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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

Jeff Scott. Photo courtesy of DSO

Road trip to Detroit yields symphonic pleasure – speed bumps notwithstanding

By Paul E. Robinson on 19 November 2021 Concert Reviews

Last week I had the pleasure of hearing the Cleveland Orchestra in top form at its home in Severance Hall. A real treat after the COVID-19 restrictions that have restricted access to live music, especially for Canadians travelling to the United States. This week I was in the Motor City to hear the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under its new music director, Jader Bignamini. Once again the music-making was on the highest possible level. As Canadians are well aware, the U.S. government finally opened its borders to travelers entering the country by car on Nov. 8. It was a welcome relief,…

Renaud Capuçon: Un violon à Paris (Warner Classics)

By Norman Lebrecht on 19 November 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

At the start of the first Covid lockdown in March 2020, the violinist Renaud Capucon asked his son Elliott to film a short Dvorak piece he was playing on a tablet. What arose from this moment was a ritual in which, for 56 days, Capucon would play each morning with the pianist Guillaume Bellom and post the results online. ‘It would give me a goal every morning, at a time when one could easily come adrift,’ he says. Twenty-two of those tracks have now been released on record, at the very moment that parts of Europe are heading back into…

Concert Reviews

By La Scena Musicale Team on 17 November 2021 Concert Reviews

By Justin Bernard, Natasha Gauthier, Arthur Kaptainis, Denise Lai, Dino Spaziani La Nef / Myriam Leblanc / Sylvain Bergeron Oct. 2 What you missed Myriam Leblanc’s soft voice immediately immersed us in an intimate atmosphere. In J’avais cru qu’en vous aimant la douleur serait extrême, by an anonymous composer, we were able to admire her artistic flair, her musicality and her technique, perfectly adapted to early music, especially the vocal treatment of appoggiaturas. In Vos mépris, chaque jour, by a certain Michel Lambert, she showed off her excellent diction. This piece is stylistically very similar to the famous Pur…

Cleveland Orchestra, Michael Sachs, trumpet. Photo By Roger Mastroianni.

Review: Cross-border trek to Cleveland proves picture perfect

By Paul E. Robinson on 13 November 2021 Concert Reviews, Orchestral, Piano, Romantic

CLEVELAND – On Nov. 8, the American authorities decided it was safe to let Canadians enter their country by car. The next day I drove down from Toronto and crossed the border at Lewiston, New York and continued on to Cleveland. A few days later I attended a memorable concert by the Cleveland Orchestra. For someone who had been driving to Cleveland regularly since his teenage years to hear the likes of George Szell, Robert Shaw, Lorin Maazel, Pierre Boulez and Christoph von Dohnanyi leading this great orchestra, it was a welcome and overdue return to normalcy. For the record,…

Paul Hindemith: Mathis symphony (Naxos), Clarinet concerto (Orfeo)

By Norman Lebrecht on 12 November 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

****/*** Hindemith is a house without a door. The immensity of his output – 11 operas, 5 ballets, a dozen concertos, countless works for orchestra, lots of chamber music – is not just daunting but superficially impenetrable. The consistency is high and the differentiation difficult. A German who fought in the First War and was exiled by Hitler, Hindemith concerned himself with performance high and low, writing for major stages and domestic living rooms. When asked ‘which Hindemith should I try first?’ I’m lost for an answer. The American conductor Marin Alsop is embracing Hindemith with great enthusiasm with her…

Photo: Gerard Richardson

Good vibrations at TSO reopening

By Arthur Kaptainis on 11 November 2021 Concert Reviews, Toronto

TORONTO – Standing ovations before and after: The response by a live audience to the reappearance of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra following a long separation was both appropriate and predictable. Happily, the enthusiasm Wednesday night in Roy Thomson Hall was justified by the calibre of the playing. This was a first-class ensemble led by a conductor – Gustavo Gimeno, making his live-public debut as music director – who gave every indication of being equal to his task. The program, amounting to a little more than an hour of music, was not of exceptional interest, which made the success of the concert…

London Nights (Capriccio)

By Norman Lebrecht on 5 November 2021 Lebrecht Weekly, Newswire

In my 20s, on a spare afternoon, I would stroll down the Thames from Westminster to the City marvelling at how little had changed in the essential topography since the days of Shakespeare and Pepys. Yesterday, I had cause to wander through Leadenhall and Lombard and was struck at how little I recognised. Glass and steel skyscrapers have created a humanoid alienation, an impermeable wall between eternal London and the 21st century version. I felt a similar regret listening to Franziska Lee’s album of Londonoid piano pieces, intelligent and well played though it is. Lee, a German-trained Korean, plays Michael…

Review: OM, Yannick make strong case for Farrenc

By Arthur Kaptainis on 30 October 2021 Concert Reviews

Programing is not what it used to be, as Yannick Nézet-Séguin commented Friday evening to a masked and distanced crowd in the Maison symphonique. We used to expect Mozart and Beethoven. On this occasion – the second concert of the Orchestre Métropolitain subscription season – we got Bruch and Louise Farrenc, and were generally happy to accept delivery. We also heard Schumann – Robert Schumann – whose Manfred Overture got this program titled “Romantic Treasures” off to an appropriately smoldering start. Strings were warm and legato was abundant. Scattered over an extended stage, the OM made a big-orchestra sound. Perhaps…

Photo: Mark Pillai

Emily D’Angelo: Enargeia (DG)

By Norman Lebrecht on 29 October 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

Most debut vocal albums consist of familiar arias sung in much the same way as all the big divas and stuffed with agent-approved hype. Not this one. I have never heard any of the songs on this Canadian mezzo’s first outing and know no more about her except that I tipped her for stardom six years ago and now discover that my first impression was a woeful underestimate of her tremendous promise. O, Canada! The songs first. They are all by women – Missy Mazzoli, Sarah Kirkland Snider and Hildur Guðnadóttir, with two modern arrangements of medieval devotions by the…

Shani Diluka: The Proust Album (Warner)

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 October 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

Every now and then a record arrives that I have been waiting for all my life. As any Marcel Proust reader knows, the author’s search for lost time involves a tremendous amount of musical reminiscence and quotation, drawn from the salons of fin-de-siècle Paris. There must be a record of them, I used to think. There is now. Expect no masterpieces in this album. Although Proust once attended eleven consecutive performances of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, his musical tastes were as trivial as the idle conversations he so languidly eavesdropped. The album opens with a piano concerto in E by…

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