This month we review: Anna Prohaska, Pat. Kopatchinskaja, Ellinor d'Melon, RTE Orch/Martín, Clare College CH/Graham Ross and Montreal SO/Rafael Payare.
Abstract statement, or central chapter in a musical autobiography? Peter Quantrill sifts the recorded legacy for answers to one of Mahler's popular but most enigmatic pieces
There are some wilfully odd things said about the Fifth even by its interpreters. Mehta called it Mahler's Eroica (why? Because it has a funeral march and a happy ending?). Much emphasis is placed on its 'purity' of discourse as though this would make it a better or nobler symphonic statement. According to Bruno Walter, 'nothing in my talks [with Mahler], not a single note of the work, suggests that any intrinsic [extrinsic?] thought or emotion entered into its composition'.
This month we review: Lucile Richardot, Stéphane Degout, Anne de Fornel, et AL, Los Angeles PO/Gustavo Dudamel, Veronika Eberle, LSO/Rattle and WDR SO/Łukasz Borowicz.
Fauré Mark 2? Absolutely not, says Peter Quantrill, as he unravels the mysteries and contradictions surrounding this devotional work, and surveys its history on record
In 1941 the Vichy government of wartime France commissioned pieces from a wide range of composers as part of a nationalist cultural revival. Duruflé was 39 at the time and known more as an organist, not least because he withheld and revised far more music than he published, though in 1936 Paul Paray had conducted the premiere of three orchestral Dances which masterfully synthesise Debussyan impressionism and Ravellian shades of light.
Brahms the beardless, Brahms the keyboard revolutionary: the D minor Concerto sorts out pianistic sheep from goats. Peter Quantrill surveys almost a century of recordings
Picture yourself sitting in the audience at the earliest performances of the D minor Concerto, in January 1859, the 25-year-old composer at the keyboard. Imagine that the contemporary piano concerto meant Liszt and Litolff: glitter and fluff, brevity and showmanship. How would you take to the epic first movement, itself as long as several whole Mozart concertos? No wonder that it was hissed in Leipzig – Brahms wrote off the event as a brilliant and decisive failure.
Peter Quantrill listens back to five centuries of Mass settings and 50 years of recordings and asks how did one French folk song become the seed for an entire musical genre?
It was the 19th century and the Romantic age that elevated originality above all to an artistic goal and an aesthetic standard. Back in an age when composers were treated as musical craftsmen, and wrote accordingly, turning over the tables in the temple of art would have been a baffling ideal.
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