CD and Book Reviews - my/maSCENA

CD Review | Jean-Marie Zeitouni conducts Massenet’s Grisélidis

By John Gilks on 31 January 2025 CD and Book Reviews

Jules Massenet: Grisélidis Vannina Santoni, soprano; Julien Dran, tenor; Thomas Dolié, Tassis Christoyannis and Thibault de Damas, baritones; Antoinette Dennefeld and Adèle Charvet, mezzo-sopranos; Adrien Fournaison, bass. Orchestre national Montpellier Occitanie; Choeur Opéra National Montpellier Occitanie; Jean-Marie Zeitouni, conductor Bru Zane, 2024 Grisélidis is a conte lyrique in three acts with prologue by Jules Massenet. It premièred at the Opéra Comique in 1901 and enjoyed considerable success before dropping out of the repertoire. It’s peculiar in a couple of ways. Despite being written for the Comique, it’s mostly through-sung with just a few instances in which the singers switch to…

CD Review | Carl Orff: Carmina Burana with Russell Braun

By John Gilks on 31 January 2025 CD and Book Reviews

Carl Orff: Carmina Burana Alina Wunderlin, soprano; Max Emanuel Cencic, countertenor; Russell Braun, baritone; Tonhalle Orchester Zürich; Zürcher Sing-Akademie; Paavo Järvi, conductor Alpha Classics, 2024 What does one want from a new recording of a familiar, if idiosyncratic, piece like Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with its curious mix of Latin, Old High German, Old French and lush Romanticism? I think the answer is a pulsating, exciting ride spiced with some humour and if it’s a bit vulgar, then that’s just part of the fun. That’s pretty much the overall impact of this new recording from Zürich on the Alpha Classics…

CD Review | ARC Ensemble, The Chamber Works of Frederick Block

By Heather Weinreb on 31 January 2025 CD and Book Reviews

ARC Ensemble: Erika Raum and Marie Bérard, violins; Steven Dann, viola; Thomas Wiebe, cello; Joaquin Valdepeñas clarinet; Kevin Ahfat, piano Chandos, 2024 The Chamber Works of Frederick Block is ARC Ensemble’s latest album of music by forgotten and silenced artists. Jewish-Viennese composer Frederick Block’s career was shattered by the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938. A traditionalist with a distaste for Schoenberg, Block’s music is thoroughly rooted in the Romantic tradition. Yet these pieces are in no way pastiches of a bygone era; they are constructed in a highly intricate and original musical language. ARC Ensemble has not only…

The Sun Ra Arkestra. Photo: Ben Houdijk.

The Sun Ra Arkestra: Space-Age Jazz Returns

By Félix-Antoine Hamel on 31 January 2025 CD and Book Reviews, La Scena Online, Scena Jazz

As the joke goes, symphony orchestras are mostly 19th-century cover bands. In jazz, the big bands provide that link to the past, with “ghost bands” surviving the disappearance of their leaders for many decades—yes, it is still possible to see a version of the Glenn Miller Orchestra live in 2025! However, if the Sun Ra Arkestra fits that description, it is indeed quite an unusual “ghost band.” This writer vividly recalls the sight of a dozen or so gentlemen (some quite elderly) dressed in colourful, shimmering robes, playing old swing charts and free-form freak-outs. From Morton Street in Philadelphia (Arkestra…

Lebrecht Weekly | The More Satisfying Mahler Seventh on Record

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 January 2025 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

The seventh was the least understood of Mahler’s symphonies and the last to get recorded. Bruno Walter, Mahler’s closest apostle, never performed it. Otto Klemperer, next in line, distended it to twenty minutes over its regular length. At 75 minutes, it can tax an audience’s patience. The symphony has five movements, two of them designated ‘Night Music’, though not in the Mozart sense. The score requires a tenor horn, cowbells, guitar and mandolin. Arnold Schoenberg grasped these Klimt-like colours as the foundational palette of modernism and used the last two in his turning-point Serenade, opus 24. Hermann Scherchen, who made…

Lebrecht Weekly | Reynaldo Hahn and Hans Gal Chamber Musics

By Norman Lebrecht on 17 January 2025 CD and Book Reviews, Chamber Music, Lebrecht Weekly

If you are about to step into a warm bath, put one of these on the player and submerse your January body in a fantasy world that never changes. What Hahn and Gal have in common, other than a one-syllable name, is a reluctance ever to be tempted beyond the musical language they were born into youth. Hahn, Venezuelan-born lover of Marcel Proust, composes remembrances of those lost times before the First World War. The string quartet and piano quintet on this album, each composed directly after a world war, might easily be mistaken for Fauré or Saint Saens, masquerading as Vinteuil…

Lebrecht Weekly | Admirable Recording of Mahler Pioneers

By Norman Lebrecht on 3 January 2025 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

The death of composer Alexander Goehr last August reminded obituarists of the vital contributions his refugee father Walter Goehr had made to insular British culture. Walter worked as a house conductor for EMI and for one of the BBC’s weaker orchestras. He is remembered chiefly for giving the 1953 UK premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalia Symphony, but he also introduced a gamut of novelties from Monteverdi to Mahler, Schoenberg and Stravinsky to Britten and Tippett. The first shock on hearing Das Klagende Lied and the fourth symphony is how intuitively he grasped Mahler’s unpredictable pauses and rhythmic shifts. He makes…

Photo: Busoni. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital File Number: cph 3c26592)

Lebrecht Weekly | Busoni’s Centenary: Recordings of Piano Works and Doctor Faust

By Norman Lebrecht on 27 December 2024 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

What’s the point in having a centenary if it doesn’t restore a reputation? A hundred years have passed since the German-Italian Busoni died in Berlin and, while we’ve heard his massive piano concerto in concerthalls during 1924, nothing much else has happened to change the general perception that Busoni was a formidable pianist with great ideas that did not necessarily translate into music of lasting value. Two albums of piano works reinforce that image. The German pianist Wolf Harden has reached volume 13 in his Naxos trawl of the complete works. While awed by his persistence and dedication, I find…

Marmen Quartet, Photo: Marco Borggreve

Lebrecht Weekly | Marmen Quartet Excels in Ligeti & Bartok String Quartets

By Norman Lebrecht on 13 December 2024 CD and Book Reviews, Chamber Music, Lebrecht Weekly

It’s 30 years since I heard Gyorgy Ligeti explain why he was allowing his first string quartet to be performed after four decades lying in a drawer. The quartet, composed in 1954, was too close to its sources. “It’s Bartok’s seventh,’ said Ligeti, ‘But I’ve now realised that’s not such a bad thing.” Titled Metamorphoses nocturnes, the quartet has buzzing insects, whispering grasses and many things that go bump in the night. In amidst the feral noises there are wistful lines of melody and a macabre sense of humour, blacker by far than Bartok’s Bluebeard. Every now and then, a…

CD Review | Migrant Voices, Itamar Erez and Hamin Honari

By Hassan Laghcha on 14 November 2024 CD and Book Reviews

Migrant Voices Itamar Erez, guitar, requinto, bandola; Hamin Honari, drum, daf, tombak, cymbals Independent, 2024 Given the current crisis in the Middle East, Migrant Voices by the duo Itamar Erez, a Canadian guitarist of Israeli origin, and Hamin Honari, a Canadian percussionist of Iranian origin, shows that art can transcend warring doctrinal divides. Their album offers two actors for peace a platform in these tragic times. With the exception of the title track, the album is made up of free improvisations. And that is precisely where its great merit lies. Erez (guitar, requinto and bandola) and Honari (frame drum, daf,…

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