Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Lebrecht Weekly | Jean Sibelius: Orchestral songs (LAWO)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 2 September 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Sibelius, like Mahler, stuck to what he knew. He wrote no opera and hardly any chamber music, just symphonies and songs. His concentration of means and expression is as intense in a two-minute song as it is in a forty-minute symphony. Unlike Mahler, Sibelius is sparing with his orchestration, sometimes leaving it to solo clarinet and lower strings. He uses Swedish texts, only rarely reverting to his national language, Finnish, which he spoke imperfectly. The Sibelius songs are seldom heard below the Baltic, which is a pity since they tell us more about him than yet another season-opening Finlandia. In…

James Ehnes (image from the James Ehnes website)

Lebrecht Weekly | Alban Berg: Violin concerto &c. (Chandos)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 26 August 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Violin

This is Alban Berg as you’ve never heard him before. The English conductor Sir Andrew Davis has spent lockdown time orchestrating two works that Berg never intended for orchestra. The piano sonata of 1907-08 was Berg’s first published work, written under the admonitory thumb of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg who was in the throes of embracing atonality. The Passacaglia of 1913 is another Berg stepping stone towards maturity. In Davis’s orchestration, the sonata score sounds like a missing suite from his second opera, Lulu, while the Passacaglia is steeped in its predecessor, Wozzeck. If I’d heard it in a blind…

Lebrecht Weekly | Prokofiev, Tcherepnin: The Bark of Yearning (Avi-music)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 19 August 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Western orchestras take a binary view of the Russian 20th century. Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich are good for business, the rest are box-office death. Like most iron rules, these categorisations are pointless and misleading. Prokofiev can be bad for audiences, very bad, when you leave him alone in a room with a piano. His Five Sarcasms, dated 1912-14, come as close to atonality as Schoenberg in a fish-shop tantrum, while Visions Fugitives of 1915-17 are way off the scale of anything you’d allow a Ukrainian refugee play on your prize Bechstein. Prokofiev can be the most annoying composer you never…

John Adams (image from the John Adams website)

Lebrecht Weekly | John Adams: Slonimsky’s Earbox (Alpha)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 12 August 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

When did John Adams become John Adams? Around 1995, according to his own narrative, when he broke with repetitive minimalism and found a more variegated expression. The turning point was an orchestral work called Slonimsky’s Earbox, written soon after the contentious opera The Death of Klinghoffer and paying homage to one of the quirkiest characters ever seen in a concert hall. Nicolas Slonimsky was a Russian-Jewish polymath who made himself useful to Serge Koussevitsky and Leonard Bernstein by re-barring complex scores that they could not beat unaided. The Rite of Spring, on their recordings, is taken from Slonimsky’s score. Among…

Lebrecht Weekly | John Cage: Four Walls (Fuga Libera)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 5 August 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

When John Cage came to Moscow in the summer of 1988 it was not so much a convergence of opposites as a validation of the prophecy of cultural deconstruction which the American iconoclast had long foretold. Cage made music by breaking it down, causing records to stick in a groove, telling performers to chance it, making silence instead of sound. The Soviet Union, in its final disintegration year, was the perfect place to preach his kooky doctrines. Cage met a young pianist, Alexei Lyubimov, who became an instant apostle. ‘We drank vodka and ate dandelions,’ Lyubimov recalls. He was transfixed…

Banner image from the Matangi Quartet website

Lebrecht Weekly | Matangi: Outcast (PIAS)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 29 July 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

I dithered for weeks over whether or not to review this release, for reasons that will soon become clear. In the course of my indecision I listened to it at least ten times, so much so that it became a signifier of the state of our world in the war-torn, climate-seared summer of 2022. It is now a candidate for record of the year. Matangi are a Dutch string quartet, enterprising in its choice of unheard and little-heard music. The album consists of works by Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov and Dmitri Shostakovich, none of whom can be considered obscure or,…

Kurt Weill

Lebrecht Weekly | Kurt Weill: 2nd Symphony, Violin Concerto (Somm)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 22 July 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Banned in Berlin and exiled in March 1933, Kurt Weill stayed for a while in Paris where he wrote a symphonic work to a commission from the Singer sewing machine heiress, Princesse de Polignac. The symphony was taken up by his fellow-exile Bruno Walter and performed three times in the Netherlands, but apparently nowhere else. It was not published until 1966 and remains an esoteric item, seldom performed or recorded. The present release by Jan van Steen and the Ulster Orchestra is by some distance the best I have heard, elegantly phrased and chock full of show tunes from the…

Capella Artemisia (image from the Capella Artemisia website)

Lebrecht Weekly | Isabella Leonarda – A portrait (Brilliant Classics)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 15 July 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

In the inexhaustible search for women in history, Isabella Leonarda (1620-1704) has emerged from the mists of Novara as the most prolific composer of the 17th century. Overshadowed by the likes of Allegri, Albinoni and Corelli, Leonarda was a Ursuline nun who dedicated each of her works to the Virgin Mary – as well as to some rich man or other who paid to have them printed. She entered the convent at age 16 and remained there until she died at 83, leaving more than 200 performable scores, mostly vocal and choral. The last, for voice and violin, appeared when…

Nico Muhly (image taken from the Nico Muhly website)

Lebrecht Weekly | Nico Muhly: Stranger (AVIE)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 8 July 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Covid has been cruel to rising composers. Two years out, with theatres shut and managements unwilling to commit to new work, is equivalent to having to start all over again. Many, lacking the fight, have fallen by the wayside. Nico Muhly, now 40, had his first opera, Two Boys, staged at English National Opera and the Met a decade ago. It was the first opera to engage with social media, taking place both on stage and on phone screens. Its successor Marnie, based on the Alfred Hitchcock film, was something of a narrative regression but the Met streamed it for…

Olivier Messiaen (left) with Prince Bernhard (right)

Lebrecht Weekly | Olivier Messiaen – Quartet for the end of time (OUR)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 1 July 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Neither the title of the work nor the circumstances of its creation offer much by way of levity. Messiaen was 31, a soldier in uniform, when France collapsed in May 1940 and he became a prisoner of war. The Germans sent him to a camp in Poland. The diet was ersatz coffee for breakfast, a slice of black bread with soup for lunch and nothing in the evening. Messiaen, ordered to strip naked on arrival, clung to his satchel of pocket scores – works by Berg, Debussy, Stravinsky and Bach. All feed ideas into the quartet he writes for available…

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly

Lebrecht Weekly | Jean Sibelius: Orchestral songs (LAWO)

Lebrecht Weekly | Alban Berg: Violin concerto &c. (Chandos)

Lebrecht Weekly | Prokofiev, Tcherepnin: The Bark of Yearning (Avi-music)

Lebrecht Weekly | John Adams: Slonimsky’s Earbox (Alpha)

Lebrecht Weekly | John Cage: Four Walls (Fuga Libera)

Lebrecht Weekly | Matangi: Outcast (PIAS)

Lebrecht Weekly | Kurt Weill: 2nd Symphony, Violin Concerto (Somm)

Lebrecht Weekly | Isabella Leonarda – A portrait (Brilliant Classics)

Lebrecht Weekly | Nico Muhly: Stranger (AVIE)

Lebrecht Weekly | Olivier Messiaen – Quartet for the end of time (OUR)

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