Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

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…

Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Chamber symphonies 2&4, chamber music (Naxos/Evil Penguin Classic)

By Norman Lebrecht on 14 January 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

At the turn of the century there was hardly any Weinberg to be found on record, except on scratchy old Soviet LPs. Two decades on, there is so much Weinberg about it is hard to advise a new listener where to begin. *****/**** Weinberg is one of those composers – like Martinu and Milhaud, for instance – who kept on writing, with or without commission, carrying on even when publishers refused to put out any more. Towards the end of his life, with 26 symphonies lying virtually unperformed, he wrote chamber symphonies and string quartets in the hope that smaller…

Album of the Year 2021

By Norman Lebrecht on 17 December 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

Choosing an album of the year is never easy. In a pandemic period of alternating isolation and emergence, there are additional pressures and distortions. A performance that overwhelms one week can seem ephemeral the next. Marketing hype melts like the snows of yesteryear. An eye-catching cover offers nothing to the ear. That said, 2021 has yielded more memorable albums than I can count on the fingers of two hands. So I drew up a longlist to get some perspective. 1 Anna Clyne’s Mythologies… an amiable walk into a wonderfully interesting composer (Avie). 2 Vasily Petrenko’s Miaskovsky and Prokofiev – for those who don’t…

Ferrucio Busoni: Elegies (Chandos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 10 December 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

Gustav Mahler, who disliked flashy soloists, used to say that his mood picked up if he saw Busoni’s name on the programme. The Italian-Austrian, half-Jewish piano virtuoso and ambitious opera composer was a voracious intellectual and bibliomane who could talk philosophy all night long, studding his conversation (like his music) with jokes. Mahler liked him so much that he conducted the premiere of his orchestral Berceuse in New York in the last concert he ever gave. This recital by the British pianist Peter Donohoe is a perfect pick-me-up for Covid gloom. Starting with the Bach-Busoni Toccata in C major –…

Photo: Eytan Pessen

Hans Werner Henze: The Sea Betrayed (Capriccio)

By Norman Lebrecht on 3 December 2021 Lebrecht Weekly, Newswire

There is an unwritten law in music that composers are left unperformed for ten years after they die. The muting is certainly true of Henze, who died in 2012 and has hardly been heard since. A Vienna Opera staging of his 1990 opera, based on Yukio Mishima’s powerful novel, The Sailor who fell from grace with sea, was intended to break the silence last year, only to be disrupted by Covid-19 closure. Considerable revision and imagination had gone into the Vienna production as the opera had flopped at its 1990 Berlin premiere. Henze and Mishima had much in common, both…

Brahms 4th symphony, MacMillan Larghetto for orchestra (Reference Recordings)

By Norman Lebrecht on 26 November 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

Ever since Samuel Barber’s Adagio and Gustav Mahler’s Adagietto became the standard works of public mourning and consolation, the first in the 1940s, the second in the 1970s, the search has been on for an alternative orchestral offering of sombre yet hopeful contemplation. When the Pittsburgh Symphony commissioned the Scottish composer James MacMIllan to mark the tenth anniversary of its Austrian music director, Manfred Honeck, his thoughts turned inward to their shared Roman Catholic faith. The Larghetto, based on MacMillan’s choral setting of Psalm 51, moves from a Miserere starting point to something altogether more encouraging, an organic optimism that transcends…

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