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Bizet

CD Review | Bizet rarities on Bru Zane’s Portrait

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music
April/May 2025

Georges Bizet: Portrait  Djamileh, Vasco de Gama, Le Retour de Virginie, Clovis et Clotilde, symphonic and choral music, music for piano and arias Karina Gauvin (soprano), Cyrille Dubois (tenor), Adèle Charvet (mezzo), Julien Dran (tenor) Bru Zane, 2025 Apparently Bizet didn’t write only Carmen … We might know Les pêcheurs de perles, among his lyrical works, but we’re less acquainted with La jolie fille de Perth or Le docteur Miracle, for example. Yet there is much to discover in this composer who over a short 20-year career wrote tirelessly in a variety of genres—arias, symphonies and piano works.  Tireless workers…

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Alfredo

CD Review | Rare Donizetti, Alfredo il Grande on Naxos

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music
April/May 2025

Donizetti: Alfredo il Grande Antonino Siragusa and Antonio Garés, tenors;  Gilda Fiume, soprano; Valeria Girardello, mezzo-soprano; Lodovico Filippo Ravizza, baritone; Adolfo Corrado, bass;  Hungarian Radio Choir; Donizetti Opera Orchestra, Corrado Rovaris, conductor Naxos Records, 2025 In 1823, the 25-year-old Donizetti made his debut on one of Italy’s greatest stages, the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, with his opera Alfredo il Grande. His illustrious predecessor Rossini had just left the city after several triumphs, and the pressure was on for the newcomer who had big shoes to fill. Neapolitan audiences didn’t take kindly to this opera about the battles of an…

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Santa Ana

CD Review | Alfredo Santa Ana Before the World Sleeps

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By on CD and Book Reviews
April/May 2025

Before the World Sleeps Alfredo Santa Ana, composer; Miranda Wong, piano Redshift Records, 2024 Before the World Sleeps is a direct result of the current tensions in the world surrounding politics, the climate crisis, and technology. Mexican-Canadian composer Alfredo Santa Ana’s artistic response to this instability was “to reorient the compositional process toward creating small pieces of music that (he) could finish quickly, and using an archiver’s mindset, commit them to a recording rather than prepare them for public performance.” The pieces on this album are varied, technically demanding, and are a manifestation of a world caught between the peaceful…

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John Field

Lebrecht Weekly | Alice Sara Ott’s Post-Chopin Approach on John Field’s Complete Nocturnes

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

The most influential Irishman in the history of music is not Bob Geldof, Bono, Sinead O’Connor or the Dubliners, all of whom are famous as influenza, but a fairly obscure piano salesman who awoke a sub-continent to its creative potential. John Field was born in Dublin in 1782 to Anglican parents who took him to London to work for Muzio Clementi, Beethoven’s publishing partner and piano dealer. As a rep for the wealthy Clementi, Field travelled to Paris and Vienna before settling in St Petersburg, where he starred at the new-founded Philharmonic Society. Field gave three piano lessons to Mikhail…

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Ravel

Lebrecht Weekly | Maurice Ravel: Complete solo piano music (Chandos), Complete songs (Signum)

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Both double-album titles left me feeling uncomfortable. Ravel is a miniaturist, a maker of exquisite small things that drop into your consciousness like olive oil into a bowl of rice. Each drop is an object entire. Pour them freely and the uniqueness dissolves. It speaks volumes for both of these projects that they manage to avoid that danger, most of the time anyway. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet takes a chronological route, starting with a Serenade grotesque written in 1892 when Ravel was 17 and concluding with that monstrously grotesque caricature of morbid Vienna known as La Valse (and more often heard in…

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Shostakovich

Lebrecht Weekly | Shostakovich’s 15th Symphony by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra Under Bernard Haitink

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his last symphony with left hand alone. A heart attack in 1966, followed by several falls and fractures, left him heavily disabled. His solution was to train one hand to do the work of two and economising on physical effort. This may explain the expanses of blank staves in some pages of his fifteenth symphony, as if he lacked strength to fill in instrumental detail. Maxim Shostakovich, who conducted the 1972 premiere, called the work his father’s ‘birth-to-death autobiography’. That, too, is only a partial view. The symphony opens with a holiday funfair and a blast of…

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Fung & Sondheim

Lebrecht Weekly | Zlatomir Fung’s Fantasies & Stephen Sondheim’s Chamber music

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Chamber Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano, Strings

I love artists who attempt the impossible. Within reason, that is. I’d draw the line at someone playing the 32 Beethoven sonatas one-handed, or the 15 Shostakovich quartets without a bathroom break. But any artist who takes a piece of music beyond the limits of what I’d heard in it before gets my vote. The American cellist Zlatomir Fung has composed a fantasy on Janacek’s opera Jenufa, a feat that defies credibility. The tunes and rhythms of Jenufa are rooted in Czech speech patterns. Erase the voice, and what’s left? An X-ray. Fung and his pianist Richard Fu present fifteen…

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Schubert 9 symphonie

Lebrecht Weekly | Franz Schubert: Orchestral Songs, 9th Symphony (Chandos)

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Many composers have tried to improve on Schubert. Mahler made a string-orchestra version of the Death and the Maiden string quartet, Joseph Joachim orchestrated a four-hand piano sonata, Liszt made the Wanderer Fantasy into something resembling a piano concerto. Even atonal Anton von Webern had a go. All with the best of intentions and without harm to the crystalline original, but you do wonder what value they added. Schubert, like apple strudel, does not need sweetener. What we have on this album are little-known orchestral settings by famous composers of four perfect songs. Benjamin Britten tacked on two clarinets and…

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King's Singers
Photo: Ben Ealovega, 2024

Lebrecht Weekly | The King’s Singers’ Latest Album: Such Stuff as Dreams are Made on (Signum)

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Vocal

In a world of mounting uncertainty, it’s a relief to find the King’s Singers are still around. The novelty of their act might have worn off since that inaugural London concert in 1968 but polished a capella singing by six male  voices remains a miraculous thing and their latest album is a joy to spin. The title is Shakespeare – The Tempest Act 4 (but you knew that, surely) – and the underlying theme is the hope we cling to in times of mortal terror. Three Vaughan Williams songs from 1951 capture that dichotomy to the depths of its poignancy.…

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Le Rossignol. Stravinski

Lebrecht Weekly | The Most Convincing Performance of Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol on Record

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

The English conductor Sir Eugene Goossens was stopped in March 1956 on arrival at Sydney Airport. He was found to be in possession of pornographic materials and rubber goods that he intended to share with a female lover. The police had been tipped off by a tabloid reporter, in cahoots with the conductor’s professional rivals. Goossens was fined a hundred pounds and left Australia in disgrace. Back in London he resumed working with BBC orchestras and others, going on to make one of my most-played recordings, the Bach double concerto with the Oistrakhs. Sir Eugene, who kept his knighthood, died…

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