — and this is just the kind of remark you’d expect from a music critic – “Dracula” itself, for all its spectacle and atmosphere, is a playtrack to the original sound.

Dracula. Original Music by Sergei Kvitko

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