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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

La Route des concerts: Paving the Way for Regional Presenters

By Justin Bernard on 8 October 2024 Baroque and Early, Interviews, La Scena Spotlight

Established in 2022, La Route des concerts continues to expand. It now welcomes an increasing number of partners into its network of concert halls across the province and has caught the eye of established musical institutions. Chantal Boulanger, organist and project co-ordinator, admits being surprised by this inexhaustible resource. “We have come to realize that there are many small classical music presenters who are unknown,”she says. “I’m still discovering them, even after working in the field for a long time. By bringing them together, we provide more visibility. “Shortly after we started in Estrie, Laurentides, Beauce-Appalaches, Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, and Côte-Nord have…

A scene from the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Nabucco, 2024. Photo: Michael Cooper

Review | Nabucco makes a triumphant, belated COC debut

By Denise Lai on 8 October 2024 Concert Reviews, Toronto

The Canadian Opera Company opens its 2024-25 season with Nabucco. It is hard to believe that the opera that launched Giuseppe Verdi’s career has never been staged by the COC in its 74-year history. A Lyric Opera of Chicago production, Nabucco is finally making a long-overdue premiere in Toronto. Nabucco, the tyrannical king of Babylon, is about to invade Judah. Although the Israelites have taken Nabucco’s daughter Fenena hostage, they lose their bargaining chip when she is freed by her captor Ismaele, who is in love with her. The enraged Nabucco goes on a rampage, destroys the Israelites’ temple and…

Renaud Capuçon. Photo: Simon Fowler

Review | Renaud Capuçon plays splendid Mozart with Gimeno & the TSO

By Paul E. Robinson on 7 October 2024 City, Classical Music, Concert Reviews, La Scena Online, Toronto

French violinist Renaud Capuçon has been a favourite of mine for some years now – especially in the music of Mozart – but this was the first time I had seen and heard him in a live concert. I was not disappointed and neither was the capacity audience at George Weston Recital Hall in North York. With Gustavo Gimeno leading the TSO Capuçon gave us good old-fashioned Mozart with impeccable technique and beautiful tone. Capuçon first played with the TSO way back in 2008 but that was fairly early in his career. He has since gone on to build an…

Photo: Tam Photography

Review | Rhapsody in Blue‘s 100th: Romance and American Jazz with Jean-Philippe Sylvestre

By Amanda Wong on 4 October 2024 Concert Reviews, Jazz, Montreal

George Gershwin was born on September 26, 1898; it was only fitting that his most beloved piece Rhapsody in Blue, written 100 years ago, would be celebrated in Montreal on what would have been his 126th birthday. In a night of romance and American jazz, Montérégie’s very own Jean-Philippe Sylvestre filled Maison Symphonique on Sept. 26h for a solo piano concert that also included Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturnes and Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances” from West Side Story. Sylvestre has won many awards worldwide, the First Prize and Audience Prize from the OSM Competition, the esteemed Virginia Parker Prize, and the John…

Photo: Anton Spronk

Lebrecht Weekly | Balagan is A Voyage of Discovery in Open-Mouthed Wonderment (Accentus Music)

By Norman Lebrecht on 4 October 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

There’s more content in this compilation than a reviewer has a right to expect. Coming off the back of a pointless set of Shostakovich symphonies, this chunky bar of trios for clarinet, violin and piano just keeps delivering hi-energy nutrients. First up is a four-part klezmer romp by Paul Schoenfield, an American composer who moved to Jerusalem and died there five months ago. Schoenfield took a hybrid genre of Hasidic celebration modes and moulded it into an eclectic set of wild dance moves, irresistible at best. Claude Vivier’s six-minute piece for violin and clarinet is the same in reverse: an…

Record Reviews

By Félix-Antoine Hamel on 1 October 2024 CD and Book Reviews, La Scena Online, Scena Jazz

Fresh sounds… AnchorsJason Stein, bass clarinet; Joshua Abrams, bass; Gerald Cleaver, drums; guest artist/co-producer Boon. TAO Forms (TAO 16), September 2024 Musicians who dedicate themselves solely to the bass clarinet are not legion. In jazz, it is possible to count them on the fingers of one hand; one thinks mostly of European reedmen, like Rudi Mahall, Thomas Savy, or the late Michel Pilz. Jason Stein is a rare American clarinetist who practises only the bigger horn, but he’s not exactly a newcomer. Twenty years ago, he was already teaming up with Ken Vandermark in the Bridge 61 quartet. The trio on…

Saxophonist Devin Daniels

Devin Daniels: Fire in the West

By Félix-Antoine Hamel on 1 October 2024 La Scena Online, Scena Jazz

“I always tell people I’m trying to bring that toxic New York swing energy to L.A.,” saxophonist Devin Daniels confesses to Nate Chinen in the liner notes to his new album, LesGo! The Inglewood, Calif., native apparently came back to home state with some of that combative East Coast attitude after his stint at the famous Berklee College of Music. It certainly shows right from the first notes of the title track (and opener) of his new album; after a brief, ornate alto-sax cadenza, Daniels leads his quintet in a joyous, driving theme that makes one immediately take notice. When…

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…

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