Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Lebrecht Weekly: Good Night! (Erato)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 1 January 2021 Lebrecht Weekly, Piano, Romantic

Musical lullabies can quickly outlast their welcome. Everybody’s had the Brahms Wiegenlied sung to them at some point in infancy and many have experienced the sleepy time duet in Hansel and Gretel, the one they sing just before the witch becomes their nightmare. But one hearing is usually all I can bear of these bonbons. The beauty of this compilation by the French pianist Bertrand Chamayou is that it leads the ear down unexpected paths – some overgrown like Janacek’s crystalline opener, others unexpected, neglected or altogether unknown. Two etudes by Sergei Liapunov are drops of perfect chamomile. A dollop…

Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 5th symphony and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Hyperion)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 24 December 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

At the midpoint of the Second World War, our parents looked to two composers for symphonies of hope and vision. Such was the excitement attending the 7th symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich that Arturo Toscanini and Leopold Stokowski almost went to war themselves for the right to conduct the American premiere (Toscanini won). There was less fuss abroad over Vaughan Williams’s 5th, but in London it was hailed as oracular – a statement by a great artist on the spirit of his nation and its depth of confidence. The world premiere, conducted by the composer on June 24, 1943, was roared to the…

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Transatlantic (Orchid)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 18 December 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Winston Churchill’s famous witticism that Britain and America are divided by a common language is equally true of their musical output. In late-romantic repertoire, the accent on either side is so strong that a listener could never mistake Elgar for Barber, let alone Britten for Bernstein. Much of the appeal of this Covid-era recital by violinist Callum Smart and pianist Richard Uttley lies in the effort they invest to find common ground. Elgar’s violin sonata, written in the last summer of the First World War, is in deep denial of all that was going on around him. If he got…

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Giya Kancheli – Poetry of Silence (Gramola)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 11 December 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Like most composers in the Soviet Union, Kancheli held down two jobs as a music director and a professor and wrote scores to order for instantly forgettable Party films. Except that, in his case, while the films vanished from memory, the music refused to fade. Kancheli, who died last year at the age of 84, conserved his best film themes as a set of 33 piano miniatures? You know how the best music grips you by the throat and won’t let you do anything else until it’s over? That’s what you will find in these miniatures. Some are for piano…

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: John Luther Adams – The become trilogy (cantaloupe)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 4 December 2020 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Composers grow middle names to protect themselves against rivals of similar plumage. There were so many Bachs around in JS’s time that he was mostly known as Sebastian to ward off all the useless Johanns. Here, too, the opera composer John Adams stamped ten-league boots on the domain and our Luther had to use his middle name to carve out a claim. Pretty big terrain he has staked, too. Adams went to Alaska after college in the late 1970s to work in environmental protection. His music derives, he says, from ‘sustained listening to the subtle resonances of the northern soundscape.’…

Vasily Petrenko and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Prokofiev/Myaskovsky – Symphonies (LAWO Classics)

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By Newswire on 27 November 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

What would you say if I gave up star ratings? They are only the vaguest approximation of a critic’s opinion and they might well be affected by the weather, or the latest Covid numbers. I’ve seen ratings that barely reflect the text of a review, just as footballers get marks out of ten that bear no relation to their influence on a game. I know some readers look no further than the star rating before making up their minds. But for those who actually read, does the rating make any difference to you? Do tell. Take the present pair of…

Arvo Pärt

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Arvo Pärt – Works for Choir (Cugate Classics)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 20 November 2020 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

I chucked out a bunch of new releases this week, mostly solo recitals on esoteric instruments like the harp, the mandolin and the saxophone, though also viola, voice and harpsichord, some on so-called major labels. These recitals tend to be paid for by the soloist after a label decides they are uncommercial. Knowing that people are unlikely to buy it, why would I waste valuable time reviewing it and you reading about it? In these fragile times when every hour of life is doubly precious, artists need to think twice and think again before pushing out more and more of…

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Daniil Trifonov – Silver Age (DG)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 13 November 2020 Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

The second piano by Sergei Prokofiev was the least performed of the five until Evgeny Kissin came along a decade ago and showed it was not only playable but pleasant. At this early stage in his emergence – the opus number is in the low teens – Prokofiev was more inclined to be rebarbative than agreeable. But once Kissin stripped off the barbed wire, an underlying soft centre was exposed and other pianists piled in to make the once-deterrent concerto practically an audience draw. The Vienna Philharmonic were touring it only this week in Japan. Of the half-dozen interpretations I…

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Tigran Mansurian – Con anima (ECM New Series)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 6 November 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Just by reviewing this recording I will be accused of taking sides in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, such is the ferocity and pettiness of the largely unreported conflict. Mansurian is, as his name suggests, Armenian. Born in Beirut in 1939 to refugees from the Turkish genocide in Armenia, he returned to Yerevan in the 1950s and lived there fruitfully under Soviet rule and after. The title track of this album is a meditation for sextet on the 13th string quartet of Dmitri Shostakovich composed in a mixture of Kurtag-like fragments and long devotional…

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Dear Mademoiselle (Alpha)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 30 October 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

An unprepossessing Parisian teacher of piano and solfège received an unexpected career boost when the victorious General Pershing opened a French music school for Americans at Fontainebleau, near Paris, in 1921. Nadia Boulanger applied for an advertised vacancy and was appointed professor of harmony. Before long she was the go-to teacher for Americans in Paris, of whom there were a great many in the 1920s when the living was cheap and the romance abundant. The shy and unconfident Aaron Copland signed up for her first semester. George Gershwin applied for private lessons. In 1924, Boulanger was sent on a US tour to…

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly

Lebrecht Weekly: Good Night! (Erato)

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 5th symphony and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Hyperion)

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Transatlantic (Orchid)

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Giya Kancheli – Poetry of Silence (Gramola)

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: John Luther Adams – The become trilogy (cantaloupe)

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Prokofiev/Myaskovsky – Symphonies (LAWO Classics)

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Arvo Pärt – Works for Choir (Cugate Classics)

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Daniil Trifonov – Silver Age (DG)

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Tigran Mansurian – Con anima (ECM New Series)

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Dear Mademoiselle (Alpha)

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