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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

Grazyna Bacewicz: Complete violin sonatas (Muso)

By Norman Lebrecht on 7 February 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

The missing voice in modern Polish music is female. At the time of her early death, aged 59, in 1969, two contemporaries of Grazyna Bacewicz, Lutoslawski and Penderecki, were world famous and two others, Panufnik and Gorecki, were laying down tracks for the future. Poland punched well above its weight on the musical map, yet Bacewicz, alive or after, was barely heard. This was not a direct consequence of male prejudice; Lutoslawski, for one, had great respect for her music, as did David Oistrakh. Rather, it was due to personal shyness, allied to an inability or an unwillingness to begin…

Photo: Courtesy quatuormolinari.qc.ca

Quatuor Molinari celebrates good works of two special women

By Arthur Kaptainis on 1 February 2020 Chamber Music, Concert Reviews, Contemporary, Strings

Never miss a Quatuor Molinari concert. It might end up being a Prix Opus-winning event. Actually, I had a few reasons turn up at the Conservatoire on the final evening of January. One was an opportunity to hear Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 4 – probably the first in Montreal since this enterprising ensemble played a Schoenberg cycle in 2012. One can understand why the Fourth is a less-than-frequent flyer on the standard chamber circuit. Made of 12 tones and multiple time signatures, it poses considerable technical and intellectual challenges, which the Molinaris managed adroitly in this taut reading. The rigour…

Louis Lewandowski: 18 Liturgical Psalms (DG)

By Norman Lebrecht on 31 January 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

The appearance in Holocaust Memorial Week of an album of synagogue music on the Deutsche Grammophon label is a milestone of sorts, perhaps a first step towards a reckoning with the German company’s complicated past. Founded by Emile Berliner, an American Jew, DG was dominated in its heyday by an Austrian Nazi, Herbert von Karajan. One record of Jewish liturgies does not reconcile these extremes, but it does point towards a settling of memories. The album’s content is archaic. The opening of the 3,000-seat Oranienburger Strasse synagogue in 1866 marked a high point of civic confidence among German Jews. Its…

Songstress Sarah Slean electrifies with Symphony Nova Scotia

By Newswire on 28 January 2020 Concert Reviews, Newswire

Sarah Slean Music by Christos Hatzis Symphony Nova Scotia | Bernhard Gueller, conductor “New, creative music that transcends any stylistic boundaries.” – CBC Eight years in the making, Canadian songstress Sarah Slean’s electrifying performances with composer Christos Hatzis and Symphony Nova Scotia are now available for the first time on one album from Centrediscs. This ground-breaking collaboration began in 2012 with the premiere of Hatzis’ Lamento, broadcast nationwide by CBC and praised as “marvellously colourful and dramatic” (Chronicle Herald, Halifax). Six years later, Symphony Nova Scotia and conductor Bernhard Gueller – then celebrating his final season as Music Director – jumped at…

Cherubini Discoveries (Decca)

By Norman Lebrecht on 26 January 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

In 1824, while waiting for the the ninth symphony it commissioned from Beethoven, the Philharmonic Society of London ordered a backup symphony in D major from the Italian-turned-French composer Luigi Cherubini. The Society had been founded ten years earlier to perform music by ‘the greatest masters’, notably Beethoven, Cherubini and Carl Maria von Weber. Cherubini did his best to sound great by imitating everything Beethoven did around the time of his first and second symphonies. Trouble is, Beethoven moved ahead in giant strides while Cherubini got stuck. The D major symphony has big gestures and a few half-tunes, but nothing…

Photo: Erich Schlegel

Everest the Opera a Tough Climb in Austin

By Paul E. Robinson on 26 January 2020 Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Contemporary, Opera

BY PAUL E. ROBINSON ON 26 JANUARY 2020 Austin, TX – Joby Talbot’s one-act opera Everest was composed in 2014, and is based on an ill-fated Mount Everest expedition in 1996 in which several climbers perished. The premiere was presented by Dallas Opera in a fully staged version. Three years later it was again performed in Dallas but this time in a semi-staged version with the orchestra on stage. It was this version that was offered last week by Austin Opera at the Long Center for the Performing Arts. Among the survivors from the 1996 expedition was the journalist Jon…

Photo: Xiomara Bender

Debargue is a major artist, no contest

By Arthur Kaptainis on 20 January 2020 Concert Reviews

When Lucas Debargue won fourth prize at the 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, many spectators took the apparent slight as a ringing endorsement of his individuality. Sunday in the Maison symphonique the 29-year-old Frenchman made apparent why he is by far the most talked-about laureate of that contest, not to mention one of the new celebrities of the piano world. It was substantially a bravura program, not that anything came across as simply or solely mechanical. In Liszt’s Dante Sonata Debargue seemed to embody the composer’s concept of a transcendental artist, rendering the flurries of octaves with a clarity that made them…

Photo: Sylvia Elzafon

Fabio Luisi Begins New Era with Dallas Symphony

By Paul E. Robinson on 19 January 2020 Classical, Concert Reviews, Orchestral

DALLAS, TX – Jaap van Zweden is gone and Fabio Luisi doesn’t take over until the 2020-2021 season, but the new man is stopping by often enough as music director designate to begin to give Dallas audiences a taste of what is to come. This past week he offered three works by American composers and a major chestnut in the form of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. All in all it was carefully-considered programming and the performances were very good. At the age of 60, Italian-born Fabio Luisi has an enormous repertoire and vast experience. But most of it is with European…

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphonies 3 and 4 (Hyperion)

By Norman Lebrecht on 17 January 2020 Lebrecht Weekly

With Australia in flames, Italian cities choked by smog and parts of Canada enjoying an unseasonal thaw, I’m listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony, a lament for pre-1914 rhythms of life. The composer, who served in his 40s as an ambulance driver on the French frontlines, had seen too much there ever to imagine that the old ways could be resumed, a recognition that intensifies his regret. The 3rd symphony is a requiem for rolling hills and ancient hedgerows, for arts and crafts, for simple pleasures in candlelight. A new recording by Martin Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra…

Photo: Antoine Saito

Kent Nagano, the Waltz King

By Arthur Kaptainis on 16 January 2020 Concert Reviews

Kent Nagano has been favourably disposed to residents of Vienna – Beethoven, Bruckner, Brahms, Mahler – from the beginning of his tenure with the OSM. I do not recall his ever having given a standard light “Viennese” program of the type that used to be offered yearly by orchestras around the globe. He came close on Wednesday evening in the Maison symphonique, with variable if ultimately wonderful results. The concluding selection, Johann Strauss Jr.’s Emperor Waltz, was the highlight. Nagano is not known as a liberal tempo manipulator, but he seemed to understand all the ins and outs and comings and…

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