New from ICA Classics: BBC Legends Volume 4. “And there shall come to pass at the end of days when every recording that was ever made is gathered together and ascended to heaven for all to hear,” Norman Lebrecht says.
When Georg Friederic Handel lived in London in the first half of the 18th century, there was not much to do after a concert and a composer could drone on as long as he liked. Handel’s propensity for inordinate length was tolerate for a couple of decades but the backlash caught up with him in April 1739 when the second of his dramatic biblical oratorios fell flat with aristocrats complaining it was too long and static. This was unfair, in part. Handel had stopped writing operas when the upper classes imported Italians to do it supposedly better. Facing penury, Handel…
I can’t remember a pre-Christmas season that started so sluggishly, without an obvious blockbuster on display. DG and Sony are leading with cultish solo pianists; Warner are dormant. Jonas Kaufmann is singing weakly about cinema. There are no big releases out there to drive a healthy economy. I turned to the continuation of the Boston Shostakovich cycle which I have reviewed before with some enthusiasm. The conductor Andris Nelsons is a Latvian who grew up in a post-Soviet country still shadowed by Shostakovich’s ghosts. The Boston Symphony Orchestra sound stronger on record than any of the original Russian performers and…
This weirdly unbalanced album opens with a live performance of Beethoven’s first piano concerto and continues with solo pieces from the bottom drawer, some of which are little higher than kindergarten level in difficulty. No explanation is offered in the glossy booklet. To work out what’s really going on, you’ll have to delve into the background of Alice Sara Ott, the German-Japanese soloist who, four years ago, made it known that she had been stricken with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative condition. In sympathy and solidarity, her record label has been quietly gathering her unreleased material while Alice continues to enhance…
The 12 symphonies that Haydn composed on visits to London in 1791-92 and 1794-95 belong to a world that was already gone. Mozart, who died soon after Haydn left Vienna for the first time, led his symphonies into darker, dangerous tonal territory. Beethoven, whom Haydn taught on his return, was ready to leapfrog into a new century of revolutionary ferment. The Haydn London symphonies belong mostly to a decadent age of domestic amusements on noble country estates. In some ways, though, Haydn was transformed by London. In his early sixties, he was treated for the first time in his life…
In Dmitri Shostakovich’s last years, Mieczyslaw Weinberg stopped writing symphonies. After his 51th in 1970, nothing more stirred in him until, in December 1975, four months after his friend’s passing, he began a memorial symphony. The 12th did not go well. The influential conductor Kirill Kondrashin rejected the overlong opening movement and the hourlong score did not get a hearing until Maxim Shostakovich, son of the dedicatee, conducted a Soviet radio broadcast in October 1979. Soon after, Maxim fled to the West and the symphony was left to gather dust. What we hear is a chronicle of gratitude and ambivalence, a tapestry…
Although quite a few orchestras now release concerts on their own labels, the field is fraught with risk. London’s Philharmonia Orchestra has chosen Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony as its second selfie. Big mistake. The Philharmonia’s brand is largely defined by Otto Klemperer’s 1960s Mahler performances, led by an earth-shattering Resurrection. It remains an everlasting benchmark. The latest Mahler Second is conducted by a Finnish music director, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, who has incandescent qualities but speaks Mahler clunkily as a foreign language. The opening movement, though two minutes quicker than most, has sluggish tempi and structural frailty. Instrumental solos are highlighted at the…
Has there ever been a more collaborative pianist than Martha Argerich? Not in the clumsy modern sense where the term is used as a substitute for ‘piano accompanist’ but in the literal meaning of a pianist who does everything in her power to help others to fulfil dreams, careers and good deeds. Martha is the ultimate collaborator. On this album, Martha joins a Venezuelian protege Sergio Tiempo in the Schubert F-minor Fantasy for four hands, a work she has never recorded before and which, inevitably, she endows with flashes of wit and light. The most famous recording of this compelling…
The history of Hollywood film music runs in a fairly straight line from Erich Wolfgang Korngold to John Williams, offering a colourful blend of Wagner, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Puccini and Prokofiev. The historical line is as unwavering as it is untrue. While mainstream movie composers relied on much the same materials, some spun off into a different sound world, creating a satellite narrative of screen sound. The most original rethinker of film sound was the New York composer Bernard Herrmann. He was just 30 when he won his first Oscar for The Devil and Daniel Webster in 1941, and then he went to…
Prepare to shed a tear. After 47 years at the string quartet frontlines, the Emersons are breaking up this summer to spend the rest of their lives on their other passion – nurturing new quartets. Their two violinists – Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer – have been there since the quartet’s formation in America’s bicentennial year; the violist Lawrence Dutton joined in 1977. Only the cello seat has seen changes. Few groups, from the Buena Vista Social Club to the Rolling Stones, have ever maintained such consistency at such high performance over so many years. The foundation year is, to…
