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La Scena Online is the digital magazine of La Scene Musicale.Contents: News, Concert reviews, CD reviews, Interviews, Obituaries, etc; Editor: Wah Keung Chan; Assistant Editor: Andreanne Venne
ISSN: 1206-9973

Lebrecht Weekly | Mäkelä offers little in Shostakovich beyond an energetic superficiality

By Norman Lebrecht on 27 September 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

When the British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer said this week that he listened to Shostakovich if he was having a hard time, I wondered if he’d been tuned in to the same set as me. There are many things in life that make me reach for Shostakovich and I am rarely let down by performance – certainly never as exasperated as I was by these. The good things first. The Oslo Philharmonic is a first-rate orchestra with brilliant woodwind soloists and a cracking work ethic. The Norwegian recording engineers are pretty good, too, and the digital editors have cleaned…

Photo: GTG / Carole Parodi

Review | Disappointing Tristan und Isolde opens Geneva opera season

By Ossama el Naggar on 25 September 2024 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

Tristan und Isolde is a colossal work, not only due to its length (five hours, including two intermissions) or for the influence of its “Tristan” chord on Western music, but also for its symbolism, as Wagner was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer’s philosophy. He was also conducting an illicit affair with Mathilde, the wife of his benefactor, Swiss businessman Otto von Wesendonck. Tristan’s plot is simple: an Irish Princess takes pity on Tantris, the knight who killed her betrothed Morold. She tends to him, nursing him back to life, even while knowing he was her fiancé’s killer. Tantris turns out to…

Lebrecht Weekly | Berg, Schoenberg, Webern: Piano works (Warner)

By Norman Lebrecht on 23 September 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

Music of the Second Vienna School was condemned as noise on first reception. How deaf is that? The greatest asset of these revolutionary works is their quietude. The arresting opus 1 sonata of Alban Berg achieves a 12-minute span of introspection without an obvious atonal tantrum. Berg was the most lyrical of the Schoenberg crowd but the softness of this sonata is its winning virtue, never more so than in the hands of the Vienna-based Russian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaya. Beauty becomes even more wondrous when it is literally off the scale. A Mozartian at heart, Leonskaya has more trouble at locating…

Artists of Alberta Ballet in La Sylphide. Photo: Aaron Anker

Review | Alberta Ballet makes the case for La Sylphide

By Robin J Miller on 20 September 2024 La Scena Online, West

La Sylphide is an important ballet, but one that few of today’s ballet fans have ever seen. Alberta Ballet makes the case for it to be performed far more often. Not only is it key to understanding the foundations of ballet, it’s also a lot of fun: a tragedy that does not make you weep, with beauty enough to make you smile. La Sylphide — a modern ballet At nearly 200 years old, La Sylphide was the first “modern” ballet where a ballerina, supported by a large female corps de ballet, became the focus of the story. It was also…

Augusta Holmès par L. Taponier (circa.1880). Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Lebrecht Weekly | Augusta Holmès: Symphonic poems (CPO)

By Norman Lebrecht on 13 September 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

The Times of London has shrunk its weekly classical record review to an inch and a half. Other papers ignore recordings altogether, except in Christmas roundups. The classical sector is dying for want of attention and labels are laying off expert staff. All the more reason for online publications like this to maintain continuous coverage of a vital part of the musical economy. My pick of the week may appear esoteric. It comes from Ludwigshafen in western Germany and is performed by the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz with its British chief conductor Michael Francis. The composer is an Irishwoman who lived in…

Anna Prohaska & the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at Musikfest Berlin. Photo: Fabian Schellhorn

La Scena on the Road | Musikfest Berlin 2024: The Americas & Politics

By Gianmarco Segato on 11 September 2024 Classical Music, Concert Reviews, La Scena Online, Vocal

Musikfest Berlin is an ambitious annual festival that hosts the world’s top orchestras, instrumental and vocal ensembles, together with the major symphony orchestras of the city of Berlin. Its 20th-anniversary season focuses on the double continent of America and borrows its title, “Amériques”, from France-to-US transplant, Edgard Varèse’s 1921 work that raised the roof at the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra’s festival-opening concert on Aug. 24th. Acknowledging the ‘American’ theme during his opening remarks, artistic director Winrich Hopp made reference to recent and upcoming European and North and South American elections which have seen far right parties gain more ground than…

Photo: Public Domain

Lebrecht Weekly | Dvorak’s Symphonies by Two Orchestras (Warner/Pentatone)

By Norman Lebrecht on 6 September 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

Comparisons in music are unfair. An ephemeral art cannot be measured and pinned, like a butterfly, to the page without risking mortal damage. Nevertheless, human beings possess critical faculties and spend much of their lives assessing whether A is preferable to B. Not necessarily better, just more apt to present circumstances. I offer these caveats because I have been listening to Dvorak orchestral works from very different sources. Nathalie Stutzmann with the Atlanta Symphony present the American Suite, opus 98, together with the 9th symphony, From the New World. The project marks Stutzmann’s debut on record as a symphonic conductor…

Darius Jones (Photo: Kholood Eid)

Jazz in Ontario: Guelph, Toronto & Beyond

By Félix-Antoine Hamel on 30 August 2024 La Scena Online, Région, Scena Jazz, Toronto

GUELPH AT THE CROSSROADS This year, the Guelph Jazz Festival organization is in transition, after its former director, Scott Thomson, was appointed artistic and general director of FIMAV (the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville) last year. The Guelph festival’s Interim Artistic Director Karen Ng and Interim General Manager Alex Ricci and their team have nevertheless assembled a promising lineup featuring a range of creative groups from Ontario, Quebec and the U.S. They’ve retained a strong focus on improvised music, in keeping with the Guelph Jazz Festival’s distinctive flavour, while also adding some world and electronic musics in the…

Wadada Leo Smith (Photo: Michael Jackson)

Montreal (In)Flux

By Félix-Antoine Hamel on 30 August 2024 La Scena Online, Montreal, Région, Scena Jazz

“It almost happened by accident,” says Peter Burton (from Arts in the Margins) about the many organisations pulling their forces together for the upcoming Flux Festival, which will have its first edition from Oct. 4 to 10. In an era where money is rare for the creative arts, necessity is the mother of collaboration and no less than seven different organizations are involved in putting together concerts and conferences about experimental and improvised music during that week, including the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation as well as Innovations en concert. But while concert-goers will find much to enjoy…

Lebrecht Weekly | Roberto Gerhard’s Sheer Eclecticism with Don Quixote &c. (Chandos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 30 August 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

Don’t try to pin an adjective to Gerhard: he transcends them all. The son of a Swiss-German father and an Alsatian mother, born in Spanish Catalonia, he studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin, organised the 1936 seminal modernist festival in Barcelona and left a couple of years later to spend the rest of his life in English exile. None of these nationalities was his, any more than his modernism was dogmatic. The ballet scores on this scintillating album are rooted in Iberian folklore but the language is distinctly, inimitably Gerhard. Nobody knew what to make of him and,…

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