Composers have learned not to mess with Beethoven. Fewer variations have been written on themes by Beethoven than on any other master’s work.
What small labels do best is backing the owner’s hunches. BIS in Stockholm produced symphonies by Alfred Schnittke when he was unheard outside Russia. Hyperion in south London resurrected 19th century piano concertos. Cedille in Chicago backs off-beat US composers. Manfred Eicher’s ECM in Munich is the engine behind Arvo Pärt, Giya Kancheli and Chick Corea. These labels are often thelion kings of classical recording. We owe the rediscovery of Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a Polish refugee in Soviet Russia, to a father-son team in Colchester, England, operating from a mobile recording unit. Their company, Chandos, released its first Weinberg recording around…
I have no problems with impressionism. It’s what French artists do off the cuff when they can’t be bothered with sketches, what French composers do in a wishy-washy mood. So Debussy, so easily recognised. Expressionism is another matter. A parallel 1900s movement of poets and painters who liked to let it all hang out, it was associated in music chiefly with Schoenberg and his disciples, three of the most buttoned-up composers you could ever wish to avoid. It is supposed to convey ‘powerful feelings’, as if Bach and Handel hadn’t done it better. Schoenberg’s paintings were also deemed ‘expressionist’. The…
Lukas Foss was a classmate of Leonard Bernstein’s at the Curtis Institute and a lifelong friend, though never an equal. While Bernstein blazed to national glory in his annus mirabilis of 1944, Foss was quietly composing his first symphony in the bucolic tranquility of the MacDowell Colony. His Curtis teacher Fritz Reiner premiered the symphony in Pittsburgh a year later but without wider acclaim. Foss’s Americana style sounded both dated and derivative. Aaron Copland did this stuff so much better, and a decade sooner. Foss also composed three ballets that year, but he lacked Bernstein’s On the Town recklessness and…
Ries and Clement were the musicians closest to Beethoven. Ries, who knew Beethoven from Bonn, acted as his secretary before moving to London where he was active in the Philharmonic Society that commissioned Beethoven’s ninth symphony.
When Janine Jansen is on song, no living violinist comes close.
The first we heard of Magdalena Kozena was a mid-1990s album of Bach arias, recorded when she was 22.
There are many reasons why Beethoven’s triple concerto usually fails on record. Most are to do with ego.
I am starting to think that Grazyna Bacewicz might be the next Mieczyslaw Weinberg. Bacewicz trod water under Polish Communism and saw her music eclipsed by the authorised forces of Lutoslawski and Penderecki.
There used to be a drivetime programme on BBC Radio 3 called Mainly for Pleasure. They changed the title when too many musicians referred to it as Strictly for Cash, but the formula got thrown away with the concept. We forget that music exists primarily for pleasure and we tend to disparage those albums and concerts that aspire to no higher purpose. Here’s one. Tim Posner, principal cellist of the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, has chosen three works for cello and orchestra for a signature release. Two are very Jewish and familiar, the third less so. Posner brings a freshness to all…
