Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Lebrecht Weekly – Elgar, Martinu: Cello concertos (Sony Classical)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 18 November 2016 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Strings

The Argentine-born Sol Gabetta, now in her mid-30s, made her first recording of the Elgar concerto six years ago in Denmark, an impressive performance stressed ever-so-faintly at the edges by the long shadow of Jacqueline Du Pré. In this live concert with the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle, Gabetta is more languorous and, one suspects, more herself. The opening phrases are so leisurely you can imagine half the orchestra taking an illicit sip of tea from an under-chair flask, knowing there is plenty of time before they have to come in. But her tempo is immediately convincing and musically…

Lebrecht Weekly – Shostakovich plays Shostakovich (Praga Digitals)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 11 November 2016 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly

If the print on this review goes blurry on your screen it’s because I’m still rubbing my eyes at the cast list on this astonishing trove of archive finds, unobtainable anywhere on line. The composer Dmitri Shostakovich was a capable pianist who sometimes participated in his own premieres. The people he played with were the elite of Russian music. The song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, unplayable in public while Stalin was waging his anti-Semitic purge, existed as samizdat between Shostakovich and his friends, sung quietly in his apartment and theirs. The public premiere in January 1955 was sung by…

Lebrecht Weekly – Schoenberg and Shostakovich (CSO.Resound)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 4 November 2016 Choral, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly

Two composers in despair, reaching deep into their souls. Arnold Schoenberg, a penniless refugee in Los Angeles in 1938, was commissioned by a liberal temple to make a modern version of the Yom Kippur introductory prayer. Dmitri Shostakovich, dying of lung cancer in 1974, wrote a song cycle for bass singer and piano from Michelangelo’s battle between public expectation and personal need. Together, the two works contains some of the darkest moments known to music. Schoenberg, unexpectedly, delivers confidence, hope and consolation. Without yielding to the temptations of simple faith or melody, he conjures serenity out of musical austerity by…

Lebrecht Weekly – György Kurtág: Complete string quartets (ATMA Classique)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 28 October 2016 Chamber Music, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly

Some of my least endurable musical moments have been spent trapped in a small hall listening to a new piece by Kurtág, the venerable, post-tonal Hungarian aphorist. Making sense of seemingly unrelated sounds, and clusters of sound, is made all the most uncomfortable by the occasional squeaks that emanate from dedicated musicians struggling with the composer’s demands. The relief is that Kurtág always writes short. The pain tends to be over in ten minutes. So it was with trepidation that I put on the Molinari Quartet’s album of Kurtág’s complete string quartets – a total of 50 minutes – and…

Lebrecht Weekly – J S Bach: The French Suites (DG)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 14 October 2016 Baroque and Early, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

What a difference a label can make. All his adult life, ever since he won the 1972 Leeds Piano Competition, Murray Perahia has recorded exclusively for Columbia Masterworks, known now as Sony Classical after a Japanese takeover. In a fragmenting record industry, Perahia’s was among the last label loyalists. CBS/Sony engineering was the sound by which he was known. It began as a natural fit – New York pianist with New York label, joined at the hip by Vladimir Horowitz who admired Perahia above all young pianists. But Perahia moved to London and, over time, developed a sound that was…

Lebrecht Weekly – Arnold Schoenberg: Gurre-Lieder (Chandos)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 7 October 2016 Art Song, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

It is so rare to hear the Gurre Lieder live that most of us are acquainted with it only on record – in memorable interpretations by Rafael Kubelik, Pierre Boulez, Riccardo Chailly, Claudio Abbado and others. The work employs a vast orchestra and chorus for an unbroken duration of ninety minutes, much of which occupies a zone of uncertainty as to whether what we are hearing is ancient or modern. Schoenberg began composing the cycle in Wagnerian modalities in 1900, abandoned it three years later, finished it in 1911 as a provocative atonalist, and achieved the greatest triumph of his…

Lebrecht Weekly – Pretty Yende: A Journey (Sony Classical)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 30 September 2016 Lebrecht Weekly, Opera

The classical music industry does not so much promote talent as postpone it. Faced with a gleaming young star, the male curators of fame (all men) then seek validation in endless meetings. Agents and record producers hedge and haver. They deliberate and dine out, they call another meeting, and another. Then they write a budget. No wonder the business is in such bother. It is now seven years since the South African soprano Pretty Yende burst on our ears as winner of the 2009 Hans Gabor competition in Vienna. It is five years since she won every single trophy in…

Lebrecht Weekly – Lang Lang: New York Rhapsody (Sony Classical)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 23 September 2016 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

I am not the right person to be reviewing this album, but then I’m not sure the right person actually exists. This is a Sony crossover project that falls smack between the tracks. How does one rate it on a scale of one to five? Obviously five stars for production. This is a six-digit concept album involving dozens of round-table meetings, the top recording crew, best designer, photographer, makeup artist, go-fer. The cover shows Lang Lang sitting apparently exhausted on the steps of a nightclub. We’re not quite sure it is Lang Lang since there is no sight of the…

Lebrecht Weekly – Prokofiev: Violin concertos (BIS)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 16 September 2016 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Violin

Two albums of Prokofiev concertos arrive in the same delivery, one piano, the other violin. Both are from pedigree artists, pedigree labels. Which one do I review? Here’s where you run into the problem of having too much music in your head. I cannot listen to the 4th and 5th Prokofiev concertos, or the 7th and 8th sonatas, without hearing Sviatoslav Richter as a parallel soundtrack, allowing others little room for manoeuvre. Likewise the 3rd concerto which I heard Martha Argerich play with Riccardo Muti one Sunday afternoon more than 40 years ago with such effervescence that all else pales…

Lebrecht Weekly – Michael Nyman: The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Naxos)

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By Norman Lebrecht on 9 September 2016 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Opera

In the spring of 1985 I saw three opera world premieres in London in as many weeks. There was Busoni’s Doctor Faust in the restored original ending, Birtwistle’s breakthough opera The Mask of Orpheus and last, and smallest, Michael Nyman’s chamber opera on a troubling case history by the neurologist Oliver Sacks. I felt confident at the time that Nyman’s opera would be revived soon and often, but that’s not how it goes. Chamber operas are notoriously hard to get staged, falling as they do between too many institutional stools. All the more reason, then, to welcome a new recording…

Browsing: Lebrecht Weekly

Lebrecht Weekly – Elgar, Martinu: Cello concertos (Sony Classical)

Lebrecht Weekly – Shostakovich plays Shostakovich (Praga Digitals)

Lebrecht Weekly – Schoenberg and Shostakovich (CSO.Resound)

Lebrecht Weekly – György Kurtág: Complete string quartets (ATMA Classique)

Lebrecht Weekly – J S Bach: The French Suites (DG)

Lebrecht Weekly – Arnold Schoenberg: Gurre-Lieder (Chandos)

Lebrecht Weekly – Pretty Yende: A Journey (Sony Classical)

Lebrecht Weekly – Lang Lang: New York Rhapsody (Sony Classical)

Lebrecht Weekly – Prokofiev: Violin concertos (BIS)

Lebrecht Weekly – Michael Nyman: The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Naxos)

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