my/maSCENA
You are at:»»Category: "Lebrecht Weekly"

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly

Schubert 9 symphonie

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

0
By on 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…

Read More
Share:
Le Rossignol. Stravinski

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

0
By on 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…

Read More
Share:

Lebrecht Weekly | Boult’s Elgar : An extraordinary double-album of unpublished recordings

0
By on Lebrecht Weekly

There are days when only Elgar will do. When the skies are low and the politics grim, a wash of Elgarian orchestral colour relieves existential gloom like no other remedy. The first symphony delivers pull-your-socks-up bluster and the second a subtler encouragement. Elgar always does it for me. This extraordinary double-album, titled Boult’s Elgar, brings together unpublished recordings by the composer’s young friend, Sir Adrian Boult. The sleeve notes are by Nigel Simeone, whose new book, Edward Elgar and Adrian Boult, chronicles a friendship that was interrupted for seven years by the composer taking umbrage at something the conductor had…

Read More
Share:
Fatma Said

Lebrecht Weekly | Fatma Said’s New Album of Lieder Everyone Will Rave About

0
By on Lebrecht Weekly

The Egyptian soprano, based in London and Berlin, had a mix of western and Arabic classical songs on her debut album, illustrating musical connections around the Mediterranean. Her ease in both ethnicities was enviable. To change tracks from microtonal maqam precision to the lushness of Ravel’s Shéhérazade was a hair-raising act of cultural transcendence, achieved without a hair out of place. Fatma Said’s new album is pure German: Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms. Hard to tell which she adores most. The opening track, ‘Ständchen’, has an arresting liquidity, only to be outshone by ‘Auf dem Wasser zu Singen’. Felix Mendelssohn’s…

Read More
Share:
Simon Rattle

Lebrecht Weekly | The More Satisfying Mahler Seventh on Record

0
By on 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…

Read More
Share:
Reynaldo Hahn, Hans Gal: Chamber music

Lebrecht Weekly | Reynaldo Hahn and Hans Gal Chamber Musics

0
By on 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…

Read More
Share:
Santtu-Matias Rouvali

Lebrecht Weekly | Santtu offers imaginative performances of Shostakovich’s Symphonies Nos. 6 & 9 with the Philharmonia Orchestra

0
By on Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Four months ago, I wrote about one of the least satisfying Shostakovich records I have ever heard, a performance where the conductor, a hyped young Finn, skied across the musical surface without penetration or strategic concept. The gloom that overwhelmed me at the onset of a full cycle of symphonies from this unprepared interpreter has since been mitigated slightly by the emergence of a parallel cycle from a Finnish compatriot, Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Turning 40 this year, Rouvali is music director of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London and a long-shot to be the next chief in San Francisco or Los Angeles.…

Read More
Share:
Mahler

Lebrecht Weekly | Admirable Recording of Mahler Pioneers

0
By on 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…

Read More
Share:
Busoni
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

0
By on 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…

Read More
Share:
Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Schubert and Liszt

Lebrecht Weekly | Unknown Pieces for Multiple Pianos and Orchestra by Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Schubert and Liszt (Hyperion)

0
By on Lebrecht Weekly

German composers don’t know how to have fun. Think no further than Mozart’s Musical Joke, or Beethoven’s fat-shaming of the violinist Schuppanzigh. Not funny at all. Not to mention Schumann and Brahms, or the feeble anti-critic jokes made by Wagner, Mahler and Richard Strauss. So it was in a wary frame of mind that I approached a frisky album of unknown pieces for multiple pianos and orchestra by Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Schubert and Liszt. Four-hand is where musicians share in-jokes. Was it a fun hour? Actually, not far from it. The first piece, by Mendelssohn and his pal Ignaz Moscheles, was…

Read More
Share:
1 2 3 … 52

Current Issue

PDF HTML

Next Issue : April/May

Ad Deadline : March 21, 2025

Past Issues, Subscriptions, Advertising