Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Rachmaninov: Etudes-tableaux (Hyperion)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 13 July 2018 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

I need to declare an interest. I have described Steven Osborne elsewhere as the most interesting British pianist of his generatiom, a declaration which practically precludes me from reviewing his recordings, predisposed as I am to praise them. It’s a dilemma which I try to resolve by listening to everything that Osborne does and allowing at least a year to elapse between one enthusiastic review and the next. You’ve no idea how taxing this can be. That said, I am happily immersed in the two Rachmaninov sets of piano sketches, written in 1911 and 1916 and apparently not intended for…

Georg Friedrich Händel: Johannes-Passion (CPO)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 6 July 2018 Baroque and Early, Choral, Lebrecht Weekly

Did you know Handel wrote a St John’s Passion? Me, neither, and I’m still not convinced. This score was discovered in the Berlin Royal Library in the mid-19th century by the authoritative Friedrich Chrysander and included in the even more authoritative Halle Handel Edition. But there have always been doubts about dates and style. The credited librettist, Christian Heinrich Postel, died of consumption in Hamburg in 1705, when Handel was 20. Handel knew Postel’s work and may have asked for a text, but Postel worked mostly for Telemann and if he found time at all for Handel it would have…

Dame Sarah Connolly: Come to me in my Dreams (Chandos)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 29 June 2018 Art Song, Lebrecht Weekly

What are we to make of songs that were written for people to sing and play at home, when nobody plays at home any more? The great canon of so-called ‘art song’ (horrible term) has shifted from the drawing room to the public stage and, in doing so, has lost something of its intended intimacy and improvisation. It seems to be that English song suffers more in this transition than French or German. All too often, in a concert setting, the singer feels obliged to pop a peach in his/her mouth for declamatory purpose. The English mezzo Dame Sarah Connolly…

John McLeod: Out of the Silence (Delphian)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 22 June 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

The late Michael Kennedy, lifelong Telegraph critic, once told me he lost interest in new music in his late sixties. Michael had known Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten and reckoned their successors were not up to the mark. We argued about the merits of Birtwistle and Turnage but his ears were not for the turning and I respected the candour of his admission. Myself, around the same age, I am still bi-curious: eager to see what the old hands are doing and keen to hear new sounds coming through. Nothing thrills me more than finding a composer I can…

Bach violin concertos (Deutsche Grammophon)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 15 June 2018 Baroque and Early, Lebrecht Weekly, Violin

Averse as I am to teenage prodigies, I heard Daniel Lozakovich in a Berlin nightclub this week and had no doubt from the first touch of bow on string that he is the genuine article. Sixteen years old, raised in Stockholm by Kazak-Russian parents, he gives the impression of belonging nowhere but some deep place inside himself. Fresh from a sleepless night on a bench in Tokyo airport where his flight had been cancelled, he draws energy – as the great ones do – from an audience. No-one breathed on the dance-floor during his Bach Partita. His DG debut recording…

Vaughan Williams: Concertos (Chandos)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 10 June 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral, Piano

If I had to choose Elgar or VW for a desert island, I know which it would be. Elgar these days seems over-familiar, where Vaughan Williams loses none of his capacity to surprise. You would not automatically guess that from the opening item on this Toronto Symphony recording, the 1938 Serenade to Music, a flossy piece which is made up of bits of Shakespeare and broderie anglaise. Moving swiftly on, the 1944 oboe concerto is an exquisite wartime consolation, a promise of green fields and scones for tea when all the unpleasantness is over. Sarah Jeffrey’s reading is ideally serene,…

Nikolai Myaskovsky: Complete piano sonatas (Moscow Conservatoire)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 1 June 2018 Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

There is no clear western pereception of Myaskovsky. We think we know Prokofiev and Shostakovitch, whether through their music or through their Stalin ordeals. But their senior contemporary barely flickers on our attention even though Stravinsky, among others, held him in high regard. In a fairly undramatic life, Myaskovsky simply got on with writing symphonies – 27 altogether – and piano sonatas, which serve as a kind of private commentary on the symphonic output. He taught for most of his life at the Moscow Conservatoire, where a successor professor, Mikhail Lidsky, has applied himself to recording the complete piano output…

Stephen Hough: Dream Album (Hyperion)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 26 May 2018 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

In the hands of anyone other than Stephen Hough, this album would be either a horrible indulgence or a public act of psychoanalysis. Hough is far too fastidious a pianist to be suspected of such temptations. What we have here are morsels by composers great and (mostly) small, work the evoke a trance-like state between sleep and wakefulness. I’m not sure about Hough’s opening setting of Strauss’s overworked Radetsky March, but thereafter he hardly puts a finger wrong. Das alte Lied by Henry Love will blow you away; Love was the pseudonym of Hilde Loewe, a Viennese refugee in London.…

J S Bach: Goldberg Variations/Sonatas and Partitas (Delphian/Navona)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 18 May 2018 Baroque and Early, Lebrecht Weekly

In times of stress I reach for Bach in the raw, one instrument, one pair of hands. I’m choosy who I listen to when the nerves are frayed. The immortal interpretations – Gould in the Goldbergs, Milstein in the Sonatas and Partitas – are too profound, too perfect, to afford prompt and gentle relief. Two new releases are just what the soul doctor ordered. Peter Hill is an English pianist, a Messaien expert who studied with Nadia Boulander and taught at the University of Sheffield. I have come across him on record and radio, never in the concert hall. His…

Federico Colli Plays Scarlatti with Rare Conviction

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By Norman Lebrecht on 11 May 2018 Baroque and Early, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

Domenico Scarlatti: Sonatas, volume 1 (Chandos) It feels dangerously transgressive, and thus all the more enjoyable, to listen to Scarlatti’s keyboard pieces on a full-throated Steinway D piano set up in an English country barn. Why musicians submit so readily to the tyranny of political correctness – composers to the imposition of serialism, performers to the doctrines of period practice – is a mystery to me. So to find a young pianist at the start of his path who is prepared to defy the professorial rule makers and play a Bach contemporary on a modern big banger of a concert…

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly

Rachmaninov: Etudes-tableaux (Hyperion)

Georg Friedrich Händel: Johannes-Passion (CPO)

Dame Sarah Connolly: Come to me in my Dreams (Chandos)

John McLeod: Out of the Silence (Delphian)

Bach violin concertos (Deutsche Grammophon)

Vaughan Williams: Concertos (Chandos)

Nikolai Myaskovsky: Complete piano sonatas (Moscow Conservatoire)

Stephen Hough: Dream Album (Hyperion)

J S Bach: Goldberg Variations/Sonatas and Partitas (Delphian/Navona)

Federico Colli Plays Scarlatti with Rare Conviction

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