Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

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

By Norman Lebrecht on 10 January 2025 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.…

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…

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

By Norman Lebrecht on 20 December 2024 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…

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…

Lebrecht Weekly | David Oistrakh: The Warner Remastered Edition (58CDs, 3DVDs)

By Norman Lebrecht on 6 December 2024 Lebrecht Weekly, Violin

Where has my week gone? Much of it was spent plundering a coffin of one of the most captivating violinists that ever lived. David Oistrakh, Odessa born (thus Ukrainian-rather than Russian-Jewish), set the tone for violin playing in the Soviet era. Not just in his own performances but in those of his Moscow students who included Oleg Kagan, Gidon Kremer, Lydia Mordkovich, Nina Belina, Stoika Milanova, Rimma Sushanskaya and many more, not to mention his own distinguished son, Igor. Maintaining a distinctive individualism in an authoritarian state, he taught young musicians to find their own path to the variable meanings…

Lebrecht Weekly | Kurt Weill: Symphonies, Seven Deadly Sins (DG)

By Norman Lebrecht on 29 November 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

The sound of Berlin in the Weimar years is defined by Kurt Weill. More than any other composer, his music for the Bertolt Brecht shows conjured the jittery, reckless, hopeful, resigned and inventive carousel of a society in perpetual crisis. Weill, son of a Jewish cantor from provincial Dessau, cracked the capital’s musical codes and perpetuated them in songs for his cracked-voice wife, Lotte Lenya. There were also two symphonies, but we don’t talk about those, do we? The first was shunned in 1921 by Weill’s teacher Ferruccio Busoni as excessively expressionist. It is also indebted to Gustav Mahler, especially…

Kremerata Baltica. Photo: Angie Kremer

Lebrecht Weekly | Lebrecht Album of the Year for 2024

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 November 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

2024 has been a flat year for major labels and an unsettled one for minors. Four independent outfits sold out – Hyperion to Universal, Bis to Apple, Chandos to Klaus Heymann, Divine Art to Rosebrook – the biggest shakeout in decades, leaving us wondering how much of their stubborn individuality might survive in the decade ahead. In choosing the album of the year, I look for projects that define the era and will pass the test of time. Janine Jansens’ recording of the Sibelius and first Prokofiev concertos on Decca is one that bears comparison with the legends. Yundi Li’s…

Lebrecht Weekly | Hanni Liang Plays Ethel Smyth With Blazed Conviction

By Norman Lebrecht on 15 November 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

Ethel Smyth was a middle-class butch lesbian from an English military family who went to jail for the Suffragette cause and was seen conducting fellow-inmates at Holloway Prison with a toothbrush. That, in sum, is the impression given by Thomas Beecham and other wary admirers. Virginia Woolf once said that being loved by Ethel was ‘like being caught by a giant crab’. The composer’s daunting physicality occluded whatever merit there was in her music, which faded out with her death in 1944. Glyndebourne’s recent revival of her opera The Wreckers has been restorative and several German opera houses have taken it up.…

Lebrecht Weekly | Miklos Rozsa’s Violin Concerto with LSO Live

By Norman Lebrecht on 8 November 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

I had tea once with Miklos Rozsa in a friend’s flat, around the corner from Abbey Road. It was my first encounter with a Golden Age Hollywood composer and I had far more curiosity than he was prepared to satisfy. He wanted to talk about his concert works, not movie scores. I kept reverting to The Jungle Book and Julius Caesar while he nudged me towards his neglected concertos. The Violin Concerto, written for Jascha Heifetz in 1953, took three years to reach the stage while the soloist fiddled around with the score. Heifetz had been savaged by critics for…

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