CD and Book Reviews - my/maSCENA

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…

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.…

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