Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Lebrecht Weekly | Music for a new century (DG)

By Norman Lebrecht on 26 May 2023 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

The San Francisco-based New Century Chamber Orchestra, now in its 30th year, has a strong inclination for commissioning new work. A good thing, right? That depends on the work. The four pieces presented here are not so much a mixed bag as a Walmart display assembled by AI. The third piano concerto by Philip Glass veers between nursery-rhyme puerility and elevator Muzak. I have an open mind about Glass, but this is the most trivial piece of his that I have heard in years. Its third movement is dedicated to fellow-minimalist Arvo Pärt, who has the right to feel insulted…

Lebrecht Weekly | 1919 Coda: Janacek, Boulanger, Debussy, Elgar (Delphian)

By Norman Lebrecht on 19 May 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

The title of this violin-piano recital requires some explanation. By 1919, two of the named composers were dead and a third was worn out. Only Leos Janacek was firing on all cylinders – indeed, on more cylinders than he ever had before. If 1919 was a benchmark, it is not evident from their lifecycles. However, the year does mark an end-point for the war era and these sonatas exist in that immediate past, with no thought of present or future. The Janacek sonata, finished in 1915 and revised over six more years, is a masterpiece composed in a vacuum. The…

Lebrecht Weekly | Beethoven: Piano concertos 3 & 4 (Warner)

By Norman Lebrecht on 12 May 2023 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

I cannot, in all conscience, give this recording a star rating, or even a detailed review. The soloist is Elisabeth Leonskaja, a legendary pianist whose introspections are perhaps the strongest living reminder of her late friend Sviatoslav Richter. There is an organic element to Leonskaja’s playing, a lack of obvious human agency, that makes Leonskaja at once unpredictable and unarguably at the composer’s service. I have never known her make a recording that was not a unique contribution to the history of the work’s interpretation. Since 1978, when she left the Soviet Union, Leonskaja has lived quietly in Vienna as…

Lebrecht Weekly | Bruno Walter: String quartet, piano quintet (CPO)

By Norman Lebrecht on 5 May 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

Context is a shocking thing. Looking through a list of concerts performed by inmates at the Theresienstadt concentration camp between 1942 and 1944, I was taken aback to find a chamber work by Bruno Walter. Most of the music performed was either by major Austrian and Czech names, with a fair sampling by composers who were themselves incarcerated in the camp – Ullmann, Haas, Krasa, Ilse Weber – all destined for deportation to the Auschwitz death camp. Bruno Walter was an outlier in this company. A conductor trained by Gustav Mahler in Hamburg and employed by him in Vienna, Walter…

Photo: Per Morten Abrahamsen

Lebrecht Weekly | Nielsen: The Symphonies (DG)

By Norman Lebrecht on 28 April 2023 Classical, Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

In 1925, at the age of 60, Denmark’s national composer gave in to depression. ‘If I could live my life again,’ said Carl Nielsen, ‘I would … take a commercial apprenticeship or do some other form of useful work that would lead to a visible final result. The creative artist’s lot is not a happy one.’ Nielsen was working at the time on his sixth symphony, titled ‘the simple symphony’ though it was nothing of the sort. His marriage had broken down and he was feeling unappreciated. His fifth symphony, in two movements, was packed with impotent rage. The sixth…

Photo: tippettquartet.co.uk

Lebrecht Weekly | Erich Wolfgang Korngold: String quartets 1-3 (Naxos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 21 April 2023 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

If his violin concerto led you to expect lovely tunes and mushy strings, you may be disappointed with the three quartets, written a decade apart in a career that began in Mahler’s Vienna and ended on the Pacific Palisades. The first quartet, dated 1923 amid Korngold’s operatic success with The Dead City, has an atonal opening that might be aimed at the annual congress of the International Society for Contemporary Music. After a Vienna premiere by the quartet of Arnold Rosé, Mahler’s brother-in-law, the new work was played to the ISCM by a quartet led by Arnold Schoenberg’s brother-in-law, Rudolf…

Photo: Irene Zandel

Lebrecht Weekly | Glenn Gould: String quartet, opus 1 (CPO)

By Norman Lebrecht on 14 April 2023 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Strings

You mean Glenn Gould, the composer? Well, he was always too big a personality to fit in a pair of pianist socks. In his teens the Canadian genius tried his hand at various small scores, none of them satisfying his restless self. The first composition to warrant an opus number was a half-hour string quartet, finished in 1955 when he was 23 and premiered the following year in Montreal. Gould, by now, was a soaring star and four members of the Cleveland Orchestra hastened to record the single-movement quartet for CBS Records, which forgot to promote it. Gould, in later…

Photo: Mat Hennek

Lebrecht Weekly | Valentin Silvestrov: Silent Songs (DG)

By Norman Lebrecht on 7 April 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

I know it’s barely April but I’ve shortlisted this album as one of my records of the year ad don’t expect it to get easily displaced. The project came about the wrong way round. Instead of a singer approaching a label with a cycle he or she wants to record, in this case the French pianist Hélène Grimaud carried the cycle in her heart for twenty years waiting for the right vocalist. The one she found is a young German-Romanian baritone, Konstantin Krimmel. When they came together in Berlin last summer, they were joined unexpectedly by the composer, an 85…

Lebrecht Weekly | Missy Mazzoli: Dark with excessive bright (BIS)

By Norman Lebrecht on 31 March 2023 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Given the composer’s decade-long success and her emergence as the first woman to clutch a Metropolitan Opera commission, it is vaguely surprising to find that Missy Mazzoli’s only recordings until now have been on a non-export hometown label, New Amsterdam Records. In a potential breakthrough, the Swedish boutique label Bis has gone where majors fear to tread and given her music a Baltic footprint. One does fear, however, for the survival of the music industry if a talent of this order is ignored for so long by its dominant corporations. Mazzoli, 42, made her name with an operatic adaptation of…

Lebrecht Weekly | Beethoven/Ravel: Concertos (Avanticlassic)

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 March 2023 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral, Piano, Romantic

Did anyone know that Pablo Casals had a kid brother who wrote him a concerto? Enrique Casals, 16 years younger, was a violinist and conductor. His cello concerto came to light three years ago and the enterprising Jan Vogler has made a captivating world premiere recording of it on Sony. It was sitting on my deck destined to be named album of the week when, as so often happens, an unforeseen astonishment dropped through the letterbox and took pride of place. Let’s not get all wokey and egalitarian about this: the best is, always and forever, the enemy of even the…

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