Lebrecht Weekly – Shostakovich, Martinu: Second cello concertos (Bis)
The second concerto for cello by Dmitri Shostakovich is the least ingratiating of the six he wrote, two for each major instrument. Opening with a…
Browsing: Norman Lebrecht
Lebrecht Weekly – Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli: Sonate da Camera, 1-6 (Delphian)
Never heard of Carbonelli? Don’t feel too bad about it. The Vivaldi scholar Michael Talbot writes that he ‘has remained unknown, even to specialists’. Listen…
Lebrecht Weekly – Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli: Sonate da Camera, 1-6 (Delphian)
Never heard of Carbonelli? Don’t feel too bad about it. The Vivaldi scholar Michael Talbot writes that he “has remained unknown, even to specialists.” Listen…
Lebrecht Weekly – Georgy Sviridov: Russia Cast Adrift (Delos)
The texts of this song cycle were written by Sergei Yesenin between 1914 and 1920, a period of world war, revolution and civil war. Yesenin…
Lebrecht Weekly – Ravel/De Falla: Piano Concertos (Hyperion)
Never forget that Maurice Ravel was more Basque than French. His rhythms and harmonies belong to the borderlands. He is happiest with the smell of…
Lebrecht Weekly – Dmitri Shostakovich: First Symphony (Pentatone)
Great recordings are easy to review. Likewise bad ones. About 99.5 percent of all releases fall somewhere in between. Of these, four in five quickly…
Lebrecht Weekly – Kathleen Ferrier Remembered (Somm)
When the English contralto Norma Procter died a few weeks ago at the age of 89, readers remembered seeing Kathleen Ferrier in her audience at…
Lebrecht Weekly – Impromptu (Onyx)
The trouble with keeping records is that library science has yet to devise a method of telling you where any piece of music will be…
Lebrecht Weekly – Mahler: Third symphony (Channel Classics)
There is no wholly recommendable performance on record of Mahler’s third symphony. The earliest, by F. Charles Adler in 1952, is faultlessly idiomatic, as is…
Lebrecht Weekly – Alexander Lokshin: Clarinet quintet & c. (Melodiya)
In the dying years of the Soviet Union I became aware of dozens of symphonists who survived on the fringes of musical society, tolerated by…
