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…
Browsing: Norman Lebrecht
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…
Lebrecht Weekly – Morton Feldman: For Bunita Marcus (Hyperion)
The US composer Bunita Marcus worked for seven years with Morton Feldman and subsequently accused him, after his death, of sexual abuse. Feldman wrote this…
Lebrecht Weekly – Joyce El-Khoury, Michael Spyres (Opera Rara)
Now here’s a surprise. A new release from Opera Rara usually consists of some bel canto work that has languished forgotten in a vault since its premiere…
Lebrecht Weekly – Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius (DG)
The first thing you need to know about Daniel Barenboim’s live performance with the Staatskapelle Berlin is that it is the best-sounding Gerontius on record.…
