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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

Artists of Alberta Ballet in La Sylphide. Photo: Aaron Anker

Review | Alberta Ballet makes the case for La Sylphide

By Robin J Miller on 20 September 2024 La Scena Online

La Sylphide is an important ballet, but one that few of today’s ballet fans have ever seen. Alberta Ballet makes the case for it to be performed far more often. Not only is it key to understanding the foundations of ballet, it’s also a lot of fun: a tragedy that does not make you weep, with beauty enough to make you smile. La Sylphide — a modern ballet At nearly 200 years old, La Sylphide was the first “modern” ballet where a ballerina, supported by a large female corps de ballet, became the focus of the story. It was also…

Augusta Holmès par L. Taponier (circa.1880). Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Lebrecht Weekly | Augusta Holmès: Symphonic poems (CPO)

By Norman Lebrecht on 13 September 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

The Times of London has shrunk its weekly classical record review to an inch and a half. Other papers ignore recordings altogether, except in Christmas roundups. The classical sector is dying for want of attention and labels are laying off expert staff. All the more reason for online publications like this to maintain continuous coverage of a vital part of the musical economy. My pick of the week may appear esoteric. It comes from Ludwigshafen in western Germany and is performed by the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz with its British chief conductor Michael Francis. The composer is an Irishwoman who lived in…

Anna Prohaska & the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at Musikfest Berlin. Photo: Fabian Schellhorn

La Scena on the Road | Musikfest Berlin 2024: The Americas & Politics

By Gianmarco Segato on 11 September 2024 Classical Music, Concert Reviews, La Scena Online, Vocal

Musikfest Berlin is an ambitious annual festival that hosts the world’s top orchestras, instrumental and vocal ensembles, together with the major symphony orchestras of the city of Berlin. Its 20th-anniversary season focuses on the double continent of America and borrows its title, “Amériques”, from France-to-US transplant, Edgard Varèse’s 1921 work that raised the roof at the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra’s festival-opening concert on Aug. 24th. Acknowledging the ‘American’ theme during his opening remarks, artistic director Winrich Hopp made reference to recent and upcoming European and North and South American elections which have seen far right parties gain more ground than…

Photo: Public Domain

Lebrecht Weekly | Dvorak’s Symphonies by Two Orchestras (Warner/Pentatone)

By Norman Lebrecht on 6 September 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

Comparisons in music are unfair. An ephemeral art cannot be measured and pinned, like a butterfly, to the page without risking mortal damage. Nevertheless, human beings possess critical faculties and spend much of their lives assessing whether A is preferable to B. Not necessarily better, just more apt to present circumstances. I offer these caveats because I have been listening to Dvorak orchestral works from very different sources. Nathalie Stutzmann with the Atlanta Symphony present the American Suite, opus 98, together with the 9th symphony, From the New World. The project marks Stutzmann’s debut on record as a symphonic conductor…

Darius Jones (Photo: Kholood Eid)

Jazz in Ontario: Guelph, Toronto & Beyond

By Félix-Antoine Hamel on 30 August 2024 City, La Scena Online, Scena Jazz, Toronto

GUELPH AT THE CROSSROADS This year, the Guelph Jazz Festival organization is in transition, after its former director, Scott Thomson, was appointed artistic and general director of FIMAV (the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville) last year. The Guelph festival’s Interim Artistic Director Karen Ng and Interim General Manager Alex Ricci and their team have nevertheless assembled a promising lineup featuring a range of creative groups from Ontario, Quebec and the U.S. They’ve retained a strong focus on improvised music, in keeping with the Guelph Jazz Festival’s distinctive flavour, while also adding some world and electronic musics in the…

Wadada Leo Smith (Photo: Michael Jackson)

Montreal (In)Flux

By Félix-Antoine Hamel on 30 August 2024 City, La Scena Online, Montreal, Scena Jazz

“It almost happened by accident,” says Peter Burton (from Arts in the Margins) about the many organisations pulling their forces together for the upcoming Flux Festival, which will have its first edition from Oct. 4 to 10. In an era where money is rare for the creative arts, necessity is the mother of collaboration and no less than seven different organizations are involved in putting together concerts and conferences about experimental and improvised music during that week, including the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation as well as Innovations en concert. But while concert-goers will find much to enjoy…

Lebrecht Weekly | Roberto Gerhard’s Sheer Eclecticism with Don Quixote &c. (Chandos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 30 August 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

Don’t try to pin an adjective to Gerhard: he transcends them all. The son of a Swiss-German father and an Alsatian mother, born in Spanish Catalonia, he studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin, organised the 1936 seminal modernist festival in Barcelona and left a couple of years later to spend the rest of his life in English exile. None of these nationalities was his, any more than his modernism was dogmatic. The ballet scores on this scintillating album are rooted in Iberian folklore but the language is distinctly, inimitably Gerhard. Nobody knew what to make of him and,…

Camilla Nylund (Isolde) & Christa Mayer (Brangäne) in Bayreuth Festival's Tristan und Isolde. Photo: Enrico Nawrath

Review | Bayreuth Festival 2024: Wagner revisited

By Gianmarco Segato on 29 August 2024 Concert Reviews, La Scena Online, Opera

One of the most unique features of the annual Bayreuth Festival dedicated to the operas of Richard Wagner is the opportunity it affords to revisit productions. Most big time European summer opera festivals pride themselves on presenting brand new stagings each year (though times may be changing given this year’s revival of Katie Mitchell’s 2016 production of Pelléas et Mélisande at Aix-en-Provence). But the idea of reviving and refining productions at Bayreuth is part of its DNA thanks to the Werkstatt (workshop) process initiated by Wieland Wagner in the 1950s. Stage directors are encouraged to hone their ideas as productions…

Lebrecht Weekly | War poems (Somm)

By Norman Lebrecht on 23 August 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

I am generally resistant to albums that impose an external theme on unrelated pieces of music from different places and times. In this case, it is eastern Europe, 1814 to 2024.

Gergely Madaras

Lebrecht Weekly | Liszt: Faust Symphony (Bis)

By Norman Lebrecht on 16 August 2024 La Scena Online, Lebrecht Weekly

Franz Liszt has been cancelled by the world’s orchestras, probably for something he said on social media. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a Liszt orchestral work on a concert programme, other than the two piano concertos?

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