Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Lebrecht Weekly – Karol Szymanowski; Stabat Mater, 3rd Symphony (Warner)

0

By Norman Lebrecht on 13 April 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Choral, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Never a big Easter bunny, I generally receive the springtime festival releases with the same excitement as I’d feel about a Placido Domingo Christmas record. What comes round, comes round. This one, however, is pure class. The international Polish soprano Aleksandra Kurzak opens with a Litany to the Virgin Mary that is slow, devout, soulful and twenty shades lighter than one might expect from a Polish Catholic ritual. Kurzak has never sounded sweeter or more comfortable on record. The little-known Litany is followed by the more familiar Stabat Mater and capped with Szymanowski’s third symphony, the ‘Song of the Night’…

Lebrecht Weekly – Rachmaninov: Piano concertos 2 and 3 (Sony Classical)

0

By Norman Lebrecht on 7 April 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Romantic

It’s raining Rachmaninov concertos and I’m not sure the roof can take any more. The past couple of weeks have brought Vanessa Benelli Mosell on Decca, Marc-André Hamelin on Hyperion and now the exuberant Khatia Buniatishvili on Sony. Benelli and Hamelin both play with London orchestras, neither sounding on peak form. Khatia is seriously challenged by the Czech Philharmonic, who are in terrific shape under Paavo Järvi’s baton. Benelli’s pairing for the C minor concerto is the Corelli Variations, which she does rather well. Hamelin matches the D minor concerto with Nikolai Medtner’s long-neglected second concerto, a curiosity that falls…

Lebrecht Weekly – Verdi: Requiem (LSO Live)

1

By Norman Lebrecht on 31 March 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Romantic

The Barbican’s season opener last September was one of the great Requiems of my life. The London Symphony Orchestra had a spring in their step as they came on stage, the chorus had been seriously souped up by director Simon Halsey and the conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, waited at least half a minute until complete silence prevailed before he began. And silent it stayed. I have seldom sat among a more rapt London audience, not a cough in eighty minutes. Every individual in the orchestra displayed ferocious concentration. And, best of all, the quartet of soloists – Erika Grimaldi, Daniela Barcellona,…

Lebrecht Weekly – Yo-Yo Ma, Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer: Bach trios (Nonesuch)

1

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 March 2017 Baroque and Early, CD and Book Reviews, Chamber Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Hard to know whether to give this confection one star or five. The dominant voice is the mandolin of Chris Thile, an instrument probably unknown to J S Bach who never wrote for it, but used often in modern transcriptions of his works. It sits more comfortably in a Bach score than, say, a tenor sax, but that does not make it remotely authentic. The other instruments at play here are a cello and double bass. What hits the ear from the off are clever, virtuosic trio adaptations of anything from a solo keyboard fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier to…

Lebrecht Weekly – Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (Sony)

0

By Norman Lebrecht on 17 March 2017 Art Song, CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Romantic

This is one of those treasurable major-label releases, made with the best of intentions, in which everything turns out wrong. Mahler wrote The Song of the Earth for high tenor and alto, singing alternate movements. It can also be sung by tenor and baritone if no alto sounds right. The chief requirement is a tenor who needs to sing high and very loud – a Siegfried kind of voice that can surmount the force of full orchestra. This is as much a competition for two soloists and orchestra as a composition. Jonas Kaufmann tells us he has loved the work…

Lebrecht Weekly – Hanns Eisler: Hangmen Also Die! (Capriccio)

0

By Norman Lebrecht on 13 March 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

In the Hollywood walk of composing fame, Hanns Eisler is the forgotten man. Erich Korngold was the founding father, Waxman and Newman the busy bees, Rosza and Herrmann the atmosphere merchants. Eisler, who wrote the first book on composing for film and treated the craft as an art in its own right, is all but pushed off the sidewalk. A Hitler refugee, Eisler landed in New York in 1938, taught for three years at the New School, then moved to Los Angeles to work with Bertolt Brecht. In 1948, he was forced to leave the US during Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunt,…

Lebrecht Weekly – Nadia Boulanger: Works (Delos/SWR Music)

0

By Norman Lebrecht on 3 March 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

In half a century of listening to records, I cannot recall ever hearing music by the noted French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. Revered by a stream of American (Copland, Harris, Carter, Glass) and British (Berkeley, Musgrave, Maw) pupils, the formidable Mademoiselle deferred to the music of her short-lived sister Lily and barely spoke of herself as a composer. Two releases, newly landed, may help to adjust that misperception. On Delos, an outpouring of early songs betray an uncritical adoration of Debussy, with touches of Saint-Saëns, Franck and a hint of the Russians. Nicole Cabell, Alek Shrader and Edwin Crossley-Mercer make the…

Lebrecht Weekly – Boris Tishchenko: 8th symphony (Naxos)

0

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 February 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral, Violin

Try as I might, I can’t stop listening to these late works of a Russian composer who was close to Shostakovich but never tried, as others did, to imitate him. The eighth symphony, written in 2008 when Tishchenko was mortally ill, draws the ear into an eerie landscape of ghosts, trolls and spooks, weird and possibly political. The composer thought it might make a good companion piece to Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. He was right: it would. But where is the conductor or orchestra manager that dares to do such a thing in timid 2017? Unlike Schubert, there are expressions here…

Lebrecht Weekly – Not bad music, just not very good Bartók

0

By Norman Lebrecht on 17 February 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly

The unique selling point of this release is what appears to be the first recording of Bartók’s piano quartet in C minor, an unpublished work that the composer began in high school in 1898 and his publishers somehow forgot. The gushing sleeve note says nothing about where this work was found, or what state it was in. We have to judge from the performance why Bartók and his publishers considered it unworthy of inclusion in his mature output. The reason, by my best guess, is lack of originality. The Allegro and Scherzo sound like warmed-over Brahms, while the Adagio could…

Lebrecht Weekly – Complete piano music of Vítězslava Kaprálová is compelling listening

0

By Norman Lebrecht on 10 February 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

Don’t look away just because the composer’s name is unfamiliar and has too many syllables. Kaprálová (1915-1940) is a vital link in Czech music, her death at 25 the closure of a century of genius. Daughter of a Leoš Janáček student and herself the secret lover of Bohuslav Martinů, Kaprálová flowered in France and Britain in the last years before the Second World War. In addition to composing she was an active conductor, the first woman to raise a baton on BBC television – unscreened, in an experimental studio – and she was widely praised at a London international festival…

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly

Lebrecht Weekly – Karol Szymanowski; Stabat Mater, 3rd Symphony (Warner)

Lebrecht Weekly – Rachmaninov: Piano concertos 2 and 3 (Sony Classical)

Lebrecht Weekly – Verdi: Requiem (LSO Live)

Lebrecht Weekly – Yo-Yo Ma, Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer: Bach trios (Nonesuch)

Lebrecht Weekly – Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (Sony)

Lebrecht Weekly – Hanns Eisler: Hangmen Also Die! (Capriccio)

Lebrecht Weekly – Nadia Boulanger: Works (Delos/SWR Music)

Lebrecht Weekly – Boris Tishchenko: 8th symphony (Naxos)

Lebrecht Weekly – Not bad music, just not very good Bartók

Lebrecht Weekly – Complete piano music of Vítězslava Kaprálová is compelling listening

Current Issue