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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

Review | RCM: “Music Lights the Way”

By Shirley Wu on 21 May 2022 Concert Reviews, Piano

On April 27, 2022, Canada’s largest and most respected music education institution, The Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM), held the ‘Music Lights the Way’ black-tie concert at Toronto’s Koerner Hall to launch the sixth edition of their newest Celebration Series® piano books. Some invited pianists played for the audience in person, while others sent virtual greetings and performances. During the pre-concert reception, attendees were the first in the world to browse through the Celebration Series®, Sixth Edition. The concert hosts then announced a series of upcoming student piano competitions, as well as an unprecedented decision to provide free sets of…

Lebrecht Weekly | Henryk Mikolai Gorecki: Piano pieces (Accord)

By Norman Lebrecht on 20 May 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

When an unknown Polish composer burst into the pop charts in 1992 with an ethereal third symphony, I arranged to meet him twice, in Brussels and London. Gorecki spoke only Polish and German, the latter with reluctance in light of his wartime memories. I got the impression of a stubborn man of strong character with an unshakeable faith in God, a hatred of Communism and a contempt for effete western fashions. Pierre Boulez had called his third symphony ‘merde’ and Gorecki was no less withering about him. Gorecki’s early works, however, were no less modern than Boulez. This luminous…

Lebrecht Weekly | Arvo Pärt, Poulenc, Stravinsky (BR Klassik)

By Norman Lebrecht on 13 May 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Just how much we miss Mariss Jansons is manifest in this Munich concert of three sacred works. Jansons, who died in November 2019, aged 76, was not principally noted for religiosity or choral masterpieces, but his shaping of this triptych is so masterful that one can hardly imagine them presentled with greater coherence or sincerity. Arvo Pärt’s Berlin Mass, composed in 1990 for the city’s reunification, is a five part setting of the Roman Catholic service in an idiom that is, at once, respectful of traditional sonority and, at the same time, pushing gently to a minimal modernism that is…

Lebrecht’s Weekly | Allan Pettersson: Barefoot songs (BIS)

By Norman Lebrecht on 6 May 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

Sweden, unlike its neighbours, has no great composer. Norway has Grieg, Finland Sibelius, Denmark Nielsen and Sweden – blank. The one composer who might have filled the role was treated with such disdain by polite society that he lived all his life in grim poverty, never able to afford a piano. Allan Pettersson died aged 68 in 1980, leaving 17 symphonies that are still being slowly discovered. Although the government granted him a lifelong pension in his 50s, the Stockholm Philharmonic banned his music ‘for all time’ after a dispute over touring. Pettersson was working-class and dirt-poor. Sweden did not…

Photo: Michael Cooper

Review | Canadian Opera Company’s La Traviata a Feast for the Eyes and Ears

By Denise Lai on 4 May 2022 Concert Reviews, Opera

One of the Verdi’s best-known operas with many recognizable tunes, La Traviata tells the tragic love story of Parisian courtesan Violetta, who initially rejects the notion of love, but eventually falls for the handsome Alfredo, only to be forced to relinquish her life with him, in the name of saving his family’s honour. Conducted by Music Director Johannes Debus, this is a revival of COC’s 2015 production under director Arin Arbus, which stays true to Verdi’s original vision for the opera, and transports the audience back into the world of Paris’ elite in the mid-1800s. What you missed Egyptian-born soprano…

Photo : Matthew Perrin

Review | Marina Thibeault: a special guest for the Trio Fibonacci

By La Scena Musicale Team on 4 May 2022 Concert Reviews

by Guillaume De Pauw Invited to join the Trio Fibonacci for their next concert, the presence of violist Marina Thibeault will allow the ensemble to tackle some gems of the piano quartet repertoire. Our interview with this virtuoso before the concert ‘Le trio se met en quatre’ gives us a foretaste of a program which delves into German Romanticism. To begin with, it is notable that the Trio Fibonacci rarely invites outside artists to join them, which raises the question of how a musician can create their own niche within an established group. “I feel all the more fortunate to…

Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, photographed at Ainola, his home outside Helsinki, in the 1940s.

Lebrecht Weekly | Sibelius: 7 symphonies and Tapiola (Decca)

By Norman Lebrecht on 29 April 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

The record industry never makes the fuss about a Sibelius cycle that it does with Beethoven and Mahler. Not sure why not. Maybe Sibelius sells less, or Finns are shy. Or past sets by the likes of Colin Davis, Neeme Järvi and Herbert Blomstedt failed to get the suits excited. The new set from young Finn wizz Klaus Mäkelä comes accompanied by exceptional hype from Decca, always a strong Sibelius label. The conductor’s promise is incontestable. At 26, he is chief of the Oslo Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris, and hotly tipped to succeed in Chicago or New York. So…

Lebrecht Weekly | Gustav Mahler: 4th Symphony (Pentatone)

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 April 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

Four vital traditions inform this recording, the first in a planned cycle by the Czech Philharmonic and its Russian-Jewish chief conductor Semyon Bychkov. Mahler grew up in Czech countryside, in a Jewish family that spoke Yiddish and German. The Czech Philharmonic gave the world premiere of his seventh symphony and keeps scores with Mahler’s markings in its archive, where I have studied them. Mahler twice visited St Petersburg where he had cousins, fostering an empathy with his music that feeds audibly into the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich and into Bychkov’s personal upbringing. All four of these streams inform his interpretation,…

Photo: Curtis Perry

Review: NACO Returns to Ottawa

By Natasha Gauthier on 18 April 2022 Concert Reviews, Orchestral, Ottawa

After performing in Toronto and New York, the National Arts Centre Orchestra brought its Truth in our Time program home to the NAC in Ottawa on April 13 and 14. For my third and last time listening to this concert, I decided to sample the April 14 Livestream. The NAC has significantly upped its videocasting game over the pandemic. Although this particular livestream had a charge attached, plenty of events have been available for free. For all the setbacks and hardships the performing arts have experienced over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, accessibility gains have been a silver lining.…

Lebrecht Weekly | British piano concertos (Lyrita); British music for strings #3 (CPO)

By Norman Lebrecht on 15 April 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

Lyrita: **** CPO: *** A Times obituary this week for Joseph Horovitz reckons that he could not decide if he was a composer of serious or light music. The same could be said of most of his contemporaries. An unexpected album of mid-century piano concertos delivers a prawn cocktail of exceptionally competent music without much by way of intellectual nutrients. The film composer John Addison wrote a jolly Wellington Suite for his old public school. Arthur Benjamin’s Concertino is a British Rhapsody in Blue – and rather good, too, as is Elizabeth Maconchy’s, pitched in a Hindemith or Martinu mode.…

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