Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Lebrecht Weekly | David Oistrakh: The Warner Remastered Edition (58CDs, 3DVDs)

By Norman Lebrecht on 6 December 2024 Lebrecht Weekly, Violin

Where has my week gone? Much of it was spent plundering a coffin of one of the most captivating violinists that ever lived. David Oistrakh, Odessa born (thus Ukrainian-rather than Russian-Jewish), set the tone for violin playing in the Soviet era. Not just in his own performances but in those of his Moscow students who included Oleg Kagan, Gidon Kremer, Lydia Mordkovich, Nina Belina, Stoika Milanova, Rimma Sushanskaya and many more, not to mention his own distinguished son, Igor. Maintaining a distinctive individualism in an authoritarian state, he taught young musicians to find their own path to the variable meanings…

Lebrecht Weekly | Kurt Weill: Symphonies, Seven Deadly Sins (DG)

By Norman Lebrecht on 29 November 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

The sound of Berlin in the Weimar years is defined by Kurt Weill. More than any other composer, his music for the Bertolt Brecht shows conjured the jittery, reckless, hopeful, resigned and inventive carousel of a society in perpetual crisis. Weill, son of a Jewish cantor from provincial Dessau, cracked the capital’s musical codes and perpetuated them in songs for his cracked-voice wife, Lotte Lenya. There were also two symphonies, but we don’t talk about those, do we? The first was shunned in 1921 by Weill’s teacher Ferruccio Busoni as excessively expressionist. It is also indebted to Gustav Mahler, especially…

Kremerata Baltica. Photo: Angie Kremer

Lebrecht Weekly | Lebrecht Album of the Year for 2024

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 November 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

2024 has been a flat year for major labels and an unsettled one for minors. Four independent outfits sold out – Hyperion to Universal, Bis to Apple, Chandos to Klaus Heymann, Divine Art to Rosebrook – the biggest shakeout in decades, leaving us wondering how much of their stubborn individuality might survive in the decade ahead. In choosing the album of the year, I look for projects that define the era and will pass the test of time. Janine Jansens’ recording of the Sibelius and first Prokofiev concertos on Decca is one that bears comparison with the legends. Yundi Li’s…

Lebrecht Weekly | Hanni Liang Plays Ethel Smyth With Blazed Conviction

By Norman Lebrecht on 15 November 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

Ethel Smyth was a middle-class butch lesbian from an English military family who went to jail for the Suffragette cause and was seen conducting fellow-inmates at Holloway Prison with a toothbrush. That, in sum, is the impression given by Thomas Beecham and other wary admirers. Virginia Woolf once said that being loved by Ethel was ‘like being caught by a giant crab’. The composer’s daunting physicality occluded whatever merit there was in her music, which faded out with her death in 1944. Glyndebourne’s recent revival of her opera The Wreckers has been restorative and several German opera houses have taken it up.…

Lebrecht Weekly | Miklos Rozsa’s Violin Concerto with LSO Live

By Norman Lebrecht on 8 November 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

I had tea once with Miklos Rozsa in a friend’s flat, around the corner from Abbey Road. It was my first encounter with a Golden Age Hollywood composer and I had far more curiosity than he was prepared to satisfy. He wanted to talk about his concert works, not movie scores. I kept reverting to The Jungle Book and Julius Caesar while he nudged me towards his neglected concertos. The Violin Concerto, written for Jascha Heifetz in 1953, took three years to reach the stage while the soloist fiddled around with the score. Heifetz had been savaged by critics for…

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

By Norman Lebrecht on 1 November 2024 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…

Lebrecht Weekly | Franz Schmidt: 4 symphonies (Naxos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 25 October 2024 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…

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

By Norman Lebrecht on 18 October 2024 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…

Photo: George Garnier

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

By Norman Lebrecht on 11 October 2024 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…

Photo: Anton Spronk

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

By Norman Lebrecht on 4 October 2024 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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