Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Benjamin Baker and Daniel Lebhardt

The Lebrecht Weekly: ‘1942’ (Delphian Records)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 23 April 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

In the year 1942, while millions were being slaughtered on battlefields and in German extermination camps, three composers in different countries wrote sonatas for violin and piano. Nothing connects these works to contemporary events or to each other. They are acts of escapism by expert musicians who chose not to engage with the worst time in human history. Aaron Copland’s is an act of self-denial, using folksy tunes that he picked up on Hollywood film sets, snatches of an organic America that never was. Upon finishing the score he heard that a pilot friend, Harry Dunham, had been shot down…

Sir Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra

The Lebrecht Weekly: Vaughan Williams – Symphonies 4 and 6 (LSO Live)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 16 April 2021 Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Recordings of Ralph Vaughan Williams fall into the middle of the Atlantic. English interpreters – Boult, Barbirolli, Hickox, Handley and most recently Andrew Manze – veer towards understatement, allowing the power of the music to emerge by stealth. Americans – Stokowski, Previn, Slatkin – are more energetic and explicit. These may be broad generalisations, but they reflect just how narrow the arteries are of Vaughan Williams reception. No star non-UK or US conductor has ever taken up his symphonies. The only European champion on record is the Dutchman Kees Bakels on Naxos. Where do these concerts by the London Symphony…

Les vents français

The Lebrecht Weekly: Hindemith – Wind sonatas (Warner)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 9 April 2021 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

When did you last hear Hindemith? Seriously, when did you last consciously select a piece of music by Paul Hindemith above all other composers living or dead, or go to a concert with one of his works? In his time (1895-1963), Hindemith was so prominent a modernist that the Nazis kicked him out of the country and so prolific a composer that, hearing of King George V’s death while in a BBC studio, before leaving the building he dashed off a musical lament to be performed that same day. It’s a bit of a mystery why Hindemith has vanished so…

The Lebrecht Weekly: Hilary Hahn – Paris (Deutsche Grammophon)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 2 April 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

When you hear the term ‘multiple issues’ in 2021 it usually signifies that Covid is not the only cause of death. This album has multiple issues. On the positive side, it marks the return of the US violinist Hilary Hahn after a year’s sabbatical that was doubled in length by pandemic lockdown. Hahn, 41, is one of few concert violinists to enjoy broad media recognition and she is much needed on our empty concert stages. Her playing has lost none of her edgy assertiveness or her eye for a selling angle. The album, which contains works by a Finn, a…

The Lebrecht Weekly: Im Abendrot (DG)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 26 March 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

A cultured Russian friend was telling me the other day she cannot bear to listen to Lieder – ‘all that shrieking and, worse, in German’. It’s not easy to find an antidote to such national prejudices, but one landed on my doorstep the very next day. The baritone Matthias Goerne, with a voice like brushed velvet and diction clearer than iced vodka, is the perfect riposte to high-pitched complainants, the more so when he’s singing Lieder that are usually in the soprano’s locker. His programme here consists of Wagner’s Wedendonck Lieder, an assortment from Hans Pfitzner and five songs of Richard…

The Lebrecht Weekly: Krzysztof Penderecki – Credo (Hänssler Classics)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 19 March 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

The Polish composer died a year ago next week and still awaits a funeral. The constraints of Covid and the demands of family and friends for a state occasion have led to delays and deferrals, a sad coda to a life of service to God and man. Although acclaimed as a modernist, Penderecki never supped easily with the atheistic avant-garde and always lit up when opportunity arose to compose a work that celebrated his Roman Catholic faith. The Credo, co-commissioned in 1996 by Stuttgart’s Bach academy and the Oregon Bach Festival, is infused with a sense of liberation, a release…

Peter Jablonski

The Lebrecht Weekly: Alexey Stanchinsky – Piano works (Ondine)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 12 March 2021 Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

In the evolution of Russian music, Stanchinsky is the great might-have-been. A student of Sergey Taneyev and Alexander Grechaninov, he was introduced to Tolstoy as the next Russian genius, only for his mental health to collapse in the midst of a double family crisis. After father died in 1910 when Stanchinsky was 21, his mother refused to let him marry his pregnant lover, daughter of the estate manager. Suffering depression and hallucinations, Stanchnsky was taken around all the best nerve doctors in Russia and developed a habit of burning any new works he set on paper. In March 1914 he…

The Lebrecht Weekly: Friedrich Gulda – Symphony in G (SWR Musik)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 5 March 2021 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

The Viennese pianist Friedrich Gulda was a commanding interpreter of Mozart and Beethoven in the 1950s and 1960s. Had he stuck to the classics and modified his more eccentric behaviours, he might have filled the space in the record catalogues that was soon occupied by Alfred Brendel. Gulda, however, was a man of many parts. After giving his Carnegie Hall debut, he went off to play the Newport Jazz Festival. He wore a Turkish kepi on stage, sometimes otherwise naked. His interest in jazz was non-pecuniary and all-consuming. He organized an international competition for modern jazz composers and set up…

Dmitry Vasiliev and the Siberian Symphony Orchestra

The Lebrecht Weekly: Alexander Tchaikovsky – Quarantine Symphony (Toccata Classics)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 26 February 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

I had serious qualms about listening to, let alone reviewing, a symphony that purports to describe our present situation. We all know by now the effects this pandemic has wrought on our lives, and we also remember the lives it has taken. Music has limitations in conveying such losses in abstract form. Mostly, one feels, it shouldn’t try. But if you are a composer called Tchaikovsky it will take more than a public health crisis to stop you relating to an historic event, be it Napoleon or cholera. Alexander Tchaikovsky, 75 years old this month, is a nephew of the…

British pianist Danny Driver

The Lebrecht Weekly: György Ligeti – The 18 Etudes (Hyperion)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 19 February 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

Among composers of the post-War avant-garde, Ligeti is now the most performed. You can go from one end of the year to the other without hearing a note of Boulez or Stockhausen, but Ligeti – who died sooner than the other two, in 2006 – is somehow freshest in mind. His opera Le grand macabre is practically made-for-TV with its post-modern anarchic comedy and his violin concerto is a back-to Bartok contemporary classic. These piano studies, written in the 1980s and 1990s when Ligeti had fallen out with the didactic avant-gardists, are fiendishly difficult to play and irresistibly easy on…

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly

The Lebrecht Weekly: ‘1942’ (Delphian Records)

The Lebrecht Weekly: Vaughan Williams – Symphonies 4 and 6 (LSO Live)

The Lebrecht Weekly: Hindemith – Wind sonatas (Warner)

The Lebrecht Weekly: Hilary Hahn – Paris (Deutsche Grammophon)

The Lebrecht Weekly: Im Abendrot (DG)

The Lebrecht Weekly: Krzysztof Penderecki – Credo (Hänssler Classics)

The Lebrecht Weekly: Alexey Stanchinsky – Piano works (Ondine)

The Lebrecht Weekly: Friedrich Gulda – Symphony in G (SWR Musik)

The Lebrecht Weekly: Alexander Tchaikovsky – Quarantine Symphony (Toccata Classics)

The Lebrecht Weekly: György Ligeti – The 18 Etudes (Hyperion)

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