CD and Book Reviews - my/maSCENA

CD Review – Nadine Sierra (Deutsche Grammophon)

By Norman Lebrecht on 14 December 2018 Art Song, CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

We do this so you don’t have to. The flow of Christmas albums has slimmed in recent years but there is still a belief in the music industry that nothing sells at Christmas like an opera singer. Is that still true? I sampled Bryne Terfel’s DG Santa sock which includes duets with Katherine Jenkins and Emma Thompson. Need I say more? I dipped into Renée Fleming’s Broadway disc on Decca and quickly dipped out again. I attended with sadness to the great John Tomlinson’s Schubert Swansong on Signum. And then I heard Nadine Sierra’s debut album and all was light…

Gorecki: String quartets (Naxos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 7 December 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Ever wonder what Henryk Mikolaj Górecki did before he hit the jackpot with that million-selling third symphony? The sage of Katowice never stuck to any doctrine or style, allowing himself to develop from modernism to minimalism and all points between. His first string quartet, commissioned by Kronos in 1988, is titled ‘Already it is dusk’ and appears to lament the dying day in meditative fragments, as if to suggest that nothing is ever finished. The second quartet, written three years later, bears the title ‘Quasi una fantasia’ and emerges slowly, hypnotically, from the simplest of themes. In between the two,…

Jazz – Record Roundup

By Collectif Jazz on 5 December 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Scena Jazz

by Marc Chénard, Benjamin Goron et Éric Champagne Jazz at the movies The Romance of Improvisation in Canada / Justin Time – JTR 8613-2 Given the fact that jazz and motion pictures were born around the same time, their histories intertwine in so many ways. For one, there is no shortage of movies with jazzy soundtracks, and loads of jazzers have ¿contributed to them, as players and composers. But the opposite is also true, when musicians have turned to soundtracks as vehicles to improvise on. This recording is one such example. Its mastermind, James K. Wright, is not a musician…

Blues dialogues (Cedille)

By Norman Lebrecht on 23 November 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Here’s cause for thanksgiving. The Chicago violinist Rachel Barton Pine has filled an album with music by Black American composers, most of them shamefully little-known. Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, for instance, no relation to the British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, but named after him at birth. C-T’s set of blues for solo violin strikes me as having a dual purpose of being truly enjoyable for the listener and perfect warm-up riffs for the player if Bach is too cold to start with on a winter’s morning. William Grant Still is the most familiar name here, probably because he was a cause celebre after…

Cello concertos (Pentatone/Myrios)

By Norman Lebrecht on 16 November 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Mstislav Rostropovich commissioned more than 100 works for his instrument and performed some of them more than once. Aside from the two Shostakovich concertos and the symphony-concerto by Prokofiev, only the Britten Cello Symphony and the concertos by Lutoslawki and Dutilleux get heard much these days. The latter pair are performed by Johannes Moser on a new Pentatone release and the gulf in quality between them is striking. Lutoslawski opens with several minutes of cello meditation, as if he has bought the complete TM package or forgotten he booked an orchestra. The concerto does not get much more communicative, dickering…

Requiem, The Pity of War (Warner)

By Norman Lebrecht on 9 November 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Another themed album, but for once a timely theme. Ian Bostridge has chosen sets by two composers who fell in the First World War and two who knew the terror of war without having experienced it. George Butterworth’s setting of A. E. Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad captures at once the timelessness of English landscape and the hopelessness of young men in the trenches. Bostridge wrenches the heart with his falsetto lines in ‘Is my team ploughing?’, the appeal of a fallen soldier. Butterworth fell on the Somme to a sniper’s bullet in August 1916. Rudi Stephan was 28 when he…

Eri Lu: Chopin, Beethoven (Warner Classics)

By Norman Lebrecht on 2 November 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

The trouble with international competitions – apart from widespread jury corruption, too many events and an uneven entry level – is that they are under pressure to produce winners. Common sense will tell you that there can’t be that many geniuses in the world for two dozen major contests to find them year in, year out, and commonsense is right. But competition audiences demand a clear result and contestants need to be assured that they have not entered for nothing. So, year in, year out, every competition must give prizes. Eric Lu, 20 years old, won the Leeds International Competition…

Nicandro e Fileno: a Historical Recording

By Benjamin Goron on 30 October 2018 Baroque and Early, CD and Book Reviews

On the strength of last year’s production of Nicandro e Fileno by Le Nouvel Opéra and Les Boréades, ATMA Classics has now released this Italian pastoral opera, never issued on record before. Composed by Paolo Lorenzani to a libretto by Phillipe-Julien Mancini, Duke of Nevers, the opera was premiered in September 1681 at the Château de Fontainebleau, a retreat occasionally used by Louis XIV and his loyal subjects. For its time, the Italian style of the work was quite subversive. So much so that the king’s personal secretary Lully forbade its use. And if that weren’t enough, the subject matter…

Barbara Hannigan: Vienna fin de siècle (Alpha-classics)

By Norman Lebrecht on 26 October 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

In an avalanche of theme albums – it’s what record execs dream up these days instead of fresh talent – the Canadian diva’s release feels like she really means it. Not the cover picture, which shows her snogging some bloke in the woods, but the content, which embraces songs by Schoenberg, Webern, Zemlinsky, Berg and Hugo Wolf, with one politically correct aberration whom we’ll come to in a moment. Four early songs by Schoenberg, opus 2, are so close to Mahler they feel sentimental to the point of self-indulgence. Webern’s plinks are saved from the nuthouse by Reinbert de Leeuw’s…

Shostakovich: 8th Symphony (LSO Live)

By Norman Lebrecht on 19 October 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

There was a year or so when it was touch and go whether Gianandrea Noseda or Simon Rattle was going to be the next music director of the London Symphony Orchestra. In the end the LSO got the best of both worlds, with Rattle as #1 and Noseda, now in Washington DC, flying in three or four times a year with hair-raising performances. This account of Shostakovich 8, which I regret having missed in April, is one of the most pungent and idiomatic on record. Noseda, who cut his baton as house conductor at the Mariinsky in St Petersburg, is…

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