Listening Post /Brief reviews of select releases

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Pop

Rihanna, “Rated R” (Island Def Jam). On Rihanna’s last CD, she was a good girl gone bad. On her latest, “Rated R,” she’s definitely a bad girl—more like a mad girl, and a dangerous one, out for revenge. Throughout her fourth studio album, the 21-year-old is reasserting her strength through viciousness and vulgarity. And sometimes it works, like on “Rude Boy,” “Hard” and “Wait Your Turn (The Wait Is Ova).” But enduring surly, bitter Rihanna through 13 songs can be a bit much, and sometimes you want her to tone the attitude down.

Rihanna says she started recording “Rated R” one month after she was beaten by ex-boyfriend Chris Brown, and her thoughts on that situation and the end of the relationship is the all over the CD. “Don’t understand it, blood on your hands, and still you insist on trying to tell me lies,” she sings on “Stupid in Love,” a melancholy tune that finds Rihanna moving on and asking: “Which one of us is really dumb?” Letting her emotions and feelings calmly come through is when Rihanna is at her best, like on the Justin Timberlake-assisted “Cold Case Love,” the will. i. am-produced “Photographs,” and “Fire Bomb,” a soaring rock song that is stadium-ready. “Rude Boy” is the true gem on “Rated R.” The sexy tune bumps with Island flavor, edge and wit —and Rihanna doesn’t even sound like she’s trying. ★★½ (Mesfin Fekadu, Associated Press)

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Adam Lambert “For Your Entertainment” (19/RCA). Each year brings the same ritual: waiting to see if the newest batch of “American Idol” singers will make distinctive statements with their debut albums. Surely if any of these kids has star potential it’s Adam Lambert, the glamtastic Season 8 runner-up. He’s certainly swinging from his high heels on songs like the title track, a jolting dance-floor imperative, and on the ABBA-accelerated “If I Had You.” The most intriguing song is also the most atypical: “Soaked,” a wall-of-sound power ballad on which Lambert sounds like a modern Roy Orbison. He’s trying on a lot of capes here: disco, glitter pop, hair metal, electronica and more. Ambitious and aurally rousing, “For Your Entertainment” is satisfying without being innovative. ★★½ (David Hiltbrand, Philadelphia Inquirer)

Classical

Fazil Say, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven performed by pianist Say with (on Vol. 1-Mozart) the Zurcher Kammerorchester conducted by Howard Griffiths (Naive, three discs). There are, to be sure, a few entirely disparate ways of looking at the 39-year-old Turkish pianist. You could, to be sure, be entirely justified in thinking, for instance, that his 2005 performances of Beethoven’s “Tempest,” “Waldstein” and “Appassionata” sonatas are some of the most excessive and vulgar ever put on disc. There is no question, for instance, that the knuckle-busting thunder of the “Appassionata” and “Waldstein” bring out the emotional extrovert (to put it mildly), but then, what is one to do with the Mozart pianist so apt in some of the most famous Mozart concertos— No. 23 in A-major, K. 488, No. 21 in C-major K. 467 and No. 12 in A-major K. 414? Or the Haydn pianist whose recording of five Hadyn Sonatas is so attentive to both their classicism and experimentalism? What is so special about Fazil Say is that he is not a pianist who leaves one in any possible semblance of indifference. He’s an exciting and engaging performer (yes, he even hums along with himself a la Glenn Gould) as at home in this central classical repertoire as in Stravinsky’s piano version of “The Rite of Spring.”★★★½ (Jeff Simon)

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Philip Glass, Piano Music from the Ruhr Piano Festival performed by pianists Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies (Orange Mountain Music). The new piece here is the “Four Movements for Two Pianos” performed by Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies as a piano duo. Davies is, of course, much better known to us as a conductor, quite frequently of Glass’ music—which brings up an interesting problem. As a composer of piano music, Glass has been quite tolerant of pianists of less than formidable virtuosity tackling it—not least himself. Davies is a very good pianist, to be sure, as you can hear from him alone in the 1994 Six Etudes for Piano. Completing the beautiful disc is Namekawa playing music from Glass’ haunting score for the movie “The Hours” (which, somewhat incredibly, one of the film’s producers didn’t want to use). ★★★½ (J. S.)

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Tchaikovsky, Grand Sonata Op. 37 and Prokofiev Ten Pieces from “Romeo and Juliet” Op. 75 performed by pianist Daria Rabotkina (Concert Artists Guild). Young Russian pianist Daria Rabotkina is in her mid-20s and the daughter of two pianists and attends the Eastman School of Music. But the really tantalizing part of her biography describes her doctoral program at Eastman making her a “Liberace Scholar.” Is that a program sponsored by the estate of Liberace? Or is she actually a scholar of Liberace’s piano career? Whatever she is, she’s a more than capable pianist in this slightly out-of-the-way Russian piano repertoire— Tchaikovsky’s Grand Sonata Op. 37, his only true piano sonata and, despite its contemporaneity with his violin concerto, a lesser work, and 10 pieces from Prokofiev’s transcription of his own great ballet “Romeo and Juliet.” Wherever he is in the great beyond, Liberace would be proud. ★★★(J. S.)

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Beethoven, Piano Concertos Nos. 4 and 5, Olli Mustonen, piano, the Tapiola Sinfonietta (Ondine). “Thoroughly refreshing and convincing,” the International Piano Magazine said of this recording. The performances are different, I will say that. The question is how important you consider it to be that a new recording be different. It’s a problem for a pianist, perhaps, that there are so many recordings of these concertos already out there. But I do not think that is an excuse for the dryness and fussiness that Finnish pianist Olli Mustonen, conducting from the keyboard, gives to this music. Several times the piano was so quiet it dropped out completely. Rhythms and accents sounded unnatural and labored. I read he is playing from a new Urtext edition, and maybe he wanted to emphasize what he discovered there. But I like a pianist with a natural sound who can go with the flow of the music. ★★(Mary Kunz Goldman)

Jazz

Charito, Watch What Happens: Charito Meets Michel Legrand (CT Music). Yes, Virginia, Michal Legrand is not only alive and well at the age of 77 but, if a Philippine-born and raised jazz singer from Japan goes to France and expresses enough admiration for him, the great French composer/pianist will make a whole disc with her. He’ll play piano, lead the orchestra and scat sing along with her on a couple of tracks. If you listen to Charito’s vibrato on quieter notes, it sounds a lot like Joni Mitchell’s (and her recent imitator, Diana Krall’s). Legrand has always been sui generis, a combination jazzman and gushingly melodic Roman-tic whom jazz musicians from Miles Davis to Phil Woods have loved playing with. Whatever he is, no one is more French. Which makes this new disc of his music with Charito about as international as music gets. And in this case, a pleasure to hear. ★★★(J. S.)

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Dupree Bolton, Fireball (Uptown/Flashback). Few musical genres are as full of mysterious and tragic figures as jazz. In jazz trumpet legendry, one of the most obscure and mysterious of them all was Dupree Bolton, who made a handful of records and was a casualty of junk, ever after, with numerous periods of imprisonment in Oklahoma. On this fascinating disc, you get airchecks of some radio performances by Bolton with tenor saxophonists Curtis Amy and Earl Anderza from the 1960s and, most fascinatingly, from 1980 with the Oklahoma Prison Band. As a presentation of great jazz, the disc leaves more than little to be desired. But as an archaeological excavation into a tragically aborted career, it’s rare indeed. Where else would you find out that, despite a junkie’s life even more chaotic than Art Pepper’s, he managed to live to the age of 64?★★(J. S.)

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