Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

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

Lebrecht Weekly | Augusta Holmès: Symphonic poems (CPO)

By Norman Lebrecht on 13 September 2024 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…

Photo: Public Domain

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

By Norman Lebrecht on 6 September 2024 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…

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

By Norman Lebrecht on 30 August 2024 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,…

Lebrecht Weekly | War poems (Somm)

By Norman Lebrecht on 23 August 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

I am generally resistant to albums that impose an external theme on unrelated pieces of music from different places and times. In this case, it is eastern Europe, 1814 to 2024.

Gergely Madaras

Lebrecht Weekly | Liszt: Faust Symphony (Bis)

By Norman Lebrecht on 16 August 2024 La Scena Online, Lebrecht Weekly

Franz Liszt has been cancelled by the world’s orchestras, probably for something he said on social media. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a Liszt orchestral work on a concert programme, other than the two piano concertos?

Quartetto Adorno

Lebrecht Weekly | Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Complete string quartets (Naxos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 9 August 2024 La Scena Online, Lebrecht Weekly

If it’s summer music you’re after, it doesn’t come much sunnier than this. Castelnuovo-Tedesco – it translates as Newcastle German – was a Florentine who traced his lineage to the Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492.

Lebrecht Weekly | Did Bartok Play Klezmer?

By Norman Lebrecht on 2 August 2024 La Scena Online, Lebrecht Weekly

Did Bartok play klezmer? The Hungarian composer enthused over many authentic forms of folk music and spent his summers tracking them down across the Balkans, the Iberian peninsula and north Africa.

Lebrecht Weekly | Klaus Tennstedt: The Radio Broadcasts

By Norman Lebrecht on 26 July 2024 La Scena Online, Lebrecht Weekly

Klaus Tennstedt fled East Germany in his mid-40s in 1971 and hung around for half a decade before anyone noticed he was a truly remarkable conductor – ‘last of the old Kapellmeisters,’ as Herbert von Karajan drily put it.

Romanian pianist Alexandra Dariescu, Photo by Nick Rutter

Lebrecht Weekly | A Tale of Two Piano Concertos

By Norman Lebrecht on 19 July 2024 La Scena Online, Lebrecht Weekly

In the early days of long-playing records, a man in a suit at EMI realised that the Grieg and Schumann concertos were half an hour long, in the same key of A minor and would fit on either side of a plate of shellac without requiring fillers.

Lebrecht Weekly | Yundi Gives Mozart a Makeover

By Norman Lebrecht on 12 July 2024 Classical Music, La Scena Online, Lebrecht Weekly

Unlike elements in Beijing who had him arrested on phony morals charges, I have never wavered in my belief that Yundi Li is the most interesting and original pianist to emerge from China.

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