Music to my ears
What the classical world has been listening to this month
Delyana Lazarova Conductor In the absence of much live music,
I’ve been enjoying a lot of concert video recordings, including Christian Ferras’s 1965 performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto with a young Zubin Mehta conducting. In the second movement, right at the emotional centre of the piece, the camera zooms in on Ferras and you suddenly realise there are tears rolling down his face. They play with such poise and you can really feel the connection between conductor and soloist.
I recently discovered conductor Kirill Petrenko’s recording of
Suk’s tone poem Ripening with the Berlin Comic Opera Orchestra.
It is so carefully crafted, and Petrenko always brings out of an orchestra important colours and voices, which often get lost in the texture. Suk deserves a lot more attention, which is something hopefully I can help with as a young conductor. His evocative music brings the musical traditions of Dvo ák to a new level.
Carlos Kleiber’s recordings of Brahms’s Symphonies Nos 2 & 4 have helped me understand both pieces so much better, and have shown me how important the conductor is in bringing meaning to music. As a 21st-century musician, I may not do certain things in the same way in terms of interpretation, but the sheer fire and depth that Kleiber brings to the music is something I love revisiting. This music can never be in the background: it’s so pregnant with meaning.
And also…
I recently moved to Manchester, and while the museums and galleries have been closed, I’ve been doing a lot of walking around the city to try and learn more about its history. I’ve found a statue of Engels and learnt that the first atom was split at Manchester University – it’s been really exciting.
Delyana Lazarova conducts the Hallé’s online concert at Bridgewater Hall on 25 February
James Newby Baritone
Recorded in 195665, Dietrich Fischer-dieskau’s Live in Salzburg series of recitals pretty much covers the highlights of the German song repertoire, but it is specifically his Schumann and Schubert that I find so exquisite. The flexibility of his voice was remarkable, and he also had such clarity of diction, evenness of tone throughout the range and such stunning colours. We all know him as a great recording artist, but this shows he was just as good live.
On baritone Benjamin Luxon’s When I was one-and-twenty disc with David Willison at the piano, he sings Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad and Bredon Hill and then this beautiful mix of Gurney songs such as ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’, ‘In Flanders’ and ‘By a bierside’, which is one of the great recordings in my opinion. Luxon has quite a rich voice with a beautiful roundness to it and he is a communicator through and through – it is like he is speaking to you.
I’ve been preparing Schubert’s Winterreise as I was supposed to be performing it in Barcelona at the beginning of 2021. I’ve been listening to all sorts of recordings of it – men, women, tenors,
The camera zooms in on Ferras and you realise there are tears rolling down his face