• Mozart y Mambo: La Bella Cubana (Alpha Classics) completes the uplifting trilogy of albums by Berlin Philharmonic horn player and salsa dancer extraordinaire Sarah Willis, with her Cuban collaborators, the Havana Lyceum Orchestra, conducted by José Antonio Méndez Padrón. Willis plays Mozart’s Horn Concerto No 4 in E flat, K495, demonstrating her gift for characterful and radiant solo performance. The Havana Lyceum’s orchestral playing matches hers with their own lithe definition, sparkling ornamentation and crisp detail. Cuban rhythms swing with Mozart in Edgar Olivero’s Rondo alla Rumba, inspired by the fourth concerto’s well-known finale, enhanced by spirited playing by small ensemble the Sarahbanda. In Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for four winds in E flat, K297b, Willis is joined by her Berlin Phil colleagues Jonathan Kelly, oboe, Wenzel Fuchs, clarinet, and Stefan Schweigert, bassoon. Willis bids farewell to this joyful endeavour in the irresistible Cuban hit Guantanamera (arr. Jorge Aragón). There’s another side to this project: sales of the records have gone towards the Instruments for Cuba Fund: buy all three and support these wonderful musicians.
• Recorded in St Cuthbert’s parish church, Edinburgh, Earth, thy cold is keen (Delphian) by the Scottish composer Stuart MacRae, conjures an aural landscape steeped in folk music and medieval lyric, but the result is entirely distinctive and modern. With the Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean and the duo Sequoia (Alice Rickards, violin, Sonia Cromarty, cello), MacRae adds harmonium or electronics to settings from Middle English, the Norse Poetic Edda and traditional Gaelic, as well as later poems by Christina Rossetti and others. The Captive, a setting of Emily Brontë’s The Prisoner, written for Betts-Dean, suits perfectly the singer’s pure tone and skilful storytelling powers. In sharp contrast, Alwynne Pritchard’s text elided compressed is a playfully spiky collage of voice and electronics. The last song, The Lif of This World, a medieval precis of birth to death in a translation by MacRae, is especially affecting. This is music for slow, close listening, beautifully performed, not for the impatient.
• This week’s Radio 3 lunchtime concerts from Edinburgh include the Dunedin Consort on Tuesday and Friday, playing Bach orchestral suites; pianist Mikhail Pletnev playing Chopin on Wednesday; and soprano Julia Bullock, with pianist Bretton Brown, in music from Schubert to Kurt Weill on Thursday. Radio 3, 1pm/BBC Sounds.
