Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Mahler: 7th symphony (Channel Classics)

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 March 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Many regard the seventh as the most perplexing of Mahler’s symphonies. Coming after the extreme pessimism of the sixth, it appears to revert to the pastoralism of the third symphony while maintaining undertones of terror and insecurity. The two Night Music segments that interleave the three main movements may remind you of the Blumine section that Mahler inserted in his first symphony, only to remove it as a bucolic distraction. Where is Mahler going in the seventh? The only musician to understand it on first hearing was Arnold Schoenberg, who paid literal tribute to its textures in his seminal 12-note…

Giovanni Giornovich: London concertos (Delphian)

By Norman Lebrecht on 16 March 2019 Baroque and Early, CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

At first hearing, these three violin concertos dated 1790 sound like Haydn. The second of them could even be Mozart if we didn’t know that Mozart only wrote five concertos and these are numbered 13 to 15. So who was Giornovich if he could write so well, and why have we never heard this music before, given that this is a world premiere recording? Giornovich was, if nothing else, well connected, A Croat whose name has at least 30 misspellings, he was raised in Palermo and became a French citizen because it was the best passport to hold in those…

Grace Williams: Chamber music (Naxos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 8 March 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

If you haven’t heard of Grace Williams, it’s not entirely down to vicious male suppression. The Welsh composer (1906-1977) studied in London with Ralph Vaughan Williams around the same time as Elizabeth Maconchy and Imogen Holst. Women composers were emerging in the 1920s and receiving strong encouragement. Grace Williams was particularly friendly with Benjamin Britten, as their extant letters attest. She remained in London through the 1930s and was a visible part of its musical life. During the War she began to suffer from depression. She returned home to Barry in 1945 for the last 30 years of her life.…

Ferruccio Busoni: Piano concerto (Myrios)

By Norman Lebrecht on 1 March 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Busoni is a great baffler. One of the most interesting musical minds of his time – the only pianist that Mahler considered an intellectual equal – his music so often falls short of his written ideas that one is tempted to dismiss both as inconsequential. Yet there is always something in Busoni that draws you back, just in case you missed the point first time round. The piano concerto, premiered by the composer in 1904, is a case in point. It sounds for the most part like an overlong symphony – 72 minutes, for heaven’s sake – in which the…

Wilhelm Furtwängler: The radio recordings, 1939-45 (Berlin Philharmonic)

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 February 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

At the end of the war, when the Russians occupied Berlin’s radio centre, a musically literate officer called Konstantin Adzhemov rounded up some 1,500 tapes and sent them home to Moscow. His purpose in doing so is unknown, unless it was just part of the general order to plunder everything, but the result was that a historic picture was preserved of the music that was played in Berlin during the Hitler years. Musicians in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra had been spared from military service and their conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, was known to be the Führer’s favourite Wagner interpreter. The musicians…

Alexander von Zemlinsky: Lyric Symphony (Accentus)

By Norman Lebrecht on 15 February 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

I think I’m safe in saying there is no satisfactory performance of this troubling work on record. Lorin Maazel undertook it for DG with minimal conductorial intervention, Michael Gielen released a live- and fairly lithe – radio recording and Riccardo Chailly broached it with the Concertgebouw in the early 1990s, which is as good as it got until now but not close enough for me to the heart of the Zemlinsky enigma. The Lyric Symphony is the only major work to take the form of Das Lied von der Erde, with baritone and soprano instead of tenor and mezzo, but…

Tasmin Little (Chandos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 8 February 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

A letter from the English violinist Tasmin Little telling me she is giving up the circuit in a couple of years when she hits 55 arrives pretty much at the same time of her latest release on Chandos, itself a fairly regular occurrence in recent years. Tasmin Little is a prolific recording artist and her programmes often take a few strides off the beaten track. The latest consists of music by women – Amy Beach, Ethel Smyth and Clara Schumann – and the sense of an ending adds poignancy to its reception. Neither of the first two composers can claim…

Forgotten Russians (Nimbus Alliance)

By Norman Lebrecht on 1 February 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

There were those that Stalin murdered or suppressed, those who went abroad and the few who stayed at home and kept very quiet for most of their lives. I thought I knew them all, but the New York pianist Vladimir Feltsman has put together a gallery of peripherals, each of whom adds a vital dimension to the Russian picture. Alexei Stanchinsky (1888-1914) was a Scriabin-like figure who wrote vaguely modern sonorities and suffered intermittent mental lapses. He drowned two months into the First World War, possibly a suicide. Samuel Feinberg (1890-1962) taught most of his life at the Moscow Conservatoire,…

Mozart: Symphonies 40 and 41 (Pentatone)

By Norman Lebrecht on 26 January 2019 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

The conductor Hans von Bülow once described Mendelssohn’s music as ‘something to be got over in childhood, like measles’. I feel the same way about much of Mozart and listen to very little, making an exception now and then only when I have a particular purpose to study a piece – in this case, the Jupiter Symphony, Mozart’s last. It so happened that a Pentatone CD with the NDR Radiophilharmonie landed just as I was reaching up the shelf for the unassailable Abbado/LSO on DG and its arrival proved more than just instructive. The Hannover radio orchestra, not always the…

Wilhelm Stenhammar: 2nd symphony, Serenade (BIS)

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

Ever bought a record just for the opening track? You’d be sorely tempted by this offering from the Gothenburg Symphony and Herbert Blomstedt, a pairing of the second symphony by a pal of Sibelius’s with his orchestral serenade. Swedes regard Stenhammar’s 2nd, dated 1914, as their best symphony after Sibelius and some have argued the case with me alcoholically far into the unbroken winter’s night. I am not persuaded. Stenhammar might have enjoyed a drink or few with Sibelius but the most he got out of these sessions was an imitative gift and a blinding hangover. The first movement of that…

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