San Francisco’s latest Post-Minimalist outing raises two musical smiles for the price of one. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

This new recording on the San Francisco Symphony’s own label presents two works written three decades apart by American composer John Adams. Although Adams is most commonly associated with Minimalist compositional techniques, these are only very obliquely in evidence in this world premiere recording of Absolute Jest (2013 Most unusually, the work is scored for string quartet with symphony orchestra – “pretty much a repertory black hole,” as Adams notes dryly. This piece takes as its starting points phrases from late Beethoven string quartets, predominantly Op. 131, 135, and the Große Fuge (Op. 133), weaving them into “a colossal 25-minute scherzo” with orchestral elaborations, digressions and counterpoints, and nods to other Beethoven works. “Absolute Jest is playful, in the literal sense of scherzo as joke, but it is by no means lightweight”  It’s hugely playful, in the literal sense of scherzo as joke/jest, but it is by no means lightweight, flippant or ironic. Rather, it’s a vivacious, lively homage, a recent example in a long line of composers (including Brahms and Stravinsky, to name but two) looking back and ‘sampling’ the work of their… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

It’s the time of year when many of us in the media enjoy letting our heads swivel back and forth, Janus-like, over the old year and the new.

Rush, Russell Beale, Salminen & Skovhus: four Lears tackle the tortured monarch. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

“King Lear is about power. The story shows us that nobody has so much power that it can’t be taken away in a minute.” Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Chris Latham discusses the impact of the technological miracle from 1910 that changed the way we listen for ever. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Google Play Music’s world-first initiatives offers music lovers the chance to download and stream the latest concert recordings. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Sex and lies in Ancient Rome will be on the menu for Festival’s second outing. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Though Ge Gan-Ru was raised and educated in Shanghai where he would discover the Western avant garde (Stockhausen, Cage and Crumb), like Tan Dun and Bright Sheng, upon moving to the US he would adopt a hybrid style bringing together traditional Chinese elements with a style associated with American modernists such as Copland and Bernstein. It was during his period of overseas study that, homesick, he would experience recurring “dreams of the street scenes and sounds of old Shanghai”, which led to a wish to compose music that would bring a coalescence of East with West. And Shanghai Reminiscences is the musical realisation of that wish. Opening this large-scale work we hear the chanting monks and bells of his beloved Jing An temple, placed within an emotional and harmonic milieu akin to Bernstein’s Symphony No 2 (The Age of Anxiety). Woven into this ingenious work, the listener also discovers elements of traditional Peking opera and folk tunes set against the more familiar (for us) sound world of the Western violin. The other piece on this disc is Butterfly Overture, a tribute to his first teacher at the Shanghai Conservatory, Chen Gang who composed the Butterfly Lovers violin concerto – still…

The Slovak composer Eugen Suchoň (1908-1993) possessed a rich, distinctive voice that drew as much on the diatonicism of late-Romanticism and the modality of Slovak folk music as on Impressionism and chromaticism. But what most astonishes when listening to these three impressive large-scale orchestral works from the mid-1930s and mid-1950s is Suchonˇ’s subtle yet expansive orchestrations and fulsome narrative drive. It’s easy to be reminded that he did a lot of piano improvising for silent films. Metamorfózy (Metamorphoses, 1953) is quasi-programmatic, the portrait of the artist around the time of World War II. Each of its five sections is exquisitely crafted but the final Allegro feroce, with its rushing strings and explosive brass and percussion, steals the show. The earlier Baladická Suita opens in a mood of bustling energy through which one can glimpse the gorgeous lyricism of the following Adagio, which in turn submits to a frenetic Allegro molto that is itself conquered by the final movement’s lush impressionism. Completed in 1956, Symfonietta Rustica is adapted from parts of the composer’s Sonata Rustica for solo piano and is dominated by the spirit of folk song and dance…. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

Hans Gál (1890-1987) was one of those composers of Jewish heritage who fled Nazi Germany. While many headed to the USA, Gál went to England, where he was interred as an enemy alien and imprisoned alongside actual Nazis. His sister perished during The Holocaust and later he lost his 18-year-old son to suicide. After the war, Gál taught at Edinburgh University and was instrumental in setting up the Edinburgh Festival. He continued to compose, though like other refugee composers he did so in a vacuum. He regarded himself as a craftsman: when forced to spend time in hospital in his 80s, he committed himself to writing a fugue every day. Gál enjoyed a burgeoning reputation before life’s vicissitudes intervened. His four symphonies span his entire creative career: the First was written in 1927 and the Fourth in 1974. Nevertheless, his style and language remained consistent. The turmoil of the times is not reflected in his music. Evidently he turned to composition for escape and solace. His symphonic music is redolent of the English pastoral school – even the First, written before he came to England. That work is probably closest to modernism, with its cheeky Scherzo and buoyant, extrovert finale,……

Music lovers over 50 will recall the Ace of Clubs label: a series of reissues of mono recordings from the 1950s. They sold in Australia for $2.95, enticingly cheaper than full price stereo LPs at $5.95. The latest in a series of Decca Sound boxes, delving into the old Decca catalogue, brings back many of those recordings, encased in reproductions of the original sleeves and with bonus tracks to take each CD beyond 70 minutes. Decca’s Full Frequency Range sound quality was always a feature and is enhanced in the digital remastering, although violin sections are occasionally toppy. For instance, you have to listen through the harsh string sound of Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro to appreciate the bracing vitality of Anthony Collins’s performance. His Falstaff has no such caveat: it sounds great and is enthralling from beginning to end. Sadly there is too much here to cover in a short review. Conductors include stalwarts like Ansermet, Argenta, Boult, Martinon, Fistoulari, Erich Kleiber (beautifully unaffected in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony), Van Beinum, and the earliest discs by Solti: a riveting Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and a lively Haydn Symphony No 100. Unique and celebrated recordings abound: Britten’s Diversions with…