Leander Schlegel News
Dutch composer and pianist
Commemorations 2024 (Birth: Leander Schlegel)
- piano, violin, voice
- Kingdom of the Netherlands
- composer, pianist, violinist
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2024-04-24
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2023-11-16 07:29:00
In a much-recorded field, they create something memorable: Songs of the Night from Rowan Pierce, Julien van Mellaerts, & Lucy Colquhoun
[…] Robert Schumann's far less familiar setting, and includes two of the rather underappreciated songs of Hans Pfitzner. The songs are shared out between van Mellaerts and Pierce with the two coming together at the very end for a pair of duets by Mendelssohn.Songs of the Night recording session - Lucy Colquhoun, Julien van Mellaerts at the Music Room, Champs Hill (Photo: Patrick Allen)We begin with Schubert. Julien van Mellaerts introduces things with Schubert's very large scale Schlegel setting, Waldesnacht with a lovely flexible tone and great attention to the words, telling us the story in this darkly mysterious piece. Pierce sings with vibrant tone in a lovely concentrated account of Nachtstück, whilst van Mellaerts and Colquhoun conjure pure magic in Wandrers Nachtlied II.Mr Schumann comes next. Van Mellaerts is vividly characterful in Die feindlichen brüder and Der Hidalgo, and in the latter I loved the contrast between his serious tone and […]
2022-06-03 12:00:26
NOT ONE WELL-KNOWN COMPOSER HAS WRITTEN A SYMPHONY IN THE KEY OF G-SHARP MINOR? The only moderately well-known composer to have done so was Nikolai Miaskovsky (No. 17). Beyond him there are such obscure names as Dimitrie Cuclin, Elliot Goldenthal, Jordan Grigg, and Christopher Schlegel. G-sharp Minor, incidentally, is also the only key in which [...]
2021-09-19 07:46:00
‘Let music not be forgotten in the meantime’: Sonatas, Fantasies, and Fragments by Schumann and Chopin
In Beethoven’s wake, composers, especially in the Austro-German tradition, asked themselves what should become of forms and genres he had seemingly taken to their ultimate, foremost among them the sonata and symphony. Allied to increasing interest, born of literary Romanticism, in the idea of the ‘fragment’ – for Friedrich Schlegel, ‘a small work of art, complete in itself and separated from its surrounding world, like a hedgehog’ – such pressure led in several directions: rejuvenation and rejection of old forms only two possible polarities. We shall hear in this programme Schumann wrestle with such questions; Chopin take, to Schumann’s bemusement, a very different sonata path; and much territory both between and beyond. ‘For ladies’ Writing in 1843, Schumann argued that ‘difficulties in form and content’ had prevented much of his music from gaining greater public esteem. The C major Arabeske, composed over his Vienna winter of 1838–9, had represented […]
2019-09-09 04:52:00
Opera Phantasies from 150 Years (SACD review)
[…] the Concert Fantasy on Themes from Gershwin's Opera Porgy and Bess (1991) by Russian violinist and composer Igor Frolov (1937-2013). This is the one fantasy on the program that seems to include every familiar tune from the opera from which it derives. If you like Gershwin, you'll like Frolov's treatment of the themes, and you'll love Reinhold and Zedler's evocatively dreamy, jazzy realizations of the score. Producers Werner Dabringhaus and Reimund Grimm and engineer Holger Schlegel recorded the music at the Konzerthaus der Abtei Marienmunster, Germany in April 2019. They made the disc in hybrid SACD, which contains a regular two-channel stereo layer for playback on a regular CD player and an SACD layer, which contains a two-channel stereo format, a multichannel format, and a 2+2+2 format for playback on an SACD player. Apparently, the 2+2+2 format utilizes the middle and bass channels to provide a left and right height […]
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