Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Lise Davidsen/Renee Fleming (Decca)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 7 June 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

A soprano at the start of her journey cuts a debut album as another reaches what must be the end. The contrasts are simply too compelling to ignore. Lise Davidsen, a Norwegian, came to attention in the Kathleen Ferrier competition four years ago, though her voice is more Flagstad than Ferrier. This is a genuine Wagnerian instrument, fully formed at 32 years old and equal to a massive orchestra. Two Tannhäuser arias are surmounted here with what sounds like nonchalance, a walk in the Bayreuth park in a really pleasant breeze. The shortcomings are exposed in a set of Richard…

Josef Suk: Asrael (Decca)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 24 May 2019 CD and Book Reviews, La Scena Online, Lebrecht Weekly

The symphonic monument Asrael, written in memory of the composer’s wife Otilie and her father Antonin Dvorak, embodies for Czech musicians what Verdi’s Requiem does for Italians – a summit of national loss and hope. Unlike the Verdi Requiem, it has never caught on outside its heartland. Its great interpreters on record have all been Czech – Talich, Ancerl, Kubelik, Pesek and now Jiri Belohlavek. To the latest interpreter the heritage must have weighed particularly heavy since he knew he was mortally ill and this recording would stand as his legacy. Never a flamboyant conductor, Jiri Belohlavek goes for large…

L’Esprit des Six (Claves)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 17 May 2019 Lebrecht Weekly

Your challenge for the weekend: name all six of Les Six. Poulenc and Milhaud? That’s average. Arthur Honegger? Good (unless you’re Swiss). Germaine Tailleferre? Very good. Georges Auric. Excellent. So who have we forgotten? (Louis Durey (1888-1979). Nobody remembers Durey.) Les Six came to the fore in 1920s Paris as acolytes of the iconoclastic Erik Satie and briefly caught the spirit of the age before veering off in diverse directions. This ingenious album of clarinet-piano music from either end of their careers. Francis Poulenc, the most lyrical and the only one with a major opera to his credit, can be…

Photo: Tommy Persson, Olga Rakhalskay.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg : Symphonies nos 2 and 21 (Deutsche Grammophon)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 10 May 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

There was never any question what was going to be my album of the week once the envelope disgorged this little twin-set from DG. I started writing about Weinberg in the early 1990s when he was unknown outside Russia and forgotten within. Some emigres played me his string music and I found the communication so direct and personal that I could not understand his neglect. A Polish Jew, Weinberg fled to the Soviet Union in 1939, was befriended by Shostakovich and narrowly survived incarceration in the Stalin murder machine. Although there are common gestural elements with his friend and mentor,…

Photo: Clive Barda

David Matthews: 9th symphony (Nimbus Alliance)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 3 May 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical, Lebrecht Weekly

You may recognise the composer’s name as one of two brothers who assisted Deryck Cooke and Berthold Goldschmidt in creating the first performing edition of Mahler’s tenth symphony. Now 76, David Matthews has come a long way from those early Gustavian speculations. Where his brother Colin drew close to Benjamin Britten, David veered to the wilder fantasies of Michael Tippett while staying close to English roots and traditions. His ninth symphony, receiving its world premiere on this release, is a kind of summation. Starting with a self-composed carol and extending to a Bach chorale, it represents the best of British…

Paul Ben-Haim: Evocation (Bis)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 25 April 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

When Paul Frankenburger was taken on as Bruno Walter’s assistant conductor in Munich in 1920, he was one among thousands of highly-trained musicians in a city of deep-rooted musical traditions. When he fled Germany for Palestine in 1933, Paul Ben-Haim (his Hebraised name) was by some distance the most accomplished musician in a land with no musical tradition since King David. He saw his new life more as a responsibility than an opportunity, immersing himself in the micro-tones of Judeo-Arab liturgies and nurturing two new generations of composers. His own music, a fusion of west and east, is seldom heard…

Gustavo Gimeno. Photo: Marco Borggreve

Rossini: Petite Messe Solonelle (Pentatone)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 18 April 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

As proof that the Devil has the best tunes, it is an established fact that atheists write the best religious music. Verdi, Elgar, Saint-Saens, Janacek, Ravel, Vaughan Williams, Britten… the list of unbelievers who wrote great sacred works extends to the limits of the known universe. And while we know little of Rossini’s state of faith, it is safe to assume that a man of his dedicated hedonism was not one of the godlier composers. His ‘little mass’, written in 1863 when the composer was in poor health and mourning a friend’s death, has all the Rossini hallmarks of hummable…

The Yiddish Cabaret (Harmonia Mundi)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 12 April 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Journalists sometimes write reckless headlines, knowing they will be fish-food in a couple of days. Artists cannot afford that luxury with album titles. The cover here does not reflect the contents, and I’m telling you this so you don’t pester some poor record shop demanding your money back. The second string quartet by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and the 5 Quartet Pieces of Erwin Schulhoff are about as Yiddish as a bacon croissant. Korngold’s primary influences were Strauss and Puccini, Schulholff was a Dvorak protégé who wrote musical manifestos for the Communist Party. Both were born into Jewish families but neither…

Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Fantasy for Cello and Orchestra &c. (Claves)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 5 April 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

This recording almost slipped by unnoticed. It opens with a neither here nor there performance of the first Shostakovich concerto, neither rippled with black comedy the way Slava Rostropovich played it nor invested with loving compassion like the mellifluous Heinrich Schiff. The Berlin-based soloist, Anastasia Kobekina, gives a good account of the piece and the Berne Symphony play well enough under the direction of Kevin John Edusei. What follows is simply gripping. The 1956 Weinberg Fantasy, of which there appear to be only two extant recordings, has an arresting opening melody and the best atmospherics I can think of outside…

Dmitri Shostakovich: 6th and 7th symphonies (Deutsche Grammophon)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 29 March 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

The sixth and seventh symphonies are central to the composer’s work, in both senses of the term. Written in 1939 and 1941, they develop the method that Shostakovich invented in the fifth symphony of delivering two messages at the same time – public optimism to fool the commissars and private anxiety to express what the audience was experiencing under Stalin’s terror. The sixth, written as the Soviet Union was signing its notorious alliance with Nazi Germany, opens with an ominous phrase from Malher’s tenth symphony, which Shostakovich had neither heard nor read. Brisk, bold and barely half an hour long,…

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly

Lise Davidsen/Renee Fleming (Decca)

Josef Suk: Asrael (Decca)

L’Esprit des Six (Claves)

Mieczyslaw Weinberg : Symphonies nos 2 and 21 (Deutsche Grammophon)

David Matthews: 9th symphony (Nimbus Alliance)

Paul Ben-Haim: Evocation (Bis)

Rossini: Petite Messe Solonelle (Pentatone)

The Yiddish Cabaret (Harmonia Mundi)

Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Fantasy for Cello and Orchestra &c. (Claves)

Dmitri Shostakovich: 6th and 7th symphonies (Deutsche Grammophon)

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