Classical Features
Boulez, The Rite and the National Youth OrchestraFriday, 15 January 2016
David Nice writes: 2016 began by ringing in the new with concerts by the ever-astonishing National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, and continued by ringing out the old-new with funeral bells on the news of Pierre Boulez’s death at the age of 90. Read more...
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Opinion: The new London hall - 10 Questions we need to askWednesday, 06 January 2016
So the feasibility study for the new concert hall – The Centre for Music – has finally surfaced, a little later than planned. It’s being greeted, generally speaking, as if it’s to be the next London Olympics. “A global beacon,” declares the Evening Standard... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Örebro: Brandenburgs plusMonday, 21 December 2015
In 1981 a 20-year-old Swedish trumpeter on national service turned up in the town – city, by Swedish reckoning – of Örebro as soloist in Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto. Read more... |
Kurt Masur (1927-2015)Sunday, 20 December 2015
This is difficult. An official obituary, such as the one I’ve just finished for The Guardian, has no problem in pointing out the achievements of Kurt Masur’s distinguished career. Whatever his party-line status in Honecker’s East Germany, which he used to get the Leipzig Gewandhaus rebuilt to his own satisfaction, Masur did play a crucial role as one of five spokesmen preventing a Tiananmen Square-style massacre before the Berlin Wall fell. Read more... |
Jaap van Zweden: ‘A great orchestra needs to be a chameleon’Sunday, 13 December 2015
Jaap van Zweden is going places. At 55, he is already 16 years into a second high-profile musical career. His first, as a violinist, saw him appointed leader of the Concertgebouw, the youngest ever to hold the position. From there, he moved to the conductor’s podium, and is now Music Director of the Dallas Symphony and the Hong Kong Philharmonic. According to some rumours, he is also under serious consideration for the New York Philharmonic. Read more... |
Farewell to Stravinsky's right-hand manSunday, 15 November 2015
Missionary angel or twelve-tone devil? Musical figures like Poulenc, perhaps too much attached to the diabolical element in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, were inclined to see the incursion of Robert Craft into Stravinsky’s Hollywood life in 1948 in demonic terms. Read more... |
First Person: 'We Have Found a Better Land'Monday, 02 November 2015
"Helo, ti yw Mark?" A friendly-looking woman on the tiny plane asks me my name. She is a teacher from a Welsh-speaking school in Patagonia, Ysgol yr Hendre, escorting her pupils home from a trip to Cardiff. "I was told to look out for you on the plane. Come and sit with us!" she continues. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Pianist Stephen KovacevichSunday, 18 October 2015
“Whatever happened to Stephen Bishop?” is not a question likely to be asked by followers of legendary pianism. Born in San Pedro, Los Angeles on 17 October 1940, the young talent took his stepfather’s name as his career was launched at the age of 11. Later he honoured his own father’s Croatian "Kovacevich", by appending it to the “Bishop”. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Music@Malling FestivalThursday, 01 October 2015
One of the summer’s greatest pleasures has been to confirm an often untested truism: that you may hear some of the finest and rarest music-making in out-of-the-way places. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Lammermuir FestivalMonday, 21 September 2015
It’s hard to believe that East Lothian’s Lammermuir Festival has only been around for six years. In that short time, it’s become a cherished fixture in Scotland’s musical calendar. For regular concert-goers, it’s a calmer antidote to the August festival mayhem of Edinburgh, just half an hour away, and just a couple of weeks after the capital’s wall-to-wall chaos ends. Read more... |
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