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Dutch label Pentatone

Lebrecht Weekly | Kurtág’s Játékok by Pierre-Laurent Aimard: An Absolute Cracker from Pentatone

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

It may be a bit early in springtime to be nominating an Album of the Year, but I’ll be very surprised if any release in the next eight months makes me sit up and take note with such awe and excitement as this absolute cracker from the Dutch label Pentatone. The composer turned 99 two months ago. He has been writing this piano series – the Hungarian title means ‘Games – since 1973, adding fresh episodes every now and then. There are 75 complete movements to this suite and another ten in manuscript. Kurtág may yet have more up his…

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Wagner

CD Review | Gerald Finley & Lise Davidsen, The Flying Dutchman

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By on CD and Book Reviews
April/May 2025

Wagner: Der fliegende Holländer Lise Davidsen, soprano; Gerald Finley, bass-baritone; Brindley Sherratt, bass; Stanislas de Barbeyrac and Eirik Grøtvedt, tenors; Anna Kissjudit, mezzo-soprano; Orchestra and Chorus of Norwegian National Opera, Edward Gardner, conductor Decca, 2025 Of the 13 operas Wagner composed, his fourth—Der fliegende Holländer, also known as The Flying Dutchman, and premiered in1843)—was his first hit.  Legend has it that Wagner and his wife Minna, on their way from Germany to England in 1839, were stranded in southeastern Norway when the ship they were on encountered a fierce storm. This experience provided Wagner with the inspiration for this opera. …

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Réflexions

CD Review | Réflexions, Francis Choinière

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By on CD and Book Reviews
April/May 2025

Réflexions Francis Choinière, piano GFN Productions, 2025 Francis Choinière has swapped his conductor’s baton for the piano keyboard, and now brings us his first solo album of compositions. Revisiting melodies from his youth or working with new material, the young conductor of Orchestre FILMharmonique and the Orchestre Philharmonique et Chœur des Mélomanes has given himself a great gift by recording these five tracks, symbols of reconnection with himself, on the Steinway at Maison symphonique. Here we find a neoclassical language in the vein of Stréliski or Einaudi. Soaring music with timeless echoes—between its arpeggios and harmonic progressions unfolds an ambience…

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Canadian Mosaic

CD Review | Canadian Mosaic, Canadian Sinfonietta Chamber Players

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By on CD and Book Reviews
April/May 2025

Canadian Mosaic Canadian Sinfonietta Chamber Players, Ronald Royer, conductor; Stephen Tam, flute; Kaye Royer, clarinet; Kristin Day,  bassoon; Joyce Lai and Alain Bouvier, violins; Ian Clarke, viola; Andras Weber, cello; Talisa Blackman, piano; composers An-Lun Huang, Ronald Royer, Tak Ng Lai, Michael Pepa, Bruno Degazio   Akashic Classics, 2024 This disc presents a diverse collection of music by Canadian composers. While the pieces differ from each other stylistically, there is a subtle, yet solid through line which connects them all. An-Lun Huang’s Seven Canadian Folk Songs in Chinese Style and Tak Ng Lai’s Romance No. 2 for Violin and String Ensemble…

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Santa Ana

CD Review | Alfredo Santa Ana Before the World Sleeps

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By on CD and Book Reviews
April/May 2025

Before the World Sleeps Alfredo Santa Ana, composer; Miranda Wong, piano Redshift Records, 2024 Before the World Sleeps is a direct result of the current tensions in the world surrounding politics, the climate crisis, and technology. Mexican-Canadian composer Alfredo Santa Ana’s artistic response to this instability was “to reorient the compositional process toward creating small pieces of music that (he) could finish quickly, and using an archiver’s mindset, commit them to a recording rather than prepare them for public performance.” The pieces on this album are varied, technically demanding, and are a manifestation of a world caught between the peaceful…

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John Field

Lebrecht Weekly | Alice Sara Ott’s Post-Chopin Approach on John Field’s Complete Nocturnes

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

The most influential Irishman in the history of music is not Bob Geldof, Bono, Sinead O’Connor or the Dubliners, all of whom are famous as influenza, but a fairly obscure piano salesman who awoke a sub-continent to its creative potential. John Field was born in Dublin in 1782 to Anglican parents who took him to London to work for Muzio Clementi, Beethoven’s publishing partner and piano dealer. As a rep for the wealthy Clementi, Field travelled to Paris and Vienna before settling in St Petersburg, where he starred at the new-founded Philharmonic Society. Field gave three piano lessons to Mikhail…

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Ravel

Lebrecht Weekly | Maurice Ravel: Complete solo piano music (Chandos), Complete songs (Signum)

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Both double-album titles left me feeling uncomfortable. Ravel is a miniaturist, a maker of exquisite small things that drop into your consciousness like olive oil into a bowl of rice. Each drop is an object entire. Pour them freely and the uniqueness dissolves. It speaks volumes for both of these projects that they manage to avoid that danger, most of the time anyway. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet takes a chronological route, starting with a Serenade grotesque written in 1892 when Ravel was 17 and concluding with that monstrously grotesque caricature of morbid Vienna known as La Valse (and more often heard in…

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Shostakovich

Lebrecht Weekly | Shostakovich’s 15th Symphony by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra Under Bernard Haitink

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his last symphony with left hand alone. A heart attack in 1966, followed by several falls and fractures, left him heavily disabled. His solution was to train one hand to do the work of two and economising on physical effort. This may explain the expanses of blank staves in some pages of his fifteenth symphony, as if he lacked strength to fill in instrumental detail. Maxim Shostakovich, who conducted the 1972 premiere, called the work his father’s ‘birth-to-death autobiography’. That, too, is only a partial view. The symphony opens with a holiday funfair and a blast of…

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Fung & Sondheim

Lebrecht Weekly | Zlatomir Fung’s Fantasies & Stephen Sondheim’s Chamber music

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Chamber Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano, Strings

I love artists who attempt the impossible. Within reason, that is. I’d draw the line at someone playing the 32 Beethoven sonatas one-handed, or the 15 Shostakovich quartets without a bathroom break. But any artist who takes a piece of music beyond the limits of what I’d heard in it before gets my vote. The American cellist Zlatomir Fung has composed a fantasy on Janacek’s opera Jenufa, a feat that defies credibility. The tunes and rhythms of Jenufa are rooted in Czech speech patterns. Erase the voice, and what’s left? An X-ray. Fung and his pianist Richard Fu present fifteen…

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Schubert 9 symphonie

Lebrecht Weekly | Franz Schubert: Orchestral Songs, 9th Symphony (Chandos)

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By on CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly

Many composers have tried to improve on Schubert. Mahler made a string-orchestra version of the Death and the Maiden string quartet, Joseph Joachim orchestrated a four-hand piano sonata, Liszt made the Wanderer Fantasy into something resembling a piano concerto. Even atonal Anton von Webern had a go. All with the best of intentions and without harm to the crystalline original, but you do wonder what value they added. Schubert, like apple strudel, does not need sweetener. What we have on this album are little-known orchestral settings by famous composers of four perfect songs. Benjamin Britten tacked on two clarinets and…

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