Lebrecht Weekly – FolksLied: Beethoven, Britten, Haydn (BR Klassik)
Viennese masters, always short of cash, picked up commissions from rich British tourists for composing drawing-room settings of national heritage. Haydn and Beethoven filled their…
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Lebrecht Weekly – Debussy, Elgar &c: violin sonatas (Onyx)
After two years of creative trauma that silenced almost every leading composer, the latter half of the First World War yielded works of extraordinary intimacy.…
Lebrecht Weekly – British Clarinet Concertos 2 (Chandos)
An unknown work by Benjamin Britten sets the pulse racing. It turns out to be fragments of a concerto he started writing for Benny…
Lebrecht Weekly – Mahler: 1st Symphony (BR Klassik)
Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s interpretation of Mahler’s first symphony is beautifully played by Munich’s (some say Germany’s) best orchestra and thoughtfully structured by an impressive guest conductor.…
Lebrecht Weekly – Rudi Stephan, Albéric Magnard (accentus)
These two composers are joined by tragic deaths on opposite sides of the First World War. Stephan, a Munich avant-gardist, was the only soldier…
Lebrecht Weekly – Ivry Gitlis (SWR/Naxos Deutschland)
Great violinists come in two forms: stars and legends. Think about it. Jascha Heifetz was a star, Nathan Milstein a legend. One was a household…
Lebrecht Weekly – Yevgeny Sudbin: Medtner/Rachmaninov (BIS)
Most concert pianists are like modern tennis players. They know that only two or three men and women are ever going to win the major…
Lebrecht Weekly – Bartók: 44 Duos (Decca)
It has been an age since I looked to my shelves for a work by a major composer and found that, after 40 years of…
Lebrecht Weekly – Wihan Quartet: Dvořák/Janáček (Nimbus Alliance)
It must be something in the plum juice that produces, generation after generation, a cluster of distinctive string quartets from the country constituted as the…
Lebrecht Weekly – Manhattan Intermezzo (Naxos)
Editor’s Note: La Scena Musicale is pleased to welcome back contributor Norman Lebrecht for his weekly CD reviews, which will be posted online on Mondays…
