Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

The Varian Fry Quartet and Harp Serves Up Mozart

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By Norman Lebrecht on 16 March 2018 Chamber Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Strings

Mozart: Concertos (Indé Sens) The only thing that saved this release from being flung unopened into the bin was the quartet’s name and the fact that this is the first fruit of a new label. The Varian Fry Quartet, made up of young Berlin Philharmonic players, is named after an American who saved the lives of at least 2,000 Nazi refugees in the south of France, a largely unsung hero. The label is a bold French venture. But an hour of harp music with string quartet? Come on, there will be plenty of time for that in the afterlife. So…

Geraldine Mucha’s Compositions Show Real Talent

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By Norman Lebrecht on 9 March 2018 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Geraldine Mucha: Macbeth (ArcoDiva) Late in the Second World War, a Scottish girl in London fell in love with a Czech journalist. Geraldine Mucha was a rising talent at the Royal Academy of Music. Jiri Mucha was the son of a world-renowned artist, the man who had remade the fin-de-siecle image of Sarah Bernhardt in a style as unmistakable and widely imitated as Gustav Klimt’s. Newly married, the Muchas returned in autumn 1945 to Prague where, with Rafael Kubelik, they organised the first Prague Spring Festival. When the Communists seized power, Jiri was arrested as an enemy of the people…

William Sterndale Bennett’s Piano Concertos Naive Yet Lovely

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By Norman Lebrecht on 2 March 2018 Lebrecht Weekly, Piano, Romantic

William Sterndale Bennett: piano concertos (Hyperion) In half a century of listening to music, I have never attended a work by the foremost English composer of the Victorian era, a man who lived and died a few streets from my London house. Bennett (1816-1875) was acclaimed in his teens as the next Mendelssohn for a D minor piano concerto that Mendelssohn himself, sitting in the audience, found promising. Two more concertos followed before the lad was twenty, the third being praised in Leipzig by no less a contender than Robert Schumann. Bennett, on the strength of these successes, became the…

Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel’s Songs Mature

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By Norman Lebrecht on 23 February 2018 Art Song, Lebrecht Weekly, Romantic

Fanny Hensel, ‘the other Mendelssohn’: Complete Songs (Champs Hill) I’m uncomfortable with the album title. Rather than being ‘the other Mendelssohn’, Fanny was the heart of the Mendelssohn family and a fine composer in her own right – despite patriarchal suppression by her father and angry resentment from her brother, Felix. Fanny, married to a Berlin artist, kept her works in a drawer until her late 30s, when she went out and got them published, to Felix’s amazement and grudging admiration. Sadly, there was little time for her to enjoy the reviews. Fanny died of a stroke at 41 and…

Fridrich Bruk’s 17th and 18th Symphonies Demand Attention

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By Norman Lebrecht on 16 February 2018 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Fridrich Bruk: Symphonies 17 and 18 (Toccata) Some 15 years ago I was asked by one of the London orchestras to curate a series titled Other Russia, looking at the composers who fell or were pushed off the wayside under the Soviet Union. We were going to focus on the likes of Karamanov, Kancheli, Knaifel, Roslavets, Tishchenko, Ustvolskaya, Firsova and more. The scheme hit a brick wall when prominent conductors balked at unfamiliar repertoire and the orchestra feared a box-office frost, but it was a worthwhile exercise and one that some braver spirits should still take up. Among the names…

Patricia Kopatchinskaja & Polina Leschenko’s Deux Ingenious and Exhilarating

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By Norman Lebrecht on 9 February 2018 Chamber Music, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano, Violin

Deux (Alpha-Classics) I can’t remember when I last heard a violin-piano recital that was as ingenious and exhilarating as this. On the sleeve, the Franco-Hungarian programme looks a bit odd – the Poulenc sonata written for Ginette Neveu in 1943, a Dohnanyi setting of a waltz from Delibes’ Coppélia, the full-on Bartok sonata of 1922 and Ravel’s Tzigane to close. What do these pieces have in common? Check this: On April 8, 1922, Bela Bartok gave a recital in Paris with his compatriot Jelly d’Aranyi. Ravel was the page turner for Bartok and Poulenc for d’Aranyi. In the audience were…

Tenor Mark Padmore’s Winterreise Intensely Musical

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By Norman Lebrecht on 2 February 2018 Art Song, Lebrecht Weekly

Schubert: Winterreise (Harmonia Mundi) Mark Padmore, tenor Kristian Bezuidenhout, piano At the 15th song of the Winter’s Journey, a piano melody that seems to come from the nursery turns into a bleak anticipation of death. ‘The crow has come with me…. Flying ceaselessly above my head.’ Anyone listening will know that Franz Schubert will be dead within a year. But Schubert does not know he is going to die. He is thirty years old and feeling a bit low from various ailments, but he has no idea that he is writing his own requiem. Our knowing against his unknowing heightens the…

Christophers and Handel and Haydn Society Shed Fragile Rays of Hope

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By Norman Lebrecht on 27 January 2018 Classical, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral, Violin

Haydn: Symphonies No. 26 & 86 Mozart: Violin Concerto No. 3 Coro Harry Christophers, conductor Handel and Haydn Society Aisslinn Nosky, violin The British conductor Harry Christophers has his own record label, Coro, which turns out a stream of fine performances, mostly with his own group The Sixteen, and mostly unnoticed outside the shrinking pages of record magazines. Which is a pity, since some of them are very fine performances indeed. The latest release is with Christophers’ other group, the venerable Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, America’s oldest performing arts organization. It presents two Haydn works written 20 years…

La Spagna’s Tribute to Telemann Lacks Genius

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By Norman Lebrecht on 19 January 2018 Baroque and Early, Lebrecht Weekly

Tribute to Telemann (Lukos Records) Never sampled Georg Philipp Telemann? It’s like Vivaldi with added carbs, or Bach at a gentle walking pace. That Telemann (1681-1767) was a significant composer is indisputable. Handel held him in high esteem and Bach named his son Carl Philipp Emanuel after his good friend. Both were happy to receive his scores and both expressed concern for his irregular personal life. Telemann’s music is well written, sits easily beneath the fingers and does not last too long. So why do I find it so hard to thrill to? Perhaps because the others had so much…

Chailly’s Stravinsky Immaculate

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By Norman Lebrecht on 12 January 2018 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Stravinsky: Chant funèbre &c (Decca) Beware the lost leavings of great composers. Time and again we get hyped up about a long-forsaken missing score, only to be cruelly awakened by the reality of its insignificance. In some case, the composer mislaid the score with good reason. In others, it adds nothing to the sum of our knowledge. Anyone care to remember a few bars of Beethoven’s 10th symphony? Or Schubert’s? The present premiere release is an exception to that ignominious rule. Here’s the back story. In 1908 Igor Stravinsky, unknown and in his mid-20s, wrote a funeral ode for his…

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly

The Varian Fry Quartet and Harp Serves Up Mozart

Geraldine Mucha’s Compositions Show Real Talent

William Sterndale Bennett’s Piano Concertos Naive Yet Lovely

Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel’s Songs Mature

Fridrich Bruk’s 17th and 18th Symphonies Demand Attention

Patricia Kopatchinskaja & Polina Leschenko’s Deux Ingenious and Exhilarating

Tenor Mark Padmore’s Winterreise Intensely Musical

Christophers and Handel and Haydn Society Shed Fragile Rays of Hope

La Spagna’s Tribute to Telemann Lacks Genius

Chailly’s Stravinsky Immaculate

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