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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

Photo: Lisa Sakulensky Photography

Follies in Concert: Live music makes a welcome comeback

By Denise Lai on 18 October 2021 Concert Reviews

TORONTO – For the first time since the pandemic began, a concert hall in Ontario saw a nearly full house of fully-vaccinated patrons sitting side by side without social distancing, albeit all wearing masks. This was the scene on Oct. 16 at Toronto’s Koerner Hall, where the Royal Conservatory of Music presented its Season Gala: Follies in Concert. This concert was originally scheduled for last October to mark composer Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday in 2020. Follies in Concert featured an all-Canadian cast of powerhouses in the musical theatre world: Cynthia Dale, the grand dame of the Stratford Festival, was aptly…

The Polish Violin, vol. 2 (Chandos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 15 October 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

I should have been on my way to Warsaw for the Chopin Competition but circumstances intervened and I find myself listening to unknown Poles of a different kind. The English violinist Jennifer Pike has Polish ancestry on her mother’s side. While rummaging a music shop in Krakow, she came away with unknown scores and turned them into a pair of fascinating releases. The familiar composers presented here are Karol Szymanowski and Grazyna Bacewicz, but not as we know them. Szymanowski’s 1904 violin sonata has yet to develop his trademark asperity, while his three Paganini Caprices of 1918 would make perfect…

Photo: Julien Mignot

Round midnight: Dutilleux, Merlin, Schoenberg (Erato)

By Norman Lebrecht on 8 October 2021 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

With the fadeout of two landmark string quartets – Germany’s Artemis in disarray and America’s Emersons to retirement – France’s Quatuor Ebène probably head the current list of the world’s best. Four crack musicians who play standing up and are forever pushing out boundaries, their album releases are always an event and often a surprise. This new recording pairs two nocturnal masterpieces – Henri Dutilleux’s Ainsi la Nuit and Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. Dutilleux goes down the Bartok path of things that go squeak in the night. Schoenberg listens in to illicit lovers in the woods. Both works arouse fear…

New Releases (October 2021)

By La Scena Musicale Team on 6 October 2021 Baroque and Early, Chamber Music, Contemporary, Daily News Roundup

This section is an advertising supplement. To announce here, contact [email protected] Sound Visionaries Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez Christina Petrowska Quilico, piano Navona Records, NV6358 Release Date: July 9, 2021 Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen, and Pierre Boulez are stunningly reconciled in Christina Petrowska Quilico’s Navona Records release Sound Visionaries. Boasting a track record of over 50 recorded albums and having recently been named to the Order of Canada, the veteran pianist proves that despite all difficulties, finding common ground between these three composers can be done spectacularly. The works in question are cleverly chosen: Debussy’s ethereal Preludes, Book Two is…

Concert reviews (October 2021)

By La Scena Musicale Team on 6 October 2021 Concert Reviews, Contemporary, Orchestral

Opéra de Montréal Riders to the Sea/Le Flambeau de la nuit What you missed A dark double bill (Sept. 25) linking one-act operas by Vaughan Williams (1927) and Hubert Tanguay-Labrosse (premiere). Both deal earnestly with tragedy at sea and the loss of family. The strong cast led by the deep-toned mezzo-soprano Allyson McHardy included some good Atelier prospects. Tanguay-Labrosse proved an effective conductor of both the moody music of Riders and his own more eclectic score. I Musici de Montréal sounded vibrant in the pit of the Théâtre Maisonneuve. Director Édith Patenaude managed the quiet entry of the chorus (the…

Beethoven, Birtwistle: A bag of bagatelles

By Norman Lebrecht on 1 October 2021 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

England’s most adventurous living composer never bothered much with the piano. Harrison Birtwistle started out on the clarinet, composed operas in his head and wrote one without strings. Asked for a piano concerto, he delivered something called Antiphonies, which is more street fight than conversation between piano and orchestra. You get the impression he’s not that keen on anything in an instrument but percussive coloration. Now 87, Birtwistle has a unique sound imagination and an approach to music that misses out many of the building bricks. He once told me that the only symphony of Mahler he knew was the…

Photo : Yves Renaud

A dark double bill from the Opéra de Montréal

By Arthur Kaptainis on 28 September 2021 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

Early out of the gate in announcing a 2021-22 season, the Opéra de Montréal on Saturday became one of the first Canadian companies to stage a post-pandemic opera for a live public. Or rather a pair of operas, separated by more than 80 years but closely linked in duration (about 40 minutes), mood and subject matter. They made for an absorbing if distinctly sombre evening in the Théâtre Maisonneuve. The classic item was Riders of the Sea, a 1927 setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams of a play by John Millington Synge that tells of maritime mortality on the west coast of…

CD Review: Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene (Decca)

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 September 2021 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene Songs by Fauré, Grieg, Hahn, Liszt, Nico Muhly, Kevin Puts, Caroline Shaw Renée Fleming, soprano. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, piano Decca 4852089 ★★★★✩ / ★★✩✩✩ Good to hear that America’s prime diva is not going gentle into that good night. Past 60 and no longer taking operatic roles, she sings out full and flamboyant in this set of nature-themed songs that came together during her daily walks in the COVID lockdown. Everything you’d expect from a Fleming recital is here – the effortless highs, the velvety lows, the flawless intonation, the jumbled syllables in several tongues. Her…

Photo credit: Ka Lam/Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra

Pianist Avan Yu in rhapsodic form

By Adam Sacks on 17 September 2021 Concert Reviews

HONG KONG – As a follow-up concert to the 48th season opener, which featured Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Jaap Van Zweden on Sept. 10 led the Hong Kong Philharmonic in a rousing and varied evening of musical contrasts. The program at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre began with the mournful and meditative Asian premiere of British composer Anna Clyne’s Within her Arms, a study in loss and memory occasioned by the passing of her mother but richly evocative in the present moment as a reflection on the losses and absences of the pandemic years. The semicircular arrangement of 15 standing strings hearkened back…

Piazzolla Cien Anos (Century Records)

By Norman Lebrecht on 17 September 2021 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

One of the sadder casualties of the Covid shutdown has been the centenary plans for Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992), the Argentine composer whose music exquisitely captures the existential melancholia of our time. Piazzolla is so intimately identified with Buenos Aires that his wider relevance is often missed, but it is truly global. Raised by Italian parents in lower Manhattan, he absorbed jazz, gypsy music and Jewish theatre. Taught by a Rachmaninov pupil of Hungarian origin, he returned to Buenos Aires for lessons with Alberto Ginastera and Raul Spivak, before finishing up in Paris with , who infused him with the worship…

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