Audio files

BONNIE RAITT, SILVER LINING (CAPITOL) Bonnie Raitt looks refreshed and sassy, arm planted on her hip, smiling from the liner notes of her 16th album, Silver Lining. On the cover, Raitt, with her trademark firecracker red and silver 'do, looks almost fierce, and her music reflects that sense of empowerment -- mostly.

Time of Our Lives boasts the sense of freedom Raitt seems to feel as she sings, "Judgin' by the way I'm feelin' boy/ we gon' have the time of our lives." The song works itself into a soulful groove, oozing vivacity.

The following track, Gnawin' on It, also serves up heaps of bluesy soul, highlighting Raitt's expert slide-guitar playing. During the song's climax Raitt and bluesmeister Roy Rogers spar, trading dueling slide guitar licks. Other highlights include Raitt's famous vocal grit on Monkey Business, a funky ditty that would make even George Clinton blush.

Raitt, playing with her touring band, often digresses into free-form jams, demonstrating a winning spontaneity and innate funkiness. No Gettin' Over You and Back Around shine with New Orleans charm, as well.

Midway through the album Raitt strays into murky -- dare I say it? -- "adult contemporary" mush. Wherever You May Be is tepid and boring. The title track, a cover of a David Gray tune, lulls, weighed down by its six-minute-plus length.

What happened to the saucy Southern mama? Despite Raitt's muscular vocal chops and swagger, Silver Living comes across as desultory. B-

-- BRIAN ORLOFF, Times correspondent

Classical file

RACHMANINOV PIANO CONCERTOS 1 & 4, ALEXANDER GHINDIN, PIANO (ONDINE) Good writing, as they say, is all about rewriting. Rachmaninoff rarely felt satisfied with his own output, wrestling endlessly with revisions of works that had already had earned him his fame.

Both the first and last of his four piano concertos bear witness to that obsession. Taking under his wing the original versions of each concerto, Alexander Ghindin gives voice to Rachmaninoff's youthful angst. The composer was still a student when he penned the first concerto in 1890. Dissatisfied with its string-rich orchestration, he rewrote it during the Russian Revolution in 1917, as machine gun fire sounded just outside his Moscow windows.

The mysterious and incisive Fourth Concerto, among Rachmaninoff's greatest works, underwent major revisions in 1941, some 14 years after its premiere to an indifferent audience in Philadelphia. The original incarnation, heard here, offers some surprises, including its greater length and the more fully developed, haunting principal theme of the first movement, which Rachmaninoff later abridged.

At 24, Ghindin moves into this music effortlessly. Though his sound is somewhat more restrained than that of many of his Russian colleagues, he is a most elegant player. To the fourth concerto he brings poignancy and specificity, never failing to convey its architectural integrity or to grasp its spiritual identity. Witness his gossamer, even mercurial manipulation of its dashing finale. His playing in the first concerto is no less purposeful.

The conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, who as a pianist himself was certainly no slouch in his own recordings of these concerti, proves an ideal collaborator here. The Helsinki Philharmonic's lush sound recalls the Philadelphia Orchestra in its heyday, even if the microphones bear a bit too close to the ensemble and too far away from the piano. A

-- JOHN BELL YOUNG, Times correspondent

ROMANTIC RUSSIAN RARITIES, ALEXANDER SITKOVETSKY, VIOLIN (ANGEL) No doubt this slickly assembled CD, devoted to an 18-year-old Russian-born violinist, is yet another entry in the classical music marketing ploy du jour. Photographs of a pouty-looking boy in a black leather jacket give way to an impressive biography and a few paragraphs written by Sitkovetsky himself.

There he eagerly discloses, with charming naivete, that his program, devoted entirely to transcriptions and encore music, does not conform to "standard violin repertoire." The fact is that repertoire like this couldn't be more standard.

(Evidently, he failed to do his homework. Henryk Wieniawski (1835-1880), one of the more prolific composers for the violin, was Polish, not Russian, as Sitkovetsky states.)

But what matters most, of course, is the musicmaking. Sitkovetsky is a polished and reasonably gifted young fiddler. What his playing lacks in color, intensity and emotional maturity is made up for in assurance, perfect intonation and fundamentally solid musical values.

He is not one inclined to take interpretive risks, or to stop and smell the musical roses, either. Where a great violinist such as Ginette Neveu (who was only 29 at the time of her death in 1949), for example, takes the listener to another realm, Sitkovetsky more often than not settles for routine.

That said, Sitkovetsky turns in a competent but unimaginative performance of Prokofiev's Five Pieces from Cinderella. Better is Gliere's heart on sleeve Romance, Op. 3, in which he demonstrates a certain affinity that is particularly affecting in the coda, its earnest mezzo-voce all aflutter. But in Rachmaninoff's Romance Op. 6 No. 1 and Daisies Sitkovetsky seems terrified of climax, as if he doesn't quite know how to build up to one, or how to recede once he has reached it.

In time Sitkovetsky, a protege of Yehudi Menuhin, may well develop into a first-class artist, but for now the best advice would be to take some time off, study the musical literature outside that of the violin, and listen with care to the musicmaking of great artists. His mother, Olga Sitkovetsky, is the well-prepared though wooden accompanist on this CD, but in future, Sitkovetsky would be well advised to find a more artistic and inspired one. B-

-- J.B.Y.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.