Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Goldschmidt: Comedy/Schulhoff: Ogelala (CPO)

By Norman Lebrecht on 12 October 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

I struggle to describe my joy at hearing two unknown works by Berthold Goldschmidt, a brilliant composer who fled to London in 1935 and lived in obscurity until a late burst of recognition in the 1980s. I saw a lot of Berthold in his final decade, when he was flying around the world for performances and I remember how he wore acclaim with the same wry modesty as he had endured oblivion. The Comedy of Errors overture is a piano trio he composed for his parents’ 25th wedding anniversary, before turning it into an orchestral prelude. At the 1928 premiere…

Dussek: Piano Concertos (Hyperion)

By Norman Lebrecht on 5 October 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

Jan Ladislav Dussek could have been a contender if only Mozart had been born somewhere else and at another time. Dussek (1760 to 1812) has the wrong dates and the wrong skill sets. Two bars into every movement he picks a note that you know Mozart would have declined for a better choice and, while Dussek may recover quickly and deliver a passage that could pass for Clementi at his best, your ear is already tensed for the next false turn. Of the three concertos on offer here, two are contemporaneous with late Mozart in 1787 and 1791 yet have…

Chopin: Cello sonata/Schubert: Arpeggione (Hyperion)

By Norman Lebrecht on 28 September 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano, Romantic, Strings

A critic’s dilemma. The cellist Steven Isserlis is a pal. He lives around the corner and we bump into each other at local amenities. He knows I have received his latest release for review. He will be disappointed if I ignore it and grumpy if I find fault. To review or not to review? If I ruled out reviewing friends I’d have to turn down half the record output. By the same token, if I mentioned a friendship every time I reviewed, readers would switch off. So what to do? I made a rule a while back that I would…

Rachmaninov: Concertos 2 & 4 (Deutsche Grammophon) – Daniil Trifonov

By Norman Lebrecht on 21 September 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral, Piano

Amid the excitement over a rediscovered rehearsal tape of the composer playing Symphonic Dances, there arrives a new account of two concertos with Rachmaninov’s favourite orchestra and the living pianist who most resembles him. Deutsche Grammophon has titled the album Destination Rachmaninov. Departure and furnished the cover with a portrait of the soloist, Daniil Trifonov, sitting in the kind of railway compartment that went out with shellac records. Do not be distracted by these marketing tricks. Trifonov opens with C minor concerto with quiet authority, each chord darker than the one before, Rachmaninov at his most morose. If this concerto had a…

Saint-Saens: Piano concertos (Chandos/Erato)

By Norman Lebrecht on 14 September 2018 Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

Camille Saint-Saens was the first Frenchman to compose piano concertos. Of the five that he wrote between 1858 and 1886, only the second gets much play and one hears few claims that the rest are scandalously neglected. Some connoisseurs consider the fourth his best. Most agree that the fifth, a pastiche of tunes supposedly sung by Egyptian boatmen at Luxor, falls somewhere between embarrassing and irredeemable. The Canadian pianist Louis Lortie and the young Frenchman Bertrand Chamayou have kicked off cycles of the concertos on their respective labels. Lortie, vastly experienced, plays 1, 2 and 4 on his release, never…

Bartok: Concerto, Enescu: Octet (Warner Classics)

By Norman Lebrecht on 7 September 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Chamber Music, Classical, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

The one thing that keeps me from awarding this album the full five stars is that it is upside down. It opens with a perfectly decent performance of Bela Bartok’s first violin concerto by the Norwegian virtuoso Vilde Frang, with the Radio France philharmonic orchestra conducted by Mikko Franck. Frang, who is 32, has been performing since she was ten years old. Everything she does is perfectly lovely and agreeable. The first Bartok concerto, a youthful effusion of innocent love, is not going to change our lives. The octet, on the other hand, might. George Enescu was one of the great…

Joyce Didonato: Into the Fire (Erato)

By Norman Lebrecht on 31 August 2018 Chamber Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Vocal

A bad album by Joyce Didonato is such a rarity that it warrants serious attention. The release at hand is a live recording of a Wigmore Hall recital just before last Christmas – not so much a recital as a tissue of decorations around a half-hour monologue by Joyce’s favourite composer Jake Heggie, ll of them accompanied by string quartet. The monologue is an evocation of the life of Camille Claudel, model and muse to the sculptor and painter Auguste Rodin. A sculptor herself, Claudel never gets the recognition she possibly deserves and winds up sadly in an asylum. It’s…

Shostakovich: Symphonies 4 and 11 (Deutsche Grammophon)

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 August 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Classical, Classical Music, La Scena Online, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Two problematic symphonies by a tortured composer are despatched by the Boston Symphony and its Latvian conductor with near-nonchalance. The 4th, withheld by the composer for quarter of a century after Stalin’s attack on Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, is ultra-Mahlerian in its orchestration and ironies and utterly daring in its refusal to toe the party line of relentless positivism. The key to the composer’s intentions eludes many conductors. Andris Nelsons adopts a kind of Baltic neutrality in downplaying the score’s emotional extremes in the hope he won’t get mauled by the Russian bear. It’s a fine performance, lacking only the…

Wolf-Ferrari: The two piano trios (Brilliant Classics)

By Norman Lebrecht on 17 August 2018 Chamber Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

Universally popular in the first half of the 20th century, the music of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari has vanished into thin air. A Venetian of German ancestry and education, Wolf-Ferrari rejected modernism and allowed himself to become – along with Mascagni, Repighi, Malipiero and most Italian composers – a cultural poster-boy for the Mussolini regime. This affiliation accelerated his reputational decline after 1945; he died three years later. But there is nothing ideological about his music. Nor is it in any sense reactionary. On the contrary, Wolf-Ferrari wrote romantic music because that is all he was equipped to do and he did…

Muzio Clementi: Keyboard sonatas (Naxos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 3 August 2018 Baroque and Early, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

The problem with Clementi is that there are no standout works. Where most famous composers write a couple of pieces that are gripping enough to be an entry point to their output, the London-based Italian just wrote and wrote more and more sonatas at roughly the same level of invention, leaving the new listener no idea where to start. Opus 33, published by Longman and Broderip in 1794, is not a bad door-knocker. Clementi employs many of the same devices as Mozart – a seductive melody, a secondary detour and several strong teases before he delivers a resolution. There’s nothing…

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