Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Paul Dessau: Chamber music (MDG/Deutschland)

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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)

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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…

Scriabin: Mazurkas (Ondine)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 10 April 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

It has taken a global pandemic and lockdown for me to discover that the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin wrote a sheaf of mazurkas, which are Polish, and made them sound every bit as ethereal as Chopin at his most consumptive. I had always taken the view that Scriabin was best taken in small doses, preferably played by Vladimir Horowitz who believed in his manic genius. Having listened now to 80 minutes of Peter Jablonski I am not only prepared to revise my opinion: I am left hungering for more. Jablonski, a Swede who used to be on Decca, has a…

Viktor Ullmann: Piano concerto and sonatas (Berlin Classics)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 3 April 2020 Chamber Music, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

In a dark moment of isolation, I found myself thinking of Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944) a student of the atonalist Schoenberg and the microtonalist Haba who never really found his voice until darkness descended and he faced segregation and extinction. Before 1939 he’d enjoyed fragments of international attention, with a piano sonata premiered in London at the Wigmore Hall and a few more glimmers of invitation. In 1939, after the Germans occupied Prague, he set about writing a piano concerto for Juliette Aranyi, a fellow-Haba student, knowing it might never get performed. Both composer and soloist were deported in 1942 to…

Papagena Vocal Quintet: Hush! (Somm Recordings)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 27 March 2020 Chamber Music, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Vocal

What can you do with 3 sopranos and 2 altos. Be inventive, that’s what. The all-women quintet Papagena have come up with a range of unaccompanied songs, settings and original commissions that often takes the breath away. Don Macdonald’s Moonset, for instance, does just what the title says: it sinks, gently, bringing hope of a new day, a breath of fresh air. Libby Larsen’s Jack’s Valentine declares ‘I love you’ with just the right degree of equivocation. Sweet Child O’Mine is a Guns N Roses hit reset for a capella voice – magic. Apart from Larsen, David Lang, Tchaikovsky and Gustav Holst, I don’t recognise any…

Photo: Deutsche Grammophon/Ari Magg

Debussy. Rameau (DG)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 13 March 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

The place to go these days to hear French piano music is Iceland. The best-selling, innovative Bach interpreter Víkingur Ólafsson has taken a pair of French composers two centuries apart and effectively melded their music into one by the simple method of interleaving short pieces across a whole album. The outcome is astonishing in respect of both Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) and Claude Debussy (1862-1918), revealing unsuspected aspects in both masters, as well as an underlying French expression in their music. Turn, for instance, from two little amusements in Debussy’s Children’s Corner to three Pièces de clavecin by Rameau and you…

Ferruccio Busoni: violin sonatas (CPO)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 6 March 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Busoni cast such a giant shadow in his time that it practically eclipsed his music. With a head that resembled Beethoven’s and the best-stocked mind of any peripatetic pianist – he was the only soloist whose visits delighted Gustav Mahler – Busoni’s own compositions were largely overlooked, whether on grounds of difficulty, or because he could invariably play them better himself. Busoni could do anything. A German-Italian hybrid of part-Jewish ancestry, culturally Anglophile and married to a Russian-Swede, he was the ultimate cosmopolitan, ever curious about literature and art and with a book collection to rival most national libraries. In…

Grieg: 3 Violin sonatas (Orchid)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 28 February 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Has anyone lately seen Edvard Grieg? The song of Norway has gone a bit quiet since the record industry stopped pumping out Grieg’s piano concerto as an automatic companion to Schumann’s and the hall of the mountain kings got converted into social housing. These twin peaks and the Peer Gynt incidental music aside, there’s not much Grieg left to perform and what there is has fallen out of fashion. It’s been all Norvège nul points the last few years. The three sonatas for violin and piano, written at different points in his longish life (1843-1907), are the first Grieg to…

Photo : Beth Nakamura, The Oregonian

Aspects of America: Pulitzer Edition (Pentatone)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 21 February 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Whatever became of the Great American Symphony? At one time it was discussed with as much cocktail-hour fervour as the Great American Novel and promoted by the best US orchestras. Leonard Bernstein at the New York Phil would not program a season without a symphony by a living American. But that was half a century ago. Since the GAS has long gone off the boil, it’s almost a guilty pleasure to listen to a pair of symphonies by composers whom Bernstein admired. Walter Piston (1894-1976) was his teacher at Harvard and Howard Hanson (1896-1981) a vaunted doyen of American music.…

Mahler: Eighth Symphony (DG)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 14 February 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

The largest symphony ever written, designed for the outdoors and knocked off in six summer weeks without revision, Mahler never expected to see the 8th performed. When an impresario booked it for Munich in 1910, the Symphony of 1,000 afforded Mahler the greatest triumph of his life. He did not conduct it again and both his close disciples, Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, shunned it. Its gigantic size and cost make performances a rarity and good performances a dream. I can count the great ones I have heard in four decades on three fingers – Klaus Tennstedt in London, Riccardo…

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly

Paul Dessau: Chamber music (MDG/Deutschland)

Howard Skempton: 24 Preludes and Fugues (Orchid)

Scriabin: Mazurkas (Ondine)

Viktor Ullmann: Piano concerto and sonatas (Berlin Classics)

Papagena Vocal Quintet: Hush! (Somm Recordings)

Debussy. Rameau (DG)

Ferruccio Busoni: violin sonatas (CPO)

Grieg: 3 Violin sonatas (Orchid)

Aspects of America: Pulitzer Edition (Pentatone)

Mahler: Eighth Symphony (DG)

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