Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Poulenc/Koechlin: Piano and orchestra (Odradek)

By Norman Lebrecht on 3 January 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

****/** No happier way to start a year than Francis Poulenc, few grimmer than Charles Koechlin. This album opens with the little-played Poulenc Sinfonietta, originally intended as a string quartet and allegedly thrown in a Paris gutter when it did not work out. First heard in London in 1948, it’s a Mozart-meets-Stravinsky score, and none the worse for that. Even at his most neo-classical, Igor never got this light. The captivating Poulenc piano concerto was premiered by the composer himself in 1950. The Boston audience snubbed it as second-rate Rachmaninov, but Poulenc has much more joie-de-vivre and wears what he…

Shostakovich: The Bedbug (Naxos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 20 December 2019 Lebrecht Weekly

Whenever I hear music by the young Dmitri Shostakovich I am astonished all over again by his up-yours raw humour and ribaldry. This is a dazzling talent strutting his stuff in the first decade of a revolution when all seemed possible and available – jobs for all, free meals at work, free love. None foresaw that Stalin would soon crush the spark and the spirit out of the cultural side of the revolution. The two unexpected world premieres on this release are compelling. The Bedbug was a comedy written by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, for which Shostakovich wrote incidental music…

Beethoven: For 4-hand piano (Delphian)

By Norman Lebrecht on 13 December 2019 Lebrecht Weekly

I’m guessing not many readers are familiar with Beethoven’s Sonata in D, opus 6. Published in 1797, though possibly dating from the composer’s teens, it begins with the unmistakable opening phrase of the Fifth Symphony. Seriously? That work that did not achieve fruition for another decade. Like me, you may have trouble believing your ears at the arresting confidence of this two-movement piece. It’s unremarkable in most other ideas except for the ta-ta-ta-taaa and the Beethoven signature that pulses through every second. The British pianists Peter Hill and Benjamin Frith have teamed up here to take us into some wholly…

Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Chamber works (Sony, Genuin, Naxos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 5 December 2019 Lebrecht Weekly

****/** The 2019 centenary of the composer’s birth has exhumed several dozen unknown works on record, enabling us to form a broader understanding of his preoccupations. The essential works in this present batch date from the Second World War. The piano quintet of 1944, fervently played by Olga Scheps and the Kuss Quartet, calls to mind Shostakovich’s stupendous quintet, dated 1940. Of the two, the Russian composer sounds more Jewish than the Polish Jew, such was his alarm at genocidal antisemitism. Weinberg’s quintet, premiered by Emil Gilels and a Bolshoi quartet, is less emphatic, though also highly strung and with…

When David Heard (Stone Records)

By Norman Lebrecht on 29 November 2019 Lebrecht Weekly

Such a relief at this time of year to receive a choral record that is not about Christmas. The Purcell Singers have selected ‘English and American Choral Masterieces of the 20th Century’ and its hard to fault their choices, or to thrill at the unfamiliar. Ahead of the shopworn Samuel Barber Agnus Dei, transcribed from his second string quartet where it sits better, the choir warms up on the first part-song Edward Elgar ever got published, the utterly transcendent My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land. Skipping swifly over Shenandoah, we reach the seriously undersung Morten Lauridsen and Kenneth Leighton,…

Alexander Veprik: Orchestral works (MDG)

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 November 2019 Lebrecht Weekly

Every composer suppressed by Stalin deserves to be remembered. Just how much musical attention they warrant is another matter. Veprik (1889-1958) was a teacher at the Moscow Conservatoire who wrote in Jewish and Kyrgyz ‘national’ idioms. His Dances and Songs from the Ghetto was performed by Toscanini at Carnegie Hall in 1933, and a Symphonic Song was taken up the following year by Hermann Scherchen and Dmitri Mitropoulos. This was the peak of Veprik’s career. Sacked by the Conservatoire in 1943, he was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag in 1950. Released in 1954, he spent his final years…

Three recitals

By Norman Lebrecht on 15 November 2019 Lebrecht Weekly

*/**/**** Something’s gone awry with Warner’s scheduling when they issue three violin-piano recitals at the same time (except one of them’s actually on cello). Something’s also skewed with the repertoire selection. Vilde Frang, the Norwegian violinist, returns after a hiatus with an album of Paganini and Schubert. Nobody should play Paganini’s opera transcriptions unless they can deliver shock and awe virtuosity. Frang is not that kind of artist. She chose wrong. Moving on, we try the Franck sonata, which was written for violin and piano, played by the cellist Gautier Capucon. The pianist is the irrepressible Yuja Wang, who’s good…

Andreas Scholl: Twilight People (BMG Modern Recordings)

By Norman Lebrecht on 7 November 2019 Lebrecht Weekly

It can be good for an artist to take a break from a big label. The German counter-tenor Andreas Scholl has been recording faithfully for Decca for about a decade without ever giving an impression of calling the shots in his career. Yes, he left lovely tracks of Dowland, Purcell, Bach and Handel, but no more than you’d expect of someone as good as he is in the heart of his Fach and not really breaking new ground. In the past couple of years Scholl has been working with his Israeli wife, the pianist and harpsichordist Tamar Halperin, along with…

Ben-Haim, Bloch, Korngold: cello concertos (CPO)

By Norman Lebrecht on 31 October 2019 Lebrecht Weekly

Jewish composers write violin concertos first, piano second. All other instruments are also-rans. Credit, then to Raphael Wallfisch for dusting off cello concertos by three Jews – the German-born Israeli Paul Ben-Haim, the Austrian-born film composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold and the Swiss-born American Ernest Bloch. Ben-Haim, in his 1962 cello concerto, performs his usual fusion act of west and east sonorities – though, on this occasion, not with Yemenite and Palestinian roots so much as Ladino-Balkan, and all the more mellifluous for it. The adagio is especially compelling. Bloch’s Symphony for cello and orchestra (1954 and his earlier Baal Shem…

Rachmaninov: Piano concertos 1 and 3 (DG)

By Norman Lebrecht on 25 October 2019 Lebrecht Weekly

Recordings of these concertos begin with the composer himself and continue with Vladimir Horowitz, whom Rachmaninov acknowledged as the superior interpreter. The benchmark in modern times was set by Vladimir Ashkenazy with Andre Previn on Decca, an act of concentration and mutual challenge that few others could sustain across the series. My feeling is that Daniil Trifonov and Yannick Nézet-Séguin have set the benchmark for the next quarter-century. Outstanding in their previous release of the 2nd and 4th concertos, they deliver a performance of the first concerto that makes light of its difficulties and hesitations, lightening also its endemic morbidity…

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