Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

César Franck: Symphony/Symphonic Variations (Pentatone)

By Norman Lebrecht on 19 June 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Determined as I was to review only modern works until this plague desists, I hit a brick wall this week with a pair of mid-20th century piano concertos on a respected label that were so sluggishly conducted it was all I could do to stop screaming profanities at the heavens. Could this be a sign that someone up there wants me to give up reviewing the modern stuff? If so, I got the message, thanks. Just no more bad conductors, please. Happily (and believe me I’m happy now), close at hand was a work I haven’t heard live since I…

Photo: Rob Bogaerts / Anefo

Morton Feldman: Coptic Light (Capriccio), For John Cage (Diatribe Records)

By Norman Lebrecht on 12 June 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

You’d probably meet Morton Feldman if you hung out long enough in the Village in the early 70s. He was one of those guys with an idea in his head that was going to save the world if only you gave him enough time to explain it – like an hour, a day, the rest of your life. You might think that never in human history did time pass slower than it did in the Village in the 1970s until you hear the stuff Feldman was writing in which the passage of time ceases to have any meaning at all.…

Photo: Marek Suchecki

Krzysztof Penderecki: St Luke Passion (Bis)

By Norman Lebrecht on 5 June 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

After the atonal terrors of Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, his breakthrough work, Penderecki dismayed both the western avant-garde and the atheist Polish state by writing an overtly devotional church oratorio. Premiered for the 700th anniversary of Münster cathedral in West Germany in March 1966, it was greeted with shifting unease and polite reviews. By presenting it as ‘a homage to J S Bach’ the composer only increased the confusion. Penderecki was Catholic, Bach Lutheran. Nowhere in this hour-long recitation of modernist discords and vocal shrieks can the orderly and respectful spirit of Bach be definitely ascertained. Heard again,…

Luciano Berio/ Florence/1997

Luciano Berio: Coro Cries of London (Bis)

By Norman Lebrecht on 28 May 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Since we’re unlikely in the next few years to hear another live performance of Berio’s massive Sinfonia – his collage tribute to Mahler’s second symphony – we’ll have to make do with the works that followed it. Coro developed out of Cries of London, written for the King’s Singers in 1973-74. It is a montage of street songs, madrigals, verses by Pablo Neuruda and snatches of colloquialism, built upon a large orchestral foundation – 84 instruments – of pure ascetic modernism. It’s wonderfully challenging to all our musical preconceptions and frequently beautiful beyond words. This is peak-period Berio, before he…

Uri Caine: The Passion of Octavius Catto (816 Music)

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 May 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Around the turn of the century, an Argentine-Israeli composer living in Massachusetts was suddenly all the rage. Osvaldo Golijov was a maker of fusions, welding symphonic, jazz and folk music into orchestral scores, often with a choral component. Such was his success, that he was showered with commissions by Big Five US orchestras and film deals from Hollywood. It all got a bit much for Golijov, who missed one deadline after another before eventually pronouncing himself blocked. Nothing has been heard from him for a decade and eclecticism has gone totally out of fashion. So I was quite thrilled to…

Music around the Bauhaus (MDG)

By Norman Lebrecht on 15 May 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

I wish more piano albums were like this, formed by an original idea and a lot of unfamiliar sounds to tweak the ear. All five composers performed were involved in some way with the Bauhaus that Walter Gropius founded at Weimar in 1919 to rethink the look of the built environment. Gropius was wedded to visual austerity even while he was married to Alma Mahler and the composers who gathered around him were not entirely a bundle of laughs. (One who does not feature here is Erwin Ratz, Gropius’s secretary, who went on to become a hugely controversial editor of…

Otto M. Zykan: Cello concerto; Beethoven’s cello (Kairos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 8 May 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Please don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Zykan. He’s the last name in all good music dictionaries and many think he’s a hoax. Maybe that’s what they want you to think A Viennese cellist (1935-2006), Zykan existed on the fringes of the music establishment, making his living by writing TV jingles and not getting a call from the Vienna Philharmonic until he was almost 70. His cello concerto, written in 1982 for the magnificent Heinrich Schiff and recorded live, was described by the composer as ’40 minutes of seriousness’. Actually, it gives two fingers to Vienna’s stuffed shirts with…

Nikos Skalkottas : World premiere recordings (Melism)

By Norman Lebrecht on 1 May 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

The modernist Greek composer Skalkottas left Berlin in 1933 and returned to Athens, where he lived in poverty and poor health. When the Germans occupied his country, he was placed in an internment camp. Lthough he found love and finally married in 1946, he died three years later of what is said to have been an untreated ruptured hernia. He was by a long chalk the foremost Greek composer of the first half of the 20th century, but the Greeks are not good at preserving musical heritage and his legacy has mouldered. The present release pulls together three new recordings…

Paul Dessau: Chamber music (MDG/Deutschland)

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 April 2020 Classical Music, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly

Like Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, and with equal reluctance, Paul Dessau left McCarthyist America in the late 1940s to settle in the austere and oppressive German Democratic Republic. All three men were tainted by having enjoyed life in the capitalist West. Dessau, the least famous, was attacked by party inquisitors and forced to write propaganda hymns in the requisite Socialist Realism style. In the US he had been reduced to working on a chicken farm before Brecht brought him to Hollywood, helping him get filmscore work while playing off his insecurity against Eisler’s in a sadistic game that continued…

Howard Skempton: 24 Preludes and Fugues (Orchid)

By Norman Lebrecht on 17 April 2020 Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

First there was J S Bach. Then came Dmitri Shostakovich. The form is open for others to play with. I was unaware of Skempton’s contribution until this CD landed. A northern Englishman in his early 70s, Skempton is a minimalist in the absolute literal sense that he uses the fewest number of notes to make his point. Not a minim more or less. In prelude-and-fugue form this yields a string of aphorisms connected by a tonal centre and a gentle, rocking, bucolic mood. Some of the pieces last no longer than 40 seconds. The effect can be hypnotic if you…

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