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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

Valery Gergiev, chef d’orchestre. Photo: Antoine Saito

Big-time Bruckner from MSO under Gergiev

By Arthur Kaptainis on 6 March 2020 Concert Reviews

Valery Gergiev as the next music director of the MSO? Hardly likely, given the famous Russian’s multiple commitments and the formidable commute between St. Petersburg and Montreal. But the concert Wednesday in the Maison symphonique sounded curiously like the work of a conductor who enjoyed what he was doing and an orchestra that would not mind having him around. A more realistic explanation for the positive results would be a common intention to explore the outward beauties and spiritual depths of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. This was a big conception of Bruckner’s valedictory statement, including some of the most massive climaxes…

Ferruccio Busoni: violin sonatas (CPO)

By Norman Lebrecht on 6 March 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Busoni cast such a giant shadow in his time that it practically eclipsed his music. With a head that resembled Beethoven’s and the best-stocked mind of any peripatetic pianist – he was the only soloist whose visits delighted Gustav Mahler – Busoni’s own compositions were largely overlooked, whether on grounds of difficulty, or because he could invariably play them better himself. Busoni could do anything. A German-Italian hybrid of part-Jewish ancestry, culturally Anglophile and married to a Russian-Swede, he was the ultimate cosmopolitan, ever curious about literature and art and with a book collection to rival most national libraries. In…

Grieg: 3 Violin sonatas (Orchid)

By Norman Lebrecht on 28 February 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Has anyone lately seen Edvard Grieg? The song of Norway has gone a bit quiet since the record industry stopped pumping out Grieg’s piano concerto as an automatic companion to Schumann’s and the hall of the mountain kings got converted into social housing. These twin peaks and the Peer Gynt incidental music aside, there’s not much Grieg left to perform and what there is has fallen out of fashion. It’s been all Norvège nul points the last few years. The three sonatas for violin and piano, written at different points in his longish life (1843-1907), are the first Grieg to…

Photo: Dahlia Katz

Jacqueline du Pré opera gets it half right

By Arthur Kaptainis on 23 February 2020 Concert Reviews, Opera

Classical music has its icons, including Jacqueline du Pré, the brilliant British cellist who contracted multiple sclerosis at the youthful height of her powers and died in 1987 at 42. Various efforts have been made at posthumous commentary, to which we must now add Jacqueline, an opera for voice and cello that seems to toggle erratically between skepticism of, and sympathy for, its subject. The only positive impulse this Tapestry Opera production inspires is a desire to know more and get the story straight. Photo: Dahlia Katz The problem resides not in the accomplished and free-spirited score of Luna Pearl…

Photo: Jag Gundu

MSO, Nagano bring in the Toronto hordes

By Arthur Kaptainis on 21 February 2020 Concert Reviews

Quite a crowd in Roy Thomson Hall for the Montreal Symphony Orchestra under Kent Nagano. Apparently the American maestro’s magnetism, combined with the good name of the orchestra, can cross provincial boundaries and compete successfully with such dependable sources of entertainment as the Democratic candidates debate. And the program? Well, Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony did not hurt sales. Pascal Dusapin’s Waves, here given its second North American performance after the premiere on Tuesday in Montreal, probably did not help. Yet this 25-minute exercise in dense modernity was the headline item of the concert. The work is subtitled “Duo for Organ and Orchestra,”…

Photo : Beth Nakamura, The Oregonian

Aspects of America: Pulitzer Edition (Pentatone)

By Norman Lebrecht on 21 February 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

Whatever became of the Great American Symphony? At one time it was discussed with as much cocktail-hour fervour as the Great American Novel and promoted by the best US orchestras. Leonard Bernstein at the New York Phil would not program a season without a symphony by a living American. But that was half a century ago. Since the GAS has long gone off the boil, it’s almost a guilty pleasure to listen to a pair of symphonies by composers whom Bernstein admired. Walter Piston (1894-1976) was his teacher at Harvard and Howard Hanson (1896-1981) a vaunted doyen of American music.…

Photo: Jag Gundu

Toronto Symphony’s Valentine’s Program Sweet

By Denise Lai on 16 February 2020 Concert Reviews, Orchestral, Piano, Romantic

Toronto, February 16, 2020—The Toronto Symphony performed its Valentine’s program to a full house last night featuring some of the most romantic classical music ever written. What you missed? The concert opened with the Canadian premiere of American composer Elizabeth Ogonek’s “As though birds.” The work was inspired by a three-line stanza from a poem by Jonathan Dubow. Though only three-and-a-half minutes long, it is densely packed with an immense range of orchestral timbres, with moods alternating between melancholy and euphoria. Elim Chan, Stephen Hough, Photo: Jag Gundu Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, a work that epitomizes…

Mahler: Eighth Symphony (DG)

By Norman Lebrecht on 14 February 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

The largest symphony ever written, designed for the outdoors and knocked off in six summer weeks without revision, Mahler never expected to see the 8th performed. When an impresario booked it for Munich in 1910, the Symphony of 1,000 afforded Mahler the greatest triumph of his life. He did not conduct it again and both his close disciples, Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, shunned it. Its gigantic size and cost make performances a rarity and good performances a dream. I can count the great ones I have heard in four decades on three fingers – Klaus Tennstedt in London, Riccardo…

Singing Valentines! A Memorable Romantic Experience

By Vasyl Pawlowsky on 11 February 2020 Art Song, La Scena Online, Newswire, Opera, Vocal

This Year’s Singing Valentines: 12th Edition includes Serenades and Free Streaming Concert FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE La Scena Musicale presents Singing Valentines! A Memorable Romantic Experience Montreal, QC, Feb. 11, 2020 – This Valentine’s season, for the cost of a bouquet of flowers, offer a unique valentine! For the tenth year, La Scena Musicale has been providing individuals an opportunity to deliver a unique gift to their loved ones regardless of their location. Six professionally trained singers offer their time on Valentines Day, to help raise funds for La Scena Musicale and to give a special gift through song. “It has…

Photo : François Goupil

OM choral night is fit for a queen

By Arthur Kaptainis on 10 February 2020 Concert Reviews

There was no vice-regal musical salute Friday from the Orchestre Métropolitain, nor an “all rise” ceremony in the Maison symphonique. But Yannick Nézet-Séguin did draw attention to the presence in the Choeur Métropolitain of Governor General Julie Payette, who was stationed with the sopranos, as she had been the night before in a performance at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Imagine. The Queen’s representative as head of state singing with the multitudes. Great country, Canada. Pretty good concert, too, concluding with Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor, a comparably accomplished if less intensely dramatic piece than the Requiem. YNS…

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