Lebrecht Weekly: Paderewski, Stojowski: violin sonatas (CPO)
We don’t hear much of Ignacy Jan Paderewski these days, let alone his friend Zygmunt Stojowski. The first prime minister of independent Poland has been…
Browsing: Norman Lebrecht
Lebrecht’s Albums of the Week: Singing in the Dead of Night / Love and Death
You’ll often hear me telling people a couple of generations down the line that they should listen to new music of our time rather than…
Lebrecht’s Album of the Week: Malcolm Arnold – The Dancing Master (Resonus)
The most popular and prolific composer of his time, Malcolm Arnold was shunned by the British music establishment for being, mostly, too popular and prolific,…
Paul Dessau: Chamber music (MDG/Deutschland)
Like Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, and with equal reluctance, Paul Dessau left McCarthyist America in the late 1940s to settle in the austere and…
Howard Skempton: 24 Preludes and Fugues (Orchid)
First there was J S Bach. Then came Dmitri Shostakovich. The form is open for others to play with. I was unaware of Skempton’s contribution…
Paul Ben-Haim: Evocation (Bis)
When Paul Frankenburger was taken on as Bruno Walter’s assistant conductor in Munich in 1920, he was one among thousands of highly-trained musicians in a…
J S Bach: Goldberg Variations/Sonatas and Partitas (Delphian/Navona)
In times of stress I reach for Bach in the raw, one instrument, one pair of hands. I’m choosy who I listen to when the…
Lebrecht Weekly – Ebony Quartet: Unheard (Channel Classics)
Quarter of a century ago, Decca sank its Three Tenors profits into an ‘Entartete Musik’ series, breaking the silence that had settled on a generation…
Lebrecht Weekly – Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Late keyboard pieces (ECM New Series)
No label generates such a buzz around new releases as the quirky Munich-based ECM which, after 48 years of high output, still manages to produce…
Lebrecht Weekly – Hans Werner Henze: Kammermusik 1958, Neue Volkslieder (Tudor)
Modern composers, when they die, go into limbo for about a decade before their reputation settles. It has been five years since Henze left us…
