CD and Book Reviews - my/maSCENA

CD Review: Sound visionaries (Navona Records)

By Arthur Kaptainis on 8 October 2021 CD and Book Reviews

Sound visionaries Works by Debussy, Messiaen, Boulez Christina Petrowska Quilico, piano Navona Records NV6358 ★★★★✩ The Toronto pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico has built her career on the twin pillars of contemporary and Canadian repertoire. Here she goes international with incisive results. The angular and structural properties of Debussy’s Book 2 Préludes (we hear a selection of eight) are given full value. Seven of Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus are brilliantly lit for all to see. The solemn chorale and treble cascades of Première communion de la vierge are sharply contrasted. Who would have thought that a “regard” of baby Jesus…

CD Review: Sibelius – Symphony No. 3 (ATMA Classique)

By Arthur Kaptainis on 8 October 2021 CD and Book Reviews

Sibelius: Symphony No. 3 Orchestre Métropolitain Yannick Nézet-Séguin ATMA Classique ACD24033 ★★★★✩ Least loved of the brood of seven, Sibelius’s Third Symphony is known (to the extent that it is known at all) as a modest classical interregnum between the heroic Second and tragic Fourth. This latest instalment in the Orchestre Métropolitain cycle under Yannick Nézet-Séguin sharpens its profile with crisp strings and tangy woodwinds held in a handsome balance. There are shadows and sunbeams under Nézet-Séguin’s exacting direction, and wonders of contrapuntal and colouristic interplay. The Andantino con moto second movement is as close to chamber music as orchestral…

CD Review: Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 2 – Scherzi (Deutsche Grammophon)

By Paul E. Robinson on 8 October 2021 CD and Book Reviews

Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 2 Op. 21; Scherzos (4); Etude Op. 10 No. 12 (“Revolutionary”); Impromptu No. 1 in A flat major Op. 29; Nocturne in E flat major Op. 9 No. 2 Seong-Jin Cho, piano Deutsche Grammophon DG 28948604395 ★★★★★ The 27-year-old South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho won the Warsaw Chopin Competition in 2015 and made a DG recording shortly thereafter devoted to Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and the Ballades. This new CD is a companion volume and one expects there will be more Chopin to come from this outstanding artist. Each time out he displays dazzling technique…

CD Review: Louise Farrenc (Erato)

By Paul E. Robinson on 8 October 2021 CD and Book Reviews

Louise Farrenc: Symphony No. 1 in C minor Op. 32; Symphony No. 3 in G minor Op. 36 Insula Orchestra/Laurence Equilbey Erato 190296698446 ★★✩✩✩ There is no question that the classical music business has done a poor job of providing equal opportunity for female composers and conductors. The present generation is trying hard to do something about that and this new recording provides an excellent example. Both the composer and conductor are Frenchwomen. Louise Farrenc (1804-1875) studied with Hummel and Reicha and was a professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire for more than 30 years. She composed a great…

Beethoven, Birtwistle: A bag of bagatelles

By Norman Lebrecht on 1 October 2021 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

England’s most adventurous living composer never bothered much with the piano. Harrison Birtwistle started out on the clarinet, composed operas in his head and wrote one without strings. Asked for a piano concerto, he delivered something called Antiphonies, which is more street fight than conversation between piano and orchestra. You get the impression he’s not that keen on anything in an instrument but percussive coloration. Now 87, Birtwistle has a unique sound imagination and an approach to music that misses out many of the building bricks. He once told me that the only symphony of Mahler he knew was the…

CD Review: Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene (Decca)

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 September 2021 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene Songs by Fauré, Grieg, Hahn, Liszt, Nico Muhly, Kevin Puts, Caroline Shaw Renée Fleming, soprano. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, piano Decca 4852089 ★★★★✩ / ★★✩✩✩ Good to hear that America’s prime diva is not going gentle into that good night. Past 60 and no longer taking operatic roles, she sings out full and flamboyant in this set of nature-themed songs that came together during her daily walks in the COVID lockdown. Everything you’d expect from a Fleming recital is here – the effortless highs, the velvety lows, the flawless intonation, the jumbled syllables in several tongues. Her…

CD Review: Romantic cello (Chartré-Salov)

By Arthur Kaptainis on 23 September 2021 CD and Book Reviews

Romantic cello. Œuvres de Brahms, Gustav Jenner et Schumann Thomas Chartré, cello. Serhiy Salov, piano KNS Classical ★★★★✩ Gustav Jenner (1865-1920) enjoys the interesting distinction of being the only composition student of his fellow north German, Johannes Brahms. The connection certainly shows in Jenner’s Cello Sonata, a score of 1901 that seeks to emulate the master in its carefully worked-out complexity and heartfelt melodic flow. If the striving after craftsmanship seems a little appliqué in the finale, with its ample post-cadential epilogue of more than two minutes, the serious aims are nonetheless appreciated. Université de Montréal doctoral candidate Thomas Chartré…

CD Review: Chopin : 24 Préludes (Richard-Hamelin)

By Arthur Kaptainis on 23 September 2021 CD and Book Reviews, Piano

Chopin : Préludes Op. 28; Andante spianato et Grande polonaise brillante Op. 22 Charles Richard-Hamelin, piano Analekta AN 2 9146 ★★★✩✩ Several months after praising his Mozart concertos to the skies, I must register some disappointment with Charles Richard-Hamelin’s most recent outing on the Analekta label. Chopin’s Préludes Op. 28 – monumental in their entirety, fascinating in their fragmentary parts – require a more individual outlook than this. The opening C Major prelude (marked Agitato) sounds nondescript and several others are stripped of their “molto” and “assai” modifiers. The little ballet that is No. 7 in A Major seems to lurch to…

CD Review: Rossini – Sei Sonate a quattro (Leaf Music)

By Arthur Kaptainis on 23 September 2021 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music

Rossini: Sei Sonate a quattro Mark Fewer, Yolanda Bruno, violins. Julian Schwarz, cello. Joel Quarrington, double bass. Leaf Music LM240 (Two CDs) ★★★★✩ Rossini is not often counted among the great prodigies, but the six Sonate a quattro, written in the summer of 1804, when the composer was 12, offer ample evidence of his precocity. Scored for two violins, cello and double bass, they are distinguished not only by balanced phrasing and appropriate modulation, but a proto-operatic sense of fun and drama. The so-called Andante of No. 3 scans as the introduction of a stageworthy scena for a star soloist…

Piazzolla Cien Anos (Century Records)

By Norman Lebrecht on 17 September 2021 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

One of the sadder casualties of the Covid shutdown has been the centenary plans for Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992), the Argentine composer whose music exquisitely captures the existential melancholia of our time. Piazzolla is so intimately identified with Buenos Aires that his wider relevance is often missed, but it is truly global. Raised by Italian parents in lower Manhattan, he absorbed jazz, gypsy music and Jewish theatre. Taught by a Rachmaninov pupil of Hungarian origin, he returned to Buenos Aires for lessons with Alberto Ginastera and Raul Spivak, before finishing up in Paris with , who infused him with the worship…

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