Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Lebrecht Weekly | Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn: Choral and vocal works (Pentatone/First Hand Records)

By Norman Lebrecht on 4 August 2023 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

It’s not often one gets a chance to compare two composers who are brother and sister. In fact, apart from the Mendelssohns, there is hardly another instance except Mozart and his inauspicious sister, Nannerl. In the Mendelssohn family, Fanny was the first to show talent, only to be silenced by her father once young Felix displayed a boyish genius that many likened to Mozart’s. Fanny went off, got married, acted as family conscience and shocked Felix by taking up composing again in her thirties. The works on these two albums are disparate in tone and intent. Felix’s psalms, sung by…

Lebrecht Weekly | Eugène Ysaye: Solo violin sonatas (Deutsche Grammophon)

By Norman Lebrecht on 28 July 2023 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Every era has its defining violinist. For the second half of the 19th century it was the avuncular Joseph Joachim, for the first third of the 20th the mischievous Fritz Kreisler. Then came Heifetz, Menuhin, Perlman, briefly Vengerov and Anne-Sophie Mutter. If there is a defining violinist in the present century I suspect it is Hilary Hahn. American to her pop-socks, forged from age ten in the Curtis foundry, she has hardly put a career foot wrong, limiting her concert engagements and taking time out to have two daughters. At 43, she stands head and a shoulder pad taller than…

George Frideric Handel in a painting by Denner. Photo : Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library / Alamy

Lebrecht Weekly | Mr Händel im Pub: Baroque meets folk (Arcantus)

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 July 2023 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

I had high hopes of this album, an attempt by period musicians to recreate the kind of stuff that might – repeat, might – have been performed in London pubs during the early 18th century. Henry Purcell, who hung out far too much in London hostelries, was recently dead. Handel, who went in for heavy eating rather than heavy drinking, was newly arrived from Germany and still finding his way around the city’s entertainment venues. Match their music with the rougher folk trade that, then as now, played at esoteric drinking holes and the collusion promised possible enlightenment. The first…

Photo: Teemu Rajala

Lebrecht Weekly | Rautavaara: 3rd piano concerto (Bis); Overtures from Finland (Chandos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 14 July 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

Like Russians at tennis, Finns now predominate in the production of classical music. Finnish conductors command orchestras from San Francisco to Paris, Finnish soloists receive more than their fair share of concerto dates and Finnish composers are extensively promoted. Sadness at the recent death of the exceptional Kaija Saariaho merely magnified the size of the footprint that a marginal nation of five million citizens has planted across an international art form. Finnish musicians are exceedingly well trained and motivated. The question of individual quality is seldom put under the spotlight. Bis: ** Chandos: *** Einojuhani Rautavaara, who died in 2016,…

Weekly Lebrecht | Franz Liszt: Transcendental Etudes (Steinway)

By Norman Lebrecht on 7 July 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

The world awoke to Yunchan Lim in the Rachmaninov concerto final of the Van Cliburn competition when the conductor, Marin Alsop, was seen wiping away a tear in wonderment at this astonishing young talent. Just 19 at the time, Yunchan has been pursued ever since with media deals. He says he prefers to spend his time on a Korean mountain, contemplating infinity. This, his debut recording, is a live take of the semi-final round of the Van Cliburn, issued by its piano sponsor. The audience is inaudible except at start and finish and the ambience is intense. A professional record…

Lebrecht Weekly | Sergei Rachmaninov: Symphonies 2 and 3, Isle of the Dead (DG)

By Norman Lebrecht on 30 June 2023 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

The opening bars of this live performance assert that the Philadelphia Orchestra owns these works. The orchestra eases into the second symphony like an Olympic swimmer into a public pool, totally in its element, fearless of hazard or challenge. The strings are silken, the woodwinds ethereal. And then it all goes choppy. The Philadelphia Orchestra was involved with Rachmaninov from his arrival in America as a refugee in 1918 to his death 25 years later. Its music directors, Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy, championed his works and invited him to play them. The third symphony, his first important exile work, was…

Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Lebrecht Weekly | Gustav Mahler: 2nd symphony ‘Resurrection’ (Pentatone)

By Norman Lebrecht on 23 June 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

If ever you want to know why records are going out of business, look no further than the small print at the back of the booklet. The present performance was recorded in November-December 2018 in the Dvorak Hall in Prague. Almost five years have elapsed before we got to hear it. And just as the first copies were sent out three months ago they were instantly withdrawn because of ‘a manufacturing fault’, apparently in a German pressing plant. Does time mean nothing to record managements? No matter. All is forgiven on listening to the recording, which raises the bar yet…

Photo: Andrew Campbell

Lebrecht Weekly | Kaija Saariaho: Reconnaissance (Bis)

By Norman Lebrecht on 16 June 2023 Lebrecht Weekly

Two weeks after the composer’s death, an album has been rush-released of her little-known choral music, some of it as captivating as any you will hear all summer. Saariaho is famed chiefly for her stark operas and intricate orchestral textures. She admits in the album notes to a lifelong inclination to write for choirs and, in this intriguing collection, she does so in her own inimitable way. Finnish born but never cowed by Sibelius’s shadow, Saariaho studied with the European avant-garde and found her voice while tinkering with early computers in Pierre Boulez’s Ircam laboratory in Paris. Her opening track,…

Lebrecht Weekly | Benjamin Appl: Forbidden Fruit (Alpha Classics)

By Norman Lebrecht on 9 June 2023 Lebrecht Weekly, Opera, Vocal

Franz Schubert knew what he was doing when he wrote songs in cycles. It stopped singers from taking them pick-and-mix for recitals that showcased their own gifts rather than the composer’s. The art of creating a voice and piano recital has receded in the present century with very few – Matthias Goerne and Alice Coote spring to mind among recent, coherent exceptions – willing and able to pitch a programme in which the individual songs relate to one another and to a larger idea. Welcome, then, this new release by the German baritone Benjamin Appl and his British pianist James…

Lebrecht Weekly | Brahms: Double concerto (Sony)

By Norman Lebrecht on 2 June 2023 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Strings

Craving a dose of Brahms, I landed on a new release of his violin and cello double concerto, written in 1887 and the last score he composed for orchestra, a decade before his death. The concerto was a conciliatory offering to his lifelong friend Joseph Joachim. It followed a bitter falling-out over the violinist’s divorce from his wife, Amelie, in which Brahms was suspected of taking Amelie’s side. Joachim had accused her, falsely, of infidelity with a publisher. When Robert Hausmann, a member of Joachim’s string quartet, wondered in Brahms might write him a cello concerto, the composer designed the…

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