I am generally resistant to albums that impose an external theme on unrelated pieces of music from different places and times. In this case, it is eastern Europe, 1814 to 2024.
Franz Liszt has been cancelled by the world’s orchestras, probably for something he said on social media. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a Liszt orchestral work on a concert programme, other than the two piano concertos?
If it’s summer music you’re after, it doesn’t come much sunnier than this. Castelnuovo-Tedesco – it translates as Newcastle German – was a Florentine who traced his lineage to the Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492.
Did Bartok play klezmer? The Hungarian composer enthused over many authentic forms of folk music and spent his summers tracking them down across the Balkans, the Iberian peninsula and north Africa.
Klaus Tennstedt fled East Germany in his mid-40s in 1971 and hung around for half a decade before anyone noticed he was a truly remarkable conductor – ‘last of the old Kapellmeisters,’ as Herbert von Karajan drily put it.
In the early days of long-playing records, a man in a suit at EMI realised that the Grieg and Schumann concertos were half an hour long, in the same key of A minor and would fit on either side of a plate of shellac without requiring fillers.
Unlike elements in Beijing who had him arrested on phony morals charges, I have never wavered in my belief that Yundi Li is the most interesting and original pianist to emerge from China.
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…
