Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Lebrecht Weekly | Wilhelm Furtwängler Under Neeme Järvi: A 2nd Symphony Going Nowhere

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By Norman Lebrecht on 9 May 2025 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

What’s this record doing on my deck? I have listened to Furtwängler’s own recordings of his overlong second symphony and have heard it performed live by Daniel Barenboim with the Berlin Philharmonic without walking out. The works spends three-quarters of an hour going nowhere. Furtwängler composed it in Switzerland after fleeing Berlin in January 1945, abandoning his musicians to a desperate fate. The work propounds motifs of fate and destiny beloved of German composers from Schumann to Strauss, alternating massive ffffs and church-organ simulations, all the tricks of the orchestral trade. There are some tender woodwind strands in the third…

Martha Argerich

Lebrecht Weekly | Martha Argerich Edition (Warner Classics, 46 CDs)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 2 May 2025 Lebrecht Weekly

Some artists stop at nothing to get attention. Others shy away from it like birds of an endangered species. No prizes for guessing which category Martha Argerich belongs to. The Buenos Aires-born pianist has never given a sit-down interview in her life, never posed for cover shots, never taken a political stance. Despite these modest precautions, she became the world’s most sought-after keyboard artist. At 83, after bouts of ill-health, each recital she now gives seems like a miracle. The present box-set, combining former EMI, Teldec and Erato releases and her festival events at Lugano, is but a partial record…

Sheku Kanneh-Mason. Photo: Mahaneela

Lebrecht Weekly | Fresh and Lyrical Accounts of Britten & Shostakovich Cello Works

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By Norman Lebrecht on 25 April 2025 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Strings

The second cello concerto of Dmitri Shostakovich has never matched the first in public appeal or soloist appreciation. Premiered on the composer’s sixtieth birthday, at a concert where he was proclaimed a Hero of Socialist Labour, the concerto is ambivalent both in meaning and in its balance between soloist and orchestra. There are stretches where the cello is left to find its own way home as a huge orchestra sits idly by. Quite possibly a metaphor for Socialist Labour. Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom the work was written, made a hash of its first recording and the work has, to some…

Lebrecht Weekly | Surprise Box Songs from Japan and Europe

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By Norman Lebrecht on 18 April 2025 CD and Book Reviews, Choral, Lebrecht Weekly

Like every reviewer I love surprises, and nothing has surprised me more in a month of Easter Sundays than this delicate and brilliant pairing of Japanese and Viennese classical songs. The album notes are skimpy and mostly in Japanese so I’m guessing here, but I’ll credit the selection of songs as well as the performance to Misaki Kobayashi, apparently a soprano in the Berlin radio choir. The pairings are so smart they are practically symbiotic. Kobayashi opens with a springtime song by Rentaro Taki (1879-1903) and matches it with Beethoven’s little-sung Ich liebe dich. Who’d have thought? It works brilliantly.…

Lebrecht Weekly | The Cosmos of Paul Ben-Haim (CPO)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 12 April 2025 CD and Book Reviews, Chamber Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

If you are looking for neglected stocks in these shaky times, you could do worse than sink a pair of ears into the music of Paul Ben-Haim. It seems to be heading for revival. Lahav Shani is recording the symphonies for DG and other works are popping up all over the place. This 145-minute compilation under review mingles orchestral and chamber music to positive effect, prompting this listener at least to reconsider some aspects of a much-misunderstood composer. A conducting assistant to Bruno Walter in Munich, Paul Frankenburger fled to Palestine when the Nazis seized power and changed his name…

Lebrecht Weekly | Kurtág’s Játékok by Pierre-Laurent Aimard: An Absolute Cracker from Pentatone

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By Norman Lebrecht on 4 April 2025 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

It may be a bit early in springtime to be nominating an Album of the Year, but I’ll be very surprised if any release in the next eight months makes me sit up and take note with such awe and excitement as this absolute cracker from the Dutch label Pentatone. The composer turned 99 two months ago. He has been writing this piano series – the Hungarian title means ‘Games – since 1973, adding fresh episodes every now and then. There are 75 complete movements to this suite and another ten in manuscript. Kurtág may yet have more up his…

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

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By Norman Lebrecht on 28 March 2025 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…

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

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By Norman Lebrecht on 21 March 2025 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…

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

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By Norman Lebrecht on 14 March 2025 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…

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

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By Norman Lebrecht on 7 March 2025 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…

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly

Lebrecht Weekly | Wilhelm Furtwängler Under Neeme Järvi: A 2nd Symphony Going Nowhere

Lebrecht Weekly | Martha Argerich Edition (Warner Classics, 46 CDs)

Lebrecht Weekly | Fresh and Lyrical Accounts of Britten & Shostakovich Cello Works

Lebrecht Weekly | Surprise Box Songs from Japan and Europe

Lebrecht Weekly | The Cosmos of Paul Ben-Haim (CPO)

Lebrecht Weekly | Kurtág’s Játékok by Pierre-Laurent Aimard: An Absolute Cracker from Pentatone

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

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

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

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

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