It's good to find Daniel Hope continuing the all-20th-century commitment of his impressive debut disc (5/99). After the satisfyingly complementary contrasts offered by Takemitsu, Schnittke and Weill, this new programme has a narrower focus. Yet it still makes for absorbing listening, and the Nimbus recording is of outstanding quality, with just the right degree of space around the sound, and an ideal balance between Hope and his excellent partner, Simon Mulligan, whose name is unjustly omitted from the booklet cover.
The two sonatas both count as late works. The Shostakovich, at 36 minutes, is built on a symphonic scale and exposes the full intensity of the composer's characteristic blend of lament and danse macabre. The sonata's steady dramatic evolution is superbly sustained in this performance, and although the early stages of the long finale hint at some loss of compositional concentration, the build-up to the central pair of cadenzas is electrifying. Schnittke's Third Sonata is half the length, and has much of that enigmatic understatement which has led some authorities to compare his late works unfavourably with their predecessors. David Fanning, reviewing the recording by Mark Lubotsky and Irene Schnittke (Ondine, 10/97), found only 'unselfcritical inconsequentiality' in this piece: yet for me the contrast between the strangely gentle lyricism of the second movement and the dark drama of the brief finale is as haunting and idiosyncratic as anything Schnittke ever wrote.
I'm no devotee of Part's prolonged arpeggiated doodling, and Hope's scrupulous observance of the composer's wish for a cool and unsentimental tone can't save Spiegel im Spiegel from projecting the full weight of its own inertia. But Penderecki's Cadenza has a welcome austerity and asperity, and there's a blistering final track with Schnittke's familiar Stille Nacht, in which Hope and Mulligan make great play with the composer's own perception of it as a (relatively) lighthearted depiction of a broken-down musical box.
There are authoritative alternatives to the main works included here, not least the historic Oistrakh/Richter account of the Shostakovich. But no other disc offers this thought-provoking collection of compositions, or such superior recorded sound. It is highly recommended.
Arnold Whittall
Gramophone, April 2000