Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

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.…

Hans Werner Henze: Night pieces and arias (Naxos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 4 February 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

It’s about time Germans got to grips with their greatest modern composer. While Berlin plays reams of Rihn and Munich wallows in Orff, the life and works of Hans Werner Henze are considered too recent and controversial to be admitted to bourgeois concert halls. Of the nine symphonies – two of them masterpieces – none gets done by major state orchestras. We’re in 2022 and Henze has been dead for ten years. Surely it’s time for the Germans to get over their Henze issues. Raised in a Nazi family, Henze turned Communist and gay. In 1953 he left West Germany…

Nastasia Khrushcheva: Normal Music (Melodiya)

By Norman Lebrecht on 28 January 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

Neither the sleeve notes nor the internet tells us much about the composer of this hypnotic and vaguely disturbing album from the Russian state label. These are troubled times in Russia, the eve of war, and the music pretends at a bleak normality. Its composer is 34 years old, an associate professor at the Department of History of Foreign Music of the St Petersburg Conservatoire. Any family connection to the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev may, or may not, be incidental. I wonder what the old shoe-banger would have made of this music, most of it written for piano and…

Brahms: Clarinet sonatas (BIS), French clarinet music (Delphian)

By Norman Lebrecht on 21 January 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

**/**** January is the month when we all stop drinking, go vegan, return to the office and listen to clarinet music. At least, that’s the conclusion to be drawn from the CDs that have been dropping through my door. Three sonatas by Brahms? I knew two, but Michael Collins has adapted the 1886 violin sonata into a clarinet piece and, to no surprise, it doesn’t work. Collins is a superb player with a conductor’s ear for variegation and his pianist, Stephen Hough, has a composer’s sensitivity. But Brahms knew his way around the violin and was some years short of…

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly