CD and Book Reviews - my/maSCENA

Josef Suk: Asrael (Decca)

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 May 2019 CD and Book Reviews, La Scena Online, Lebrecht Weekly

The symphonic monument Asrael, written in memory of the composer’s wife Otilie and her father Antonin Dvorak, embodies for Czech musicians what Verdi’s Requiem does for Italians – a summit of national loss and hope. Unlike the Verdi Requiem, it has never caught on outside its heartland. Its great interpreters on record have all been Czech – Talich, Ancerl, Kubelik, Pesek and now Jiri Belohlavek. To the latest interpreter the heritage must have weighed particularly heavy since he knew he was mortally ill and this recording would stand as his legacy. Never a flamboyant conductor, Jiri Belohlavek goes for large…

Photo: Tommy Persson, Olga Rakhalskay.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg : Symphonies nos 2 and 21 (Deutsche Grammophon)

By Norman Lebrecht on 10 May 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

There was never any question what was going to be my album of the week once the envelope disgorged this little twin-set from DG. I started writing about Weinberg in the early 1990s when he was unknown outside Russia and forgotten within. Some emigres played me his string music and I found the communication so direct and personal that I could not understand his neglect. A Polish Jew, Weinberg fled to the Soviet Union in 1939, was befriended by Shostakovich and narrowly survived incarceration in the Stalin murder machine. Although there are common gestural elements with his friend and mentor,…

Photo: Clive Barda

David Matthews: 9th symphony (Nimbus Alliance)

By Norman Lebrecht on 3 May 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical, Lebrecht Weekly

You may recognise the composer’s name as one of two brothers who assisted Deryck Cooke and Berthold Goldschmidt in creating the first performing edition of Mahler’s tenth symphony. Now 76, David Matthews has come a long way from those early Gustavian speculations. Where his brother Colin drew close to Benjamin Britten, David veered to the wilder fantasies of Michael Tippett while staying close to English roots and traditions. His ninth symphony, receiving its world premiere on this release, is a kind of summation. Starting with a self-composed carol and extending to a Bach chorale, it represents the best of British…

Paul Ben-Haim: Evocation (Bis)

By Norman Lebrecht on 25 April 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

When Paul Frankenburger was taken on as Bruno Walter’s assistant conductor in Munich in 1920, he was one among thousands of highly-trained musicians in a city of deep-rooted musical traditions. When he fled Germany for Palestine in 1933, Paul Ben-Haim (his Hebraised name) was by some distance the most accomplished musician in a land with no musical tradition since King David. He saw his new life more as a responsibility than an opportunity, immersing himself in the micro-tones of Judeo-Arab liturgies and nurturing two new generations of composers. His own music, a fusion of west and east, is seldom heard…

Gustavo Gimeno. Photo: Marco Borggreve

Rossini: Petite Messe Solonelle (Pentatone)

By Norman Lebrecht on 18 April 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

As proof that the Devil has the best tunes, it is an established fact that atheists write the best religious music. Verdi, Elgar, Saint-Saens, Janacek, Ravel, Vaughan Williams, Britten… the list of unbelievers who wrote great sacred works extends to the limits of the known universe. And while we know little of Rossini’s state of faith, it is safe to assume that a man of his dedicated hedonism was not one of the godlier composers. His ‘little mass’, written in 1863 when the composer was in poor health and mourning a friend’s death, has all the Rossini hallmarks of hummable…

The Yiddish Cabaret (Harmonia Mundi)

By Norman Lebrecht on 12 April 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Journalists sometimes write reckless headlines, knowing they will be fish-food in a couple of days. Artists cannot afford that luxury with album titles. The cover here does not reflect the contents, and I’m telling you this so you don’t pester some poor record shop demanding your money back. The second string quartet by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and the 5 Quartet Pieces of Erwin Schulhoff are about as Yiddish as a bacon croissant. Korngold’s primary influences were Strauss and Puccini, Schulholff was a Dvorak protégé who wrote musical manifestos for the Communist Party. Both were born into Jewish families but neither…

Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Fantasy for Cello and Orchestra &c. (Claves)

By Norman Lebrecht on 5 April 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

This recording almost slipped by unnoticed. It opens with a neither here nor there performance of the first Shostakovich concerto, neither rippled with black comedy the way Slava Rostropovich played it nor invested with loving compassion like the mellifluous Heinrich Schiff. The Berlin-based soloist, Anastasia Kobekina, gives a good account of the piece and the Berne Symphony play well enough under the direction of Kevin John Edusei. What follows is simply gripping. The 1956 Weinberg Fantasy, of which there appear to be only two extant recordings, has an arresting opening melody and the best atmospherics I can think of outside…

Chopin’s Concertos: a landmark release

By Benjamin Goron on 3 April 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Orchestral, Piano, Romantic

After almost four years, a major project has come to fruition with the release of Chopin’s two Piano Concertos as played by Charles Richard-Hamelin and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal under Kent Nagano. “It’s one of the five best recordings that Analekta has ever produced,” exclaims the label’s president, François-Mario Labbé. Almost 32 years after the record company’s establishment, this landmark recording reminds the wide world of the excellence of musicians from Quebec. “After Charles Richard-Hamelin’s win at the 2015 Chopin Competition, I thought of recording those concertos and brought it up with Kent Nagano, who was immediately interested,” Labbé…

Dmitri Shostakovich: 6th and 7th symphonies (Deutsche Grammophon)

By Norman Lebrecht on 29 March 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

The sixth and seventh symphonies are central to the composer’s work, in both senses of the term. Written in 1939 and 1941, they develop the method that Shostakovich invented in the fifth symphony of delivering two messages at the same time – public optimism to fool the commissars and private anxiety to express what the audience was experiencing under Stalin’s terror. The sixth, written as the Soviet Union was signing its notorious alliance with Nazi Germany, opens with an ominous phrase from Malher’s tenth symphony, which Shostakovich had neither heard nor read. Brisk, bold and barely half an hour long,…

Book Review: Song of a Nation: The Untold Story of Canada’s National Anthem

By Vasyl Pawlowsky on 22 March 2019 Canadian Music, CD and Book Reviews, La Scena Online

Song of a Nation: The Untold Story of Canada’s National Anthem by Robert Harris, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. ISBN: 9780771050923 While growing up in the 1970s I assumed that O Canada was our nation’s official anthem. Many others were similarly mistaken. Song of a Nation: The Untold Story of Canada’s National Anthem, by Robert Harris is a wonderfully written biography, history and tale that will resonate and tug at one’s heartstrings while revealing some gems of Canadian history, which all Canadians and lovers of music will probably appreciate. The biography is of a man who “left home at twelve, worked…

Browsing: CD and Book Reviews