CD and Book Reviews - my/maSCENA

Shostakovich: Symphonies 4 and 11 (Deutsche Grammophon)

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 August 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Classical, Classical Music, La Scena Online, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Two problematic symphonies by a tortured composer are despatched by the Boston Symphony and its Latvian conductor with near-nonchalance. The 4th, withheld by the composer for quarter of a century after Stalin’s attack on Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, is ultra-Mahlerian in its orchestration and ironies and utterly daring in its refusal to toe the party line of relentless positivism. The key to the composer’s intentions eludes many conductors. Andris Nelsons adopts a kind of Baltic neutrality in downplaying the score’s emotional extremes in the hope he won’t get mauled by the Russian bear. It’s a fine performance, lacking only the…

John McLeod: Out of the Silence (Delphian)

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 June 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

The late Michael Kennedy, lifelong Telegraph critic, once told me he lost interest in new music in his late sixties. Michael had known Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten and reckoned their successors were not up to the mark. We argued about the merits of Birtwistle and Turnage but his ears were not for the turning and I respected the candour of his admission. Myself, around the same age, I am still bi-curious: eager to see what the old hands are doing and keen to hear new sounds coming through. Nothing thrills me more than finding a composer I can…

Vaughan Williams: Concertos (Chandos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 10 June 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral, Piano

If I had to choose Elgar or VW for a desert island, I know which it would be. Elgar these days seems over-familiar, where Vaughan Williams loses none of his capacity to surprise. You would not automatically guess that from the opening item on this Toronto Symphony recording, the 1938 Serenade to Music, a flossy piece which is made up of bits of Shakespeare and broderie anglaise. Moving swiftly on, the 1944 oboe concerto is an exquisite wartime consolation, a promise of green fields and scones for tea when all the unpleasantness is over. Sarah Jeffrey’s reading is ideally serene,…

CD Reviews

By La Scena Musicale Team on 6 June 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music

Quatuor Bozzini Gyula Csapó : Déjà ? Kojâ ? Label : Collection QB Catalogue number : CQB 1821 ★★★✩✩ In recent years the Bozzini Quartet has added to its discography recordings dedicated to a single composer, sometimes even devoted to a single work. That is also the case with their most recent album, Déjà ? Kojâ ?, which is a mix of French and Persian languages meaning “Already? to where?” The title of the same name for string quartet is by Gyula Csapo, composer of Hungarian descent. Commissioned by the Bozzini Quartet, the work underwent various transformations before its completion in 2016. It is structured in three…

Stephen Hough: Dream Album (Hyperion)

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

In the hands of anyone other than Stephen Hough, this album would be either a horrible indulgence or a public act of psychoanalysis. Hough is far too fastidious a pianist to be suspected of such temptations. What we have here are morsels by composers great and (mostly) small, work the evoke a trance-like state between sleep and wakefulness. I’m not sure about Hough’s opening setting of Strauss’s overworked Radetsky March, but thereafter he hardly puts a finger wrong. Das alte Lied by Henry Love will blow you away; Love was the pseudonym of Hilde Loewe, a Viennese refugee in London.…

CD Review – The Mirror with Three Faces

By Norman Lebrecht on 7 February 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Classical, Classical Music, Piano

The Mirror with Three Faces Shostakovich: Piano Trio No. 2. Lera Auerbach: Piano Trios No. 1 and No. 2. Delta Piano Trio. Odradek Records ODRCD350. Total Time: 63:40. The Delta Piano Trio call their new disc The Mirror with Three Faces. Their account of Shostakovich’s second piano trio, dated 1944, leaves no doubt as to the composer’s state of mind in the closing stages of World War II. Ostensibly a tribute to a late friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, the work ripples with anger and frustration at pointless deaths and ruined lives – the appalling legacy of the Stalin-Hitler era. The last…

CD Review – Stravinsky: Chant Funèbre, Fireworks, Scherzo fantastique, Le Faune et la Bergère, The Rite of Spring.

By Norman Lebrecht on 7 February 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Classical, Classical Music

Stravinsky: Chant Funèbre, Fireworks, Scherzo fantastique, Le Faune et la Bergère, The Rite of Spring. Lucerne Festival Orchestra. Riccardo Chailly, conductor. Sophie Koch, mezzo. Decca 028948325627. Total Time: 70:35. This premiere release of a lost Stravinsky has a fabulous back story. In 1908 the young Igor, unknown and in his mid-20s, wrote a funeral ode for his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The music was played at Rimsky’s obsequies and then apparently lost, until the parts turned up in 2015 in a St. Petersburg archive. Valery Gergiev won the rights to give the first modern performance, while Decca won the recording rights.…

CD Review – Haydn: Symphonies No. 26 and No. 86. Mozart: Violin Concerto No. 3.

By Norman Lebrecht on 7 February 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Classical, Classical Music, Contemporary

Haydn: Symphonies No. 26 and No. 86. Mozart: Violin Concerto No. 3. Handel and Haydn Society. Harry Christophers, conductor. Aisslinn Nosky, violin. Coro COR 16158. Total Time: 69:15. The British conductor Harry Christophers has his own record label, Coro, which turns out a stream of fine performances, mostly with his own group The Sixteen. This release, however, is with Christophers’ other group, the venerable Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, America’s oldest performing arts organization. It presents two Haydn works written 20 years apart with Mozart’s G Major Violin Concerto sandwiched in between. It shows Haydn looking both to past…

CD Review – Woefully Arrayed : Sacred & Secular Choral & Polychoral Works

By Arnaud G. Veydarier on 7 February 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Choral, Classical Music, Contemporary, Vocal

Woefully Arrayed : Sacred & Secular Choral & Polychoral Works Jonathan David Little, Navona Records NV6113 Woefully Arrayed by the Australian-born composer Jonathan David Little is dedicated to choral music. Recorded for the most part in churches in 2016, the six pieces have been performed by various ensembles, including Vox Futura, the Thomas Tallis Society Choir and The Stanbery Singers. As the title suggests, Little’s musical manner is in line with such Renaissance polyphonic composers as Palestrina and Josquin des Prés. However, Little does not just imitate the language of his predecessors. If he accepts the formal general characteristics, such as contrapuntal…

CD Review – Subduction

By Arnaud G. Veydarier on 7 February 2018 Canadian Music, CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Contemporary, Quebec Music

Subduction Julie Thériault, Audiogramme 19075801072 Inspired by geology, the pianist, composer and arranger Julie Thériault last November launched her second album, Subduction. This term refers to the slow and inexorable movement of two overlapping tectonic plates. Seemingly benign, these underground movements can have dramatic effects at the surface. The metaphor is quite appropriate to describe Thériault’s music: the 11 pieces unfold and follow each other slowly and steadily, gradually increasing in dramatic intensity before reaching the cataclysmic paroxysm of the last track, Magma. Thériault’s delicate and serious articulation introduces the main melodies as accompanying instruments appear, thickening the sound as…

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