If you want to broaden your horizons, start here: Thomas Allen’s and Daniel Barenboim’s new albums

Thomas Allen                            September Songs                                        Out Fri 

Rating:

Daniel Barenboim              Mozart: Piano Quartets                             Out now 

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Since I hit the big 7O next spring, I’m almost pathetically grateful to Sir Thomas Allen, 73, and Daniel Barenboim, 75, for proving there’s lots of life after the Bible’s great milestone.

Tom Allen raids the Great American Songbook for a delightful recital. It’s a typically imaginative selection, with three classics from Jerome Kern – They Didn’t Believe Me, All The Things You Are and The Folks Who Live On The Hill – rubbing shoulders with less predictable stuff, such as Kurt Weill’s My Ship, and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Come Home, from the flop Allegro.

Two Cole Porter standards – Miss Otis Regrets and Just One Of Those Things – are dispatched with typical Allen élan and faultless diction. As are two Bernstein rareties: Some Other Time from On The Town, and Greeting from Arias And Barcarolles.

Thomas Allen’s voice carries the amplitude it had in its prime, and sits comfortably next to the beautiful voice of soprano Lucy Crowe 

A stimulating album, made even more so by the addition of soprano Lucy Crowe in three numbers. As for Allen’s voice, it’s in great shape, with all the amplitude and beauty of tone of his prime.

Poor old Mozart got nowhere near 70, yet he wrote so much. And an awful lot of fine pieces, like these two piano quartets, pass almost unnoticed. Hopefully Barenboim’s advocacy, with his hand-picked trio of colleagues, drawn from the West-Eastern Divan orchestra and including his son Michael, will win them a wider audience.

Daniel Barenboim carefully selected three colleagues from the West-Eastern Divan orchestra to create his impressive album 

These quartets were composed in 1785/6 in what was, given his short life, Mozart’s full maturity. So showy are the piano parts that they are viewed by some scholars as actual piano concertos, but only made available to us in the kind of chamber music arrangements Mozart often employed when a full orchestra wasn’t available.

All six movements here are of a high standard. The finale of the Quartet No 1 is good enough to be included among Mozart’s most exhilarating confections. If you want to broaden your horizons, start here.