Country



The Kentucky Headhunters, “Live/Agora Ballroom— Cleveland, Ohio, May 13, 1990” (Universal Music Group). A bunch of long-haired country-rockers, the Kentucky Headhunters made a well-deserved splash with their 1989 debut, “Pickin’ on Nashville.” The 1990 show documented here finds the quintet at its wild and woolly best. The Headhunters open with Hank Williams’ “Honky Tonk Blues,” showing their affection for country music even as they light a new fire under it. That’s how it goes throughout the set as they alternate supercharged covers of country (“Oh Lonesome Me”) and rock (“Dizzy Miss Lizzy”) with colorful originals like “Rag Top” and “Dumas Walker.” They could have skipped the overdone blues-rock take on Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads,” especially with the cliched drum solo they add to it, but they get right back on track and eventually close with a “Spirit in the Sky” that offers a smart lyric change: “Never been a sinner” becomes “I’ve been a sinner.” Haven’t we all????(Nicky Cristiano,



Classical



Heitor Villa-Lobos, Complete Symphonies performed by Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR conducted by Carl St. Clair (CPO/RSO- 7 discs). “Why is it,” Igor Stravinsky supposedly once asked, “that every time I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa-Lobos?” Unfortunately, in late life, a lot of the quotable malice attributed to Stravinsky was actually the product of his amanuensis Robert Craft, who was often suspected of promiscuous score-settling. And yet one can understand how Stravinsky, the epitome of dry-point modernism, could be decidedly unnerved by the indefatigable and luxuriant rain-forest invention of the Brazilian master. Almost any completist collection of Villa-Lobos is going to be startling because of all that bursting un-Stravinskyan flow and stern Amazonian counterpoint. You wouldn’t especially think that you could find a great Villa-Lobos orchestra in Stuttgart, but what St. Clair has done here is, quite possibly, a modern landmark. It isn’t uncommon anymore for the intrepid to hack their way through Villa-Lobos’ gorgeous overgrown oeuvre, but it’s still not commonplace in the contemporary world to do it in completist quantity. ??? (Jeff Simon)



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Simon Keenlyside and Malcolm Martineau performing songs by Schubert, Wolf, Faure and Ravel (Wigmore Hall Live). The British baritone Simon Keenlyside— that Dickensian name, I love saying it—provides an exciting addition to the already impressive Wigmore Hall Live series with this recital of four very different sets of songs. He has a rich voice and he unleashes it in unexpected places, giving thrilling overtones to even a familiar song like Schubert’s “Serenade.” Martineau is a wonderful collaborative pianist (that is the term now, not “accompanist”) whose ease and virtuosity bring out the challenging subtleties of the sensual Hugo Wolf songs and also the delightful songs by Gabriel Faure, which are a highlight. Another highlight is the encore, “Hotel,” which Keenlyside said its composer, Francis Poulenc, described as “the laziest song ever written.”???? (Mary Kunz Goldman)



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Unexpected Encounters: A Selection of Piano Sonatas by Joseph Haydn performed by pianist Tzimon Barto (Ondine). Unexpected encounters is right. These bright, witty sonatas—I would not listen to them all in a row—hold so many surprises, my favorite being the long, wandering, just plain odd slow movement to the Sonata No. 10 in C. Barto—his name sounds foreign but he was born and raised in Florida—takes a modern approach, pedaling, letting the music breathe. By the way, the pianist sounds like quite the brain: He speaks four languages, knows Greek, Latin and Hebrew, studies Farsi and Mandarin. No wonder he speaks Haydn. ??? (M. K. G.)



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John Dowland, Complete Lute Music performed by Nigel North (Naxos, four CDs). It isn’t Sting’s fault that somewhere on his way to becoming one of the great rock stars of his era, he was cursed with taste and a rather unquenchable search for knowledge. Those who interviewed him were likely to find dirty, beaten-up, well-thumbed paperback editions of Arthur Koestler’s “The Act of Creation” lying on a dresser with bookmarks sticking out of it. When he decided in his post-Police life that the world needed his John Dowland disc, the only thing wrong with his thinking was that the world needed him doing it (though you can’t blame him for wanting to partake of Dowland’s melodic genius.) Dowland was, arguably, the greatest of all lute composers and the earliest of all the incontestably great English composers (he predates Henry Purcell by a full century and is, in fact, Shakespeare’s exact contemporary). Nigel North, at 55, is one of the most prominent lutenists of our day, and the performances and the recorded sound on these four discs are splendid. ????(J. S.)



Pop



Leona Lewis “Echo” (J Records). If you can get past the fact that Lewis is a Simon Cowell protege, you have to grant that she’s an exciting talent. Her second album confirms that. The first single, “Happy,” follows the winning formula of her big hit, “Bleeding Love”: a quiet, churchy beginning exploding into a passionate, swelling chorus, slingshotted by kick drum. (Both songs were written with Ryan Tedder.) Though the British singer has cited Minnie Riperton as an influence, her voice suggests a more soulful version of Paula Cole, with whom she shares vocal inflections and harmonic tendencies. Lewis is less adept at pop songs such as “Love Letter.” But on torch songs such as “Can’t Breathe” and “My Hands,” she’s an absolute scorcher. “Echo” plays to her flaming strengths. ???(David Hiltbrand, Philadelphia Inquirer)



Jazz



Ashley Brown, Speak Low (Ghostlight Records). The loungy, synthesized, string-heavy sound of this recording won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it was to mine, from the first languorous tones of “Speak Low.” Brown is the actress who played Mary Poppins in the recent Broadway production and is now reprising her role in the national tour. She tosses a spoonful of sugar into these 13 songs, too, and it becomes them. I like the weird saxophone effects, the Vince Guaraldi-like piano against the strings, all that after-hours stuff. Could have gone without the overplayed “My Funny Valentine,” but Brown’s Broadway sound goes well with melancholy ballads like “As Time Goes By,” “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night of the Week.”???(M. K. G.)



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Dana Hall, Into the Light (Origin) Young Chicago drummer Dana Hall has been around. This may be his first disc as a leader, but he’s played with Jon Faddis’ Carnegie Hall Jazz band as well as Branford Marsalis, Russell Malone, Kenny Barron, Maria Schneider, you get the idea. Add to that this morsel of information: He shares a birthday with the hugely influential modern omni-jazz drummer Roy Haynes (you don’t have to stretch a point too much to hear a kinship across all those decades). He’s currently the musical director of the Chicago Jazz Ensemble. But this bunch here is a kind of close-knit mutual admiration society of jazz veterans— trumpet player Terrell Stafford, tenor saxophonist Tim Warfield, pianist Bruce Barth (who reaffirms the partial comeback of the Fender Rhodes piano by playing some here) and bassist Rodney Whitaker. “Jabali,” named for the great drummer and jazz spirit Billy Hart, was “our Ornette Meets Herbie meets whatever-you-got piece. That was a tricky piece for us and we actually got that in one take. What I wanted to do was conjure up some of the energy of the ’70s loft scene in New York. . . . A lot of people aren’t looking at those Arthur Blythe recordings from the early ’80s, the Anthony Braxton quartet recordings and some of the freebop stuff of that period.” Hall was. And Warfield is spectacular along with him. ??? (J. S.)