Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

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…

Renaud Capuçon: Un violon à Paris (Warner Classics)

By Norman Lebrecht on 19 November 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

At the start of the first Covid lockdown in March 2020, the violinist Renaud Capucon asked his son Elliott to film a short Dvorak piece he was playing on a tablet. What arose from this moment was a ritual in which, for 56 days, Capucon would play each morning with the pianist Guillaume Bellom and post the results online. ‘It would give me a goal every morning, at a time when one could easily come adrift,’ he says. Twenty-two of those tracks have now been released on record, at the very moment that parts of Europe are heading back into…

Paul Hindemith: Mathis symphony (Naxos), Clarinet concerto (Orfeo)

By Norman Lebrecht on 12 November 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

****/*** Hindemith is a house without a door. The immensity of his output – 11 operas, 5 ballets, a dozen concertos, countless works for orchestra, lots of chamber music – is not just daunting but superficially impenetrable. The consistency is high and the differentiation difficult. A German who fought in the First War and was exiled by Hitler, Hindemith concerned himself with performance high and low, writing for major stages and domestic living rooms. When asked ‘which Hindemith should I try first?’ I’m lost for an answer. The American conductor Marin Alsop is embracing Hindemith with great enthusiasm with her…

London Nights (Capriccio)

By Norman Lebrecht on 5 November 2021 Lebrecht Weekly, Newswire

In my 20s, on a spare afternoon, I would stroll down the Thames from Westminster to the City marvelling at how little had changed in the essential topography since the days of Shakespeare and Pepys. Yesterday, I had cause to wander through Leadenhall and Lombard and was struck at how little I recognised. Glass and steel skyscrapers have created a humanoid alienation, an impermeable wall between eternal London and the 21st century version. I felt a similar regret listening to Franziska Lee’s album of Londonoid piano pieces, intelligent and well played though it is. Lee, a German-trained Korean, plays Michael…

Photo: Mark Pillai

Emily D’Angelo: Enargeia (DG)

By Norman Lebrecht on 29 October 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

Most debut vocal albums consist of familiar arias sung in much the same way as all the big divas and stuffed with agent-approved hype. Not this one. I have never heard any of the songs on this Canadian mezzo’s first outing and know no more about her except that I tipped her for stardom six years ago and now discover that my first impression was a woeful underestimate of her tremendous promise. O, Canada! The songs first. They are all by women – Missy Mazzoli, Sarah Kirkland Snider and Hildur Guðnadóttir, with two modern arrangements of medieval devotions by the…

Shani Diluka: The Proust Album (Warner)

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 October 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

Every now and then a record arrives that I have been waiting for all my life. As any Marcel Proust reader knows, the author’s search for lost time involves a tremendous amount of musical reminiscence and quotation, drawn from the salons of fin-de-siècle Paris. There must be a record of them, I used to think. There is now. Expect no masterpieces in this album. Although Proust once attended eleven consecutive performances of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, his musical tastes were as trivial as the idle conversations he so languidly eavesdropped. The album opens with a piano concerto in E by…

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly