CD and Book Reviews - my/maSCENA

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…

Mahler: 7th symphony (Channel Classics)

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 March 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Many regard the seventh as the most perplexing of Mahler’s symphonies. Coming after the extreme pessimism of the sixth, it appears to revert to the pastoralism of the third symphony while maintaining undertones of terror and insecurity. The two Night Music segments that interleave the three main movements may remind you of the Blumine section that Mahler inserted in his first symphony, only to remove it as a bucolic distraction. Where is Mahler going in the seventh? The only musician to understand it on first hearing was Arnold Schoenberg, who paid literal tribute to its textures in his seminal 12-note…

Giovanni Giornovich: London concertos (Delphian)

By Norman Lebrecht on 16 March 2019 Baroque and Early, CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

At first hearing, these three violin concertos dated 1790 sound like Haydn. The second of them could even be Mozart if we didn’t know that Mozart only wrote five concertos and these are numbered 13 to 15. So who was Giornovich if he could write so well, and why have we never heard this music before, given that this is a world premiere recording? Giornovich was, if nothing else, well connected, A Croat whose name has at least 30 misspellings, he was raised in Palermo and became a French citizen because it was the best passport to hold in those…

Grace Williams: Chamber music (Naxos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 8 March 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

If you haven’t heard of Grace Williams, it’s not entirely down to vicious male suppression. The Welsh composer (1906-1977) studied in London with Ralph Vaughan Williams around the same time as Elizabeth Maconchy and Imogen Holst. Women composers were emerging in the 1920s and receiving strong encouragement. Grace Williams was particularly friendly with Benjamin Britten, as their extant letters attest. She remained in London through the 1930s and was a visible part of its musical life. During the War she began to suffer from depression. She returned home to Barry in 1945 for the last 30 years of her life.…

Ferruccio Busoni: Piano concerto (Myrios)

By Norman Lebrecht on 1 March 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Busoni is a great baffler. One of the most interesting musical minds of his time – the only pianist that Mahler considered an intellectual equal – his music so often falls short of his written ideas that one is tempted to dismiss both as inconsequential. Yet there is always something in Busoni that draws you back, just in case you missed the point first time round. The piano concerto, premiered by the composer in 1904, is a case in point. It sounds for the most part like an overlong symphony – 72 minutes, for heaven’s sake – in which the…

Wilhelm Furtwängler: The radio recordings, 1939-45 (Berlin Philharmonic)

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 February 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

At the end of the war, when the Russians occupied Berlin’s radio centre, a musically literate officer called Konstantin Adzhemov rounded up some 1,500 tapes and sent them home to Moscow. His purpose in doing so is unknown, unless it was just part of the general order to plunder everything, but the result was that a historic picture was preserved of the music that was played in Berlin during the Hitler years. Musicians in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra had been spared from military service and their conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, was known to be the Führer’s favourite Wagner interpreter. The musicians…

Alexander von Zemlinsky: Lyric Symphony (Accentus)

By Norman Lebrecht on 15 February 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

I think I’m safe in saying there is no satisfactory performance of this troubling work on record. Lorin Maazel undertook it for DG with minimal conductorial intervention, Michael Gielen released a live- and fairly lithe – radio recording and Riccardo Chailly broached it with the Concertgebouw in the early 1990s, which is as good as it got until now but not close enough for me to the heart of the Zemlinsky enigma. The Lyric Symphony is the only major work to take the form of Das Lied von der Erde, with baritone and soprano instead of tenor and mezzo, but…

Review – Cassandra Miller by Bozzini Quartet

By Benjamin Goron on 11 February 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Contemporary

This release brings together works written between 2008 and 2015 by London-based Canadian Cassandra Miller. The Bozzini Quartet, who gave most of the premieres, is perhaps best placed to open the door to this delicate world. Four works reveal the manner of the composer, who, like the writer drawing inspiration from newspaper clippings, is on the lookout for the ambient musical material as the basis of her composition. Thus, Warblework starts with bird songs to offer us a world of changing textures with a treatment of silence and just intervals of remarkable efficiency. About Bach, which won the Jules Léger…

Tasmin Little (Chandos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 8 February 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

A letter from the English violinist Tasmin Little telling me she is giving up the circuit in a couple of years when she hits 55 arrives pretty much at the same time of her latest release on Chandos, itself a fairly regular occurrence in recent years. Tasmin Little is a prolific recording artist and her programmes often take a few strides off the beaten track. The latest consists of music by women – Amy Beach, Ethel Smyth and Clara Schumann – and the sense of an ending adds poignancy to its reception. Neither of the first two composers can claim…

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