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ALAN SILVESTRI
Predator Suite for Solo Piano
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Piano Concerto No. 9 "Jeunehomme"
JAMES MACMILLAN
Angus Dei: Variations on a Cistercian Chant
ERMANNO WOLF-FERRARI
Sinfonia da camera

Hélène Grimaud (piano)

Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Deutsche Grammophon- B00040104(CD)
Reference Recording - None for this coupling

ARTISTIC QUALITY 9
SOUND QUALITY 8

Good as Credo, Hélène Grimaud's first album for DG was, its sequel is better still. Even the album title, "Agnus", somehow suits the artist. After all, Grimaud is well known for her personal crusade to save the wolf, and wolves just love lamb, right? Perhaps this is what led her to select four highly varied works (as on Credo) that mix the familiar with the unfamiliar, the new with the old, the carnivore with the herbivore, music with orchestra alongside a couple of piano solos. It's a mix that will have many listeners howling with delight.

The most interesting new piece here is the "Predator" Suite, fanciful transcriptions of three selections from Alan Silvestri's soundtrack to the film Predator 2. Grimaud dispatches these with obvious relish, attacking the persistent ostinatos of the first movement, Lamb Chops, with virtuoso abandon, supplely stroking the keys over the slow central meditation (Steak Tartare), and really sinking her musical incisors into the hellishly difficult finale, Blood Sausage. The contrast with Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 9 "Jeunehomme" could not be more vivid. Keeping her natural aggression memorably in check, Grimaud turns in a sparkling and idiomatic performance characterized by fleet outer movements and a sensitively-sung central Andante. Esa-Pekka Salonen's accompaniment fits her lively but cool-headed approach like a paw, I mean hand, in a glove.

Grimaud pursues the album's spiritual side with a work dedicated to her, James MacMillan's Angus [sic] Dei: Variations on a Cistercian Chant. Now a sense of humor is not normally a quality that we grant this composer, and sure enough his booklet notes betray not a shred of mirth: "The point to keep in mind," he notes, "is that the common attribution to Christ of the characteristics of a lamb need not apply to those unfamiliar with the Middle Eastern diet, and replacing the image of the lamb with that of a steer is not more unusual than the habit of painters of the Flemish school in locating the Annunciation in a local domestic setting." Sure James, whatever. There's really not much music in this polytonal but modally inflected 10-minute jeu d'esprit. Grimaud does what she can with it, and it certainly works within the album's overall concept. I think.

Finally, we have a welcome rarity: Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari's Sinfonia da camera for piano and chamber ensemble. Aside from the music being delightful, Grimaud chose the work because, as she explains in her personal introduction to the disc, "the composer's name unites two of my principal interests: wolves and nifty Italian cars." And who can blame her? In fact, the music's brittle neo-classicism offers the perfect aural equivalent of the proverbial "wolf in sheep's clothing," and so couldn't be more pertinent. Excellent recorded sound, especially given the different performance venues and forces involved, completes this typically enterprising combination of disparate elements. DG has thoughtfully included the original Cistercian Chant on which the Macmillan is based, nicely intoned by the Swedish Radio Choir. Unfortunately there's no encore, probably because no one serves lamb for dessert.
--David Hurwitz

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