Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

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…

Portrait of Ferdinand Ries

Lebrecht Weekly | Ferdinand Ries: Piano trio and sextets (Hyperion)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 24 June 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

While writing a book about Beethoven (to be published next year), I recoiled from many of the pupils, acolytes, secretaries, amanuenses, self-seeking musicians and all sorts of hangers-on who lived off their connection with the great man and published reminiscences of him, many of them invented. A singular exception was Ferdinand Ries, a young man from Beethoven’s home town who grew up in the Bonn court orchestra and shared some of the same teachers. Ries, so far as I can tell, never made up stories about Beethoven or made him out to be anything other than he was – a…

Ancienne photographie de Ralph Vaughan Williams

Lebrecht Weekly | Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphonies 7 & 9 (Hallé)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 17 June 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Oenologists tell me there is no obvious reason why some fine wines travel and others don’t. It’s the same with symphonic composers. Carl Nielsen will never catch on beyond the Baltic Sea, Bohuslav Martinu beyond Czechia and Ralph Vaughan Williams beyond Anglophiles. The 150th anniversary of his birth is being marked in his home country and practically nowhere else. Ask not the reason why: there is none. VW is, by any known measure, an outstandingly accomplished writer for symphony orchestra. Despite passing similarities to Sibelius and Ravel, his voice is unmistakably his own and his urgency can, if you succumb…

Itamar Zolman (image from the Itamar Zolman website)

Lebrecht Weekly | Erwin Schulhoff: Violin sonatas (Orfeo/FHR)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 10 June 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

Eighty years after his cruel death in a Nazi camp, the Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff is having something of a revival this month, with an opera staged in Prague and two sonatas coming out on record. Coming of age in the Roaring Twenties, Schulhoff soaked up every fleeting trend – jazz, serialism, ragtime, nightclubs – without losing touch with his core purpose. An embrace of Communism cost him supporters in Prague and, when the Germans marched in, landed him in a camp, where he died of tuberculosis, aged 48. A sonata for solo violin, written in 1927 and numbered opus…

Hans Winterberg: Orchestral works (Capriccio)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 3 June 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

Among thousands of composers who were banned and oppressed by the Nazis, the case of Hans Winterberg is seriously peculiar. A German-speaking Prague Jew, Winterberg fled after the war to Bavaria, where he received an icy welcome. He lived there in virtual oblivion until his death in 1991. In 2002, his adopted son Christoph Winterberg sold his catalogue of works to the Sudeten German Music Institute under the condition that it should not see light before 2031. The composer’s grandson Peter Kreitmeir challenged this ruling in court and, with the help of Arnold Schoenberg’s grandson, obtained judgement that it…

Reynaldo Hahn (1875-1947) compositeur francais d'origine venezuelienne photo 1898 Nadar --- Reynaldo Hahn (1875-1947) french (Venezuelan born) composer, photo by Nadar, 1898 (©PVDE/Bridgeman images/Leemage)

Lebrecht Weekly | Reynaldo Hahn: Poèmes & Valses (Hyperion)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 27 May 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

It is a crying shame that Hahn is remembered chiefly as Marcel Proust’s only known lover and not as a creative artist in his own right. The Proust liaison belonged to the 1890s. Hahn lived on to 1947, fighting the Germans in the First World War and hiding from them as a hunted Jew in the Second. He wrote a Merchant of Venice opera for Paris and a popular musical called Mozart. But his prime gift was for songs and piano miniatures. The ones collected here are altogether unfamiliar, some of them record debuts. A piece called Eros Hiding in…

Lebrecht Weekly | Henryk Mikolai Gorecki: Piano pieces (Accord)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 20 May 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

When an unknown Polish composer burst into the pop charts in 1992 with an ethereal third symphony, I arranged to meet him twice, in Brussels and London. Gorecki spoke only Polish and German, the latter with reluctance in light of his wartime memories. I got the impression of a stubborn man of strong character with an unshakeable faith in God, a hatred of Communism and a contempt for effete western fashions. Pierre Boulez had called his third symphony ‘merde’ and Gorecki was no less withering about him. Gorecki’s early works, however, were no less modern than Boulez. This luminous…

Lebrecht Weekly | Arvo Pärt, Poulenc, Stravinsky (BR Klassik)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 13 May 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Just how much we miss Mariss Jansons is manifest in this Munich concert of three sacred works. Jansons, who died in November 2019, aged 76, was not principally noted for religiosity or choral masterpieces, but his shaping of this triptych is so masterful that one can hardly imagine them presentled with greater coherence or sincerity. Arvo Pärt’s Berlin Mass, composed in 1990 for the city’s reunification, is a five part setting of the Roman Catholic service in an idiom that is, at once, respectful of traditional sonority and, at the same time, pushing gently to a minimal modernism that is…

Lebrecht’s Weekly | Allan Pettersson: Barefoot songs (BIS)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 6 May 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

Sweden, unlike its neighbours, has no great composer. Norway has Grieg, Finland Sibelius, Denmark Nielsen and Sweden – blank. The one composer who might have filled the role was treated with such disdain by polite society that he lived all his life in grim poverty, never able to afford a piano. Allan Pettersson died aged 68 in 1980, leaving 17 symphonies that are still being slowly discovered. Although the government granted him a lifelong pension in his 50s, the Stockholm Philharmonic banned his music ‘for all time’ after a dispute over touring. Pettersson was working-class and dirt-poor. Sweden did not…

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly

Lebrecht Weekly | Nico Muhly: Stranger (AVIE)

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

Lebrecht Weekly | Ferdinand Ries: Piano trio and sextets (Hyperion)

Lebrecht Weekly | Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphonies 7 & 9 (Hallé)

Lebrecht Weekly | Erwin Schulhoff: Violin sonatas (Orfeo/FHR)

Hans Winterberg: Orchestral works (Capriccio)

Lebrecht Weekly | Reynaldo Hahn: Poèmes & Valses (Hyperion)

Lebrecht Weekly | Henryk Mikolai Gorecki: Piano pieces (Accord)

Lebrecht Weekly | Arvo Pärt, Poulenc, Stravinsky (BR Klassik)

Lebrecht’s Weekly | Allan Pettersson: Barefoot songs (BIS)

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