Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Lebrecht Weekly | British piano concertos (Lyrita); British music for strings #3 (CPO)

By Norman Lebrecht on 15 April 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

Lyrita: **** CPO: *** A Times obituary this week for Joseph Horovitz reckons that he could not decide if he was a composer of serious or light music. The same could be said of most of his contemporaries. An unexpected album of mid-century piano concertos delivers a prawn cocktail of exceptionally competent music without much by way of intellectual nutrients. The film composer John Addison wrote a jolly Wellington Suite for his old public school. Arthur Benjamin’s Concertino is a British Rhapsody in Blue – and rather good, too, as is Elizabeth Maconchy’s, pitched in a Hindemith or Martinu mode.…

Lebrecht Weekly | Rachmaninov: Sonata #1, Moments musicaux (Hyperion)

By Norman Lebrecht on 8 April 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

Why, people have been asking for about 120 years, is Rachmaninov so popular? The music is morbid to miserable, the melodies are unhummable and mere finger virtuosity does not explain the infallible and inexhaustible attraction. Rachmaninov remains a frontline bestseller. What does he have that Scriabin, say, lacks? We ask the questions (as they say in war films); don’t look for instant answers. But a new release by the introspective Scottish pianist Steven Osborne has set me thinking hard about the hidden irresistibility of the first piano sonata and the shameless populism of the Moments Musicaux. The sonata, dated…

Lebrecht Weekly | Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Cello works (Evil Penguin), Piano sonatas 1-3 (Polskie Radio)

By Norman Lebrecht on 1 April 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

Evil Penguin: ***** Polskie Radio: **** When I first came across Weinberg 30 years ago, he was listed as Vainberg in western dictionary and the only music one could hear was on grainy Soviet Melodiya. These days, you’ll find him on major labels in the most impressive orchestral sound, if not always the most penetrative interpretation. When people ask me, ‘where do I start with Weinberg?’, I’ve had no easy answer – until now. Weinberg’s first three piano sonatas were written soon after his escape into Russia from German-occupied Warsaw. I find them altogether fascinating – a ragbag of reminscences of…

Lebrecht Weekly: Metamorphosen (Chandos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 25 March 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

In mid-March 1945 Richard Strauss set about writing a suite for string orchestra that would reflect his feelings at the surrounding devastation. The eighty year-old composer had seen his home town Munich bombed to ruins, but he was comfortably situated in Alpine Garmisch and at no immediate personal risk. His suite, Metamorphosen, was bitter-sweet: a reflection on his country’s defeat and his own early complicity with its fallen Nazi regime. The music of Metamorphosenis usually performed as lament. Here, John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London reinterpret it chillingly as elegy – an old man looking back not in anger…

Lebrecht weekly: Ligeti and Kodaly: Lux Aeterna (OUR Recordings)

By Norman Lebrecht on 18 March 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

One should never let too much time pass without hearing some Ligeti. The Hungarian has such an ethereal turn of ear that any chorus he writes becomes instantly disembodied, the human voices floating like butterflies at the edge of consciousness. He is best known for Lux Aeterna, which Stanley Kubrick purloined for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It receives an exemplary liftoff here from the Danish National Vocal Ensemble (conductor Marcus Creed), opening up uncharted worlds of imagination. Other Ligeti songs, some folk-based others atonal are delivered with comparable immersion in a soundworld like no other. The fillers on…

Lebrecht Weekly: Harrison Birtwistle: Chamber works (BIS)

By Norman Lebrecht on 11 March 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

Into every musical life, a little Birtwistle must fall. Do not read anything pejorative into that statement. I have been smitten by the British composer’s major works for half my life and if some of them can test one’s patience on first hearing they usually deliver rewards on repetition. Birtwistle is an acquired taste. He works hard at complex textures and does not readily produce long lyrical lines. He is a one-off, a loner, an original, a man on an unmarked path in an untrodden field. Truth to tell, I was a little deterred by a full-length compilation album of…

Lebrecht Weekly: Schulhoff, Popov: String quartets (QBT)

By Norman Lebrecht on 4 March 2022 Lebrecht Weekly, Newswire

Nothing navigates the edge of tension more graphically than a string quartet. Two works by composers lost in the political mists of eastern Europe deliver a profound resonance amidst the horrors of Russia’s latest outrage in Ukraine. Erwin Schulhoff was a committed Communist who could not get a hearing in 1920s Germany and returned to his home town Prague, working as a pianist at state radio and writing pieces that are riven with echoes of jazz, ballroom dancing and melancholy. When the Nazis marched in he was shunted off to a concentration camp, where he died in 1942, at the…

Joyce DiDonato: Eden (Erato); Asmik Grigorian: Rachmaninov (Alpha)

By Norman Lebrecht on 25 February 2022 Art Song, Lebrecht Weekly

DiDonato, Rating: 4 stars Grigorian, Rating: 5 stars The American mezzo-soprano is touring a programme of works that are designed to reconnect humanity to nature. On this evidence, her voice has darkened in the COVID absence, acquiring a warming reassurance and companionable presence. This is singing as a form of mildly polemical conversation, from her to us. Her selection, accompanied by Il Pomo D’Oro ensemble with Maxim Emelyanchev, is colourfully varied, from a Baroque aria by Marini to an aubade by the film composer Rachel Portman. I am slightly confused by the presence of Mahler and Wagner but…

Grazyna Bacewicz: Piano works (Ondine)

By Norman Lebrecht on 18 February 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

Every time I relisten to Bacewicz, I wonder whether prejudice does not have something to do with her lack of exposure. Her male colleague were always careful to praise her. But Lutoslawski, when he taks of ‘her integrity, honesty, compassion and her willingness to share and sacrifice for others’, is a man describing female qualities not a composer assessing a co-equal. They elected Bacewicz vice-president of the Polish Composers’ Union, but she didn’t get much glory. On a trip to Armenia in January 1969 she caught the flu, took too many antibiotics to keep up with her schedule and died,…

Alexander Scriabin: Mazurkas (Hyperion)

By Norman Lebrecht on 11 February 2022 Lebrecht Weekly, Newswire

No-one ever built a career on Scriabin. The Russian composer is altogether too quirky, too much a self-declared outsider, to draw a mainstream following. Lion of the piano raided his lesser pieces for encores but never played a Scriabin concerto or a full recital. Vladimir Horowitz, who played for the composer as a ten year-old boy, is a rare devotee who made a Scriabin D# minor Etude his Carnegie Hall calling-card. All the more reason to applaud the young Russian virtuoso Andrey Gugnin for inveting in an album of Mazurkas, a Polish national dish that demonstrates Scriabin’s attachment to Chopin.…

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