La sélection Gramophone du mois (août 2018)

Leonard Bernstein, one of 20th-century music’s great polymaths is the focus of his month’s ‘Gramophone Selects’ — as teacher, as conductor (with the LSO in the music of Igor Stravinsky) and as composer (with Simon Rattle conducting Wonderful Town). Our masterclass finds Pinchas Zukerman putting New World Symphony alumna Rebecca Reale through her paces in Mozart’s Fifth Violin Concerto. Our opera takes us to Spain for a production at Madrid’s Teatro Real of Handel’s Rodelinda — Lucy Crowe takes the title-role with Bejun Mehta, Jeremy Ovenden, Sonia Prina, Lawrence Zazzo and Umberto Chiummo in support. Ivor Bolton conducts and Claus Guth directs. That mercurial genius, the pianist Grigory Sokolov is the subject of the documentary, a film that takes us closer to this enigmatic musician. Daniel Lozakovich is our Young Artist (playing the same concerto, Mozart’s Fifth, that Zukerman teaches) and we’ve two performances of Mahler’s mighty Eighth Symphony to compare — one from Yannick Nézet-Ségiun and the other from Riccardo Chailly.