Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Photo: Deutsche Grammophon/Ari Magg

Debussy. Rameau (DG)

0

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)

0

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)

0

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)

0

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)

0

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…

Grazyna Bacewicz: Complete violin sonatas (Muso)

0

By Norman Lebrecht on 7 February 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

The missing voice in modern Polish music is female. At the time of her early death, aged 59, in 1969, two contemporaries of Grazyna Bacewicz, Lutoslawski and Penderecki, were world famous and two others, Panufnik and Gorecki, were laying down tracks for the future. Poland punched well above its weight on the musical map, yet Bacewicz, alive or after, was barely heard. This was not a direct consequence of male prejudice; Lutoslawski, for one, had great respect for her music, as did David Oistrakh. Rather, it was due to personal shyness, allied to an inability or an unwillingness to begin…

Louis Lewandowski: 18 Liturgical Psalms (DG)

0

By Norman Lebrecht on 31 January 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

The appearance in Holocaust Memorial Week of an album of synagogue music on the Deutsche Grammophon label is a milestone of sorts, perhaps a first step towards a reckoning with the German company’s complicated past. Founded by Emile Berliner, an American Jew, DG was dominated in its heyday by an Austrian Nazi, Herbert von Karajan. One record of Jewish liturgies does not reconcile these extremes, but it does point towards a settling of memories. The album’s content is archaic. The opening of the 3,000-seat Oranienburger Strasse synagogue in 1866 marked a high point of civic confidence among German Jews. Its…

Cherubini Discoveries (Decca)

0

By Norman Lebrecht on 26 January 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

In 1824, while waiting for the the ninth symphony it commissioned from Beethoven, the Philharmonic Society of London ordered a backup symphony in D major from the Italian-turned-French composer Luigi Cherubini. The Society had been founded ten years earlier to perform music by ‘the greatest masters’, notably Beethoven, Cherubini and Carl Maria von Weber. Cherubini did his best to sound great by imitating everything Beethoven did around the time of his first and second symphonies. Trouble is, Beethoven moved ahead in giant strides while Cherubini got stuck. The D major symphony has big gestures and a few half-tunes, but nothing…

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphonies 3 and 4 (Hyperion)

0

By Norman Lebrecht on 17 January 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

With Australia in flames, Italian cities choked by smog and parts of Canada enjoying an unseasonal thaw, I’m listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony, a lament for pre-1914 rhythms of life. The composer, who served in his 40s as an ambulance driver on the French frontlines, had seen too much there ever to imagine that the old ways could be resumed, a recognition that intensifies his regret. The 3rd symphony is a requiem for rolling hills and ancient hedgerows, for arts and crafts, for simple pleasures in candlelight. A new recording by Martin Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra…

Shostakovich: 13th symphony ‘Babi Yar’ (CSO.Resound)

0

By Norman Lebrecht on 10 January 2020 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Half a century ago, in January 1970, the young Riccardo Muti gave this symphony its western Europe premiere in Rome with the RAI orchestra and the wondeful bass Ruggiero Raimondi. The performance was semi-samizdat. A score had been smuggled out of Russia, where the work was suppressed for its denunciation of Soviet antisemitism, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s text was unofficially translated into Italian. Muti, who never forgot the occasion, revisited it 16 months ago with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Although unversed in Russian ironies, his interpretation has the authority of a leader who lived through the late-Soviet era and observed the…

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly

Debussy. Rameau (DG)

Ferruccio Busoni: violin sonatas (CPO)

Grieg: 3 Violin sonatas (Orchid)

Aspects of America: Pulitzer Edition (Pentatone)

Mahler: Eighth Symphony (DG)

Grazyna Bacewicz: Complete violin sonatas (Muso)

Louis Lewandowski: 18 Liturgical Psalms (DG)

Cherubini Discoveries (Decca)

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphonies 3 and 4 (Hyperion)

Shostakovich: 13th symphony ‘Babi Yar’ (CSO.Resound)

Current Issue