Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Photo : Norbert Kniat

Lebrecht Weekly | Yuja Wang: The American Album (DG)

By Norman Lebrecht on 17 March 2023 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Our inbox has clogged up with readers’ demands to know what the new Yuja album is all about. So, if you insist, it’s neither one thing nor the other. It begins with Yuja playing a 4:34 minute solo by Michael Tilson Thomas, followed by a half-hour piano concerto by Teddy Abrams. Both composers are, in the main, conductors – and it shows. The MTT vignette is a jazz-club vignette. The Abrams concerto falls midway between Glenn Miller and Big Bill Broonzy with a central patch of Hollywood marshmallow. Yuja’s job involves honky-tonking around in the left hand without much glitter…

Lebrecht Weekly | Rachmaninov: 2nd symphony (Chandos/Vox)

By Norman Lebrecht on 10 March 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

Chandos: *** Vox: **** If you think Rachmaninov’s second symphony is easy to play, you should have heard the mush one of London’s top orchestras made of it recently under a famous conductor who has performed it all his life. There is a fine line to walk in this symphony between sentiment and passion, assertiveness and overblown bombast, explicitness and allusion. Two recordings, just landed, exemplify these contrasts. John Wilson, heading London’s finest string section, brings off the big-bash passages quite brilliantly, less so with the underlying confusions. Rachmaninov, aged 33 in 1906-7 when he wrote the symphony, was remaking…

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Lebrecht Weekly | Shostakovich: Works unveiled (BIS)

By Norman Lebrecht on 3 March 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

This album solves a mystery that goes back eight decades. Anyone immersed in the music of Gustav Mahler will have noticed that the opening of Shostakovich’s sixth symphony is identical to Mahler’s unfinished tenth. How did that happen? Mahler’s tenth was unheard outside Vienna, where a partial facsimile had been published in a few hundred copies in 1924. Shostakovich never left the Soviet Union. How could he possibly have seen a copy of Mahler’s manuscript? All, or part, can now be revealed. The French pianist Nicolas Stavy has recorded a four-hand piano arrangement by Shostakovich of one-third of the Adagio of…

Lebrecht Weekly | Nannette Streicher’s Fortepiano (Gramola)

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 February 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

I can barely control my finger at the play button.This recording takes us as close to Beethoven in audible terms as it is possible to get. This is the sound that filled Beethoven’s room as he composed at least half of the 32 sonatas. Nannette Streicher was his piano maker, and much more. She took his order for a Hammerflügel in 1812. Once it was installed Nanette was in and out of his house every other day, disciplining his servants, helping with his accounts and generally doing her best to allow the most helpless of men to overcome his daily…

Photo: Julian Simmonds

Lebrecht Weekly | Jean Sibelius/Arne Nordheim; The Tempest (Naxos/LAWO)

By Norman Lebrecht on 17 February 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

Jean Sibelius: *** Arne Nordheim: **** By no means one of Shakespeare’s more popular plays, the Tempest has been adapted into no fewer than 45 operas and many concert works besides. It has intrigued composers as unlikely as Beethoven and Berlioz, Arthur Sullivan and Michael Tippett, by exposing primal fears of the force of nature and the inadequacy of human relationships. Sibelius wrote incidental music for a Copenhagen production of Shakespeare’s play in 1926, adding an epilogue the following year for a Helsinki revival. By this time, however, Sibelius was all but played out. His seventh and last symphony had…

Lebrecht Weekly | Krzysztof Meyer, Dmitri Shostakovich: Cello-piano sonatas (Kaleidos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 3 February 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

When asked to review compositions by a living musicologist, my inclination would be to catch the night train out of town and not approach a window before daylight. Musicology has degenerated in the past two decades into factional wars, with one American sideshow even arguing that it’s not necessary to read music in order to obtain a musicology PhD. Krzysztof Meyer is, however, no ordinary musicologist. The foremost authority in Eastern Europe on the life and works of Dmitri Shostakovich, he pulls no punches about Shostakovich’s oppression by the Communist state, an attitude that made him less than popular among…

Lebrecht Weekly | Prokofiev: Violin concertos (Channel Classics)

By Norman Lebrecht on 27 January 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

The old French truism that the best is the enemy of the good – le mieux est l’ennemi du bien – does not apply to musical performance. The best is simply the best. There are half-a-dozen recordings of the two Prokofiev concertos that stand way above the rest, whether by reason of primacy (Oistrakh, Heifetz), serenity (Janine Jansen, Perlman) or combustion (Vadim Gluzman, Leila Josefowicz). This does not, however, turn all the rest into also-rans. On the contrary, my curiosity is often quickened by the arrival of a new recording, especially if the soloist is not a star name and…

Photo: Eric Rudd

Lebrecht Weekly | Anthony McGill: Brahms sonatas/American Stories (Cedille)

By Norman Lebrecht on 13 January 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

Brahms Sonatas: **** American Stories: *** The principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic can claim with some ease to be America’s finest. He has played for a decade at the Met, serenaded Barack Obama at his inauguration, commissioned screeds of new music for his instrument and is professor at Juilliard, actively seeking students from under-represented backgrounds. As for the music, he has few peers. In two simultaneous releases, I was keen to hear what he made of Brahms last pair of sonatas, written for clarinet (or viola) and piano. The pieces, while valedictory, constantly challenge players to colour them…

Weekly Lebrecht | César Franck: Symphony in d minor (Alpha-classics)

By Norman Lebrecht on 6 January 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

The bicentenary of Belgium’s greatest composer has just elapsed without any material change to his depressed reputation. When I was growing up, great conductors vied to perform Franck’s D minor Symphony. Its mounting climaxes were guaranteed crowd pleasers and there was no shortage of performers, either, for his Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra. Now, they gather dust. The D minor symphony is a late work. Franck was 66 at its Paris premiere in 1889, venerated as the organist of Sainte-Clotilde and professor of composition at the Conservatoire, where his students included Chausson and D’Indy. There was nothing sacramental or…

Lebrecht Weekly | Janacek, Brahms, Bartok: Violin sonatas (Alpha-Classics/Outhere)

By Norman Lebrecht on 9 December 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

Spot the odd man out here (the last two words can be read as a production credit). Janacek and Bartok occupied a tranche of east-central Europe, sharing a riff of off-beat rhythms and a penchant for quarter-tones, almost atonal. Brahms did none of these. He was a Hamburger by origin, inclination and diet. What he’s doing in this Slav-Baltic sandwich album is frankly unfathomable. The performers, Fazil Say and Patricia Koptachinskaya, are respectively Turkish and Moldavian, close enough to Janacek and Bartok. PatKop’s violin attack in the 1914 Janacek sonata is so edgy it’s almost off the cliff. Say throws…

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