Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Lebrecht Weekly | Joseph Haydn: Symphonies 93-95 (Naxos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 September 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

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…

Lebrecht Weekly | Mieczyslaw Weinberg: 12th symphony/Dawn (Chandos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 15 September 2023 La Scena Online, Lebrecht Weekly

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…

Weekly Lebrecht: Mahler – Symphonies 1, 2 and songs (various labels)

By Norman Lebrecht on 8 September 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

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…

Lebrecht Weekly | Sergio Tiempo: Hommage (Avanti)

By Norman Lebrecht on 1 September 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

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…

Lebrecht Weekly | Bernard Herrmann: Wuthering Heights (Chandos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 28 August 2023 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

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…

Photo: Jürgen-Frank

Lebrecht Weekly | Infinite Voyage: Emerson Quartet (Alpha Classics)

By Norman Lebrecht on 18 August 2023 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

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…

Lebrecht Weekly | Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn: Choral and vocal works (Pentatone/First Hand Records)

By Norman Lebrecht on 4 August 2023 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

It’s not often one gets a chance to compare two composers who are brother and sister. In fact, apart from the Mendelssohns, there is hardly another instance except Mozart and his inauspicious sister, Nannerl. In the Mendelssohn family, Fanny was the first to show talent, only to be silenced by her father once young Felix displayed a boyish genius that many likened to Mozart’s. Fanny went off, got married, acted as family conscience and shocked Felix by taking up composing again in her thirties. The works on these two albums are disparate in tone and intent. Felix’s psalms, sung by…

Lebrecht Weekly | Eugène Ysaye: Solo violin sonatas (Deutsche Grammophon)

By Norman Lebrecht on 28 July 2023 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Every era has its defining violinist. For the second half of the 19th century it was the avuncular Joseph Joachim, for the first third of the 20th the mischievous Fritz Kreisler. Then came Heifetz, Menuhin, Perlman, briefly Vengerov and Anne-Sophie Mutter. If there is a defining violinist in the present century I suspect it is Hilary Hahn. American to her pop-socks, forged from age ten in the Curtis foundry, she has hardly put a career foot wrong, limiting her concert engagements and taking time out to have two daughters. At 43, she stands head and a shoulder pad taller than…

George Frideric Handel in a painting by Denner. Photo : Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library / Alamy

Lebrecht Weekly | Mr Händel im Pub: Baroque meets folk (Arcantus)

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 July 2023 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

I had high hopes of this album, an attempt by period musicians to recreate the kind of stuff that might – repeat, might – have been performed in London pubs during the early 18th century. Henry Purcell, who hung out far too much in London hostelries, was recently dead. Handel, who went in for heavy eating rather than heavy drinking, was newly arrived from Germany and still finding his way around the city’s entertainment venues. Match their music with the rougher folk trade that, then as now, played at esoteric drinking holes and the collusion promised possible enlightenment. The first…

Photo: Teemu Rajala

Lebrecht Weekly | Rautavaara: 3rd piano concerto (Bis); Overtures from Finland (Chandos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 14 July 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

Like Russians at tennis, Finns now predominate in the production of classical music. Finnish conductors command orchestras from San Francisco to Paris, Finnish soloists receive more than their fair share of concerto dates and Finnish composers are extensively promoted. Sadness at the recent death of the exceptional Kaija Saariaho merely magnified the size of the footprint that a marginal nation of five million citizens has planted across an international art form. Finnish musicians are exceedingly well trained and motivated. The question of individual quality is seldom put under the spotlight. Bis: ** Chandos: *** Einojuhani Rautavaara, who died in 2016,…

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