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La Scena Online is the digital magazine of La Scene Musicale.Contents: News, Concert reviews, CD reviews, Interviews, Obituaries, etcEditor: Wah Keung ChanAssistant Editor: Andreanne VenneISSN: 1206-9973

Photo: Tam Photography

Review | Rhapsody in Blue‘s 100th: Romance and American Jazz with Jean-Philippe Sylvestre

By Amanda Wong on 4 October 2024 Concert Reviews, Jazz, Montreal

George Gershwin was born on September 26, 1898; it was only fitting that his most beloved piece Rhapsody in Blue, written 100 years ago, would be celebrated in Montreal on what would have been his 126th birthday. In a night of romance and American jazz, Montérégie’s very own Jean-Philippe Sylvestre filled Maison Symphonique on Sept. 26h for a solo piano concert that also included Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturnes and Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances” from West Side Story. Sylvestre has won many awards worldwide, the First Prize and Audience Prize from the OSM Competition, the esteemed Virginia Parker Prize, and the John…

Photo: Anton Spronk

Lebrecht Weekly | Balagan is A Voyage of Discovery in Open-Mouthed Wonderment (Accentus Music)

By Norman Lebrecht on 4 October 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

There’s more content in this compilation than a reviewer has a right to expect. Coming off the back of a pointless set of Shostakovich symphonies, this chunky bar of trios for clarinet, violin and piano just keeps delivering hi-energy nutrients. First up is a four-part klezmer romp by Paul Schoenfield, an American composer who moved to Jerusalem and died there five months ago. Schoenfield took a hybrid genre of Hasidic celebration modes and moulded it into an eclectic set of wild dance moves, irresistible at best. Claude Vivier’s six-minute piece for violin and clarinet is the same in reverse: an…

Record Reviews

By Félix-Antoine Hamel on 1 October 2024 CD and Book Reviews, La Scena Online, Scena Jazz

Fresh sounds… AnchorsJason Stein, bass clarinet; Joshua Abrams, bass; Gerald Cleaver, drums; guest artist/co-producer Boon. TAO Forms (TAO 16), September 2024 Musicians who dedicate themselves solely to the bass clarinet are not legion. In jazz, it is possible to count them on the fingers of one hand; one thinks mostly of European reedmen, like Rudi Mahall, Thomas Savy, or the late Michel Pilz. Jason Stein is a rare American clarinetist who practises only the bigger horn, but he’s not exactly a newcomer. Twenty years ago, he was already teaming up with Ken Vandermark in the Bridge 61 quartet. The trio on…

Saxophonist Devin Daniels

Devin Daniels: Fire in the West

By Félix-Antoine Hamel on 1 October 2024 La Scena Online, Scena Jazz

“I always tell people I’m trying to bring that toxic New York swing energy to L.A.,” saxophonist Devin Daniels confesses to Nate Chinen in the liner notes to his new album, LesGo! The Inglewood, Calif., native apparently came back to home state with some of that combative East Coast attitude after his stint at the famous Berklee College of Music. It certainly shows right from the first notes of the title track (and opener) of his new album; after a brief, ornate alto-sax cadenza, Daniels leads his quintet in a joyous, driving theme that makes one immediately take notice. When…

Lebrecht Weekly | Mäkelä offers little in Shostakovich beyond an energetic superficiality

By Norman Lebrecht on 27 September 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

When the British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer said this week that he listened to Shostakovich if he was having a hard time, I wondered if he’d been tuned in to the same set as me. There are many things in life that make me reach for Shostakovich and I am rarely let down by performance – certainly never as exasperated as I was by these. The good things first. The Oslo Philharmonic is a first-rate orchestra with brilliant woodwind soloists and a cracking work ethic. The Norwegian recording engineers are pretty good, too, and the digital editors have cleaned…

Photo: GTG / Carole Parodi

Review | Disappointing Tristan und Isolde opens Geneva opera season

By Ossama el Naggar on 25 September 2024 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

Tristan und Isolde is a colossal work, not only due to its length (five hours, including two intermissions) or for the influence of its “Tristan” chord on Western music, but also for its symbolism, as Wagner was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer’s philosophy. He was also conducting an illicit affair with Mathilde, the wife of his benefactor, Swiss businessman Otto von Wesendonck. Tristan’s plot is simple: an Irish Princess takes pity on Tantris, the knight who killed her betrothed Morold. She tends to him, nursing him back to life, even while knowing he was her fiancé’s killer. Tantris turns out to…

Lebrecht Weekly | Berg, Schoenberg, Webern: Piano works (Warner)

By Norman Lebrecht on 23 September 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

Music of the Second Vienna School was condemned as noise on first reception. How deaf is that? The greatest asset of these revolutionary works is their quietude. The arresting opus 1 sonata of Alban Berg achieves a 12-minute span of introspection without an obvious atonal tantrum. Berg was the most lyrical of the Schoenberg crowd but the softness of this sonata is its winning virtue, never more so than in the hands of the Vienna-based Russian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaya. Beauty becomes even more wondrous when it is literally off the scale. A Mozartian at heart, Leonskaya has more trouble at locating…

Artists of Alberta Ballet in La Sylphide. Photo: Aaron Anker

Review | Alberta Ballet makes the case for La Sylphide

By Robin J Miller on 20 September 2024 La Scena Online

La Sylphide is an important ballet, but one that few of today’s ballet fans have ever seen. Alberta Ballet makes the case for it to be performed far more often. Not only is it key to understanding the foundations of ballet, it’s also a lot of fun: a tragedy that does not make you weep, with beauty enough to make you smile. La Sylphide — a modern ballet At nearly 200 years old, La Sylphide was the first “modern” ballet where a ballerina, supported by a large female corps de ballet, became the focus of the story. It was also…

Augusta Holmès par L. Taponier (circa.1880). Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Lebrecht Weekly | Augusta Holmès: Symphonic poems (CPO)

By Norman Lebrecht on 13 September 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

The Times of London has shrunk its weekly classical record review to an inch and a half. Other papers ignore recordings altogether, except in Christmas roundups. The classical sector is dying for want of attention and labels are laying off expert staff. All the more reason for online publications like this to maintain continuous coverage of a vital part of the musical economy. My pick of the week may appear esoteric. It comes from Ludwigshafen in western Germany and is performed by the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz with its British chief conductor Michael Francis. The composer is an Irishwoman who lived in…

Anna Prohaska & the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at Musikfest Berlin. Photo: Fabian Schellhorn

La Scena on the Road | Musikfest Berlin 2024: The Americas & Politics

By Gianmarco Segato on 11 September 2024 Classical Music, Concert Reviews, La Scena Online, Vocal

Musikfest Berlin is an ambitious annual festival that hosts the world’s top orchestras, instrumental and vocal ensembles, together with the major symphony orchestras of the city of Berlin. Its 20th-anniversary season focuses on the double continent of America and borrows its title, “Amériques”, from France-to-US transplant, Edgard Varèse’s 1921 work that raised the roof at the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra’s festival-opening concert on Aug. 24th. Acknowledging the ‘American’ theme during his opening remarks, artistic director Winrich Hopp made reference to recent and upcoming European and North and South American elections which have seen far right parties gain more ground than…

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