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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

The Lebrecht Weekly: Elgar – Violin concerto/Violin sonata (Warner)

By Norman Lebrecht on 5 February 2021 Lebrecht Weekly, Violin

The first soloist I ever heard play Elgar was the French cellist Paul Tortelier at the Royal Festival Hall – elegant, expressive and chastely romantic, half an hour of unblemished beauty. I was a kid and that must have been 60 years ago. Since then I’ve heard maybe one other French cellist attempt an Elgar concerto, but never, until now, a violinist. Renaud Capucon is a revelation in many ways. He shifts the accent from phlegmatic to something more Gallic and the dynamics to a whispering tendresse. There is so much individuality in this account that I kept wondering why…

The Lebrecht Weekly: Anna Clyne – Mythologies (Avie)

By Norman Lebrecht on 29 January 2021 Lebrecht Weekly

The late Michael Kennedy, an honest critic if ever there was, told me that on reaching the age of sixty his ears gave up on contemporary music. We then had a stand-up row about the recent works of Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies and parted, as always, good friends. Now, having long passed Michael’s age threshold for new music, I find myself still curious about living composers. I first heard Anna Clyne’s violin concerto at the Chicago Symphony and loved it on the spot. That is unusual for a modern premiere, but Clyne is adept at masking complexity with hummable sonorities…

George Bridgetower

The “Kreutzer” Sonata: Friendhip and Transgression

By Jacqueline Vanasse on 29 January 2021 Classical Music, La Scena Spotlight, Romantic

Much the most admired of Beethoven’s 10 Violin Sonatas is the ninth, which we know as the “Kreutzer.” It could just as logically be called the “Bridgetower,” and might have been so, had an unfortunate disagreement not intervened. George Bridgetower (1778-1860) gave the first performance with the composer at the piano and was probably on track to be the first dedicatee. Our evidence for this is an inscription on the autograph1 by the composer, which can be translated as: “Mulatto sonata composed for the mulatto Bridgetower, great madman and great mulatto composer.” Despite the apparently humourous tone, Beethoven’s admiration for…

The Lebrecht Weekly: Shostakovich: Symphonies 9 and 10 (LSO Live)

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 January 2021 Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

If Gianandrea Noseda were not already music director in Washington DC and at Zurich Opera, he would probably be top of the London Symphony Orchestra’s wishlist to succeed the stop-gap Sir Simon Rattle in two years’ time. Listen to the whiplash crack of the rhythms he elicits at the start of the Shostakovich ninth symphony and you might be reminded of the young Riccardo Muti at the Philharmonia in the 1970s. Listen further to the ironic discordances of the Largo movement and you’ll hear a unique fusion – a lyrical Italian with a sophisticated sympathy for covert Russian ambiguities. Noseda…

The Lebrecht Weekly: Edward Elgar – Partsongs, From the Bavarian Highlands (BR Klassik)

By Norman Lebrecht on 15 January 2021 Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Sir Simon Rattle, who became a German citizen this week, prefers to work with an English chorusmaster. In Berlin he had his former Birmingham partner, Simon Halsey. At his new job with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, he will find Howard Arman in charge of the salaried singers. Arman, a graduate of Trinity College London, has spent the past 40 years in German-speaking companies, working in Halle, Leipzig, Salzburg and Lucerne. The Munich he took over in 2017 choir is top-notch. Even a devoted Elgarian may be forgiven for never having heard these part-songs. The early ones, dated 1894, have words by…

Lebrecht Weekly: Good Night! (Erato)

By Norman Lebrecht on 1 January 2021 Lebrecht Weekly, Piano, Romantic

Musical lullabies can quickly outlast their welcome. Everybody’s had the Brahms Wiegenlied sung to them at some point in infancy and many have experienced the sleepy time duet in Hansel and Gretel, the one they sing just before the witch becomes their nightmare. But one hearing is usually all I can bear of these bonbons. The beauty of this compilation by the French pianist Bertrand Chamayou is that it leads the ear down unexpected paths – some overgrown like Janacek’s crystalline opener, others unexpected, neglected or altogether unknown. Two etudes by Sergei Liapunov are drops of perfect chamomile. A dollop…

Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 5th symphony and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Hyperion)

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 December 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

At the midpoint of the Second World War, our parents looked to two composers for symphonies of hope and vision. Such was the excitement attending the 7th symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich that Arturo Toscanini and Leopold Stokowski almost went to war themselves for the right to conduct the American premiere (Toscanini won). There was less fuss abroad over Vaughan Williams’s 5th, but in London it was hailed as oracular – a statement by a great artist on the spirit of his nation and its depth of confidence. The world premiere, conducted by the composer on June 24, 1943, was roared to the…

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Transatlantic (Orchid)

By Norman Lebrecht on 18 December 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Winston Churchill’s famous witticism that Britain and America are divided by a common language is equally true of their musical output. In late-romantic repertoire, the accent on either side is so strong that a listener could never mistake Elgar for Barber, let alone Britten for Bernstein. Much of the appeal of this Covid-era recital by violinist Callum Smart and pianist Richard Uttley lies in the effort they invest to find common ground. Elgar’s violin sonata, written in the last summer of the First World War, is in deep denial of all that was going on around him. If he got…

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Giya Kancheli – Poetry of Silence (Gramola)

By Norman Lebrecht on 11 December 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Like most composers in the Soviet Union, Kancheli held down two jobs as a music director and a professor and wrote scores to order for instantly forgettable Party films. Except that, in his case, while the films vanished from memory, the music refused to fade. Kancheli, who died last year at the age of 84, conserved his best film themes as a set of 33 piano miniatures? You know how the best music grips you by the throat and won’t let you do anything else until it’s over? That’s what you will find in these miniatures. Some are for piano…

Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: John Luther Adams – The become trilogy (cantaloupe)

By Norman Lebrecht on 4 December 2020 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Composers grow middle names to protect themselves against rivals of similar plumage. There were so many Bachs around in JS’s time that he was mostly known as Sebastian to ward off all the useless Johanns. Here, too, the opera composer John Adams stamped ten-league boots on the domain and our Luther had to use his middle name to carve out a claim. Pretty big terrain he has staked, too. Adams went to Alaska after college in the late 1970s to work in environmental protection. His music derives, he says, from ‘sustained listening to the subtle resonances of the northern soundscape.’…

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