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Fauré

Lebrecht Weekly | Gabriel Fauré: Violin concerto (Naxos), Complete piano works (Calliope)

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By on Lebrecht Weekly

Fauré is the French composer the world finds hardest to dislike. While Debussy means custard to some tastes and Ravel an acute form of mustard, their senior colleague wore a bushy white moustache and wrote Claire de Lune. What’s not to like? Fauré’s reputation has barely changed since his death, 100 years ago this week. Fauré is admired as a supplier of salon songs to the Proustian set, as composer of the most-imitated Requiem, as organist of the elite Madeleine church in Paris and as reforming director of the crusty old Conservatoire. Take away the French accent and he could…

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Franz Schmidt

Lebrecht Weekly | Franz Schmidt: 4 symphonies (Naxos)

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By on Lebrecht Weekly

Into every musical life, a little Schmidt must fall. I cannot count the conductors who have tried to persuade me that the Viennese cellist belongs among the ranks of great composers, or the number of hours I have devoted to attempts to understand their devotion. In vain. Once I’m over admiring the brilliance of the scoring, what then? Schmidt played in the Vienna Opera orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic under Gustav Mahler but fell out with his brother-in-law, concertmaster Arnold Rosé, and left on bad terms. He became a conservatory teacher and, eventually, principal of the city’s music academy, spending…

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York Bowen, Willam Walton

Lebrecht Weekly | Diyang Mei plays Bowen and Walton’s Viola Concertos Like Heifetz on Roller-Skates

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Strings

It is nothing short of a scandal that not one concerto for viola and orchestra has broken into the standard concerthall repertoire. There are at least fifty violin concertos that get regularly played and half a dozen for cello and orchestra. Yet, among a plethora of viola concertos by good composers – from Arnold to Bartok, Schnittke to John Williams – not one gets as much as a half-chance for public attention. In any other field, this would be considered illegal discrimination. The present release is a dazzling ear-opener. York Bowen, slightly younger than Ralph Vaughan Williams, was a shy chap…

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Doric String Quartet.
Photo: George Garnier

Lebrecht Weekly | Doric String Quartet Strikes a Perfect Balance Between Beethoven’s Early Quartets and Later Milestones

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Chamber Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Strings

The fashion these days is to remix the 16 Beethoven quartets, selecting one from each period – early, middle and late – in concert and record cycles. It doesn’t always work, but the latest release from the Doric String Quartet, a mid-career UK ensemble, strikes a perfect balance between two of the opus 18 quartets and major milestones from later on. Opus 18/2 in G major is one of Beethoven’s invitations to the dance, a proposition more in the mind than on the floor. Opus 18/5 in A is all in the mind, one of his most self-contemplative works, so…

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Lebrecht Weekly. Balagan. Noa Wildschut, violin Pablo Barragán, clarinet Frank Dupree, piano Anton Spronk, cello
Photo: Anton Spronk

Lebrecht Weekly | Balagan is A Voyage of Discovery in Open-Mouthed Wonderment (Accentus Music)

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By on Lebrecht Weekly

There’s more content in this compilation than a reviewer has a right to expect. Coming off the back of a pointless set of Shostakovich symphonies, this chunky bar of trios for clarinet, violin and piano just keeps delivering hi-energy nutrients. First up is a four-part klezmer romp by Paul Schoenfield, an American composer who moved to Jerusalem and died there five months ago. Schoenfield took a hybrid genre of Hasidic celebration modes and moulded it into an eclectic set of wild dance moves, irresistible at best. Claude Vivier’s six-minute piece for violin and clarinet is the same in reverse: an…

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Klaus Mäkelä. Oslo Philharmonic. Decca.

Lebrecht Weekly | Mäkelä offers little in Shostakovich beyond an energetic superficiality

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By on Lebrecht Weekly

When the British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer said this week that he listened to Shostakovich if he was having a hard time, I wondered if he’d been tuned in to the same set as me. There are many things in life that make me reach for Shostakovich and I am rarely let down by performance – certainly never as exasperated as I was by these. The good things first. The Oslo Philharmonic is a first-rate orchestra with brilliant woodwind soloists and a cracking work ethic. The Norwegian recording engineers are pretty good, too, and the digital editors have cleaned…

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Lebrecht Weekly | Berg, Schoenberg, Webern: Piano works (Warner)

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By on Lebrecht Weekly

Music of the Second Vienna School was condemned as noise on first reception. How deaf is that? The greatest asset of these revolutionary works is their quietude. The arresting opus 1 sonata of Alban Berg achieves a 12-minute span of introspection without an obvious atonal tantrum. Berg was the most lyrical of the Schoenberg crowd but the softness of this sonata is its winning virtue, never more so than in the hands of the Vienna-based Russian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaya. Beauty becomes even more wondrous when it is literally off the scale. A Mozartian at heart, Leonskaya has more trouble at locating…

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Augusta Holmès
Augusta Holmès par L. Taponier (circa.1880). Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Lebrecht Weekly | Augusta Holmès: Symphonic poems (CPO)

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By on Lebrecht Weekly

The Times of London has shrunk its weekly classical record review to an inch and a half. Other papers ignore recordings altogether, except in Christmas roundups. The classical sector is dying for want of attention and labels are laying off expert staff. All the more reason for online publications like this to maintain continuous coverage of a vital part of the musical economy. My pick of the week may appear esoteric. It comes from Ludwigshafen in western Germany and is performed by the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz with its British chief conductor Michael Francis. The composer is an Irishwoman who lived in…

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dvorak
Photo: Public Domain

Lebrecht Weekly | Dvorak’s Symphonies by Two Orchestras (Warner/Pentatone)

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By on Lebrecht Weekly

Comparisons in music are unfair. An ephemeral art cannot be measured and pinned, like a butterfly, to the page without risking mortal damage. Nevertheless, human beings possess critical faculties and spend much of their lives assessing whether A is preferable to B. Not necessarily better, just more apt to present circumstances. I offer these caveats because I have been listening to Dvorak orchestral works from very different sources. Nathalie Stutzmann with the Atlanta Symphony present the American Suite, opus 98, together with the 9th symphony, From the New World. The project marks Stutzmann’s debut on record as a symphonic conductor…

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Lebrecht Weekly | Roberto Gerhard’s Sheer Eclecticism with Don Quixote &c. (Chandos)

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By on Lebrecht Weekly

Don’t try to pin an adjective to Gerhard: he transcends them all. The son of a Swiss-German father and an Alsatian mother, born in Spanish Catalonia, he studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin, organised the 1936 seminal modernist festival in Barcelona and left a couple of years later to spend the rest of his life in English exile. None of these nationalities was his, any more than his modernism was dogmatic. The ballet scores on this scintillating album are rooted in Iberian folklore but the language is distinctly, inimitably Gerhard. Nobody knew what to make of him and,…

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