Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Lebrecht Weekly – NDR Symphony Orchestra/Krzysztof Urbanski (Alpha)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 11 April 2016 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Most composer reputations subside in the generation after their death. It’s as if posterity calls time out while deciding its final judgement. Witold Lutoslawski is a notable exception to this hiatus rule. Since his death in 1994, performances of his music have become more frequent and his status has risen steadily among both modernists and conservatives. A Pole living under Stalinism, Lutoslawski was adept at facing both ways without sacrificing his creative principles. He wrote works of dangerous aleatory freedom and others of completely conventional form. All bore his unmistakable elegance. The Concerto for Orchestra, premiered in 1954, was acclaimed…

Lebrecht Weekly – Ludmila Berlinskaya: Pasternak And Scriabin (Melodiya)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 4 April 2016 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

You knew that the author of Doctor Zhivago was a composer, right? You didn’t. Well sit back; this might take a while. One of the most iconic portraits of the mystical Russian musician Alexander Scriabin was painted by the distinguished arstist, Leonid Pasternak. The sitter so impressed the artist’s 14 year-old son that Boris Pasternak promptly decided to become a composer and went to study for a while at the Moscow Conservatoire. Six years later he gave up writing music, but Scriabin’s influence proved formative and enduring, especially on his poetry. Boris Pasternak later married the wife of the important…

Lebrecht Weekly – FolksLied: Beethoven, Britten, Haydn (BR Klassik)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 25 March 2016 Art Song, Classical, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly

Viennese masters, always short of cash, picked up commissions from rich British tourists for composing drawing-room settings of national heritage. Haydn and Beethoven filled their boots with Scottish and Welsh ballads for two ducats a song. Haydn wrote about 200, dressed up with piano, violin and cello accompaniments. Easy money. The first surprise in this absorbing recital by Christian Gerhaher is that he sings the Haydn ditties in German, in a 1920s translation. It’s disconcerting at first but gradually deepens with hints of the nearness of these simple sentiments to the core topics of German Lieder: springtime, love and loss.…

Lebrecht Weekly – Debussy, Elgar &c: violin sonatas (Onyx)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 21 March 2016 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Violin

After two years of creative trauma that silenced almost every leading composer, the latter half of the First World War yielded works of extraordinary intimacy. Claude Debussy, responding to a terminal diagnosis of rectal cancer, wrote three intense sonatas for varied instruments and piano. In the last concert of his life, in September 1917, Debussy accompanied Gaston Poulet in the violin sonata, a work of fizzing energy, utterly lacking lament or regret. Gone is Debussy’s distancing feline detachment. The sonata closes on a ‘very animated’ springlike dance, a smiling might-have-been. Debussy died in March 1918, within sound of German gunfire,…

Lebrecht Weekly – British Clarinet Concertos 2 (Chandos)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 14 March 2016 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

An unknown work by Benjamin Britten sets the pulse racing. It turns out to be fragments of a concerto he started writing for Benny Goodman in 194. What with Pearl Harbour and Peter Grimes, it got pushed to the back of the desk. Before Britten sailed home to England in March 1942, the only finished movement was seized by US Customs was seized on suspicion that it contained espionage codes. The movement did not see light of day until 1989 when it was retrieved and orchestrated by Colin Matthews, Britten’s composing assistant, and premiered by the clarinet virtuoso Michael Collins.…

Lebrecht Weekly – Mahler: 1st Symphony (BR Klassik)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 7 March 2016 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s interpretation of Mahler’s first symphony is beautifully played by Munich’s (some say Germany’s) best orchestra and thoughtfully structured by an impressive guest conductor. I think I am safe in saying that it is conceptually different from any of the 120 Mahler Firsts on record, stretching all the way back to Dmitri Mitropolous’s towering Minnesota performance for Columbia in April 1940. And that’s no small distinction in a much-repeated piece. Where Yannick differs from all others is in atmospherics. The opening four and a half minutes of ambient sound, where the ear searches for a clue to what’s going…

Lebrecht Weekly – Rudi Stephan, Albéric Magnard (accentus)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 29 February 2016 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Violin

These two composers are joined by tragic deaths on opposite sides of the First World War. Stephan, a Munich avant-gardist, was the only soldier in his German unit to die in a September 1915 battle with Russian troops for the Galician town of Stryi. Magnard, a French traditionalist, was either shot or burned to death defending his home from German troops in September 1914. Only 28 at the time of his death, Stephan was little known outside German new music circles and not well liked within them. A young man of strong opinions and no tolerance for sycophancy, he…

Lebrecht Weekly – Ivry Gitlis (SWR/Naxos Deutschland)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 22 February 2016 Lebrecht Weekly, Violin

Great violinists come in two forms: stars and legends. Think about it. Jascha Heifetz was a star, Nathan Milstein a legend. One was a household name, the other inspired a kind of spiritual reverence among musicians of all stripes, not just violinists. Fritz Kreisler was a star, Jacques Thibaud a legend. The late Yehudi Menuhin was a star, as was Isaac Stern. Ivry Gitlis, their close contemporary, lives on – and he’s a legend. A child prodigy from the port town of Haifa, Ivry came to London before the Second World War to study with Carl Flesch. Turned down by…

Lebrecht Weekly – Yevgeny Sudbin: Medtner/Rachmaninov (BIS)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 15 February 2016 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Most concert pianists are like modern tennis players. They know that only two or three men and women are ever going to win the major tournaments, which leaves all the rest working harder each day in vain pursuit of an inhuman perfection and an inexhaustible hope. The Russian-born Yevgeny Sudbin is a circuit pianist who, living in London and teaching at the Royal Academy, has yet to break top ten rankings. He’s a tremendous player of exceptional flair who has made recording for the past decade on an esoteric Swedish label, covering mostly Russian music. The reception has been enthusiastic,…

Lebrecht Weekly – Bartók: 44 Duos (Decca)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 8 February 2016 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

It has been an age since I looked to my shelves for a work by a major composer and found that, after 40 years of building a library, I don’t have it. Nor, so far as I recall, have I ever heard it, either in concert or on radio (though a few recordings do exist). The 44 duos were written by Béla Bartók in 1931 on commission from a German violinist, Erich Doflein, who wanted to use them as teaching aids in his studio. Easy money, you’d think. But Bartók, being Bartók, couldn’t write a dull phrase. The four books…